The world after Habermas | Culture | EUROtoday

Many eulogies can be written about Jürgen Habermas, probably the most distinguished member of the second technology of the Frankfurt School. It can be mentioned, fairly rightly, that he’s the final of the classics, that nobody like him has conceptualized the twentieth century, the period that in Germany they known as the “Republic of Bonn.” No one was so influential within the understanding of that world that’s fading and that’s now not ours.

I’m going to permit myself, out of respect, admiration and friendship, to level out some issues that had no place in Habermas’s monumental mental work, what he couldn’t perceive or didn’t match into his classes. Habermas didn’t combine feminism and id politics into his psychological universe, sure dimensions of the complexity of up to date society, the overwhelming energy of digitalization, the expansion of reactionary actions, the lack of Europe to do what everybody is aware of it has to do. The concept that in an excellent state of affairs of dialogue “the force of the best argument” prevails appears to us an train in naivety in an period during which the reality issues much less to individuals than we thought. This will not be a reproach however fairly the alternative: a reward for that mental naivety from which it was very troublesome for him to grasp the disruptive forces or negativity in historical past.

I bear in mind a dialog at his home in Starnberg during which I, maybe too boldly, however with all of the respect of which I’m succesful, warned him of those realities that had been outdoors his mental building and inspired him to consider them. He answered me saying: you, the third technology, must do this. I do not know if we can, however I’m satisfied that we are going to solely do it if we take as a reference, even whether it is to transcend it in some facets, that immense, balanced and complex mental building that he leaves us as a legacy.