Habermas: Postmetaphyiscal Thinking II
The work of philosopher Jurgen Habermas has been important to me for over 30 years. I have previously mentioned his approach to the concepts of Lifeworld and Intersubjectivity (not original ideas but certainly important to his wide-ranging thoughts on communicative action and democratic discourse in the public sphere, among other topics important to him). In 1992 MIT Press published a translation of essays by Habermas entitled Postmetaphysical Thinking. I do not now, nor did I then, consider that collection to be among his finest work, which fleshes out more of the ideas Habermas presented in his The Theory of Communicative Action, published in 1985, and in his excellent series of lectures published in 1987 as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, a comprehensive outline of 20th century philosophical forces.
In 2012, Habermas published Postmetaphysical Thinking II, translated into English in 2017. This is an expansion of the original work into a broader field of study. Predominantly, the essays here deal with the place of religion within “post-secular” society. In brief, Habermas argues that it harms democracy and genuine cultural discourse whenever the ideas and belief systems of religious citizens are marginalized by overbearing forces of secularization. There is (or should be anyway) a rightful place for religion and for religious citizens in contemporary democratic societies.
The defense of religion in the public sphere is somewhat surprising for a philosopher that has many neo-Marxist characteristics and who is a champion of science and, more importantly, of ethics as the basis for civil discourse and tolerance. Habermas does take exception of the aspects of religions that make direct claims to validity at the expense of other religions and the perspectives of science and ethics. Religion should not be the prevailing force in democratic societies. Yet, according to Habermas, secularism has gone too far in its efforts to isolate religion completely from the public sphere. He seeks a middle ground of mutual respect of people who have a multitude of relevant perspectives. The force of religion is still vitally important to many citizens in most western societies. Habermas believes this resilience must be respected in a truly open society.
Like the first book, much that is contained in Postmetaphysical Thinking II is of little interest to me. I find what Habermas has to say about religion’s place in contemporary society to be even-handed. But, I don’t need a well-intentioned philosophical perspective to be open to religious people. I was born into a Christian tradition and practiced it actively for my first 25 years or so. Generally speaking, the religious perspective is founded upon wisdom, much of which is applicable to human ethics and even to secular discourse. Yet, devout people often annoy me with their aggressive belief systems even though they certainly have the right to believe as they choose and to act upon their beliefs.
What does interest me in Postmetaphysical Thinking II are the first three out of the ten essays offered that pertain more specifically to the nature of the Lifeworld. The book’s initial essay, “From Worldviews to the Lifeworld,” features an appealing hypothesis on how Lifeworlds evolved in human consciousness. I know from Habermas’ earlier works that Lifeworlds are largely linguistically generated background assumptions; things that we think and say and do every day without ever questioning any of them, without noticing them. “The lifeworld does not confront us as a theoretical object, rather, we find ourselves in the lifeworld in a pre-theoretical sense. It encompasses and supports us insofar as we, as finite beings, cope with the things and events we encounter in the world….To anticipate, the lifeworld can be described as the insurmountable, only intuitively, accompanying horizon of experience and as uncircumventable, non-objectively present experiential background of a personal, historically situated, embodied and communicatively socialized everyday existence.” (page 4)
To me, what Habermas just described is an obvious fact of my existence and it seems that everyone else lives and behaves in exactly the circumstances and orientation contained in the quote. In other words, Lifeworlds are absolute factual manifestations in the world. Of course, this is a somewhat arrogant thing to suggest. But it is a fundamental aspect of my belief system. The Lifeworld is so qualified as to almost suggest you are talking about nothing at all, it is extraordinarily overlooked and mundane. But rather than talking about nothing, the Lifeworld is intricately basic to the degree that anyone can notice if it is simply pointed out as Habermas just did. Our lives are built and contained by our individual Lifeworlds. The Lifeworld is truly a self-evident essence of human experience.
But the Lifeworld, as such, did not always exist in human consciousness. In the first essay, Habermas argues that early humans had a completely different view of themselves. “The earliest mythical traditions” of tribal humanity generated “worldviews” out of the same basic stuff (though far less complex and sophisticated given the limitations of language and culture at that time) as the Lifeworld; but the landscape of human expressions and experiences was flat.
