Two new works historicize the human faculty of reason. The first, a biography of Jürgen Habermas, traces the evolution of his postmetaphysical theory of reason from its origins to its most recent iterations. The second offers a far broader genealogy of the concept of reason in modern thought, especially in Kant, Hegel, Marx, and the Frankfurt school. Both depict Habermas as one of the most important protagonists in contemporary philosophy, but offer differing accounts of his place in the history of the “Frankfurt school.” The two also contextualize Habermas very differently. While Müller-Doohm locates Habermas firmly within a postwar German, European, and to a lesser extent transatlantic frame, Jay opts for the longue durée of German Idealist thought and its critics from Kant to the first generation of the Frankfurt school. Both help us assess the merits of the procedural rationality that Habermas considers the only valid conception of reason available to us as moderns—Müller-Doohm by sketching its many facets and spheres of application, Jay by scrutinizing the arguments for and against Habermas's account of reason. As Jay puts it,
it is fair to say that a paradigm shift has occurred in our appreciation of the stakes involved in defending reason as a ground of critique against those who have reduced it to a tool in the service of some deeper purpose . . . put in a nutshell, it might be said—or at least plausibly hoped—that both the Enlightenment's Age of Reason and the Counter-Enlightenment's Age of Reason's Other have been left behind, and in their place is dawning a new Age of Reasons” (148, original emphasis).
Jay emplots Habermas's lifework as an “audacious attempt to restore the light of reason after its eclipse,” which replaced the “untenable ‘objective’ or ‘dialectical’ reason of the first generation” (122). In one of the most exciting sections of the book, Jay enumerates the eight most “salient departures” Habermas makes from traditional Western notions of reason. He names these: reason's desubstantialization, its detranscendentalization, its linguistification, its desublimation, its pluralization, its proceduralization, the temporalization of reason as an infinite project, and finally the “as-if” narrativization of reason. Jay seems to concur with the view that (as Müller-Doohm quotes Habermas), “there are ‘always better and worse reasons, there is never the “one and only right” reason.’Footnote 1 ‘Rationality [Rationalität] is reduced to something formal insofar as the rationality [Vernunftigkeit] of content evaporates into the validity of results.’”Footnote 2 As Muller-Doohm summarizes (370), in Habermas's thought, “The ‘unity of reason’ finds expression in the ‘diversity of its voices alone’.” Though Jay maintains a balanced presentation of Habermas and his critics, his sympathies for Habermas as a prophet and exemplar of the age of reasons are striking.
While even experts in Habermas will find that Jay's chapters on Habermas offer a remarkable synthesis, those convinced that Habermas has little or nothing to offer their own theoretical projects will find valuable its fresh debunking of certain myths about his thought. Rather than setting the “good” Adorno against the “bad” Habermas, for example, as some Adorno enthusiasts tend to do, Jay provides repeated instruction in their similarities.Footnote 3 While both Rawls and Habermas have been criticized for allegedly rigging the “public use of reason” such that only those who agree with the ground rules of liberalism can enter the public sphere, Jay defends Habermas against the notion that communicative rationality is only superficially committed to inclusion. Unlike other versions of reason in the history of Western thought, Jay asserts, communicative reason “did not serve to enforce rigid boundaries in order to fend off pollution by what it had abjected . . . In fact rather than dismissing these ‘others’ as utterly heterogeneous to reason . . . and . . . ‘irrational’, [it] could include them in the discursive process itself, as least as producing alternative content worth arguing about” (130). Unlike contemporary neo-Aristotelians who aspire to a “fully rational form of life,” or “earlier Critical Theorists in their more Hegelian moods,” Habermas substitutes the practice of reason-giving for more comprehensive types of reason: “Impure reason . . . meant the imperative to give reasons . . . in an unending quest for a general consensus that would remain forever counterfactual, not the attainment of a single perfectly consistent state of full rationality” (131). To those who imagine Habermas as a foundationalist, Jay reminds his readers that “Habermas conceded a great deal to the antifoundationalist critics of an emphatic concept of substantive reason . . . Agreeing with radical contextualists like Rorty and Lyotard that reason cannot be disembedded from its contingent historical embodiments, he admitted that if there is a unified rationality it exists only in those diverse manifestations that resist subsumption under a single, comprehensive model” (135).
While Jay emphasizes that Habermas's personal willingness to learn from his critics illustrates the consistency of his theory and practice, Müller-Doohm provides a platform for much harsher and more personal criticisms of Habermas and claims that his theory is not consistent with his personal intellectual practice. Given his generally appreciative account of Habermas's theory of discourse ethics, one is struck by the fierceness of his characterization of Habermas's stance in the public sphere as at times manipulative and polarizing. He notes a related tension between Habermas's theoretical argument that philosophers are not authorities on ethical or political questions (but rather the architects of fair procedures for the discursive testing of arguments over these questions), and his recurrent attempts to steer the German polity in his preferred left-liberal direction. Müller-Doohm is correct to note the tension between his apparent acceptance of “the role of a central moral and intellectual authority,” in the words of one laudatio, and his philosophical conclusion that “[t]he citizens, not the philosopher, are to have the final word” (320).
