CAHN JOB

Metaphysics or Politics?: The Clash Between Two Orthodoxies (S Parvez Manzoor, October-December 2002, The Muslim World Book Review)

Despite all attempts to unmask reason, science and secularism as a few among the many possible narratives that may or may not capture some truth about our human world, the discourse of politics is still hostage to what Foucault once expressed as "the blackmail of being 'for' or 'against' the Enlightenment". For contemporary political thinkers still find it exceedingly painful, if not impossible, to overcome the dubious and nefarious dichotomy of "politics" and "metaphysics". They are both unwilling and unable to renounce the Enlightenment's claim that only the modern man, who has acquired the gift of self-consciousness and who creates his own values and goals, is fully human. Politics, accordingly, may not be grounded in any trans-rational and transcendent vision of the ultimate; its focus must be the historical rather than the metaphysical, its temper rational rather than emotive, and its spirit secular rather than religious. Any claimant to historical order, Islamic polity including, must therefore abandon the transcendent moorings of its theology and purge its political rhetoric of the metaphysical dross of the medieval times, if it is to be accorded permission to join the modern, "civilized", world. [...]

Any contemporary Muslim effort to strike a bargain with modernism and overcome the aporias of modernity must contend with the formidably fecund thought of Jurgen Habermas, undoubtedly the mostresolute defender of European reason and normative modernity today. [...] Habermas's present work, [The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory] a collection of essays written during the last decade, provides a very convenient access to the exciting world of his political philosophy. Further, as the title of the work insinuates, the themes treated here are all to be found on the borderlines of the political discourse, demanding both scrupulous detachment and intimate involvement, a task for which, judging from the evidence available here, Habermas seems eminently suited.

As someone who unabashedly rejects both "moral realism and modern value-skepticism", Habermas belongs to those moral philosophers and political theorists who feel that their task is "to provide a convincing substitute for (traditional) justifications of norms and principles." His is, then, a project of discovering a normative basis of modern political existence, without the a priori authority of any transcendent referent. The introductory chapter of the volume, "A General Analysis of the Cognitive Content of Morality", offers a synoptic account not only of the traditional, Christian and monotheistic, scheme of moral order, but also of the four alternative attempts, viz. that of "moral realism", "utilitarianism", "metaethical skepticism" and "moral functionalism", to fill the axiological vacuum created by "the death of God". The dilemma of "secular" moral philosophy, according to Habermas, is that "it must renounce God's eye viewpoint; as its contents, it can no longer appeal to the order of creation and sacred history; and, as regards its theoretical approach, it cannot appeal to the metaphysical concepts of essences that undercut the logical distinctions between the different types of illocutionary utterances." In a post-theological, post-metaphysical discourse, the justification of moral utterance (the raw data of morality) comes, in his view, through their "cognitive content". Needless to say that Habermas's whole opus is an endless reflection on the meaning and significance of this putative "cognitive content", which is for him a matter of "communicative rationality" and "discourse ethics". [...]

[R]elevant to our own inquiry is Habermas's extended comment on John Rawls's celebrated thesis about "overlapping consensus" ("'Reasonable' vs. 'True', or the Morality of Worldviews"; Chapter 3) that evolves into a penetrating critique, elucidating Habermas's own views on the nature of the political. Rawls's well-known slogan that "justice is fairness" implies that it is a "free-standing" conception that moves "entirely within the domain of politics" and leaves "philosophy as it is". However, such a claim about the autonomy of politics from philosophy is contingent upon a specific understanding of the political. For when the "political" is conceived in such a way that it stands in opposition to the "metaphysical", it leads to controversies that, in Habermas's opinion, cannot be so easily resolved. That there exists a consensus in modern societies concerning the neutrality of justice with respect to the extant, though often competing, worldviews may be an entirely justified strategy in the face of religious and cultural pluralism, but it does not follow that "political theory can itself move entirely within the domain of the political and stay clear of stubborn philosophical controversies." Arguing against Rawls's separation of the philosophical and the political on the basis of (some flimsy) distinction between "reasonable" and "true", Habermas believes that "reasonable citizens" cannot develop and overlapping consensus so long as they are prevented from jointly adopting a moral point of view which is prior to, or independent of, their individual doctrines. In other words, even an overlapping consensus requires the cement of normativeness. For Habermas, it can only be found in "the proceduralist conception of the public use of reason".

