Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 23:48:21 +1100
From: saeed urrehman <saeed.urrehman-AT-anu.edu.au>
Subject: habermas


Juergen Habermas on Faith, Knowledge and 9/11
http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/18/1317208

  posted by Autonomedia on Sunday November 18, -AT-08:15AM
from the gnosis,-secularization,-and-annihilation dept.


   Faith and Knowledge -- An Opening
Juergen Habermas
Speech by Juergen Habermas accepting the Peace Price
of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association
Paulskirche, Frankfurt, 14 October 2001
Sueddeutsche Zeitung, 15 October 2001
[translated from German by Kermit Snelson]
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/aktuell/sz/artikel86740 .php

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?





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