2024-03-25 15:16:29
Literature Habermas biography
World reason still meets in Starnberg
As of: 4:16 p.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
Jürgen Habermas in 1981
Quelle: picture-alliance/ dpa
It is not the first biography about Jürgen Habermas, but it is the first that is entertaining to read. Philipp Felsch tells how the philosopher has shaped the thinking of the Federal Republic for decades – and he even includes a few home story moments.
The following is said to have happened at a Suhrkamp party in the 1970s: Beatles fan Peter Handke asked Jürgen Habermas his opinion of the Fab Four. Habermas replied with a shrug that he didn’t know the Beatles. Handke is then said to have brutally beaten his conversation partner with his fists. This anecdote has been known to an interested audience since Stefan Müller-Doohm used it to lighten up the undeniably meritorious, albeit somewhat brittle, statements in his brick-thick biography of Habermas from 2014.
You also come across Handke’s physicality in Philipp Felsch’s book about the now 94-year-old philosopher. But this time their mention does not serve to fulfill the chronicler’s obligation to ensure completeness. Instead, Felsch interprets the party incident in terms of mentality history: for the cultural scientist, who teaches at Berlin’s Humboldt University, the writer’s punches exemplify the “regressiveness of the German cultural industry” of those years. It was still completely normal for intellectuals in this country to pose as a teenager, while in the USA, after pop and camp, a playful, queer sensibility had long been part of the basic habitus of the avant-garde.
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Habermas, who despite his Adornite pop aversion was intellectually oriented towards America, clashed with the provincialism of his homeland not just physically at publishing parties. As a philosopher, he was committed to the timeless and universal. As an influential intellectual who also liked to intervene polemically, he continually wrestled with the German circumstances under which this universalism should take effect.
In 22 brilliantly written short chapters, Felsch tells of how Habermas once invented cosmopolitan reason with a post-national, federal republican face in order to arm his compatriots against falling back into hopeless traditions, and how he has tried to modify and expand this invention since the fall of the Wall preserve. The question inevitably arises as to how plausibly Habermas has defended his theoretical achievements since the beginning of the Ukraine war. With the “turning point”, which marks a break with long-held beliefs, has not the point been reached at which essential components of this body of thought become obsolete? Felsch prefers to package his own pessimistic, melancholic answer in suggestive paraphrases and quotations.
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Apart from that, he mixes homeopathically dosed home story elements (the author visited the philosopher in his Starnberg bungalow for research purposes) with an essayistic, concise re-enactment of Habermas’ debate battles. The whole thing is condensed into a multi-layered intellectual epoch panorama. Most of the stages have been known since Müller-Doohm’s biography at the latest. However, Felsch strictly follows his own priorities and always comes up with original interpretations of events, for example when he discusses Habermas’ role in the student movement, the comparatively quiet years in journalism as co-director of the Max Planck Institute, the German Autumn and the historians’ dispute again reconstructed.
This becomes extremely impressive when Felsch identifies the notorious, awkward nominal style and the tendency to paraphrase in Habermas’ major works as the ultimate realization of the thesis of the “death of the author”. Ultimately, Habermas was much more consistent than the vain “fine writers from France” who only ever pretended to let their own authorial self get lost in the noise of the discourse. And one is looking forward to the fact that the legendary discourse mud battles Habermas-Foucault and Habermas-Derrida are about to be dealt with. Felsch restricts himself here in a truly surprising way – probably because this field has already been cultivated all too thoroughly in the research literature. That may make sense, but it is still disappointing. So you can at least make one criticism of this magnificent book, which is also a compliment: it is a bit too brief.
Philipp Felsch: The philosopher. Habermas and us. Propylaea, 255 pages, 24 euros
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In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third party providers [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.
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