{"id":71494,"date":"2026-03-26T22:53:20","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T21:53:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/?p=71494"},"modified":"2026-04-09T09:43:28","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T07:43:28","slug":"walk-tall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/walk-tall\/","title":{"rendered":"Walk Tall"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For over seventy years, J\u00fcrgen 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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On March 14, 2026, the philosopher and sociologist J\u00fcrgen 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\u2019 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 J\u00fcrgen Habermas\u2019s late philosophy: \u201cMuch 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.\u201d<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 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<\/em> [Theory of communicative action], and his philosophy has been aptly described as a \u201ccritique of the conditions of understanding.\u201d<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What drove Habermas to produce his monumental work? When asked this question in an interview, he replied, using a surprising choice of words: \u201cI 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\u2014an 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.\u201d<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historians and sociologists refer to the recent era of the consciousness soul as \u201cmodernity.\u201d What Habermas calls the \u201cproject of modernity\u201d 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.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In order for the arms of the mobile to move freely again, the whole thing must be raised up. Habermas\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His work raises into consciousness something that implicitly underlies our actions and speech. Most of the time, it remains deeply hidden. But when it\u2019s made explicit, something also comes to light that Habermas calls the \u201clifeworld\u201d\u2014a term adapted for sociology, originally derived from Husserl\u2019s phenomenology. Habermas\u2019s theory of communication describes the polarity between system and lifeworld and critiques the so-called \u201ccolonization of the lifeworld\u201d by economic-bureaucratic systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his later philosophy, the relationship between faith and knowledge becomes increasingly important. Although Habermas once described himself as \u201creligiously tone deaf,\u201d he is quite sensitive to matters of faith, the increasing trivialization of which he recently criticized.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 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: \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Translation <\/strong>Joshua Kelberman
Image\u00a0<\/strong>J\u00fcrgen 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 (E\u00f6tv\u00f6s Lor\u00e1nd University) in Budapest. Photo: European Commission\/Szabolcs Dud\u00e1s, CC BY 2.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For over seventy years, J\u00fcrgen 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 J\u00fcrgen Habermas passed away. He was born on June 18, 1929, the exact same day that the anthroposophist Michael Bauer died. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9222,"featured_media":71430,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10939,8793,8845],"tags":[11775,11778,8824],"class_list":["post-71494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-obituary","category-philosophy","category-social","tag-ausgabe-13-2026-en","tag-english-issue-13-2026","tag-spotlights"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71494"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71521,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71494\/revisions\/71521"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}