The German Genius

meaning emerges not by access to some “inner realm” but by the “fusion of horizons” ( Horizontverschmelzung ). 62
    Gadamer therefore concluded that the humanities, the Geisteswissenschaften , could never achieve the methodological footing of the “sciences of nature,” that such an attempt was misguided. He even thought that the natural sciences claimed too much for their method, that understanding was an ongoing process with no final completion, a stance that marked Gadamer as in the same mold as the later Wittgenstein and Thomas Kuhn. Eventually, he arrived at a model for understanding that said it was like a “conversation”: it takes place in language and each brings his or her understanding to the conversation or negotiation.
    A final aspect was his exploration of culture, in particular “the relevance of the beautiful,” in which he considered “art as play, symbol and festival.” 63 He thought that the meaning, or role, or function of art often got lost in the modern world, and that play—the activity of disinterested pleasure—was also overlooked. 64 The symbolic role of art was to open up for us “a space in which both the world, and our own place in the world, is brought to light as a single but inexhaustibly rich totality,” where we can “dwell” out of ordinary time. The disinterested pleasure we take in art is an aid to escaping ordinary time and moving into “autonomous time.” The final quality of the successful artwork, as festival, also takes us out of ordinary time and opens us up “to the true possibility of community.” 65
    Gadamer engaged in two famous debates, with Jacques Derrida and with Jürgen Habermas, on whether we can ever transcend history and how this affects criticism of contemporary society, whether such criticism can ever be truly objective (and therefore what validity it can have). The debate with Derrida was inconclusive, but as a result of the other debate, Gadamer and Habermas became good friends, and the former helped secure the latter’s appointment to a professorship at Heidelberg.
    T HE A CHIEVEMENTS OF R EFLECTION
     
    Habermas, however, was much more interested in politics than Gadamer, and more critical of his own country. Born in 1929 in Gummersbach, Habermas was the son of the chairman of the Cologne Chamber of Industry and the grandson of a pastor. 66 The Nuremberg trials had a big effect on the teenage Habermas, and he became especially critical of his own country, in particular its scholars. He studied philosophy at Göttingen from 1949 to 1954 and was alarmed to observe that most of the professors made no allowance in their teaching for the events of 1933–45. Accordingly, he first put pen to paper in a critique of Heidegger and his failure to repudiate the ideas of Hitler. An interest in Marxism led Habermas to both Lukács’s Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein ( History and Class Consciousness ) and Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung ( Dialectic of Enlightenment ), his first encounter with the critical school with which he was himself to be so much identified. He taught at Heidelberg before taking a chair in philosophy and sociology at Frankfurt in 1964; in 1971 he took up a position at the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg, near Munich. During those years he became well known internationally as a theorist of the student protest movement.
    Habermas’s written output has been prodigious—politics, philosophy, the evolution of society, the role of religion and the social sciences in modern life, Freud, even the role of child psychology in civic life. But his most innovative and enduring contributions have been in the realm of critical theory and “communicative action.”
    The aim of critical theory, for Habermas, is to facilitate the understanding of communicative action—the way different aspects of society link with each other, often in unconscious and unintended ways, so as to enable cultural evolution, a key idea. 67 He began, in Theorie und Praxis ( Theory and Practice ), with the observation of four historical developments that rendered Marxism obsolete. The most important of these is that the state is no longer separated from the economy as it was in the days of laissez-faire capitalism, but plays a crucial role in regulation and enablement, meaning that the functioning of the state now requires careful critical attention. A second crucial observation is that rising standards of living in advanced societies