[HN Gopher] Philosoph Jurgen Habermas Gestorben
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Philosoph Jurgen Habermas Gestorben
Author : sebastian_z
Score : 143 points
Date : 2026-03-14 14:08 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.spiegel.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.spiegel.de)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I love his
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book)
|
| but feel this ponderous two-volume set
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Communicative_Ac...
|
| is thoroughly refuted by our last two decades of experience with
| electronic communications.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Perhaps the missing component is that not only is rationality
| communicable, but so is irrationally.
|
| The memetic material out there has had an incredible and
| tumultuous era of rapid evolution. Theres been such radical
| pressure to get better at consuming our attention, at trying to
| get ideas to spread. The means have perhaps outstripped the
| Humana ability to communicate & make sense of so much highly
| weaponized memetic systems.
| biggestlou wrote:
| Thoroughly refuted? Sorry, but no
| FabHK wrote:
| I wondered to which extent Habermas with the Frankfurter Schule
| and Critical Theory could be held partially responsible for
| postmodernism's march through the institutions, identity
| politics, and indirectly for Trump's two election victories. But
| it looks like he was explicitly critical of postmodernism and
| other counter-enlightenment movements.
|
| RIP.
| gr__or wrote:
| I find this to be vile political posting, moving responsibility
| for Trump's rightwing fascism to a social theorists is just
| misguided, banal and does not belong here. Don't you have X for
| that?
| lmf4lol wrote:
| Wait until you discover that Alex Karp is a (Neo-)Marxist...
|
| Philosophical insights and methods can be used for politics
| of any color.
|
| I do agree that its wrong to say that Habermas would be
| responsible(!) for any of that though. As if thinking up
| stuff would make you responsible for the misuse of those
| ideas down the road.
| LocutusOfBorges wrote:
| It fits in with the contemporary mainstream on this site,
| unfortunately. Whenever politics comes up on HN, it
| invariably brings all the cranks out to play.
| FabHK wrote:
| 1. "Responsibility" was indeed too strong. Involved in the
| chain of causality, maybe.
|
| 2. I'm not blaming Trump's rightwing fascism on social
| theorists. I wondered whether a backlash against overbearing
| postmodernism enabled Trump's election victories. Sorry if
| you find that question vile and banal; I find it rather
| consequential and important to avoid further fascists.
| panagathon wrote:
| It just comes off a bit victim-blamey, I think. If it's not
| intended, you should certainly be aware that it can.
| parodysbird wrote:
| Trump is the most postmodern politician, and MAGA the most
| postmodern of political movements
| atmosx wrote:
| In all honesty that's not even the worst part.
|
| He signed that "never again" letter, completely buying into
| the exceptionalism of one group over all others... They kind
| of threw the baby out of the water and moved into Heidegger
| territory quickly. They seemed to put "who" over "what" very,
| very hastily. One would expect an enlightened mind to
| understand the difference and maybe phrase his concerns a bit
| more "inclusively". But let's be honest, it wasn't a mistake.
|
| Anyway, we'll take the good parts and move on.
|
| RIP.
| lmf4lol wrote:
| Yes very interesting topic and HIGHLY relevant.
|
| Here is a good essay from Moira Weigel that you might want to
| read: https://www.boundary2.org/2020/07/moira-weigel-palantir-
| goes...
|
| It is called ,, Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School" and
| analysis Karp's PhD thesis. Which, even though he didnt write
| it under Habermas supervision, was highly influenced by the
| Frankfurt school (Adorno et al).
|
| The author also provides some thoughts on your question. The
| connection between Critical Theory and Trumpism
| calf wrote:
| Very much so, I hold this view as someone who reads a bit of
| Critical Theory; Catherine Liu recently makes a case for this
| as well as disparate other public intellectuals from Chomsky to
| Zizek have also generally critiqued CT academics,
| postmodernists, etc. The basic argument is something like,
| Frankfurt School itself had a tension over their primary text
| (Dialectic of Enlightenment) by Adorno and one faction
| basically got totally divorced from Marxist ideas, and the
| result of that was bad theories and bad praxis and then even
| worse being coopted as a capitalist intelligentsia. See also
| Thomas Picketty's Brahmin Left. I'm oversimplifying but there
| is a continued strain of this criticism (albeit largely on deaf
| ears).
