Romantik. Eine deutsche Affäre

"When Rüdiger Safranski had completed his doctorate at the Freie Unversität, Berlin, he wished to write a habilitation thesis on the topic of the German Romantic E.T.A. Hoffman. The editor at Hanser to whom he offered the idea replied: ‘If you write a readable book about E.T.A. Hoffman we shall print it, and if you write a habilitation thesis for the university, we shan’t’. Safranski chose the former course, wrote a literary biography at a time when academia was withdrawing more and more into its ivory tower, scored a tremendous popular success with later monographs on Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Schiller, and now appears frequently on philosophical talk-shows, evoking no little envy and resentment from fellow academics.

His latest book is divided into two sections, the first on the German Romantic Movement of the early nineteenth century, the second on its ideological tendencies and after-effects. He offers as a basic definition of German Romanticism Novalis’s famous formulation: ‘By lending the commonplace a lofty meaning, the customary an aura of mystery…, the finite a semblance of the infinite, I romanticise it’ – adding, to emphasise the rediscovery of the numinous, his own adaptation of Clauswitz’s definition of war: ‘Romanticism is a continuation of religion by other means’.

He is of the opinion that Romanticism ‘is not just a German phenomenon but has assumed a special impress in Germany, leading to a flight from reality into the Self and the distant past and to what György Lukács called ‘the German malaise’ and Helmuth Plessner ‘the belated nation’; and from this follows an important debate on whether Romanticism contributed to preparing the ground for Nazism. He finds that Romanticism contained no traces of the biologism and racism of the Nazi Movement, but sees to what extent a romantic mentality can fall prey to political extremism, so that even the students’ revolt of 1968 is to some extent a manifestation of it. He concludes that the Romantic Movement as an epoch is past, but romanticism as a mindset has remained – adding as a warning that whenever it flows into politics, it should contain a strong admixture of realism. A warning to be heeded, and perhaps not by Germans alone, on a theme with still topical and unsettling ramifications."

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Challenging Habermas' response to the European Union democratic deficit

Jonathan Bowman

Jürgen Habermas' response to the European Union democratic deficit calls for a minimal threshold of democratic legislation through an explicit constitutional founding. He defends a model of freedom as autonomous self-determination by proposing to tie basic rights in the EU to a univocal form of European-wide popular sovereignty. Instead of constructing a common European political identity, I appeal to the novel democratic potential of institutions in the EU such as the Open Method of Coordination for mediating overlapping sovereignties in accord with freedom as non-domination. The concluding example of basic rights to effective participation for immigrants and permanent minorities illustrates the strengths of Iris Young's and James Bohman's republican views of non-domination over Habermas' call for a European-wide collective willing.

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Read key continental philosophy articles in EJP

"We are pleased to offer free access to selected key articles published over in
European Journal of Philosophy on continental philosophy. To access these
articles, please click on the article titles below!"



Outside ethics

by Raymond Geuss



Religion in the public sphere

by Jürgen Habermas


Hegel's critique of pure mechanism and the philosophical appeal of the 'logic'
project

by James Kreines


Kant and non-conceptual content

by Robert Hanna

History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965

Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965, Polity Press, 2006, 272pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780745630137.

Reviewed by David Ingram, Loyola University Chicago

"As a student-activist during the Vietnam War my first introduction to Adorno and Critical Theory came by way of my philosophical apprenticeship under Herbert Marcuse, whose work I studied assiduously, despite his own modest advice directing me to read classical figures in the philosophy of history, notably Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, with an occasional nod to contemporary figures, including Sartre (who was still much in vogue) and several of his own former colleagues, uppermost being Adorno. At the time this advice was given I was too ignorant of Adorno's life and thought to appreciate fully the irony of Marcuse's gesture. Marcuse had been embraced as the guru of the very student movement that had scorned Adorno for allegedly being a mere academic pedant who was afraid to commit himself wholeheartedly to the revolutionary task of building a new emancipated society. As is well known, Adorno's last course on dialectical thinking, which he began in the summer semester of 1969, never progressed beyond a few lectures to its central theme due to frequent interruptions by students in attendance. That's a shame, because the theme in question -- the classical Marxian theme concerning the relationship between theory and practice and specifically the relationship between history (and philosophy of history) and revolutionary practice -- was obviously pertinent to their concerns. Yet one need go no further than the lecture series on history and freedom delivered in 1964-1965 to discern the core of Adorno's argument on this topic -- a topic that emerged with considerable urgency in Adornos' thought as early as 1932, when he taught a course on Lessing's Education of the Human Race with Paul Tillich, who also directed his second dissertation, and continued up until his last writings, 'On Subject and Object' and 'Marginalia to Theory and Practice,' both of which contain material that doubtless would have been included in that last lecture series."

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Download the top 5 articles

Download the top 5 articles from Volume 13 of International Journal of Philosophical Studies

The International Journal of Philosophical Studies publishes academic articles of the highest quality in all areas of philosophy. Routledge are pleased to give you the opportunity to download the top 5 downloads from Volume 13 of the journal for free. The top 5 downloads from Volume 13 of IJPS were:

The Nature of Transcendental Arguments
Mark Sacks


Suffering Injustice: Misrecognition as Moral Injury in Critical Theory
J. M. Bernstein

We, Heirs of Enlightenment: Critical Theory, Democracy and Social
Science
James Bohman

When conscience calls, will Dasein answer? Heideggerian authenticity and
the possibility of ethical life
Mariana Ortega

Husserl's concept of the 'transcendental person': Another look at the
Husserl-Heidegger relationship
Sebastian Luft

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Staying Alive: Adorno and Habermas on Self-Preservation under Late Capitalism

Abstract

I explore the points of contention between Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas that account for their divergent claims about self-preservation, and maintain that Adorno has the more defensible view. Although both thinkers agree that the task of material self-preservation has largely been assumed by the welfare state and the capitalist economy, Adorno views this development as destructive and self-destructive while Habermas thinks it has benefited the lifeworld by relieving it of the burden of materially reproducing itself. Unlike Habermas, who rejects the idea of a collective subject, Adorno believes that only such a subject, conscious of its instinctual impulses and directing them toward the preservation of humanity and the environing world on which it depends for its survival, would make self-preservation rational.

Rethinking Marxism, Volume 18, Issue 3 July 2006 , pages 433 - 447

Habermas and Foucault: Deliberative Democracy and Strategic State Analysis

Contemporary Political Theory, Volume 6, Number 2, May 2007 , pp. 218-245(28)

Abstract:

The paper explores ways to bring the approaches of J. Habermas and M. Foucault into a productive dialogue. In particular, it argues that Habermas's concept of deliberative democracy can and should be complemented by a strategic analysis of the state as it is found in Foucault's studies of governmentality. While deliberative democracy is a critical theory of democracy that provides normative knowledge about the legitimacy of a given system, it is not well equipped to generate knowledge that could inform the choice of strategies employed by (collective) actors from civil society — especially deliberative democrats — vis-à-vis the state to pursue their goals. This kind of strategic knowledge about strengths and vulnerabilities of a given state is provided by Foucault's reading of the state as driven by varying governing rationalities. Since, particularly in his later works, Habermas finds strategic action normatively acceptable under certain circumstances, I argue that societal actors could profit from an integrated approach that incorporates Foucault's strategic analysis into the framework of deliberative democracy. This approach would yield critical knowledge of both a normative and strategic, action-guiding nature