I came across the following from the closing
paragraphs of JH's lecture "The Idea of the
University" (citation follows the quote), while going
through old notes (1997) today, relating to:

[JH} "...the unity of research and teaching, the unity
of science and scholarship with general education, the
unity of science and scholarship with enlightenment,
and the unity of the scientific and scholarly
disciplines. Of course,...the openly differentiated
multiplicity of the scientific and scholarly
disciplines no longer represents as such the medium
that can tie all those functions together....[T]he
learning processes that take place within the
university not only enter into an exchange with the
economy and administration but also stand in an inner
relationship to the functions through which the
lifeworld reproduces itself. These learning processes
extend beyond professional preparation to make a
contribution to general processes of socialization by
providing training in the scientific mode of thought,
that is, in the hypothetical attitude toward facts and
norms; they go beyond the production of expert
knowledge to make a contribution to intellectual
enlightenment with their informed political stands on
concrete issues; they go beyond reflection on
fundamental issues and questions of methodology to
contribute to the hermeneutic continuation of
tradition through the humanities, and to the
self-understanding of the scientific and scholarly
disciplines within the whole of culture through
theories of science and scholarship, morality, art,
and literature. It is the organization of scientific
and scholarly learning processes in university form
that continues to root the differentiated specialized
disciplines in the lifeworld by fulfilling these
various functions *simultaneously*....

[....]

[JH} "...I seriously believe that in the last analysis
it is the communicative forms of scientific and
scholarly argumentation that hold university learning
processes in their various functions together....The
scientific and scholarly disciplines were [in the 19th
century] constituted within specialized internal
public spheres, and they can maintain their vitality
only within these structures. The specialized internal
public spheres come together and branch off again in
the university's organized public events[..., such as]
lectures, seminars, and scientific and scholarly
cooperation among working groups at institutes
affiliated with the university....They are all
sustained by the stimulating and productive forces of
a discursive debate that carries with it the
promissory note of the surprising argument. The doors
stand open; at any moment a new viewpoint may emerge,
a new idea appear unexpectedly.

[JH} [However,] "I do not want to repeat the mistake
of [the history of the idea of the university, of]
characterizing the communication community of
researchers as something exemplary [for society as a
whole]. The egalitarian and universalistic content of
its forms of argumentation expresses only the norms of
scientific and scholarly activity, not those of
society as a whole. But they share emphatically in
the communicative rationality in whose forms modern
societies, that is, socieities which are not fixed
once and for all and which have no guiding images,
must reach an understanding about themselves."

[Presented 1986 in a Heidelberg lecture series
honoring the 600th anniversary of the founding of the
University of Heidelberg, translated in _The New
Conservatism_, MIT Press, 1989 pp. 122, 124, 125]

Perhaps the cultivation of humanity is the general
context of practice that Habermas's philosophy of
reason most appropriately serves: an interplay and
mitosis of discursive "unities" (in so-to-speak
quotation marks for Habermas as well) that can be
evolutionary. (The rubric "the cultivation of
humanity" is the title of a late-'90s book by
neo-Stoic philosopher Martha Nussbaum on higher
education).

Usually, maybe, we consider "evolving" intransitively,
as something which happens (in some sense, whether
naturalistic, developmental or historiographical). But
the keynote of pragmatics is transitive: primary
valuation of action and potentials for
constructiveness. Philosophy of action---and a theory
of "action-orienting" communication---is motivated (I
would argue) by interest in fostering or educing the
actualization of human potentials, (broadly and deeply
conceived). So, I consider evolving in primarily a
transitive sense, as if philosophy is all about the
integrity and aims of higher education, itself
evolving (intransitive sense) through its place in
humanity's self-cultivation.

Such an idea echoes the German idea of *bildung* or
self-formation that is at the heart of Hegel's Jena
period, yet beyond Hegel in Gadamer's _Truth &
Method_, then beyond Gadamer in Habermas's
emancipatory interest, which is a derived mode (in the
face of domination) of the so-called interest in
enlightenment (beginning modernly in the Renaissance),
which is ultimately the endless ecumenical human
interest in universalizing as much actualization of
human potential as possible.



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