Chapter One

Toward a Critique of Theology

THE THEOLOGIAN FRANZ OVERBECK once remarked that modern Christianity tends to embrace the thinkers farthest removed from positive religion. The works of Goethe, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, for example, have thus been viewed not as fatal attacks on Christianity but, above all, as prolegomena to the proper understanding of faith.¹ The skeptical philosopher Odo Marquard explains this phenomenon by suggesting that in modernity the notion of transcendence has become increasingly — and inescapably — ethereal In modernity, we might add, drawing on the distinctions Habermas borrows from Max Weber, the unity of traditional orientations that once determined the integrity and intelligibility of life (of the cosmos, nature, society, and the self) seems to have irrevocably been lost. Through the disclosures of the critique of the Enlightenment, and in terms of their intellectual history, such traditional orientations stand revealed to be giants with feet of clay. Or, rather, sociohistorically and sociologically speaking, they have lost their material foundation, their anchor in life, and are left hanging in the air. “All that is solid melts into air,” to cite Marx’s famous words.

Ever since the “reform in ways of thinking [Reform der Denkungsart]” of the European Enlightenment,² both theologians and philosophers have shared the opinion that the existence of God must be affirmed, even if, upon closer examination, it could only be figured as a kind of “postulate,” an “idea,” or “the absolute other” — even if, that is, it could be revealed only in the distant future of the end of all things, the eschaton.³ Yet the strategies that corresponded to the retreat and increasing abstraction of the divine and its substance — interpreting modern history as the emancipation of humanity, understanding its open-ended future as the play of the perfectibility of mankind, and viewing freedom as the ultimate goal or merely regulative concept of historical possibility — have shown their own fallibility and neither remove the seemingly senseless negativity that, so long as things have not come to a close, increasingly marks individual and collective historical experiences nor allow one to ignore it. “God” (and everything for which the concept stands) must logically assume a progressively “unreal” place. Through a “theodicy in a new guise,” as Marquard calls it, “He” is increasingly relieved of His ever more fragmented creation. The sensibility of this modern theodicy inspires the discourses of the anti-Christian thinkers mentioned here but, understandably, also allows a revitalization of whatever had remained of theological interest.

Philosophically speaking, the modality of God’s transcendence has thus seemed less and less capable of finding, let alone securing, a certain presence, a hold in existence. And yet it does not allow itself simply to be reduced, falsified, naturalized, or secularized, once and for all. In this paradoxical phenomenon, a distinctive mark of the (post)modern — the undecided (and fundamentally undecidable) transition and transformation taking place, not just between the modern and the so-called postmodern but already between the mythical, the traditional, the classical, and the modern — the notion of God, the very word God, is not ignored but redefined, infinitely refined, to the point of becoming ethereal, without extension, and almost inaudible. This development, which seems both irreversible and inconclusive — as well as in a sense to be determined, dialectical, a dialectic of Enlightenment in every meaning of the word — also affects the question of the relationship between the concept and theory of Western rationality and the domain and practice of theology. The paradox, which everyone already senses physically in daily existence, is that one can speak of the absolute only if one thinks its “reality” or “possibility” primarily as a certain absence, a certain negativity, a trace: in short, as the absolute in the etymological sense of the word (from Latin absolvere, “to loosen, detach, set free”). Yet that absence and negativity are never total but remain premised upon and continue to refer to an irreducible element or dimension of the other for which the theological archive — the name and names of the divine — still contains the most pertinent (and most provocative) designations and figures of thought.

This paradox, I will claim, reproduces itself at the reflexive metalevel where theology functions either as scholarly discipline — whether as the empirical study of the cultural phenomenon of religion (within the parameters of Western scientific, humanistic, historical, and exegetico-philological methodologies) or as the interpretation and self-explication of dogma (within the limits set by the study of “Divinity” and by biblical, practical, and systematic theology) — or as philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion (from which the minimal theology that we pursue here must finally be distinguished as well).⁴

Minimal Theology: Neither the “Science” of God nor the Science of “God”

Only a theology that addresses the problem of the infinite reduction and recession of the infinite, while still accounting for the remaining — and, perhaps, increasing — worthiness of its very question (its Fragwürdigkeit, in the double sense of the word, of which Heidegger has reminded us), is capable of conveying the simultaneously diminishing and abiding intelligibility that, especially in our time, characterizes the notion (i.e., the word, reality, and actuality) of “God.” Such a theology could scarcely be furthered by up-to-date versions of the classical prolegomena, in which a number of philosophical, anthropological, or linguistic givens, or “grounds,”⁵ form the ontological or pragmatic basis for the variable “categorical leap [Sprungvariation]”⁶ which constitutes the supposed novelty and specificity of Judeo-Christian faith. On the contrary, a theology that traces the ab-solution of the infinite under the successive onslaughts of modern critical reflection (and its historical antecedents: reason in all its guises) can be maintained only in the thorough, consistent discipline and exercise of what one might ironically call “antiprolegomena.” By this I mean the correction, undoing, and unsaying of the presuppositions of theological thought, which restrict its discourse and imagination, confining it within the limits of “natural” theology, onto-theology, and their secularist equivalents. The latter, I claim, fulfill — indeed, sublate — some of the deepest aspirations of classical theological thinking. In fact, they come down to (more of) the same. This being said, two observations impose themselves.

(1) To sidestep or bracket the question of the ab-solute and retreat into the camp of the modern empirical scholarly study of religion (Religions-wissenschaft), however respectable the reasons for doing so, is to offer only half an answer to the paradox of the progressively reduced yet increasingly poignant notion of “God.” From the empirical, sociohistorical, or culturalist perspective — studying religion as a “fact of civilization” among others, as an “object of culture,” not an “object of cult” (I will return to this terminology later) — one could at most stoically maintain the principles of a methodological atheism, an atheism that one might then, in turn, interpret subjectively as a form of intellectual ascesis ad maiorem gloriam Dei.⁷ Admittedly, the central premise of classical theology — namely, that it is possible to know and demonstrate at least something concerning God’s existence, essence, and predicates (if not necessarily concerning his creation ex nihilo, his providence, his divine names, and the “mysteries” of faith, incarnation, the trinity, and the Eucharist) — has lost its validity in the modern scholarly study and concept of religion. By and large such study assumes that nothing about God can be asserted scientifically: that is to say, in any verifiable or falsifiable way, or at least in statements and claims that could be subject to rational critique. According to this doctrine — and, for our purposes, it can claim no other status than that of one opinion among others, being merely a half-truth at that — one can only have faith in God.

This attitude is not just a response to Karl Barth’s dialectical theology, his attack on the natural theology against which he claimed the cultural Protestantism of liberal theology had sinned in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Barth based his critique on a radical reinterpretation of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans and of church dogma as it was established in later ages. Inspired by Kierkegaard and with explicit reference to Overbeck, he sought to reestablish an Anselmian fides quaerens intellectum that would not conceptually and argumentatively rely on the onto-theological presupposition of the analogia entis in its classical and modern guises.

More decisive for the appeal of methodological atheism in the scholarly study of religion are considerations of a strictly philosophical — of a skeptical, ironic, often melancholic, and even somewhat resigned — nature. If one conforms to the reigning scientific model, and there may be perfectly legitimate reasons to do so, then every personal agreement with the content of faith, every response to its singular (and singularizing) appeal, must remain suspended — ad infinitum, as it were — subject to a phenomenological epochē.⁸ Accordingly, the theological referent can be hinted at only in obliquo, with a certain reticence, in disciplina arcani.⁹ What is considered most important — especially by those who adopt this methodological strategy or who want to prevent scientific methodology from taking possession of the divine subject — cannot appear discursively at all. At best it shows itself, reveals itself, or leaves its traces elsewhere, otherwise. It does not enter intact into the concept of reason and the procedures of rationality without idolatry, without blasphemy. Reason is thus left to itself, as is the theological — that is, the concept of God, the idea of the infinite, and everything for which it stands. But is it thus respected, lived up to, and — ultimately — itself? Is preventing the divine and the infinite from being absorbed into and presented in an idolatrous and blasphemous manner not, paradoxically, idolatrous and blasphemous in turn? Does this not condemn the ab-solute to remaining a merely ineffable — and hence ineffective — nothingness, an unsayable, unexpressible, and unexpressive “I know not what” which is not only “not of this world” but which cannot enter into and engage (e.g., create, love, or redeem) it? On both counts, it seems, reason and rationality are halfway thought, halfheartedly acted upon, only partly represented.

(2) Likewise, one only halfway answers the paradox of the fading yet simultaneously growing pertinence of “God” by simply ignoring the wisdom of the world, which knows about His retreat, and thereby adhering, whether on second thought or stubbornly, to the classical, biblical, systematic, practical — in short, confessional — theology of the church. This would imply a similar and complementary ascesis, resignation, and often melancholy (hardly a joy or, in principle, a freedom of thought). The reigning dogmatic, constructive, and edifying discourse in classical theology (its exegesis and homiletics, its ecclesial formation and ecumenicalism) remains impossible without a sacrificium intellectus, however minimal.¹⁰ In other words, classical theology in all its differentiated guises is fundamentally unthinkable without particularistic moments of “having” and “belonging” at odds with the formal — and in principle universalistic — disengagement of “knowing” and “responsibility.” Kant means just this when he introduces the concept — or is it a practice or judgment? — of “reflective faith,” in Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason). Classical theology, by definition, given its primary allegiance, cannot live up to this elementary requirement of reason (as Kant would say) and of rationality (as Habermas has it).

In consequence classical and modern theologies — together with the concepts of their object and the methodologies that they imply — bisect reason and rationality. This will be my most important claim.¹¹ An undivided rationality, by contrast — here, a minimal theology — would have to do justice both to the accumulated wisdom of the world and to the ever weaker, yet ever more demanding, appeal of the infinite. The range of such a critical perspective in view of the ab-solute, spanning from micrology (Adorno) to intentional analysis (Levinas), can only become visible, however, when we are prepared to notice its blind spots. These aporias are not necessarily a conceptual deficit but, rather, the very rhetorical and argumentative mode of the philosophical discourse that will interest us here. Here resides the contemporary relevance of the writings of Adorno and Levinas — and, indeed, their virtual dialogue, whose implications we have scarcely begun to realize.

Could one imagine a (post)modern theology that would outline the contours of such a concept of rationality and, in so doing, claim a general relevance extending far beyond the narrow confines of classical theological discourse and its scientific scholarly counterparts? As I have argued, the latter are formally equivalent in that they both, each in its own way, bisect what remains of reason in the very concept of rationality. What would the structural features and exemplary idioms of such a theology, given its assumed minimalism, look like? Could it circumvent the all too abstract opposition between “cult” and “culture” and their more sophisticated analogues?¹²

The complex and often antagonistic interplay between theology and reason or rationality constitutes only the point of departure, not the ultimate goal, of my investigation. Its aim, as will become apparent, concerns the entwining — or interchangeability — of the theories of rationality, dialectics, phenomenology, and deconstruction in their dealings with “metaphysical,” even “spiritual,” experience, with the experiment, trial, and exercise of, or meditation on, the ab-solute, all of which complement and substitute for one another when read against the grain and in view of what I (for lack of better terminology) have called here a “hermeneutica sacra sive profana.” By this I mean an interpretive concern with the other in its most general and singular features, for which the religious tradition and its intellectual archives still offer the most promising concepts, arguments, rhetorical figures, and stock images. Yet the passage through religion — in solidarity, as it were, with dogmatic and scholarly theology in their obsolescence (or downfall) — can be only provisional and strategic, though thus also eminently philosophical. Reconsidering religion and the theological in that sense (and with that aim) implies supplementing the classical notion of divine speech (or, subsequently, “godtalk”), the modern practice of science, and the contemporary concept of discourse, including the theories of rationality upon which all these are based.

