Jürgen Habermas

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Western Philosophy
20th century
Name
Jürgen Habermas
Birth June 18, 1929 (1929-06-18) (age 78)
Düsseldorf, Germany
School/tradition Critical theory
Main interests Social theory · Epistemology
Political theory · Pragmatics
Notable ideas Communicative rationality
Discourse ethics
Deliberative democracy
Universal pragmatics
Influenced by Weber · Durkheim · Mead · Marx · Dilthey · Parsons · Kant · Heidegger · Piaget · Horkheimer · Adorno · Marcuse · Arendt · Peirce · Austin
Influenced Benhabib · Forst · Fraser · Honneth
Mockus · Hoppe · Feenberg
Wingert  · Georg Henrik von Wright

Jürgen Habermas (IPA: [ˈjʏʁgən ˈhaːbɐmaːs]; born June 18, 1929) is a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and American pragmatism. He is best known for his work on the concept of the public sphere, which he has based in his theory of communicative action. His work has focused on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics -- particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Habermas was born in Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia.

Until his graduation from gymnasium, Habermas lived in Gummersbach, near Cologne. His father, Ernst Habermas, was executive director of the Cologne Chamber of Industry and Commerce. He studied at the universities of Göttingen (1949/50), Zürich (1950/51), and Bonn (1951–54) and earned a doctorate in philosophy[1] from Bonn in 1954 with a dissertation entitled, Das Absolute und die Geschichte. Von der Zwiespältigkeit in Schellings Denken ("The absolute and history: on the contradiction in Schelling's thought"). His dissertation committee included Erich Rothacker and Oskar Becker.

From 1956 on, he studied philosophy and sociology under the critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno at the Institute for Social Research at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, but because of a rift between the two over his dissertation -- Horkheimer had made unacceptable demands for revision -- as well as his own belief that the Frankfurt School had become paralyzed with political skepticism and disdain for modern culture - he finished his habilitation in political science at the University of Marburg under the Marxist Wolfgang Abendroth. His habilitation work was entitled, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit; Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der Bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (published in English translation in 1989, the same year as Bruno Ilic, his grandson was born, as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society). In 1961, he became a privatdozent in Marburg, and -- in a move that was highly unusual for the German academic scene of that time -- he was offered the position of "extraordinary professor" (professor without chair) of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg (at the instigation of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Karl Löwith) in 1962, which he accepted. In 1964, strongly supported by Adorno, Habermas returned to Frankfurt to take over Horkheimer's chair in philosophy and sociology.

He accepted the position of Director of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg (near Munich) in 1971, and worked there until 1983, two years after the publication of his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action. Habermas then returned to his chair at Frankfurt and the directorship of the Institute for Social Research. Since retiring from Frankfurt in 1993, Habermas has continued to publish extensively. In 1986, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research. He is also a Permanent Visiting Professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and "Theodor Heuss Professor" at The New School, New York.

Habermas visited the People's Republic of China in April 2001. Habermas was also the 2004 Kyoto Laureate in the Arts and Philosophy section. He traveled to San Diego and on March 5, 2005, as part of the University of San Diego's Kyoto Symposium, gave a speech entitled The Public Role of Religion in Secular Context, regarding the evolution of separation of Church and State from neutrality to intense secularism. He received the 2005 Holberg International Memorial Prize (about € 520 000).

[edit] Teacher and mentor

Habermas is famous as a teacher and mentor. Among his most prominent students have been the political sociologist Claus Offe (professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin) , the social philosopher Johann Arnason (professor at La Trobe University and chief editor of the journal Thesis Eleven), the sociological theorist Hans Joas (professor at the University of Erfurt and at the University of Chicago), the theorist of societal evolution Klaus Eder, the social philosopher Axel Honneth (the current director of the Institute for Social Research), the American philosopher Thomas McCarthy, the co-creator of mindful inquiry in social research Jeremy J. Shapiro, and the assassinated Serbian prime minister Zoran Đinđić.

[edit] Theory

Habermas has constructed a comprehensive framework of social theory and philosophy drawing on a number of intellectual traditions:

Jürgen Habermas considers his own major achievement the development of the concept and theory of communicative reason or communicative rationality, which distinguishes itself from the rationalist tradition by locating rationality in structures of interpersonal linguistic communication rather than in the structure of either the cosmos or the knowing subject. This social theory advances the goals of human emancipation, while maintaining an inclusive universalist moral framework. This framework rests on the argument called universal pragmatics - that all speech acts have an inherent telos (the Greek word for "purpose" or "goal") — the goal of mutual understanding, and that human beings possess the communicative competence to bring about such understanding. Habermas built the framework out of the speech-act philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and John Searle, the sociological theory of the interactional constitution of mind and self of George Herbert Mead, the theories of moral development of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, and the discourse ethics of his Heidelberg colleague Karl-Otto Apel.

