WORLD VIEW:Celebration of Jürgen Habermas's birthday shows Germany cherishes intellectuals, writes DEREK SCALLY.
IT’S NOT surprising in Ireland, the country that gave the world the “cute hoor”, that there is little understanding of the term “public intellectual”. But it may be of some comfort to Irish intellectuals that, even in the Jade Goody era, there are still places in Europe where thinkers are at times celebrated in public.
One of those occasions was the recent 80th birthday of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, marked with generous coverage in all newspapers and magazines. Die Zeit newspaper made him their cover boy for the week, noting that the octogenarian was “in demand like never before”.
“He is no philosophical show-off,” it noted. “He has no buzz words or catchphrases to offer. But when he brings a topic into the public domain, he succeeds in raising it – immediately – to a higher philosophical level.”
The newspaper attributed his enduring relevance and popularity to the “integrity of his character – deeply moral and serious – and his steadfast advocacy of democratic principles”. Even the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, a critic over the years, praised him as an “intellectual miracle” considering his beginnings in post-war Germany.
The country lay in ruins, its centuries-old intellectual tradition poisoned. Almost every idea had been tainted by having selective ideas incorporated into Nazi ideology. "There was no school of thought that could be sure it hadn't failed, terribly," said the Frankfurter Allgemeine.
Habermas emerged in the 1950s as a chaperone for the fledgling West German state, the public face of a post-war intellectual miracle that accompanied the economic transformation. Born in Düsseldorf in 1929, he was drafted into the Hitler Youth as a teenager and later studied in Göttingen, Zürich and Bonn. He rose to prominence at 24 for challenging the grand old man of German philosophy, Martin Heidegger.
Habermas began his career in the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, under Adorno and Horkheimer, but left after the latter took issue with his left-wing views and opposition to nuclear energy. His first great work was 1961’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which looked at the emergence since the 18th century of a civic society in Britain, France and Germany.
Beyond his writings, Habermas has been a leading contributor to almost every public debate in post-war Germany history.
During the student revolt of 1968, he attacked the political establishment for cracking down on students’ right to demonstrate and protest. Then he turned on student leader Rudi Dutschke, accusing him of inciting “left-wing fascism” that put student lives at risk. Habermas took back his remarks, but suggested later, after the rise of left-wing terrorism in the 1970s, that his original remarks contained a “tiny kernel of truth”.
In the 1980s, his work in social theory and moral philosophy looked at “post-traditional identity” in western societies, stripped of identifying characteristics such as nationalism and historicism.
Perhaps his most critical intervention in the 1980s was in the “historians’ dispute”, when he attacked attempts by conservative historians to relativise the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes as neither unique nor absolute. In the debate over the fall of the Berlin Wall, Habermas found himself on the wrong side of public opinion for arguing that, even united, Germany could not be a normal nation due to ongoing disruption between east and west.
In his second key work, 1981’s Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas described how people had replaced political activity with mass consumption and specialised interest groups.
Although he predicted citizens distancing themselves from society and the atomising effect of the internet on public discourse, he is one of the few German thinkers to embrace the online reality even if, as he suggests, it is undermining his trade.
Of all modern German thinkers, Habermas has the least reason to worry about dwindling relevance. Although best known for writing books with which, as one admirer said recently, “the average reader doesn’t get past page 50”, his recent articles on the EU have been important, accessible contributions. The future of the EU engages him so because, he admitted, the topic engages so few. That most Europeans find EU debates dull was, he said, all the more reason for him to sound an alarm bell.
In 2006, he warned: “If we are not able to hold a Europe-wide referendum before the next European elections in 2009 on the polarising question of the goal of European unification, the future of the union will be decided in favour of neo-liberal orthodoxy.”
In recent years, he engaged in a second discussion about the place of religion in modern society, including a fascinating public debate with another great German thinker, Joseph Ratzinger. Habermas, a non-believer, attracted attention for remarking that all philosophy in the enlightenment tradition owes much to the ethical orientation of religious tradition.
Critics called it the late concession of an old man to religious piety. Supporters said Habermas was recognising religion while viewing it separately from his world of philosophy and science.
At his birthday celebrations, he said he has no plans to depart the intellectual stage, nor to read any living obituaries. “I have no desire,” he said, “to be the object of any manifestation of nostalgia whatsoever.”