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Thursday, May 23, 2013

Habermas on Horkheimer on Schopenhauer's subjective objectivism

So I totally agree with these quotes that I"m putting below

'The individuated will is base only when it turns itself against others; it becomes good when, through compassion, it recognizes its true identity with all other beings.'

- Schopenhauer did get pretty cool like this later on in his will and representation

'On the Schopenhauerian interpretation...compassion cannot assume the role of dialectical mediation between individual and society, between equal respect for all and the solidarity of each with all.  Here is is solely a matter of the abstract self-overcoming of individuality, of the dissolution of the individual in an all-encompassing oneness' 

but Horkheimer disagrees with this, because

'Those who at the Last Judgement come, one after the other, before the eyes of God as unrepresentable individuals stripped of the mantle of worldly goods and honors - and hence as equals - in the expectation of receiving a fair judgment, experience themselves as fully individuated beings for their actions.'

later on, Habermas criticizes Horkheimer when he writes that

'this impulse confirms Horkheimer in the view that the reconciling potential of solidarity with those who suffer can be realized only if individuals renounce themselves as individuals.  He fails to see that the danger of a nationalistic distortion of the identificatory bond with the nation arises precisely at the moment when false solidarity permits individuals to be subsumed into the collectivity.'

Habermas talking about Horkheimer now and bashing the reductive tendencies of analytic philsophy

'He also recognizes that we have to take into account the pragmatic dimension of language use, for the context-transcending truth-claim of speech cannot be grasped from the blinkered perspective of a semantics that reduces utterances to propositions'