A Secular State for a Postsecular Society?

Postmetaphysical Political Theory and the Place of Religion

Maeve Cooke
Like many contemporary political theorists, J rgen Habermas asserts a close connection u between social integration and legitimation. In common with theorists such as Rawls, for example, Habermas emphasizes that the motivation of citizens to live together peacefully in a particular political order cannot be separated from their view of the justification of the political authority governing that order.1 For both theorists, a political order is deficient if citizens accept a particular form of government merely as a modus vivendi.2 Although in such cases citizens with different beliefs agree to a set of political arrangements that allow them to live together peacefully, an agreement of this kind does not generate the social solidarity required by a political order that is stable for the right reasons.3 Thus, against proponents of democracy as a modus vivendi,4 Habermas and Rawls see social solidarity as intimately bound up with the rational acceptability of laws and political decisions. In contrast to Rawls, however, Habermas attributes an epistemic dimension to political legitimation.5 Unlike Rawls, who rejects the view that truth is at stake in democratic public deliberation and decision-making,6 he insists that democratic deliberation improves the epistemic quality of democratic decisions and that such decisions raise a claim to truth. This is why he describes the democratic constitutional state the form of government he favors as an epistemically demanding form of government that is, to an extent, sensitive to truth and claims that a posttruth democracy would no longer be a democracy.7 In other words, when Habermas asserts a close link between social integration and the rational acceptability of laws and political decisions, he means rational acceptability in a truth-analogous sense. On his account, legal-political validity shares with truth an ideal moment of unconditionality: like truth, this form of validity is context-transcending in the strong sense that it refers to a kind of validity that always goes beyond the standards of validity actually prevailing in a particular social-cultural context.8 A crucial ingredient of Habermass account of context-transcending validity, however, is its rejection of an otherworldly reference point. In contrast to approaches that locate the source of context-transcending validity externally, in some metaphysical outside or otherness, Habermas insists that it is innerworldly. As he often puts it, communicative rationality expresses a concept of transcendence from within a transcendence that is immanent to human practices. 9 This is one of the principal reasons why he describes his theory as postmetaphysical. A further defining feature of postmetaphysical theory is that it is ethically abstemious: it refrains from judging the validity of particular conceptions of the good.10 In the

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context of law and politics, postmetaphysical theory calls for a secular state that bases its laws and political decisions on reasons that everyone could accept, irrespective of their particular ethical conceptions. In his recent writings Habermas addresses the question of religious belief as a separate issue for postmetaphysical theory. Up to the end of the 1990s, he rarely considered the relationship between postmetaphysical philosophy and religious faith,11 and Between Facts and Norms, his major work on law and democracy, contains no discussion of the place of religious contributions in the democratic public sphere. In a series of essays published since then, however, he addresses the question of how to draw the boundary between religious faith and reason, as an issue both for postmetaphysical philosophy and for any model of law and politics congruent with postmetaphysical thinking.12 In both cases, to begin with, epistemic restraint is called for. As in the case of ethical conceptions of the good, postmetaphysical philosophy is required to abstain from judging the truth of religious convictions: the counterpart to its ethical abstemiousness is a methodological agnosticism.13 Similarly, a democratic state congruent with postmetaphysical thinking must base its laws and decisions on reasons that everyone could accept, irrespective of their ethical convictions and religious or non-religious worldviews. However, Habermas now also sees an important difference between ethical conceptions and religious convictions.14 Unlike conceptions of the good, which are always conceptions of the good for me (as a particular individual) or for us (as the members of a particular group),15 religious beliefs are deemed to have a cognitive content that is of potential relevance for everyone.16 This means that postmetaphysical philosophy, and postmetaphysically-minded citizens, must be willing to learn from religious traditions and to engage critically with their contents. Unlike in the case of ethical conceptions, where rational discussion is held to be a matter of hermeneutic elucidation and interpretation, rational discussion of religious convictions is described as a matter of salvaging (bergen) the valuable contents of religious traditions and translating them into reasons that are public in the sense of generally accessible: reasons that can be convincing beyond the boundaries of a particular community of faith.17 It is important to notice that Habermas does not think that rational assessment of the cognitive content of religious convictions is possible.18 We can see this if we look more closely at his stipulation that postmetaphysical philosophy and postmetaphysicallyminded citizens must be willing to learn from religious traditions, and at the translation requirement accompanying it. He connects the recommended willingness to learn with two societal changes, in particular.19 The first change relates to recent developments in biotechnology, especially in the field of genetic engineering. Habermas claims that these developments threaten to instrumentalize human nature in ways that fundamentally endanger our ethical understanding of ourselves as members of the human species. The second change relates to the terrorist attacks that have taken place globally from September 11, 2001 onwards. Habermas suggests that these attacks may be indicative of widespread disenchantment with Western models of societal modernization. He raises the question of whether the threatened instrumentalization of human nature, and the perception of a directionless process of modernization, can be countered without the
