The death of Jürgen Habermas is an irreplaceable void. He was the last of the great philosophers to emerge in post-war Europe in 1945. His intellectual ambitions were similar to those of the great thinkers of German illustration. He read the criticism formulated by the first representatives of the Frankfurt School on the idea of reason and devoted his thoughts show civilized rational thinking paper again.
Like Adorno and Horkheimer, they recognized that reason can be turned into an instrument of oppression. From a perspective similar to that of Emmanuel Lévinas, he prepared the ramp to Auschwitz following the journey of Ulysses. Ulises did not pretend to co-exist with the otherness he experienced during the accidental return to Ithaca until he had overcome and dissolved it. She is not interested in diversity, but in identity or, to put it another way, the hegemony of her cultural perspective. However, Habermas believes that illustration design transcends this reductive and fleeting bias. Reason, freedom and autonomy are the only ideals that can found a free, democratic and tolerant civilization.
Habermas admits that instrumental reason is a perversion of the illustrated ideal. Just look for domain and efficiency. It is foreign to the individual and represents an environment for freedom and diversity. This does not mean that illustration is a failed project. The Kantian categorical imperative is not a dangerous formula, not even an insufficient one. Correct development presupposes the overcoming of the monological character of the categorical imperative through communicative reason, according to norms and laws, so that it is legitimate only when dialogue arises, and not individual reflection.
There is no need to apologize for the reason until we reconstruct it by word and consensus. In this sense, Habermas confirms Hannah Arendt’s arguments regarding “action”. “Action”, established as the exercise of freedom by using the word in the public sphere, represents the highest and most emancipatory activity of the human species. Debate without censorship is the best debate against tyranny and barbarism. A word for nonviolent confrontation is the most effective practice to neutralize the possibility of war or abuse of power.
Published in 1981, Theory of communicative action de Habermas proposes a transition from instrumental reason to communicative reason. Instrumental reason is oriented toward an individual outcome. Don’t think of men as self-serving, but average. It does not promote social cohesion, but rather disintegration and non-communication. In return, the communicative mind seeks truth, directness, and truthfulness. Nor is it about imposing, but about negotiating and enforcing an agreement between citizens, those who consider it fundamentally hablantic, to decide whether they are rational with autonomy, dignity and their own criteria.
Habermas contrasts “lifeworld” with “system”. The “world of life” is a space of culture, society and dialogue. It is based on values and knowledge. On the contrary, the system is the substance of capitalism. An increase in the combination of economic power and political power. The only concern is to ensure the economic development and stability of the state. No consent or communication is required. All you have to do is keep institutions and companies running.
The “system” colonized the “lifeworld” and dehumanized society. Instrumental logic replaced rational communication and undermined social pathologies such as democratic desafección, deterioration of coexistence, revival of totalitarian ideologies and inhuman hatred of immigrants. The instrumental reason is a technocracy similar to a Nazi dystopia. If deactivated or neutralized, Europe’s old demons could be resurrected and lead us to dramatic scenarios once again.
Habermas’ thesis was not suitable for the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo. It was published in 1985 The end of modernityfrom which he argued that rationality cannot be reconstructed. Faith in reason, linear progress and absolute truths, the three fetishes written indiscriminately by liberalism and Marxism, have been shattered. Modernity was associated with its end. In that place arose postmodernity, an era with many stories that you did not create in absolute truths. This new nihilism was not a disaster but an opportunity.
The death of unquestionable certainties freed the human being from authoritarian structures and promoted social transformation based on tolerance, relativism and diversity. The “powerful thinking” of modernity was undermined by colonialism and world wars. In turn, the “doubtful idea” of postmodernity would favor an era in which there were no truths, no interpretations that allowed for the coexistence of different cultures and cosmovisions. The dogmatisms of modernity would be replaced by a logic of emancipation, where tradition would no longer be a legend, but rather a legacy with an oscillating value. A human being creates his identity through desapego and not from unconditional adhesion to what is inherited or instilled.
Habermas argued that postmodernity is an anti-modernity that denies the principle of truth, thus thwarting any possibility of consensus. If everything is relative, it is not possible to justify the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by not promoting the most guaranteed one, where minors can invoke norms of planetary application.
Relativism can be turned into an ally of reactionary thinking, it can appeal to the diversity of customs to justify hateful discrimination. Habermas supplemented his defense of a critically revised modernity with the concept of “constitutional patriotism,” which places loyalty to democratic principles above loyalty to ethnic or cultural identity. In accordance with the constitutional norm, citizenship may not be tied to blood or territory. This is the only way to guarantee the stability of multicultural societies, where plurality will always be protected and moderated by the rule of law.
Habermas argued for globalization and declared that shared freedom will always be more important than national sovereignty. Like Plato, he always believed that the thinker cannot remain on the margins of history. He also condemned the invasion of Ukraine, but did not hide his concern about the idea of rearmament that could reactivate the old European warism. Habermas, born in Düsseldorf in 1929, suffered firsthand the ravages of totalitarianism. Hello, Executive Director of the Cologne Chamber of Industry and Commerce, your family sympathized with the Nazis, and like others of your generation, joined the Hitler Youth.
With a smile on his face and a rabbit’s lip, he did not take well to the pranks of his classmates, so they resorted to schools and valued dialogue as a tool to fight conflicts. After passing as a Hitler Youth, he prevented her from expressing any critical opinion about the State of Israel. There was a middle ground between social democracy and progressive liberalism convinced Europeanist.
If I opposed the Mayan radicalism of ’68 and accused former leader Rudi Dutschke of enarbolarizing the “Izquierdas fascism” flag. In the 1980s he met the conservative and revisionist historian Ernst Nolte, who observed that Nazism was merely a response to Bolshevik terrorism. Habermas accused Nolte of downplaying the move to free Germany from its historical responsibility for the Shoah, history’s greatest pogrom.
Jürgen Habermas died at the age of 94. His life was fruitful. We have more than five hundred books and hundreds of articles and conferences. Always open to dialogue, he debated with Joseph Ratzinger at the Bavarian Catholic Academy on January 19, 2004, arguing about the origins of universal values. Habermas argued that they were the result of deliberative processes and not a supernatural command. Ratzinger signaled that this plan hides the danger of turning mayors into the only source of legitimacy that does not guarantee unconditional respect for human dignity.
Both closed the issue by recognizing that faith and reason must exercise self-criticism to avoid intolerance. For those who care about fe, Ratzinger and Habermas are but a memory in the collective memory. We are thinking of those who still hold out hope for a life situated more outside of time and space the philosopher and the theologian will be able to continue the dialoguewithout bearing the ungodly limits of implacable biology.
“Beware of dying until you achieve victory for humanity,” said Habermas. In light of this reasoning, only when it is concluded that the philosopher died in peace can it be until the end of his days that dialogue—and not violence—marks the rumbling of the story.
Leave a Reply