habermas taylor and the public sphere-libre

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Unpublished manuscript work in progress

Habermas, Taylor and Religion in the Public SphereIn their recent dispute on religion in the public sphere (Taylor/Habermas 2011),

Habermas and Taylor agree on one fundamental point, namely that the formalinstitutions of the liberal democratic state must (ideally) be neutralwith regard todifferent cultural or religious conceptions of the good. Their disagreement seems toconcentrate on two questions: (1) does religion have a special problem withneutrality? (2) Is political fairness and inclusiveness depending on democratic

processes ofsecular reasoningin the public sphere? According to my reconstruction,Habermas answer to both questions isyes, Taylors no. I discuss some of the strengthsand weaknesses of both positions, and I argue lastly that (a) Habermas current

position on the requirements of citizenship is ambivalent; (b) there are good reasonsto be ambivalent; (c) a normatively stronger and more controversial interpretationof the relationship between morality, politics and secularism in Habermas is

preferable to a weaker, but less controversial interpretation.

1 Secular or neutral?Habermas interventions in the debate on religion and public reasoning hinge on adistinction between the formal and the informal public spheres, and the relation

between the two (2005, 119-155; 2011). The formal public sphere is defined as theinstitutions of the state, such as parliaments, courts, and official administration(2005, 129). In this sphere, only strict impartiality is fair for everyone; the principle ofthe separation of church and state obliges politicians and officials within politicalinstitutions to formulate and justify laws, court rulings, decrees, and measures

exclusively in a language that is equally accessible (ibid.) to all citizens. It wouldseem to be clear that equally accessible language must be independent of particularreligious vocabularies, which leads Habermas to claim that official language must be

secular. In their recent debate, however, Charles Taylor has argued againstHabermas that he wrongly turns religion into a special problem: equally accessiblelanguage also excludes references to, say, Marx or Kant, and not only religiousreferences (Taylor 2011, 50). The fact that Habermas remains fixated on the case ofreligion shows, according to Taylor, that he is biased by a well-known myth of theenlightenment according to which religious thought is rationally inferior to secularthought (Taylor 2011, 53). If this myth becomes a part of an official ideology ofsecularism, this will alienate religious citizens, especially non-Western ones, from

political life. Why not admit with Taylor that, in principle, secularism is aboutneutrality, not about religion?

One reason why Habermas maintains that religion isin fact a special case is itsopaque core of discursively inaccessible truths:

() religis verwurzelte existentielle berzeugungen entziehen sich durch ihren ()Kern von infalliblen Offenbahrungswahrheiten der Art von vorbehaltsloserdiskursiver Errterung, denen sich andere ethische Lebensorientierungen undWeltanschauungen, d.h. weltliche Konzeptionen des Guten aussetzen (2005, 135).

Legitimate political will-formation, according to Habermas, depends oncommunication processes in which the regulative idea of a rational discourse iseffective as a counterfactual, critical ideal. According to the most basic intuitions of


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what a conversation looks like (2005, 89), this ideal demands inclusiveness(allaffected parties can participate), equality(all have an equal change of contributing),

sincerity (participants say what they mean) and absence of extradiscursive power(such as threats). But the spoken words of holy prophets, for example, are notunderstood by believers as claims to be tested in a critical discourse, but as truths to

be interpreted and lived. Since their validity ultimately depends on a postulatedpastevent the revelation religious certainties are not even possible to confirm or falsifyvia new evidence or arguments (2005, 267). By contrast, disagreements betweenKantians and utilitarians, or between natural scientists, point to afuturesolution thatcan - in principle be reached discursively (where, in the last case, empiricalevidence also counts as an argument). According to Habermas, this turns religiouscertainties into a special challenge for a democracy that wants to be deliberative.Taylor, on the other hand, refuses to see any principle difference between religiousand secular language. Kantian philosophy, he argues, will appear just as nonsensicalto some people as Christian dogmas appear to others (Taylor 2011, 64-65). Habermas,of course, does not dispute that official institutions should refer neither to Kant nor to

the Bible, but he holds on to the view that Kantian insights are easier to formulate in aneutral language than Christian beliefs. And also that this says some principle aboutthe difference between secular and religious ways of knowing.

