What is Missing? Jürgen Habermas's Turn to a 'Post-secular Society' and the Limits of Postmetaphysical Modernity

This thesis examines Jürgen Habermas’s recent turn to a “post-secular society” and evaluates this move in light of the wider background of his philosophical and political thought. While taking stock of Habermas’s arguments that a postsecular turn in liberal politics is necessary in order to regenerate and thus strengthen and stabilize the normative content of the Enlightnement project, my analysis in this thesis shows that the concept of “post-secular society” raises significant nor-mative tensions for the “postmetaphysical” character of Habermas’s philosophical and theoretical thinking. In the first part of the thesis I examine Habermas’s re-construction of the normative project of modernity (as found in the works of Kant, Hegel and Marx) independent from the metaphysical premises of “the philosophy of the subject”. My discussion brings to the fore the central role played by the “dialectic of Enlightenment” in Habermas’s thought: modernity must generate normative substance out of its own resources and thus “communicative reason” continues the Enlightenment project of finding a rational replacement for metaphysics/religion. I also underscore the role played in this project by the thesis of the “linguistification of the sacred”. In the second part of the thesis I examine Habermas’s recent writings (post 9/11/2001) and the concept of a “post-secular society” introduced in them. Conceding that something is missing in the “postmetaphysical” view of modernity as previously articulated, Habermas turns to religion as an important source of normative and moral insight. A “post-secular society” relies on a project of translation: the cognitive (or truth-) content of religious traditions must be “salvaged” from the religious dogmatic shell that encapsulates them and transferred into the “universally accessible” language of reason. I examine this project and discuss some important normative tensions that it generates first, for the project of grounding modernity out of its own normative resources and, second, for the universal dimension of “communicative reason”. Finally I suggest some directions that could be explored in order to cash in on the aspirations animating Habermas’s project of “salvaging” translation and make this project more feasible and plausible.Ph.D