By Jürgen Habermas · Saturday, November 3, 2007 [The following is the second part of an address delivered by Jürgen Habermas at Stanford University on Friday, November 2, 2007. Part 1 appeared yesterday, and part 3 will appear on Monday. It is reproduced here by kind permission of the journal New Literary History, which will publish it in early 2008, in an issue devoted to Richard Rorty.]
Ladies and Gentlemen, for this hour you invited a philosophical colleague to speak and can thus expect that I will attempt to explain how Richard Rorty proceeded from that “metacritique of knowledge” [4] that I drew to your attention, 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. In this view, the basic conditions for a culture created by man are the result of natural evolution. All cultural achievements in the past can be construed functionally as “tools” that have proved their worth in practical as well as instrumental interaction with risky environments. This way of looking at anthropology and history leads only to a “soft” naturalism, as the Darwinist language does not undermine the everyday self-understanding of socialized individuals as autonomous, creative, and learning actors. By contrast, the line between soft and hard naturalism is crossed by those reductionist explanations that in a speculative manner combine insights from biogenetics and neurology in the framework of a neo-Darwinist theory of evolution. They cross the boundary of a naturalist self-objectification of man, beyond which we can no longer grasp ourselves as the authors of our actions, discoveries, and inventions. Under the sway of such objectivistic self-descriptions, if they purport to be the only true ones, it is the awareness of a “self” that disappears. They treat exactly that as an illusion which neopragmatism—a kind of Lebensphilosophie—so celebrates in man, namely, the consciousness of freedom, creativity, and learning.
Rorty quite simply had to protest this move toward scientism. Because he fully elaborates his own concept of man in a Darwinist language, he had now to introduce a stop rule into this kind of soft naturalism. In order to be able to reject the hard naturalism of a Daniel Dennett as “scientism,” he has to offer an explanation of the uncautious inflation of objectifying research approaches to the status of a pseudo-scientific objectivism. He hoped to find such an explanation by embedding the spectator model of knowledge in a sweeping deconstruction of the history of metaphysics. In this broader context he established scientism’s affinity to Platonism. Both share the bad habit of conceiving of human knowledge as a vision from nowhere, thus moving all of our constructive research practices beyond the limits of our or of any world: “The last line of defense for essentialist philosophers is the belief that physical science gets us outside ourselves, outside our language and our purposes to something splendidly nonhuman and nonrelational.” [5] With the help of Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s critique of the ontological implications of the language of physicalism, Rorty claims to uncover even in the reductionist strategies of cognitive scientists and biologists the Platonic heritage of the assumption of world-less objectivity that supposedly allows for a view from nowhere.
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By Jürgen Habermas · Friday, November 2, 2007 [The following is the first part of an address delivered by Jürgen Habermas at Stanford University on Friday, November 2, 2007. Part 2 will appear on Saturday, and part 3 on Monday. It is reproduced here by kind permission of the journal New Literary History, which will publish it in early 2008, in an issue devoted to Richard Rorty.]
Dear Mary, dear Friends and Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Given the highly personal occasion that brings us together here today, please allow me to start with a private memory.
I first met Richard Rorty in 1974 at a conference on Heidegger in San Diego. At the beginning of the convention, a video was screened of an interview with the absent Herbert Marcuse, who in it described his relationship to Heidegger in the early 1930s more mildly than the sharp post-War correspondence between the two men would have suggested. Much to my annoyance, this set the tone for the entire conference, where an unpolitical veneration of Heidegger prevailed. Only Marjorie Green, who had likewise studied in Freiburg prior to 1933, passed critical comment, saying that back then at best the closer circle of Heidegger students, and Marcuse belonged to it, could have been deceived as to the real political outlook of their mentor.
In this ambivalent mood I then heard a professor from Princeton, known to me until then only as the editor of a famed collection of essays on the Linguistic Turn, put forward a provocative comparison. He tried to strike harmony between the dissonant voices of three world-famous soloists in the frame of a strange concert: Dewey, the radical democrat and the most political of the pragmatists, performed in this orchestra alongside Heidegger, that embodiment of the arrogant German mandarin par excellence. And the third in this unlikely league was Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations had taught me so much; but he, too, was not completely free of the prejudices of the German ideology, with its fetishization of spirit, and cut a strange figure as a comrade of Dewey. [1]
Certainly, from the perspective of Humboldt and philosophical hermeneutics, a look at the world-disclosing function of language reveals an affinity between Heidegger and Wittgenstein. And that discovery must have fascinated Rorty, given that Thomas Kuhn had convinced him to read the history of science from a contextualist vantage point. But how did Dewey fit in this constellation—the embodiment of that democratic wing of the Young Hegelians that we had so sorely lacked in Europe? After all, Dewey’s way of thinking stood in strident contrast to the Greco-German pretension, the high tone and elitist gesture of the Few who claim a privileged access to truth against the many.
At that time, I found the association so obscene that I quite lost my cool in the discussion. Surprisingly, however, the important colleague from Princeton was by no means irritated by the resilient protest from the backwoods of Germany and instead was so kind as to invite me into his seminar. For me, my visit to Princeton marked the beginning of a friendship as happy and rewarding as instructive. On the bedrock of shared political convictions, we were easily able to discuss and endure our philosophical differences. Thus, the kind of “priority of politics over philosophy” that Dick defended as a topic tacitly served as a source of our continuing relation. As regards Heidegger, incidentally, my initial agitation was unfounded. Dick likewise felt a greater affinty to the pragmatic Heidegger of the early parts of Being and Time than to the esoteric thinker who devoutly listened to the voice of Being. [2]
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By Fred Siegel · Wednesday, October 31, 2007 [The following review, which includes a discussion of Matthias Küntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred (published by Telos Press), first appeared in City Journal on October 19, 2007. Reproduced here by kind permission.]
