Philipp Felsch | The Philosopher. Habermas und wir | Ullstein Verlag | 256 pages | 24 EUR

Rüdiger Suchsland: You begin your book with a description of the first time you met Habermas. Perhaps you could tell us about that? How did you come to this project, how did your personal relationship with Habermas begin?

Philipp Felsch: It started with a visit to Habermas at his house in Starnberg. It was a very surprising encounter for me - I’d never really been a Habermasian in terms of my entire intellectual  and educational history. I was there researching early Suhrkamp culture - I let it be known that I was in the area, and Habermas had invited me. I rang the bell, Habermas himself opened the door to his mid-century building, wearing khaki pants and Reebok running shoes - resembling not so much a German emeritus but an American East Coast intellectual; with his straightforward speech, the no-frills manner and his still youthful agility... my first impression was that  "Hegel of the Federal Republic" is actually an American.

Then there is a second impression, which also played a part in the decision to write this book: We went to the couch in the living room. Habermas often had his picture taken there. 
The Habermas couch is the iconographic epicenter, so to speak, where Habermas also practised communication and dialogue and as such, is a hallowed place in the history of ideas in the Federal Republic of Germany. Then his wife Ute joined us- we had coffee and cake and I suddenly felt a sense of déjà -vu, transported right back to my grandparents' living room in Gummersbach.

Gummersbach is also where Habermas comes from...

Yes,that's right. He was born in 1929 and is exactly 10 years older than my father. This memory and the slight Oberberg accent contributed to the image of the cosmopolitan East Coast American next to that of my small, middle-class, provincial grandparents, even though their large living room looked very different to Habermas', which was furnished in a classic modernist style. 
The impression captivated me: the cosmopolitan and the provincial, the universalist and the private individual.

This is also something very typically West German, and Habermas is certainly a philosopher whose work and life story cannot be separated from the history of the Federal Republic of Germany -  even this turning towards to the USA and this positive image of America that you describe is also quite typical of his generation, the West German post-war generation. Habermas is clearly a representative of those young Germans who were shaped by the period of re-education after 1945.
My educational experience is linked to Habermas: The historians' dispute and the student strikes around 1990 with the self-organized seminars. There you learned about communicative action and the inevitability of consensus on the practical. He was always there, he always spoke out and ever since then, with his public statements, he has been one of the most important German intellectuals. I can't imagine him not being around one day...

When the historians' dispute happened in 1986, I was 13 - I remember Chernobyl in the spring;  we weren't allowed to play outside after that. Then there was the football World Cup in Mexico. And I think 10 days after Germany lost in the final against Argentina, Habermas published this truly epochal article that triggered the historians' dispute.

In the early 90s, Habermas was always an opponent of mine: intellectually, I grew up with Michel Foucault and Niklas Luhmann, two theorists with whom Habermas had huge differences of opinion. In this respect, one can always easily recognise their work and their approach to society, history, language and communication, from that of Habermas.

Shortly before my visit, after a long period of silence, Habermas had spoken out publicly about the war in Ukraine and had been harshly criticized for what many called "appeasement"- In other words, for insisting on proceeding very cautiously, not getting carried away by enthusiasm for war and supporting Ukraine unconditionally.

To my mind, this attitude was symbolic  of the old Federal Republic of Germany. I wanted to understand and investigate for myself, why Habermas seemed to embody the ideals of the old Federal Republic - as the "Hegel of the Federal Republic". 

You also confirm this theory in your book: that Habermas stands for the old Federal Republic. Perhaps you could briefly describe, especially for our non - German readers, what the old Federal Republic is and what distinguishes it from the new, current Berlin Republic.

Historically, the old Federal Republic was the German state founded after the defeat in the Second World War. It very much developed its own particular culture: the Bonn Republic, whose many attributes fit well with Habermas. Civil and post-heroic, 
there was a symbolism that deliberately dispensed with representativeness: an aesthetic that deliberately undermined the pomp of the old state aesthetic. 
The green and brown uniforms of the police - it was the opposite of the sleek SS uniforms tailored by Hugo Boss. 
For Habermas, these were ultimately virtues of this country: Not a shortcoming, but a guarantee that this Federal Republic, at least in the late 1980s, when the big battles between his own left-liberal camp and the conservative camp had been fought - the last major dispute of this kind was the Historikerstreit - that's when Habermas, I think, had the feeling for a few years that this post-national political culture and universalist identity - he picked up the term "constitutional patriotism" again at the time - had arrived across the board. This was partly due to the fact that we did not have a capital city that was characterized by monumental, emphatically representative architecture. Of course, Habermas also spoke out strongly against moving the capital to Berlin in the early 1990s. 
These are some of the characteristics of the old Federal Republic.