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semantic resources of religion. Societal changes such as these appear to have prompted Habermas to assert the dependence of postmetaphysical theory, and democratic public life, on the world-disclosing power of religious language: he now maintains that a postmetaphysical vocabulary philosophical or political is impoverished if it loses contact with religious sources of illumination and inspiration.20 For this reason, postmetaphysical philosophy must open itself to the power of religious imagery and narratives with a view to seeing what it can salvage from these for its own philosophical projects.21 Similarly, postmetaphysically-minded citizens must be prepared to engage in political discussion of the content of religious contributions, and to translate what might prove to be their morally convincing intuitions and reasons into a language that is generally accessible.22 Examples of successful translations from religious into secular language include Kants moral theory, which translates the moral content of the Sermon on the Mount,23 the Marxian idea of an emancipated society, which translates the idea of the kingdom of God on earth,24 and Walter Benjamins idea of anamnetic solidarity, which translates belief in the Last Judgment.25 Both in the context of postmetaphysical philosophy and of democratic deliberation, his discussion makes clear that translation is a matter of rescuing what is valuable from religious traditions while abstaining from judgment as to the truth of the validity claims raised by religious believers. The point of critical engagement with religious traditions is not to cast light on the truth of religious beliefs but to contribute to the semantic regeneration of postmetaphysical thinking. Thus, it would be wrong to see Habermass stipulation of a willingness to learn from religious traditions, and accompanying translation requirement, as indicative of a move away from postmetaphysical thinking; to the contrary, it indicates his continued commitment to it. I want to suggest, however, that it is time for Habermas to reconsider this commitment. For one thing, it is far from clear that Habermas can deliver on his promise of transcendence from within, which, as we have seen, is a central component of postmetaphysical theory. His claim to be able to do so depends in substantial measure on the success of his program of formal pragmatics: on formal linguistic investigations designed to show that a moment of unconditionality is rooted in universal practices of communicative action. Even commentators sympathetic to his project have pointed to problems with formal pragmatics as a justificatory strategy26 and, since Between Facts and Norms, at least, Habermas himself seems to favor a more contextualist mode of justification.27 For another, the idealizing suppositions of argumentative speech to which Habermas appeals as the basis for his concept of communicative rationality project the idea of an ideal speech community that has a metaphysical character, in Jacques Derridas sense of being beyond human history and context;28 while this, in my view, is not cause for concern, it does raise questions about his description of his project as postmetaphysical. In addition to these problems, which affect the postmetaphysical theoretical enterprise in general, I want to argue that his postmetaphysical approach to political theory is unnecessarily restrictive as regards the kind of reasons admissible in processes of democratic legislation and decision-making. This leads to a model of law and politics that impairs the conditions of political legitimacy for citizens who understand political validity in otherworldly terms (be these religious or
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non-religious), thus weakening their motivation to live together peacefully with others in a democratic political order. In the following I focus on this unwelcome consequence of postmetaphysical political theory. Against Habermass view that only a secular state is compatible with the liberal democratic principle of neutrality, I make a proposal for a kind of state in which reasons that refer to otherworldly sources of validity are deemed admissible in public deliberations about the validity of laws and political decisions, provided the reasoning in question satisfies the epistemological and ethical requirements of what I call non-authoritarian thinking. Since reasons formulated in religious terms tend to refer to otherworldly sources of validity, my proposal is one for a kind of state that could be described as postsecular. I see this as the appropriate counterpart to what Habermas refers to as a postsecular society. I contend that my proposal for a postsecular state allows for a normative conception of political legitimacy, and corresponding conception of social integration, that is better suited to a postsecular democracy than the conceptions currently offered by Habermas. The term postsecular has gained currency in contemporary debates in sociology, political theory, and even theology.29 In the context of political theory, it has a normative as well as an empirical aspect. In its empirical sense it refers to social orders that have undergone processes of secularization over the course of the past two or three hundred years, but in which religious worldviews continue to shape the identities of inhabitants; it is usually connected with the further empirical claim that this situation is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. The empirical claims do not, of course, justify the normative use of the term postsecular. It is precisely the persistence of religious worldviews in secularized social orders that has led theorists such as Rawls to advocate models of democracy in which religious believers are required to replace reasons based on their religious beliefs with reasons that could reasonably be accepted by non-believers, when they engage in deliberation in the public, political domain.30 In other words, the persistence of religious