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Post-secularity and (global) politics: a need for radical redefinition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2013

FRED DALLMAYR
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Abstract

The past two decades have produced a bulky literature on religion and politics, with many writers being influenced by Habermas's notion of ‘post-secularity’. However, despite the vast amount of literature, there is still little agreement on the meaning of this term. The article explores two main directions in which the expression has been interpreted: one direction where religious faith is in a way ‘secularised’ by being adapted to modern secular discourse; and another where faith triumphs over secularity by expunging its modern corollaries. What surfaces behind this divergence is a version of the immanence/transcendence conundrum which accentuates a presumed contrast of language games in which one linguistic idiom is said to be more readily accessible than the other. In agreement with Charles Taylor, this article challenges the assumption of an ‘epistemic break’ between secular reason and ‘non-rational’ religious discourse. Once this challenge is taken seriously, a new and more radical redefinition of ‘post-secularity’ comes into view: a definition where the prefix ‘post’ signifies neither a secular nor a religious triumphalism, but rather an ethical-political task: the task of liberating public life from its attachment to ‘worldly’ self- interest and the unmitigated pursuit of wealth, power, and military adventures.

Type
Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 5: The Postsecular in International Relations , December 2012 , pp. 963 - 973
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2012

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References

1 Kepel, Gilles, The Revenge of God, trans. Braley, Alan (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

2 This is the development leading from A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) to Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

3 Habermas, Jürgen, ‘An Awareness of What is Missing’, in Habermas, et al., An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, trans. Cronin, Ciaran (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008)Google Scholar. See also Habermas, , Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans. Cronin, Ciaran (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

4 ‘An Awareness of What is Missing’, pp. 20–1.

5 ‘An Awareness of What is Missing’, pp. 16–17, 22. With this statement, Habermas basically accepts the positivist stage theory (first formulated by Auguste Comte) that history moves from religion to metaphysics and then to (post-metaphysical) science.

6 Habermas, , ‘The Political’: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology’, in Mendieta, Eduardo and VanAntwerpen, Jonathan (eds), The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 25–6Google Scholar. The conference had been held in New York City's Cooper Union in October 2009.

7 On Tertullian see De praescriptione haereticorum (Freiburg: Mohr, 1892), esp. chap. 7Google Scholar. The conflict between Athens and Jerusalem was also a central theme in the work of Strauss, Leo; see on this point my ‘Leo Strauss Peregrinus’, Social Research, 61 (1994), pp. 877–906Google Scholar.

8 Vattimo, Gianni, After Christianity, trans. D'Isanto, Luca (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 38–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Compare in this context also Kitaro Nishida's comment: ‘Just as there is no world without God, there is no God without the world … And as Eckhart said, one sees the true God where even God has been lost.’ Nishida, , An Inquiry into the Good, trans. Abe, Masao and Ives, Christopher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 168–9Google Scholar. For background see Levinas, Emmanuel, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bergo, Bettina (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Derrida, Jacques, The Gift of Death, trans. Wills, David (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Marion, Jean-Luc, Reduction et donation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989)Google Scholar; and Janicaud, Dominque, ‘The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology’, trans. Prusak, Bernard G., in Janicaud, et al. (eds), Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’ (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), pp. 16–103Google Scholar.

9 See Gadamer, Hans-Georg, ‘The Universility of the Hermeneutical Problem’, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. Linge, David E. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 1–20Google Scholar. In his Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Shapiro, Jeremy J. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971)Google Scholar, Habermas had tried to limit hermeneutical understanding to the humanities, while exempting natural science and psychoanalytic self-knowledge from such understanding – a procedure which ignored ‘post-empiricist’ trends in science as well as the issue of depth hermeneutics. See in this respect my ‘Borders or Horizons? An Older Debate Revisited’, in Small Wonder: Global Power and Its Discontents (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), pp. 176–98Google Scholar; and my ‘Life-World and Critique’, Between Freiburg and Frankfurt (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), pp. 13–24Google Scholar.

10 Charles Taylor, ‘Why We Need a Radical Redefinition of Secularism’, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, pp. 49–50, 52–3. Giving some concrete examples, Taylor adds (p. 54): ‘The two most widespread this-worldly philosophies in our contemporary world, utilitarianism and Kantianism, in their different versions, all have points at which they fail to convince honest and unconfused people.’ Extending this point to the relation between himself and Habermas, he states: ‘He finds this secure [secular] foundation in a “discourse ethics”, which I unfortunately find quite unconvincing.’ What Taylor fails to notice is that his rejection of the ‘epistemic break’ also puts pressure on his own ontological or metaphysical break between transcendence and immanence.

11 See in this context my ‘Postsecular Faith: Toward a Religion of Service’, Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2010), esp. pp. 80–1Google Scholar.

12 The above passages can be read as a subtle commentary on the (much later) doctrine of ‘sola gratia’.

13 Habermas, ‘An Awareness of What is Missing’, p. 19. For a somewhat more helpful text see Brunkhorst, Hauke, Solidarity: From Civic Friendships to a Global Legal Community, trans. Flynn, Jeffrey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

14 Taylor, ‘Why we Need a Radical Redefinition of Secularism’, pp. 46, 56.

15 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Irwin, Terence (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), pp. 14–15Google Scholar (1097a35–1097b15), 34–35 (1103a31–1103b1). See also Muzaffar, Chandra, Rights, Religion and Reform: Enhancing Human Dignity through Spiritual and Moral Transformation (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2002), p. 104Google Scholar; and my ‘Religion and the World: The Quest for Justice and Peace’, Integral Pluralism, pp. 85–101.

16 In the gospel of John (4:23–24), Jesus simply says: ‘But the hour is coming and now is, when the true worshipper will worship the father in spirit and truth, for such the father seeks to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.’ For the statement of Armstrong see {http://www.ted.com/speakers/karen_armstrong.html}. Her words are distantly echoed by Gadamer when he writes: ‘Just as health is not known in the same way as a wound or disease, so the holy is perhaps more a way of being than of being believed.’ See his ‘Reflections on the Relation of Religion and Science’, Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics, trans. Weinsheimer, Joel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 127Google Scholar.

17 See in this context Freire, Paulo, Pedagogy of the Heart, trans. Macedo, Donaldo and Oliveira, Alexandre (New York: Continuum, 1997)Google Scholar; also my ‘Polis and Cosmopolis’, Margins of Political Discourse (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 1–21Google Scholar, and my The Promise of Democracy: Political Agency and Transformation (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010)Google Scholar.