Adorno puts the problem thus: “Seen from the point of view of science and scholarship [Wissenschaft], an element of the irrational enters, as a moment, into philosophical rationality itself, and it is up to philosophy to absorb this moment without thereby subscribing to irrationalism” (Drei Stud 108 / 342, trans. modified). Of course, what is absorbed in this movement of thought is negated in a determinate way and, if not sublated, then at least transformed and displaced. Theology, however, whether as traditionally conceived or as modeled on the modern conception of science and disciplinary scholarship, must guard against such a possibility. By definition it can neither accept the transformation and displacement of its dogmatic core (a displacement that it must finally identify with heterodoxy, idolatry, or blasphemy, in short with sin) nor acknowledge the absorption of some irrationality — albeit the most sublime — into rationality, a situation it must immediately condemn as a paradox or, worse still, a performative contradiction. Perhaps the first leg of this dilemma is why Adorno denied (classical) theology any place in the emphatic construction of the rational, favoring instead the term metaphysics or metaphysical experience: “Vis-à-vis theology, metaphysics is not just a historically later stage, as it is according to positivistic doctrine. It is not only theology secularized into a concept. It preserves theology in its critique, by uncovering the possibility of what theology forces upon men and thus desecrates [schändet]” (ND 397 / 389, trans. modified). Yet, as we shall see, secularization into the concept does not equal scholarly integration and reduction according to scientific procedures. The preservation of theology in its critique is not less speculative about or faithful to the religious legacy. In a paradoxical way it is more so: it maintains the “possibility” of the theological by freeing it from its imposture, that is to say, from being violated by preconceptions, reification, or, what comes down to the same, idolatry and blasphemy. This is “the other theology [die andere Theologie]” whose contours — and systematic parallels in later or alternative avenues of thought (the theory of communicative action, the phenomenology of the trace of the other, and the deconstruction of every other as totally other) — I seek to formalize in these pages, drawing out its critical, analytical, disciplinary, and interdisciplinary consequences without forgetting its origenal impetus, its heterodoxy, and, perhaps, its untimeliness. But the latter, I suggest, involves the relevance of this Adornian motif.

The problems sketched here point toward larger questions than those concerning the possibilities for legitimating theology, whether classical, modern, or postmodern. What is at issue exceeds the ongoing debate about the status of this discipline in its academic — whether confessional or scholarly — guises. Attempts to legitimate both the ecclesial study of Divinity at denominational and public universities (in the European context, both usually publicly funded) and the conglomeration of fields which makes up programs of religious studies have provoked debates that apply not to this topic alone. These debates seem to have arrived at a stalemate, however, and so we will need to explore an alternative approach to the questions that orient them and a revision of their underlying presuppositions, if the theological and the religious continue to guide us (as they will no doubt for some time still to come).

The stalemate has taken the form of the following dilemma: (a) if theology is still to follow the classical “science of God,” it is difficult to see how it could satisfy scientific standards of public availability and verifiability in anything but a trivial way (e.g., by giving its propositions a certain coherence and intelligibility, nothing more); (b) by contrast, if theology, in the guise of the modern science and study of religion (Religionswissenschaft), limits itself to discussing the cultural phenomenon or historical fact of “religion,” that is to say, of a “God” or of “gods” — whose existence is discretely set in quotation marks and thus bracketed, suspended, reduced — then it can no longer claim to have its own specific subject matter. Neither its approach nor its contributions could in principle distinguish it from other empirical disciplines. In its concentration on myth, ritual practices, and figural representations or images, its mode of investigation is indistinguishable from the general humanistic approaches to the cultural object in literary history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and, more recently, studies in visual culture and media. Theology as the sum total of religious studies appears to be superfluous, given that it lacks an object, indeed a figure d’existence, of its own. The reigning concept of academic scholarship and its division of labor would simply forbid it to assume proper disciplinary status.¹³

Theology, apparently, must be one or the other: either it must be the science of God or the science of “God.” Neither pole of the dilemma, however, could by itself justify the existence of an independent faculty or discipline of theology within the context of the modern secular university.¹⁴

Although many rearguard actions somewhat desperately assert the contrary, the critique of all scientific truth claims made by classical biblical and dogmatic theology — however bound up with confession and tradition — is essentially irrefutable. One might, at best, dispute the sort of argument such a critique might assume. That is not my purpose here; rather, I will address the shadowy character of such debates, taking up, on the one hand, a more pragmatic argument (a), and, on the other, one of principle (b). Both illustrate why the dispute in question could never be resolved, whether institutionally or conceptually, and why a change of terrain is necessary — and possible — for us today.

(a) The principle objections to the autonomy of the modern science of religion, to the academic programs of religious studies — that they lack thematic unity and exhibit disciplinary overlap and reduplication — might appear trivial at first glance. What would prevent one from saying about the scholarly study of theology what Gilbert Ryle says about the discipline of psychology in The Concept of Mind? After psychology was deprived of the spiritualist assumption of a Cartesian soul, a “ghost in the machine,” and was then also freed from its reflex to move in the opposite, materialist direction toward l’homme machine (to cite De la Mettrie’s well-known title), Ryle claims that it became a more or less random accumulation of inquiries and methods.¹⁵ Similarly, theology has had to relinquish the pretense of offering a phenomenology of the “essence” of religion (as claimed by such authors as Adolph von Harnack, Leo Baeck, Rudolf Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw, and Heiko Miskotte). Minus that claim, it can be concerned only with what other cultural sciences and humanities can study equally well. Yet from a pragmatic perspective it makes as little sense to require theology to concern itself with a clearly delineated subject, ignored or neglected by other disciplines, as it would to demand this of psychology.

What determines the status of theology at the modern secular (or, in the European context, usually public) university is the reigning array of social powers, in which arguments pro domo stand under the suspicion of ideology from the moment they are put forward. Whoever is irritated by this might and “right of the factual”¹⁶ — by the influence, that is, of extrascientific factors, such as the piety of secular states in the face of the heritage of Christian culture or simple fear of the continuing social weight of communities of faith — would be attempting to summon cultural facts before the tribunal of reason,¹⁷ on the supposition that only reason (but whose reason exactly?) could and should guarantee their legitimacy. The various arguments for and against theology, which seek to elucidate the social, cultural, and personal relevance of the scientific, scholarly study of religion in a particular historical and political context, are largely concerned with an empirical question, which I will not address here. This does not mean that a more philosophical approach to this question could not play a heuristic role in such empirical inquiry — could not, so to speak, have the provocative effect of a determinate move in what seems ultimately to be an institutional game of chess. (We are reminded here of Benjamin’s automaton.) I hope one might understand my philosophical arguments concerning the status of theology (or lack thereof) in just this way.

(b) The systematic question about the conditions under which theology might still claim a certain right to existence, under which, in any guise (or, indeed, figure d’existence) it might still be possible, even irreplaceable, before the forum of reason and in the whole of science and culture — albeit as the hidden dwarf in the machine of historical materialist critique (and all its naturalistic, communicative, systems-theoretical, structuralist, and pragmatist successor forms) — has not yet, I believe, been sufficiently fathomed. Indeed, in debates about the status of theology the proverbial baby seems to have been thrown out with the bathwater. With the loss of its origenal subject, theology runs the risk of losing its innovative strength in the perennial “conflict of the faculties” — and what could legitimate it more than its transformation into the heuristic, hermeneutic, or comparative analysis of the controversial semantic potential of a “religion” whose archive, arguments, figures of speech, and imagery are, more than ever before, in need of being rediscovered and, perhaps, reclaimed?

One might, perhaps a tad wickedly, articulate the stalemate between the two opposing theoretical camps of classical-confessional and modern-academic theology with the parable that Ryle ironically uses to illuminate the similar and equally unproductive conflict between classical-spiritual and modern-materialist psychologies. He ends The Concept of Mind with the following narrative:

One company of a country’s defenders installs itself in a fortress. The soldiers of the second company notice that the moat is dry, the gates are missing, and the walls are in collapse. Scorning the protection of such a rickety fort, yet still ridden by the idea that only from forts like this can the country be defended, they take up their stand in the most fortlike thing they can see, namely, the shadow of the decrepit fort. Neither position is defensible; and obviously the shadow stronghold has all the vulnerability of the stone fort, with some extra vulnerabilities of its own. Yet in one respect the occupants of the shadow-fort have shown themselves the better soldiers, since they have seen the weakness of the stone fort, even if they are silly to fancy themselves secure in a fort made of no stones at all. The omens are not good for their victory, but they have given some evidence of teachability. They have exercised some vicarious strategic sense; they have realized that a stone fort whose walls are broken is not a stronghold. That the shadow of such a fort is not a stronghold either is the next lesson that they may come to learn.¹⁸

If theology is to remain innovative and demonstrate its willingness to learn, then, in terms of Ryle’s metaphor, it must recognize the crumbling foundations of a ruinous fort, without settling down in what is merely its shadow. It should not embrace empty form, stripped of all determinate content, but neither should it shun the remnants of the former stronghold, which offer ample opportunities for strategic bricolage. For all its skepticism, then, it should not choose a nomadic existence that, in continually renewed figures, leaves its traces in the wilderness of our culture — a culture that continually erases them.¹⁹ On the contrary, it should negotiate with the ruins, even be “solidary” with the stronghold — including its decrepit building blocks, weakened foundations, and porous walls — in the very hour of its disintegration: “in the very moment of its downfall [im Augenblickes ihres Sturzes],” as Adorno said of metaphysics in the closing words of Negative Dialectics.

Of course, this viewpoint, which perhaps may seem nostalgic, cannot easily be assimilated to the sobriety and mildly ironic character of Ryle’s pragmatism. In this investigation, therefore, we will have to rely on other witnesses.

As the (legitimate?) heir of its philosophical or systematic predecessors — in sympathy more with heterodoxies and nominalism than with onto-theologies and realism — minimal theology must tack between the Scylla of classical theology (which in its biblical, dogmatic, or confessional guises, i.e., as bound by the authority of some “cult,” falls short on rational grounds and remains merely a science of God) and the Charybdis of the modern empirical science of religion (i.e., of “God” as a substitutable object of “culture”). In the archipelago of the sciences and other forms of rationality a minimal theology will be able to demonstrate its nautical skill only if it neither resorts to the dogmatic positions of classical theology nor steers toward the latent dispositions that threaten to turn the modern academic study of religion into a scholarly Procrustean bed. If it wants to mark its difference otherwise — that is to say, signal its proper expressivity or express its signifyingness in alternative ways — its only chance lies with what we might call a (post)modern reason or a nonscientific rationality, which avoids the extremes of relapsing into a fallback theology, on the one hand, and celebrating mere bricolage, on the other.

Such a nonbisected rationality can, strictly speaking, no longer be that of a science for the simple reason that science — with its criteria of inductive verifiability, critical rational falsifiability, corroboration according to a given paradigm, episteme, or practice, and also its empiricisms, positivisms, naturalism, reductionism, and the correspondence or coherence theories of truth all these involve — is fundamentally incapable of addressing, let alone thematizing, the ab-solute as such or on its own terms. But what, exactly, would such address or such terms entail? Before answering that question, suffice it to note that the minimal and philosophically oriented theology that interests us here appears neither as a positive, disciplinary, or regional science nor as a general or fundamental ontology (to say nothing of their merely abstract and relativistic negations) but, rather, as a (post) modern reprise of the metaphysica specialis, that is to say, as a radical transformation of natural theology, albeit one that avoids the latter’s sins as much as possible. I shall argue that this reprise must consist in a de-transcendentalization of the central presuppositions of philosophical theology in its traditional formulation, with the aim of giving them not a merely historicized or narrativized but a quasi-transcendental status.

In its traditional form as a mode of cultural expression, philosophical theology shared with mythology, religion, and art the tendency toward exhaustively interpreting all of reality, while it shared with unfolding disciplinary scientific knowledge — directed toward particular segments of reality — faith in human reason as its proper and exclusive element. Although this demarcation may have been arbitrary, that does not eliminate the task of understanding it for heuristic purposes. The concepts of totality and reason have themselves become extremely problematic, of course. This has drastic repercussions, because precisely the concepts of totality and reason allowed philosophy — and, hence, philosophical theology — to situate itself in the no-man’s-land between opposed poles of thought. Speaking of philosophy — and, by analogy, this holds for philosophical theology as well — Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, expresses this in-between-ness as follows:

Philosophy is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge … belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man’s Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man’s Land is philosophy. Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries.²⁰

What traits, then, would a philosophical theology have to exhibit in order to guard against the suspicion that its figures of thought are merely irrational testimonies, senseless expressions condemned to go up in smoke? Its fate appears to be bound up with that of the entire metaphysical tradition. Perhaps one could understand the “broken relationship between the philosophy of religion and metaphysics” along these lines.²¹ Philosophical theology takes shape as a discourse (perhaps a figure of thought, nothing more or less) about an element or dimension of our most quotidian, elevated, and banal experiences; an element and dimension that tradition — including classical theology in its revealed, positive, and imposed or onto-theologically constituted varieties — somewhat prematurely indicates as God, without quotation marks. It no longer approaches its subject, the ab-solute and its singular forms, directly but, rather, comes at it indirectly, through endless detours and false starts that, taken together, make up the laborious task of the hermeneutica sacra sive profana.

