Opinion | My Time With Jürgen Habermas, Europe's 'last Intellectual'

My first meeting with Jürgen Habermas, who died last week at the age of 96, was inauspicious.

It was the summer of 1992, and I had just arrived in Frankfurt am Main after three, somewhat plodding, years in California at law school.

The legal profession was experiencing a kind of revival at the time, becoming more accessible to ambitious newcomers like myself. Nearly all of my classmates at Stanford Law School were eager to find jobs at law firms that followed well-established paths.

I had different plans. At the age of 24, my firm and un-ironic hope was to become an academic.

I wrote a letter to Habermas during my last semester at law school, essentially asking if I could study with him in Frankfurt at Goethe University, where he had become, by nearly every account, the world’s most significant and influential living philosopher.

My interest in the Frankfurt School — the group of thinkers and writers that had coalesced in the 1920s and 1930s around Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and, by different accounts, many others, including Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse — had been piqued during my college years at Haverford College in Pennsylvania in the late 1980s.

My professors Mark Gould, Richard Bernstein, and Kathleen Wright, among others at Haverford, introduced me to intellectual traditions from pragmatism and psychoanalysis to the Frankfurt School of social thought, as well as the work of 19th and 20th century giants of political and social theory, including Niklas Luhmann, Talcott Parsons, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida — and Jürgen Habermas.

Some time after I sent my letter, a response arrived in the mail from Habermas’s assistant. Her tone suggested that she was unenthused, likely worn down by the incessant clawing of students to find time with Habermas. I was American and essentially unremarkable to him. Gould and Bernstein, however, had kindly vouched for me, and with their endorsement I decided to make my way to Germany to enroll at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt.

I bought a one-way ticket on a Pakistan International Airlines flight from New York to Frankfurt, before it travelled on to Islamabad. The principal virtue of this particular flight was that it was the least expensive means of crossing the ocean. I packed light and had a single, particularly reliable pair of leather shoes with me.

The prospect of meeting Habermas that summer inspired a certain anxious anticipation — I viewed him as one of the greatest and most significant living thinkers.

On the morning of the planned meeting, I walked from my dormitory to his office, which was located at the Institute for Social Research in the northwest part of the city known as Bockenheim.

As I crossed a street, I noticed a German woman waiting patiently at the crosswalk. The sign made clear not to cross, and despite the fact that there was not a car in sight, she had submitted obediently waiting for the light to change — as was the custom among nearly all Germans at the time and many to this day — without even a hint of protest or discomfort. Her resignation was thorough and complete. I remember thinking of Heinrich Heine’s remark that Germans walk around “as if they swallowed the stick with which they were once beaten.”

When I arrived at Habermas’s office, there were at least two dozen students and aspiring students milling about and standing in the hallway, all of whom were waiting for an audience with the professor. Every so often, the wait was punctuated by someone emerging from his office, often in a state of not-so-thinly veiled distress. A few had tears in their eyes.

After an hour or so, the door opened and his all-powerful assistant beckoned me; she sat in a sort of antechamber through which one had to pass in order to enter his private office. The assistant had warned me to speak English; my German was insufficient at the time.

When I entered, he was surrounded by smoke and books. It was clear that the box of cigarillos on his desk, possibly neatly wrapped Montecristos, were routinely replenished.

Our first conversation that summer afternoon was substantive yet fairly brief. As he sat and leaned back in his chair, we talked mostly about Talcott Parsons, who was born in 1909 in Colorado Springs and would become a towering figure in American sociology.

Habermas had little patience for what he routinely and unsparingly derided as “idiots” and “half-idiots” on either the right or the left; he was unforgivingly critical of both sides in a way that would almost feel unnatural today among what passes for public intellectuals. It would indeed be jarring for many among our current commentariat to be exposed to such an even-handed capacity and instinct for identifying inconsistent thought and a lack of intellectual rigor, no matter where it emerged on the political spectrum.

I left that first meeting feeling modestly encouraged, and over the next several months dedicated myself to improving my German, which I had first studied at the Goethe Institute in Paris during a stint abroad in my final year at law school.

