Postmetaphysical Thinking II E-Book

Jürgen Habermas

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 578

Beschreibung

'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.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Linguistification of the Sacred: In Place of a Preface

Notes

I The Lifeworld as a Space of Reasons

1 From Worldviews to the Lifeworld

Notes

2 The Lifeworld as a Space of Symbolically Embodied Reasons

Notes

3 A Hypothesis concerning the Evolutionary Meaning of Rites

I The Sacred Complex

II Myth and Ritual Practices – World Disclosure and Staging

III The Intrinsic Meaning of Ritual Behaviour

IV The Hypothesis

V Communicating with Someone about Something

VI The Development of the Hypothesis: Ordinary and Extra-ordinary Communication

VII The Transformations of the Sacred Complex

Notes

II Postmetaphysical Thinking

4 The New Philosophical Interest in Religion: A Conversation with Eduardo Mendieta

Notes

5 Religion and Postmetaphysical Thinking: A Reply

I ‘Stages’ of Religious Development

II Why a Secular Translation of Religious Potentials at All?

III On the ‘Secularization Debate’ within the Humanities in Post-War Germany

IV What is Meant by a ‘Genealogy’ of Postmetaphysical Thinking?

V Methodological Atheism and Agnosticism

VI The Role of Religion in the Public Sphere

VII Political Background Consensus under Conditions of Social Complexity

VIII Difficult Discourses

IX What We Owe to the Murdered Innocents

Notes

6 A Symposium on Faith and Knowledge: Reply to Objections, Response to Suggestions

I On Kant’s Philosophy of Religion

II Objections and Suggestions from the Philosophy of Religion

III Conversation with Contemporary Theology

IV The Status of Religion in Post-Secular Society

Notes

III Politics and Religion

7 ‘The Political’: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology

Notes

8 The ‘Good Life’ – a ‘Detestable Phrase’: The Significance of the Young Rawls’s Religious Ethics for His Political Theory

Notes

9 Rawls’s Political Liberalism: Reply to the Resumption of a Discussion

I On the Scope of Practical Reason

II Moral Impartiality

III Postmetaphysical, Not Freestanding

IV Acceptability vs. Acceptance

V On the Normative Substance of Moral and Legislative Procedures

VI Law and Morality

VII The Role of Religion in the Secular State

VIII International Law and Cosmopolitanism

IX Human Rights

Notes

10 Religion in the Public Sphere of ‘Post-Secular’ Society

I European ‘Exceptionalism’ or Doubts about the Secularization Thesis

II The Vitality of the Religious

III Post-Secular Society: Religious Communities in a Secular Environment

IV The Process of the ‘Separation of Church and State’

V Religious Freedom and the Principle of Toleration

VI ‘Enlightenment Fundamentalism’ versus ‘Multiculturalism’: The New Kulturkampf and its Slogans

VII The Relativism of Radical Multiculturalists

VIII Secular or Secularist

IX Dialectic of Enlightenment: Secularization as a Complementary Learning Process

Notes

Sources of the Texts

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Postmetaphysical Thinking II

Essays and Replies

Jürgen HabermasTranslated by Ciaran Cronin

polity

First published in German as Nachmetaphysisches Denken II. Aufsätze und Repliken © Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2012

This English edition © Polity Press, 2017

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

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: 978-0-7456-9493-1

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LINGUISTIFICATION OF THE SACRED

In Place of a Preface

The collection of essays published in 1988 under the same title as the present collection1 dealt with the self-confirmation of philosophical thinking. This remains the theme of the present collection. Philosophy is not a scientific discipline that could be defined in terms of a fixed method or a set subject matter. Philosophical discourses derive their unity instead from the formation of a canon – in other words, from the texts that have been associated with the history of philosophy for two and a half millennia. What philosophy can achieve is therefore an essentially contested question. Nevertheless, this is not an idle question that we can sidestep. For even a form of thought that is not determinate must tie itself down for the time being if it is not to wander around aimlessly.

A cursory examination of our scientific, cultural and social context already tells us that philosophers no longer keep company with poets and thinkers. The role of the sage or seer who – like Heidegger – still claims privileged access to the truth is no longer an option for them. Since philosophy has also joined the ranks of modern scientific disciplines, philosophers begin their efforts at persuasion among their peers. Anyone who does not withstand the tribunal of professional criticism is rightly suspected of charlatanism. Today philosophical arguments, too, can expect to be accepted as prima facie worthy of consideration only in the context of the established discourses of the natural, social and human sciences, of existing practices of art criticism, legal discourse, and political and public communication. Only in this wider context of intrinsically fallible knowledge can we seek the narrow path on which philosophical reasons still ‘count’.

But this search must assume a performative form – that is, by actually engaging in philosophy; metatheoretical considerations remain abstract in the pejorative sense. Anyone who wants to engage in the business of clarifying philosophy’s proper role must actually do philosophy. This reflexive circle is unavoidable even for those who still think that it is possible to define a canon of philosophical knowledge. In a recent study, Herbert Schnädelbach tries to persuade his readers that a certain compendium of knowledge comprises ‘what one can learn from philosophers’; but in doing so he has to develop his arguments in a philosophical way.2 Authors for whom the question is problematic rather than one that admits of conclusive answers, too, can differentiate philosophical from other forms of thought only by trying to show what philosophy actually is. For example, I could not justify my recommendation that philosophy should henceforth be conducted only in the mode of ‘postmetaphysical thinking’ without at the same time arguing for the concept of ‘communicative reason’. This is why Postmetaphysical Thinking II opens with a systematic section on ‘The Lifeworld as a Space of Reasons’ (just as the earlier volume began with a corresponding section on the ‘pragmatic turn’).

