" . . . my position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science in the same boat - a boat which, to revert to Neurath's figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy. All scientific findings, all scientific conjectures that are at present plausible, are therefore in my view as welcome for use in philosophy as elsewhere."

"Natural Kinds," in Ontological relativity,: And other essays, p. 126-127.

The best Habermas site on internet (in English at least) Habermasonline

Speech by Juergen Habermas on Biotechnology

Speech by Juergen Habermas on Biotechnology
Juergen Habermas is a well-known German philosopher who was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association on October 14,2001. He speaks of faith and knowledge in a secular society within the context of what happened on September 11th.

Speech by Juergen Habermas accepting the Peace Prize of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association
Paulskirche, Frankfurt, 14 October 2001

Sueddeutsche Zeitung, 15 October 2001 http://www.sueddeutsche.de/aktuell/sz/artikel86740.php
[translated from German by Kermit Snelson]

When current events become so overwhelming that they rip the choice of topic out of our own hands, so to speak, the John Waynes among us intellectuals are of course greatly tempted to compete instead as to who can be the quickest to shoot from the hip.

Only a short time ago the spirits moved us to discuss the question of whether and how far we should subject ourselves to genetic technology for self-instrumentation or even for pursuing the goal of self-optimization.

Our first steps along this path were beset by controversy between the advocates of those two great rival faiths: organized science and organized religion. One side feared obscurantism and the revival of atavistic suspicion against science. The other accused the scientistic belief in progress of a crude naturalism that undermines morality.

But after 11 September, the tension between secular society and religion exploded in an entirely different way. As we know from Atta's testament, these suicidal murderers, who turned civilian means of transport into living missiles against the capitalist citadels of Western civilization, were motivated by religious convictions. For them, those symbols of globalizing modernism were the embodiment of the Great Satan.

But we too, the universal eyewitnesses to these "apocalyptic" events, were moved to Biblical imagery by what we saw on the TV screen. The language of retribution used at first (and I repeat, at first) by the US President in reaction to the events resounded with Old Testament overtones. Synagogues, churches and mosques filled up everywhere, as if the blind attacks had struck a religious chord deep within the innermost core of secular society. This subterranean symmetry did not, however, go so far as to lead the religious memorial gathering at the New York Stadium three weeks ago to a symmetric display of hate.

Despite its religious language, fundamentalism is, as we know, an exclusively modern phenomenon. What struck us immediately about the Islamic perpetrators was the imbalance between their ends and their means. This reflects an imbalance that has emerged in the perpetrators' home countries between culture and society in the wake of an accelerated and radical modernization.

What under more fortunate conditions might have been considered a process of creative destruction offers these countries no prospect that can adequately compensate for the suffering caused by the collapse of traditional ways. The prospect of improved material living conditions is merely one of these. What is decisive is that the prospect of spiritual freedom, which finds its political expression in the separation of church and state, has been impeded there by feelings of humiliation.

Even in Europe, where centuries have been spent trying to work out a sensible accommodation with the Janus head of modernity, "secularization" is still accompanied by highly ambivalent feelings, as evident in the controversy over biotechnology. There are obdurate orthodoxies in the West as well as in the Middle and Far(ther) East, and among Christians and Jews as well as Muslims. Those who wish to avoid a "clash of civilizations" must therefore keep in mind the still-unresolved dialectic inherent in our own Western process of secularization.

The "war against terrorism" is no war, and in terrorism is expressed also -- and I emphasize the word "also" -- the ominously silent collision of worlds that must find a common language beyond the mute violence of terrorism against military might. Instead of a globalization that consists of a market without boundaries, many of us hope for a return of the political in another form. Not in the original form of a global security state, tied to the spheres of the police, intelligence services and now even the military, but instead as a world-wide, civilizing power of formation.

At the moment we don't have much more to work with than a pallid faith in rationality and a little self-awareness, because this lack of language has also divided our own house against itself. The risks of disruptive secularization elsewhere may be addressed only when we are clear on what secularization means in our own post-secular society. So with this aim in view, I return today to an old topic, Faith and Knowledge. But don't expect a polarizing Sunday sermon that causes some to leap out of their pews while others remain seated.

First of all, the word "secularization" has a juridical meaning that refers to the forcible appropriation of church property by the secular state. This meaning has since been extended to the emergence of cultural and societal modernism in general. Since then, the word "secularization" has been associated with both of these opposed judgments, whether it is the successful taming of ecclesiastical authority by worldly power that is being emphasized or rather the act of unlawful appropriation.

According to the first interpretation, religious ways of thinking and living have been replaced by reason-based and consequently superior equivalents. According to the second, modern modes of thinking and living are to be regarded as the illegitimate spoils of conquest. The "replacement" model lends a progressive-optimistic meaning to the act of deconsecration, whereas the "expropriation" model connotes theoretically-conceived corruption of a rootless modernity.

But I think both interpretations make the same mistake. They both consider secularization as a kind of zero-sum game between, on one hand, the productive powers of science and technology harnessed by capitalism and, on the other, the tenacious powers of religion and the church. This image no longer fits a post-secular society that posits the continued existence of religious communities within a continually secularizing society. And most of all, this too-narrow view overlooks the civilizing role of democratically enlightened common sense, which proceeds along its own track as an equal third partner amid the murmurs of cultural conflict between science and religion.

From the standpoint of the liberal state, of course, religious communities are entitled to be called "reasonable" only if they renounce the use of violence as a means of propagating the truths of their faith. This understanding stems from a threefold reflection on the role of the faithful within a pluralistic society. First of all, the religious conscience must handle the encounter with other confessions and other religions cognitively. Second, it must accede to the authority of science, which holds a social monopoly on knowledge. Finally, it must participate in the premises of a constitutional state, which is based on a non-sacred concept of morality. Without this reflective "thrust," monotheisms within ruthlessly modernizing societies develop a destructive potential. The phrase "reflective thrust," of course, can give the false impression of being something that is one-sided and close-ended. The reality, however, is that this work of reflection in the face of any newly emerging conflict is a process that runs its course through the public spaces of democracy.

As soon as an existentially relevant question, such as biotechnology, becomes part of the political agenda, the citizens, both believers and non-believers, will press upon each other their ideologically impregnated world-views and so will stumble upon the harsh reality of ideological pluralism. If they learn to deal with this reality without violence and with an acceptance of their own fallibility, they will come to understand what the secular principles of decision-making written into the Constitution mean in a post-secular society. In other words, the ideologically neutral state does not prejudice its political decisions in any way toward either side of the conflict between the rival claims of science and religious faith. The political reason of the citizenry follows a dynamic of secularization only insofar as it maintains in the end product an equal distance from vital traditions and ideological content. But such a state retains a capacity to learn only to the extent that it remains osmotically open, without relinquishing its independence, to both science and religion.

Of course, common sense itself is also full of illusions about the world and must let itself be enlightened without reservation by the sciences. But the scientific theories that impinge on the world of life leave the framework of our everyday knowledge essentially untouched. If we learn something new about the world and about ourselves as beings in the world, the content of our self-understanding changes. Copernicus and Darwin revolutionized the geocentric and anthropocentric worldviews. But the destruction of the astronomical illusion that the stars revolve around the earth had less effect on our lives than did the biological disillusionment over the place of mankind in the natural order. It appears that the closer scientific knowledge gets to our body, the more it disturbs our self-understanding. Research on the brain is teaching us about the physiology of our consciousness. But does this change that intuitive sense of responsibility and accountability that accompanies all of our actions?

If we join Max Weber and turn our attention to the beginnings of the "disenchantment of the world," we see what is at stake. Nature is depersonalized to the extent that it is made accessible to objective contemplation and causal explanation. Such a world of scientifically-researched nature is far removed from a social framework of persons who ascribe motive and intent to each other. But what would become of such persons, we may ask today, if they subject themselves and each other to similarly scientific processes of description? Will common sense in the end allow itself not only to be instructed by the counterintuitive discoveries of science, but altogether consumed by them?

The philosopher Wilfred Sellars answered this question in 1960 (in a famous lecture on "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man") with the scenario of a society in which the old-fashioned language games of everyday life are overthrown in favor of the objectifying description of conscious processes. The point of departure for this naturalization of the spirit is a scientific image of man that also thoroughly desocializes our self-conception. Of course, this can succeed only if the intentionality of human consciousness and the normativity of our behavior in such a self-description disappears without a trace. Such a theory must explain, for example, how people can obey or disobey rules -- whether grammatical, conceptual or moral.

Sellars's students misunderstood their teacher's aporetic thought-experiment as a research program, and they are pursuing it to this day. The application of a scientific modernization of our everyday psychology has even led to attempts at a semantics that postulates a biological explanation for the very content of our thoughts. But even these most advanced theses still appear unable to explain that difference between Is and Ought that comes into play whenever we disobey rules.

When one describes how a person has done something that he didn't mean to do and also shouldn't have done, then that person is not being described as natural science would describe one of its objects. This is because in the description of persons there is a silent moment of pre-scientific self-conception of what it is to be a subject capable of language and behavior. When we describe a phenomenon such as a person's behavior, we know for example that we're describing something not as a natural process, but as something that can be justified if necessary. Behind this is an image of personhood, persons who can hold each other accountable, who at home and away are involved in normatively regulated interactions and who encounter a universe of public fundamentals.

This perspective that accompanies everyday life explains the difference between the language games of justification and pure description. In this dualism, non-reductionistic strategies of explanation also encounter a limit. The concept of individual accountability is the core of a self-conception that develops only the perspective of a participant and not that of an observer. The scientistic faith in a science that will one day not only fulfill, but eliminate, personal self-conception through objectifying self-description is not science, but bad philosophy. Moreover, no science will take away from scientifically enlightened common sense the ability to judge how we are to deal with its effects on human life, as we do, for instance, the descriptions of molecular biology that make possible genetic intervention.

Common sense is thus concerned with the consciousness of persons who are able to take initiative, make mistakes and correct those mistakes. It asserts against the sciences a stubborn perspectival structure. With this consciousness of autonomy which cannot, I think, be grasped naturalistically, common sense on the other hand asserts also the perspective of a religious tradition whose normative rules to which we equally assent.

