Rethinking secularism: The philosopher-citizen (Charles Taylor on Jurgen Habermas)

Very interesting article.

Rethinking secularism:

The philosopher-citizen

posted by Charles Taylor

Jürgen Habermas is one of the most prominent philosophers on the global scene of the last half century. His work is of an impressive range and depth. It would be impossible to sum it up in a short essay, but I shall try to single out three facets of his extraordinary achievement which help throw light on his deserved fame and influence.

Jürgen Habermas is known in the world of analytic philosophy primarily as a moral and political philosopher. He has striven against a slide which has often seemed plausible and tempting for modern thinkers, that towards a certain relativism or subjectivism in morals. The difficulty of establishing firm ethical conclusions in the midst of vigorous debate among rival doctrines, particularly when these disputes are contrasted to those among natural scientists can all too easily push us to the conclusion that there is no fact of the matter here, that ethical doctrines are not a matter of knowledge, but only of emotional reaction or subjective projection, that the issues here are not cognitive.

Habermas from the very beginning set his face against these non-cognitivist views. There can be ethical knowledge. But he wished also to break with a long-hallowed notion of what this knowledge must consist in, that which we find in the traditions which go back to Plato and Aristotle. According to these, ethical knowledge has for its object human nature, or the nature of things. In other words, it is grounded in some normative picture of what humans are like, or else of their place in the universe. According to Habermas, it was the discredit of these “metaphysical” views which gave colour to non-cognitivism in the first place. In order to refute subjectivism, morality needs another kind of rational basis.

The alternative route which he explored was that which makes the rationality of ethical conclusions a function of the rationality of the deliberation which produces them. A deliberation is rational if it meets certain formal requirements. This is, of course, the route which was pioneered by Kant. But Habermas made a revolutionary change in this tradition. Whereas for Kant the principal criterion of a rational and therefore defensible deliberation was that it was sought universalizable maxims, for Habermas the very notion of deliberation is transformed. Following Kant a lone reasoner can work out what maxims can be the objects of a universal will. But Habermas introduces the dialogical dimension. The ultimately acceptable norms are those which can pass the test of acceptance by all those who would be affected by them.

In other words, for Habermas, ethical deliberation is primarily social, dialogical; it is worked out between agents. Of course, in a secondary way, we can and often do deliberate on our own, but the shape of our ethical world is dialogically elaborated, and this conditions all our moral thinking, even when we want to rebel against the morality of our community.

In proposing this transformed model of ethical reasoning, Habermas was articulating two profound changes in the consciousness of the later 20th Century, one philosophical, the other in our political culture. The philosophical change was the dialogical turn itself, which we see in a host of places: in the critique of monological Cartesian foundationalism by figures like Wittgenstein and the phenomenological writers, in the sociological literature which began to stress the dialogical nature of identity-formation, as we see with George Herbert Mead. One could prolong the list almost indefinitely.

The second big change, in the political culture, also gave a new importance to dialogue. The political identities of democratic societies were no longer seen as defined once and for all by some founding principles or acts. The combined impact of feminism, of multiculturalism, of the battles over identity and recognition, of the gay movement, and so on, brought to the fore how much traditional modes of understanding were based on silent exclusion of minorities. Redefining, renegotiating the political contract came to be seen as an important, often urgent task; and this could only be carried out dialogically.

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Tags: Philosophy, culture, values, Politics, Rethinking secularism, The philosopher-citizen, Charles Taylor, Jurgen Habermas, The Immanent Frame