interview [a generation apart from adorno]

8/12/2019 Interview [a Generation Apart From Adorno]

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Philosophy & Social Criticism

DOI: 10.1177/0191453792018002011992; 18; 119Philosophy Social Criticism

jürgen habermasa generation apart from adorno (an interview

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jürgen habermasa generation apart from adorno

(an interview)*

FROCHTL: From 1949 until 1954 you studied in G6ttingen,Zurich, and Bonn. Erich Rothacker and Oskar Becker were yourmost influential philosophy professors. You worked principally in

Heidegger’s philosophy. The end of that came when his

&dquo;Introduction to Metaphysics&dquo;-lectures he held during the Nazi

period-were published in 1953 without a commentary. In an

interview in Athetik und Kommunikation you spoke of how in

the same period you read Luk6cs’s History and Class

Consciousness and the Dialectic of Enlightenment ’With

fascination.&dquo; But your fascination with Horkheimer’s and Adorno’sbook obviously was not enough to compel you to go to Frankfurt

and listen to the authors themselves. How is it that in 1956 youcame to be Adorno’s Assistentand a member of The I nstitute for

Social Research?

HABERMAS: As far asI remember, the Frankfurt School-and

Frankfurt as a place to study generally-had no noteworthyachievements in the early fifties that one could have perceived

clearly from without, least of all from the perspective of a

philosophy student in Bonn, from where one looked towards

Freiburg and Heidelberg, or G6ttingen. Adorno became known to

*JOrgen Habermas, &dquo;A Generation Apart from Adorno,&dquo; Geist gegen den

Zeitgeist. Erinnern an Adorno, (Hrsg.) J. Fruchtl, M. Calloni, Frankfurt:

Suhrkamp, 1991. Translated by James Swindal.








120

jurgenhabermas

a wider public particularly from his writings during the later fifties.

The Frankfurt School remained for a long time an enclave within

its field.I had been working on my dissertation since 1952. So

itwas more a fortunate coincidence of circumstances that broughtme to Frankfurt in 1956, two years after my Promotion and after

some free-lance journalism. Musil’s publisher Adolf Fris6, to

whose feuilleton articlesI sometimes contributed, one day offered

to introduce me to Adorno. Adorno had read something of mine

in Merkur. During this first conversation Adorno invited me to

come to the Institute for the time being on the basis of a grantRothacker had already provided me to do research on the

concept of ideology. Then, in the autumn of 19561 was appointed Adorno’s Assistent; moreover, I was his first personal Assistent.

FRUCHTL: In the interview in Athetik und Kommunikation you

spokeof the situation in Frankfurt: about the

selectivityof

Horkheimer and Adorno with regard to philosophical theories, theabsence of an intellectual &dquo;past&dquo; of the Institute, and Adorno’s role

in &dquo;sparking&dquo; a systematic reading of Marx and Freud. Little has

been said up until now about the unsatisfactory, even

embarrassing, business of your separation from the Institute.I do

not want to appear indiscreet, but I did not want at all to believe

what I read in the chapter of Wiggershaus’s recently publishedhistory of the Frankfurt School regarding what Horkheimer

brought up about you. Is Wiggershaus being polemical when heclaims that Horkheimer had &dquo;in the course of the fifties become a

convinced advocate of the CDU-motto, ’no experiments&dquo;’?

HABERMAS: My impression is that Wiggershaus’s treatment of

Horkheimer’s writings during the fifties is accurate. Horkheimer

enjoyed a good reputation in Frankfurt. He was concerned about

maintaining good contact politically with all sides. We Assistenten

at the Institute were not exactly enthusiastic about his political

views on the Algerian war or the question of re-armament, forexample. His public behavior and his politics at the Institute

appeared to us almost as an example of an opportunisticadaptation that did not stand in harmony with the critical tradition

that he nonetheless embodied. But I changed my opinion of

Horkheimer after his death, when I read his dairy entries of that

period. There it comes out that he led an utterly split existence

after his return from the United States. He was a relentless

observer and keen analyst of all the false continuities that were so

characteristic of the Adenauer period. But the fear in which he

lived (and not only the fear of the need for recognition) allowed him

to maintain a facade, behind which he sat as if upon unpackedbags.

FRUCHTL: Did there turn out to be a strict division between youand Adorno on the one side, and Horkheimer on the other?








121

a generationapart from

adorno

HABERMAS: One cannot say that, but Adorno never shared

Horkheimer’s prejudice against me, and he also protected me

against Horkheimer’s pressure at the Institute.