Certainly, the democratic common sense of the citizenry has, when so desired, taken its place among the reason-based constructions of the democratic constitutional state. The idea of egalitarian law based on reason also has religious roots. But this reason-based legitimation of law and politics drinks from long-profaned springs. Religion therefore contests democratically enlightened common sense for reasons that are acceptable not only to those who are members of a religious community. This naturally also awakens suspicion among the faithful that Western secularization may be a one-way street that leaves religion standing on the curb.

The reverse side of religious freedom is actually a pacification of ideological pluralism that has unequally distributed consequences. After all, the liberal state has so far imposed only upon the believers among its citizens the requirement that they split their identity into public and private versions. That is, they must translate their religious convictions into a secular language before their arguments have the prospect of being accepted by a majority. Today's Catholics and Protestants do this when they argue for the legal rights of fertilized ova outside the mother's body, thus attempting (perhaps prematurely) to translate the "in the image of God" character of the human creature into the secular language of constitutional law.

But the search for reasons that aspire to general acceptance need not lead to an unfair exclusion of religion from public life, and secular society, for its part, need not cut itself off from the important resources of spiritual explanations, if only the secular side were to retain a feeling for the articulative power of religious discourse. The boundaries between secular and religious reasons are, after all, tenuous. Therefore, fixing of this controversial boundary should be understood as a cooperative venture, carried on by both sides, and with each side trying to see the issue from the other's perspective. Democratically enlightened common sense is not a singularity, but is instead the mental constitution of a public with many different voices. Secular majorities must not reach a conclusion without first having given a hearing to the objections of opponents who believe their religious convictions to have been injured; they must also make an effort to learn something from them.

Giving due consideration to the religious heritage of its moral foundations, the liberal state should consider the possibility that it may not be able to meet the completely new challenges it faces simply by relying on the formulations it developed earlier to meet those attending its origins. Today, the language of the market penetrates every pore and forces every interpersonal relation into the schema of individual preference. The social bond, however, is based on mutual recognition and cannot be reduced to the concepts of contract, rational choice and the maximization of utility.

For this reason, Kant did not intend his categorical imperative to be sucked into oblivion by the undertow of enlightened self-interest. He extended the concept of freedom to autonomy and thus provided the first great example of a completely secularizing, yet at the same time redeeming, deconstruction of the truths of faith. In Kant we find the authority of divine command reestablished in the unconditional validity of moral duty. In this we hear an unmistakable resonance. With his conception of autonomy, Kant certainly destroyed the traditional conception of being "a child of God." But in doing so, he also avoided the banal consequences of a simply vacuous deflation through his critical transformation of the religious stance.

Secular languages that simply eliminate what was once there leave behind only irritation. Something was lost when sin became guilt. The desire for forgiveness is, after all, still closely connected with the unsentimental wish to undo other injuries as well. We are rightfully disturbed by the irreversibility of past suffering, the injustice that has been committed against the innocently mishandled, debased and murdered, injustices that exceed every human power of redemption. The lost hope of resurrection has left behind a palpable emptiness. Horkheimer's justified skepticism of what I consider to be Benjamin's indomitable faith in the redemptive power of human thought -- "The killed really were killed," said Horkheimer -- does not of course deny that impotent impulse to undo what has already been done. (This correspondence between Benjamin and Horkheimer dates from early 1937.)

Both factors, validity of this impulse and its impotence, continued after the Holocaust in the equally necessary and futile practice of a "redemption of the past" (Adorno). Disguised, as I perhaps should say from now on, this same impulse is expressed in the ever-growing lament over the inadequacy of this practice. The unbelieving sons and daughters of the modern age appear in such moments to believe themselves more obliged to each other, and to be in greater need, as if the religious tradition were accessible to them in translation, and thus as if its semantic potential were not yet exhausted.

However, this ambivalence can also lead to the reasonable position of keeping one's distance from religion without at the same time excluding its perspective. This position could well lead the self-enlightenment of a civil society, ridden with cultural conflict, in the right direction. Moral sentiments, which until now could be expressed only in a rather exclusionary way through religious language, might find general resonance as soon as they find a redemptive formulation for what has been almost forgotten, but is still implicitly missed.

This approach very seldom succeeds, but sometimes it does. A secularization that does not annihilate is brought about as a kind of translation. That is what the West, as the great secularizing force in the world today, can learn from its own history. Otherwise the West will either appear simply as another crusader on the behalf of a competing religious faith, like the Arab world, or as the travelling salesman of an instrumental reason that subjects all meaning to itself.

Allow me to close by illustrating the concept of non-annihilating secularization with an example. In the controversy over the use of human embryos, many voices still allude to Genesis 1:27: "So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him." It is not necessary to believe that God, who is Love, created Adam and Eve as free beings like Himself in order to understand what "in His own image" means. Love cannot exist without knowledge of another, nor can freedom exist without mutual recognition.

Consequently, the "opposite stance" inherent in the nature of humanity must remain free to repay this gift of God. Despite his nature as a creature "in the image of God," this "otherness" can itself be considered a creation of God. The created nature of "in His own image" expresses an intuition that has something to say even to those who have no ear for religion, among whom I count myself. God remains a "God of free men" only as long as we do not erase the absolute difference between the Creator and the created. In other words, only as long as the gift of a divine form to man is taken to mean that no hindrance be placed on man's right of self-determination.

This Creator, because he is both Creator and Redeemer in one, need not operate as a technician according to the laws of nature, nor as a computer scientist according to the rules of code. The voice of God, which calls to life, operates from the outset within a morally tangible universe. God can thus in a sense "govern" man, in that He at once both releases and compels man to freedom.

Now, it is not necessary to believe in these theological premises in order to understand their consequences. A completely different, causally reimagined subjection would come into play if the difference inherent in the concept of creation were to disappear and a peer were to take the place of God -- if, for instance, somebody were to impose his own preferences on the coincidence of parental chromosomes without being obligated at least counterfactually to assume a consensus with the others affected. This way of stating the issue brings us close to a question that I have considered elsewhere. Did not the first person who subdued another person according to his own purposes destroy exactly that freedom which exists among peers in order to guarantee their difference?

Jürgen Habermas and Post-Secular Societies

Jürgen Habermas and Post-Secular Societies
By RICHARD WOLIN

Among 19th-century thinkers it was an uncontestable commonplace that religion's cultural centrality was a thing of the past. For Georg Hegel, following in the footsteps of the Enlightenment, religion had been surpassed by reason's superior conceptual precision. In The Essence of Christianity (1841), Ludwig Feuerbach depicted the relationship between man and divinity as a zero-sum game. In his view, the stress on godliness merely detracted from the sublimity of human ends. In one of his youthful writings, Karl Marx, Feuerbach's most influential disciple, famously dismissed religion as "the opium of the people." Its abolition, Marx believed, was a sine qua non for human betterment. Friedrich Nietzsche got to the heart of the matter by having his literary alter ego, the brooding prophet Zarathustra, brusquely declaim, "God is dead," thereby pithily summarizing what many educated Europeans were thinking but few had the courage actually to say. And who can forget Nietzsche's searing characterization of Christianity as a "slave morality," a plebeian belief system appropriate for timorous conformists but unsuited to the creation of a future race of domineering ـbermenschen? True to character, the only representatives of Christianity Nietzsche saw fit to praise were those who could revel in a good auto-da-fé -- Inquisition stalwarts like Ignatius Loyola.

Twentieth-century characterizations of belief were hardly more generous. Here, one need look no further than the title of Freud's 1927 treatise on religion: The Future of an Illusion.

Today, however, there are omnipresent signs of a radical change in mentality. In recent years, in both the United States and the developing world, varieties of religious fundamentalism have had a major political impact. As Democratic presidential hopefuls Howard Dean and John Kerry learned the hard way, politicians who are perceived as faithless risk losing touch with broad strata of the electorate.

Are contemporary philosophers up to the challenge of explaining and conceptualizing these striking recent developments? After all, what Freud, faithfully reflecting the values of the scientific age, cursorily dismissed as illusory seems to have made an unexpected and assertive comeback -- one that shows few signs of abating anytime soon.

Jürgen Habermas may be the living philosopher most likely to succeed where angels, and their detractors, fear to tread. Following Jacques Derrida's death last October, it would seem that Habermas has justly inherited the title of the world's leading philosopher. Last year he won the prestigious Kyoto Prize for Arts and Philosophy (previous recipients include Karl Popper and Paul Ricoeur), capping an eventful career replete with honors as well as a number of high-profile public debates.

The centerpiece of Habermas's moral philosophy is "discourse ethics," which takes its inspiration from Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative. For Kant, to count as moral, actions must pass the test of universality: The actor must be able to will that anyone in a similar situation should act in the same way. According to Kant, lying and stealing are immoral insofar as they fall beneath the universalization threshold; only at the price of grave self-contradiction could one will that lying and stealing become universal laws. Certainly, we can envisage a number of exceptional situations where we could conceivably justify lying or stealing. In Kant's example, at your door is a man intent on murdering your loved one and inquiring as to her whereabouts. Or what if you were too poor to purchase the medicine needed to save your spouse's life?

In the first case you might well think it would be permissible to lie; and in the second case, to steal. Yet on both counts Kant is immovable. An appeal to circumstances might well complicate our decision making. It might even elicit considerable public sympathy for otherwise objectionable conduct. But it can in no way render an immoral action moral. It is with good reason that Kant calls his imperative a categorical one, for an imperative that admits of exceptions is really no imperative at all.

Habermas's approach to moral philosophy is Kantian, although he takes exception to the solipsistic, egological framework Kant employs. Habermas believes that, in order to be convincing, moral reasoning needs a broader, public basis. Discourse ethics seeks to offset the limitations of the Kantian approach. For Habermas, the give and take of argumentation, as a learning process, is indispensable. Through communicative reason we strive for mutual understanding and learn to assume the standpoint of the other. Thereby we also come to appreciate the narrowness of our own individual perspective. Discourse ethics proposes that those actions are moral that could be justified in an open-ended and genuine public dialogue. Its formula suggests that "only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the appro-val of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse."

Until recently Habermas was known as a resolutely secular thinker. On occasion his writings touched upon religious subjects or themes. But these confluences were exceptions that proved the rule.

Yet a few years ago the tonality of his work began to change ever so subtly. In fall 2001 Habermas was awarded the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association. The title of his acceptance speech, "Faith and Knowledge," had a palpably theological ring. The remarks, delivered shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, stressed the importance of mutual toleration between secular and religious approaches to life.

Last year Habermas engaged in a high-profile public dialogue with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger -- who, on April 19, was named as Pope John Paul II's successor -- at the cardinal's behest. A number of the philosopher's left-wing friends and followers were taken aback by his willingness to have a dialogue with one of Europe's most conservative prelates. In 2002 Habermas had published In Defense of Humanity, an impassioned critique of the risks of biological engineering and human cloning. It was this text in particular, in which the philosopher provided an eloquent defense of the right to a unique human identity -- a right that cloning clearly imperils -- that seems to have piqued the cardinal's curiosity and interest. Yet if one examines the trajectory of Habermas's intellectual development, the Ratzinger exchange seems relatively unexceptional.

Glance back at Habermas's philosophical chef d'oeuvre, the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (1981), and you'll find that one of his key ideas is the "linguistification of the sacred" (Versprachlichung des Sakrals). By this admittedly cumbersome term, Habermas asserts that modern notions of equality and fairness are secular distillations of time-honored Judeo-Christian precepts. The "contract theory" of politics, from which our modern conception of "government by consent of the governed" derives, would be difficult to conceive apart from the Old Testament covenants. Similarly, our idea of the intrinsic worth of all persons, which underlies human rights, stems directly from the Christian ideal of the equality of all men and women in the eyes of God. Were these invaluable religious sources of morality and justice to atrophy entirely, it is doubtful whether modern societies would be able to sustain this ideal on their own.

In a recent interview Habermas aptly summarized those insights: "For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or a 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."

Three years ago the MIT Press published Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, an illuminating collection of Habermas's writings on religious themes. Edited and introduced by the philosopher Eduardo Mendieta, of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the anthology concludes with a fascinating interview in which the philosopher systematically clarifies his views on a variety of religious areas. (A companion volume, The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers, also edited by Mendieta, was published in 2004 by Routledge.)

On the one hand, religion's return -- Habermas, perhaps with the American situation foremost in mind, goes so far as to speak of the emergence of "post-secular societies" -- presents us with undeniable dangers and risks. While theodicy has traditionally provided men and women with consolation for the harsh injustices of fate, it has also frequently taught them to remain passively content with their lot. It devalues worldly success and entices believers with the promise of eternal bliss in the hereafter. Here the risk is that religion may encourage an attitude of social passivity, thereby contravening democracy's need for an active and engaged citizenry. To wit, the biblical myth of the fall perceives secular history as a story of decline or perdition from which little intrinsic good may emerge.

On the other hand, laissez-faire's success as a universally revered economic model means that, today, global capitalism's triumphal march encounters few genuine oppositional tendencies. In that regard, religion, as a repository of transcendence, has an important role to play. It prevents the denizens of the modern secular societies from being overwhelmed by the all-encompassing demands of vocational life and worldly success. It offers a much-needed dimension of otherness: The religious values of love, community, and godliness help to offset the global dominance of competitiveness, acquisitiveness, and manipulation that predominate in the vocational sphere. Religious convictions encourage people to treat each other as ends in themselves rather than as mere means.
One of Habermas's mentors, the Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer, once observed that "to salvage an unconditional meaning" -- one that stood out as an unqualified Good -- "without God is a futile undertaking." As a stalwart of the Enlightenment, Habermas himself would be unlikely to go that far. But he might consider Horkheimer's adage a timely reminder of the risks and temptations of all-embracing secularism. Habermas stressed in a recent public lecture "the force of religious traditions to articulate moral intuitions with regard to communal forms of a dignified human life." As forceful and persuasive as our secular philosophical precepts might be -- the idea of human rights, for example -- from time to time they benefit from renewed contact with the nimbus of their sacral origins.

Last April Habermas presented a more systematic perspective on religion's role in contemporary society at an international conference on "Philosophy and Religion" at Poland's Lodz University. One of the novelties of Habermas's Lodz presentation, "Religion in the Public Sphere," was the commendable idea that "toleration" -- the bedrock of modern democratic culture -- is always a two-way street. Not only must believers tolerate others' beliefs, including the credos and convictions of nonbelievers; it falls due to disbelieving secularists, similarly, to appreciate the convictions of religiously motivated fellow citizens. From the standpoint of Habermas's "theory of communicative action," this stipulation suggests that we assume the standpoint of the other. It would be unrealistic and prejudicial to expect that religiously oriented citizens wholly abandon their most deeply held convictions upon entering the public sphere where, as a rule and justifiably, secular reasoning has become our default discursive mode. If we think back, for instance, to the religious idealism that infused the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, we find an admirable example of the way in which a biblical sense of justice can be fruitfully brought to bear on contemporary social problems.

The philosopher who addressed these issues most directly and fruitfully in recent years was John Rawls. In a spirit of collegial solidarity, Habermas, in his Lodz paper, made ample allusion to Rawlsian ideals. Perhaps Rawls's most important gloss on religion's role in modern politics is his caveat or "proviso" that, to gain a reasonable chance of public acceptance, religious reasons must ultimately be capable of being translated into secular forms of argumentation. In the case of public officials -- politicians and the judiciary, for example -- Rawls raises the secular bar still higher. He believes that, in their political language, there is little room for an open and direct appeal to nonsecular reasons, which, in light of the manifest diversity of religious beliefs, would prove extremely divisive. As Habermas affirms, echoing Rawls: "This stringent demand can only be laid at the door of politicians, who within state institutions are subject to the obligation to remain neutral in the face of competing worldviews." But if that stringent demand is on the politician, Habermas argues, "every citizen must know that only secular reasons count beyond the institutional threshold that divides the informal public sphere from parliaments, courts, ministries, and administrations."

With his broad-minded acknowledgment of religion's special niche in the spectrum of public political debate, Habermas has made an indispensable stride toward defining an ethos of multicultural tolerance. Without such a perspective, prospects for equitable global democracy would seem exceedingly dim. The criterion for religious belief systems that wish to have their moral recommendations felt and acknowledged is the capacity to take the standpoint of the other. Only those religions that retain the capacity to bracket or suspend the temptations of theological narcissism -- the conviction that my religion alone provides the path to salvation -- are suitable players in our rapidly changing, post-secular moral and political universe.

Richard Wolin is a professor of history, comparative literature, and political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance With Fascism From Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton University Press, 2004).

from here

Ein mehrdimensionaler Gerechtigkeitsbegriff ist unverzichtbar

Ein mehrdimensionaler Gerechtigkeitsbegriff ist unverzichtbar

Für den Philosophen Axel Honneth haben allein die Grünen die intellektuellen Ressourcen, um den gegenwärtigen Strukturwandel der Politik zu begreifen

Axel Honneth (FR)


Frankfurter Rundschau: Herr Honneth, Sie haben vor drei Jahren mit einer Art philosophischen Beratung versucht, den Grünen auf die Sprünge zu helfen. Inzwischen deutet einiges auf ein baldiges Ende der rot-grünen Koalition hin. Ist das rot-grüne Projekt gescheitert und wenn ja, woran?

Axel Honneth : Von einem Scheitern der Regierungskoalition lässt sich wohl kaum sprechen, weil das ein klares, wohldefiniertes Aktionsprogramm voraussetzen würde, dessen Durchsetzung misslungen oder fehlgeschlagen wäre - davon aber kann keine Rede sein. Zwar hatte der kleinere Koalitionspartner zu Beginn der Regierungszeit eine Reihe von äußerst sinnvollen, überfälligen Reformprojekten ins Auge gefasst, vor allem im Bereich der Bürgerrechte und der ökologischen Wachstumsbeschränkung, von denen im Laufe der Jahre dann Gott sei Dank einige auch umgesetzt werden konnten; insgesamt aber geriet die Regierungspolitik schnell unter den Druck einer ständigen, geradezu atemlosen Anpassung an die vorher unterschätzten Herausforderungen der wirtschaftlichen Globalisierung und des demographischen Strukturwandels, so dass weder das Potenzial noch die Zeit für eine aktivere Gestaltung blieb. Tatsächlich ist es der Regierungskoalition nie gelungen, den Verdacht der stets bloß nachholenden Strukturanpassung loszuwerden, immer standen beide Parteien als Verräter ihrer ehemaligen Ideale und Visionen da.

Ist denn vom intellektuellen, kulturellen Profil etwas geblieben?

Immerhin hat diese Handlungsblockade bei den Grünen doch wohl die gedankliche Flexibilität, die parteiinternen Spannungen und die politische Umsicht so anwachsen lassen, dass dort heute die intellektuellen Ressourcen gegeben sein dürften, um ein tragfähiges Programm für einen sozialpolitischen Strukturwandel mit zivilem Antlitz zu erarbeiten - denn darauf wird es ankommen, die Sozial- und Sicherungsssysteme so umzugestalten, dass die gewachsenen Anforderungen an individuelle Leistungen und Mobilitäten mit unseren Vorstellungen von sozialer Gerechtigkeit, der Garantie von individueller Autonomie und sozialer Inklusion für alle, vereinbar bleiben.

Eine der Kernfragen des Wahlkampfes ist die scheinbare Übermacht der Wirtschaft und die Möglichkeiten ihrer politischen Regulierung. Steht die Politik insgesamt vor einem fundamentalen Strukturwandel?

Nicht, was die Aufgaben, aber wohl doch was ihren Organisationsmodus, ihre institutionelle Existenz anbelangt. Die zentrale Aufgabe der Politik in den nächsten Jahren wird wohl die bleiben, die durch die Globalisierung ermöglichte Enthemmung der kapitalistischen Akkumulation durch die Regulierung zentraler Märkte einzudämmen, so dass die Bürger und Bürgerinnen ein Leben in Anstand und Würde ohne ständige Drohung von Kündigung, Verelendung und Abstieg führen können. Aber das ist wohl nur durch eine stärkere Internationalisierung der Politik möglich, zumindest eine Europäisierung der Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik.

Ist unsere Politik denn auf solch einen Orientierungsrahmen ausgerichtet?

