The Postsecular Political Philosophy of Jürgen Habermas

Dafydd Rees

Description

Jürgen Habermas is arguably the world’s most influential living philosopher – by introducing ideas such as the public sphere, constitutional patriotism, and the discourse theory of law and democracy, he has transformed modern political philosophy. But since 2001, Habermas’s thought has taken an unexpected turn. This book is the first full-length treatment of Habermas’s postsecular political philosophy, and critically analyses his new direction of thought. The author places the postsecular turn in the context of Habermas’s long-standing commitment to developing a postmetaphysical account of morality, politics and human communication; the tension between secular liberal democracy and religious freedom is real, but there may be losses as well as gains to Habermas’s quest to translate the sacred.

List of Tables
Introduction - At the Paulskirche
1. Sacred and Profane
2. Religion and Postmetaphysical Thinking
3. The Anthropic Problem
4. Rawls, Habermas and the Critique of Secularism
5. Postsecular Deliberative Democracy
6. Pyrrhic Translation
Conclusion - Ethics and Metaphysics
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Political
• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786832733
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY NOW
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Political Philosophy Now is a series which deals with authors, topics and
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Kant’s Political Legacy: Human Rights, Peace, Progress
Luigi Caranti
PPPJH.indd 2 25/07/2018 12:03:54POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY NOW
The Postsecular
Political Philosophy of
Jürgen Habermas
Translating the Sacred
Dafydd Huw Rees
UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS • CARDIFF • 2018
PPPJH.indd 3 25/07/2018 12:03:54© Dafydd Huw Rees, 2018
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ISBN 978-1-78683-272-6
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PPPJH.indd 5 25/07/2018 12:03:54Contents
List of Tables viii
Introduction – At the Paulskirche 1
1 Sacred and Profane 21
2 Religion and Postmetaphysical Thinking 45
3 The Anthropic Problem 75
4 Rawls, Habermas and the Critique of Secularism 106
5 Postsecular Deliberative Democracy 121
6 Pyrrhic Translation 143
Conclusion – Ethics and Metaphysics 166
Notes 173
Bibliography 213
Index 227
PPPJH.indd 7 25/07/2018 12:03:54List of Tables
Table i.1: Formal pragmatics – elements of language 12
Table i.2: The social formation and social evolution 15
Table 1.1: Worldviews 38
Table 2.1: Metaphysics, philosophy of consciousness, 57
and postmetaphysical thinking
PPPJH.indd 8 25/07/2018 12:03:54Introduction – At the Paulskirche
The Postsecular Turn
At the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, on 14  October 2001, Jürgen
Habermas rose to address the audience. He had been awarded the
Peace Prize of the German Booksellers and Publishers Association.
Little more than a month earlier Islamic extremists, using hijacked
planes, had killed 2,996 people in New York and Washington DC.
1Habermas delivered an address entitled ‘Faith and Knowledge’.
He called for the secular West to re-evaluate its vision of moder -
nity; he called for dialogue between believers and non-believers,
for the translation of religion’s ethical insights into secular
language; he argued for the inclusion of religious voices in the public
sphere in a new, ‘postsecular’ deliberative democracy.
Many commentators see this as the moment of Habermas’s
postsecular turn: the beginning of a new phase in his work, in which
the hitherto neglected topic of religion takes centre stage. If we can
indeed speak of a postsecular turn in Habermas’s thought – and,
as we will see, the idea is disputable – it was of a piece with a
broad trend among Western philosophers and social and political
theorists, which has been visible since the 1980s. The Weberian
assumption that religion will be privatised and will fade away as
human societies become more developed, rationalised and
disenchanted has been put into question, both by the undeniable
persistence of religious belief and its increasing visibility in political
2 3 4life. Theorists such as Charles Taylor and José Casanovas have
argued that the supposedly universal vision of a secular moder -
nity is in fact rather particularistic, limited to a certain historical
moment and to parts of the Western world alone. Habermas is far
from the only philosopher who looked back at the beginning of the
twenty-first century and reconsidered his assumptions about the
sacred and the secular.
What is notable about Habermas’s post-2001 work is his
unexpected and vociferous support for religion as an integral part of
PPPJH.indd 1 25/07/2018 12:03:542 INTRODUCTION
contemporary societies, as a source of precious ethical values, and
as an equal partner in dialogue for philosophy. Habermas’s major
texts on social theory, ethics and political philosophy barely
consider religious belief as a modern phenomenon. And yet today, he
insists that non-believers must open themselves to the possible
truth-contents of religious language, and collaborate with their
5religious fellow-citizens in the public sphere. He claims that many
of philosophy’s central concepts can be traced back, genealogically,
6to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. He castigates secular political
7theory for marginalising and alienating religious believers. From
a philosopher who had previously paid little attention to religion,
this change in tone and perspective is striking.
Linguistification, Appropriation, Translation
The purpose of this book is to go behind the scenes of the
postsecular turn. My aim is to look critically at the background of
this new phase in Habermas’s work, and especially at the
political philosophy which emerges from it. I will make two claims.
First, Habermas’s new approach to religion has as much to do with
‘endogenous’ factors, namely the blind spots and limitations of
his own philosophical project, as it does with ‘exogenous’ factors,
such as violent external events and the uncomfortable position of
religious believers in secular democracies. Secondly, postsecular
deliberative democracy, the political theory which Habermas has
developed in the years since 2001, is a flawed model which cannot
perform the tasks Habermas sets for it. Above all, the model’s
central procedure of ‘translating’ religious inputs to the public sphere
into secular language is unworkable.
For Habermas’s current philosophical work to be postsecular, it
must at one time have been secular. Chapter 1 considers the role
which religion plays in his social theory as it developed during the
1970s and 1980s, culminating with the Theory of Communicative
Action. As we will see, at this time Habermas considered religions
to be no more than the worldviews of traditional societies, tied to
a particular level of communicative competence and moral
capacity. Their social functions of providing group solidarity, social
integration and moral legitimation are usurped in the modern era
by communicative action. This transition, which Habermas calls
PPPJH.indd 2 25/07/2018 12:03:54INTRODUCTION 3
the ‘linguistification of the sacred’, implies the obsolescence of
religions in the modern era – if they survive at all, they are
relics, with no significant role to play. This strongly secularist vision
of modernity pervades the Theory of Communicative Action, and
is reproduced to a great extent in Between Facts and Norms, his
major work in political philosophy, published in 1992.
This was the high-water mark of Habermas’s secularism. But
even during this period his view of religion was shifting, in large
part due to his development of a philosophical paradigm,
postmetaphysical thinking, and a moral philosophy, the discourse theory
of morality. Chapter  2 discusses these developments, and shows
that the constraints of postmetaphysical thinking and the discourse
theory of morality create a space for modern subjects to borrow
(or ‘translate’, or ‘appropriate’) religious ideas and values, above
all for use in their ethical discourses. In a similar way, secular
philosophies have for centuries borrowed religious concepts.
Following on from this, Chapter 3 argues that by the end of the 1990s
Habermas had become aware that this division of labour between
postmetaphysical and religious discourse was unsustainable. The
appearance of urgent ‘species-ethical’ questions, connected to
human genetic modification and the growth of a ‘hard naturalist’
worldview, threatened to undermine his philosophical project. As I
will show, making use of religious discourse represented a solution
to this crisis. This, it seems to me, was the decisive endogenous
factor behind Habermas’s postsecular turn.
In Chapter 4, I turn to Habermas’s postsecular political
philosophy. This chapter sets the scene by exploring the dispute