Habermas (Düsseldorf, Germany, 1929) is one of the few living philosophers able to transcend intellectual fashions, and is as present in the public sphere today as he was when he was a young theorist raging in the student movement of the late 1920s occurred. sixty. On the occasion of his 80th birthday, the philosopher Ronald Dworkin said of him: “Not only is he the most famous living philosopher in the world, but his own fame is famous too.” Or I would say that his fame far exceeds the knowledge of his complex theory . He owes his fame above all to his tireless desire to comment at any time on any event that shocks public opinion; that is, it is more about his role as an intellectual than his complicated philosophy. I wouldn’t be surprised if, at the age of 94, he surprised us with a text about the current situation in Palestine, just as he did with the war in Ukraine and all previous war conflicts, with the relationship between philosophy and religion the debates about biotechnology, the defense of the EU from a federal integration perspective or the more specific German questions about reunification or the critical approach to the Nazi past and the Holocaust. And with tens of millions of other topics.
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In Germany, it is as solid a national landmark as the Brandenburg Gate. On the occasion of his 90th birthday in 2019, a true collective tribute to his figure was organized with an unusual media presentation. It is a country that loves its intellectuals, perhaps because they are becoming an increasingly rare breed. This birthday coincided with the presentation of a 1,752-page book that reviews the entire history of philosophy over the last 2,500 years, starting with the beginning of the “Axis Age” (in the words of Karl Jaspers), the moment in which The The first developed religions began to take hold, sparking a mixture of admiration and disbelief. Since then he has already published a new book – A New Structural Change in the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, 2022 (no Spanish edition) – and apparently has another one ready. More wood to feed a myth that was born when, at just 24 years old, he published his article “Thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger” in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which had a spectacular impact. No one could imagine at the time that this bold and clever young man would become the successor to the old miser from the Black Forest in the canon of great German philosophers, who would become the “Hegel of the Federal Republic”.
A restless and hyperactive theorist
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Habermas spent his childhood in Gummersbach near Cologne, the city where his father headed the Chamber of Commerce and Industry and therefore tacitly collaborated with the ruling regime, although he had liberal beliefs. During the war he was drafted into the Hitler Youth, but never took part in the war. However, this and Nazi totalitarianism in general will leave deep marks on him, immediately leading him to a firm commitment to democracy and an enormous distrust of those who have readjusted without freeing themselves of their previous responsibilities. For half of his life he was associated with the Frankfurt Critical School and in 1955, on Adorno’s initiative, he entered its Institute for Social Research, although in reality he did not stay at this institution for more than four years. He immediately had differences of opinion with his director Max Horkheimer, who considered him too left-wing. He always recognized himself as a student of Adorno, whom he deeply admired, but immediately began flying alone. He was too free and restless to simply enroll in school. In fact, in his first impact book, “History and Criticism of Public Opinion” (1962), he began to distance himself from his alleged teachers by undertaking a radical reinterpretation of the Enlightenment. Far from being content with the defeatist and dead-end criticism of his forebears, but more inclined to focus on the pathologies of modernity, Habermas turned to a more optimistic vision. Modernity now begins to be assessed as an “unfinished project,” not as the deformed culmination of a process that sought to emancipate man and ultimately transformed into its opposite: a new form of anonymous and intangible power. Although he was alert to its distortions, Habermas would soon emerge as the great defender of the Enlightenment project, even after the spectacular emergence of French poststructuralist philosophy.