Darauf ist keine unserer Parteien wirklich eingestellt, ja, die ganze Politik, die Existenzweise politischen Handelns, ist noch immer vollständig in nationalen Grenzen eingehegt. Das beginnt mit der Keimzelle unseres politischen Systems, den politischen Parteien, die von unten bis oben personell und thematisch rein national orientiert sind, setzt sich in den Parlamenten fort, deren Debatten kaum einen Blick über die Grenzen hinweg unternehmen, und endet schließlich in der politischen Öffentlichkeit, deren Medien und Zirkel ebenfalls ausschließlich auf national definierte Themen gerichtet sind. Es bedürfte einer Revolutionierung dieser politischen Aktionszentren, eines Strukturwandels der Politik durch die personelle und thematische Transzendierung nationaler Grenzen, um die Herausforderungen der nächsten Jahre tatsächlich meistern zu können. Die Aktionszentren politischen Handelns müssen den Schritt zur transnationalen Organisationsform nachvollziehen, den die Wirtschaft längst vollzogen hat, um ihr durch vernünftige Grenzziehungen Einhalt gebieten zu können. Nur ganz wenige Gestalten unseres politischen Lebens haben diesen notwendigen Schritt zur Entnationalisierung der Politik bereits vollzogen, an oberster Stelle vielleicht Cohn-Bendit, den seine Lebensgeschichte darauf vorbereitet hat.

Im aktuellen Wahlkampf geht es viel um das Gesundheitssystem, Steuer- und Arbeitsmarkt-Fragen. Dennoch hat man den Eindruck, als komme die soziale Frage zu kurz. Kann die Politik der sozialen Gerechtigkeit noch Rechnung tragen?




Die soziale Frage

Die Reform des Gesundheits-, Steuer- und Arbeitsmarktsystems zieht so viele Kontroversen auf sich, weil die Parteien für die ihr zu Grunde liegende soziale Frage kein Konzept besitzen. Nach Sighard Neckel (6.9.) und Susan Neiman (10.9.) äußert sich heute Axel Honneth.

Axel Honneth ist Professor für Philosophie an der Frankfurter Goethe-Universität und Direktor des Instituts für Sozialforschung. Bei Suhrkamp erscheint diesen Herbst seine neue Studie "Verdinglichung". FR




Hier habe ich eine ganz andere Wahrnehmung - alle diese scheinbar technischen Fragen, um die der Wahlkampf sich primär zu drehen scheint, die nach der notwendigen Reform unseres Gesundheits-, Steuer- und Arbeitsmarktsystems, sind deswegen so schwer lösbar, ziehen deswegen so viele Kontroversen auf sich, weil sie schon im Ansatz mit Fragen der sozialen Gerechtigkeit unmittelbar verzahnt sind. Wahrscheinlich war kein Wahlkampf in den letzten 20 Jahren untergründig so sehr von der sozialen Frage beherrscht wie der jetzt gerade zu Ende gehende. Das Problem ist nur, dass keine der Parteien schon ein Konzept von sozialer Gerechtigkeit besitzt, das komplex, vielschichtig genug wäre, um die verschiedenen, von den unterschiedlichen Fragen mitberührten Aspekte der Chancengleichheit, der Angewiesenheit auf Arbeit, der Generationenbenachteiligung und der ökologischen Rücksichtnahme in ein vernünftiges und überblickbares Verhältnis zu bringen - fast alle Parteien operieren noch mit einem eindimensionalen Gerechtigkeitsbegriff, in dem etwa allein auf Leistung, auf Chancengleichheit oder auf Bedürftigkeit gesetzt wird, anstatt den Schritt zu einem mehrdimensionalen Gerechtigkeitsbegriff zu vollziehen, der für die Zukunft unverzichtbar sein wird. Hier ist noch viel mehr intellektuelle Arbeit zu leisten, als sich das die Chefdenker der verschiedenen Parteien heute ausmalen können.

Interview: Harry Nutt

Declaration on Globalization

The development of economic, political and social relationships over the past few decades has acquired dimensions and characteristics that are gradually rising above frontiers and State powers, ignoring the administrative and political divisions between peoples.
　 Individual acts and decisions, however remote, can be transported by the media, the new information technologies, economic networks and movements of people in a manner that can affect the life and destinies of distant peoples anywhere in the world.
　 Many human activities now take place at global level. We are active and passive agents in a great river of interactions in a global society. To express this new reality, we use the generic term globalization’. However, we should not forget that it is a complex, many-faceted network that is increasingly more vast and intense. There is an economic globalization consisting primarily in the globalization of financial markets, the expansion of an international market of goods, services and workers. Obviously, we are facing the birth of a super state or transnational economy that largely escapes State authority. Economic globalization is making the social ills of our times even worse.
　 However, this is not only an economic issue. There is also a globalization of cultural patterns, of environmental effects, of communications and also of insecurity and conflicts.
　 We know that the outcome of this complex increase in human exchanges has been an increase in economic well-being and a cultural enrichment for some segments of the world population. However, at the same time, we are witnessing the appalling suffering, lack of culture and marginalization that threatens millions of human beings. Lack of food, lack of access to drinking water, endemic diseases, illiteracy and superstition are the only horizon in the lives of entire populations. Global economic ties between countries, large corporations and all kinds of economic agents are frequently accompanied by financial speculation beyond all control, wicked exploitation of workers, the persistent and increasing exploitation of children, discrimination of women and entire peoples dispossessed of their natural resources through corruption and bribery of illegitimate political authorities.
Thus, the globalized society is a poorly structured society with a perverse effect on hundreds of millions of human beings. Following the terminology in vogue, we could talk of ‘global injustice’.
　 There can be no doubt that such injustice and social imbalances give rise to unstoppable flows of immigrants who, pushed by extreme need, attempt again and again to enter foreign countries, against all hope. However hostile these countries may be, they offer a remote possibility of survival with dignity.
The unstoppable invasion of messages and communications of all kinds via computer networks, with their wonderful cultural and scientific logos, do not manage to hide the fact that thousands of human beings, alienated from a strange culture, turn to their traditions and beliefs in search of refuge. This reaction may promote ethnic intolerance, aggressive nationalism and religious fundamentalism, with an obvious increase of strained international relationships and the eventual appearance of terrorism and war.
　 We also observe increasing threats to the environment, the irrational exploitation of natural resources and an uncontrolled consumption of an irreplaceable environmental heritage.
　 The new system of economic, social and cultural relationships demands a new international order. Among other things, globalization means a social process under scant control and governance, frequently lead by powers with little or no democratic legitimacy. Until now, the power of nation-States had achieved some degree of social justice, at least in the developed States. The breaking up of state borders and serious social ills that state powers may no longer be able to solve demand more effective authority and governance. Above all, they must be more legitimate. In a sense, it could be said that globalization is a new social phenomenon that has placed the international society in a kind of wild state that requires a degree of rationalization. The paradigm of state democracy has become insufficient, although States are still the main players in the international order. They may still work effectively to stop the perverse effects of a new system of economic, political, social and cultural relationships that is becoming a reality beyond State boundaries. The law and justice that presides international relations becomes increasingly complex and diverse each day but they do not manage to become stronger. The international organisations that encourage them are incapable of implementing them. Their discoursed is reduced to mere exhortations, whereas actual international exchanges have become unpredictable and anonymous. Injustice and inequality are growing. Non-governmental organisations and the individuals and groups that make up global civil society are playing an important role in denouncing these situations, but they can do little more.
　 Likewise, international authorities and institutions suffer very serious democratic deficiencies. We need to strengthen and give more legitimacy to current international institutions, whether they are strictly political or economic. We need to create new institutions that will be capable of lessening the weakness of democratic States in the face of these new social situations.
　 It is essential to make political debate more honest and more concerned with important problems, instead of strategies and slogans. Therefore, we feel that it is our duty to call our governments and fellow citizens, international organisations and the big international institutions to adopt a new and decisive attitude, and to integrate equality and freedom as effective values for all human beings so that all aspects of globalization will be subject to the rule of law. Increasingly, this law should obey the will of people in general and not the will of a few. The 21St century faces the huge challenge of constituting a new world order in which human rights will be the real foundation of law and politics. To achieve this, we feel that it is essential to return to politics in the noblest sense, and for citizens to recover their awareness and appreciation of their rights.
==
Jürgen Habermas, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Francisco J. Laporta, Nicolás López Calera, Manuel Atienza, William Twining, Robert Alexy, Luigi Ferrajoli, Elías Díaz,Neil MacCormick, Paolo Comanducci, Zhan Wenxian, Uma Narayan, Larry May y otros participantes en el 22º Congreso Mundial de Filosofía Jurídica y Social – 2005.

El desarrollo de las relaciones económicas, políticas, sociales y culturales ha adquirido en las últimas décadas una dimensión que se eleva por encima de las fronteras entre los Estados e ignora las divisiones administrativas y políticas que se han establecido entre los pueblos. Transportadas por los medios de comunicación, por las nuevas tecnologías de la información, por las redes económicas y los flujos de personas, las acciones y decisiones de cada uno, por remotas que sean, pueden llegar a afectar la vida y el destino de poblaciones lejanas en cualquier lugar de la geografía del planeta. Somos agentes activos y pasivos en el gran río de las interacciones de la sociedad mundial.

Para expresar esa nueva realidad utilizamos genéricamente el término "globalización", aunque no debemos olvidar que se trata de un complejo entramado de creciente extensión e intensidad que presenta multitud de caras y facetas. Hay una globalización económica, que es ante todo globalización de los mercados financieros y expansión del mercado internacional de bienes, servicios y trabajadores. Estamos evidentemente ante una economía transnacional que en gran medida escapa al control de los poderes de los Estados. Pero no se trata sólo de un fenómeno económico. Hay una globalización de las pautas culturales, una globalización de los efectos medioambientales, una globalización de las comunicaciones, y también una globalización de las inseguridades y las luchas.

Sabemos que esa compleja multiplicación de los intercambios ha dado como resultado el incremento del bienestar económico y la riqueza cultural en grandes segmentos de la población mundial, pero somos también testigos de que, a su lado, una pavorosa realidad de sufrimiento, incultura y marginación atenaza a millones de seres humanos. La carencia de alimentos, la falta de acceso al agua potable, las enfermedades endémicas, el analfabetismo y las supersticiones conforman el horizonte vital de pueblos enteros. Las relaciones económicas globales entre países, grandes corporaciones y agentes económicos de todo tipo van con frecuencia escoltadas por la especulación financiera sin control, la explotación inicua de los trabajadores, la persistencia y el incremento de la ocupación de niños en labores extenuantes, la discriminación de la mujer y el despojo a pueblos enteros de parte de su riqueza natural mediante corrupciones y sobornos a autoridades políticas ilegítimas. También observamos crecientes amenazas al medio ambiente, explotación irracional de los recursos naturales y un consumo incontrolado del patrimonio irremplazable del entorno natural.

