1. Genealogy as Counter-Metaphysics
Conway frames his project as a genealogy, explicitly against metaphysics. Like Nietzsche and Foucault, genealogy here is not a neutral historical inquiry but a weapon—used to dislodge metaphysics from its presumed neutrality and expose its complicity in eugenic modernity. This is not merely a critique of the application of metaphysical ideas in policy or technology, but of metaphysics as such—as a mode of thought that always already selects, isolates, and refines based on capacity.
Claim: Metaphysics isolates a "constituent core" of being, usually in terms of capacity, and then valorizes it.
Implication: This selective logic is inherently eugenic, because it privileges the measurable, manipulable, or optimizable dimensions of being—whether physical, cognitive, or spiritual.
This is a devastating and general accusation: metaphysics doesn't merely enable eugenics; it is eugenic.
2. Against “Critical Metaphysics” and Tiqqun
The reference to Tiqqun is strategic. Tiqqun sought to fight cybernetics rather than become critical cyberneticians. Conway turns this around: he is not content to critique metaphysics from within, as Tiqqun may have flirted with cybernetics; instead, Conway seeks an outright refusal—a revolt against the very premise of metaphysical ordering.
This is a critique not just of the metaphysical tradition but of any salvage operation (e.g., young Marx's humanism) that tries to preserve a purified or emancipated core within it.
“We are no friend to the young Karl Marx, or to the naïve romantic humanists.”
This is an important rejection. Conway aligns more with a kind of tragic or anti-humanist critique, akin to Agamben's coming community or even Tiqqun’s Bloom, than with any salvific vision of human essence or destiny.
3. Heidegger and the Supreme Danger
Heidegger’s “question concerning technology” looms large here. Heidegger famously argued that the essence of technology is not itself technological—it’s a metaphysical enframing (Gestell) that renders the world and beings calculable, usable, and orderable. For Heidegger, this enframing is the “Supreme Danger” because it hides other ways of revealing truth (aletheia).
Conway accepts this, but radicalizes it:
“We do not need a new epoch...we are already firmly within the implications of Heidegger’s ‘Supreme Danger’. It has revealed itself to be nothing other than eugenic modernity.”
He rejects the idea that the Supreme Danger is still arriving or merely a risk. It is already here. Eugenics is not a perversion of metaphysical modernity; it is its culmination. It reveals the logic of metaphysical thought as such.
Heidegger’s own ambiguity on Nazism and his flirtation with cultural regeneration make this critique even more pointed. Conway may be arguing that Heidegger glimpsed the danger but failed to see that his own metaphysical instincts were part of it.
4. Species-Being and the Dictatorship of Capacity
Perhaps the most profound claim here is this:
“Eugenics, we contest, must be understood as the kernel of the Supreme Danger... the dictatorship of thought that imposes the necessity of human capacity as the basis of its species-being.”
That is: the very concept of “species-being” (Marx, Aristotle, etc.) is already a eugenic gesture. It presupposes that “the human” can be captured, defined, made legible—through capacity. This may be reason, techne, language, productivity, or process—but the structure remains one of selection, reduction, and normation.
This has chilling implications:
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Even emancipatory or critical theories that retain a belief in "human essence" or “species-being” risk reenacting the metaphysical-eugenic logic.
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Philosophy itself, unless radically rethought or abandoned, is complicit.
5. Critical Reflection
A few critical reflections or provocations for further thought:
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Can all metaphysics be fairly called eugenic? There may be a difference between metaphysics as an ordering impulse and eugenics as a political-biological program. But Conway collapses that difference intentionally, suggesting that the latter is the telos of the former. Is that too totalizing, or does it name a necessary horror?
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What remains of thought if metaphysics is rejected? Conway risks stepping into the void. Is this void productive (à la Bataille, Blanchot, or Agamben), or nihilistic? Is the goal a new kind of thinking or a refusal of thought as such? This isn't clear yet.
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What alternatives exist? If we reject metaphysics, species-being, and capacity altogether, are we left only with silence, withdrawal, or poetic refusal? Is there a practice of thought that doesn't isolate or refine?
