Jürgen Habermas was the “defender of reason” – and the most important living German-speaking philosopher. He has now died at the age of 96.
March 15, 2026, 05:42March 15, 2026, 05:42
Christoph Bopp / ch media
In the person of Jürgen Habermas we are losing a world-class thinker, both as a scientist and as an intellectual. Born in 1929 and raised in the handball town of Gummersbach, he had experienced National Socialism in the youth organizations; he no longer had to go to the front; he had apparently gone into hiding.
Jürgen Habermas was the founder of the theory of communicative action.Image: keystone
At some point, however, he had a vague feeling that “something had gone wrong” in the Federal Republic even after the restart in 1945. It differed significantly from the “inauthenticity” with which Martin Heidegger had endowed existence in general. According to him, ever since the Greeks, humanity has taken a wrong turn into “forgetfulness of being” and the desert of “planetary technology”. Habermas meant it – as would later become clear – in more concrete terms.
In any case, it was the confrontation with Heidegger that brought the young Habermas onto the stage. Because Heidegger had barely emerged from his denazification process and published an old lecture from 1935, which spoke of the “inner truth and greatness of the movement”. This undoubtedly means National Socialism. The doctoral student Habermas thinks: That doesn’t work. And makes this clear in an article in the FAZ. This was also the moment when he realized that politics and philosophy were not as separate areas as they had previously seemed to him.
He was too active for Max Horkheimer
And it was also the moment to say goodbye to philosophy, which whispered about mysterious wisdom that was only accessible to it. Philosophy in a reduced form – from now on nothing other than a sober work on and with concepts and in a similar language. Odo Marquard – never at a loss for sayings – didn’t take Habermas’s situation badly: “… the philosopher is no longer the expert for the whole thing – is the stuntman of the specialist, i.e. his double for the dangerous.”
Jürgen Habermas at a conference in Athens in 2013.Image: keystone
At his next station, as assistant to Theodor W. Adorno at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, there would be no shortage of opportunities for such “stunts”. The young philosopher was too active for institute director Max Horkheimer – to say the least. The grandees of critical theory had made themselves comfortable in their critical full professorships and no longer had a great need for change. Horkheimer wrote to Adorno that it had already been established before the exile that there was nothing wrong with the revolution. “He should do his Marxism somewhere, but not with us,” he decided.
And so Habermas went to Marburg to complete his habilitation (“Structural Change in the Public”), but later came back after a detour to Starnberg (Max Planck Institute for Research into the Living Conditions of the Scientific and Technical World). He experienced the turbulent 1968s in Frankfurt.
Unlike the student activists, he did not consider the situation revolutionary. Born with a speech impediment (cleft palate, hare lip), which had to be treated surgically, people made fun of him at this very stage. It hit him. Otherwise he seemed to be fine with it.
Forced into a shorthand formula, one could say: Habermas was always a defender of reason. The use of reason is enlightenment, Kant said. After 1945 this seemed problematic. The aforementioned Horkheimer/Adorno had described their dialectic. Reason is reduced to its instrumental form (What means can I best achieve my purpose?) and has become an instrument of domination not only over nature, but also over people. “The completely enlightened earth shines in the sign of triumphant calamity.”
He was the defender of reason
Despite everything, Habermas insisted on its emancipatory core. He wanted to continue the “project of modernity”. Can there not, he asked, still be a theory of society based on reason? Or to put it another way: Can reason, disenchanted in this way, still provide a yardstick for criticizing society? Can modern society be analyzed (“reconstructed”) in such a way that it is a critical theory of this society?
So he still became a critical theorist (“critical” written in lower case). You can analyze a society in an objectifying and explanatory manner, as colleague Niklas Luhmann did. He inserted the last Lego brick and announced: “The system is ready, that’s how society works.” But you can also ask yourself how people as a society have reacted to challenges and problems. And whether there were or would be other ways to organize oneself socially.
Following Hegel, Marx saw work as something that integrates society. In the capitalist mode of production he found the exploited and alienated worker and the proletarian became the revolutionary subject and the change of society for the better a historical necessity.
However, modern post-war society could no longer be described in this way. What was crucial was that there was democracy and political rights. Habermas himself described the difference like this:
“Instead of relying on the reason of the productive forces, ultimately natural science and technology, I trust in the productive power of communication.”