Modern societies, whose growing pluralism Rawls's doctrine is designed to address, are premised on the sovereignty of the political. What this principle presupposes it that not only is the political independent of the religious (and often, in practice, of the moral), but that political values also have priority over non-political values. In other words, unless there exists a prior acceptance of these normative claims of modernity, indispensable for the constitution of power in modern societies, Rawls' proposal about the neutrality of justice towards competing worldviews cannot work. Even Rawls recognizes that an overlapping consensus is possible only among citizens who acknowledge that in cases of conflict, political values outweigh all other values. This holds true even for Habermas who concedes that "the priority of political values is a requirement of practical reason." . Interestingly, the sovereignty of the political, of practical reason, yields a theory of coercion which makes legitimate the subjugation of worldviews that do not posit the political as the highest value (worldviews adhering to a trans-political, trans-existential, transcendent order of ultimate reality). Habermas may therefore unabashedly proclaim that "clearly a requirement of practical reason to which comprehensive doctrines must submit if an overlapping consensus is possible can only be justified by appeals to an epistemic authority that is itself independent of worldviews."

With the postulation of such a transcendent locus of epistemic authority, an authority that is independent of worldviews, Habermas manages to buttress Rawls's scheme of "justice as fairness", but he does so at the cost of abandoning Rawls's original claim about the separation of politics and metaphysics. For what Habermas proposes in the name of practical reason is nothing less than a metaphysics, a metaphysics of politics. Indeed, his "theory of politics" is a "comprehensive doctrine" (worldview) that now acquires its own centre of uncontested, transcendent, power (epistemic authority). Little wonder that a fellow German moral philosopher, Ernst Tugendhat, who like Habermas is a protagonist of discourse ethics, has no qualms in admitting that in the post-theological, post-metaphysical scheme of governance "intersubjectivity" "takes the place of the transcendent pregiven." Practical reason, thus understood as the supreme epistemic authority, has the function of establishing the sovereignty of the political community over matters that in classical liberalism belonged only to individual conscience. Any representative body, which follows "the proceduralist conception of the public use of reason", may now decide upon any question; say, the truth of Darwinism, the historicity of the Holocaust, or the obligation of self-mutilation (Read: Jewish/Muslim custom of (Male) circumcision). Surely, Rawls's liberalism and Habermas's "communitarianism"--politics without metaphysics and politics as metaphysics--are separated by a wide ideological gulf, even if they both promote the regime of modernity.

Habermas is by no means a conservative, authoritarian thinker, oblivious to the virtues of dissent and diversity. In fact, he is quite the opposite. Thus, if his thought occasionally tilts in that direction, it is so, because as a pragmatic thinker, he is concerned with the problem of governability. Further, he is fully cognizant that without some legitimate theory of coercion, the political ceases to be political. The coercive in his thought, however, is organically linked to the discursive, deliberative, democratic. He sees it as the epistemic authority of practical reason. Of course, it is a metaphysical postulate that is grounded in the arrogant claims of radical humanism, which recognizes no value in the universe except human subjectivity and which discerns no telos in nature except the self-realization of the human will. Human subjectivity, when objectivised as a democratic community that submits to the epistemic authority of proceduralist, practical reason, is, in his opinion and in those of all modernists, sovereign: it may do anything. There are no limits - theoretical, moral, theological - to its legitimate power. Needless to say, this is one claim of Habermasian political philosophy which Islamic conscience can never submit to.

So we are arrived back at the station and the irony, delightful to us, but appalling to the secular humanists in the crowd, that Reason, the supposed liberation theology that would free Man from the gods and allow us to finally craft a morality on the basis of human thought alone, fails utterly at its task and leaves men completely subjugated to the State. And so, if we might paraphrase Rousseau and Nietzsche: Man was free, but then God died, and now everywhere in former-Christendom men don chains. As another great philosopher wrote: Ain't that a kick in the head? Posted by Orrin Judd at May 8, 2003 8:37 PM