| bwestergard wrote:
| "Frankfurt School Critical Theory" went through several
| generations with different commitments and each of those
| generations was quite politically and theoretically diverse.
|
| The only true statements that hold for all writers at all times
| are largely uninteresting.
|
| What can be said with confidence is that Frankfurt School
| theorists were not "counter-enlightenment".
|
| Adorno and Horkheimer were explicitly trying to explain why the
| ideal of the enlightenment - greater rationality in social and
| political affairs and a fuller realization of individual moral
| autonomy - had not been achieved in their time. They saw
| themselves, rightly, as more faithful heirs to the tradition in
| their attempt to "rescue" it than those who insisted it did not
| require rescue. You may disagree - many within the tradition of
| critical theory have - but I don't think readings of their
| texts which see them as "counter-enlightement" can be
| sustained.
|
| "I wondered to which extent Habermas with the Frankfurter
| Schule and Critical Theory could be held partially responsible
| for postmodernism's march through the institutions, identity
| politics, and indirectly for Trump's two election victories."
|
| With all due respect, this sentence betrays a complete
| unfamiliarity with "postmodernism", "the long march through the
| institutions", and "identity politics". It wildly anachronistic
| to conflate these. It makes about as much sense as saying that
| Mitterand was an Avignon pope.
| tsss wrote:
| Maybe he was critical, but he was also a part of them.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The Frankfurter Schule was politically conservative, the
| "leftism" of present-day identity politics is a rehash of
| radical 1970s Maoism that simply coopts the Frankfurter Schule
| lexicon in agitating for a new "Great Cultural Revolution"
| throughout the West, consequences be damned. This is the
| "counter-enlightenment" part: the Maoist "Great Proletarian
| Cultural Revolution" saw Enlightenment values as reflecting
| "bourgeois privilege", and identity politics has wholly
| inherited this point of view. Frankfurter Schule members would
| have disagreed quite sharply with that position, their outlook
| was defined by a whole lot of nuance.
| Tomte wrote:
| SEP:
| https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2024/entries/habermas...
|
| My favorite quote of Habermas ist about Luhmann's[1] theory:
| "It's all wrong, but it's got quality".
|
| [1] the Zettelkasten person
| smooc wrote:
| I like Luhmann's theory better. What i like about it is that
| Luhmann argues that the smallest denominator of a social system
| is a realation between two. Habermas says it can be brought
| down to an individual. Which in my mind defeats the "social"
| part.
| goodmythical wrote:
| Havin not read the underlying theory, is the society of one
| constructed with the belief that one has relations to one's
| self?
|
| That is, I could see that the idea of a society of two could
| be derived from a society of one in that I could extend my
| desire to be kind to my past, present, and future selves, to
| a desire to be kind to selves that are not my own.
|
| Kind of like a computing network being a generalisation of
| the network that exists inside anyone one machine in that
| networking is just i/o with more steps and more wire?
| biggestlou wrote:
| Where exactly in Habermas is such an idea expressed?
| shevy-java wrote:
| 96 years old. He lived a "full life".
| sombragris wrote:
| RIP. He was a giant among philosophers.
| the-grump wrote:
| Rick Roderick on Habermas.
|
| The series "Self Under Siege" is one of my favorite things on
| YouTube. Highly recommend watching all 8 in order.
|
| https://youtu.be/aXkmmfaZhEg
| prydt wrote:
| +1 These are incredible lectures and there's another series
| from Rick Roderick on the history of western philosophy that I
| also love:
| https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxPmwaGMOAvsZp9vavFkyxYFZ...
