… has died.

My Habermas posts.

Habermas spells out precisely why he sees Europe as a project for civilization that must not be allowed to fail, and why the “global community” is not only feasible, but also necessary to reconcile democracy with capitalism. Otherwise, as he puts it, we run the risk of a kind of permanent state of emergency — otherwise the countries will simply be driven by the markets.

… [Why does Habermas take] the topic of Europe so personally[?]. It has to do with the evil Germany of yesteryear and the good Europe of tomorrow, with the transformation of past to future, with a continent that was once torn apart by guilt — and is now torn apart by debt.

He’s in Dublin today, accepting the Ulysses Medal.

Paul Gillespie: You are being presented with a Ulysses medal in University College Dublin and have a long-standing interest in James Joyce’s work. What attracts you to it and what do you think it has to tell us about today’s world?

Jürgen Habermas: You must not expect any special expertise on my part in this area. I am simply one of the countless admirers of one of the most outstanding works of literature of the twentieth century. For me, Joyce, the itinerant European author, combines things in Ulysses that are otherwise seldom encountered together. He combines the artifice of a highly self-reflective, aesthetically uncompromising modern novel whose allusions are almost indecipherable with an unmistakable, though by no means uncritical, attachment to the all-pervasive ethos of his Irish native country. The novel is a declaration of love to the streets and pubs of Dublin and to the rich tradition and spirit of the country. It could be that this mixture is gaining a new resonance in times of “glocalisation”, that is especially in places where the local is entering into strange combinations with the global.

At 5.38pm on 29 January, the German social theorist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas apparently tweeted the following: “It’s true that the internet has reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public sphere of writers and readers.” At 5.40, he tweeted again: “It also counter­balances the deficits from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting insofar as . . .” At 5.41: “. . . it reintroduces deliberative elements in communication. Besides that, it can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes . . .” At 5.44: “But the rise of millions of fragmented discussions across the world tend instead to lead to fragmentation of audiences into isolated publics.”

Had the 80-year-old doyen of the Frankfurt School for social research joined the twitterati?’

… [O]n 1 February, the blogger Jonathan Stray (jonathanstray.com) revealed that he had contacted the real Habermas at his home, and asked him if he was on Twitter. “No, no, no,” he was told. “This is somebody else. This is a misuse of my name.” …

… some of his thoughts about religious tolerance and the state.

Every religion is originally a ‘worldview’ or, in Rawls’s terminology, a ‘comprehensive doctrine,’ also in the sense that it claims the authority to structure a form of life in its entirety. Religion must renounce this claim to structure life in a comprehensive way that also includes the community once the life of religious groups becomes differentiated from that of the larger political community within pluralistic societies. …

For the believer who travels with heavy metaphysical baggage, the good enjoys epistemic primacy over the right. The validity of the ethos on this assumption depends on the truth of the worldview in which it is embedded. The exclusive validity claims of the underlying worldviews are accordingly bound up with different ethical existential orientations and competing forms of life. As soon as one’s conception of the good life is shaped by religious notions of salvation or metaphysical conceptions of the good, a divine perspective (or a ‘view from nowhere’) opens up from which (or where) other ways of life appear not only different but mistaken. When an alien ethos is not merely evaluated in relative terms, but is judged in terms of truth and falsity, the demand to show every citizen equal respect regardless of his ethical self-understanding and his way of life represents an imposition….

[T]he spread of religious tolerance, which we have already identified as a pacemaker for the emergence of democracies, has also become a stimulus and model for the introduction of further cultural rights within constitutional states.

Between Naturalism and Religion

… UD shared a Guinness with Mr UD at the dinner table (pad thai with shrimp from Noodles and Co., since you ask). Holding her little glass aloft, she said A toast to the greatest English-language writer the modern world has ever seen. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, I love you, and I will never stop reading you.

