Professor Jürgen Habermas, who has died aged 96, was widely celebrated. Many obituaries read like academic papers; I offer here a personal tribute, a glimpse of a life truly lived.

In 1998, as a student in London, I learned that Jürgen Habermas would be giving a lecture at the Royal Institute of Philosophy. By coincidence, at almost the same hour, my father was due to land at Heathrow Airport from Athens to visit me. What was I to do? In a world before mobile phones, I made a choice that shaped me. I asked my father to wait at the airport for three hours so I could witness, firsthand, a man who defined our era. I was 24 at the time. My father, understanding the “what and the why,” agreed. It was worth the wait. Life is made up of thousands of days, most of which fade. Thus, that day has never left me.

The Guardian’s recent coverage of Habermas’s “politics of the human” rightly honors his rupture with Nazi inhumanity. Yet, looking back at my notes from that day, I am struck by his rare, physical presence. Standing just a few meters from him, I saw a “kind giant”, tall, slightly stooped, with blue eyes that had seen Theodor W. Adorno. He battled a cold, his white hair like delicate cotton, using a large handkerchief that appeared like a “small ghost” as he defended the Enlightenment.

When I asked whether philosophy, in the second half of the 20th century, had shifted from the problem of knowledge to the problem of meaning, his anxious “Sorry?” made the amphitheater erupt in laughter. I repeated the question, adding that I stood with him against his Parisian rivals. Habermas seemed genuinely touched. “Oh, very good!” he replied with a Hegelian cadence, as if drawing words down from somewhere higher, in agreement with my point. In that moment, the distance between a young student and a major thinker collapsed. He was consensus incarnate, yet deeply human.

Afterward, we spoke, shook hands firmly and took a photograph I still treasure. He held a yellow envelope I had given him and accepted it warmly. Inside, among other lines, I had written: “I want to see your eyes—eyes that witnessed the end of Nazism.” In a gesture of the very “communicative action” he championed, he wrote his home address in my notebook, at my request, so I could stay in touch.

I never stopped reading him. Habermas showed me how intellectual moments and thoughtful, engaged dialogue can serve as a personal antidote to the distortions of social media, the “age of demagogues” –or emerging challenges from AI– and, importantly, as a vital part of a healthy public sphere. He taught us that reason is found (and emerges) in our speech with one another, our best defense against tyranny and oligarchy. Jürgen Habermas also remained a lifelong supporter of Israel and the Jewish people.

Recently, calling from New York, I asked my father if he remembered waiting at Heathrow all those years ago. He didn’t. But when I told him the philosopher he had waited for so I could attend his lecture had died, he fell silent and was deeply saddened. My father had never read his books, but he understood that the encounter had been a rare moment of meaning lived on across a life. In our age of irrationality, Habermas’s penetrating ideas remain open, enduring, and profoundly necessary.

In an age of ‘illiberal times’ and digital echo, Habermas’s life reminds us that true reason isn’t found on a screen, but in the “communicative action” of two people –one a titan of thought, the other a son– forging human connection together. Thus, he is survived not only by close relatives –and, if I may say so, his ideas, my love for my father, and my guilt at having him wait at the airport– but also by all who encountered him and cherish their sincere memories of him. In the public sphere, memory becomes a form of immortality.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)