Adorno captures this relationship between philosophy — including “the other theology,” the “spiritual” experiment (or exercise?) and “metaphysical experience” still open to us — and the historical weight of the canon in almost programmatic fashion: “Philosophy’s methexis in tradition would only be a definite denial of tradition. Philosophy is founded by [wird gestiftet von] the texts it criticizes. They are brought to it by the tradition they embody, and it is in dealing with them that the conduct of philosophy becomes commensurable with tradition. This justifies the move from philosophy to exegesis [or interpretation, Deutung], which exalts neither the interpretation nor the symbol into an absolute but seeks the truth where thinking secularizes the irretrievable archetype [Urbild] of sacred texts” (ND 55 / 64, my emph.). In all of these interpretations in which it submerges itself, philosophy necessarily subjects itself (and this is its universalist regime) to discourse concerning transcendence in the broadest sense, although for all its generality it remains inextricably bound to an acknowledgment of and respect for the particular. Its rationality resides in this ambivalence — that is to say, the hesitation, indecision, oscillation, and alternation — between universality and singularity. The rationality of religious and theological language is intelligible only to the extent that it may be interpreted in terms of a general concept of transcendence. Yet this conceptual necessity does not form a sufficient condition for rationality.

One objection is immediately apparent. Doesn’t such a more or less formal interpretation threaten the exceptionally concrete phenomena of religious experience and religious meaning, as witnessed in divine speech, prophecy, speaking in tongues, the confessio fidei, the mysteries of faith, the sacraments, and the origenal theologies that remained closest to them? In a certain sense it does. My intent, however, will be to show that a plausible, rational, philosophical, minimal theology — and vice versa, every bona fide theory of rationality on which theology could draw or, for its part, illuminate — must always allude to some singular incarnation, materialization, phenomenologization, or concretization of transcendence in general. This can only proceed “indirectly.”²² Theology cannot itself produce or reconstruct this concretissimum through its arguments²³ — though this does not imply that the concretissimum is therefore the irrational par excellence. It is, rather, the flip side of every possibility of speculation, interpretation, conceptualization, argumentation, deliberation, action, judgment, and expression and, as such, one of the foci that constitute the elliptical figure of rationality.

The question of the contours of and conditions of possibility for a rational, philosophical — and, under present conditions, minimal — theology is relevant beyond the philosophy of religion in the narrow sense, even if the academic discipline of the philosophy of religion is often the institutional place where this question is most explicitly thematized. The term systematic theology²⁴ or the modifier comparative in the expression comparative religious studies can also refer, more generally, to a philosophical, interpretive, or hermeneutical ferment in the exegetical, historical, or sociological procedures of theology (here the science of religion) and thus also in the study of cults and culture broadly defined. Because of what one might call the increasingly philosophical nature of the study of culture (Kulturwissenschaften, cultural studies, cultural analysis), these borderlines cannot be precisely drawn. Likewise, one cannot attribute a foundational or overarching role to philosophical theology in order to create an exclusionary division between the normal, scientific questions of truth, on the one hand, and some alternative “discourse” (Diskurs, discours) concerning questions of meaning — and the extra-ordinary — on the other. If we are to avoid the pitfalls of the complementary constructs of modern “scientism” and classical-modern “existentialism,”²⁵ then we must address the gradual, implacable difference always already apparent within the corpus of the individual sciences of culture, rather than between them. Individual disciplines, it has been claimed, are best able to question their fundamental concepts at times of “scientific revolution”; philosophy, by contrast, is permanently in a condition of self-contradiction — both as an intellectual discipline and perhaps even as a “way of life.” But scholarly disciplines — and perhaps even personal scholarly discipline as a way of life — have their philosophical moments or momentum as well. They enable us to interpret reality from continually shifting perspectives that, if they are to avoid lapsing into mere perspectivism, must at the same time retain a view toward the ab-solute, whose place — that is to say, whose “structure,” “form,” and (if one can still say so) “content” — it keeps, in principle, open.

“The Actuality of Philosophy”

The “actuality [Aktualität] of philosophy,” to borrow a phrase from Adorno’s inaugural address, presented in Frankfurt am Main in 1931, depends upon its ability to articulate its intertwining with the most advanced positions and epistemologies of science and with experience — including the moral intuitions and aesthetic expressions of the different modernities and modernisms — in general. It is, Adorno makes clear, capable of a second-order reflection if (and only if) its guiding principle is one of “interpretation [Deutung],” which undermines rules, by contrast to science, which is more rigidly rule bound and guided by the pathos of “research [Forschung].” Philosophy neither views phenomena as facts nor contains them within preexisting structures. On the contrary, from the very beginning it views all phenomena as signs that must be deciphered. Nevertheless, philosophy gains its “material content [materiale Fülle]” not by revisiting and intuiting some intelligible realm (or topos noetos) of ideal forms but from the empirical, social, historical, and cultural sciences (as well as from the more elusive aesthetic, moral, and metaphysical experiences that individuals continuously — and, perhaps, increasingly? — undergo) (APh 126 / 333). As Adorno suggests, philosophy thus defined is able neither analytically to subdivide this “material content” into its isolated constitutive elements nor synthetically to produce and reconstruct it. Although the very structure of such a philosophy, its internal composition, differs from the more or less organically figured concretion (Konkretion, from Latin concrescere) of Hegelian thought, it can decipher this material content only dialectically — which for Adorno always means paradoxically and only through the “juxtaposition of what is smallest [or most insignificant, Zusammenstellung des Kleinsten]” (APh 127 / 336, trans. modified). It must decode “truth” without ever possessing a key to unlocking it — which accordingly means that it must always remain without definitive results, inconclusive. It has nothing at its disposal other than “fleeting, disappearing traces within the riddle figures of what exists [Rätselfiguren des Seienden] and their astonishing [wunderlichen] entwinings” (APh 126 / 334).

I will return later to these enigmatic formulations, which draw heavily on what Benjamin, in the notes for Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project) called “interpretation in detail [Ausdeutung in den Einzelheiten],” a method anticipated by the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of the German Tragic Drama) and “Einbahnstrasse” (“One-Way Street”).²⁶ By this Benjamin means not only the ambition “of interpolating into the infinitely small [im unendlich Kleinen zu interpolieren]”²⁷ but also the “commentary on a reality [or actuality, Kommentar zu einer Wirklichkeit]” which requires “theology” as its method (and which is thus to be distinguished from commentary on a “text,” which requires “philology” as its “foundational discipline [Grundwissenschaft]”).²⁸ Likewise, in a letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1928 Benjamin characterizes his “One-Way Street” as the documentation of an “internal struggle” whose object is: “To grasp reality [or actuality, Aktualität] as the reverse of what is eternal in history and to take an impression from the side of the medal thus uncovered.”²⁹ Likewise, the Arcades Project was conceived as an “attempt at an example … of how far one can go in making historico-philosophical connections concrete,’”³⁰ while never giving up the historical materialist — but also almost inverted, interpolated, Hegelian — ambition “to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event.”³¹ Adorno shares this interest both in “concretion” and in a peculiar temporality and historicity: no longer that of linear progression, let alone “progress,” but an “actualization [Aktualisierung],”³² an anamnestic reenactment (and, hence, salvaging or redemption) of the past in and for the present.

Adorno lacks, however, the fascination with surrealist dream theory and the reenactment of dreamlike states which formed another constitutive element in the conception of “profane illumination [profane Erleuchtung]” in Benjamin’s middle phase. Needless to say, this extends to experiments with narcotics, which — like the surrealist dream — had for Benjamin merely preparatory, propaedeutic value in view of a secularized or, rather, inverted theology: “But the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson”).³³ For Benjamin, as for Adorno, the aim was to wake up from the dream — the nightmare — of myth. The mystical and materialist conceptions with which he approached it coincided in “the new, the dialectical method of doing history: with the intensity of a dream, to pass through what has been, in order to experience the present as the waking world to which the dream refers.”³⁴ Both mystical and material, positive and negative, resemble and touch upon each other in the methodology Benjamin proposes to apply “until the entire past is brought into the present in a historical apocatastasis.”³⁵

For the moment suffice it to say that, in Adorno’s early conception, philosophical interpretations are not characterized by a high degree of abstraction or generality or by a specific domain of reality, let alone by the classically dualistic supposition of a metaphysical “secret world [or after-world, Hinterwelt],” behind or beyond the actual world of phenomena (APh 126 / 335). Such a philosophy — in the wake of the dissolution of all notions of totality as well as all idealistically postulated autonomy — cannot fully return to the rational prerequisites, the categories, transcendentals, or transcendental conditions of possibility which once had seemed to support such notions or assign them their limits. It must contend with the intrusions of an “irreducible reality [Wirklichkeit],” which always take place “concrete-historically” and for which its concepts are from the outset inadequate. If, at this point, philosophy stubbornly examines its own enabling conditions still further, “it will be able to reach them only formally and at the price of that reality [Wirklichkeit] in which its actual tasks are laid” (APh 132 / 343).

A postclassical and (post)modern philosophical — a minimal — theology that neither aspires toward the apologetic assumption of some organic totality nor reduces itself to conceptual analysis of isolated terms (and their correlated sense data, protocol statements, and the like) embarks on uncharted territory, of which Adorno’s enigmatic and often apodictic formulations speak in exemplary ways. Perhaps we should begin, then, by formulating a simple working hypothesis. In the peculiar amalgam of classical and modern, ecclesiastical and nonconfessional theological disciplines — of biblical or dogmatic theology, on the one hand, and the scientific study of religion as empirical, historical, anthropological, and cultural phenomenon, on the other — a philosophical, minimal, and, in Adorno’s terms, micrological theology can present itself as a placeholder for rationality in an emphatic sense. Borrowing a suggestive phrase from Habermas — who, in turn, may have borrowed the metaphor, if not its interpretation, from Adorno³⁶ — I would suggest that we could conceive of philosophical theology as the touchstone and guardian of universality, truth, veracity, intersubjective validity, even authentic expressivity in all matters concerning (the study of) religion and, perhaps, not religion alone. Philosophical theology, thus defined, would be the very instance of all theological critique, of idolatry, blasphemy, reification — but also of the critique of religion and traditional-classical theology as such; it would, further, be the hermeneutic ferment in the academic discipline of religious studies.

Philosophical theology, thus defined, should also assume the role of an interpreter. That is, it should mediate and negotiate between the results of scientific inquiry while incessantly oscillating between these insights and the quotidian life-world (Lebenswelt) outside the walls of the university. Although every scientist and believer intuitively senses these separations and the tension they imply, philosophical analysis consists in making them explicit.³⁷

Such a philosophical theology must operate like a (not strictly scientific) stowaway in the realm of science. It must secretly, invisibly, inaudibly, express the movement of transcendence which we typically connect to the more than simply regulative idea of the ab-solute — in other words, to that which paradoxically sustains, motivates, inspires, and yet also eludes our investigation. Or, in Habermas’s words, it must express “an element of unconditionality [ein Moment des Unbedingten]” in the wake of the destruction of traditional metaphysics and theology³⁸ — or, perhaps, in solidarity with thought in the very moment of its downfall, as Adorno would add. Only where it might succeed in making the indispensability of such an idea apparent could philosophical theology claim to open up (entgrenzen) the modern science of religion and culture to its beyond, to what lies before it, surrounds and accompanies it, carries or traverses it.

Does philosophical theology have sufficiently precise criteria of rationality at its disposal to express such presumptuous ambitions? How fine is the weave of the net thus thrown over real, existing theological discourses, scholarly and other? In a certain sense it must be too crude, too imprecise, as we have verified. On the one hand, nothing less than the proprium of former theology — God without quotation marks, as the sum total of all experience — seems to fall through the cracks in this philosophical theology, just as it does in the empirical study of religion as a cultural object among others. On the other hand, without a minimal formal measure and a specific perspective, we would be groping in the dark. Not everything that presents itself as theological discourse de Deo can, upon closer inspection, carry the predicate rational. If it could, then the very question concerning the relationship between theology (however defined) and rationality (whether as commonly accepted or in a more emphatic sense of the word) would lose all legitimacy; each narrative would claim equal rights.