Mr UD went on a bit, during the meal (pad thai without the shrimp), about Habermas, and the rather different form of communication about which he’s obsessed. Joycean internal monologues are all well and good; the stories we endlessly tell ourselves about ourselves as we walk around all day are all well and good; but the understanding of rationality to include communicative rationality, and, on that foundation, the elaboration of a discourse ethics, is just as crucial…

All day, UD‘s been playing and singing songs that appear in Joyce’s work (she just performed Sweet Rosie O’Grady).

UD has read from Joyce at the Irish Embassy, at the Cosmos Club, and at lots of other venues around DC. But some years seem to call for something more quiet. One year she took two of her GW students to an Irish bar. Sipping Guinness, we took turns reading favorite passages from Ulysses.

James Joyce is Mr UD‘s ninth cousin, twice removed.

Jurgen Habermas is in Ireland to receive the James Joyce Award.

An Irish journalist covers his address at University College Dublin and summarizes his view of the public intellectual.

The intellectual’s sole remaining ability in an age when television has reinforced an iconic turn from word to image is an “avantgardistic instinct for relevances”, he writes in a book of recent essays published last year, Europe, The Faltering Project. “They have to be able to get worked up about critical developments while others are still absorbed in business as usual”. That includes a mistrustful sensitivity about any damage to the normative foundations of politics, or threats to its mental resources. More positively it requires “the sense for what is lacking and ‘could be otherwise’ ”, including “a spark of imagination in conceiving of alternatives” and “a modicum of the courage required for polarising, provoking, and pamphleteering”.

Along similar lines, there’s this, from a review of Christopher Hitchens’ memoir:

In 1987 Russell Jacoby published a mournful elegy to untamed public intellectuals. He argued that the unruly, iconoclastic thinkers that had dominated the New York intellectual scene well into the 1950s were a disappearing species. They had a literary cast of mind; they knew how to write about large scale questions in a way accessible to an educated public without obfuscating their texts with unintelligible academic lingo. They were not domesticated by the perks of academia, think tanks and public grants. They were irreverent and value driven.

Well, there is good news. The above is a perfect description of Christopher Hitchens. Gifted with a phenomenal memory, with the ability to form sentences that give the reader the pleasures of linguistic precision combined with watching a good knock-out punch, Hitchens is exactly the untamed public intellectual that Jacoby mourned.

… the Poles will be leaning – very visibly – in the next few weeks of masses and memorials make the most recent New York Times column by Stanley Fish particularly topical.

He’s reviewing a book by Jurgen Habermas, titled An Awareness of What is Missing, in which Habermas — long associated with the view that “the authority of the holy,” is in the process of being successfully replaced, in modern, secular culture with “the authority of an achieved consensus” — seems to change his mind. Fish writes:

In recent years … Habermas’s stance toward religion has changed. First, he now believes that religion is not going away and that it will continue to play a large and indispensable part in many societies and social movements. And second, he believes that in a post-secular age — an age that recognizes the inability of the secular to go it alone — some form of interaction with religion is necessary: “Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.”

What’s missing, then, is the “substance of the human,” “normative guidance” …

[The] modern Liberal state, … Habermas reminds us, maintains “a neutrality . . . towards world views,” that is, toward comprehensive visions (like religious visions) of what life means, where it is going and what we should be doing to help it get there. The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield. Worldviews bring with them substantive long-term goals that serve as a check against local desires. Worldviews furnish those who live within them with reasons that are more than merely prudential or strategic for acting in one way rather than another.

The Liberal state, resting on a base of procedural rationality, delivers no such goals or reasons and thus suffers, Habermas says, from a “motivational weakness”; it cannot inspire its citizens to virtuous (as opposed to self-interested) acts because it has lost “its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole” and is unable to formulate “collectively binding ideals.”

