By JURGEN HABERMAS

Introduction to the newly published book

 Two opposing tendencies characterize the spiritual situation of our time – the proliferation of naturalistic world pictures and the growing political influence of religious orthodoxies.

On the one hand, advances in biogenetics, neuroscience and robotics, driven by therapeutic and eugenic hopes, are successfully presented. The aim of this program is to ensure that an objectified self-understanding of people in accordance with the natural sciences penetrates everyday contexts of communication and action. The implementation of a perspective of self-objectification, which reduces everything that is comprehensible and that can be experienced to something observable, would also stimulate the disposition towards a corresponding self-instrumentalization.^[1]

As far as philosophy is concerned, this tendency is linked to the demand for a scientific naturalism. There is no dispute that all the operations of the human spirit depend entirely on organic substrates. The controversy has more to do with the correct way to naturalize the spirit. An adequate naturalist understanding of cultural evolution must account for both the intersubjective constitution of the spirit and the normative character of its rule-guided operations.

On the other hand, the tendency towards the proliferation of naturalistic images of the world runs counter to an unexpected revitalization, as well as the politicization on a global scale, of faith communities and religious traditions. As far as philosophy is concerned, the revitalization of religious forces, from which only Europe seems to be excluded, is linked to the demand for a fundamental critique of the post-metaphysical and non-religious self-understanding of Western modernity.

There is no dispute that the possibilities of political configuration exist only within the universe of technical, scientific and economic infrastructures that have emerged in the West and for which there are no alternatives. What is controversial is, rather, the correct interpretation of the consequences of the secularization of a social and cultural rationalization that the defenders of religious orthodoxies increasingly denounce as the true singular path of the world history of the West.

These opposing intellectual tendencies go back to antagonistic traditions. Hard naturalism can be understood as a consequence of the premises of the Enlightenment [Enlightenment] that concern belief in science, while politically renewed religious consciousness breaks with the liberal premises of the Enlightenment. These figures of the spirit do not clash, however, only in academic controversies, but are transformed into political powers – both within the civil society of the predominant nation in the West and on an international scale in the clash of world religions and cultures that dominate the world.

From the perspective of a political theory that deals with normative foundations and the conditions for the functioning of democratic states governed by the rule of law, this opposition also reveals a secret complicity: if both sides lack the willingness to self-reflect, the two opposing tendencies are divided in the task of, in a certain sense, endangering the cohesion of the political community through the polarization of worldviews.

A political culture that, whether on questions of human embryo research, abortion or the treatment of coma patients, is irreconcilably polarized along the line separating the secular/religious pair of opposites, calls into question the common sense of citizens even in the oldest democracy. The ethos liberal citizenship requires both sides to reflectively certify the limits of both faith and knowledge.

As the example of the United States clearly shows, the modern constitutional state was also invented to make peaceful religious pluralism possible. Only the exercise of secular political power in accordance with the rule of law, neutral with regard to worldviews, can guarantee the equal and tolerant coexistence of different faith communities that, in the substance of their worldviews or doctrines, remain irreconcilable.

The secularization of state power and the positive and negative freedoms of religious practice are two sides of the same coin. They have protected religious communities not only from the destructive consequences of bloody conflicts between them, but also from the anti-religious mentality of a secularized society. The constitutional state can only protect its religious and non-religious citizens from one another if, in their coexistence as citizens, they not only find a modus vivendi, but also live together out of conviction in a democratic order. The democratic state is nourished by a legal and non-coercive solidarity of citizens who respect each other as free and equal members of their political community.

In the political public sphere, this solidarity between citizens, which has a low cost, must also be confirmed, above all, beyond the limits of worldviews. Mutual recognition means, for example, that religious and secular citizens are willing to listen to each other and learn from each other in public debates. In the political virtue of reciprocal civil relations, certain cognitive attitudes are expressed. They cannot be prescribed, but only learned.

However, there is a consequence that is of particular interest in our context. Insofar as the liberal state requires its citizens to adopt cooperative behavior that goes beyond the limits of worldviews, it has to assume that the cognitive attitudes required on the religious and secular sides have already been formed as a result of historical learning processes. Learning processes of this kind are not just random changes in mentality that “occur” independently of rationally comprehensible ideas. But neither can they be produced and controlled by means of media of law and politics. In the long run, the liberal State depends on mentalities that it is not capable of producing with its own resources.

This becomes clear when we consider the expectations of tolerance that religious citizens must meet in the liberal state. Fundamentalist convictions are incompatible with the mentality that must be shared by a sufficient number of citizens so that the democratic community does not collapse. From the perspective of the history of religion, the cognitive attitudes that religious citizens must adopt in their civil relations with those who have other beliefs and with those who have no beliefs can be understood as the result of a process of collective learning.

In the Christian West, theology has clearly taken on a pioneering role in this hermeneutical self-reflection on doctrines inherited from tradition. The question of whether the dogmatic elaboration of the cognitive challenges posed by modern science and religious pluralism, constitutional law and secular social morality, is “successful,” and the question of whether it is possible to speak of “learning processes” in general, can naturally only be judged from the internal perspective of these traditions, which thus find a connection with the conditions of modern life.

In short, the formation of opinion and will in the democratic public sphere can only work if a sufficiently large number of citizens meet certain expectations regarding the civility of their behavior despite profound differences in belief and worldview. But religious citizens can only be confronted with this under the assumption that they actually meet the cognitive presuppositions required for this.

They must have learned to relate their own religious convictions in a reflective and reasonable way to the fact of religious pluralism and worldviews, and they must have reconciled the cognitive privilege of socially institutionalized sciences as well as the precedence of the secular state and universalist social morality with their faith. Philosophy, unlike theology linked to faith communities, cannot influence this process. In this respect, philosophy is limited to the role of an external observer who is not responsible for judging what within a religious doctrine can be considered a basis or what should be rejected.

