"All at once we saw that we had been living in a politically criminal system. His horrified reaction to what he called his fellow Germans' collectively realised inhumanity constituted what he described as that first rupture, which still gapes. His great leftist, Jewish teachers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer philosophised in that rupture."
"Habermas, perhaps because he was young and perhaps because he was not Jewish, went beyond his teacher's guilt and despair. Where Adorno had developed a philosophical anti-method called negative dialectics, Habermas sought, like the titans of German philosophy Kant, Hegel and Marx to develop system and method."
"He did so in order to work out how, as he once wrote, citizens could still exercise collective influence over their social destiny through the democratic process. He took from Adorno the need to create a new categorical imperative."
Jürgen Habermas, who died at 96, served in the Hitler Youth during World War II manning anti-aircraft defenses. His worldview shifted dramatically after witnessing the Nuremberg trials and Nazi concentration camp documentaries, which he described as a foundational rupture. This traumatic realization of systematic inhumanity profoundly influenced his intellectual development. Under mentors Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer at Frankfurt's Institute of Social Research, Habermas engaged with critical theory. Unlike Adorno's philosophical despair, Habermas pursued systematic philosophy following Kant, Hegel, and Marx to develop frameworks enabling citizens to exercise collective democratic influence over their social destiny.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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