My knowledge of the language progressed more briskly after I became involved, first professionally and then not long after romantically, with an extraordinarily compelling and beautiful doctoral student at the university.

Susanne had grown up in a Lutheran family in North Rhine-Westphalia, not far from the Dutch border and it was through her and because of her that I found something approaching an academic and emotional home during those years of study. Perhaps one of the mistakes of my life was not saying yes when she asked to marry me.

My impression of Habermas that would develop over the years, through dozens of meetings in the 1990s to discuss my research and evolving dissertation, was that he had a certain reverence, perhaps undisclosed to or at least shielded from subsets of his colleagues, for the American project — our quite radical experiment in this new republic building a nation in which belonging did not hinge on either blood or soil.

The madness and speed of Germany’s descent in the 1930s had spawned an industry of remembrance and self-flagellation among leftist thinkers at the time. Habermas, however, while responsible in large part for our confrontation and reckoning with humanity’s nearly existential failure during the war, remained skeptical of the worst and most pernicious elements of the left, which in its modern form has become wholly untethered from outcomes and indeed unconcerned with the practical effects of its ideology. He remained allergic to un-rigorous thought, no matter its political allegiance.

The theater of the discourse, for many, became more important than what was happening in the world, which is that the profound successes of the progressive left in the middle part of the 20th century in advancing the interests of an American underclass had descended into a sort of imperial overreach — an obsession with theory at the complete expense of practice and results.

Habermas advocated for what he described as Verfassungspatriotismus, or constitutional patriotism — the view that one could be loyal to a republic while setting aside the more parochial and tribal affiliations that had dominated human history since the advent of the species. A permanent end to a distasteful and unenlightened nationalism in all of its forms, we were assured, was near.

The vision was noble yet, in hindsight it seems clear, strikingly premature and misguided. In 2011, the German magazine Der Spiegel described him as “the last European,” as the continental government for which he had advocated so fiercely came under increasingly sustained assault.

His hope for a sort of disembodied political identity, untethered from the inconvenient particularities of family and culture, represented an aspirational cosmopolitanism that has proven insufficient to animate allegiance in the modern era. Put differently, he believed in the possibility of a purely rational public discourse. I believed, and still believe, such a discourse must be rooted in a more corporeal and traditional — and indeed national and cultural — source.

He may yet be vindicated, but I fear not in our time.

In the years after our first meeting in Frankfurt, I continued work on my dissertation, which concerned an obscure critique of Parsons, focused on the human mind’s instinct towards aggression and its implications for our deployment of jargon as a means of exercising power over others.

There were diversions, certainly, both professional and romantic.

I developed a side business of sorts, asking German colleagues who made trips to Zurich to bring me back Cuban cigars; the prices and taxes were more forgiving across the Swiss border. I kept half of the cigars for myself and sold the rest to bankers in Frankfurt.

After a number of years, I eventually developed a firmer vision of the shape of the critique that would become my dissertation and drafted 40 pages or so, in German, that I thought worthy of submission to Habermas for his review.

On August 10, 2000, I received a three-page typed letter from him, forwarded by Karola Brede via fax, critiquing various aspects of the draft in detail but also declining to continue on as my adviser. He disagreed with my approach to the literature.

It was a lengthy and methodical dissection of my work. He wrote, for example, that “you must more clearly articulate how your conception differs from the Parsonian model of biologically rooted drives that have been culturally shaped — drives which, for the sociologist, become relevant only at the level of interpreted needs.”

But he had a broader critique as well.

“You simply cannot compete with literary critics and theorists [who have recently weighed in on this subject],” he wrote.

His rejection, in the end, was unequivocal. I had spent several years in his colloquium at the Institute for Social Research and even longer refining my understanding of the language. His decision came as an utter shock and was wounding. The sting would linger for years.

And yet it was his very willingness to be so productively unsparing that reminds me of what we have lost as a culture.

Karola Brede, a sociology professor at the Sigmund Freud Institute with whom Habermas worked closely, kindly stepped in to supervise my dissertation. And nearly two years later, on November 14, 2002, with Brede’s wise counsel and support, I received my doctorate.