The European Legacy Toward New Paradigms
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Postsecular Sensibility: Sacralization and Principled Distance Richard R. Weiner To cite this article: Richard R. Weiner (2015) Postsecular Sensibility: Sacralization and Principled Distance, The European Legacy, 20:4, 400-403, DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2015.1016767 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2015.1016767
Published online: 22 Apr 2015.
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The European Legacy, 2015 Vol. 20, No. 4, 400–403, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2015.1016767
Review Postsecular Sensibility: Sacralization and Principled Distance What Is Political Theory, and Why Do We Need It? By Rajeev Bhargava (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), xvi + 408 pp. $29.75/13.99 paper. The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights. By Hans Joas (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013), xii + 220 pp. $29.95/24.00 paper. Multiple Modernities and Postsecular Societies. Edited by Massimo Rosati, Kristina Stoecki, and Richard R. Weiner (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), xii +188 pp. $99.95/49.95, cloth.
RICHARD R. WEINER L’insertion de l’e´ternal dans le temporal, du spiritual dans le corporel, dans le charnel. Charles Peguy (1910) Before the First World War, Georg Lukacs ruminated about how a soul might express itself through communication with another soul; how a soul can cope with and even house the chaos and contingency giving it life. Afterwards, Lukacs recognized how consciousness of objectified representations takes the place of the longings of the soul. Inherent in Lukacs’s ruminations is the persistent unsettledness of how we engage secular reason in the fugitive flashes of a sense of the sacred—a sense of grace amidst the mysteries exceeding both our control and our comprehension. The “sacred,” Jose´ Ortega y Gassett reminded us, is our decisive existential attitude. And Henri Bergson noted that sacred-
ness/sacralization implies a sense of the soul’s capacity to reach outside of time to fulfill its longing. Must we see the concept of secularization that is linked to the myths of the Enlightenment and the Idea of Progress as desacralizing? Or does sacred reverence persist as what Ronald Dworkin and Hans Joas call “secular sacredness,” secular as opposed to divine self-revelation, when we consider secular events as resulting from contingent creations of human beings acting within historical time? Proceeding in parallel with the late Robert Bellah, Hans Joas utilizes a cluster approach of moral anthropology and historical sociology in conjunction with Quentin Skinner’s contextualized history of political theory. The common problematic is whether the values upon which a democratic secular society is built may be generated out of the deepest value commitments articulated in the normative and intersubjective forms we live in. To what extent is secular vs. sacred a false binary? Does the secular eclipse and replace the spiritual? Secular society is no longer naively thought of as state neutrality toward religion, where religions and theology lose their public role and remain important only in private sanctuaries of individual spirituality. Secularism more broadly—as argued by Charles Taylor and William Connolly— denotes a turning toward temporality, toward the world in one’s own epoch. Rajeev Bhargava’s contribution is rooted in his concepts of “principled distance” and “political secularism”—which are the essence of his book. These concepts are similarly described as “principled tolerance” in Massimo Rosati and Kristina Stoecki’s edited volume, Multiple Modernities and Postsecular
Rhode Island College, Department of Political Science, Providence, RI, 02908, USA. Email:
[email protected] © 2015 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
REVIEW Societies. Thus the political theory essays in the Bhargava volume are just stuck on at the beginning of what is a collection of previously published essays. Their importance lies in how Bhargava targets the presumed neutral universal norms of the liberal rule-of-law state (Rechtsstaat) in the attempt to redefine the history of modern political theory and adjust it to the complex realities of contemporary non-Western societies. Yet modernity, the Rosati and Stoecki volume demonstrates, is not a monistic concept particular to Western/European civilization. Experience manifests uneven and multiple paths of modernizing which cannot be universalized. Thus alongside the French Republican laicist model of exclusion, there is the Dutch consociational pillarization of parallel societies, and the German model of state collaboration with religious communities without privileging one religion over another. Further, we can note the antagonistic force of religion vis-a`-vis modernization in Russia; while in Nigeria, Pentecostalism serves as a motor for modernization. And in Turkey we witness a dramatic shift