Adorno’s Children
Martin Hähnel
With the deaths of Jürgen Habermas and Alexander Kluge, an entire era has lost its voice and intellectual conscience.
Just a few weeks ago, the filmmaker, writer and visual artist Alexander Kluge, who passed away on March 25th, gave an interview in which he spoke of his 70-year friendship with Jürgen Habermas. “Fundamentally, there is no difference [between us],” Kluge stated. That sounds rather vague, but it is entirely accurate in describing the depth of their commonalities. But what specifically connects the two?
The answer is not only their association with the famous Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, but also an unabashed rejection of the Adenauer world of the 1950s, from which the so-called Suhrkampkultur —to which both wholeheartedly belonged — sprang and which continues to shape the intellectual mainstream in Germany to this day. Habermas and Kluge, each in their own way, through meticulously detailed work and with remarkable productivity, gave the German Left a voice and thus contributed significantly to its aestheticisation and academisation. But what remains of these two influential figures in a world that is increasingly turning its back on their premises, ideals, and practices; one in which public and non-authoritarian rational discourse, supported aesthetically and culturally by a productive counter-public sphere, is no longer the measure of things?
What Kind of Reason Was Habermas Actually Talking About?
Let us first turn to the philosopher himself. Whilst the German feuilletons are currently erecting a posthumous monument to Habermas, intended to remind us that we have no choice but to continue working on his Enlightenment project, critical voices that recoil from such glorification multiply.
When Habermas is praised as the last defender of reason, one cannot help but become sceptical and ask what kind of reason Habermas was actually talking about. This form of rationality is no longer the excellent tool that enables us to recognise the world and its limits (as it was with Kant or Thomas Aquinas), but rather a communicative faculty emptied of all metaphysical content, intended to guide us through procedural considerations to ethical decisions.
The inadequacy of Habermas’s project of reason, however, is evident above all in the fact that, ultimately, no truly politically viable decisions can be made on the basis of its premises, because a politically consequential formulation of the general will through discourse, based on interests that are in principle incommensurable and worldviews held by actors with no interest in cross-partisan compromise, is simply impossible to conceive of empirically, let alone to apply.
Sharpening the Functional Definition of Religion
Years ago, in a remarkable discussion in the magazine Merkur, Robert Spaemann invoked these arguments to reproach Habermas for his inability to dispense with the idea of a wise ruler or decision-maker, since otherwise discourse ethics would risk slipping into utopianism. At this point, we could cite further examples, including the absence of a consistent theory of the good, which cast doubt on whether Habermas deserves the place accorded to him in the pantheon of modern philosophy.
Perhaps we could highlight Habermas’s interest in religion and theology as a distinctive hallmark of his thought. Here, too, caution is called for. Just because Habermas was interested in theology does not mean that it became part of his thought. As Peter Hoeres rightly observes, Habermas never moved beyond a primitive and thus mistaken understanding of religion and theology. Even in his unpublished dissertation on Schelling, he attempted to strip anthropology of its theological and speculative elements in order to align it with a Neo-Marxist philosophy of history.
Habermas’ media-friendly exchange with Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, on secularisation cannot obscure the fact that we were dealing here with a thinker who sought out compliant interlocutors whom he used as a foil to further sharpen his functional concept of religion. This is evidenced clearly in his recently expressed regret that large sections of contemporary theology merely parrot the prevailing ideas of the age and attempt to articulate belief in God in the language of a spiritualistically charged philosophy of existence.
One thing is thus clear: until the end of his life, although he always adapted to the philosophical fashions and trends of his time, Habermas stood in the tradition of Adorno and not in that of Horkheimer, who, at the end of his career, certainly attempted to effect a genuine religious turn.
Kluge and Habermas: Complementarity of Worldviews
But let us now turn to Alexander Kluge. It may at first seem surprising to place Habermas alongside one of the most influential and versatile intellectuals and media figures in contemporary Germany, but this example only shows how deeply a certain form of thinking, acting and evaluating has penetrated into the hidden nooks and crannies of the local cultural landscape. Kluge and Habermas struck the same intellectual and political note is demonstrated not only by their friendship, but also by their ideological complementarity.
Like Habermas, Kluge explores the various cultural possibilities and political forms of expression offered by the ‘post-metaphysical’ age to his advantage. For both Habermas and Kluge, there is no transcendence, no ‘view from nowhere’ (Thomas Nagel). Whilst Habermas settles into and indulges in the horizontality of linguistic-pragmatic acrobatics, Kluge follows suit in his own way by collecting or creating countless media objects that present themselves to the viewer as works of art, but instead express and document the world’s disintegration into various objects, the resistance of which the modern artist must grapple with.
This anti-essentialist undertone ensures that the viewer and reader feel adrift and cannot—and are not allowed to—find any point of connection to their own experience of the world and its values. The present author thus can no longer recall anything when he thinks back to his visit to a Kluge retrospective in 2019 at the Munich Literaturhaus. Kluge, who was once described by Adorno’s wife Gretel as an ‘adopted son’, was a typical child of his time, who seemingly felt more at home in the shadow than in the light of great ideas.
What remains? With the deaths of Habermas and Kluge, an entire generation – whose mainstream had more or less consciously aligned itself with both men – undoubtedly loses two of the most formative intellectual figures in post-war Germany, a country defined by its search for a new direction. With them, we must also bid “farewell to yesterday” (to quote the title of one of Kluge’s films); that is, to the hegemony of a culture which, through its homogenising grip over universities and cultural life, was increasingly unable, to paraphrase Nietzsche, to “think against its own thoughts”.
Dr. Martin Hähnel is the director of the Carlsbad Institute and a lecturer at the University of Bremen.