“If we can believe the accounts of cultural anthropology, the world reflected in those mythic narratives has a monistic structure: there is only one level of phenomena but nothing ‘in itself’ underlying them. Narrated events are structured as social interactions involving people and animals, but also the spirits of the ancestors and imaginary natural and original forces, supra-personal powers and personalized gods. Almost anyone can communicate with anyone and everything with everything…” (page 9)
“For us today, these mythical origins and the worldview of modern science stand in a peculiar contrast, which suggests that during the development of worldviews the objective world that exists ‘in itself’ was progressively purified for the participants of the surplus lifeworld qualities projected upon it. As we learn to cope with cognitive dissonances that are empirically triggered and mastered, our view of the objective world becomes disenchanted.” (page 10)
This is, of course, the same disenchantment that I have pointed out before in my discussion of Joseph Campbell’s later work. Habermas is a very dense read, as are many other philosophers. If you have an interest in philosophy as I do then you must generally be prepared to wade through a thick jungle of words.
“Of primary interest in the present context is the process by which an involved actor became liberated from the cognitive bias that confined her to a representation of the world from the internal perspective of someone entangled in mythic stories. The new dualistic worldviews broke with this two-dimensional monism. With the conception of a single God beyond the world of concepts of a law-governed cosmic order, they opened up perspectives from which the world could be grasped as an objective whole. The reference to the fixed pole of the single creator of the world, to the nomos which holds everything in balance, to the deep underlying reality of Nirvana or of eternal being, afforded the prophet or the wise man, the preacher and the teacher, the contemplative beholder and the mystic, the holy man absorbed in prayer and the philosopher sunk in intellectual contemplation, the necessary distance from the many, the contingent and the changeable. Regardless of whether this dualistic view of the world was more pronounced, as in the salvation religions of Israel and India, or less pronounced, as in Greek philosophy and Chinese wisdom teachings, these intellectual elites everywhere achieved a cognitive breakthrough to a transcendent standpoint.” (page 11)
“With the differentiation between ‘world’ and what is ‘in-the-world’, the everyday world was demoted to the realm of mere appearances. This theoretical grasp of essences enhanced the explanatory power of narratives. The conceptual framework was now able to process the mass of practical, natural historical and medical knowledge, including astronomical and mathematical knowledge, which had accumulated in the urban centers of the early civilizations and to integrate into a coherent whole that could be transmitted.
“For those involved, religious or contemplative conceptions of the world as a whole marked the dissolution of the fusion of the ‘objective world’ with the ‘lifeworld’ which we today read out of mythical worldviews. From our point of view, the introduction and subordination of the everyday world downgraded to mere phenomenon takes account of the fact that the performatively present lifeworld, together with practices and network of cross-references in which they become accessible to communicative actors, is an entity /in/ the world like all others.” (pp. 11-12)
Habermas is very careful to point out that he is thinking about humans immersed in the experiences of their own perspective, which was different from ours within modernity. He refrains from elevating any perspective. He merely attempts to accurately articulate that perspective as an authentic human experience. He does, however, point out that our Lifeworld today generally is fundamentally changed from their Lifeworld.
“With the advance to the modern secular and scientized understanding of the world, the conceptual constellation of lifeworld, objective world and everyday world undergoes a change. Because the objective world consists of everything about which true statements are made, Newton’s philosophical contemporaries comprehended the world in terms of the mechanistic picture that physics forms of nature as a whole. To the ‘world’ belong the objects of experience, which stand in a ‘natural’ – that is, law-governed – relationship with all other things. Mathmatics and scientific experimentation succeed the ‘natural reason’ of the theologian-philosopher in its role as the canonical authority for judging notoriously unreliable everyday experiences. Underlying the sensory phenomena of the everyday world are no longer essences but law-governed movements of causally interacting bodies.” (pp. 14-15)
“The lifeworld background is removed from events in the world in principle. Otherwise lifeworld practices and artifacts could not be treated as entities in the world or be made into objects of the human sciences and philosophy. But then what speaks against the possibility of bringing the performatively present background of our practices completely, thus including the research practices themselves, to the object side, and doing this in the familiar categories of the natural sciences?
