Sunday, March 15, 2026
response to ambivalent praise for Habermas
German philosophy professor Ruth Edith Hegengruber, Director of the Center for History of Women Philosophers and Scientists in Germany, posted a memorial article on Habermas at her Facebook account and at a Heidegger forum which I discuss below.
The text of her German article is available below (“Europa heute”) along with a translation (“Europe Today”). My discussion doesn’t address her criticisms of recent history in Europe (I’m a U.S. reader) nor her praise for Habermas. Rather, I want to address her critical comments which seem based on misunderstanding.
This is also a chance to sketch what Habermas’s thinking might best be supposed to entail for progressive practice and practical thinking, though briefly, occasioned by Hegengruber’s discussion.
Your memorial to Habermas is validly appreciative and thoughtfully critical. Habermas would welcome both.
As an American who admires E.U. leadership, I’m delighted to read this perspective relative to Habermas’s interests.
But enlightenment is not over. As long as societies are committed to advancing broadly public higher education, the learning-oriented sense of social evolution which Habermas prospected in the mid-1970s onward remains alive.
Keep near to mind that enlightenment was a trans-Atlantic Event all along. The “American Idea” originated in Europe. The American Enlightenment led to the first non-monarchal constitutional nation. The French Revolution was populist, inspired by the American Revolution, not imposed on the French. The American idea of nationhood was not about state as much as it was about constitutional patriotism. Though the national idea wasn’t overtly articulated as such—and it became dominated by capitalist statism—U.S. constitutionality is intended to be the formal basis of “e pluribus unum.” U.S. nationhood is a constitutional patriotism in jurisprudential principle. Alleviation of tragic racism, difficult as it has been (and remains) has been based on constitutional principle. Habermas’s hopes for a Unitied States of Europe traces directly to the American Enlightenment.
I protest that American philosophy ever “proclaimed the end of European values.” Part of Habermas’ originality was to see his project as part of an Atlantic alliance of thought. The second half of the 20th century saw flourishing of “Continental” thought in the U.S. Criticism of “America’s claim to normative authority” has been vivid in the U.S.; indeed, that has been the origin of the E.U.’s own critique.
And one can’t judge the viability of constitutional patriotism by looking at China’s defensive neo-Maoism. The appeal of democracy with Chinese characteristics is so alive that the Xi regime must very deliberately “fire wall” the general Chinese public from the spirit of Hong Kong and Taiwan, which remains alive and a continuing danger to Xi’s pyramidal autocracy.
To call the theory of communicative action “romantic and blind” results from misunderstanding. It’s a theory of process, not ground-level program, analogously as all theory in academic life must be made practical by specific appreciations. We have to see how a politics emerges from its sociality (and advance that), how a sociality emerges from its culture, and how a culture emerges from the quality of interpersonal life in shared spaces.
Habermas’s discourse ethics is a theory of legislation, not the “ideal speaking situation” itself which pertains to advancing and evaluating immanent life. Habermas distinguished a highly abstracted, procedural discourse ethics from an interpersonal model for evaluating actual consensus formation.
In both instances, Habermas’s theory was not meant to be a direct guidance for “overturn[ing] domination.” It's a contribution to social thinking which may figure into advancing academic practice in higher education and derivatively for social life, which is challenged to find durable bridges to actually enlightening progressive action across levels and modes of personal life in interpersonal, cultural, social, and political settings.
As a Habermasian, I know that he was not blind to feminism, because I easily see how his thinking advances the primacy of care and genuine relational sensitivity as integral to communicative life. His notion of lifeworld has no overtone of male domination. Genuineness is integral to his conception of validity.
I see no void. I see challenges. I see a lot of work to be done by higher education and by all of us. Rational progress emerges from genuine lives which organize against willful power through education, engagement, reliable media, litigation, and legislative activism. There is no “inevitable shatter[ing].”
Europe Today. Romantic and Blind—In Memoriam Jürgen Habermas
Would he not deliver the ceremonial address for the 75th anniversary of the German Society for Philosophy—titled "Rethinking Europe"? My first official act as President of the German Society for Philosophy was to congratulate Jürgen Habermas on his birthday and to inquire whether he would be available for this commemorative ceremony. The question regarding the future of Europe—a subject Habermas had grappled with so often—had, by the end of his life, taken on a new and acute urgency.
Habermas did not come. My birthday letter felt almost awkward to me, for it must have reached Habermas during those very days when his wife had passed away. Absent yet present: the history of German philosophy—and of German philosophy in its connection to European philosophy—could not be told without Habermas.