No one has been harsher in his critique of Habermas than Peter Sloterdijk, who in 1999 pushed this argument to its reductio ad absurdum. As he is quoted by Müller-Doohm, “The whole left-liberal bloc consists of faint Habermasians . . . [It is in fact] a large majority [practicing cultural hegemony but] understands itself as a persecuted minority . . . [It has a] monological concept of truth which takes great pains to appear in dialogical camouflage . . . at bottom, Habermas has always remained nothing but a theoretician of reeducation” (316). Müller-Doohm does not go this far, but argues that,“According to Habermas's ideal, intellectuals do not strive to exert strategic influence on the political struggle for power, but help create a pluralist public sphere” (253). The German “1968” was as divisive as its counterpart in the United States. In Germany, the backlash against the ’68ers’ demands for cultural and political reform took the form of the rise of a neoconservative intellectual tendency or “liberal-conservative” bloc. Müller-Doohm correctly asserts that when Habermas battled the representatives of these tendencies, he “frequently and consciously made use of the arsenal of weapons used in ideological warfare . . . knowing full well that the politics of ideas he thus practiced would have a polarizing effect, would simplify the arguments, and would contradict his ideal of the enlightenment. [To him it must have seemed] that the ends did justify the means” (262).Footnote 4 Müller-Doohm's knowledge of these controversies is deep, but he doesn't provide much evidence to substantiate these charges. Thus there is a disconcerting oscillation in the volume between overly strong critique and overly strong defense, presumably animated by an effort to appear balanced. Müller-Doohm follows these highly critical assessments of Habermas's role in the public sphere by pivoting 180 degrees to argue that the more exacting procedural rules of discourse do not fully apply in ideological controversies, since the latter are not about the “formation” of convictions. “[T]hose directly involved have long since established their convictions” (262). And in his final defense of Habermas, Müller-Doohm insists that Habermas does not just instrumentalize the public sphere but appreciates and seeks the “acid bath of relentless public discourse” (425) for what it teaches him.
THE HISTORY OF REASON AND ITS COGNATES AS COMEDY
Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory is, like many of Jay's earlier, now classic, works in intellectual history, concerned to historicize and assess the value of the Frankfurt school's diagnoses and prescriptions for the ills of capitalist modernity. But in this book, the treatment of the Frankfurt school shrinks to focus on three major figures of its first generation—Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse—and Habermas as the only major figure of its “second generation.” Jay treats Benjamin only glancingly and ignores figures he has treated elsewhere, such as Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer. At the same time, the frame expands well beyond twentieth-century Germany or Europe to encompass a much longer story of the idea of reason since classical Greece. This is not a “grand survey of different usages of the concept of reason,” he reassures the reader, but “a selective and incomplete presentation of the long history of something called ‘reason,’” oriented to those “issues in the history of ‘reason’ and its cognates” most relevant to the Frankfurt School's own efforts to articulate the connections between freedom, reason, and the good society (x–xii.)
Why situate the Frankfurt school project within a longue durée of the history of Western ideas of reason? Jay explains that he was never satisfied with the answer Friedrich Pollock gave to a question he asked him in 1969: “What was the normative alternative to instrumental, subjective reason based on the narrow imperative of self-preservation? What exactly was the substantive, emphatic, objective concept of reason that was now in peril and how could it be justified both as a philosophical concept and as a norm for human emancipation, without regressing to a discredited idealist metaphysics?” (ix). Jay recounts that Pollack was frustrated by his question, replying testily that, “Horkheimer has written a whole book about this!” (x). But the answers contained in that work, Eclipse of Reason (1947), to which he returns in this volume, did not satisfy Jay. In “subsequent attempts of later generations of Frankfurt School theorists to develop a more plausible normative concept of reason,” he explains, “I have remained troubled by the nagging sense that my question of 1969 remained unresolved” (x). By the end of the volume, the reader concludes that Jay believes that the later Adorno and mature Habermas offered the most “plausible answers” to his central normative question: their aesthetic theory and theory of communicative interaction “reworked, rather than repudiated, Enlightenment tradition” (106). Why, then, reconstruct the long background to the dialectic of Enlightenment, the critique of instrumental reason, and its reconstruction? What does the historian bring to this particular philosophical table?