“It is bipolar objectivization which, at the end of the path from worldviews to the lifeworld, confronts us with a semantically unbridgeable epistemic dualism – that is, with a divided image of the objective world.” (page 23) Human beings who lived within worldviews did not differentiate as much as we do today. For them there was little difference between themselves as individuals or between themselves and the environment. There was little or no ego. This was a naturally decentered reality. The Lifeworld evolved linguistically out of many millennia of worldviews. Part of the “cost” of that was humans became more centered on their own experiences apart from their family and tribe and nature. But, more positively, the Lifeworld also made Intersubjectivity possible.
“…an interpreter who seeks access to cultural expressions, actions, texts, markets, etc., must essentially engage in the very practices to which the segments of the everyday world constituted through the lifeworld owe their qualities. In the process, the interpreter draws on a prior understanding she acquired previously based on an ordinary language – that is, as a participant in everyday communication and as a member of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld.
“The more the social and cultural sciences objectify lifeworld practices in their functional differentiation and their historical and cultural diversity, the more they force these analyses to make a transition from hermeneutic to reconstructive interpretation and to develop a /formal/ concept of the lifeworld as such that can only be acquired through reflection. The analytical clarification of the background and presuppositions of communicative action requires a kind of reflection that is beyond the scope of the humanities and social sciences. The only experiential basis for this genuinely philosophical inquiry, as I tacitly assumed when I introduced the formal pragmatic concept of the lifeworld, is the performative consciousness of speaking and communicating, cooperating, experiencing, calculating and judging subjects who intervene in the world.” (page 24)
Essay two is entitled “Lifeworld as a Space of Symbolically Embodied Reasons.” Here Habermas contends that cultural traditions and institutional practices are made possible by the communication between shared intentions of individual Lifeworlds. Interpersonal relations create “intersubjective interconnection between the respective viewpoints and perceptions.” (page 33) This inherently means “the decentering adjustment of reciprocally assumed perspectives [which] gradually lose characteristics of an environment perceived in an ‘egocenteric’ way.” (page 33)
This Intersubjectivity is essentially how “oral traditions, family structures, habits and customs” emerge to become culturally accepted norms. It also gives rise to ritual communication that transcend mere gesture to create entirely new levels of meaning for human beings and forms the basis for intelligent cooperation. Ultimately, according to Habermas, this cooperation leads to “dogmatization of teachings” and “institutionalized behavioral expectations” which are necessary for cultures to thrive. But it also creates tension whenever the Lifeworld, “floating freely,” experiences dissent within the Intersubjective norms.
Such tension is necessary because it prevents cultures and societies from stagnating. “…good reasons are replaced by better reasons in the light of different conditions and new insights. This is what underlies the internal dynamics of learning processes. In some epochs, cognitive dissonances accumulated to such an extent that cumulative learning processes triggered an advance by invalidating a whole category of conventional reasons and revolutionizing the dominant social understanding of self and the world.” (page 40)
The third essay offers a hypothesis on how cultural rites contribute to the evolution of meaning. Here is where the role of religion comes more sharply in focus. To make his point, Habermas borrows the concept of “Axial Age” from Karl Jaspers to indicate how cognitive dissonances impact established new Intersubjectivities. “During the comparatively short period from around 800 to 300 BCE, cognitive revolutions occurred independently of each other which gave rise to those ‘strong’ religious doctrines and metaphysical worldviews that remain influential to the present day.
“This period marked the emergence of ‘religion’ in the sense of a ‘founded’ doctrine and practice out of mythical narratives and ritualized practices in ways that can be traced back to the teachings of a historical figure; Zoroastrianism in Iran, monotheism in Israel, Confucianism and Daoism in China, Buddhism in India and Greek metaphysics. These ‘religions’ assumed the form of canonized scriptural doctrines that left their imprint on entire civilizations.” (page 43)
Ironically, all of these independent occurrences preserved the basis and intent of ancient myth and rites while simultaneously transforming them into forms more compatible with ‘higher level’ understanding. We know about this global transformation because it took place within history, that is, within a world of written texts. But, this revolution was not new. In fact it had been occurring constantly for probably more than 100,000 years. It is simply that, in absence of written texts, there is scant evidence to guide our contemporary understanding.
We can only assume certain things based upon the facts that the oldest ritual sites date from 50,000 years ago and the burials date from at least 100,000 years ago. “Mythical narratives and ritual practices belong together, even if they no longer occur together in every historical case. Mythical narratives are in many cases what first provide us with the key to understanding rites.” (page 45) The whole of our evidence, written and conjectural, is what Habermas calls “the sacred complex.”
