Habermas's Sins of Omission

“One should not speak ill of the dead”, so the adage goes.  But philosophers aren’t bound by conventional wisdom and when the deceased is a serious philosopher of the first order, an honest reflection on his legacy isn’t only appropriate, it’s called for.  When the philosopher is Jürgen Habermas, who died on March 14^th, a particular concern arises, namely, that our admiration for him as a man and for his sometimes-courageous interventions in the public sphere may inhibit our willingness to raise fundamental questions about his project.  We should take this obligation seriously because when we examine his theory, we encounter the stunning fact that the leader of the Frankfurt School’s second generation had little useful to say about two of the most urgent concerns confronting us: humanity’s headlong race towards an ecological cliff and the accelerating global spread of neo-fascist movements. Habermas’s relative silence is especially striking in light of the fact that the domination of nature was a defining topos of the first generation when Horkheimer and Adorno concluded that it was necessary to fathom humanity’s descent “into a new form of barbarism.” 

Many of the notices that have appeared since Habermas’s death on  March 14th have cited the obvious criticisms —  that his underestimation of capitalism’s destructiveness led him to believe that it could be contained[*]; that he placed undo confidence in the emancipatory potential of communication and failed to assign sufficient weight to the actual workings of power; that his idealized picture of American constitutionalism and democracy led to serious errors in his theorizing and political judgement; and that because of his predominantly Eurocentric orientation, he largely ignored the Global South and failed to appreciate the significance of post-colonial struggles. These and similar criticisms are well-taken and have important political consequences.  At the same time, however, none of the notices I have come across have focused on the criticisms that point to deeper difficulties with Habermas’s position.

These notices have also discussed the “perennial” question of the continuity or discontinuity between the first and second generation of the Frankfurt School, or, more specifically, between Adorno’s and Habermas’s theories.  There are those, motivated by a desire to defend Habermas’s legacy at a time when his relevance seems to be waning while Adorno’s appears to be reasserting itself, who emphasize the degree of continuity between the two philosophers.  But the points I am calling attention to suggest that this is inaccurate, something that can be clearly seen when we consider Adorno’s signature concept of the domination of nature.  Whereas Adorno held that humanity’s reconciliation with nature was a necessary condition for exiting the dialectic of enlightenment — indeed, that the reconciliation with nature constituted a secular form of redemption — throughout his career, Habermas consistently rejected the idea. Indeed, as early as his first discussion of Adorno in Philosophical-Political Profiles, he facilely dismissed the reconciliation with nature as a piece of nature mysticism that regressed behind the standpoint of modern science. By doing so, he conveniently spared himself the formidable but necessary task of envisioning a new, non-instrumental, and ecologically desirable relationship to the natural world.[†]  

Because Habermas was a major participant in the famous Positivismusstreit (Positivism Dispute) of the 1960s, there is something that is often overlooked about his position. At the same time as he was a firm anti-positivist when it came to the human sciences, he was prepared to surrender the realm of external nature to the positivist natural sciences, leading one critic to brand him as a “crypto-positivist.”  And because he maintained that the natural sciences were constituted with “an interest in instrumental control,” this meant that he was also prepared to accept that a relation of domination constitutes the only possible cognitive and practical way for humanity to relate to its natural environment. 

It is unfortunate that Habermas didn’t pursue the work of “the post-empiricist philosophers of science” who, unlike the Logical Empiricists, did not seek to formulate a prescriptive theory of scientific validity, but studied the actual practices of the various sciences instead. For had he done so, he might have come to realize that the Positivist’s call for the unity of the science — which took mathematical physics as the paradigm of valid knowledge — had not only been superseded by what Joseph Rouse calls the “disunification” of science, but that these pluralizing developments provide abundant resources for rethinking our relation to nature.  Indeed, going further, he might also have come to agree with his friend and colleague Richard Bernstein’s claim that the innovations of the post-empiricists also made it possible to reopen the question of “the nature of nature,” which had been foreclosed by the philosophy of science’s dominance in the academy.