worldviews in secularized social orders can just as easily be taken as an argument for a secular political domain as for a postsecular one. If the term postsecular is deemed to be appropriate, therefore, there must be more to it than the empirical claims I have mentioned. And, indeed, in Habermass political theory the concept of postsecular society is used primarily in a normative sense. It does not merely describe a secularized social order in which religious worldviews continue to shape the identities of many inhabitants; it makes a plea for a model of law and politics in which religious arguments are not excluded from political debate.31 However, Habermas does not permit the inclusion of religious arguments in all kinds of political debates. In order to understand the place of religion in his postmetaphysical political theory we must first grasp his distinction between weak and arranged publics. This distinction is a key feature of the two-track model of deliberative politics set out in Between Facts and Norms.32 In this model, the weak publics of civil society are concerned primarily with opinion-formation; this is effected in an open and inclusive network of overlapping, subcultural publics with fluid boundaries. The wild complex of weak publics is distinguished from the formally organized, public sphere of democratic legislation and decision-making, which is the sphere of
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will-formation; this is effected by bodies such as the judiciary and the parliament. Although Habermas insists on the need for a permanent feedback relation between the opinion-forming, informal public sphere and the formally organized, legislative and democratic decision-making bodies, he presents them as distinct domains of public deliberation. Contributions between the informal public sphere and the formally organized legislative and decision-making bodies are filtered by a range of political institutions and offices. Habermass proposal to allow religious contributions in political deliberation is confined to deliberations in the informal public sphere. Whereas in the weak publics religious arguments are now deemed to have their place in public discussions, in the formally organized, democratic legislative and decision-making bodies only generally accessible reasons are permissible; in consequence, citizens who hold office in such legislative and decision-making bodies, or who are candidates for office, are required to formulate their contributions to discussions in generally accessible terms.33 This gives rise to a need for translation.34 Since only contributions to discussions that are formulated in generally accessible terms are permitted in the formally organized, legislative and deliberative processes of the democratic constitutional state, citizens must work together to translate the results of their discussions in the weak publics into a commonly accessible language. There are a number of reasons for looking suspiciously at Habermass translation requirement. To begin with, it implies a model of argumentation that is out of step with his own emphasis on the transformative power of deliberation.35 In his writings in general, Habermas construes public deliberation as open-ended, fair, and inclusive argumentation in which participants are concerned to find the single right answer. This idea of deliberation has a built-in transformative aspect: since participants engage in discussion with one another with a view to finding the single right answer, they must be prepared for the possibility that they will have to modify or give up their existing perceptions, interpretations, and evaluations, if the reasons on which they rest no longer prove sustainable. Without a readiness to undergo cognitive change change in the ways they see, interpret, and evaluate things participation in argumentation would be pointless. Thus, in his discourse ethics, he emphasizes that moral discourse is a process in which moral judgments are constituted, pointing out that justice refers to the achievement, by way of a procedure of deliberation, of a norm or principle that is considered equally in everyones interests.36 It is strange, therefore, that in his recent writings on religion in the public sphere, Habermas denies the dynamic, transformative aspect of public deliberation. We will recall that he requires citizens to engage in a cooperative effort to translate the results of their discussions in the informal, weak publics into a commonly accessible language. But such a requirement seems to undermine the whole point of argumentative deliberation as outlined above. As indicated, the point of such deliberation is to reach agreement on the single right answer through transformation of perceptions, interpretations, and evaluations. If the arguments introduced into discussion at the start of the deliberative process were already generally accessible, there would be no need to pursue the process any further. In other
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words, on a dynamic model of argumentation, general accessibility cannot be construed as a requirement that has to be met by reasons prior to deliberation, for this would render the search for the right answer pointless. If Habermas wishes to uphold such a model of argumentation, therefore, the requirement of translation into a generally accessible language prior to the deliberative process makes no sense. But nor can general accessibility be understood as a condition that has to be satisfied in fact at the end of a process of argumentative deliberation. Another way of reading Habermass translation requirement is as the view that laws and political decisions may claim legitimacy only if participants in argumentation reach agreement as to their validity for the same reasons, which implies that such reasons are formulated in generally accessible terms. Evidently, in complex, pluralist societies a requirement of this kind is unworkable. Making an actual agreement of this sort a precondition for political legitimacy would render such legitimacy impossible. This is why decision-making principles such as majority rule are key features of contemporary liberal democracies.37 Habermas, of course, recognizes this. At the same time, he is concerned to assert an internal connection between majority rule and rational