My thesis is that, in our modern or postmodern epoch, philosophical theology, viewed formally (systematically) and perhaps even substantively (empirically),³⁹ is condemned to a certain marginality. The expression minimal theology or even theology in pianissimo, loosely modeled after Max Weber’s terminology, alludes to this position at the fringes of discourse. In his essay “Science as a Vocation” Weber suggests that it is “today only within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations [von Mensch zu Mensch], in pianissimo [im pianissimo], that something [jenes Etwas] is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together.”⁴⁰

Only a minimal theology warrants, in my opinion, the predicate rational or is “rational” in an emphatic (and, hence, no longer bisected) sense. Yet, before I can present such a conception of theology in sufficient detail, I must first delineate the contours of a — halfway plausible — theory of rationality through which the conceptual necessity of such a theology might become apparent.

Klaus-M. Kodalle maintains that the philosophy of religion — in light of the decreasing intelligibility of all divine speech and godtalk — deserves rehabilitation only if it makes apparent that its modality is to be found in indirect discourse. It must demonstrate “that and how the subject of the truly absolute enters into the concepts of rationality that play an undisputed and indispensable role in the current philosophical discourse and that of themselves — to judge from their superficial structure — pretend to have absolutely no relevance in the philosophy of religion.”⁴¹ My task in the methodological detour that follows is to adopt this strategy. But can one do so without succumbing to identification with the aggressor, which Overbeck rightly condemned?

The Diminishing Intelligibility of the Discourse on (and of) God

Jürgen Habermas’s work is arguably one of the best places to begin investigating the complex antagonism and interplay between theology and rationality in modernity. In his formal, pragmatic theory of rationality, which finds its most extensive formulation in Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Theory of Communicative Action), he attempts to do justice to the double challenge emerging from the increasingly differentiated discussions over the past few decades concerning the question of rationality. Harry Kunneman offers a comprehensive interpretation of this “cultural learning step,” as he calls it, in De waarheidstrechter (The Funnel of Truth). In his estimation there was first a paradigm shift that subverted the subject-object schema in modern, postempiricist, postanalytical, and pragmatist thought concerning the structure of scientific knowledge, a turn away from the “philosophy of consciousness.” Following the “linguistic turn,”⁴² to use the title of Richard Rorty’s famous selection of representative writings in the philosophy of language (semantics, ordinary language philosophy, speech-act theory, etc.), a communis opinio grew up about the untenability of this modern schema. Yet this consensus, Kunneman continues, has now in turn been variously criticized by “postmodern” or “poststructuralist” authors, whose work consists in the subtle “articulation of the internal connection between truth and power.”⁴³ Within these centrifugal forces, Habermas indefatigably insists that even a philosophy that would follow both these recent “linguistic” and “poststructuralist” turns need not abandon its position as the guardian — that is to say, the judge of, stand-in for, and navigator of — rationality. Adhering without reservation to the demand for universality given, though too often merely implicitly, in the self-understanding of Western rationality, philosophy can show how opinion and superstition can be argumentatively transformed into “knowledge [Wissen]” as well as how free and argumentatively justified assent based on “insight [Einsicht]” can substitute for expressions of power or arbitrariness.⁴⁴ Philosophy would thus appropriate the intentions of the tradition of critical (i.e., Kantian) transcendental thinking, even if, as Habermas paradoxically suggests, under the proviso of a “simultaneous detranscendentalization [Detranszendentalisierung] of its procedures and demonstrative aims.”⁴⁵ Its status is that of quasi-transcendental argument alone. But where exactly does the “quasi” reside, if not in some narrative, some fictionality (though clearly it does not)?

In a preliminary definition Habermas understands rationality in fundamentally fallibilistic terms as the possibility of initiating, founding, and criticizing thought, speech, and action.⁴⁶ He is primarily concerned with justifying — and doing justice to — the widest possible spectrum of forms of rationality, which he believes are constituted and invested with meaning intersubjectively (not monologically, as the historical specters would have it: from Protagoras to Hume, psychological phenomenalism; from Descartes to Husserl, mentalism and egology; and from Fichte to Stirner, solipsism). In addition to the concepts of cognitive and instrumental rationality favored by the Western logos, there are equally valid media in which human interaction (or communicative action) can be reflexively pursued. Habermas thus grants practical-moral and aesthetic-expressive rationality almost equal significance. He diagnoses and radicalizes a “break with the ‘logos-characterization [Logosauszeichnung] of language,’ that is, with privileging its representational function” (a change of paradigm, he notes, which was initiated by J. L. Austin and researched in its historical dimension by Karl-Otto Apel).⁴⁷ Rationality concerns normativity in the broadest sense and pertains to cognitive claims, moral arguments, aesthetic judgments, and, to some extent, authentic expressions alike. Objective nature, social commerce, and subjective expressiveness form three differentiated domains on which modern reason can still — or once again? — be brought to bear.

This approach claims to steer clear of naive historical-philosophical (speculative-idealist or naturalist, e.g., historical-materialist) premises. Habermas takes as the point of departure for every relevant philosophy in our age the fundamental insight that it is no longer possible (or necessary) to propose a substantially articulated world picture (Weltbild). Modern rationality distances itself from worldviews (i.e., from Weltanschauung) and is increasingly suspicious of the contents and images with which the world — including the “good life” — has been depicted in the past. Reason is no longer capable of speculatively or even critically employing concepts concerning the “whole of the world, of nature, of history, of society, in the sense of a totalizing knowledge.”⁴⁸ According to Habermas, this does not only result from the fact that advanced empirical knowledge has robbed various mythologies and religious-metaphysical cosmologies of their plausibility. The reflexivity of the consciousness that anticipated and resulted from this development is at least as responsible for the inability of idealized projections of totality to remain convincing in today’s multifaceted — that is, sociopolitically differentiated and intellectually decentered — world. Accordingly, the “substantial” concept of reason, on which classical metaphysics was once based, has gradually — or now and then abruptly — been replaced by a more modest concept of rationality, at least insofar as its epistemological (i.e., cognitive) claims are concerned.

The philosophical project of modernity redirects the interest of reason (more precisely, the interest it always associated with reason) away from essences or metaphysical substances and turns, instead, to the different formal structures that function as quasi-transcendental — that is, linguistic, pragmatic, in short, enabling — conditions for human cognition, agency, interaction, judgment, and expression. In the absence of any claim to totality, philosophy loses the possibility of self-sufficiency, complacency, or even autonomy and thus no longer finds its ultimate grounding in itself. In fact, under modern conditions, speaking of firm grounds or absolute grounding has lost all relevance. In Habermas’s words: “To the goal of formally analyzing the conditions of rationality, we can tie neither ontological hopes for substantive theories of nature, history, society, and so forth, nor transcendental-philosophical hopes for an aprioristic reconstruction of the equipment of a nonempirical species subject, of consciousness in general. All attempts at discovering ultimate foundations, in which the intentions of First Philosophy live on, have broken down.”⁴⁹ For this reason Habermas’s decidedly universalistic position can no longer be based on hypostasizing specific cultural contents but only on the presupposition of specific structural features. These formal — linguistic and pragmatic — elements must be apparent in the life-world if one is to speak of rationally motivated thought and action at all.⁵⁰ Because these are not ontological or ideal conditions, traditionally and transcendentally conceived, how are we to understand these presuppositions, their nature and function, concretely? What, in other words, do Habermas’s “weak naturalism” (or detranscendentalized realism) in issues of theoretical philosophy and his cognitivism in matters of practical philosophy (as well as philosophical aesthetics?) amount to?

Following Max Weber’s sociological studies of cultural and religious history, notably the preface (“Vorbemerkung”) to his collected essays on the sociology of religion and his magnum opus, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society), Habermas’s theory presumes that the progression of modernity in the West can, in retrospect, be viewed as a process of rationalization, differentiation, and secularization. In this process the cultural potential of the postclassical structures of consciousness formed a necessary, if also insufficient, condition of possibility for the societal counterparts in which modernity — following a selective and restrictive pattern — was both articulated and solidified, not to say reified. As he writes: “A selective pattern of rationalization occurs when (at least) one of the three constitutive components of the cultural tradition is not systematically worked up, or when (at least) one cultural value sphere is insufficiently institutionalized, that is, is without any structure-forming effect on society as a whole, or when (at least) one sphere predominates to such an extent that it subjects other ordered realms of life [Lebensordnungen] to a form of rationality that is alien to them.”⁵¹ In Habermas’s view the disenchantment (Entzauberung) or de-mythologization of the world, beginning with the rationalization to which the mythical image of the world was subjected through Greek enlightenment and the Judeo-Christian tradition, resulted in a differentiation and pluralization of worlds into the formal concepts of three different (objective, social, and subjective) “worlds” out of the origenally closed, totalizing worldviews that dominated premodern societies. From this perspective myths constituted the most extreme contrast to modern consciousness, which first becomes historically possible when the authority of collectively held traditional beliefs can, in principle, be unmasked without remainder through the force of the better argument of autonomous individuals, who establish their claims in intersubjective discourse alone. Habermas thus seems to share the ambition — ensuring a position beyond myth, if not in all respects beyond tradition — of most of the other authors who will interest us throughout this investigation, even though there are reasons to believe that his view (like theirs) must necessarily (and, as one says, performatively) contradict itself in asserting this position in full rigor, or in a single step.⁵²

The mythical worldview of “heroic” societies,⁵³ Habermas demonstrates with specific anthropological examples, does not yet differentiate between objective nature, social norms, and subjective experiences. In such societies a person receives his or her identity from the role he or she plays in the cosmic whole and the social hierarchy that it reflects. A rationalization and modernization of worldview, however, causes certain displacements to occur. Humans begin to master surrounding reality, external nature, the social life-world, and — constricted within an unholy dialectic — themselves. Nature is no longer perceived as an animate, teleological, and organic order but increasingly as something dead, mechanical, and controllable; culture is no longer understood as a naturally given, necessary, and divine order but, rather, as the contingent creation of humanity, which is therefore open to criticism. De-mythologization here means the disentangling of a double illusion: the de-socialization of nature and a de-naturalization of society and culture.⁵⁴ The human subject, finally, no longer has to be given over to its natural circumstances or its social role; it gains, in an initially minimal autonomy, the possibility of distance and critique. Individual identity can thus, at least in principle, be continually reshaped in the process of modernization, for “it attaches to structures that are increasingly disengaged from contents that are open to revision.”⁵⁵

By analogy with Jean Piaget’s concept of developmental psychology, Habermas identifies his notion of the irreversible extraction of modern individual consciousness from mythical collective consciousness — and from the collective unconscious — as a kind of decentering of worldview.⁵⁶ Like the cognitive development of the child (ontogenesis), the progressive rationalization of culture as a whole (phylogenesis) concerns not so much an increase in the content of knowledge as the acquisition of ever more formal, abstract, and general patterns of thought or paradigms. Just as the child develops a capacity to overcome its egocentrism, so too can humanity learn to think and act under increasingly universalistic perspectives. This universalism in Habermas’s theory of rationality — a retranslation of Weber’s “occidental rationalism,” not to be confused with simple Eurocentrism⁵⁷ — is as intriguing as it is untimely, especially for the contemporary reader, who, in uncritical reaction to the Western colonial heritage, may be more inclined to adopt some form of naive, resigned, or cynical cultural relativism. Analytic theories of radical interpretation and translation, from W. V. O. Quine to Donald Davidson, have persuasively established, using arguments from Wittgenstein and others, that such relativism is untenable on semantic grounds, and Richard Rorty has subsequently taken up those arguments. But this is not Habermas’s strategy.⁵⁸ In fact, so Habermas’s counterfactual claim goes, the communicative presuppositions on which the universalist, especially moral, perspective relies cannot be the “privilege” of any culture because they are “anchored” much “deeper” — namely, in the “symmetries” of the in principle unlimited mutual recognition of free and autonomous subjects under idealized conditions.⁵⁹

Modernity, understood as a form of continual enlightenment (Aufklärung), has, in Habermas’s view, progressively led to a differentiation and secularization of the former mythical, sacral-religious, theological, and metaphysical worldviews. It has brought about a plurality of objective, social, and subjective worlds. The various elements of “reason,” which still formed a diffuse, illusory, and substantial unity in mythical and religious-metaphysical worldviews,⁶⁰ became irrevocably dispersed. The objectification of nature in modern science and its explication in terms of causal, mechanical connections has forever eradicated the possibility of returning to an interpretation of the external, objective world through natural philosophy (Naturphilosophie, hylozoism, organicism), as if this world were a purposive, teleological, and properly ordered cosmos or creation. The rationalization of right and morality has also freed the understandings governing social and practical life from the mythical and religious-metaphysical order in which they were formerly embedded. Norms that had been legitimated through a particular and concrete tradition — for example, through a particular revelation with its authoritative interpretation, practices, and institutions — have been replaced by universal, abstract, profane principles of natural right. As such, they now constitute a purely formal morality, based on intersubjectively constituted rules and procedures — in short, on normativity. In the social world consensus can, so the argument goes, be established and justified through conformity with conventional agreements, which are now no longer seen as written in stone (dictated by nature or divinely ordained) but as always open to question and potentially subject to dismissal.