And yet myths and rites are different manifestations. The former, according to Habermas, are “representational” whereas rites are “performative.” “From the perspective of communication theory, rites are an earlier stage of symbolic expression by comparison with mythical narratives. The media of communal dance and song, mime and pantomime, body painting, jewelry and cultic objects (masks, emblems, coasts of arms, ornaments, etc.) permit iconic representations or imitations that do not require any further explication. If we want to discover the original meaning that the sacred complex had for participants, we must follow the traces back to these meanings encapsulated in rites themselves.” (page 47)
Habermas offers a hypothesis about the evolutionary role scared rites play in human meaning. “…the sacred complex reflects the mastering of a problem that arises once the evolution of primates crosses the threshold to a new level of symbolically mediated communication and interaction. The origin of language represents a caesura in the evolution of the human species. The old idea that grammatical language originated in gestural communication has acquired a surprising topicality in recent research. Therefore, it seems plausible to assume that this form of communication reveals a family relation between this early form of everyday communication and the extra-ordinary language of rites which is specialized in dealing with the powers of salvation and misfortune. Both cases involve a form of mimetic behavior or iconic representation which suggests a comparison between ritualized communication and ordinary gesture communication….rites are a response to the susceptibility to disruption of the new evolutionary stage of social life founded on symbolically mediated communication.” (page 50)
According to Habermas, we are still dealing with the fallout of the “crisis” regarding tensions created within human interactions, based upon emotions and gestures. On an individual level these were transformed into the human cooperation between groups based upon the rationale of the collective. He refers to this as the tension between ordinary and extra-ordinary communication. “According to my proposal, in the evolution of our species this crisis can be traced back to the changeover in cognition and the coordination of action from the pre-linguistic to the linguistic level of communication, whereby the socialization of intelligence goes hand in hand with the cooperating subjects themselves. This explains the conflict inherent on the socialization of the motivational structures of individuals.” (page 54)
All of this serves as a description of the mechanics of rites and meaning within contemporary society. Although Habermas does not mention this specifically, we are basically the same humans, with the same bodies and emotions and nervous systems as humans possessed with the coming of the Axial Age. We are also the same people who struggle with the tension between culturally accepted norms and the potential dissent of new, even revolutionary, experiences. Rituals and rites continue to be a fundamental part of human cultural experience, of the Lifeworld within Intersubjectivity.
For this reason, Habermas insists that respect of religion within the secular is imperative. We cannot reason away the basic human need for religion. However, it is a two-way street. As dissent has led to new Lifeworld expressions and Intersubjective experiences within post-modernity, the sacred complex, though diminished, remains intact. In fact, Habermas argues, religion claims a “privilege” to “arcane” experience and, by definition, such experience is excludes “the unbelieving sons and daughters of modernity.” From my point of view, if the secular decenters itself (a difficult proposition) and welcomes religion into the public sphere, the religious Lifeworld must stop privileging itself and acknowledge the secular Lifeworld even if there appears to be little Intersubjectivity between secular and religious claims of truth. This, of course, has enormous implications for, among other things, the relationship of both contemporary atheism and orthodox religion with the rest of human society who are either theistic or of another religion entirely.
The remainder of Postmetaphysical Thinking II addresses the stress between the preservation of the arcane experience and the innovation of secular experience. Although he doesn’t mention it specifically, to me, this applies to today’s political turmoil over everything from climate change to abortion rights. We cannot begin to reconcile this dichotomy, this increasing polarity, without understanding the diverse experience of the Lifeworld today and the mechanics of how humanity arrived at this circumstance. We are dealing with the tension of the widespread acceptance of new forces and experiences against the widespread acceptance of traditional Intersubjective dimensions.
Habermas, the true advocate of competent communication between social human beings, demonstrates in this collection of essays that to deal with such matters requires both sides actively participate in the perspectives of the other; that they decenter and engage in authentic discourse. This means, among other things, the acceptance of traditional experiences of the sacred within the context of more recently developed democratic and materialistic understanding. For Habermas, this is possible, but only within the context of open dialog and communicative theory.