Michele Nicoletti, the event’s keynote speaker, invokes Habermas when he calls for a European public sphere—one composed of an integrated European civil society, as well as supranational movements and associations. Habermas once castigated the French Left for rejecting the European Constitution. Habermas advocates for the formation of a European political consciousness—precisely where others merely invoke a shared economy, technology, and military as the markers of European unity. Nicoletti’s inquiry—as to what the European citizenry, as such, might (re)discover as its own defining essence—leads him back to certain characteristics; traits he continues to unearth from the repository of the European Enlightenment, even though, strictly speaking, they were never to be found there in quite that form: plurality, freedom, and justice.
These well-intentioned narratives—and the ruptures within them—had already prompted American philosophers, at a memorable congress in 1947, to ask: What, now, would become of Europe, lying as it did in rubble and ashes? Contrary to all predictions, German philosophy was not, in fact, utterly finished. The triumvirate of Arendt, Adorno, and Habermas ensured that the Enlightenment lived on—albeit through interpretations of it that differed quite profoundly. The youngest of the three—who himself claimed to have learned a great deal from Arendt—outdid her in his emphatic assessment that the French Enlightenment was the epoch of cafés and salons, and the era in which the bourgeois public sphere emerged. His historical approach—already evident in his *The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity*—was once again cast in heroic terms in his final historical work.
Yet the Enlightenment is over. Freedom and equality have lost their home in Europe. Colonialism and the Holocaust demonstrated that Europe had failed to live up to its own ideals. This indictment now dominates the debate regarding Europe. Europe’s failure has become the turning point for new global aspirations—from Russia to China and Africa. As recently as 2013, the Arab elite sought to let the light of the Enlightenment shine; now, however, they too seem to be pouring scorn upon Europe’s weakness.
Following this initial euphoria, Habermas, too, embraced the concept of "coercion" as a means to achieve European unity. He argued that the nation-state, too, had once been imposed upon Europeans. Even in that era, Germans were not necessarily friends to one another, nor Poles to Poles, nor were Frenchmen friends to all other Frenchmen. Therefore, he reasoned, what was made possible by the nineteenth-century narrative of the nation-state—a narrative that today hinders us from "overcoming our national parochialisms"—must and can be achieved once again today (*The Divided West*, 2004, p. 64).
Habermas remained true to his program. Whereas American philosophy had, in 1947, proclaimed the end of European values, Habermas countered in 2003 that America’s claim to normative authority had failed, calling instead for "The Rebirth of Europe." For this stance, he faced considerable opprobrium (FAZ, May 31, 2003). His speech at the 2013 World Congress of Philosophy in Athens seemed utterly anachronistic; he once again invoked this narrative at a time when the Chinese delegation was already celebrating Confucianism as the new normative force of the future—thereby defending the assignment of every individual to their designated place within the social order.
Today, the theory of communicative action—which dreamed of the "unforced force" of rational thought—appears both romantic and blind; it failed, if not sooner, then certainly at the point where it could offer an aggressor nothing more than a "face-saving compromise" (SZ, Feb. 15, 2023). His discourse ethics were consensus-oriented and oblivious to the fact that rational agreement inevitably shatters against the will to power. Habermas could not—and would not—acknowledge that his theory was ill-equipped to overturn relations of domination. Thus, he remained blind to feminism as well; transforming the primacy of the male-dominated lifeworld into a community of true parity through rational communication was simply not a concern of his.
The last of the Enlightenment thinkers has now departed. He leaves behind a void—one that must now be filled in a new world.
Ruth Edith Hagengruber
Europa heute. Romantisch und blind.– In memoriam Jürgen Habermas
Ob er nicht die Festrede zur 75 Jahrfeier der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Philosophie Europa neu denken halten würde. Meine erste Amtshandlung als Präsidentin der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Philosophie war es, Jürgen Habermas zum Geburtstag zu gratulieren und anzufragen, ob er für diesen Festakt zur Verfügung stünde. Die Frage nach der Zukunft Europas, mit der sich Habermas so oft auseinandergesetzt hatte, war am Ende seines Lebens auf neue Weise akut geworden.