I now approach the same theme from an evolutionary perspective, however, because a different constellation has developed over the past two decades. The philosophical scene at the time was dominated by trends towards a return to metaphysics. On the one hand, there were some nuanced attempts to return to speculative ideas in response to the deflationary schools of thought of analytic philosophy – one proposal was to rehabilitate metaphysical figures of thought by drawing directly on classical sources;3 another was to renew motifs from German idealism by reactivating the post-Kantian problem of self-consciousness.4 On the other hand, critiques of reason inspired by Nietzsche and the late Heidegger had inspired attempts to recover the dimension of a ‘true origin’ in a different way.5 As things now stand, political and historical developments over the past decades have lent topicality to a completely different theme. In the wake of globalization and digitalized communication, the largely secularized societies of Europe are confronted with religious movements and forms of fundamentalism of undiminished vitality both at home and throughout the world.

This development has not only steered the discussion in social science on secularization and social modernization in a different direction; it also poses a challenge for philosophy – in two respects.6 As normative political theory, philosophy must first examine that laicistic interpretation of secularized state power and religious pluralism which would banish the religious communities from the political public arena and confine them to the private domain. Moreover, in its role as heir to the European Enlightenment, philosophy feels provoked. Insofar as it sees itself as the ‘guardian of rationality’, what should philosophy make of the fact that religious communities and religious doctrines, in spite of their archaic roots in ritual practices, seem to be asserting themselves at the heart of social modernity as a contemporary, culturally productive intellectual formation? Philosophy cannot fail to be disconcerted by this contemporaneity of religion because a relationship of parity between philosophy and religion would profoundly alter the constellation that became established in the eighteenth century. Since that time, philosophy, in an alliance with the sciences, had either treated religion as an obscure object in need of explanation (as did Hume, for example) or subsumed it under its own concepts as a past but transparent intellectual formation (as from Kant to Hegel). But now, by contrast, philosophy encounters religion not as a past but as a present-day formation, however opaque. What does this mean for philosophy’s self-understanding?

The first chapter in the present volume, ‘From Worldviews to the Lifeworld’, throws light on the change in the constellation formed by philosophy and science. In this essay, the hard-core scientistic self-understanding of philosophy proposed by advocates of a ‘scientific worldview’ provides an occasion for defending a ‘soft’ version of naturalism. The new debate over naturalism calls to mind the aspects under which philosophy, as a scientifically imbued discursive understanding of ourselves and the world, differs from the objectifying sciences. Here, in the context of a rough sketch of the emergence of postmetaphysical thinking out of the symbiosis between faith and knowledge, I develop the basic concepts of ‘communicative action’ and ‘symbolically structured lifeworld’.

The following two essays in the first section present a more in-depth account of this communicative approach from an evolutionary perspective. Michael Tomasello explains the development of human communication out of contexts of cooperation in which the participants coordinate their intentions and actions via simple symbolic gestures.7 Tomasello’s socio-cognitive approach emphasizes the intersubjectively shared knowledge that proceeds from gestural communication and makes possible the purposive coordination of actions and intentions. However, the socio-cognitive requirements for realizing shared goals through cooperation can explain the communication only of facts, intentions and requests, not of normative behavioural expectations. Simple requests and expressions of intentions do not have the intrinsic obligatory force of commands or precepts. The intersubjectively shared normative meaning of moral obligation draws on binding energies that cannot be explained in terms of the constraints of cooperation. If the social-pragmatic approach is sufficient to explain the origins of linguistic communication, it must be possible to explicate the meaning of linguistic communication independently of a ‘strong’ normative consensus about values and reciprocal normative expectations. In any case, the dimension of obligations requires a special explanation.

The hypothesis that language originates in gestural communication directs our attention to ritual practices, which seem to have supplemented everyday communication as an extraordinary form of communication. Even though this form of communication deviates conspicuously from everyday communication in being decoupled from all tangible functional contexts and not referring to inner-worldly objects and states of affairs, it exhibits structural similarities to gestural communication. Durkheim already identified these ritual practices as the source of social solidarity. This suggests the following hypothesis. As gestural communication developed into fully fledged grammatical languages, ritually generated normative binding energies could be captured and explicated in this fully differentiated linguistic medium. At any rate, the illocutionary forces of many regulative speech acts (such as commanding and promising, appointing, putting into force, etc.) can be understood as the result of a conventionalization of meanings of ritual origin through which they become routines. J. L. Austin developed the concept of ‘illocutionary force’ with reference to examples of institutionally bound speech acts such as baptizing, swearing, praying, proclaiming, marrying, etc., whose sacred background is evident.

As it happens, the evolutionary perspective outlined throws light on two problems in the theory of language that I would like at least to mention in passing.8 The socio-cognitive hypothesis concerning the origin of language focuses on cooperative relationships as the original source of language. This context of emergence speaks against the widespread intentionalist conception that the meaning of human communication consists in people informing one another about their ideas, desires and intentions. If exchanging symbolic gestures originally served the purpose of pursuing shared goals based on a division of labour, then the meaning of linguistic communication can be explained in terms of the practical need for participants to reach an agreement under the pressure to act. Person A wants to communicate with person B about something, be it about the existence of states of affairs or about intentions, desires and requests to intervene in the world to bring about corresponding states of affairs. Under the pressure to coordinate their actions in ways which promote their goals, it is not enough simply to let the addressee know what is meant. Rather, with her utterance the speaker pursues the illocutionary goal that the listener should accept her assertion as true, take her desire seriously, if necessary accept the correctness of her normative expectations or reproaches, and comply with her requests. For every utterance is addressed to persons who can take a position by answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The success of communication is measured by whether the person addressed accepts the claim to truth, truthfulness or rightness raised for what is said as valid (or as sufficient in view of potential reasons).9

The second problem I would like to mention concerns the striking asymmetries between the validity claims of truth and truthfulness, on the one hand, and normative rightness, on the other. Taken together with the supposition of a secondary linguistification of the sacred, the hypothesis that there are two equally original forms of communication provides an explanation of these asymmetries. Elementary speech acts can always be questioned both as regards the truth of statements (or the existential presuppositions of the propositional contents) and as regards the sincerity of the speakers’ intentions (whether these are thematized or implicitly accompany their speech acts). These two cognitive validity claims seem to be intrinsic to language. By contrast, motivationally binding claims to rightness come into play only when speech acts are embedded in normative contexts that are already assumed to be obligatory or to be capable of justification.

