It is important to talk about “constitutional patriotism” and “deliberative democracy”, not only in national states, but also in the European supranational reality, especially at a time when doubt is confused with disbelief, and when discouragement and malaise fuel giving up. “Truth does not exist in the singular”, so democratic legitimacy must be connected to the mediation of institutions and the involvement of citizens. This is what Jürgen Habermas (1929-2026) says, who recently left us, remembering the origins of the European Union, as a construction of peace and development, capable of integrating differences, taking into account historical memory, from a perspective of personal responsibility.
Thus, the young philosopher Habermas dared to confront Heidegger, in 1953, in a fundamental text entitled “Thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger”. So, he accused the old thinker not of refusing democratic equality, but of the lack of self-criticism regarding his political involvement and the fact that this silence irremediably contaminated the philosophical attitude. After all, the main task of those who dedicate themselves to the business of thinking is to shed light on the crimes that have been committed and keep awareness about them awake? Remember the terror so that it does not happen again, but avoid resentment and revenge.
Challenged, Heidegger would avoid controversy and respond that his concern had to do with the relationship between man and technique. But Habermas would counter that his criticism had nothing to do with the political involvement with National Socialism, but with the stubbornness in not recognizing its error. Basically, “the discussion about Martin Heidegger’s political behavior could not, and should not, serve purposes of summary defamation and contempt, since, as those born later, we cannot know how we would have behaved in this situation of dictatorship”.
J. Habermas would also draw the attention of Theodor W. Adorno with a text published in the magazine Mercury entitled “The dialectic of rationalization”, in which he analyzed the alienation generated both by work in an assembly chain and by unlimited consumption. And premonitorily he warned: “From production to transportation, through communication or leisure, the ‘machine culture’ will end up dominating our lives.”
However, democracy should result from a continuous debate between citizens with a view to producing legitimacy submitted to the “best argument”. In this sense, critical responsibility will mark the decisive importance of the thinker today. Hence the need to domesticate capitalism with democracy, guaranteed through a Rule of Law with a “social face”, overcoming the “anthropological pessimism” that characterized the beginnings of the Frankfurt School. The concepts of knowledge, freedom and progress constitute values of an illustrated reason, in the context of “modernity”, as an “unfinished project”, as opposed to post-modernity…
The famous conference given at the Gulbenkian Foundation in 2013 and the publication by the institution of Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Another History of Philosophy (2 volumes) in specially careful editions. “If I have a trace of utopia left, it resides in the conception that democracy (and public debate in its best forms) has the capacity to break the Gordian knot of almost practically insoluble problems.”
The master’s memory continues to echo in those walls.
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