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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
Speaker 1 0:00
Habermas really sees the public intellectual as a kind of guardian of the public sphere, and as somebody who is not who's not a partisan, they're not a movement intellectual, right, or somebody who is speaking on behalf of a party or a movement, right? It's about presenting arguments. Is about alerting people to dangers.
PJ 0:20
Hello, today's podcast was recorded before the tragic news of Dr Habermas death. We deeply mourn his passing. Dr Habermas was a man who carefully and passionately pursued the truth, and so we hope that today's episode, in that spirit, we'll pay a small tribute to his legacy. Hello and welcome to chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ weary, and I'm here today with Dr Peter voroshek, and where he's the Senior Assistant Professor in history and theory of European integration at the University of Groningen. And we're talking about his book, Jurgen Habermas, public intellectual and engaged critical theorist. I like the I like the cover design. It's really anyway. I say that with almost every book. I probably should stop saying that, because then people will notice when I don't say it. But I like, like the effect that they've done to the photo. Dr Zach, varashek, thank you for coming on the show today. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 1:28
Thank you for having me. And yes, I like the cover design as well. Actually, for this book, I actually ended up asking an artist to sort of do a sketch for me based on a sort of photograph of Habermas, sort of at his desk. And as you can see, I have the original sort of up behind me in my home office. So that's one of the nice things about actually commissioning an artist, is that then not only do you have a unique image, but you can actually get the original. And interestingly enough, sort of the artist is South Sudanese migrant to Germany who actually read some Habermas, who is quite excited to take excited to take on, to take on the commission and and I like the fact that he's at his desk, even though it's about him as a public intellectual. I decided to take the image of him at his desk, because for Habermas, being a public intellectual is primarily something you do in sort of the written word. He's very committed to the written word over the spoken word. And he often, sort of when he's writing letters to friends and things like that, and sort of tried to organize various actions. He said, I will do what an academic can do from his desk. And so in some ways, the desk for Habermas is sort of the primary place of the public intellectual.
PJ 2:39
Well, I want to make sure we get talking about the book, but I will say that there is something discouraging to me that I assume that someone had taken a photo and done an effect to it, and instead, this is, I was like, but it looks really nice. I'm like, Oh, it was actually like a beautiful piece of art. Anyways, first and foremost, that aside, why? Why this book? Why? Why now? I mean, I think there's some obvious reasons. But where did your interest come from? And why is this important?
Speaker 1 3:12
Yeah, so, I mean, my interest in Habermas dates back to, actually, my undergraduate studies. So I did my undergraduate in the US Dartmouth College, but I had already been introduced to philosophy in high school in Slovenia, where I did the International Baccalaureate, and so I knew I was interested in philosophy, and especially in continental philosophy. And as an undergraduate, I took a course, basically, I took all the courses that were offered in continental philosophy in a very, what was otherwise a very analytic department, and the course on contemporary continental philosophy, the way the Professor Amy Allen organized it was to sort of have some, you know, the sort of read, do some readings from all the great thinkers from primarily, sort of Western Europe in the continental tradition. And then she used Habermas texts, because Habermas has commented on so many of these thinkers as to sort of see his replies. And I was found I always found myself sort of very engaged by his replies, I think sort of also temperamentally. I found myself to be, I think, very attracted by his sort of very middle of the road and his attempts to kind of both listen to others, but then also bring them into his system. The emphasis on communication, on dialog, I found very attractive. And then also, as somebody who majored in German Studies, I found it very fun to sort of go back and read the original texts in German. So that's where my interest in haubermas comes from originally. But I think in terms of this book, it really, sort of, for me, the broader, sort of, the broader context is that Habermas is in is now 96 years old already he's coming towards the end of his life, and sort of, he's really one of those formative, one of the formative voices of the modern. Federal Republic of Germany. But I think especially sort of in the US and in the English speaking world, while there's been a lot of uptake of his work, I think a lot of people don't realize that this sort of really crucial, perhaps even the most important philosopher of the 20th century, that in addition to his philosophical writings and his theoretical work, more generally, his public intellectual writings, or his writings that are meant for the public sphere, that were originally published in newspapers or delivered as public lectures, that they're almost as voluminous as his theoretical writings. And I thought that this was something that was really overlooked in the scholarship and also in the commentary. And I think that it really that being aware of that and being aware of that distinction really changes how we have to look at Habermas, who, I think sometimes in sort of more popular readings, is seen as someone who moved Critical Theory away from its more activist roots, and who sort of moved away from kind of Marxism and the desire to change the world. I really think the sort of paying attention to his intellectual writings and to his work as this kind of public figure really helps to push back on what I see as a real fundamental misunderstanding of his browner project.
PJ 6:16
Is there? So what would you recommend? And you mentioned that the scholarship and the commentary haven't really focused on those public facing works. Is there, are there good translations of those public facing works? And are there any that you would recommend to kind of get into that side of things?