Postmetaphysical thinking is literally reasoning without any privileged overarching guiding principle. Instead, it is about developing the competence to consider any overarching guiding principle, to sample it as a participant, and to come to terms with its foundation and expression. It places a premium on understanding over advocating. Habermas doesn’t really develop this idea anywhere in either of the two books I have read with that title, almost 30 years apart. Rather, he demonstrates that some social issues and cultural essences are worthy of continued reflection. Perhaps these essays are postmetaphysical in their very nature. He might be revealing by example, as any good master of any worthy discipline would do.
In 2012, Habermas published Postmetaphysical Thinking II, translated into English in 2017. This is an expansion of the original work into a broader field of study. Predominantly, the essays here deal with the place of religion within “post-secular” society. In brief, Habermas argues that it harms democracy and genuine cultural discourse whenever the ideas and belief systems of religious citizens are marginalized by overbearing forces of secularization. There is (or should be anyway) a rightful place for religion and for religious citizens in contemporary democratic societies.
The defense of religion in the public sphere is somewhat surprising for a philosopher that has many neo-Marxist characteristics and who is a champion of science and, more importantly, of ethics as the basis for civil discourse and tolerance. Habermas does take exception of the aspects of religions that make direct claims to validity at the expense of other religions and the perspectives of science and ethics. Religion should not be the prevailing force in democratic societies. Yet, according to Habermas, secularism has gone too far in its efforts to isolate religion completely from the public sphere. He seeks a middle ground of mutual respect of people who have a multitude of relevant perspectives. The force of religion is still vitally important to many citizens in most western societies. Habermas believes this resilience must be respected in a truly open society.
Like the first book, much that is contained in Postmetaphysical Thinking II is of little interest to me. I find what Habermas has to say about religion’s place in contemporary society to be even-handed. But, I don’t need a well-intentioned philosophical perspective to be open to religious people. I was born into a Christian tradition and practiced it actively for my first 25 years or so. Generally speaking, the religious perspective is founded upon wisdom, much of which is applicable to human ethics and even to secular discourse. Yet, devout people often annoy me with their aggressive belief systems even though they certainly have the right to believe as they choose and to act upon their beliefs.
What does interest me in Postmetaphysical Thinking II are the first three out of the ten essays offered that pertain more specifically to the nature of the Lifeworld. The book’s initial essay, “From Worldviews to the Lifeworld,” features an appealing hypothesis on how Lifeworlds evolved in human consciousness. I know from Habermas’ earlier works that Lifeworlds are largely linguistically generated background assumptions; things that we think and say and do every day without ever questioning any of them, without noticing them. “The lifeworld does not confront us as a theoretical object, rather, we find ourselves in the lifeworld in a pre-theoretical sense. It encompasses and supports us insofar as we, as finite beings, cope with the things and events we encounter in the world….To anticipate, the lifeworld can be described as the insurmountable, only intuitively, accompanying horizon of experience and as uncircumventable, non-objectively present experiential background of a personal, historically situated, embodied and communicatively socialized everyday existence.” (page 4)
To me, what Habermas just described is an obvious fact of my existence and it seems that everyone else lives and behaves in exactly the circumstances and orientation contained in the quote. In other words, Lifeworlds are absolute factual manifestations in the world. Of course, this is a somewhat arrogant thing to suggest. But it is a fundamental aspect of my belief system. The Lifeworld is so qualified as to almost suggest you are talking about nothing at all, it is extraordinarily overlooked and mundane. But rather than talking about nothing, the Lifeworld is intricately basic to the degree that anyone can notice if it is simply pointed out as Habermas just did. Our lives are built and contained by our individual Lifeworlds. The Lifeworld is truly a self-evident essence of human experience.
But the Lifeworld, as such, did not always exist in human consciousness. In the first essay, Habermas argues that early humans had a completely different view of themselves. “The earliest mythical traditions” of tribal humanity generated “worldviews” out of the same basic stuff (though far less complex and sophisticated given the limitations of language and culture at that time) as the Lifeworld; but the landscape of human expressions and experiences was flat.
