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  • Pursuing a Remnant of Utopia
  • J. Craig Hanks (bio)
Habermas: A Biography
Stefan Müller-Doohm
Polity
www.politybooks.com
456 Pages; Print, $39.95

In his address, Public Space and Political Public Sphere: The Biographical Roots of Two Motifs in My Thought, presented upon receipt of the Kyoto Prize in Art and Philosophy in 2004, Jürgen Habermas noted that when philosophers lecture on the lives and work of other philosophers we "usually limit ourselves to stating only bare biographical facts—when these thinkers were born, lived, and died." There are two reasons for this. In his own words, "lives of philosophers do not provide the stuff of legends," instead what is important is that philosophers "leave behind is a new, uniquely formulated and often enigmatic set of thoughts with which later generations will repeatedly tussle." The second reason is one that is central to Habermas's work, the idea, traceable at least to Kant, that we can separate public and private uses of reason, that those who enter a sphere of public discourse about matters of common concern "turn their backs on their private lives."

Given this, what are we to make of the massive (almost 600 pages in English translation, including notes) new biography Habermas: A Biography by Stefan Müller-Doohm, Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Director of the Research Centre for the Sociology of Intellectuals at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Müller-Doohm studied in Frankfurt under Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer and in 2009 published the widely acclaimed Adorno: A Biography. Müller-Doohm had access to the notes for Habermas's in-progress autobiography, access to the family, and his own significant collection of relevant materials.

Habermas was born in Düsseldorf in 1929 into a conservative bourgeois household. By his own account, although his father served in the German army during the Second World War, and although Habermas (at the time an aspiring physician) spent some time as a first-aid office in a district office near the front at the end of the war, his thoroughly Protestant childhood and a cleft palate that required numerous childhood surgeries and left him with a mild speech impediment to this day, gave Habermas the sense of being an outsider to the dominant culture, and helped him recognize the criminality of the Nazi regime. Peter Wingender, Habermas's uncle and high school philosophy teacher, provided mentoring and access to a library. He experienced 1945 and the end of the war as a great opening, full or intellectual, artistic, political, and moral possibility and responsibility. Democracy was, he says "the magic word" and he felt an obligation to be actively engaged in the project of thinking and making democracy. His interests shifted from medicine to philosophy. Habermas noted, "A new horizon opened for me when I began to think more independently . . . My interest in understanding the nature of human beings has remained, only that the anatomical perspective . . . has broadened into a general biological, psychological, and philosophical one."

In 1953, while a graduate student in philosophy at Bonn and much interested in existentialism and the work of Heidegger, Habermas was given by his friend Apel a new edition of Heidegger's An Introduction to Metaphysics (1953). In this [End Page 7] new edition Heidegger had published his 1935 essay without any significant revisions, keeping a reference to the "inner truth and greatness" of National Socialism, and "reflecting the idolatry of a nationalist spirit." Habermas wrote an essay he titled "Thinking Heidegger Against Heidegger" in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in which he denounced Heidegger. This was an extraordinary act for a 24-year old PhD student, during a time when a general and willful amnesia accompanied the founding of the Federal Republic. With time, although incorporating some insights from Heidegger, especially methodological insights, Habermas would move far away from the view of language as a house of Being, to a view of language as a cooperative, open-ended, contested, and constitutive aspect of human existence.

Habermas is the primary representative of the second generation of the Frankfurt School. He is regarded in the US as the major German philosopher and social theorist of the past...

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