There will be spring!...

---

...though maybe you find spring figuratively in your work, no matter the winter. I hope so!

Facebook algorithms thought I might know you—evidently because I saw your Facebook page years ago, when we were corresponding by e-mail—not via Facebook!—about history. Technology! [Other readers: Johanna in icy Michigan got an e-mail about this posting.]

I’m still engaged with Habermas’s work, and a new set of essays by him is coming into English this spring, The Lure of Technocracy. I’m still a promoter of his work, even though I disagree with him like one may disagree exuberantly with one’s much-loved partner.

I trust your writing is going well. I wondered whether your grad. student page linked to something yet to read by you. I see your interesting statement about your dissertation topic. That would be fun to write to: “Discourses”!

“Materiality”? I did my dissertation on “historical materialism” in Habermas’s work. That was 1979. So long ago, developmentally speaking, re: my life (though it could be yesterday in spirit for me). He went far beyond historical materialism; me too—quite congruent with studies on science, technology and society—in his effort to write to East Germany, so to speak: to write to the future of German social theory and philosophical historiography generally. A key issue at the height of the Cold War was how to unify Europe, in his case vis-à-vis Germany, but academically to do so in terms that spanned nationality and spanned specialized disciplines. It was not only a matter of the future of Europe, but a matter of the future of the university—“cultivation of humanity,” I like to say. I saw essential congruence of his turn to American pragmatism and my desire to find new directions in academic philosophy that were truly progressive.

I was 30 then, when everything was about the evolutionarity of historical materialism. Being very activist, I chose to work for educational reform in Berkeley, then for public health leadership in the Bay Area, rather than pursue a university teaching career. 

I was, I guess—am—too much a wonderer in woods (wanderer in words—American “Old South” English pronounces ‘woods’ and ‘words’ similarly. I’m as Deep South as one can have been [by birth and lineage]. Though I never had the accent—middle childhood in SoCal—there are auras in my ears.)

But I couldn’t stay away from academia. At heart, I am a professor, in the generic sense: ever professing that I don’t know enough. It’s the classical plight of the philosopher, isn’t it—more literarily these days, for me, than social-theoretical. (What ever became of the old domain of psychohistory, i.e., psychological approaches to history? Now there’s cognitive anthropology, even cognitive literary studies, all born of cognitive science. What would be cognitive historiography?)

It would be fun to write about living through the Cold War years, longing for international solidarity for the sake of True Democracy, in terms of German social theory because I was so disappointed by “democracy” in America—so much a child of my century, archetypal leftist Boomer...

I’ve outgrown that, though. The Fall of the Berlin Wall (the neighborhood of your birth!) made the ‘90s blossom for me in ways I couldn’t have anticipated in the ‘80s. The turn of the millennium had millennial gravity for me. Now, I feel myself resisting the 20thC, wanting to live as if everything is futurity, as life is for youth. (Only elders refer to “youth,” I realize. Yet, only elders may know being still youthful in old age.)

Even the very old might best live this way: taking joy in the primordial futurity of life, all history, Our evolving. 

What futurity was implied by the history? What futurity is implied now, in Our unforseeable historicality, one’s flow of living historicity?

Anyway, the essence of life might well be the narrative we’re writing by living. We look back to see where we are still going. We go on to make the story better. No matter how wonderful the story is going—or disappointingly—a better story is always feasible.

I love life so much. I am the story, one day at a time—one is the story, “we” are the writing: Life! 

Non sequitur: I want to understand Hayden White’s school of historiographical theory. 

But I don’t. So many books! So little time.

Meh.

The poetic point may actually imply an aura that, far away, integrates It All: Literature, History, Philosophy—horizons of Our evolving that sciences serve to advance. 

I see a grand consilience—no great architectonic, rather:
Our generativity scaled highly, at best lastingly. 

All becomes history, yet always evolving. 

Yea, humanity writing itself.

---