Normatively ‘freestanding’ requests and proclamations are authorized by nothing except the justified intention and the rationally intelligible will of the speaker. We understand such speech acts, therefore, when we know the actor-relative reasons for the rationality of the corresponding intentions (and the conditions for implementing them).10 By contrast, commands derive their binding authority, or declarations their legal force, from a prior normative background that is assumed to be valid. We understand such speech acts only when we know the authorizing reasons which must be drawn from this background. This dependence of normative claims to rightness on their context can be explained in terms of the hypothesis that the binding energies initially generated through ritual are connected only subsequently with the language that arises from everyday contexts of cooperation. This also implies, on the other hand, that we must not attach too much explanatory weight to the linguistification of the sacred.

In the Theory of Communicative Action, I made the rash and overinclusive assumption that the rationally motivating binding force of good reasons, on which the coordinating function of linguistic communication turns, can be traced back in general to the linguistification of a basic agreement initially secured through ritual: ‘The aura of rapture and terror that emanates from the sacred, the spellbinding power of the holy, is sublimated into the binding/bonding force of criticizable validity claims and at the same time turned into an everyday occurrence.’11 In the light of a differentiation between roots of language in communication within and beyond everyday contexts, I now conceive of the linguistification of the sacred differently. Normative contents first had to be liberated from their encapsulation in rituals before they could be translated into the semantics of everyday language. To be sure, the ritual propitiation of the forces of salvation and perdition had always been associated with a semantic polarization between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. But it was only when ritual meanings found linguistic expression in mythical narratives that this psychodynamic opposition between good and evil could become assimilated in everyday language to the binary coding of statements and utterances (as true/false and truthful/ untruthful) and develop into a third validity claim associated with regulative speech acts (right/wrong). I mention this speculative hypothesis about how meanings frozen in rituals could be released into language because the development of worldviews can also (though by no means only) be understood as the disenchantment and reflexive dissolution of sacred meanings.

If we follow Michael Tomasello,12 contemporary languages owe their grammatical complexity to a prehistoric differentiation of gestural languages into propositionally structured languages (though this process of differentiation can be reconstructed only in a hypothetical way). Let us assume, then, that in early human history there was such a period of ‘linguistic’ communication,13 albeit communication mediated exclusively by deictic and iconic gestures.14 It was only the emergence of grammatical languages that made it possible not to base the fragile solidarity of the social collective (as analysed by Durkheim) and the recognition of its normative framework – that is, of institutionalized kinship relations – any longer only on rites, but also to interpret, explain and justify social solidarity and its normative foundation in terms of mythical narratives. After all, the interplay between ritual and myth founds the sacred complexes that continue to exist in highly reflexive forms to the present day. Until the development of a secular, postmetaphysical understanding of self and the world in the modern West, all cultural systems of interpretation developed within such a sacred framework.

I now understand the linguistification of the sacred in the narrower sense that a transfer of meaning from sources of sacred communication to everyday language took place in these worldviews. The achievement of mythical, religious and metaphysical worldviews was to liberate the semantic potentials encapsulated in ritual practices into the language of mythical stories or dogmatically developed teachings, while at the same time processing them, in the light of the contemporary profane knowledge, into an identity-stabilizing system of interpretation. In doing so, the worldviews established a connection between the collective self-understanding of the respective intersubjectively shared lifeworlds rooted in sacred sources, on the one hand, and the empirical knowledge of the world acquired in profane interactions, on the other. They established an internal, conceptual link between the conservative self-interpretation supported by tradition and an understanding of the world subject to continuous revision.15

A study of the genealogy of faith and knowledge would be required to make plausible at least the major stages in the reflexive dissolution, sublimation and displacement of semantic potentials originating in rituals – hence, to explain these stages in the development of worldviews. The essays collected in the present volume are not a substitute, but can offer at best some pointers, for such a study. However, the idea of such a still-to-be-conducted genealogy may explain why I think that the continuing contemporary vitality of religious traditions and practices represents a challenge for philosophy.

Hume and Kant mark the end of metaphysics. Philosophy no longer insists on its original Platonic route to salvation through contemplation of an all-encompassing cosmic unity, so that it no longer competes in this regard with religious worldviews. The nominalist revolution paved the way for liberating philosophy from the embrace of religion; it now claims to ground morality and law, and the normative content of modernity in general, in reason alone. On the other hand, the critique of a false scientistic self-understanding of philosophy can highlight the fact that it cannot be reduced to science. In contrast to the objectifying sciences, philosophy still shares with religious and metaphysical ‘worldviews’ the self-reflexive attitude in which it processes mundane knowledge (now produced and filtered by the institutionalized sciences). It is not directly involved in increasing our knowledge of the world but asks instead what the growing body of empirical knowledge, the knowledge we acquire through interactions with the world, means for us. Instead of being reduced to the role of an auxiliary of cognitive science, for example, philosophy should continue to pursue its task of articulating a justified understanding of ourselves and the world in the light of the best available scientific evidence.

There is no reason to question the secular character of postmetaphysical thinking. But the fact that religious communities, through their ritual practice, maintain a connection, however refracted and sublimated by reflection, with the archaic origins of the ritualized production of normative binding and bonding energies raises the following question for postmetaphysical thinking: Can we know whether the linguistification of the sacred, which took place over the millennia in the work on myth, religion and metaphysics, has run its course and has come to a close? However, philosophy now faces the task of continuing the ‘theological’ linguistification of the sacred, which was conducted until now within religious teachings, ‘from the outside’. For philosophy, ‘linguistification’ can only mean discovering the still vital semantic potentials in religious traditions and translating them into a general language that is accessible beyond the boundaries of particular religious communities – and thereby introducing them into the discursive play of public reasons.