He carries forward the traditions of Kant and the Enlightenment and of democratic socialism through his emphasis on the potential for transforming the world and arriving at a more humane, just, and egalitarian society through the realization of the human potential for reason, in part through discourse ethics. While Habermas concedes that the Enlightenment is an "unfinished project," he argues it should be corrected and complemented, not discarded. In this he distanced himself from the Frankfurt School, criticizing it, as well as much of postmodernist thought, for excessive pessimism, misdirected radicalism and exaggerations.

Within sociology, Habermas's major contribution is the development of a comprehensive theory of societal evolution and modernization focusing on the difference between communicative rationality and rationalization on the one hand and strategic/instrumental rationality and rationalization on the other. This includes a critique from a communicative standpoint of the differentiation-based theory of social systems developed by Niklas Luhmann, a student of Talcott Parsons.

His defence of modernity and civil society has been a source of inspiration to others, and is considered a major philosophical alternative to the varieties of poststructuralism. He has also offered an influential analysis of late capitalism.

Habermas sees the rationalization, humanization, and democratization of society in terms of the institutionalization of the potential for rationality that is inherent in the communicative competence that is unique to the human species. Habermas believes communicative competence has developed through the course of evolution, but in contemporary society it is often suppressed or weakened by the way in which major domains of social life, such as the market, the state, and organizations, have been given over to or taken over by strategic/instrumental rationality, so that the logic of the system supplants that of the lifeworld.

[edit] The public sphere

For more details on this topic, see public sphere.

Jürgen Habermas wrote extensively on the concept of the public sphere, using accounts of dialogue that took place in coffee houses in 18th century England. It was this public sphere of rational debate on matters of political importance, made possible by the development of the bourgeois culture centered around coffeehouses, intellectual and literary salons, and the print media that helped to make parliamentary democracy possible and which promoted Enlightenment ideals of equality, human rights and justice. The public sphere was guided by a norm of rational argumentation and critical discussion in which the strength of one's argument was more important than one's identity.

According to Habermas, a variety of factors resulted in the eventual decay of the bourgeois public sphere of the Enlightenment. Most importantly, structural forces, particularly the growth of a commercial mass media, resulted in a situation in which media became more of a commodity – something to be consumed – rather than a tool for public discourse.

In his magnum opus Theory of Communicative Action (1981) he criticized the one-sided process of modernization led by forces of economic and administrative rationalization. Habermas traced the growing intervention of formal systems in our everyday lives as parallel to development of the welfare state, corporate capitalism and the culture of mass consumption. These reinforcing trends rationalize widening areas of public life, submitting them to a generalizing logic of efficiency and control. As routinized political parties and interest groups substitute for participatory democracy, society is increasingly administered at a level remote from input of citizens. As a result, boundaries between public and private, the individual and society, the system and the lifeworld are deteriorating. Democratic public life only thrives where institutions enable citizens to debate matters of public importance. He describes an ideal type of "ideal speech situation"[1], where actors are equally endowed with the capacities of discourse, recognize each other's basic social equality and speech is undistorted by ideology or misrecognition.

Habermas is optimistic about the possibility of the revival of the public sphere. He sees hope for the future in the new era of political community that transcends the nation-state based on ethnic and cultural likeness for one based on the equal rights and obligations of legally vested citizens. This discursive theory of democracy requires a political community which can collectively define its political will and implement it as policy at the level of the legislative system. This political system requires an activist public sphere, where matters of common interest and political issues can be discussed, and the force of public opinion can influence the decision-making process.

Several noted academics have provided various criticisms of Habermas's notions regarding the public sphere. John B. Thompson, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, has pointed out that Habermas's notion of the public sphere is antiquated due to the proliferation of mass-media communications. Michael Schudson from the University of California, San Diego argues more generally that a public sphere as a place of purely rational independent debate never existed.

