For someone like me who has been studying Jürgen Habermas’ thought and classical sociology in the Durkheimian tradition for years, being here on this occasion is not only a great pleasure, but also a great opportunity. I wish to thank Regina Kreide and Walter Privitera for such an opportunity. Years ago, writing on solidarity and the sacred in Ėmile Durkheim, I tried to unearth a Durkheimian core in the Theory of communicative action (Rosati 2003), reconstructing communicative action as a linguistified form of the sacred, whose normative force — under modern structural conditions of world’s differentiation — keeps some echo of the sacred itself and duplicates its inner tension between duty and desirability. As a consequence of this Durkheimian reading of communicative action, I was not surprised at all — as many were in Italy and worldwide — when Habermas started to write systematically on religion. It was not only, in my view, a new postsecular awareness of the role of historical religions in the world after September 11, but also a quite predictable reflection on a nucleus of Habermas’ thought that had always been in need of further elaboration. I welcomed this further elaboration, and I am deeply convinced that Habermas’ work on religion — too frequently by him considered in the singular, namely in abstract terms and far from historical differentiations, particularities and specificities — is a fantastic, precious and rare lesson of openness and intellectual generosity. Despite my disagreements on many points.
What has changed over the years in Habermas’ view on religion is that nowadays he doesn’t believe anymore that communicative action can fully linguistify the sacred; the new awareness of the coexistence of secular and religious forms of life in a contemporary horizon made him more sensitive towards traces of ritual and myth that are still among us, towards what he calls the archaic that resists to a full linguistification. This is part of the new postsecular sensitivity: a stronger awareness that, to quote Robert Bellah, nothing is ever lost, and that both mimetic and mythic worldviews coexist together within theoretical ones. Drawing from socio-anthropological literature — Durkheim, Van Gennep, Turner: a real pleasure for Durkheimian ears — Habermas analyzes in details the working of ritual and myth (Habermas 2011). Despite residual modernist overtones and specific disagreements on his analysis of ritual, I have no doubts on the relevance of Habermas’ present awareness of the persistence – albeit in transformed, more reflective forms – of ritual praxes and sacred worldviews, that – in his words – keep an access to that ‘archaic experience to which unbelievers sons and daughters of modernity turned their backs’ (end of chapter 3).
In my opinion, this is a great gain, in terms of our capability of understanding societies which are fully modern and, at the same time, fully religious (Davie 2005) — in Europe as well as in the US and elsewhere in the world. This said, I want to take the advantage of this occasion to explicit three persisting limits that I see in Habermas’ position. I want to synthetize them under three labels: a) refusal of fully recognizing the normative dimension of the postsecular; b) refusal of decoupling the sacred; c) refusal of grasping the deep, unconscious dimension of the sacred.
a) Refusal of fully recognizing the normative dimension of the postsecular
What surprised me reading the chapters of the new book on post-metaphysical thinking—especially those concerning myth, ritual and religion — was the lack of any reference to that process of complementary learning which characterizes the very concept of the postsecular in previous Habermasian writings. It seems that what Habermas gained in anthropological thickness in his articulation of the role of myth and ritual in evolutionary terms, he lost in the normative understanding of the relationship between secular and religious forms of life.
Shadowed by a deeper understanding of the sociological relevance and the workings of myth, ritual and the sacred, the central idea of a complementary learning process between secular and religious forms of life seems to step in the background. Habermas’ views seems to be ‘disenchanted’ and even ‘nostalgic’: the echo of the archaic is still here, and religious people are those who have a privileged access to it, while “we”— as modern unbelievers —can just take note of this. Habermas clearly sees that ritual practices provide for both the self-constitution and the self-expression of (religious) communities; at the same time, he seems uninterested in reflecting upon what we, the moderns, might learn from the workings of ritual: the making of social solidarity on the one hand, and a specific kind of reflexivity on the other.[1] It is like if that echo could only work within the small and self-contained borders of religious communities, and its inner logic might not be “expanded” to the social at large. Ritual and the sacred have nothing to do with society at large, they make sense only in the religious domain traditionally understood.