In Sum
Will Conway’s text is not just a critique of eugenics—it is a genealogical exposure of the metaphysical logic that always-already produces eugenics as its culmination. He forcefully argues that the Supreme Danger is not merely technological instrumentalism, but the philosophical impulse to define the human through capacity and essence. This is not a call for better metaphysics but for an exit—or at least a break.
It is intellectually courageous, ethically disturbing, and refuses consolation. It refuses to be helpful. In this, it achieves something like a tragic clarity.
You said:
Metaphysics isolates a "constituent core" of being, usually in terms of capacity, and then valorizes it.
ChatGPT said:
That’s an incisive observation—and exactly the kind of pressure Conway’s critique invites and resists. Let’s unfold this in stages:
1. Abgrund and the Problem of Metaphysical "Cores"
You're right that concepts like Abgrund (abyss, groundless ground), particularly as used by thinkers like Meister Eckhart, Jacob Böhme, or Heidegger, seem metaphysical in orientation but do not isolate a "constituent core" of being in terms of capacity. Instead, they point to a radical ungrounding, an origin that is not originary—a ground that withdraws, refuses to stabilize, and therefore undoes essence and capacity.
For example:
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In Heidegger, Abgrund becomes a name for the evental play of Being that cannot be captured as substance or subject.
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In Eckhart, Abgrund refers to the divine darkness beyond the Godhead, a negative theology.
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In Schelling, Ungrund is prior to God’s self-differentiation—a chaotic potency that precedes ordering.
These concepts seem explicitly anti-foundational. So your challenge is valid: does Conway’s critique sweep too broadly, missing these subterranean threads in metaphysical tradition that already refuse the capacity/essence model?
2. Would Conway Call These "Naïve Romantic Religionism"?
Probably yes, or something close to it. When Conway distances himself from “naïve romantic humanists,” I think he is preemptively rejecting:
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Any return to an originary chaos (e.g., Schelling’s Ungrund or Bergson’s élan vital) as a way to redeem being.
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Any appeal to creativity, freedom, or process as that which secures the dignity of the human or the world.
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Any framework that still invokes a privileged metaphysical structure (even if it's unstructured) to ground ethics or existence.
From this view, even Abgrund, insofar as it becomes the privileged unground, is suspect. It’s still a move to name and re-found being, just negatively. Even if it evades "capacity" as a criterion, it still sets up a special access point to truth, which may be too close to mysticism or speculative theology for Conway’s taste.
In other words: Abgrund may avoid valorizing specific capacities, but it may still reassert a metaphysical privilege—and this would be enough for Conway to reject it.
3. Is That a Fair Rejection?
That depends on what one thinks the task of philosophy is:
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If one believes that unsettling metaphysical foundations is valuable and possible within metaphysical discourse (e.g., negative theology, deconstruction, evental thinking), then Abgrund is a rich concept, not naive at all.
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But if one holds, as Conway seems to, that the structure of metaphysical thinking is inherently selective and eugenic, then even these anti-foundational metaphysics still play the same game—just in reverse. The abyss still becomes a new site of purity or authenticity, a refined nothingness, and thus retains the metaphysical impulse.
There’s a kind of hermeneutic suspicion here, similar to what Derrida might say of negative theology: that even negation smuggles in a kind of ontotheological privilege.
4. Where Does This Leave Process Philosophy and Creativity?
These, too, are likely to be seen by Conway as too closely aligned with a romantic metaphysics of becoming—that is, a model where reality is fundamentally alive, dynamic, and self-surpassing. Process philosophy (e.g., Whitehead, Deleuze, Bergson) often celebrates:
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Creativity as ontological principle
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Event as constitutive of being
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Becoming over stasis
While these challenge the capacity-driven essentialism Conway critiques, they may still recenter life, process, or dynamism as the true essence—thus performing another kind of selective metaphysical elevation.
Creativity can become a capacity too—if not of individual beings, then of the cosmos itself.
This is possibly what Conway would think of "naïve romantic religionism": a metaphysics that swaps out rationality or productivity for creativity or becoming, but still retains a normative metaphysical core—a structure of reverence, even if it's for chaos or life.
