Habermas in 60 Minutes

By Walther Ziegler

Habermas's great philosophical discovery is a rousing and a modest one. Rousing because almost two centuries after the great philosophers of history Hegel and Marx he attempts once again to discover a meaning and purpose for human history; modest because he describes without bombast humanity's ability to shape its own future and deduces this ability from a phenomenon we encounter in our daily life: language. It is no longer, as in Hegel, the World-Spirit nor, as in Marx, class struggle that forms the motor of development but rather human speech. Agreement achieved through language will, says Habermas, eventually unite humanity.The wish for such an ever greater agreement, based on an unforced exchange of views, is inherent in the structure of our speech. Because as soon as anyone speaks with anyone else anywhere on earth, he must, consciously or unconsciously, raise four universal validity-claims, such as the claim to be understood. What begins so simply is developed by Habermas in an hypothesis of great breadth. In communicative action, and thus in language, there inheres a stubborn claim to rationality, even if it is constantly suppressed.
Does language really compel us to rationality? Does it really have such emancipatory power or is it, in the end, just a tool? And if language really causes humanity to draw closer together, why are there still wars? Habermas answers all these questions. The book "Habermas in 60 Minutes" explains the core of his philosophy using over 60 key quotations and many examples. The chapter "Of What Use is Habermas's Discovery to Us Today?" points up the meaning of his Critical Theory for our present world and for our personal lives. The book appears as part of the popular series "Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Nov 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9783752634631

Walther Ziegler

Walther Ziegler est professeur d'université et docteur en philosophie. En tant que correspondant à l'étranger, reporter et directeur de l'information de la chaîne de télévision allemande ProSieben, il a produit des films sur tous les continents. Ses reportages ont été récompensés par plusieurs prix. En 2007, il a prit la direction de la « Medienakademie » à Munich, une Université des Sciences Appliquées et y forme depuis des cinéastes et des journalistes. Il est l'auteur de nombreux ouvrages philosophiques, qui ont été publiés en plusieurs langues dans le monde entier. En sa qualité de journaliste de longue date, il parvient à résumer la pensée complexe des grands philosophes de manière passionnante et accessible à tous.

Book preview

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine

graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their

excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first

inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most

professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the

English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great

care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear

understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the

needs of English-language readers.

Contents

Habermas’s Great Discovery

Habermas’s Central Idea

The Double Structure of Human Language

The Four Validity-Claims and The Stubborn Wish for Comprehension and Agreement

Am I Driving Here or You? – The Four Validity-Claims in Everyday Speech

Rationality as the Goal of Every Act of Linguistic Understanding

Domination-Free Discourse and Discourse Ethics

The Development of Humanity Within the Linguistic Paradigm

Communicative vs. Instrumental Reason

Of What Use Is Habermas’s Discovery for Us Today?

The Struggle Against the Colonization of the Lifeworld

Eugenics, the Self-Optimization of Humanity: Act Communicatively, Not Instrumentally!

The Third Millennium: A New Barbarism or the Development of Communicative Rationality?

Dare to Engage in Domination-Free Discourse!

Bibliographical References

Habermas’s Great Discovery

Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) is generally looked on as one of the most important philosophers of the last half of the 20th and first half of the 21st century. His work is known far beyond the borders of Europe. His magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, has by now been translated into over forty languages and is the subject of debate worldwide. Habermas has read the works of all the most significant British, American, French and German philosophers, linguists, sociologists, psychologists and psychoanalysts and integrated the ideas of these writers into his own theory. It is, in fact, unlikely that there has ever been another philosopher who succeeded, to the degree that Habermas has, in productively drawing so many key ideas, taken from research done in both present-day and classical philosophy and social science, into his own theory. But what has emerged from this is not, as one might have expected, a mere digest or synopsis of contemporary thought as a whole. No. Despite his massive erudition and the multiplicity of his intellectual interests, Habermas does in the end produce his own highly personal answer to the question of life’s sense and meaning.

His great philosophical discovery is both a rousing and a modest one. Rousing because, almost two hundred years after the great philosophers of history Hegel and Marx, Habermas attempts once again to discover a meaning for human history in its entirety, showing that there is reason in this history and that there will continue to be; modest because he describes without any rhetoric or bombast the capacity that humanity has to shape its own future and deduces this capacity, in a highly pragmatic way, from a phenomenon we encounter in our daily life.

Because, whereas for Hegel it was the mystical self-movement of the World Spirit that drove history on, and for Marx the drama of class struggle, Habermas discovers the driving motor of humanity’s development rather in a seemingly unremarkable phenomenon that surrounds us all day every day: language.

In these few brief words we have the core idea, subtle and revolutionary at the same time, of Habermas’s philosophy. What raises us out of Nature, what distinguishes us from plants and animals, is language. All human beings have the capacity for speech. For this reason, Habermas calls language a species-competence which belongs, as an innate ability, to human beings already at the moment of our birth and distinguishes us from all other living entities. Communication through language is indeed a faculty which is much more fully formed and developed in human beings than is the case with any other species. In humans it is universal.

Thus, a child that is born in deepest Bavaria but is raised in Beijing will learn to speak Chinese just as perfectly as, conversely, a Chinese child raised in Bavaria will learn to speak German, indeed even the Bavarian dialect of German.

This capacity of human beings to talk with one another is the central starting point for Habermas’s philosophy. His discovery of language to be a key phenomenon explaining mind, identity and society has, in fact, a biographical aspect to it that is not without interest. Habermas himself was born with a speech-related handicap, a so-called hare lip, which, even despite two operations, continued to affect his pronunciation and which often made him, as a child, the butt of other children’s mockery. Habermas himself has said that it may well have been this disability that sharpened his attention to the key significance of linguistic communication.

For Habermas, language stands both at the beginning and at the end of humanity’s history. It points the way forward for us. And not just a way leading anywhere but a way to a better future. In his famous magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, he expounds his great hypothesis regarding development both singular and collective: the learning and the exercise of language leaves profound marks on the development both of the individual and the species and culminates in an insistent claim to the necessity of ever better and ever broader understanding between human beings:

Telos is the Greek word for aim or goal. The sentence, therefore, means: reaching understanding is the inherent goal of human speech. But why? Why would language aim in every case at reaching understanding? I can, of course, use language in everyday situations to come to an understanding or agreement with other people. I can use it to arrive at a compromise with others, for example, or even to express solidarity with them and join them in realizing a shared project. But is