By Thaddeus Kozinski, Jul 17, 2009 in Musings, Pedagogy and Teaching, Academic Life Outside the Classroom
Beyond Secular Reason
There was a time when liberals would decry liberalism's transformation into a tradition as a betrayal of liberalism, a reversal of the Enlightenment, a corruption of pure reason by irrational belief. Well, as Mr. DeHart points out in his excellent post, "Doing Political Philosophy after the Enlightenment's End," things have changed. We have moved “beyond secular reason.” The era of Enlightenment, modern, foundationalist, universalist, idealist liberalism has been displaced by post-Enlightenment, postmodern, anti-foundationalist, particularist, pragmatic liberalism. The most sophisticated and honest of contemporary liberal theorists have not only admitted liberalism’s traditionalist identity, but have defended it precisely as such. Tom Bridges summarizes the raison d’etre of the traditionalist liberal project:
If liberalism is to survive the collapse of Enlightenment culture, liberals must now attempt to de-universalize or contextualize their political language, to learn to explain and advocate liberal democratic moral ideals in a vocabulary that can express the particularism of liberal political norms without thereby invalidating them.
And Jeffrey Stout, perhaps the most sophisticated spokesmen for postmodern liberalism, writes:
There is much to be gained by abandoning the image of democracy as essentially opposed to tradition, as a negative force that tends by its nature to undermine culture and the cultivation of virtue. Democracy is a culture, a tradition, in its own right. . . . To put the point aphoristically and paradoxically, pragmatism is democratic traditionalism.
Enlightenment secularism is dead. As Jurgen Habermas stated in the remarkable 2004 exchange between him and the former Cardinal Ratzinger, western culture is now “post-secular.” Liberalism, due, I would argue, in part to Alasdair MacIntyre’s powerful and influential critique, now accepts that it is culturally contingent and historically particularist, that is, a tradition. The post-modern, traditionalist liberal has sloughed off the impossible burden of identifying his philosophical system with reason itself, and thus can defend liberalism in the same manner as Christians defend Christianity: as both our tradition, and the best tradition, as both good for us and for others, as historically limited in origin, embodiment, and intelligibility, but timelessly universal in scope and significance.
This traditionalist turn in contemporary thought necessitates, I think, a radical change in strategy for the Christian political philosophers. While we generally endorse integrally Christian practices and discourse, we deem it prudent to doff our particular practices and discourse whenever we depart Christian precincts. For those outside our tradition, and for the secular public sphere in general, we offer a mere translation. We secularize, intellectualize, moralize, and politicize what in our tradition is supernatural, mystical, spiritual, and theological, both in doctrine and in practice, so as to render it intelligible to non-Christians and practically effective for secular society.
This strategy appears quite reasonable, but it presupposes two fundamental ideas whose plausibility, in light of the traditionalist turn, needs to be reexamined. The first is that there is such a thing as the “secular public sphere” at all. The second is the separability of theoria and praxis, that one can effectively strain out from the concrete practices and particularist discourse of any tradition a secular, universally accessible remainder intelligible to all regardless of particular traditional allegiance.
Regarding the first: The Enlightenment claimed an ideologically neutral, universal, public world accessible to and based upon a universal public reason, abstracted from the practical and speculative particularities of any one tradition. But, as is now readily admitted by the Enlightenment’s own disciples, this claim is no longer credible. But if the Enlightenment is no longer tenable, isn’t the alternative even less so? If there is no objective, public reason, then do not all claims to truth become subject to the postmodernist “hermeneutics of suspicion,” whereby any affirmation of truth or goodness is unmasked as either mere idiosyncrasy or the will to dominate? There is a another alternative. According to MacIntyre,
Either reason is thus impersonal, universal, and disinterested or it is the unwitting representative of particular interests, masking their drive to power by its false pretensions to neutrality and disinterestedness. What this alternative conceals from view is a third possibility, the possibility that reason can only move towards being genuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither neutral nor disinterested, that membership in a particular type of moral community, one from which fundamental dissent has to be excluded, is a condition for genuinely rational enquiry and more especially for moral and theological enquiry.
