Jürgen Habermas

1929-present · German · Critical Theory, Social and Political Philosophy, Discourse Ethics

Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech.

Jürgen Habermas came to Frankfurt in 1956 as Adorno's assistant and has spent seven decades constructing an alternative to the conclusion of Dialectic of Enlightenment: that reason and domination are the same thing. His answer is that Adorno and Horkheimer mistook one kind of reason for reason as such. Instrumental reason, which treats the world as material for control, is not the whole of rationality; there is also communicative reason, exercised whenever two people try to reach an understanding by offering each other reasons.

Topics Jürgen Habermas addresses

• communicative action
• strategic versus communicative action
• the public sphere
• the bourgeois public sphere
• refeudalization of the public sphere
• the lifeworld
• the colonization of the lifeworld
• the uncoupling of system and lifeworld
• the steering media of money and power
• validity claims
• the ideal speech situation
• universal pragmatics
• discourse ethics
• the discourse principle (D)
• the universalization principle (U)
• performative contradiction
• rational reconstruction
• knowledge-constitutive interests
• the emancipatory interest
• systematically distorted communication
• legitimation crisis
• crisis tendencies in advanced capitalism
• postmetaphysical thinking
• the unfinished project of modernity

Questions to put to Jürgen Habermas

Communicative Action and the Public Sphere

• What's the difference between communicative action and strategic action?
• What do you mean when you say every utterance raises validity claims?
• How did the bourgeois public sphere emerge in the eighteenth century?
• What happened to the public sphere — why do you call it refeudalization?
• Can the public sphere be revived, or is the decline irreversible?

System, Lifeworld, and the Colonization Thesis

• What's the difference between system and lifeworld?
• How do money and power work as steering media?
• What do you mean by the colonization of the lifeworld?
• Isn't the uncoupling of system and lifeworld just accepting capitalism as inevitable?
• How would you know when a domain has been colonized versus legitimately coordinated by markets?

Discourse Ethics and Performative Contradiction

• What is discourse ethics, and how does it ground morality?
• What's a performative contradiction, and why does it matter?
• How can a purely procedural morality tell us what we ought to do?
• What's the difference between questions of justice and questions of the good life?
• How do you respond to someone who just refuses to argue with you?

The Unfinished Project of Modernity

• What do you mean when you say modernity is an unfinished project?
• How is your defense of reason different from what Foucault and Derrida were attacking?
• What's wrong with Adorno and Horkheimer's claim that Enlightenment is domination?
• Why do you think the postmodern critics of reason contradict themselves?
• What would it mean to finish the project of modernity?

Law, Democracy, and Constitutional Patriotism

• What do you mean by the co-originality of private and public autonomy?
• How can a nation's identity attach to a constitution rather than to a shared culture?
• How do you see Germany's relationship to its past after Auschwitz?
• What role should religious reasons play in democratic debate?
• Can European integration create a postnational form of democracy?

Knowledge, Interests, and the Linguistic Turn

• What are knowledge-constitutive interests, and why did you abandon that framework?
• How was psychoanalysis supposed to be a model for critical theory?
• Why did you move from the philosophy of consciousness to a theory of communication?
• What is rational reconstruction, and how does it work?
• Did you lose something important about power and the unconscious in the linguistic turn?

Converse with Jürgen Habermas on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Jürgen Habermas's own writing, cited to the page.