Postmetaphysical Thinking II

Jürgen Habermas, Ciaran Cronin

• Editore: Polity
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780745694931
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Filosofia
• Categoria: Storia e teoria della filosofia

'There is no alternative to postmetaphysical thinking': this statement, made by Jürgen Habermas in 1988, has lost none of its relevance. Postmetaphysical thinking is, in the first place, the historical answer to the crisis of metaphysics following Hegel, when the central metaphysical figures of thought began to totter under the pressure exerted by social developments and by developments within science. As a result, philosophy's epistemological privilege was shaken to its core, its basic concepts were de-transcendentalized, and the primacy of theory over practice was opened to question. For good reasons, philosophy 'lost its extraordinary status', but as a result it also courted new problems. In Postmetaphysical Thinking II, the sequel to the 1988 volume that bears the same title (English translation, Polity 1992), Habermas addresses some of these problems.

The first section of the book deals with the shift in perspective from metaphysical worldviews to the lifeworld, the unarticulated meanings and assumptions that accompany everyday thought and action in the mode of 'background knowledge'. Habermas analyses the lifeworld as a 'space of reasons' – even where language is not (yet) involved, such as, for example, in gestural communication and rituals. In the second section, the uneasy relationship between religion and postmetaphysical thinking takes centre stage. Habermas picks up where he left off in 1988, when he made the far-sighted observation that 'philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion', and explores philosophy's new-found interest in religion, among other topics. The final section includes essays on the role of religion in the political context of a post-secular, liberal society.

This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, religion and the social sciences and humanities generally.

II
POSTMETAPHYSICAL THINKING

4
THE NEW PHILOSOPHICAL INTEREST IN RELIGION A Conversation with Eduardo Mendieta¹

EM: Over the last couple of years you have been working on the question of religion from a series of perspectives: philosophical, political, sociological, moral and cognitive. In your Yale lectures from the autumn of 2008, you approached the challenge of the vitality and renewal of religion in world society in terms of the need to rethink the link between social theory and secularization theory. In those lectures, you suggest that we need to uncouple modernization theory from secularization theory. Does this mean that you are taking distance from the dominant trends in social theory in the West, which began with Pareto, continued through Durkheim, and reached their apogee in Weber, and thus also from its explicit and avowed Eurocentrism?

JH: We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The debate over the secularization thesis in sociology has led to a revision especially in respect to prognostic statements. On the one hand, the system of religion has become more differentiated and has limited itself to pastoral care – that is, it has for the most part lost other functions. On the other hand, there is no global connection between societal modernization and religion’s increasing loss of significance, a connection that would be so close that we could expect religion to disappear. José Casanova, for example, has developed interesting new hypotheses in the still undecided dispute over whether the religious United States or the largely secularized Western Europe is the exception to a general development trend. In any case, we must expect that the world religions will remain vital at the global level.

In view of the consequences of which you speak, I consider the programme of the group around Shmuel Eisenstadt and its comparative research on civilizations to be promising and informative. In the emerging world society, and concerning the social infrastructure, there are, as it were, by now only modern societies, but these appear in the form of multiple modernities because the major world religions have exerted major power to shape culture over the centuries, a power they have not lost entirely by any means. As in the West, these ‘strong’ traditions also paved the way in East Asia, in the Middle East, and even in Africa for the development of cultural structures that confront each other today – for example, in the dispute over the correct interpretation of human rights. Our Western self-understanding of modernity emerged from the confrontation with our own traditions. The same dialectic between tradition and modernity is repeating itself today in other parts of the world. There, too, societies and cultures fall back on their own traditions to confront the challenges of societal modernization rather than to succumb to them. Against this background, intercultural discourses about the foundations of a more just international order can no longer be conducted one-sidedly, from the perspective of ‘first movers’. These discourses must become habitual under the symmetrical conditions of mutual perspective-taking if the global players are to finally bring their social-Darwinist power games under control. The West is one participant among others, and all participants must be willing to be enlightened by others about their respective blind spots. If there is one lesson to be learned from the financial crisis, it is that it is high time for the multicultural world society to develop a political constitution.

EM: Let me come back to my original question: If we can no longer explain modernization in terms of secularization, how then can we speak about societal progress?

JH: The secularization of state power is the hard core of the process of secularization. I see this as a liberal achievement that should not get lost in the dispute among world religions. But I never counted on progress in the complex dimension of the ‘good life’. Why should we feel happier than our grandparents or the liberated Greek slaves in ancient Rome? Of course, some people are luckier than others. Like a ship on the high seas, individual fates are buffeted by an ocean of contingencies. And happiness is as unjustly distributed today as it ever was. Perhaps something has changed in the course of history in the subjective coloration of existential experiences. But no progress alters the crises of loss, love and death. Nothing mitigates the personal pain of those who live in misery, who feel lonely or are sick, who experience tribulations, insults or humiliation. This existential insight into anthropological constants, however, should not lead us to forget the historical variations, including the indubitable historical progress that exists in all those dimensions in which human beings can learn.