These difficulties are not contingent features of Habermas’s theory but follow from his basic normative commitments and the essential constituents of his theoretical construction. While there undoubtedly is a significant Hegelian dimension to his thinking, in one fundamental respect, he was a Kantian. Politically and morally, his top priority was to defend the “dignity” of the human subject against the multiplicity of dangers threatening it in today’s world. To achieve this goal, like Kant, he constructed a theory which, despite undergoing many modifications over the course of his career, remained essentially dualistic. In its various iterations, the theory always postulated a linguistically constituted realm of human (inter-) subjectivity that stood over against an objectified and disenchanted realm which operated according to the laws of natural causality or functionalist rationality. By locating all value on the side of the human subject, this construction deprived the entire domain of non-human existence — including animals — of normativity and meaning, making it a “happy hunting ground” for exploitation.  In short, elevating the human subject above the rest of nature and reducing it to a meaningless and valueless domain was, the price that Habermas was willing to pay for purchasing the subject’s “dignity.” This should make it clear that it was Habermas’s normative commitments and theoretical stance that made it impossible for him to address the ecological crisis in a robust way.

 [book-strip index="1" style="buy"]

Put differently, Habermas’s theory is irreducibly anthropocentric. As such, it belongs to the mainstream of the European religious and philosophical tradition religion in which, as Horkheimer and Adorno note, “the idea of the human being has been expressed in contradistinction to the animal,” whose “lack of reason” [or language — jw] is proof of human dignity.”  Their opposed attitudes towards anthropocentrism, which are tied to their conflicting attitudes towards Kant’s transcendental philosophy, comprise one of the fundamental differences between Habermas and Adorno’s philosophical approaches. There can be no doubt that the animal-loving Teddie, who was a consultant to the Director of the Frankfurt Zoo, believed that overcoming anthropocentrism is a sine qua non for escaping the dialectic of enlightenment — and today we would add for ameliorating the ecological crisis as well.

In the 1990s, Habermas, in a less-than-fulsome attempt to redress the anti-naturalist tendencies in his thinking, proposed a program of “soft naturalism” which would consist in a synthesis of Kant and Darwin.  That it had to be a “soft” naturalism, I would argue, indicates his continuing reluctance to fully accept our embeddedness in nature. The assumption seemed to be that the “hard” naturalism of the reductionists was the only possible alternative, something the post-empiricists have shown was not the case.  Furthermore, while the call for a Kant/Darwin synthesis was promising, to the limited extent that Habermas pursued the program, Kant continued to occupy the predominate position, while Darwin played a minor role.

Insofar as he retained its basic commitments but only reinterpreted them in terms of the philosophy of language rather than the philosophy of consciousness, Habermas’s relation to the Kantian tradition remained straightforward and positive. Adorno, on the other hand, viewed Kant as a philosophical giant and an invaluable adversary whose primary contribution was to bring the difficulties and deficiencies of Idealism into such sharp relief that the tradition could be overcome. If Adorno wasn’t a “sworn enemy of Idealism like Marx,” he was nevertheless one of its sharpest critics. In contrast to Habermas, his criticisms of Kantian morality, which concerned the domination of nature, are deep and severe.  Far from viewing “dignity” as the highest moral attribute, Adorno considered it “suspect” insofar as it not only “excludes man from nature,” but is “covertly used to legitimize dominance — dominance over nature.” Indeed, “nothing is more abhorrent to the Kantian,” he argues, “than a reminder of man’s resemblance to animals.” And finally, “To revile man as animal — that is genuine idealism.”  It is possible to argue, moreover, that the traditions’ hypostatization of “dignity” in fact represents a manifestation of human omnipotence which interferes with our coming-to-terms with our rightful place “as honest shareholders on this earth” (Freud).

