by Genevieve Balance Kupang

I. The First Encounter

I met you not in Frankfurt,

not in Starnberg's quiet light,

but in the humid heart of Manila,

where the air was thick with the scent of mimeographed pages

and the restless hunger of minds not yet arrived.

You came to us in De La Salle's and Maryhill School of Theologys seminar rooms in the 1990s,

not in flesh, though your words were flesh enough

You arrived through syllabi and arguments,

through the strange and beautiful insistence

that speech itself is sacred,

that every conversation carries within it the seed of its own justice.

I was studying religious studies and values then.

I did not yet know that you were teaching me

the grammar of transformation.

II. The School of Theology and the Resonance

Across the city, in Quezon City's quieter corridors,

Maryhill School of Theology opened its doors to me

thirty-six units of liberation theology,

the Adult Theological Education Program

drawing me deeper into the questions that Gutierrez and Boff had dared to ask:

Whose voice has been silenced?

Whose suffering is made invisible by the structures we call order?

And there you were again, Habermas, not named perhaps in every lecture,

but present in the logic of critique,

in the recognition that the powerful have always colonized the conversation,

that the public sphere you theorized was never truly public

until the excluded were invited in.

Liberation theology andcommunicative actionwere,

I began to understand, the same flame in different vessels

One burning in the favelas of Latin America,

One lit in the ruins of postwar Germany

Both insisting that reason belongs to everyone,

that the silenced have the right to speak,

that truth emerges not from domination but from dialogue freely entered.

III. What You Taught Me Before I Knew My Name as Scholar

You taught me that argument is not war.

You called it "the unforced force of the better argument"

That in the ideal speech situation,

outcomes depend not on power but on reason,

freely given and freely received.

You taught me that the public sphere is not a given

It is a practice, a discipline, a moral commitment

That every time I pick up my pen, I am either enlarging

or diminishing the space where democratic life is possible.

You taught me that language is not merely instrument.

You knew this in your bones

Born with a cleft palate,

you understood spoken language as "a layer of commonality

without which we as individuals cannot exist."

And I, a woman from the Cordillera,

whose people have always known that the word

is the bond between self and cosmos, recognized in you, a kindred knowing.

Before I had the language of Applied Cosmic Anthropology,

You gave me the epistemology of listening

that knowledge is not extracted,

it is negotiated, co-created, earned in the honest fire of genuine encounter.

IV. The Journalist and the Philosopher

When I began writing for Pressenza,

I did not call myself Habermasian.

But your spirit walks in every piece I file.

You insisted, against the noise of the age,

that communicative rationality is located not in the structure of the cosmos alone

but in the structures of interpersonal linguistic communication.

That the goal of all genuine speech is mutual understanding.

So when I write about mandala, education and the arts

about indigenous knowledge and decolonization

about corruption as structural violence

and peace education as its antidote

I am practicing your theory in the field.

Peace journalism is not passive.

It is the radical act of insisting on the public sphere

for those who have none

for the elder whose story is not in the archive,

for the student protester whose voice is drowned by the machinery of power

for the victim whose truth has been made legally inadmissible by the powerful.

Every article I submit is an act of communicative action

It is my covenant with your teaching.

V. Your Greatest Gifts to the World

You reworked Critical Theory as developed by Adorno and Horkheimer

The theory that analyzes society, politics, and culture

And calls into question existing power structures,

ideologies and relations of domination.

But you refused to surrender to despair.

Where others saw only the administered world,

you still believed in the emancipatory power of reason.

Your Theory of Communicative Action

two volumes, 1984 and 1987

Your ideas of the public sphere, discourse ethics,

your discourse theory of law and democracy

These became the connective tissue between Frankfurt School critical theory

and today's living political philosophy.

You shaped theology because liberation theologians recognized

that the preferential option for the poor is structurally identical

to your insistence that those excluded from discourse

must be brought back to the table.

You shaped liberal arts

because you insisted that education is not the transmission of content

but the formation of the communicatively competent subject

the citizen who can argue, listen, and be persuaded.

You shaped communication theory

because you gave journalists and scholars alike

a moral framework for their craft, not just what to say,

but how and why the saying must be accountable to the other.

John Rawls himself, asked who was the greatest theorist of democracy,

said your name, "Habermas," with gravity and emotion,

noting that you were German, that you grew up under Nazism,

and that this made your commitment to reason all the more powerful.

VI. The Bridge to My Advocacy

You are present in every dissertation I supervise,

in every colloquium we convene,

in every anti-corruption forum I co-organize

where voices from Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, and elsewhere

speak to each other across the distance of difference.

You are present in Project DAD-DAD-AT

in the insistence that Cordilleran stories deserve their place in the human archive,

that indigenous knowledge is not supplemental

but foundational to any true public sphere.

You are present in my peace education work

Because WCCI, Pathways to Peace, WURII's mandate

these are all exercises in building what you called the communicative community

where no voice is structurally silenced, where reason has a chance.

Kapwa, the Filipino soul-bond between self and other,

is your communicative action translated into metaphysics.

We arrived at the same place from different rivers.

VII. Farewell, Old Teacher

You were called "a beacon in a raging sea"

and so you were, for those of us who needed to believe

that reason could survive the century's catastrophes,

that discourse was not dead,

that the public sphere could be rebuilt even in the rubble of authoritarianism.

You were the last surviving representative of the Frankfurt School,

the final keeper of that difficult, necessary flame.

Now we carry it.

Rest in the deep reason you always sought.

Rest in the speech that was always, for you,

an act of love toward the stranger

the cleft-palated boy from Dsseldorf

who learned that words were how we hold each other

across the terrifying distance of being human.

Your public sphere lives in every honest sentence.

Yourcommunicative actionlives every time the silenced find their voice.

Peace, force, and joy, Jrgen Habermas.

The conversation continues.

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About the Author:

Dr. Genevieve Balance Kupang, International Relations Officer, Baguio Central University | Applied Cosmic Anthropologist | Peace Educator | Pressenza Contributor; Baguio City, Philippines March 15, 2026

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