MacIntyre’s term for this third-way between Enlightenment rationalism and post-Enlightenment irrationalism is “tradition-constituted rationality.” It is only through active participation in particular authentic traditions that men are rendered capable of discovering and achieving their ultimate good; for it is only by going down, as it were, through a particular tradition that we rise up to universal truth. As body and soul composites, our encounters with reality are mediated by bodies, which are themselves mediated by history and culture. Even the words and concepts we use to interpret and make sense of the brute facts of reality originate and develop in what MacIntyre calls “traditions of rationality.” All men are necessarily habituated into a particular tradition, even if it is a rationally incoherent and morally defective one like the tradition of liberalism. Outside of one tradition or another coherent and accurate knowledge of man’s good is quite difficult, and perhaps impossible. We are, in MacIntyre’s improvement on Aristotle’s classic definition, “tradition-dependent rational animals,” or as Paul Griffiths puts it, we are, willy-nilly, “confessional”:
To be confessional is simply to be open about one’s historical and religious locatedness, one’s specificity, and openness that is essential for serious theological work and indeed for any serious intellectual work that is not in thrall to the myth of the disembodied and unlocated scholarly intellect.
Regarding the second problematic assumption, the separability of theoria and praxis, MacIntyre articulates a dilemma:
The theologian begins from orthodoxy, but the orthodoxy. . . becomes too easily a closed circle, in which believer speaks only to believer, in which all human content is concealed. Turning aside from this arid in-group theology, the most perceptive theologians wish to translate what they have to say to an atheistic world. But they are doomed to one of two failures. Either [a] they succeed in their translation: in which case what they find themselves saying has been turned into the atheism of their hearers. Or [b] they fail in their translation: in which case no one hears what they have to say but themselves.
Is there a solution to this dilemma? I think so, but the indispensable condition for its realization is the recognition of the inescapable intertwining of theoria and praxis in all human activity.
What this intertwining could teach us is that there is no such thing as “pluralism” in the public sphere, only the domination of one tradition over another, and no such thing as “liberalism,” if that means a sphere of reason or action that manages to escape the particularism and exclusivity of tradition. And since traditions of rationality are distinguished by the particular way they grapple with matters of ultimate concern, all traditions are ultimately religious. In short, the “religious pluralism” of American public life is an illusion. David Schindler expresses well the political upshot of this tradition-and-praxis-constituted understanding of rationality: "A nonconfessional state is not logically possible, in the one real order of history. The state cannot finally avoid affirming, in the matter of religion, a priority of either “freedom from” or “freedom for”—both of these priorities implying a theology."
As Cardinal Ruini, Cardinal Vicar of Benedict XVI, has recently argued , we, as individuals and in society, must live either as if God exists or as if God doesn’t exist—there can be no neutrality in action, including political action. This is something Christian political philosophers need to broadcast from the housetops—and in the classroom.
2 Responses to "Beyond Secular Reason"
Paul DeHart on Jul 28, 2009
What a wonderful blog. To pick up on your last point, William James, in a famous debate, described believing that God exists or that he doesn't as a forced option. Living "agnostically" is in practice to live atheistically. While I'm no pragmatist, I think James is right. If God exists, if Christ is Kurios (or Kyrie), then refusing to enter into relationship with the Creator or refusing to bend the knee to his rule is to refuse these rather than to remain neutral with respect to them. And it is very much right to suggest that this is a forced option for politics as well as for private life. Either Christ is king of kings, the one before whom every king must bend the knee and to whose rule every king must submit, or He isn't. To fail to act as though He is, is to act as though He isn't. And if He is King of kings, then it's hard to see how this isn't deeply relevant for the practice of political philosophy and, indeed, for regime design as well. The covenantal and federal tradition (the tradition from which American federalism emerges) were, in fact, at their inception premised on the notion that Christ alone is King--one need only read early American documents and writing to ascertain this, though there's Althusius and Bullinger as well. I'm not recommending theonomy here. The federal tradition is, after all, more interested in the separation of church and state than the modern, statist traditions. I just mean to suggest that the Kingship of Christ matters not just in the world to come and not just to "private life." If it matters, it matters to and for everything--the world to come and the world as it presently is.
