Quotes from Jurgen Habermas

Only by externalization, by entering into social relationships, can we develop the interiority of our own person.

Perhaps September 11 could be called the first historic world event in the strictest sense: the impact, the explosion, the slow collapse - a gruesome reality literally took place in front of a global public.

Some of those drawn into the holy war had been secular nationalists only a few years before. If one looks at the biographies of these people, remarkable continuities are revealed.

In the U.S.A. or Europe there is no realistic way to estimate the type, magnitude, or probability of the risk, nor any way to narrow down the potentially affected regions.

A threatened nation can react to uncertain dangers solely through administrative channels, to the truly embarrassing situation of perhaps overreacting.

The uncertainty of the danger belongs to the essence of terrorism.

I cannot imagine a context that would some day, in some manner, make the monstrous crime of September 11 an understandable or comprehensible political act.

Osama bin Laden, the person, more likely serves the function of a stand-in. Compare the new terrorists with partisans or conventional terrorists in Israel. These people often fight in a decentralized manner in small, autonomous units, too.

I take as my fundamental starting point the fundamental distinction between work and interaction

Today's Islamic fundamentalism is also a cover for political motifs. We should not overlook the political motifs we encounter in forms of religious fanaticism.

One never really knows who one's enemy is.

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.

Today, the language of the market penetrates every pore and forces every interpersonal relation into the schema of individual preference.

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.

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.

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.

Contextualism is only the flipside of logocentrism.

Diskurse herrschen nicht. Sie erzeugen eine kommunikative Macht, die die administrative nicht ersetzen kann, sondern nur beeinflussen kann.

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.

In einem Aufklärungsprozess gibt es nur Beteiligte.

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.

Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.