Taylor appears to me to have a point in questioning Habermasstraightforward definition of secular reasons as reasons that can be expressed in apublic, or generally shared language is problematic (2011, 61).1First, manysecular reasons will be just as difficult to make available to a wider public as manyreligious ones, such as complex scientific or philosophical reasons, or reasons thatdepend on subjective experience. Secondly, if we understand sharable in a strictlyquantitative sense (how many people understand it), then some religious claims will,in some contexts, be more sharable than some secular ones. In the USA, for example,a political statement that refers to the will of God will probably be more sharable, andless controversial, than a reference to Darwins theory of evolution. Habermas meetsthis objection with a further argument: Taylors refusal to distinguish principally

between religious and secular reasons is failed because of the fact that

By using any kind of religious reasons, you are implicitly appealing to membership in acorresponding religious community. Only if one is member and can speak in the first personfrom within a particular religious tradition does one share a specific kind of experience onwhich religious convictions and reasons depend. () The most important experience ()arises from participation in cultic practices, in the actual performance of worshipping ()(2011, 61).

In other words, according to Habermas, philosophical arguments rely neither on culticpractices nor on a worshipping community, and this makes them more sharable thanreligious ones. But again, not all religious arguments rely on these things either; thearguments made by Buddha, Jesus or Muhammad, for example, rather sought toredefine or break radically with established communities and their institutionalized

practices of worship. So did the Christian motives invoked by Sren Kierkeggard.Furthermore, as also Taylor observes, the mere reference to God in a discourse does

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not bind the speaker to aparticularreligious community: she could be Christian, Jew,Muslim or something else (Taylor/Habermas 2011, 62-63).

These problems, however, are of a rather terminological nature, and they canhardly be seen as pressing problems in our political culture; as Habermas observes,religious citizens mostly shift naturally between different contexts of justification

(Habermas 2011, 68). Even during the so-called cartoon crisis, I would add,European Muslims almost exclusively usedseculararguments (in Habermas sense offallible, understandable arguments) to criticize or discuss the publication of

provocative caricatures of their prophet (see also Asad 2009).Taylors model, I believe, has more fundamental problems. If we ask why

secularism, or state neutrality, is to be preferred at all, he draws attention to theEnlightenment ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood as common goods inour culture (Taylor 2009). These goods wouldnt be possible in a theocracy. ButTaylor doesnt give any normativejustificationof secularism since he believes that nocontext-transcendent justification is possible. But this is unsatisfying for politicaltheory; when confronted with critique, such as the influential post-structuralist

critique according to which secularism is a suppressive Western ideology that violatesMuslim sensibilities (e.g. Asad 2009), we should be able to say something more than:this is how we do it here (Taylor 2009). Why is liberal democracy a legitimatemodel, and not simplygodfor us? As touched upon above, the main Habermasian

justification of liberal democracy, and of political secularism as its condition ofpossibility, is that (a) social arrangements that result from deliberative processesamong all affected parties are more legitimate than arrangements resulting fromtradition, coincidence, fear, suppression, strategy and so on. Furthermore (b) fair

processes of communication presuppose certain civil and social rights, just as a fairimplementation of these rights presuppose democratic processes (which makesdemocracy and human rights gleichursprnglich). In recent writings, Habermasadmits that this procedural strategy of justification might be influenced by adogmatic intuition about the autonomy and dignity of the human person (Habermas1998; 2010); the search for the better argument is not the only reason why we grant

people rights, or why we take their interests and needs into consideration; it is alsobecause there are humans, that is, with Kant, ends in themselves.

But this more philosophical or quasi-anthropological justification ofsecularism in terms of the normative presuppositions of liberal democracy is morecontroversial than the mere reference to the neutrality of the state. The hardquestion therefore arises: should normal citizens agree with this justification? Wouldit not be a paternalistic violation of peoples freedom of conscience to demand that?

In the next section on deliberation in the unofficialpublic sphere(s) I will argue thatHabermas is ambivalent in this matter.

2 Religion and justificationOver the years, and for good reasons, both Taylor and Habermas have changed their

political-philosophical theories in ways, which could be seen as responses to eachothers criticisms. Habermas has increasingly recognized ethical and religiouslifeforms as important bearers of meaning, identity and solidarity, and thickquestions of the good as relevant in political discourse (Habermas 1998). He has alsoadmitted than questions of the good and the right are often impossible to separate

practically in political deliberation. And, in recent writings, he seems to be open to anintuition that was always present in Taylor: that even procedural theories of justice

presuppose a modern conception of the autonomous, linguistic human being -


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however thin we formulate it (Taylor 1986, 45). Taylor, on the other hand, seems tohave downplayed the communitarian tendencies in his initial approach, and nowspeaks more of overlapping consensus in John Rawls sense, than of healthynational patriotism (Taylor 2009).

