Jürgen Habermas
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 (a concept page for that model doesn't exist yet — see holons and holarchy for the surrounding framework); 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
