Found in Translation: Habermas and Anthropotechnics

Abstract

In his recent work on postsecular societies Jürgen Habermas has stressed the need for a dialogue between religious and nonreligious citizens aimed at strengthening social integration and rejuvenating the moral bases of modern political and juridical institutions. This dialogue should focus on the translation of religious traditions into rational, secular forms. In his more recent work on the social function of rituals, however, he rejected the Durkheimian view of public secular rituals as mechanisms for fostering social integration. In this article I discuss Habermas’s early reflections on postsecularism and assess his interpretation of public religious rituals as sources of social integration. I then propose an alternative to his translation proviso whereby religious symbolic content would be translated into behavior-regulating technologies aimed at developing the dispositional resources needed for a continuous postsecular dialogue between religious and nonreligious citizens.

Keywords:

• Habermas
• translation
• religious practices
• postsecularism
• technologies of the self

Acknowledgment

An earlier version of this essay was presented at the seminar “Europe, Democracy and Critical Theory. A German-Italian Workshop on Jürgen Habermas’s Theory,” Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Bad Homburg, Germany, December 6, 2013. Later versions were discussed at seminars in Rome, Florence, and Pisa. I would like to thank Jügen Habermas, Walter Privitera, Regina Kreide, Marina Calloni, Adam B. Seligman, Bill Sullivan, Paolo Costa, Matteo Bianchin, Mauro Piras, Alessandro Ferrara, Dimitri D’Andrea, Riccardo Prandini, Olimpia Affuso, Martina Visentin, Martina Maritan, Camil Ungureanu, Luca Corchia, two anonymous reviewers for The European Legacy, and the late Massimo Rosati for their help in giving my chaotic ideas a form. The final version was written at the Department of Sociology of the University of California, Berkeley, summer 2016, and greatly benefited from discussions with my students there.

Notes

1. See, among others, Taylor, “Radical Redefinition of Secularism”; Hennig, “Habermas’s Translation Proviso”; Kerkwijk, “Lost in Translation”; Calhoun, Mendieta, and VanAntwerpen, eds., Habermas and Religion; Cooke, “Salvaging and Secularizing”; Flores D’Arcais, “Eleven Theses on Habermas”; and Gleason, “From Jürgen Habermas.”

2. Pleas for focusing on civil society can be found in Bohman, “A Postsecular Global Order?” and in Lafont, “Religion and the Public Sphere.”

3. Chambers, “Religion Speaks to the Agnostic,” 215ff.

4. I am paraphrasing Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles, 227. See Arendt, On Revolution, 215ff.

5. See Junker–Kenny, Habermas and Theology; and Mendieta, “Religion in Habermas’s Work.”

6. Habermas, “Prepolitical Foundations,” 102. See also Böckenförde, State, Society, and Liberty.

7. Habermas, “Prepolitical Foundations,” 105–12.

8. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 127, italics in the original.

9. Ibid., 130, italics in the original.

10. Ibid., 137.

11. See also Habermas, “Awareness of What Is Missing,” 16. In “Political Liberalism and Religious Claims,” Stoeckl calls attention to the different attitudes of liberal, traditionalist, and fundamentalist religious groups to the principles of postsecularism.

12. Habermas, “Reply to My Critics,” 372.

13. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 139. Habermas adds that religious traditions have an “opaque core” that can never be fully grasped by postmetaphysical philosophy (143).

14. Ibid., 138.

15. Habermas, “Reply to My Critics,” 373.

16. See, among others, Rosati, Ritual and the Sacred; Bellah and Tipton, eds., The Robert Bellah Reader; Rappaport, Ritual and Religion; and Tiryakian, For Durkheim.

17. Rosati, The Making of a Postsecular Society, 213ff.

18. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 49ff. See also Adams, Habermas and Theology, 69ff.

19. Habermas’s early conceptualization of postsecular societies rests on an understanding of religion cast almost exclusively in cognitive and discursive terms. According to this, “religion” corresponds to a set of interconnected beliefs that might be expressed as propositions; these beliefs are an object of identification for “believers,” who are expected to admit or declare their adherence to them—thus the label of “confessionalism.” See Strenski, Why Politics Can’t Be Freed, 1–6 and 27; see also King, Orientalism and Religion, 38ff. Within this disembodied discursive framework, the recognition of the power of religion upon individual and collective lives is based solely on the content of religious ideas, and systematic theology is taken as the ultimate representation of religion itself. As almost all the essays in Habermas and Religion show, this view of religion is normally accepted or taken for granted by Habermas’s postmetaphysical critics.