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| For the benefit of those like me who haven't heard of Roderick,
| some further digging leads to this:
| https://rickroderick.org/max-roderick/
|
| Major, _major_ rabbit hole warning. You think you 're about to
| read something about a philosophy professor, and what you get
| is an Alice Munro/Larry McMurtry mashup. His son seems to be a
| pretty amazing writer in his own right.
| minebreaker wrote:
| I have to say I'm quite disappointed by his attitude against
| Palestine. RIP, but not with the victims.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/22/israel-hamas-w...
| nwellnhof wrote:
| The majority of Germans is completely biased towards Zionism
| because of their history, so it's more of a cultural than a
| personal thing.
| submeta wrote:
| No we are not. 80% of us are against what Israel does in
| Palestine. But the Goverment and media will tell you
| otherwise. It's got nothing to do with our history. Konrad
| Adenauer--first chancellor--once said:
|
| "The power of the Jews even today, especially in America,
| should not be underestimated. And therefore I have very
| deliberately and very consciously -- and that was always my
| opinion -- put all my strength, the best I could, to bring
| about a reconciliation between the Jewish people and the
| German people."
|
| It was never about guilt, still is not. Germany has learned
| nothing from its past.
| throw310822 wrote:
| This is well known, but isn't this exactly what you ask of a
| great thinker, to be able to transcend the biases of the
| culture and provide clarity and guidance? (Though of course
| at that age is hard to expect much from anyone).
| chmod775 wrote:
| Berlin perspective: It really doesn't feel that way.
| Germany's official political stance is very much "pro-Israel"
| and somewhat intentionally deaf and blind towards what is
| happening in Palestine (though not completely). Public
| opinion and discourse is much more nuanced though.
| submeta wrote:
| Totally disappointing. But coming from Germany, no surprise.
| German intellectualls and media totally ignore the suffering in
| Palesine. And fully suppress any solidarity with Palestine. By
| defunding, by cancelling, by smear campaigns (look up how they
| --overnight--deligitimised Greta Thunberg), by basically not
| reporting about what's going on there. And if you are state
| employed, you can basically bet on it losing your job once you
| show soliarity with Palestine.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Europe also has a non-trivial problem with both Islamic
| terrorism and cultural clash between indigenous Europeans and
| newly settled Muslims.
|
| That reduces empathy towards other Muslims quite
| significantly.
| submeta wrote:
| Why did muslims have to leave their countries? The
| "cultural clash" didn't appear out of thin air. Muslims are
| in Europe in large numbers because of wars that Europe and
| the West either started, fueled, or failed to prevent.
|
| To name a few conflicts incited by the West: The Nakba in
| 1948 displaced 750,000 Palestinians and created a refugee
| population that still hasn't been resolved.
|
| The Soviet-Afghan War displaced 6M+ people.
|
| The US invaded Iraq in 2003, directly creating the vacuum
| that spawned ISIS.
|
| NATO bombed Libya into a failed state.
|
| The US and Israel spent years destabilizing Syria long
| before the civil war made it the worst refugee crisis since
| WWII.
|
| Europe's closest allies armed all sides of Yemen's proxy
| war.
|
| => Every single wave of Muslim refugees into Europe traces
| back to a conflict the West had its hands in. Blaming
| Muslims for being here while ignoring why they had to leave
| is not a serious position.
|
| And now Iran, a country with 90+m population. And noone
| stops US/israel. What do you think will cause the next flow
| of refugees?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Most Muslims in Europe are descendants of Gastarbeiters
| from the 1960s and 1970s.
| submeta wrote:
| That's only partially true and it conveniently skips the
| last 15 years.
|
| Yes, Germany's Turkish community largely traces back to
| Gastarbeiter recruitment in the 1960s/70s.
|
| But since 2010, Germany alone received 850,000 Muslim
| migrants, with 86% of refugees coming from war zones like
| Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
|
| Between 2013 and 2019, nearly 70% of all refugees in
| Germany were Muslim. Across Europe, large Muslim
| communities in Sweden, the Netherlands, and elsewhere
| originate from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and ex-
| Yugoslavia, not from guest worker programs.
|
| The Gastarbeiter framing erases the millions who came
| because their countries were destroyed by wars the West
| participated in.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Approximately 5,5 million Muslims live in Germany. If
| about 1 million of these came as refugees, that is still
| a minority within minority.
|
| "The Gastarbeiter framing erases the millions"
|
| Don't try this newspeak at me. I said quite clearly that
| majority, not all, European Muslims are descendents of
| Gastarbeiters.
|
| Or OK, lets use your newspeak. When it comes to framing,
| your framing of the wars in the Middle East is that they
| are completely attributable to the West. Do the locals
| have no agency? Didn't they engage in wars prior to rise
| of Western power? Is the Shi'a-Sunni split a Western
| plot? Did Islam spread by completely non-violent means?