FRUCHTL: Was it then a bitter departure for you when you went

to Marburg as a Privatdozent in 1961 ? Why didn’t your contact

with the Institute break off completely, and the period of yourworkwith Horkheimer and Adorno in the fifties remain just a passingphase?

HABERMAS: I did my Habilitation with Abendroth in Marburg. Mytermination with Horkheimer was a spontaneous move that did

not at all prove to be misguided, becauseI soon was given the

possibility, with the help of a DFG grant, to finish writingStructural Transformation of the Public Sphere. I nevertaughtas a Privatdozent because Gadamer and L6with invited me to

Heidelberg. I was happy to be able to go to Heidelberg.&dquo;Bitterness&dquo; is not the right word. My widely diverse attitudes

towards Horkheimer and Adorno remained for the time being the

same as when I was Adorno’s Assistent. Both before and after I

came back to Frankfurt as Horkheimer’s successor in 1964, Adorno had tried repeatedly to ease the tension in the relationshipbetween Horkheimer and me-which also then worked out.

FRUCHTL: Whatwere

the discussions and conversations likebetween you and Adorno? Were not controversies dealt with, or

at least discussed? When one looks at the places in Adorno’s

writings where he refers to you, one notices his great readiness

to agree. At one point he appears &dquo;very committed&dquo; to your

Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and at

another point he adopts the term &dquo;pseudo-reality&dquo; that you had

directed towards the student protests. He refers to you most

frequently in his introduction to The Positivist Dispute in

German Sociology, but in my opinion interprets you in a waywhich entirely misconstrues your meaning. Only in the interview

with Der Spiegel does one hear a more critical tone, when to youraccusation that his dialectic abandons itself at its &dquo;darkest point&dquo;to a &dquo;destructive vortex of a death wish,&dquo; he responds: &dquo;I would say

above all that the desperate dependence upon the positiveemerges from a death wish.&dquo;On the other hand, one can observe

that the essay that you wrote in 1963 for Adorno’s sixtieth birthdayhas a considerate and friendly tone towards him; only after his

death did yourdifferences become less qualified and increasinglymore pronounced. What is also salient is the impression that you,as theoreticians, acted very respectfully towards each other, and

thus,I can well imagine that there was something like an

agreement producing spell, which a personality-for him one canindeed use such a term-such as Adorno’s was capable of

exerting.








122

jurgenhabermas

HABERMAS: One ought not forget that Adorno andI were a

generation apart. I always remained the Assistent, and even a

younger colleague at that, who honored the older one in

friendship. Moreover, Gretel and my wife were embedded in this

same constellation. In regard to the theoretical relationship, it

indeed never was a matter of two equally weighted positions.I

doubt that Adorno ever read a book of mine. During my time as

his Assistent we did work together in a certain sense. Adorno

always read my manuscripts intensely and covered them with his

notes. Later, he perhaps read one ortwo of my articles. Even until

well into the mid-sixties he may have assumed that no greatdifferences existed between us in our philosophical approaches.Theoretical discussions, which the two of us often had, alwayscentered around his texts. During the period whileI was at the

Institute, he would come to the second floor, whereI had a room

opposite Gretel’s,to tell me about an idea or

inspirationthat had

just excited him. Such was the case, for instance, when he

grasped for the first time the internal relationship between identitythinking and commodity form. In these situations I would, by the

way, immediately express reservations that we then discussed-

not thatI could have been able to influence him by them. As to the

differences that went deeper-and which were definitely alreadybeginning-they actually came clear to me only later. Your

phrase, &dquo;agreement producing spell,&dquo; sums up the situation quite

well. The differences I brought to the fore in Theory ofCommunicative Action are those that came clear to me onlymuch later, after reading one of Axel Honneth’s essays.

FROCHTL: Frequently you speak of the &dquo;genius,&dquo; or rather the

&dquo;ingenuity,&dquo; of Adorno. This seems to me to be an expressionwhich cuts both ways. Kant is known to have accepted the geniusonly in art, a thesis that one can attribute to his narrow conceptionof science. But don’t you implicitly follow the same restriction?I

could also ask whether this ingenuity was reserved for Adornohimself, or would it also have had its entitlement only in

conjunction with Horkheimer and Marcuse, or perhaps even with

all creative philosophers?

HABER MAS: Adornowas a genius;I say that without reservation.

