On June 18, Jürgen Habermas, who has had a lasting impact on the humanities and social sciences at Goethe University, turns 95, and our academic community, of which he is still an active member, sends its warmest congratulations. To this day, Habermas’ academic and intellectual voice is one of the most widely heard nationally and internationally, and we sincerely hope that it will remain so for a long time to come.
We remember with great pleasure the 90th birthday that the Normative Orders organized at our university and on which Jürgen Habermas presented us with a major lecture, his last public one. Under the title “Once again: On the relationship between morality and morality”, he reviewed the great historical-philosophical concepts of Kant, Hegel and Marx and related them to his own philosophy. He traced the reflections of the three greats, who had a strong influence on his thinking, on the question of reason in history and expressed his ultimately morally based hope that reason must never give up its work on improving social conditions, despite all the disappointments that the course of events holds in store. Not for the sake of those whose struggle for justice should not have been in vain, and not in view of the many who suffer from injustice.
It is primarily Kant, whose 300th birthday we celebrated in the spring, to whom Habermas refers when he adheres to the imperative of enlightening the times in which we live through the “public use of reason”, i.e. in the discourse of those affected themselves. This is his life’s theme, which runs through all his writings: Emancipation through communicative reason, which takes upon itself the effort to recognize and overcome its own blockages, including those caused by social and systemic factors. With Hegel, Habermas certainly insists that this work must make sure of past learning processes in order to gain orientation and encouragement from them. And finally, with Marx, he insists that it is the task of philosophy and the sciences as a whole not only to improve individual and social life, but also to free it from the limitations that are ideologically glorified as natural and inevitable. In doing so, reason works like a “mole”, namely “in the mode of the fallible (…) learning processes of the socialized subjects themselves”.
More than 3,000 people attended the lecture, and it demonstrated the special way in which Habermas embodies the thinking of the critical theory that characterizes Frankfurt University: A thinking that is theoretically comprehensively grounded in an interplay between philosophy and the social sciences, and at the same time practically oriented without misjudging the complexity of the stages of mediation between theory and practice. Habermas’s work is also unique in the sense that he brings this mediation to the concept and at the same time practices it with his public interventions. In recent years, he has also spoken out pointedly on central issues of our time – whether it is the fate of Europe, the course set in the fight against the pandemic, the war unleashed by Russia in Ukraine or the situation that has arisen not least in Germany following Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
At the end of his memorable lecture, Habermas briefly reviewed the three periods of his academic life that he spent in Frankfurt: the time as Adorno’s assistant in the second half of the 1950s, the time as Horkheimer’s successor in his professorship in the 1960s and finally his return in the 1980s after completing his directorship of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg. He described the last period as the “most satisfying time of my academic life” in the “free air” of Goethe University, and with a view to the present, he wished us all that the special, open and critical spirit that still characterizes this university today would sprout on the new Westend campus and find its “protective niches”. We are committed to this in our work, because the questions that we dealt with as students and colleagues of Habermas, especially those concerning the future of democracy, will not let us rest.
His most recent works take up these questions and give his thinking a new twist, as befits a philosophy with, as Adorno put it, a “contemporary core”. Following his birthday lecture, his most important companions gathered for a two-day conference to discuss his monumental two-volume work Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (A History of Philosophy ), which was about to be published. In a way that is unique to Habermas, he pursues a central idea in his passage through the history of Western philosophy that stands in the tradition of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment: the critique of one-sided forms of rationality that lead to reductionist ideas of social interaction or individual action. In reflecting on the dangers of a “derailing modernity”, the dialog between philosophical reason and religious faith plays a decisive role in this book. Habermas reconstructs historically significant translations from religious to secular language, for example with regard to the concept of human dignity, but at the same time calls for this translation work not to be regarded as complete, for example in view of bioethical challenges. In this work, the “post-metaphysical” thinking that Habermas calls out looks back on its own genesis, but does not see itself as a passive, contingent product of this history. Reason writes its history from its own point of view, but sees that it must keep itself open to further learning processes, knowing full well, as Habermas writes, that reason, which clung to the present, “would itself wither away with the disappearance of every thought that transcends what exists in the world as a whole”.
A volume published this year entitled Reasonable Freedom discusses this approach and contains an impressive, detailed response by Habermas to a large number of detailed critiques. Here, his philosophy is shown on the one hand, as Hegel said, to have captured its time in thought, but at the same time points far back to earlier epochs of philosophy and forwards, to the challenges of the future.
Another recently published book by Habermas raises a no less topical question, this time from a more sociological perspective. According to him, the concept of communicative reason must, on the one hand, be developed philosophically; on the other hand, however, the realization of this form of rationality is a question that requires the social sciences and law. In Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, he returns to this topic sixty years after the publication of his habilitation thesis on the structural transformation of the public sphere. The book, which was recently the subject of a conference with him, shows the possibilities, but especially the threats to the public use of reason and an informed political public sphere under the new media conditions of our time; he is particularly concerned about the influence of the new social media and their tendency to fragment the public sphere and split it into “semi-publics” that produce their own truths. Whether an ideal of “deliberative democracy” can be maintained under these conditions is a question that concerns Habermas as well as many others. For democratic self-government, political autonomy, presupposes a shared space of political justification, which must be constantly recreated, but also maintained where it exists.
It is this understanding of autonomy that Habermas impressively recalled in his major lecture five years ago, when he said: “Only freedom fulfills the concept of autonomy, of which we know that no one is truly free until everyone is.”
It is not only students like the author of these lines who owe Jürgen Habermas a debt of gratitude for placing this idea at the center of his philosophical and social theory work. In its breadth and depth, it is unique in an academic landscape that is becoming increasingly specialized and limited.
Once again, we offer our heartfelt congratulations and hope for many more opportunities to think together.
Rainer Forst is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at Goethe University and Director of the Research Center Normative Orders.