Everything about J Rgen Habermas totally explained
Jürgen Habermas (; 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's 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.
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 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).
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.
Theory
Habermas has constructed a comprehensive framework of
social theory and philosophy drawing on a number of intellectual traditions:
- the German philosophical thought of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel, Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, and Hans-Georg Gadamer
- the Marxian tradition — both the theory of Karl Marx himself as well as the critical neo-Marxian theory of the Frankfurt School, for example Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse
- the sociological theories of Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and George Herbert Mead
- the linguistic philosophy and speech act theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, Stephen Toulmin and John Searle
- the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg
- the American pragmatist tradition of Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey
- the sociological social systems theory of Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann
- Neo-Kantian thought
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's inherent in the
communicative competence that's unique to the
human species. Habermas believes communicative competence has developed through the course of
evolution, but in contemporary society it's 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.
The 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"
(External Link
), 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.
Historikerstreit (Historians' Quarrel)
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. He argued that they'd 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") wasn't at all one-sided, because Habermas was himself attacked by scholars like
Joachim Fest and
Klaus Hildebrand
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's 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. |
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 Bourdieus position in the Eighties which seems to have closed any possibility of collaboration (1986, Theory, culture and Society 3, 3, p55) According to Honneth Bourdieus 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 doesn't 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 doesn't 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 and 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 went to interview Bourdieu and tell him that in spite of the similarity of their starting places and aims, due to a fundemental conceptual error his theory is fatally flawed.
Here we might imagine the missing somatic dimension to this sad story. The two male intellectual giants can't 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's 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 can't 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 isn't acknowledged by him." (Diana Coole in D'Entreves and Benhabib, 1996, p232)
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?
Major works
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) ISBN 0262581086
Theory and Practice (1963)
On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967)
Toward a Rational Society (1967)
Technology and Science as Ideology (1968)
Knowledge and Human Interests (1968)
Legitimation Crisis (1975)
Communication and the Evolution of Society (1976)
On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction (1976)
The Theory of Communicative Action (1981)
Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983)
Philosophical-Political Profiles (1983)
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985)
The New Conservatism (1985)
Postmetaphysical Thinking (1988)
Justification and Application (1991)
Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1992)
On the Pragmatics of Communication (1992)
The Inclusion of the Other (1996)
A Berlin Republic (1997, collection of interviews with Habermas)
The Postnational Constellation (1998)
Rationality and Religion (1998)
Truth and Justification (1998)
The Future of Human Nature (2003) ISBN 0745629865
Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe (2005) ISBN 184467018X
The Divided West (2006)
The Dialectics of Secularization (2007, w/ Joseph Ratzinger)
The life and work of Bruno Ilic.Further Information
Get more info on 'J Rgen Habermas'.
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