Abstract
This article is based on a paper given in December 2013 at a German–Italian workshop on Jürgen Habermas’ theory. Massimo Rosati had been studying Jürgen Habermas’ thought and classical sociology in the Durkheimian tradition for years. Because of his own Durkheimian reading of communicative action, he had been unsurprised when Habermas began to write systematically on religion. In this article, he addresses the new post-secular sensitivity to the remnants of mimetic and mythic worldviews within theoretical ones and discusses the sacred as a universal historical structure of human consciousness.
Years ago, writing on solidarity and the sacred in Émile Durkheim, I tried to unearth a Durkheimian core in the Theory of Communicative Action (Rosati, 2003), reconstructing communicative action as a linguistified form of the sacred, whose normative force – under the modern structural conditions of the world’s differentiation – keeps some echo of the sacred itself and duplicates its inner tension between duty and desirability. As a consequence of this Durkheimian reading of communicative action, I was not surprised at all – as many were in Italy and worldwide – when Habermas started to write systematically on religion. This development was not only, in my view, a new post-secular awareness of the role of the historical religions in the world after 11 September 2001, but was also a quite predictable reflection on a nucleus of Habermas’ thought that had always been in need of further elaboration. I welcomed this further elaboration, and I am deeply convinced that Habermas’ work on religion – too frequently considered by him in the singular, namely in abstract terms and far from historical differentiations, particularities and specificities – is a fantastic, precious and rare lesson of openness and intellectual generosity, despite my disagreements on many points.
What is changed over the years in Habermas’ view on religion is that nowadays he does not believe any more that communicative action can fully linguistify the sacred; the new awareness of the coexistence of secular and religious forms of life in a contemporary horizon made him more sensitive towards traces of ritual and myth that are still among us, towards what he calls the archaic that resists a full linguistification. This is part of the new post-secular sensitivity: a stronger awareness that, to quote Robert Bellah, nothing is ever lost, and that both mimetic and mythic worldviews coexist together within theoretical ones. Drawing from socio-anthropological literature – Durkheim, Van Gennep, Turner: a real pleasure for Durkheimian ears – Habermas analyses in detail the working of ritual and myth (Habermas, 2011). Despite residual modernist overtones and specific disagreements on his analysis of ritual, I have no doubts concerning the relevance of Habermas’ present awareness of the persistence – albeit in transformed, more reflective forms – of ritual praxes and sacred worldviews that, in his words, keep an access open to that ‘archaic experience to which unbelieving sons and daughters of modernity turned their backs’ (Habermas, 2012: 95).
In my opinion, this is a great gain, in terms of our capability of understanding societies that are fully modern and, at the same time, fully religious (Davie, 2005) – in Europe as well as in the USA and elsewhere in the world. This said, let me highlight three persisting limits that I see in Habermas’ position. I want to synthesize them under three labels: (1) the refusal to fully recognize the normative dimension of the post-secular; (2) the refusal to decouple the sacred; (3) the refusal to grasp the deep, unconscious dimension of the sacred.
1 Refusal to fully recognize the normative dimension of the post-secular
What surprised me upon reading the chapters of the new book by Habermas on post-metaphysical thinking – especially those concerning myth, ritual and religion – was the lack of any reference to that process of complementary learning which characterizes the very concept of the post-secular in previous Habermasian writings. It seems that what Habermas gained in anthropological thickness in his articulation of the role of myth and ritual in evolutionary terms, he lost in the normative understanding of the relationship between secular and religious forms of life.
Shadowed by a deeper understanding of the sociological relevance and of the workings of myth, ritual and the sacred, the central idea of a complementary learning process between secular and religious forms of life seems to recede into the background. Habermas’ view seems to be ‘disenchanted’ and even ‘nostalgic’: the echo of the archaic is still here, and religious people are those who have a privileged access to it, while ‘we’ – as modern unbelievers – can just take note of this. Habermas clearly sees that ritual practices provide for both the self-constitution and the self-expression of (religious) communities; at the same time, he seems uninterested in reflecting upon what we, the moderns, might learn from the workings of ritual: namely, the making of social solidarity on the one hand, and a specific kind of reflexivity on the other. 1 It is as though that echo could work only within the small and self-contained borders of religious communities, and its inner logic might not be ‘expanded’ to the social at large. Ritual and the sacred have nothing to do with society at large, they make sense only in the religious domain traditionally understood.