acceptability in the contexttranscending, epistemic sense I attributed to him earlier. In his account, majority rule retains an internal relation to the search for truth, for it represents a caesura in an ongoing discussion concerned to find rationally acceptable norms and principles.38 As he writes: Because of its internal connection with a deliberative practice, majority rule justifies the presumption that the fallible majority opinion may be considered a reasonable basis for a common practice until further notice, namely, until the minority convinces the majority that their (the minoritys) views are correct.39 However, formulations such as these can be taken to mean either that the ongoing discussion may at some point come to an end or that the process of democratic deliberation is inherently open-ended. The first position gives rise to a host of difficulties that can be summed up as the problem of finalist closure.40 For this reason, Habermas would be well-advised to commit himself to the second position. As things stand he has not done so explicitly. Nonetheless, there is some evidence in Between Facts and Norms that this is the position he favors. Not only is the whole emphasis of the book on process rather than outcome, there are indications that he sees the idea of rational acceptability discursively achieved, general agreement as to the validity of laws and democratic decisions as a regulative idea that, as such, guides deliberative practices and can never be obtained, even approximately.41 If discursively achieved, general agreement is construed as a regulative idea that guides our practices while always transcending our powers to achieve it, political legitimacy is not dependent on the achievement, ever, of such agreement; it is dependent only on the orientation towards the idea of norms and principles that are the object of a discursively achieved, general agreement. But if this is the case, the achievement, through deliberation, of generally accessible reasons cannot be a condition of political legitimacy, and the translation requirement is redundant. A further objection to Habermass translation requirement is that it underplays the complexity of the argumentatively effected, transformative process.42 If transformation of perceptions, interpretations, and evaluations through encountering objections
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is paradigmatic for argumentation, then such transformation is more likely to happen when participants have very different perspectives.43 Typically, I am most challenged by arguments that are very different to my own, ones that I have not anticipated, and am unfamiliar with. This constitutes a further reason against making general accessibility a condition that has to be met prior to participation in argumentation. There are related reasons for querying it as a condition that has to be met by the end of deliberation. Not only is the transformative power of argumentation increased when the arguments presented are different, unexpected, and unfamiliar; arguments that are challenging in these ways tend to result not in conversion to the other persons perspective, but in the production of a new perspective that is different to either of the existing ones; this new perspective may integrate certain insights of the other persons perspective, while continuing to deviate from it significantly. In discussion with a vegetarian, for example, I may feel challenged by her objections to killing animals and, as a result, acquire a greater sensitivity towards the suffering of animals that leads me to change my views and my behavior in certain ways. However, I may find her objections illuminating, resulting in changes to my thinking and acting, without feeling compelled to become a vegetarian or even to embrace her view that it is wrong to kill animals.44 In sum, if Habermas makes the general accessibility of reasons a condition that has to be met prior to participation in formal democratic deliberation, he seems to deny the transformative power of different, unexpected, and unfamiliar arguments. If he makes it a condition that has to be met by the end of an actual process of argumentation, he fails to allow for modification of perspectives in ways that are unanticipated by any of the parties concerned, and for the emergence of new perspectives that are different to those held by any of the parties at the outset of discussion. In both cases, he fails to do justice to the complexity of the process of argumentatively effected, cognitive transformation. My objections so far have been directed mainly against Habermass translation requirement, understood as the requirement of translation into a language that is generally accessible. However, a further aspect of the translation requirement also merits attention. This is Habermass equation of the terms generally accessible and secular. Unlike Rawls, who insists on the distinction between public reason and secular reason, and on the corresponding distinction between publicly acceptable reasons and secular reasons,45 Habermas assumes that a commonly accessible language is a secular language and, correspondingly, that only secular reasons are generally accessible. This is particularly evident in his essay on religion in the public sphere, where he uses the terms generally accessible and secular interchangeably.46 In addition to my objections to the translation requirement understood as the requirement of generally accessible reasons, I have a specific objection to Habermass requirement of secular reasons in processes of democratic legislation and decision-making. I see it as undermining the conditions of political legitimacy for many citizens and, as a result, weakening the motivation of such citizens to live peacefully with others in a democratic political order. As I shall now explain, the particular cost of Habermass requirement of translation into secular language is damage to the principle of equal
