Jürgen Habermas (18 June 1929 – 14 March 2026)

 

 Jügen Habermas, one the giants of 20th century thought died 14 March 2026. Many will write excellent obituaries of a mind that was, in its own way, fearlessly honest, even if it meant displeasing an audience that from time to time assumed that he "belonged" to them or to the orthodoxies their praxis appeared to define as inevitable.  Among my favorite was his confrontation of  elements of the student movement--the "left fascists"("linken Faschismus" and the APO (Außerparlamentarische Opposition) in the late 1960s, then radical, now perhaps (or at least some of them) grown into something quite different.  (See here).

I celebrate his life with a snippet from a work that I have always found a source of inspiration: Knowledge & Human Interest, 1968, publ. Polity Press, 1987. 

Marx, however, conceives the moral totality as a society in which men produce in order to reproduce their own life through the appropriation of an external nature. Morality is an institutional framework constructed out of cultural tradition; but it is a framework for processes of production. Marx takes the dialectic of the moral life, which operates on the basis of social labour, as the law of motion of a defined conflict between definite parties. The conflict is always about the organisation of the appropriation of socially created products, while the conflicting parties are determined by their position in the process of production, that is as classes. As the movement of class antagonism, the dialectic of the moral life is linked to the development of the system of social labour. The overcoming of abstraction, that is the critical revolutionary reconciliation of the estranged parties, succeeds only relative to the level of development of the forces of production. The institutional framework also incorporates the constraint Of external nature, which expresses itself in the degree of mastery Of nature, the extent of socially necessary labour, and in the relation of available rewards to socially developed demands. Through the repression of needs and wishes, it translates this constraint into a compulsion of internal nature, in other words into the constraint of social norms. That is why the relative destruction of the moral relation can be measured only by the difference between the actual degree of institutionally demanded repression and the degree of repression that is necessary at a given level of the forces of production. This difference is a measure of objectively superfluous domination. It is those who establish such domination and defend positions of power of this sort who set in motion the causality of fate, divide society into social classes, suppress justified interests, call forth the reactions of suppressed life, and finally experience their just fate in revolution. They are compelled by the revolutionary class to recognise themselves in it and thereby to overcome the alienation of the existence of both classes. s long as the constraint of external nature persists in the form of economic scarcity, every revolutionary class is induced, after its victory to a new “injustice,” namely the establishment of a new class rule. Therefore the dialectic of the moral life must repeat itself until the materialist spell that is cast upon the reproduction of social life, the Biblical curse of necessary labour, is broken technologically. (Chapter Three: The Idea of the Theory of Knowledge as Social Theory).

It, like its author, speaks both to itself and to the structures within which it is possible to construct that self and then elaborate worlds around the construct.  It points as much to the foundations of triumphant left orthodoxy from liberal lite liberal democratic theory to the most formalized expression of Marxist Leninist theory. But it also points to the cognitive structures of systems most interesting explored by Niklas Luhmann, and to the coming construction of the digitalized simulacra of human struggle formed through the digitized transformation of the struggle of the human, now reconstituted as a simulation of itself, at the heart of some of Habermas' thought developed in complex ways over a lifetime. And that is the fundamental insight of a lifetime--to overthrow a system is to create it anew. What is revealed at the end of a system is. . .  a system.