The reflections and replies included in the second section of the book serve as variations on this single theme. They collect evidence for a changed constellation in the relationship between philosophy and science, on the one hand, and between philosophy and religious traditions, on the other. And they exemplify a dialogical relationship to religious interlocutors which could be adopted by a philosophy that is willing to learn, without regarding this dialogue as a zero-sum game.16 This has obvious relevance for political questions raised by ideological pluralism. Therefore, the third section builds on those contemporary discussions which demonstrate that religious communities remain relevant for the democratic legitimization of political rule even after political authority has become secularized. John Rawls’s political theory is based on the insight that the secularization of the state is not necessarily synonymous with the secularization of civil society. The question that interests me is what follows for the role of religious communities in the political public sphere.

In constitutional democracies, the relationship between religion and politics is quite clear-cut from a normative point of view. This makes the unhinged responses we are currently witnessing to outbreaks of religious violence, and to the difficulties faced by our postcolonial immigrant societies in integrating foreign religious communities, all the more disconcerting. I do not want to play down the seriousness of these political problems; but what political theory has to say about them is not particularly controversial. Evoking ‘the political’ is not a convincing remedy for a political system that has become administratively independent and whose power is at the same time being undermined by developments at the global level. But the dispute between secularists and supposed multiculturalists, who accuse each other of Enlightenment fundamentalism or of watering down basic rights, is not a convincing remedy for our predicament either.

Jürgen HabermasStarnberg, June 2012

Notes

1.

Habermas,

Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays

, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge: Polity, 1992).

2.

Herbert Schnädelbach,

Was Philosophen wissen und was man von ihnen lernen kann

(Munich: C. H. Beck, 2012).

3.

See Robert Spaemann’s self-confident retrospective account of his intellectual biography in

Über Gott und die Welt: Eine Autobiographie in Gesprächen

(Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2012) and

Schritte über uns hinaus: Gesammelte Reden und Aufsätze

(Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2010).

4.

Dieter Henrich has continued to pursue his programme with impressive rigour: Henrich,

Denken und Selbstsein: Vorlesungen über Subjektivität

(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007) and

Werke im Werden: Über die Genesis philosophischer Einsichten

(Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011).

5.

Hent de Vries,

Philosophy and the Turn to Religion

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

6.

Habermas,

Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays

, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).

7.

Michael Tomasello,

Origins of Human Communication

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

8.

See the introduction to Habermas,

Rationalitäts- und Sprachtheorie, Philosophische Texte

, Vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009), pp. 9–28.

9.

Habermas, ‘Toward a Critique of the Theory of Meaning’, in

Postmetaphysical Thinking

, pp. 57–87.

10.

The distinction between normatively freestanding and normatively embedded requests and proclamations compelled me to make corresponding differentiations between the use of language ‘oriented towards agreement’ and the use of language ‘oriented towards reaching understanding’ and between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ communicative action. See Habermas, ‘Some Further Clarifications of the Concept of Communicative Rationality’, in

On the Pragmatics of Communication

, ed. Maeve Cooke (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), pp. 307–42, here pp. 320ff. and pp. 326ff.

11.

Habermas,

The Theory of Communicative Action

, Vol. 2, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), p. 77.

12.

Michael Tomasello,

Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of

Language Acquisition

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

13.

I use the term ‘linguistic’ to refer to the communicative exchange of conventionalized symbols employed with identical meanings within the linguistic community.

14.

Merlin Donald,

Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the

Evolution of Culture and Cognition

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

15.

From this formal perspective, a similar relationship between philosophy and science can still be found even in the postmetaphysical understanding of ourselves and the world. This is true, at any rate, as long as philosophy regards it as its classical task, as it were, to rationally reconstruct the most general features of the intuitive knowledge of knowing, speaking and acting subjects about how to form and justify judgements, pursue and realize intentional goals, and form linguistic expressions and use them for communicative purposes.

16.

I have defended this conception a number of times against the concerns expressed by theologians that it involves a functionalist understanding of religion. See, among others, my ‘Reply’, in Michael Reder and Josef Schmidt (eds),

An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age

, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), pp. 72–83.

ITHE LIFEWORLD AS A SPACE OF REASONS

1FROM WORLDVIEWS TO THE LIFEWORLD

When we reflect theoretically on our understanding of the world and of ourselves, we speak in terms of worldviews [Weltbilder] or Weltanschauungen. While the notion of a ‘Weltanschauung’ has the connotation of the process of comprehending the whole, the concept of a ‘worldview’ places the emphasis more on the result of an interpretation of the world – that is, its theoretical or representational character. Both expressions have the existential significance of something which provides orientation – Weltanschauungen and worldviews give us orientation in our life as a whole. This orientational knowledge must not be confused with scientific knowledge even when it claims to represent a synthesis of currently valid research. This explains the distanced tone of the associated terminology. When ‘worldview’ and ‘Weltanschauung’ are not used merely as pejorative expressions to distinguish philosophy from dubious rivals,1 the preference is to apply them retrospectively to the ‘strong’ traditions of the past. Then we mean first and foremost conceptions which can be traced back in one way or another to the cosmological and theocentric worldviews of the Axial Age, also including essential parts of Greek philosophy.