Secondly, when Habermas confronts the hotly debated issue of the place of religions in the public and political sphere, he abstains from any immanent and “inner” analysis of the principled-reasons that religious communities may have to articulate a vocabulary consistent with pluralism and democracy (that is i.e. Adam B. Seligman’s strategic choice, see i.e. Seligman 2004), ending up with the empirically (and also normatively) questionable distinction between the wider public sphere and political institutions such as parliaments, where religious vocabulary should leave room for public reason. In both cases — the sociological analysis of the dynamogenetic effects of ritual and the sacred for society at large, and the socio-political analysis of the relationship between public reason and religious vocabularies needed to legitimate democratic and pluralistic principles—it seems that Habermas’ attitude is one of marked mistrust towards empirical communities, their concrete dealings with secular institutions, their ability of creating bonds within and across their borders.
b) Refusal of decoupling the sacred
Reading Habermas’ writings on ritual and myth is so exciting that a Durkheimian palate gets more and more hungry line after line. From a Durkheimian point of view, speaking of myth, ritual and the sacred in contemporary societies obviously entails decoupling the sacred and distinguishing between a religious and a secular sacred (see Knott 2013).[2] Only by doing so we can understand how the grammar of the sacred and the workings of ritual affect not only religious communities but also — and in spite of any difference between the two domains —secular identities, both individual and collective. This means that naïve theories of secularization can be criticized not only by taking into account the place of the religious sacred and religious communities in a postsecular horizon, but also from the point of view of a host of secular forms of the sacred (in the political domain as well as in the social at large), including those ‘survival and camouflages’ of myth and the sacred (Mircea Eliade) that fill contemporary imaginaries. If one looks at both secular and religious forms of the sacred, the sacred appears something like a form of sociological quasi-transcendental (Rosati 2003) whose main features (the proprieties of the sacred) are more or less the same in the secular as well as in the religious field. From that perspective, that is a fully Durkheimian perspective, a-religious societies do not exist, and actually can’t exist: the sacred has ‘just’ to be uncovered under its camouflaged forms, but it is a condition of possibility of society (the sacred is the outcome of a human praxis – through ritual action – of self-creation and self-representation, which, in turn, is a constitutive part of our cognitive and moral orientation and judgments).
c) Refusal of grasping the sacred as unconscious dimension of modernity
The above mentioned points concern the normative and the phenomenological level: what we can learn from the grammar of the sacred as “moderns” and where religions and the sacred happen in contemporary society. However, there is still one level that one can dig into. This is a deeper level so to speak, familiar to Durkheimian scholars — i.e. Émile Durkheim himself, Marcel Mauss and Robert Hertz — when they maintained that the sacred used to shape both our cognitive and moral criteria of judgment. Space, time, our sense of right and wrong, in past times everything was shaped by the sacred. They thought that science was rapidly replacing religion in the cognitive domain, while the sacred would have continued to play its role in the moral one. Today, cultural sociology offers its contribution in revealing “to men and women the myths that think them so that they can make new myths in turn”; according to Jeffrey C. Alexander (2003, p. 4), such a Durkheimian cultural sociology is a societal psychoanalysis of sorts, well aware of the fact that new, and hopefully more progressive, myths can replace old ones, but also that nothing is ever lost and that even theoretical cultures cannot free themselves from both the religious and the secular sacred (Bellah 2011).
A neo-Durkheimian sociology, capable of making the most of the thought of classical thinkers’ such as Durkheim himself and the others of the circle of the Anée sociologique, but also Erving Goffman in the micro-sociological domain and Mircea Eliade in that of the history of religions, might be able to show how ritual and the sacred in their religious and secular forms continues to be building blocks of society at large, despite our removal of their role.
To conclude, and to be fully honest (once again taking an advantage of the present opportunity to discuss with Jürgen Habermas in a favourable context): my view is that difficulties to a better understanding of religions and the sacred by a self-reflective Enlightenment culture have a main root and cause: a post-protestant understanding of religion. Habermas gives a precious contribution in considering, within a post-Enlightenment horizon, religion as not only a private but also a public issue, and nowadays in considering ritual and cult. At the same time, it seems to me that in Habermas’ view an implicit post-protestant understanding of religion still persists. He never writes about religions in the plural, about concrete communities, and in so doing he frequently considers religion(s) as a matter of belief, overemphasizing the theological and cognitive dimension and approaching the whole discussion from that point of view.
