Philosophers are not doing too well these days. Chomsky was defrocked and walked off the pulpit just before the war. Bombs fell on a Gandhi hospital in Tehran. The other day, the Iranian strongman Ali Larijani met his end—we read of his impressive bouts of Persian wrestling with Immanuel Kant to justify ‘eastern’ theocracy, like the poet Iqbal a century ago. In between, another sentence was left hanging when Jürgen Habermas departed from the scene.
Many say Habermas had already died months earlier, by philosophical suicide, when he refused to put Gaza on an equal footing with holocausts closer home, as a crisis of morality that put the world in peril. The limits of western philosophy seem as geographical as they are philosophical! The universal rights to life and dignity are not that universal after all, and seem to stop somewhere north of the Mediterranean.
It remains for us to rummage through the debris of ethical models and see what can be retrieved. Even in their failing, or especially in those moments, we can peep under the hood of their thoughts, see all the inner wiring, and try to reverse-engineer a simpler but more serviceable model of use to humanity.
Habermas is one of those who put philosophy directly to the question of international law. There is irony in the fact that he has passed on when international law has broken down again, like a 1940s’ model Ford after decades of rough use. A time when democracy is in crisis globally—both within national boundaries and across them.
He came out of a post-war Europe that had seen what happens when truth collapses under power. His answer was not heroic leadership. Germany had had enough of that by then. Nor was it blind faith in bureaucratic institutions insulated from people. It was something more difficult and demanding, but ultimately simple. Think of it like a telephone exchange.
At its root, his democracy is built around conversations. All his life, Habermas stood guard over the notion that reason, argued out in the open, creates and exerts its own power. What he called the “public sphere” was a space where citizens argue, question, justify. Not shout, not perform a theatrical role, certainly not intimidate—but argue in a way where the better argument has a chance. Reason, he felt, would hold things together when everything else is fraying. It would be the spirit that legitimises governments. If they listen to their people.
Look around, and in today’s climate of noise and propaganda that sounds almost naive. Our debates—on television, on social media, among family—tick frequency rather than meaning. Everyone is speaking, few are listening. Positions are declared, like the Iron Dome, but rarely tested.
Yet, human progress has always come from dissent. India’s own lapse into dogma is curious because its history of thought was quite clearly written at the picket lines. The ‘Sad-darsanas’ often exist in refutation of each other, the early Buddhist councils argued deeply about what the Buddha said and what dhamma meant, Nagarjuna said meaning is nothing by itself, and the Jaina tradition said everything is meaningful!
The dramatic image of Socrates walking through Athens, needling people with questions, is another version of the same instinct. We wouldn’t be where we are if Galileo hadn’t directed his questions at the Church. Every society, at some point, produces these figures. And almost every society, at some point, crucifies them while eventually accepting their answers.
That’s why Habermas, even when he feels slightly out of place in a new world order, also feels familiar. He is making a case for something very old. Out of place because his “communicative rationality” suggests that if conditions are right, people can reason their way to understanding. The real issue is that the conditions are never right these days.
Ambedkar saw that early enough, cutting through the optimism. He understood that argument, by itself, does not level anything. You can have all the debate in the world, but if some voices carry more weight than others before the conversation even begins, the outcome is skewed.
With 21st century mass media, the problem has metastasised. The overwhelming majority of “communicative” actions out there are from media industries that are extensions of power. Western thought control, as Chomsky showed, is only a vastly more ingenious update of the Soviet-era version. The trusty old model runs well too. Tel Aviv has its own Iron Curtain, and it’s doing well, thank you, even if its Iron Dome isn’t.
But such a stance means you still fear the truth. Perhaps it’s with Donald Trump’s “Post Truth Social” that Habermas’s communicative rationality breaks down utterly!
But Gaza—or the Jin Jiyan Azadi protests—give us ways to test Habermas. He had a conception of world citizens. Humans being invested with the right to life, liberty and dignity everywhere. Yet he feared a “world government”, and left more than enough space for states to continue enjoying monopoly over violence within their boundaries. A philosophical Strait of Hormuz, perhaps, but we can see theocratic ships of all religious shades slipping through unmolested.
So he too has ended up too aligned with power, too insufficiently attentive to imbalance. Still, the present algorithmic capture of words makes his core method very relevant. How do we rebuild the “public sphere”, this time globally? How do we talk to each other?
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Santwana Bhattacharya
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