An Awareness of What is Missing

Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age

Jürgen Habermas

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745694702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In his recent writings on religion and secularization, Habermas has challenged reason to clarify its relation to religious experience and to engage religions in a constructive dialogue. Given the global challenges facing humanity, nothing is more dangerous than the refusal to communicate that we encounter today in different forms of religious and ideological fundamentalism.

Habermas argues that in order to engage in this dialogue, two conditions must be met: religion must accept the authority of secular reason as the fallible results of the sciences and the universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality; and conversely, secular reason must not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith. This argument was developed in part as a reaction to the conception of the relation between faith and reason formulated by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2006 Regensburg address.

In 2007 Habermas conducted a debate, under the title 'An Awareness of What Is Missing', with philosophers from the Jesuit School for Philosophy in Munich. This volume includes Habermas's essay, the contributions of his interlocutors and Habermas's reply to them. It will be indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand one of the most urgent and intractable issues of our time.

1
Habermas and Religion

MICHAEL REDER AND JOSEF SCHMIDT, S. J.

Starting Point: The Renewed Visibility of Religion

Religion is once more a topic of debate. It is once again being increasingly perceived as a social phenomenon, a development not prompted solely by the events of September 11, 2001. Against the background of the sociological debate on secularization of the 1970s and 1980s, in western countries religions seemed destined to lose ever more of their importance with progressive modernization and individualization. Yet this hypothesis has not been confirmed; on the contrary, today religions play an extremely important role in western societies.

The social traces of religions are to be found primarily in two domains. On the one hand, they take positions on political questions or engage in public debates. This phenomenon has undoubtedly been reinforced in Germany by the fact that Pope Benedict XVI has drawn renewed attention to the Christian Churches. However, the many other religious communities – be they Islamic, Buddhist, or Hindu – are also becoming increasingly important actors within western civil societies.

On the other hand, religion in these countries has undergone a multifaceted transformation, for religious symbols and language games are being transposed into other, not genuinely religious, domains. Unmistakable borrowings from religious traditions can be found in film, theater, and advertisement and in how mass events are orchestrated. In the process, the semantic and symbolic potentials of religions are becoming a universal social resource which shapes public and cultural life in a whole variety of ways.

The social significance of religion is becoming even more clearly apparent from a global perspective, for today religious communities play an important public role in very many regions of the world. They shape the individual practical attitudes of human beings in a variety of cultural ways, they influence cultural life, and they are part of public discourses and political processes. As a result, religions represent an important factor which merits attention when analyzing social developments in many parts of the world. Religion has also become a central topic on the global political stage, especially since September 11, 2001. Today global political strategies are difficult to conceive without reference to the relation between religion and politics.

Thus the discourse concerning secularization has also undergone a pronounced change. In spite of enduring trends towards secularization in certain regions (for instance, in eastern Germany), today almost nobody speaks of an imminent “extinction” of religions or of the religious any longer. Common sense seems to dictate that, although religions have changed profoundly and have been in part transformed during the modern and postmodern eras, they nevertheless remain a phenomenon of major social importance – in particular as regards the global situation. Thus “the return of the gods” – to quote the title of a book by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (Graf 2004) – is not strictly speaking a “return”; what we are witnessing is rather a renewed attention to the religious, even if the latter today appears in a new garb.

Philosophy, too, has dealt with this phenomenon extensively in recent years. One need only think of the conference which took place on the island of Capri in 1994, in which Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, and Hans-Georg Gadamer participated, among others (Derrida and Vattimo 1998). The volume The Future of Religion edited by Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo in 2006 is a further expression of this revived interest (Rorty and Vattimo 2006).

The philosophical discourse on religion in the context of the twenty-first century is multifarious and reflects clearly the different philosophical approaches of the respective authors. Notwithstanding all differences, however, one generally encounters three major sets of shared questions: (1) What does secularization involve and how should we understand its most recent development? (2) The second complex of questions concerns the difficulty involved in describing religion itself given the initial conditions outlined. Immanuel Kant, the paradigmatic authority figure of the modern era, is repeatedly invoked in this context in connection with the question of how religion should be conceived in philosophical terms. How, for example, should the relation between faith and knowledge be conceptualized and what is the specific domain of the philosophy of religion in the light of the emergence of an interreligious reality as globalization progresses? (3) The third line of enquiry connects the two previous ones in a certain way. For many studies deal with the issue of how, in the light of the current social developments, the relation between the secular and the religious language games, between citizens and institutions, can be conceived. Do they stand in a complementary relation or must we assume a priority of the one over the other for political and ethical reasons? And, finally: What potential do religious language games and symbols have for secular citizens?

