Europe

The Faltering Project

Jürgen Habermas

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780745646497, 9780745646404
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The future of Europe and the role it will play in the 21st century are among the most important political questions of our time. The optimism of a decade ago has now faded but the stakes are higher than ever. The way these questions are answered will have enormous implications not only for all Europeans but also for the citizens of Europe's closest and oldest ally – the USA.

In this new book, one of Europe's leading intellectuals examines the political alternatives facing Europe today and outlines a course of action for the future. Habermas advocates a policy of gradual integration of Europe in which key decisions about Europe's future are put in the hands of its peoples, and a 'bipolar commonality' of the West in which a more unified Europe is able to work closely with the United States to build a more stable and equitable international order.

This book includes Habermas's portraits of three long-time philosophical companions, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida and Ronald Dworkin. It also includes several important new texts by Habermas on the impact of the media on the public sphere, on the enduring importance religion in "post-secular" societies, and on the design of a democratic constitutional order for the emergent world society.

Part I
Portraits

1
‘… And to define America, her athletic Democracy’: In Memory of Richard Rorty^*

In view of the highly personal occasion that brings us together today, please allow me to begin with a private recollection.

I first encountered Richard Rorty at a conference on Heidegger held in San Diego in 1974. At the opening of the conference, a video of an interview with the absent Herbert Marcuse was screened in which he described his relationship with Heidegger in the early 1930s in milder terms than the sharp post-war correspondence between them would have led one to expect. Much to my annoyance, this set the tone of unpolitical veneration of Heidegger that prevailed throughout the entire conference. Only Marjorie Green, who had also studied in Freiburg prior to 1933, made a brusque comment to the effect that, at the time, at most the closer circle of Heidegger students, to which Marcuse belonged, could have been deceived as to the true political outlook of their mentor.

In this ambivalent mood I then heard a professor from Princeton, who was until then known to me only as the editor of a celebrated collection of essays on the linguistic turn,¹ put forward a provocative comparison. He tried to harmonize the dissonant voices of three world-famous soloists in a strange concert: Dewey, the radical democrat and the most political among the pragmatists, featured in this chorus alongside Heidegger, the very embodiment of the arrogant German mandarin par excellence. The third member of this unequal alliance was Wittgenstein, from whose Philosophical Investigations I had learnt so much; but he, too, was not completely free of the prejudices of the German ideology with its intellectual fetishism, and he cut a strange figure alongside Dewey.²

Certainly, from the perspective of Humboldt and philosophical hermeneutics, a consideration of the world-disclosing function of language reveals an original affinity between Heidegger and Wittgenstein. This discovery must have fascinated Rorty, once he had been convinced by Thomas Kuhn to read the history of science in contextualist terms. But how did Dewey, the embodiment of the democratic wing of the Young Hegelians that we so sorely lacked in Europe, fit into this constellation? Dewey's way of thinking, if anyone's, stood in stark contrast to the German–Hellenistic pretentiousness, to the lofty tone and elitist arrogance of the few who claim a privileged access to truth against the many.

At that time, I found the juxtaposition so obscene that I lost my composure in the discussion. Surprisingly enough, the distinguished colleague from Princeton was not in the least irritated by the robust protest from the German backwoods; he was instead so kind as to invite me to his seminar. For me, that visit to Princeton marked the beginning of a friendship as happy and rewarding as it was instructive. On the bedrock of shared political convictions we could express and accept our philosophical differences with ease. Thus something of the ‘priority of politics over philosophy’ for which Dick also explicitly argued with me proved itself in practice and served as a tacit basis of our ongoing relationship. As regards Heidegger, incidentally, my initial agitation proved to be unfounded. Dick likewise felt a greater affinity with the pragmatist Heidegger of the early sections of Being and Time than with the esoteric thinker who hearkened to the voice of Being.³

Following our first meeting, Dick sent me an offprint of his essay ‘The World well Lost’,⁴ whose title's ironic allusion should have already alerted me to the intellectual and writer behind the philosopher Richard Rorty. However, I read the essay, with its rigorous analytical argumentation, in the way one tends to read articles from the Journal of Philosophy. Only with hindsight did I realize that it was a preliminary draft of the critique of the modern paradigm of epistemology he was to publish a couple of years later as Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), a book destined to have such an unprecedented impact. What was revolutionary in this study was less the critical reconstruction of the linguistic turn, taken in different ways by Heidegger and by Wittgenstein, than the insistence on one crucial consequence of the shift from ‘consciousness’ to ‘language’. Rorty systematically deconstructed the spectator model of ‘representative’ or ‘fact-depicting’ thinking. This critique struck at the heart of a discipline which, since Russell and Carnap, was preoccupied with achieving scientific respectability through a logical and semantic treatment of fundamental epistemological issues, first raised during the seventeenth century. Allow me to remind you briefly of the key issue here. If facts cannot be conceived independently of the propositional structure of our language and if the truth of opinions and statements can be corrected only by other opinions and statements, then any idea of truth as correspondence between sentences and facts ‘out there’ is misleading. We cannot describe nature in a language we assume to be nature's own language. On the pragmatist interpretation, the ‘depiction’ of reality is replaced by a problem-solving ‘coping’ with the challenges of an over-complex world. In other words, we acquire our knowledge of facts through our constructive dealings with a disconcerting environment. Nature provides only indirect answers, because all of its answers remain bound to the grammar of our questions. What we call ‘the world’, therefore, does not consist of the totality of facts. Instead it is the sum total of the cognitively relevant constraints to which our attempts to learn from, and to achieve control over, contingent natural processes through reliable predictions are subject.

