According to a well-known sentence by Hegel in the preface to his “Philosophy of Right”, every philosophy “reflects its time in thought”. This is a claim that can no longer be fulfilled. But in philosophy, just as in literature and art, there are works of “high seismographic value for diagnosing the times”. This is what Jürgen Habermas says in his introduction to the key words “On the intellectual situation of the time”, which he published almost half a century ago, with the title quoting Karl Jaspers’ book of the same name from 1931 with a hint of irony – as if it had become time-barred. No other work of contemporary philosophy has brought the multi-voiced spirit of his, our time, to a worldwide audience and awareness to the same extent and with a comparable effect as the life’s work of Jürgen Habermas.
Reinhard Merkel on the 95th birthday of Jürgen Habermas – Culture