Densely packed with illustrative quotation and with ample references, the book offers the gratifications of challenging but accessible lectures on a major theme in Western thought, akin to his treatments in other books of themes such as experience or vision. Part I of the book, “The Ages of Reason,” is divided into a lengthy chapter which begins with the Greeks, then jumps to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European Enlightenment; it is followed by chapters on Kant, Hegel, and Marx, and the crisis of reason at the fin de siècle. Part II, “Reason's Eclipse and Return,” begins with a chapter on the crisis of instrumental reason in Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse, before turning to two chapters which offer sustained treatment of Habermas and his critics. The greatest critical energy is expended on Kant and Habermas.
The book organizes the vastness of the topic around a series of ideal-typical contrasts beginning with the tension between logos and mythos in ancient Greek thought. “At its core,” the discourse of reason has a notion of a disembedded faculty, self-sufficient and unpolluted. “The claim that it had been successfully achieved had a demonstrably powerful impact on Western thought.” On the other hand, “the split between logos and myth could also be presented as a tragic loss . . . For them the alleged ‘pollution’ of reason by its inferiors—not only myth, but variously the body, emotions, history, language, the feminine or faith—would better be understood as a salutary return . . . of the abjected” (8–9).
In pursuit of these opposing positions, “two dominant strategies have been developed” in Western thought, which Jay names the “broad church” and “narrow church” approaches. The broad church
seeks to locate in those very “others” already existing ciphers of a more capacious version of reason, one that the restricted alternative fails to appreciate and indeed threatens to undermine. Rather than simply inverting the hierarchy of logos over mythos . . . it posits a more robust and inclusive version of reason. For if reason can be understood as making sense of the world through discerning patterns of meaning, why not allow a broader notion of reason . . . narrative as well as discursive? (9)
To portray the conflict between “reason and its others,” Jay organizes his protagonists and their arguments by the type of reason or rationality they embody, including those types that signify the outer boundaries of what have been considered rational: rhetoric versus logic, narrative versus discursive, emphatic versus formal, noetic versus dianoetic, non-dispositional versus dispositional. Noesis “is the mental operation of nous (mind or intelligence),” Jay explains. It “identifies resemblances, proportions and contrasts, penetrates to essences beneath appearances, and is able to discern the intelligible forms inherent in reality”—what Plato refers to as the eidos or eternal ideas. “Sometimes [noesis] is understood as an intuitive grasp of the deeper truths denied to mere sense-knowledge, truths that are disclosed, brought to light, made present, rather than the result of analysis, constitution or reflection” (15). Dianoesis, by contrast, includes the temporal process of demonstration, argumentation, and inference; the addition of the prefix “dia-” (through) adds a diachronic dimension. The dianoetic therefore “privileges judgment and justification as the essential tools of rational discourse. Rather than noetic intuition, it employs syllogistic logic and discursive argumentation . . . to come to rational conclusions” (15). The tension between noetic and dianoetic knowledge is the major one that runs throughout the history of reason.
Jay's sympathy for the dianoetic over the noetic is evident in his characterization of the affinity of the dianoetic with dialectical disputation:
Often dianoetic reason . . . can move the locus of reasoning away from the individual subject . . . to the intersubjective process of argumentation . . . It also has a more tenuous relationship to truth, which it may approximate but not fully capture . . . [For] Habermas, it led to a defense of communicative rationality as the only alternative to the authoritarian implications of monologic intuition. (16)
By contrast, Adorno's negative dialectics, with which he also sympathizes, can be described, Jay writes, as “a noesis of the non-identical” (17).Footnote 5 Heidegger and Marcuse, by contrast, are criticized as one-sidedly noetic. But Jay strives for evenhandedness between the noetic and the dianoetic, despite his preference for the dianoetic: “The danger of an infinite regress backward always haunts dianoetic reasoning, which can only move forward from an original premise that it cannot defend by argument alone . . . It might be said that there is always a noetic moment even in the most stringently dianoetic attempt at discursive reasoning” (16).
It is impossible to summarize all of the ground covered and the intricacies of this learned and challenging work. Instead, and in order to focus on its overlaps with Müller-Doohm's volume, I focus on his figuration of Habermas. Jay, without explicitly formulating it as a thesis, presents Habermas as a kind of heroic protagonist who saves the Frankfurt school from its own floundering within the antinomies of reason. With his breakthrough from subject-centered philosophy to the intersubjective or dialogic redescription of reason as the dispositional faculty of fallible subjects, Habermas develops an account of reason—perhaps the most convincing contemporary account, in Jay's opinion, one senses—most adequate to the pursuit of the good society in a world without metaphysical certainties. The suspicion arises that this is the implicit telos of the book since Jay often characterizes earlier figures or debates in the history of Western thought in ways that he sometimes says explicitly prefigure (or at least seem to prefigure) Habermas's own resolutions of these antinomies.