Rorty's painstaking analysis of the assumed representative function of the knowing mind can command respect even from those colleagues who are not willing to follow the ambitious thrust of the author's conclusions. This ambition was revealed at the time by an addition to the English title in the German translation: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature appeared in German under the title: The Mirror of Nature, with the subtitle: A Critique of Philosophy (tout court!). I myself first grasped the full scope of Rorty's project, and thus the meaning behind that strange constellation of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Dewey, when I read the introduction to his essay collection Consequences of Pragmatism (1982).

For those who knew the author in person it was not easy to bring the extraordinary claims of this philosopher, writer, and political intellectual into line with the modest, shy, and sensitive character of the person of the same name. His public appearances were marked by rhetorical brilliance, controlled passion, the charm of a youthful, at times sharply polemical mind, indeed by a certain pathos. For deflation and understatement can acquire a pathos of their own. But behind the aura of the impressive speaker and writer and of the passionate teacher lay concealed that quiet, reserved, noble, and loveable man who hated nothing more than any pretence of profundity. Yet, for all our reverence for the personality of our friend, we should not downplay the ambition of the philosophical claims he championed.

Richard Rorty's aim was nothing less than to foster a culture which liberated itself from the conceptual obsessions of Greek philosophy – and from a fetishism of science which sprang from the furrows of that metaphysics. What he understood by ‘metaphysics’ and what he criticized about it can best be seen if we bear in mind what underlies this critique: ‘Philosophers became preoccupied with images of the future only after they gave up the hope of gaining knowledge of the eternal.’⁵ Platonism fixes its gaze on the immutable Forms of the good and of the true and spawns a web of categorical distinctions in which the creative energies of a self-generating human species ossify. Of course, Rorty did not regard the priority of essence over appearance, of the universal over the particular, of necessity over contingency, and of nature over history as purely theoretical matters. Because these concern how ways of life are structured, he sought to familiarize his contemporaries with a vocabulary which articulates a different view of the world and of ourselves.

Rorty's hope was that a second, more radical phase of the Enlightenment would rejuvenate the authentic motives of a modernity which had lost its way. For modernity must discover the source of all normativity within itself. There is no longer any authority or foundation beyond the opaque ebb and flow of contingencies. Nobody can leave her local context without finding herself in a different one. At the same time, the human condition is such that the sober recognition of the finitude and corruptibility of human beings – of the fallibility of the mind, the vulnerability of the body, and the fragility of social bonds – can and should become the driving force behind the creativity of a restless self-transformation of society and culture. Against this backdrop, Rorty believes that we must learn to see ourselves as the children of a self-confident modernity, if Walt Whitman's faith in a better future is to have any chance in our politically, economically, and socially divided world society. The democratic voice of hope in a fraternal and inclusive form of social life must not fall silent.

The moving songs of the public intellectual Richard Rorty – his interviews and lectures, his popular message of ‘contingency, irony, and solidarity’, the treatises that were disseminated worldwide – are all infused with the peculiarly romantic and highly personal harmonic triad of meta-philosophy, neo-pragmatism, and leftist patriotism. For this life and work I can think of no more fitting epitaph than a quotation from a poem by Walt Whitman dating from 1871. Under the title To Foreign Lands, these are words that Dick might also have addressed to his European friends:

I heard that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle the New World,

And to define America, her athletic Democracy,

Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.⁶

You have invited a philosophical colleague to speak for this hour. Thus you can expect me to try to explain how Richard Rorty proceeded from that ‘metacritique of knowledge’⁷ to which I referred above to a critique of metaphysics, and from there to the cosmopolitan patriotism of a very American democrat.

The pragmatist conception of knowledge that Rorty develops in The Mirror of Nature should be seen in the context of a Hegelian naturalism. From this perspective, the initial conditions for a culture created by human beings are the result of natural evolution. All past cultural achievements can be construed in functional terms as ‘tools’ which have proved their worth in practical and instrumental interactions with risk-laden environments. This way of looking at anthropology and history inspires at most a ‘soft’ naturalism. The Darwinist language does not undermine the everyday self-understanding of socialized individuals as autonomous, creative actors who are capable of learning and are socialized through norms. By contrast, this very line between soft and hard naturalism is crossed by those reductionist explanations which combine insights from biogenetics and neurology in a speculative manner, in the context of neo-Darwinist evolutionary theory. They overstep the boundary of a naturalist self-objectification of man beyond which we can no longer understand ourselves as the authors of our actions, discoveries, and inventions. The ‘self’ disappears under the sway of such objectivistic self-descriptions if they purport to be the only true ones. They treat as an illusion the very thing which Rorty's interpretation of neo-pragmatism as a kind of Lebensphilosophie so celebrates in human beings, namely the consciousne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Author's Preface
• Translator's Preface
• Part I: Portraits
• Part II: Europe, the Faltering Project
• Part III: On Reason in the Public Sphere
• Afterword: Lessons of the Financial Crisis
• Index