telic appeal in the flow of being

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I’m presently in the latter stages of transposing the “Habermas and Truth” e-mails into Webpages [June 4: Finished! and a new sense of the Website initiated, to be updated as apt], yet also using the occasion to comment on that earlier work, which makes those pages very involved. I don’t imagine that anyone has read much of them, though the project links almost directly from the Facebook/Habermas Page. Students of Habermas’s work may find the Facebook Page, find my pages, and read a few paragraphs before moving on. Fine. The work is there; one can’t claim that my innerworldly reveries don’t result from sober philosophical explorations. I welcome better sense from others about it all. But I don’t obsess about others’ disinterest. The work is there. I move on.

facing desire for Truth

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Let me start off frivolously, fun; then get into worthwhile things.

Since I hadn’t posted to the Facebook/Habermas Page for a couple of weeks, I’ve been getting a daily e-mail from the software indicating in the subject line that “Habermas fans want to hear from you.”

We know what this is: educing the reader to put a face on algorithmic interaction. Face the text. We so want to personify things. [Insert monograph: from toys to Literature…Phenomenology lives. Pygmalion finds True Love. A movie moves one. The trees know.]

There’s no programmed assessment of what “fans” want (but you, too, can be a fan of philosophical venturing!). There’s a Facebook algorithm that either [1] automatically generates an e-mail if a Page with relatively high content has no activity (I have a Facebook Page with little activity, no posting for months, and I get no reminder); or [2] folks are checking the Habermas Page at X rate, causing a software widget to be triggered. I hope for the latter (2), but I presume it’s the former. Anyway, Facebook is less about connectivity than about “eyeballs” for ads. “It’s a business, honey, just like everything.”

communicative community: the basis of good systems

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If you find plausible that a “lattice” approach to political change tends to prevail over a “wheel” approach (“Sustainable Global Growth” posting), then a focus on dynamics of reflective equilibration may tend to prevail over dynamics of normative structure (and collaborative innovation precedes norm formation). In this case, Habermas’s theory of communicative action becomes all the more useful, not less so.

sustainable global growth as international focus

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In his February, 2014, lecture to the SPD, Habermas said “...the fact that the European Commission abstained from setting guidelines for national climate protection objectives is one of the many fatal signs of a regression into the stronghold of the national state.”

But the Europe2020 platform, shaped in 2011, is full of guidelines, including specific targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, among other goals, “as part of a comprehensive global agreement.” The EU Commission has a detailed policy platform for a “Resource-efficient Europe” and “An industrial policy for the globalisation era.”

How does inter-regionality evolve?

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Given that internationalism has been an evident feature of global politics for a century, how does global change work?

That's a more-accessible question than one might expect. In March 2014, Robert O. Keohane (Professor of International Politics at Princeton) published an essay which implicitly, but definitely, serves the question: How does internationalism—or inter-regionality—evolve? His article is entitled “Contested Multilateralism.” The tediousness of his discussion (typified by his abstract below) implicitly dramatizes the state of play in international studies.

The challenge of fruitfully distributed authority

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The challenge in existing democracy never goes away, but it’s most prominent in constitutional processes: When does authority that is granted to intra-national regions undermine the potential effectiveness of governing trans-regional interests? This is a problem that Ukraine is presently grappling with.

fast times in Ukraine

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the Ukrainean Event as philosophical venue

On the PBS News Hour, Janusz Bugajski (Center for Strategic and International Studies) says what may seem obvious, but there’s an implicit, important philosophical point to be drawn for Habermasian discourse (after my quoting):

It’s a free choice...of every nation that emerged from the communist bloc to belong to the international organizations that best protect their security and that best ensure their prosperity and their development. And all the Central European countries, almost, have chosen to ally with the West, because the European Union and NATO provides the security, stability, sovereignty, and development. The Russian world, the Customs Union, the Eurasian Union, will be a source of instability, because Russia cannot provide that sort of security, integrity and international — and national independence.