However, in discussing religions in the plural, beyond Christianity, ritualized practices and memories are almost everything, while theology and beliefs are frequently an almost residual dimension; in other terms, religions can only be discussed from within, starting from particularities and differences, as genuine interreligious dialogue, for example, does; in discussing the sacred, we have to decouple it into different dimensions: unmasking those hyper-rationalistic self-understandings of modernity we have to show that — without being an ontological structure — the sacred seems to be an universal historical structure of human consciousness (Eliade); finally, in coming to religions and the sacred, we have to be ready to think about those myths that think us, in order to play our part, as citizens and human beings, in the making the new and more human myths we need to replace the old ones.
Notes
[1] In Rosati 2009 and 2011 tried to show the features proper to what I called liturgical reflectivity, distinguishing it from cognitive reflectivity and postmodern reflectivity. Liturgical reflectivity “is a performative and procedural model of justification, focusing on how to justify the specific form of an action, rather than on why it is perforrned. The full justification of the reasons why it is performed depends on regressive justification, which sometimes – as in the case of doctrinal modes of religiosity – takes the form of internally systematic and highly rationalised theories, theologies, and so on. Here the performer is not an automaton at all. His reflectivity has four main characteristics: firstly, he reflects on how to perform certain actions (even when highly frequent repetitions make such actions almost “spontaneous”); secondly he reflects, even if regressively, on why to perform those actions in that way, within an ongoing hermeneutical debate on the indexical and canonical meaning those ritualised actions have (a debate that takes a stronger theological form, e.g. as in the case of Catholicism, and a weaker doctrinal form, e.g. as in Judaism); thirdly, here reflectivity is related to the subjunctive dimension of liturgical rituals, that subjective as if that allows us to look at the world around us as a conjunctural, namely not necessary, matter of fact, as an is criticisable in the light of a subjunctive might be; liturgical reflectivity, in other words, allows us to nurture a sort of inner-worldly asceticism that aims to bring the divine order (hopefully in an asymptotical way) within the world (as is proper to frequent but brief liturgical rituals), thus avoiding a fatalistic and unreflective acceptance of the actual world. Finally, reflectivity here is related to doubtfulness, scepticism. The performer of liturgical rituals, above all when the sacred has a totally transcendent dimension, accepts canonical meanings in the absence of full belief. Liturgical rituals might imply obedience and conformism in the realm of action (as, according to Durkheim, sociologically speaking, society necessarily requires), and freedom in the domain of thought. Inner freedom is related to the unknowable character of the sacred (i.e. of revelation), so that no one can be judged (other than by the Lord of the Universe) because of their thoughts and beliefs, but only because of their actions. In this case, precisely the heteronomous nature of the sacred allows me to protect my sacrosanct inner sanctuary and, at the same time, to distance myself from my actions, considering them as a part of a play, as something to be almost ironically seen from a perspective of epistemic humility”. When there are rituals for everything – sleeping, eating, working, dressing, washing and so on –, then simply sleeping, eating, working, dressing, washing is not enough; one has to think how to sleep, eating, working, dressing, washing and so on, and everyday practices become much more refcletive.
[2] Examples of secular sacred can be spaces (memorials) as well as ideals (the dignity of the person)
REFERENCES
Alexander, J. C. 2003 The Meanings of Social Life. A Cultural Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Bellah, R. 2011 Religion in Human Evolution. Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Davie, G. 2005 The Sociology of Religion. London: Sage
Habermas, J. 2011 “Myth and Ritual. Lecture at the George Town University”, Washington (DC)
Knott, K. 2013 The Secular Sacred: In between or both/and?, in Social Identities Between the Sacred and the Secular, edited by A. Day, G. Vincett, C. R. Cotter. Farnham, Ashgate
Rosati, M. 2003 “The Making and Representing of Society: Religion, the Sacred and Solidarity among Strangers in a Durkheimian Perspective”, Journal of Classical Sociology, 3, pp. 173-196
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