The Frankfurt Spider

'public sphere' was killed off during the twentieth century...(by) the welfare state, mass media, the rise of public relations, the undermining of parliamentary politics by the rise of political parties... (thus) the public sphere lost its autonomy and critical power.
al reason has two oinstrumental reason has two opposing elements, namely 'the abstract ego emptied of all substance except its attempt to transform everything in heaven and on earth into means for its preservation, and on the other hand an empty nature degraded to mere material, mere stuff to be dominated, without any other purpose than that of this very dominance'.
（postmodernist French philosopher) Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote:'After the enormous massacres we have experienced (WWII), no can any longer believe in progress, in consensus, in transcendent values.'
This is essentially the same despair shared by Adorno, but not by Habermas.
(Max Weber) with the collapse of religious and metaphysical worldviews as a result of the Enlightenment, three value sphere or discourses open up to replace them --- the natural sciences, morality and law, and the arts.
真、善、美。
d householifeworld means the pre-theoretical everyday world of family and household, of shared meaning and understanding, of the unconstrained conversations that take place in the public sphere. The system by contrast means structures and patterns of instrumental rationality and action, notably money and power, whose chief function is the production and circulation of goods and services.
Habermas was arguing that the great production of Enlightenment, secular reason, is 'unenlightened about itself', it doesn't know what it is for
This is still a corolary from the "instrumentality" of reason; which causes Habermas to rethink about role of 'religion' post-Enlightenment.
Habermas prioritizes the moral over the ethical.Habermas prioritizes the moral over the ethical... norms are universalisable and thus moral, whereas values are non-universalisable and thus ethical.
我们可不可以把你家房子推到，以建一条造福大家的高速公路？Habermas反对。