In an impressive synthetic treatment of the Enlightenment, Jay describes the “emergence of several alternative models of reason to challenge—although never completely replace—the hegemony of the substantive, metaphysical version underpinning the absolutist Polizeistaat and the radical Enlightenment alike” (32). One such alternative to the “alliance of substantive reason and administrative rationality from above or political radicalism from below” was the tradition of “common sense” treated by Sophia Rosenfeld in her recent work.
Rather than seeing reason as the preserve of the educated few or those with the gift of noetic intuition . . . [it was understood as] disseminated among the population as a whole, even if underdeveloped and always in competition with other impulses and mental faculties. Resisting the privilege of the eyes, typical of rationalism from Plato to Descartes, it took seriously the claims of the ear in the process of reasoning, the role of listening to the opinions and arguments of others . . . (33)
Similarly, in his reading of Kant's “Idea of a Universal History” (1784), Jay argues that Kant
attempted to find in nature the ground for the moral imperatives of practical reason, which were themselves then increasingly realized in the institutions and practices of the species as a whole. Or put in yet another way which anticipates the similar effort made by Habermas in linguistic terms, he sought to locate a transcendent imperative immanently in nature and history rather than hovering above them in a realm entirely outside of the messy contingencies of the world. (57, italics mine)
In another of his characterizations of Kant, one also hears intimations of Habermas's account of the telos in human history towards collective learning: “Rationality exists in the learning process of humanity, which can progressively tame, if never entirely obliterate, the selfish, instinct-driven animal in us and overcome all conflict” (58).
The “vital importance of the Hegelian tradition for Critical Theory” is evident in works by Marcuse and Adorno in particular, Jay writes. Part of what attracted the Frankfurt school to Hegel was that he “continued and deepened Kant's insight . . . that there was rationality latent in the course of contingent historical events, a rationality that nonetheless needed to be fostered” (62). In contrast to Kant's critical and limited concept of reason, Hegel's dialectical and absolute concept of reason was more noetic than dianoetic; the Phenomenology, Jay explains, does not rely on “assertoric claims that need proofs to persuade” (62). Hegel's “more emphatic and capacious ‘broad church’ position clearly struck a chord” with those who wished reason “could go beyond mere ‘understanding’ (Verstand) and once again claim access to ontological truths” (64). The mature Hegel's monologic notion of self-objectifying Absolute Spirit “displaced the active agent of reason from humans to the more impersonal spirit or Geist (spirit or mind)” (63). Jay also describes this monologic, noetic, emphatic concept of reason as “fully nondispositional”; that is, not the property of agents or persons. This left Hegel's system open to the charge that “the skeptical Habermas made” (but here read Jay's skepticism too) “that for all [Hegel's] stress on freedom, there was something determinist about it” (67). By contrast, Jay writes, “Habermas himself offered a ‘rational reconstruction’ of the past as meaningful evolutionary narrative but, contra Hegel, explicitly ascribed to it only a heuristic status without any guarantees of realization” (67–8).
In the final chapter of Part I, “Reason in Crisis,” Jay writes that
despite the efforts of Kant, the young Hegelians, and Marx to close the gap between the “imperfect actual subject” of reason and the “regulative ideal of absolute reason,” other thinkers saw “the existing flawed subject . . . culturally bound, linguistically limited, motivated by . . . unshakeable prejudices . . . as the hidden truth behind the fantasy of an unrealizable ideal subject, which was then understood to be merely an ideological cover for the promotion of less exalted ends. (81)
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the erosion of confidence in reason, suspicions about technological rationality in particular, caused the “optimistic metanarrative of impersonal, nondispositional rationalization” to stall (82). Skepticism and cynicism about reason caused its “defenders [to grow] less confident of their cause” (91). Jay does not undertake a sustained account of the “crisis of reason,” between 1848 and 1914. Instead he focuses on a single text of Horkheimer's from 1934 which he considers illustrative of “the complicated role reason played in Critical Theory in the decade before they lamented its putative eclipse (92). As Jay summarizes part of Horkheimer's thesis, “For all its regressive hostility to conceptualism, in which it wrongly conflates Vernunft with Verstand, Lebensphilosophie has been so successful because it exploits a major weakness in traditional rationalism . . . [its] overestimation of the power of pure thought. But it sins in the opposite direction, failing to understand that ‘all knowledge is codetermined by people who bring it about’” (93). Jay's description of Horkheimer's account of Lebensphilosophie and positivist scientism as two sides of the same coin in a way reminds the reader of Jay's own effort to show that beneath the apparent tensions between the noetic and the dianoetic, “it is sometimes possible to glimpse one hidden beneath the façade of the other (or perhaps better put, to realize that one is the blind spot of the other)” (17). Here we may surmise that by highlighting the nearly eternal return of the conflict between “reason and its others,” Jay wishes to declare a final truce, as it were, between the “reason wars” that have divided so-called Enlightenment reason and its critics in recent decades.