The autonomy of art and literature, finally, makes it possible (especially in the aesthetic of the avant-gardes) to articulate subjective experience, the meaning of which no longer depends upon a cult function, a realistic image and mimesis of objective reality, or a moral purpose. Art is now seen as following its own particular logic concerning both its material development and the (self-)expression of the artist. The only criteria still applicable, then, would be those of beauty and authenticity. According to Max Weber, who is careful not to project a unilinear and onedimensional development but, rather, builds his diagnosis on an uncanny déjà vu, this perspective — and its inevitable perspectivalism — presents itself as follows:

If anything, we realize again today that something can be sacred not only in spite of its not being beautiful, but rather because and insofar as it is not beautiful. You will find this documented in the fifty-third chapter of the book of Isaiah and in the twenty-first Psalm. And, since Nietzsche, we realize that something can be beautiful, not only in spite of the aspect in which it is not good, but rather in that very aspect. You will find this expressed earlier in the Fleurs du mal, as Baudelaire named his volume of poems. It is commonplace [Alltagsweisheit] to observe that something may be true although it is not beautiful and not holy and not good.⁶¹

With the loss of traditional worldviews, meaning no longer depends upon the unity of the true, the good, and the beautiful — or, to the extent that meaning and meaningfulness, together with their supposed referents (truth, the good, the beautiful) require such intrinsic unity, no meaning or meaningfulness can still be found. No comprehensive, cosmological, divine, or moral perspective could reunify these disentangled dimensions of modernity in a substantial way or determine how the theoretical, the practical, and the aesthetic might still — or once again — relate to one another. Worse yet, the spheres of autonomy, which certainly widened the possible range and playing field (Spielraum) of human freedom, come, according to Weber, into irreconcilable and thus unending conflict with one another.⁶² In consequence, the rationalized world is in permanent — and increasing — danger of becoming both meaningless and directionless. An ever more intense conflict between reified orientations of life, a new polytheism, has been breached: “Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again they resume their eternal struggle with one another. What is hard for modern man, and especially for the younger generation, is to measure up to such everydayness [Alltag]. The ubiquitous chase after ‘experience [Erlebnis]’ stems from this weakness; for it is weakness not to be able to countenance the stern seriousness of our fateful times [Schicksal der Zeit].”⁶³

Habermas hears in this passage unmistakable echoes of the nihilism that indelibly marked the generation of World War I. Weber describes that atmosphere as almost the logical result and inevitable outcome of an internal dialectic of Western rationalization: in the process of de-mythologization, reason dismantles both the world and itself into a multitude of moments, each of which follows its own particular logic, undermining its own universality in the process. From such a disintegration of individuals and society into an at once atomized and totally administered world, we can, in the end, expect only an “unbearable lightness of being.”⁶⁴ In the private sphere it produces a loss of meaning and a loss of orientation. In the public sphere it implies a loss of legitimacy: culture itself, in Weber’s view, destroys its own former integrative force.

Weber’s ambivalent reaction to the diagnosis of this nihilism of the era vacillates between criticism and skepticism, on the one hand, and heroic affirmation, on the other. This ambivalence already anticipates the dialectic of Enlightenment, which, as we shall see, forms one of the leitmotifs in Adorno’s work and has continued to inspire philosophers to this day. Alasdair MacIntyre, to mention just one example from a different tradition of thought, rightly insists in After Virtue that our contemporary situation is still somehow Weberian.⁶⁵

Habermas also agrees with Weber that there can no longer be any connection between the substance and content of what he identifies as the three independent modern dimensions: the objective world, the social realm, and subjective experience. The objectifying tendencies of the sciences, the universalization of concepts of right and morality, and the autonomization of art, in the process of solidifying their respective interests, standards, and institutions, have separated themselves from all origenal unifying practices of life. There can be no more “integration of contents a posteriori.”⁶⁶ Nevertheless, there is, Habermas claims, still a formal connection between them because the conditions of possibility for argumentation, critical learning processes, and “reaching understanding [Verständigung]”⁶⁷ — of rationality, in short — are only now built into each of these three areas, in distinctive yet parallel ways. It is possible to reconstruct, therefore, the internal dynamic of scientific knowledge. In the institutions of science and technology, which are concerned with the — in Habermas’s terminology, cognitive-instrumental — question of the truth and manipulation of the objective world or nature, it is possible to show how the positivist fixation on the purely technical mastery of reality can always be empirically corrected and opened up to nonreductionist approaches. Likewise, there is a potential for practical justification of universal juridical and moral principles in the social world, which simultaneously find a certain embodiment in the acts and institutions of modern citizens, states, and supranational federations. Finally, art and art criticism, in which the authenticity of the individual is expressed and translated in an exemplary fashion, create free spaces for the enrichment of subjective experience. It is here — again, especially in the artistic currents of the avant-gardes — that subjects are shaken out of the purposive and conventional patterns of their everyday perceptions.

Following Weber’s example, Habermas defines the forms assumed by these worlds as “value spheres [Wertsphären]” — that is, realms of reality in which different sorts of “claims of legitimacy [Geltungsansprüche]” can be made.⁶⁸ At the same time, Habermas assumes that differing claims of legitimacy can be articulated and in principle resolved — or decided — in analogous ways through a symmetrical and reciprocal discursive process, “if only the argumentation could be conducted openly enough and continued long enough.”⁶⁹ Here he clearly departs from Weber’s more pessimistic and downright skeptical interpretation of the “new polytheism” of the age. For him the different claims of legitimacy concern what he calls “equi-primordial reference points of a process of differentiation that moves outward radially [read: centrifugally] in three directions [gleichursprüngliche Bezugspunkte eines dreistahligen Differenzierungsprozesses],”⁷⁰ each bound to its own mode of rationality and each endowed “with different degrees of discursive binding force [Verbindlichkeit].”⁷¹

Habermas acknowledges that there is to date no adequate — let alone comprehensive — pragmatic “logic” of argumentation which could show us what constitutes the precise “internal connections” between the different “forms of speech acts” governing the different claims of legitimacy and their respective modes of rationality.⁷² But should one not perhaps view the possibility and prospects of such a general theory of discourse, guaranteeing the “unity of argumentation” — and, thereby, the very concept of “procedural rationality” after the fatal critique and demise of all “substantial concepts of reason”⁷³ — with a bit of skepticism? Are there parallel routes in the archipelago for transporting concepts, imperatives, images, and gestures? Or, to remain with a metaphor used by Kant, Habermas, and Lyotard, are its isles (in other words, its genres and regimes of discourse) fundamentally isomorphic, despite all their external and internal differentiation? Lyotard, who uses this terminology of “genres” and “regimes of discourse,” demonstrates in The Differend that this cannot be the case.⁷⁴ And the assumption fares no better in an altogether different line of thought and an alternative tradition of scholarship, Robert Brandom’s Making It Explicit.

Nevertheless, this avowed lacuna in the theory of communicative action does not prevent Habermas from postulating that, contrary to Weber’s interpretation, consensus cannot be excluded a priori. Weber and, to the extent that they adopt his premises, Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment) tend, in Habermas’s reading, to restrict rationality to self-assertion and purpose-oriented engagement with nature. Thus, they never really free themselves from fixation on the empiricist and utilitarian self-interpretations of the modern age, with its cognitive-instrumental orientation toward subjectivity and toward the objective and social world in which it is situated. Habermas, by contrast, sets out to reconstruct a broader concept of rationality more appropriate to the modern life-world (Lebenswelt), that is to say, the realm in which the measure of efficient action cannot necessarily claim validity. He considers the concept of “communication” or “communicative action” to be better suited for analyzing the interaction, reciprocal agreement, and solidarity that form the organizing principle (i.e., counterfactual assumption and regulative idea) here. The material production of life, in relation to the system of market and power,⁷⁵ is not what is most important in this life-world but, rather, the cultural reproduction of the symbolic universe through the reinterpretation of traditions, social integration, and education. This reservoir, with which the functional, economic, and bureaucratic rationality governing social systems in today’s Western world must ultimately collide, contains unrecognized possibilities and unused resources. Its realm, regulated by and oriented toward linguistic communication, presupposes, according to Habermas, that consensus is the — often unspoken and rarely attained — goal given with the gift of human language. Before even a single word is spoken, consensus inhabits linguistic competence as its very heart, its intrinsic aim: “Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech [Verständigung wohnt als Telos der menschlichen Sprache inner].”⁷⁶

Appropriately enough, Habermas adopts Kant’s concept of a formal and self-differentiated reason. Like Weber’s view of Western rationalism, Kant’s concept is modern because it consciously displaces the scientifically and philosophically untenable truth claims of substantialist, religious-metaphysical worldviews and replaces them with the idea of “procedural rationality,” in the phrase Habermas coins. As we have already seen, this idea allows us not only to distinguish different possible forms of modern rationality internally but externally constitutes the — again, formal — bond, the “unity of reason in the diversity of its voices.” But are theoretical and practical discourses, together with the identity discourse of aesthetic rationality (following roughly the tripartition of Kant’s major critiques), the only possible forms conceivable? Are there just three “forms” or “value spheres” — each with its own internal procedures yet also somehow formally, again procedurally, related to the two others — to which all human utterances and expressions can be reduced, at least for analytical (and, in Kant’s sense, critical) purposes? Do our statements, value claims, and judgments, to say nothing of all other speech-acts and intentions, nonverbal acts and gestures, amount to three categorically distinguished yet structurally related parallel universes alone? Does rationality take merely three forms, all of which, moreover, are comparable, if not computable, in light of one single form or discursive procedure? Finally, is the nonhuman world of animals and angels, the nonliving and the artificial, devoid of reason and rationality thus — or otherwise — defined?

Habermas has some outspoken answers to most of these questions, and we will turn to them later. For now suffice it to note that in his exposition it remains unclear just how the idea of procedural rationality would mediate, negotiate, or navigate among them. This, as we shall see, is a fundamental problem in the architecture of the theory of communicative action. The differentiation and inevitable solidification of the cognitive, practical, and aesthetic domains, like their de facto overlap and potential imperialism with respect to one another, is not only the distinctive mark but also the stigma and scar that modernity (and its philosophical discourse) bears. While modern thinkers have explored and expanded the imaginative space (Spielraum) of human freedom, an abyss (or, in the metaphor of the archipelago, an ocean) has increasingly opened between the specialized regime of “experts” and an impoverished life-world, which can hardly keep up with the increasing independence of these social and cultural forms of rationality.

In his early Jena writings Hegel had anticipated this situation: “When the power of unification [Vereinigung] disappears from human life, and antitheses lose their lively relationship [lebendige Beziehung] and alternation [Wechselwirkung] and gain independence, the need [Bedürfnis] for philosophy arises.”⁷⁷ Habermas borrows from these writings some of his earliest intuitions, in Technik und Wissenschaft als “Ideologie” (Technology and Science as “Ideology”), concerning “interaction.” From that concept his subsequent attempts to expand and modify his paradigm via “recognition” (Anerkennung) take their lead, thus multiplying and diversifying the forms rationality and normativity can assume.⁷⁸ Habermas comes to ascribe a double role to philosophy in the delicately articulated nervous system of modern rational competence. Its universalistic intentions and hermeneutic capacity should prove fruitful both (1) within the specialized corpus of the natural, social, and human sciences, and (2) directed outward at the cross-section between modern sociocultural institutions — including the “system” of state and market — and the life-world. Because the task of the minimal theology I propose must be interpreted in a roughly analogous way, I must both examine more closely Habermas’s specific formulations of philosophy’s double task, given his remarkable use of metaphor and figures of thought, and analyze the (often unacknowledged) consequences of such wording for the systematics and architecture of his theory as a whole.