Habermas and Religion – A Relation with Many Facets

Over the past forty years, Jürgen Habermas has consistently responded creatively to political and social developments. Scarcely any other philosopher has taken such an active part in current debates or has played a comparable role in initiating them. As a thinker concerned with “society as a whole,” he has consistently adopted an interdisciplinary approach and has exercised a profound influence on the public life of the Federal Republic of Germany. Thus it is not surprising that he has addressed the new visibility of religion in a very stimulating way.

If one surveys Habermas's work as a whole, the first thing one notices is that, until the middle of the 1990s, it contained just a few systematic treatments of religion; nevertheless, he expressed himself at least indirectly on religion in a number of works. In what follows, we will first mention these references briefly.¹

In Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981; English translation: The Theory of Communicative Action, 1984 (vol. 1), 1987 (vol. 2)), the work in which he laid the foundation of his approach to sociology and ethics, one can find a few preliminary references to the social role of religion that are still clearly influenced by the secularization hypothesis. Habermas assumes that, with the development of modern democratic society, the function of religion in fostering social integration is essentially transferred to secularized communicative reason: “… the socially integrative and expressive functions that were at first fulfilled by ritual practice pass over to communicative action; the authority of the holy is gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus” (Habermas 1987, p. 77). Underlying this assessment is the basic idea of communicative action, which states that communicatively acting persons reach agreements concerning their normative validity claims through rational argument and “only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse” (Habermas 1991a, p. 93). Religion is in danger of blocking precisely this communicative action because it does not leave the religious participants in discourse free to enter the presuppositionless space of rational communication, but instead equips them with clear directives concerning the goal of the discourse. Hence Habermas calls on the religious citizens not to absolutize their one-sided (moral) judgments but instead to submit to the conditions of a liberal state. From the perspective of the theory of communicative action, religion ultimately appears to belong to a historical developmental phase along the path to the modern, democratically constituted society.

In contrast to this more religion-skeptical point of view, during the 1970s and 1980s one can already find scattered remarks which are less informed by the thrust of the secularization hypothesis and which attach greater importance to the fact that modern societies – assuming that they want to strengthen the human [das Humane] – depend inherently on an understanding and a translation of the potentials of religious traditions. On the occasion of Gershom Scholem's eightieth birthday, Habermas expressed this insight as follows in his interpretation of a selection of Scholem's assertions: “Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human” (Habermas 1978, p. 142).

Ten years later, in the essays on Postmetaphysical Thinking, this recognition of the importance of the religious for modern societies found still clearer, if only indirect, expression. For Habermas now stresses the need to reflect on the religious if we are to be able, for example, to understand the central concepts of the history of ideas, which in many cases developed out of religious convictions. In addition to this historical knowledge, however, he emphasizes that religions contain indispensable semantic elements which differ fundamentally from philosophy and which may be important for the just ordering of modern societies. However, the basic idea of the theory of communicative action is preserved in these reflections. For the analysis of postmetaphysical thinking shows that, although religion exercises an important function in dealing with metaphysical issues, it can no longer raise, any more than can philosophy, a claim to universalizability for this function; nor can it claim to perform any of the integrative functions of worldviews.

From the mid-1990s onwards, Habermas has addressed the topic of religion explicitly and has enquired, in particular, into the relation between religion and the basic assumptions of his own social theory and ethics.² He first addressed the question of religion in his acceptance speech on receiving the Karl Jaspers Prize in 1985. However, his speech on receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2001, and the discussion with the then Cardinal Ratzinger at the Catholic Academy in Munich in 2004, have attracted particular attention.

