Jurgen Habermas' death ends the illusion of a universal European philosophy
The passing of the pre-eminent German philosopher Jurgen Habermas (1929-2026), at the mature age of 96 and at the height of his global reputation as a formidable critical thinker of his age, cannot be measured in ordinary terms.
He was an icon. He died an icon. Whether we agreed or disagreed with him on one point or another, he was a philosopher of enormous significance we all had to reckon with.
Habermas was a German philosopher and social theorist of extraordinary influence among his contemporaries, rooted in the tradition of critical theory, who deeply cared about the fate of European civil society, the protection of Enlightenment achievements, which he considered still unfinished, and the robust health of the European public sphere.
As doctoral students at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1970s and early 1980s, my friends and I used to go to nearby Haverford College to attend Habermas' lectures, where he was invited by the eminent American philosopher Richard Bernstein (1932-2022), who was at the time teaching at Haverford, later moved to the New School, and was instrumental in introducing the German philosopher to his American readers.
Habermas held academic positions at Heidelberg University and Goethe University Frankfurt and directed the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg. He was the author of books of exceptional significance and influence among his contemporaries.
Habermas' dialogue with Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, on 19 January 2004, became a cornerstone of his articulation of the place of religion in what he termed a "post-secular" society. His ideas on incorporating Muslim immigrants into the fabric of European society were far more tolerant than the rising anti-Muslim hatred among his contemporaries would warrant.
Public sphere
Among Habermas' seminal works, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) and its key concept, the "public sphere," have had a widespread influence on our understanding of the potential contestations of the bourgeoisie with state power.
The idea was generated and remained limited to Habermas' habitual Eurocentrism. But it had a crucial impact on other thinkers with a more transnational conception of the public sphere, including my own articulation of the parapublic sphere.
But it was Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action (1982), where he sought to address the challenges to the viability of reason in mass societies, that made his significance felt outside Europe.
In his pivotal work, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), he offered the most sustained argument in his defence of European modernity, though he consistently maintained it had remained an unfinished project.
Soon after the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, Habermas and French philosopher Jacques Derrida published a major essay in the form of a manifesto, "Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: The Birth of a United Europe" (2003).
Two years later, that essay became the centrepiece of a book, Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations After the Iraq War (2005), which also included major European philosophers such as Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo.
The key issue of these debates was to define the distinct nature of Europe in contradistinction to the US, then led by neoconservative reactionaries and their blatant warmongering in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Born on 18 June 1929 in Dusseldorf, Habermas grew up in Gummersbach near Cologne during the final demise of the Nazis. His commitment to Enlightenment ideals was deeply informed by his experiences as a European during World War Two. His unrelenting criticism of European postmodernism was rooted in the same spectrum of sentiments.
Blind spots
As a dignified human being, Habermas died on 14 March 2026, two weeks into his favourite Israeli settler colony going on yet another rampage, mass murdering Iranian civilians, as it had done in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen before that.
But philosophically, Habermas had died a couple of years earlier when he and his colleagues went public endorsing Israel's genocide in Palestine as "justified in principle" - a position that drew widespread criticism for totally disregarding the terror of non-European human suffering.
Philosophically, Habermas had died a couple of years earlier when he and his colleagues went public endorsing Israel's genocide in Palestine as 'justified in principle'
That was the time Habermas died to false consciousness and reputation, as if he had anything to teach the world beyond his immediate, myopic German provincialism. That provincialism was not his fault. It was our fault; we non-Europeans should never have assumed and invested any universal claims in his and other Europeans' incurable provincialism.
European philosophical tribalism was falsely universalised not by any innate virtue of its epistemic strands, but by the power of globalised colonialism that accompanied it.
That same force coded European philosophers as the inheritors of the Greek tradition while disregarding vast bodies of philosophical thought developed by generations of non-European thinkers in similar veins in Pahlavi, Syriac, Arabic, Persian or Hebrew.
The designation "Islamic philosophy" was in and of itself an orientalist concoction to localise alternative philosophical universes and privilege what had coded itself as "western philosophy". But the false and falsifying formation of "western philosophy" was in and of itself a colonial framing, granting itself imperial hegemony over all other philosophical legacies that had legitimate claims to Greek thought.
While western philosophy carried itself on the wings of European and American fighter jets and gunboats, militantly universalising itself, until very recently, the contrapuntal philosophical thrusts in Asia, Africa and Latin America had no formal frame of reference to assert themselves except in the anthropological designation of "ethno-philosophy".
Beyond Europe
The passing of Habermas marks a historical moment when the European and Eurocentric philosophy he best and most eloquently represented has settled into the tribal specificity it had successfully repressed.
Today, philosophers like V Y Mudimbe, Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Achille Mbembe in Africa, Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo in Argentina, Kojin Karatani in Japan, Nasr Hamed Abu Zaid in Egypt, Abdolkarim Soroush and Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari in Iran, Wang Hui in China, Lewis Ricardo Gordon in Jamaica, and W E B Du Bois and Cornel West in African-American intellectual history have radically altered our global conception of the world of philosophy and reclaimed the very word "philosophy".
These and other philosophers like them have far more serious claims on a much wider global domain than Habermas or any other European philosopher ever did.
Today, we of course need to continue reading Habermas, as we do all other European philosophers before and after him, with utmost respect and admiration, but with a rooted anthropological gaze far more respectful than European and American anthropologists ever were when approaching the world of our moral and cultural particularities.
Habermas was often called "the last European", meaning a key critical thinker who still believed in the Enlightenment ideals of Europe, in particular, in contradistinction to the United States.
That indeed is the best way for the world to remember him: as the last European philosopher who may have, alas, failed to see the rise of a wholly different world for philosophy, as the very word "philosophy" is being liberated from its myopic European confinements.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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