The person who should have been best able to explain how we got here was the great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who illuminated how a feisty, principled public sphere is integral to democracy. But Habermas died in March, at the age of ninety-six, and, although he remained active until his final months, commenting on Ukraine, Gaza, and Eurobonds, he struggled to understand the turn history had taken. As a teen-ager in 1945, he had witnessed American soldiers enter his home town of Gummersbach, near Cologne, carrying messages of freedom and openness. Eight decades later, he watched American voters choose a leader who had advertised his fascistic bent in blood-and-soil rhetoric, fantasies of punitive violence, and a taste for bombastic architectural kitsch. The far right was making inroads across Europe, including in Germany. The print-based media culture that once anchored Habermas’s public sphere had devolved into a digital sludgefest that proved better at circulating racist memes than at fostering morality and dignity. A couple of years before his death, in a conversation with the historian Philipp Felsch, Habermas said that his world was being dismantled “step by step.”...
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...The medieval philosopher al-Farabi, who considered democracy the least imperfect of imperfect governments, is mentioned only in passing. A similar Western bias contributed to one of Habermas’s last, and least effective, public interventions. In November, 2023, after Hamas’s massacre of Israelis and the onset of Israel’s brutal counterstrike on Gaza, Habermas signed a statement that reasserted solidarity between Germany and Israel. After a glancing mention of Palestinian suffering, the authors write, “The standards of judgment slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.” It’s one thing to deny that genocide has taken place in Gaza; it’s another to imply more broadly that the topic is out of bounds. At a crucial moment, Habermas’s cherished pluralism failed him.
“If no dread remains, the monsters return,” Habermas wrote early in his career. They’re back, on several continents. Earlier this year, in Germany, the Sachsen-Anhalt branch of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party released a platform containing such demands as “Think German!,” “Promote patriotism—no state money for anti-German art and culture!,” and “Build more beautifully!” This dumbed-down Goebbels gobbledygook revived talking points that Habermas had tried to quash during the Historikerstreit. Not surprisingly, AfD representatives could barely contain their glee over the philosopher’s death. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, one of the Party’s nastier voices, posted a YouTube video in which he said, “Habermas is dangerous. He is one of the greatest enemies of the German nation.” Tillschneider’s inability to put Habermas into the past tense was somehow reassuring.
An equally obnoxious obituary came from the billionaire pen of Alex Karp, the C.E.O. of Palantir Technologies. Before Karp turned to hawking surveillance systems that have assisted ice in its murderous roundups of immigrants, he studied philosophy under Habermas in Frankfurt. In an article for Politico, Karp recounted how Habermas provided fierce but fair criticism of his papers: “It was his very willingness to be so productively unsparing that reminds me of what we have lost as a culture.” Alas, the losses that Karp has in mind don’t seem to involve learning, rigor, or reason. Waving away Habermas’s cosmopolitan ideals, he says that discourse “must be rooted in a more corporeal and traditional—and indeed national and cultural—source.” This is the language of maga and the AfD, not to mention Heidegger circa 1935. Karp’s ideological atavism is all too typical of the current bent of Silicon Valley...When the A.I. chatbots march in, the “colonization of the lifeworld,” to use another ungainly but apt Habermas phrase, enters a terminal stage. Horkheimer and Adorno had concluded that advanced capitalism, far from being a technocratic monolith, had an inherent tendency toward chaos and madness. A.I. is at once a consummation of technological control and a new level of cultish delirium. The designers themselves are often incapable of explaining what their systems are doing. Habermas’s entire world view was premised on the idea of people learning from one another; A.I. annihilates communicative action in the name of hallucinatory conversations with sycophantic machines. The social effects have proved instantly disastrous: rampant disinformation, mass student cheating, cases of users becoming addicted to A.I. or killing themselves with its help. Meanwhile, to the joy of investors, untold thousands of jobs have vanished. As an added coup, A.I. managed to deliver a personal affront to Habermas a year before his death. In 2024, Google DeepMind unveiled a “Habermas Machine,” which has been described as a “scaffolded pair of LLMs designed to find consensus among people who disagree.” The philosopher had not given Google permission to use his name, and he was horrified when he heard about the scheme...Philosophy is a discipline of abstractions, yet it raises achingly elemental questions. The august Kant asks, “What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for?” The answers are seldom simple or bright. The seduction of despair can be intense, whether on the personal or the political level. But the fact that most of our hopes remain unrealized should not revoke the reality of our fitful, painful progress.
This was Habermas’s core conviction; he was an incrementalist, though a radical one. On the other hand, in his almost manic drive toward consensus, he blunted the edge of his critical inheritance. If we are to say no to the monstrosities that we have unleashed, we need the uncompromising fury that the Frankfurt School writers invested in their work. We need Adorno to tell us that the confusion of truth and lies “makes it a Sisyphean labor to hold on to the simplest piece of knowledge.” In the end, we need both voices: the critical and the reconstructive, the savage and the sage. The dialectic moves between crashing despair and hovering hope.
That's just a tad.