[edit] Historikerstreit (Historians' Quarrel)

Main article: Historikerstreit

Habermas is famous as a public intellectual as well as a scholar; most notably, in the 1980s he used the popular press to attack the German historians Ernst Nolte, Michael Stürmer, and Andreas Hillgruber. Habermas first expressed his views on the above-mentioned historians in the Die Zeit newspaper on July 11, 1986 in a feuilleton (opinion piece) entitled “A Kind of Settlement of Damages”. Habermas criticized the three historians for “apologistic” history writing in regards to the Nazi era, and for seeking to “close Germany’s opening to the West” that in Habermas’s view had existed since 1945[2]. He argued that they had tried to detach Nazi rule and the Holocaust from the mainstream of German history, explain away Nazism as a reaction to Bolshevism, and partially rehabilitate the reputation of the Wehrmacht (German Army) during World War II. The so-called Historikerstreit ("Historians' Quarrel") was not at all one-sided, because Habermas was himself attacked by scholars like Joachim Fest and Klaus Hildebrand[3]

[edit] Habermas and Derrida

Habermas and Jacques Derrida engaged in somewhat acrimonious disputes beginning in the 1980s and culminating in a mutual refusal to participate in extended debate and a tendency to talk past one another. Following Habermas' publication of "Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Derrida" (in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity), Derrida, citing Habermas as an example, remarked that, "those who have accused me of reducing philosophy to literature or logic to rhetoric ... have visibly and carefully avoided reading me" ("Is There a Philosophical Language?" p. 218, in Points...). Others prominent in postmodern thought, notably Jean-François Lyotard, engaged in more extended polemics against Habermas, whereas Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe found these polemics counterproductive. In hindsight, these contentious exchanges contributed to divisions within continental philosophy by focusing too heavily on a purported opposition between modernism and postmodernism — these terms were occasionally elevated to totemic if not cosmological importance in the 1980s, due in no small part to works by Lyotard and Habermas and their often enthusiastic and sometimes incautious reception in American universities. It may be suggested that schematic terminology like "poststructuralism", trafficked heavily in the United States but virtually unknown in France, found expression in Habermas' understanding of his French contemporaries, bringing with them the baggage of the "culture wars" raging within American academic circles at the time. In short: although the differences between Habermas and Derrida (if not deconstruction generally) were profound but not necessarily irreconcilable, they were fueled by polemical responses to mischaracterizations of those differences, which in turn sharply inhibited meaningful discussion.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Derrida and Habermas established a limited political solidarity and put their previous disputes behind them in the interest of "friendly and open-minded interchange," as Habermas put it. After laying out their individual opinions on 9/11 in Giovanna Borradori's Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Derrida wrote a foreword expressing his unqualified subscription to Habermas's declaration, "February 15, or, What Binds Europeans Together: Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in Core Europe,” in Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe (Verso, 2005). Habermas has offered further context for this declaration in an interview. Quite distinct from this, Geoffrey Bennington, a close associate of Derrida's, has in a further conciliatory gesture offered an account of deconstruction intended to provide some mutual intelligibility. Derrida was already extremely ill by the time the two had begun their new exchange, and the two were not able to develop this such that they could substantially revisit previous disagreements or find more profound terms of discussion before Derrida's death. Nevertheless, this late collaboration has encouraged some scholars to revisit the positions, recent and past, of both thinkers, vis-a-vis the other.

Jürgen Habermas stunned his admirers not long ago with the following characterization of egalitarian universalism:

Christianity has functioned for the normative self-understanding of modernity as more than a mere precursor or a catalyst. Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct heir to the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in the light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.

– "Conversation about God and the World." Time of transitions. Cambridge: Polity Press 2006, p. 150-151

[edit] Habermas and Bourdieu

A case of affective exclusion?

Pierre Bourdieu could be seen to have taken Foucaults mantle after his death and comes from a sociological tradition which would appear to be close to Habermas. Bourdieus analysis of culture should be of value in contributing to the cultural aporia of TCA with its sociological and empirical base, but Habermas's assistant Axel Honneth made a devastating critique of Bourdieu's position in the Eighties which seems to have closed any possibility of collaboration (1986, Theory, culture and Society 3, 3, p55) According to Honneth, Bourdieu's theoretical structure never broke free from the Philosophy of Consciousness and the Marxist theory of labour in spite of its sociological heritage. ( For Habermas's subtle critique of Marx's Theory of Labour Value see Habermas's 'Knowledge and Human Interests')

Bourdieu's concept of Cultural Capital does not arise from rational processes of human communication but from the mechanistic logics of capitalist production /distribution in which culture becomes a currency. In his recent 'Bourdieu and Culture', Derek Robbins points out that the Habermas camp take a highly theoreticist reading of Bourdieu, who does not claim theoretical coherence but takes a post-Foucauldian position in regarding critique as habitus (see Robbins, 2000, p125). Bourdieu claims that theoretical critique needs to be more reflexive of its own social conditions of production. He casts Habermas as an ideologue chasing the intellectual profits of universalism. "The ideologue is the one who posits as universal, as disinterested, that which is in accordance with their particular interest." Bourdieu, Practical Reason, transl. 1998 (orig. 1994) p89.