Similarly, Adorno did not view Kant’s celebrated contribution, the categorical imperative, as an emancipatory formula that provides a means for determining human autonomy. Instead, he argued that it was “repressive” because of its hostility to inner nature. Along with bringing us to the question of the role of psychoanalysis in Critical Theory, the reference to “inner nature” — which was Horkheimer and Adorno’s shorthand for unconscious-instinctual life — also brings us to the connected question of Habermas’s failure to adequately address the rise of neo-fascist movements. Unlike Habermas, Adorno didn’t merely think about psychoanalysis. Having thoroughly internalized Freud’s thinking, he thought psychoanalytically. Psychoanalytic concepts played an essential and constitutive role in the way he developed many of his fundamental philosophical ideas, for example, the autocratic subject, the cannibalistic roots of Idealism, mimesis, the addendum, false projection, and, most significantly, the remembrance of nature in the subject.

At the beginning of his career, while still under the influence of the first generation, Habermas undertook a penetrating Auseinandersetzung with Freud in Knowledge and Human Interests.  In that important encounter, however, which has assumed its rightful place in the literature, the young philosopher wasn’t primarily interested in psychoanalytic concepts.  What interested him was using psychoanalysis to pursue the methodological questions pertaining to his distinctive theory of communication that was taking shape at the time. Most importantly, by categorically denying Freud’s canonical distinction between a non-linguistic unconscious and linguistically mediated consciousness — thereby eliminating the dimension of radical internal otherness and an essentially conflicted self — Habermas set forth a flattened and substantially domesticated, which is to say, an overly rationalist version psychoanalysis. This was a gesture, moreover, that he repeated in his discussions of Durkheim and Castoriadis, where, in a remarkable claim, he denied that we are citizens of two worlds, a diurnal world of consensually validated intersubjective reality, and a nocturnal world of private dreams and phantasms. 

In “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment,” Habermas deployed an ad hominem argument to dismiss Horkheimer and Adorno’s position in Dialectic of Enlightenment.  He suggested that it was their “mood” — that is, their traumatized condition as two German-Jewish philosophers who had been forced into exile — that produced the over-the-top totalizing exaggerations of their magnum opus.  Traumas, after all, are known to produce exaggerations. He argues, moreover, that because “we no longer share this mood,” we aren’t compelled to work in this hyperbolically distorted way, which is to say, we are free to ascend from the archaeological depths of the primal history of subjectivity and theorize in a more conventional (traditional?) fashion (one wants to know who the “we” is in this claim). Might we not ask whether Habermas’s “mood” — resulting from the trauma of having been German philosopher of the next generation who came of age under Nazism — helps to explain some of the shortcomings and distortions in his theorizing. What’s more, following Adorno, we might also remind him that a traumatic a “splinter in the eye” can sometimes be “the best magnifying glass.” 

What I am suggesting, in other words, is that the traumatic aspects of Habermas’s personal history partly account for significant deficiencies and distortions in his thinking — most significantly, its nearly compulsive progressivism — its “fear of breakdown” which can’t countenance the possibility of massive historical regressions — and its phobic inability to engage with the “truth content” of the irrational or with the dark thinkers of the counter-Enlightenment. It is worth noting that, in contrast to Adorno, who surprisingly tells us that Nietzsche was an even more important thinker for him than Hegel, Habermas perceived the author of The Gay Science as nothing but a dangerous irrationalist who had to be shut down as quickly as possible. Rather than seeking to defeat the irrational — what he called the “non-identical” — Adorno argued that its pursuit and the integration of its content into an expanded and enriched conception of the Enlightenment was perhaps the essential task of philosophy after the Second World War. “All the reactionary arguments against Western culture,” he famously declared, ought to be placed “in the service of the progressive enlightenment.” But as an examination of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, where Habermas took on his “irrationalist” adversaries, demonstrates that instead of seeking to enlist the arguments of the counter-Enlightenment to enrich the progressive cause, Habermas phobically sought to refute and expurgate them toute de suite. The lesson to be drawn from Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus, a work that Adorno had collaborated on, was to steer clear of the irrational and the demonic.

