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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Jürgen Habermas is the voice of a generation. One of the world’s most influential philosophers and Germany’s greatest living intellectual, he has shaped debates, both academic and public, for more than half a century. For as long as the cultural historian Philipp Felsch can remember, Habermas has been around: as an admonishing voice of reason, as the moral conscience of post-Holocaust German society, as the son of his grandparents’ neighbours in Gummersbach. Is the philosopher's intellectual supremacy coming to an end today, or are his ideas gaining new relevance in the crisis times in which we now find ourselves?
To answer this question, Felsch plunged anew into Habermas’s voluminous work and travelled to his home to talk with him over tea and cake about the concerns that have motivated him, the people who have influenced him and the controversies in which he has been involved. Can the ideas that the philosopher has championed throughout his career – universalism, reason, dialogue – be of any help to us now as we face the major challenges of the twenty-first century?
This compelling account of a strikingly original thinker is also a portrait of an epoch that bears his imprint and a glimpse of a future we could embrace.
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Seitenzahl: 296
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
An Afternoon in Starnberg
Notes
In the Upside-Down World
Notes
Perpetrators and Victims
Notes
Farewell to Profundity
Notes
The Consciousness of the Present
Notes
The Centre Does Not Hold
Notes
Running the Gauntlet in Frankfurt
Notes
Rocket Science for a Better Society
Notes
What We Must Presuppose
Notes
The Stigma of the Spoken
Notes
Uncanny Germany
Notes
Theory of the Loss of Meaning
Notes
Was That Really Necessary?
Notes
Taxonomy of the Counter-Enlightenment
Notes
Distance and Thymos
Notes
J’accuse
Notes
Back from the Future
Notes
History and Memory
Notes
Stirrings of Post-National Feeling
Notes
The Primacy of Global Domestic Politics
Notes
On War
Notes
The Philosopher of the Universal Provinces
Notes
Acknowledgements
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Begin Reading
Acknowledgements
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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The Philosopher
Habermas and Us
PHILIPP FELSCH
Translated by Tony Crawford
polity
Originally published in German by Propylaën Verlag as Der Philosoph. Habermas und wir © Philipp Felsch 2024. Published by arrangement with Gaeb & Eggers Literary Agency.
This English translation © Polity Press, 2025.
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6770-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025936422
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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An Afternoon in Starnberg
It looks as though my forty-minute train ride from Munich’s main station has brought me to Long Island: the modernistic bungalow overlooking a wooded slope would be more at home in the Hamptons than in upper Bavaria. The owner of the house looks American to me too, coming to the door in his chinos and brand-new Reeboks.
In spite of his age, Jürgen Habermas makes a slim, sprightly impression. I can’t deny feeling a certain awe in his presence. This man in trainers worked closely with Adorno, conversed with Hannah Arendt in New York and Michel Foucault in Paris – and is himself the author of a monumental philosophical oeuvre. And not only that: even now, seventy years after he entered the German public sphere in the early 1950s, his influence still seems to be tangible in every debate. His political positions with regard to Germany’s history continue to influence German commemorative culture. Whether he weighs in on digital media, the Ukraine war or the crisis in the Middle East, he can be sure of national – even international – attention. At over ninety! If they had lived as long, Foucault would have interpreted the election of Donald Trump, Hannah Arendt would have analysed 9/11 and Adorno would have commented on Oliver Bierhoff’s golden goal in the 1996 European Championship. In spite of his status as an old white man, Habermas still seems to be indispensable. It is as if what Chancellor Olaf Scholz has named our Zeitenwende – the disturbing break with long-cherished beliefs – calls more than anything for a re-examination of his work.
Habermas has been around for as long as I can remember – but as someone I acknowledged more or less out of duty, and whose ideas I received mostly second-hand, and preferably from the point of view of his opponents. Today, that strikes me as negligent. Hadn’t he been an indispensable point of reference in my own intellectual development? Hadn’t he influenced, as no other, the political discourse of West Germany? What does the passing of the world of yesteryear mean for his legacy? Will Germany be a different country without him?
