Does Reason Know What It Is Missing? - NYTimes.com - 2 views
shared by Terry Elliott on 26 Jan 11
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Jürgen Habermas
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Enlightenment
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postmodernism
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“…the authority of the holy,” he once declared, “is gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus.”
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In recent years
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First
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second
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post-secular age
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“Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.”
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The question of course
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“An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age.”
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The point can be sharpened: in the context of full-bodied secularism, there would seem to be nothing to pass on to, and therefore no reason for anything like a funeral.
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To be sure
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secular reason is missing something
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What secular reason is missing is self-awareness
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It is
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no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments.
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postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.
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Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know.
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Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong.
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The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield.
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Worldviews
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Worldviews
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Habermas says,
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The liberal citizen is taught
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Habermas concludes
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The consequences
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Fish realizes he has gotten into some rarified atmosphere and then decides he needs to give us something concrete.
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massive injustices nations and tribes inflict on one another
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So what will supply the strength that is missing?
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Religion
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And so he proposes something less than a merger and more like an agreement between trading partners: “…the religious side must accept the authority of ‘natural’ reason as the fallible results of the institutionalized sciences and the basic principles of universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality. Conversely, secular reason may not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith, even though in the end it can accept as reasonable only what it can translate into its own, in principle universally accessible, discourses.”
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There is still something missing.
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MacGilchrist suggests what that might be--the leavening influence of the right hemisphere
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Liberal rationality is committed to pluralism and cannot affirm the absolute rightness of anything except its own (empty) proceduralism.
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which derides
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secular to go it alone
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Enlightenment rationality