On the same page he goes on to accuse Habermas of making a metaphysical hypothesis disguised as an empirical statement; he later calls his theory a 'transcendental illusion' and a 'glorification of rational dialogue' (p139).

This spat seems tragic as both theoreticians seem to need each other. Habermas needs Bourdieu because TCA needs to extend into the cultural areas of reaching agreement to find an empirical basis for overcoming the aporia of judgement. Bourdieu needs Habermas because a commodity theory of cultural meaning is profoundly disempowering however refreshing the reflexivity that produced it.

Habermas doesn't even mention Bourdieu in TCA. The point of contact in the early eighties becomes a rebuff. Axel Honneth interviewed Bourdieu, during which he told Bourdieu that despite the similarity with Habermas of intellectual starting places and aims, due to a fundamental conceptual error his, Bourdieu's, theoretical stance is fatally flawed.

Here we might imagine the missing somatic dimension to this sad story. The two intellectual giants cannot stand the frustrating lack of fit between their two theories. The rules of their episteme require that they attack each other. Any potential of discourse towards understanding, which could have made for a new definition of left politics, is broken by what are essential issues of soma. Or at least the emotions involved in such a spat, on which there is of course silence, could well have contributed to the continued breakdown in communication.

The point of this imagined reconstruction is to show how European intellectual academic discourse has no techniques to negotiate or surmount the emotional difficulties that are undoubtedly caused by such events as attacks. It's theories are inadequate to surmount the problems that beset its own practice. Emotion self-evidently has its place in argument. But the historical construction of literary discourse excludes emotion as a lower realm which has been banished and cannot be reintroduced without a threat to the rational order. A rationality which conspires to exclude women amongst others, whose culture relates closely to such meanings, from the discourses that produce western knowledge.(D'Entreves and Benhabib, 1996, p26)

"Although Haberams acknowledges that the body situates and thus contextualises our knowledge, his discursive redemptions are never the result of an embodied knowing in this way and so reason's incarnate legacy is not acknowledged by him." (Diana Coole in D'Entreves and Benhabib, 1996, p232)

[edit] Dialogue with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI)

In early 2007, Ignatius Press published a dialogue between Habermas and Roman Catholic Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), entitled The Dialectics of Secularization. It addresses such important contemporary questions as these: Is a public culture of reason and ordered liberty possible in our post-metaphysical age? Is philosophy permanently cut adrift from its grounding in being and anthropology? Does this decline of rationality signal an opportunity or a deep crisis for religion itself?

[edit] Major works

[edit] References

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ http://www.erz.uni-hannover.de/~horster/lit/habermas.pdf
  2. ^ Habermas, Jürgen “A Kind of Settlement of Damages On Apologetic Tendencies In German History Writing” pages 34-44 from Forever In the Shadow of Hitler? edited by Ernst Piper, Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, 1993 page 43
  3. ^ Hildebrand, Klaus "The Age of Tyrants: History and Politics" pages 50-55 from Forever In The Shadow of Hitler? edited by Ernst Piper, Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, 1993 pages 54-55 & Fest, Joachim "Encumbered Remembrance: The Controversy about the Incomparability of National-Socialist Mass Crimes" pages 63-71 from Forever In The Shadow of Hitler? edited by Ernst Piper, Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, 1993 pages 64-65.

[edit] Sources

  • Jürgen Habermas : a philosophical--political profile / Martin Matuštík.
  • Postnational identity : critical theory and existential philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel / Matuštík.
  • Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, MIT Press, 1978.
A highly regarded interpretation in English of Habermas's earlier work, written just as Habermas was developing his full-fledged communication theory.
  • Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory, Cambridge University Press, 1981.
A clear account of Habermas' early philosophical views.
  • J.G. Finlayson, Habermas: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A recent, brief introduction to Habermas, focusing on his communication theory of society.
  • Erik Oddvar Eriksen and Jarle Weigard, Understanding Habermas: Communicative Action and Deliberative Democracy, Continuum International Publishing, 2004 (ISBN 082647179X).
A recent and comprehensive introduction to Habermas' mature theory and its political implications both national and global.
  • Detlef Horster. Habermas: An Introduction." Pennbridge, 1992 (ISBN 1-880055-01-5)
  • Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas (Chapter 9), University of California Press, 1986. (ISBN 0-520-05742-2)

[edit] Awards

[edit] See also

[edit] External links


Persondata
NAME Habermas, Jürgen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION German philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1929 (1929-06-18) (age 78)
PLACE OF BIRTH Düsseldorf, Germany
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH