Abstract
Jürgen Habermas, in his recent work on post-secular public reasoning, attempts to craft a model of democratic deliberation in which theistic and non-theistic selves can learn from each other and develop bonds of democratic solidarity. His proposed model raises questions about the abilities of democratically oriented individuals in the twenty-first century to reflect critically upon their own cherished beliefs, to comprehend the beliefs of others, and then to engage critically with the beliefs of others during deliberations about matters of common concern. I argue that these questions are best addressed by focusing on how individuals reason from within and through (rather than independently of) the cultural and ethical forces that make the subjects what they are. The work of many grassroots organizers today illustrates this lesson.
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Notes
Habermas uses the term “post-secular” to depict a collective “shift in consciousness in largely secularized or ‘unchurched’ societies that by now have come to terms with the continued existence of religious communities, and with the influence of religious voices both in the national public sphere and on the global political stage.” Jürgen Habermas, “Reply to My Critics,” in Habermas and Religion, ed. Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (London: Polity Press, 2013), 348.
Jürgen Habermas, “The Political: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology,” in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 27.
Jürgen Habermas, “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy,” in The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, ed. and trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 111–12.
Jürgen Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union: A Response, trans. Ciaran Cronin (London: Polity Press, 2012), 42.
Jürgen Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of Reason by Religious and Secular Citizens,” in Between Naturalism and Religion (London: Polity Press, 2008), 142.
Jürgen Habermas, “The Boundary between Faith and Knowledge: On the Reception and Contemporary Importance of Kant’s Philosophy of Religion,” in Between Naturalism and Religion, 242–43.
Ibid., 247.
Habermas, “The Political: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology,” 25.
Ibid.
Ibid., 26.
Jürgen Habermas, “An Awareness of What Is Missing,” in An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age, ed. Habermas, trans. Ciaran Cronin (London: Polity Press, 2010), 19.
Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of Reason by Religious and Secular Citizens,” 143.
Ibid., 17.
Jürgen Habermas, “A Conversation about God and the World” (1999); reprinted in Jürgen Habermas, in Time of Transitions, ed. and trans. Ciaran Cronin and Max Pensky (London, Polity, 2006), 154.
Jürgen Habermas, “Pre-political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State?” in The Dialectics of Secularization, ed. Jürgen Habermas, and Joseph Ratzinger (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2006), 23.
Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of Reason by Religious and Secular Citizens,” 139–40.
Habermas, “An Awareness of What Is Missing,” 18. See also his “Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of Reason by Religious and Secular Citizens,” 143.
Habermas, “Pre-political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State?” 50–51. See also his “An Awareness of What Is Missing,” 22.
Jürgen Habermas, “What Is Meant by a Post-secular Society? A Discussion on Islam in Europe,” in Europe: The Faltering Project, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 74.
Habermas, “An Awareness of What Is Missing,” 21. See also his “Reply to My Critics,” 372.
Jürgen Habermas, “Faith and Knowledge,” in The Future of Human Nature, trans. Max Pensky (London: Polity, 2003), 105.
Habermas, “What Is Meant by a Post-secular Society? A Discussion on Islam in Europe,” 74.
Habermas, “An Awareness of What Is Missing,” 21.
Habermas, “Reply to My Critics,” 371 and 376.
Habermas, “Faith and Knowledge,” 114.
Habermas, “The Political: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology,” 26.
Habermas, “An Awareness of What Is Missing,” 22.
Habermas, “What Is Meant by a Post-secular Society? A Discussion on Islam in Europe,” 75. See also his “Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of Reason by Religious and Secular Citizens,” 139–40.
Craig Calhoun, “Secularism, Citizenship and the Public Sphere,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011), 83.
Charles Taylor, “What Does Secularism Mean?” in his Dilemmas and Connections (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011), 321.
Habermas, “What Is Meant by a Post-secular Society? A Discussion on Islam in Europe,” 75.
Habermas, “Faith and Knowledge,” 104–05.
Ibid., 109
Ibid.
Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, “Dialogue: Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor,” in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, 63.
Ibid., 66.
Habermas, “Reply to My Critics,” 384.
Habermas, “What Does Secularism Mean?” 323.
Charles Taylor, “Why We Need a Radical Redefinition of Secularism,” in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, 53.
R. Scott Appleby, “Rethinking Fundamentalism in a Secular Age,” in Rethinking Secularism, 243–44.
As MacIntyre points out, for theists like himself the main issue in contemporary secular discourses on religion “is not the issue of God’s existence or nonexistence, but the contrast between His presence and His absence, between those occasions when He manifests Himself in and through particulars and those dark nights of the soul when He withdraws from us. To someone engaged in prayerful practice of the presence of God … the thought that perhaps God does not exist would be an idle thought, certainly not a thought to be responded to by philosophical argument any more than the fanciful thought that some human friend whom one only hears from at long intervals has perhaps never existed.” Alasdair MacIntyre, “On Being a Theistic Philosopher in a Secularized Culture,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 84 (2011): 23–32.
Colin Jager, “This Detail, This History: Charles Taylor’s Romanticism,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 171.
Nilfur Gole, “The Civilizational, Spatial, and Sexual Powers of the Secular,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, 246.
Asad shows how the contemporary liberal understanding of autonomy, which come from the Christian ethical tradition, sanctifies a markedly different political division of public and private realms than is found in Islamic states. The contemporary liberal state allows social workers, police, and others to intrude into the private realm in the name of individual rights, while permitting freedom of expression and dissent in the public realm. In the Islamic tradition, this is reversed: the private realm is private, but “conformity in public space may be much stricter.” Talal Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy and Secular Criticism” in Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech, ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 37.
Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (London: Polity Press, 2013), 74.
Habermas, “Reply to My Critics,” 379.
Charles Taylor, “Perils of Moralism,” in Dilemmas and Connections, 350.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 706.
Habermas, “Faith and Knowledge,” 113. See also his “Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of Reason by Religious and Secular Citizens,” 143.
Habermas, “Faith and Knowledge,” 113.
Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of Reason by Religious and Secular Citizens,” 143.
See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Michel Senellart (New York: Picador, 2008).
Friedo Ricken, “Postmetaphysical Reason and Religion” in An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age, ed. Habermas, 57.
Habermas, “Perils of Moralism,” 364.
Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 57. MacIntyre points out that this dilemma can only be avoided at the cost of living either a divided life or a life in denial. As he puts it, theistic belief has a “double aspect, at once problematic and unproblematic. As the former, it invites ruthless and systematic questioning. As the latter, it requires devoted and unquestioning obedience. Theists, who recognize one of these aspects of theism, but not the other, have an imperfect understanding of their own beliefs. Yet it seems impossible to acknowledge both aspects without tension and conflict. So theists have, it seems, a dilemma. Either they must willfully ignore some aspect of their own beliefs or they must live as divided selves, agonizing over the incompatible attitudes to which their beliefs give rise.” Alasdair MacIntyre God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2009), 8.
Peter Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 101.
Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 30.
Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” trans. Catherine Porter [1984]; reprinted in Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 48–49.
Habermas, “An Awareness of What Is Missing,” 74. See also his “Reply to My Critics,” 355.
Luke Bretherton, Christianity & Contemporary Politics (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 216.
Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage Press, 1989), 123. Taken from Christianity & Contemporary Politics, 73.
Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 127.
Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 290.
Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 14.
Ibid.
Ibid., 56.
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 218.
Ibid., 44.
Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 83.
Ibid., 14.
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 225.
Ibid., 223.
Ibid., 224.
Bretherton, Christianity & Contemporary Politics, 15.
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 147
Ibid., 206. See also Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 167.
Bretherton, Christianity & Contemporary Politics, 79.
William E. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xvii.
Hannah Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt, the Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 336.
Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 27.
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 162. See also William E. Connolly, The Augustinian Imperative (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Press, 1993), 56.
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 128.
Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 7.
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 130.
Ibid., 128
Charles Taylor, “Taylor Made Selves,” Interview by Alex Klaushofer, The Philosopher’s Magazine 12 (2000), 38.
Charles Taylor, “Afterword: Apologia pro Libro suo,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, 300.
Charles Taylor, “Reply to Baybrooke and DeSousa,” Dialogue 33 (1994), 131.
Charles Taylor, “Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View of Conceptual Schemes,” in Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald and Jens Kertsche (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 296.
Ibid., 284.
Charles Taylor, “Comparison, History, Truth,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 150.
Taylor, “Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View of Conceptual Schemes,” 295.
Taylor, “Comparison, History, Truth,” 156.
Charles Taylor, “The Future of the Religious Past,” in Dilemmas and Connections, 286.
Taylor, “Comparison, History, Truth,” 162.
Ibid., 152.
Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 39–42.
Ibid., 215.
As Taylor nicely puts it, “If understanding the other is to be construed as fusion of horizons and not as possessing a science of the object, then the slogan might be: no understanding the other without a changed understanding of self.” Charles Taylor, “Remembering Gadamer,” IWM Newsletter 76 (2002), 13.
Ibid., 12.
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 101.
Taylor, “Comparison, History, Truth,” 57.
Taylor, “Comparison, History, Truth,” 150–51.
William E Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
Bretherton, Christianity & Contemporary Politics, 198.
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 120.
Ibid., 151.
Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 125.
Ibid., 162
Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 129.
Ibid.
Ibid., 258.
William E. Connolly, “Biology, Politics, Creativity,” Perspectives on Politics 11 (June 2013): 510.
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Redhead, M. Reasoning between Athens and Jerusalem. Polity 47, 84–113 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2014.29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2014.29