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The Meaning of the Sacred

 A rite is essentially a rhythmic movement that combines dance, pantomime, body painting and music with audio-visual and motor expressive gestures into figurative enactment.
 What sets it apart from other iconic representations, however, is, as mentioned, its peculiar self-referential character: ritual practices do not refer to any jointly identifiable 'something in the world', even though this is precisely what is novel about symbolically mediated communication.

Girard thus takes an approach that says, yes, there is a referent of rites and myths, and it is the founding murder. Habermas takes a rationalist approach as well to rites, while admitting the paradoxical nature of rites as self-referential. This is why he likens rites to art and Kant's idea of aesthetic judgment.

The conspicuous absence of anything in the world to which it refers sets ritual apart from the profane forms of symbolically mediated cooperation and imbues it with the appeal of the out-of-the-ordinary.

Furthermore, the thesis that there is no referent for rites makes it seem like rites are the origin of l'art pour l'art, while cooperation for big game hunting and the like are the origin of political economy. This is much too neat a distinction when the whole discussion of the sacred is that all these things were intermingled, such as, as Habermas writes, social causes and natural causes into a type of "magical thinking". Again, another point when Habermas tries to explain how we arrived at post-metaphysical thinking, but we somehow find the neatly distinct categories back in the origins of Homo sapiens.

To use a metaphor, Habermas seems to find all the parts of a tree, branches, roots, trunk, etc., but for me and for Girard, I would liken the cultural origins of humanity to the seed, all of them are mixed together. There is no communicative agency as such or l'art pour l'art, they are mixed together. Habermas at times seems to be going to this, but then when it comes to bringing the topic back to his theory of communicative action and language, the leap is too large.

Even for Hegel or Kant, when discussing pre-modern societies and archaic societies, it did not feel as dogmatic. There was no self-consciousness of freedom or idea of the other as an other, although these forms of life were implicit for them. But the vocabulary in a Hegelian genealogy develops over time into more complex and nuanced stages, Habermas wants it both ways, it feels like.

The representative dimension of language is based on the cognitive preconditions for making an objectifying reference to the world. Those who learn to speak must free themselves from the immediacy of the flood of fluctuating episodic experiences and achieve intentional distance from the 'world' as the totality of objects of possible statements.

Kant's apperception is precisely the logical ability to have perceptions about various things that persist over time, the "I think". This logical core of aggregating the "manifold" of experience is what makes experience possible. In the realm of logic, there must be something that is able to take two disparate concepts, such as 7+5 and 12, and recognize them as the same thing. This extends to perceptions as well. Habermas is arguing that the origin of this ability is linguistic and evolved from the transition of symbolic to linguistic communication. Again, Brandom's A Spirit of Trust develops a similar project as Habermas, both influenced by Hegel.

In this way, while engaging in the act of communication about something in the world, the participants acquire a background awareness that this process of communication simultaneously occurs as an event in the world. They owe this awareness to the possibility of oscillating between active participation and impersonal observation.

To be sure, the step from environmentally bound primate consciousness dominated by episodic experiences to the confrontation with a world of publicly represented processes did not occur overnight. The first iconic representation, the first conventionalized gesture, already unlocks the species-specific environment; with this, the clearing of an objective world, as the counterpart of the intersubjectively shared lifeworld, is opened up for the participants who communicate with one another about something.

As a minor point, and I would need to see the German, it is interesting that Habermas uses the Heideggerian word "clearing", or at least translated as that. Heidegger would never have looked to the origins of language in a biological or anthropological sense as the "clearing", but this is exactly what Habermas is doing, and takes a different route than Heidegger's "jargon".

... The hypercomplexity of the representatable occurrences, of the perceived and recognized facts and options, awakens the need to cognitively process the flood of information which, within the simultaneously extended time horizon of practical intentions, preserves the store of knowledge for open possibilities of action.
 This need is served by systemically subsuming what is new in each case into the relevant context of what is known, and by connecting the problems and their explanations to the entire cultural store of transmitted knowledge of the world. The basic vocabulary of the lexicon of language provides a world-constituting categorial framework for this interpretation of events in the natural and social worlds.

This is the "motor of history" for Habermas. This is the way to explain how humans advanced over time. In a Kantian way, he does assume a basic level of cognitive functioning that must have occurred evolutionarily, in tandem with sociological development that made the right conditions for the "world" to be created, i.e., a world-categorial framework that made possible the ability for there to "be a world". This motor of history is how we explain, against the declinist narratives, how cognition and beliefs advance over time.

As a short excursus, the idea of the world, pre-metaphysical and post-metaphysical, is similar. This idea of a "world" persists in phrases in common language like "you are the world to me" or "people like that make the world go round". The blurring between natural and social relations is evident here. But more importantly, it is the idea that the world is some place where things make sense and things are meaningful and intelligible.

As an aside, there is definitely something to this with Habermas. The ability to engage in big game hunting assumes a proto-sports, proto-military, proto-corporation ability to coordinate and cooperate. Think of the ability of a football team to coordinate on a single football play and the ability to run a "play" on big game such as mammoths. The level of sophistication to hunt like that, potentially with tools and different roles, communicating "when i go here, you go here" like a football quarterback, even in a minimal sense of our ancient ancestors, is a complex cognitive task.