Habermas kam nicht mehr. Mein Geburtstagsbrief war mir geradezu unangenehm, denn er musste Habermas in jenen Tagen erreicht haben, als seine Frau verstorben war. Abwesend anwesend, konnte die Geschichte der deutschen und der deutschen in Verbindung mit der europäischen Philosophie nicht ohne Habermas erzählt werden. Michele Nicoletti, Festredner der Veranstaltung, bezieht sich auf Habermas, wenn er eine europäische Öffentlichkeit einfordert, die sich aus einer integrierten europäischen Zivilgesellschaft, aus supranationalen Bewegungen und Vereinigungen zusammensetzt. Habermas beschimpfte die französische Linke, weil sie die europäische Verfassung ablehnt. Habermas fordert die Bildung des europäischen politischen Bewusstseins, wo andere die gemeinsame Wirtschaft, Technologie und das gemeinsame Militär als Zeuge europäischer Einheit beschwören. Nicolettis Frage, worin sich die europäische Bürgerschaft als solche (wieder) erkenne, führt ihn zu den Merkmalen, die er immer noch aus dem Fundus der europäischen Aufklärung hervorgräbt, obwohl sie dort so gar nicht zu finden waren: Pluralität, Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit.
Diese wohlgemeinten Narrative und ihre Brüche hatten die amerikanischen Philosophen bereits 1947 auf dem denkwürdigen Kongress fragen lassen, was nun aus Europa würde, da es in Schutt und Asche läge. Anders als prognostiziert, war die deutsche Philosophie nicht völlig am Ende. Das Dreigestirn Arendt, Adorno und Habermas ließ die Aufklärung weiterleben, wenn auch in recht unterschiedlichem Verständnis davon. Der jüngste der drei, der selbst von sich sagte, er habe von Arendt viel gelernt, übertrumpfte diese in seiner emphatischen Einschätzung, die französische Aufklärung sei die Epoche der Cafés und Salons und die der Entstehung der bürgerlichen Öffentlichkeit. Seine historischen Zugriffe, schon in seinem Philosophischen Diskurs der Moderne Illusion, wurden in seinem letzten historischen Werk noch einmal heroisiert.
Doch die Aufklärung ist vorbei. Freiheit und Gleichheit haben ihre Heimat in Europa verloren. Kolonialismus und Holocaust zeigten, Europa sei an seinen eigenen Ansprüchen gescheitert. Dieser Vorwurf bestimmt heute die Debatte gegen Europa. Europas Scheitern wurde zum Wendepunkt der neuen globalen Ansprüche, von Russland bis China und Afrika. Noch 2013 wollte die arabische Elite die Aufklärung leuchten lassen, nun scheint auch sie ihren Hohn auf Europas Schwäche zu ergießen.
Auf die Euphorie folgte dann auch bei Habermas die Idee der „Nötigung“ zur europäischen Einheit. Auch der Nationalstaat sei den Europäern einst aufgenötigt worden. Auch damals war der Deutsche dem Deutschen nicht Freund, der Pole nicht dem Polen und nicht der Franzose Freund aller Franzosen. Deshalb müsse und könne auch heute gelingen, was mit dem Narrativ des 19. Jahrhunderts des Nationalstaats möglich wurde und uns heute, hindert, „unsere nationalen Bornierungen zu überwinden.“ (Der gespaltene Westen 2004, 64 stw)
Habermas blieb seinem Programm treu. Erklärte Amerikas Philosophie 1947 das Ende der europäischen Werte, so konterte Habermas 2003, der amerikanische Anspruch normativer Autorität sei gescheitert und forderte “Die Wiedergeburt Europas”. Dafür wurde er nicht wenig geschmäht (FAZ 31.5.03). Wie aus der Zeit gefallen war seine Rede 2013 im Rahmen des Welt-Philosophie-Kongresses in Athen, als er diese Geschichte noch einmal beschwor, während die chinesische Delegation längst den Konfuzianismus als die neue normative Kraft der Zukunft feierte und damit die Einordnung eines jeden an seinem ihm zugewiesenen Ort verteidigte.
Romantisch und blind erscheint heute die Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, die vom „zwanglosen Zwang“ rationalen Denkens träumte, die aber spätestens dort scheiterte, wo sie dem Agressor sonst nichts als einen „gesichtswahrenden Kompromiss“ anbieten konnte (SZ 15.2.23). Seine Diskursethik war konsensorientiert und ignorant gegenüber der Tatsache, dass die rationale Übereinstimmung am Willen zur Macht zerschellte. Habermas konnte und wollte nicht einsehen, dass seine Theorie nicht geeignet war, Herrschaftsverhältnisse zu wenden. So blieb er auch dem Feminismus gegenüber blind. Den Vorrang der männlich dominierten Lebenswelt durch rationale Kommunikation in eine paritätische Gemeinschaft zu verwandeln war ihm kein Anliegen.
Der letzte der Aufklärer ist nun gegangen. Er hinterlässt einen leeren Raum, den es in einer neuen Welt zu füllen gilt.
Ruth Edith Hagengruber, 14.03.2026
