“Also A History of Philosophy Vol. 2” by Jurgen Habermas (translated by Ciaran Cronin)

Volume Two of Habermas’ magnum opus is where he recounts how the fissures between faith and knowledge solidified. First, Habermas notes the differences between classical Athens and Christian Jerusalem, “There remains the crucial difference between the metaphysical path of salvation, which privileges the thinking and intellectual contemplation of the sage as epistemic ways of approaching the unknowable One, and the religious path of salvation, which teaches the sinner's faith in the promise of the invisible but communicatively accessible God…. Christians believe that they can only be redeemed from their sins by God's prevenient grace and through faith in Christ's sacrificial death, the Platonist knows that he can only free his rational soul from the material entanglements of a corporeal existence and reunite it with the transcendent good through insight, that is, intellectual self-liberation.”

The lynchpin between classical and Christian philosophy was Aristotle. “Aristotle's writings on physics, biology and psychology assume as self-evident the idea of a hierarchical 'ladder' of nature, which has retained its relevance to the present day, extending from inorganic nature through self-reproducing plants and animals endowed with consciousness to ensouled human beings…. Individual things are composed of 'form' and 'matter'; and the law-governed connections between things are analysed from the perspective of a craftsman making a product in accordance with four causal aspects (the form, the material, the applied movement and the desired end). But since what exists as a whole is conceived as a self-sufficient cosmos, eternally resting within itself, the telos inherent in things cannot be understood on the model of the mode of production as a fixed or intended purpose. Rather, as in an organism, the 'telos' is 'implicit' in each thing as a specific or generic determination…. This teleological structure pervades that which is as a whole, so that in this respect Aristotle's ontology is congenial to the Christian doctrine of creation…. It is not primarily by reconceptualizing metaphysics in scientific terms that Aristotle leaves the via antiqua and points towards modernity, but rather by decoupling practical and theoretical reason…. The Aristotelian theory of virtue is not based on any metaphysical premises…. The bios theorêtikos is no longer conceived as a path leading to a transcendent goal; it loses the religious meaning of a preparation for a fulfilled life of the immortal soul after death. Rather, the philosopher's life, devoted to intellectual activity, is a source of pleasure and contains the reward of satisfaction in itself…. In accordance with the ancient ideal of the life of the wise man, the life of the theoretician is distinguished from the already privileged ways of life of the politician and the soldier, of the businessman and the craftsman, by the advantages one enjoys in the sublunar spheres. This is what ethics as such is about: it is a guide to the good life, which belongs in general to the telos of the human species.”

It was the juxtaposition of Plato, carried into the Middle Ages through Neoplatonism, and Aristotle, first subsumed through Aquinas via Albertus Magnus and the Arabs, that would form the foundations for western metaphysics, “In the Platonic theory of knowledge, experience, discursive thought, intellectual intuition and wisdom still refer to each other. The complex relationship between these cognitive faculties reflects the unity of the understanding of the world and of oneself, of theoretical and practical reason. Aristotle, on the other hand, constructs such a relationship only at the biographical level, through the philosopher's way of life dedicated to theory. In Aristotle, the perspective of a first person seeking practical orientation becomes so independent of the observer perspective of the natural scientist that the doctrine of metaphysical principles can no longer provide information about the principles of ethics. This task is now left to practical prudence, which no longer has to satisfy the demands of scientific knowledge. Ethical reflection is oriented towards a highest good that already lacks the redemptive power and transcendent position of the Platonic idea of the good. The downgrading of practical reason in the hierarchy of cognitive faculties goes hand in hand with the profanation of its goal—the good life assumes the concrete form of a telos in the world…. If, like Thomas, one wishes to discover the monotheistic god of creation and salvation in the anonymous shell of the 'unmoved mover', the ontotheological idea of a first being suggests itself as the common ground of philosophy and theology…. But God cannot be grasped with the senses, nor can he be subsumed under a generic concept (such as 'living being') or a specific concept (such as 'man' or 'plant'). Otherwise, he would just be one composite being among others. Using our natural reason, we can only infer God's existence indirectly from the effects he causes in the world…. This makes it all the more urgent to trace the boundaries between the realms of faith and knowledge, and thus to ask how far conclusive scientific knowledge extends into the realm of the truths of faith. Thomas chooses two indirect ways in which the human mind can get confirmation, at least in outline, of the divine essence, using metaphysical concepts alone: the first is the via negationis, the negation of general statements that we use to describe what we typically perceive as imperfect features of natural processes in the world; the second is the analogia entis, the analogical comprehension of qualities…. In both cases, we not only presuppose from the outset the teleological structure of being as a whole, but also tacitly assume that God has a personal nature. Otherwise we would not be able to know his essence either via negationis as the exalted compensation of perceived deficiencies, or per analogiam as the asymptotic perfectioning [infinitesimale Perfektionierung] of the most highly valued faculties of the human mind, that is, of an individuated mind embodied in a person.”