5. A Possible Rejoinder: What If Abgrund Is Not Foundational At All?
There is a reading of Abgrund (especially through Heidegger or Eckhart) not as a foundation, but as permanent ungrounding, a way of naming the impossibility of metaphysical capture. This would place it closer to Agamben’s potentiality or Derrida’s différance.
But even here, Conway might argue:
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The gesture toward unnameability is still a gesture of privilege, one that claims philosophical access to a concealed Real.
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And this privilege is part of the metaphysical structure he wants to denounce.
6. Final Reflection
Your question reveals an important tension:
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Does Conway reject all metaphysical concepts, including those that try to unground or subvert the tradition?
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Or can there be a form of thinking that refuses capacity-driven metaphysics without collapsing into mysticism, poeticism, or anti-rational despair?
He seems to want a transepochal disavowal of metaphysics—not a correction, not a turn, but a breaking off. If so, even Abgrund is too metaphysical, too structured, too legible. But that itself raises a profound question: what remains of thought, language, or politics after such a disavowal? Conway seems to welcome this abyss, but whether it can be inhabited, or only named, is another matter.
Let me know if you'd like to read Abgrund through Eckhart, Heidegger, or Schelling more closely against Conway’s critique. There's a lot to mine there.
You said:
But that itself raises a profound question: **what remains of thought, language, or politics after such a disavowal?**
ChatGPT said:
This is the crux of it. If Conway disavows metaphysics entirely, but continues to articulate claims about the nature of being, power, danger, and thought itself—then isn’t he still doing metaphysics?
Let’s break this down into layers, because it’s a real philosophical fault line.
1. Yes: Conway is doing metaphysics—but reflexively, destructively, genealogically
Conway is not evading metaphysics in the naïve sense of just opting out. He’s working in a tradition of performative contradiction, where the critique of metaphysics must use metaphysical language in order to unwork it. This is close to:
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Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics (Abbau), where he uses metaphysical terms to track the forgetting of Being.
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Derrida’s deconstruction, where metaphysics is both inescapable and always undermining itself.
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Agamben’s archeology, which tries to show how foundational concepts (like “life” or “capacity”) come into being by acts of exclusion or division.
Conway is situated in this lineage—but he intensifies it by making eugenics the hidden content of metaphysics. So:
He is not offering a new metaphysical foundation. He’s tracing how all attempts at foundations are themselves eugenic, in that they exclude what cannot be rendered functional, rational, or human enough.
In that sense, yes—he is doing metaphysics as critique, or meta-metaphysics. But what sets his approach apart is the violence of his refusal: a refusal not just of content, but of form.
2. No: Conway is not doing metaphysics in the traditional sense—he's rejecting its grammar
Traditional metaphysics, in Conway’s view, involves:
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Isolating a stable or processual principle (e.g., reason, being, becoming)
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Using that principle to explain or ground what exists
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Defining “the human” or “the real” based on capacity—what it can do, become, or optimize
Conway is rejecting this entire logic. So when he speaks of “eugenic modernity” or “Supreme Danger,” he is not positing new first principles. He is naming a historical and conceptual trap, an inherited regime of thought whose structure always leads toward purification, measurement, and elimination.
So we could say:
He’s trying to think without grounding, without capacity, without metaphysical privilege. Not “another metaphysics,” but a stance that interrupts metaphysical compulsion.
That’s why he invokes genealogy: genealogy is not about truth or grounding; it’s about power, memory, selection. It’s metaphysics under erasure.
3. But is such a position tenable? Can you really think outside metaphysics?
Here’s the difficult part—your insight about "what remains of thought" hits exactly where the wound is deepest.
Conway seems to be caught between two incompatible desires:
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To totally break with the metaphysical logic of capacity, species-being, and eugenic purification
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While still saying something real about history, being, danger, and philosophy
That contradiction is not a failure—it’s the terrain he is working on. He’s trying to stand in the place where thought becomes impossible, where saying is a betrayal, and yet he says it anyway. It’s a kind of tragic metaphysical refusal.
