I was sad to hear the news that one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century passed away- the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. His passing elicited in me some thoughts about how the intellectual culture which helped create, and celebrate, such an innovative, ambitious thinker has changed. I wrote my thoughts out below for this blog post.
I first encountered the work of Habermas while an MA student back in the mid 1990s. I never took a university course that covered, in any depth, the work of Habermas. His name would come up in different classes, and then one of my graduate supervisors suggested he might be someone I wanted to engage with given the embryonic ideas I was developing for my MA thesis. That project involved defending free speech from a commitment to the pragmatics of dialogue. Habermas's Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action had just been published in English a few years earlier.
As I read through that book I felt like the universe had delivered Habermas to me at precisely that time to provide me with the theoretical commitments I needed to develop and defend my MA thesis! The academic year of 1995/1996, a year devoted primarily to researching and writing my MA thesis, was so critical to my intellectual development.
When I proposed my potential PhD thesis the following year I initially intended to explore Habermas for it. In the summer after my MA thesis I enrolled in an introduction to German language course but dropped out as I found it too difficult. In my first year of the PhD program I had proposed the faculty and students in our reading group read through Habermas's new book Between Facts and Norms, which had just been published that year.
However, that book proved a very challenging read. And that same year I began to learn about John Rawls, and the exchange between Rawls and Habermas in the
Journal of Philosophy. I found Rawls's social contract theory a bit easier to comprehend and engage with. But Habermas was the thinker that lead me to Rawls (for many it was the other way around), and I think that played a substantive part in my eventual
departure from the Rawlsian project.
For many years my research then developed in ways that had minimal contact or engagement with that of Habermas. But my path crossed his again when he published
The Future of Human Nature in the early 2000s.
By that time I had already devoted most of my post-PhD research to studying and writing about the impact of the genetic revolution. This was a bit of an intellectual risk for me, as it was not (and still isn't) a topic of interest to most political theorists. But having a heavy-weight like Habermas engage with these topics, even if I disagreed with much of what he argued, was a major source of both inspiration and reassurance that these were important issues that political theorists should address.
Habermas was my first intellectual "crush", and in many ways I consider him one of my "intellectual grandfathers". As a 25 year old grad student reading Habermas's research on discourse ethics was one of the most transformative experiences of my intellectual life. Which leads me to some broader reflections on how things have changed in academia and society more generally, over the past few decades.
I see Habermas as a figure who represents the last of an intellectual era in two important respects. Firstly, he was a creative and ambitious thinker who wrote great works of philosophy that spoke to a large audience. The professional norms that came to dominant the field by the 1990s, with the proliferation of publication venues, department rankings, sub-field specializations, etc. incentivized the inward specialization which, in my opinion, narrowed (rather than expanded) the intellectual interests and problem-solving tool-kit of philosophy. Habermas's work pre-dated that era, which I think is a main reason why his work will remain a work "for the ages".
Habermas is also the last of the tradition of public intellectuals who were relevantly well known for the ideas he published in scholarly works covering decades of research versus tweets or social media posts. The latter has also, in my opinion, had a corrosive impact on the field. Habermas would have never developed his creative ideas had he been preoccupied with reducing his communication to the size of a "tweet" and being preoccupied only with the problems dominating the news/ social media of his day.
When I think about the reasons I am so saddened by the news of Habermas's passing, my feelings extend beyond the loss of just him as one intellectual and scholar. I am sad for the passing of the culture and time that made someone like Habermas possible in the first place. That is not to say it is not possible for an intellectual giant on par with him to emerge today. But I do believe the changes in the norms and practices of academia, as well as technology and society, have altered the intellectual landscape in significant ways. Making it unlikely that someone with Habermas-like potential could spend many decades developing and refining such creative and ambitious ideas.
The world of ideas was meaningfully impacted in a positive way by having had the good fortune to have enjoyed Habermas an active participate for so many decades. Let his example inspire the public intellectuals and philosophers of tomorrow.
Cheers,
Colin