The patterns he finds recurrent in these struggles over the power, status, and meaning of reason have a reassuring regularity—suggesting that the crises of reason are endemic, and not perilous, to the human condition.
In the evolution of German Idealism . . . from a critical to a speculative stage [we find] a mirror reversal of the Enlightenment pattern, in which a deflationary concept of reason, one conscious of its limits, now gave way to an inflationary one . . . A “broad church” notion of reason now prevailed. Even though it too lost its momentum and was succeeded by an even more radical disenchantment, even a frank embrace of irrationalism, the legacy of the German Idealist discourse of reason still resonated for the Frankfurt School and remains potent [today]. (35)
There is a reassuring feel to this ebb and flow, the tide of inflationary and deflationary accounts of reason, since the Frankfurt school's mid-1940s emplotment of reason's “self-liquidation” as tragedy is recuperated as part of the human comedy, just another chapter in a longer story of historical recurrence.
According to Jay, 1941 is an abrupt turning point in Frankfurt school thought: before 1941 we find Marcuse and Horkheimer still committed to an emphatic, substantive, or objective concept of reason that transcends and can tame the subjective, functionalist version that Weber diagnosed as merely “instrumental.”Footnote 6 Horkheimer's “The End of Reason” presages the shift from the more emphatic tradition to the more despairing and totalizing account we find in his Dialectic of Enlightenment and Eclipse of Reason, both published in 1947. The subtle shift from “end” to “eclipse” signified Horkheimer's “stubborn refusal . . . to believe that all was lost” (100). Yet the two works still represent for Jay “the summa of the Frankfurt School's thesis of the self-liquidation of reason” (100). Jay is unsympathetic to this chapter of Frankfurt school theorizing because the pathogenesis of the crisis is left indeterminate; he calls Horkheimer's last-ditch efforts to access objective reason “vague and unsatisfactory.”Footnote 7 Horkheimer thus equivocated on the important question whether the degeneration of reason was inevitable or not, leaving critical theory “increasingly unable to generate a plausible immanent point d'appui from which to launch its critique” (105). Jay dismisses Marcuse (too quickly) as offering no more than a “sunny redescription of Hegelian rationality, infused with Heideggerian nostalgia for being and vitalized by libidinal energy” (106).
In a brief nod to H. Stuart Hughes's classic account of the crisis of positivism,Footnote 8 Jay writes,
The heroes of Hughes's story are not the neo-Hegelians like Lukàcs or Croce, who sought to restore a more emphatic concept of reason against the dangers of unchecked empiricism, but rather Weber and Freud. [For they were] . . . suspicious of an emphatic concept of reason that sought to use it to establish or even vet values . . . [and] no less cautious when it came to assigning history the redemptive task . . . (89)
In his account of Habermas and the Frankfurt school in Part II of this volume, we find a similar dynamic, this time with Habermas assigned the heroic role. Horkheimer and Marcuse are characterized as oscillating between unconvincing faith in an emphatic concept of reason and a too-thorough rejection of all reason (on the grounds that it is inherently bound up with the domination and subjugation of nature).
The later Adorno plays a supporting role as the other most “plausible alternative” to the cul-de-sac of 1947, distancing himself from the more despairing pronouncements of the 1940s (106). Assessing Adorno and Habermas's answers to the question that nagged Jay since 1969 required the present reexamination of the roots of their thought in Kant and Hegel: “Both still found in Hegel some inspiration for a reason that would go beyond the limits of Enlightenment rationality, while also conceding the value of Kant's more modest acknowledgment of reason's limits.” Further, by framing his book around the theme of “reason and its others,” Jay provides a helpful context for his assessment that both Adorno and Habermas “came to appreciate the potential of religion or at least theology as a resource for a more capacious concept of reason than the instrumental variant that Critical Theory feared was crowding out all alternatives” (106).
Jay's final two chapters, which focus on what he calls the “communicative turn” in critical theory accomplished by Jürgen Habermas, have the merit of underscoring the Hegelian legacy in Habermas, a dimension often overlooked or downplayed in his North American reception. In this reception, Habermas is usually paired with the liberal Rawls under the rubric of Kantian constructivism, deliberative democracy, and the public sphere. But as Jay writes, no less than Horkheimer and Adorno, “Habermas absorbed the Hegelian lesson that reason, however it may be defined, had to be realizable in history, rather than conceived naturalistically or transcendentally . . . Habermas thus shared and even intensified Horkheimer and Adorno's suspicion of a subject-centered notion of reason” (115). By providing a highly sympathetic account of Habermas's project which emphasizes its continuities with the problematic of the Frankfurt school and its roots in Kant, Hegel, and Marx, Jay's intellectual history restores Habermas to a place at the center of a tradition from which he is sometimes excluded as an apostate, or as someone whose innovations are viewed as so distinct as to burst the bounds of that “tradition.”