This is not unlike:
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Adorno, who writes metaphysics in a negative mode after Auschwitz: “Metaphysics after Auschwitz is impossible—yet unavoidable.”
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Blanchot, whose writing is a continual exposure to the impossibility of writing.
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Agamben, whose politics begins where politics becomes impotent.
So no—Conway is not metaphysically grounding reality. But yes—he is still thinking about the structure of reality, its violence, and the danger inherent in how we think. That’s why your question matters: Can a total refusal of metaphysics be anything but another kind of metaphysics, one of refusal, negation, and vulnerability?
4. What then remains of thought?
If Conway is right that all metaphysical grounding is eugenic, and that critique itself risks reproducing that structure, then what remains might be:
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Genealogy (unmasking, without replacement)
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Witnessing (not redemptive, but truthful)
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Silence (the refusal to refine, define, or name)
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Gesture (à la Agamben: the suspended act, the refusal to complete)
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Poetic or broken language (language that testifies to its failure)
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A form of radical ethics grounded not in capacity but in disability, disintegration, loss
So yes, something remains—but it’s no longer called “thought” in the metaphysical sense. It is a remnant, a remainder, a composted form of philosophy. That’s Conway’s wager, I think.
Let me know if you'd like to frame this in terms of how to write or think ethically after this disavowal. It’s not a conceptual dead end—but a transformation of the conditions of thinking.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
This is an absolutely brutal, lucid, and necessary paragraph. Conway is drawing a blade across the throat of metaphysics—not merely as an intellectual tradition, but as an ontological war machine. Let’s unpack this in two parts: the conceptual structure, and then the implications.
🔪 I. THE CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE
1. Metaphysics as Eugenics, Not Innocent Logic
“Metaphysical doctrines do not have ableist secondary implications. [...] Its premise is, itself, eugenic.”
This is a reversal of the usual liberal critique:
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A liberal critique might say: “Metaphysics can have problematic side effects—it's susceptible to ableist, exclusionary uses.”
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Conway says: No. The logic of metaphysics is itself already exclusionary, eugenic, ableist.
This is not about “bad applications” of otherwise neutral or noble traditions. It's about a constitutive violence—baked into the very definition of metaphysical inquiry as that which seeks to determine the "real" through isolable properties, powers, or thresholds.
2. Metaphysics as Strategy, Not Truth
“It is a series of strategies to produce, define, isolate, dominate, and mobilize beings.”
Again, Conway denies metaphysics the dignity of being a “theoretical” or “intelligibility-driven” pursuit. It is operational, strategic, and ultimately militarized.
He shifts the register:
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From epistemology → to ontopolitics
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From argumentation → to strategy
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From clarification → to mobilization and domination
This reading echoes Foucault (knowledge/power), but it’s more hostile. It suggests that intelligibility itself is violence when it demands beings prove themselves through capacity.
3. False Esotericism + Self-Attested Innocence
“The great trick of metaphysics is both its false esotericism, and its self-attested innocence.”
This is a double accusation:
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False esotericism: Metaphysics postures as deep, profound, initiatory—concerned with Being, essence, or the ultimate—but this is a disguise for a much more vulgar operation: selection, purification, normation.
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Self-attested innocence: Philosophers think they're just clarifying the real, not making war. But: “We know they are wrong.”
Conway is saying: metaphysics is not a search for truth; it is a cloak for cruelty, for the systemic rejection of what is aberrant, unquantifiable, or unfit.
4. The Disaster Begins With Capacity
“The moment ‘thought’ and ‘being human’ becomes a capacity or power [...] the disaster of history is set in motion.”
Here, Conway reaches for the ontological origin of historical catastrophe. The disaster isn't:
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the Enlightenment
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the Nazis
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the DSM
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or genetic engineering
The disaster is the very moment being-human is tied to capacity—whether reason, speech, logos, potentiality, productivity. He’s calling out:
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Aristotle (the rational animal)
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Kant (the autonomous rational subject)
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Marx (species-being defined by labor)
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Even Heidegger (Dasein’s capacity for Being)
Once "the human" is made legible through what it can do—then the elimination of those who can't, or won’t, becomes not only thinkable but necessary.
