Habermas’s religion

Peter Gordon has an excellent discussion of Jurgen Habermas’s alleged “turn to religion” in the latest issue of TNR . Gordon wants to show that Habermas has long shown interest in religion, and that his recent obsession with it is not evidence that he has abandoned his commitment to secular reason.

Gordon is also sharp in spotting the difficulties that Habermas has set for himself. He quotes a passage from The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (A Columbia / SSRC Book) , one of the books is he reviewing, where Habermas explains how the public square demands mutual deference and “translation” from both religious and secular participants:

“Religious citizens who regard themselves as loyal members of a constitutional democracy must accept the translation proviso as the price to be paid for the neutrality of the state authority toward competing worldviews. For secular citizens, the same ethics of citizenship entails a complementary burden. By the duty of reciprocal accountability toward all citizens, including religious ones, they are obliged not to publicly dismiss religious contributions to political opinion and will formation as mere noise, or even nonsense, from the start. Secular and religious citizens must meet in their public use of reason at eye level.”

Gordon spots the sleight of hand: “is the burden of translation truly equal? Does it even make sense to say they are both burdens? Consider the analogy of translation between profane languages: If a Frenchman is asked to express his claims in public where English is the only language in principle intelligible to all participants, then of course the Frenchman can be required to obey the rules of English grammar. That is surely a burden, and it may be a great challenge for someone who has spent his entire life thinking in French. But it makes no sense to say that the Englishman bears a symmetrical burden because he cannot think of himself as a “judge” concerning the comprehensive merits of France. There is nothing about speaking English that makes such a judgment plausible, let alone necessary. Habermas, I suspect, is trying to dress up the unidirectionality of the burdens of translation in a way that promotes a more favorable vision of reciprocity. This may be diplomatic—and, given the frequent intolerance of both parties, religious and secularist, some diplomacy may be called for—but the notion of a shared burden in translation does not accurately capture Habermas’s deeper commitments to profane reason.” The very analogy of “translation” works against Habermas here: “Translation, after all, is a linguistic event of semantic transfer, from a language of origin to a target language— from religion to the secular public sphere. The analogy thus reveals how Habermas’s earliest ideas concerning the character of public reason have not lost their validity.”

This is reassuring to anyone who wants Habermas to continue to be one of our day’s most prominent advocates of Enlightened reason, but Gordon also recognizes that there is something new going on in Habermas’s recent work. “What is most striking in Habermas’s recent writings on religion is that he seems more than willing to meet the conservative critics of secularization half way. He disagrees with the philosopher Hans Blumenberg, the author of a monumental tome back in the 1960s that extolled modernity for developing resources of legitimacy that did not flow from secularized religious norms. Unlike Blumenberg, Habermas sees substantive streams of religious instruction that nourish the modern age. The idea of a sharp break is not only a historical fantasy, it may also prevent us from acknowledging genuine sources of guidance that secular modernity seems to crave. Habermas also disagrees with proponents of thoroughgoing secularization such as the French advocates of laïcité, who seem intent upon denying religion any role in politics whatsoever. He readily concedes that religion (especially monotheistic religion) may furnish important moral insights that can be useful to secular democracies, although he is aware that this very claim may strike radical secularists as an outrageous concession.”

And he also notes that Habermas has left open the possibility that there is some residual something in religion that will never be fully incorporated into secular reason: “Against the intolerance of a secularism that is dogmatically certain of its independence from religion, and against the intolerance of a religiosity that is no less certain that it retains exclusive ownership rights on human morality, Habermas prudently—but on theoretically defensible grounds—refuses to take sides. As a philosophical modernist who remains open to unwritten possibilities, he believes that the process of translation will continue at least for the foreseeable future, and that the future alone will decide.”