IN DEFENSE OF THE ACCIDENTAL

Habermas. 2026.03.14. R.I.P.

Deren Schwierigkeit aber ist nicht, daß durch sie — die modern revolutionäre Geschichtsphilosophie — die biblische Eschatologie säkularisiert wurde, sondern, daß durch sie die biblische Eschatologie zu wenig säkularisiert wurde: die revolutionäre Geschichtsphilosophie ist die mißlungene Säkularisierung der biblischen Eschatologie und darum „politische Theologie" (Odo Marquard, 1983).

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Die andere Möglichkeit Wenn wir den Krieg gewonnen hätten, mit Wogenprall und Sturmgebraus, dann wäre Deutschland nicht zu retten und gliche einem Irrenhaus. Man würde uns nach Noten zähmen wie einen wilden Völkerstamm. Wir sprängen, wenn Sergeanten kämen, vom Trottoir und stünden stramm. Wenn wir den Krieg gewonnen hätten, dann wären wir ein stolzer Staat. Und preßten noch in unsern Betten die Hände an die Hosenn…

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Fateful accidents are the reality of our life, because as human beings we are always "entangled in stories" (Wilhelm Schapp); because, as Hermann Luebbe, above all, has shown, actions become stories when something interferes in them, happens to them, befalls them. A story is a choice that is interrupted by something accidental, something fatefully accidental; this is why stories cannot be planned, but must be told. O…

«Jacob Taubes (to put it bluntly) advocated the thesis: the central philosophy of modern times is the philosophy of history, and this is the continuation of Gnosis using modern means. Hans Blumenberg put forward the thesis (also formulated in a pointed way): the Modernity and its philosophies (including the philosophy of history) is not a continuation of Gnosis, but its opposite - it is the second overcoming of Gnosi…

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The crisis of geocentric astronomy is supposed to have reached its blasphemous eruption, a millennium after the system’s codification by Ptolemy, in the dictum of the king of Castile, Alfonso, who was called "the Wise," that the world would have turned out better if he could have been present at the Creation. This legendary censure of the creation became a topos that was varied in many ways. The most startling fact t…

In Gnosis the cosmos is seen as a world and an order devoid of meaning. For Gnosis, the unity of the ancient cosmos is conceived as a barrier or wall against which we collide in desperation. It is only this barrier, in its unity, which enable us to say that the beyond exists, which means precisely the beyond of the outermost shell enclosing the cosmos. The cosmos, as portrayed in Gnosis, has not been emptied to a poi…

What is more important than universal history is the reply to it that promotes motleyness, which <…> is "multiversal history," the scholarly form of polymythical thinking. Universal history is human only insofar as it functions, directly or indirectly, to empower multiversal thinking. Which implies, I think, that universal history is only made human by historicism—that is, by the self-distancing procedure by which t…

There was once, we know, an automaton constructed in such a way that it could respond to every move by a chess player with a countermove that would ensure the winning of the game. A puppet wearing Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent on all sides. Actually, a hunchbacked dwarf—a master at…

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Apocalypticism is at first not concerned with changing the structure of society, but directs its gaze away from this world. If revolution were to mean only replacing an existing society with a better one, then the connection between apocalypticism and revolution is not evident. But if revolution means opposing the totality of this world with a new totality that comprehensively founds anew in the way that it negates,…

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Now it is important, I think, to see that theological hermeneutics initially remained a singularizing hermeneutics even when, as a result of the Reformation, the rule of tradition and the rule of scripture came into conflict with one another: the dispute there was between two singularizing hermeneutics, for both wanted the correct interpretation, with its significance for salvation, of the absolute text, the holy scr…