How a philosopher of communicative reason fell silent in the face of the most documented genocide of our time.
Jürgen Habermas, one of the most influential contemporary philosophers, was part of a group of signatories to a statement of solidarity in support of Israel, published on 13th November 2023. The title of the letter is “Principles of solidarity. A statement”, which was published by Normative Orders, Research Centre of the Goethe University, Frankfurt. The other signatories besides Habermas are Nicole Deitelhoff, Rainer Forst, and Klaus Günther—all associated with Goethe University.
The statement’s declared purpose is to express an uncompromising solidarity with “Israel and Jews in Germany”, but it also does something else, namely, revealing how even philosophers and acclaimed academics are susceptible to blind adherence to national interests, logical fallacies, betrayal of reason, and genocidal complicity.
There are problems, obvious and hidden, in this letter—the obvious ones come out in the present and historical contexts of the Palestinian cause and suffer from basic logical fallacies; the hidden ones become manifest when seen from a particular historico-philosophical tradition, of which Habermas was one of the strongest defenders (and still is), namely, the tradition of Enlightenment modernity. We will examine both briefly, with special emphasis on the latter.
The statement of the letter begins as follows— “The current situation created by Hamas’ unparalleled atrocity and Israel’s response to it has led to a cascade of moral and political statements and demonstrations.” The error in the assumption that Hamas created the present situation is not only historically inaccurate but also morally and intellectually lazy. This purely Zionist argument is adopted by these academics without any critical engagement. The letter is filled with such assumptions and arguments. For example, Hamas’s action is “massacre,” but Israel’s is “retaliation,” when it is historically documented that Israeli actions are anything but retaliation. There are two core arguments in the statement: that Israel’s action is “principally justified” and that Germany has a moral and ethical duty to provide unwavering support to Israel in “the light of mass crimes of the Nazi era.” The first argument suffers from the fallacy of petitio principii—i.e. the argument’s conclusion (that Israel’s action is principally justified) is assumed in its premise. The second argument is a prime example of the fallacy of non sequitur (literally, it does not follow), where the conclusion does not logically follow from the premise. The premise that Germany then fostered the crimes of Hitler’s regime does not logically lead to the conclusion that Germany now has an obligation to support Israel, especially when Israel itself has committed the same crimes and continues to do so.
We now turn to the second problem, which forms the core concern of this essay: the philosophical tradition that underlies such political allegiances, namely, Enlightenment rationality. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his 1784 seminal essay “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment,” defines Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” The tradition of Enlightenment modernity established itself in the West as the vehicle of reason, rationalism, and progress. But it was also the cause underpinning such phenomena as colonialism and fascism. This view—of a scepticism and a critique of Enlightenment rationality—was expressed by such philosophers and theorists as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Aimé Césaire, Zygmunt Bauman, Michele Foucault, etc. Adorno and Horkheimer pioneered this critical inquiry into the failures and the masks of Enlightenment values in their 1944 book Dialectic of Enlightenment, where they proclaimed that “Enlightenment is totalitarian” and that the “wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.” Their critique is philosophical, with deep and serious political implications—it raises questions about the complicity of Enlightenment rationality in major political failures, from imperial domination to fascist regimes.
Habermas, in the 1980s, was part of the famous debate on the legacy of modernity and the nature of postmodernity, especially against those whom he called the “neoconservatives”—the term by which he primarily referred to Wittgenstein, Carl Schmitt and Gottfried Benn in his essay/lecture “Modernity: An Incomplete Project” (1980). However, the term later came to be associated with postmodernist thinkers in general (from the perspective of Habermasian attack), of which Jean-François Lyotard was a major figure. For Habermas, the project of modernity was not finished but incomplete, and he saw a possibility of rescuing the tradition of Enlightenment rationality. When Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition (1984), defined the postmodern “as incredulity towards metanarratives” and urged his readers to “wage a war on totality,” the tradition of Enlightenment modernity came under attack from philosophical and aesthetic standpoints. Habermas thought it imperative to defend this tradition, though his defence is not primarily an answer to the politico-philosophical critique of Adorno and Horkheimer. While Habermas defends some such elements of the Enlightenment tradition as reason and emancipation, he ignores or at least misses those elements of that tradition which culminate in fascism and Auschwitz.
Now, Habermas’s adamant Israel defence in turn implicitly advocates that same tradition which culminated in the horrors of the twentieth century. Israel, the U.S, and the West are generating and instrumentalising similar elements—such as instrumental reason, the myth of civilization vs barbarism, and the façade of human emancipation—in perpetrating what has been described as the first “live-streamed” and the “most documented” genocide in history. Habermas’s complicity is a testimony to a philosopher’s betrayal of reason (in the general sense of the word). “If barbarism itself is inscribed within the principle of civilization, then there is something desperate in the attempt to rise against it,” wrote Adorno in “Education after Auschwitz” (1966). In Gaza, that despair becomes real—as even the philosopher of communicative reason chooses complicity over critique.
Shayan Mohammad, the guest author, is pursuing a masters in English literature from Jamia Millia Islamia.
Edited by: Omama Abu Talha
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the publication are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of The Jamia Review or its members.