Jay's earlier chapters on Kant, Hegel, and Marx prepare the reader well to grasp the significance of Habermas's remarkable, if quixotic, ambition to combine the strengths of each while eschewing their liabilities. In contrast to the Hegelian or orthodox Marxist “faiths” in an objective teleology of historical development, Habermas offers the “weak naturalism” of an “as-if” narrative of the species’ possible evolution. Inspired by Kant's “Idea for a Universal History,” Habermas's philosophy of history suggests that history moves in the direction of greater rationality, but without any guarantees of its successful realization. Jay describes this rationality without any guarantees appreciatively as a “heuristic device at once descriptive and normative.” It enables us “to make sense of the process of rationalization in all of its forms without, however, either confusing the model with empirical reality or seeing it as a substantive force in history understood as a causal law” (139).
Jay succeeds admirably in highlighting the intra-philosophical stakes of Habermas's project and the significance of his achievements for contemporary thought. He also highlights the extent to which German thinkers—from German idealism to the Frankfurt school—form the essential matrix of antinomies and dilemmas to which Habermas's most essential philosophical maneuvers are a response. Jay's account of Habermas succeeds remarkably well despite his decision to forgo any sustained description of his biography or the social, political, or intellectual contexts of postwar Germany.
THE UNITY OF HABERMAS IN THE DIVERSITY OF HIS ROLES? SCENES FROM A POSTWAR GERMAN CAREER
A different but not incompatible figure is revealed by Stefan Müller-Doohm's major biography of Habermas, a tremendous accomplishment by any measure, and one with distinctive strengths and originality. Müller-Doohm enumerates several goals for his work, chief among them to depict how Habermas became the philosopher of communicative reason and a public intellectual, and to portray the “entanglement” or “interdependency” of the one role with the other. Further, he aims to show “how the battles [Habermas] engaged in led to the development of polarizations within the public life of the Federal Republic of Germany . . . which discursive means—or strategies in the politics of ideas—he used . . . and how Habermas, who is often assigned the function of an opinion-leader of the left-liberal camp . . . actually delineates his position” (xi). Müller-Doohm succeeds on these scores, but other scholars before him have also done much to illuminate the interconnections between Habermas as philosopher and as public intellectual. He reaches two conclusions that are congenial to my own view, but by no means universally shared. The first is that there is greater continuity than discontinuity in Habermas's career. The second is that there is a coherent relationship of mutual determination and interpenetration between the arguments that Habermas makes as the discipline-spanning academic theorist and those he makes as a citizen.
Chief among the successes of the volume are the richness of his account of Habermas's student years before moving to the Institute for Social Research in 1956 and the groundbreaking work on Habermas's decade of activity as codirector, with physicist Richard von Weiszäcker, of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific–Technical Colonization of the Life-World. Equally impressive are his probing and critical analyses of Habermas's role as a public intellectual (he does not shy from presenting acerbic critiques or embarrassing accounts of Habermas) and his courage in asking whether Habermas's own practice of discourse in the public sphere lives up to the standards of his discourse ethics. A massive study that relied on a team of research assistants and a five-year German Research Foundation grant for its execution, the research is prodigious and deserves our applause: the Habermas family allowed Müller-Doohm and his team access to two hundred files of personal correspondence maintained by Habermas, as well as repeated opportunities to interview him. Müller-Doohm also makes intensive use of Habermas's personal papers now maintained at the University of Frankfurt.
But the flip side of these Herculean labors at comprehensiveness is that the biography aspires to do too much. While offering synoptic paraphrase of every major work of Habermas and many minor ones, he also describes Habermas's interventions in more than a dozen public political controversies across six decades; summarizes many reviews of his books and scores of replies to his interventions in the feuilletons; depicts the man's marriage, family life, leisure activities, and closest friendships, as well as his reputation as a teacher, examiner, and administrator; includes the testimony of prominent students; describes his role in the politics of the Suhrkamp publishing house; and mentions the date and value of nearly every prize Habermas received. A related weakness is that the accounts of many episodes in his career—for example, his relationship with the student movement in 1967–9, or his interventions in the Historikerstreit, on Kosovo, or in the debates on German reunification—will be familiar to most students of Habermas or of postwar German history already. By contrast, the chapters on Habermas's writings on European affairs from 2000 to 2014 are up to date and original, filling a significant gap in the biographical literature. The same is true of Habermas's writings on bioethics, which have not been summarized and made accessible to a broad audience before.
