[D66] The last nineteenth century German philosopher: Habermas at 90

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The last nineteenth century German philosopher: Habermas at 90
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versobooks.com
28 min
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Raymond Geuss' recent article discussing the German philosopher Jürgen
Habermas on the occasion of his 90th birthday sparked a fierce
controversy. Here Raymond Geuss responds to his critics and argues that
***the liberal philosophy of Habermas is fundamentally inadequate in the
face of the crises of contemporary capitalism.***

In June 2019 I published an essay, entitled “A Republic of Discussion”
in the online journal The Point. In the essay I praised John Dewey for
his open-ended idea of communication as an empirical process with
potentially changing rules, and also Adorno for his criticism of liberal
claims about the potential universal communicability of every truth. In
doing so, I contrasted their views with those of Jürgen Habermas, who
held that communication had invariant, universal rules that imposed
forms of behaviour on all speakers. In the sense in which Habermas used
the term, ‘communication’, I thought, did not exist. This essay seemed
to strike a very raw nerve among Habermas’ students leading to a series
of highly affect-laden comments and replies. I unfortunately allowed
myself to be pulled into this maelstrom, but the experience I had of
whirling around vertiginously in replies and counterreplies has had the
eventual effect that now, at a distance, I think I can understand more
clearly what upset so many people, and I think I can now formulate some
of the points I was trying to make in a more focused way.

The nineteenth century saw four ‘revolutions’ in our way of seeing and
thinking about society: first, the great upsurge of socialist,
anarchist, communist, and other kinds of radical political thought (for
instance Marx), second, the new aesthetic sensibility associated
especially with figures like Rimbaud (‘dérèglement de tous les sens’),
third, Nietzsche’s transformation of epistemology in his
‘perspectivism’, and fourth, Freudian psychoanalysis. It, naturally,
took a while for these movements to develop and articulate themselves;
this was a very slow process that continued into the 20th century. The
thinkers whom we now group together and call the Frankfurt School
(Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse) all made some attempt in the
1930s and 1940s, in one way or another, to assimilate all of these
strands and develop them further. With the passing of the original
members of the Frankfurt School in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the
succession passed (unofficially, of course) to a younger generation
represented most notably by Jürgen Habermas (born 1929). Yet to move
from reading, say, Adorno to reading Habermas, is like watching the
clocks be turned back sixty years (from 1940 to 1880). Habermas makes a
serious attempt at thinking about the first of my four revolutions, but
can manage only a desultory stab at dealing with the fourth, completely
misses the point of the third, and does not even seem aware of the
second. Instead, anyone reading his voluminous work may well get the
impression of being projected back into the world of the neo-Kantians,
if not into that of the Sage of Königsberg himself.

Habermas’ early writings outline a programme for giving a
‘transcendental’ framework for cognition and action. Here, one should do
him the philosophical courtesy of treating his use of the word
‘transcendental’ as if it were serious and considered, and modelled on
Kantian usage. To say that there were ‘transcendental conditions of
communication’ did not mean merely (1) that there were important
conditions, nor (2) that there were universal conditions—because these
could be merely empirically universal, nor indeed (3) that there were
necessary and universal conditions, but (4) that there were necessary,
invariant, universal conditions that could be the grounds of further
cognitions apriori. What was crucial then was that the purported
necessary and universal conditions of communication gave us apriori
knowledge about commitments we (purportedly) had to have, commitments
about how we had to evaluate things, and how we had to act. These
commitments were supposed to be binding on ‘everyone’ and to trump other
considerations..

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