Although people told me he hardly ever received visitors any more, he immediately answered my written request to talk to him with an invitation to come to Starnberg. Because he no longer travelled, he wrote, he was leaving the date and time up to me. On this Friday afternoon in early June 2022 in Bavaria, the heat feels more like August. A joint search for a vase for the flowers I bought at the train station helps me over my initial timidity. While making tea, Habermas apologizes for the fact that the chocolate marble cake he bought for our meeting is cut too thick.
His unusual-sounding name has been a familiar one to me since my childhood. The Habermas family lived diagonally across from my grandparents in Gummersbach, in a neighbourhood of single-family homes with generous gardens just outside the zone of the 1950s housing estates. Their name was part of the vocabulary of our visits to Gummersbach – just like that of the Bergmanns, whom my grandparents visited to watch television before they could afford their own set; like Adamek’s, the grocery shop around the corner, and like Magerquark, the low-fat cheese curd that my digestively impaired grandfather spread on his bread. The Habermases too were part of my grandparents’ loose-knit neighbourhood network. I remember that my grandmother used to have coffee once in a while with old Mrs Habermas, whose husband had died in the early 1970s, and on one of those occasions – a birthday party, I believe – she also met Mrs Habermas’s famous son.
Habermas’s reaction to my memories of Gummersbach is reserved – he almost seems embarrassed. He left the town right after finishing school, he says. And because his parents hadn’t moved to that house until the 1950s, he only knew it from his sporadic visits. The rather distant relationship to his family of origin seems to be a characteristic of West Germany’s postwar generations in general. By this time, he has led me into the living room, where we take seats in the corner with the sofa whose light wool tones have long since entered the iconography of West German intellectual history as the ‘communicative epicentre’ of the Habermas home. On this sofa, beneath the abstract colour fields of a Günter Fruhtrunk painting titled ‘Wiesengrund Daydream’ after Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, which a clueless critic in the 1970s thought must be a landscape, the philosopher of the relations of communication has been photographed at least as often as in front of the obligatory wall-to-wall bookshelves. This is where he has had discussions with many great minds, artists and prominent politicians, including Herbert Marcuse, Wolf Biermann and half the leadership of the Social Democratic Party – a circumstance that heightens my sensation of how unpretentious the atmosphere is. I try to imagine the ceremony that a visit to Jacques Derrida or Peter Sloterdijk might have involved. In the Habermas house, in any case, everything exudes a cultivated normalcy. His wife Ute joins us after a while. With tea and marble cake, with her husband’s barely perceptible accent of the area east of Cologne in my ears, I experience my second epiphany of this afternoon: on my arrival, Habermas had looked to me like an American; now I have a momentary déjà vu of those visits to my grandparents in Gummersbach.1
Of course, my grandparents’ living room would have been dominated by genre paintings in oil and by the dark brown tones and rounded corners of 1950s middle-class nostalgia. Here, on the contrary, is the bright sobriety of postwar modernism – although its austerity is checked by the comfortable sofa group and an antique here and there. The avant-garde of 1960s Critical Theory had at least found living in the new buildings of the ribbon developments, exposed to the brutal inhospitality of the rebuilt cities, conducive to the cultivation of true class consciousness. The fact that Habermas fulfilled his dream of homeownership here, in this idyllic environment, was seen by his contemporaries in the early 1970s as a symbolic act announcing the end of an era. ‘Style is lived behaviour’, he wrote with regard to Heidegger, who had allowed a photographer to shoot an exclusive photo essay in his Black Forest cabin in 1966. Ten years later, Habermas allowed Barbara Klemm to take portrait photos of him in his house. Was homeowners’ philosophy coming into its own? From the 1970s, Habermas’s letters were sent from house to house – to Martin Walser, Niklas Luhmann, friends and colleagues sitting in their single-family homes in other corners of West Germany. Was this the only appropriate form of housing for the poets and philosophers of a country whose new urban fringe developments had resolved the historic conflict between the metropolis and the provinces?2
While I hasten to steer the conversation away from Gummersbach and my grandparents, and towards the questions that actually brought me here, the scene is disturbed by the muffled rumble of a lawnmower. Those who grew up in the time before leaf blowers came along inevitably associate this noise with the atmosphere of lazy, uneventful summer afternoons. Like the aroma of the famous madeleine that Proust dipped in his tea, it makes my observations of the past hour suddenly crystallize into a whole gestalt. In the 1990s, after German reunification, when many of his colleagues were indulging in fantasies of Germany’s new prestige in the world, Habermas had insisted that he wished to remain the citizen of a ‘universal-provincial country’.3 Here, in his sober, comfortable living room, this phrase suddenly becomes intuitively obvious: the mixture of worldliness and provincialism – the Hamptons and Gummersbach; the constellation of lawnmower, mid-century and marble cake – reveals its secret significance: it is symbolic of the old West Germany.
