Habermas and Religion E-Book

Craig Calhoun

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

Seitenzahl: 1029

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

To the surprise of many readers, Jürgen Habermas has recently made religion a major theme of his work. Emphasizing both religion's prominence in the contemporary public sphere and its potential contributions to critical thought, Habermas's engagement with religion has been controversial and exciting, putting much of his own work in fresh perspective and engaging key themes in philosophy, politics and social theory. Habermas argues that the once widely accepted hypothesis of progressive secularization fails to account for the multiple trajectories of modernization in the contemporary world. He calls attention to the contemporary significance of "postmetaphysical" thought and "postsecular" consciousness - even in Western societies that have embraced a rationalistic understanding of public reason. Habermas and Religion presents a series of original and sustained engagements with Habermas's writing on religion in the public sphere, featuring new work and critical reflections from leading philosophers, social and political theorists, and anthropologists. Contributors to the volume respond both to Habermas's ambitious and well-developed philosophical project and to his most recent work on religion. The book closes with an extended response from Habermas - itself a major statement from one of today's most important thinkers.

Leseprobe

HABERMAS AND RELIGION

HABERMAS AND RELIGION

Edited by Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen

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Copyright © Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen

The right of Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

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ISBN: 978-0-7456-5670-0

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Contents

List of Abbreviations

Editors’ Introduction

Part I   Rationalization, Secularisms, and Modernities

  1  Exploring the Postsecular: Three Meanings of “the Secular” and Their Possible Transcendence

José Casanova

  2  The Anxiety of Contingency: Religion in a Secular Age

María Herrera Líma

  3  Is the Postsecular a Return to Political Theology?

María Pía Lara

  4  An Engagement with Jürgen Habermas on Postmetaphysical Philosophy, Religion, and Political Dialogue

Nicholas Wolterstorff

Part II   The Critique of Reason and the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment

  5  The Burdens of Modernized Faith and Postmetaphysical Reason in Habermas’s “Unfinished Project of Enlightenment”

Thomas McCarthy

  6  Having One’s Cake and Eating It Too: Habermas’s Genealogy of Postsecular Reason

Amy Allen

  7  Forgetting Isaac: Faith and the Philosophical Impossibility of a Postsecular Society

J. M. Bernstein

Part III  World Society, Global Public Sphere, and Democratic Deliberation

  8  A Postsecular Global Order? The Pluralism of Forms of Life and Communicative Freedom

James Bohman

  9  Global Religion and the Postsecular Challenge

Hent de Vries

10  Religion and the Public Sphere: What are the Deliberative Obligations of Democratic Citizenship?

Cristina Lafont

11  Violating Neutrality? Religious Validity Claims and Democratic Legitimacy

Maeve Cooke

Part IV  Translating Religion, Communicative Freedom, and Solidarity

12  Sources of Morality in Habermas’s Recent Work on Religion and Freedom

Matthias Fritsch

13  Solidarity with the Past and the Work of Translation: Reflections on Memory Politics and the Postsecular

Max Pensky

14  What Lacks is Feeling: Hume versus Kant and Habermas

John Milbank

Reply to My Critics

Jürgen Habermas (Translated by Ciaran Cronin)

Appendix: Religion in Habermas’s Work

Eduardo Mendieta

Notes and References

Bibliography of Works by Jürgen Habermas

Index

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used for frequently cited works by Jürgen Habermas. Full bibliographical details can be found in the Bibliography. Dates in square brackets are the dates of publication in English.

AWM

An Awareness of What is Missing

(2008 [2010])

BFN

Between Facts and Norms

(1992 [1998])

BNR

Between Naturalism and Religion

(2005 [2008])

CES

Communication and the Evolution of Society

(1976 [1979])

CEU

The Crisis of the European Union

(2011 [2012])

DS

Dialectics of Secularization

(2005 [2006])

DW

The Divided West

(2004 [2007])

EFK

Essay on Faith and Knowledge

(n.d.)

EFP

Europe: The Faltering Project

(2008 [2009])

FHN

The Future of Human Nature

(2001 [2003])

FWL

“From Worldviews to the Lifeworld” (n.d.)

HE

“History and Evolution” (1976 [1979])

IO

The Inclusion of the Other

(1996 [1998])

JA

Justification and Application

(1991 [1993])

JS

“Justice and Solidarity” (1990)

KHI

Knowledge and Human Interests

(1968 [1971])

KV

Kritik der Vernunft

(2009)

LC

Legitimation Crisis

(1973 [1975])

LPS

The Liberating Power of Symbols

(1997 [2001])

MCCA

Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action

(1983 [1990])

NC

The New Conservatism

(1985/1987 [1989])

OPC

On the Pragmatics of Communication

[1998]

PC

The Postnational Constellation

(1998 [2001])

PDM

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity

(1985 [1990])

PF

The Past as Future

(1993 [1994])

PMT

Postmetaphysical Thinking

(1988 [1992])

PPP

Philosophical-Political Profiles

(1981 [1983])

PSI

On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction

(1984 [2001])

RPS

“Religion in the Public Sphere” (2006)

RR

Religion and Rationality

(2002)

STPS

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

(1962 [1989])

TCA

The Theory of Communicative Action

(1981 [1984/1987])

TJ

Truth and Justification

(1999 [2003])

TRS

Toward a Rational Society

(1958/1968 [1970])