In the Peace Prize speech, entitled “Faith and Knowledge” (Habermas 2003), Habermas develops the idea that the secularization hypothesis has now lost its explanatory power and that religion and the secular world always stand in a reciprocal relation. Although faith and knowledge are clearly separate from one another, they inherently depend on a constructive coexistence, especially in addressing urgent social questions such as those posed by bioethics. Religion proves to be an important moral resource in this context, according to Habermas, because religious citizens have special access to a potential for justifying moral questions. Its meaning-endowing function provides a moral basis for public discourse and thereby plays an important role in the public sphere.

In the light of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in particular, Habermas thinks that it is important to emphasize that religious expressions should not be crowded out of public discourse. On the contrary, he insists on the need to translate the contents of religious language into a secular one and thus to make them accessible to all. In this context, the concept “post-secular” – which in the interim has exerted a major influence on the debate over the social role of religion – expresses the fact that modern societies should also expect that religions will continue to exist and should seek to engage them in a constructive dialogue.

This relation of mutual dependence between faith and knowledge, between religious and secular citizens, becomes even clearer in the conversation with Cardinal Ratzinger conducted at the Catholic Academy in Munich in 2004. In addressing Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde's question concerning the normative presuppositions of the secularized state, Habermas stresses, on the one hand, the importance of fair and just procedures and, on the other, the fact that democratic majority decisions always depend on the prior ethical convictions of their citizens. Democracy depends on moral stances which stem from prepolitical sources, for example from religious ways of life. They play an important role for democracy as a background and a source of motivation, even though they cannot serve as normative guidelines for the democratic procedures.

However, religious utterances take on a positive function, for instance in virtue of their meaning-endowing potential, for deliberative democracy as part of the plurality of opinions within society. Religious and secular utterances cannot be clearly separated in any case, which for Habermas is a further pointer to the need for a process of mutual translation.

Habermas brought together his most important writings on the topic of religion between 2000 and 2005 in the volume Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion (2005; English translation: Between Naturalism and Religion, 2008). Particularly important in this connection is his essay on Immanuel Kant's understanding of religion. It is a lightly revised version of his lecture “Wirkungsgeschichte und aktuellen Bedeutung von Kants Religionsphilosophie” (“On the Reception and Contemporary Importance of Kant's Philosophy of Religion”), which Habermas delivered at the Kant symposium at the Wiener Akademie der Wissenschaften in 2004, and in which he situates his own reflections within the tradition of the philosophy of religion. Here Habermas uncovers parallels and contrasts between the ways in which the relation between faith and knowledge is defined in Kant, Kierkegaard, Schleiermacher, and Hegel. The central point for him is that Kant, as he sees it, construes reason too broadly when he integrates the postulates of religious faith into its practical dimension. The justification of morality and that of the existence of God are fundamentally separate issues for Habermas. Thus he makes a clear distinction between faith and knowledge, as already in the Peace Prize speech and in the conversation with Cardinal Ratzinger. Hence philosophy must understand religion in the end as something external to it.

The lecture on Kant's philosophy of religion and on the location of his own reflection on religion within the history of philosophy formed the starting point for a further symposium in Vienna in 2005, in which Habermas discussed his interpretation of Kant's philosophy of religion with philosophers and theologians. Rudolf Langthaler and Herta Nagl-Docekal have published this multifaceted discussion under the title Glauben und Wissen: Ein Symposium mit Jürgen Habermas über Religion (Langthaler and Nagl-Docekal 2007).

Context and Location of the Essays in the Present Volume

The Peace Price speech, the conversation with Cardinal Ratzinger, and Habermas's reflections on the Kantian concept of religion are important starting points for the lecture of Habermas published in this volume.³ Among other things, this lecture also contains Habermas's response to the address delivered by Benedict XVI on September 12, 2006 at the University of Regensburg. This address by the Pope aroused great interest especially on account of the interpretation of the relation b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1: Habermas and Religion
• 2: An Awareness of What is Missing
• 3: On the Attempt to Recall a Relationship
• 4: How Far Can Faith and Reason Be Distinguished?
• 5: Postmetaphysical Reason and Religion
• 6: A Dialogue in Which There Can Only Be Winners
• 7: A Reply
• References