Between Naturalism and Religion E-Book

Jürgen Habermas

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 624

Beschreibung

Two countervailing trends mark the intellectual tenor of our age - the spread of naturalistic worldviews and religious orthodoxies. Advances in biogenetics, brain research, and robotics are clearing the way for the penetration of an objective scientific self-understanding of persons into everyday life. For philosophy, this trend is associated with the challenge of scientific naturalism. At the same time, we are witnessing an unexpected revitalization of religious traditions and the politicization of religious communities across the world. From a philosophical perspective, this revival of religious energies poses the challenge of a fundamentalist critique of the principles underlying the modern Wests postmetaphysical understanding of itself. The tension between naturalism and religion is the central theme of this major new book by Jürgen Habermas. On the one hand he argues for an appropriate naturalistic understanding of cultural evolution that does justice to the normative character of the human mind. On the other hand, he calls for an appropriate interpretation of the secularizing effects of a process of social and cultural rationalization increasingly denounced by the champions of religious orthodoxies as a historical development peculiar to the West. These reflections on the enduring importance of religion and the limits of secularism under conditions of postmetaphysical reason set the scene for an extended treatment the political significance of religious tolerance and for a fresh contribution to current debates on cosmopolitanism and a constitution for international society.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Introduction

Notes

Part I: The Intersubjective Constitution of Norm-governed Thought

1: Public Space and Political Public Sphere – The Biographical Roots of Two Motifs in my Thought

2: Communicative Action and the Detranscendentalized “Use of Reason”

I

II

Notes

3: On the Architectonics of Discursive Differentiation: A Brief Response to a Major Controversy

Notes

Part II: Religious Pluralism and Civic Solidarity

4: Prepolitical Foundations of the Constitutional State?

Notes

5: Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the “Public Use of Reason” by Religious and Secular Citizens

Notes

Part III: Naturalism and Religion

6: Freedom and Determinism

I  For and Against Reductionism

II  On the Interaction between Nature and Mind

Notes

7: “I Myself am Part of Nature” – Adorno on the Intrication of Reason in Nature: Reflections on the Relation between Freedom and Unavailability

I  On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Freedom

II  Freedom as Emancipation from Nature – Remembrance of Nature within the Subject

III  The Naturalistic Assault on Subjective Nature

Notes

8: The Boundary between Faith and Knowledge: On the Reception and Contemporary Importance of Kant's Philosophy of Religion

Notes

Part IV: Tolerance

9: Religious Tolerance as Pacemaker for Cultural Rights

Notes

10: Equal Treatment of Cultures and the Limits of Postmodern Liberalism

I

II

III

IV

Notes

11: A Political Constitution for the Pluralist World Society?

I

II

III

IV

V

Notes

Index

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Start Reading

CHAPTER 1

Index

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First published in German as Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main, 2005

This English edition © Polity Press, 2008

Polity Press

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-07456-3824-9

ISBN-13: 978-07456-3825-6 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-07456-9460-3 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-07456-9367-5 (mobi)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk

The publication of this work was supported by a grant from the Goëthe-Institut

Introduction

Two countervailing trends mark the intellectual tenor of the age – the spread of naturalistic worldviews and the growing political influence of religious orthodoxies. On the one hand, advances in biogenetics, brain research, and robotics driven by therapeutic and eugenic motives are being successfully presented in a positive light. This program is designed to facilitate the spread of ways of understanding ourselves in terms of the objectifying categories of natural science into everyday contexts of communication and action. Habituation to forms of self-objectification that reduce all meaning and experience to what can be observed would also dispose individuals to corresponding forms of self-instrumentalization.1 For philosophy, this trend is associated with the challenge of scientistic naturalism. The fact that all operations of the human mind depend on underlying organic processes is not in dispute. Instead, the controversial issue is what form the naturalization of the mind should take. For an appropriate naturalistic conception of cultural evolution must do justice to both the intersubjective constitution of the mind and the normative character of its rule-guided operations.

