By Jürgen Habermas : Conversations with Stefan Müller-Doohm and Roman
Yos (translated by Wieland Hoban)
Polity Press. 186 pages. £20 ISBN 13:978-1-5095-6727-0
Reviewed by Tony Roberts
The impact of Jürgen Habermas, German philosopher and social theorist, has
been considerable, if controversial. In the Financial Times in
December of last year, professor Nick Pearce wrote that he ‘towers over the
intellectual history of postwar Germany’. He is, therefore, someone we might
want to know something about.
In Things Needed to Get Better we hear Habermas —now in his nineties
—in email conversation with his biographer Müller-Doohm and Yos, author of
Young Habermas: An Intellectual History of His Early Thought, 1952-1962.
The result is very interesting, but frequently not very
accessible for laymen like myself who lack a grounding in sociology or
twentieth century German philosophy. This remark, however, is not intended
to put the prospective reader off. A little work is required, but
there are rewards. Away from the forbidding language of theory, the ideas
are stimulating. In the course of reading the book —and with a little
recourse to other texts—I came to admire this philosopher.
Pearce writes of Habermas: ‘In addition to his vast scholarly publications,
he has been a leading voice in almost all the major debates in German public
life for over seven decades, on issues as diverse as the student revolts of
the 1960s, the Iraq war, genetic engineering and digital media’ —and
the Nazi period, one would add. My admiration is, I think, for that rare
phenomenon: a positive, public intellectual.
Philipp Felsch, in The Philosopher: Habermas and Us (2025), offers an
overview. Having read and reread Haberman’s books, Felsch writes, ‘His
principal works are still as discouragingly hermetic as I remembered them.
On the other hand, I have discovered Habermas the political commentator,
critic and polemicist, deploying in the debating forum a stylistic
brilliance that he seems to eschew deliberately in his academic texts…. As a
philosopher, he strove as few others for the timeless and universal, while
as a public intellectual he responded —in practically all his interventions
—to the specific historical situation.
His interlocutors contextualise this contradiction in his new book when they
point out the two impulses in his writings: ‘The tradition of Marxist
enlightenment with its inherent world-changing intention,’ and ‘the insight
into the wealth of contingencies that point to the limited feasibility of
history.’ Habermas responds,
‘Yes, you’ve put your finger on the ambivalence between the desire to make a
crisis-ridden world a little better through a collective effort and the
simultaneous understanding of the limits of controlling a highly complex
society, which characterises my work.’
Jürgen Habermas was born in Düsseldorf in 1929 and grew up near Cologne. He
was born with a cleft palate
which needed corrective surgery and which , according to him, proved a
catalyst for his later focus on communication. He was also a member of the
Hitler Youth at the end of the war, his father a member of the Nazi Party.
This would focus his attention on another theme in his early work: German
war guilt.
Habermas studied at the universities of Bonn, Göttingen, and Zürich. He
received his Ph.D. at Bonn in 1954. Two years later his socio-theoretical
thinking led him to the Frankfurt approach to Western Marxism. He became
Theodor W. Adorno’s assistant at the Institute for Social Research. The
Frankfurt School (founded 1923) analysed power relations in culture and
society and how they influenced human behaviour. ‘Suddenly the long-vanished
intellectual epoch of the Weimar years, from which we had been cut off
by the Nazi period,’ he remembers, ‘was part of the everyday present
thanks to a circle of significant émigrés’. If he saw himself at the time as
a sociologist, ‘the fundamental questions of philosophy never really
let go of me’.
In 1962 Habermas published The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere and then, as a professor at Heidelberg, taught philosophical
hermeneutics (how we understand the world, others and ourselves) and
subsequently taught at Frankfurt University, spending ten years as a
director at the Max Planck Institute. After retiring in 1994, Habermas
increased his visits to the U.S.A., teaching and lecturing there and
elsewhere.
He has an appealing modesty, despite his accomplishments. In Things
Needed to Get Better he explains: ‘I’ve always suspected myself of not
being a ‘real’ philosopher, someone who — if you’ll forgive the cliché —
proceeds from a contemplation of their own life situation and strives for
profound, metaphysically valid insights. I could identify my motives more in
Marxism and pragmatism. To me, the motive of striving to make the world a
tiny bit better, or merely contributing to warding off the constant threats
of regression, is one that should not be scorned. So I’m quite content to be
described as a ‘philosopher and sociologist’.
Reduced to their simplest, Habermas’s ideas are concerned with issues in
democracy, with public discourse, communication and social interaction. So
for example, after the reunification of Germany in 1989/1990, he publicly
drew the conclusion ‘that the crisis of capitalism, which had been
ecologically expanded by that point, could only be “overcome from within”,
i.e. through the democratically organised resilience of social movements.’
Keen to develop political participation —a subject he has recently returned
to, given the explosion of digital media— he promotes the importance of a
public sphere for informed debate in a democracy and worries over its
current health. He sees the goal of communication as being both information
exchange and a means of building shared understanding and intelligent
compromise based on reason. Modernity facilitates or obstructs these goals.
Power and scientific advances may affect their balance.
While he has published widely, unflaggingly, Habermas has also studied with
equal zeal. A look at his Wikipedia entry shows how amazingly comprehensive
are the influences on his philosophy and social theory. They include —as one
might expect — the foundational Kant (and neo-Kantian) thought; Schelling
and Hegel from the German tradition; Marx and the neo-Marxians; Adorno; the
sociology of Max Weber;
the linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin; the development
psychology of Piaget; the sociology of Talcott Parsons; and the teachings of
the American Pragmatists. His writing, he recalls in his new book, has been
shaped by the work of such people and, among others, by Walter Benjamin,
Hannah Arendt, Ernst Bloch, Ernst Cassirer, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger,
Gershom Scholem and Hans-Georg Gadamer (‘I could tell you in my sleep what
idea of theirs stimulated and instructed me’). He has been a great networker
also, forming many academic friendships in Germany and America in
particular.