Speaker 1 6:33
Yeah, so, I mean, some of them are some of the later stuff, or a lot of his later writings have been translated into English, and in particular, sort of now, right? Famously, he's written recently a couple articles on the Ukraine war, and those were in the Zach Deutsche Zeitung. And those were immediately translated into English. A lot of the collections of his works, like a new conservatism the divided West, his recent book on the crisis of the European Union, right? Those were all translated, and those are all kind of public writings. I think the big thing is that sometimes a lot of the early stuff hasn't been translated, and a lot of it, even in German, has never been republished. There's about 70 articles that I write about sort of in the 1950s that Habermas wrote that were never republished, and it's actually very difficult to find, and that Habermas, I don't think would even allow to republished. He's referred to them as kind of youthful sins. So I think some of that early stuff is not available, and part of the point of this book is to make that is to sort of bring that into the public consciousness. But I think the bigger problem is that even some of these collections of his public facing writings and his newspaper articles in German, they come they've come out in these kind of monochromatic covers with as part of a series known as his kleine politician, so his short political writings, and they're clearly labeled that way, but when they get translated into English, they lose that sort of marking and are just presented as sort of standard kind of academic books, and oftentimes with sort of more, I guess, academic essay type texts that get included in part, that's because some of the texts are very much or at least in the past before, sort of the 2000s a lot of the texts dealt with really specific kind of German issues that maybe were does were so much of interest to an international audience. But I think just the fact that there's no clear labeling in sort of the translations of what is what in the same way that you get in the original German makes a big difference, because then it seems like you don't really differentiate between the two registers, and it just seems like he's kind of schizophrenic in the way he writes, because he writes differently when he's writing for a public audience than he does in his academic texts. So I think a lot of the a lot of the reception is also just conditioned by the publication and the way these things have been published in English. So yeah, a lot of these things have been translated, but not in a way that really makes it clear that these are public writings that are that are different from his sort of academic contributions.
PJ 8:59
That's That's really helpful, though, because I definitely would pick up something by him, and I would expect it to be heavy, and then it'd be like, I mean, I started to read the part of this is homeschooling five kids, so I did not get all the way through it, but his transformation of the structuralist public sphere, yeah, if I picked up something that was more I was like, Wait, is this the same person that makes that makes a lot of sense as we as we look at Habermas, and part of me wants to ask, why is he important? But immediately, just the way that he responds, in depth to multiple of the biggest figures in philosophy automatically makes them of interest and gives us kind of a guiding thread through kind of the post war history of philosophy, which is, anyways, it's like talking to my kids, and they say I was born in the late 1900s right? We're starting to talk about a history, you know. Of the late 1900s Can we talk a little bit about his career? If you can hit the highlights, and I think that narrative backbone will help guide the rest of the discussion,
Speaker 1 10:11
of course. So very briefly, right? Habermas is born in 1929 in gumas Bach. So that's a small town. Probably the nearest city is Dusseldorf. So in Western Germany, he grows up, I think, in a sort of fairly standard, kind of middle class bourgeois family. The family sort of is his father, sort of, initially, is kind of a standard, I guess, in the German context, we do call a national conservative. But then sort of, I think, as a lot of people with sort of careers in Germany at the time, did, he sort of accommodated to Nazism without there's no evidence that he was a firm believer in kind of the racial theories or anything like that. But he could form some sort of, you know, for Standard Life reasons right not to lose his job to take care of his family. Habermas has two older brothers, and his father actually end up being called up to fight in the war. And Habermas is, luckily, just too young. He talks about having the kind of grace of a late birth in the sense that he remembers the Nazi period, but was too young to really bear any responsibility for it. He was a he was sort of a member of the Hitler Youth, right, as was to be expected and but sort of really didn't find it very enjoyable. Didn't like the kind of martial aspect of it. I think a key aspect of this too is that Habermas as a child, was often subjected to derision by his classmates because he was born with a cleft palate that was never sort of fully repaired. So he still to this day, speaks with something of a lisp, and you can sort of also see it in some photographs. There's a kind of visible sag a little bit on one side of his face. And so even at that time, sort of he managed to get himself reassigned to, I guess, what would have been kind of medical training, rather than engaging in the kind of more martial aspects of the Hitler Youth. He was actually supposed to be, or he was actually formally called up to serve in the defense of the homeland in the final days of 1945 or the final days of the war. But as he's always said that he said, fortunately he wasn't home that night when the officers came to sort of get him, and that, he always says it, and then thank God the Americans came. So that was sort of, that's his his youth, I think, sort of later on, sort of in the late 40s and 50s. He's a young student. He's very interested in philosophy, but really finds the kind of atmosphere of academic post war German philosophy still stultifying. It's very much focused on kind of German idealism, and there's a real attempt, or at least he interprets a lot of the interests that his professors have in sort of philosophical anthropology and these kind of non political issues as being an attempt by them to avoid having to sort of deal with politics and to deal with the fact that most of the faculty at German universities at the time had actually been part of the sort of gleichschaltwung right who had participated in Nazism, or at least sort of not objected to it. So he sort of found it very difficult. While he enjoyed his philosophical training, he found it difficult because he had quite, quite strong political interests at the time already, particularly he was part of the peace movement at the time, opposing rearmament, things like that. Really felt that there was too much continuity between the early the new, early federal republic and the old, sort of Third Reich. He found it very difficult then to sort of be in philosophy and not be able to bring that together with his political convictions. So he graduates with his degree, with his PhD, and initially he decides not to pursue an academic career. He decides instead to sort of become a freelance journalist who kind of writes in reaction to the events of the day. And that's sort of he spends about three years doing that, and through some of his articles there, he draws the attention of Theodor Adorno right, who is one of the sort of primary movers of sort of early, or the first generation of critical theory. Adorno had moved back to Germany after the war, along with Horkheimer, who is the director of the Institute for Social Research, and it's actually one of Habermas editors at a newspaper who sort of says, Look, Adorno has written me a letter saying that he's noticed your pieces. You really should get in touch with him. And Habermas kind of does so, almost grudgingly. Again, I think that's because Adorno, for Habermas, at least, was not a really well known figure at the time, and Habermas, again, had been sort of disillusioned about academia, but when he gets in touch, Adorno immediately invites him,
Speaker 1 14:55
and they hit it off. Adorno gives him a couple of his texts to comment on. And Habermas gets very excited by sort of meeting Adorno and almost seeing immediately in Adorno, somebody who's able to bring philosophy and politics together, and also somebody who is dealing or who is working with an archive of texts and thinkers from Marxism and kind of the Jewish tradition that Tahara mas was completely new, and also signaled a kind of almost new way of thinking about politics. So he really dives in. Is very excited, goes to the institute, initially at an unpaid position that he has to fund through kind of various research projects. And is there for three years. And those are really, I think, three formative years he's at the time, also writing structural transformation of the public sphere, which you mentioned before, which is supposed to be his habilitation. And the habilitation is this kind of second PhD that German academics have to do in order to become eligible for professorships. And Habermas sort of hands this in. And he's also sort of very active in student groups at the time with Adorno support. But when he hands it in, Horkheimer, the director of the Institute rejects it and says, Look, this is too activist. This sort of young, crazy guy is going to destroy all we stand for at the institute, because Horkheimer had sort of become a little bit more conservative, right? The Institute's funds had been depleted during World War Two, when they had supported a lot of exile scholars. And I think Horkheimer was also very worried about communism, and even refers to Habermas as sort of opening the door to what he recalls in a letter to Adorno, the gentleman from the east, right? So, in other words, to the Soviet Union. And so Habermas, then, even though Adorno is still supporting him, is forced to move, or is forced to, sort of find a new sponsor for his habilitation. And ultimately, that is Wolfgang abentolt, who is the only kind of Marxist professor of political science in Germany at the time. And that's really, in some ways, initially, at least a marriage of convenience, but Habermas ends up becoming very attached to abentold and Auld is a kind of very clearly aligned with, kind of student radicals and sort of with the labor movement and with the kind of social democratic party, and Habermas finds that very attractive, so that then sort of gives him his foothold back. But Habermas, right? I mean, he, at the time, he at the time, he talks about having a feeling that he was leaving philosophy and becoming a political scientist. And it's only sort of after his billet station when the famous philosopher Hans Gail gadema Actually arranges for Habermas to immediately get offered an extraordinary professorship in philosophy, in Heidel in philosophy, and Heidelberg. And there's a whole backstory to that, but Gadamer really saw because they had had some experience in the or some exchanges in the past, he saw Habermas as kind of being a Marxist, but a non doctrine air Marxist, and somebody who sort of would be a really interesting debating companion, even though, obviously Habermas was much more left wing than Gadamer, who was sort of a more conservative kind of liberal figure, and that then sort of really sets Habermas back on his career. He sort of sees that as the moment where he got back into philosophy. He then sort of ultimately moves back to Frankfurt and takes up horkheimer's chair with horkheimer's support, right? So Horkheimer apparently had a change of heart vis a vis Habermas as well, over sort of from the late 1950s to, sort of the mid 1960s Habermas is in Frankfurt, then through the 1960s when, sort of in the late 1960s he sort of, he's at that point. He's very much involved with the 68 with the student movement. He's seen as almost kind of a do yen of the student movement. Is often invited to speak at their events, but famously, kind of breaks with them after he denounces the student radicals for what he sees as their volunteerism, right, their idea that they can kind of create a revolutionary situation, in a sense that sort of the students have underestimated the extent to which the Federal Republic has become a liberal country that can be changed via reform, and that does not require a revolution. And he sort of famously refers to, sort of to sort of this, is this kind of desire to create revolution. Nothing has left fascism, right. And that becomes a very kind of controversial point. Leads to his break with student movement.
PJ 19:24
Sorry, yeah, no, no, it's great. I can you, can you elaborate a little bit on that point of what about the controversial point? Can you? Can you say it again, if you don't mind, and elaborate on that? Yeah, no, of course.
Speaker 1 19:38
So, so famously, right? There's a, I mean, to get into more detail right in I think it's in 68 the Shah of Iran, very topical. Now, right is visiting Germany, and there's a big protest against this among the students right, who see him as a dictator. And as a very kind of problematic figure, and famously, in as part of these protests, a police officer ends up shooting beron ona Zach and killing one of the student protesters. And there's a sort of event after that to commemorate him. And at that event, Rudy duchka is really arguing dutchka, one of the leaders of the student movement, is really arguing, sort of, that the students need to sort of take up, you know, use this and sort of push back and sort of lead a kind of revolution. And Habermas is at the same event speaking, and sort of, he's really opposing this, and saying, Look, you know, This shouldn't have happened, but we could change things through the form, and that's the proper, proper movement. And then sort of, as part of this back and forth, havas, apparently, is actually already late, leaves to go to his car and then comes back and issues this final denunciation of this is left fascism, and that really leads to this kind of break, as I said, it makes his position in Frankfurt very uncomfortable, right? Also, students are increasingly sort of engaging in occupations of the university Adorno, who is still there and active, right? Increasingly, is being subjected by the students to various actions. Most famous is the busin action, which is where female students, after one of adorno's lectures came up and sort of bared their breasts to him to sort of make the point that sort of, you know you're talking, but you actually have to do something. And Adorno, sort of is taken aback by this, and sort of doesn't know how to react. It kind of runs out of the lecture hall. Students also end up occupying the Institute for Social Research, and ultimately, sort of the police are called to clear, to clear the building. So all of this, I think, made Habermas and sort of increasingly uncomfortable with his position, and also, ultimately, sort of after these events, Adorno in 69 after the spring semester, leaves to go to Switzerland for the summer, and ends up passing away. And at that point, I think, sort of Habermas felt there was nothing left tying him to Frankfurt. And so he at the he gets an offer to to become one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute, this kind of very prestigious research professorship, or sort of, yeah, he becomes the director at this kind of research institute in Stan back which is one of the kind of richest towns in Germany, right outside of Munich, so in the south and more conservative south of Germany, and Habermas decides to take this up. Decides, look, I've been doing public lectures, doing all this work. I want to focus on my own work. I want to focus on this new project I have on linguistic philosophy. And he decides to sort of retreat, and that's really seen as a way for him to sort of back away from his public activism, from being a public employee at the university to being in this sort of private organization and doing primarily research. So that's where he spends
PJ 22:50
most of the 70s. Is that the is so in stanberg, is that the theory of communicative action? Yeah, the theory of
Speaker 1 22:56
communicative action is, ultimately what comes out of is the kind of the decade long project that he undertakes while he's there. And that's sort of the big shift then, from of critical theory, or at least of Habermas approach to critical theory, from the kind of more explicitly Marxist orientation, and the orientation towards social philosophy that it has in his early work, and towards this kind of increasing kind of linguistic philosophy that you have after the 70s.
PJ 23:23
So one of the questions I wanted to ask you, there's a lot, especially at the end, about public intellectual How does critical, or, excuse me, engaged critical theorist? You know, that's part of the subtitle. Is that almost like a story of like a first half in the second half, or is it, would you say engage critical theorist is kind of throughout what does that mean? Engage critical theorist for when you're talking about Habermas?
Speaker 1 23:50
Yeah. So, I mean, I think, I think engaged critical theorist is probably a broader term, at least in the way that I'm using it, because the idea of the public intellectual, I think it's what Habermas is known for today in terms of his sort of public activism. But the kind of the concept of a public intellectual, Habermas only really theorizes it and starts to really practice it actively in the 1980s and I almost present the development of that, of that concept as kind of the product of a kind of process of learning, right? It's not something that Havas develops and that applies, but it's something that sort of, he's searching for a way to bring theory and practice together. And he develops the concept of the public intellectual, and you see that in the 1980s right, in the historians debate and the debates around German unification that he participates in, whereas, I think, sort of the idea of being an engaged critical theorist, that's something that he's always something that he's always involved in. I think that's a broader concept. And it's also, in some sense, I think, for me, at least, the way that I'm using the idea of engaged critical theorists, it's a little bit of also, I think, a critique of, sort of how the first generation is usually interpreted, right, where a lot of people say that, you know. Habermas, that the first generation was really politically active and engaged, and Habermas sort of has become more quietest, whereas I actually think that the first generation, in many ways, really had a kind of broken relationship to practice. I certainly think right, that if you look at horkheimer's inaugural lecture, there's the desire to sort of explain why the workers movement failed, right? Why communism failed, and to sort of understand that. But then by the mid 1930s right, there's a move towards this kind of a sopian language, right, increasingly looking at the critique of instrumental reason, culminating in the dialectic enlightenment. And they're actually despite, sort of the kind of the way the first generation is sold as being very much active, and sort of active in politics, if you actually look at what they did, that's really it's hard to sustain that argument, whereas I think Habermas is always much more driven by this idea of engagement. And I think sort of he gets some of that from Adorno, who, after the war, becomes a public intellectual in Germany and in the early federal republic, through his sort of radio programs. But I think what's interesting, with interesting distinction even there, between Adorno and Habermas, is that for Adorno, that kind of attempts to sort of engage in what he calls education after Auschwitz, is completely separate, or it's hard to kind of square with the kind of negativism of adorno's theoretical works, whereas I think Habermas is really trying to provide a consistent account of or to sort of develop a consistent account where the theory and the practice actually fit together and flow from each other, and up there kind of two different sides that don't really
PJ 26:30
fit together. Is, is the theory of communicative action, kind of at the center of that where, where he develops that kind of public intellectual because that's, that's the moment where he's like, he moves from kind of that negative, not that Marxism is necessarily negative, but that's not much of but that negativism, that Marxism that he's getting from adorable. Am I reading this correctly? Or is there a better way to say that?
