Jürgen Habermas’s 90th Birthday Seyla Benhabib Originally published on Medium by the Hannah Arendt Center, 2 July 2019.
Raymond Geuss saw fit to celebrate Jürgen Habermas’s 90th birthday with a poisoned polemic called “A Republic of Discussion: Habermas at 90.” Originally commissioned by the German journal Soziopolis, with essays by other contributors reflecting on Habermas’s work and significance, the article appeared on the website of the Point magazine. Amor Mundi then featured Geuss’s essay on 23 June 2019, with no discussion or alternative commentary. A thinker of Habermas’s stature deserved a more measured exchange of opinions about his work on such an occasion. The introductory note in the Point magazine to Geuss’s essay also credited him with having brought critical theory into mainstream Anglophone philosophy with his 1981 The Idea of a Critical Theory. But Geuss’s early book is just as polemical and dismissive of Habermas’s work as his current article and it did not give rise to any significant exchange between the two traditions. Instead, the work of Thomas A. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (1978), and Richard J. Bernstein’s Restructuring Social and Political Theory (1976) have initiated the serious conversation between Habermas’s work and Anglo-American philosophy. This may not be important for Geuss, who denies that “communication” is even possible and who asserts that discussions lead only to further discord and disagreement. Why, then, should one respond to Geuss at all? And why, indeed, does Geuss himself write at all, if communication is impossible? Obviously, his paradoxical claims intend to provoke: while denying the possibility of communication, we will continue to communicate, and seek some understanding. Karl Otto-Apel, Jurgen Habermas’s senior colleague at the University of Frankfurt and the greatest interpreter of the ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce, called this predicament a “performative contradiction”: a situation in which my speech and action can take place only under certain conditions which I continue to contradict through explicit statements such as, “Believe me, reaching an agreement through discussion is impossible, and Habermas is wrong.” Apel and Habermas have argued that in speech acts, such as the one above, we implicitly raise a number of validity claims. Such validity claims include assumptions about what exists or what is the case (i.e., if I did not assume that Habermas had made such a claim, my statement would make so sense). In saying “Believe me. . . , ” I further assume it is appropriate for you to trust me and that I am prepared to convince you on the basis of evidence and reasons, and not through threats of force or violence. Furthermore, we take it for granted Jürgen Habermas’s 90th Birthday
Seyla Benhabib
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