ABSTRACT
In Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (AGP) Juger Habermas offers a genealogy of Western philosophy with a focus on the strand that issues in postmetaphysical thinking. In AGP, Habermas returns to the Axial Age to stress a common beginning for both philosophy and religion. The analysis of a rational potential embedded in democratic constitutionalism that Habermas lays out in AGP is at a very different level of analysis than that of policy and politics. The lesson to be taken from constitutional bootstrapping is that fully formed democracy cannot be exported; it can only take root through learning. Learning processes trace slow, long-term evolutions of worldviews. Freedom and inclusion are the two characteristics most important if the process is to embody rational freedom. The universal validity of postmetaphysical reason beyond the West depends on the possibility of a global intercultural dialogue in which the peoples of the world learn to cooperatively solve their problems fairly and stably.