Speaker 1 26:55
I think, in part, I think a lot of sort of, a lot of his public intellectual stuff, you can always or his commitment to public debate as the origin of democratic legitimacy. You can also read back into or read back through structural transformation of the public sphere. Right his first book in 1962 but I do think that theory of critical action is very important also as a bridge to words between facts and norms, which is his primary statement of his political theory, where he really tries to theorize the connection between kind of modern law and democratic legitimacy as expressed through public debate. And then, I think, sort of the place where he actually theorizes public intellectual most strongly is actually kind of, it's initially a public lecture, but then an essay that he writes about Heinrich, Heine, and story where he talks about kind of, yeah, the Heine is the father of the German fetal, and the fetal is, I mean, it's obviously a French word, but it's Eric has its origins in the sort of Salon culture that Habermas is writing about in structural transformation. Structural transformation. And it's the supposed to be this kind of part of the newspaper that is devoted to it's not really an opinion section, but it kind of combines storytelling, cultural criticism and sort of broader kind of political debate into one kind of section of the newspaper. And it's kind of a standard of all big, big German newspapers. Is also where most of Habermas is. Public Works are, are published, is in the photo of whatever newspaper he's writing for. And so that's the essay where he really kind of lays out his theory of public intellectual. And that's, I think, 1986 right? So precisely this period of the 1980s where he fully develops that idea, and I argue, also expresses it most fully in his sort of public commentaries as well,
PJ 28:47
you've mentioned it, and the some of the fears of communism, the gentleman from the east, I love that euphemism. I'm going to steal that now. But a lot of this, there's a seems to be a turning point in a lot of his discussion, just because there's his political commitment changes with 1989 you know, the reunification of Germany. And so, how does that? How does that West Germany? East Germany, backdrop? I mean, it's already shown up quite a bit in the story, as it should, right? Like, I mean, it's not like he could avoid it. How does that show up in 1989 for Habermas?
Speaker 1 29:33
Yeah, I think that's a really key question, because Habermas by the late 1980s right, especially because of sort of the historian's debate that he participated in, sort of about the place of, kind of the Holocaust in German national identity. By the late 1980s he's really being recognized as kind of the key, the public conscience of West Germany, and even in some cases, as kind of the he gets referred. As the stats philosopher, so the state philosopher of the Federal Republic. And it's funny, right? Because the west, east Germany joining the West, it almost means that precisely at the height of his influence, havalas, all of a sudden finds himself in a new state, right? He loses, he loses the state that he's most familiar with, and he also is involved in the debates around reunification. He's not opposed to reunification as such, but he opposes the form that it takes, right? He feels that it was sort of brought in through overly administrative means, and that there should have actually been a plebiscite in East Germany, and actually sort of the German Basic Law. So the constitution that was given to West Germany by the Allies after World War Two, it actually sort of anticipates its own demise, and it has an article, a clause, that says, sort of when, when the East rejoins, there will be a kind of constitutional convention, and they will write an actual constitution. So that's also why it's not referred to as a constitution, but the basic law and Habermas is sort of really he thinks that that's what should have happened, but Helmut Kohl instead asked for this kind of more administrative executive led procedure that Habermas really feels is quite dangerous, because it means that kind of the East Germans are simply brought into West Germany and not Given any say in the form that that takes, and they can't really appropriate the West as being or the West German state as being their state, right? So it's so he actually thinks it's very problematic, and in that sense, yeah, he opposes reunification as it takes place, and the reunification also destroys the state that he grew up in and that he felt most comfortable in,
PJ 31:41
right when he's at his most, he's really entering into his authority, yeah, and responsibility, interesting, and so, and part of this. So from there he there's a lot of talk about the colonization of politics by economics, which you'd see some of the continuation of his Marxist roots. But for him, one of the key concepts I wanted to I'd love to talk. I want to be respect for your time. Obviously, we could have multiple episodes on the public sphere. I'd love to ask about that, but you said something about the concept of spiel and the concept of play as a way to free a consumer can be free from the constraints of economics. Can you speak to that a little bit, and how that shows up in his work?
Speaker 1 32:33
Yeah, so, I mean, for Habermas, I think sort of, just to put a little bit of context right, I think after 1989 you've got this turn towards, sort of his concerns become broader than Germany, right? He increasingly turns towards the European Union, primarily because he sees the kind of European context as being the only context where a unified German state can legitimately exercise its power without sort of raising the specter of the Third Reich again and I in terms of the European Union, he increasingly becomes to be worried about kind of globalization, primarily because he feels that sort of, if you look at kind of international business interests and international markets, they're fully globalized, and capital can flow, by and large, freely. But he feels that sort of politics is still based in the nation state, and that means that sort of globalized markets can sort of take advantage, you know, of trying to push states in a race towards the bottom in terms of regulation, by sort of manipulating interest rates. They could force states to do various things, right? I mean, the most famous example is Greece during the euro crisis, right, where sort of there's a referendum, but then the government does something different than what the voters voted for, because they feel so much pressure from international markets. And Habermas feels that the only way to resist this, to sort of allow individuals to still have a modicum of control over what their political control over what their lives looks like, is to move politics up to the same level as markets, right? So to increasingly internationalize, or at least regionalize politics in sort of organizations like the EU and it's there that sort of you get this colonization thesis and this idea that he wants to sort of defend what he refers to as the life world, right, sort of of individuals against these kind of systemic forces. And the systemic forces for him are primarily power and money. And he sees these forces as being different because they operate with their own internal logics, right? Sort of the idea of money and capitalism, right? Sort of, you're searching for profit, ever renewed profit, and that's its own goal. You don't question that. You just search for the means and similarly, right, power, kind of administrative power, operates the same way, right? You're always trying to gain more of it. And he sees the life world, this crucial idea of the life world as being the area where that's sort of the kind of cultural reproduction, and that's sort of where individuals are deciding what they actually want their day to day lives to look like. And that's something where the ends, in some sense, are not. Predefined, but the ends are precisely. The topic that we should be debating right in politics, is what, what do we want our societies to look like? How do we want to live? And that's, that's the life world, and that's what he's really trying to empower. So that, in some sense, I think, is really what you see in kind of, yeah, from the mid 1990s onward, is an increasing interest in that, and in sort of fighting back, not against multiculturalism, but against the sort of power that market, that markets and that economic, that sort of global economics, has increasingly taken on after, after, sort of the 1990s
PJ 35:38
so not multiculturalism, but maybe multinational corporations.