La sociedad globalizada es, pues, una sociedad mal estructurada y con efectos perversos sobre centenares de millones de seres humanos. Puede, por ello, hablarse también, siguiendo la terminología acuñada, de "injusticias globales". Nadie puede dudar que son esas injusticias y desajustes sociales los que dan lugar a flujos incesantes de inmigrantes que, empujados por la extrema necesidad, tratan de ingresar una y otra vez y contra toda esperanza en países extraños y hostiles que, sin embargo, les ofrecen una posibilidad remota de sobrevivir con dignidad.

La invasión imparable de mensajes y comunicaciones de toda naturaleza a través de las redes informáticas, con sus maravillosos logros culturales y científicos, no puede ocultar tampoco que, enajenados ante una cultura extraña, miles de seres humanos vuelven su rostro hacia sus tradiciones y creencias en busca de un refugio que se torna a veces en intolerancia étnica, nacionalismo agresivo y fundamentalismo religioso, con el patente incremento de la tensión en las relaciones internacionales y la eventual aparición del terrorismo y la guerra.

El nuevo sistema de relaciones económicas, sociales y culturales demanda un orden internacional nuevo. La globalización es también un proceso social con falta de control y regulación, conducido frecuentemente por poderes de escasa o nula legitimidad democrática. Hasta ahora los poderes de los Estados nacionales, al menos los Estados desarrollados, habían logrado ciertos niveles de justicia social. El desbordamiento de las fronteras nacionales y la existencia de problemas humanos graves que ya no pueden encontrar solución en el marco estatal exigen una gobernanza y unos poderes más efectivos y, sobre todo, más legítimos. La globalización es un fenómeno nuevo que ha colocado otra vez a la sociedad internacional en una especie de estado de naturaleza que necesita ser sometido a regulación. El paradigma de la democracia estatal se ha hecho insuficiente pese a que los Estados siguen siendo protagonistas del orden internacional y pueden todavía actuar eficazmente para frenar esos efectos perversos del nuevo sistema de relaciones económicas, políticas, sociales y culturales que se hacen realidad más allá de las fronteras estatales. Las pautas de derecho y justicia que son invocadas en las relaciones internacionales aumentan cada día su complejidad y su diversidad, pero no aciertan a incrementar su fuerza.



Los organismos internacionales que las animan son incapaces de imponerlas, y sus discursos son cada vez más meras exhortaciones mientras la realidad de los intercambios internacionales tiende a hacerse imprevisible y anómica y crecen en ella la injusticia y la desigualdad. Además, los poderes e instituciones internacionales sufren de carencias democráticas graves. Hay que fortalecer y dotar de mayor legitimidad a las instituciones internacionales vigentes, tanto las estrictamente políticas como las económicas, y crear otras nuevas que sean capaces de aminorar las debilidades de los Estados democráticos ante estas nuevas situaciones sociales. Las organizaciones no gubernamentales y los grupos e individuos que conforman la sociedad civil global están cumpliendo un importante papel en la denuncia de esta realidad, pero no pueden ir mucho más allá.

Nos sentimos en el deber de hacer una llamada a nuestros gobiernos y nuestros conciudadanos, a las organizaciones internacionales y a las grandes instituciones globales, en favor de una actitud nueva y decidida para incorporar la libertad y la igualdad como valores básicos de los seres humanos, y para que todas las dimensiones de la globalización estén sometidas a las exigencias del imperio de la ley, de una ley que sea cada vez más voluntad general y no sólo voluntad de unos pocos. El gran reto de este siglo XXI es configurar un orden mundial nuevo en el que los derechos humanos constituyan realmente la base del derecho y la política.

Religion in der Moderne

Religion in der Moderne
Zur Auseinandersetzung von Jürgen Habermas mit naturalistischen Weltbildern der Wissenschaft und religiِsen Orthodoxien
Von Hans Joas
Besprochene Bücher ...
Wie kaum ein anderer der groكen systematischen Denker unserer Zeit hat Jürgen Habermas seit Jahrzehnten auch stets zu brennenden Zeitfragen Stellung genommen und sich in seiner philosophischen Arbeit von aktuellen Konstellationen inspirieren lassen. Von einem Nachlassen seiner enormen zeitdiagnostischen Krنfte kann weiterhin keine Rede sein. Mit seinem neuen Aufsatzband legt der Philosoph nun eine Sammlung von Arbeiten aus den Jahren 2001 bis 2004 vor, die zwar etwas heterogen geraten ist, aber gerade auch deshalb Anknüpfungspunkte für vielerlei Interessen bietet. Einige Kapitel werden vornehmlich diejenigen interessieren, die sich mit den Finessen der inneren Architektonik von Habermas' Gedankengebنude auseinander setzen. Die meisten Teile des Buches aber sind von allgemeinerem Interesse, und am Beginn des Bandes steht ein anrührender autobiografischer Text, dessen Ausstrahlung sich wohl niemand entziehen kann.

Habermas, der die ضffentlichkeit und auch persِnlich getِnte Kontroversen nie gescheut hat, hielt sich hinsichtlich der lebensgeschichtlichen Wurzeln seines eigenen denkerischen und politischen Engagements bisher immer eher scheu zurück. Zum ersten Mal reflektiert er nun ِffentlich über die leidvollen Erfahrungen, die sich aus seiner Behinderung sowie den damit verbundenen medizinischen Eingriffen, Kommunikationsschwierigkeiten und Krنnkungen ergaben. Und er schildert die für ihn (wie für viele seiner Generationsgenossen in Deutschland) zentrale Erschütterungserfahrung von 1945 und ihre Konsequenzen. Damit werden die Triebkrنfte, aber auch die schier unerschِpflichen Energien dieses Denkers in einer über das Intellektuelle weit hinausgehenden Weise verstنndlich gemacht.

Wie der Titel signalisiert, benennt Habermas zwei gegenlنufige Tendenzen als kennzeichnend für die geistige Situation unserer unmittelbaren Gegenwart: "die Ausbreitung naturalistischer Weltbilder und der wachsende politische Einfluك religiِser Orthodoxien". Mit dem Begriff des "Naturalismus" zielt er vor allem auf die Tendenzen einiger (dadurch prominent gewordener) deutscher Hirnforscher wie Wolf Singer und Gerhard Roth, alle traditionell als mental bezeichneten Vorgنnge "allein aus beobachtbaren physiologischen Bedingungen zu erklنren".

Die grِكte Sprengkraft in der Diskussion hat dabei die These entwickelt, dass das Freiheitsbewusstsein, das Handelnde gegenüber ihren eigenen Handlungen haben, eine bloكe Illusion darstelle. Dieser These ist in den letzten Jahren von philosophischer Seite schon mehrfach in groكer Differenziertheit entgegnet worden, ohne dass ihre Vertreter sich zu mehr als verbalen Korrekturen entschlieكen konnten. Die meisten Entgegnungen laufen darauf hinaus, dass die Vorstellung von Willensfreiheit als einer vِllig bedingungs- und kontextlosen Willkür in der Philosophie und den Sozialwissenschaften selbst spنtestens im 19. Jahrhundert überwunden wurde und die Angriffe der Hirnforscher insofern einem bloكen Popanz gelten.

Habermas stützt sich nun (im Kapitel Freiheit und Determinismus) auf eine Reihe dieser Kritiken und zieht sie zu einer überzeugenden Synthese zusammen. Mit dem Gedanken, dass der freie Wille sich zumindest in der Form eines Vetos gegenüber unbewusst in Gang gesetzten Handlungsablنufen zur Geltung bringen kِnne, hat schon Benjamin Libet, auf dessen Experimente sich die Beweisführung der Hirnforscher wesentlich stützt, eine deutlich weichere Position eingenommen. Habermas betont nun darüber hinaus die Rolle der Gründe für das Handeln: "Der Handelnde ist dann frei, wenn er will, was er als Ergebnis seiner ـberlegung für richtig hنlt. Als Unfreiheit erfahren wir nur einen von auكen auferlegten Zwang, der uns nِtigt, anders zu handeln, als wir nach eigener Einsicht handeln wollen."

Wenn dies so ist, dann wird ein Dualismus der Perspektiven unvermeidbar; dem subjektiv empfundenen Freiheitsbewusstsein steht eine Beobachterperspektive gegenüber, aus der nach Ursachen und Gesetzmنكigkeiten gefragt wird und die zu einem naturwissenschaftlichen Determinismus verdichtet werden kann. Habermas geht über die typischen philosophischen Kritiken auch insofern hinaus, als er diesen Dualismus selbst als ein Resultat der Naturgeschichte, das heiكt der Evolution des Homo Sapiens, zu sehen bereit ist. Damit kann er eine Fülle anthropologischer Befunde in seine Kritik eines biologistischen Weltbildes integrieren.

Der Begriff des Naturalismus wird dann allerdings zweideutig. Das Anliegen einer Naturalisierung des Geistes teilt Habermas nنmlich durchaus; seine Argumentation entstammt ja nicht einem traditionellen Idealismus, sondern dem Pragmatismus. Die Auseinandersetzung über den richtigen Naturalismus ist aber etwas anderes als ein Kampf gegen diesen. Zu bekنmpfen ist nicht der Naturalismus als solcher, sondern eine spezifische spekulative Deutung biologischer Ergebnisse, die diese zu einem Weltbild überhِht.

Auch bei der anderen groكen Tendenz unserer Zeit wird eine merkwürdige Zweideutigkeit spürbar. Wenn Habermas vom wachsenden Einfluss religiِser Orthodoxien spricht, kann sich der Leser schon beim ersten Satz des Buchs fragen, ob es nur um diese oder nicht doch besser um die politische Bedeutung der Religion insgesamt gehen sollte. Es ist sogar unplausibel, die spektakulنren Fنlle politisierter Religion in unserer Zeit wie einen gewaltbereiten Islamismus oder den protestantischen Fundamentalismus in den USA überhaupt als Orthodoxien zu bezeichnen - als kümmerten sich deren Vertreter stark um Lehrtradition oder theologische Stimmigkeit. Der Band enthنlt einige Kapitel, die die Stellung der Religion in der ضffentlichkeit in meisterlicher Weise erِrtern. Leitfaden ist dabei die Frage nach den wechselseitigen Zumutungen, die religiِse und sنkulare Bürger beim "ِffentlichen Vernunftgebrauch" in einer Demokratie zu ertragen haben.

