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ABSTRACT
This article addresses the debate between Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor on the implications of state secularism for the public use of reason. Recent commentators have traced this debate either to Habermas’s and Taylor’s divergent views about the status of Western modernity or to their disagreement about the relation between the good and the right. I argue that these readings rest on misinterpretations of Habermas’s theory of social evolution and understanding of impartial justification. I show that the debate rests on diverging interpretations of what it means for citizens to embed the principles of liberal democracy in their respective conceptions of the good. This difference in turn leads Habermas and Taylor to espouse different criteria of democratic legitimacy. I conclude by suggesting that we have prima facie reasons to prefer Habermas’s conception of legitimacy to Taylor’s, and to that extent, to favor his model of the public use of reason.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Joey Baker, Nigel DeSouza, Denis Dumas, Timothy Grainger, and Jérôme Gosselin-Tapp for their invaluable feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks are also due to the two anonymous referees who read the paper for their detailed and insightful comments, several of which have been incorporated into this version.
Notes
1. Taylor, “Radical Redefinition,” 58 note 12.
2. Habermas, “Religion and Postmetaphysical Thinking,” 78.
3. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 139.
4. Bernstein, “Forgetting Isaac,” 155; Cooke, “A Secular State,” 227; Casanova, “Exploring the Postsecular,” 47–48; Frega, “Equal Accessibility to All,” 268; Harrington, “Habermas’s Theological Turn?” 49; Spohn, “A Difference in Kind,” 121.
5. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 137.
6. Habermas, “Themes in Postmetaphysical Thinking,” 33–34.
7. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 211.
8. Habermas, “Religion and Postmetaphysical Thinking,” 78.
9. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 131.
10. Habermas, “The Boundary between Faith and Knowledge,” 211.
11. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 769–71. The precise implications of Rawls’s duty of civility are a matter of dispute. Cf. Boettcher, “Habermas, Religion and the Ethics of Citizenship,” 224–27; Courtois, “La religion dans l’espace public,” 96–99; Lafont, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 241–42, 254 note 12.
12. Audi, “Liberal Democracy,” 25.
13. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 130.
14. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 307–8.
15. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 131.
16. Ibid., 130.
17. Maclure and Taylor, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience, 27.
18. Ibid., 19–20. Taylor sometimes adds inclusion to the list of goods sought by secularism. See Taylor, “Why We Need a Radical Redefinition,” 50. However, this does not seem to add anything not already included under the principle of equality.
19. Maclure and Taylor, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience, 29.
20. Taylor, “Die Blosse Vernunft,” 326.
21. Ibid., 328.
22. Taylor, “Why We Need a Radical Redefinition,” 36.
23. Ibid., 49.
24. Ibid., 50.
25. Areshidze, “Taking Religion Seriously?” 735; Arfi, “Habermas and the Aporia of Translating Religion,” 500–4; Cooke, “A Secular State,” 227; Frega, “Equal Accessibility to All,” 280–83; Lafont, “Religion and the Public Sphere,” 243–48; Sikka, “On Translating Religious Reasons,” 112–13; Wolterstorff, “Postmetaphysical Philosophy,” 107–8; Yates, “Rawls and Habermas on Religion,” 885–88.
26. Spohn, “A Difference in Kind,” 121, 127–28.
27. Ibid. Since the 1990s, Habermas has distinguished between “ethics” (Ethik) and “morality” (Moraliät). This distinction reflects that between the good and the right. See Habermas, “On the Pragmatic, the Ethical and the Moral,” 8–9. I have maintained this distinction by speaking of religious and nonreligious conceptions of the good. However, Spohn runs the two together by speaking of “religious moral outlooks” and “secular moral outlooks.” This may account for part of the misreading of Habermas that I discuss below.
28. According to Taylor, the modern Western self-understanding is structured by what he calls an “immanent frame.” The central features of this frame are the disembedding of individuals from their social and cosmological ties and the reduction of temporality to the immanent or profane. Taylor sees these as central presuppositions in Western conceptions of social and political organization. See Taylor, A Secular Age, 542.
29. Hung, “Habermas and Taylor on Religious Reasoning,” 552, 554.
30. Taylor maintains that theories like these presuppose the evaluations, interpretations, and practices associated with the “modern moral order.” He defines this primarily in terms of an instrumentalization of society for the benefit of the individuals who make it up. See A Secular Age, 166. This observation is also closely related to his diagnosis of secular moral theories like Kantianism and Utilitarianism as being “inarticulate” about the sources of their own moral evaluations. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 89.
