Jürgen Habermas > Quotes

“Only one who takes over his own life history can see in it the realization of his self. Responsibility to take over one's own biography means to get clear about who one wants to be.”
― Jürgen Habermas

“For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk.”
― Jürgen Habermas

“Today, the language of the market penetrates every pore and forces every interpersonal relation into the schema of individual preference.”
― Jürgen Habermas

“Only by externalization, by entering into social relationships, can we develop the interiority of our own person.”
― Jurgen Habermas

“[Jürgen Habermas' obituary to friend and philosopher, Richard Rorty]

One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.”
― Jürgen Habermas

“A 'post-truth democracy' [...] would no longer be a democracy.”
― Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays

“Freedom may never be conceived merely negatively, as the absence of compulsion. Freedom conceived intersubjectively distinguishes itself from the arbitrary freedom of the isolated individual. No one is free until we are all free.”
― Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God & Modernity

“From the structure of language comes the explanation of why the human spirit is condemned to an odyssey - why it first finds its way to itself only on a detour via a complete externalization in other things and in other humans. Only at the greatest distance from itself does it become conscious of itself in its irreplaceable singularity as an individuated being.”
― Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Between Metaphysics and the Critique of Reason

“The scientistic faith in a science that will one day not only fulfill, but eliminate, personal self-conception through objectifying self-description is not science, but bad philosophy.”
― Jürgen Habermas

“The parliament no longer is an 'assembly of wise men chosen as individual personalities by privileged strata, who sought to convince each other through arguments in public discussion on the assumption that the subsequent decision reached by the majority would be what was true and right for the national welfare.' Instead it has become the 'public rostrum on which, before the entire nation (which through radio an television participates in a specific fashion in this sphere of publicity), the government and the parties carrying it present and justify to the nation their political program, while the opposition attacks this program with the same opennes and develops its alternatives.”
― Jürgen Habermas

“تجدد از آنجا آغاز می شود که ایمان در ذیل عقل قرار بگیرد”
― یورگن هابرماس

“Contextualism is only the flipside of logocentrism.”
― Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays

“Diskurse herrschen nicht. Sie erzeugen eine kommunikative Macht, die die administrative nicht ersetzen kann, sondern nur beeinflussen kann.”
― Jürgen Habermas

“Nietzsche conceives the critical consequences of scientific technical progress as overcoming metaphysics. […] The process of enlightenment made possible by the sciences is critical, but the critical dissolution of dogmas produces not liberation but indifference. It is not emancipatory but nihilistic.”
― Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures

“In einem Aufklärungsprozess gibt es nur Beteiligte.”
― Jürgen Habermas

“En el punto de partida de las ciencias empírico-analíticas hay un interés técnico, en el de las histórico-hermenéuticas un interés práctico, y en el de las ciencias orientadas críticamente aquel interés emancipatorio del conocimiento que, sin concederlo, estaba ya como base de las teorías tradicionales.”
― Jürgen Habermas

“Nietzsche wanted to explode the framework of Occidental rationalism within which the competitors of Left and Right Hegelianism still moved. His antihumanism, continued by Heidegger and Bataille in two variations, is the real challenge for the discourse of modernity.”
― Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures

“...nem a tiszta agresszió mint olyan a rossz, hanem az az agresszió, melyet elkövetője jogosnak hisz. A rossz a kifordított jó.”
― Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays

“Nietzsche shares the positivist conception of science. Only that information which meets the criteria of empirical=scientific results counts as knowledge in rigorous sense. […] Like Comte before him, Nietzsche conceives the critical consequences of scientific technical progress as overcoming metaphysics. […] The process of enlightenment made possible by the sciences is critical, but the critical dissolution of dogmas produces not liberation but indifference. It is not emancipatory but nihilistic.”
― Jürgen Habermas

“Nietzsche’s ‘theory of knowledge’ […] consists in the attempt to comprehend the categorical framework of the natural sciences (space, time, event), the concept of laws (causality), the operational axis of experience (measurement), and the rules of logic and calculation as the relative a priori of a world of objective illusion that has been produced for the purposes of mastering nature and of preserving existence: “the entire cognitive apparatus is an apparatus for abstraction and simplification—not directed at knowledge but at the control of things: ‘end’ and ‘means’ are as far from the essence as are ‘concepts.’” […] Nietzsche conceives science as the activity through which we turn ‘nature’ into concepts for the purpose of mastering nature. The compulsion to logical correctness and empirical accuracy exemplifies the constraint of the interest in possible technical control over objectified natural processes, and thereby the compulsion to preserving existence.”
― Jürgen Habermas