Angelehnt an Gedankengنnge, die John Rawls in seinen letzten Lebensjahren gebahnt hat, geht Habermas über ein militant laizistisches oder sنkularistisches Selbstverstنndnis, das auch ihn lange gekennzeichnet hatte, weit hinaus - noch weiter auch, als dies schon in seiner aufsehenerregenden Friedenspreisrede von 2001 geschehen war. Wenn damals Religion noch eher als Objekt der Zنhmung erschien, tritt sie jetzt immer mehr (und historisch mit guten Gründen) als Schrittmacherin des Wegs zu Demokratie und Menschenrechten auf.

Habermas stellt sich vehement der Vorstellung entgegen, dass die Trennung von Staat und Kirche (zu deren institutioneller Variabilitنt er mehr hنtte sagen kِnnen) auch auf die Stellungnahmen von Organisationen und Bürgern in der ضffentlichkeit auszudehnen sei. Es geht ihm um viel mehr als einen Respekt vor der Religion, nنmlich "um die selbstreflexive ـberwindung eines sنkularistisch verhنrteten und exklusiven Selbstverstنndnisses der Moderne". Auch in seiner Einleitung zu einer Diskussion mit Joseph Ratzinger votiert Habermas in aller Deutlichkeit dafür, die weltanschauliche Neutralitنt der Staatsgewalt im Sinne einer Distanz auch zu einer sنkularistischen Weltsicht zu deuten. In diesem Text zerlegt Habermas die berühmte Frage Bِckenfِrdes nach der Gewنhrleistung der normativen Voraussetzungen des freiheitlichen Staates in eine Serie von Unterfragen; in der Konklusion kommt er, ohne dass dies im mindesten als Anzeichen einer schleichenden Konversion gedeutet werden dürfte, zu dem religionsfreundlichen Schluss.

Aber die begrifflich virtuosen Texte des Bands sind gleichwohl durchzogen von Seitenhieben und Querverweisen, die für Einstellungen symptomatisch sind, um deren ـberwindung es Habermas doch gerade geht. Die Frage eines Kollegen, "ob nicht aus kulturvergleichender und religionssoziologischer Sicht die europنische Sنkularisierung der eigentliche Sonderweg sei, der einer Korrektur bedürfe" - eine Frage, der kein Glنubiger sich ja wohl entziehen kann -, lِst bei ihm die Assoziation zur Stimmungslage der Weimarer Republik, zu Carl Schmitt, Heidegger und Leo Strauss aus. Als überraschend bezeichnet er die politische Revitalisierung der Religion in den USA: als habe es die Bürgerrechtsbewegung nie gegeben. Und in seiner Rekonstruktion der Religionsphilosophie Kants und ihrer Wirkungsgeschichte werden die groكen protestantischen Theologen Schleiermacher und Troeltsch zwar kurz erwنhnt, gleich aber nach dem Klischee des "Kulturprotestantismus" entwertet, als hنtten sie "den religiِsen Bezug zur Transzendenz seiner innerweltlichen Sprengkraft" beraubt, wنhrend es doch angemessener wنre, ihre Sensibilitنt gegenüber den Widersprüchlichkeiten der Moderne, bei aller Aufgeschlossenheit für diese, hervorzuheben. Von der modernen, nicht einfach apologetischen katholischen Religionsphilosophie seit Scheler ist gleich gar keine Rede.

Auch der Begriff der postsنkularen Gesellschaft, in die wir angeblich eingetreten sind, wird trotz vielfacher Wiederholung nicht plausibler. Weder sind ja die Zahlen der Glنubigen plِtzlich stark angeschwollen, noch hat der Staat sein sنkulares Selbstverstنndnis abgelegt. Es geht Habermas um eine ـberwindung sنkularistischer Ideologien - aber diese haben nie eindeutig dominiert, und ihre ـberwindung ist entsprechend kein ـbergang in eine neue Form von Gesellschaft.

Habermas bleibt auch dabei, religiِse ـberzeugungen von "anderen ethischen Lebensorientierungen und Weltanschauungen, d. h. weltlichen 'Konzeptionen des Guten'" dadurch zu unterscheiden, dass diese sich "vorbehaltloser diskursiver Erِrterung" entziehen. Das halte ich für einen Rest sنkularistischen Selbstmissverstنndnisses. Auch die weltlichen Konzeptionen des Guten sind in biografisch-historischen Erfahrungen fundiert, die zwar expliziert werden kِnnen, von deren Evidenzcharakter sich der Mensch aber nicht einfach lِsen kann. Das zeigen autobiografische Rückblicke, auch der in diesem Band, meist in aller Deutlichkeit.

Habermas prنsentiert sich bei aller Distanznahme im Einzelnen als ein neuer Kant - ein Kant der kommunikativen Vernunft und des Zeitalters nach Darwin. Es ist kein Zufall, dass die Studie zu Kants Religionsphilosophie wohl die brillanteste des Bands ist. Auch die Haltung des Moralisten Kant zur Religion wird in ihrer mehrfachen Ausrichtung übernommen. Die eher technischen Teile des Bands - Auseinandersetzungen mit Denkern, die Habermas in verschiedener Weise verbunden sind wie Adorno, Apel, McCarthy und Menke - zeigen den enormen Anspruch dieser Philosophie.

Und das Schlusskapitel, mit dem sich Habermas in die Debatten über eine Reform der UN einschaltet, erinnert bewusst an Kants als Vertragsentwurf prنsentierte ـberlegungen zum Ewigen Frieden. Vom einstigen Vertrauen in die motivierende Kraft der Moral als solcher ist nicht mehr die Rede; auch die Verhنrtung der ausschlieكlichen Konzentration auf das Recht, um diesen Mangel auszugleichen, ist überwunden. Doch die Faszination durch die Religion bleibt wie bei Kant sehr eng moralistisch eingehegt. Das Plنdoyer für einen produktiven Dialog von Glنubigen und Nichtglنubigen ist aber selten so eloquent und konzis vorgetragen worden.

Anmerkung der Redaktion: Die Rezension ist zuerst am 13.10.2005 in DIE ZEIT erschienen. Dem Verfasser Hans Joas, Leiter des Max-Weber-Kollegs in Erfurt und Professor für Soziologie und Sozialphilosophie in Erfurt und Chicago, danken wir für die Genehmigung zur Nachpublikation.
Elf Aufsنtze von Joas zum Thema Religion und Wertbindung erschienen gesammelt 2004 unter dem Titel "Braucht der Mensch Religion? ـber Erfahrung der Selbsttranszendenz", darunter einer über die Friedenspreisrede, die Jürgen Habermas im Oktober 2001 in der Frankfurter Paulskirche hielt. Joas beschreibt sie als "generِses Gesprنchsangebot" an Glنubige und Kirchen, als Angebot allerdings "nicht ohne Tücken".

Habermas kann nicht ander

Habermas kann nicht anders
Gerhard Beckmann setzt sich mit dem populärsten deutschen Gegenwartsphilosophen auseinander, der nun die "postsäkulare Gesellschaft" verkündet
von Gerhard Beckmann

Bis vor vier Jahren war Religion für Jürgen Habermas Privatsache. Religiöse Motive für das öffentliche Handeln galten ihm als inakzeptabel: Im gesellschaftlichen und politischen Raum könne nur eine universale, für alle nachvollziehbare Moral verpflichtend sein; eine Moral, wie sie sich nur in einem vorbehaltlos freien, rational und pragmatisch geführten Verständigungsprozeß herausbilden könne. Das Modell solch einer rigoros "normativen" säkularen Ordnung entwarf Habermas in seinem philosophischen Hauptwerk "Die Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns".


In seinem neuesten Werk billigt Habermas der Religion nun auf einmal öffentliche Bedeutung zu. Warum? Was hat ihn dazu geführt - so in seinem jüngst bei Suhrkamp erschienenen Band "Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion" - mittlerweile das Ende des Säkularismus, die "postsäkulare Gesellschaft" zu verkünden?


Den Denkanstoß gaben die islamistischen Terrorakte auf New York und Washington vom 11. September 2001 einerseits, andererseits der christliche Fundamentalismus in den USA. Im alten Europa erkennt Habermas besorgt, daß Lust und Motivation zur Teilnahme am öffentlichen Leben und am politischen Diskurs rapide abnehmen, die von ihm früher propagierte säkulare Gesellschaft folglich an und in sich selber zerbrechen könnte. Und Habermas ist nicht zuletzt auch deshalb der international meistgelesene, einflußreichste lebende deutsche Philosoph, weil er Endzeitstimmungen aufgreift.


Das entspricht ein Stück weit der Tradition der Frankfurter Schule, deren Hauptrepräsentant in zweiter Generation er ist. Nur: Ihre Begründer - Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer und Herbert Marcuse - erkannten in den komplexen Phänomenen des gesellschaftlichen Wandels den utopischen Horizont: Die säkulare Gesellschaft verwirklicht sich erst in dem, was Adorno mit den Worten der christlichen Offenbarung "das richtige Leben" nennt. Diesem utopischen Gehalt der Theorie gegenüber ist Jürgen Habermas phänomenologisch blind.


Ein weltumspannendes Zeitalter des Säkularismus hat es ohnehin nie gegeben. Die "säkulare Gesellschaft", so der Habermas-Schüler Klaus Eder, ist nur ein - übrigens kaum betretener - "europäischer Sonderweg". Die 70 Millionen evangelischen Christen, die sich in den USA zum Fundamentalismus bekennen, sind nicht - quasi in Fließbandproduktion - über Nacht "wiedergeboren" worden. Gerade wegen der in Amerika seit Anbeginn herrschenden Trennung von Staat und Kirche ist die Religion dort immer ein urlebendiges zentrales Moment des kollektiven bürgerlichen Selbstverständnisses gewesen. Nur so konnte eine breite politisierte christliche Bewegung entstehen. Und ohne die Kontinuität der muslimischen Religiosität ist auch der islamistische Fundamentalismus nicht zu verstehen.


