Translating Habermas; love & justice
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - june 09 ]
You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. - Luke 10:21
Habermas, in his attempt to salvage what can be salvaged of the Enlightenment, while fully understanding that there is a dark side to such enlightenment, but refusing to forfeit what we have learned from modernism, has expressed the kind of hope in learning for the future that we share.
How do we manage to live together in peace across differences?
How is democracy possible without disenfranchising, and consequently dominating and exploiting, the Other?
How do we place boundaries on greed for the good of us all, within what has become almost exclusively a capitalist system? - Jeanne Curran
Moslems [the Other] now outnumber Christians. Having more children than other people, they are poised to take over the world by means of the "revenge of the cradle." European civilization and consequently the American Empire are doomed to be swallowed by Islam.
Christianity is the last best hope of mankind.
According to Islamicists, the old (Hindu) and newer (Christian) Indo-European notions of Divinity are idolatrous. In their view, to analyze or decompose God into parts, avatars, saints, substances, or messengers is disrepectful of the unity of God. To them, the natural result of ascribing personality to God is pantheism, in which God is seen in and as every thing, which to true believers in the unity of Allah is blasphemy. That is, in this view Hindus and Catholics, and incidentally pagans and pantheists, share similar mythologies, even though they do not know it, nor would they care to know it. And Allah is beyond mythology.
Moslems are like secularists, and also like Baha'is, Quakers, Jews, Unitarians, and so on, in that they don't see the sense, value, or worth of conceptualizing and worshiping the tripartite nature of the Godhead in Brahma,Vishnu, and Shiva, or Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, since Brahman (Allah, God) is beyond their physical world of perception. To them, the Blessed Trinity is not Allah but merely a work of invention and the imagination.
The five "pillars of Islam," confession of faith, ritual prayer, fasting during Ramadan, giving alms for the poor, and pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in one's lifetime, and sometimes jihad, whatever that is, are the only principles and practices all Moslems have in common. Islam is not a unified, rational faith. It has no center. It is an empty shell. Furthermore, among Moslems, only the Iranians have a theocractic way of life, with ayatollahs as bishops, because they borrowed their ecclesiastical and social structure from the Roman Catholic Church. And, by the way, Persians are not Arabs.
Jürgen Habermas is a popular [he writes to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung] social critic and philosopher in Germany who appears to have thought his way through everything leading up to and beyond modernism - philosophy, sociology, law, politics, rationality, emancipation, epistemology, pragmatics, and so on. And then, having absorbed the best modern thought produced by scholars, movers, and shakers such as Dewey and Peirce, Piaget, Wittgenstein, Austin, Searle, Durkheim, and Weber, the Marxists Marcusi, Horkheimer, and Adorno, and the philosophers Kant and Hegel, he looks forward to completing the process of Enlightenment in a just, loving, humane society by thinking through what is possible and then acting on it. And given all his druthers as a "methodological atheist," he chooses to be a good Catholic.
He reasons that with all the choices full of pessimism, exaggeration, and radicalism we face today, it is still a fact that a humanized, democratic society can be made a reality through egalitarian communication based on justice and love, and the institution most likely to succeed in doing so is the Christian (Catholic) Church, the biggest Church with the most people in it. I find his arguments beyond persuasion to such an extent that I can now call myself a bad Catholic and a poor Loyalist, even though I am Catholic only by association, and an outcast dalit in the realm of the British Monarchy, and an immigrant, to boot. Nonetheless, I'd rather be me than the Sultan of Swat.
The following statement by Jürgen Habermas is a logical calculation, as if drawn from gigantic syllogisms whose major premises have many parts. The writer of the conclusion has taken into consideration every modern thinker of important substance, and he reckons they all point to the need for everyone in the world to be treated equally in order for them to be free while living together without owing others so much that they cannot do what they want to do, and while treating others as they, themselves, expect to be treated, having an equal voice in public decisions, knowing all the while that the least of them deserves respect, care, freedom and dignity.
What we have inherited from Judaism and Christianity is a legacy of justice and love, which is seen in our commitment to equality and our personal independence to make choices that put others first, to be free yet bound to other people, following the dictates of our human rights while choosing selfishly for the general welfare. Our Judeo-Christian heritage has been adapted, fitted, and tried with some success, and now in these days of One World when nation-states no longer can shape culture, we have nothing better than Christianity to go on with. Any other alternative is merely BS.
