How Jürgen Habermas helped me cope with my wife’s death | Letters

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Compliments to Stuart Jeffries for his obituary of Jürgen Habermas (15 March). Jeffries does a superb job describing both the personal and intellectual dimensions of Habermas, his life, thinking and commitment to action.

For this layman, who has darted in and out of Habermas, most influential was his concept of bounded, intermediate, public settings engendering meaningful thought and action. I never looked at the role of the 19th-century coffee house in the same way.

Ironically, the obituary reminded me that Habermas had recently played a significant role for me in coming to terms with another death, that of my beloved late wife, who was known to prefer the privacy of the home to engaging in public settings. But, as it turned out, that was not quite so in a Habermas sense.

As became clear in the accounts provided by people coming to pay their last respects, my wife had maintained an active, expansive life within the public space bounded by the main street in our town. Person after person, some whom I hardly knew, related details about her and indeed our joint lives, which totally surprised me.

She would traverse a kilometre-long stretch of the street by foot and encounter pedestrians and shopkeepers on an unplanned but recurring basis, engaging them in often-lengthy conversations. I came to realise then that she had created her own version of the Habermas coffee house.

She had fashioned a public space that transcended the private, providing her with a robust venue for conversation, and even action. Little did I know that my eureka moment about Habermas in the context of my wife’s death would be so quickly joined by that of Habermas’s own death.
Neil Wilkof
Ra’anana, Israel

• A brilliant and inspiring editorial on the central message of Habermas. I was only tangentially aware of his work, but the argument you have distilled is inspiring. When we are assailed and worse by continuous babble, the truth of his insight must surely make us reflect, change and act. Sadly, I doubt that the demagogues and their acolytes will give it a moment’s thought.
Neil Blackshaw
Alnwick, Northumberland