|
| Muslims are humans, and as such perfectly capable of
| waging wars on their own.
| alephnerd wrote:
| In my opinion, it's not about "Islam" or the "West" -
| it's about institutional capacity.
|
| In 1990, both Syria and Turkiye were roughly comparable
| developmentally, with HDIs of 0.563 and 0.598
| respectively. Yet by 2000, Turkiye's HDI significantly
| outpaced Syria's (0.669 versus 0.587) _despite_ Turkiye
| going through severe political, social, and economic
| turmoil. And by 2010 (the eve of the Arab Spring), this
| difference in HDI was significantly exacerbated (0.750 in
| Turkiye versus 0.661 in Syria). Furthermore, both Turkiye
| and Syria participated in the Gulf War and didn 't
| participate in the Iraq War.
|
| The _key_ difference was the billions the Assad regime
| spent on it 's occupation of Lebanon from the 1980s to
| the 2005 Cedar Revolution, backing the PKK to antagonize
| Turkiye, and embezzling into slush funds the Assad family
| now uses to finance their life in exile in Moscow and
| Dubai. Meanwhile, during the same time period, Turkiye
| spent similar amounts building a welfare state and
| investing in expanding the social safety net and
| investing in infrastructure.
|
| And other Muslim majority countries that were comparable
| to or significantly less developed than either Turkiye or
| Syria in 1990 such as Algeria (0.593), Indonesia (0.526),
| and Iran (0.613) were able to either catch up to Syria by
| 2010 such as Indonesia with an HDI of 0.667 or outpace it
| such as Algeria with an HDI of 0.721 and Iran with an HDI
| of 0.756 _despite_ either starting from a lower base and
| going through an economic collapse in the 1990s
| (Indonesia), going through a devastating decade long
| civil war throughout the entirety of the 1990s (Algeria),
| or rebuilding after a decade long war and sanctions
| (Iran)
|
| Even IRAQ, despite starting at a significantly lower base
| in 1990 (HDI of 0.497) was able to roughly catch up to
| contemporary Syria by 2010 (with an HDI of 0.629) despite
| the Gulf War in 1991-92, the sanctions regime, the
| Kurdish insurgency, the Shia insurgency, the Iraq War,
| and the subsequent Iraqi Civil War.
|
| Fundamentally, the Assad regime mismanaged Syria, and
| it's lack of institutions outside of the Army and the
| Baath Party along with existing social fissures due to
| Hafez al-Assad's brutal repression of Sunnis in the
| 1970s-80s meant Syria's collapse was a question of "when"
| and not "if".
|
| If institutions are robust, development is compounded. If
| institutions are weak, development slows down and
| fissures in society grow larger and larger leading to a
| breaking point.
| fl0id wrote:
| that has nothing to do with it. you can see the same thing
| in other conflicts. it's just more convenient to look away.
| ks1723 wrote:
| This is utter nonsense. I have seen and read many reports and
| articles about the suffering in Gaza and the West Bank in the
| mainstream media! And you won't loose your job when
| expressing solidarity.
| nkurz wrote:
| "Jurgen Habermas is dead. The philosopher and sociologist died on
| Saturday in Starnberg at the age of 96."
|
| https://www-spiegel-de.translate.goog/kultur/philosoph-juerg...
| doener wrote:
| Obituary: https://archive.is/gQ3HB
| jhoho wrote:
| He regularly wrote essays for "Suddeutsche Zeitung", commenting
| on the world's political situation. The last one I read was
| published in November 2025. Sharp as a knive, as always. I'll
| miss them.
|
| What an accomplished life.
| throwaway260124 wrote:
| Started his life supporting genocide. Ended his life supporting
| genocide.
|
| May he learn something in his next life.
| biggestlou wrote:
| What an absolutely idiotic statement
| bwestergard wrote:
| Habermas was truly a giant. Regardless of your political outlook,
| some engagement with his texts is time well spent. For an
| accessible on-ramp to his work, I recommend:
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/#PublSphe
| Xunjin wrote:
| In a time in which Democracies are being threatened by
| authoritarians governments, such a loss is a reminder Democracy
| is not guarantee, you have to fight for it, every single day.
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