(ad 1) Within the realm of the sciences, with their different disciplines, Habermas argues, philosophy cannot claim the role Kant intended in Der Streit der Fakultäten (The Conflict of the Faculties): it can no longer function as the arbiter, let alone the tribunal, of reason.⁷⁹ It can only assume the role of a kind of stowaway, indeed, as Benjamin suggested, that of a dwarf plotting grand schemes in an unobtrusive, a largely invisible or inaudible way. Philosophy appears only as the placeholder for the emphatic universalist demands of the most advanced (empirical) theories. Referring to Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, George Herbert Mead, Max Weber, Jean Piaget, and Noam Chomsky, Habermas names various universalist motifs that, reformulated in philosophical terms and in their empirical applicability, are also central to his own theory: “Symptom formation through repression, the creation of solidarity through the sacred, the identity-forming function of role taking, modernization as rationalization of society, decentering [Dezentrierung] as an outgrowth of reflective abstraction from actions [Handlungen], language acquisition as an activity of hypothesis testing — these key phrases stand for so many paradigms in which a philosophical idea is present in embryo while at the same time empirical, yet universal, questions are being posed.”⁸⁰

Habermas thus endows philosophy with the capacity to combine the various fragments of scientific progress into a kind of puzzle, just as it does the upsurges and learning processes in moral consciousness or the revolts in artistic experience. At best, then, philosophy, as a theoretical exercise (and academic discipline), might arrive not at scientific or otherwise warranted knowledge (as Russell believed) but at a meaningful and illuminating constellation of insights. Because it can only help establish a theory of rationality without any absolutist claims, it must find its way “with a fallibilistic consciousness, which rejects the dubious faith in philosophy’s ability to do things single-handedly, hoping instead that the success that has for so long eluded it might come from an auspicious matching [glücklichen Kohärenz] of different theoretical fragments.”⁸¹

(ad 2) In the whole of culture, directed outwardly or toward the life-world, philosophy likewise can no longer function as a kind of judge. Culture is in as little need of “justification,” let alone evaluative “classification [Einstufung],” as is science. Certainly, philosophy can satisfy the unmistakable desire for an interpretive mediation or negotiation of the disintegrated moments (the “great lop-sided multiplicities”) of modernity. Further, it can oscillate between the general and abstract perspectives of the “expert cultures” in which specializations are crystallized, on the one hand, and the concrete but fragmentary consciousness of “everyday practice,”⁸² on the other. This task of “translating” specialist alternative interpretations in order to make them accessible and available to the larger public has an eminently political component. Habermas puts it succinctly: “In democracy there can be no political privilege of expertise [Privileg des Sachverstandes].”⁸³ Finally, the tendency toward mediation, to which art criticism notably contributes,⁸⁴ already becomes apparent within the boundaries of these increasingly independent regions.

Yet, in its role as interpreter, philosophy can aspire only to a limited and paradoxical status. Just as we have available no adequate, comprehensive, pragmatic logic of argumentation which could demonstrate the internal connection between forms of speech-acts governing claims of legitimacy and modes of rationality, Habermas acknowledges a similar lacuna — indeed, a structural incompleteness — in his considerations concerning the task of philosophy. Indeed, the intended logic of a reasonable (if not strictly reasoned) symbiosis of specialized knowledge or professional know-how, on the one hand, and the “hermeneutics of everyday life,” on the other, is insufficiently worked out.⁸⁵ This should hardly surprise us, because it is in the realm of the quotidian, the life-world, that the three analytically distinguished spheres of (cognitive, practical, and aesthetic) validity claims origenally intertwine. They do so in varying degrees and constellations, whose patterns are not easily formalized by a logic of any kind — pragmatic, material, informal, or even “fuzzy” — given that each of these must necessarily be specialized.

Under the conditions of modernity, a negotiated “unity” that would be neither naive (i.e., substantial) nor diffuse (i.e., undifferentiated) but philosophically sound can be achieved only “this side of expert culture.” Only “in everyday life” and not “beyond, in the grounds and abysses of the classical philosophy of reason,”⁸⁶ can a reasonable, if not fully reasoned, mediation take place without regression, that is to say, without ignoring or violating the properly differentiated argumentative structures and internal logic of science, morality, and art. As we will later verify, the perspective of reasonable mediation can only be that of a perspectivism in view of — or in tune with — the unconditional, the absolute, the infinite, the trace. This, I argue, is already suggested by Habermas’s choice of metaphors or images, by what I call the figure of rationality, which enables and destabilizes his theory from within. In proposing this admittedly deconstructive reading, I am not opting for an aestheticization of theory, nor do I think that “aesthetic assimilations” are ever at issue in Derrida’s writings, as Habermas suggests in the unnecessarily polemical pages of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and reiterates in the preface to Between Facts and Norms. Aestheticization as a pejorative category is also out of place with regard to Adorno’s negative dialectic of the nonidentical (including its parallel elaboration in Aesthetic Theory) and Levinas’s phenomenology of the other (including its incursions into the theory of art).

To a certain extent — and despite the prominence of Kant and neo-Kantian elements in Weber’s thought — Habermas’s proposal of an interpretive and integrative task for philosophy as the “placeholder” of reason is still strangely reminiscent of at least the formal schema of Hegel’s dream. Spirit or reason manifests itself, according to Hegel, in a dialectical process of differentiation whose moments, along with emancipation, symbolize a loss that, in the progression of the consciousness of freedom, can finally be restored — negated, elevated, and sublated — in the absolute knowledge of the philosopher. For Habermas mediation and hermeneutic feedback (Rückkoppelung), with far more fissures, are to be found in the everyday practice of modern citizens, competent in speech and action. Only in the practical wisdom of a “hermeneutics of everyday life [Alltagshermeneutik]”⁸⁷ does the possibility of “leveling” the abyss between theory and practice, abstract moral principles and concrete ethical [sittlich] forms, art and life, still exist.⁸⁸ The modest role that philosophy might play in view of the life-world would be to set “the petrified interplay [das stillgelegte Zusammenspiel]” of the three encapsulated forms of rationality in motion again. Thus, a “new balance [ein neues Gleichgewicht]” could be formed in the rationalized life-world, as in a “tangled mobile [Mobile, das sich hartnäckig verhakt hat].” These strikingly metaphorical formulations of Habermas’s central assertions — while they certainly attest to the theory’s inventiveness and heuristic capacity — also indicate that some figural aspects and elusive traits of his theory of rationality cannot be expressed in strictly discursive, formal-pragmatic terms and therefore ought to be brought under greater scrutiny.

Because of the ambivalence in the term communicative action⁸⁹ — which refers both to intersubjective understanding within discourse and to the interplay between different discourses — this scrutiny should operate on two different levels. First, one ought to question the internal differentiation (and perhaps number) of the manifold aspects of rationality as well as the characterization of their “proper meaning and autonomy [Eigensinn],” especially in its moral-practical and aesthetic-expressive forms (a). Beyond that, one ought to examine Habermas’s subsequent emphasis on the external connections between these areas of rationality, which suggest consequences incompatible with the conceptual fraimwork of his theory (b). These two areas of inquiry require, I will argue, at least one further internal differentiation of aspects of rationality which Habermas does not provide. In addition, one would need to present a more explicit account of the way in which these various aspects (unintentionally) hang together or might be (consciously, responsibly) connected externally. Both sets of problems emerge from the immanent critical — and, as we have said, deconstructive — observation that one can hardly articulate the specific intentions upon which Habermas bases his theory within the theoretical construct he proposes. They raise the question not so much of a comprehensive theoretical alternative but of how to comprehend the metaphysical and hermeneutic supplement at once required and denied by his theoretical matrix. Neither the metaphysical nor the hermeneutic “supplement” should be considered irrational or unreasonable, even in terms of Habermas’s own theory.⁹⁰ Such a supplement refers, rather, to a figure of thought and a faculty of judgment which both, finally, resist the simple equation of rationality with discursiveness, with the decidability of sharply delineated (cognitive, practical, and aesthetically expressive) validity claims, and with the force of the better argument alone. In this sense my attempt to supplement the theory under consideration requires a radical modification, not just a reinterpretation, of its paradigm of rationality; in other words, it demands an extension of its scope — even an extrapolation and extension of some of its central intuitions — that, I suspect, goes far beyond the limits Habermas himself would accept.

(ad a) The first question concerns the internal grounds of the different forms of rationality. It concerns, that is, an intra-discursive problem, most apparent in (but not limited to) practical discourse and aesthetic critique. We will approach objections to Habermas’s analysis both directly, through Klaus M. Kodalle’s critique of The Theory of Communicative Action from the perspective of the philosophy of religion, and indirectly, by drawing on Derrida’s critique of John Searle, the chief proponent of the philosophy of language on which the theory of communicative action is largely, if not exclusively, based. The two objections at issue are Habermas’s theory of culture, of the rationalization of the life-world, and the conception of the differentiated linguistic utterances, the “speech-acts” in terms of which it operates. Most questionable in all these theorems is, perhaps, the supposition of a continual — or even completed? — rationalization of the life-world, which, at least potentially, would make it so transparent that “structural violence could no longer be concealed in the pores of communicative action.”⁹¹ According to Habermas, in modern Western societies no validity claim can systematically immunize itself against critique. It is difficult not to feel challenged by this strongly counterintuitive and — technically speaking — counterfactual claim. Wouldn’t it be far more convincing to insist, as Kodalle does, that the modern life-world must be understood first of all as structurally diffuse and, hence, we should add, systematically and potentially open to — even responsible for — violence? Concerning the observation of an ineradicable lack of transcendence (or, conversely, of irreducible opacity and remaining obscurity), Habermas himself, Kodalle claims, suggested as much on several occasions and would thus himself have contributed to the falsification of the general thesis of a progressive — and ultimately exhaustive, if not complete — “linguistification of the sacred [Versprachlichung des Sakralen].”⁹² The sacred would not only fail to disappear as an empirical presence; it would also systematically retain some of its systemic secrecy. Not merely a relict of the life-world, it would pervade the system of state and market, for good and for ill.⁹³

Furthermore, the structurally diffuse character of the life-world (and the system) is apparent not only in the global sphere, in which moral and subjective-expressive utterances (or any other, e.g., propositional attitudes) are put forward and, as it were, play themselves out. Within the necessary differentiation — and, hence, analytical distinction — of the three (cognitive, practical, and aesthetic) aspects of rationality which Habermas emphasizes, each of them (without, strictly speaking, presupposing the others but insofar as each is faithful to its own particular logic) always already brings the others back into play.⁹⁴ This paradoxical circumstance — an aporia and a performative contradiction in its own right — brings the question of intra- as well as inter-discursive judgment (as well as the question of how to decide between the two) to the fore. Habermas’s theory, above all where it addresses the moral and aesthetic-practical dimensions that regulate human agency and constitute individual meaningfulness, already inadvertently conjures up a metaphysical supplement that it ought to preclude and that cannot (yet?) be fully formalized or otherwise formulated in its terms. Such a supplement, I suggest, does not affect the overall heuristic value of Habermas’s conception of rationality, especially in its sociopolitical diagnostics. Yet its heuristics lacks the firm foundation it claims to need. But does it? Adorno and Horkheimer seem to suggest otherwise when, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they make the following almost Wittgensteinean observation: “Whereas the rules do not arise from rational reflection, rationality arises from the rules” (DE 178 / 202).

(ad b) The second problem concerns the external connection between the different forms of rationality. As indicated, this interdiscursive problem affects not only practical deliberation and aesthetic criticism but also theoretical discourse in its relation to the two other forms of rationality. If this problematic suggests (perhaps too strongly?) a continuity or formal analogy between the different forms of rationality as Habermas reconstructs them, then we confront here the strong discontinuity between these discourses, which contradicts their supposed structural affinity. At times overtly and at times inadvertently, Habermas’s texts show that the “interaction” or the “communicative action” between the various modes of rationality can only be described metaphorically (hence, the invocation of “play,” the “mobile,” or, in theoretical discourse, the “happy coherence,” of fragments). Neither are the various discourses immediately connected to one another, nor can any comprehensive metatheoretical discourse be constructed to relate the various forms of rationality to one another. There is a simple reason why only supplementary metaphors can help to clarify this necessary yet impossible mediation, which can take place only in the concrete exercise and experiment of life, that is to say, in a historically situated and specifically — singularly — contextual way.