Second, when Habermas confronts the hotly debated issue of the place of religions in the public and political sphere, he abstains from any immanent and ‘inner’ analysis of the principled reasons that religious communities may have to articulate a vocabulary consistent with pluralism and democracy (i.e. Adam B. Seligman’s strategic choice; see Seligman, 2004), ending up with the empirically (and also normatively) questionable distinction between the wider public sphere and political institutions such as parliaments, where the religious vocabulary should leave room for public reason. In both cases – the sociological analysis of the dynamogenetic effects of ritual and the sacred for society at large, and the socio-political analysis of the relationship between public reason and the religious vocabularies needed to legitimate democratic and pluralistic principles – it seems that Habermas’ attitude is one of marked mistrust towards empirical communities, their concrete dealings with secular institutions, and their ability to create bonds within and across their borders.
2 Refusal to decouple the sacred
Reading Habermas’ writings on ritual and myth is so exciting that a Durkheimian palate gets more and more hungry line after line. From a Durkheimian point of view, to speak of myth, ritual and the sacred in contemporary societies obviously entails decoupling the sacred and distinguishing between a religious and a secular sacred (see Knott, 2013). 2 Only by doing so can we understand how the grammar of the sacred and the workings of ritual affect not only religious communities but also – and in spite of any difference between the two domains – secular identities, both individual and collective. This means that naïve theories of secularization can be criticized not only by taking into account the place of the religious sacred and religious communities in a post-secular horizon, but also from the point of view of a host of secular forms of the sacred (in the political domain as well as in the social domain at large), including those ‘survival and camouflating’ of myth and the sacred (Mircea Eliade) that fill contemporary imaginaries. If one looks both at secular and at religious forms of the sacred, the sacred appears as a form of sociological quasi-transcendental (Rosati, 2003) whose main features (the properties of the sacred) are more or less the same in the secular as well as in the religious field. From that perspective, that is a fully Durkheimian perspective, areligious societies do not exist, and actually cannot exist: the sacred has ‘just’ to be uncovered, within a historical horizon, under its camouflaged forms, but it is a condition of the possibility of society (from a sociological point of view, the sacred is the outcome of a human praxis – through ritual action – of self-creation and self-representation, which, in turn, is a constitutive part of our cognitive and moral orientation and judgments).
3 Refusal to grasp the sacred as an unconscious dimension of modernity
The above-mentioned points concern the normative and the phenomenological level: what we can learn from the grammar of the sacred as ‘moderns’ and where religions and the sacred happen in contemporary society. However, there is still one level that one can dig into. This is a deeper level so to speak, familiar to Durkheimian scholars – i.e. Émile Durkheim himself, Marcel Mauss and Robert Hertz – when they maintained that the sacred used to shape both our cognitive and our moral criteria of judgment. Space, time, our sense of right and wrong, in past times everything was shaped by the sacred. They thought that science was rapidly replacing religion in the cognitive domain, while the sacred would have continued to play its role in the moral one. Today, cultural sociology offers its contribution in revealing ‘to men and women the myths that think them so that they can make new myths in turn’; according to Jeffrey C. Alexander (2003: 4), such a Durkheimian cultural sociology is a societal psychoanalysis of sorts, well aware of the fact that new, and hopefully more progressive, myths can replace old ones, but also that nothing is ever lost and that even theoretical cultures cannot free themselves from both the religious and the secular sacred (Bellah, 2011).
A neo-Durkheimian sociology, capable of making the most of the thought of classical thinkers such as Durkheim himself and the others of the circle of the Année sociologique, but also Erving Goffman in the micro-sociological domain and Mircea Eliade in that of the history of religions, might be able to show how ritual and the sacred in their religious and secular forms continue to be building blocks of society at large, despite our removal of their role.
To conclude, and to be fully honest (once again taking advantage of the present opportunity to discuss with Jürgen Habermas): my view is that the difficulties of a self-reflective Enlightenment culture in reaching a better understanding of religions and the sacred have a main root and cause – a Protestant-like understanding of religion. Habermas gives a precious contribution in considering religion, within a post-Enlightenment Protestant-like horizon, not only as a private but also as a public issue, and nowadays in considering ritual and cult. At the same time, it seems to me that in Habermas’ view an implicit Protestant-like understanding of religion still persists. He never writes about religions in the plural, about concrete communities, and in so doing he frequently considers religion(s) as a matter of belief, overemphasizing the theological and cognitive dimension and approaching the whole discussion from that point of view.
However, in discussing religions in the plural, beyond Christianity, ritualized practices and memories are almost everything, while theology and beliefs are frequently an almost residual dimension; in other terms, religions can be discussed only from within, starting from particularities and differences, as genuine interreligious dialogue, for example, does; in discussing the sacred, we have to decouple it into different dimensions: unmasking those hyper-rationalistic self-understandings of modernity we have to show that – without being an ontological structure – the sacred seems to be a universal historical structure of human consciousness (Eliade); finally, when it comes to religions and the sacred, we have to be ready to think about those myths that think us, β in order to play our part, as citizens and human beings, in making those new and more humane myths that are needed to replace the old ones.