The Postsecular Political Philosophy of Jürgen Habermas

Translating the Sacred

Dafydd Huw Rees

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786832740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Politische Philosophie

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.

1 • Sacred and Profane

In his major works on social theory Habermas develops an understanding of religion as the worldview of a traditional society, tied to a particular level of human communicative and normative competence. This chapter starts by reviewing Habermas’s definition of a worldview (§ 1), before running through his accounts of the mythical worldview of primitive society (§ 2), the religious worldview of traditional society (§ 3), and the post-traditional worldview of modern society (§ 4). Understanding the transition from the religious to the post-traditional worldview via the ‘linguistification of the sacred’ is particularly important if we are to understand the ‘secular’ nature of Habermas’s philosophical project, which he now seeks to revise. The chapter concludes by considering his original view of religion in the modern era (§ 5).

1. Worldviews

In his writings on social theory from the 1970s and 1980s, Habermas sees religion as a worldview (Weltbild) with its origin in traditional society. By ‘worldview’, he means an interpretation of a lifeworld, a ‘cultural interpretive [system] … that reflect(s) the background knowledge of social groups and guarantee(s) an interconnection among the multiplicity of their action orientations’.¹ In most expositions of Habermas’s concept of communicative action, interlocutors are simply said to draw on shared knowledge and situation definitions from their common lifeworld in the process of communication. In fact, the lifeworld as a whole is too large and all-encompassing for individuals to process; a worldview is one view of the lifeworld, a particular mapping of the terrain.² A worldview’s functions include making communicative action easier by providing interlocutors with shared, ready-made situation definitions, and thus making it possible for them to coordinate their actions and (at least under favourable conditions) come to rational agreements about validity claims. It is thus a locus of social integration.

The dominant worldview of a primitive society is mythical, that of a traditional society is religious, and that of a modern society is modern or post-traditional. Each type of worldview, according to Habermas, corresponds to a certain degree of communicative competence and moral development, and allows a certain degree of reasoning and explanation. Mythical worldviews, for example, explain natural phenomena through narrative, religious ones through deduction from first principles, and modern ones by reference to testable laws of nature.³ Similarly, each worldview has its own mode of moral justification. As myth gives way to religion and religion to the post-traditional worldview, ‘the demand for discursive redemption of normative validity-claims increasingly prevails. [If we rationally reconstruct this process, we can observe] the expansion of the secular domain vis-à-vis the sphere of the sacred … [and the] increasing reflexivity of the mode of belief.’⁴ The development from preconventional to postconventional morality evidently tracks the evolution of worldviews.

Habermas distinguishes his understanding of worldviews from Peter Winch’s Wittgensteinian conception.⁵ He agrees with Winch that worldviews are totalities: ‘we cannot get behind them as articulations of an understanding of the world, even if they can be revised’. You cannot simply step outside your worldview, although you can (gradually and selectively) modify it. Borrowing a metaphor from Patrick Burke, Habermas compares worldviews to portraits. A portrait shows a person as they appear from a certain angle; it is possible to paint several dissimilar, but nonetheless accurate and authentic portraits of the same person. Portraits are not true or false, and neither are worldviews. Their role is not to give an unvarnished picture of reality, but to ‘lay down the framework of fundamental concepts within which we interpret everything that appears in the world in a specific way as something’.⁶

But Habermas resists the relativistic implication that all world-views are equal. They can, contra Winch, be assessed with regard to truth. While worldviews as totalities may not be true or false, they do have a connection to cognitive truth, in that they are the frameworks within which we make and assess true or false statements: ‘worldviews differ from portraits in that they in turn make possible utterances that admit of truth. To this extent they have a relation, albeit indirect, to truth …’⁷ Only within the context of our world-views do we raise the validity claim of truth (among others), and a particular worldview may be better or worse at enabling us to do so. Habermas does not think it is possible to judge a worldview as a whole in terms of its truth or falseness, since the worldview is one of the things which allows us to thematise truth claims in the first place. At the same time, Habermas insists that truth is a universal validity claim, however it is articulated. So worldviews can be judged in terms of whether they allow this universal validity claim to be raised. Some worldviews will be more adequate than others in this respect.

This gives rise to a formal-pragmatic criterion for evaluating the rationality of worldviews. ‘The rationality of worldviews is not measured in terms of logical and semantic properties but in terms of the formal-pragmatic basic concepts they place at the disposal of individuals for interpreting their world.’⁸ In other words, worldviews should be ranked with regard to how developed they are in formal pragmatic terms – i.e. to what extent they enable discourse and communicative action by allowing the three validity claims, basic attitudes and world-concepts to be thematised and contested.⁹ Worldviews which are more capable of supporting discourse and enabling communicative action are more cognitively adequate, or rational.

Habermas uses Jean Piaget’s concept of centration to describe this feature of worldviews. Piaget argues that a child at the pre-operational stage of cognitive development has a ‘centred’ understanding. She is only able to understand one aspect of a situation at a time, and is unable to switch to another aspect in response to a cognitive problem.¹⁰ In one well-known experiment, a child is shown two glasses which are the same size, filled to the same level with liquid. She is asked if the same amount of liquid is present in both glasses, and will typically be able to understand that there is. The liquid from one glass is then poured into a taller, thinner glass, so that it comes up to a higher level, and the child is again asked if both glasses contain the same amount of liquid. A child at the pre-operational level, with a centred understanding of the situation, will answer that there is now more liquid in the tall thin glass. She is fixated on one category of measurement – the height of the liquid – and is unable to switch to considering other relevant aspects of the situation, such as the difference in shape and size between the two glasses. An older child with a decentred understanding would not make this mistake.