I never would have dreamed that I would one day be sitting with Habermas in his living room. In the 1990s during my studies, when his name crossed my path for the second time, the lines were clearly drawn: Habermas had called my favourite authors of the time, the French philosophers, ‘young conservatives’, classing them with people like Helmut Kohl and Arnold Gehlen – an offence that some of the French had repaid with outrage and others with indifference. At a chilly dinner in the spring of 1983, when Habermas was teaching at the Collège de France in Paris, Michel Foucault is said to have asked, with his characteristic shark’s smile, whether Habermas considered him an anarchist. According to the historian and Foucault translator Ulrich Raulff, he probably would have taken an affirmative answer ‘as a compliment’. For my part, I considered Habermas hopelessly fixated, to my existentialist political mind, on the structure of our institutions and their legitimacy. Gilles Deleuze’s cutting reference to the ‘bureaucrats of pure reason’, the ivy-covered administrators of philosophy, seemed to be tailored to him. The Byzantine architecture of his theory was supposed to reunite the True and the Good (if not necessarily the Beautiful), as Hegel’s once had done. But when it came to academic styles, I preferred that of his domestic rival Luhmann, who stood for a leaner, meaner way of thinking – with no mercy towards ‘neat, helpful’ theories born of ‘an interest in recognizing and curing’. In comparison with Luhmann’s inscrutable laconicism, the streak of self-deprecation that Habermas permitted himself from time to time looked simply antiquated. ‘Luhmann wins in the end’, as the Luhmann follower Norbert Bolz put it after the turn of the millennium.4
I imagined Habermas as being more repelling, ponderous, mandarin. In the course of our conversation, he leans so far back in his sofa, his legs crossed, that his left trainer hovers almost at eye level. Neither his books nor his public appearances had prepared me for the charisma that he displayed in our discussion. As I now know, others before me have had the same experience: there are numerous anecdotes in which Habermas, the putative bureaucrat of pure reason, turns out to be an interested, generous, witty person to talk to. In the early 1960s, as his career was picking up speed, his unadorned, almost casual manner must have had an irresistibly modern air. The Jewish Studies professor Jacob Taubes, who was an adviser together with Habermas to the Suhrkamp publisher Siegfried Unseld, considered him the ‘brightest mind of this generation’. His friend the cultural critic Karl Heinz Bohrer said he embodied something ‘uniquely new’: that is, ‘the intellectual invasion of the university’. In those days, the old-school dons still set the tone in the ivy-covered halls, but Habermas was ‘at once witty and serious, lively and strict. And he had enormous style in his somewhat frustratingly difficult diction.’ The reporters from the left alternative daily die tageszeitung (taz for short) who visited him in Starnberg in 1980 – and admitted to some ‘jitters in the presence of authority’ – found him ‘lean, agile, very friendly’. Four decades later, I can confirm their impression.5
The delegation from the taz had some reservations about his middle-class habitus. In any case, the tone taken towards Habermas changed during the 1980s: while he became more acceptable to non-leftist circles, and in 1986 began meeting in an informal working group with the Hessian minister of the environment Joschka Fischer, the reservations that I and my cohort continued to harbour into the 1990s prevailed in the intellectual milieu and among students. Habermas was now accused of having betrayed the legacy of Critical Theory and, in the same breath, of being an unoriginal thinker who cobbled together second-hand ideas – and that in a mindless ‘prof jargon’, according to Karl Markus Michel, the former Suhrkamp editor and co-editor of the Kursbuch. Habermas, who had taken up the opposition to the philosophical style of the mandarins in the 1960s, was suddenly pigeonholed as a scholastic philosopher himself – an image shift that he seems to have registered with regret and borne with equanimity. Playing the role of ‘the guardian of rationality’ was increasingly vexing, he sighed in 1983.6