Even today philosophical doctrines still fulfil the function of worldviews to the extent that they have preserved their reference to the world as a whole, to the cosmos, to world history and the history of salvation [Heilsgeschichte], and to a process of natural evolution that includes human beings and culture.2 Such doctrines can be justified as forms of ethical self-interpretation; but the more or less explicit self-interpretation of a particular ethos cannot claim universal validity any longer under modern conditions of the pluralism of worldviews. Moreover, philosophy in the guise of postmetaphysical thinking would also be well advised to refrain from merely producing worldviews. How can it satisfy this requirement without at the same time sacrificing its reference to the whole? Today philosophy as a discipline is disintegrating into the fragments of its hyphenated philosophies by specializing in reconstructing particular competences, such as speaking, acting and knowing, or by reflecting on the pre-existing cultural forms of science, morality, law, religion or art. Can these fragments be reassembled to form a whole by taking the focus on the lifeworld as our starting point? The path leading from worldviews to the concept of the lifeworld which I will sketch here suggests that we can arrive at a non-foundational ‘non-hyphenated’ philosophy after all.

Admittedly, the world of the lifeworld is a different one from that of worldviews. It neither signifies the sublime cosmos or an exemplary order of things, nor does it refer to a fateful saeculum or an eon – that is, to an ordered succession of occurrences of relevance for salvation. The lifeworld does not confront us as a theoretical object; rather, we find ourselves in the lifeworld in a pre-theoretical sense. It encompasses and supports us insofar as we, as finite beings, cope with the things and events we encounter in the world. Husserl speaks of the ‘horizon’ of the lifeworld and of its ‘function as a ground’ for our everyday activities. To anticipate, the lifeworld can be described as the insurmountable, only intuitively accompanying horizon of experience and as the uncircumventable, non-objectively present experiential background of a personal, historically situated, embodied and communicatively socialized everyday existence. We become aware of this mode of existence under a variety of aspects. We become aware of ourselves performatively as experiencing subjects who are embedded in organic life processes, as socialized persons who are enmeshed in their social relations and practices, and as actors who intervene in the world. What is compressed into this compact formula cannot be contemplated like the starry heavens above us; and it is not something that can be accepted as binding truth trusting in the word of God.

When we engage in explicit communication about something in the world, we are operating in a milieu that has always been constructed on the basis of such performative certainties. It is the task of philosophical reflection to bring the most general features – as it were, the architectonic – of the lifeworld to consciousness. Therefore, this philosophical description refers not to how the world in itself hangs together but to the conditions of our access to what takes place in the world. All that is left of the image of the world after this anthropocentric return to the ground and horizon of our beingin-the-world is the empty framework for possible factual knowledge.

With this, the analysis of the lifeworld background also loses the orienting function of worldviews, which with their theoretical access to the whole also promise to provide practical insight into how to lead our lives. Husserl nevertheless wants to extract an important practical lesson from the phenomenology of the lifeworld, which he conceives as a strictly descriptive enterprise. Specifically, with this concept he wants to uncover the forgotten ‘meaning foundation’ of science and thus to preserve knowledge-based society from the far-reaching consequences of objectivism. Today the challenge posed by an excessively scientistic form of naturalism raises a similar question – namely, whether and, if necessary, in what sense the epistemic role of the lifeworld sets limits to a scientific revision of how people understand themselves in their everyday lives.

I would like to test the plausibility of Husserl’s thesis of the forgotten meaning foundation in terms of a rough outline of the development of worldviews. With the spread of an ontological world concept and, later, the construction of an epistemological concept of world,3 European philosophy on the one hand played a central role in the cognitive process of disentangling the objective world of science from the projective objectivization of aspects of lifeworlds which operate in the background. As a secular intellectual formation, philosophy turned its back on religion while simultaneously renouncing strong metaphysical claims to knowledge. On the other hand, while it contributed to the genealogy of a disenchanted and objectivized concept of the empirical world, philosophy suppressed the epistemic role of the lifeworld. Therefore, I am interested in how reflection on this repressed background changes the self-understanding of postmetaphysical thinking.

Anticipating the communicative concept of the lifeworld, I will first explain the difference between ‘lifeworld’, ‘objective world’ and ‘everyday world’ (1). These basic concepts will serve to relate the critique of science to the context of worldview development. The interesting thing about this development is the progressive cognitive liberation of the ‘objective world’ from projections of the ‘lifeworld’ (2) and how the resulting problems of the objectivized image of the world of natural science are dealt with by transcendental philosophy (3). This picture is further complicated by the rise of human and social science, which at the same time represent a challenge for transcendental philosophy (4). The bipolar objectivization of our picture of the objective world and a corresponding detranscendentalization of the underlying constituting subjectivity explain why Husserl’s critique of science becomes heightened into a dilemma. The complementarity between the lifeworld and the objective world, which we cannot circumvent in actu, is connected with a form of epistemic dualism which conflicts with the need for a monistic interpretation of the world (5). In conclusion, I will briefly examine some attempts to find a way out of this dilemma (6).

(1) The concept of the lifeworld is based on the distinction between performative consciousness and fallible knowledge. The unique character of the attendant, intuitively certain background knowledge that accompanies us in our everyday routines but always remains implicit can be explained by the fact that the lifeworld is present to us only in a performative manner, when we perform actions which are always directed to something else. The fear of losing one’s foothold on loose gravel or the feeling of blushing over an embarrassing mistake, the sudden realization that one can no longer count on the loyalty of an old friend, or what it means for a long cherished background assumption suddenly to begin to totter – these are all things that we ‘know’. For in situations such as these in which established routines are disrupted, a layer of implicit knowledge is uncovered, be it a habitual ability, a sensitivity, a dependable social relationship or a firm conviction. As long as they remain unthematized in the background, these components of the performative knowledge thus adumbrated form an amalgam.

In principle each of these certainties can be transformed from a resource of social cooperation and communication into a theme, especially when the normal routine is disrupted and dissonances arise. Hence, the lifeworld described in phenomenological terms can also be understood as the background of communicative action and be related to processes of reaching understanding.4 Then it is no longer the conscious life of a transcendental ego that stands at the centre of the lifeworld horizon, as in Husserl, but instead the communicative relationship between at least two participants, alter and ego. The lifeworld appears to both participants in communication as the accompanying, only implicitly present, arbitrarily expandable horizon within which each present encounter is localized in the – likewise only performatively present – dimensions of social space and lived historical time.

