My first official act as President of the German Society for Philosophy was to congratulate Jürgen Habermas on his birthday and ask if he would be willing to deliver the keynote address at the 75th anniversary celebrations of the German Society for Philosophy, ‘Rethinking Europe’. The question of the future of Europe, which Habermas had so often grappled with, had become acutely relevant in a new way towards the end of his life.
Habermas did not come. My birthday letter made me feel downright uncomfortable, for it must have reached Habermas in the very days when his wife had passed away. Absent yet present, the history of German philosophy – and of German philosophy in relation to European philosophy – could not be told without Habermas. Michele Nicoletti, the keynote speaker at the event, refers to Habermas when he calls for a European public sphere composed of an integrated European civil society, supranational movements and associations. Habermas criticised the French left for rejecting the European Constitution. Habermas called for the formation of a European political consciousness, whilst others invoked the common economy, technology and the common military as evidence of European unity. Nicoletti’s question as to how European citizenship recognises itself as such led him to the characteristics Habermas continued to unearth from the legacy of the European Enlightenment, even though they were not to be found there at all: plurality, freedom and justice.
These well-meaning narratives and their fractures had already prompted the all-American philosophers, as early as 1947 at that memorable congress, to ask what would now become of Europe, given that it lay in ruins. Contrary to predictions, German philosophy was not entirely extinct. The triumvirate of Arendt, Adorno and Habermas kept the Enlightenment alive, albeit with quite different conceptions of it. The youngest of the three, who himself said he had learnt much from Arendt, surpassed her in his emphatic assessment that the French Enlightenment was the era of cafés and salons and the emergence of citizens public life.
Yet the Enlightenment is over. Freedom and equality have lost their home in Europe. Colonialism and the Holocaust showed that Europe had failed in its own aspirations. This accusation now dominates the debate against Europe. Europe’s failure became the turning point for new global aspirations, from Russia to China and Africa. As recently as 2013, the Arab elite still wanted to let the Enlightenment shine; now it, too, seems to be pouring scorn on Europe’s weakness.
Habermas remained true to his programme. Whereas American philosophy in 1947 declared the end of European values, Habermas countered in 2003 that the American claim to normative authority had failed and called for “the rebirth of Europe”. For this he was heavily criticised (FAZ 31 May 2003). His speech in 2013 at the World Philosophy Congress in Athens seemed out of step with the times, as he invoked this history once more, whilst the Chinese delegation had long since been celebrating Confucianism as the new normative force of the future.
Habermas’s euphoria for Europe demanded for European unity even with ‘compulsion`, holding that The nation-state, too, had once been imposed on Europeans. Even back then, Germans were not friends to other Germans, Poles were not friends to other Poles, and the French were not friends to all French people. What became possible through the 19th-century narrative of the nation-state – and which today hinders us – must and can succeed in Europe, “overcome our national narrow-mindedness.” (The Divided West 2004, 64 ff.)
Today, the theory of communicative action appears romantic. Arendt had always advocated for a diversity of voices within pluralism and considered consensus unsuitable for democracy. Habermas, on the other hand, maintained that it was through consensus that unity was to be achieved—a longing, albeit steeped in rationality, that had remained with him from his early studies of Schelling.
His discourse ethics was consensus-oriented and blind to the fact that rational agreement shattered against the will to power. He announced an ‘unforced force’, a voluntary submission to reason. But this dream of reason failed at the very latest where it could offer the aggressor nothing but a ‘face-saving compromise’ (SZ 15.2.23). Habermas could not and would not recognise that his theory was unsuited to overturning power relations. Thus, he remained blind to feminism as well. Transforming the primacy of the male-dominated lifeworld into a community of equals through rational communication was not a concern of his.
The last of the Enlightenment thinkers has now passed away. He leaves behind an empty space that must be filled.
Ruth Edith Hagengruber March 14, 2026
President of the German Society for Philosophy
