Who killed Jürgen Habermas? | Column

Who the heck is Jürgen Habermas?

Well, he is one of the Germans, who, with the impetus of paying the debt the “Grösster Feldherr aller Zeiten” (the greatest commander-in-chief of all time) or “Herr Wolff Uncle Adolf” left behind, condemned “Hamas’ outrageous Oct. 7 attack as terrorism unconditionally.”

Mr. Habermas, a German philosopher by training, like his colleagues Nicole Deitelhoff, Rainer Forst and Klaus Günther, published an open letter titled “A Statement on the Principles of Solidarity” in which they argued that Hamas’s attack intended to “eliminate Jewish life” and it prompted Israel to retaliate.

But, back to my question in the title. The “Nassau Weekly” distributed fees to the Princeton University community and was available online to everyone in an article 16 years ago, thus answering my question: “Habermas loved to joke, ‘Mein zweiter Vorname ist Tanzer, also muss ich singen!’ (roughly: ‘My entire life as a thinker is rife with fraud’). Such self-doubt undoubtedly led to his early death, at the age of twenty-six, by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.”

The author, who signed this article and many others in the Nassau Weekly simply as “Anonymous,” apparently knows Habermas personally, for he explains that tragic and so “a priori” news in a very personal way:

“Habermas viewed words as a brute instrument and nothing more. His primary mode of communication was non-narrative modern dance. Often, on long strolls along Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, Habermas would regale a bemused colleague (Otto Siegenthaler, Ph.D., late of the University of Chicago, whose death aboard a trash-barge en route to Fresh Kills landfill eerily echoes that of his philosopher-friend) with balletic recounting of his third tour of service as a member of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Korea. … I must here say – and excuse so personal an interjection – that Habermas was the sweetest, loveliest, dullest dullard I have ever had chance to meet. Often in late summer, he would stroll along the headier climes of his beloved Salzburg, laughing silently to ourselves, slapping each other chummily on the back, thinking only of the evening and our time together, alone, playing chess, singing, lying about, before a fireplace, beneath the full moon, speaking a broken Swiss German and asking, finally – who out there will read us when we’re gone? Who out there remembers?”

We do; we sure do. If you have time, you should read (at least peruse) that article to get a very personal insight about this famous philosopher whose second (a priori) death I am going to scribble about.

Seriously speaking, Habermas was perhaps best known (among the students of communication science, that is) for his theory of “communicative action,” which he put forth in “The Theory of Communicative Action” in 1981.

I would compare him to Hannah Arendt, a German-Jewish political theorist who immigrated to the United States in 1941 and published her famous book “Human Condition” in 1958.

Habermas’s debt to Arendt

Habermas acknowledges his debt to Arendt in developing his theory of “communicative action.” For Arendt, actions are revelatory about our essential beings: Our actions, including the communicative actions, tell everyone who we are (“We are what we do.”) For Habermas, actions are based upon deliberative process, where two or more individuals interact and coordinate their actions based upon agreed interpretations of the situation. For Habermas, we are what we say we are.

Reading Arendt’s and Habermas’s theories on why we say what we say about the things we do and think has always been interesting for me when studying communication theories. They both were concerned with the deepening legitimation crisis of advanced capitalist societies.

German-born Arendt passed in 1975; she was a Jew, and she remained a Jew, herself a victim of Gestapo arrests and searches and her interest in political science covered a broad range of topics, the nature of power and evil, as well as political communication.

She actively engaged in the problem of a Jewish homeland and the politics of Zionism in the years 1941-1948. She advocated a “Binational Solution to Palestine” – a single political commonwealth with two national identities, Jewish and Arab, integrated with a federation with other countries in the region. In the crucial period leading up to the establishment of the State of Israel, Arendt became increasingly disillusioned with the Jewish Agency for killing Arab leaders in successive suicides, in particular, and the Zionist movement for rejecting the Palestinian right to a homeland, in general.

If she were alive today, she would be repeating her strong words when criticizing the State of Israel for creating a “Palestinian Refugee problem” and “exasperating it to the point of genocide.”

Some people accused her of creating the idea of “Israelophobia.” She never rejected the idea of Israel, but she increasingly believed that Zionism in its current form and shape would never allow the peaceful coexistence of Jews and Muslims in Palestine.

May she rest in peace!

The second intellectual suicide of Habermas

Let’s get back to my question once again. Habermas and his co-authors of that “open letter” agreed with Israel and said it would be wrong to accuse Israel of committing genocide: “Israel’s actions in no way justify anti-Semitic reactions, especially not in Germany. It is intolerable that Jews in Germany are once again exposed to threats to life and limb and have to fear physical violence on the streets. The democratic ethos of the Federal Republic of Germany, which is orientated towards the obligation to respect human dignity, is linked to a political culture for which Jewish life and Israel’s right to exist are central elements worthy of special protection in light of the mass crimes of the Nazi era.

“The commitment to this is fundamental to our political life. The elementary rights to freedom and physical integrity, as well as to protection from racist defamation, are indivisible and apply equally to all. All those in our country who have cultivated anti-Semitic sentiments and convictions behind all kinds of pretexts and now see a welcome opportunity to express them uninhibitedly must also abide by this.”

In this extremely convoluted paragraph, Habermas endorsed everything and anything Israel could do against Muslims because they had been victims of the Nazi genocide. This is the second intellectual suicide of Habermas.

Actually, he had many suicide attempts between the first and this last one: He betrayed the “left” Frankfurt School and the liberal tradition in his ruthless accusations of John Rawls.

Rawls, an American moral, legal and political philosopher, believed that individuals, as well as groups, must have freedoms of conscience, association and expression, and democratic rights; he also includes a personal property right as part of the liberties. Habermas, perhaps too much inclined to help out the founders of Israel, strongly defended the notions of the public and the common good. This attitude is clearly in line with the Jewish Agency’s “invade, kill the owners and occupy the Palestinians villages” in the name of the “common good.” In today’s parlance of Netanyahu and his ilk: “What is good for the Jews is good for Israel.”

Not only with Rawls but also with many of his contemporaries in Europe’s Habermas he had come to blows with.

Jacques Derrida, an Algerian-born French philosopher, and Paul-Michel Foucault, a French historian and political activist, received their shares of Habermas’s wrath. His disputes with these philosophers’ issues stemmed from his defense of collectivism reflected in the creation of Israel. For him, the idea of “protection of the Jewish life” has been a paramount principle in anything related to Palestine, Israel and the Middle East.

As “Anonymous” wrote 16-year-Pro-Tempore (before the fact), Jürgen Habermas has been killing himself repeatedly thanks to his fixation on paying the debt his “Uncle Adolf” created for him. His ethics or moral theory spells out that “only those norms can claim to be valid that could meet with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse.”

Then why were the Palestinians not included in that discourse? I wish he could answer this question before his final death!