Jurgen Habermas, who died last week at 96, had little tolerance for ideological laziness on either side of the political spectrum - a quality his former student Alexander Karp says would feel "almost unnatural today among what passes for public intellectuals."
The Palantir Technologies CEO and co-founder shared these observations in a memoir published by Politico, as reported by "Hvylya".
Karp, who studied under Habermas at Goethe University in Frankfurt through much of the 1990s, wrote that the philosopher routinely and "unsparingly derided" both "idiots" and "half-idiots" on the right and left alike. Habermas remained deeply skeptical of what Karp describes as "the most pernicious elements of the left, which in its modern form has become wholly untethered from outcomes."
The philosopher was responsible "in large part for our confrontation and reckoning with humanity's nearly existential failure during the war," Karp wrote - yet never gave the left a free pass. The progressive movement's great mid-century successes in advancing the American underclass had, in Karp's telling, "descended into a sort of imperial overreach - an obsession with theory at the complete expense of practice and results."
Habermas possessed a rare "capacity and instinct for identifying inconsistent thought and a lack of intellectual rigor, no matter where it emerged on the political spectrum," Karp wrote. Today's commentariat, he suggested, would find such even-handedness "jarring."
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