Jürgen Habermas

Wilber's View

Habermas is arguably the single most load-bearing living authority Wilber leans on in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality — he calls him, in a short aside, the world's foremost living philosopher and social theorist (SES, ch. 4). Two structural pieces of the book's own architecture come from him directly: Habermas's account of the three validity claims a speaker implicitly makes — for truth, for sincerity, and for rightness — maps onto the objective, subjective, and intersubjective axes that underlie Wilber's four quadrants; and an independently-derived account of the stages of social and cultural evolution that Wilber treats as confirming his own earlier developmental scheme. Later in the book, Habermas also becomes an ally against the "flatland" reduction of reason to bare instrumental calculation — an argument on which he and Foucault, usually treated as opposed, are shown agreeing.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

The other is the work of Jürgen Habermas, whom many (myself included) consider the world's foremost living philosopher and social theorist. The conclusions of these two sources are in strong agreement, even though they were arrived at independently and from very different angles.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4

Likewise, Habermas's three validity claims, for truth (objects), truthfulness or sincerity (subjects), and rightness or justice (intersubjectivity), refer respectively to the Right half, the Upper Left, and the Lower Left…

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4

"With any speech act," he says, "the speaker takes up a relation to something in the objective world [it], something in a common social world [we], and something in his own subjective world [I]."

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4

This is likewise what Habermas refers to as "the totalitarian characteristics of an instrumental reason that objectifies everything around it, itself included." In this respect, Habermas is in complete agreement with Foucault.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12

In Integral Psychology

Integral Psychology gives Habermas his own dedicated profile among the "modern pioneers" (alongside Baldwin, Aurobindo, and Maslow) — and is considerably more candid about where Wilber thinks Habermas falls short than the more purely admiring SES treatment.

Jürgen Habermas (born 1929) has, in the course of his distinguished career, applied his integral vision across a wide variety of domains—philosophy, psychology, anthropology, evolutionary theory, linguistics, politics. — Integral Psychology, ch. 7

Habermas's overall model has three tiers. First is a theory of communication ("universal pragmatics"), which serves as the starting point for an account of the development of subjective (aesthetic), intersubjective (moral), and objective (scientific) consciousness (i.e., the Big Three; this developmental account of the individual is the second tier). — Integral Psychology, ch. 7

Habermas is the most comprehensive developmental philosopher now working. However, lamentably, he leaves out and totally ignores any of the stages of I, we, and it consciousness beyond vision-logic. As I would put it, Habermas is all-quadrant, but not quite all-level. — Integral Psychology, ch. 7

…in placing his reliance on linguistically generated structures of understanding, Habermas places an unfortunate wedge between human and nonhuman nature, so that his approach to nature is essentially instrumental. In short, we might say that his integral view is inadequate to both the prerational and the transrational domains—inadequate to both nature and spirit (a major flaw, some would say). — Integral Psychology, ch. 7

…for the ground it covers, his work has already assured him a place in history as being at least one of the half-dozen most important thinkers of this century, and it appears that no integral view can hope to succeed that ignores his profound contributions. — Integral Psychology, ch. 7

Habermas's attempt to reconstruct historical materialism on the basis of universal pragmatics and communicative action remains the most sophisticated of modern attempts to trace sociocultural evolution. — Integral Psychology, ch. 12

See Also

• foucault — allied with Habermas on the critique of instrumental reason
• James Mark Baldwin — the other "modern pioneer" IP credits with the same aesthetic/moral/scientific (Big Three) developmental scope, decades earlier
• Chart 10: Jürgen Habermas — his own seven-stage good-life/validity/ethics sequence, reconstructed in full
• holons / holarchy — the developmental framework Habermas's stages are cited to support
• Sex and Gender: Male and Female Advantage/Liberation — the hominid hunting-band/family argument Wilber builds this section on directly from Habermas
• The Dialectic of Progress — Habermas's own term, quoted at length, for the pattern (each stage solves old problems while creating new ones) Wilber treats as independent confirmation of his developmental scheme
• Multiculturalism and Transnationalism — Wilber's reading of both, via the same Habermasian stage-transition logic