“Also A History of Philosophy Vol. 1” by Jurgen Habermas (translated by Ciaran Cronin)

This is Habermas’ last great work, spanning three volumes in the English translation and taking him over a decade of the last years of his life to complete. In this first volume, he takes on the challenge of explaining how the change in worldview from the mythical to the age of the axial religions was a precursor to the rise of secular philosophy and post-metaphysical thinking. He grapples with the blurred divisions between faith and knowledge that still weigh on modernity. In Habermas’ telling, modern morality, philosophy, and secularist thinking cannot shake free of religion’s roots. He begins, “In pursuing the correct path of salvation, religious communities can at least recognize each other as competing over the same goal, and in a sense as stakeholders in the same human enterprise. There is no similar basis for mutual recognition if the secular environment allows religious views per se to be regarded exclusively as scientifically demystified illusions and considers religious existences to be remnants of a superseded social epoch…. This touches upon the philosophical question of how to understand the secular character of reason in relation to religious traditions…. The decoupling of secular thinking from all paths of salvation based on faith or ‘wisdom’ acquires an immanent justification if it can be understood as the result of a learning process extending over more than one and a half millennia…. The genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking seeks to understand the structural transformation that worldviews underwent in the West as a learning process.”

Habermas details the transformation of modern philosophy, “Philosophy changed sides from theology to the natural sciences…. The human sciences acquire a different meaning for a form of postmetaphysical thinking that embraces the basic insight of the linguistic turn—that the subjective and the objective mind are interdependent…. Inherently socialized subjects are embedded in an intersubjectively shared lifeworld context by which they are as much shaped as they contribute to its reproduction…. Human ‘nature’ consists in the manifold of organically based, symbolically embodied, sociocultural forms of life that are only accessible to us from the ‘internal’ perspective of a virtual participant. Reflecting philosophers see themselves as situated subjects who, in contrast to natural scientists, do not adopt an imagined view from nowhere or deny their own situation. Rather, they understand themselves as subjects who are located in a particular political and global social constellation, are individuated by their life histories, and belong to a political community and a culturally shaped, albeit increasingly pluralistic, civilization; moreover, as subjects of cognition, they have to take this location in social space and historical time as their point of departure for making generalizations.”

The axial age saw changes in how humanity viewed the world and itself within it, across all cultures. “The concept of the axial age rests on the belief that, without constructing a transcendent divine standpoint or without the reference to the world-immanent vanishing point of a cosmic law that generates unity and coherence, the human mind would not be able to free itself from the clutches of the more or less narratively ordered flood of events controlled by deities and magical powers. A transcendent point of reference is both theoretically and practically necessary—on the one hand, to form a theoretical picture of the world, or of world history or the world ages, as a whole, and, on the other, to establish an ethics that is to some extent universalistic.”

The socialization of humanity was transformative. “Insofar as the contents of consciousness are simultaneously externalized and communalized through the symbolization of meanings, the monadic consciousness of the individual conspecific is ruptured. This entry into the public world of symbolic forms not only marks the overcoming of cognitive egocentrism; it is not only a challenge from the side of the natural environment that had to be cognitively mastered in the long run through mythical worldviews—perhaps prepared by the interactions in the context of a ‘mimetic culture’. Rather, the socialization of intelligence goes hand in hand with a revolution in how behaviour is coordinated—namely, a changeover from the instinctively secured interactions controlled by emotions and triggered by signals of conspecifics who, in their intentional actions, are trapped in their egocentric perspective in the sense indicated, to the symbolically mediated interactions of group members who have to cope cooperatively with the contingencies of the world within the horizon of their shared lifeworld.”

Axial religions shaped how cultures related to their objective world. “My hypothesis aims at the conclusion that the axial worldviews transformed the sacred for the first time into a power that promises a saving justice by linking the attainment of salvation with an ethically demanding path of salvation, hence by explicitly making salvation from earthly misfortune contingent on the observance of a universalistic ethos…. Not only the salvation religions in the narrower sense, but also Confucian wisdom teaching and Greek metaphysics were distinguished from mythical traditions by their novel teaching practice and their truth-oriented interpretation of sacralized texts, around which schools and ritual communities took shape…. Thus the canonization of sacred teachings, for which the Hebrew Bible provided the model, had to satisfy stricter standards than the literature of heroic legends and hymns. Canonizing teachings that were attributed to historical founder figures was not only intended to counteract change in time and keep classics present as contemporaries; rather, the point was to guarantee the authenticity of timeless truths…. Practising absolute obedience to God, even if it is initially ‘blind’, is meant to instruct the believer concerning the absolutely binding character of moral commandments. From the point of view of a pious person, therefore, the monotheistic moralization of salvation and misfortune subjectively means completely decoupling the moral way of life from personal expectations of salvation in the shape of ‘rewards’ for services rendered…. The judging God, who endows the general moral laws with absolute validity, is at the same time the guarantor of the history of salvation as the liberating and redeeming God. A tension can arise from the perspective of the believer between the moments of justice and salvation, because God makes moral action the responsibility of human beings, whereas salvation is something that ‘befalls’ them. In modernity, all that postmetaphysical reason—from its anthropocentric perspective—will retain of the divine legislator is the ‘moral point of view’ as a world-transcending point of view.”