This approach in terms of a theory of communication is well suited to clarifying the basic concepts of the ‘lifeworld’, the ‘objective world’ and the ‘everyday world’ (a) in terms of which I want to analyse the development of worldviews (b).

(a) Lifeworld certainties represent a heightened and nevertheless deficient form of ‘knowledge’, because they lose their performative character once they are expressed in assertions. What cannot be expressed in true or false assertions cannot count as knowledge in the strict sense. We must place the background knowledge that we have been talking about until now in quotation marks. For what we ‘know’ in this intuitive way can be made explicit only by transforming it into a description; however, in doing so, the performative character of what is merely ‘known’ dissolves – it disintegrates, as it were. Interestingly, the only exception to this are illocutionary acts. The illocutionary components of speech acts – such as ‘I concede, that I . . .’, ‘I recommend that you . . .’, or ‘I am quite certain that p’ – express the performative character of what is lived or experienced, of interpersonal relations and of convictions as such, without explicitly representing it in terms of a proposition, because in each case the propositional contents expressed with the illocutionary act deal with something else. An embarrassing confession, a piece of friendly advice or a firm conviction can have any content whatsoever. But only in the case of a constative speech act is this propositional content presented as an existing state of affairs. In an expressive utterance, the propositional meaning becomes the content of an experience to which the first person has privileged access and which he or she ‘discloses’ to others. In regulative speech acts, it becomes the content of an interpersonal relationship that a first person enters into with a second person. All three modalities are reflected in the validity claims of the corresponding types of speech acts, in the truthfulness, rightness or truth claims that speakers raise for first-person assertions, for propositions addressed to second persons or for descriptive statements. Thanks to this triad of validity claims, the performative meaning of subjective experiences, intersubjective obligations and what is objectively meant enters the public space of reasons via linguistic communication.

What is interesting in the present context is the relationship between ‘lifeworld’ and ‘objective world’ as reflected in the twofold structure of speech acts. When performing their illocutionary acts, speakers belong to a lifeworld, whereas in using the propositional components of these acts they refer to something in the objective world. In communicative action, they jointly assume the existence of this objective world as the totality of the objects or referents existing independently of description about which states of affairs can be asserted. However, this does not mean that statements cannot be made about the lifeworld itself. Those involved can assume a thirdperson attitude towards their own engagement and, in a further act of reaching understanding, thematize a performatively produced communicative relationship – that is, treat it as something that occurs in the world. This is because anything that is made into the content of a proposition is thematized as something which is given or exists in the world.

Despite the insurmountable intentional distance from events in the objective world – the gap between the performance and the explicit content of communicative act – it is part of the experience of participants in communication and of their background knowledge that the communication process in which they are currently involved takes place in the same world as that to which the referents of the statements they make in the same moment also belong. The lifeworld as a component of the objective world enjoys a kind of ‘ontological primacy’ over the respective current background consciousness of the individual involved, because the performatively present life processes – i.e., experiences, interpersonal relations and beliefs – presuppose the bodily organism, the intersubjectively shared practices and the traditions in which the experiencing, acting and speaking subjects ‘always’ find themselves.

(b) I will return to the mode of existence of these lifeworlds articulated in symbolic forms and to the objectifying description of ‘socio-cultural forms of life’. First I would like to examine the ‘picture’ we form of this all-inclusive objective world. As long as we are absorbed in performing these intentional (linguistic or non-linguistic) activities, we cannot detach ourselves from the lifeworld which is present in the background and forms the horizon within which we adopt an intentional orientation to something ‘in the world’. But we can know that this same objective world, viewed from the perspective of a distanced observer, in turn includes us, our networks of interaction, and their background side by side with other entities. This shapes our inclusive ‘everyday world’, the world of common sense. We should not equate this with the philosophical concept of the ‘lifeworld’, even though the performative traits of the lifeworld also determine the structure of our ‘everyday world’, the fact that it is centred on us, our encounters and practices, our states of mind and interests. However, the ‘everyday world’ is inclusive. It includes not only what is familiar in a performative manner but also the perceived and known elements of the natural environment that confront us. The everyday world is not exhausted by the segments constituted by our background knowledge – that is, by the subjective life routines, the social relations and the taken-for-granted cultural beliefs with which we are familiar in the performative mode. The image we form of the ‘objective world’ – our worldview – is directly shaped by this everyday world.

In our everyday lives, we categorize the things we encounter in the world according to levels of practical involvement. Roughly speaking, we categorize them as persons if they can enter into communicative relations with us; we categorize them as norms, speech acts, actions, texts, signs, artefacts, and so forth, if they can be understood as things produced by persons; we categorize them as animals and plants if their self-sustaining and boundary-maintaining character as organic systems compels us to treat them with consideration (for example, to tend to or breed them); or we construe things as manipulable objects when we can strip them of all lifeworld qualities that accrue to them from other domains of experience (for example, the qualities of a ‘tool’ or of natural beauty). It is no accident that the ontology closely allied to everyday life which we find in Aristotle recalls this practically imbued ‘picture’ of the ‘objective world’.

Clearly, the production of worldviews – of the historically varying pictures we make of the objective world – starts from the trivial layers of the everyday world. Whereas the scientific view of the world takes its orientation from the everyday category of bodies and comprehends the universe as the totality of physically measurable states and events regulated by natural laws, the earliest mythical traditions assimilate almost all events to communicative relations between persons. If we can believe the accounts of cultural anthropology,5 the world reflected in those mythical narratives has a monistic structure: there is only one level of phenomena but nothing ‘in itself’ underlying them. Narrated events are structured as social interactions involving people and animals, but also the spirits of the ancestors and imaginary natural and original forces, supra-personal powers and personalized gods.6 Almost anyone can communicate with anyone and everything with everything; they can express feelings and wishes, intentions and opinions, and influence one another.