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respect for the political autonomy of citizens, and the social and political disaffection that can be expected to follow from this. Like Habermas, I see the idea of political autonomy as a core political value. Moreover, like him I define political freedom, in the tradition of Rousseau and Kant, as selfauthorship: citizens are held to be autonomous when they are able to see themselves, in common with their fellow citizens, as the authors of the laws to which they are subject. As he puts it: Citizens are politically autonomous only if they can view themselves jointly as authors of the laws to which they are subject as individual addressees.47 Also central to Habermass conception is the connection between authorship and argumentation: citizens can see themselves as joint authors of the laws to which they are subject only if they can see these laws as valid for reasons that are rationally acceptable, where, as we have seen, rational acceptability is tied to the exchange of reasons in rational argumentation.48 As indicated, rational acceptability is understood by Habermas in a context-transcending, epistemic sense. Accordingly, political autonomy is based on rational insight into the validity of laws and political decisions. We will also recall that Habermas endorses a postmetaphysical view of validity that seeks to attribute a context-transcending power to concepts such as truth or justice without appealing to otherworldly sources of validity, such as God or the Absolute, which lie beyond the influences of history and context. These two key components of his theory lead him to endorse a conception of political autonomy as self-subjection based on rational insight, in which rational insight is conceptually tied to argumentation and refers to an idea of legal-political validity that is context-transcending, yet innerworldly. This postmetaphysical interpretation of rational insight means that, in the context of Habermass political theory, the terms secular and postmetaphysical are synonymous. For, if the collective self-authorship required for political autonomy requires citizens to see the source of the validity of laws and political decisions as innerworldly, it requires them to eschew reasons that refer to otherworldly sources of validity in favor of what we might call secular reasons: reasons that refer to context-transcending validity in an innerworldly sense. This may account for Habermass interpretation of the liberal principle of neutrality as requiring, for the purposes of democratic legislation and decision-making, the translation of arguments formulated in religious terms into a secular language, and as calling for the separation of church and state.49 However, Habermass secularist interpretation of the principle of neutrality means that only those citizens who are committed to a postmetaphysical interpretation of validity are able, in principle, to understand their subjection to laws and political decisions as a matter of rational insight and, thus, to see these laws and decisions as legitimate in a context-transcending, epistemic sense. Even in contemporary liberal democracies, many religious believers do not fall into this category: their conception of legal-political validity is not innerworldly but otherworldly, referring to a source of validity beyond history and context. Nicholas Wolterstorff makes a similar point. Against Rawls he argues:
it belongs to the religious convictions of a good many religious people in our society that they ought to base their decisions concerning fundamental issues of justice on their
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religious convictions. . . . It is their conviction that they ought to strive for wholeness, integrity, integration, in their lives: that they ought to allow the Word of God, the teachings of the Torah, the command and example of Jesus, or whatever, to shape their existence as a whole, including, then, their social and political existence . . . . If they have to make a choice, they will make their decisions about constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice on the basis of their religious convictions and make their decisions on more peripheral matters on other grounds exactly the opposite of what Rawls lays down . . . .50

Habermas claims to find Wolterstorffs objection to Rawlss compelling.51 Like a number of other commentators,52 he points out that Rawlss conception of public reason imposes an unacceptable psychological burden on the inhabitants of liberal democratic orders. It requires a radical transformation of political discussion as soon as the venue changes, even when the very same people are discussing the very same issues.53 When they put on their citizens caps and engage in political discussions in the public domain, participants are required to distance themselves from the comprehensive doctrines that shape their identities, and on which they draw in their deliberations in all non-public contexts. In consequence, a burdensome psychological split between the public and non-public components of identity seems inevitable. Habermas rebukes Rawls for overlooking the pivotal role that religion plays in the life of religious believers. Citing Wolterstorff, he points out that, for religious believers, religious faith is not just a doctrine with a specific content, it constitutes a source of energy that nourishes and invigorates their entire lives. It is partly to avoid a psychological burden of the sort Rawls imposes that Habermas now calls for a democratic public sphere in which religious contributions would be admissible in political deliberations. We have seen, however, that Habermas is willing to admit religious contributions only in political deliberations in the weak publics of the informal public sphere. He rejects Wolterstorffs proposal to allow religious arguments in processes of democratic legislation and decision-making on the grounds that it violates the discursive character of such deliberations.54 He holds that allowing religious arguments in deliberations in the formal public sphere infringes against the principle of neutrality, which demands that all political decisions implemented through the powers of the state be formulated in a language that is equally accessible to all citizens, and be capable of being justified on the basis of commonly accessible, by which he means secular, reasons. However, not only have I queried Habermass requirement of general accessibility, I have cast doubt on his claim that secular justifications of political decisions are equally accessible to all citizens. Against Habermas I have argued that only citizens who subscribe to postmetaphysical thinking will find secular reasons readily accessible, while those who do not will not be receptive to them; indeed, they will think that they ought to base their decisions on important political matters not on secular reasons, but on reasons that refer to otherworldly sources of validity. Thus, by taking the principle of neutrality to allow only secular reasons in the justification of laws and political principles, Habermass model of law and politics does not treat all citizens impartially but impairs the conditions of political autonomy
