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Religion as a 'Contemporary' Manifestation of Objective Mind?

This chapter has three parts: one on the development of religion and its current state in Europe, globally, and analyzing sociological trends on the evolution of religion. The philosophical parts of interest are the next two, where he discusses Rawls and Jaspers on religion.

Frankly, this and the next chapter were not that interesting to me. I get why they are in the book. Habermas has to differentiate his approach from others and they serve as ways to sharpen his project so people do not conflate the two, a classic technique. But, in the interest of time so I can move onto the chapters that are more interesting philosophically, I am going to briefly summarize this and the next chapter.

Rawls wrote his A Theory of Justice, but spent the next decade or so refining the views. For Habermas, this was a regression from the perspective of the autonomy of reason. Instead of seeing reason, primarily practical reason, as something independent and autonomous, Rawls's "constructivist" approach to practical reason became watered down in his later works.

In A Theory of Justice, from what I recall (this may be too reductive) Rawls created a novel, Kantian-inspired technique to generate reasonable principles that anyone could agree to with his thought experiment of the "original position". One must reason as if they do not know what particular allotment they will have in life or worldview. This guards against private reason dominating public reason. One could imagine simple things like a rich person wanting to advocate for a favorable tax code to themselves that puts a large burden on the poor, but for Rawls, you would have to reason as if you did not know if you were rich or poor. You could imagine an "original position genie" where you want to create a law such as this, but the genie says "great, you got it" but instead of being the rich person you are now the poor person in reality.

Habermas has a more favorable view of earlier Rawls. The later Rawls was worried about how to reconcile the normative power of practical reason with the competing religious / existential worldviews. When he wrote his later works such as Political Liberalism and Justice as Fairness, what was reasonable instead became what could be constructed from the lowest common denominator of laws of the competing worldviews. For Habermas, this meant that practical reason is only that which can be carved out from worldviews, not something autonomous, self-legislating, and independent of these worldviews. For Habermas and his project of secular reason, this goes against the fundamental difference, although there is a continuity, between postmetaphysical thinking and religion.

Jaspers is the second figure he discusses. Jaspers went a different but equally incorrect route for Habermas. In choosing between science and religion, Jaspers chose to incorporate philosophy back into religion as another competing existential worldview. I have not read any of Jaspers, so I feel less inclined to give a summary, even though Habermas articulates his position.

In sum, Habermas writes:

Although secular reason for Rawls does not lose its scientific character, it no longer has the final say in questions of political justice, whereas in Jaspers it is assimilated to the mode of a belief system. This should serve as a warning. Postmetaphysical thinking certainly cannot define its boundaries unilaterally vis-à-vis the sciences, on the one hand, and religious teachings and metaphysical worldviews, on the other. But it can try to comprehend the correct demarcations as the result of learning processes without compromising its autonomy.