Home | Book Notes | Also a History of Philosophy

1. Cognitive Breakthrough and the Preservation of the Sacred Core

The axial age is the age where the mind was made free to start thinking. Whether it is a "transcendent divine" or "world-immanent" point of reference, the mind can now think outside of the bounds of "the more or less narratively ordered flood of events controlled by deities and magical powers". That is, thinking was born out of the separation from magical thinking.

Thus it is not just Christianity or Judaism that is uniquely different, but many religions and worldviews, according to Habermas, such as Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and Greek metaphysics ushered in transformations in thinking. This transformation brought about the metaphysical difference between "beings" and "appearances", most well known to us probably from Plato, and the "expressivist" distinction between spirit world and manifestations of the spirit world. This new metaphysical relation brought about "a broadening of perspectives, increasing reflexivity, and the growing awareness of contingency".

We thus find the beginnings of reason and scientific thinking in the new perspective shift in the Western tradition, largely influenced by Greek metaphysics, Jewish theology, and Christian thought. However, not all of the axial age worldviews were absorbed into modernity. Religion still preserved the "sacred core" even if an element of cognition broke free and became autonomous from religion. Habermas argues that religion cannot be just boiled down to a set of dogmas and philosophy, otherwise there would be no place for religion in the face of modern philosophy. Rather, it is that religion has preserved the ritualistic and liturgical elements of the sacred from the beginning of human history. Only through the communal and embodied practice of ritual, does religion preserve something that modernity through philosophy and scientific thinking cannot.

Habermas thus posits a genealogy of religion that is similar to Girard and others. Habermas does not find that the definition of religion is captured in a functional sense, that is, the definition that religion is a set of practices that help the practitioners cope with contingency in the world. Rather, religion preserves meaningful and historical bonds that humanity suffered in the past and repeat through ritual in weaker forms that are still meaningful for the practitioners who may have not even experienced the original suffering, but may experience similar sufferings. Habermas writes more at length:

... I will argue later that a profoundly ambivalent species experience— namely the changeover to a revolutionary new mode of socialization, which was decisive for the evolutionary origin of Homo sapiens— is repeated in the weaker form of resonances whenever the social collective is plunged into crisis by unexpected events beyond its control or the individual is thrown off balance at thresholds in the life cycle. The regeneration of a society after it has overcome anomic conditions, or the rebirth of the social self after the demise of a superseded level of identity, are experienced as catastrophic, and at the same time as saving processes undergone by socialized subjects as a fate. The ambivalent dealings with sacred powers marked equally by fear and awe reflect both the element of catastrophe and that of redemption — the powerless (!) experience of the saving (!) deliverance from a devastating (!) threat.

Perhaps it would be better to say that the sacred, which is mastered through performance and imagination, arises from this harrowing crisis experience of destruction and salvation. Every critical shock to social cohesion is a repetition of the ambivalent original experience of a social bond between isolated individuals, who simultaneously depend on cooperation with others and yet are ultimately reliant on themselves, being stretched to breaking point.

There are a lot of Girardian elements to point out and expand upon. First, the sacred is ambivalent to Girard because the sacred arose out of an ambivalent experience. Humans would kill someone, the emissary victim, who at first seemed to be the cause of the crisis. The social escalation reached a point where, if the violence did not kill everyone, it targeted on one individual. To use Habermas's language as well, early human societies were not thinking scientifically yet, rather, thinking was more akin to "magical thinking" and the distinction between appearances and beings was not available, nor was the distinction between social and physical reality. Spirits were things and things were spirits. When the victim is killed, the crisis dissipates, and the victim is now seen as a god, since who else could have the power to create and end a crisis?

Second, the revolutionary mode of socialization. For much of human history, there was not that much "progress" or difference in the ways of life of early humans. I would have to look up again the dates, but sometime around 12,000 years ago, there was a cultural explosion. It seems agreed upon that it was unlikely to have been biological and evolutionary, but rather, social or second nature that explains this. For Girard and Habermas, the early, pre-Axial age religions, figured out some way of cooperating and surviving together so that not only could humans survive, but flourish and grow. In a real Hobbesian sense, we exited the state of nature into the state of culture or society, we became social animals.

This is where the repetition comes from. Societies found a mechanism of stabilizing and renewing society. Society would stabilize through original mechanisms, such as the ritual and taboo mechanisms that were interpreted as the cause of the original stabilization of society, or it would grow. There is thus a similar conservative and progressive element that we know today. Habermas earlier in our notes talks about how society grows in the way it creates new ways of cooperation or extends cooperation to new groups of people. We see how in the story written by Flavius Philostratus about the demon in Ephesus supports Girard and Habermas in the idea that the sacred was a mechanism to engender stability of the society, largely through the sacrifice of the emissary victim, the scapegoat. Although, Habermas does not have a stronger theory about the sacred like Girard does it seems. That is, Habermas does not think the sacred, so far, is through the sacrificial mechanism.

We also see how Heidegger's "only a god can save us" is quite "pagan" in philosophy. That is, Heidegger recognizes the logic of the sacred in the destruction (WW1, WW2, and the Holocaust) and thinks that there must be some sort of divine, narratively ordered salvation awaiting Germany.

This sacred core is something that Habermas thus thinks religion has preserved and modernity has lost. This is why religion seems alien and antiquated from the perspective of modernity, something we have yet to shake off. But this sacred core is not something that can be "epistemically subsumed" under modernity, it is the excess that cannot be captured by something like a Kant or a David Hume. Reason has no place for the sacred.

Habermas poses a question:

Does reason still have the inherent power to continue to reignite the liberating spark of a transcendence from within from the embers of the consciousness of universally binding normativity?