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for many religious believers and other citizens who do not endorse a postmetaphysical view of legal-political validity. By doing so it builds an inequality into the system that weakens the bonds of solidarity between all citizens. To be sure, even citizens who do not subscribe to postmetaphysical thinking may be rationally convinced of the pragmatic necessity in a given context of laws and political decisions based on reasons that are formulated in secular terms; however, they will be unable to regard these as valid in a context-transcending sense. Rational acceptance that secularly justified laws and decisions are pragmatically necessary in a given context (for instance in order to avoid religious strife) is not the same as rational insight into their validity. The latter, not the former, is the intuition at the heart of Habermass idea of political autonomy. Accordingly, rational conviction that secular justifications are pragmatically necessary in a given context fails to secure the conditions of political legitimacy as understood by Habermas, providing the basis only for a modus vivendi that does not produce social stability for the right reasons.55 For, as indicated, Habermas, holds that the democratic constitutional state can protect its citizens from internal and external threats only if they can see themselves as living together in a democratic order whose laws and political decisions they regard as valid in a context-transcending sense; it is not sufficient for citizens to see themselves as linked together by pragmatic political arrangements that secure a modus vivendi. I have argued that by allowing only secular arguments into the formally organized, democratic legislative and decision-making processes of the constitutional state, the model proposed by Habermas impairs the conditions of political autonomy for citizens who do not subscribe to a postmetaphysical conception of legal-political validity, thereby building an inequality into the political order from the outset and creating the conditions for political and social disaffection. However, I do not want to deny the force of the reasons behind Habermass insistence that laws and political decisions may be justified only on the basis of secular arguments. For Habermas, as for many of the inhabitants of contemporary liberal democratic social orders, myself included, the secular state is a historical achievement the result of a collective historical learning process that can be traced back to the European wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As we see it, the political insight gained, after much bloodshed and violence, from that experience of religious conflict is the insight that freedom of opinion is a basic political right. Freedom of opinion embraces both the positive freedom to live according to ones own religious or non-religious worldview and the negative freedom to be protected from disturbance through the worldviews of others. Commitment to such freedom has since become one of the cornerstones of liberal-democratic social orders. Although like Habermas, Rawls, and many others, I share this commitment, I hold a view of learning processes as inherently open-ended. Taking my lead from Habermas himself, I understand historical learning as entailing openness to the need to revise perceptions, interpretations, and evaluations in light of new situations that arise as a result of intercultural exchanges, technological innovations, social changes, ecological developments, and so on. Historical learning requires us to allow for revisions to even our most deep-seated normative intuitions and expectations. Following Habermas in
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this respect, too, I view the process of secularization in the Western world as a historical learning process. I move beyond him, however, in seeing the inherent openness of learning processes as an invitation to reconsider the secularist interpretation of the principle of neutrality: to ask whether the arguments for a secularist interpretation arguments that were powerful in earlier historical contexts are still powerful enough today to justify the ways in which it undermines the political autonomy of citizens who do not subscribe to postmetaphysical thinking. My suggestion is that they are not. This is due to societal changes of the kind mentioned by Habermas, in particular the widespread perception, of which the global terrorist attacks since 2001 may be indicative, that the process of modernization has lost direction. Unlike Habermas, who maintains that societal changes such as these merely point to the importance of the world-disclosing powers of religion, I hold that they call on us to reconsider his postmetaphysical secularist interpretation of the principle of neutrality and, more generally, the argument for the secular state. Other societal factors that I see as supporting the need for reconsideration include the increased migration to the West of religious believers, for whom the Western experience of secularization as a historical achievement is remote or even alien. Such believers have not internalized the particular historical and cultural traditions on the basis of which the secular basis of political authority was once regarded as justified. Reasons of this kind, combined with reasons pertaining to the political autonomy of citizens who do not subscribe to postmetaphysical thinking, suggest that it is time to reconsider the arguments for the secular basis of political authority. There is a danger, however, that dispensing with the requirement of a secular basis for political authority will create the conditions for the kind of religiously-based, authoritarian state that the secular state sought to overcome. I agree with Habermas that any democratic