Habermas's Aquinas is the philosopher who, more than any other, re-ontologizes what Aristotle had cut loose, “Whereas theoretical reason aims at describing an existing ontic 'order' that reason itself does not produce but only considers (ordo quem ratio non facit, sed solum considerat), practical reason first produces such an order in the world (ordo quem ratio considerando facit) by guiding action accordingly. Practical reason owes its existence to the extension of the intellect to another faculty of the human mind, namely, the will, in order to guide it in action…. By providing practical philosophy with a metaphysical foundation, Thomas removes it from the sphere of mere considerations of prudence and returns it to the realm of ratio. This enables him, in contrast to Aristotle, to ground the binary coding of the free decisions of the will as 'good' and 'bad' in the truth code of rational knowledge…. Ethics can indeed be guided by the theoretical philosophical concepts of the ens realissimum and the summum bonum; but this 'highest good' remains an ontological abstraction from the 'face-to-face' encounter with the transcendent God.”

The political consequences of this ontology are treated as a shift in the order of the disciplines, not as doctrine, “For Aristotle, human beings are inherently 'political' in the sense that they can realize their telos only in exercising their rights as citizens within the framework of the polis…. For Thomas, this becomes animal sociale et politicum. He sees how Aristotle defines human nature through language as a medium of communication and sociability. Language makes possible a form of cooperation based on a division of labour by which human beings can compensate for the deficiencies of their natural endowment…. Thomas is more likely to have in mind the kinship groups of the Old Testament when he declares the 'oikos', the family household and its associated economic ties, to be the nucleus and paradigm of society…. Augustine’s relationship between civitas divina and civitas terrena had shaped political theory insofar as, in the former, human beings are united under the realized law of the New Testament in a community of love governed solely by virtue, whereas, on earth, the law of the Old Testament is in the hands of a political authority that administers justice by spreading fear and terror with the sword. From this perspective, which is informed by the theology of history, the ethical already appears to be superior to the political…. The political goal of 'the good life' is subordinated to the ethical goal of blessedness, not only for the individual but also for the organization of society…. From this perspective, in contrast to Aristotle, ethics also takes precedence in the system of sciences over politics as the doctrine of wise government.”

Ockham’s nominalism introduces mentalism and contingency into God’s actions, freeing the immanent world from necessity, “Ockham rejects the claim that 'abstractive knowledge does not attain the object in itself under its perfect idea but only in a certain diminished likeness, while intuitive knowledge attains the object in itself under its perfect idea’…. He extends the faculty of intuitive experience from sensible to intelligible objects, so that the introspectively accessible acts of the human mind become as much objects of cognition as the things and states of affairs encountered in the world…. This blurs Scotus's juxtaposition of the two cognitive faculties of intuitive experience and abstract cognition to such an extent that Ockham can also question the primacy of intuition and the dependence of conceptually abstract cognition on intuition…. Ockham transforms the ontological dualism of mind and matter into the epistemological relationship between the subject of knowledge and the world of objects…. The nominalist de-structuring of the ontological order makes external nature the object of a science that, relying solely on natural reason, must search for traces of the order contingently established by God in the diversity of the objects of experience we encounter. And because it is directed in a similar way to internal nature, the subjectivity of the human mind, this objectifying view of external nature generates the opposition between subject and object that would eventually make epistemology, along with rational natural law, the royal road of modern philosophy.”

