The Liberating Power of Symbols: Philosophical Essays, and: The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (review)

The single most pressing question of the hour is this: Is it possible for cultures founded on different philosophies to enter into dialogue? To anyone who has worked in the social sciences, political studies, media or jurisprudence over the last several decades, the name of Jürgen Habermas will be familiar. He is associated with theories of legitimation, of the public sphere, of communicative rationality and of normative ethics. This pair of anthologies, collecting essays written between 1990 and 1998, remind us that Habermas, already the father figure that more recent German intellectuals such as Theweleit and Kittler target as figurehead of the establishment, is at heart a philosopher. At the end of a career focused on the possibilities for understanding and mutuality, he is brilliantly placed to pose the question of intercultural dialogue. The more specific question then arises: can European rationalism even try to engage in dialogue with its theocratic others?

The shorter volume comprising the philosophical essays is structured as a series of homages and debates with his peers and forebears. Though the essays on Cassirer and the humanist legacy of Aby Warburg and on Jaspers and Apel are pretty much what one would expect, the intriguing twist here comes from Habermas' engagement with the theology of Theunissen, Wright and Gershom Scholem. In subtle and nuanced analyses, Habermas proposes that theology has yet to make its peace with the end of the Idealist tradition of Hegel or to understand the twin challenges of the master-thinkers of the twentieth century, Wittgenstein and Heidegger.

Habermas' own problem can be summed up in two of his quotations. On the one hand, Apel speaks of "inter-subjective understanding as the mediation of tradition within an unlimited community" (p. 72), while Gershom Scholem is cited, equally approvingly it seems, to the effect that historicism is a smokescreen "which-in the form of the history of mystical traditions- conceals the space of the very thing itself" (p. 64). On the one hand, the theologians reckon with despair and with the failure of divinity to guide the world to salvation, while on the other hand, reason denies fate but at the same time refuses to promise-anything. Placing the guarantor of existence and redemption beyond the world only means that there is no guarantee, despite the twistings of theological reason. And yet, as Scholem suggests, there is always that which escapes from the discourse, the utter strangeness of the mystical experience itself. These debates with the theologians, and with the Christian existentialist legacy of Schopenhauer, shape Habermas' philosophical commitment to reason as a relentlessly secular formation, and one that therefore is all the more challenged by the equally relentless theocracy of militant Islam, as well as by the Christian fundamentalism that chokes democratic practice and rational democracy in the U.S.A.

The second, political volume begins from the specifics of German history in the twentieth century. In particular, the essays date from a period in which the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of the German nation altered everything in the old political landscape. This is the ground for Habermas' discussions of European union, its possibility and its desirability. It is also a period in which the recovery of Stasi files reopened the wounds of Nazi collaboration, pitching revisionist denials of the Holocaust (or at least of its continuing significance as a specifically German history with important implications for the present) against the politics of reconciliation in Germany (and equally in South Africa and other de-colonizing areas of the world). The political meaning of history and the possibility of dialogue as a means to understanding and overcoming the past are the seedbeds...