The “Theory of Communicative Action”
The path to the main work, the “Theory of Communicative Action” (1981), was clear. There were still a few curves on the way there, but the communicative common sense was installed. At the same time, there was the “linguistic turn” in philosophy. Knowledge no longer takes place in singular consciousness or self-consciousness, but in dialogue through language. Human language provides access to the world, not imagination.
While Kant had locked up reason in the skull of an individual subject in his conception of the Enlightenment, the modern sciences provide procedural rationality (theory and experiment) in accordance with their methods. The elements of reason themselves (the theoretical, the practical, the political, the aesthetic, etc.) have differentiated themselves. There are now experts for everything; the omniscient universal philosopher has had his day. It also manifests itself in the respective “technical languages” that laypeople do not understand. Habermas, the sociologist, has also been accused of this.
It’s not power that counts, but the better argument
“Since we have been having a conversation” (Hölderlin), a network of shared assumptions, behaviors, rules of thumb and many other unconscious predispositions has emerged in human interaction, the extent and importance of which may only really dawn on us today when we notice that the lively chattering artificial intelligences do not have this at their disposal. They lack what Habermas would then call “the lifeworld”.
All rationality is rooted in it. In modern times, individual spheres have become more differentiated and developed their own “rationalities”. Habermas calls this “the system”. In politics and business, for example, the “media” has gained power and money. They are called “media” because, to a certain extent, they save the detour through linguistic negotiation. Power and money are “shortcuts” that you can use to get your way. Nothing works without a living environment. But the system became more and more powerful. Habermas should then talk about the “colonization of the living world through the system”. And you know what is meant.
If you start with language, it quickly becomes clear that speaking subjects are always in a connection with other subjects (intersubjectivity). And that this actually applies to all discourses, especially to the cognitive ones (the relation to the world of knowledge), but also to the moral ones. Anyone who takes part in the discourse must accept that statements must be justified and that the quality of the justification ultimately determines their validity. Not power or more money, but the better argument. This communicative reason was only truly released in modern times.
When will the discourse come to an end?
The well-known keywords such as “discourse free of domination”, “consensus” or “the compulsion of the better argument” and similar ones not only describe the conditions for the possibility of communicative reasonableness, but can also be seen as construction sites that need to be worked on.
Habermas is also clear that one cannot discuss for so long until one reaches a consensus, a solution that in principle everyone “could” agree to (which would be theoretically required), but in reality the discourse always comes to an end somewhere. (This is the moment when “vote!” is shouted in the community meeting.)
This “could” is where the problem lies. Who decides what is “reasonable”? Reason is also a fundamentally open process and reasonableness is an open attitude. This also shows the aporia that one can find it “reasonable” to reject overly totalitarian or absolute “models of reason”.
Anyone who gets involved in reason will never get anywhere. He has to accept that what would be “sensible” may never become reality. The “ideal speaking situation” or something similar will not necessarily arise at some point in history. And specifically, you have to be aware that it doesn’t work without people’s participation.
If democracy should be about more than just the games of who is allowed to be in power, it requires a willingness to participate, to listen, to reach consensus and to compromise. And that willingness is something you have to strive for. It doesn’t arise by itself and certainly not in the bubbles of social media or in a zone that is occasionally “flooded with nonsense”.
Political developments worried him
Jürgen Habermas’ uniqueness also made him difficult. He did not develop his theories on a greenfield basis, but rather incorporated everything that was still available in the way of discourse. “Everything” should be taken as literally as possible. As a philosopher, anyone who doesn’t want to “whisper” has a duty to deal with what others have thought. Habermas did that and accepted the jumble of footnotes and the accusation that his colleague Sloterdijk made to him: he had not had a “single original thought” in his life.
He was much more concerned in his last years with the feeling – as he confessed to the writer Philipp Felsch – that “everything that had made up his life was currently being lost.” Habermas was an optimistic person. But current developments, not just political ones, affected his hopes.
When I’ve thought about Jürgen Habermas lately, I always think of Johann Sebastian Bach at the end of his life. Both were absolute world champions in their art, but less and less people were interested in them. (aargauerzeitung.ch)