Luther’s reforms would unleash a chain reaction of new ideas through western Europe that was unfathomable at its start, “Luther no longer attempts to explain the believer's encounter with God with the philosophical intention of clarifying the propositional content of this experience and, if possible, justifying it on philosophical grounds. He develops a hermeneutic awareness of the methodological primacy of the performative meaning of religious experience over its propositional content; but he no longer seeks to reconstruct and justify the latter rationally in order to prove that faith is rational. Rather, he focuses on the relationship between the sinner struggling for salvation and God, and decouples the act of faith from reason as such.” This irony is the hinge of the whole second volume, “It is precisely the theocentric doctrine that human destiny is unconditionally dependent on God's inscrutable mercy that, as a result of the resolute emancipation of faith from all metaphysics, opens the door to an anthropocentric turn in philosophy — and thus becomes the forerunner of postmetaphysical thought.”

Habermas locates the origin of that communicatively accessible God in Augustine, whose inward turn discovers the will as a faculty distinct from the intellect and, with it, the first-person stance that Luther will later seal off from the world entirely. Henceforth, after Luther, theology and philosophy would separate into their own spheres of interest, never to overlap, “Theology is supposed to follow the epistemic stance of the believer 'before God', while philosophy and science take the position of an inquiring observer 'towards the world'. Luther sees no way of mediating between these two epistemic stances. This definitive decoupling of faith from knowledge is a consequence of the doctrine of justification…. Faith depends on the motivational condition of a radical awareness of sin and an intense desire for existential conversion—and is no longer tied to the context of a particular worldview. Faith is a matter of trust, not of knowledge…. Until Luther, philosophy and theology had sought to demonstrate their truth by embedding the articles of faith in the context of a well-founded worldview—in other words, by proving the coherence of faith and knowledge…. There is nothing to be learnt from the knowledge gathered coram mundo for the faith experiences coram Deo. For the latter, all that counts is trust in God's promise of salvation, which can be trustworthy or untrustworthy, and not the affirmation of propositions, which can be true or false…. From a sociological point of view, this fideistic turn amounts to a self-referential isolation of religious faith from any interference by propositions from other domains…. From the point of view of the participants, the truths of faith, tailored to truthfulness or authenticity, become detached from the spectrum of assertoric and normative validity claims raised for statements and the content of statements…. The price paid by Luther for the renewal of an internalized, subjectively deepened faith was a fideistic separation of faith and knowledge, which in the following centuries called into question the religious mode of faith as such all the more, the more the faith thus sealed off also lost its roots in the ritual practice of the community…. Without a connection to God's will and his promise of salvation, practical philosophy must separate questions of justice from the perspective of the righteous life that leads to salvation, and justify moral precepts by reason alone. It must also face the resulting problem of how rational morality and rational law, tailored to questions of justice alone, relate to the socially integrative energies of moral cohesion in an increasingly secular society…. From the point of view of a philosopher who also saw himself as a natural scientist, laws of nature could still be traced back to a divine lawgiver, but they could no longer be understood in an ontotheological double sense as at once naturally necessary and normatively commanding laws of God. In any case, once the theological aspect of salvation history recedes into the background, the idea of nature as a self-sustaining whole operating according to unchanging mechanical laws suggests itself…. Once philosophy is no longer interested in the salvific relevance of the god of salvation, it makes no essential difference to the concept of law whether the divine lawgiver is conceived in deistic terms as limited to the establishment and maintenance of a self-reproducing nature (Descartes), or in pantheistic terms as merging with the living spirit of nature (Spinoza), or in materialistic terms as playing no role at all (Hobbes)…. The philosophy of the subject is faced with the question of where to locate the normative dimension of the right and the good as such.”