In a similar vein, the way the two philosophers responded to Auschwitz — which Adorno considered a world-historical event on a par with the Lisbon Earthquake — took them in opposite directions. Adorno was convinced that to prevent future “Auschwitz-like” catastrophes from erupting, one had to reflect on and work-through why the descent into barbarism had taken place to begin with.[‡]Habermas, in contrast, believed that constructing a democratic polity out of the ruins of the Nazi Götterdämmerung and rigorously defending it was the most effective way to prevent their reoccurrence. Consequently, except for the German Historikerstreit (Historians’ Controversy), he tended not to look back but instead fastened his gaze on the future. In all fairness, given the enormity of creating a democratic society in postwar Germany combined with one’s necessarily limited emotional resources, it may have been impossible to plumb the anthropological significance of the Holocaust and to pursue that formidable political task at the same time.

Considering these considerations, it is not surprising that after Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas quickly abandoned the depth-psychological approach of psychoanalysis and embraced the cognitivist psychologies of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. Their learning theories provided him with the scaffolding he needed to construct his progressivist scheme of individual and collective development. With his theory of learning processes — his theodicy of learning processes, as it were — Habermas bestowed a social scientific pedigree on Hegel’s “cunning of reason” and snuck it in through the back door. This does not mean, however, that his progressivist theory excluded the possibility of regression.  Not only is regression possible, but limited regressions are in fact periodically necessary for development to proceed.  Just as the subversion of a given Gestalt motivates the move to the next shape of consciousness in Hegel's Phenomenology, the dissolution of an established psychological configuration is necessary for proceeding to the next stage of development.  By creating a demand for a new level of integration, the dissolution creates a demand for the work of learning.  What Habermas progressivist theory excludes, however, is the possibility of massive regressions, of catastrophes, which don’t merely destabilize established structures of learning, but derail the entire developmental trajectory.

 [book-strip index="2" style="buy"]

Adorno saw things differently. Regression is not merely an accidental and episodic phenomenon in the contemporary world, nor was the Holocaust an anomaly that broke through the more normal course of history.  For him, “the descent into barbarism” followed from the innermost tendencies of capitalist modernity.  Those tendencies, moreover, were not successfully neutralized after 1945, as it might have been possible to believe during les trentes glorieuses. Writing in 1967, Adorno argued that “the fundamental conditions that favoured” that catastrophic regression “continue fundamentally unchanged”.  Along with that, he made the observation that we cannot imagine Habermas making once he abandoned his youthful flirtation with psychoanalysis: “Among the insights of Freud that truly extend even into culture and sociology, one of the most profound seems to me to be that civilization produces anti-civilization and increasingly reinforces it.”  He continues, Freud’s “writings Civilization and its Discontents and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” – works that disappeared from Habermas’s bibliography– “deserve the widest possible diffusion, especially in conjunction with Auschwitz.”

The problem isn’t only that Habermas’s theory doesn’t contain space for the sort of massive historical regressions that seem to be unfolding today. Even if he had included them, by rejecting the depth-psychological resources of psychoanalysis, he deprived himself of the resources that are necessary for making sense of them. As the realities of Hitler’s program began to reveal themselves, Adorno wrote to Horkheimer that a conventional theory would not do.  A “nonrational” theory of some sort, he suggested, would be required.  And when that “nonrational” theory took shape, it stood to reason, as it were, that the two Critical Theorists drew extensively on psychoanalysis. For it was the only available theory that offered them a theory of human irrationality destructiveness which was commensurate with the utter irrationality of antisemitism. Nothing less than the depth-psychological resources that psychoanalysis offers can allow us to address the massive irrationality of the MAGA movement, QAnon, and the Antivaxxers. As Alex Ross observed the New Yorker, the first generation of the “Frankfurt School knew Trump was coming.”  Habermas didn’t.