Habermas contends that the axial religions completely transformed how society viewed morality from the mythical worldview, “Moral conceptions of manifestly profane origin came into conflict with the experiences of violence, injustice and oppression in ways that did not admit of convincing explanation in mythological terms. This accounts for the cognitive drive towards the moralization of the sacred from which a new worldview emerged. Everywhere, the enlightening protests of intellectuals undermined the mythological explanatory models and the symbiosis of salvation and political rule; the religious and metaphysical worldviews of the axial age gave rise to generally binding norms that the ruler could no longer embody, but could only represent to the extent that he himself was subject to them…. With the concept of God, Judaism created a transcendent reference point from which the world of nature and history could be objectified as a whole. The cosmological conceptions of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and Platonism developed equivalent concepts for the transcending movement of thought in the shape of the fixed pole of the underlying reality of Nirvana, of the Tao that maintains everything in balance, and of eternal being. This explains the dualistic structure of the axial worldviews, which differentiate the world as a whole from the natural processes in the world. Opposing conceptions now open up a perspective from which empirical events that were hitherto only narrated are explained as an ephemeral flow of appearances of a deeper-lying, essential or true reality. In this way, the reflecting observer achieves the necessary theoretical distance from the many, the contingent and the changeable that enables him to comprehend occurrences in the world as constituting an organized whole…. The powers of salvation and misfortune withdraw into a transcendent divine sphere beyond or underlying the disenchanted world, and become sublimated into the unifying figure of a personal god or an anonymous foundation of the world. This telos combines the origin and goal of the ontic construction of the world with a soteriological power that confers on the collective and its members a purpose that goes beyond the contingencies of human existence. The ontological cause of everything, or that which is everything in one, has at the same time the eschatological character of the guarantor of saving justice. In each of the basic concepts of ‘Yahweh’, ‘dharma’, ‘Tao’ and ‘ontōs on’, the multiplicity of mythical powers merged into something singular in which the ontic aspects of world creation or of the ground of being of the world coalesce with the normative-evaluative aspects of redemption, liberation and just fulfilment.”

Finally, Habermas concludes volume 1 with the commonalities concerning the universalness of the axial religions, “All axial worldviews detached the multitude of sacred powers from their entwinement with processes in the world and sublimated them into a singular divine power that constitutes the world as such. While magical thinking was stripped of its foundation, everyday moral consciousness was sacralized by being connected with ideas of saving justice…. In general, the communicative relationship with the person of God, whom the believer addresses as a second person and whose word he hears, and the mystical fusion with the impersonal figure of the divine are the two privileged modes of contact with the sacred…. These approaches are connected with the ethically demanding paths of salvation along which individual believers and the community of the faithful could achieve the salvific goal of redemption or liberation, of perfection or maturity, and immunization against suffering, pain and danger through a constant way of life…. The worldviews all break with the particularism of traditional forms of conventional ethical life that developed on the basis of customary family ties. Even if Yahweh’s promise of salvation is addressed directly to the covenant people, even if Confucius has the citizens of the Chinese state in mind, and even if for Plato the constitution of the polis is the measure of what is human, the postconventional core of these ideas already points to an individualistic and egalitarian universalism.”

“The City and the Mountain” by Jose Maria de Eca de Queiros (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

This novel splits time between nineteenth century Paris and the mountains of Portugal. It is narrated by Ze Fernandes, the close friend of Jacinto, the heir to a fortune with vast estates across the Portugese countryside and a mansion in Lisbon. He was, nonetheless, born and raised in Paris, never having visited his homeland, the grandson of a self-exiled royalist noble. Jacinto spends his time indulging in food and wine, attending the theater and masked balls, perusing books from his 30,000 volume library, and tinkering with the newest mechanical inventions. “Jacinto had come up with an idea, namely, that “a man can only be superlatively happy when he is superlatively civilized.” And by “civilized” my friend meant the kind of man who, by honing his thinking skills on all the philosophy acquired since Aristotle onwards and multiplying the physical strength of his organs using all the mechanisms invented since Theramenes created the wheel, could make of himself a magnificent, near-omnipotent, Adam ready to reap—within a particular society and within the limits of Progress (at least as far as Progress had gotten in 1875)—all the pleasures and all the advantages that spring from Knowledge and Power.” Jacinto was also, as befits a man of his station, a dandy. “He always wore a flower in his buttonhole, not a real flower, but one skillfully concocted by his florist from the petals of several different flowers—carnations, azaleas, orchids, or tulips—all bound together on one stem, along with a sprig of fennel.”