“If we can believe the accounts of cultural anthropology, the world reflected in those mythic narratives has a monistic structure: there is only one level of phenomena but nothing ‘in itself’ underlying them. Narrated events are structured as social interactions involving people and animals, but also the spirits of the ancestors and imaginary natural and original forces, supra-personal powers and personalized gods. Almost anyone can communicate with anyone and everything with everything…” (page 9)
“For us today, these mythical origins and the worldview of modern science stand in a peculiar contrast, which suggests that during the development of worldviews the objective world that exists ‘in itself’ was progressively purified for the participants of the surplus lifeworld qualities projected upon it. As we learn to cope with cognitive dissonances that are empirically triggered and mastered, our view of the objective world becomes disenchanted.” (page 10)
This is, of course, the same disenchantment that I have pointed out before in my discussion of Joseph Campbell’s later work. Habermas is a very dense read, as are many other philosophers. If you have an interest in philosophy as I do then you must generally be prepared to wade through a thick jungle of words.
“Of primary interest in the present context is the process by which an involved actor became liberated from the cognitive bias that confined her to a representation of the world from the internal perspective of someone entangled in mythic stories. The new dualistic worldviews broke with this two-dimensional monism. With the conception of a single God beyond the world of concepts of a law-governed cosmic order, they opened up perspectives from which the world could be grasped as an objective whole. The reference to the fixed pole of the single creator of the world, to the nomos which holds everything in balance, to the deep underlying reality of Nirvana or of eternal being, afforded the prophet or the wise man, the preacher and the teacher, the contemplative beholder and the mystic, the holy man absorbed in prayer and the philosopher sunk in intellectual contemplation, the necessary distance from the many, the contingent and the changeable. Regardless of whether this dualistic view of the world was more pronounced, as in the salvation religions of Israel and India, or less pronounced, as in Greek philosophy and Chinese wisdom teachings, these intellectual elites everywhere achieved a cognitive breakthrough to a transcendent standpoint.” (page 11)
“With the differentiation between ‘world’ and what is ‘in-the-world’, the everyday world was demoted to the realm of mere appearances. This theoretical grasp of essences enhanced the explanatory power of narratives. The conceptual framework was now able to process the mass of practical, natural historical and medical knowledge, including astronomical and mathematical knowledge, which had accumulated in the urban centers of the early civilizations and to integrate into a coherent whole that could be transmitted.
“For those involved, religious or contemplative conceptions of the world as a whole marked the dissolution of the fusion of the ‘objective world’ with the ‘lifeworld’ which we today read out of mythical worldviews. From our point of view, the introduction and subordination of the everyday world downgraded to mere phenomenon takes account of the fact that the performatively present lifeworld, together with practices and network of cross-references in which they become accessible to communicative actors, is an entity /in/ the world like all others.” (pp. 11-12)
Habermas is very careful to point out that he is thinking about humans immersed in the experiences of their own perspective, which was different from ours within modernity. He refrains from elevating any perspective. He merely attempts to accurately articulate that perspective as an authentic human experience. He does, however, point out that our Lifeworld today generally is fundamentally changed from their Lifeworld.
“With the advance to the modern secular and scientized understanding of the world, the conceptual constellation of lifeworld, objective world and everyday world undergoes a change. Because the objective world consists of everything about which true statements are made, Newton’s philosophical contemporaries comprehended the world in terms of the mechanistic picture that physics forms of nature as a whole. To the ‘world’ belong the objects of experience, which stand in a ‘natural’ – that is, law-governed – relationship with all other things. Mathmatics and scientific experimentation succeed the ‘natural reason’ of the theologian-philosopher in its role as the canonical authority for judging notoriously unreliable everyday experiences. Underlying the sensory phenomena of the everyday world are no longer essences but law-governed movements of causally interacting bodies.” (pp. 14-15)
“The lifeworld background is removed from events in the world in principle. Otherwise lifeworld practices and artifacts could not be treated as entities in the world or be made into objects of the human sciences and philosophy. But then what speaks against the possibility of bringing the performatively present background of our practices completely, thus including the research practices themselves, to the object side, and doing this in the familiar categories of the natural sciences?
“It is bipolar objectivization which, at the end of the path from worldviews to the lifeworld, confronts us with a semantically unbridgeable epistemic dualism – that is, with a divided image of the objective world.” (page 23) Human beings who lived within worldviews did not differentiate as much as we do today. For them there was little difference between themselves as individuals or between themselves and the environment. There was little or no ego. This was a naturally decentered reality. The Lifeworld evolved linguistically out of many millennia of worldviews. Part of the “cost” of that was humans became more centered on their own experiences apart from their family and tribe and nature. But, more positively, the Lifeworld also made Intersubjectivity possible.