Thaddeus Kozinski on Jul 28, 2009
Great point, Mr. DeHart! Here's Jacques Maritain on the issue:
"In its own sphere [the state] is subject to the universal temporal sovereignty of Christ; for Christ, as Man, received from God dominion "over the works of His hands" and "all things have been subjected under His feet," and it is from Him that kings and the heads of States and every human power derive their authority; the State, as such, is bound to observe His Law and the precepts of His morality. . . . The State, therefore, is indeed sovereign in its own domain, but its domain is subordinate, so that its sovereignty can be neither absolute nor universal. There is only one universal, absolute sovereignty, the sovereignty of the Creator. The sovereignty of the Church, universal through the whole range of salvation, is clearly more extensive and elevated than that of the State."
and here is James Kalb, author of "The Tyranny of Liberalism":
"The fundamental question of political legitimacy is the nature and purpose of authority, and thus the nature of man, the world, moral obligation, and the human good—in other words, which religion is correct. Liberalism cannot get by without answering that question, but it answers it indirectly, by claiming moral ignorance. We do not know what the good is, it tells us, so we should treat all desires the same. The satisfaction of all desires thus becomes the unquestionable good. Man becomes the measure, human genius the principle of creation, and individual will the source of value. The limitations on moral knowledge on which the liberal outlook is based lead to a definite result, and so become constituent principles rather than limitations. In short, they constitute a religion, a fact concealed by the moral doubt that is liberalism’s first principle. This new religion, based on the denial of the knowability of truth, consists in nothing less than the deification of man. To refuse to talk about the transcendent, and view it as wholly out of our reach, seems very cautious and humble. In practice, however, it puts our own thoughts and desires at the center of things, and so puts man in the place of God. If you say we cannot know anything about God, but only our own experience, you will soon say that there is no God, at least for practical purposes, and that we are the ones who give order and meaning to the world. In short, you will say that we are God. "
The believer in a being who has clearly and publicly revealed to man his will for the political order could argue that perpetual and systematic ignorance regarding the existence of such a publicly accessible divine revelation is unjustified. For a Roman Catholic, for example, the Church exists as a public institution claiming to be the embodiment and spokesman of a publicly authoritative divine revelation bearing directly on morality and politics. Therefore, the Church should be seen as at least a possible candidate for a publicly authoritative social institution. Even if one prescinds from the question of the truth of this revelation, the Church’s claim about itself to be the authoritative spokesman for this truth is still an objective, intelligible fact within societies, and while a political philosopher can deny the truth of this claim, it cannot plead ignorance to the fact of the claim itself.
Thus, in articulating any ideal political order, the political philosopher must deal in some way with the Church’s claim to have the authority to define the ultimate meaning of goodness and politics, by either recognizing or denying the Church’s public authority to do so. Practical agnosticism to the very possibility of such an authority is an explicit theoretical denial of its ever becoming an actual, living authority, and therefore an implicit denial of the authority it presently has (granting for the moment that it actually possesses such authority at the present time). Any moral or political theory involving the question of ultimate political authority that excludes this theological issue from its purview inevitably makes a theological judgment, as D. Stephen Long points out: “Ethics cannot be the province of a philosophical discourse that brackets out theological consideration, unless philosophers assume a being greater than God giving access to goodness.”
Claiming ignorance or uncertainty of the truth of the Church’s claim to public authority, or even just acting as if one were ignorant or uncertain of it by committing oneself to a political theory and practice in which the Church’s authority could never, without causing grave injustice, be publicly recognized, is effectively to make a negative judgment about the Church’s claim. In practice, it amounts to a theological judgment against the Church’s authority, and when such a judgment becomes part of a lived social, cultural, and political tradition, and becomes embodied in its set of practices, one can, with Kalb, accurately call such a tradition a religion.