from French laicism to the passive form of secularism practiced in the United States. Rosati and Stoecki proceed with a “varieties of secularism” approach. Whereas in the Western approaches to modernity, secularization is associated with the functional differentiation of religion, in non-Western settings, varieties of secularism often incorporate or even thrive on religious values rather than excluding or diminishing them. Bhargava, in particular, misses the significance of the sacred/sacralization issue as he triumphantly heralds Indian political secularism: a plural society model of conflict regulation/containment. Indeed in his purported “redescriptionist rather than abolitionist” post-colonialist attack on modernization theories, secularism is associated with the imperialist shadow of embedded global liberalism. Bhargava neglects the critical issue of whether we are confronting an “axial” moment of post-secular sensibility. By “post-secular” I do not connote or denote merely the mutual respect of the Other implicit in the multiculturalist writings of Bhargava, and originally proffered in 2008 by Ju¨rgen Habermas. This is an understanding of the post-secular as a condition in which
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secular citizens treat Others’ religious/spiritual expressions as not simply irrational or nonrational, but with mutual—and even agonistic —respect and dialogic engagement. This mutual recognition and reciprocity involves what Habermas refers to as “complementary learning processes” in which “the epistemic disposition of bearers of both secular and religious world views take seriously each Others’ contributions to controversial theories in the public sphere.” Rosati and Stoecki, in a more pronounced manner than Bhargava, stress the need to bring the post-secular sensibility to the non-Western context. Yet we intuit a deeper concern in “postsecular sensibility”—the concern with what Joas refers to as the “longing for sacralization.” This is the problematic at the root of the writings of Henri Bergson, Charles Peguy, and Thomas Mann at the dawn of the twentieth century: a spiritual yearning Mann noted, along with Lukacs, “that never left us” amidst the fleeting quality of time. I intuit new forms of life that are negotiated from the categories and dispositions of the respective habituses of actors. Here I am stimulated by Rosati and Stoecki’s claim that the right to wear a headscarf is increasingly justified as a human right rather than as an Islamic rule. Bhargava misses an appreciation of the history of political theory as a dialectic of value forms and life forms (i.e., forms of life). By post-secular sensibility Habermas intimates an awareness of something missing in secular legitimations per se: after the future, after laicism, after existentialism. Habermas and Joas intimate what Gilles Deleuze would describe as the unfolding/enfolding of the latest stage of modernization where we may have reached the limit of the bourgeois public sphere. This intimation expresses two urgent needs: First there is the need to create a spiritually engaged cultural sphere. This is one in which we can feel called to share an interior authority, deeper within the soul. Second, there is the need to move beyond the Enlightenment’s purported disinterested quest for procedural universalism—as conveyed by “principled distance”—which disguises a desire to control and regulate conflict. This is what Bergson refers to in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) as the need to respect the affective intensity of spirituality and not its ecclesiastical appropriateness as a veiled
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principled distance from others. It is a spirituality expressing the openness of caritas, the care for others that unites us, beyond the principled distance dictated by the rigid dogmas of pre-existing rules and categorizations. Post-secular sensibility thus expresses a new intersubjective form of life enabling the “fusion of horizons” that John Dewey, Paul Ricouer, and Hans-Georg Gadamer dedicated their respective philosophies to. For Joas, like Bergson, this spiritual sensibility is not just a consciousness—not just an awareness—of the objects of meaningful reference Emile Durkheim focused on. It is an affective involvement rooted in intuitive memory, and denotes a mutual understanding greater than Durkheim’s emphasis on bondingness/bindingness. Durkheim’s appreciation of practical reasoning in itself is not an affective force without piggybacking on the vitalist sense of obligation—the sense of fused horizons. It is an understanding of the disposition of the soul as a form of life, or in Joas’s words: “What calls upon us with affective intensity. ... And how are we called?” These emerging value forms (bourgeois and post-bourgeois) and forms of life (secular and post-secular) are summarized in the table below, with no pun on “the sign of the cross” intended. We understand these forms of value commitment as historically specific mediations.