On the other hand, the spread of naturalistic worldviews is encountering an unexpected revitalization of religious communities and traditions and their politicization across the world. For philosophy, the revival of religious energies, to which Europe alone seems to be immune, is associated with a fundamental critique of the postmetaphysical and nonreligious self-understanding of Western modernity. The fact that, for want of alternatives, the scope for political action is henceforth restricted to the universe of scientific-technical and economic infrastructures that developed in the West is not in dispute. The source of controversy is rather the correct interpretation of the secularizing impacts of a process of cultural and social rationalization increasingly denounced by the champions of religious orthodoxies as a historical development peculiar to the West.

These conflicting intellectual trends are rooted in opposed traditions. “Hard” forms of naturalism can be understood as an implication of the Enlightenment's uncritical faith in science, whereas the political reawakening of religious consciousness breaks with the liberal assumptions of the Enlightenment. However, these intellectual and spiritual outlooks do not merely clash at the level of academic controversies. They also develop into powerful political forces both within the civil society of the leading Western nation and at the international level in the encounter between the major world religions and the dominant global cultures.

From the perspective of a political theory concerned with the normative foundations and the functional preconditions of the democratic constitutional state, this clash also reveals a tacit complicity. The two countervailing trends conspire, as though in a division of labor, to jeopardize the cohesion of the polity through ideological polarization when neither side exhibits a willingness to engage in self-reflection. A political culture that polarizes itself irreconcilably along the fault-line of secular versus religious conflicts, whether over issues of human embryo research, abortion, or the treatment of comatose patients, challenges civic common sense even in the world's oldest democracy. The ethos of liberal citizenship demands that both sides should determine the limits of faith and knowledge in a reflexive manner.

As the example of the United States shows, the modern constitutional state was also invented with the aim of promoting peaceful religious pluralism. Only the ideologically neutral exercise of secular governmental authority within the framework of the constitutional state can ensure that different communities of belief can coexist on a basis of equal rights and mutual tolerance, while nevertheless remaining unreconciled at the level of their substantive worldviews or doctrines. The secularization of the political power of the state and the positive and negative freedom to exercise one's religion are two sides of the same coin. They protected religious communities not only against the destructive effects of violent interconfessional conflicts but also against the hostility toward religion of a secularized society. The constitutional state can defend its religious and nonreligious citizens from each other, however, only when their civic interactions are not based on a mere modus vivendi; their coexistence within a democratic system must also be founded on conviction. The democratic state is sustained by a legally unenforceable form of solidarity among citizens who respect each other as free and equal members of their political community.

This kind of civic solidarity paid for in small change must prove its worth also – indeed especially – across religious and ideological divides within the political public arena. Mutual recognition implies, among other things, that religious and secular citizens are willing to listen and to learn from each other in public debates. The political virtue of treating each other civilly is an expression of distinctive cognitive attitudes. The latter cannot be prescribed – they can only be learned. This circumstance has an implication of particular interest in the present context. Insofar as the liberal state demands that its citizens cooperate with one another in spite of their ideological differences, it must presuppose that the cognitive attitudes that this requires from both the religious and the secular sides are the result of historical learning processes. These kinds of learning processes involve more than merely contingent changes in mentalities that “occur” independently of rationally reconstructible insights. But neither can they be produced and steered through the media of law and politics. The liberal state depends in the long run on mentalities that it cannot produce from its own resources.

This becomes obvious when one reflects on the expectations concerning tolerance that religious citizens must satisfy in the liberal state. Fundamentalist convictions cannot be reconciled with the mentality that a sufficient proportion of citizens must share if a democratic polity is not to disintegrate. From the perspective of the history of religion, the cognitive attitudes that religious citizens must adopt in their civic dealings with members of other confessions and nonbelievers can be understood as the result of a collective learning process. In the Christian West, theology evidently played the role of pacemaker in this hermeneutic self-reflection of transmitted doctrines. Whether the dogmatic response to the cognitive challenges of modern science, religious pluralism, constitutional law, and secular social morality has been “successful” – whether one can even speak of “learning processes” in this connection – can be judged, of course, only from the internal perspective of the traditions that in this way reconcile themselves with modern conditions of social life.

In short, opinion- and will-formation within the democratic public arena can function only if a sufficiently large number of citizens fulfill specific expectations concerning civil conduct even across deep religious and ideological divides. However, this can be demanded of religiously minded citizens only on the assumption that they actually satisfy the requisite cognitive presuppositions. They must have learned to relate their religious convictions in reflexively coherent ways to the fact of religious and ideological pluralism. Moreover, they must have found a way to reconcile the epistemological privilege of the socially institutionalized sciences and the primacy of the secular state and universalistic social morality with their faith. Philosophy, which, in contrast to theology, is not linked with any particular confession, cannot influence this process. Here philosophy restricts itself to the role of an external observer who is not entitled to pass judgment on what can and cannot count as a justification within a particular religious teaching.

