Friday, March 30, 2012

remnants of a letter on Habermas’s “Heidegger”


revised ending, May 20

I began my day with the news, which led to a curiosity about the “free rider problem,” relative to my interest in the constitutionality of the “individual mandate” to have health insurance being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court. (They took their first vote on the matter today, in secret.)

That led to noticing that the article on “Authority” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy failed to mention Habermas, though Habermas’s career is about that as much as anything. 

That led me back to the SEP’s article on Habermas, which has been evidently revised. I noticed that the article still misrepresents Heidegger (albeit in passing), which happens to be symptomatic of Habermas having fundamentally misread Heidegger in his mid-20s, when he was forming the philosophical dispositions which were decisive for his career (he avowed later).

So, I started a short note to the article author (whom I’ve corresponded with, in the past), but got carried away. Once again (my deep-seated tendency), I used a sense of the other (the “other” that is present) as occasion for satisfying my desire to articulate.

I didn’t send the “note” that became pages and pages of a letter.
I archived it.

But much that’s relevant to my own interests seemed worth posting—though I doubt that anyone else will understand it.

No biggie. I know that what I’m doing is valid.


May 20

I posted it (linking above at “what I’m doing”). Then, weeks later, I recognized need to rephrase, which became need to re-think, and I realized that extracting the best ideas made the posting have nothing to do with Heidegger at all, being rather about my own approach to potentials in Habermas’s work—which I’ll develop and eventually share.

So, I’ve deleted the posting, and you now have here another note on creative process.