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.