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The Liberating Power of Symbols: Philosophical Essays

by Jürgen Habermas,
trans Peter Dews
MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2001
130pp, Paper $17.95 ISBN 0-262-58205-8

and

The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays
by Jürgen Habermastrans, edited and intro by Max Pensky
MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2001
190pp, Paper $21.95 ISBN 0-262-58206-6

Reviewed by Sean Cubitt,
Screen and Media Studies,
University of Waikato,
Private Bag 3105,
Hamilton,
New Zealand
seanc@waikato.ac.nz

The single most pressing question of the hour is this: is it possible for cultures founded on different philosophies to enter into dialogue? If you've worked in the social sciences, political studies, media or jurisprudence over the last several decades, the name of Jürgen Habermas will be familiar. He is associated with theories of legitimation, of the public sphere, of communicative rationality and normative ethics. This pair of anthologies, collecting essays written between 1990 and 1998, remind us that Habermas, already the father figure that more recent German intellectuals like Theweleit and Kittler target as figurehead of the establishment, is at heart a philosopher. At the end of a career focused on the possibilities for understanding and mutuality, he is brilliantly placed to pose the question of intercultural dialogue. The more specific question then arises: can European rationalism even try to dialogue with its theocratic others?

The shorter volume comprising the philosophical essays is structured as a series of homages and debates with his peers and forebears. Though the essays on Cassirer and the humanist legacy of Aby Warburg and on Jaspers and Apel are pretty much what you would expect, the intriguing twist here comes from Habermas' engagement with the theology of Theunissen, Wright and Gershom Scholem. In subtle and nuanced analyses, Habermas proposes that theology has yet to make its peace with the end of the Idealist tradition of Hegel, and to understand the twin challenges of the master-thinkers of the 20th century, Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Habermas' own problem can be summed up in two of his quotations. On the one hand, Apel speaks of 'intersubjective understanding as the mediation of tradition within an unlimited community' (72), while Gershom Scholem is cited, equally approvingly it seems, to the effect that historicism is a smokescreen 'which -- in the form of the history of mystical traditions -- conceals the space of the very thing itself' (64). On the one hand, the theologians reckon with despair, and with the failure of divinity to guide the world to salvation, while on the other, reason denies fate but at the same time refuses to promise -- anything. Placing the guarantor of existence and redemption beyond the world only means that there is no guarantee, despite the twistings of theological reason. And yet, as Scholem suggests, there is always that which escapes from the discourse, the utter strangeness of the mystical experience itself. These debates with the theologians, and with the Christian existentialist legacy of Schopenhauer, shape Habermas' philosophical commitment to reason as a relentlessly secular formation, and one which therefore is all the more challenged by the equally relentless theocracy of militant Islam, as well as by the Christian fundamentalism that chokes democratic practice and rational democracy in the USA.

The second, political volume begins from the specifics of German history in the 20th century. In particular, the essays date from a period in which the fall of the Wall and the reunification of the nation altered everything in the old political landscape. This is the ground for Habermas' discussions of European union, its possibility and its desirability. It is also a period in which the recovery of Stasi files reopened the wounds of Nazi collaboration, pitching revisionist denials of the Holocaust (or at least of its continuing significance as a specifically German history with important implications for the present) against the politics of reconciliation in Germany (and equally in South Africa and other de-colonising areas of the world). The political meaning of history and the possibility of dialogue as a means to understanding and overcoming the past are the seedbeds of Habermas' political analyses. But something even more profound is happening to the political landscape, something that threatens to end the received meaning of politics altogether. As he writes in the title essay, 'the image of a postnational constellation gives rise to alarmist feelings of enlightened helplessness widely observed in the political arena today' (61).

The anger, the moral disgust evoked so often in eco-protests and globalisation resistance movements confronts an even larger threat than the concentration of power beyond the reach of the nation-state. The supranational appears as the supernatural: a force, as of nature (which is the explanation given by apologists of the free market), over which no citizen, no citizen's movement, has any hold whatever. What then might be the grounds on which a global movement might demand some basic justice (human rights, labour legislation, welfare, education) over against the power of greed? The nation can no longer be defined by shared monocultural values and geographical boundaries. Nor can it claim the right to tax, since states no longer regulate welfare in the wake of IMF and World bank policy-making, and have to offer permanent tax holidays for the wealthy to attract inward investment. At the same time, there is no supra-national organisation to take on the burden of justice. Neo-liberalism says it will drip through wealth, but the evidence that it has, does or ever will is non-existent. Habermas calls for a new political party, of a kind that will operate in the residual forum of the state, but with an eye to European Union, with innovative visions of transcultural, trans-border equality, justice and welfare that will carry it beyond even the European scale toward the cosmopolitan. An essay on human rights attempts to add detail, but in some ways demonstrates a weakness in Habermas' argument. The question he addresses is the source of human rights. Are they the political achievement of a community of citizens, or the essential, inherent and ideal properties of any human being? Habermas argues that the two modes are in fact dialectically unified as the social and individual faces of a single process -- we must have the right to reasoned debate if we are to construct rational rights. Seeking a way beyond the export of human rights discourse as a colonising ideology, Habermas rightly condemns the 'deception that leads to the false conclusion that the meaning of human rights is exhausted by their misuse' (129). Yet the cosmopolitanism he seeks is belied by the gap left in the absence of the converse to a small phrase: 'the shared willingness to consider one's own tradition with the eyes of the stranger' (129). What is missing here is the willingness to learn the stranger's tradition with the stranger's eyes: the still embedded Eurocentrism of the 'post-colonial' cosmopolitan, ready to critique her own culture, but unwilling to acquire familiarity with that of others.

In 'Conceptions of Modernity', the philosopher turns to a critique of the linguistic turn in postmodernism. In a radical move (derived from Apel), he sees Wittgenstein and Heidegger united in their rejection of metaphysics' failure to understand the linguistic dimension of world-construction, their distrust of the concept of 'mind' as grounding entity of existence and thought, and their 'hermeneutics of suspicion, which seeks to reveal the Other of reason behind reason's own back' (145). In the division of labour between sociology on the one hand and philosophy turned towards language on the other, Habermas sees the roots of a postmodernism which, for all its virtues, has deprived itself of social theory's tools, mistaking discourse for social actuality, and so rejecting 'the very criteria by which we can distinguish between the universalizing achievements of modernity and its colonizing features' (138).

What a critical review like this cannot communicate is the subtlety of Habermas' thought, the pleasure to be had in disagreeing with one of the century's most significant thinkers. It was too much to hope for, that one man might bring the tools for that cross-cultural dialogue which we so desperately need. For my part, and in the context of Leonardo, I would suggest that the problem lies specifically in the centrality of language to both postmodernism and Habermas' communicative rationality. Instead, the shared praxis of making that unites artists of every culture might form a richer grounds for understanding than the sealed worlds of words.

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Updated 5 December 2001.




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