Philosophy first comes into play on the secular side. For nonreligious citizens can also satisfy the expectations concerning civic solidarity only on the condition that they adopt a particular cognitive attitude toward their religious fellow-citizens and toward the latters' utterances. When the two sides meet in the democratic confusion of voices of a pluralistic public arena and debate political questions, specific epistemic obligations follow from the demand that they must show one another suitable respect. Participants who express themselves in a religious language also have a claim to be taken seriously by their secular fellow-citizens. Thus the latter should not be allowed to reject out of hand the possibility that contributions formulated in religious language could have a rational content.

Granted, a shared understanding of the democratic constitution requires that all laws, all judicial decisions, and all decrees and directives must be formulated in a public language that is equally accessible to all citizens and that they must, in addition, be open to justification in secular terms. However, in the context of the informal conflict of opinions within the political public arena, citizens and civic organizations operate below the threshold at which the institutional sanctioning power of the state can be invoked. At this level, it is not permissible to channel opinion- and will-formation by censoring speech or cutting it off from possible sources of meaning.2 To this extent, the respect that secularized citizens owe their religious fellow-citizens also has an epistemic dimension.

On the other hand, secular citizens can be expected to demonstrate openness toward the possible rational content of religious contributions – and, all the more so, a willingness to engage in the cooperative endeavor of translating these contents from religious idioms into a generally intelligible language – only under a cognitive presupposition that is essentially contested. For in their eyes the conflict between secular convictions and those founded on religious doctrines can assume the prima facie character of a reasonable disagreement only if it can also be made plausible from a secular perspective that religious traditions are not merely irrational or meaningless. Only on this presupposition can nonreligious citizens assume that the major world religions could involve rational intuitions and instructive moments of unfulfilled but legitimate demands.

However, this is an open question that cannot be prejudged by constitutional norms. It is by no means a foregone conclusion which side will prove to be correct. The secularism of the scientific worldview insists that the archaic ways of thinking of religious doctrines have been completely overtaken and made redundant by the advances in knowledge of established research. By contrast, fallibilistic but nondefeatist postmetaphysical thought differentiates itself from both sides by reflecting on its own limits – and on its inherent tendency to overstep these limits. It is as wary of naturalistic syntheses founded on science as it is of revealed truths.

The ideological polarization into religious and secular camps that threatens to undermine civic cohesion is a topic for political theory. However, once the focus switches to the cognitive presuppositions that must be fulfilled if civic solidarity is to function effectively, analysis must shift to a different level. In a similar way to the process by which religious consciousness becomes reflexive in the modern era, the reflexive overcoming of secularistic consciousness also has an epistemological aspect. The mere allusion to these two complementary learning processes betrays a detached description from the perspective of a postmetaphysical observer. From the perspective of participants, among whom the observer must count him- or herself, however, this controversy remains open. The contentious issues are clear. The discussion concerns, on the one hand, the correct way to naturalize an essentially intersubjective and norm-governed mode of thought. Corresponding to this, on the other hand, is the debate over how we should understand the cognitive advance marked by the emergence of the major world religions around the middle of the first millennium before the Christian era (which Jaspers called the “Axial Age”).

In this dispute, I defend Hegel's thesis that the major world religions belong to the history of reason itself. Postmetaphysical thinking misunderstands itself if it fails to include the religious traditions alongside metaphysics in its own genealogy. On these premises, it would be irrational to reject those “strong” traditions as “archaic” residua instead of elucidating their internal connection with modern forms of thought. Even today, religious traditions perform the function of articulating an awareness of what is lacking or absent. They keep alive a sensitivity to failure and suffering. They rescue from oblivion the dimensions of our social and personal relations in which advances in cultural and social rationalization have caused utter devastation. Who is to say that they do not contain encoded semantic potentialities that could provide inspiration if only their message were translated into rational discourse and their profane truth contents were set free?