Luther had successfully sealed faith off from within. The natural sciences now are able to do it from without, “The modern natural sciences and their philosophical foundations claim a monopoly on scientific knowledge that deprives faith of its rational character and relegates it entirely to the realm of the irrational…. As Hegel would note, Descartes's attitude of not accepting as true any proposition that does not withstand the most scrupulous rational scrutiny embodies the modern consciousness of freedom.” Spinoza takes the opposite tack, not sealing religion off, but going in after what is salvageable, “Spinoza is the first philosopher to seek to understand the biblical tradition in its historical context in order to reconstruct a truth content hidden in religion itself; he wants to teach religion about its own rational core.” And the modern political settlement is what emerges from the wreckage of the scholastic worldview, “A crucial legacy is the conceptual tools of late scholastic natural law, which Hobbes and Spinoza put on a secular footing: political rule can only be legitimized by the general consent of free and equal citizens who agree with each other—each with all the others—to unite in a political body and cumulatively transfer their natural individual power to the legally constituted authority of a government…. Like Hobbes and Spinoza, Locke endows human beings with primordial natural rights. From the right to self-preservation follow the fundamental rights to life and bodily integrity, liberty and property.” The final question is one Habermas returns to, whether reason alone can generate the normative substance that the metaphysical path of salvation used to supply, or whether it can only inherit it from theology.

“Smoke” by Ivan Turgenev (translated by Donald Rayfield)

This short novel by Turgenev takes place almost entirely amongst the large Russian community taking in the waters, the mountains, and the casinos in Baden Baden. “If a dozen Russians get together, the very first question to arise—as you’ve been able to see today—will be the meaning, the future of Russia, all in generalizations, from Leda and the Swan onward, with no evidence or conclusions. They keep chewing over this miserable question like children with a mouthful of rubber: no juice, no point. And of course, that means the rotten West will get a kicking. Some parable, you might think! The West beats us on all counts, but it’s rotten! It wouldn’t be so bad… if we really did despise it, but it’s all hot air and lies. We certainly curse it, but the only thing we value is its opinion, I mean the opinion of Parisian morons.”

The theme of Russia’s place in Europe recurs often amongst this affluent Russian set, “I’m a Westernizer, I’m devoted to Europe, or to be precise, I’m devoted to an educated culture, which we Russians make such gentle fun of nowadays, to civilization—yes, yes, that’s the right word for it—and I love it with all my heart, I believe in it, and I have no other faith, and am not going to change…. All the other terms—national character, or glory—have a smell of blood about them. To hell with them!… Yes sir, I both love and hate my Russia, my strange, dear, nasty, precious motherland.” Class is another recurring motif in the novel, “Litvinov felt more and more uncomfortable. His pride, his decent plebeian pride, was making him feel indignant. What did he, the son of a minor civil servant, have in common with them, these Petersburg military aristocrats? He loved everything they hated; he hated everything they loved—of that he was only too clearly aware, he could feel it with his entire being.”

The entire plot of the novel centers around Litvinov and a past love, who after a decade apart, reenters his life just when he is about to be married, “Litvinov tried to expel Irina’s image from his head, but he had no success. That was the reason that he hadn’t even remembered about his fiancée; he felt that today Irina’s image would not give way. He proposed, without worrying any more, to wait for this entire “strange story” to reach a conclusion. That conclusion could not be far off, and Litvinov had no doubt at all that it would be a wholly innocuous and natural one.” However, the story proceeds as expected to all except Litvinov, perhaps, “That night Litvinov didn’t sleep at all, and didn’t even undress. He was very distressed. Being honest and fair-minded, he could understand the importance of obligations, the sacrosanct nature of duty, and he would have found it shameful to try to be evasive, given his weakness and his misconduct. At first, he was overcome by numb consternation, and it took him a long time to shed this constant half-conscious, dark, oppressive, and confused feeling. Then he was overwhelmed by horror at the thought that his future, which he had with great effort virtually assured, his future was once more enveloped in darkness. He was horrified at the thought that the solid house which he had only just erected had suddenly collapsed…. Positive people, like Litvinov, should not let themselves be carried away by passion, for it unhinges the very meaning of their life. But nature can’t handle logic, our human logic; it has its own, which we can’t understand and won’t recognize until it runs over us like a carriage wheel.”

“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.”