CONVERSATIONS

by Liam Boyle

 

in memoriam Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026)  

 

In his later years, Jürgen Habermas was sometimes described as “the last European” – a reference to his passionate commitment to the ideals of the European Union (although not always its modern reality). The great German philosopher was also the last surviving exemplar of a generation of postwar intellectuals formed by the experience of the second world war. Like Jean-Paul Sartre in France, Habermas was as at home in the public square as the seminar room, debating the future of a continent that needed to be rebuilt ethically as well as physically. In the new age of unreason, where brute exercise of power is explicitly prized above the force of moral argument, the loss of any such figure is to be mourned. But Habermas’s death at the age of 96, as the US and Israel wage an illegal war of choice, and the far right is in the ascendant in France and Germany, feels particularly poignant. A member of the Hitler Youth as a boy, Habermas then made it his life’s work to philosophically ground the democratic values which are now under threat again. A renewed focus on the great insight that drove his thinking would be an appropriate legacy. The Theory of Communicative Action, his 1980s magnum opus, was not (to put it mildly) as accessible as some of his newspaper opinion pieces. But its central idea – that our nature as linguistic beings puts reason and the search for consensus at the core of who we are – remains an antidote both to intellectual relativism and Trumpian “realism”, which elevates national or individual self-interest above all other sources of human motivation. —The Guardian, March 18, 2026

 

I have to think that it matters
my own small contribution 
to the project of democracy
going door to door at evening time
arguing the merits of my candidate. 
 
And I know there isn’t time enough
to trace each reason back to source
and I know, between my tired feet
and families readying meals,
this is not the ideal public sphere 
that you described.
 
In your obituary the familiar gripes –  
too much Enlightenment,
too out of its time,
too emphatically rational. 
But that’s what I liked, the ambition of it all, 
the long conversations 
step by step to consensus.
 
The horror of holocaust formed you.
You saw the mirage of Nazism
and its brutal reality. 
Your “never again” meant reckoning 
with the whole story of modernity. 
You sought to rescue its promise
from the twisted wreckage around you. 
 
And with the recent turn from talk,
all the strong men who do because they can, 
might is right, and all that gab, 
the giddy march of atavistic nativism, 
it can be said that you failed. 
 
But I thank you for the ideal you sketched 
of undistorted conversation
of reasons advanced and scrutinised
in the slow careful business 
of building understanding and agreement. 

 

Liam Boyle lives in Galway, Ireland. He was a featured reader in the New Writing Showcase at Cúirt International Festival of Literature 2025. Many of his poems deal with memory and heritage. He enjoys spending time with his grandchildren.