Explorations in Post-Secular Metaphysics

Josef Bengtson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137553362
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

This book explores the metaphysical assumptions that underlie different interpretations of the relationship between religion and the secular, faith and reason, and transcendence and immanence. It explores different answers to the question of how people of diverse religious and cultural identities can live together peacefully.

1

Introduction: Between Scientism and Fundamentalism

Is the universe reducible to the merely material, or is there a transcendent dimension? And if there is transcendence, how does it relate to our mundane reality? These have been central questions for every civilization throughout human history, expressed and explored through poetry, literature, music, philosophy, and religions. But, how do we relate to the notion of transcendence in our own secular age? Central to the story of how the Western world became modern has been a certain narrative of how we got rid of transcendence and religion, and became both rational and secular in the process. A popular claim that has accompanied this narrative of secularization has been that citizens should disconnect their beliefs about metaphysics and religion from their dealings with politics and the public sphere. The political philosophy of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and Robert Audi are influential examples of this perspective, suggesting that religion should be kept to a “private sphere,” and that citizens who participate politically should adhere to a “communicative rationality” or “generally acceptable reasons,” rather than reasons based on religious doctrine.¹

However, in recent years it has become impossible to disregard the public presence, as well as the political impact, of religions in the Western world. This has been accounted for in terms of the “return of religion,” or perhaps more correctly, by religion’s “new visibility,” suggesting that religious beliefs may have always existed, but are now visible in different ways.² The new visibility of religion has been studied in relation to fundamentalism and extremism, as well as politics, the public sphere, and liberal democracy. Furthermore, the resurgence of religion has also been noticed within philosophy, where the critique of Enlightenment account of reason in the guise of postmodern critical theory, according to the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, has accomplished a “breakdown of the philosophical prohibition of religion.”³ Several politically radical thinkers in the continental tradition can be seen exemplifying Vattimo’s claim through their engagement with theological themes. Without believing in, or belonging to, religion in any traditional sense, thinkers such as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, the French philosopher Alain Badiou, and the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, have all analyzed religion, and in particular Christian theology, as a means to critique a neo-liberal or capitalist hegemony.⁴ As a consequence of these engagements, new ways of approaching religion and the secular have emerged. Many of these accounts have sought to go beyond the concept of “religion” understood as merely personally held beliefs, inner feelings, and theoretical propositions, and have thus rejected earlier approaches as being essentialist, constructed, provincially Western, and post-colonial. Instead, more focus has been given to the lived, material, and political aspects of religion.⁵ The secular, understood as a realm differentiated from “the religious,” has in a similar way undergone a renewed scholarly scrutiny that has often been tied to the “legitimacy” and “autonomy” of modern reality.⁶ Furthermore, the typical Enlightenment narrative, in which human history is understood as a straightforward progression from religion to reason and is thought to culminate in secular modernity, is today being increasingly challenged, for reasons I shall explore.

Some of these questions, concerning the social role of religions in relation to the secular state, were in 2001 addressed by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in a speech later published under the title Glauben und Wissen (Faith and Knowledge).⁷ Habermas, who has been one of the most influential theorists of secular modernity, initiated a discourse concerning “post-secular” societies in this speech, which has since gained widespread use and commentary.⁸ But, what does it mean to say that a society is post-secular? By this question Habermas, as well as later engagements with this theme, is not primarily interested in empirical accounts of the demise of Enlightenment accounts of secularity, but rather in the social and political role of religions in relation to the secular state. The central questions thus concern how the relation between religion and politics, and between transcendence and immanence, should be construed in the wake of critiques towards the Enlightenment account of religion. In his engagement with these questions Habermas makes certain claims and delimitations regarding metaphysics, which will serve as a backdrop for my account of Taylor, Milbank, and Connolly. So, before proceeding, let’s look closer at some more recent comments of Habermas’ regarding the dilemma related to the notion of the post-secular.

“Two countervailing trends mark the intellectual tenor of the age – the spread of naturalistic worldviews and the growing political influence of religious orthodoxies.”⁹ That is how Jürgen Habermas opens his book Between Naturalism and Religion from 2005. In this book Habermas points out the paradoxical spread of naturalism and return of religion at the same time, and the challenge that this raises for liberal democracy. Habermas sets out, without dismissing either naturalism or religion, to find a path between what he perceives as the malaises of both “scientism” and “fundamentalism.” I will here briefly explain the “gap” Habermas identifies between scientism and fundamentalist religion, since it is in relation to this gap that I will position the three different post-secular narratives that I intend to examine.

A central issue in Habermas’ account of the post-secular concerns the distinction between belief and knowledge. He refuses to limit knowledge to the sum of statements that empirical science is able to verify. This, Habermas argues, results in a scientism that “misleads us into blurring the boundary between scientific knowledge which is relevant for understanding ourselves and our place in nature as a whole, on the one hand, and a synthetic naturalistic worldview constructed on this basis, on the other.”¹⁰ The problem with this form of scientism is, according to Habermas, that it operates within a narrow mindset, unaware of its own limits. Habermas exemplifies this “narrow-mindedness,” or the unawareness of scientism’s own underlying assumptions, with “the blurred distinction between secular reasons and statements that should count, and secular worldviews that should count just as little as religious doctrines.” Habermas here refers to the American philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff’s claim that “Much, if not most of the time we will be able to spot religious reasons from a mile a way ... Typically, however, comprehensive secular perspectives will go undetected.”¹¹ In this way, Habermas seeks to point out elements of “belief,” or metaphysics, in scientism. However, according to Habermas, religion, in its fundamentalist forms, is haunted by a similar blindness and “cannot be reconciled with the mentality that a sufficient proportion of citizens must share if a democratic polity is not to disintegrate.”¹²

