The Postnational Constellation

Political Essays

Jürgen Habermas

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745694405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Does a global economy render the traditional nation-state obsolete? Does globalization threaten democratic life, or offer it new forms of expression? What are the implications of globalization for our understanding of politics and of national and cultural identities?

In T he Postnational Constellation, the leading German philosopher and social theorist J?rgen Habermas addresses these and other questions. He explores topics such as the historical and political origins of national identity, the catastrophes and achievements of "the long twentieth century, " the future of democracy in the wake of the era of the nation-state, the moral and political challenges facing the European Union, and the status of global human rights in the ongoing debate on the sources of cultural identity. In their scope, critical insight, and argumentative clarity, the essays in The Postnational Constellation present a powerful vision of the contemporary political scene and of the challenges and opportunities we face in the new millennium.

Those unfamiliar with Habermas's theoretical work will find in this volume a lucid and engaging introduction to one of the world's most influential thinkers. For readers familiar with Habermas's writings, The Postnational Constellation provides an invaluable application of his social and political theories to current political realities.

1

What is a People?

The Frankfurt “Germanists' Assembly” of 1846 and the Self-Understanding of the Humanities in the Vormärz

Address for the Centenary celebration of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat, Frankfurt/Main

I. Dual Objectives

The dual objectives that the organizers of the “Germanists' assembly” had in mind can be seen clearly enough, both from the letter of invitation “to an assembly of scholars at Frankfurt a.M.”, as well as the short introductory text to the Proceedings of the Germanists,¹ the assembly's official record. On the initiative of the Tu bingen jurist Reycher, prominent scholars such as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Georg Gottfried Gervinus, Leopold Ranke, Ludwig Uhland, Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, Georg Beseler, and Karl Mittermaier gathered with the goal of founding a union of the three disciplines of German law, German history, and German language. Their primary objective was the institutionalization of an improved mode of scholarly and professional communication. Until that time, any professional exchanges beyond the normal medium of books and newspapers depended entirely on personal acquaintance and correspondence. This was true not just for interdisciplinary communication between jurists, linguists, and historians, but also for communication within the disciplines themselves,particularly among German philologists. There was thus a keenly felt need for more robust forms of personal contact, for mutual understanding and learning – “in free speech and unforced conversation” and “without prepared lectures.” The earliest German disciplinary congresses of physicians and natural scientists (beginning in 1822), and classical philologists (beginning in 1838), served as preliminary models. The organizers of the Germanists' assembly were, of course, well aware that a collective assembly of Germanistic scholars would itself be understood as a political act.

The second objective went beyond any disciplinary needs. It was to stage a subtle demonstration on behalf of the unification of a politically fragmented Fatherland:

It would be asking too much of a meeting of scholars if . . . its goal were to be set as the direct intervention in life; yet we expect no mean task from this assembly if, standing on a firm foundation of scholarly research, it acknowledges both the importance and the gravity of these times, and will satisfy, for each individual, the enthusiasm that animates us all.²

The course of the assembly itself would confirm this expectation. Re-reading these protocols, even those of us in later generations, who feel bound through profession and biography both to the humanities and to the republican traditions of this country, can sense the strength of emotion that had moved these speakers. In hindsight, of course, we can also recognize the unpolitical dimension in the passions of these heroes of the German Historical School. Nevertheless, no amount of criticism can entirely remove the peculiar charm of these voices, animated as they are by the spirit of Romanticism. Their interest in “Germanic antiquities,” the objects of their work, coincides in a virtually unconscious way with the political tendencies of their times.

The assembly itself is surely colored by a tragic irony: what was celebrated so enthusiastically as a new beginning signified, in objective terms, an end as well – both politically and in the history of the humanities. The assemblies of the Germanists, in Frankfurt in 1846 and in Lübeck the following year, constituted both the first and the last attempts to unify the three disciplines that had formed the core of the early humanities. Fifteen years later, both the German jurists and the German philologists would found their own independent associations, entirely in keeping with the normal differentiation of scholarly disciplines.

