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 world's foremost living philosopher and social theorist"
Wilber's own description of Habermas, introducing him as a source whose conclusions arrived independently at the same place as Wilber's.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4