form of political authority must seek to uphold the liberal-democratic commitment to freedom and equality that typically is incorporated in constitutional commitments to freedom of opinion and related principles. This means that certain kinds of constraints on contributions to legislation and decision-making are advisable. I regard the requirement of non-authoritarian reasoning (and acting) as the most appropriate kind of constraint.56 Contributions to public debate, be they in informal, weak publics or in more formally organized, legislative and decision-making processes, are admissible only if they satisfy this condition of non-authoritarianism. Non-authoritarian practical reasoning may be defined negatively, through contrast with authoritarian modes. Defined in this way, it has two interrelated components: it rejects authoritarian conceptions of knowledge and it rejects authoritarian conceptions of justification. Citizens who internalize and practice non-authoritarian modes of reasoning reject authoritarian conceptions of practical knowledge; such conceptions restrict access to knowledge to a privileged group of people and tend to assert the availability of a standpoint removed from the influences of history and context that could guarantee the unconditional validity of claims to truth and rightness; in adopting a non-authoritarian view of practical knowledge, citizens acknowledge the essential contestability of claims to truth and rightness and the ways in which these claims are subject to the influences
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of history and context. Equally, citizens who internalize and practice non-authoritarian modes of reasoning reject authoritarian modes of practical justification, which split off the validity of propositions and norms from the reasoning of the human subjects for whom they are proclaimed to be valid; in adopting non-authoritarian modes of reasoning, citizens regard only those laws, principles, and policies as valid for which reasons are available that they are able to see, or come to see, as their own reasons. These two components of non-authoritarian reasoning rejection of authoritarian conceptions of practical knowledge and rejection of authoritarian modes of practical justification are linked by the idea of ethical autonomy. Ethical autonomy is the individual counterpart to political autonomy.57 It rests on the intuition that the freedom of human beings consists in important measure in the freedom to form and pursue their conceptions of the good on the basis of reasons that they are able to call their own. Evidently, non-authoritarian reasoning is fundamentally opposed to all forms of political authoritarianism, for these deny the political and ethical autonomy of citizens by imposing views of what is true and what is right and presenting these views as unquestionably valid. It is important to see that non-authoritarian modes of reasoning can be and have been internalized and practiced by citizens who do not endorse postmetaphysical thinking, including those who hold religious convictions. There is no conflict in principle between non-authoritarian reasoning and an orientation towards some otherworldly, transcendent source of validity (for example, God or the good).58 In short, non-authoritarian citizenship is independent of postmetaphysical or metaphysical thinking, and of religious belief. The requirement of non-authoritarian reasoning should help to dispel Habermass reluctance to admit religious contributions to debates in formal processes of democratic deliberation. However, my proposal could be seen as more stringent and more difficult to implement than Habermass proposal. While there are certainly difficulties of implementation that need to be considered carefully, its alleged stringency does not, in my view, constitute an objection. All political orders are based on certain exclusions and restrictions: the challenge for citizens of liberal democracies is not the elimination of all exclusions and restrictions but only those that do not stand up to critical interrogation in public processes of deliberation. My contention is that there are good reasons for excluding authoritarian modes of thinking and acting from democratic legislative and decision-making processes, but that there are no good reasons, at least in the present context, for excluding contributions solely on the grounds that they are formulated in religious terms. I have argued, furthermore, that the advantage of including arguments proposed by religious believers, and other citizens who do not accept the innerworldly basis of state authority, is that it enhances the conditions of legitimacy for citizens who do not endorse postmetaphysical thinking, thereby eradicating a currently existing inequality and removing one potential cause of social and political disaffection. Indeed, it may help citizens with religious worldviews who hold authoritarian views of truth and knowledge to see that religious faith is not necessarily dependent on such views, encouraging the kind of non-authoritarian approach, not just to knowledge but also to ethics and politics, that I see as a cornerstone of liberal democracy.
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NOTES

1. See J. Habermas, Vorpolitische Grundlagen des demokratischen Rechtstaats? in J. Habermas and J. Ratzinger, Dialektik der S kularisierung, ed. F. Sch ller (Freiburg, Basel, Vienna: a u Herder, 2003), 16. 2. See J. Habermas, Reconciliation through the Use of Public Reason in his The Inclusion of the Other, tr. and ed. C. Cronin and P. de Greiff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 14647; see also his The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, in J. Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. S. Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 58889. In the latter, Rawls gives as an example acceptance of the principle of toleration by Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Seeing toleration as a modus vivendi meant that should either party fully gain its way it would impose its own religious doctrine as the sole admissible faith (589). 3. The phrase is Rawlss. See his Political Liberalism, xlii, 388n. 4. See, e.g., J. Gray, The Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2000); J. Horton, John Gray and the Political Theory of Modus Vivendi, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 9 (2006): 15570. 