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Postmetaphysical Thinking II

Essays and Replies

Jürgen Habermas
Translated by Ciaran Cronin










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 Habermas
Starnberg, June 2012

Notes

I
THE LIFEWORLD AS A SPACE OF REASONS