The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, by Mark Lilla (Knopf, 352 pp., $26)
The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West, by Lee Harris (Basic, 290 pp., $26)
Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, by Matthias Küntzel (Telos, 174 pp., $29.95)
Two new books, Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God and Lee Harris’s The Suicide of Reason, argue that religious extremism imperils the liberal-and, as they see it, fragile-traditions of the West. Both books base much of their analysis on the writings of Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century English philosopher of public order. But they see the extremist danger coming from dramatically different religious directions. For Lilla, it radiates from unresolved tensions in Christianity, which can burst forth at any moment into millenarian madness. Harris, on the other hand, sees the threat coming from an Islamic fanaticism that the rationalist West is unable to comprehend, much less counter. Matthias Küntzel shares Harris’s fears. His Jihad and Jew-Hatred is a compelling historical account of how modern Islamic extremism has been informed by the anti-Semitism of the Third Reich.
Lilla, a Columbia University philosopher, has written the more original of the first two books. Though Lilla never mentions it by name, Norman Cohn’s pathbreaking 1957 book, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, clearly frames his argument. Augustinian Catholicism, Cohn wrote, had insisted that despite the limitations imposed by man’s original sin, the Catholic Church provided a state of spiritual near-perfection on earth. But in the Middle Ages, what Cohn described as an “underworld” of apocalyptic Christians emerged, convinced that the path to salvation was being blocked by nefarious agents of evil-Jews among them-who had to be extirpated. Cohn convincingly argued that twentieth-century totalitarian movements were the underworld’s ideological children, which drew on a “common stock of European social mythology” derived in large part from the biblical book of Revelation. “When this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people,” he explained, “it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history.”
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The following is an email exchange initially between Ernest Sternberg, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University at Buffalo, and Maria Piccone, publisher of Telos. The exchange then continues between Sternberg and Russell Berman, editor of Telos.
October 2, 2007
Hi Mary,
As I promised, I’m now searching for a periodical for which to review Matthias Küntzel’s book, Jihad and Jew Hatred [published by Telos Press].
The back-story is in itself notable: that Telos is publishing the book. I remember as a grad student that my favorite professor had a shelf of Telos issues. This led me to read it on occasion, to recognize it as a very good journal, and to understand it as being closely associated with the Frankfurt School.
In recent years as my own politics have shifted, I have found with some interest that Telos has shifted to some extent as well, though it remains a broad forum. (I’m now a subscriber.) Is there a piece that has been written, perhaps by the editor, that has told the story of the political evolution at Telos? That very fact might place Matthias’s book in an interesting light.
Ernie
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By Hannes Stein · Monday, October 8, 2007 [This review of the German edition of Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great appeared in Die Welt. Translated by Russell Berman.]
There is always something edifying about attending an execution, especially if it’s not a human but an idea that is being dispatched from life to death. In God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens—for weeks on the bestseller list in the US and the UK—religion is devastated. One has to give it to Hitchens who, as executioner, does a thorough job. First he slips the noose of natural-scientific reason around the neck of piety. Then he lets it quarter itself on its own contradictions, before boiling the pieces in the oil of his righteous anger. Finally he shoots it through with the bullets of logic and, just in case, he lets the guillotine of irony fly down on its neck. Do recall that this is not about religious fundamentalism or fanaticism but rather religion as such. All, truly all, are meant and are buried alive: Catholics, Protestants, Muslims—whether Shiite or Sunni—Hindus, Buddhists, Osho-faithful and, last but not least, Jews as well, to whom Hitchens, with his Jewish mother, belongs at least in the sense of descent.
He is probably the smartest thinker of his generation of baby-boomers in the English-speaking world. He grew up in England, but left early for America where he has enjoyed a brilliant career as a journalist. For many years a Trotskyist, he was a star of the radical Left, fighting against Evil in the incarnations of Henry Kissinger and Mother Teresa, until September 11, 2001, when he was forced to recognize that “forces of reaction” had attacked the US. Suddenly he found himself close to George W. Bush, at least as far as the “War on Terror” went. His erstwhile comrades have never forgiven him this betrayal, but he doesn’t seem to care.
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Telos 140: Peter Szondi and Critical Hermeneutics is available in our store.
 Literature has been a long-standing, if sometimes hidden, topic for Telos. While the journal has ostensibly focused on social and political theory, in various traditions and stretching from philosophy to culture, matters of literature have frequently percolated between the lines. This interlinear presence has certainly been the case for our engagements with those thinkers who made major contributions to literary and aesthetic theory, such as Adorno, as well as Baudrillard, Benjamin, Goldmann, Gramsci, and Lukács, but more broadly to the wide-ranging efforts to interpret and reinterpret works of the past: Telos has been about rereading, recovering, and reinterpreting parts of the intellectual legacy with reference to questions of current urgency. While the journal did succeed in keeping a healthy distance of common sense from the vanity fair of “literary theory” that gripped the universities during the 1980s and 1990s, our interest in mapping alternatives to the mentalities of bureaucracy—traditions, communities, the life-world, and religion—also indicated an underlying interest in literature, as well as in the arts in general. This testifies, of course, to the legacy of Critical Theory and the effort to correct the dominance of instrumental reason with an aesthetic dimension; but there is a much bigger picture, beyond the specific confines of Critical Theory per se, the pursuit of a richer life and a resistance to all the cultural and social forces that degrade human creativity and freedom, whether one attributes them to modernity or to conditions of longer duration. As a vehicle that can enhance imagination and expressivity, literature turns out to be indispensable.
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