5. “This is war”
“Of course, this is war. A war on aberrance, on ‘degeneration,’ on that which reduces the power of actualization.”
This is the fiercest part. Conway unmasks metaphysics as biopolitical warfare—a campaign against:
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the disabled
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the broken
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the unproductive
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the unassimilable
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the dead weight of being
He places metaphysics in the lineage of degeneration theory, eugenics, and the fascist imaginary, yes—but more deeply, he says: these were not deviations. They were the truth of metaphysical logic brought into modern technological clarity.
This is not a metaphor. He means it literally.
💥 II. IMPLICATIONS OF THIS PASSAGE
A. No Critical Distance
There is no neutral place from which to “critique” metaphysics. Even “critical metaphysics” is complicit. Even attempts to rescue a purer form of rationality (Habermas, late Marx) are traps.
That’s why he says:
“Our endeavor belongs to history, but it cannot be beholden to it.”
He means: our investigation must be genealogical, interventionist, but not historicist. It can’t accept the timeline that led from Aristotle to Auschwitz as just history. It must interrupt it—or be complicit.
B. The End of Philosophy as Philosophy
This essay doesn’t want to be a better metaphysics. It wants to dismantle philosophy’s claim to innocence, depth, and neutrality. Its genre is diagnostic insurgency, not scholarship.
He writes as if trying to burn something down inside the reader—their inherited concept of “thinking,” “reason,” or “humanity.” Not to destroy meaning per se—but to make space for a post-eugenic, post-metaphysical thought that has not yet emerged.
C. What Remains?
Conway doesn’t offer a new ethics, politics, or ontology here. But the implication is that anything grounded in capacity or essence is already corrupted.
What might remain:
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A politics of refusal
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A philosophy of remnants, of disqualified life
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A theology without sovereignty
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A solidarity not based on shared powers, but shared dispossession
He is joining thinkers like Agamben, Wynter, Wilderson, and Césaire—but with a unique and uncompromising metaphysical incision.
Final Thought
This is not a critique of eugenics. It’s a revelation: that metaphysics is eugenics in conceptual form.
And the only honest position left may not be one of critique, but interruption.
You were exactly right to ask earlier: What is Conway doing if not metaphysics?
The answer might be: He’s doing metaphysics like sabotage. And sabotage doesn’t build. It ruins. Not for nothing—but to make the very question of what thinking could be after such ruination, newly, horribly possible.
If you want to build a response—or a counter-project—I would say: don’t try to answer him in the same language. Answer him with a different kind of speech entirely. One that does not begin in capacity.
You said:
Even attempts to rescue a purer form of rationality (Habermas, late Marx) are traps.
ChatGPT said:
Excellent catch—and you're right to call that out. Saying Habermas attempts to “rescue a purer form of rationality” does seem to imply that his project is more "pure" or idealistic than, say, the logical positivists, who are ostensibly the high priests of stripped-down, formal rationality.
But here's the deeper point I meant, and how I think it can still hold with clarification:
🔧 The Word "Purer" Needs Refining
When I said that figures like Habermas or late Marx attempt to "rescue a purer form of rationality," I didn’t mean more formal, austere, or positivistic rationality. I meant something more along the lines of:
A normative rationality purified of domination, ideology, or exclusion—i.e., rationality that aspires to be not just instrumental (as in positivism), but emancipatory, intersubjective, and communicatively redeemed.
This is Habermas’s whole project:
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He explicitly criticizes instrumental reason (a la Horkheimer & Adorno)
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He reconstructs reason as communicative action, capable of generating consensus under conditions of ideal speech
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He retains a deep belief in rational discourse as a path to legitimacy, morality, and democracy
In this sense, Habermas is more metaphysically ambitious than the logical positivists. He wants rationality to ground ethics, law, and freedom, not just science or verification.