Jürgen Habermas gives a lecture at the Technical University of Dresden, December 9, 1998. Matthias Lüdecke (AKG / ALBUM)
From then on, its aim will be to gain access to normative criteria on which to base a critical social theory adapted to the new conditions of “late capitalism”, knowing full well that for this it is not enough to rely exclusively on the tradition of philosophy to leave neo-Marxist social analyzes; In addition, it was necessary to draw on the contributions of different areas of expertise. It was clear to him from the beginning that access to a new theory of rationality was not possible without relying on collaboration between philosophy and all the social sciences. And a restless adventure begins, marked by an alchemy and intellectual flexibility that allow him to integrate into his theory elements of others that might serve these purposes. In doing so, he undertakes a critical reappropriation of the theory and philosophy of liberal democracy and, in particular, reconstructs the necessary institutional and normative assumptions that underlie the public dimension of reason as originally formulated by Kant; formulates an ethics of discourse, which he developed together with KO Apel; and promotes a re-reading of Weber, Parsons and Luhmann as well as pragmatism and the “linguistic turn” in contemporary philosophy.
“Arguing is more important than food,” he said to a student who wanted to go to lunch in the middle of an argument.
All while establishing himself academically. In 1964 he took over the chair for social philosophy that Horkheimer had held until then, and in 1971 he was appointed director of the Max Planck Institute for “Research into the Living Conditions of the Scientific and Technical World” until he returned to his chair in Frankfurt in 1971. There he retired in 1993. His reputation as a polemicist has always accompanied him, not only because of the journalistic interventions already mentioned, among which I would like to highlight the “historians’ debate” about Germany’s Nazi past or the one he led with Sloterdijk about genetic manipulation or all those about the role of the EU. Of his public debates, the one that he held with the still Cardinal Ratzinger on reason, religion and secularism, one of the topics to which he devoted himself enthusiastically after the attacks of September 11th, stands out. And among academics, his arguments about positivism, Luhmann’s systems theory or postmodern philosophy, although he did not miss the opportunity to have lunch with Michel Foucault when he went to Paris. Arguing has always been his way of life – “Arguing is more important than eating,” he said to a student who wanted to interrupt a discussion of his work with the teacher to go to lunch.
The intellectual feeds on the philosopher
His irrepressible desire to be present in almost all public debates is not only one of the main characteristics of his personality; it is a natural extension of his theoretical premises. It is not for nothing that he is the great architect of the theory of deliberative democracy, this constant enlightenment between free and equal citizens who resolve their differences in a process of constant reflection with arguments. It is essential that this discussion is geared towards mutual understanding and takes place under conditions that ensure perfect integration and symmetry of the advisors. In the end it’s the budget, the best argument would prevail in the end. Political communication in our public space is obviously far from this ideal that our author has always denounced. In these post-truth moments, with the proliferation of fake news, tribal epistemology, rampant emotionalization and thousands of opinion conditioning strategies, there would already have been a complete departure from these normative assumptions. This led him to write his last book to date: A New Structural Transformation of the Public… Public reason, that great achievement of the Enlightenment, has dissolved behind the noise of social media and manipulation.
Overall, it at least provides a normative template that allows us to assess the dimension of the disorder and can provide us with a starting point for criticism. This template was woven by Habermas over the years until it culminated in what will go down in the history of philosophy: his theory of communicative action, based on the centrality of language as a natural medium of communication and understanding; but it is also about concealment, deception and power interests. To gain access to rational communication and eliminate the distortions highlighted, it is enough to resort to an analysis of our usual communication practices. In them we constantly make validity claims to facts, norms, experiences that we try to justify or validate by resorting to arguments that we subject to the interaction of others; We subject them to the practice of “intersubjectivity.” Habermas does this and nothing else in his public interventions or in his scientific work, trying to water down his statements in a dialogue that always aims at mutual understanding.
In A History of Philosophy (Trotta, published November 6), the monumental book whose first volume is now available in Spanish, the long gallop it undertakes through the whole life of the mind is not aimed at us to overwhelm with his undoubted erudition; The aim is to clarify what the task of philosophy might be at a time when science’s expansive vision and continuous specialization threaten to distract us from what should be its fundamental goal: telling us about the world, in who we live, to orient ourselves and to enlighten us about how we can face the challenges of today’s world and help us to “use reason autonomously” to be able to decide who and how we want to be. These were always the questions that shaped Habermas’s extraordinary intellectual life.
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