For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk. - Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, edited by Eduardo Mendieta, MIT Press, 2002, p149
The first sentence of the statement I took at first to be a translation from the original German: For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst, although the text in German is not available, suggesting that it was not first written in German, but in English, which makes it no more intelligible for having been so written. Just because the author lacks Englischgeschicklichkeit [skills], up with this sort of nonsense we do not have to put. Perhaps Habermas was thinking of a certain document that begins, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equalÖ
Yet I have nothing against the topic the normative self-understanding of modernity. I simply do not know what it means, except what I can figure out by guessing from the context. The word normative is a French word [Latin norma] only lately used in English and German. My Petit Robert dictionary says it refers to value judgments that yield rules, principles, precepts, and lessons. Now comes the hard part. Self-understanding is what you and I have, or modernity has; I don't know which. Does "sich verstehen auf" transpose into "die Selbstverständigung auf die moderne?" Does the reflexivity of the German verb affect the English phrase? Yes, unfortunately, and it doesn't make sense; it is not clear in English. Do we understand ourselves, do we understand modernity, and/or does modernity understand itself? He could have simply written, "We take it that Christianity is essential to modernity," or, "Give me that old time religion."
Perhaps he means given that the modern world is liberal, the accepted way in which we all understand modernity is that Christianity informed worldwide liberalism. Christianity has been more than a harbinger or stimulus of modernity for us.
Try this one: Christianity does more than come before or cause what we take to be modernity. Or is this a better translation, we take it for granted that Christianity has served as a forerunner or stimulus, an antecedent or spark, of modernity, or for what we usually accept as modernity, Christianity has acted as a precursor or catalyst?
If we change self-understanding to self-knowledge, which is how self-understanding is glossed in the dictionary, we get for the normative self-knowledge of modernity,* and that does not help at all.
Habermas says we owe our soul to the Company Store, and if we don't pay up, the post-national constellation of barbarians will foreclose on our subprime mortgage, and we'll all be up Shit Creek without a paddle.
The God of the Jews is a mensch, and the God of the Christians is a hero. The very notion of the Messiah implies humanity in the godhead; it is then no wonder that Jesus is a Jew. After all, Christianity is a Jewish development, not a revolution, not a shocking heresy or apostasy, not idolatry. No, it is seeing the godliness, the promise of justice and love in people, the Father at His best in the Son, in a word, Humanism.
A mensch is a decent responsible person with admirable characteristics. A hero is a man distinguished by exceptional courage, nobility and strength. We do not know to Whom the god who allows evil to exist answers to, nor do we know why he lets pain endure. And we try only to look on the Jesus-wants-me-for-a-sunbeam side, the bright side. The bright side includes the hero who can die on the stage of public trial and take his tragic lumps. I mean old Jesus really did not shine at his hearing in front of Pontius Pilate, yet he kept his pride; he did not plead or grovel.
He had already talked to his friends and followers at dinner the previous evening, saying something like this:
"...I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be everywhere - wherever you can look. Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beating up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad - I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready. And when the people are eating the stuff they raise, and living in the houses they build - I'll be there, too." - Tom Joad, The Grapes of Wrath
The question of religion is once again at the forefront of critical thought precisely because it crystallizes some of the most serious and pressing questions of contemporary social thought: the relationship between social structure and rationality; between reason as a universal standard and the inescapable fact that reason is embodied only historically and in contingent social practices; that reason as universality was, if not discovered, at least enunciated as a teleological standard by religions; that in an age of secularization and scienticization, religion remains a major factor in the moral education and motivation of individuals uprooted from other traditions; and at the very least, in an age of accelerating homogenization and simultaneous manufacturing of difference, what sociologists of globalization have called glocalization, religions are articulated as the last refuge of unadulterated difference, the last reservoir of cultural autonomy. - Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity, first page
Here is a description of this book from Amazon.
This important new volume brings together Jürgen Habermas's key writings on religion and religious belief. In these essays, Habermas explores the relations between Christian and Jewish thought, on one hand, and the Western philosophical tradition on the other. He often approaches these issues through critical encounters with the work of others, including Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Johann Baptist Metz, and Gershom Scholem. In an introduction written especially for this volume, Eduardo Mendieta places Habermas's engagement with religion in the context of his work as a whole. Mendieta also discusses Habermas's writings in relation to Jewish Messianism and the Frankfurt [Marxist] School, showing how these essays reflect an important yet often neglected dimension of critical theory. The volume concludes with an original extended interview that examines Habermasís current views on religion and modern society."