Despite his wealth and position, the city of Paris gradually began to bore Jacinto. “He never openly confessed his feeling to me. Jacinto, elegant and reserved, did not wring his hands and moan: “Oh accursed life!” It was more the look of satiety on his face: a gesture angrily dismissing the importunate nature of things; the way in which he would sometimes sit immobile, as if in protest, on a divan from which he would not stir, as if he wished those moments of repose to be eternal; then there were the yawns, the gaping yawns with which he underlined everything he did.” All his books of political and economic philosophy and the modish salons, where they discussed the newest utopian fads, could not cure him. “Hardened in sin, the bourgeois revels in his strength, and against him all the tears of the Humanitarians, the reasoned arguments of the Logicians and the bombs of the Anarchists are impotent.”

Ever-tired of his routine in Paris, Jacinto spontaneously decides to journey to his family estate, spurred by the news of a ceremony to reinter the bones of his ancestors, displaced when a mudslide destroyed their resting place in the ancient familial chapel. “Those hairy Jacintos who returned to their high lands in Tormes, back from defeating the Moor at Salado or the Spaniard at Valverde, did not even bother taking off their battered armor to tend their fields and to train their vines to the elms, building their kingdom with lance and spade.” In the countryside, Jacinto finally finds himself, his calling, and his home. “Jacinto had put down strong loving roots in his rough mountain home. It was as if he had been planted, like a cutting, in the ancient soil from which his race had sprung and as if the ancient humus were seeping in and penetrating him, transforming him into a rustic, almost vegetable Jacinto, as much a part of the earth and as rooted in the earth as the trees he so loved.”

“The Slaughterman’s Daughter” by Yaniv Iczkovits (translated by Orr Scharf)

This novel, translated from Hebrew, has its fair share of Yiddish sprinkled in. It takes place during the nineteenth century in the Pale of Settlement. Most of the action takes place in Motal, a predominantly Jewish village with a few muzhiks in the mix. It has quite the cast of characters—a mute Russian Army veteran, a degenerate-gambling Jewish cantor, a hobbling Okhrana officer, a brothel owner, an apocalyptic Yeshiva scholar, and, of course, a slaughterman’s daughter or two. “Fanny feels the sheath against her thigh: Why has she continued to carry the knife even after abandoning her career of slaughtering? She does not know. She intended many times to bury it in the back of a cupboard, but whenever she removed the blade from her body she felt as though something was amiss, as if it were another body part in addition to the 248 that the Sages of antiquity had enumerated in the human body.” Fanny belongs to an insulated rural Jewish community, but is a bit of an outcast, having married a stoic cheesemaker, who lives dangerously close to the goyim. “The righteous do not take political positions, they strengthen their allegiance to the Blessed Holy One instead, and they could not care less whether the nobility is bickering with the peasants, and it is all the same to them if Polish nationalists are clashing with Russian oppressors. If there is something to sell to the gentiles or to buy from them in order to make a living, so much the better—but this is where the line between them and us is drawn. We share with them the same soil but not the same world.” The adventure Fanny will end up going on will bring death aplenty, as well as soul searching, hero-making, and reconciliation. “Now she is proud of the riff-raff she has gathered around her, the types that townspeople would point at and say: “See them? They’re exactly what we’re not.” Well, this is her army. And although none of them would admit it, she knows that whatever powerful thing it is that unites this divided, battered crew, it has made waves throughout the entire empire.”

“The Beast in the Nursery” by Adam Phillips

I would not recommend this book to any of my friends with young children. It might seriously disturb them. On the other hand, it might also enlighten. Freud claimed, “if children could follow the hints given by the excitation of the penis they would get a little nearer to the solution of the problem” of how to best navigate the mysteries of growing into a successful adult. In another essay, Freud propounded, “no one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.” Phillips does not dwell on all things Oedipal, yet, as in all psychoanalysis, it lurks in the recesses of the mind.