A violent fantasy by the British author Rachel Cusk is a late echo of the distaste for Habermas: in her 2014 novel Outline, a minor character tells about a complex relationship with a male philosophy professor. The man is a Habermas expert. The books and papers he leaves lying around in their flat drive her to desperation, but she literally lacks the strength to fight his mess: ‘the works of Jürgen Habermas … are as heavy as the stones they used to build the pyramids’. The tables are not turned until she comes home one evening to find that her cats have taken the initiative: ‘My novels … were untouched: only Habermas had been attacked, his photograph torn from every frontispiece, great claw-marks scorched across The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.’ Her partner puts his things away from then on to prevent further damage.7
I am struck not only by the deep satisfaction that the narrator seems to feel, above and beyond her relationship issues, at the destruction of Habermas’s books, but also by the philosopher’s dubious fame expressed in her aversion to him. On the other hand, what contemporary thinker should Cusk have chosen as an icon of scholasticism? The French have the reputation – whether deserved or not – of being rebels against academic convention. And the Americans are too unknown outside university walls. As early as the 1970s, the publisher of French philosophy Axel Matthes certified that Habermas was a ‘brand name’. Not only the man, wrote Ronald Dworkin, but ‘his fame itself is famous’. Perhaps ‘Habermas’ had long since ceased to refer to an individual philosopher, had become a label with global recognition as representing a certain style of thinking.8
Over the course of the afternoon, as the June sun wanders across the bay windows of the Habermas house, we talk about Adorno and Foucault, New York and Jerusalem; about what the Suhrkamp culture and German unification meant to him. Only at the very end do we get round to talking about the war that broke out four months ago in Ukraine. Habermas’s initial statement on the war, just recently published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, has brought him a great deal of criticism for advocating the German chancellor’s cautious stance. Without disguising his consternation, the man who has always been able to rely on his sense of the zeitgeist explains that, ‘for the first time’, he feels he no longer understands the reactions of the German public.
It has grown late. A short time afterwards, we say good-bye. On the way back to Munich, I have an almost poignant feeling of having experienced the end of something. But what? The end of a seventy-year-long relationship between an intellectual and his audience? The end of the old West Germany, of which I had a vision that afternoon in Habermas’s living room?9
In spite of mild doubts about my project of writing a book about him, he granted me access to his archived papers. In the year and a half that have passed since then, I have immersed myself in his correspondence in the archive centre of the University of Frankfurt. It is characteristic of Habermas that he has ceded his papers not to the august German Literature Archives in Marbach, but here, where they can be read in the pale fluorescent light of an antiquated ambience. Loyalty to his old institution seems to be more important to him than accession to the German pantheon.
Reading and rereading Habermas’s published writings proved to be a double-edged exercise: 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. The various puzzle pieces formed a picture of a thinker both rigorous and contradictory. 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 that had resulted from the aftermath of Nazism in Germany. Although he has, with extraordinary insistence, kept the two roles separate since the 1980s, their interleaving – the alternation between distance and engagement, the dialectics of universalism and particularism – is what characterizes his oeuvre. Habermas is therefore a more or less ideal figure through whom we can survey the peculiar interrelation of theory, history and memory that is so characteristic of the intellectual terrain of West Germany. Several generations of readers have examined themselves in the mirror of his works over the course of his endless career. Their response to him says at least as much about them as about the philosopher: in addition to everything else, Habermas is a kind of historical–philosophical litmus test. For my part, as I delved into his biography and his work, I felt I saw the intellectual silhouette of my own generation more distinctly in contrast.10
Notes
1.
To keep the number of notes as small as possible, I have grouped several references in one note as follows: first the sources of the verbatim quotations and direct paraphrases, in the order of their occurrence in the text, then the references to further reading. Maak, ‘Die absolute Form und die Geschichte’, 102. On the Fruhtrunk painting, see Iden, ‘Alles Linke auf seine Kappe’.
2.
