Candidate of Political Sciences, Ph.D University of Bonn, Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia, Moscow, pogorels@mail.ru
Jürgen Habermas, a world-famous German thinker who celebrated his 95th birthday in June 2024, is mastering the new realities and problems of the global political pro-cess. The way Western powers solve problems is increasingly at odds with his con-cepts of peace, discursive democracy, and correct German policy on the path to a European civil community. The active and dynamic philosopher is trying not only to master these realities, but also to shape them – and ultimately comes into fundamen-tal conflict with himself where a decision must be made between consistency and identity. Since the spring of 2022, the thinker has been at the center of public dis-course on Germanyʼs role in military conflicts. He has consistently advocated for the search for ways to peacefully resolve the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine. Without expressing sympathy for either side, he called on Germany to return to its peacekeeping role. However, in the new escalation of the Middle East crisis that began in October 2023, during the debate about Israelʼs military operation in Gaza, he declared that for Germany the issue was not subject to discussion: it was obliged to support Israel. The article will examine the position of Habermas and his colleagues from Frankfurt University in connection with the Middle East crisis and the subsequent reactions in Germany and abroad, and draw conclusions about the reasons why Habermas preferred to refrain from communicative action where the principles of German identity that were important to him were called into question. Habermasʼ example is indicative of an entire generation of West German intellectu-als, prominent representatives of the “public sphere”, symbolizing the West German political culture that is leaving us forever.
modern German philosophy; Jurgen Habermas; the Palestinian-Israeli conflict of 2023; public sphere.
Download textFor citing: Pogorel'skaya S. V. (2024) Forbidden discourse: Jurgen Habermas and the middle east crisis. Human being: Image and essence. Humanitarian aspects. Moscow. INION RAN.Vol. 4 (60). pp. 172-189. DOI: 10.31249/chel/2024.04.10