Post-Secular Visions

Abstract

In the introductory chapter I accounted for what Jürgen Habermas has depicted as the paradoxical return of both naturalistic worldviews and religious orthodoxies. The dilemma at hand concerned the mediation of “uncritical faith in science” and religious traditions critical of “the liberal assumptions of the Enlightenment.”¹ Habermas has, in an essay titled The Boundary Between Faith and Knowledge (2008), described the inability of pure reason to generate values which can sustain a liberal democracy, by claiming that “pure practical reason can no longer be so confident in its ability to counteract a modernization spinning out of control armed solely with the insights of a theory of justice.”² Habermas’ “solution” to this dilemma involves the idea of context-transcendent validity claims, accessible through a discursive and postmetaphysical procedure.³ It is on this discursive account of reason that Habermas bases his strict distinction between faith and reason — a distinction central to his account of the post-secular. Thus, Habermas does not actively engage with metaphysical questions since he chooses to draw a strict distinction between religion and the secular, faith and reason, and between the transcendent and the immanent.