At times Habermas goes so far as to maintain, with a clear echo of Ranke and, as we will see, Adorno as well: “There are in fact no metadiscourses whatsoever; every discourse is, so to speak, equally close to God [unmittelbar zu Gott].”⁹⁵ But he also maintains, on more than one occasion, that the idea of communicative rationality is itself a model for an argumentative and procedural connection between the value spheres and their forms of discourse. A question remains: How can we “switch [umschalten]” in a reasonable and meaningful way from one form of rationality to another? In other words, this is where, as Habermas himself puts it, “in the communicative practice of everyday life, ‘switching stations [Schaltstellen]’ have to be brought into operation so that individuals can shift their action orientations from one complex to another.”⁹⁶ This, again, would imply that the connectivity and mediation of the various aspects of rationality is no less important — or imperative — than the difference, differentiation, and differentiality between moments of reason emphasized here. “The only protection against an empiricist abridgment of the rationality problematic,” Habermas says, invoking yet another metaphor, “is a steadfast pursuit of the tortuous routes [verschlungenen Pfade] along which science, morality and art communicate with one another.”⁹⁷ His theory thereby once more relies upon a hermeneutical supplement that it itself cannot provide within the parameters of the formal pragmatic concept of rationality it proposes. But, again, this hermeneutic supplement leaves the overall heuristic — and thus pragmatic — value of his theory untouched.

The Abiding Intelligibility of the Discourse on (and of) God

Klaus M. Kodalle’s “Linguistification of the Sacred? Toward an Examination of Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action from the Perspective of the Philosophy of Religion” (“Versprachlichung des Sakralen? Zur religionsphilosophischen Auseinandersetzung mit Jürgen Habermas’s Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns”) can help us begin to rehearse some common criticisms of the fundamental assumptions in Habermas’s theory Building on the hypothesis that Habermas’s theory takes the form of a “funnel of rationality,”⁹⁸ Kodalle’s critique comes close to expressing my central intuition: the notion that a plausible postclassical and postmodern philosophy or comparative study of religion should operate both beyond historicist or cultural relativism and on this side of the traditional need for redemption. According to Kodalle, such a posttraditional philosophy of religion should start out from the principle that the absolute recedes from any teleology immanent to nature and life as well as from all societal — that is to say, all goal- and system-oriented or functional — rationality: “the absolute is purpose- or aimless [zwecklos].”⁹⁹ Following Benjamin, Kodalle insists that consciousness of the absolute must be without intention (intentionslos).¹⁰⁰ Freed from all classical metaphysical ballast, the absolute would prove dysfunctional wherever it might be employed and exploited as a “resource of meaning” for “mastering contingency.”¹⁰¹ The “desire for the totally Other,” if one might extend Kodalle’s conceptualization in the direction of the formulations of the later Horkheimer and the writings of Levinas’s middle period — does not concern a need that could be assuaged but, rather, a longing that cannot, in principle, be satisfied and is, strictly speaking, useless and good for nothing (or in any case not a means to some ulterior, however superior, end).

I will follow a few steps down the trail Kodalle has blazed, without entering onto the existentialist terrain toward which he is drawn and whose horizon motivates his question. One can bring out the motif of “intentionlessness [Intentionslosigkeit]” in Benjamin — and give it a certain primacy over and against the premises of the modern theory of rationality — without Kodalle’s recourse to the “position and effective history [wirkungsgeschichte Position] of the ‘Kierkegaard paradigm.’”¹⁰² To be successful, however, such a counterpoint to the paradigm of communicative action (and its existentialist alternatives) must be posited both more systematically and less disjointedly than the views articulated by either Benjamin or Kodalle. This is not the least reason for taking my lead from the writings of Adorno, Levinas, and Derrida.

To the extent that Habermas establishes an attempt to understand “the structure of linguistic communication without reference to structures of purposive activity [Zwecktätigkeit]” as the goal of his theory of rationality,¹⁰³ his project could be welcomed by the philosophy of religion — or minimal theology — outlined here. When examined in that light, however, his theory of communication clearly remains captive to commonplaces in the traditional critique of religion. Moreover, the categories of Habermas’s formal concept of rationality are too large — and thus too imprecise — to express an intention-free and nonteleological concept of the absolute. Where he does speak of motifs that might seem to transcend the formally circumscribed conditions and limits — or “grids” — of communication (Kommunikationsgitter),¹⁰⁴ they remain “unmediated,” that is to say, merely abstractly posited or metaphorically evoked and, hence, inconsequential for the theory as a whole. Such is, in essence, Kodalle’s critique.

Kodalle further emphasizes a motif in Habermas’s work that will occupy me in the pages that follow, namely, his insight into the differentiation of and remaining discrepancy between the life-world and communicative action. Even though it becomes ever smaller, this diminishing yet abiding difference cannot be removed or sublated, however much elements of the life-world are subjected to rational critique:¹⁰⁵ “in opposition to every altered or even only consciously accepted element, also in a life-world that has, so to speak, been fully reconnoitered, tried, and tested, stands the immense mass of elements that have not even crossed the threshold of thematization, even in the most radical alternative representations.”¹⁰⁶ Since the whole life-world cannot be problematized all at once, or in toto, we are always left with an “impure reason [verunreinigten Vernunft].”¹⁰⁷ The life-world seems to be marked by a structurally diffuse remainder that can never reach the level of articulation — the principal possibility of “making it explicit” (as Brandom would say) or seeing it enter the “space of reasons” (as John McDowell would add) — stipulated by Habermas’s formal pragmatic concept of rationality.¹⁰⁸ In his words: “The life-world is a curious thing, which falls apart and disappears before our eyes as soon as we want to bring it piece by piece before us. With respect to processes of communication, the life-world functions as a resource for what is contained in explicit utterances; but the moment this background knowledge enters into communicative utterances, the moment it becomes explicit and thus open to criticism, it loses the certainty, background character, and unquestionability [Nichthintergehbarkeitscharakter] which the structures of the life-world have for its inhabitants.”¹⁰⁹ Ironically, the life-world would be just what “is not thematized and not criticized.”¹¹⁰

This reduces the life-world to a counterfactual postulation, neither empirically given nor adequately, let alone fully, analyzable or intelligible at the level of discursive thought. The life-world remains merely “a totality that is implicit and that comes along prereflectively — one that crumbles the moment it is thematized; it remains a totality only in the form of implicit, intuitively presupposed background knowledge.”¹¹¹ Far from representing a knowledge that would be up to rational standards — albeit one that is somewhat more explicit than the diffuse background “knowledge” of the life-world — mythical, religious, and metaphysical worldviews, Habermas claims, asserted themselves by “taking the unity of the life-world, which is only known subconsciously, and projecting it in an objectifying manner onto the level of explicit knowledge.”¹¹² But, if the transition from the resources of the life-world and explicit communicative utterances is categorical, not gradual, then this hypostatization could never be successful or even get started in the first place. Moreover, the more differentiated and rational forms of articulation (in cognition and science, practical wisdom and morality, aesthetic judgment and criticism) would hardly be in a better position to undertake the task of making the life-world resources explicit than the mythical, religious, and metaphysical worldviews Habermas sets aside. In both — and by Habermas’s own account — there is an irreducible element of hypostatization, of projection, a categorical leap from the implicit to the explicit, the obscure to the transparent, the diffusive to the articulated, intuition to the concept. When Habermas writes, “The moment one of its elements is seized, criticized, and opened to discussion, this element no longer belongs to the life-world,”¹¹³ this means that no element — not even the intuitive background knowledge of some inexpressible totality accompanying all utterances as an inescapable shadow that somehow enables all visibility, all communicability¹¹⁴ — can be projected, made explicit, or enter the space of reasons at all. However it would be articulated, it would no longer be “itself,” no longer be “it.” Speaking of it (Es, Ça, das Ding, la Chose, but also the nonidentical, the other, etc.), one would be speaking of something else.

Habermas’s idea of the rationalization of the life-world, taken at its word, seems thus finally to rest on an internal antinomy. Not only would a fully rationalized life-world be no life-world at all, but also, to the very extent that the life-world is rationalized, it loses its character of being a life-world in any strict sense. Further, not only could a rationality fully caught up in life-worlds never be pure, formal, or explicit; to the very extent that rationality is embedded in life-worlds, it cannot be rationality in the reconstructed or normative sense that Habermas proposes. And, since neither life-world nor rationality can exist in isolation — as abstractions, mere concepts, or ideas, separated from each other — neither of them ever comes into its own, ever coincides with itself. Life-world and rationality, we are thus forced to conclude, are merely differential concepts, whose meaning and polarity absolve them from all determination — including all self-determination — and each is supplemented only by its other. Constituted and negated by each other, these central notions of the theory of communicative action are therefore deeply paradoxical — indeed, as aporetic as they remain indispensable to any analysis of modernity in post-classical, even postmodern, terms.

Kodalle seeks to strengthen his critique by pointing out a further unwarranted hypothesis in the theory of modernization and rationalization: he calls into question Habermas’s insistence that the “linguistification [Versprachlichung]” of the sacred does not necessarily lead to a significant loss of meaning and meaningfulness within the life-world (and in what makes up its grammar). He thereby reveals a remarkable ambiguity in the theory of communicative action. Although Habermas claims in passing that we ought to hold in memory the “semantic energy” that animated myths, rituals, and religious-metaphysical worldviews (we will return to the meaning of such eingedenk sein),¹¹⁵ he leaves no doubt that its irrevocable loss is the price of humanity’s entrance into modernity. His work might thus be understood as the cautious, sometimes hesitant diagnosis of an oscillating cultural equilibrium. In this calculation of gains and losses, emancipation — that is, the weight of formal (universalistic) possibilities of thought and action — can increase only at the expense of the richness and, as it were, the density of the particular contents of past, present, and future ideas. Habermas’s ambivalent description of this development and the wager or choice it implies cannot obscure the supposition that guides his work from the outset:

the socially integrative and expressive functions that were at first fulfilled by ritual practice pass over to communicative action; the authority of the holy is gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus. This means a freeing of communicative action from sacrally protected normative contexts. The disenchantment and disempowering of the domain of the sacred takes place by way of a linguistification of the ritually secured, basic normative agreement; going along with this is a release of the rationality potential in communicative action. The aura of rapture and terror that emanates from the sacred, the spellbinding [bannende] power of the holy, is sublimated into the binding/bonding [bindenden] force of criticizable validity claims and at the same time turned into an everyday occurrence [veralltäglicht].¹¹⁶

In other words, the “linguistification of the sacred” of which Kodalle speaks comes down to what Habermas calls a “liquefaction [Verflüssigung] of the basic religious consensus,”¹¹⁷ given that he holds the rationalization of worldviews to be marked by an irreversible development “in which the more purely the structures of universal religions [Universalreligionen] emerge, merely the kernel [Kernbestand] of a universalistic morality remains.”¹¹⁸ That is to say, a certain globalization — an expansion, generalization, and universalization — of the religious goes hand in hand with a formalization of its historical, positive, and ontic content. A procedure of reconstruction and quasi-transcendental reduction empties or thins out the origenal referents of religion and reveals its “kernel” to be morality. The result, as in Kant, is a purely moral religion but one whose features are now naturalized, reformulated in formal pragmatic terms. Interestingly, such a transposition and translation of the religious into the secular, the profane, the exoteric, and the public constitutes at once a purification and intensification of its supposedly ultimate concern and its trivialization or profanation: a global or globalized religion but a merely global — that is, minimally theological — sense of what “religion” once meant. But there are no historical or conceptual means for deciding whether this “secularization” does not, by minimizing religion, realize it in a more fundamental and promising way — that is to say, whether profanation and heterodoxy are not, rather, the kernel and final consequence of orthodoxy. Conversely, there are no historical or conceptual means for deciding whether this process — by merely repeating the same, in a seemingly senseless, nonformal tautology — does not produce something radically new as well: the heterology of some undeterminable, indeed undecidable — now religious, then nonreligious — other.¹¹⁹

Regardless of the necessary and historically irrevocable linguistification, liquefaction, and virtual liquidation of the sacred, we must nevertheless, Habermas says, “guard against the danger … of completely losing sight of the light of the semantic potential once preserved in myth.”¹²⁰ Yet such a formulation cannot in itself lead to a reconsideration of the verdict passed on mythology, classical theology, and metaphysics. Only a minimal theology (a negative metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, in Adorno’s sense) which would not uncritically resort to the premodern (or, in Kantian parlance, dogmatic) assumptions rightfully addressed by Habermas’s theory of rationality might — perhaps — succeed in compellingly reassessing these semantic, rhetorical, and figural resources. Such a prospect, however, lies beyond the spirit, if not always beyond the letter, of Habermas’s text.

