asphara
27-07-2010, 02:41 PM
Hi - I'm writing about Habermas, and I cannot get his work, and I've set out why. I wanted to check if people can relate to this perspective, or whether I am missing something, because most people seem to want to go down on him.
I could not recognise the philosophy of Habermas, because a central antimony of existence seemed to be missing - emotion. I felt it might be lurking somewhere in the performative contradiction, in the depths of his discourse ethics, or possibly sublated into reason; but as I challenged the conceptual impediments to understanding this work, and then asked myself what experience of reality was being indicated here, I recognised it as completely alien. Habermas was like the emotional Adorno upside down, who found that the source of societal ills was the weight of subjectivity on objectivity. Even in Luther’s theology emotionality was central in his understanding of the human - the flesh and its sinful passions; but it is markedly absent from the thought of Habermas. It srikes me as profoundly dissociative - quite literally psychopathic, and indeed it was conceived in a culture of increasingly dissociative subjectivity.
I could not recognise the philosophy of Habermas, because a central antimony of existence seemed to be missing - emotion. I felt it might be lurking somewhere in the performative contradiction, in the depths of his discourse ethics, or possibly sublated into reason; but as I challenged the conceptual impediments to understanding this work, and then asked myself what experience of reality was being indicated here, I recognised it as completely alien. Habermas was like the emotional Adorno upside down, who found that the source of societal ills was the weight of subjectivity on objectivity. Even in Luther’s theology emotionality was central in his understanding of the human - the flesh and its sinful passions; but it is markedly absent from the thought of Habermas. It srikes me as profoundly dissociative - quite literally psychopathic, and indeed it was conceived in a culture of increasingly dissociative subjectivity.