At least two motives cause me to begin this blog: The email discussion group is an antedated medium, and I want a cultural notion of The Conversation of Humanity that’s not fundamentally political.
What’s “the” Conversation of Humanity?
I’m so unclear about my sense of “after”—an ambiguity of “in light of” and “beyond”—that I have to accept that my interest “after Habermas” is my own.
Here’s most of a posting to the Habermas group, Nov. 27, 2010, that I deleted from the group archive:Occasionally, I have thoughts of wanting the site to turn into something new, but I don’t feel a good way to pose this. Who cares anyway? But I’m tired of intellectual tourism, which this [discussion] medium seems to be about.
Habermas’ work is not about Habermas. It’s about what his work is about, which is about a commonwealth of discursive inquiry, having a historicality to which he exemplarily contributes, thus may be seen to advance. But it’s not about him, though it’s intriguing to ask: What is being “Habermasian”? Generally: What are we to make of a singularity in philosophy: that there arises a philosophical mind with great singularity? The conditions for the possibility of a singularity of mind are bio-cultural and a lot of work, i.e., very difficult individuation. What are we to make of that, philosophically speaking?
I expect that my subject line seems eccentric. However, James T. Kloppenberg, Harvard scholar of American intellectual pragmatism, has just published Reading Obama (Princeton, 2011) which argues, in light of a thorough reading of Obama’s young career as legal scholar and political author, that Obama is an “intellectual president” in the lineage of American pragmatism and that Obama’s critical years of development at Harvard took place at a time of especially progressive ferment in legal theory concordant with Putnam’s interest in Habermas and philosopher Richard Bernstein’s pragmatism (beyond that fact that “...many of Bernstein’s books...appeared regularly in the footnotes of law review articles and books...at just the time when Obama was studying law at Harvard…”[134]).
Thursday, 10.28 / Saturday, 10.30
Obama evidently fits into a small set of intellectual American presidents, and is the first to fit into the intellectual lineage (outside of politics) of American pragmatism. Reading Obama evidently shows a comprehensively-progressive political engagement with deliberative democratic thought which (I anticipate) connects well with the philosophy of Jürgen Habermas which is a development of American pragmatism for his approach to philosophy, so influential for me.
Thursday’s U.S. Supreme Court majority decision favoring unlimited corporate freedom to fund political marketing is depressing.
Saturday, 1/23
(AP)….At the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the head of its office that monitors democratic practices—an international human rights organization—says that the ruling…“threatens to further marginalize candidates without strong financial backing or extensive personal resources.”
Saturday, 1/23
“Obama says court ruling a blow to democracy”
(Reuters)….The Supreme Court ruling dealt a powerful blow to efforts to rein in corporate influence and could even allow foreign corporations to “get into the act,” Obama said.
“It will make it more difficult to pass common-sense laws to promote energy independence because even foreign entities would be allowed to mix in our elections,” Obama said.
Human rights, parenting, ecopolitics—how does it all fit together?—you don’t much wonder. (Who has the time? And Why?)
The conditions of humanistic flourishing are manifold, to say the least. The nature of human futurity is vastly elusive—but a discursive luxury, you might think.
The ultimate singularity of planetary life “with” the increasing hyperintegration of humanity is a brute fact in a vacuum, astronauts so dramatize. Either a cohering of it all emerges (since life requires enough homeostasis), with humanity coping with The Given (as the Earth goes its own way). Or the cohering must be engineered—and not quietistically (i.e., not conservatively)—for the sake of broadening our flourishing and for sustaining the irreplaceable regions of Earth’s Givingness that are still flourishing, such as rainforests.
I believe that the whole scale of our planetary existence, down to (up to? into) the ostensible, lived level, can be made coherent, purposefully and constructively—can be explicated progressively and practically (or pragmatically—realistically and idealistically).
In service to that, discursive inquiry is worthwhile, just as the university is more than an administrated network of professional schools. We belong to a living well of intelligent life—evolving, historical, and exemplified in leading lives—through which prospects for constructive humanistic union, for richly flourishing widely—“evolving” in an active sense (evolving ourselves, democratically governing our evolution)—are kept realistically alive and properly ambitious.
Anticipating discursive inquiry into Our Singularity (in much detail, by the way—no romanticist garden of rhetorical well-formedness), I live a sense of holism that’s delightful to me—inspiring, thus durably motivating, an elating pleasure of mind—a veritable eros of our evolving. Our Gaic, hyperintegrating singularity is a thrilling wonder. Wanting to make time for detailing and advancing my sense of this, our Perpetual Project, feels like the ecstatic kid I commonly was and, so, remain.
That image doesn’t really fit the following, but I just so want to use it for something (more on the image, at the end here).
The Copenhagen Climate Talks go on, marginal to most lives (except governments, leading capital, and activists). Anyone would agree that it’s important, but the complexity escapes us?
It escapes me, I think. I don’t believe the following captures it. Nonetheless...
With “deep gratitude and great humility,” President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for the sake of “our highest aspirations.” He endeavors to recount a story of our inhumanity and avarice that must lose their war against our humanity and generosity. The real substance of Our Perpetual Project is intangible: ideas bearing values that work as ideals.
“Concretely, we must direct our effort to the task that President Kennedy called for long ago. ‘Let us focus,’ he said, ‘...on a gradual evolution in human institutions.’ A gradual evolution of human institutions. What might this evolution look like? What might these practical steps be?”
“Agreements among nations. Strong institutions. Support for human rights. Investments in development. ....And....the continued expansion of our moral imagination...[W]e do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place....[F]undamental faith in human progress...must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey....what’s best about humanity....our sense of possibility....our moral compass....Let us reach for the world that ought to be—that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.”
