a note of conscience in conceptual adventuring

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A key feature of misunderstanding (or misreading) another person or text passage (posting, synoptic statement) is doing too much with little information. This might be innocent and creative, e.g., being inspired to think richly by ideas or questions. But it can inhibit mutuality of understanding to draw another’s representations far into foreign territory without tracking the draw, if you will. There’s nothing harmful about drawing freely, as long as one doesn’t lose sight of the difference between a representation’s own context and its deployment in one’s own conceptual adventure.

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.