The liberal citizen is taught that he is the possessor of rights and that the state exists to protect those rights, chief among which is his right to choose. The content of what he chooses — the direction in which he points his life — is a matter of indifference to the state which guarantees his right to go there just as it guarantees the corresponding rights of his neighbors (“different strokes for different folks”). Enlightenment rational morality, Habermas concludes, “is aimed at the insight of individuals, and does not foster any impulse toward solidarity, that is, toward morally guided collective action.”

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You see the moral paralysis Habermas has in mind in a recent interview about the burqa with historian Joan Wallach Scott in Salon.

Scott insists that “One can’t assume …that [the burqa] signifies oppression.”

Why then, her interviewer asks, “does the [burqa] so dominate conversations about the rights of Muslim women?”

Well, that’s an interesting question. I think it is a way of avoiding talking about the discrimination Muslims (men and women) face in Western societies, a way of indicating “our” superiority to “them,” of blaming “them” for the discrimination they suffer, a way of depicting “them” as less modern, less enlightened than “us.”

There are, that is, no standards of enlightenment or modernity among us. As Scott’s quotation marks suggest, there’s no us. There are only bunches of people making choices and suffering discrimination as a result of some of those choices.

Muslim women, Scott says, must be choosing the burqa. Some of them must be choosing it. Enough of them for our liberal states to honor their choice.

We’re forced into this assumption because we have no general moral point of view from which we could assume otherwise, or, more importantly, from which we could put aside questions of the motivation of these women and instead defend our own set of collective moral principles.

Scott seems unable to perceive, in other words, the evisceration of “the substance of the human” that the burqa makes visible to pretty much everyone else.

On a deeper level, defending our own set of collective moral principles would be, for Scott, a logical absurdity, since we don’t exist (only individual choosers or groups of choosers exist). And its realization would be an abomination, since acting collectively on behalf of what can only be, as she describes it, a self-aggrandizing myth, would make us savage bigots.

… on the faculty of the University of Chicago when Les UDs were students there, has died.

… “His big contribution was to bring philosophy from the abstractions of reason and logic — Plato’s world — to the reasonableness of making inquiries into human situations in which questions of morals, ethics and logic come to life,” said Roy Pea, the director of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning at Stanford University.

… Mr. Toulmin’s provocative ideas often encountered resistance at first, especially in Britain, and his work on argument was no exception. He proposed, instead of formal logic’s three-part syllogism, a model of persuasive argument consisting of six components. Some, he maintained, apply universally but others do not. Arguments, in other words, do not unfold in a Platonic ether, but in particular contexts…

From his 1997 Jefferson Lecture:

Print taught readers to recognize the complexity and diversity of our human experience: instead of abstract theories of Sin and Grace, it gave them rich narratives about concrete human circumstances. Aquinas had been all very well, but figures like Don Quixote or Gargantua were irresistible. You did not have to approve of, or condemn such figures: rather, they were mirrors in which to reflect your own life. Like today’s film makers, 16th century writers in the Humanities from Erasmus and Thomas More to Montaigne and Shakespeare present readers with the kaleidoscope of life. We get from them a feeling for the individuality of characters: no one can mistake Hamlet for Sancho Panza, or Pantagruel for Othello. What count are the differences among people, not the generalities they share. As Eudora Welty said in appreciation of V.S. Pritchett, who died just recently at the age of 96: ‘The characters that fill [his stories] — erratic, unsure, unsafe, devious, stubborn, restless and desirous, absurd and passionate, all peculiar unto themselves — hold a claim on us that cannot be denied. They demand and get our rapt attention, for in the revelation of their lives, the secrets of our own lives come into view. How much the eccentric has to tell us of what is central!’