“…an interpreter who seeks access to cultural expressions, actions, texts, markets, etc., must essentially engage in the very practices to which the segments of the everyday world constituted through the lifeworld owe their qualities. In the process, the interpreter draws on a prior understanding she acquired previously based on an ordinary language – that is, as a participant in everyday communication and as a member of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld.
“The more the social and cultural sciences objectify lifeworld practices in their functional differentiation and their historical and cultural diversity, the more they force these analyses to make a transition from hermeneutic to reconstructive interpretation and to develop a /formal/ concept of the lifeworld as such that can only be acquired through reflection. The analytical clarification of the background and presuppositions of communicative action requires a kind of reflection that is beyond the scope of the humanities and social sciences. The only experiential basis for this genuinely philosophical inquiry, as I tacitly assumed when I introduced the formal pragmatic concept of the lifeworld, is the performative consciousness of speaking and communicating, cooperating, experiencing, calculating and judging subjects who intervene in the world.” (page 24)
Essay two is entitled “Lifeworld as a Space of Symbolically Embodied Reasons.” Here Habermas contends that cultural traditions and institutional practices are made possible by the communication between shared intentions of individual Lifeworlds. Interpersonal relations create “intersubjective interconnection between the respective viewpoints and perceptions.” (page 33) This inherently means “the decentering adjustment of reciprocally assumed perspectives [which] gradually lose characteristics of an environment perceived in an ‘egocenteric’ way.” (page 33)
This Intersubjectivity is essentially how “oral traditions, family structures, habits and customs” emerge to become culturally accepted norms. It also gives rise to ritual communication that transcend mere gesture to create entirely new levels of meaning for human beings and forms the basis for intelligent cooperation. Ultimately, according to Habermas, this cooperation leads to “dogmatization of teachings” and “institutionalized behavioral expectations” which are necessary for cultures to thrive. But it also creates tension whenever the Lifeworld, “floating freely,” experiences dissent within the Intersubjective norms.
Such tension is necessary because it prevents cultures and societies from stagnating. “…good reasons are replaced by better reasons in the light of different conditions and new insights. This is what underlies the internal dynamics of learning processes. In some epochs, cognitive dissonances accumulated to such an extent that cumulative learning processes triggered an advance by invalidating a whole category of conventional reasons and revolutionizing the dominant social understanding of self and the world.” (page 40)
The third essay offers a hypothesis on how cultural rites contribute to the evolution of meaning. Here is where the role of religion comes more sharply in focus. To make his point, Habermas borrows the concept of “Axial Age” from Karl Jaspers to indicate how cognitive dissonances impact established new Intersubjectivities. “During the comparatively short period from around 800 to 300 BCE, cognitive revolutions occurred independently of each other which gave rise to those ‘strong’ religious doctrines and metaphysical worldviews that remain influential to the present day.
“This period marked the emergence of ‘religion’ in the sense of a ‘founded’ doctrine and practice out of mythical narratives and ritualized practices in ways that can be traced back to the teachings of a historical figure; Zoroastrianism in Iran, monotheism in Israel, Confucianism and Daoism in China, Buddhism in India and Greek metaphysics. These ‘religions’ assumed the form of canonized scriptural doctrines that left their imprint on entire civilizations.” (page 43)
Ironically, all of these independent occurrences preserved the basis and intent of ancient myth and rites while simultaneously transforming them into forms more compatible with ‘higher level’ understanding. We know about this global transformation because it took place within history, that is, within a world of written texts. But, this revolution was not new. In fact it had been occurring constantly for probably more than 100,000 years. It is simply that, in absence of written texts, there is scant evidence to guide our contemporary understanding.
We can only assume certain things based upon the facts that the oldest ritual sites date from 50,000 years ago and the burials date from at least 100,000 years ago. “Mythical narratives and ritual practices belong together, even if they no longer occur together in every historical case. Mythical narratives are in many cases what first provide us with the key to understanding rites.” (page 45) The whole of our evidence, written and conjectural, is what Habermas calls “the sacred complex.”
