Abstract
Karl Mannheim’s at times rather tentative and at times most ambivalent commitment to a programme of merging philosophical (especially epistemological), sociological and moral discourse could only emerge after he severed strong dependence on a Hegelian philosophy of history. For it was on the basis of such a philosophy that Mannheim, for many years, remained convinced that most if not all intellectual and social divisions in society were mere transitory phenomena, soon be to transcended by the logic of history. Mannheim’s commitment to joining separate, narrow and unequal modes of discourse, however, is also tentative and ambivalent because such a programme strongly violates contemporary prohibitions and taboos against mixing, for example, sociological and moral issues. It would not violate the same set of norms, however, if one were to view sociological discourse as dependent and subsequent to epistemological discourse. It is my contention that a non-restrictive and self-reflexive sociology of knowledge requires a set of arguments which are based on the assumption that moral, sociological and epistemological modes of discourse are interdependent.
It has become extremely questionable whether, in the flux of life, it is a genuinely worthwhile intellectual problem to seek to discover fixed and immutable ideas or absolutes.
Karl Mannheim (1936: 77)
This text was first published as: Stehr, Nico. 1981. “The Magic Triangle: In Defense of a General Sociology of Knowledge ”, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 11: 225–229. The permission to republish this text was granted on behalf of SAGE by Ms. Yvonne McDuffee, Rights Coordinator, SAGE Thousand Oaks, CA 91320.
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Notes
- 1.
Despite the arguments advanced here, charges of relativism will of course persist. From a hermeneutic-linguistic perspective Apel (1972: 10) suggests that such a charge is consequential because “der Mensch [erwirbt] mit der kommunikativen Erlernung der Sprache zugleich ein wie immer unausdrückliches Bewusstsein davon, was es heisst, sich nach einer Regel zu richten. D.h. er wird nicht nur faktisch in eine bestimmte Lebensform eingeübt, sondem erwirbt ein effektives Reflexionsverhältnis zur Form des Lebens überhaupt. Z.B. hat er mit der Erlernung der Sprache zugleich ein Verständnis von Sprachbegrauch überhaupt erlernt, das ihn in den Stand setzt, aus einer Sprache in eine andere zu übersetzen, und d.h. zugleich fremde Lebensformen zu verstehen”.
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Stehr, N. (2018). The Magic Triangle: In Defense of a General Sociology of Knowledge. In: Adolf, M. (eds) Nico Stehr: Pioneer in the Theory of Society and Knowledge. Pioneers in Arts, Humanities, Science, Engineering, Practice, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76995-0_11
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