Speaker 1 35:43
Yes. I mean multinational corporations, international markets. These are the things that he's primarily, primarily worried about.
PJ 35:48
Yeah, and forgive me, this is entirely for my own sake, life, world, and I I've definitely seen the German word for that before. Is that something that originates in dilti?
Speaker 1 36:03
Is certainly one person who talks about this, but it's sort of, it's a kind of standard term in phenomena in the phenomenological tradition. But speaking about, Yeah, sort of, if you look back at a lot of sort of early phenomenology, including clissural, you'll also see this term often get get used this idea of the life world, and that's really supposed to capture, right? The idea that phenomenology is really driven by an interest in how individuals really experience the world, right? So it's supposed to be primarily right, going back to the things themselves and really to individual experience.
PJ 36:39
Thank you. I appreciate that, because I yeah, that has that word. Has an interesting intellectual history.
Unknown Speaker 36:47
It does, it does now.
PJ 36:50
And I think this is more, maybe this is more the public intellectual speaking to the masses part of things. But when he talks about play as a means of freedom, and I think that is earlier on in his career, is that, for someone listening today, is there value in that kind of in the use of play, in your cultural reproduction to avoid economics? Is that, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 37:15
Sorry for not taking up that before, but yeah, the idea of No, no, no worries, play, it really shows up in some of these early texts that he's writing in the 1950s and it's not a it's not a concept that you then see and I guess his more mature works, but in those early works, I think sort of the concept of play is in some way related to this idea of the life world. And again, right? I mean, it's anachronistic, as you'd be reading this back from his later work into his earlier work, but I think it is related to to this general interest that he has from early in his career, in kind of pushing back against kind of these capitalist forces, against the idea that the ends of our reason have already been set and we're only debating the means right. That also relates back to the early Frankfurt School and the critique of instrumental reason and there Spiel is right, an art and esthetics in general are seen as these areas of freedom, right? Because they aren't. They aren't governed by the same kind of internal logics of wanting more or more, but are supposed to be governed right by emotions and about a certain kind of expressivism that doesn't really fit into the kind of economic logic that we often feel ourselves being dominated by. So I think in his early work, yeah, spiel, that's one area where he's looking for a certain kind of freedom, or liberation from the kind of obsession with with economics, with material gain, and sort of trying to carve out an area that is not governed by that, and then later, sort of that becomes more political. With his development of the concept of the life world, as opposed to the system
PJ 38:50
got it. And so you could probably trace some development, but you don't want to read too much, yeah? Like, obviously he's developing his own thought, yeah, right. There's a
Speaker 1 38:58
consistent interest in finding areas of life that are not governed by instrumental reason, or ways of pushing back against this kind of instrumental reason, and then sort of that interest develops over time through these kind of various concepts that he's considering. But again, right? The concept of Spiel is not something he takes up in his philosophical works. It's something that appears a few times in his kind of journalism, especially in that early journalism in the 1950s those are the stuff that he refers to. Now is his youthful sins. Yes,
PJ 39:28
the idea of play being one of your youthful sins is kind of as a concept, being one youthful sins is kind of funny. Indeed. I I don't want to finish today without asking about the public sphere and the public intellectual because I think, I mean, certainly, the public sphere is one of the biggest contributions, I would say, or the most widespread. Can you talk a little bit about what the public sphere is, and kind of how he's talked about it? Maybe I don't know. So it might be beyond the book. So feel free to just ignore this part of it, how that has, what's the legacy of the public sphere?
