Interview with Jürgen Habermas: “for God’s sake, spare us governing philosophers!”
Himself the author of important works
concerning sociological and political science in the 20th century, Habermas
talks to EL PAÍS about the issues that have concerned him for the last 60
years. His posture is rigid, his handshake firm and, despite his grandfatherly aspect emphasized by a mane of
white hair, he is angry. “Yes,” he says. “I’m still angry about some
of the things that are happening in the world. That’s not a bad thing, is it?”
I am of the antiquated opinion that
philosophy should continue to try answering the questions of Kant: What can I
know? What should I know? What can I expect? What is it to be human? However,
I’m not sure that philosophy as we know it has a future. Currently, it follows
the trend of increasing specialization, like all disciplines. And that’s a
dead-end street because philosophy should try to explain the whole, to
contribute to the rational explanation of our way of understanding ourselves
and the world.
Question. There is a lot of talk about the
decadence of the committed intellectual. But do you think it’s fair to say that
this topic of conversation rarely goes beyond the intellectual sphere?
Answer. Based on the French model – from Zola to
Sartre and Bourdieu, the public sphere is crucial to the intellectual, though
its fragile structure is undergoing an accelerated process of decay. The
nostalgic question, ‘Where
have all the intellectuals gone?’ misses the point. You can’t have
committed intellectuals if you don’t have the readers to address the ideas to.
Q. Has the internet diluted the public
sphere that supported the traditional media, which has, in turn, adversely
affected philosophers and thinkers?
A. Yes. Since Heinrich Heine, the figure of
the intellectual has gained in status along with the classical configuration of
the liberal public sphere. However, that depends on implausible social and
cultural assumptions, mainly the existence of alert journalism, with newspapers
of reference and mass media capable of directing the interest of the majority
toward topics that are relevant to the formation of political opinion; and also
the existence of a reading population that is interested in politics, educated,
accustomed to the conflictive process of forming opinions, and which takes the
time to read quality, independent press.
Nowadays,
this infrastructure is no longer intact, although as far as I know it still
exists in countries such as Spain, France and Germany. But even there, the
splintering effect of internet has changed the role of traditional media,
particularly for the younger generations. Even before the centrifugal and
atomic tendencies of the new media came into force, the commercialization of
public attention had already triggered the disintegration of the public sphere.
An example is the US
and its exclusive use of private TV channels. Now, new means of
communication have a much more insidious model of commercialization in which
the goal is not explicitly the consumer’s attention, but the economic
exploitation of the user’s private profile. They rob customers’ personal data
without their knowledge in order to manipulate them more effectively, at times
even with perverse political ends, as in the
recent Facebook scandal.
Q. Despite its obvious advantages, do you
think the internet is encouraging a new kind of illiteracy?
A. You
mean the aggressive controversies, the bubbles and Donald Trump’s lies in his
tweets? You can’t even say that this individual is below the political cultural
level of his country. Trump is permanently destroying that level. From the time
the printed page was invented, turning everyone into a potential reader, it
took centuries until the entire population could read. Internet is turning us
all into potential authors and it’s only a couple of decades old. Perhaps with
time we will learn to manage the social networks in a civilized manner.
Internet has already opened up millions of useful niches of subcultures where
trustworthy information and sound opinions are being exchanged. – not just the
scientific blogs whose academic work is amplified by this means, but also, for
example, [forums] for patients who suffer a rare disease and can now get in
touch with others in the same situation on another continent to share advice
and experience.
There are undoubtedly great communication benefits and not just
for increasing the speed of stock trading and speculation. I am too old to
judge the cultural impulse that the new media is giving birth to. But it annoys
me that it’s the first media revolution in the history of mankind to first and
foremost serve economic as opposed to cultural ends... read more:
https://elpais.com/elpais/2018/05/07/inenglish/1525683618_145760.html