I do not mean to dispute that much has been forgotten in the course of history. But we cannot intentionally revert to a stage prior to the results of learning processes. This explains the progress in technology and science, as well as the progress in morality and law – that is, the decentring of our ego- or group-centred perspectives when it comes to resolving practical conflicts in non-violent ways. These social-cognitive kinds of progress already refer to the further dimension of the increase in reflection – that is, the ability to step back behind oneself. This is what Max Weber meant when he spoke of ‘disenchantment’.

The (for the present) last socially relevant advance in the reflexivity of consciousness can in fact be traced back to Western modernity. In early modernity, the instrumental attitude of the state bureaucracy towards a form of political power which was largely bereft of moral norms represented such a reflexive step, as did the instrumental attitude, which appeared around the same time, towards nature objectified in accordance with methodological principles, which first made modern science possible. I am thinking, of course, primarily of steps of self-reflection which gave rise, in the seventeenth century, to social contract theory and autonomous art, in the eighteenth century to rational morality and the internalized religious and artistic forms of expression of pietism and romanticism, and, finally, in the nineteenth century, to historical enlightenment and historicism. These cognitive advances had widespread effects – and cannot be easily forgotten.

It is also in connection with these influential advances in reflection that we have to view the progressive disintegration of traditional popular piety. Two specifically modern forms of religious consciousness emerged in addition: on the one hand, a form of fundamentalism that either withdraws from the modern world or turns aggressively against it; and, on the other, a reflective form of faith that adopts a relation to other religions and respects the fallible insights of the institutionalized sciences as well as human rights. This faith remains anchored in the life of a congregation and should not be confused with the new, de-institutionalized forms of fickle religiosity that have withdrawn entirely into the subjective domain.

EM: For over two decades already, you have been arguing for an enlightenment of philosophical thinking in terms of ‘postmetaphysical thinking’. You have characterized postmetaphysical thinking in terms of the rearticulation of reason as procedural – that is, thoroughly linguistified – and at the same time historically situated, which has led to the deflation of the extraordinary. Postmetaphysical thinking, thus, is parsimonious, fallibilistic, and humble in its claims. In your recent work, however, you claim that postmetaphysical thinking forces us to take the next step – namely, the post-secular step. You talk about a ‘post-secular world society’ as a sociological condition, as a socio-cultural fact. In what sense, then, is post-secular reason catalysed by social developments and in what sense is it the result of the inner dynamic of postmetaphysical thinking?

JH: Your question alerts me to a terminological ambiguity. The widespread fashion of distinguishing all kinds of new phenomena from familiar phenomena merely by the preposition ‘post’ has the disadvantage of indeterminacy. Postmetaphysical thinking as I conceive it also remains secular in a situation depicted as ‘post-secular’; but, in this different situation, it may become aware of a secularistic self-misunderstanding. It seems I should have guarded against the misleading equation of ‘postmetaphysical’ with ‘post-secular’.

In considering Kant to be the first ‘postmetaphysical’ thinker, I simply follow a convention. His ‘transcendental dialectic’ ends the bad habit of applying the categories of the understanding, which are tailored to inner-worldly phenomena, to the world as a whole. This devaluation of essentialist statements about nature and history as a whole is one of the far-reaching consequences of the ‘nominalist revolution’ of the High Middle Ages and early modern thought. The anthropocentric turn towards the world-constituting achievements of subjectivity or language – that is, the paradigm shift to the philosophy of consciousness and the philosophy of language – can be traced back to this revolution as well. Already in the seventeenth century, the objectifying natural sciences led to the separation of practical and theoretical reason. This separation in turn provoked the attempts of social contract theory and rational morality to justify obligations and worldviews on the basis of practical reason alone, rather than from the ‘nature of things’. Finally, with the emergence of the human sciences in the early nineteenth century, a historical mode of thought became established which – up to a point – devalues even these transcendental approaches. Furthermore, the results of hermeneutics confront us with a split in our epistemic access to the world: the lifeworld that discloses itself to our understanding only as (at least virtual) participants in everyday practices cannot be described from the natural-scientific perspective in such a way that we could recognize ourselves in this objectifying description.

The sciences emancipated themselves from the guidelines of philosophy in both directions: they condemn philosophy to the more modest business of retrospective reflection on, first, the methodological advances of science and, second, the presumptively universal features of those practices and forms of life which are without alternative for us, even though we find ourselves in them as a contingent matter. In other words, the place of the transcendental subject is taken by the uncircumventable universal structures of the lifeworld in general. Along the paths of a genealogy of modern thought, which I have merely sketched here, a differentiation took place to which the strong, metaphysical claims fell victim. We can also think of this differentiation process as a process of selecting those reasons that alone still ‘count’ for postmetaphysical t...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Linguistification of the Sacred: In Place of a Preface
• I The Lifeworld as a Space of Reasons
• II Postmetaphysical Thinking
• III Politics and Religion
• Sources of the Texts
• Index
• End User License Agreement