Speaker 1 40:10
Yeah, so, I mean, I think again, we could probably have multiple podcast just on this topic. But I think the public sphere, at least the way I read Habermas, I think is really, in some sense, the organizing principle for understanding pretty much all of his work, or at least all of his political theory, which is primarily sort of my angle, and for him, the public sphere, I think, really does play this crucial role as the primary site, or at least in a sort of mature philosophy, as the primary site of kind of democratic legitimation. And it's also kind of, for him, the area where that is really supposed to guarantee the participation of all democratic citizens, right? So very few democratic citizens ever become politicians, relatively. I mean, you know, a lot of democratic citizens don't vote, but for him, sort of the idea that democratic citizens all participate in the public sphere, maybe not as speakers or authors, but at very least as consumers, right? They all sort of engage with the newspaper or the news in some way bless you
Speaker 1 41:16
and and he sees that sort of even just having conversations about politics at dinner table based on sort of the debates that are on television, or based on what you heard on Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow, right? Or whatever you like, that that those are all kind of expressions of the public sphere in forms of participation. And he really sees that as the way that citizens engage, and that that's really that the public sphere is what should be driving, ultimately, politics through kind of public opinion, that these sort of engage in opinion formation in the public sphere, and that then that opinion formation should sort of through various channels of open communication, be driving will formation right or the formation of actual laws through institutional mechanisms in politics, and his worry is that it sort of already expressed in 1962 and I think it's become more and more present since then, is that increasingly kind of the systemic forces, right through lobbying, like rich both rich individuals, but also companies, have increasingly sort of short circuited those mechanisms by, sort of, not only by short circuiting the mechanisms of opinion formation. And if you think about sort of various conglomerates or rich individuals who own key newspapers or news networks, right, this is, again, I think, something that's coming up now with, sort of the sale of CNN, right, or the takeover of CBS in the US, right? The idea that sort of there's always a direct impact on the kind of leading media that really affect opinion formation, but also that increasingly opinion, the link between opinion, popular opinion formation, and the will formation in kind of formal institutions that that's being broken, and that's that sort of that lawmakers or individuals in these institutions increasingly only listen to lobbyists and not so much to sort of public opinion. And so that's his concern about kind of the state of democracy in the modern world. And so I think sort of that, anyways, is really key to understanding his worries. And I think those worries have just become even greater, sort of as the old kind of public sphere that was mediated primarily through sort of newspapers and other legacy media has been transformed by the rise of the Internet and by sort of social networks, which, in many ways, right, no longer kind of seek to provide neutral information, or to sort of, I Guess, provide ensure that kind of the best forms of each argument are being given right. If you think about sort of a classic kind of Op Ed page, or something like that, where it's supposed to be right, the best voices representing each side of the argument, sort of presenting this dispute to each other in public, and allowing the individuals to sort of see who they think is right. And increasingly, social media no longer play that function can be manipulated in various ways, right? That even social media is no longer kind of driven by the written word and by argumentation, but by kind of appearance and by just speak, sort of mobilization rather than actual argumentation, right? You seek to mobilize your own supporters, and it's increasingly sort of about Yeah, who can go viral with kind of the most snappy comment, rather than who's actually giving the most reasoned opinion that considers all the best possible arguments. And so I think that really explains, sort of some of his more recent concerns about the state of democracy, about the potential to push back against the systemic forces we've been talking about. But also, as I kind of argue in the conclusion to the book, that increase book, that increasingly, I think makes, makes it more difficult for the public intellectual as a kind of figure to even have the kind of the influence or even play the role that the public intellectual is supposed to be playing right which is ensuring that these kind of marginalized voices are heard. That important arguments are not passed by and I think increasingly right, that's that's increasingly difficult for individuals, and I think increasingly difficult, even for Habermas, in this kind of new, new media environment, to really fulfill that role now.
PJ 45:14
And I think this will be a good lead, and I love that you already pointed towards the public intellectual side. But when we talk about the internet, kind of, at least transforming the public sphere again, definitely, I think a lot of people would say deforming the public sphere. Is this because of systemic pressures? Is this because of interests? Is this because the medium of the internet, because you know, you mentioned at the beginning Jurgen Habermas being at the at his desk and being committed to the written word. Is it a combination of those things? Why is the internet? What does Habermas see as the real influence of the internet on that is it because of the way it's controlled through social networks, or is it be just the medium itself?
Speaker 1 46:05
I think to a certain extent, all those things are interrelated, yeah. So he has actually written, so a couple of years ago, he put out a short volume that was the new structural transformation of the public sphere, sort of comment, 2022 right? I think so, yeah, yeah. Commenting on some of these changes, and they're there, he really identifies the kind of platform category, or the platform nature of these new media as being the key thing, right? These are not, there are no editors, right? Nobody's doing copy editing. Nobody's doing fact checking, right? These are just platforms, and Habermas recognizes the kind of democratic potential of that, and the fact that it sort of makes everyone into a potential author, in the way that wasn't true in the kind of old public sphere, right? We had all these gatekeepers and where it was difficult for certain individuals to get heard. But Habermas also recognizes kind of the dangers of that, right? And sort of Yeah, the fact that they're that it is sort of about appearance, increasingly right, less text driven, more image driven, but also right that it's more about sort of building a following and selling yourself rather than making good arguments. And he makes this comment that I find very, very telling and potentially very fruitful is in that book, he makes this comment about how, you know, after Gutenberg, or you know, so after the invention of the printing press, that it took a while right for Europe, and then, obviously globally, for everyone to gain literacy and to learn how to become good readers. And he says that the problem right now is with the rise of social media, we're all potential authors, but we haven't really learned how to be authors. I think that is, that is a real difference, right? It's sort of the, again, the kind of standard ethics that somebody, that a journalist, writer, a trained author, would engage in, they don't apply to a lot of the people who are who have the largest followings online and again, right? The commitment to truth, to fact checking, right, the commitment to ensuring that the information you give is accurate. All those things are missing. And then add to that that I mentioned that these are sort of all private organizations controlled by individuals who are increasingly, sort of politically active and to increasingly right, can manipulate algorithms to ensure what gets seen, right? There are famous cases right of, sort of Elon Musk trying to manipulate the the algorithm to ensure that sort of his tweets or his exes or whatever they're called now get more attention. And it's sort of certain individuals that he doesn't like don't right? And that's, that's really worrying, just the fact that individuals can sort of engage in that, and that would be, I think, for havamas, a classic example of something like a systemic force deforming the public sphere.