Philosophy only enters the field on the secular side. For even non-religious citizens can only fulfill the expectations of civil solidarity if they adopt a certain cognitive attitude towards their religious fellow citizens and their manifestations. When the two sides meet in the confusion of voices of a public sphere that is pluralistic in its worldviews and discuss political issues, certain epistemic obligations result from the requirement of mutual respect. Even participants who express themselves in religious language have the claim to be taken seriously by their secular fellow citizens. The latter cannot in advance refuse to give rational content to contributions formulated in religious language.

It is true that it is part of the common and shared understanding of the democratic constitution that all laws, all judicial decisions, all decrees and measures are formulated in a public language, that is, one that is equally accessible to all citizens and capable of secular justification. However, in the informal dispute of opinions in the public political sphere, citizens and civil society organizations still fall short of the level of an institutional recourse to the state's power of sanction. Here, the formation of opinion and will cannot be channeled through linguistic censorship nor isolated from possible sources that produce meaning.^[2] To this extent, the respect that secularized citizens must show for their fellow believers also has an epistemic dimension.

On the other hand, only by fulfilling an essentially controversial cognitive condition could one expect secular citizens to be open to accepting a possible rational content of religious contributions – and even more so to be willing to participate in the cooperative translation of these contents from religious languages ​​into a language accessible to all.

For, in their eyes, the conflict between secular and doctrinal convictions can only have prima facie the character of a reasonable dissent if it can be made plausible from a secular point of view that religious traditions are not simply irrational or absurd. Only on such an assumption can non-religious citizens accept that the great world religions could bring with it rational intuitions and instructive moments of unmet but legitimate demands.

However, this is the subject of an open discussion that cannot be prejudged by constitutional principles. It is by no means predetermined which side will be right. The secularism of the scientific worldview insists on the idea that the archaic forms of thought of religious doctrines have been completely overcome and devalued by the advances in knowledge of established research. On the contrary, fallibilist but not defeatist post-metaphysical thought, in the course of reflecting on its own limits – and on the tendency inscribed in it to go beyond limits – differentiates itself from both sides. It is equally suspicious of naturalistic scientific syntheses and of revealed truths.

The polarization of worldviews into religious and secular camps, which endangers cohesion among citizens, is the subject of political theory. However, as soon as we consider the cognitive assumptions that condition the functioning of citizen solidarity, we must move the analysis to another level.

Just as the process by which religious consciousness becomes reflexive in the age of modernity, the reflexive overcoming of secular consciousness also has an epistemological side. The characterization of these two complementary learning processes already reveals the detached description made from the point of view of a post-metaphysical observer. But from the point of view of the participants, to whom the observer himself belongs, the dispute is open.

The controversial points are clear. On the one hand, the discussion revolves around the correct way of naturalizing a spirit that is, from its origin, intersubjectively constituted and guided by norms. On the other hand, this corresponds to the discussion about the correct understanding of that cognitive impulse marked by the emergence of universal religions around the first millennium BC – Karl Jaspers speaks of the “axial age”.

In this dispute, I defend the Hegelian thesis, according to which the great religions belong to the history of reason itself. Post-metaphysical thought cannot understand itself if it does not include religious traditions alongside metaphysics in its own genealogy. If this premise is accepted, it would be foolish to set aside these “strong” traditions as an archaic residue, instead of explaining the internal connection that links them to modern forms of thought. Religious traditions have, to this day, articulated an awareness of what is missing.

They keep alive the sensitivity to what has failed. They preserve from oblivion the dimensions of our social and personal life, in which the advances of cultural and social rationalization have caused catastrophic damage. Why should they not still maintain encrypted semantic potentials that could develop an inspiring force, provided they were poured into discourses of foundation and their profane truth content were released?

This volume brings together essays that move within the horizon of such questions. They have come to light in recent years in rather contingent circumstances and do not form a systematic set. But throughout all the contributions there runs, like a red thread, the intention to confront the opposing but complementary challenges of naturalism and religion with the postmetaphysical insistence on the normative sense of a detranscendentalized reason.

The comments and studies in the first part recall the intersubjectivist approach to the theory of spirit, which I have long pursued. In line with a pragmatism that links Kant and Darwin,^[3] It is possible to deflate Platonic ideas with the help of the concept of idealizing presuppositions, without carrying anti-Platonism to such an extent that the operations of the rule-guided mind are hastily reduced to nomologically explicable regularities.

The studies in the second part develop the central question, outlined in advance here, from the perspective of a normative theory of the constitutional State, while the texts in the third part address the epistemological theme and seek to explain the position of post-metaphysical thought between naturalism and religion. The three final contributions return to themes of political theory.

In them, I am particularly interested in the correspondences that exist between, on the one hand, state control of religious pluralism and world views and, on the other, the perspective of the political constitution of a peaceful world society.^[4]

*Jürgen Habermas is a retired professor of philosophy and sociology at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in Frankfurt. Author of, among other books, Theory of communicative action (unesp).

Reference

Jurgen Habermas. Between naturalism and religion – philosophical essays. Translation: Antonio Ianni Segatto & Rúrion Melo. Unesp, São Paulo, 2024, 550 pages. [https://amzn.to/4iPwxEZ]

Notes

[1] Cf. Habermas, Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur.

[2] Habermas, “Glauben und Wissen”, in Time diagnosis

[3] Cf. Habermas' introduction, Protection and Law.

[4] In the last contribution, I again deal with questions of the constitutionalization of international law. Cf. the corresponding essay in Habermas, The West's gestalt.

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