Subject: HAB: Re: Re: solidaridad (translation)
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 23:25:22 -0500


This is a multi-part message in MIME format.


Raul, ...agreed...what can Enlightenment mean without being in dialectic with Power?... in relation to world and fact? 
No surprise, academics, - their cotidian existence engrossed as it is in scholarship, low crit, not phil, consider the world grossly impertinent; but, fortunately for us, this is not their virtual lecture hall,- wherein to magisterially dictate the rules, neither.  The enormus global drama being enacted so flagrantly in our midst and with our taxes and children is the immediate emblem of the immemorial aporia of nature red in tooth and claw, the strong eating the weak,...to profess philosophy but omit to decry this nihilist outrage in every, but most especially a philosophy, venue, signifies an abysmal insufficiency of insight at essential philosophy.

bob



----- Original Message -----
  From: Deirdre Golash
  To: habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
  Sent: Sunday, March 31, 2002 2:32 PM
  Subject: HAB: Re: solidaridad (translation)


  Dear fellow readers of the philosophy of Habermas and Critical Theory:

  The critical tradition of the Frankfurt School was not formed around the banality or the superficiality of philosophy.  Instead, it was formed on the shoulders of the social and political problems of its age.  This is CRITICAL THEORY.  Social theory and social philosophy only in the PRACTICAL sense, is what has the sensitivity capable of having an impact on the problems of its time.  The traditional conception of philosophy takes only a "technical" perspective on philosophy which reduces it to a simple game of definitions and terms and an exegesis of concepts, for academic entertainment.  This is a sterile philosophy incapable of being what is sought by such figures as Weil, Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, etc., and, of course, Habermas.   To interpret what is happening in our time:  the pathologies of modernity, the bestialization of humanity, consensus as a regulative idea, etc.

  It is for this reason that it is not destined to be able to respond to the urgencies of our day in the world.  There is a massacre in Palestine, hundreds of youth detained, dead, etc.  Do you believe that Habermas's philosophy is indifferent to all this and that it has nothing to say on the subject?  Philosophy is neither the analysis of language nor an investigation; (it?) is more serious because it presents itself as "neutral" on those occasions when it is called on.  To denounce anti-semitism, as did the Institut fur Sozialforschung in the 30s and 40s, was not academic entertainment but, on the contrary:  it was a question of life and death, like that which, today, it behooves us to denounce: the killing of Palestinians as politics of the State.
  ______

  Corrections welcome.

HTML VERSION:

From: Deirdre Golash

To: habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu

Sent: Sunday, March 31, 2002 2:32 PM

Subject: HAB: Re: solidaridad (translation)

Dear fellow readers of the philosophy of Habermas and Critical Theory:

 

The critical tradition of the Frankfurt School was not formed around the banality or the superficiality of philosophy.  Instead, it was formed on the shoulders of the social and political problems of its age.  This is CRITICAL THEORY.  Social theory and social philosophy only in the PRACTICAL sense, is what has the sensitivity capable of having an impact on the problems of its time.  The traditional conception of philosophy takes only a "technical" perspective on philosophy which reduces it to a simple game of definitions and terms and an exegesis of concepts, for academic entertainment.  This is a sterile philosophy incapable of being what is sought by such figures as Weil, Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, etc., and, of course, Habermas.   To interpret what is happening in our time:  the pathologies of modernity, the bestialization of humanity, consensus as a regulative idea, etc.

 

It is for this reason that it is not destined to be able to respond to the urgencies of our day in the world.  There is a massacre in Palestine, hundreds of youth detained, dead, etc.  Do you believe that Habermas's philosophy is indifferent to all this and that it has nothing to say on the subject?  Philosophy is neither the analysis of language nor an investigation; (it?) is more serious because it presents itself as "neutral" on those occasions when it is called on.  To denounce anti-semitism, as did the Institut fur Sozialforschung in the 30s and 40s, was not academic entertainment but, on the contrary:  it was a question of life and death, like that which, today, it behooves us to denounce: the killing of Palestinians as politics of the State.

______

 

Corrections welcome.