Dedicated thinking and elegant style: The philosopher Jürgen Habermas becomes 90 | Culture | '
Just a few weeks ago, Jürgen Habermas in Berlin campaigned for a Europe beyond narrow-minded nationalism. At the age of 89, he received the German-French Media Prize for his commitment to a democratic Europe. "Oh, Europe," moans Habermas fittingly in a ribbon that appeared a few years ago in Suhrkamp Verlag and presents his contributions and speeches on the integration of Europe.
Jürgen Habermas is one of the most influential living philosophers and sociologists in Germany. He will turn 90 on this 18th of June. And it is still not a bit quiet about the "Frankfurt fire head". In September, Suhrkamp Verlag publishes its latest work with the modest and telling title "A History of Philosophy", two volumes of 1700 pages that, according to the publisher, show how thinking has developed since antiquity.
The public emerged only at the end of the 17th century
The big picture is always with Jürgen Habermas, who is also willing to argue for this big picture and get involved. It is typical of Habermas that a combination of philosophical reflection and intellectual intervention is a matter of the heart. He is one of the few public intellectuals in Germany who regularly comment on political developments. Even his habilitation dissertation "Structural change of the public", which he presented in Marburg in 1961, is considered groundbreaking even today. He sees "public" as a "historical category"; He shows, for example, that "public opinion" can only be spoken of late, namely in England at the end of the 17th century and France in the 18th century.
Pulse generator of the '68 generation
Jürgen Habermas was born on June 18, 1929 in Dusseldorf, today he lives in the Bavarian Starnberg. His name is most closely linked with Frankfurt am Main. As a representative of the so-called "Critical Theory," a form of continuation of Marx's critique of capitalism after the failure or absence of the proletarian revolution in the industrially developed countries of Europe, he was an important driver of the Frankfurt School. This was the name given to a circle of intellectuals whom Max Horkheimer, social philosopher and director of the Frankfurter Institute for Social Research, called himself. One of the main motives of her research was the question of why enlightened thinking, which brought human beings, through their own reason, to the liberation from the forces of nature and superstition, turned into the barbarism of National Socialism.
Habermas had a doctorate in Bonn with a thesis on the philosopher Schelling (1775-1854). In 1964 he took over the chair of philosophy and sociology from the University of Frankfurt from Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), whom he initially held until 1971 – during the student protests. Many 68s invoked Habermas and saw him as a spiritual mentor, but as the movement became more radical, Habermas openly criticized her. In his main work "Theory of communicative action" he designed in 1981 a kind of action guide for modern society. According to his theory, the normative foundations of a society lie in the language: only it as a means of communication enables social action. What is the "informal compulsion of the better argument?" To realize the "ideal speech situation" or the "rule-free discourse" in a democracy, these are its central questions.
In 2010, Jürgen Habermas will hold the eulogy on Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who received the "Prize for Understanding and Tolerance of the Jewish Museum Berlin".
Language as a source of reason
Habermas believes in the power of communication. The special linguistic sensitivity of the philosopher also speaks from the titles of his publications: "Knowledge and interest"; "Factuality and effectiveness"; "Truth and justification". At least in academia, they have gained some popularity, simply because of their almost magical sound, with which they bind seemingly familiar concepts together and immerse them in a new light. So coupled, what for decades became the hallmark of Habermas' philosophy: dedicated thinking and elegant style – even if this style made high demands on the patience and Dekerkiffrierungskunst its readers.
A politicized generation
But that's the way it is: things are not easy. Above all, if you talk to them, you have to be exact. For ambivalence may be good for poetry; in philosophy, especially in political philosophy, it is out of place. And Habermas is a political philosopher par excellence. This can hardly be different for one who experienced the end of a disaster at a young age. Like the writers Martin Walser, Günter Grass and Siegfried Lenz, the sociologist and publicist Ralf Dahrendorf and all other leading intellectuals and artists of the later Federal Republic, Jürgen Habermas also grew up in the shadow of National Socialism. This experience left its mark on his life's work: What had happened that could come to this? What had gone down to the Germans in 1933 when they elected a raging, vulgar anti-Semite Chancellor? And above all, how could it be prevented that such a constellation and mood would come again?
Jürgen Habermas during the Adorno Congress at the University of Frankfurt 1983
Philosophy after the Fall
These questions are at the beginning of Habermas's philosophy. They inspired him to create those complex models of communication, those public authority designs and mechanisms in which members of society could balance their different interests. "Consensual" was the name given to these social models, and the term, like few others, hit the self-understanding of the Federal Republic. No orders from above should receive more from the citizens, instead intervene in public, formulate their views recognizably and incorporate them into a comprehensive discussion at the end of which was the compromise. Thus, the Habermas society drafts corresponded exactly to the peacemaking committed to dialogue, which the Federal Republic wrote after the National Socialist Fall.
The sound of thinking
Would the Federal Republic of Germany have changed without Habermas? Hardly likely. However, parts of it would have lacked that specific sound in which Habermas philosophically commented on the emergence of this republic. And this sound – abstract, hermetic, inaccessible as it was – was exactly the kind of sound pop and rock music had brought into the country since the 1960s. Both of them worked towards the cosmopolitan atmosphere that increasingly shaped the Federal Republic in the following years. Thus Jürgen Habermas in his own way played the accompaniment music for that long march on which the post-war German society had embarked – on which it once and for all took leave of the province.
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