Habermas, ‘Martin Heidegger: On the Publication of Lectures from the Year 1935’, 161. On the preferences of the advocates of Critical Theory, see Bohrer, ‘Sechs Szenen Achtundsechzig’, 412. On the end of an era, see Müller-Doohm,
Habermas: A Biography
, 166–7. I have coined the term ‘detached-house philosophy’ after Andreas Koch’s ‘
Einfamilienhaussoziologie
’.
3.
Habermas,
The Past as Future
, 72.
4.
Habermas, ‘Modernity: An Incomplete Project’, 14; Raulff, ‘Akute Zeichen fiebriger Dekonstruktion’; Deleuze, ‘Nomadic Thought’, 259; Luhmann,
Social Systems
, 115, 114; Bolz, ‘Niklas Luhmann und Jürgen Habermas’, 34. On the French reaction to Habermas’s affront, see Scholz, ‘Innerdeutsches Frankreich’, 66. The dinner with Foucault is mentioned in Eribon,
Michel Foucault et ses contemporains
, 291–2.
5.
Jacob Taubes to Habermas, 15 January 1972, Papers of Jürgen Habermas, Archivzentrum, University Library, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main (hereinafter UBA Ffm), Na 60, 18; Bohrer, ‘1968: Die Phantasie an die Macht?’, 1073; Bohrer quoted in Müller-Doohm,
Habermas
, 493, n.90; Habermas, ‘Vier Jungkonservative beim Projektleiter der Moderne’.
6.
Michel, review of Habermas’s
Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns
; Habermas, ‘Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter’, 20. On the discussion group with Fischer, see Habermas to Joschka Fischer, 12 February, 1986, UBA Ffm Na 60, 104.
7.
Cusk,
Outline
, 16.
8.
Axel Matthes to Habermas, 8 March 1979, UBA Ffm Na 60, 52; Dworkin quoted in Müller-Doohm,
Habermas
, 401. As early as 1980, the critic Peter Iden suspected that, among living philosophers, Habermas was the best-known outside the profession: Iden, ‘Alles Linke auf seine Kappe’. On Habermas’s international reception, see Corchia et al.,
Habermas global
.
9.
On the need for intellectual intuition, see Habermas, ‘An Avantgardistic Instinct for Relevances’, 55. Other quotations and paraphrases of Habermas are from our conversations at his home on 10 June 2022 and 1 September 2023.
10.
The present book is not intended as a biography. As these notes indicate, it draws frequently on Stefan Müller-Doohm’s indispensable
Habermas: A Biography
. Particularly instructive on the political and constitutional context of Habermas’s thought is Specter,
Habermas: An Intellectual Biography
. On Habermas’s early work, see Keulartz,
De verkeerde wereld van Jürgen Habermas
; Roman Yos,
Der junge Habermas
.
In the Upside-Down World
Those who ask why Habermas seems to embody the old West Germany, and at least a part of the reunited Germany, inevitably have to talk about his generation. The space that his generation takes up, not only in postwar Germany’s political and cultural makeup, but also in its self-image, is indicated by the many labels that have been tacked onto that cohort: the flak auxiliaries, the sceptics, the twenty-niners, the forty-fivers and, most recently, the fifty-eighters. The 1929 vintage in particular has brought forth so many great names that it is hard to keep them all in mind: Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Dorothee Sölle, Christa Wolf and Heiner Müller, Harald Juhnke and Eduard Zimmermann, Ralf Dahrendorf – and of course Jürgen Habermas. It may be tempting to attribute it to the influence of favourable stars, if it weren’t for the historic reasons – the journalist Günter Gaus, also born in 1929, once called it the ‘mercy of a later birth’ – that help to explain the success of that vintage. The forty-fivers – the label that fits Habermas best – found themselves ideally prepared for a new beginning: too young to be seriously compromised, but old enough to realize that an era had ended. Habermas is the last person who would deny having had this head start. After the turn of the millennium, he wrote to Martin Walser, two years his senior, that he saw himself ‘and all of us, yourself included, always as the undeserving beneficiaries of a historical constellation that fell to us in postwar Germany’.1
The forty-fivers have been lauded for their political virtues – their realism, optimism and inventiveness. According to the writer Florian Illies, the ‘intellectual life skills’ of the 1929 cohort are defined by the ‘belief in the possibility of a second and better life’ – a belief that they share, not with Illies and my generation, but with those of our age group on the other side of the Iron Curtain. On one of the stacks of books in Habermas’s living room, I saw the memoirs of the Albanian political scientist Lea Ypi, in which she recapitulates her life before and after the end of actually existing socialism. ‘When you see a system change once, it’s not that difficult to believe that it can change again’, she writes about the lesson of those years – a sentiment that must have been immediately obvious to her reader in Starnberg.2
Habermas too, who has described on various occasions how the radio reports on the Nuremberg trials and the Allies’ documentation of Bergen-Belsen opened his eyes to the true nature of Nazism, believed a political reset was possible. ‘We believed that a spiritual and moral renewal was indispensable and inevitable’, he recalled thirty years later. Great hopes were attached to that renewal. He had felt the need for a ‘spontaneous sweeping away, some explosive act, which then could have served to begin the formation of a political entity’.3 In that sentiment he expresses a longing for purification, for revolution and redemption, which has something zealous, millenarian, about it, rather than the reformist temperament that he was later reputed to have.