The dilemma that Habermas here identifies is closely related to the concept of the post-secular, a term by which Habermas denotes two things. First, on a sociological level, it signifies how in secularized societies “religion maintains a public influence and relevance, while the secularistic certainty that religion will disappear worldwide in the course of modernization is losing ground.” But secondly, and more importantly for my project, it involves the question of what we should “reciprocally expect from one another in order to ensure that in firmly entrenched nation states, social relations remain civil despite the growth of a plurality of cultures and religious worldviews.”¹³ Habermas argues that “scientism,” understood as a form of radical naturalism, is unable to provide the normative resources necessary to sustain a society: in the sense that it “devalues all types of statements that cannot be traced back to empirical observation, statements of laws, or causal explanations, hence moral, legal and evaluative statements no less than religious ones.”¹⁴ Habermas here fears that the “naturalization” of the human mind that has been brought about by advances in biogenetics and brain research “places our practical self-understanding as responsibly acting persons in question.”¹⁵ Habermas has in another essay described this dilemma in the sense that “pure practical reason can no longer be so confident in its ability to counteract a modernization spinning out of control armed solely with the insights of a theory of justice.”¹⁶ Habermas here points to how the secular state is faced with important ethical and political questions related to pluralism as well as science and capitalism – problems he argues a narrow account of reason fails to address. Accordingly, the post-secular dilemma, as defined by Habermas, concerns the constructive discussion of how diverse societies may live in peace despite inner cultural or religious differences, and furthermore, which resources and strategies might be employed in this process.

To problematize the relation between reason, religion and metaphysics, Habermas cites the German legal philosopher Ernst Wolfgang Böckenförde’s question: “Does the free, secularized state exist on the basis of normative presuppositions that it itself cannot guarantee?.”¹⁷ This question is rooted in the assumption that democracy depends on moral stances that stem from pre-political sources such as religion. Here Habermas goes beyond the influential liberal political philosopher John Rawls in his willingness to allow both metaphysical naturalists (scientism) and representatives of religious traditions to speak in their own language in public. However, Habermas maintains a filter between the spheres of church and state – “a filter through which only ‘translated’, i.e., secular, contributions may pass from the confused din of voices in the public sphere into the formal agendas of state institutions.”¹⁸ In this sense Habermas claims agnostic neutrality in public discourse, free from metaphysical commitments of either a naturalistic or a religious kind. Instead, Habermas argues that the liberal state can satisfy its own need for legitimacy, independent of metaphysical or religious traditions. Nevertheless, he claims that religions have cognitive and motivational aspects that are valuable for the virtues necessary to sustain a democracy.¹⁹ It should here be pointed out that, while Habermas sometimes operates with a broad understanding of the term “religion,” with the distinction between reason and revelation as its defining trait, it is more specifically Christianity that stands at the center of his engagements with religion.

Habermas’ “solution” to the post-secular dilemma consists of seeking to affirm a neutral, secular ground of reasonable humanism. He expressly rejects two positions: first “the blinkered enlightenment which is unenlightened about itself and which denies religion any rational content” and a Hegelian view “in which religion represents an intellectual formation worthy of being recalled, but only in the form of a ‘representational thinking’ (vorstellendes Denken) which is subordinate to philosophy.”²⁰ By the term “representational thinking” Habermas employs a Hegelian distinction between objective thought (where thought alone can reveal the true nature of things), and subjective thought. “Vorstellendes Denken,” or “pictorial thought” is part of the objective thought that assumes that the object of our knowledge is easily accessible and can become subject to our mastery. In this sense representational thinking suggests a straightforward and easily available connection between words and things, or a sort of naive realism.²¹ Accordingly, Habermas denies that religious imagery is able to provide insights that are untranslatable into rational language. Instead, he seeks to re-appropriate the Kantian distinction between discursive immanent reason on the one hand, and inexpressible faith on the other.

Habermas’ rejection of both scientism and fundamentalism is grounded in his critique of metaphysics. Habermas rejects any attempts to ground philosophy or religion on supposedly absolute, universal, transcendent, or timeless principles – what he associates with the Western metaphysical tradition, along with what he argues is an exaggerated conception of reason.²² It is metaphysics understood in this sense that he sees to be at the root of both religious fundamentalism and scientism. Instead, for Habermas, the “awareness that we live in a post-secular world is reflected philosophically in the form of post-metaphysical thought.”²³ By “postmetaphysical” Habermas means, and here I risk oversimplification, a world of politics in which controversial religious and existential orientations, if not subjected to translation into a secular language, are kept from public discourse and political life. Differently put “respecting the precedence of secular reasons and the institutional translation requirement.”²⁴ Habermas has accordingly characterized postmetaphysical thinking in terms of a re-articulation that, based on his account of a communicative rationality, emphasizes a linguistified and procedural account of reason.²⁵

Post-metaphysical thought draws, with no polemical intention, a strict line between faith and knowledge. But it rejects a narrow scientistic conception of reason and the exclusion of religious doctrine...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Between Scientism and Fundamentalism
• 2  Whose Religion, Which Secular?
• 3  Phenomenology and Overlapping Consensus
• 4  Analogy and Corporatist Pluralism
• 5  Becoming and Rhizomatic Pluralism
• 6  Post-Secular Visions
• 7  Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index