Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 10:24:29 -0800 (PST)
From: Gary E Davis <gary-AT-gedavis.com>
Subject: HAB: Post-Secular Humanity (part 4 of 4)



Departing from the value of democracy for religion, JH (in his
"Prize" speech) comments on the effects of scientific understanding
that seem vaguely memorial of his career, rather than focused on any
presentational point (paragraphs 15, 18, 19). I find the critique of
scientism anachronistic (16, 17). So I'll skip comment, unless
someone else finds 15-19 engaging (as I go on here with my pretension
that anybody else is interested in any of this dialoging with JH's
text-in-translation). 

The anti-scientistic point might be basically that, in the
"perspective that accompanies everyday life[, which] explains the
difference between the language games of justification and pure
description...non-reductionistic strategies of explanation...
encounter a limit" (20). 

But the problems I found with JH's sense of individuality, in the
"Liberal Eugenics" essay (late October - early November), are echoed
here, now with consequence for his later view of religious
understanding. JH says presently that "[t]he 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" (20),
but it is rationalistically reductionist to formulate self-conception
as basically (at its "core") accountability. Self-conception is
basically about the *living* of "my" life--that can *also* be
accountable, but only derivatively. Lives are, so to speak,
diachronic (in their general calling); accountability is synchronic,
when specifically called upon. Moreover, an observer perspective is
inherent to the reflectability of self-understanding and
self-identification, which is intimately related to the *growth* or
enrichment of identity over life eras, as well as the sense of
lifespan as an historicality. So, in this sense at least, the
perspective of an observer is inherent to the *capability* of
self-conception.

"Common sense is...concerned with the consciousness of persons who
are able to take initiative, make mistakes and correct those
mistakes" (21) relative to the *autonomy* of sensibility; it is *not*
characteristic of autonomous sense to "assert[] against the sciences
a stubborn perspectival structure" (21), as does common sense. Yet JH
now collapses the difference between common sense and autonomy by
referring immediately to "this consciousness of autonomy." In fact,
scientific thinking is born from the autonomy of cognitive potentials
beyond the common sense of ontogeny, and mature autonomy embodies a
perspectivity that is *not* stubborn. Thus, JH is either oblivious to
a difference that is basic to his own work (which I find implausible)
or else he is *rhetorically* assimilating autonomy to common sense
for the sake of *appealing* to that potential in pre-autonomous
common sense (in good Socratic form). 

But the latter seems implausible too, since he quickly passes to an
unrelated kind of point (that wouldn't interest common sense) when he
says that "this consciousness of autonomy... cannot, I think, be
grasped naturalistically..." (21). Yes, he's still within the
critique of scientism, thereby just making a big mistake about the
relevance of the difference between common sense and autonomy for
what he will go on to surmise. Who knows what he's thinking. I'm
familiar with the interest in naturalization (naturalized
epistemology, naturalized phenomenology), and I don't see tendencies
toward reductionism. *I'm" certainly not interested in reductionism,
and I'm *very* interested in the *contemporary* interest in
naturalism (which is distant from the physicalism of the early 20th
century). 

Anyway, "common sense...asserts also the perspective of a religious
tradition" (21), but it's implausible that this tradition is
something "whose normative rules... we equally assent [to]" (21), in
any sense of "we" relevant to what JH means by normative--*except*
inasmuch as the religious tradition does indeed embody such a
normativity *coincidently*. But where would such a normativity come
from? I think it would come (in Christianity) from NON-religious
roots of Christian religion: Stoicism and Renaissance humanism, which
had populist and democratic effects on Protestantism (The Christian
humanism of Erasmus is arguably the origin of Protestanism, if not
the distal cause of Luther's Act).
 
So, it may NOT be notably (as I believe is the case) that "[t]he idea
of egalitarian law based on reason also has religious roots" (22);
*rather* that *both* law and Western religion have *humanistic* roots
in Hellenism. These are the "long-profaned springs" from which
"reason-based legitimation of law and politics drinks" (22). It's not
generally *religion* (in some undifferentiating sense) that
"therefore contests democratically enlightened common sense" (22);
rather it's *common sensical* (usually fundamentalist) religion that
contests, along lines of theocentric essentialism about
otherworldly-located wellsprings (which is not a fundamentally
Christian view). That the Kingdom of Heaven is among/within you is an
Hellenic, individuating and democratizing notion. 

But JH is in another world. "The reverse side of religious freedom is
actually a pacification of ideological pluralism that has unequally
distributed consequences" (23). Yet, without an efficacious sense of
self-conception based in life historical calling and without a locus
of the genealogy of calling in the democratizing entailments of
Christianity, one might be compelled (as JH evidently is) to see the
public/private difference as a "split" "imposed" by "the liberal
state" (23) without a complement of boundary-setting born within
humanistic individuational processes once authentically embodied
through religious life, now increasingly (and largely, for modernity)
embodied through child-centered parenting, cultural, and educational
processes that live in solidarity with evolving religious life (which
becomes increasingly differentiated or denominational).

JH's single-minded focus on political life leaves individuality
primarily living with its accountability to the public: "...they must
translate their religious convictions into a secular language before
their arguments have the prospect of being accepted by a majority"
(23). But this is so secondary to the interest of everyday life in
making meaning within intimacy, work, friendship, etc., which models
itself on the extended family of *identification* with the other, not
basically in terms of accountable struggles for recognition in
publicity. JH expresses a decidedly one-sided sense of the reality of
religious life. When "[t]oday's Catholics and Protestants... 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" (23), they are *entering* publicity from a
lifeworld *de-centered* from political life (in highly
de-traditionalized democracies--having clearly delimited domains of
private life--as well as in traditional lives not yet having a
clearly separated notion of the public apart from extended family or
covenanted community)--and too often such religiously-centered
publicity seeks to *impose* its private conceptions of life on other
privacies. The other side of this coin is religious liberalism that
really respects "Choice" and *gives* to public life a truly
humanistic dignity of pluralism, based in the same Christian
humanistic history as democracy (This has been integral to the
USAmerican experience). 

So, it seems to me that "[g]iving due consideration to the religious
heritage of its moral foundations" (25) (bad translation?) is so far
lacking in JH's sense of the relationship between religion and
democracy. A *market-based* "schema of individual preference" (25) is
not credible, given the roots of individuality shared by both
modernization and Christianity. Furthermore, though "[t]he social
bond...is based on mutual recognition" (25), the *social* bond
(solidarity and civility) is secondary to the *intersubjective* bond
(which is familial or kindred)--a distinction that is commonly
collapsed in a general notion of sociality. Intersubjective bonds are
based on extended-familial *identification* with others. Ontogeny
provides for the capability to *appreciate* an other, and this gives
meaning to so-called recognition. Also, ontogenically matured
identification is the basis for a capacity for mutuality. Thus, a
mere assertion of a sociality of mutual recognition is abstracted
from the existential bases of sociality that religious life has
traditionally expressed. 

Perhaps this abstract sociality is indirectly dramatized in the
Kantian will. Is it not somewhat chilling that "[i]n Kant we find the
authority of divine command reestablished in the unconditional
validity of moral duty" (26)? Is there foreboding in that "Kant
certainly destroyed the traditional conception of being 'a child of
God'" (26)? 
 
I agree that "[s]ecular languages that simply eliminate what was once
there leave behind only irritation" (27), but the available wealth of
meaning in artistic culture is eliminated in lamenting that "[t]he
lost hope of resurrection has left behind a palpable emptiness" (27).
Is "[s]omething...lost when sin became guilt" (27) or is something
gained, inasmuch as the dramatic literary canon (e.g., tragic form)
reaches deeply into our cultural roots? Is it not part of our
modernity that "[t]he desire for forgiveness is, after all" (27)
dependent on the capacity to forgive, which (it turns out) *we* grant
to "God" (who abandoned humanity in the Holocaust), thanks to our own
capacity for comprehending tragedy, and *thereby* "[w]e 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" (27)? 

Our humanity is embodied and exemplified in our art--in the aged Art
of living and in our aged arts--which bridge religious meaning and
modernity profoundly. 

Bring strict religious understanding to heights of art; bring
superficialities of democratic commonality to depths of art. *This*,
it seems to me, may be the "kind of translation" (30) available to us
all in "[a] secularization that does not annihilate" (30), i.e.,
including all authentic senses of religious life in its ecumenical
humanism.





__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! GeoCities - quick and easy web site hosting, just $8.95/month.
http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/info1


     --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---