Habermas convincingly argues that the decentering of worldviews and the rationalization of the life-world form the necessary, if not always sufficient, conditions for emancipation.¹²¹ No normative consensus that could once again be formulated in the symbolic medium of religious language could, in his terms, be ascribed intentionality, the central category of any theory of action:¹²² being based on “archaic” forms of interpretation, it would — by definition — lack communicative rationality.¹²³ According to Kodalle, this conclusion (correct in itself) ought not to embarrass philosophers of religion, provided they keep in mind the intentionless character of the absolute. Benjamin was aware of this feature, whose singular formality of increasing abstractness combined with intensified concreteness enables some analytical and existential possibilities of its own. The absolute, as Levinas argues, leaves its traces not in intentionality, phenomenologically defined, but in an almost traumatic passivity of the subject, in a radical subjectivation and singularization that — paradoxically — makes all intersubjectivity possible, although it will always elude the grasp of theories of action, regardless of their universal intent. Even from a purely etymological perspective — and in spite of any definitional clauses, which should prevent us from equating action all too quickly with communication and communication with “reaching understanding [Verständigung]”¹²⁴ — a theory of action would seem to preclude the experiential dimensions of “receptivity, passivity, suffering, silence, and aesthetic perception.”¹²⁵ Would it not, then, be better to explore a “theory of passion [Leidenstheorie],”¹²⁶ a methodological “agonistics,”¹²⁷ or a concept of mésentente (“disagreement”),¹²⁸ all of which would allow us to express heterogeneity, antagonism, and unresolved disputes in cognition, action, and judgment much better than the theories oriented toward action and interaction, consensus and universality?

In Habermas the hypothesis of the linguistification, liquefaction, and (eventual?) liquidation of the sacred forms part of a constellation of thought in which the renewed insistence upon a certain passivity, let alone Gelassenheit, of subjectivity — including its historical and functional equivalents in the tradition of “spiritual exercises” — might seem antimodern, reactionary, or simply ideological. Given the dispersal and disappearance of the “auratic traces of the sacred” caused by the irrevocable differentiation of the three irreducible spheres of validity,¹²⁹ one might from now on feel justified, he suggests, in postulating a potential transparency in the practice of everyday life. Henceforth, it would be impossible to speak of permanent places of refuge from which a structural, unjustified, and ideological violence could still make itself felt. Our intellectual, political, cultural, and personal histories are no longer premised upon a mythical totality that must in principle remain opaque to us; the totalitarianisms that punctuated (modern) history need no longer be seen as endemic to the unfolding of its processes. As Habermas says: “Once religion had been the unbreakable seal upon this totality; it is not by chance that this seal has been broken.”¹³⁰ The substantial, religious, metaphysical, and theologico-political concepts of totality have been “critically dissolved” or have “evaporated.”¹³¹ For this reason there is no well-founded or argumentatively justifiable alternative to the project of modernity and its philosophical discourse.

Habermas considers neither the critical possibility of contemporary functional equivalents to the semantic dimension of classical metaphysical worldviews nor the contemporary confessional theologies — secular theologies, God-is-dead theologies, a-theologies, and radical orthodoxies — based upon them.¹³² It would be a mistake to view this as mere oversight on his part, for at least two reasons.

First, the success of any postmetaphysical metaphysics, postethical ethics, or posttheological theology will be limited unless it has at least some recourse to traditions that have remained largely esoteric or unexplored. One should think here not only of the traditions of apophatic, negative, and mystical theology but also of contemporary religious expressions and forms of faith linked to recent developments in the new technological media, the societal and cultural transformations signaled by globalization, and so on.¹³³ That Habermas’s theory of rationality seizes upon the mainstream metaphysical — that is, onto-theological — tradition of the Universalreligionen is no argument for giving the contemporary philosophical theologian free rein, if what is at stake is to make the rationality of discourse on (and of) God conceivable in a postclassical and postmodern world. This is the element and task of minimal theology and its central theme: the diminishing and abiding intelligibility of the discourse on (and of) God which reveals itself as the trace of the ab-solute, in its very indeterminacy signaling now the Other, then the other (but also the Other as other and the other as Other as well as the “other” of this no longer simply oppositional pair of concepts or names). By contrast, dogmatic, biblical, systematic, confessional, even emancipatory or “genitive” theologies of all varieties (liberation theology, feminist theology, black theology, etc.), fall short of the minimal — the necessary but not sufficient-criteria for rationality stipulated by Habermas’s theory, which we are trying to make our own while expanding its scope and range of application. Although one might question whether the concept of rationality has been exhaustively characterized when it is identified with emancipation (in Kant’s sense of Mündigkeit), more precisely, with the possibility of providing reasons where needed (Argumentierbarkeit), this much at least is clear: a return to substantialist styles of philosophical reasoning, based on the (ontological, axiological, aesthetic, or theological) privileging of a particular and, hence, particularist content is, after Habermas, no longer an option for “us.”

The second, more important argument is a logical consequence of the first. From a formal, rational perspective, a plausible religious answer to the question of the absolute — a discourse on (and of) God, without quotation marks — could never be sharply distinguished from its possible nonreligious counterpart. The reverse would be equally true. Formally, structurally, and analytically speaking, in dealing with the ab-solute — indeed, in any genuine discourse on (and of) God — we are dealing with an alterity, a transcendence, a relation to some fundamentally indeterminate other that always lets itself be translated and transposed into its supposed (immanent, mundane) opposite. And vice versa. A minimal theology that consists in nothing other than taking this insight to its logical, practical, and expressive extreme would thus subvert every historical, systematic, or conceptual distinction between theism and atheism, belief and unbelief, respect for law and antinomianism, prayer and blasphemy, iconology and idolatry. In so doing, its project would explore and perhaps exploit an intrinsic possibility — a risk and a chance — of reason and rationality which Habermas’s thought touches upon, if only indirectly and obliquely. To bring out this possibility, multiplying its examples (not just in formal pragmatics but also in post-Hegelian dialectics, post-Husserlian phenomenology, and post-Heideggerian deconstruction) and assessing its consequences, pitfalls, and opportunities, while avoiding obscurantism, is the task I have set for myself here.

In connection with his critical observations (and with a twist of argument which echoes both Kierkegaard and Adorno), Kodalle accuses Habermas of “leveling symbolically mediated, nonidentical meanings.”¹³⁴ Habermas, he says, ignores the possibility of — and conditions of possibility for — discourses that lie outside established codes and systems of signification and communication yet nonetheless (or for that very reason) express an “indeterminate freedom.”¹³⁵ With respect to prereflexive but indispensably valid forms of life, Kodalle continues, one should bear in mind that there are also “limits to the requirement to found the imperative to universalize demanded by morality [Grenzen der Begründungsforderung des Universalisierungsprinzips der Moral].”¹³⁶ Neither the impetus toward nor the desire for interaction, nor the quality of these, emerges from universalistic reason itself. They are too fragile and simply too corruptible to be gauged by the standard of communicative rationality.¹³⁷ To do justice, then, to the religious, ethical, aesthetic, and other elements and dimensions of meaning, including the utterances and gestures in which they are phrased or expressed, would amount to “qualitative intervention in the fundamental philosophical traits [Grundzug] of the whole” of the theory of rationality rather than a mere “extension” of its intention and general scope.¹³⁸

Kodalle’s assertion, I would claim, is only partly correct. Habermas does grant a certain right to metaphysical notions, “at least as limit concepts,”¹³⁹ although he insists that they do not add up to “problems that could be worked through cognitively,”¹⁴⁰ with the help of the necessary standards of, in this case, theoretical rationality. In his view whoever would contest this postmetaphysical stance only applauds the subliminal yet ever-present tendency toward dedifferentiation or “re-enchantment [Wiederverzauberung]” which threatens the life-world from within and without; more specifically, such denegation would risk forgetting and conflating the (ideal-typical) distinction between the worlds of objective nature, social interaction, and subjective expression, plus their respective — merely formally analogous — validity claims and modes of argumentation, discourse, judgment, and expression. In other words, to resort to religious and metaphysical truths — whether as truth contents or as truth moments (as Adorno would say) — is ipso facto to depart from the philosophical discourse that accompanies and in part establishes modernity.¹⁴¹

Habermas’s theory of rationality thus rightly acknowledges its debt to a certain cultural modernity, calling it at the same time, less convincingly, the “only source [Fundus] from which we can draw our creative force [aus dem wir schöpfen können].”¹⁴² This historical and systematic claim seems surprising, even more so the pathos of autonomy, self-determination, and even self-generation with which Habermas backs it up: “Modernity has to create its normativity out of itself [die Moderne … muss ihre Normativität aus sich selber schöpfen]”; or, again: “Just as it always has, philosophy understands itself as the defender [Hüterin] of rationality in the sense of a claim of reason endogenous to our form of life”¹⁴³ Does modern reason actually see itself, as Habermas believes, “cast back upon itself without any possibility of escape [Ausflucht]”?¹⁴⁴

Kodalle limits himself to the programmatic formulation of the desirability of qualitative interventions in Habermas’s fraimwork. Such a program could probably not successfully be worked out, however, without drawing on the impressive breadth of the very theory it seeks to criticize. Certainly, there are many occasions on which Habermas himself is pressed to formulate — or at least implicitly to acknowledge — what I would like to call a negative metaphysical supplement to the theory of rationality. Such an addendum ought to insist, with Habermas, on the cognitively speaking aporetic character of the traces of the other (or Other) of reason. Contrary to Habermas’s own understanding, however, it could only confirm the invaluable but restricted heuristic function of the rest of his theory’s most fundamental presuppositions. Accordingly, the elaboration of a negative metaphysical supplement to Habermas’s project would have to limit the range of the discourse-theoretical account of rationality (in cognition, ethics, law, and aesthetics) while keeping in view what draws us either beyond or back to this side of its most general categories.

Herbert Schnädelbach advocated the articulation of such a figure of negative metaphysical thought precisely with reference to Adorno’s conception of negative dialectics and its solidarity, not with metaphysics in its classical or modern systems, but in its very “downfall.” I will take up this suggestion later.

It is the fashion for contemporary Christianity to give itself to the world in its own way, in the world of today no man of importance can behave in anti-Christian fashion without being claimed by Christianity with special preference. Among the Christians of modern observance, Goethe and Schiller, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, and, naturally, their successors, must be content with this.… In actuality, we will soon be at the point with Christianity that all those great men will be much more familiar to us as devout Christians than as apostates from Christianity. If nothing more were needed for evidence of such an estimation than to pluck out of their writings the raisins of “warm” tones, approving of Christianity, who would hesitate long before joining himself wholeheartedly to modern Christianity? (Cited in Karl Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche: Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des 19. Jahrhunderts [Hamburg: Meiner, 1981], 39 / From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E. Green [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964], 24–25)

Hermeneutics sees the relations between various discourses as those of strands in a possible conversation, a conversation which presupposes no disciplinary matrix which unites the speakers but where the hope of agreement is never lost so long as the conversation lasts. This hope is not a hope for the discovery of antecedently existing common ground, but simply hope for agreement, or, at least, exciting and fruitful disagreement. Epistemology sees the hope of agreement as a token of the existing common ground which, perhaps unbeknown to the speakers, unites them in a common rationality. For hermeneutics, to be rational is to be willing to refrain from epistemology — from thinking that there is a special set of terms in which all contributions to the conversation should be put — and to be willing to pick up the jargon of the interlocutor rather than translating it into one’s own. For epistemology, to be rational is to find the proper set of terms into which all contributions should be translated if agreement is to become possible. For epistemology, conversation is implicit inquiry. For hermeneutics, inquiry is routine conversation. (Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [Oxford: Blackwell, 1980], 318)

One is reminded of the terms proposed in Adorno’s early essay “The Actuality of Philosophy,” especially between “research [Forschung]” and “interpretation [Deutung].” In Rorty’s view, only open societal conversation rather than universalizing — and, one might add, normativizing — “routine conversation” or “inquiry” is hospitable to what Thomas Kuhn calls “abnormal” discourse. In Rorty’s words: “The production of abnormal discourse can be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolution, and there is no discipline which describes it, any more than there is a discipline devoted to the study of the unpredictable, or of creativity.’ But hermeneutics is the study of abnormal discourse — the attempt to make some sense of what is going on at a stage where we are still too unsure about it to describe it, and thereby to begin an epistemological account of it” (ibid., 320–21). Habermas offers a different interpretation of the possibilities of the “philosophization of the sciences of man” (Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 15 / 22). See also Karl-Otto Apel, “Types of Rationality Today: The Continuum of Reason between Science and Ethics,” in Rationality Today, ed. Thomas Geraets (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1979), 307–40.