jl0630 - Habermas

Habermas prefaced his way into his segment on terrorism with, “A refied everyday praxis can be cured only by creating unconstrained interaction of the cognitive with the moral-practical and the aesthetic-expressive elements” (105). I must have read this sentence and its paragraph a dozen times to understand it, but what I got from it is that the development of art from its religious and scientific roots to a laissez-faire ‘everything is art and everyone is an artist’ has suppressed people from analyzing its existence and its meaning. It is simplistic and has transformed our consumption of media from, like we talked a few classes ago, “how was is it” to “did you like it?” Propaganda can be alarmingly easy to attempt with such simple mindedness, which ties into the terroristic notions of art that Habermas explains. He mentions specifically about tendencies to aestheticize politics and we can see that example almost every day in the comic section of the newspaper. These cartoons negate to the enormity of real life situations at hand and can be shown over and again in examples like – how do we know what a model looks like? How do we know what a Jew looks like? You see Iranians with large beards and a goofy smile and making puns on war, and you see Jewish men who are short and have enormous noses. It’s dehumanizing, and to an extent even, it allows people like Hitler to get away with things like genocide. It’s unconscious and like professor Casey said, we can’t all be psychics – it’s in our mind for a reason. So what Habermas is saying is that we need to start being cognitive about “the moral-practical and the aesthetic-expressive elements” because to athseticize without consciousness is dangerous and potentially terroristic.