On Lost Coffee Houses
“The obituaries will honour Habermas as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. But the work that will endure longest is the one that began in the coffee-houses of Georgian London, and whose deepest insight was, in the end, a conservative one: that the conditions of rational public life are fragile, historically contingent, and not easily recovered once lost.”
Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri - https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/jurgen-habermas-lost-world-the-coffee-house-and-the-public-sphere/. I often found myself starting with Habermas’s work, if only to move beyond it in various ways. Fabbri’s sense that there’s something fragile under consideration is right I think, and it is fair to say that there was much in recent technological developments that made Habermas’s view of the public sphere seem nostalgic.
“Social media, he argued, had shattered the already weakened public sphere into self-enclosed fragments: echo-chambers in which opinion circulates without challenge, algorithms that reward outrage over argument, and a collapse of the distinction between the private and the public that the 18th-century coffee-house had been careful to maintain. The mediating institutions on which representative democracy depended, above all a professional press governed by norms of factuality, were being hollowed out from within. It was the re-feudalisation thesis restated for the age of the smartphone, and it carried the unmistakable tone of a man who had watched the culture he most admired recede still further from reach.”
However, I think that there remained a hidden resilience in Habermas’s notion of communicative action that is grounded not in abstract concepts like reason or the public sphere, but in a powerful human need to connect to each other in meaningful relationships that are open to questions. As Arendt saw, the condition of mass society was loneliness, and this should most worry those tracking bellweathers of democratic unhealth. Said another way, maybe it is never too late for coffee.