From the end of the eighteenth century, new humanistic disciplines had arisen alongside the older, established fields such as classical philology or art history. Initially, at least, a common basis of shared historicist convictions had kept these new disciplines from separating from one another; they were still far more than mere background environments for each other. But this early period was already nearing its end in the 1840s. Among the participants in the 1846 Germanists' assembly, we find only four of the figures that the historian Erich Rothacker counts among the founding fathers of the humanities in Germany: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Leopold Ranke, and Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker. They are the last in the illustrious line of Herder, M

ser, Wolf, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, Niebuhr, Savigny, Eichhorn, Creuzer, G

rres, Bopp, and Boeckh.³ Rothacker sets the parameters for this founding phase, during which the different scholarly disciplines still spoke a common language, with two famous quotations from the eighty-year period between 1774 and 1854: “Every nation contains its own central point of felicity, just as every sphere has its center of gravity” (Herder); “Every epoch stands in an immediate relation to God, and its value lies not in what it produces, but in its existence itself” (Ranke). The Frankfurt assembly, which sought to open a new chapter in the history of the humanistic sciences, actually marked the end of this founding period. Seen from the perspective of the history of the humanities, it was exactly suited for such a translatio nominis; indeed at that time the honorary title of “Germanist,” which Jacob Grimm had claimed for linguistics alone, was also entering into general usage by legal historians and modern philologists.⁴

The role that the Germanists believed they could play as the natural interpreters of the spirit of the people in the political public sphere proved equally illusory. As is well known, two years after the Frankfurt assembly, the attempt in the neighbor ing Paulskirche to achieve national unification through a liberal constitution ended in failure. Roughly 10 percent of the participants in the Germanists' assembly met once again in the first German National Assembly in 1848, most of them as centrists. Wilhelm Scherer would later describe the Germanists' assembly as “a sort of precursor to the Frankfurt parliament.”⁵ The Vormärz period was both the first and the last time that leading representatives of the humanities possessed the political will to make public use of their professional knowledge as intellectuals and citizens. What could still appear in my own teachers' generation – before, during, and after 1933 – as an attempt to exercise a political and intellectual influence obviously does not fall into this category of civil engagement. The role of intellectuals is utterly dependent on the sounding board of a liberal public sphere and a political culture grounded in freedom. With their demands for freedom of the press, the Germanists in the Frankfurt Kaisersaal 150 years ago understood this clearly. One cannot say the same of Julius Petersen, Alfred Baumler, Ernst Bertram, Hans Naumann, or Erich Rothacker.

The Paulskirche movement failed due to historical circumstances that are not my theme here. But the Germanists, who are of interest to me as a part of this movement, did not fail due to external circumstances alone. A political self-understanding that was shaped by the philosophy of the early humanities was also a decisive factor. There was, first, the desire to place themselves beyond any disciplinary boundaries, no matter how rapidly and clearly those boundaries emerged. But equally problematic was the unselfconscious fabrication of political relationships based on shared descent, which were intended to give the German nation the appearance of a natural phenomenon. Following the lead of Jacob Grimm, I will briefly sketch the philosophical background of the Historical School (II). I will use the contradictions that emerge from this sketch to show how the idea of a “spirit of the people,” a Volksgeist, always directed toward a real or imagined past, poses insurmountable difficulties for the future-oriented intentions of liberal republicanism (III). Gervinus avoids the fatal dialectic of inclusion and exclusion through a historically dynamic reading of the doctrine of the spirit of the people. But at that time, it was only democrats who remained unrepresented in the Germanists' assembly, people such as Julius Fr

bel, who were willing to pay attention the precarious relationship between the culturally defined “people” and the “nation” of citizens (IV). I will conclude by recalling the factors internal to scholarly disciplines themselves that disposed the Germanists to an unpolitical self-understanding.

II. The Worldview of the Early Humanities

Jacob Grimm officially opened the second public session of the assembly with remarks on the relation between the natural and the human sciences. Chemistry and physics served as examples of exact sciences based on calculation, which conceive of nature as a mechanism, deconstructing it into its component parts and reassembling it for technical objectives. The “inexact” sciences, on the other hand, operate quite differently, thanks to a finely developed and highly sensitive disposition (“a rare device of exceptional natures”) for penetrating into the organic multiplicity and interiority of the historical creations of humankind. The human sciences are not characterized by the “levers and contraptions that awe and astonish the human race,” but rather through the inherent worth, the dignity of their objects: “That which is human, whether in language, poetry, law, or history, is closer to our hearts than animals, plants, or elements. . . . It is with the same weapons,” Grimm concludes with a startlingly militant turn of phrase, “that the nation triumphs over all that is foreign.”⁶