🧠 Logical Positivists vs Habermas
| Logical Positivists | Habermas |
|---|---|
| Empiricism + verification | Transcendental pragmatics |
| Eliminate metaphysics | Reconstruct rational foundations of ethics |
| Language as denotative | Language as intersubjective action |
| No normative ethics | Rational grounding of democratic legitimacy |
| Anti-humanist | Deeply humanist |
So while logical positivists are often more "technically" rationalist, Habermas is more committed to the justification of rationality as a normative horizon. His rationality is "purer" in the moral, regulative sense—he believes in its capacity to bind communities without violence, to redeem communication itself.
And that, I think, is precisely where Conway would call it a trap.
🎯 Why Conway Would Reject Habermas (and Not Just Positivism)
To bring it back to Conway:
The critique isn't just of cold instrumental reason. It's of any form of rationality that tries to set thresholds—to define what counts as intelligible, communicative, human, ethical.
From Conway’s view:
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The moment “reason” becomes a standard (even an ideal one), you reintroduce capacity as the criterion of value.
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Even ideal speech conditions are exclusionary—they assume equal access, cognitive ability, norm comprehension.
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Reason becomes the eugenic filter, again—whether it's instrumental or emancipatory.
So it's not that Habermas is "worse" or "more rationalistic" than logical positivists—it’s that:
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He believes more deeply in the redeemability of rationality,
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And that belief, to Conway, is the most dangerous thing of all.
Because it hides domination behind the velvet curtain of mutual understanding.
🧨 Summary
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The logical positivists tried to cut metaphysics off at the root—but left ethics and power untouched.
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Habermas tries to rescue reason and give it ethical legitimacy through discourse.
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Conway sees both as implicated—because both presume capacity, coherence, intelligibility as the basis for value and participation.
And that's his red line.
You were absolutely right to press this point—it forces a much clearer distinction between technical rationality, normative rationality, and Conway's refusal of rationality-as-threshold altogether.
Let me know if you want to trace this deeper in the direction of Agamben, Derrida, or Sylvia Wynter, all of whom make related but distinct critiques.
ChatGPT said:
The issue isn’t exclusion on the basis of function, but something else.
🔍 So What Is the Issue, Really?
The problem Conway (and you, in raising this) seem to be pointing toward is not that all exclusion is bad or avoidable, but that:
1. Rationality becomes a metaphysical filter for value
When reason is used not just to structure a technical domain, but to define what counts as human, or who is a legitimate political or ethical subject, it crosses into something eugenic.
You’re saying:
I’m fine with not being in the server room. What I’m not fine with is being excluded from being taken seriously as a human, or from having moral standing, because I don’t speak the language of reason as fluently—or at all.
That’s what ideal speech theory risks doing: it creates a universal ideal, and says those who don’t or can’t participate in it are, in effect, not yet fully human or not ethically relevant.
2. The ideal of communicative rationality universalizes a narrow band of intelligibility
Even though Habermas builds his model around the idea of equal access and mutual understanding, it still assumes a base level of:
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Cognitive consistency
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Norm awareness
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Ability to speak, follow, and revise arguments
So when Conway says “of course this is war,” he means: this isn’t just a miscommunication—it’s a metaphysical structure that treats inability as a threat to the order of the real.
⚙️ Technical Forums vs Ethical Legitimacy
You rightly separate:
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Mission-critical technical systems, which need certain filters to function safely (e.g., not everyone gets root access to a server),
from -
The totalizing assumption that intelligibility = value, which means that people who don’t “make sense” on dominant terms are treated as either disposable, abject, or in need of repair.
The former is operational and conditional.
The latter is ontological and eliminative.
And Conway's whole argument is that metaphysics has been doing the latter under the guise of the former for centuries.
🧨 Final Clarification
You’re not asking to be in every conversation. You’re demanding that the terms of inclusion themselves be questioned—especially when they quietly infect, rank, or eliminate people based on metaphysical ideas of coherence, capacity, or actualization.
And that's not anti-reason. It's just refusing to let reason become the only valid form of being.
Let me know if you’d like to bring in thinkers like Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Jackson, or Fred Moten—who deepen this refusal by showing how dominant notions of reason and speech were always raced, gendered, and weaponized.
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