Perhaps Habermas’s most famous intervention as an activist public
intellectual was in regard to the moral conscience of post-Holocaust German
society, when he did more than anyone to fuel the ‘Historians Dispute’ (Historikerstreit)
in the late 1980s. In response to the conservative historian Ernst Nolte’s
(and others’) attempt to ‘draw a line’ under the German past, minimizing
responsibility for the Nazi period and drawing moral equivalence with allied
acts, Habermas and fellow left wing historians countered with the need to
confront the past as an expression of the German character, not to excuse it
as a regrettable aberration.
As he explains in Things Needed to Get Better, ‘It was an intuitive
understanding that separated the critical part of our generation from the
entrenched mentality all around us: the Nazis had not been a foreign body in
the fabric of an ‘essentially healthy’ culture —not some horrible episode
that was fortunately over now. Rather, they were able to draw on that
darkest legacy of our culture that even great minds of the nation such as
Thomas Mann had mobilized at the start of the First World War against the
“spirit of 1789.”’
On the fundamentally important questions of today, such as the
‘species-ethical ‘question, Habermas has something to offer. He recognises
that the question, ‘How do we actually want to live as human beings?’, has
to be asked in the current context of the successes of biogenic research and
speculations about artificial intelligence. He sees with concern the ‘end
of the naturalness of the human organism’ and views ‘This form of life
endangered as soon as genetic interventions are no longer conditioned on a
state-approved therapeutic purpose and are subject to the arbitrariness of
parental wishes.’ This would mean those born with manipulated genes are
denied possession of the independence we view as morally important.
I found Habermas most persuasive in the political digression on the state of
Western Europe: ‘In the course of the entirely necessary but
strategically thoughtless support for Ukraine, politics and the
mentality of the clueless Western elites have focused increasingly narrowly
on the military angle. I’m certainly not criticizing the resolute
assistance, but the lack of perspective with which the West falls
back on the reflexes rehearsed in the Cold War without any initiative of
its own.’ Referring to the ‘headless politics’ of the European Union, he
records his worry over ‘the fact that we seem equally helpless in the face
of a growing domestic right-wing populism in many hitherto reliably
democratic states’.
Habermas is a seasoned critic of the West: ‘I also hold the view that
Western tradition has rightly faced criticism, because, in the course of the
West’s imperialist domination, it has claimed the universal validity of
reasonable reasons blindly, i.e. without sensitivity to the self-will of
foreign cultures, and often enough by their own highly particular
standards.’
As to the controversy surrounding Habermas’s work: the first main criticism
the reader may have noted is the fact that —at least simplified —some of his
central ideas seem idealistic. The world is more diverse than he allows for.
All voices cannot be heard, nor have they the same power or interests. As
Isaiah Berlin famously stressed, there is a conflicting plurality of values.
Haberman’s solutions cannot address this without almost unimaginable change.
The criticism more immediate to Things Needed to Get Better is the
question of whether Habermas’s language is a barrier to understanding. What
are we to make of such sentences in the book as the following: ‘The
dialectical elaboration of the concrete universal from the reconciliation of
the opposition between the individual and the abstract universal gains its
plausibility from the social model of overcoming the crisis of a
disintegrating moral totality.’ Unfriendly?
One cannot escape the feeling that the conversation here is intended
to exclude the uninitiated.
The late, conservative philosopher Roger Scruton took aim similarly at
Habermas’s books in his entertaining Fools, Frauds and Firebrands:
Thinkers of the New Left (2015), delighting in exposing the emperor’s
new gown. He dismissed the prose as mostly waffle and sociological jargon,
though ‘an integral component of the message. The style is the agent of
legitimation, whereby the Habermasian critique of bourgeois society
establishes its academic credentials.’ Scruton ends his dismissal with a
wonderful Kafkaesque image: ‘the reader waits in the corridors of Habermas’s
prose like a petitioner to whom truth has been promised, albeit only
abstractly, on a document that is perhaps already out of date.’ He
concludes, ‘if the only message is, let’s talk, it is doubtful that
we really need volume upon volume of inspissated jargon to convey it.’
Well, on the basis of my reading of Habermas in conversation, I would
say that —amusing as it is —Scruton is being unfair to the seriousness with
which the philosopher approaches our problems. However, criticisms of
Habermas’s idealism and of his style are enough to explain his
controversial status in some circles. In a 2019 interview with Roman Yos
regarding his book on early Habermas, he was asked to explain a point he
made: that the philosopher’s ‘work has not been as formative for the
theory-hungry students of the 1970s as for example Michel Foucault’s or
Adorno’s,’ that his ‘oeuvre has neither sparked the emergence of rivalling
interpretative schools fighting over the correct reading of his philosophy
nor a historiography of his ideas.’ He was asked to explain the slow
reception of Habermas’s work. In answering, Yos turned again to the fact
that taking ‘a stand as a critical commentator on contemporary issues, may
be reason enough for some to consider him a contender for the status of a
“classic.”’
So we are back to admiring the ‘stand’. But there is also that other answer:
in the face of despair Habermas —unfashionably —finds reason for hope:
‘Despite our justified scepticism about the power of our reason to change
something in politics and history, we can’t let defeatism have the last
word! It’s not a trivial matter of a little more optimism or pessimism… but
of justifying the modicum of trust in reason and the duty to use our reason
that enable us to resist the obscene tendency to revel in a quietist
know-all cynicism, which is unfortunately widespread among intellectuals.’
Recommended reading therefore.