Für religiöse Bewegungen hat Habermas jedoch nie eine Antenne gehabt. Auch jetzt, bei seiner scheinbaren Hinwendung zur postsäkularen Gesellschaft, nimmt er die Religion nur unter dem Aspekt der Politisierung wahr. Im ersten Schritt registrierte er sie vor allem als Störfaktor. Dann ging ihm auf, daß hier eine ungeheure Kraft wirkt, die im säkularen Bereich versiegt ist. Habermas versteht die Religion (nachdem er sozusagen einen Kraftstoffmangel für den säkularen Motor festgestellt hat) als mögliche Ersatzquelle ausschließlich unter dem Aspekt ihrer gesellschaftlichen Funktionalität.

Doch wie will er sich diese Energiequellen nutzbar machen? Nicht nur fundamentalistische religiöse Bewegungen widersetzen sich dem Säkularismus, weil er Lebensräume, Lebensvorstellungen und Lebensweisen zerstört. Doch eben diesen Säkularismus rechtfertigt Habermas nach wie vor mit seiner universalistischen Moralphilosophie; mit dem herrschenden politischen Liberalismus des Westens hat er sich (weitgehend) identifiziert, und außerdem bleibt er dabei: Religiöse Überzeugungen sind im öffentlichen Raum nur akzeptabel, sofern sie sich einer "vorbehaltlos diskursiven Erörterung" unterziehen lassen und ihre Überzeugungen sich als rational begründbar erweisen.


Damit aber ist das Religiöse in seiner Substanz diskreditiert und zum nicht Integrierbaren erklärt. Mit anderen Worten: Die von Habermas geforderte "selbstreflektive Überwindung eines säkularistisch verhärteten und exklusiven Selbstverständnisses der Moderne", die für eine "postsäkulare Gesellschaft" charakteristisch sein soll, mißlingt schon im Ansatz. Der nämlich bleibt der Ideologie des Säkularen verhaftet und fordert die Religion auf, sich zu überwinden.


Wenn Habermas voraussetzt, daß säkulare Menschen sich in ihrem Denken und Handeln vorbehaltlos rational, pragmatisch und öffentlich - der modische Komplexbegriff heißt: transparent - verhalten, legt er wiederum phänomenologische Blindheit an den Tag: Beobachtungen und Erkenntnisse der Anthropologie, Psychologie, Soziologie wie der verhaltensorientierten Wirtschaftswissenschaften belegen nämlich das Gegenteil.


Das Religiöse verweigert sich dem rationalistischen Diskurs. Es beharrt auf seiner fiktiven Wahrheit, oder, um mit Adorno zu argumentieren: Eine Religion, die sich auf etwas anderes als ihren eigenen Wahrheitsgehalt umpolen läßt, untergräbt sich selbst. Wie sollte sie, auf herrschende allgemeine Moralbegriffe reduziert, dem Perspektiven- und Motivationsmangel der "säkularen Gesellschaft" abhelfen können?

Der Autor war international als Verleger tätig und ist heute freier Kulturpublizist. Das Werk, auf das sich Gerhard Beckmann hier bezieht - Jürgen Habermas, "Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion. Philosophische Aufsätze" - ist bei Suhrkamp erschienen

Introduction to my thesis

Introduction

Habermas’ work from the start has two seemingly contradictory aspects to it. On the one hand he emphasises the natural origin of human beings, their knowledge and reason and adopts a position that though avoiding all kinds of reductionism can be termed as materialist, realist and naturalist. On the other hand Habermas also aims to preserve the distinction between human beings and their surroundings by emphasising the transcending powers of reason and thought.

Habermas’ first mature philosophical work Knowledge and Human Interests starts with a Hegelian note endorsing the essence of Hegel’s critique of Kant. In its claim that knowledge is based on and founded on human interests, the interests that connect human beings to nature and the material world, it is a thoroughly anti Kantian and Marxist-Hegelian work. Habermas’ later weak naturalism is already present in KHI. Habermas’ Frankfurt inaugural lecture on which KHI is based contains a scathing critique of the notion of pure theory divorced from practice. The lecture shows the deep influence of Heidegger. Habermas’ critique of pure theory emanates from the deep anti intellectualism whose roots go back not only to Heidegger’s Being and Time but also to the Marxist and Frankfurt schools’ distrust for pure theory.

In Habermas’ later writings the above results in Habermas’ adoption of a full blown pragmatism and a conception of knowledge that recognises the epistemic value of practice and action.

Hegelian themes are also all pervasive in Habermas’ later work. Habermas’ theory of communicative action is based on the insight that our explicit contact with our fellow beings and the world around us is based on a prior and implicit contact with them. The theory of communicative action gives centrality to the embedded and social character of the process of reaching understanding. The subjects of communicative action are thoroughly socialised and embedded subjects. The theory of communicative action also emphasises the importance of the process as against the product of that process in correctly analysing rational activity.

The above mentioned aspects of Habermas’ work can be seen as his adherence to realism, naturalism and materialism and can be regarded as emanating from his commitment to the Hegelian and Marxist espousal of what has been termed as detranscendentalisation. This aspect also represents Habermas’ anti-Kantianism.

However to conceive the above as standing on its own would be a grave mistake. Habermas’ naturalism, materialism and realism is never metaphysical and he never abandons the transcendental/Kantian standpoint altogether. KHI is also a very Kantian work. It is a critique of the positivistic/scientistic/empiricist tendencies of modern philosophy and in this regard is thoroughly Kantian in its spirit. Positivism is criticised as the abandonment of reflection and KHI is an attempt to articulate the transcendental basis of human knowledge even if it is termed ‘weak’ transcendentalism. Habermas’ later work specially his formal pragmatics, his attempt at articulating the conditions of the possibility of the process of reaching understanding and his method of rational reconstruction bear more than superficial resemblance to Kant’s transcendentalism. This second aspect of Habermas’ work can be justifiably seen as his anti naturalism, anti realism and his commitment to the core of the idealist tradition despite his critique of it.

The two strands of Habermas’ work briefly explained above cannot be understood separately because in a crucial sense they define each other not only negatively but also positively. For Habermas the whole idea of detranscendentalisation is unthinkable without transcendentalism and detranscendentalisation for him is the positive condition of the possibility of any viable transcendentalism in a post metaphysical world.

In order to understand the above we need to understand Habermas’ work as aiming at a synthesis of transcendentalism and detranscendetnalisation, the synthesis which claims to be open ended in that it aims to achieve the synthesis without sublating the tension between the two altogether. Arguably even in KHI Habermas was aiming at such a synthesis which at that time he hoped to find in a new critical science modelled on the Freudian example. The widespread misunderstanding of Habermas’ work stems from the fact that this main task of Habermas’ enterprise is not sufficiently realised and his work is one sidedly branded as either Hegelian Marxist or Kantian depending on the relative emphasis put on the two sides of the synthesis. This is also the reason for the constant misunderstanding of Habermas’ mature work by some as die hard Kantian transcendentalist and by others as Hegelian. Thus understanding this synthesis is necessary for grasping the significance of Habermas’ philosophical enterprise as a whole.

In Habermas’ own work and in secondary literature as well we do not see any sustained effort to understand this synthesis. The main reasons for this in my opinion are two: The first has to do with the way Habermas’ work has developed over the years. Habermas’ philosophical work has largely developed in essay form written for special occasions such as to announce a programme of research, clarify or rebut critics or engage in a dialogue with his chosen interlocutors. Though these works contain all the elements of his synthesis they nowhere contain its elaboration in a sustained manner. The second reason is Habermas’ fateful polemic against French post structuralist/post modernists and the followers of Heidegger. The result of this polemic has been an untenable drift away from the synthesis and undue emphasis on one element of the synthesis at the expense of the other.

Habermas’ opponents have accused him of harbouring untenable Kantianism, transcendentalism and formalism. In other words his opponents have largely focused on Habermas’ transcendentalism and his alleged Kantianism as if it were good enough reason to discredit his whole work as an anachronism. Habermas’ supporters on the other hand tend to put the emphasis on his Hegelianism and his detranscendentalisation project.

The result of both tendencies has been the same, namely that there has been insufficient attempt to understand the synthesis. Nonetheless there is an urgent need to understand the synthesis in order to grasp the significance of Habermas’ work as a whole. Habermas’ work continues to be of the highest importance from the perspective of the modern European and Western thought and to the extent this thought affects the rest of the world, from the perspective of world thinking as well. This alone provides sufficient reason to try to understand his work as a whole.

Habermas in his recent work has provided on more than one occasion sufficient hints which could provide the basis for an attempt to understand his theoretical philosophy as a whole rather than just from one sided perspectives. Important in this respect has been Habermas recent frequent use of the term transcendence from within/immanent transcendence. The present dissertation is based on a conviction that a thorough understanding of the notion of transcendence from within may facilitate and provide the basis for understanding the relation between transcendentalism and detranscendentalisation in the work of Habermas.

Apart from the obvious need to fill in a significant lacuna within Habermasian scholarship the overall movement in European philosophy also demands and will benefit from the emergence of an overall picture of Habermasian synthesis. I shall briefly mention three such ‘events’ within European and Anglo-American scholarship that point towards increasing interest in understanding the relation between detranscendentalisation and transcendentalism and in the phenomenon of transcendence:

•In French philosophical theological scholarship the phenomenon of transcendence and its different interpretations have acquired great attention from philosophers and philosophical minded theologians from a variety of perspectives. A debate has emerged between those who deem that transcendence without God is possible and those who deny the possibility of any such transcendence. Moreover, an eminent Foucault scholar Béatrice Han has developed an interpretation of Foucault that reads him as developing a conception of transcendence from within, even if he does not use exactly the same terminology or methodology as Habermas. Han is currently working on a book entitled Transcendence without Religion, which uses the work of Foucault and Heidegger to develop a notion of transcendence from within.

•In the Anglo American philosophical scene it is safe to say that mainstream analytic philosophy is still largely dominated by philosophical naturalism (in Habermas’ terminology strong naturalism). However the hold of philosophical naturalism on Anglo American philosophy has been vigorously contested from within by influential philosophers even if they are still minorities. In this context the work of John McDowell is of great philosophical import. McDowell, while using resources almost entirely different from that of Habermas has developed a version of soft naturalism that resembles very much in its aims and structure to that of Habermas.