… Writing early in World War II, near the end of his Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, [Wallace Stevens] refers [to] the contrast I have emphasized here, between reasonableness and rationality. For him, too, Reasonableness is more important than Rationality; and its importance is itself more than an intellectual one. It is the expression – as he puts it – of a “more than rational distortion – the fiction that results from feeling.” I recall one of my Chicago colleagues lecturing on the theme, “Is it rational to act reasonably?” Unless reasonable actions could be proved to fit his abstract moral theory with geometrical precision, respect for human frailty was for him intellectually suspect. Yet, rather than ask, “Is it rational to be reasonable?”, we might equally well ask, “Is it reasonable to argue in rational terms alone? In what situations can we reasonably rely on formal theories?”

… To sum up: like the uniqueness of names, the individuality or particularity of cases and characters divides the world of practice, in its actuality, from the world of theory, with its abstractions. Behind the contrast of the reasonable and the rational, behind the rival attractions of Nation State and Global Future, underlying the survival in a time of general toleration of the things Jefferson called bigotry and priestcraft, lie abstractions that may still tempt us back into the dogmatism, chauvinism and sectarianism our needs have outgrown… Nor is this conflict likely to be resolved permanently. It is another of those conflicts that demand eternal vigilance. So listen again to Wallace Stevens, writing in 1942… :

We shall return at twilight from the lecture,
Pleased that the irrational is rational . . . .
Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.

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More on Toulmin. An interviewer summarizes:

[L]ike Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty, and many others, Toulmin sees “no legitimate role for theory” and advises that we “be prepared to kiss rationalism goodbye and walk off in the opposite direction with joy in our hearts.” These views are entirely understandable given the fact that Toulmin’s mentor at Cambridge and his principal intellectual influence was Wittgenstein, from whom he inherited “a kind of classical skepticism.” As a committed pragmatist, then, Toulmin’s life’s work has concerned “the recovery of the tradition of practical philosophy that was submerged after the intellectual triumph of theory in the seventeenth century.”

… Toulmin would rather be known as a “neo-premodernist” than as a postmodernist; he believes “the thing to do after rejecting Cartesianism is not to go on through the wreckage of the temple but to go back into the town where this heretical temple was built and rediscover the life that was lived by people for many centuries before the rationalist dream seized hold of people’s minds.”

From his remarks during the interview:

[Jürgen] Habermas comes here to Northwestern most years, and we have a jolly two or three days when he’s here. He gives a couple of lectures, usually on Kant’s ethics as being the ultimate font of universalization and impartiality and the rest. He and I have a kind of joking relationship: he gets up and denounces the neo-Aristotelians, by whom he means some people in Germany who call themselves neo-Aristotelians; then I get up like St. Sebastian, take the arrows full in my chest, and say, “I’m happy to be a neo-Aristotelian.” So we chew that one a bit. Sometimes I ask my colleague Tom McCarthy, “What’s really biting Jürgen; why does he have so much investment in his pragmatics being universal?” Tom explains how different it was growing up in Germany after the Second World War from growing up in England just before and during the Second World War. We really do come out of situations in which what reasonably mattered to us was very different.

… There was a very intelligent conservative politician called Edward Boyle who died ridiculously young. I remember having an amusing conversation with him in which he was explaining how there were certain nineteenth-century novelists–the one he chose to talk about was Thomas Hardy–who could only have written after the invention of the railway and before the invention of the automobile. Chekhov is similar: everybody in Chekhov is always dreaming of going to Moscow in the same way that everybody in Hardy is dreaming of going to London. This comes out in Anna as well. One of the central things in Anna is that Anna finds herself in a series of situations that become progressively intolerable to her; she can’t cope. Because the moral demands made on her are for one reason or another too intense, too unbearable, what happens again and again is that she goes down to the railway station and gets on a train to go somewhere. Where the train is going is the last matter of importance. Right at the end, of course, she is doing it again, only this time a train journey is not enough. This is why, in some ways, the invention of the private car made it much harder to distinguish between the people with whom we are actively engaged in a moral way from day to day, and other people.

… Canes Times (Complete Coverage of the Miami Hurricanes). I hope you also enjoy my recent posts on Jurgen Habermas and Ralf Dahrendorf.