This book is about the struggles with and conflicts in growing up- what we have to give up and what we, unfortunately, leave behind. We are told that “being realistic is a better guarantee of pleasure” and that “morality is the way we set limits on wanting,” but we don’t want to kill that inner child for “inspiration is the best word we have for appetite, and that appetite is the best thing we have going for us.” In the end, “lives are only livable if they give pleasure: that is, if we can renew our pleasures, remember their intensities.” We are told or we figure out as children that there is a natural progression in life. We are not fully humans until we become adults. Children are in search of the missing, what will complete them. But as we age we learn we must all make sacrifices, that we are not the center of the universe, and that we must settle, for not all our wishes will become fulfilled. “People come for psychoanalysis when they are feeling under-nourished, and this is because- depending on one’s psychoanalytic preferences- either what they have been given wasn’t good enough, so they couldn’t do enough with it, or because there is something wrong with their capacity for transformation…. We are interested in things despite ourselves.” To grow up is to learn to live with disappointment. “Wishing is the sign of loss; wanting things to be otherwise because they are not as they are supposed to be. For the child to live his curiosity is itself an acknowledgement of loss, of wanting as the sign of life…. We are the animals for whom something is missing and for whom what is missing is always privileged. What is absent, ironically, is what is there for us to be interested in.” Growing up also often means settling. “Education, Freud implies, teaches the child either to lose interest in what matters most to her or to compromise that interest.” What is lost on the child is that she too has something unique to offer to the world as is. The child is not merely waiting to become an adult. One could say that an adult is a child who has become stale and calcified. “If you know too well how to do something, you’re less likely to fall into originality.” The adult can try to teach, but only the child can learn. “Children’s self-education [is] about what they learned despite the adults, not because of them…. From an unknowable (unconscious) set of criteria a person, unbeknown even to himself, picks out and transforms the bits he wants; the bits that can be used in the hidden projects of unconscious desire.” Learning about the world is a mysterious process that one is constantly involved in and what is unconsciously absorbed is often more lasting than what is learned through effort.

Phillips suggests the best kind of learning is done by simply taking a hint. But “the useful hint is, more often than not, not intended as such.” It is often the case that we do most of our teaching when we never even intend it- or, at least, not how we intend it. “We might make our words smell as nice as they can, but they will go into the world and be made use of sometimes beyond our wildest intentions. They will fuel that dreamwork of everyday life called gossip. They will evoke idiosyncratic personal histories- what we call associations- in their listeners.” Life is a continuous project, but it is not always linear. But we are always growing up (or growing somewhere, at least). But as we are growing into something, we must also be growing out of something. And that loss can be acute. “How could growing up be anything but an adaptation to something other than oneself, and therefore a disillusionment?…. Something essential is lost, or at least attenuated, in the process of growing up. Whether it is called vision or imagination or vitality or hope, lives are considered to erode over time.” As we grow we learn to accept life, to accept compromise. But what we cannot compromise on, what we will not compromise on, are our morals. “It is from our discontents that we can infer our ideals…. Our unofficial, more idiosyncratic morality is only available, so to speak, through humiliation. Once you know who or what humiliates you, you know what it is about yourself that you ultimately value, that you worship. Tell me what makes you enraged- what makes you feel truly diminished- and I will tell you what you believe or what you want to believe about yourself.” In the process of growing up the child’s pleasures turn into the adult’s ideals. “Freud is not saying that we are really children, but that the sensual intensities of childhood cannot be abolished, that our ideals are transformed versions of childhood pleasures. That the values and ambitions- the representations- of the adult are an obscured picture of the passions and conflicts and curiosities of childhood. (So the wish to be rich, for example, becomes a fantasy of uninhibited access, or of being exempt from dependent need.)” What is the underlying need that is being superficially satisfied by wealth? What fears do riches satisfy? Self-sufficiency? Adulthood? Growing up? Growing old? “There is an inevitable element of humiliation in simply being a child, though the child’s relative helplessness can be more or less exploited by the parents; the child is not sufficient unto himself, he cannot bring himself up…. Compliance is always experienced by the child as demeaning (sadomasochism is the trick by which adults make compliance and domination bearable by making them sexually exciting.)”

In the end, do we ever really grow up? Is it healthy to do so? “What children supposedly suffer from is not being what they think of as adults; and adulthood becomes the afterlife for children, which means a growing acquaintance with the unappeasable nature of desire…. Growing up, in other words, is not so much acquiring a more realistic sense of ourselves, but rather the process of forgetting our earliest entitlements.” However, the really interesting question for Freud was quite the opposite of growing up, “why is it that adults are more like children than they want to be?”