It was Jürgen Habermas who coined the phrase “public sphere” — that space of discourse that mediates between the individual and the state; conversations in coffee shops, letters to the editor, opinion pieces, and latterly social media.

Habermas died on 14 March 2026 in Starnberg, Germany, at the age of 96.

His life and contribution is being celebrated in Germany because of his extraordinary public profile as an academic and his profound, lifelong engagement with the public sphere.

Born in 1929 in Düsseldorf, he grew up in a happy home environment in Gummersbach where his father was director of the Chamber of Commerce. He was born with a cleft palate. Corrective surgery left him with an asymmetric face and a slight lisp.

In an interview he once said:

Philosophers live finally from their own intuitions, and those intuitions are not acquired by reading philosophic texts. They are acquired in certain particular individual experiences while growing up — rather negative experiences of violation, indignation and Krankung. (M. Stephens “Jürgen Habermas: The Theologian of Talk”, 21)

That word means “an injury to one’s feelings.” I suspect one of those negative experiences was going from a caring home accustomed to his speaking with a cleft palate to school where his classmates mocked him and did not try to understand him.

Language rooted in experience

When, as a mature philosopher he attempted to formalize preconditions for communication in his “Universal Pragmatics” the first was: Intelligibility: That the speaker has uttered something understandable.

The other three preconditions were:

Truth: That the speaker is saying something true (or that the propositional content is true), allowing the hearer to share knowledge.

Rightness/Normative Appropriateness: That the speaker is speaking in a way that conforms to accepted social norms (i.e., the utterance is socially appropriate), establishing mutual trust.

Sincerity/Truthfulness: That the speaker is being truthful and sincere about their intentions (i.e., the speaker’s intentions are recognized and appreciated), allowing for mutual trust.

A second major negative experience for Habermas was at the end of World War II, when, as a teenager, Habermas discovered just how much and how systematically the German government and German society had distorted the truth about what was going on.

The documentaries about the Concentration Camps and the information that came out from the Nuremberg Trials convinced him that “we had been living in a politically criminal system.”

Communicative action vs. strategy

In response, Habermas developed a theory of language that distinguished “communicative action” — seeking understanding — from “strategic action” — saying something to make you do what the speaker wants.

Concealed strategic action included conscious and unconscious deception — the kind of manipulation and propaganda that he had experienced as a child growing up in a country at war.

Habermas styled himself as a neo-Marxist.

Classical Marxists took “labour” as the basic form of human action. One aspect that made Habermas’s philosophy new was his view that “communication and the use of language” are the fundamental human act. According to him we communicate so as to gain mutual understanding.

Habermas believed that the key to understanding other people, to discerning truth, and to building consensus was communication that was sincere, honest, open, and free.

He advocated for the “ideal speech situation”, where there is no deception, conscious or otherwise and:

• All relevant voices are heard,
• The best of all available arguments, given the present state of our knowledge, is accepted and
• Only the non-coercive coercion of the better argument determines the affirmations and negations of the participants. (Autonomy and Solidarity, 260)

Habermas and the synodal church

We have recently had much promotion of “synodal” processes in the Catholic Church. We are trying to form a consensus through listening and egalitarian speaking.

The philosophical ideas of Jurgen Habermas have much to contribute to exactly this process.

As he wrote in Communication and the Evolution of Society (3):

The goal of coming to an understanding is to bring about an agreement that terminates in the intersubjective mutuality of reciprocal understanding, shared knowledge, mutual trust, and accord with one another. Agreement is based on recognition of the corresponding validity claims of comprehensibility, truth, truthfulness, and rightness.

• Dr Mervyn Duffy SM lectured in theology at Good Shepherd College, Auckland, where, for a time, he was also Dean of Studies and, for two years, Acting Principal. In 2025 he was elected Provincial of the Society of Mary in New Zealand. Among his publications is “How Language, Ritual and Sacraments Work: According to John Austin, Jürgen Habermas and Louis-Marie Chauvet, Rome, 2005.”