An additional problem with the totalizing ambition and largely chronological organization of the book is to flatten the lived temporality of a life into a homogeneous time in which each year seems to unfold as productively and energetically as the last. One might describe the biography as two books: one with the unwieldy aspiration to grasp the whole of the life and work together, indivisible and complete, and a second in which the author's own voice is more audible and critical perspective is sharper. The prologue and epilogue, for example, in which the author permits himself more inventiveness, are among the best aspects of the work.
Müller-Doohm's biography makes at least two further valuable contributions to the study of postwar German history. The leading imprint for West German authors of the left-liberal camp, the Suhrkamp publishing house became a symbol of Germany's recovery of its progressive traditions before 1933. His rendering of Habermas's long relationship with Siegfried Unseld, Suhrkamp's publisher, affords us a window on the making of the left-liberal political and intellectual culture with which Suhrkamp was long identified (403). Habermas is described as a “feisty and opinionated” member of Suhrkamp's editorial committee for the Theorie series it initiated in 1963. Müller-Doohm shows how Habermas personally advocated for the translation of works by Pierce, James, Dewey, Mead, and Morris, aiming to rectify the absence of American pragmatism in the German context (104). Second, through his reconstruction of Habermas's academic relationships with mentors, rivals, and students in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and Starnberg/Munich, and to a lesser extent in Bonn and Berlin, Müller-Doohm remaps the intellectual fields of the Federal Republic, especially in philosophy. This achievement will not only interest a wide range of historians, but also help answer the question of Habermas's proximity, in both geographic and intellectual terms, to Frankfurt and the “Frankfurt school.”
By foregrounding his associations in Marburg and Heidelberg, Müller-Doohm succeeds in decentering Frankfurt from accounts of Habermas's intellectual formation. Despite the impression made by the Habermas–Gadamer debate of the late 1960s about the relative merits of tradition versus critique, hermeneutic understanding versus the “emancipatory” interest in knowledge, Gadamer lent his professional support to Habermas. They remained on respectful good terms until Gadamer's death in 2002. According to Habermas, it was Gadamer's Heidelberg, not Frankfurt, that must be viewed as “the philosophical center of the republic for two, three decades.”Footnote 9 Heidelberg was where many of Habermas's most important interlocutors studied, including Dieter Henrich, Robert Spaemann, Wolfgang Theunissen, and Ernst Tugendhat. Furthermore, coming after his brief immersion in social theory and political science in Frankfurt, Habermas's move to Heidelberg represented a sort of homecoming. Hermeneutics constituted the “bridge” that enabled him to reconnect with the philosophical anthropology and Heideggerianism of his youth in Bonn. Müller-Doohm also does a good job of rendering the importance of Habermas's relationship with Karl-Otto Apel, a figure who exerts the pull of the transcendental in Habermas's system, and whose friendship dates back to their student years in Bonn.
Müller-Doohm's account of Habermas's relative closeness to Adorno and distance from Horkheimer from 1956 to 1959 corroborates Jay's assessment of the philosophical affinities between Habermas and Adorno. Indeed, Müller-Doohm goes as far as to claim that more than any other figure in postwar Germany, “it was Adorno who created a new role (for intellectuals) through his specific kind of public use of reason” (66). Adorno was a revelation for Habermas: “Suddenly and for the first time philosophical and political matters were being brought together” (74). Still, we learn from Müller-Doohm that Habermas didn't initially feel at ease in Frankfurt, and never completely identified with the school. Habermas admired Adorno, but felt irritated by the elitism he perceived in the institute in Frankfurt: “I felt like a figure from a novel by Balzac—the awkward and uneducated boy from the country whose eyes are opened by the city. I became aware of the conventionality of my thinking and feeling” (74). “Any doubts as to whether he should be considered a member of the Frankfurt circle” were removed only in 1961, when the “positivist debate” in Tübingen positioned Karl Popper and Hans Albert on one side and Adorno and Habermas on the other (113). Habermas's reputation as the “youngest and most productive mind” of the Frankfurt school took shape only once Horkheimer had retired and Habermas took his chair in philosophy (128). Adorno was the driving force behind Habermas's appointment—the figure best suited “to combine theoretical sociology and philosophy” in his view, and supported by Horkheimer too. Despite the fact that Habermas declined to take over the directorship of the Institute for Social Research, his teaching at Frankfurt from 1964 to 1971 “gradually attracted more and more students from all over the world. Part of the reason was certainly the pull of the name the ‘Frankfurt School’” (128).