*

The present volume collects essays located within the ambit of these questions. They were written in recent years for diverse occasions and do not constitute a systematic whole. However, a thread running through all of them is the objective of confronting the opposed, yet complementary, challenges of naturalism and religion with the stubborn postmetaphysical insistence on the normative meaning of a detranscendentalized reason.

The commentaries and essays in the first part revisit the intersubjectivist program in the theory of mind that I have long advocated. If we take our cue from a form of pragmatism that links Kant with Darwin,3 it is indeed possible to deflate the Platonic ideas using the concept of idealizing presuppositions without pushing anti-Platonism to such an extreme that the rule-governed operations of the mind are summarily reduced to nomological regularities. The essays comprising the second part develop the central problem sketched in an anticipatory way above from the perspective of a normative theory of the constitutional state. The texts in the third section address the epistemological problematic in an attempt to clarify the position of postmetaphysical thinking between naturalism and religion. The three remaining contributions return to topics in political theory. There I am interested mainly in the correspondences between the process of coming to terms with religious and ideological pluralism within the state, on the one hand, and the prospects of a political constitution for a pacified world society, on the other.4

Notes

1

    See Jürgen Habermas,

The Future of Human Nature

, trans. Hella Beister and William Rehg (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).

2

    Habermas, “Faith and Knowledge,” in

The Future of Human Nature

, pp. 101–15.

3

    See the introduction to Habermas,

Truth and Justification

, trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 1–50.

4

    In the final essay I return to questions concerning the constitutionalization of international law previously discussed in the corresponding essay in Habermas,

The Divided West

, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), pp. 115–93.

Part IThe Intersubjective Constitution of Norm-governed Thought

1Public Space and Political Public Sphere – The Biographical Roots of Two Motifs in my Thought

Permit me first to confess to my discomfiture at the request that I should relate in plain terms something instructive about my life and personal experiences. President Inamori's request to prizewinners is “Please, talk about yourself” – “Tell us how you overcame hardships, what your guideline was when standing at the crossroads of your life.” I am thereby addressed as an author, teacher, and intellectual who is accustomed to communicating with readers, students, and listeners. So, you might well ask, why should someone who leads a comparatively public life be at all disconcerted when expected to talk about himself? But that would be to overlook the fact that in general the life of a philosopher is rather poor in external events. And philosophers themselves feel more comfortable in the theoretical domain. So please allow me to begin by explaining my inhibitions when it comes to talking about private matters by offering you a theoretical remark on the relationship between the private and the public.

It helps to distinguish here between two types of public and publicity. In today's media society, the public sphere serves those who have gained celebrity as a stage on which to present themselves. Visibility is the real purpose of public appearances. The price that stars pay for this kind of presence in the mass media is the conflation of their private and public lives. The intention behind participation in political, literary, or scholarly debates or any other contribution to public discourse, by contrast, is quite different. Here reaching agreement on a particular topic or clarifying reasonable dissent takes priority over the self-presentation of the author. This public is not a space of viewers or listeners but an arena in which speakers and interlocutors exchange questions and answers. Rather than everyone else's gaze being focused on the celebrity, an exchange of opinions and reasons takes place. In discourses that focus on issues of common concern, participants turn their backs on their private lives. They have no need to talk about themselves. The line between public and private spheres does not become blurred but instead the two domains complement each other.

This kind of objectivity may explain why when philosophers deliver historical lectures on Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas or Kant they generally limit themselves to stating only the bare biographical facts of when these thinkers were born, lived, and died. Even stormy episodes in the lives of these philosophers – one need only think of Plato's visits to Syracuse – take a back seat to their ideas and arguments. The lives of philosophers are not the stuff of legends. What they leave behind is at best a new and often enigmatic set of thoughts formulated in a unique language with which later generations continue to struggle. Indeed, in our field we treat those thinkers as “classics” whose works have remained contemporary for us. The ideas of such a classical thinker are like the molten core beneath a volcano that has deposited biographical rings of hardened lava. The great thinkers of the past whose works have stood the test of time impress this image upon us. By contrast, we, the many living philosophers – who are in any case more professors of philosophy – are merely the contemporaries of our contemporaries. And the less original our ideas are, the more they remain bound to the context from which they emerged. At times, indeed, they are no more than an expression of the biography from which they spring.