One could say, with a great degree of veracity, that Jürgen Habermas played a significant and indeed profound role in the transition not only of Germany, but indeed of Europe as a whole, to a peacetime role in its postwar period. Born and raised in the Ruhrgebiet in 1929, Habermas witnessed the war first- hand through his teenage years. This experience inspired a passion in the future philosopher to help establish the social and political conditions that would never allow the horrors of total war to happen again, a passion that continued through his long life and prolific writing. This legacy was multifaceted; it stretched from the political reflections of his early years of writing, to his academic connections through his early mentors in critical theory at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, to his turn to sociological research primarily in his years in Starnberg in the 1970s as the director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Living Conditions in the Scientific and Technical World, to his return to Frankfurt in the eighties and his work in communication action, discourse ethics, and law. Then after his mandatory retirement from Frankfurt, his later years were spent chiefly in the United States at Northwestern University and New York University, followed then by his final return to Starnberg.
Critique of Philosophy of Consciousness
Habermas explored epistemology in foundations neither theoretical nor speculative but rather in a manner that was based in practice. In his first years of study, Habermas studied Martin Heidegger, but lost interest when learning of the latter’s early support for Nazism that was never sufficiently explained or retracted. Habermas then wrote a dissertation on the Romantic philosopher Friederich Schelling, and focused on the German Idealist’s objectivation of the ego and intellectual intuition, which Immanuel Kant had rejected. Habermas concluded that German Idealism aimed to investigate subjectivity as a theory of consciousness that was principally guided by self-interest with a focus on empirical and scientific truth. In reaction to this, he delved into a kind of social-psychological epistemology inspired in part by Freudian psychology, but he did not follow it towards its ultimate in part because of criticism of his approach by University of Pittsburgh philosopher Adolf Grünbaum. Nonetheless, he held to critically derived meaning as a key for human consciousness. But this set up Habermas’ famous confrontation with Hans George Gadamer’s hermeneutics, which did not conclude in any significant rift between their positions but did induce Habermas’s search for a more pragmatic framework than what he found in such “philosophies of consciousness” as he called them.
The Public Sphere
In his attempts to use philosophy as a tool not simply for the explication of consciousness but rather for social and political change, Habermas developed an epistemology that what would undermine fascism and its role in what Nazism had unleashed. Fascism operates generally as a phalanx of industry and private ownership meant to oppose and supplant democratic proceduralism. For Habermas its overturning could be sparked only by a radical democracy – not simply the overturning of unquestioned executive authority, but rather the empowering of legislative and judicial reasoning. His key work in this discussion was first explicated in the publication of the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962. According to his argument, media, religion, cultural practices, and education are key to shaping the public sphere. Since historians contribute to the process of generating a public sphere as well, Habermas was troubled by finding that some German historians, such as Ernst Nolte, declared that the rise of National Socialism was necessitated by threats to Germany elicited by the Russian Revolution’s shaping of Communist forces. This shaped what came to be known as the Historikerstreit controversy in the mid-1980s. Habermas was convinced that the German public sphere should not excuse Hitler because of supposed outside influences, arguing rather that Germans must retain a “critical memory” of the Holocaust.
A Pragmatic Turn
Habermas was a prolific reader and interlocutor. He engaged in critical assessment of arguments, such as in his own renowned international seminars for graduate students, faculty, and researchers in Frankfurt. His forays into American pragmatism comprised one broad area of his investigations that these seminars provided. He held that American pragmatism witnesses well to what a mature democracy ought to be, especially in comparison to Germany’s short experience of it. What did this maturity represent? Not so much a strong and balanced interaction between legislative, executive, and judicial branches, but a spirit of trust, as Robert Brandom, whom Habermas respected, puts it. Yet how does one guarantee this trust, this faith in one’s social and political environment? For Habermas, it was by a focus on, and the celebration of, social and political diversity and a vision of a progress towards collective unity in the difference. Thus, he formed a model of “universal pragmatics” that gathers the interests of all affected participants into a dialogue to form new or modified distributions of all goods and benefits to them. The result of the discourse, however, does not produce permanent norms, but only those in turn revisable by later discourses as needed. The writings of C.S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and also George Herbert Mead contributed to his development of the theory. He then turned also to the contemporary writings of speech act theory to undergird the structure of discourse, particularly to Karl-Otto Apel’s Transformation of Philosophy. But Habermas did not find this same support for collective deliberations in what he considered postmodernism, particularly in Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, given their affirmation of what he believed an aesthetic and noncritical view of truth.