And yet myths and rites are different manifestations. The former, according to Habermas, are “representational” whereas rites are “performative.” “From the perspective of communication theory, rites are an earlier stage of symbolic expression by comparison with mythical narratives. The media of communal dance and song, mime and pantomime, body painting, jewelry and cultic objects (masks, emblems, coasts of arms, ornaments, etc.) permit iconic representations or imitations that do not require any further explication. If we want to discover the original meaning that the sacred complex had for participants, we must follow the traces back to these meanings encapsulated in rites themselves.” (page 47)
Habermas offers a hypothesis about the evolutionary role scared rites play in human meaning. “…the sacred complex reflects the mastering of a problem that arises once the evolution of primates crosses the threshold to a new level of symbolically mediated communication and interaction. The origin of language represents a caesura in the evolution of the human species. The old idea that grammatical language originated in gestural communication has acquired a surprising topicality in recent research. Therefore, it seems plausible to assume that this form of communication reveals a family relation between this early form of everyday communication and the extra-ordinary language of rites which is specialized in dealing with the powers of salvation and misfortune. Both cases involve a form of mimetic behavior or iconic representation which suggests a comparison between ritualized communication and ordinary gesture communication….rites are a response to the susceptibility to disruption of the new evolutionary stage of social life founded on symbolically mediated communication.” (page 50)
According to Habermas, we are still dealing with the fallout of the “crisis” regarding tensions created within human interactions, based upon emotions and gestures. On an individual level these were transformed into the human cooperation between groups based upon the rationale of the collective. He refers to this as the tension between ordinary and extra-ordinary communication. “According to my proposal, in the evolution of our species this crisis can be traced back to the changeover in cognition and the coordination of action from the pre-linguistic to the linguistic level of communication, whereby the socialization of intelligence goes hand in hand with the cooperating subjects themselves. This explains the conflict inherent on the socialization of the motivational structures of individuals.” (page 54)
All of this serves as a description of the mechanics of rites and meaning within contemporary society. Although Habermas does not mention this specifically, we are basically the same humans, with the same bodies and emotions and nervous systems as humans possessed with the coming of the Axial Age. We are also the same people who struggle with the tension between culturally accepted norms and the potential dissent of new, even revolutionary, experiences. Rituals and rites continue to be a fundamental part of human cultural experience, of the Lifeworld within Intersubjectivity.
For this reason, Habermas insists that respect of religion within the secular is imperative. We cannot reason away the basic human need for religion. However, it is a two-way street. As dissent has led to new Lifeworld expressions and Intersubjective experiences within post-modernity, the sacred complex, though diminished, remains intact. In fact, Habermas argues, religion claims a “privilege” to “arcane” experience and, by definition, such experience is excludes “the unbelieving sons and daughters of modernity.” From my point of view, if the secular decenters itself (a difficult proposition) and welcomes religion into the public sphere, the religious Lifeworld must stop privileging itself and acknowledge the secular Lifeworld even if there appears to be little Intersubjectivity between secular and religious claims of truth. This, of course, has enormous implications for, among other things, the relationship of both contemporary atheism and orthodox religion with the rest of human society who are either theistic or of another religion entirely.
The remainder of Postmetaphysical Thinking II addresses the stress between the preservation of the arcane experience and the innovation of secular experience. Although he doesn’t mention it specifically, to me, this applies to today’s political turmoil over everything from climate change to abortion rights. We cannot begin to reconcile this dichotomy, this increasing polarity, without understanding the diverse experience of the Lifeworld today and the mechanics of how humanity arrived at this circumstance. We are dealing with the tension of the widespread acceptance of new forces and experiences against the widespread acceptance of traditional Intersubjective dimensions.
Habermas, the true advocate of competent communication between social human beings, demonstrates in this collection of essays that to deal with such matters requires both sides actively participate in the perspectives of the other; that they decenter and engage in authentic discourse. This means, among other things, the acceptance of traditional experiences of the sacred within the context of more recently developed democratic and materialistic understanding. For Habermas, this is possible, but only within the context of open dialog and communicative theory.
Postmetaphysical thinking is literally reasoning without any privileged overarching guiding principle. Instead, it is about developing the competence to consider any overarching guiding principle, to sample it as a participant, and to come to terms with its foundation and expression. It places a premium on understanding over advocating. Habermas doesn’t really develop this idea anywhere in either of the two books I have read with that title, almost 30 years apart. Rather, he demonstrates that some social issues and cultural essences are worthy of continued reflection. Perhaps these essays are postmetaphysical in their very nature. He might be revealing by example, as any good master of any worthy discipline would do.
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