Right at the founding of West Germany, in the winter term of 1949, the twenty-year-old Habermas enrolled in the university of my home town, Göttingen. A series of disappointments began immediately with the formation of the first Bonn government, which included two national-conservative ministers; it continued with West Germany’s rearmament, its anti-Communist stance and the failure of denazification. The ‘politics of normalization of an old man with a limited vocabulary’, as Habermas called the first chancellor, belied hopes for a fresh start. Ralf Dahrendorf called Habermas a true ‘grandchild of Adenauer’, but although he later advocated integration with an ideal West, the young Habermas supported the idea of a demilitarized, neutral Germany and in 1953 voted for the ‘All-German People’s Party’ of the renegade CDU member Gustav Heinemann. Habermas’s attitude towards the ‘Bonn Republic’ was shaped by the belief that a historic opportunity had been missed – and his relation to the current ‘Berlin Republic’, which in his view emerged from yet another tainted foundation, is analogous. The gulf between the promise and the reality, between the possible and the actual, became the driving force behind his critical social theory.4
One of the paradoxes of his educational career is that Habermas, who had begun reading extensive philosophical works while still in secondary school, enunciated his opposition to the new normalcy with reference to Martin Heidegger – who, as we know since the publication of his ‘Black Notebooks’, was in those years a paragon of maudlin self-righteousness. The book and theatre reviews and the topical essays that Habermas wrote from the early 1950s on for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and other newspapers have an unmistakable Heidegger vibe. In defining philosophy’s task as ‘by aesthesis to unlock the destiny of Being’, in advocating against an ‘existence of self-assertion, of making available, of planning imposition’, and in saying ‘that we have lost the proper relationship to “things”’, Habermas was translating his discontent with the times into the dualism of authentic and inauthentic life that seems to have been almost unavoidable to critics of culture of every political persuasion in those days. Habermas called on the older professors ‘who still define the profile of the universities’ to catch up on their reading and finally engage in ‘an objective discussion’ with Heidegger, while preparing his contemporaries generally for an ‘act of inversion’: ‘Man must take on an attitude of listening to the things and learning to let them be, instead of dominating them.’5
The idea of ‘inversion’ and the dualism of ‘utility’ and ‘awareness’ are also key concepts in his 1954 dissertation on Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s ‘Ages of the World’ fragments. In these unfinished writings, Schelling broke with the subjective philosophy of German Idealism and turned instead to a mystical tradition, going back through Pietism to the esoteric teachings of the Jewish Kabbala and the Gnosticism of late antiquity, which interpreted the world as a system of decay waiting for the spark of inversion, since the divine hierarchy of love and hate, light and darkness, good and evil has been perverted into its negation.6
Is there also in the philosophy of the all-too-earnest, all-too-rational Habermas a Gnostic idea of decay and a burning core of mystical longing for redemption that can be traced back to his earliest intellectual influences? In what may be the most candid interview he ever gave, he said that something is ‘deeply amiss’ in our society. His philosophy, on the other hand, is based on a fundamental intuition that draws on religious sources: that is, a notion of ‘felicitous’ forms of human coexistence ‘in which autonomy and dependency can truly enter into a non-antagonistic relation’. In the paired concepts of ideology and self-reflexion, instrumental and communicative reason, system and lifeworld, has Habermas exhaustively explored the dualism of a perverted world and the hope for redemption that he alludes to here? Can that dualism also be found in his notion of a different, ‘post-national’ Germany? It makes sense, in view of the convulsions and expectations of the year 1945, that he yielded to the fascination of Heidegger and Schelling, of the mystic Jakob Böhme and the kabbalist Isaac Luria, and that these thinkers gave him the means to immunize himself against the disappointments to come.7