The next section is about "myth as a response to the cognitive challenge of openness of the world". I am going to pass over it in the notes largely because it is self-explanatory for Habermas's position. Mythical themes, such as evil and darkness, chaos and stability, are cognitive ways of grappling with the fact that our world-categorial framework is always open to revision upon new information. There is a "negative", in the Hegelian sense, that dialectically overturns any framework, i.e. myth. This ambivalence between the positive, that is, the currently stable world-categorial framework, and the negative, the internal contradictions of the framework that threaten the stable positive, explains the dual-meaning of the sacred.

Habermas writes:

We get closer to the core of the sacred when we understand ritual as a response to the transformation of the drive structure that, with the change of social integration, must have already begun with the transition to the stage of gesturally mediated communication.

This is coupled with the two other aspects of the sacred. One is the recognition that one is fundamentally dependent on the social collective, the loss of freedom is at the same time the only securing of freedom, as exemplified by philosophers like Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel and the idea of "autonomy" and "public reason".

The other aspect of ambivalence and oscillation is that the crossing of symbolic to linguistic communication was a potential destructive act, transgressive, that is "at once frightening and, as a possible source of salvation, fascinating". Habermas cites a passage from Angehrn.

The transgression of boundaries in myth and ritual, the passage through the region of dissolution and decomposition, the integration of the alien—all of these are forms of regression to a First that appears ambivalent in several respects: it is the object of ambivalent affects, of fear and longing, frightening and fascination; it provokes conflicting reactions, something traversed and overcome, assimilated and repelled; it appears in itself as salvation and perdition, as an at once creative and destructive power.

All of what Habermas is saying, I think, is true from a philosophical perspective, but all the worse for philosophy. When I read The Bible, I think, this is a story that speaks to humans about the story of humans. There is very little philosophy in there, quite a bit of religion. If we want to understand humans, especially how we got here, we need to abandon the terms of philosophy I think, they come much later.

In one of the collections influenced by Girard, the author said what should be an obvious point, that humans did not start off thinking that domesticating animals was worth it based on the cost-benefit analysis. There were no venture capitalists funding them, showing the stats on how if we domesticated the horse or the cow, we could move faster and longer, carry more weight, produce more meat and milk, etc. Indigenous folks in America did not domesticate the buffalo or the deer. Rather, the author argues that economic rationality played no part in why we domesticated and the origin must be religious. The anachronism in thinking is so hard to avoid but seems so silly when called out. I don't find Habermas's picture here a compelling genealogy for similar reasons. The description is too philosophical and ad-hoc, almost scientific, which at first it seemed like he was trying to avoid. I am interested in the rest of the book still, the dialectic of faith and knowledge, but I am more convinced of a Girardian approach, that views religion as the origin, motor, and meaning of all this. The view is too abstract and philosophical to motivate me here.

I hope it does not seem like I am cherry picking quotes here. But Habermas writes:

From the perspective of a version of social pragmatics that explains the use of language solely in terms of the cognitive requirements for efficient action coordination, the transition from imperative requests to strong valuations and normative behavioral expectations remains a blank. Nor can the retroactive semanticization of certain institutions in the manner of illocutionary meanings (such as marrying, appointing, setting a seal on, begging, and so on) or in the form of generalized modalities (such as commanding, promising, recommending, committing, and so on) obscure this. The normative claim to validity that we can raise with regulative speech acts is in each instance borrowed from a normative background, which in turn is symbolically structured and therefore presupposes the use of symbols, but whose existence nevertheless cannot be explained, like language, from the profane contexts and functional requirements of social cooperation.

Ritual communication can be understood as an answer to these challenges. The tensions that broke out between the individual and society in everyday communication were evidently thematized and absorbed in this out-of-the-ordinary communication. The processing of the self-referential theme of the instability inherent in the socialization process itself would explain not only why ritual lacks a reference to the world, but also what qualifies it to generate the countervailing normative binding and bonding energies.

The lack of reference to anything in the world is just that for Habermas, it is a lack in the world and thus not something with an objective referent. It is the self-thematized and symbolic negative, the tension, that is at play in society when it comes up against challenges to its world-categorial framework. I would like to see how this occurs more concretely as the book plays out. Why do we need religion, is theater not enough? Is literature, the movies? In a way, Robert Pippin is seemingly going this way with art. What is the role of liturgy then after philosophy if philosophy, especially Hegel, has come to the self-conscious awareness of dialectic?

Habermas also says he will skip the transition from ancient tribal societies to the axial age worldviews in his book. For him, it is because the literate, Axial age developed enough information to cause a revolution to break free from myth. But, again, it is disappointing to see this book so light on examples. I don't agree with his analysis of the meaning of the sacred and if someone already did, I don't think anyone would feel like they have been challenged. Even though, both of us, may have a similar philosophical view. The story of how we got her is important. Just like, how we went from domesticating animals and big game hunting to Nvidia, the NFL, and Congress.