surface structure, deep whatever

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Days go by.... We live with a world dominated by surface structure, novelty, or “whatever,” among those who can barely explore constructively where surface ends and depth begins, where “It's all about me” can barely think about life and Time realistically. Of course, an Appeal's always a matter of degree, giving way according to some interpretive interest that never comprehends totality.

Habermas vs. Heidegger in ‘Derrida’

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Habermas associates Derrida’s performativity with Adorno’s “Praxis” in his remembrance of Derrida, soon after Derrida died: “Derrida’s deconstruction, like Adorno’s negative dialectics, is essentially a performative exercise, a Praxis” [end of paragraph (i.e., passing comment)], Derrida-Habermas Reader, p.307. That seems to me to “essentially” express a misunderstanding of Derrida.

An oddness about Habermas’ comment is that, since all communicative action has a performative component, there seems to be an emptiness to calling negative dialectic “performative,” as if other action is something else. Perhaps, Habermas means by ’performative’: emancipatory efficacy, which is the perlocutionary effect (or unforced force) of critique. Certainly, the best sense of immanent critique (a longstanding value of the Marxian tradition) is exhibited by Derridean deconstruction: framing the self-betraying text, whose enactivity undermines itself in terms of what it enacts. This suggests Habermas’ later notion of performative contradiction.

Toward a post-metaphysicalist discourseon evolutionarity

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There's no teleology in social evolution. Nonetheless, evolution can be usefully theorized and done so, as I began to explicate recently, without a problematic naturalism. But that's not conducive to a short posting on self-constitutivity of inquiry. However, human intelligence has evolved to provide high capacity for giving telos to activity and phenomenology. This same capacity provides for potential self-constitutivity in inquiry, thanks to ultimate openness in cognitive development, in terms of the kinds of inquiry that may be discursively integrated ("what I have in mind" below). A postmetaphysicalist sense of discursivity is implied that learns through scientifically conceptual efficacy (without scientism!).

discursive communicationas appropriative interfacing

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A momentary intent this morning to revise a typographical error in my brief discussion of the "theory"-"practice" relationship, Nov. 2004, became a substantial revision of that still-short discussion (after the third paragraph).

Consider the notion of interface there as something axially dependent on communicative action. The rendered "manifold of interfaces" isn't an overt focus as such, but the whole of it (a holism rendered relatively briefly, but which is vertiginously connotative to me—without overtones of mystification!) can be regarded as a sense of context for doing philosophy of social science in a Habermasian spirit.

enlightenment as love of learning

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So, I've been plodding onward toward that philosophical cognitive science (previous posting: October), going on many years now, as evolution of the literature vastly outpaces anyone's opportunities for mastering it.

I make philosophically informed choices (I hope, as any scholar must choose—philosophically or not—from the evolving library, no matter the degree of freedom won by income and talent), and I dare claim that I am attuned to the leading literature.