What Hope Remains?

What Hope Remains?

Peter Gordon

tnr.com| Dec 14th 2011

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”

The Theory of Communicative Action, which appeared in 1981, he tried to show how the very structure of human language bears within itself the promise of mutual understanding and rational consensus: an ideal that can serve as the groundwork for a truly democratic polity.

Every culture begins by holding certain truths as sacred and virtually unquestionable.

We may have begun by imagining the divine as the sole source of our moral codes, but when we were awakened to the possibility that these codes can be challenged, our capacity for self-direction eventually outstripped our original experience of religious awe. The critique of the sacred therefore turns out to be the original model for the ongoing historical drama by which humanity came to understand itself as author of its own fate. Religion and Enlightenment are not eternal foes, since religion serves as reason’s point of departure. But the departure is necessary.

He readily concedes that religion (especially monotheistic religion) may furnish important moral insights that can be useful to secular democracies

In fact, the very emergence of the modern West has been shaped by the way that “philosophy continuously appropriates semantic contents from the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Habermas prefers to speak of “translation” as the only mode of “nondestructive secularization” whereby modern society might salvage the moral feelings that “only religious language has as yet been able to give a sufficiently differentiated expression.”

The idea of translation works especially well in the context of modern democratic society where we all have to be ready, if pressed, to furnish intelligible reasons for our arguments and the policies that we advocate. Yet if these reasons are to be binding for all members of our society, they cannot be reasons that presuppose everyone shares allegiance to the very same metaphysical vision of reality.

Instead I must be willing to back up my claims with reasons that all other citizens could recognize as at least potentially binding no matter what comprehensive doctrines they may hold.

A deeper objection would be that there is nothing in religion that is so indispensable that it requires the salvaging work of translation. After all, aren’t there other sources of instruction besides religious ones? On this point Habermas remains tellingly uncertain. He readily acknowledges that religious rituals and practices remain deeply affecting for many of us in ways that appear to have no obvious secular counterpart.

Habermas observes that in our ethical reasoning we provide justification in the language of universalistic concepts that presuppose the freedom of the individual. But when we are actually moved to act on our insight into the solidarity of the human collective, we may need more than “good reasons.” 

Habermas claims, when profane reason is set free to act on its own, it “loses its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole—of the Kingdom of God on earth—as collectively binding ideals.” Simply put, profane reason may not retain the requisite strength of motive or aspiration to fulfill its own mission: 

What Habermas actually meant, it seems, was far more modest: reason is fallible, and as such it should not dismiss the possibility that religious traditions may bear invaluable gifts.

Germany is, in Habermas’s phrase, a “post-secular society.” Whatever their origins, and whatever their faith or lack thereof, both religious and non-religious citizens should be able to encounter each other on a common plane and in mutual respect.

philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion as long as religious language is the bearer of a semantic content that is inspiring and even indispensable, for this content eludes (for the time being?) the explanatory force of philosophical language and continues to resist translation into reasoning discourses. 

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/98567/jurgen-habermas-religion-philosophy