PJ 48:51
Are those commitments part of what makes someone a public public intellectual, and does he see public intellectual like democratizing in some way? Actually, I'm getting ahead of myself. How would you define a public intellectual, according to Habermas before
Speaker 1 49:07
we Yeah, so, I mean, so Habermas really sees the public intellectual right as as a kind of guardian of the public sphere, and as somebody who is not, who's not a partisan right. So they don't, they're not a movement intellectual right, or somebody who is speaking on behalf of a party or a movement, in the sense that they would be, in a sense, sort of like communist intellectuals, right, who felt that they had to toe the party line. So public intellectual has to be an independent thinker. They speak in their own voice, while they gain some authority from sort of their their intellectual practice really their argument to the citizens. And sort of there's a they always have to recognize that ultimately, sort of in the public sphere, it is the citizens who have the last say and who decide who's right and who's wrong. He really sees the public intellectual, not as being somebody who offers a positive political program and says, you need to do this to this. As someone who says, look, here's this worrying trend that we're not paying enough attention to, or we're having these debates about these things, but we're ignoring these crucial voices or these crucial arguments, and the public insulation, in that sense, are almost like an early warning system, right? That they have to kind of enter the fray when, yeah, when important voices, important arguments or important things are happening that are just not being debated enough, and thus cannot gain democratic legitimacy. So for him, the public intellectual really is this kind of figure who is committed to the quality of debate in the public sphere and to the public sphere itself as the organ of opinion formation, and to ensuring that sort of individual of individuals, when they are engaging in opinion formation, are doing so based on the best possible information, of the best possible arguments.
PJ 50:49
And that's that's interesting, because it does sound like it's democratizing, but what does it look like to have many more of those? Could you comment on that, on every everyone, the possibility of everyone becoming an author, and what does it look like to have this authority in a broader context, if I'm if I'm reading that is, is that the right way to ask that?
Speaker 1 51:16
Yeah, I mean, I think sort of the problem precisely, is that the democratization comes with almost a loss of this authority, right, where there is no longer a kind of a sense that, okay, right? I'm paying attention to this person, or this person has something to say, right, because they have a certain background, or because they have the freedom, right? And perhaps a big part of this also is that a public intellectual is different from somebody who's in from somebody who's in kind of the commentariat, right? Is somebody who's paid to get their opinion right, the public intellectual, because they are usually an academic, right, with a job and get paid for their research, they have the freedom, and they don't need to sort of come up with a hot take in order to sort of earn their keep, right, whereas a lot of influencers right, they kind of have to come up with the next hot take, and they have to sort of say something in order to keep getting clicks, keep getting likes, and to keep monetizing themselves. But I think that's his worry, is that then once, once the sort of monetary remuneration becomes the primary, or one of the primary, or at least, sort of one of the key goals of this is you lose the public intellectual loses their loses that basic commitment to the quality of the public sphere and to the public sphere itself, and they start to sell themselves, rather than sort of ensuring there's this democratic commitment. So I think that's the problem he sees as well, is that a lot of what passed for public intellectuals today, right? I mean, I certainly think somebody like Jordan Peterson, right. I mean, there's a clear monetary interest there that goes beyond sort of an intellectual interest, and there's also a key interest there, and sort of, almost, you know, telling people how to live. And for Habermas, again, being a public intellectual is not, is not being a guru, right? It's about presenting arguments. Is about alerting people to dangers, but it's not about telling them, you know, this is how you know, this is how you must live, or this is what it means to be a man in the 21st Century, right? Or something like that.
PJ 53:06
So public intellectual. And I really like that distinction between public intellectual and Guru, because I do feel like we are moving, if you can make that distinction immediately. A lot of the people we would want to label as public intellectual, whether we wanted to or not, they often get that attached to them. It's like, oh, clearly they're more of a what we consider a guru. That's helpful. I want to be respectful your time. So first off, Dr varacek, wonderful to have you on besides buying and reading your excellent book, Jurgen Habermas, public intellectual and engaged critical theorist. So besides buying and reading your book, which everyone should do, what is something you would recommend to someone who has listened for the last hour to either think about or do over the next week in response?
Speaker 1 53:57
So I mean, I think one of the big things would be to think about sort of, who are your who are your trusted voices, right? Who are you listening to, who are you reading? And sort of to think about, who are you really reading or getting your news from, that is sort of challenging you, and challenging you, not sort of in the sense of just saying something different from what you believe, but actually providing sort of good reasoned arguments that maybe might force you to rethink some of what you some of your opinions, and sort of again to think about sort of, are there, are there public intellectuals in your sort of media diet, or is it mostly gurus and commentators and sort of people more in that mode, right, who are living off of politics and who are competing for your attention because they want to monetize themselves. Or to what extent sort of are you seeking out, people like Habermas, or, you know, people who are at least are approaching this, who seem to be driven by kind of a desire? To actually sort of engage you, to think and really think about, sort of the origins of your opinions, and to think about the big picture issues, beyond just kind of partisan politics or the kind of, yeah, whatever new, new issue has been put on the kind of daily table by sort of the latest Trump tweet. But really to think about sort of the big picture issues, issues that are facing our society today, and sort of to think about if you can increase your reading diet to pay more attention to those voices that are really getting you to think about the big issues that are not simply sort of trying to tell you who to vote for or where to spend your money.
PJ 55:36
Dr varicek, great application. Really appreciate. It been a joy having you on. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 55:42
Thank you. It's been a pleasure for me as well. You i.
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