Jürgen Habermas 90 years: A personal homage

The Insitute for Social Research in Frankfurt, 

where Habermas started his academic career

Tuesday last week one of the most outstanding living philosophers celebrated his 90th birthday: Jürgen Habermas. Already this would be reason enough to devote a blog to him. But there is also another reason: Habermas is one of those philosophers who had a big influence on my thinking, especially during the earlier years of my sociological and philosophical development. Currently Habermas is especially known as a political philosopher who stands for the freedom of speech and opinion, for democracy and open discussions and who is an advocate of the European Union. Habermas has always had these views, but during the earlier years of his career he was especially known by his contributions to methodology and the philosophy of science and also because he stressed the importance of language for human understanding. His works in these fields were an attack on positivist thinking and on the idea that there is such a thing as an objective fact. This was especially so in his first major work Knowledge and Human Interest. In this book Habermas defended the view that behind each type of science there is a leading interest that guides its practice. In plain words, the natural sciences are guided by an interest in instrumental action and technical manipulation, while the humanities are guided by an interest in communicative action and mutual human understanding. In order to understand this view one must know that “science” (“Wissenschaft”) in German can refer both to the natural sciences (as in English) and to the humanities and the liberal arts (just as in Dutch, though); then “humanities” can also be read as “hermeneutic sciences”.

Habermas’s epistemological thinking didn’t stop here. On the contrary, it just had started and in his Theory of Communicative Action he further founded the view that no theoretical thinking – so including the theories of the natural sciences – can be objective, independent of what humans value. Moreover, all this thinking is based on the mutual human understanding of what these theories are about. Actually there are two levels of thinking: theoretical thinking, so scientific understanding, and commonsense thinking, so human understanding in daily life. Habermas called the former level of thinking and understanding level 1, and the commonsense level – the way we understand in daily life – level 0. This brought me the idea that there are two levels of meaning related to these levels, which I called respectively meaning 1 and meaning 0 (see my blog dated 16 March 2009).

But what does it mean when we say that we have come to a mutual understanding, be it in scientific discussions or be it in daily life? According to Habermas mutual understanding has three aspects. All these aspects are equally important. In my interpretation, we have only reached mutual understanding on what we say if we – firstly – agree about the truth of the statement we discuss about. So, is the snakelike animal over there really a snake or is it a blindworm (so a kind of lizard)? And – secondly – what is our intention by uttering a statement, for example that there is a snake over there (and not a blindworm)? Are we classifying animals, or is it a warning for a dangerous animal? Moreover – thirdly – do we really mean what we say: Are we honest or authentic when uttering a statement? Maybe, you know that that animal is a blindworm but you try to convince me that it is snake so that I become scared and I’ll run away. I think that this threefold “theory of acceptability” is an important contribution in grasping what mutual understanding and coming to a consensus means. Although the original version of this theory of acceptability was much criticized, for instance because Habermas seemed to suggest that in the end truth depends on our consensus and not on what is out there in the world outside us, I think that its essence, as formulated here by me, still stands.

Anyway, after the publication of his Theory of Communicative Action, questions in the field of philosophy of science faded into the background in Habermas’s work and gradually I stopped following him. I went more and more in the direction of the analytical philosophy of mind and action, also under the influence of Habermas’s friend and co-philosopher Karl-Otto Apel (see my blog dated 20 March 2017). But Habermas’s earlier ideas on methodology and mutual human understanding had a big influence on my further philosophical development and his idea of the levels of understanding were fundamental in my Ph.D. thesis on the method of Verstehen (“understanding”). Moreover it’s not difficult to find there other ideas that directly or indirectly go back to Habermas. However, as it turned out, my thesis led me definitively away from Habermas. This didn’t happen because I came to disagree with his ideas, but my thesis made that I took new paths in philosophy and it stimulated me to develop new ideas in new philosophical fields. However, no doubt , without Habermas I would have failed to see the right signposts.

What does an action mean?

When I asked myself what to write in this week’s blog, I suddenly realized that through the years I have given hardly any attention to my Ph.D. thesis. Actually the only thing that I discussed here from my dissertation was the difference between meaning 1 and meaning 0 (see my blog dated 16 March 2009). Although not everything in my thesis will be of interest to the readers of these blogs, I think that at least one theme is, namely: What do we mean when we say that an action has a certain meaning? The answer to this question is not only of theoretical interest for philosophers or, for instance, sociologists. It has also practical relevance. Think for instance of a court that must judge why a murderer performed his criminal act, or – hopefully more innocent – of parents who want to know why their child did this or that in a certain situation.

Traditionally, it is said that, when we want to know what an agent meant with his or her action, we want to know the reason. Let’s take an example. A man shoots down another man on the other side of the street; then he runs to him and takes his wallet. Why? Without any additional information, you may think that the man is a criminal who robs his victim of his wallet, hoping that it is filled with bank notes. However, such an act is difficult to understand, if the agent happens to be a millionaire. We can “understand” that a poor man needs money and that he thinks that he can get it by shooting down and robbing a stranger, who may have a thick wallet in his pocket. But a millionaire? Why should he do that? I’ll not answer this question, but what my example makes clear is that we need at least two questions in order to understand what the agent did; so in my case why he shot down (and robbed) his victim. The first question is: What was the intention of the agent that he shot down a stranger? Answer: He wanted to take his wallet. And the second questions is: What was his motive (ground) for doing so? Answer: he needed money (or had another motive if the perpetrator was a millionaire). In my blog dated 9 July 2019 we saw that Daniel Dennett calls the first question the “for-question” and the second question the “how-come-question”.

