a note on authenticity vis-à-vis sincerity

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In an exchange on Habermas earlier this week, the correspondent wondered (“K>>” below) about my earlier characterization of the distinction between sincerity and authenticity (“G>>>”), in response to a question from K (“K>>>>”). I responded briefly (“G>”), then more free associatively offline yesterday, which I’ll archive here (following my quoting of our exchange on this point, over four emails. The entirety of the four emails, via the Yahoo! Habermas group [May 1, 2022: which no longer exists], can be made available.

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Aug. 8-9

K>>>> - Can/should we distinguish between sincerity and authenticity, as Amanda Anderson has done in her excellent defense of Habermas (“The Way We Argue Now”)?

G>>> Yes. Habermas would, I think, explicate this distinction in terms of the difference between (a) a way of life (“ethical life” in chapter 1 of Justification and Application, implicating one’s whole exemplification of lifeworldliness, so to speak), which may be variably authentic/inauthentic; and (b) one’s self-representation in communicative action, relative to one’s fidelity to asserted beliefs or values regarded as normative for interaction. Authenticity tends to pertain to living a life; genuineness pertains, for Habermas, to intentional stances in interaction.

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!).