Postmetaphysical Thinking II

[Edward theurj Berge]

by Jurgen Habermas

‘There is no alternative to postmetaphysical thinking’: this statement, made by Jürgen Habermas in 1988, has lost none of its relevance. Postmetaphysical thinking is, in the first place, the historical answer to the crisis of metaphysics following Hegel, when the central metaphysical figures of thought began to totter under the pressure exerted by social developments and by developments within science. As a result, philosophy’s epistemological privilege was shaken to its core, its basic concepts were de-transcendentalized, and the primacy of theory over practice was opened to question. For good reasons, philosophy ‘lost its extraordinary status’, but as a result it also courted new problems. In Postmetaphysical Thinking II, the sequel to the 1988 volume that bears the same title (English translation, Polity 1992), Habermas addresses some of these problems.

The first section of the book deals with the shift in perspective from metaphysical worldviews to the lifeworld, the unarticulated meanings and assumptions that accompany everyday thought and action in the mode of ‘background knowledge’. Habermas analyses the lifeworld as a ‘space of reasons’ – even where language is not (yet) involved, such as, for example, in gestural communication and rituals. In the second section, the uneasy relationship between religion and postmetaphysical thinking takes centre stage. Habermas picks up where he left off in 1988, when he made the far-sighted observation that ‘philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will be able neither to replace nor to repress religion’, and explores philosophy’s new-found interest in religion, among other topics. The final section includes essays on the role of religion in the political context of a post-secular, liberal society.

This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, religion and the social sciences and humanities generally.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Some excerpts of interest to this forum from the Notre Dame Philosophical Review:

"‘Postmetaphysical thinking,’ as Habermas defines it, then, is obliged to walk a tightrope. It renounces as outdated any philosophical vision of the world imbued with substantive values. But then it finds itself intimately linked to extra-philosophical sources of meaning — pre-eminently religion — that are characterized by a fusion of validity spheres. It needs this connection in order to make up for what it has renounced by insisting on their separation."

"The volume is divided into three parts, each of which deals with the interface between philosophy — or, more generally, rational argumentative discourse — and religion, but focuses on a distinct domain of philosophical enquiry. In Part I, Habermas deals with the function of myth and religious ritual as integral to the emergence of human society as such. He also offers a grand historical schema for mapping the evolving relation between philosophy and religious consciousness, stretching from the ‘axial age’ (the period of the founding of the world’s great religious traditions — roughly around the middle of the first millenium BCE), right up to the post-modern theology of the present. Part II is concerned with the venerable question of the relation between faith and knowledge; with his habitual intellectual generosity, Habermas offers extensive, thoughtful and learned responses to the papers which were presented by theologians and philosophers of religion at two conferences devoted to his work, in New York and Vienna. In the final part he addresses the thorny and acutely topical question of the political relations between the secular and religious citizens of contemporary states, taking as his most important interlocutor John Rawls."

[Edward theurj Berge]

More:

"Habermas’s new emphasis on the notion that religious faith, which — as he stresses — has an ‘opacity’ resistant to the kind of conceptual appropriation which Hegel assumed possible, may remain a reservoir of meaning and insight, already set a limit to the scope of reason-giving. But, in the first part he concedes further weaknesses of purely discursive procedures."

"He then argues, building on Durkheim, that religious ritual functions as a compensating mechanism, stabilizing the newly fluid norms of social life by re-enacting the process of their generation. This means, Habermas suggests, that — still in the present day — believers, through the liturgical practices which are integral to any faith, have access to ‘an archaic experience’ and to ‘a source of solidarity’ which is closed to the ‘unbelieving sons and daughters of modernity.’"

[Edward theurj Berge]

That last point is relevant to discussions we're having in our local humanist group. We humanists, as adherents of Enlightenment reason, lament that we don't have the sort of solidarity that religious folks share. We tend to be cats that cannot be herded because of our rejection of herd mind or tribal affiliation.

Another part of that is lack of any contemplative or meditative "archaic experience" around which to bind ourselves. Humanists tend to stereotype this as just superstitious nonsense outside of rational inquiry. Whereas many in the integral community do partake of such practices and have such shared "archaic" experiences.

But then there's still the question of postmetaphysics, a key ingredient for Habermas. Those religious or meditative experiences still are not direct access to reality as such or even some sort of pure consciousness free of 'defilements' or biases. It's still a very sticky wicket. Their syntegrity seems to come from a balancing act of both separating and fusing the validity spheres, maintaining some autopoetic distance yet finding those sweet spots where they intersect. Those spheres share in their intersection yet still constrain each other in their separation: Dynamic tensegrity as syntegrity.

[Edward theurj Berge]

As a supplement I suggest Edwards et al. discussion on syntegrity. For some reason it can no longer be read online so you'll have to download it.

"Therefore syn-integral bridging does not follow the ideas of a metaphysical harmony, nor an underlying unity-oriented ideal(ism). Rather, it embraces demands of diversity, complexities, intricacies and ambiguities of bounded organizational realities as well as its theoretical and empirical investigations. Such an orientation towards integral passages in the spirit of ‘syn-integrality’ allows not only dealing with conflicts, dilemmas, paradoxes and pathologies of organization in a creative way. It also contributes to a more comprehensive rendering of individual, group-related and organizational surplus within a ‘bounded integrality'" (128).