The “Post-Secular” Philosopher Jürgen Habermas Has Died

That was not auspicious, in my view.  But he came to see that the thought that emerged from the Frankfurt School, in reducing virtually all cultural relationships to power and oppression, made actually improving society impossible.  But as a peer of the thinkers who would give us postmodernism, Habermas was taken seriously when he critiqued them, as he did with both Foucault and Derrida.

Habermas argued that communication, interpersonal relationships, and mutual understanding are, in fact, possible.  His Wikipedia article says this:

Jürgen Habermas considers his major contribution to be the development of the concept and theory of communicative reason or communicative rationality,which distinguishes itself from the rationalist tradition by locating rationality in structures of interpersonal linguistic communication.This social theory advances the goals of human emancipation, while maintaining an inclusive universalist moral framework.

This framework rests on the argument called universal pragmatics—that all speech acts have an inherent telos—the goal of mutual understanding, and that human beings possess the communicative competence to bring about such understanding.

Towards the end of his life, Habermas began to see that secularism is not enough, that any kind of humane society must also incorporate religion.  He called for a “post-secular” society.

I discuss this–and the prospects for achieving “post-secularism”–in my book Post-Christian:  A Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture.  Here is part of what I wrote about Habermas:

Jürgen Habermas is an acclaimed contemporary thinker—“the most important German philosopher of the second half of the 20th century”; “one of the most influential philosophers in the world.” A leftist and member of the Frankfurt School, the incubator of post-Marxism, Habermas is in the orbit of the postmodernist thinkers and critical theorists. But later in his life, Habermas began to temper his political radicalism and began to question his postmodernist peers. He held debates with Jacques Derrida, arguing that his practice of “deconstruction” made social critiques impossible, and with Michel Foucault, questioning his reductionism of culture to issues of power.

Habermas recognized the need for universal moral principles, as opposed to postmodernist relativism, and sought a basis for liberty, democracy, and a just society. He wanted to preserve the best parts of the Enlightenment legacy by rehabilitating reason against the postmodernist critiques. He developed the notion of “communicative rationality,” which interprets reason in terms of language. (Sound familiar? Habermas was influenced by J. G. Hamann.) In his formulation, reason and reasoning are means by which human beings arrive at understanding; not just understanding of the world but understanding of each other. The capacity of language to create this mutual understanding creates a sense of intersubjectivity—a shared internal experience—that, along with a consensus about objective truth that reasoning brings about, can make culture, morality, freedom, and a more humane society possible.

Still later in life, Habermas abandoned his earlier dismissal of religion and explored its positive role in philosophy, politics, and culture. This led to a dialogue between Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, who a year later would become Pope Benedict XVI.  Before that, Habermas made a remarkable assertion:

For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk.

“The Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love”! Deconstruct everything else, but these two biblical principles have to remain! Otherwise there can be no freedom, rights, or democracy. Without the ethic of justice and the ethic of love, all the diverse efforts to improve society—Marxist, post-Marxist, social democratic, liberal, conservative, Democratic, Republican—dissolve. And “up to this very day there is no alternative” to these religiously grounded imperatives of justice and love. “We must draw sustenance now”—in these allegedly secularist, post-Christian times—“as in the past, from this substance.”. . .

Habermas sees the emergence of what he calls a “post-secular society.” In coining the term, “post-secular,” Habermas recognizes that in the contemporary world, the secular and the religious exist side by side. He calls for a dialogue between the two—in his sense of communication that results in mutual understanding—with each side learning from the other.

In a paper entitled “An Awareness of What Is Missing,” Habermas says that secularism, by itself, cannot sustain a humane society.  Secular science has great power, but it has no mechanism within itself for questioning how it experiments or what it produces. (Habermas is concerned about the misuse of technology, especially biotechnology.) Secular morality at its best is individualistic, but societies need “collectively binding ideals” that create a sense of “solidarity” with other people. Secular society, having lost “its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole,” has a “motivational weakness,” that is, an inability to inspire. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” he says, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.” According to Habermas, “Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.”

For more about Habermas, post-secularism, their limits, and references for these quotations, see my book Post-Christian.

Photo:  Jürgen Habermas by photographer: Wolfram Huke at en.wikipedia, http://wolframhuke.de – Transferred from en.wikipedia; Transfer was stated to be made by User:ojs., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4498310