Habermas’s greatest disappointment was to be the discovery that Heidegger himself refused to re-evaluate his political past. In the 1953 book publication of the introductory lectures on metaphysics that he had originally given in 1935, Heidegger persisted in mentioning the ‘inner truth and greatness’ of Nazism; that prompted Habermas to call out the philosopher he had once found so authoritative in an article in the FAZ. ‘Can the planned murder of millions of people, which we all know about today, be explained in terms of Being as a fatal mistake?’ That was the question with which Habermas made his debut as a brilliant polemicist on the West German scene. It would be going too far to say he broke with Heidegger: the import of his critique lay in the argument that Heidegger, by stubbornly defending an error that seemed to manifest the pathology of a whole society, was falling short of his own pioneering conception of temporality, which required questioning the past from time to time ‘as something … yet to come’. Very generally, Habermas defended content against style and the categories Heidegger had developed in Being and Time against the vulgarity of their political appropriation. It was time, Habermas concluded with dialectical finesse, ‘to think with Heidegger against Heidegger’.8
Jacob Taubes later claimed to have seen ‘the whole Habermas’ in this phrase – a claim that is not without support. By supplanting the isolated subject of the Cartesian tradition with an intrinsically involved Being-in-the-world, Heidegger had pointed the way towards post-metaphysical philosophy. But he had not gone far enough. He had interpreted human existence as a network of involvements, but not of communication. Because communication with others, from the perspective of his heroic nihilism, boiled down to the lamentable state of ‘surrender to the They’, Heidegger had been unable to perceive the interactive dimension of Dasein. It was left to his reader Habermas to correct this omission.9
And Heidegger himself? A reader of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung who had not failed to see the attack, he noted incredulously that its author ‘Habermaas’ (sic) was an unknown, twenty-four-year-old student. He did not feel called upon to issue a rebuttal – on the contrary, as he wrote to his wife in August 1953, he had ‘purposely not looked at a newspaper’ since then.10
Notes
1.
Specter,
Habermas: An Intellectual Biography
, esp. 6–8, calls Habermas’s generation the ‘’58ers’ to distinguish them explicitly from the ‘’68ers’. Habermas’s letter quoted in Müller-Doohm,
Habermas: A Biography
, 485, n.80. On Gaus’s phrase – later made famous by Helmut Kohl – see ‘Verschwiegene Enteignung: Wer erfand die Wendung von der “Gnade der späten Geburt”?’. On the 1929 cohort, see, for example, Habermas, ‘Die Liebe zur Freiheit’.
2.
Illies, ‘Jahrgang 1929’; Ypi,
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History
, 310.
3.
Habermas, ‘Ideologies and Society in the Post-war World’, 43; Habermas, ‘Political Experience and the Renewal of Marxist Theory’, 79.
4.
Habermas,
The Past as Future
, 48; Dahrendorf, ‘Zeitgenosse Habermas’, 480. On the motif of the missed opportunity, see, e.g., Habermas, ‘Public Space and Political Public Sphere’.
5.
Habermas, ‘Im Lichte Heideggers’; ‘Chemische Ferien vom Ich’; ‘Philosophie ist Risiko’; ‘Im Lichte Heideggers’, translation after Müller-Doohm,
Habermas: A Biography
.
6.
See Habermas, ‘Das Absolute und die Geschichte’. See also Keulartz,
De verkeerde wereld van Jürgen Habermas
, 12–13, 47–8.
7.
Habermas, ‘Dialectics of Rationalization’, 125–6. On the pairs of terms, see Keulartz,
De verkeerde wereld