Habermas adapts this concept of centration to refer to the efficacy of worldviews for allowing interlocutors to reach understanding via communicative action. Worldviews are interpretations of the lifeworld; like the lifeworld, they contain the situation-definitions and interpretations passed down by previous generations. Interlocutors draw on these in discourse. They either take their interpretations and situation definitions ready-made from the lifeworld, or construct them themselves in communicative action. Interlocutors with a heavily centred worldview will have to take the former option, and those with a decentred worldview can take the latter. So, individuals with a centred worldview must accept a pre-established consensus on truth, rightness and authenticity, while individuals with a decentred worldview can establish their own consensus via communicative action.¹¹ The former, like the pre-operational child, are fixated on one aspect of their situation, and are unable to consider it from other angles. The latter are more capable of rational action and critique. They have a greater flexibility in how they choose to interpret the situation, and can pick out and challenge particular aspects of it.

At the communicative level, those worldviews which enable their adherents to thematise validity claims and distinguish between attitudes and worlds are more decentred, and more capable of supporting discourse and communicative action. As we will see, Habermas considers mythical worldviews to be highly centred, religious-metaphysical ones to be partly centred, and modern worldviews to be highly decentred:

To the degree that the lifeworld of a social group is interpreted through a mythical worldview, the burden of interpretation is removed from the individual member, as well as the chance for him to bring about an agreement open to criticism … The linguistic worldview is reified as the world order and cannot be seen as an interpretive system open to criticism. Within such a system of orientation, actions cannot reach that critical zone in which communicatively achieved agreement depends upon autonomous yes/no responses to criticisable validity claims.¹²

By contrast:

It is distinctive of the modern understanding of the world that the cultural tradition can be exposed to testing … across its entire spectrum and in a methodical manner. Centred worldviews that do not yet allow for a radical differentiation of formal world-concepts are, at least in their core domains, immunized against dissonant experiences … What was until then ‘taken for granted’, is transformed in the process into cultural knowledge that can be used in defining situations and exposed to tests in communicative action.¹³

It is clear that Habermas considers the extent to which a worldview allows differentiation between the formal-pragmatic elements of language – validity claims, world-concepts and basic attitudes – to be its most important feature. With this in mind, we can turn to the details of the three worldviews: the mythical, the religious, and the modern.

2. Myth – A Syndrome of Validity

To Habermas, myth is simply the polar opposite of modernity. Modern language-users can differentiate between the three attitudes, worlds and validity claims. Mythical thinkers can do none of these things, and so ‘mythical thought does not yet permit a categorical separation between cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical, and expressive relations to the world …’.¹⁴ This conflation of attitudes, worlds and validity-claims colours the types of reasoning and justification supported by mythical worldviews.

Habermas takes up other theorists’ accounts of mythical thought and re-interprets them in formal-pragmatic terms. For example, he notes that in myths, the natural and social worlds are not cleanly separated. ‘From Durkheim to Lévi-Strauss, anthropologists have repeatedly pointed out the peculiar confusion between nature and culture. We can understand this phenomenon to begin with as the mixing of two object domains, physical nature and the socio-cultural environment.’¹⁵ To Habermas, this is evidently the result of an inability to distinguish between the objective and intersubjective world-concepts. Consider the instance in Norse mythology where all of nature – rocks, plants, fire, water – agrees not to injure the god Baldur, and then weeps when he is indeed killed.¹⁶ Here both norm-conformative behaviour (coming to a binding agreement) and the expression of emotion (weeping to express grief at Baldur’s death) are imputed to the objective natural world. This, according to Habermas, is why mythical reasoning is analogical. It works through ‘a complex of analogies in which all natural and social phenomena [are] interwoven and [can] be transformed into one another’.¹⁷ If there is no categorical difference between the three worlds, then any phenomena within them can be connected by analogy – the rain can be equated to the sky weeping for Baldur.

In myth everything is connected by analogy, and the methods for attaining an end in one world can be applied anywhere.¹⁸ This explains the magical practices which are associated with mythical world-views.¹⁹ ‘The mythical concept of powers and the magical concept of conjuring systematically impede the separation of an objectivating attitude to a world of existing states of affairs from a conformist or nonconformist attitude to a world of legitimately regulated interpersonal relations.’²⁰ To mythical thinkers, there is no reason why speech-acts, which can ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Introduction – At the Paulskirche
• Chapter 1: Sacred and Profane
• Chapter 2: Religion and Postmetaphysical Thinking
• Chapter 3: The Anthropic Problem
• Chapter 4: Rawls, Habermas and the Critique of Secularism
• Chapter 5: Postsecular Deliberative Democracy
• Chapter 6: Pyrrhic Translation
• Conclusion – Ethics and Metaphysics
• Notes
• Bibliography