Can we say now that we understand the action performed by the agent? Let’s assume that we know that the agent needed money (so he had a motive) and that therefore he shot down the other man in order to take his wallet (so he had also an intention). Then most of us will say that his act is a crime. Nonetheless the latter is not as obvious as you might think. Even if we know an agent’s motive for acting and his intention in acting, it may be that we still don’t fully understand the action in question. In order to make this clear, let me assume that the town where the action just discussed took place is in the frontline of a war. Two armies are fighting against each other in the streets. Now it may be so that the shooting we just saw happen before our eyes has been done by a criminal who had put on a uniform and uses the confusing situation to rob other people. However, it’s also possible that both the agent and the victim are soldiers belonging to different armies. Both soldiers have received orders to kill opponents and to take the wallets of the victims and to give them to their commanders. Then the shooting soldier has a motive (his orders) and an intention (killing enemy soldiers). Should we then no longer call the action a crime but the execution of a – supposedly legal – order? At first sight we may say so; nevertheless it doesn’t need to be correct. For maybe the victim had seen that his opponent wanted to shoot him down and realized that his gun was empty, so that he couldn’t defend himself. Therefore he held his hands up. Nevertheless he was shot down. Then we talk no longer of the execution of an order but of a crime of war. Cases like these made me conclude that in order to understand an action we need not only to know what its motive is (Dennett’s how-come-question) and what its intention is (Dennett’s for-question), but that we need also to ask a third question, namely the question what the action as such is (in my example: a crime or an order). We can only understand an action and so know its reason if we know (1) how it comes about (its motive); (2) what it is for (its intention); and (3) what it stands for or represents (let’s call it its sense). Only when we have answered these three questions, we know what an action means.

The social self

When you want to show yourself to another, you take a picture. With a few clicks you can share it with anybody. There are many reasons to share a photo. Maybe you just want to show your face; or you want to show a funny situation in which you were involved; or something bad happened to you and you want to tell about it. Whatever the reason is to share a picture of yourself, all such pictures have one thing in common: in one way or another, even in negative situations, you try to show your best side in the given circumstances or anyway a better side. Hardly anybody wants to present him or herself as a wretched little creature, or with sleepy eyes just after s/he has woken up in the morning. If the photo is to be shown to strangers, giving a positive impression is even more important.

When the French philosopher Montaigne (1533-1592) wanted to picture himself for his family and friends, of course, he couldn’t take a selfie or had made a photographic portrait. He could have made a painted portrait of himself, – and such portraits exist – but he had another idea: He thought that the best way to present himself was to write about himself. And so he did and so he wrote his Essays. They pleased many people and they still do, for they are still widely read. Because of this we know what kind of person he was, or rather many people think so. But do we really know Montaigne? Even the most honest person can give only a subjective image of him or herself and such a self image is always distorted in some way. It’s your image of how you see yourself; not one how you are. It’s a first-person view and as such it is always a subjectively distorted if not dressed up self-view. Why would it have been different for Montaigne?

If you realize this when making your self-picture, it wouldn’t be that bad. Maybe you don’t know in what way your self-view doesn’t fully represent the way you are, but once you know that you might be wrong about yourself, you are basically open to corrections. But alas, this is often not the case. Often it is so that people unknowingly present themselves better than they are. Even more, some do so intentionally and think that it’s okay. There can be good reasons for this, of course. You want to have a better position or you want to be accepted by others, for instance, and then it is a bad idea to be negative about yourself. The problem is, however, that, once you have painted such a better self-image, you tend to think that this is really how you are. You are going to believe in your own false image; in the image you have first dressed up. Many people fall into this trap set for others. This was already noticed by the French writer and nobleman François de La Rochefoucauld. A century after Montaigne he wrote: “We are so used to present a distorted image of ourselves to others that in the end we distort ourselves for ourselves.” La Rochefoucauld saw it happen in his own social environment. If in his days you wanted to be a successful nobleman, you had to take part in all kinds of intrigues and conspiracies in order to gain a higher position in the pecking order of the nobility and at the court. And you had also to present yourself better than you were, with the psychological consequence that you went to believe your self-created distorted image. Being a sharp observer, this didn’t escape La Rochefoucauld’s attention.

As said, there can be good reasons to dress up your self-image a bit, but there is risk that you will forget your self-distortion. In my blog last week we saw how social media try to manipulate your self. But that’s only one aspect of what the social media do, albeit an important aspect. The social media are also a source of self-manipulation. Take a look at the profiles of people in Facebook, Instagram, and so on. Take especially a look at the photos and look how people present themselves. What you see are nearly only happy lives and handsome people; people presenting their better selves. That would be nice, if it weren’t so that increasingly people are going to believe that life fundamentally is that way; and they are going to believe that they are as they are in the pictures of themselves they have uploaded. “If my life is not that way, there is something wrong with it; if I am not as in my pictures, there is something wrong with me.” That’s what they are going to believe. More and more I get the impression, to give an example, that if people aren’t handsome they think that they have failed. So they make themselves handsome. In the Internet you can do it by using FaceApp (an app for improving a picture of your face), or in real by using makeup. In the same way you can adapt other aspects of yourself. In your profile description, in your chats .... And in the end you become your self-presentation, or rather you think so. But, whatever you do in order to dress up yourself, you cannot change the facts. As Montaigne said, even on the highest throne, you have to sit on your buttocks. Why should you hide that? If it leads to soreness, it’s better to use an ointment.