At the heart of this elliptical formulation is the claim that the observational and explanatory natural sciences encompass general phenomena and lawlike states of affairs, while the human sciences, based on understanding, are dedicated to the cultural uniqueness and the distinctive individuality of their objects. Grimm had more in mind than the contradiction between general and particular, between “nomothetic” and “ideographic” science, as Windelband would later describe them. He relates this contradiction to the contrast between the foreign and the familiar, and thereby sharpens a hermeneutical claim concerning the prejudicial structure of understanding, according to which we understand what is closest to us better than what is foreign. Like must be recognized by like. This is most evident in poetry, which “can in reality only be understood in the mother tongue,” as well as “Germanic antiquities.” Understanding such historical documents of the “spirit of a people” is no neutral scientific operation; it is deeply rooted in feeling. To understand truly is to bring the whole of one's subjectivity into play, a process of recognition whose ultimate goal is the enthusiastic moment of self-recognition in the other. Hermeneutical understanding appears to live from the pathos of appropriation:

The chemical crucible will come to a boil under any flame; newly discovered plants, baptized in cold Latin, will grow in any similar climate everywhere; but we are better pleased by the unearthing of a long-lost word of German than by the rediscovery of a foreign one, because we can reappropriate it into our own country: every discovery in the history of the Fatherland directly benefits the Fatherland itself.⁷

For Jacob Grimm, the inclusive character of scientific and scholarly communication itself leads beyond the cool universalism of the natural sciences: “The exact sciences encompass the whole earth, and foreign scholars stand to benefit from them as well. But they do not seize the heart.”⁸ The human sciences, by contrast, are so deeply embedded in their own respective cultures that their results are of interest primarily to members of those cultures. The “German sciences” are thus addressed to a German public.⁹

The spirit of a people, which provides the ultimate referent for this differentiation between the familiar and the foreign, expresses itself most purely in its poetry. And this, in turn, is immediately connected with a “native language.” Jacob Grimm could thus answer the apparently simple question, “What is a people?” with the claim that “a people is the essence of all those who speak the same language.”¹⁰ Despite what appears at first glance to be a purely culturalistic determination, “a people” is thus reformulated in substantialist terms. It is no coincidence that all the metaphors for language, in which the spirit of the people expresses itself, are borrowed from natural history and biology.

As Jacob's brother Wilhelm Grimm reported to the assembly on the collective project of the Dictionary of the German Language, he described the cultural desolation in the wake of the Thirty Years War with the imagery of a natural landscape and its flora:

Language too, wilted and the leaves fell one by one from the boughs...at the beginning of the eighteenth century, dark clouds still hung over the ancient trees, whose life force seemed to have all but vanished . . . only Goethe's staff, striking the face of the cliff, let loose a fresh spring to stream over the barren drought lands; once again they turned to green, and the spring flowers of poetry appeared anew.¹¹

This organic vision of language, in turn, implies a protective role for the caretakers of language. Their defensive attacks against foreign admixtures are intended to purify their native tongue without putting it in the chains of standardization.

Do not think that the Dictionary, because it undertakes the historical transformation of language, shall for that reason also prove itself to be casual or lenient. It will rebuke all that which has unjustly penetrated, even if some of it must be patiently borne; because in every language there will be individual shoots that grow poor and deformed, and which can no longer be weeded out.¹²

Whoever uses a naturalized conception of language as a definition of a people and its spirit needs to delimit the nation unambiguously in time and space: “Our forbears were Germans, even before they were converted to Christianity; it is an ancient estate, which forms the point of departure for all of us, a condition that has unified us, one with the other, into a bond as Germans.”¹³ This continuity of the spirit of the people, grounded in the history of its language, endows the Volksnation, the nation of the people, with a quality of naturalness or organicity. But once the nation is conceived as organic, the project of national unification loses its constructive character as the production of a modern nation of citizens. And what is true of duration in time is also true of extension in space: if the nation is, or ought to be, coextensive with a linguistic community, then the contingent borders of national territories vanish in the face of the natural facts of linguistic geography. Jacob Grimm appeals to the law that “it is not rivers or mountains that form the womb of a people; rather, their language alone establishes the borders of a people, dispersed over mountain and stream.”¹⁴ This conviction, moreover, constitutes the background for the ambitions of the jurists and historians who devoted the first public session of the Germanists' assembly to denouncing the Danish crown's claim to Schleswig, which was not even a member of the German federation.

In 1874, Wilhelm Schere...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Editor’s Introduction
• Foreword
• 1 What is a People?
• 2 On the Public Use of History
• 3 Learning from Catastrophe?
• 4 The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy
• 5 Remarks on Legitimation through Human Rights
• 6 Conceptions of Modernity A Look Back at Two Traditions
• 7 The Differing Rhythms of Philosophy and Politics
• 8 An Argument against Human Cloning Three Replies
• Notes
• Index