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Above: Jürgen Habermas as a
young man |
Jürgen Habermas
By Peter Gordon
The New Republic,
December 2011
Edited by Andy Ross
In October 2001, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, then aged 72,
started talking about religion. Habermas has never betrayed any sign of
personal faith but his turn to religion amplifies philosophical and
political themes that have preoccupied him for many years.
Habermas
was a philosopher in the Hegelian tradition of Western Marxism. He was
raised on the insights of the Frankfurt School and his teachers were Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer. But he eventually concluded that his teachers had
backed themselves into a corner with their totalizing critique of reason as
such. He abandoned the revolutionary ambitions and shabby apologetics that
brought Marxism into disrepute and made his peace with European social
democracy.
Habermas was a young man in postwar West Germany. In a
1992 book he described how Enlightenment intellectuals and critics developed
a practice of public debate that would become the core feature of Western
democracy. He argued that the reality of property exclusions meant that
bourgeois practice always contradicted this ideal. In his magnum opus, The
Theory of Communicative Action (1981), Habermas tried to show how the
structure of human language promises mutual understanding and a rational
consensus that can serve as the basis for a truly democratic polity.
Habermas had wrestled for years with the classic theorists Weber and
Durkheim in the sociology of religion. Habermas saw that as reason expands
its reach, the contents of our religious heritage must undergo a trial of
rationalization. The ideas that were once considered beyond scrutiny must be
refashioned into propositional claims that are susceptible to criticism. His
new work on religion is built upon a formidable bedrock of preparatory
theory in both the philosophy and the sociology of religion.
In his
Frankfurt speech in 2001, Habermas was keen to offer words of moderation.
One month after 9/11, the Bush administration had rushed to a rhetoric of a
crusading war on terror. Habermas: "If we want to avoid a clash of
civilizations, we must keep in mind that the dialectic of our own occidental
process of secularization has not yet come to a close." The task of
understanding religious violence would have to be a collective effort.
The task is urgent for European democracies that confront the challenge
of cooperation within increasingly multicultural and multireligious
societies. The challenge of this new situation is not easily managed, but it
is easily manipulated and has provoked waves of xenophobic backlash.
Some conservatives in Europe continue to believe that Christianity is a
necessary component of modern civilization. Many theorists of democracy
regard the secular Enlightenment as a precondition for the rise of
democratic institutions, but some conservative political theorists blame
overzealous secularization for the rise of Nazism as a new kind of paganism.
Habermas meets the conservative critics halfway. He sees streams of
religious instruction that nourish the modern age. The idea of a sharp break
may also prevent us from acknowledging sources of guidance for secular
modernity. Habermas disagrees with proponents of thoroughgoing
secularization who seem intent upon denying religion any role in politics
whatsoever. He accepts that monotheistic religion may furnish moral insights
that can be useful to secular democracies. The West has been shaped by a
continuous philosophical appropriation of "semantic contents" from the
Judeo-Christian tradition.
Habermas claimed that with the
rationalization of our collective discourse, the authority of the holy could
be "gradually replaced" by the authority of an achieved consensus. The
language was unapologetic in its rationalism and seemed consonant with the
belief that religion was destined to disappear once its contents were spent.
But now Habermas prefers to speak of translation as the only mode of
"nondestructive secularization" whereby modern society might salvage the
moral feelings that "only religious language has as yet been able to give a
sufficiently differentiated expression".
The idea of translation
works well in the context of modern democracy where we need to provide
reasons for the policies we advocate. Yet these reasons cannot presuppose
that everyone shares the same metaphysical vision of reality. In a
multicultural democracy we must submit to a relativization of moral vision.
I must be willing to back up my claims with reasons that all other citizens
could recognize as at least potentially binding no matter what they may
believe. This is the price of democracy.
This requirement seems to
place an unequal burden on religious members of a society, but Habermas
tries to present the task of translation as a reciprocal learning process in
which burdens are symmetrical. He dresses up the unidirectionality of
translation to promote a more favorable vision of reciprocity. This may be
diplomatic but it does not reflect his deeper commitment to reason.
What Habermas used to call the "linguistification of the sacred" he now
calls translation. The theory of translation is essentially a theory of
secularization mapped onto democratic discourse. Perhaps there is nothing in
religion that requires translation. Habermas acknowledges that religious
rituals and practices appear to have no obvious secular counterpart.
Habermas observes that in our ethical reasoning we provide justification
in the language of universalistic concepts that presuppose the freedom of
the individual. But to act on our insight into the solidarity of the human
collective we may need more than good reasons. Habermas says profane reason
"loses its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole —
of the Kingdom of God on Earth — as collectively binding ideals."
Habermas was not endorsing religion and condemning reason. He risked serious
misunderstanding when he talked about what is missing, with the apparent
implication that for secular reason what is missing is God. What is missing
is the unity of a world reconciled with itself, a world that is rational not
merely in promise but also in substance. Habermas meant that reason is too
fallible to dismiss the possibility that religious traditions may still be
of value.
Habermas suggests that in a democracy one should not
exclude from the public sphere any religious culture whose normative
insights admit of translation. But religious citizens must submit to the
reciprocal game of public critique.
AR Peter E. Gordon is Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University. His original essay is much wordier and more nuanced than the short cut I present here. My apologies for any distortion.
