Studies in a Dying Culture

“In this situation, silence would be a false response: the person who is addressed and remains silent, clothes himself in an aura of indeterminate significances and imposes silence. For this, Heidegger is one example . . . . Because of this authoritarian character Sartre rightly called silence ‘reactionary’.”

SOURCE: Habermas, Jurgen. “Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in This World,” in: Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, edited and with an introduction by Eduardo Mendieta. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), Chapter 3, p. 67.