Editors’ Introduction

For social and political theorists – both philosophers and social scientists – religion was long an easy subject to ignore. Or, if it wasn’t ignored, its importance was minimized. It was treated as a fading phenomenon, a survival from earlier history, not really a part of modernity. Great figures of modern social theory such as Marx, Weber, and Durkheim all expected religion to lose its grip in the face of trends like capitalism, reason and rationalization, the growing complexity of social organization, and cultural pluralism. Religion demanded attention because it held back progress – not least as “the opium of the people” – or because it played a temporarily crucial role in early modern transitions before the process of secularization marked its decline, or because as it disappeared an absence was noticed, a need for new forms of ritual and new sources of social solidarity and cultural integration. These were not just nineteenth-century ideas; they remained prominent throughout the twentieth-century history of political philosophy and social theory. To be sure, there were ebbs and flows of attention to religion. There was something of a flourishing early in the twentieth century and another in the period just after World War II. But the overall pattern remained intact, and indeed religion was particularly off the agenda for philosophy and social science during the last decades of the twentieth century. This coincided with a decline in certain forms of religious practice (a decline meticulously tracked by researchers). Mainline Protestant denominations in the US lost members continuously, while newer forms of religious practice blossomed throughout the world; religious practice plummeted even more markedly in Europe. To be sure, some researchers noticed, and puzzled over, a resurgence of evangelicalism and fundamentalism, not just in the US but throughout the world. It is for this reason that sometimes social analysts refer to this global phenomenon as the “revitalization” of religion. This received attention especially as it shaped politics – a “new religious right” – notably in the US (where, a few observers reminded us, religion hadn’t faded as much or as fast as in Europe). But these observations were slow to gain center stage in most of philosophy and social science. They gained more traction in anthropology and history, perhaps, than in other disciplines, but almost everywhere the dominant intellectual framework remained the expectation of secularization.

What was widely called “the secularization hypothesis” became instead more of an assumption in most of political philosophy and social theory. If religion mattered, it was because of its influence in the past, and as a survival out of step with the dominant patterns of progress. This was evident not least in the work of Jürgen Habermas, perhaps the most distinguished and enduringly influential figure in these fields during the late twentieth century and to the present day.

Quite remarkably, Habermas has been at the forefront of debates since the early 1960s. He was the foremost representative of the Frankfurt tradition of critical theory, but he also engaged in extended debates and reciprocal learning with Niklas Luhmann, Hans-Georg Gadamer, John Rawls, Robert Brandom, and others of the most influential thinkers in philosophy and social science. He wrote fundamental work in philosophical anthropology and epistemology; he put the idea of the public sphere at the center of thinking about democracy; in his Theory of Communicative Action, he produced the most important analysis of reason and rationalization since Weber and the most influential synthesis of action theory and systems analysis since Parsons. And, in keeping with the philosophy and social theory of his era, he did all this with what for a long time seemed like no more than passing attention to religion.

This changed, modestly in the 1990s, then with major emphasis since the beginning of the current century. The change was driven not so much by concern over past neglect or a sense of intra-theoretical need; it was driven by attention to troubling dimensions of contemporary affairs. Throughout his career, Habermas had been actively engaged in political debates, not only offering his theoretical work to help in resolving them but accepting the challenge to innovate in response to shifting public concerns and evident transformation in society. Still, it was impressive to see one of the world’s most famous thinkers resist the temptation simply to defend his established views and instead take up issues that posed challenges. And Habermas’s engagement with religion has demanded not just the application of his existing theory but innovation of it, and even restructuring of its fundamental assumptions.

First, Habermas was pushed by genetics and other innovations in biotechnology to ask anew about the core nature of the human (FHN). This led him to examine the inheritance – often left tacit – of metaphysical notions that understood the human essentially in relationship to the divine and to Creation. Habermas was disturbed most by what he saw as a potential renewal of eugenics, driven by an unchallenged technological impetus and unclarified assumptions concerning individuality and political liberty. Instead, Habermas situated his analysis of the dangers of liberal eugenics in an exploration of the moral nature of the human and human self-development. This built on Habermas’s earlier work on communicative action, especially as it related to philosophical anthropology and an evolutionary theory of human capacities for social self-organization and incremental advancement of what in a Hegelian-Marxist vocabulary might be considered “species-being.” Centrally, Habermas argued that much of the semantic import of the idea of divine Creation could be and indeed was rendered in secular terms as the idea of human dignity. Religion, Habermas suggested, was a crucial source for convictions at the heart of notions like human rights, but meaning drawn from religious faith could be translated into terms accessible to those without such faith and on the basis of reason.

Second, like many, Habermas was shocked by the 9/11 attacks. He was troubled by the fundamentalist convictions that informed some terrorist actions. This drew him into an unexpected dialogue with Jacques Derrida, a post-structuralist thinker with whom he was in many ways philosophically at odds but with whom he found impressive commonalities in analysis of the ethical and political implications of both terrorism and the US-led War on Terror (see Philosophy in a Time of Terror). He was also astonished and disturbed by a US President who invoked religion in framing his response and who made a public point of praying in Congress as he took the country and the world to war. Rather than just condemning what he didn’t like, Habermas struggled to articulate a theoretical account that would make sense of sharing citizenship with those who offer reasons rooted more in faith than reason and who sometimes reach troubling, literally terrifying conclusions. He repeatedly engaged Kierkegaard, a central figure in both religious and secular philosophical thinking about faith and knowledge, but even more drew on Kant and a tradition he construed as advancing a procedural approach over the search for prior substantive commonalities as a basis for collective life (). Habermas also notably situated the rising prominence of religion in the public sphere in relationship to “the epoch-making historical juncture of 1989–90” as well as more recent events (“Religion in the Public Sphere,” , 114). It reflected not only age-old questions about faith and knowledge, but also a specific historical period shaped by geopolitical chaos and a weakening of apparent alternatives to capitalist domination.