No one would have even thought of such a thing in regard to

Horkheimer or Marcuse. With Marcuse I had, by the way, an

uncomplicated and-as you know-intimate relationship. Adorno had a presence of mind, a spontaneity of thought, a powerof formulation that I never have seen before or since. One was

unable to grasp the emerging process of Adorno’s thoughts; theyemerged, as it were, finished. That was his virtuosity. He also did

not have the freedom to go below his level; he could not let up onthe effort of his thought even for a moment. When you were with

Adorno you were in the movement of his thought. Adornowas not








123

a generationapart from

adorno

trivial; it was denied him, in a clearly painful way, ever to be trivial.

But at the same time, he lacked the pretensions and the

affectations of the stilted and &dquo;auratic&dquo; avant-garde that one saw

in George’s disciples. If there was a pathos, it was that of

negativity; and this did not stand in contradiction to his egalitarianconvictions. By all notable standards, Adorno remained anti-

elitist. Incidentally, he was a genius also in that he preservedcertain child-like traits, both the character of a prodigy and the

dependence of one &dquo;not-yet-grownup.&dquo; He was characteristicallyhelpless before institutions or legal procedures.

FRUCHTL:I would like to make a small jump here and use the

previously mentioned phrase &dquo;pseudo-reality&dquo; as a key term to

address both of your positions with regard to the student protests.One cannot deal with this much-discussed issue in a few phrases,but it would be

unfortunateto let this

opportunity go bywithout

some comment on it. Summarizing, let it perhaps be put this way:while Adorno neither unreservedly identified himself with the

student protest nor clearly differentiated himself from it, you

distinguished yourself by showing an increasingly strong interest

in the politics of the day and-as the author of the connection

between the university, politics and democratic publicness-bothidentified with the protests with less reservation and also,

invoking dangers and illusions, more clearly distanced yourself

from it. Did the anger of the students diminish because of itshesitant reception by Adorno, above all?

HABERMAS: I think that you describe it perfectly. I certainly hadno part in their anger.

FR UCHTL: It is conspicuous that the younger adherents of critical

theory left Frankfurt shortly after Adorno’s death. Von Friedeburgbecame Hesse’s

Culture Ministerin

1969, Negtbecame a

sociology professor in Hannover in 1970, you went to become the

director of the &dquo;Max Planck Institute for Research into the Life

Conditions in a Scientific-Technical World&dquo; in Starnberg in 1971.

Did something noticeable vanish with Adorno’s death?

HABERMAS: Adorno’s death was a turning point; all of us in

Frankfurt experienced that. At that time no one could have

imagined the resumption of anything that would bridge the

chasm. Admittedly, whether things would have worked out in a

totally different way if Adorno had still lived on and worked duringthe seventies, who can say? After the critical reaction set in, the

resentments thickened and finally in the autumn of 1977 a mood

of persecution broke out. I often asked myself how Adorno wouldhave reacted, how he would have understood the entirelyatrocious intrigue.








124

jurgenhabermas

FRUCHTL: In the collected works, Die Frankfurter Schule und

die Folgen, you attribute a part of the relatively great influence of

the &dquo;Frankfurt School,&dquo; or &dquo;critical theory,&dquo; directly to its &dquo;largelyfictitious unity.&dquo; &dquo;Today,&dquo;as you continue, &dquo;the impulses started bycritical theory take effect in scientific discussions in so manyvaried and sometimes contrary directions, that one cannot speakany longerof the identity of a single school, if it ever even existed.&dquo;

&dquo;

But the question still remains, how did the at least fictional unitycome to exist? Was it not possible precisely because critical

theory remained identifiable-and perhaps also still remains so-

as an interdisciplinary structured theory of society with a critical

intent, or in a more contemporary expression, as a theory of

broadening rationality with a social-critical intent?

HABERMAS: The Frankfurt School has become a historical form.

In the late seventies it tookon,

withsuperb

works such as Helmut

Dubiel’s, a historicizing thrust. Now we see better contemporaryhistory’s connection between the deeper impulses of critical

theory and the totalitarian determinations of the thirties and

forties. Today one can resume these same theoretical motives

only from a distance that does not allow itself to be cancelled at

will. Nevertheless there emerges from the philosophical core of

the theory of Adorno and Benjamin, and even from Horkheimer

and Marcuse, an aura, a fascination that not only sets afire, but

preserves something of the purifying power of the best:something of the steadfastness of the exoteric Kant. Even the

Dialectic of Enlightenment breaches no betrayal of the

impulses of the Enlightenment.






interview [a generation apart from adorno]

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