•Finally Mark Sacks and his colleagues are working on a project which aims to understand the relation between philosophical naturalism and transcendentalism.

All these events attest to my conviction that there is a growing interest in understanding the relation between what can be broadly termed as detranscendentalisation and transcendentalism. An interpretation of Habermas’ notion of transcendence from within can make a contribution to this ongoing concern and debate.

The thesis then is an interpretation of Habermas’ notion of transcendence from within. It is hoped that such an interpretation would help us understand the relation between transcendentalism and detranscendentalisation in Habermas’ work as well his overall synthesis and it’s logic. However the thesis does not make any claim to provide a full account of the relation between detranscendentalisation and transcendentalism or Habermas’ synthesis. Moreover the dissertation does not discuss Habermas’ notion of transcendentalism or detranscendentalisation as such but rather presupposes a detailed account of them. The purpose of the thesis is rather to understand Habermas’ claim that detranscendentalisation itself can provide the basis of preserving certain distinctions that are the basis of transcendentalism. It is hoped that a thorough understanding of Habermas’ notion of transcendence from within can provide the basis for any such understanding.

Finally the dissertation is an interpretation of Habermas’ notion of transcendence from within and no attempt has been made to assess the viability of any such interpretation. It is hoped that by telling the story itself one would have contributed to the subsequent discussions which can evaluate the story from different perspectives. However some general remarks are ventured in the conclusion to indicate possible lines of critique.

The dissertation is divided into 7 chapters. The first three chapters are introductory and provide the basis for further discussion in the next four chapters which are reconstructions of different aspects of Habermas’ notion of transcendence from within.

In chapter 1, I give a general introduction to the idea of transcendence from within by introducing the notion of Kantian pragmatism. Habermas’ move towards pragmatism can be understood as his adoption of a thoroughgoing detranscendentalisation of the conception of knowledge and experience and their deintellectualisation. Habermas’ pragmatism can be seen as his attempt to overcome the dichotomy between knowledge and action, and knowledge and experience. The overall effect of this is to emphasise the overall continuity between human beings and their surroundings, their ways of beings (passivity?) and their ways of acting.

However, though Habermas rejects Kantian dichotomies, he wants to preserve the relevant distinctions emphasised by Kant and others between knowledge and actions, language and experience. It follows from the above that Habermas must show how the relevant distinction emerges from within overall continuities. I further explain this by direct reference to the notions of transcendentalism and detranscendentalisation. The emphasis on detranscendentalisation means that Habermas intends to reembed the Kantian subject within its surroundings as his emphasis on the natural origins of the subject and his notion of socialised individuality shows. Similarly Habermas brings the Kantian realm of intelligible down from the heaven of otherworldly to the earth of “this” world.

However Habermas also wants to preserve the transcending powers of reason and the Kantian subject as well as the Kantian realm of intelligible. Habermas wants to do this while stripping these conceptions of their otherworldly origins and connotations in Kant. Habermas can combine the theme of detranscendentalisation and transcendentalism only if he can show that the transcending power of reason can emerge from within. That is, he must show that the process of detranscendentalisation is also the process which establishes the transcending power of reason and the subject. The notion of transcendence from within conveys this very idea as is the case with the notion of individuation through socialisation.

In chapter 2, I introduce the idea of weak naturalism. Weak naturalism continues the overall thrust of Habermas’ enterprise to establish continuities between human beings and their surroundings. However, Habermas’ rejection of ‘strong’ naturalism means that he does not want to collapse the distinction between human beings and their surroundings altogether. In our terms, although he wants to overcome the dichotomy between human beings and nature he does not want to abolish the distinction between the two. For this reason Habermas must show how the distinction between nature and human beings emerges from within. The hypothesis of weak naturalism aims to provide the basis for establishing such a link from within. The idea of transcendence from within operates at the level at which ‘social’ has already clearly emerged and has been demarcated from the rest of nature and when we already possess propositionally differentiated language. However weak naturalism provides the ontological underpinnings to the idea of transcendence from within by putting forth a working hypothesis that human beings and society have emerged from ‘nature in itself’ in the long process of evolution. Weak naturalism also provides the key link between the ‘intersubjective’ side of Habermas’ notion of transcendence from within and the ‘objective’ side.

In chapter 3, I explore Habermas’ attempt to go beyond empiricism and linguistic idealism. I introduce the issue by briefly considering Habermas’ critique of Quine and Heidegger respectively. Empiricism is criticised on the grounds that it totally dispenses with the participant’s perspective and relies exclusively on the observational model. However human language and its primordial relation with the world cannot be understood from the perspective of the observer. By trying to understand language and our relation with the world solely from the observer’s perspective empiricism ends up with an instrumental conception of language and a causal understanding of our relation with the world.

Heidegger on the other hand gives so much prominence to the holistic aspect of language and of our primordial relation with the world that he neglects the role of causality and innerworldly learning experiences altogether. Habermas on the other hand wants to give both the observer perspective and the participant perspective their due. Habermas particularly emphasises the capability of innerworldly learning experiences to revise our linguistic knowledge. In this context Habermas introduces the concept of the indirect effect of our innerworldly experiences on our linguistic knowledge. While innerworldly experiences cannot play any direct role in the revision of linguistic knowledge they can play an indirect role. Thus what is needed is to go beyond the one sided reductionism of Quine and Heidegger and to establish a dialectical yet open ended relation between the linguistic knowledge and innerworldly experiences, between implicit and explicit knowledge and between the primordial and causal.

In chapter 4, I introduce the idea of the ontological conception of freedom in Habermas. The idea is not explicitly present in Habermas; however, I argue that it is necessary for developing a conception of transcendence from within. The idea of transcendence from within requires that the dichotomy between freedom and limits be overcome and limits should be seen positively as the conditions of the possibility of freedom and not just negatively as hindrances. I argue that though the idea is not explicitly present in Habermas it is implicitly working in his analysis.

In chapter 5, I start reconstructing the idea of transcendence from within directly. In chapter 5 and 6 I reconstruct the idea from the ‘subjective’ angle, i.e. from the side of language, lifeworld and subjects capable of speech and action. In chapter 7, I construct the idea from the ‘objective’ angle, i.e. from the side of the objective world and nature and reality as a whole.

In chapter 5, I concentrate on a single meaning of transcendence from within from the subjective side. I argue that Habermas wants to maintain Kant’s distinction between causality of nature and the causality of reason (freedom), which in contemporary terms can be understood as the distinction between the space of reason and the space of law, without positing a Kantian otherworldly realm of pure intelligibility. In other words the distinction between the causality of nature and causality of reason must be established from within. I aim to do this by concentrating on Habermas’ theory of communicative action, especially on his distinction between strategic and communicative action. I argue that, for Habermas, the space of reason and Kant’s realm of intelligibility emerge when the participants ‘lock’ themselves within the space created by communicative action by pursuing the aim of mutual understanding with their co participants without reservation and without regard for any instrumental and strategic aims. Within such a space, claims Habermas, a this worldly version of Kant’s space of reason can be experienced as long as one remains within that space by solely aiming at the purpose of mutual understanding and disregarding strategic aims.

In chapter 6, I build on the analysis in chapter 5, further exploring related meanings of transcendence from within from the subjective side. In this context I explain how unconditionality emerges from within conditional and without positing unconditioned, and how validity emerges from within the factual. In other words I explain the emergence of the critical force from within the factual. In the same manner I also explain how generality emerges from within particular. In explaining the above I discuss Habermas’ notion of idealisations as the conditions of the possibility of communicative action and argumentation in general and how these idealisations set in motion in this world the resources of Kant’s intelligible realm without positing any separate otherworldly realm of intelligible.

In chapter 7, I explore the meaning of transcendence from within from the ‘objective’ side. Until recently Habermas’ strategy for transcendence from within was solely explained from the ‘subjective’ side. The theory of communicative action presupposes the notion of objectivity only as a formal concept. However Habermas’ recent move away from an epistemic conception of truth and his development of a full blown pragmatic conception of knowledge has helped him to explain the role played by nature and objective world in making transcendence from within possible. Habermas now sees a more pro-active role of the world in making transcendence from within possible. Although there still remains a difference in kind between the objections of participants within argumentation and the objections of the world and nature, in that the world and reality object to our claims only figuratively and indirectly in that if it goes along with our claims and our linguistic knowledge or refuse to cooperate with us, a more prominent role is given to both objective world and nature in making transcendence from within than was the case previously.

By resisting our empirical as well as linguistic knowledge the world and nature create the possibility of transcending our existing empirical knowledge from within. The world and nature also provide the possibility of overcoming the bridges between historical times by overcoming the distance between the two different historical epochs from within. The world and nature provide the continuum across historical time which answers that changes across historical time are not haphazard and that learning is possible across historical times.

The world as well as reality as a whole does not only provide the basis for transcendence from within it also forms the basis of objectivity of not only our empirical knowledge and factual claims but also of our linguistic knowledge. If empirical knowledge and linguistic knowledge can stand the resistance of reality they pass the test of objectivity and ensure their own survival. The knowledges that cannot pass this test are transcended in turn.

The above ensures that the claims justified in the space of reason are not mere chimera of our imagination. However since there is an ultimate gap between reality and language and we do not have direct and immediate access across to the naked reality and since reality can only unsettle our beliefs indirectly and can never directly prove or disprove them, the objectivity remains fallibilistic and open ended.

Thus for Habermas transcendence from within is the result of an open ended but complex dialectic between language, action, world and the subjects capable of speech and action. Furthermore it presupposes modern (post conventional) fallibilism and open endedness towards ourselves, others and our own world. It also requires presupposing the ‘weak’ naturalist hypothesis which though, a hypothesis is necessary for assuming continuity between language, action and world, essential for proving the possibility of transcendence from within.

In brief concluding comments I speculate about possible objections to Habermas’ strategy for establishing the possibility of transcendence from within. I suggest that one of the main weaknesses of Habermas’ enterprise might be the enormous amount of presuppositions that it involves. Furthermore I suggest that it has implications which might lead to the abandonment of any substantive conception of truth.

Ali Rizvi (2006), draft please do not quote.