An Awareness of What is Missing

"Habermas is also writing from what I imagine is a secular agnostic background. But what is so interesting about this book is that he is quite unequivocal in his affirmation of what religion has given to western society: concepts like the value of the person and solidarity in society, for example. He thinks our society has derived these values from Christian faith. He believes that in the politics we have at the moment something is missing, hence the very intriguing title of his book, An Awareness of Something Missing. He says that none of the political nostrums we have on show at the moment can motivate people or bind people together in society with a sense of belonging together in a way that religion at its best is able to do. We need to recover a moral vision, which for Habermas draws very deeply on the wells of religion. And he has a very interesting approach to religion, because he thinks that while religion has been essential and is essential now, religion must translate its concepts into what the philosopher John Rawls would call ‘public reasoning’, concepts which the ordinary citizen can understand. He is very critical of so-called enlightenment thinkers who regard religion as irrational, and says that religion does have a rationality in its own terms and that there must be a recognition of that by secular non-believers. The interesting phrase he uses about religion is das Unabgegoltene – the unexhausted force of religious traditions in what they have to offer to society; there is more that society can draw from religion. But (and this is, I suppose, one of the reasons he regards himself as a secular thinker) religion has to make its treasures or its moral vision available in terms which can be grasped and assimilated by secular people. That’s not quite the phrase he uses; he says that religion always stands in an opaque relationship to society. It can’t be totally transmuted into secular terms and it can’t be totally assimilated. Religion has more to give, it has an opaque and mysterious quality, which means that it will always be juxtaposed with secular society. I’m not defending his position, I’m just saying that it is an unusual and an interesting one – on the one hand clearly to be so affirmative about what religion has to offer, and how much religion is needed now, but at the same time remaining firmly a secularist and insisting that religion has to translate its terms into terms which secular people can assimilate. He argues that secular and religious people mustn’t simply talk about each other, they must talk to and with each other in a new kind of dialogue, and one of the conditions he lays down is that ‘secular reason must not set itself up as the judge concerning the truth of faith, even though in the end it can accept as reasonable only what it can translate into its own, in principle, universally accessible discourses’."