The narratives give rise to a network of ‘correspondences’ in which ritualized actions are also embedded. The dealings with the mythical powers organized in burial and sacrificial rituals, in ancestor worship and natural magic, acquire their self-evidence from this embedding. In this way, the performative attitude, in which a first person adjusts herself to a second person in order to communicate with him about something, merges in magical practices with the objectifying attitude of a technician towards impersonal or supra-personal forces over which she wants to exercise causal influence. By communicating with a spirit, the sorcerer acquires power over it. The dominance of a single category, namely, that of communicative action, provides impressive evidence of this.

Clearly, so-called mythical worldviews are not only shaped by the totalizing features of a centred lifeworld inhabited ‘by us’. They are also imbued with and structured by the performative consciousness of the lifeworld in such a way that the distinction between lifeworld and objective world built into the grammar of communicative action and managed practically by those involved in everyday life merges in the worldviews of early tribal societies. The categories of action oriented to reaching an understanding structure natural processes in the world as a whole, so that, from our point of view, what occurs in the world is absorbed by the segments of the everyday world constituted by the lifeworld.

For us today, these mythical origins and the worldview of modern science stand in a peculiar contrast, which suggests that during the development of worldviews the objective world that exists ‘in itself’ was progressively purified for the participants of the surplus lifeworld qualities projected upon it. As we learn to cope with cognitive dissonances that are empirically triggered and mastered, our view of the objective world becomes disenchanted. Would an exaggerated scientistic version of naturalism have to have the last word from this perspective? Or can we defend Husserl’s thesis that science rests on a forgotten foundation of meaning by arguing that the progressive trend towards objectivization has led to an increasingly extreme polarization between the lifeworld, which is henceforth defined exclusively in formal terms but remains epistemically unavoidable, and a scientific objectified world?

(2) The following, very rough sketch of the development of worldviews is a proposal for how we can understand three caesuras along the path ‘from worldviews to the lifeworld’ as cognitive advances, each of which led to increasingly disenchanted and progressively more specific perspectives on the objective world. From this selective and correspondingly biased viewpoint, I am first interested in the step which leads from mythical thinking absorbed in the fluctuation of inner-worldly events, as outlined above, to a conception of ‘the’ world as a whole; I will then examine the distinctive occidental combination of theocentric and cosmological worldviews which leads to a polarization between faith and knowledge; and, finally, I will trace the emancipation of scientific knowledge of nature from metaphysics, which also breaks the link between cosmology and ethics and thus destroys the shared rational basis of faith and knowledge.

Since this account focuses narrowly on the development in the West, and even then would need to fill several books or even libraries, I can address only one aspect of my proposal regarding our topic: How did the conceptual constellations of ‘lifeworld’, ‘objective world’ and ‘everyday world’ shift in the wake of these presumed advances in learning?

With his concept of the ‘Axial Age’, Karl Jaspers highlighted the fact that, during a relatively short period around the middle of the first millennium BCE, there was a cognitive breakthrough in the world of civilizations that extended from the Middle East to the Far East.7 The religious doctrines and cosmological worldviews that remain influential up to the present day arose around that time in Persia, India and China, and in Israel and Greece. These ‘strong traditions’ – namely, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Confucianism, Judaism and Greek philosophy – brought about a shift in worldviews from the plurality of surface phenomena linked at the same level through narratives to the unity of the world as a whole conceived in theological or ‘theoretical’ terms. In monotheism, the cosmic ‘order of things’ assumed the temporalized form of a teleological order of world ages.

In the meantime, the concept of the Axial Age has inspired a diverse international literature.8 Of primary interest in the present context is the process by which an involved actor became liberated from the cognitive bias that confined her to a representation of the world from the internal perspective of someone entangled in mythical stories. The new dualistic worldviews broke with this twodimensional monism. With the conception of a single God beyond the world or concepts of a law-governed cosmic order, they opened up perspectives from which the world could be grasped as an objectified whole. The reference to the fixed pole of the single creator of the world, to the nomos which holds everything in balance, to the deep underlying reality of Nirvana or of eternal being, afforded the prophet or the wise man, the preacher and the teacher, the contemplative beholder and the mystic, the holy man absorbed in prayer and the philosopher sunk in intellectual contemplation, the necessary distance from the many, the contingent and the changeable. Regardless of whether the dualistic view of the world was more pronounced, as in the salvation religions of Israel and India, or less pronounced, as in Greek philosophy and Chinese wisdom teachings, these intellectual elites everywhere achieved a cognitive breakthrough to a transcendent standpoint.

From this vantage point, everything that takes place within the world could be distinguished from the world as such or in itself. And this perspective on being and humanity as a whole gave rise to that categorical distinction between essence and appearance which replaced the older, expressivist distinction between the spirit world and its manifestations (and in addition undermined the basis of magical conceptions in worldviews). With the differentiation between ‘world’ and what is ‘in-the-world’, the everyday world was demoted to the realm of mere appearances. This theoretical grasp of essences enhanced the explanatory power of narratives. The conceptual framework was now able to process the mass of practical, natural historical and medical knowledge, including astronomical and mathematical knowledge, which had accumulated in the urban centres of the early civilizations and to integrate it into a coherent whole that could be transmitted.

While myth remained tightly interwoven with everyday practices and did not acquire the self-sufficiency of a theoretical ‘image’ of the world, philosophical and theological conceptions of an ‘objective’, all-encompassing world found expression in the worldviews of the Axial Age. For those involved, religious or contemplative conceptions of the world as a whole marked the dissolution of the fusion of the ‘objective world’ with the ‘lifeworld’ which we today read out of mythical worldviews. From our point of view, the introduction and subordination of the everyday world downgraded to a mere phenomenon takes account of the fact that the performatively present lifeworld, together with the practices and network of cross-references in which they become accessible to communicative actors, is an entity in the world like all others.

