Between Rorty and Habermas

Jürgen Habermas, who died March 16 at 96, was an intellectual giant in a number of respects, a systematizer on the level of Kant or Hegel, dedicated to figuring out everything in vast, monumental works of the greatest ambition. For better and worse, thinkers at that level are a dying breed.

I've read him all these decades, and I particularly recommend Between Facts and Norms: Contributions To a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1992) as a solid later summary of a vast and intimidating oeuvre. The title tells you a lot about Habermas: he characteristically argued that the conditions of human communication themselves dictated a political philosophy of sorts; what was necessary to language and hence to the human formed reasons to pursue a liberal polity in which everyone's voice could be heard. In a reasonably good conversational situation, we can collaborate to reach collective decisions. The circumstances under which that’s possible form the minimum conditions of a defensible political system.

It's a remarkably decent point of view, even if it has a bit of a utopian flavor. But what’s really impressive is the incredible dedication, the supreme effort of reading and writing, that Habermas brought to bear on the project for 60 years and more.

I first became aware of Habermas's philosophy under the auspices of Richard Rorty, my dissertation advisor at the University of Virginia in the 1980s. Rorty loved Habermas, the man and the thinker, and instructed me to read him. While I was working with him, and maybe more than once, Rorty jetted off to Germany to hang around with the man and debate him.

Two of the most eminent intellectuals in the world, Rorty and Habermas often agreed. Both thought of people as fundamentally linguistic creatures, and of language as significantly constituting our reality. In that, they were also the inheritors of the whole century of reflection, of Heidegger and Gadamer, Wittgenstein and Austin, Adorno and Marcuse, through to the contemporaries Foucault and Derrida.

Habermas and Rorty reached strikingly similar political conclusions as well, both endorsing modified versions of "classical liberalism" inflected toward socialism. Both could’ve described roughly their ideal Republic, and it might’ve looked something like an idealized US constitutional order, the UN universal declaration of human rights, or the EU charter, with a little more in the way of elaborate welfare provisions.

They agreed on the conclusions. What they disagreed on was, above all, the sort of reasons they were willing to give for their positions or the sorts of reasons that should be or could be given for any position, philosophical or political. Here they were emblematic opposites: Habermas a late-breaking figure of the Enlightenment and Rorty an avatar of post-modernism. They looked similar, like gray-haired intellectual uncles, and despite the fact that Rorty died in 2007 and Habermas last week, they were close contemporaries (Habermas was born in 1929, Rorty in 1931). They drew, as I say, similar conclusions. But they got there by extremely different paths, and they found that interesting and maybe a bit disturbing about one another.

Habermas had a certain humility about claiming to have proven his positions, but he certainly intended to. In thousands of densely-packed pages (culminating in the three-volume project of his Also a History of Philosophy), you could feel that he believed he could establish his positions beyond doubt. He held them to be entailed by the conditions of rational communication themselves. If you and I are going to communicate in an honest way (and if we don't communicate in an honest way, we’re not communicating at all), we’re going to have to accord one another a minimum degree of respect. We’re going to have to think of one another as things that count, morally. We’re going to have to put ourselves on a footing of equality, to the extent we’re communicating. We’re going to have to forego the desire to dominate one another. The basic conditions of human communication can guide us toward substantive political conclusions.

I'll give you a sample of Habermas' laborious but impressive prose and also of his positions (from Between Facts and Norms): "The ideal character of conceptual and semantic generality is accessible to a semantic analysis of language, whereas the idealization connected with validity claims is accessible to a pragmatic analysis of the use of language oriented to reaching understanding. These idealizations inhabiting language itself acquire, in addition, an action-theoretic meaning if the illocutionary binding forces of speech acts are enlisted for the coordination of the action plans of different actors."

It's easy to consider the thinkers who reached maturity in the 1970s and '80s as arch postmodernists, including Foucault, Derrida, and Butler, often accused of attacking reason and even truth. But Habermas was one of a cohort of thinkers of that generation who were, implicitly and also perversely and perhaps nobly, fighting against postmodern "relativism" or "nihilism" with some of the most ambitious systematic projects ever attempted.

John Rawls' version of liberalism, for example, was as systematic as Habermas' and as dedicated to establishing its conclusions rationally against all comers. The moral philosopher Derek Parfit went from entertaining delightful thought experiments (if you were suddenly duplicated, so that there were two identical-looking bodies with all he same memories, who would be the real you?) to attempting to establish a moral system that took into account the whole tradition and which was rationally unanswerable.

All of these thinkers were trying to deliver a thunderclap final answer and establish it on undeniable rational grounds. Their authorships represent the overweening project of philosophy for thousands of years with the utmost seriousness and ambition. And, like the works of Kant and Hegel, the works of Parfit, Rawls, and Habermas are hell to read: real slogs. These fellows aren’t trying to be inviting. They’re not trying to amuse or delight you. They’re not indulging in digression or decoration. They want to prove their points so thoroughly that you’ll have to agree with them or else just be wrong.

Rorty didn’t think that was one of the possibilities, and I agree with him, though in a way I'm impressed that people are still trying. But Rorty's defense of liberalism was calculated to drive his fellow liberal Habermas insane. He was a liberal, Rorty said, but he didn't think that political positions like that could be rationally established. He couldn't or wouldn't give any reasons. He just thought that we should try to help and respect one another, and that pain should be reduced. He didn't really have any arguments for that: it's just what his parents and his culture taught him when he was growing up in the USA in the 1940s.

Rorty didn't think that we could give reasons for positions like that which didn’t just appeal to conventional cultural beliefs. He didn't think there was any point to trying to establish all this rationally, so he didn't think there was much point to Habermas' thousands of pages of argument, despite the fact that he found them impressive. Habermas applied thousand-pager after thousand-pager to the task of trying to establish his political philosophy. Rorty had the same political philosophy but didn't waste a moment trying to establish it. He just shrugged and said he thought that good-hearted people from NYC basically agreed, and that was enough.

There's something emblematic about that contrast for intellectual history. The conclusions are so similar, and the techniques so entirely opposite; the careers are so similar, and the strategies so entirely distinct.

The rivalry and collaboration-at-a-distance between Habermas and Rorty might suggest some great traditional pairs of intellectual giants: Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Kant, or Hegel and Kierkegaard, for example. Rorty and Habermas had the same positions on fundamental matters, and even similar temperaments (they were gentle personally, and combative philosophically). They were contemporaries in all these senses. And yet they seemed to come from different historical eras, or to have entirely different techniques and notions of what philosophy could accomplish.

It would make a good book, and I suspect that in Rorty's and Habermas' papers there’s a rich correspondence between the two, and commentaries by each on the others' work as it emerged. Maybe figuring them out as a pair is a job for Chris Voparil.

—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell