He just wanted to write a “normal philosophical book”, says Jürgen Habermas. He does not want to use false modesty to downplay his monumental, more than 1700-page old work “Also a History of Philosophy” (FAZ of November 9, 2019). Rather, he expresses his surprise at how much the reception of the two volumes published two years ago has so far revolved around the question of what religion and metaphysics can still be saved today. The author suspects that the fact that even sober philosophy professors insist on this could indicate emotional needs that are no longer caught up by the inculcated academic forms of argumentation.
This is how Habermas reacts in his closing remarks to a conference at the Evangelical Academy in Tutzing, where students and companions appreciated his latest book.
With pointed statements and concise replicas, the philosopher showed himself to be extremely open to discussion and intellectually agile, even at the age of 92.
In recognition of his life's work, he was awarded the “Tutzinger Lion” during the conference, with which Habermas was distinguished from longstanding ties to the house, which is picturesquely situated on Lake Starnberg, although he actually no longer accepts any prizes.
What else do we believe in philosophy?
In view of a number of lectures that asked about the social cohesiveness of religious rites in contemporary secular societies (Thomas Schmidt) or who felt his philological interpretation of Luther (Micha Brumlik), Habermas attached importance to clarifying that he remained a “religiously unmusical” thinker may be. He had the impression that he had written the book for different motives than had previously emerged in its discussion. Habermas characterized his concerns as "inherently philosophical". Apart from the fact that he wanted to correct a picture of the history of philosophy in which the apparently "dark Middle Ages" and the problems that concern it in the relationship between belief and knowledge do not yet take their due place,With his three millennia-long history of philosophy he wanted to “criticize tendencies of narrowing and specialization of the subject performatively”, whose level of abstraction often no longer shows any reference to “decisive questions”.
Habermas expressly distanced himself from his own understanding of philosophy, presented at the Hegel Congress in 1981, as a “placeholder”, according to which it was irreplaceable as a producer of substantial questions, but had to leave the answers to the sciences. In contrast, he wanted to renew a demanding concept of philosophy in the current work, which not only limits it to conceptual analysis or scientific feeder activities, but sees in it contributions to a "rational world and self-understanding". Such a philosophy continues the project of the Enlightenment by taking up "human issues" and thereby contributing to the "promotion of sensible living conditions".
He raised the "Occidental constellation of belief and knowledge" to the central motif in the book only because the "question of what philosophy can and should still trust itself" depends on how it turns into the "transformed legacy of religious origin" behaves, as it says in the preface - a legacy that, in the form of Kant and the German idealists, has long since become philosophy.
The reliance of philosophy on religion, of modernity on the traditional ritual, which was sometimes taken from the book, Habermas wanted to know limited: Saying goodbye to metaphysics does not elicit any tears from him, social problems today must of course be solved “by means of practical reason alone” .