Nevertheless, Habermas and Taylor still disagree fundamentally over the

notion of consensus in liberal democracies. According to Taylors defence ofoverlapping consensus, all we can hope for is an agreement on core political

principlesfor different reasons, e.g. Christian, Islamic or Kantian reasons. This meansthat, in a pluralistic society, we must accept that other people support the basic

political principles from reasons we may find bad. Habermas, on the other hand, holdsthat this is insufficient when it comes to core principles of justice: here, citizens mustreach a political background consensus in a stronger sense: a consensus on the same

principlesfor the same reasons. Without coming (discursively) to a mutualunderstanding of the fairness of our core political principles, citizens of a pluralistsociety could not go to the courts and appeal to specific rights or make arguments byreference to constitutional clauses in the expectation of getting a fair decision

(Taylor/Habermas 2011, 65). Habermas also makes it clear this consensus is onlypossible in asecular language (Taylor/Habermas 2011, 65).

This strong focus on consensus has led some critics to claim that Habermasprefers homogeneity and assimilation to the diverse landscape of culturalformations. Veit Bader, for example, claims that Habermas () fails to appreciatethe depths of national diversity (Bader 2009, 133). Taylor is not so strong in hisformulations, but his critique goes in the same direction, namely that Habermasdistrusts the varietyof equality legitimate reasons to support liberal democracy. Withregard to the implicit assumption of these criticism that consensus leads tohomogenization, Habermas does not agree:

() the transitory unity that is generated in the porous and refracted intersubjectivity of alinguistically mediated consensus not only supports but furthers and accelerates thepluralisation of forms of life and the individualization of lifestyles. More discourse meansmore contradiction and difference. The more abstract the agreements become, the morediverse the disagreements with which we can non-violently live (1992, 140)

Habermas seems justified in claiming that a peaceful unfolding of disagreement andcontestation, and its pluralizing effects, is only possible on the background of somesort of dialogue. Furthermore, Baders strong critique ignores that Habermas takesreasonable disagreement (or non-consensus) to be a self-evident fact in ethical,existential and religious matters. However, it also seems reasonable to ask with

Taylor if not the idea of strong consensus is futile, or maybe counterproductive, in asociety whose citizens identify with completely different and deeply rootedtraditions and life-forms? As I understand Habermas, he is ambivalent on this matter.In the debate with Taylor he insists that citizens agree on abstract principles of justiceindependent of deeper religious or ethical doctrines. However, in his more wellknown work,Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion(2005) he claims that religiouscitizens cannotbe expected to justify political principals with secular reasons:religiously monolingual citizens should be allowed to use the only language theyknow (2005, 134). In both works we also meet a third interesting formulation, namelythat the public use of reason demands a reflexive consciousness that makes theegalitarian premises of the morality of human rights compatible with its own articlesof faith (2011, 27). But the interpretation of this demand is far from obvious: does itmean that human rights should be justifiedfrom withinreligious traditions, that with,


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with religious reasons? In that case, the consensus with other citizens will beoverlapping, and not based on thesamereasons. Or does it mean that religiouscitizens must harmonizethe independent secular consensus with their own religiousreasons?

Habermas motive for adopting the weaker, overlapping line of

argumentation, and for refraining from the strong demand that ordinary citizens reacha consensus through reason alone (2011, 65), is sympathetic: it expresses a wish toinclude all citizens, religious or non-religious, in democratic life - without

paternalistic demands to their inner motives. He therefore agrees with the criticismsmade by Nikolas Wolterstorf and Paul Weitman of the standard liberal approach toreligion in the public sphere (e.g. Rawls and Robert Audi). This approach demandsthat public reasoning should refer to proper political reasons only (Rawls), and notto comprehensive religious or secular doctrines. According to the critics, this has twounacceptable consequences: (1) the positive influence of religious movements ondemocratic processes, such as the American civil rights movements is denied; thinkonly of the famous speech of Martin Luther King or the humanitarian work of

religious organizations (Habermas 2005, 129-130). It is a clear motive in the laterHabermas to make the epistemic potentials of religious vocabularies available as acommon ethical-existential resource in a derailed (entgleisende) modernity. (2) Theliberal approach implies a notion of citizenship, which is unacceptable for religiouscitizens who cannotor are not willingto make the required separation betweencontributions expressed in religious terms and those expressed in secular language(Habermas 2011, 25). For some religious citizens, in other words, it would by

psychologically impossible to find secular reasons in political deliberation; they verydemand would violate their sense of personal integrity. The weaker Habermastherefore concludes that a liberal state cannot expect from religious citizens to justifytheir political motives independently of religious motives (2005, 133):