20. Riesebrodt, The Promise of Salvation, 75ff. and 92ff.

21. Habermas, “Eine Hypothese zum gattungsgeschichtlichen Sinn des Ritus”, 77–95. I quote from an unpublished translation by Ciaran Cronin, “A Hypothesis Concerning the Evolutionary Meaning of Rites,” mimeograph, 7.

22. Ibid., 8.

23. Habermas, “The Political,” 17.

24. See Habermas, “A Postsecular World Society?”.

25. Habermas, “Eine Hypothese zum gattungsgeschichtlichen Sinn des Ritus,” 9.

26. Habermas, “Reply to My Critics,” 373, my italics.

27. See Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice. Randall Collins’s and Peter Sloterdijk’s theories of practice, their enormous differences notwithstanding, might be as useful as Bourdieu’s. See Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains. See also Schatzki, Knorr Cetina, and von Savigny, eds., The Practice Turn.

28. Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, 100. See Wacquant, “Homines in Extremis,” 197ff.

29. Mahmood, “Rehearsed Spontaneity,” 843; Delamont and Stephens, “Each More Agile,” 50. See, among countless others, Wacquant, Body and Soul; Algazi, “At the Study”; Markula, “‘Tuning into One’s Self,’”; Ericsson, “Deliberate Practice.” The documentary film Kumaré: The True Story of a False Prophet directed by Virkam Gandhi (2011) is a striking example of how ritual practices can transform bodily and mental habits.

30. What follows owes a great debt to Massimo Rosati, Rahel R. Wasserfall, and Adam B. Seligman as scholars, organizers, and personal friends.

31. Riesebrodt, The Promise of Salvation, 75–76.

32. Foucault’s definition includes both religious and philosophical technologies of the self. See Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 17, and Hermeneutics of the Subject. For an interpretation of ancient philosophy as more than an argumentative practice, see Hadot, Philosophy.

33. Anthropotechnics are defined by Sloterdijk as “the methods of mental and physical practising by which humans from the most diverse cultures have attempted to optimize their cosmic and immunological status in the face of vague risks of living and acute certainties of death” (You Must Change Your Life, 10).

34. In his English rendition of Sloterdijk’s Du musst dein Leben ändern, Wieland Hoban translates Übung as “practice.” I use “practice” as I have been using it so far, but I use “exercise” for Übung, in accord with Sloterdijk’s erratic use of the word Exerzitium. See, for example, Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, 4, which matches the original Du musst dein Leben ändern, 14.

35. Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 30.

36. Rosati, Ritual and The Sacred, 79ff., italics and spelling modified.

37. Examples here are countless: Assman and Stroumsa, eds., Transformations of the Inner Self; Shulman and Stroumsa, eds., Self and Self–Transformation; Martin, Gutman, and Hutton, eds., Technologies of the Self. All of Foucault’s later writings are also relevant here.

38. On this apparent paradox, see Collins, Selfless Persons; and Siderits, Thompson, and Zahavi, eds., Self, No Self?

39. See Blée, The Third Desert.

40. Bethune, By Faith and Hospitality, 2–3. See also Bethune, Interreligious Hospitality; and Cornille, ed., Companion to Inter–religious Dialogue. Information on the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue can be found at http://www.dimmid.org/ (accessed March 19, 2017).

41. Quoted in Bethune, By Faith and Hospitality, 2. See also Give, A Trappist Meeting Monks; Billot, Voyage dans les monasters zen; Kiser, The Monks of Tibhirine; and Shomali and Skudlarek, eds., Monks and Muslims.

42. Seligman, Wasserfall, and Montgomery, Living with Difference, 16.

43. Ibid., 102, my italics.

44. See the dialogue between Habermas and Taylor in Butler, Habermas, Taylor, and West, The Power of Religion, 60–69.

45. Seligman, Wasserfall, and Montgomery, Living with Difference, 21.

46. Ibid., 43.

47. Ibid., 79, 42, 35.

48. Habermas, “Awareness of What Is Missing,” 17ff.; and Chamber, “Religion Speaks to the Agnostic,” 216.

49. George, “Mindfulness Helps You”; and Clark and Chorley, “Lessons in Meditation?” Some historical work can be found in Ie, Ngoumen, and Langer, eds., The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Mindfulness. For ethnographical work on these translated and recombined practices, see Lea, “Liberation or Limitation?”; and Lea, Cadman, and Philo, “Changing the Habits.”

50. See Singleton, Yoga Body; and Jain, Selling Yoga.

51. Seligman, Wasserfall, and Montgomery, Living with Difference, 42, 155. For a classic discussion, see MacIntyre, After Virtue.

52. Abbott, Processual Sociology. See also Seligman and Weller, Rethinking Pluralism.

53. See Gergen, The Saturated Self; Elliott and Lemert, The New Individualism; and Holstein and Gubrium, The Self We Live By.

54. Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 18–21.