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be regarded exclusively as scientifically demystified illusions and considers religious existences to be remnants of a superseded social epoch….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.”