When Adorno was ready to retire in 1970, a “very public conflict broke out” about who should succeed him. Habermas's suggestion of Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher critical of Marxism, was met with fierce criticism and produced “grueling and perpetual conflicts” which ultimately caused Habermas to depart for Starnberg, a small city near Munich, at the end of 1971 (165). “The beginning of what is now referred to as the linguistic turn in Critical Theory” can be dated to Habermas's lectures at Princeton in February and March 1971. Müller-Doohm interprets the significance of this turn fairly conventionally: “this research agenda was difficult to reconcile with [the] philosophers and sociologists in Frankfurt who remained committed to the Marxist tradition of Critical Theory . . . or those working at the Institute.” Müller-Doohm adds that in truth, “he never thought (or at least at this point, had long since stopped thinking) of himself as a member of the inner circle of the Frankfurt School, a view of himself that any individuals felt resentful about (and maybe still do today)” (164). Habermas's own deemphasis on his roots in the Frankfurt school is thus in tension with Jay's hermeneutic strategy of emphasizing their common roots in the problematics of German Idealism. However, that Habermas's identification with the “Frankfurt school” was only partial does not require us to reject Jay's claim that Habermas is central to the critical tradition in German social philosophy. But Müller-Doohm's own account leaves doubt that the question was as cut and dried as this. Habermas seemed quite concerned to assuage Horkheimer and Marcuse alike that his decision to leave Frankfurt for the directorship of a research institute in Starnberg was a decision motivated more by practical considerations than by ideological ones. Marcuse, for his part, no doubt aware of Habermas's linguistic turn, still “regretted Habermas's departure from Frankfurt,” writing him that “somehow it is a ‘symbolic act’ which is part of the end of the Frankfurt School” (167). Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Karl-Heinz Bohrer maintained, in Müller-Doohm's paraphrase, that,“it was wrong to subsume Habermas under a Frankfurt School that had been inflated to mythic proportions” (166).
For Müller-Doohm, too, it is little more than optical illusion to consider Habermas the representative of the Frankfurt school. “He is connected with the . . . Frankfurt School . . . because he was present . . . in the decades [of liberalization] . . . This role made him the main representative of the second generation.” Or it is the “trivial” effect of his assumption of Horkheimer's old chair in 1964. Provocatively, he argues that what makes Habermas a recognizable representative of the tradition of critical theory is his interventionist stance in the public sphere more than any aspect of his philosophical program (4–5). But to argue this way is peculiar, since to the extent that his biography may be said to have a thesis, it is for the mutually constitutive relationship at work between Habermas's careers as citizen and philosopher. How could Habermas be critical theorist in one role and not in the other, one might ask? Müller-Doohm could refer us to Habermas's own statements: “What annoys me terribly,” he once remarked disapprovingly, “What gets to me, is the aggressiveness of people who do not see the role-differentiation in me” (5). But Habermas is not the final authority on the meaning and coherence of his career, the porousness or purity of its boundaries. To wit, Habermas has also contradicted himself on this point, saying at his seventieth birthday celebration, “The public sphere as a space of reasoned communicative exchanges is the issue that has concerned me all my life. The conceptual triad of ‘public space,’ ‘discourse,’ and ‘reason,’ in fact, has dominated my works as a scholar and my political life” (317, italics mine).
Müller-Doohm has probably spent more time with the full spectrum of Habermas's writings than any scholar before him, but the totalizing ambition to document the life risks shunting to the margins of his own study some of his most original insights. For example, Müller-Doohm offers some reflections on the role of intuition in Habermas's creative process that recall Jay's distinctions between the noetic and dianoetic modes of reason. As Jay suggested, there may be “a noetic moment even in the most stringently dianoetic attempt at discursive reasoning” (16). Similarly, Müller-Doohm concludes his biography with the claim that Habermas's reason is an embedded one; that the root of Habermas's work is the life; and that intuition—the signature of noetic reason—was “a kind of hinge between biographical experience and the emergence of thoughts” (425). As he writes, “Habermas says of his intuitions that they represent the ‘dogmatic core,’ but that he would ‘rather let go of science altogether than allow this core to melt’” (425).Footnote 10 “It is not science which forms the inner voice,” continues Müller-Doohm, “and the thoughts it creates; rather these are ‘at times . . . no more than an expression of the biography from which they spring.’ Thus it is the lived life, both of the individual and of the collective, which form the fertile ground for intuitions to grow and provide the stimulus for [reflection]” (425).Footnote 11 But intuitions “need to be continuously translated into intersubjectively accessible reasons if they are to ‘survive’ in the long term” (426). If we return to Jay's comment that “the danger of an infinite regress backward always haunts dianoetic reasoning, which can only move forward from an original premise that it cannot defend by argument alone,” we might respond with Habermas that he would rather give up on science than allow that core to melt.