However, this objectivization exacts a price. The ‘lifeworld’ as such does not appear in the worldviews of the Axial Age but is merged with the appearances of the ‘everyday world’. For believers and philosophers, their own lifeworld operating behind their backs disappears so completely behind the ontotheologically objectivized images of the world that the projective traits which these worldviews continue to borrow from the performative consciousness of their vital lived existence in the world remain hidden from them. This can be shown by three aspects of the lifeworld which are reflected in the world of cosmologies and theologies.

First

, the cosmos and the history of salvation are depicted in dimensions of lived social space and experienced historical time. As a result, the boundaries of the object world merge with the lifeworld horizon, projected to a superhuman scale, of an inhabitable world centred on us, of which the fleeting appearances of our everyday life in turn constitute only a part. In this architectonic of what Jaspers calls the ‘encompassing’, the teleological constitution of the world retains the lifeworld character of our everyday dealings with human beings, animals, plants and inanimate nature.

Second

, the worldviews of the Axial Age are by no means theories in the sense of a value-neutral description of known facts. The reason for this is that the

theoretical

interpretation of the world is already fused with precepts of the

practical

conduct of life through its strong, value-laden conceptual frame. When the whole is described with the help of such concepts as ‘God’, ‘Karma’, ‘to on’ or ‘Tao’, the

description

of sacred history or of the cosmos simultaneously acquires the

evaluative

connotation of an exemplary being [

Seiende

] whose telos has a normative significance for the believers and wise men as something to be emulated. This conceptual fusion of the binding force of normative statements with the truth of descriptive statements is reminiscent of the lifeworld background syndrome, which dissolves only in the course of linguistic thematization and becomes ramified into the different validity dimensions of the corresponding types of speech acts.

Finally

, the claim to infallibility with which religious and metaphysical ‘truths’ appear is also a function of the practical connotations of the theoretical interpretation of the world. Because the various conceptions of the world and of the ages of the world are supposed to be ‘cashed out’ in paths to salvation or in politically influential models of an exemplary life, theoretical beliefs have to be as convincing and as immune to cognitive dissonances as are ethical-existential certainties. This explains the

dogmatic form of thought

which lends religious and wisdom teachings the shape of ‘strong’ theories. With the claim to infallible truths, the

performative mode of knowledge

as it were reaches out of the lifeworld into the domain of explicit mundane knowledge.

Insofar as the worldviews of the Axial Age can be described retrospectively as involving an unreflected projection of such aspects of the lifeworld onto the objective world, the structure of the world concept already prefigures the path leading to a possible objectivization. The cognitive development points, firstly, towards a decentred concept of the world as the totality of physically describable states and events, secondly, towards a separation between theoretical and practical reason, and, finally, towards a fallibilistic, but non-sceptical understanding of theoretical knowledge. These vanishing points refer, of course, to our own hermeneutic starting point – that is, to a postmetaphysical understanding of ourselves and the world as this developed from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onwards. In order to strip this ‘narcissistic’ developmental construction at least of the deceptive appearance of necessary progress, I would now have to discuss the historical contingencies which first explain the improbable and unique systematic interpenetration of a cosmological worldview with a theological doctrine – that is, the productive conflation of Pauline Christianity and Greek metaphysics into the twofold shape of Hellenized Christianity and theologically founded Platonism. During the centuries that followed, the discourse on revelation and natural reason contended with the explosive impact of sciences such as mathematics, astronomy, medicine and natural philosophy, each of which observes a logic of its own. However, the discourse on faith and knowledge developed its explosive power only with the reception of Aristotle through Arab mediation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.9 In the course of this reception, the opposing concepts of ‘faith’ and ‘knowledge’ sharpened their respective profiles in contrast to one another.

However, the shared rational basis of faith and knowledge fell to pieces to the extent that natural philosophy lost its ability to connect up with theology, which nevertheless wanted to keep pace with contemporary science. Aristotle’s teleological ontology still contains a semantic potential which was open to a practical connection interpreted in terms of a conception of salvation. However, scholastic nominalism laid the groundwork for an unbiased empirical view of nature and ultimately for nomological empirical science for which the book of nature no longer bears a divine signature; it also prepares the way for a theory of knowledge which correlates the ‘nature’ of modern natural science with the human mind.10 This second orientation involves an inversion of the burden of proof when it comes to demonstrating the compatibility of religion and science, because henceforth stubborn philosophical discourses develop around the modern empirical sciences and the secular political powers which assert their independence from theology.11

Along this line of development, metaphysics, which until then had been contained within the realm of theology, assumed, in the course of the seventeenth century, the form of philosophical systems which received their formative impulses from both epistemology and social contract theory. The world of moving and causally interacting bodies conceived in physicalist terms lost the character of a ‘container’ of human existence. At the same time, the theoretical knowledge of this world, which is no longer affiliated with practical reason, forfeited its ability to provide practical orientation. For this reason Christian natural law also had to be replaced by human law based on practical reason alone. From that point onwards, philosophy gradually lost interest in its relation to religion. Postmetaphysical thinking concentrates on philosophy’s relation to science. This gives rise to a deficit that I cannot discuss in greater detail here.12

With the advance to the modern secular and scientized understanding of the world, the conceptual constellation of lifeworld, objective world and everyday world once again undergoes a change. Because the objective world consists of everything about which true statements can be made, Newton’s philosophical contemporaries comprehended the world in terms of the mechanistic picture that physics forms of nature as a whole. To the ‘world’ belong the objects of experience, which stand in a ‘natural’ – that is, law-governed – relationship with all other things. Mathematics and scientific experimentation succeed the ‘natural reason’ of the theologian-philosopher in its role as the canonical authority for judging notoriously unreliable everyday experiences. Underlying the sensory phenomena of the everyday world are no longer essences but the law-governed movements of causally interacting bodies.