Der Verfassungskonsens, den sich die Brger gegenseitig understellen mssen,erstreckt sich auf das Prinzip der Trennung von Stat und Kirche. Diesen Grundsatzvon der institutionellen Ebene auf die Stellungnahmen von Organisationen undBrgern in der politischen ffentlichkeit auszudehnen, ist aber () eineskularistische berverallgemeinerung (2005, 134)

The question is, however, if the stronger Habermas is guilty of such a secularisticberverallgemeinerung himself? In his discussion with Taylor he speaks of theinformalpublic sphere (politische ffentlichkeit) and claims that in this sphere,

citizensmust come to a background consensus on constitutional essentials(Verfassungskonsens). And he continues: How can we settle this backgroundconsensus in the first place if not within a space of neutral reasons (). The reasonsmust be secular () (2011, 65)

What are the motives behind this stronger line of argumentation? The explicitreason in the discussion with Taylor is that citizens could not expect formal stateneutrality without a mutualjustification of constitutional essentials. If we had noidea if and why our fellow citizens supported basic principles of justice, our trust inthe political system would decrease. And, since religious reasons are principallyimpossible to agree upon via argument, the discursive justification must be secular.Even though I see some possible objections here, I sympathize with the demanding

character of this ideal, and its provocative insistence on learning processes: discursiveprocesses of justification naturally force us to transcend the narrow self-security of


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particular worldviews and take a larger perspective (2011, 66). But is it not unfair, oreven narrow, that the reasons in this discourse should be secular? We shouldremember here that Habermas demands from secular (or non-religious) citizens thatthey engage in a cooperative work of translation of the semantic potentials assumedto be inherent in religious traditions (2005; 2011). Also atheists and agnostics should

make an effort to find meanings and potentials in religious utterances from which theyare at first alienated. By being translated into fallible arguments, religious motivesand meanings find a form through which they can be taken up also in officialpoliticalwill-formation. In other words, the narrow form of secularism, which regards religionas nonsense, is alsoincompatible with fair processes of justification and consensus

building. According to Habermas, the duty to translate (or interpret) puts equalburdens on the shoulders of religious and non-religious citizens.

The force of Habermas weaker position is its greater inclusiveness: privatereligious citizens can support constitutional essentials for religious reasons as long asthey accept an institutional translation proviso (2005; 2011). The force of thestronger position is its insistence that citizens communicate and reach a mutual

understanding concerning constitutional essentials and core political principles. Inorder to be neutral, this understanding cannot rely directly or solely on religiousreasons. In addition, I would argue, the stronger position is not strictly procedural. Itsays that, not only must we sometimes agree on the same principles for the samereasons, we must also agree on certain principles for certain reasons. And it spellsout some of these principles and reasons. For example, when Taylor suggests that our

being created in Gods image is a morally good reason to support human rights - justas good as any utilitarian or Kantian reason (2011, 54) - we should object: also if Goddidnt exist, it would be wrong to deny specific groups in our society the same legalstatus as others. Why would it be wrong? The answer to this question points in thedirection of Habermas later writings in which the procedural focus is supported byreflections on the normative substance of the equal dignity of every human beingthat human rights only spell out (2010, 467).

The weakness of the stronger position is that more people will disagree withit and find it Western or secularistic. But that might be a price worth paying for

being honest about ones normative intuitions.


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Bader, Veit 2009: Secularism, public reason or moderately agonistic democracy?In: Levey G. Brahm and Modood, Tariq Secularism, Religion and MulticulturalCitizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009, p. 110-135.

Boettcher, W. James 2009. Habermas, religion and the ethics of citizenship,Philosophy and Social Criticism35, pp. 215-238

Habermas, Jrgen 1998:Faktizitt und Geltung: Beitrge zur Diskurstheorie desRechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats: Beitrge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts

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Habermas, Jrgen and Taylor, Charles: Dialogue: Jrgen Habermas and CharlesTaylor. In Mendieta, Eduardo and Vanantwerpen, Jonathan (eds.): The Power ofreligion in the public Sphere. New York: Colombia university Press.

Taylor 1986: Sprache und Gesellschaft. In Honneth, Axel and Joas, Hans (eds.):Kommunikatives handeln. Beitrge zur Jrgen Habermas Theorie desKommunikativen Handelns.

Taylor, Charles 2008: What is secularism?. Foreword in Levey, Geoffry Brahm andModood, Tariq: Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

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