"In Europe, you do philosophy by performing discourse on another guy's text, and so Derrida will go over Heidegger, and Habermas will extend Marx's corpus; but in America you could never get away with kinky stuff like that, for you have to generate philosophy from real things—like computers or television. You need to look at Omni magazine to get a feel for this new kind of mail-order, Popular Mechanics science of mind. It's full of articles about meditation helmets and downloading the soul into computers so that when your body wears out you can live forever. What is completely missing in Europe is precisely what you will find in America: namely, an electronic Umwelt in which history is replaced with movies, education is replaced with entertainment, and nature is replaced with technology. This peculiar wedding of low kitsch and high tech generates a posthistoric world that no European literary intellectual can quite fathom."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from GermanyPhilosophers from GermanySociologists from GermanySystems scientistsCritical theory
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
William Irwin Thompson (1991) Fast Foreword, from The American Replacement of Nature
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Jürgen Habermas
41 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Jürgen Habermas →
Related Quotes
"The usage of the words “public" and “public sphere” betrays a multiplicity of concurrent meanings. Their origins go b…"
"This investigation aims to analyze the type "bourgeois public sphere". Its particular approach is required, to begin …"
"Technically speaking, since our complex societies are highly susceptible to interferences and accidents,they certainl…"
"As historical and social beings we find ourselves always already in a linguistically structured lifeworld. In the for…"
"The 'state' on the modern conception is a legally defined term which refers, at the level of substance, to a state po…"
"Christianity has functioned for the normative self-understanding of modernity as more than a mere precursor or a cata…"
"I would in fact tend to have more confidence in the outcome of a democratic decision if there was a minority that vot…"
"Subjects who reciprocally recognize each other as such, must consider each other as identical, insofar as they both t…"
"The speaker must choose a comprehensible [verständlich] expression so that speaker and hearer can understand one anot…"
"[According to Habermas, the genesis of the bourgeois public sphere resulted from a combination of early capitalist co…"