At the end of the book, you talk again on the couch - presumably in the autumn of 2023 as there is talk of the consequences of the Ukraine war, and also Germany’s relationship with the USA, and the threat of a Trump re-election . Habermas speaks quite openly about the impression that a large part of his life's work is melting away between his hands, and that he is almost resigned to seeing the failure of all his ideas.
His pessimistic conclusion saddened me greatly . 

Yes, absolutely, I also see that as a pessimistic conclusion.

Do you think that does Habermas justice? In terms of his significance and far- reaching impact, both as a philosopher and as a political intellectual?

We'll see, I think. The international reception is extremely lively and Habermas is very well established within specialist philosophy. He was looking for the universalist principles of communicative reason. 
If we exclude Habermas as a political intellectual, we have to realise that he was actually someone who was exclusively concerned with Germany and German problems. He was an educator of Germans. At the same time, of course, he developed a special relationship with the USA - keyword: Westbindung. 
Habermas is also a theorist of the post-heroic society. For him, war is an outdated, atavistic form of politics. This is why he found the reaction of large sections of the German public to his statement on the war in Ukraine so shocking. He sees this as a relapse into heroic forms of political self-image that he thought had long been overcome.

I would like to disagree with one point. You said: "Educator of the Germans". Yes, he certainly is. I just believe that there is a lot in these political texts that goes beyond criticism of Germans. 
His political texts form the somewhat idealised, even utopian, draft of a bourgeois society that applies to all Western societies. And in many of his books, Habermas ties this back in with the history of philosophy, i.e. to his actual area of expertise. 
This is a critique that is aimed at the public all over the world. It seems to me that there is a close connection between the political writings of the day and his philosophical writings.

Yes, that's true. Although Habermas has insisted vehemently since the 1980s that he distinguishes between these two roles. 
When reading him, you almost have the feeling that you are dealing with two different authors: on the one hand, the philosopher who writes important philosophical books, and on the other, the political intellectual, whose collected political interventions now comprise twelve volumes.
The specialist philosophical texts are almost deliberately dry and brittle. You could say it's the worst scientific German. In contrast, his philosophical-political texts are characterized by pronounced rhetorical brilliance. Habermas often uses powerful images. As an opponent of Habermas, you had to worry that he would label you permanently. He also started out as a critic, writing many reviews in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; they are unmistakably characterized by the Heidegger sound. 
He then went to the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, where he reached the attention of Adorno with his harsh criticism of Heidegger in the FAZ.

Habermas countered what could be summarized as postmodernism with an emphatic concept of modernity. This is still very relevant to the political and practical-philosophical discourses in many countries today. For example, it is well known that Habermas travelled to China in the 1990s and gave a series of lectures there. Since then, there have also been Chinese Habermasians.
This is just one example of the global impact of this philosopher. Can you give other examples of his impact in the part of the world that we now call the "Global South"? Why should he be read, for example, in Africa, Latin America or Southeast Asia?

I must confess that I am not very familiar with the history of Habermas' impact outside Europe, precisely because it is very large. Habermas is of course not the representative of post-colonial theory. These are his French opponents, who historically have had a completely different reception.
Habermas is, of course, a universalist - although the label of the "Hegel of the Federal Republic" is also fitting in the sense that he has always been interested in how this universalist reason, which he traces throughout his entire oeuvre, in ever new attempts, and the resulting abstract norms and laws are embodied and must be embodied in historical forms of the practical ,of institutions and of morality, as Hegel calls it - it's this that makes him a philosopher who is very strongly attached to his present. Because he is interested in how abstract nouns can be made concrete. 

Post-colonial theory and the widespread flare-up of identity struggles and particularism naturally emerge at the very moment when the West has run out of steam. Despite all this, we must ask ourselves the question: Where is this universalist heritage? Do we have to renounce something like the universalist demand for reason? Are we falling into unbridled cultural relativism? Habermas is, of course, an important reference.

An indispensable one, because Habermas is one of those thinkers who hold fast to the unity of the world beyond particular identities, religions, power, beyond North and South. Thank you very much for this interview.