Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida On 9/11

European philosophers go where U. S. philosophers fear to tread. If this is (fair & balanced) reason and truth, so be it.

[x Philadelphia Inquirer]
Can philosophers help handle terror?
By Carlin Romano

Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues With Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida
By Giovanna Borradori
University of Chicago Press. 208 pp. $25

Could we be in so much al-Qaeda trouble that we need help from - philosophers?

Does any terror-alert level stretch that high? Is there, above "Severe" Red, an incandescent "We're Desperate for Some Eternal Truths!" Purple?

Without a doubt, huge issues of conceptual analysis, entwined with policy choices, confront the international community today. Consider three:

Since suicide bombing looks like a growth industry among political insurgents, is "innocence" increasingly a defunct moral concept? Should one support the Palestinian resistance to Israel despite its triggering of a worldwide, copycat degradation of innocence?

Now that modern communication enables a government's crimes against its people to be quickly known (Kosovo, Iraq, Zimbabwe), should "sovereignty" - a protection of de facto governments rooted in the divine right of kings - still shield evil rulers and obstruct humanitarian outsiders from intervening?

In an era of growing global travel and expansive notions of human rights, is there any limit to "tolerance" as a national political value? Should a country such as France, whose secular civil society now faces pressure from the religious wishes of its large Muslim community, change its traditions to accommodate new arrivals?

By analogy to a simple thought - "Spot a fire, call the fire department!" - we might think, "Spot a conceptual controversy, call the philosophy department!" Yet there's a problem.

With some admirable exceptions, America's philosophy professors either avoid such up-to-the-minute controversies or discuss them in such rarefied venues and insider argot that hardly anyone else pays attention.

European academic philosophers, by contrast, often vent about politics at the drop of a cigarette or the offer of an op-ed column, though too frequently in a prolix style heavy on airy abstractions.

Undeterred, Giovanna Borradori, a Vassar College philosophy professor who lives in Manhattan, experienced 9/11 as a New Yorker 50 blocks from ground zero, and believes in the "scholarly interview" as an important form, aims straight at the top. In Philosophy in a Time of Terror, she nervily places the microphone before Europe's two most famous living philosophers - Germany's Jürgen Habermas and France's Jacques Derrida - and grills them on 9/11 and related issues.

Habermas (1929 - ), heir to the so-called Frankfurt School tradition that criticizes modern capitalist societies, is more associated with political philosophy than his French peer. Habermas enjoys enormous respect both internationally and in Germany. For decades, he's advocated an ideal of democratic, republican society in which citizens rationally deliberate and argue all important issues.

A regular contributor over the years to top newspapers, this committed public intellectual has long urged postwar German thinkers not to shirk responsibility for the country's brutal "unmasterable past," and to adopt "constitutional patriotism" - loyalty to the liberal principles of the nation's postwar constitution - as the only acceptable glue binding the German people.

Habermas' appeal to many readers rests in his systematic thinking about politics on an international scale, his Enlightenment values that carry forward Immanuel Kant's 18th-century writing on "perpetual peace" and the possibility of international citizenship.

Derrida (1930 - ), Algerian-born and Jewish, owes his international fame to his method of "deconstruction." In principle, it requires calling into question virtually every word and concept, and particularly binary distinctions (e.g., male and female) that a philosopher might wish to use. The aim? To show the contingent meaning and instability of words and ideas that most people take for granted, and of truth itself.

Derrida's many fans - more numerous outside France than within - think him an ingenious master at spotlighting nuances of ideas and paradoxical insights in a punning, arabesque style. His many critics - including a substantial number who see him as a verbose charlatan - tend to support his hostile stance toward the French philosophical tradition's deceptive clarity, but otherwise dismiss his work as a curiosity of Parisian intellectual life.

In that milieu, the complaint goes, reverence for masters of thought allows those with a registered license to ramble endlessly and confusingly, dropping a coherent thought here and there.

These interviews and lucid commentaries by Borradori - who keeps asking good, precise questions of her subjects despite receiving circuitous answers - reflect almost all her interviewees' familiar tics. They demonstrate that while the duo offer some ideas worth attention in the ongoing debate about terrorism and the shape of the post-Cold War world, both remain too burdened by chronic philosopher's ailments (such as a numbingly didactic tone) to be effective real-world players in that debate.

Habermas' most interesting point is that terrorism may be accelerating the advent of Kant's cosmopolitan vision of world citizenry. National sovereignty, Habermas contends, continues to weaken. As we've seen lately, the U.S. unilateralism that Habermas opposes, and its failure to pacify Iraq, has forced the United States back into the arms of the United Nations.

Less persuasive is Habermas' belief that international terrorists lack "realistic goals." If terrorists finally succeed in assassinating Pakistan's pro-Western President Pervez Musharraf after multiple failed attempts, some of those destabilization goals might suddenly seem quite realistic.

Habermas' trust in the legitimizing power of international organizations also ignores a puzzle in democratic theory posed by the flawed reality of these institutions: Why should procedurally democratic judgments from an organization such as the U.N., composed of a mishmash of states - many of them not individually democratic or legitimate - be more legitimizing than the judgment of a coalition of democratic states?

Derrida's most useful remarks, by contrast, require one to wade through enormously self-indulgent introductory dithering, not to mention 25-clause sentences. What, after all, is an "event"? What is a "major event"? Was 9/11 an "event" at all? What does referring to "events" by a date signify?

With typical glibness, Derrida comments that something "terrible took place on September 11, and in the end we don't know what."

Derrida's discovery of abstruse metaphysical difficulty in our shorthand use of "9/11" confirms Cicero's enduring quip: "There's nothing so ridiculous but some philosopher said it." Derrida appears oblivious to the headline writer's common-sense grasp that "9/11" conveniently pulled together three geographically distinct events in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. "Dec. 7" didn't come to designate "Pearl Harbor" because of the single setting of FDR's "date which will live in infamy."

Yet Derrida also asks questions more conventional minds don't. Suppose we knew that another 9/11 would never happen. How would it change the lessons we draw from that day? It's an instructive thought experiment. Similarly, his suggestion that "hospitality" might be a wiser attitude toward "others" than "tolerance" in a post-9/11 world provides a fresh angle of vision.

A color-coded scheme to alert readers that European philosophers might attack your peace of mind would hold up a rectangle of stately gray to signal Habermas' approach, and perhaps brandish a trapezoid of seaweed green to announce Derrida's. Both come with lots of "chatter," as intelligence analysts say, and you have to sift it pretty closely to extract the useful nuggets.

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