Communicative Action and Discourse Ethics
Habermas’s magnum opus is considered his two-volume work, Theory of Communicative Action,published in the early eighties. The first part contains his continuing criticisms ofinstrumental reason, following Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, and the second his sociological analysis of “system” demands on political and economic action that undermine lifeworld integration described initially by the later Edmund Husserl. For the systems theory he consulted sociological analysis from Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons, as well as the psychology of Lawrence Kohlberg. This contributed also to his positivist critique against Karl Popper’s critical rationalist assessment of the social sciences. Habermas and Adorno both argued that ignoring the structural and historical context of society makes social theory passive and uncritical. What Habermas specifically developed was a grounding of meaning and truth in a collective discussion, understood as an “ideal speech situation,” to bring all participants in the discussion toward a consensus about the best outcome emergent through the unforced force of the better arguments. But facing criticisms about this consensus theory of truth, even from critical theorists such as Seyla Benhabib, Habermas responded by modifying the discourse’s characterization from an “ideal speech situation,” to a broader “idealization” that takes better account of the many intricacies and contexts of discourse and its participants.
Progress
Critical theorists from the beginning assessed the status of progress or decline of cultures, especially in the West. Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment had expressed severe doubts about the instrumental reason that underlay its notion of progress in a way that moved cultures either towards thriving or towards alienation and decline. Sigmund Freud had made a similar diagnosis in his Civilization and its Discontents and other writings. Habermas instead defended a positive account of the steady, but uneven, amelioration of the West and its engagements with other nations over time. He claimed that communicative rationality, developing over time, cannot radically dissolve, but aims for foreseeable democratization. Much of his impetus for this optimism was rooted in Kant’s What is Enlightenment, and history has borne out its thesis’s diffusion first particularly in Europe and then in democratic experiments throughout the broader world. He defends his modernist view of progress extensively in the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. In turn, he was critical of postmodernists such as Lyotard, who claimed such progress was only a “grand” metanarrative and instead insisted on defending only small narratives of free expression, aesthetics, and deconstruction.
From Verification of Assertibility to Truth
One of the more astonishing intellectual “turns” that Habermas undertook came through a close collaboration with Cristina Lafont in a discussion on truth claims. Rejecting philosophies of consciousness, Habermas had formed his own consensus theory of truth in an article, entitled “Wahrheitstheorien,” which argued that those who follow the objectivizing rules of intersubjective discourse derived from successful speech acts do achieve a form of a consensus on truth claims that lead to valid assertibility of them. But Lafont insisted that truth is based not on de facto agreements or verifications about claims or states of affairs but rather is a predicate that when assigned to a set of propositional assertions transcends mere assertibility and thus “cannot be lost.” In Truth and Justification, Habermas then admitted a potential relativism of his assertibility theory and mended it accordingly, though retaining his demand always for a prediscursive accounting of all contexts in which a truth claim must nonetheless be applicable. Truth for him thus can be captured not by a deflationary, coherence, or semantic account, but only by one that is supplemented by a realist and non-relative conceptual idealization of the fallibility of all truth claims.
Turn to Religion
In later publications, Habermas rather surprisingly asserted that religion ought to be more of an essential part of the public sphere. He worked with Eduardo Mendieta, and also Judith Butler, Cornel West, Charles Taylor, and Lafont, in elaborating various aspects of this thesis. In 2004, he had a colloquy with Pope Benedict, a fellow German, on the important role that culture plays not only in the political sphere but also in the religious ambient generally. Religious cultures have long histories. Habermas was particularly given to asserting the emergence, in the Axial age roughly from 2000 to 800 BCE, not only of the Abrahamic religions, but also Buddhism, Confucianism, and Judaism. In his last major publication, Also a History of Philosophy, he sees these origins also as contributing to the genealogy of the very post-metaphysical thinking which he himself had developed as a part of a neo-pragmatic theory of the truth of empirical, ethical, aesthetic, or psychological claims.
Personal Remarks and Legacy
Habermas’s legacy can be summed up as a continual struggle, drawing much inspiration from Kant, for dignity and respect for the role of reason and freedom in our intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic lives. In later years he emphasized the difficulties of those who need emancipation from their physical, mental, as well as political and economic vulnerability (Verletzbarkeit). He was convinced that continuous engagement and interaction with other philosophers, sociologists, legal scholars, historians, and theologians could contribute to this goal. So now he leaves a number of scholars who are continuing their own research with his influence and various forms of critical theory idealizations. Among them are his former Assistent, Axel Honneth, Rainier Forst, Thomas McCarthy, Albrecht Wellmer, David Ingram, Seyla Benhabib, David Rasmussen, Klaus Günther, Nancy Fraser, Alessandro Ferrara, Hauke Brunkhorst, and many others. After the initial generation of Adorno and Horkheimer, and a second generation of critical theory with Habermas, these new philosophers are a third generation continuing this important work.