Bourgeois Secular
Bourgeois Post-Secular
Post-Bourgeois Secular
Post-Bourgeois Post-Secular
In the value forms articulated in Kant (bourgeois) and Marx (post-bourgeois), the organizing principles of modern life are grasped within a secular frame. These organizing principles are historically determinate structuring forms. Thomas Mann describes the compulsive discipline of Thomas Buddenbrooks as Kantian imperatives. Marx on the
other hand depicts the evasion of the social. Currently the neoliberal restoration of the link between property and culture manifests the persisting bourgeois value form. Forms of life are the processes created by the active doings/practices of subjects as manifested in their interpretative schemas for role-taking and performance. These forms denote a sense of being and action in the lifeworld, bracketed off from the enveloping historically determinate structural forces. Peguy, Lukacs, and Mann sensed the impasse of the Bourgeois Secular. Mann recognized the Post-Secular longings, but was too attached to the Bourgeois to jettison its valorizations. Peguy and Lukacs—and more recently Deleuze—pursued their Post-Secular intimations. Bhargava points to a comparative political theory in discussing how Western conceptions of political secularism have not been successfully translated into non-Western societies. The important question he raises is: “What are the independent rational principles for such comparative analysis and understanding?” In his concept of “principled distance” boundary regulation, he suggests a more flexible approach than strict state neutrality. He even recognizes the need to defetishize the walls and veils occluding mutual recognition and the fusion of horizons. And the state is understood as a filter through which voices are recognized. But “principled distance” assumes (1) closed religious/spiritual communities; and (2) an interventionist state role in balancing incommensurable and competing spiritual value commitments. Bhargava proceeds in a “best practices” mode rather than in terms of independent rational principles of comparative political theory. At its best, the Bhargava volume emphasizes the need to open up social spaces —sacred places in the words of Rosati and Koecki—where people can be engaged spiritually. Importantly, this points up the transformation of social rights beyond health and income maintenance into cultural rights. However, Bhargava raises some deeply troubling contentions. First, whether we need to jettison the social liberal state’s preoccupation with equal treatment. Further, whether we should abandon secularism and become more religious-centered. And finally, he trumpets the superiority of Indian plural society
REVIEW institutional arrangements. This hubris is completely shattered by the work of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen who in Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (2013) condemns the very Indian model trumpeted by Bhargava as a consumer economy built on the destitute without healthcare, without adequate schools, and without basic facilities for human wellbeing. Where the poor are shut out of public discourse and mutual recognition, “shackled to their deprived lives in a way quite rarely seen in other self-respecting countries that are to move ahead in the world.” Joas, on the other hand, responds to the challenge of a comparative political theory: the need to supplement the social liberal politics of human dignity with both a more universalistic and comparative politics of difference by understanding practices as forms of life. Despite his debt to Durkheim, Joas acknowledges that Durkheim did not provide an adequate theory of the collective process of sacralization as a sensibilization: as a solidarity of feeling, a collective moral intuition having affective intensity. The sacred is an experience generated in the social itself, but is not to be understood just as a moral bond experience. Joas turns to the writings of another at the dawn of the twentieth century—Ernst Troeltsch (100). Like Lukacs, Troeltsch confronted the turn to a modern consciousness itself, “especially to the extent that this consciousness is thought to have made us aware of the historical genesis of all belief, all claims to truth and value”—particularly universalizable validity claims beyond incommensurability. For Joas the cultural specificity of value systems does not exclude the possibility of sociologically taking into account universalist value commitments in the mediation of historical specificity and intensive intersubjective forms of life, linking historical and justificatory arguments (69, 105–8). Value commitments are understood as more than purely cognitive validity claims, for they contain
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“affective intensity” (chap. 6). He presents an empirically grounded historical sociology as an “affirmative genealogy” that undercuts strictly rational explanation with an intriguing intuitive sense of sacrality (5, 130). In his own words: “the moral intuition that some things —such as human life—must be categorically protected” (44), but not in the Kantian mode of universal validity claims that are entirely independent of history. This is Critical Theory understood as an affirmative genealogy of committedness to secular objects, as experienced in embodied practices, with an illocutionary goal of convincing listeners/readers of implicit or explicit justificatory arguments at the level of practices and institutions. Rather than a deconstructive genealogy that erodes our commitment to values in an irreducible subjectivity of all evaluations, Joas’s affirmative genealogy sustains and strengthens that committedness to sacred objects of meaningful reference. “Religious convictions are not immune to communicative questioning” (178). Joas argues that there are universal values (3). They emerge as practices. Human rights did not emerge as purely secular phenomena (27). They emerged sociologically to serve as the independent rational principles for a comparative political theory. He builds his affirmative genealogy of human rights on Durkheim’s attention to how the individual is converted into a sacral object as part of the transformation of diffuse solidarity-based relations, and describes secular and post-secular sacrality and the sacralization process as one in which “every single human being has increasingly, and with ever-increasing motivational and sensitizing effects, been viewed as sacred, and this understanding has been institutionalized in law” (5). The emerging sacred sense of the dignity of the human being, typically studied comparatively in material practices, thus rises beyond and above bourgeois convention.