31. Hung, “Habermas and Taylor on Religious Reasoning,” 550.
32. Habermas, “Religion and Postmetaphysical Thinking,” 79, 94.
33. Habermas, “‘Reasonable’ versus ‘True’,” 79 (my emphasis).
34. Maclure and Taylor, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience, 10–12.
35. Dreyfus and Taylor, Retrieving Realism, 163–64.
36. Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” 31, 38.
37. Habermas, “Discourse Ethics,” 104.
38. Ibid., 78.
39. Habermas, “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” 95.
40. Ibid., 50.
41. Habermas, “Reply to My Critics,” 255 (original italics).
42. Habermas, “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” 105. See also McCarthy, “Practical Discourse,” 190–92; Rehg, Insight and Solidarity, 101–6.
43. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 224. Rawls later qualifies the duty of civility to allow citizens to introduce their comprehensive doctrines into public dialogue under certain special circumstances. See Rawls, “Idea of Public Reason,” 786.
44. McCarthy, “Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism,” 51. It is debatable whether Rawls’s model of public reason would in fact have this effect. See Rawls’s discussion of feminist critiques of his political liberalism in “Idea of Public Reason,” 775 note 28.
45. Habermas, “Genealogical Analysis of Morality,” 37–38.
46. Ibid., 35–36.
47. Cooke, “A Secular State,” 232; cf. Cooke, “Violating Neutrality,” 252–53; Harrington, “Habermas’s Theological Turn?,” 48; Hung, “Habermas and Taylor on Religious Reasoning” 558; Sikka, “On Translating Religious Reasons,” 96; Waldron, “Two-Way Translation,” 861. See also Taylor’s comments in Habermas and Taylor, “Dialogue,” 63.
48. In brief, Habermas’s argument is that the very experience of incommensurability or untranslatability presupposes the possibility of a hermeneutic fusion of horizons. It “betrays the conceptual necessity of a tertium comparationis that enables us to bring the two language worlds into relation to each other.” This opens the possibility of cultural dialogue by reciprocal paraphrases across very different forms of life in principle, even though there may be “more or less radical difficulties of translation” in practice. See Habermas, “Remarks on Discourse Ethics,” 103–4.
49. Habermas, “Transcendence from Within,” 75.
50. McCarthy, “The Burdens of Modernized Faith,” 119.
51. Taylor, “Language and Society,” 30–31; cf. note 30 above.
52. Taylor, “Cross-Purposes,” 187, 199.
53. Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” 48.
54. Ibid., 52.
55. Taylor, “Die Blosse Vernunft,” 346.
56. Ibid., 329.
57. Cooke, “A Secular State,” 228–29; cf. Cooke, “Violating Neutrality,” 252–53; Hung, “Habermas and Taylor on Religious Reasoning,” 552–53; Sikka, “On Translating Religious Reasons,” 97–98; Wolterstorff, “Postmetaphysical Philosophy,” 105–6. Note that Cooke sometimes does draw this distinction nominally. However, her misreading of accessibility leads her to draw it in the wrong place. See note 48 above.
58. Rorty, “Religion as Conversation-Stopper,” 171.
59. Cooke, “A Secular State,” 234–35; Lafont, “Religion and the Public Sphere,” 240–41; cf. Lafont, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 250–52; Rosenbaum, “Must Religion be a Conversation-Stopper,” 403–5. See also Rorty, “Religion in the Public Square,” 147–48, as well as Habermas and Taylor, “Dialogue,” 63. The implications of this point for political deliberations are unclear to me. It is true that certain appeals to religious teachings, narrative, or imagery are intended only to play an evocative or allegorical role. In these cases, however, they do not seem to play a justificatory role at all, and so do not appear to pose any problem for practical discourse in Habermas’s sense. See Habermas’s response to Lafont, “Religion and Postmetaphysical Thinking,” 103.
60. Rosenbaum, “Must Religion be a Conversation-Stopper,” 403.
61. Baynes, Normative Grounds, 73; Habermas, “‘Reasonable’ versus ‘True’,” 83.
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Philippe-Antoine Hoyeck
Philippe-Antoine Hoyeck teaches philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. His primary research interests are social and political philosophy. His graduate work pertains to the question of religion and the public sphere in the recent work of Jürgen Habermas.