Table Of ContentBetween Naturalism and Religion
Between Naturalism
and Religion
Philosophical Essays
By Jürgen Habermas
Translated by Ciaran Cronin
polity
First published in German as Zwischen Naturalismus und
Religion © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main, 2005
This English edition © Polity Press, 2008
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Contents
Introduction 1
Part I The Intersubjective Constitution of
Norm-governed Thought 9
1 Public Space and Political Public Sphere –
The Biographical Roots of Two Motifs
in my Thought 11
2 Communicative Action and the Detranscendentalized
“Use of Reason” 24
3 On the Architectonics of Discursive Differentiation:
A Brief Response to a Major Controversy 77
Part II Religious Pluralism and Civic Solidarity 99
4 Prepolitical Foundations of the Constitutional
State? 101
5 Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive
Presuppositions for the “Public Use of Reason”
by Religious and Secular Citizens 114
Part III Naturalism and Religion 149
6 Freedom and Determinism 151
7 “I Myself am Part of Nature” – Adorno on the
Intrication of Reason in Nature: Refl ections on
the Relation between Freedom and
Unavailability 181
vi Contents
8 The Boundary between Faith and Knowledge:
On the Reception and Contemporary Importance
of Kant’s Philosophy of Religion 209
Part IV Tolerance 249
9 Religious Tolerance as Pacemaker for
Cultural Rights 251
10 Equal Treatment of Cultures and the Limits of
Postmodern Liberalism 271
11 A Political Constitution for the Pluralist
World Society? 312
Index 353
Introduction
Two countervailing trends mark the intellectual tenor of the age –
the spread of naturalistic worldviews and the growing political
infl uence of religious orthodoxies. On the one hand, advances in
biogenetics, brain research, and robotics driven by therapeutic and
eugenic motives are being successfully presented in a positive light.
This program is designed to facilitate the spread of ways of under-
standing ourselves in terms of the objectifying categories of natural
science into everyday contexts of communication and action.
Habituation to forms of self-objectifi cation that reduce all meaning
and experience to what can be observed would also dispose indi-
viduals to corresponding forms of self-instrumentalization.1 For
philosophy, this trend is associated with the challenge of scientistic
naturalism. The fact that all operations of the human mind depend
on underlying organic processes is not in dispute. Instead, the
controversial issue is what form the naturalization of the mind
should take. For an appropriate naturalistic conception of cultural
evolution must do justice to both the intersubjective constitution
of the mind and the normative character of its rule-guided
operations.
On the other hand, the spread of naturalistic worldviews is
encountering an unexpected revitalization of religious communi-
ties and traditions and their politicization across the world. For
1 See Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, trans. Hella Beister and
William Rehg (Cambridge: Polity, 2003).
2 Introduction
philosophy, the revival of religious energies, to which Europe
alone seems to be immune, is associated with a fundamental cri-
tique of the postmetaphysical and nonreligious self-understanding
of Western modernity. The fact that, for want of alternatives, the
scope for political action is henceforth restricted to the universe
of scientifi c-technical and economic infrastructures that developed
in the West is not in dispute. The source of controversy is rather
the correct interpretation of the secularizing impacts of a process
of cultural and social rationalization increasingly denounced by the
champions of religious orthodoxies as a historical development
peculiar to the West.
These confl icting intellectual trends are rooted in opposed
traditions. “Hard” forms of naturalism can be understood as an
implication of the Enlightenment’s uncritical faith in science,
whereas the political reawakening of religious consciousness
breaks with the liberal assumptions of the Enlightenment.
However, these intellectual and spiritual outlooks do not merely
clash at the level of academic controversies. They also develop
into powerful political forces both within the civil society of
the leading Western nation and at the international level in the
encounter between the major world religions and the dominant
global cultures.
From the perspective of a political theory concerned with
the normative foundations and the functional preconditions of
the democratic constitutional state, this clash also reveals a tacit
complicity. The two countervailing trends conspire, as though
in a division of labor, to jeopardize the cohesion of the polity
through ideological polarization when neither side exhibits a
willingness to engage in self-refl ection. A political culture that
polarizes itself irreconcilably along the fault-line of secular
versus religious confl icts, whether over issues of human embryo
research, abortion, or the treatment of comatose patients, chal-
lenges civic common sense even in the world’s oldest democracy.
The ethos of liberal citizenship demands that both sides should
determine the limits of faith and knowledge in a refl exive
manner.
As the example of the United States shows, the modern con-
stitutional state was also invented with the aim of promoting
peaceful religious pluralism. Only the ideologically neutral exer-
cise of secular governmental authority within the framework of
