For over seventy years, Jürgen Habermas provided a sharp polemic that served as a safeguard for the young Federal Republic of Germany and later for the entire country. Originally intending to become a journalist, he went on to become a scholar of international renown and lived till the age of 97.
On March 14, 2026, the philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas passed away. He was born on June 18, 1929, the exact same day that the anthroposophist Michael Bauer died. Bauer was, in many ways, the polar opposite to Habermas, but besides this date, they shared a common central intention. At the Members’ Assembly of the Anthroposophical Society in 1921, when, for reasons of health, Michael Bauer had to step down from the Executive Board, he said something that also formed the core of Jürgen Habermas’s late philosophy: “Much has been said about trust, and I would like to add that there can be no meaningful interaction between human and human unless this trust exists in the depths of the soul. When I exchange a word with any person, and they have the will to understand me, something of my soul works in the other; and, strictly speaking, it works in the other on the basis of what is stated in the first of our guiding principles: on the basis of a common spirit. That which connects one soul to another, through which we can understand each other in words, has consciously been made the very foundation of our Society.”1 Habermas said the same thing, only within a different discourse. Understanding is the foundation of every human society. If Bauer is right, then anthroposophists ought to also take an interest in Habermas. His first major work is titled Theorie des kommunikativen Handeln [Theory of communicative action], and his philosophy has been aptly described as a “critique of the conditions of understanding.”2
The early Habermas was proud to be regarded as a Marxist. As a sociologist, he did, in fact, learn a great deal from Karl Marx. But he was an unusual Marxist. He was one of the few among his contemporaries who still had a concept of the spirit and occasionally implemented it in a productive way. This concept of spirit was the fruit of his studies of Hegel.
What drove Habermas to produce his monumental work? When asked this question in an interview, he replied, using a surprising choice of words: “I have a conceptual motive and a fundamental intuition. This, by the way, refers back to religious traditions such as those of the Protestant or Jewish mystics, also to Schelling. The motivating thought concerns the reconciliation of a modernity which has fallen apart, the idea that without surrendering the differentiation that modernity has made possible in the cultural, the social, and economic spheres, one can find forms of living together in which autonomy and dependency can truly enter into a non-antagonistic relation, that one can walk tall in a collectivity that does not have the dubious quality of backward-looking substantial forms of community. The intuition springs from the sphere of relations with others; it aims at experiences of undisturbed intersubjectivity. These are more fragile than anything that history has up till now brought forth in the way of structures of communication—an ever more dense and finely woven web of intersubjective relations that nevertheless make possible a relation between freedom and dependency that can only be imagined with interactive models.”3
Historians and sociologists refer to the recent era of the consciousness soul as “modernity.” What Habermas calls the “project of modernity” is particularly close to his heart. It remains unfinished. To describe what it is all about, he once used the image of a mobile that has become tangled.4 In order for the arms of the mobile to move freely again, the whole thing must be raised up. Habermas’s work serves this goal. It can be read as the language of the progressive conscious soul. This is what constitutes its greatness, but it is also its limitation.
His work raises into consciousness something that implicitly underlies our actions and speech. Most of the time, it remains deeply hidden. But when it’s made explicit, something also comes to light that Habermas calls the “lifeworld”—a term adapted for sociology, originally derived from Husserl’s phenomenology. Habermas’s theory of communication describes the polarity between system and lifeworld and critiques the so-called “colonization of the lifeworld” by economic-bureaucratic systems.
In his later philosophy, the relationship between faith and knowledge becomes increasingly important. Although Habermas once described himself as “religiously tone deaf,” he is quite sensitive to matters of faith, the increasing trivialization of which he recently criticized.5 He regards matters of faith as socially indispensable and attempts to translate them into a rational discourse that can be popularly understood today. So what does this great theorist of democracy have to do with religion when he is actually more of a moderate naturalist? He once said: “The egalitarian universalism from which the ideas of living together in freedom and solidarity, of autonomous living and emancipation, of individual moral conscience, human rights, and democracy have sprung, is a direct legacy of the Jewish ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. Essentially unchanged, this legacy has been critically appropriated and reinterpreted time and again. To this day, there is no alternative. Even in the face of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on this substance. Everything else is postmodern babble.”6
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Image Jürgen Habermas, one of the most renowned sociologists and philosophers of our time, during his lecture in Lecture Hall VII of the Faculty of Law at ELTE (Eötvös Loránd University) in Budapest. Photo: European Commission/Szabolcs Dudás, CC BY 2.0.
Footnotes
- Rudolf Steiner, Zur Geschichte der Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft 1913-1922 [On the history of the Anthroposophical Society], GA 251, (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 2023), 535 f.; first printed in Mitteilungen des Zentralvorstandes der Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft [Communications from the central Executive Board of the Anthroposophical Society], no. 1 (1921), from the Members’ Assembly in Stuttgart, Sept. 4, 1921.
- Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984–1987); first published in German, 1981. Thomas A. McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978); translated into German as Kritik der Verständigungsverhältnisse [critique of the conditions of understanding], 1980.
- Jürgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas, trans. rev. Peter Dews (London: Verso, 1986), “The Dialectics of Rationalization”: interview with Axel Honneth, Eberhard Knödler-Bunte, and Arno Widmann, Berlin, May 22, 1981, and Starnberg, July 10, 1981; first published in Asthetik und Kommunikation, nos. 45/46 (1981): 126–55; English translation by Leslie Adelson, Philip Boehm, Barton Byg, Karen Jankowski, and Istan Varkonyi, Telos, no. 49 (1981): 5–31.
- J. Habermas, “Untiefen der Rationalitätskritik,” [The shallows of the critique of rationality] in Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit [The new unclarity] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 136.
- See Jürgen Habermas, “Hope Without Faith,” The Lamp, no. 33 (Dec. 11, 2025), English translation of “Ein Geburtstagsgruss” [A birthday greeting], in Michael Roseneck, Annette Langner-Pitschmann, and Tobias Müller, eds., Den Diskurs bestreiten: Religion im Spannungsfeld zwischen Erfahrung und Begriff. Festschrift für Thomas M. Schmidt [Engaging in discourse: Religion at the intersection of experience and concept. Festschrift for Thomas M. Schmidt] (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2025).
- Jürgen Habermas, “Ein Gespräch über Gott und die Welt” [A conversation about God and the world], in Zeit der Übergänge [Time of transition] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 175.