5. See my discussion of positions that attribute an epistemic dimension to deliberative democracy in M. Cooke, Five Arguments for Deliberative Democracy, Political Studies 48, no. 5 (2000): 94769. 6. In political liberalism citizens appeal only to a public conception of justice and not to the whole truth as they see it (Rawls, Political Liberalism, 216). Accordingly, a political conception is referred to not as true but as reasonable (xxii). 7. J. Habermas, Religion in der Offentlichkeit. Kognitive Voraussetzungen f r den u ffentlichen Vernunftgebrauch religi ser und s kularer B rger, in his Zwischen Naturalismus und o o a u Religion, 11954 (15051, see note 12 below) (A shorter, translated version of this essay called Religion in the Public Sphere was given as a Kyoto Prize lecture in San Diego in March 2005.) With post-truth democracy Habermas refers to a discussion in the New York Times during the last USA presidential elections. Cf. E. Altermans discussion of the post-truth presidency of G.W. Bush in his When Presidents Lie. A History of Official Deception and its Consequences (New York: Penguin, 2005). 8. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, tr. W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) 1517. In M. Cooke, Laws Claim to Correctness, in G. Pavlakos, ed., Law, Rights, and Discourse. Themes from the Legal Philosophy of Robert Alexy (Oxford & Portland: Hart, 2007), I raise questions about the sustainability of this position, given that Habermass account of legal-political validity now dispenses with the epistemic principle U, which in his earlier work functioned as a criterion of rational acceptability in legal-political as well as in moral discourses. In the following, I leave aside this difficulty. 9. Habermas often refers to the moment of ideality inherent in communicative action as innerworldly transcendence or transcendence from within. See, for example his Between Facts and Norms, 5, 17. 10. J. Habermas, Are there Postmetaphysical Answers to the Question: What is the Good Life?, in his The Future of Human Nature, tr. W. Rehg, M. Pensky, and H. Beister (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). 11. Up to the end of the 1990s, Habermas did not deal extensively with the place of religion in his theory. A rare exception was his response to theologians and philosophers of religion, Transzendenz von innen. Transzendenz ins Diesseits, in J. Habermas, Texte und Kontexte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). 12. Many of these essays are collected in J. Habermas, Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). 13. Whereas in Transzendenz von innen. Transzendenz ins Diesseits, Habermas referred to methodological atheism, he now speaks of methodological agnosticism. See, for example, his Religion in der Offentlichkeit, 147.

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14. Habermas, Religion in der Offentlichkeit, 135n, 1378n. 15. J. Habermas, On the Pragmatic, the Ethical, and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason, in Justification and Application, tr. C. Cronin (Cambridge, MA: 1993), 119; Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 16061. 16. This is one of the main claims Habermas makes in his Religion in der Offentlichkeit. See also J. Habermas, Die Grenze zwischen Glauben und Wissen: Zur Wirkungsgeschichte und aktueller Bedeutung von Kants Religionsphilosophie, in his Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion. 17. Ibid., 255. 18. I draw here on an argument developed in my Salvaging and Secularizing the Semantic Contents of Religion: The Limitations of Habermass Postmetaphysical Proposal, International Journal of the Philosophy of Religion 60, nos. 13 (2006): 187207. 19. See J. Habermas, Faith and Knowledge, in The Future of Human Nature, 10115. 20. His presently unequivocal assertion of the dependence of postmetaphysical thinking on the world-disclosing power of religious language contrasts with the cautious attitude vis-` -vis the critical a appropriation of religious contents he adopted in the 1980s and early 1990s. See, for example, J. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, tr.. W.M. Hohengarten (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 51; Habermas, Transzendenz von innen. Transzendenz ins Diesseits, 141. 21. Habermas, Die Grenze zwischen Glauben und Wissen, 255. 22. Habermas, Religion in der Offentlichkeit, 14546. 23. Habermas, Are there Postmetaphysical Answers to the Question: What is the Good Life?, 6. 24. Habermas, Die Grenze zwischen Glauben und Wissen, 240. 25. Ibid., 250. 26. See, for example, S. Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), A. Wellmer, Ethics and Dialogue, in his The Persistence of Modernity, tr. D. Midgley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); T. McCarthy, Ideals and Illusions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), M. Cooke, Language and Reason (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 27. See M. Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 5861, 18284. 28. Wellmer criticizes Habermass and Karl-Otto Apels theories from this point of view in his Ethics and Dialogue. See my discussion in my Re-Presenting the Good Society, ch. 5. 29. See, for example, James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Postsecular Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004). 30. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 10, 12. Although he modifies his position in The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, Rawls continues to insist that the reasons justifying a political conception of justice cannot, in the end, be based on a comprehensive doctrine (see 59192). 31. Habermas, Religion in der Offentlichkeit, 14546. 32. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 3048. 33. Habermas, Religion in der Offentlichkeit, 13334. 34. Ibid., 13638. 35. The transformative aspect of Habermass idea of public deliberation can be contrasted with Rawlss conception, in which public reason is not a dynamic process of intersubjective reasoning that seeks to generate normative agreement through the transformation of preferences, but an idea imposing a constraint on the public acceptability of political principles. 36. See J. Habermas, Truth versus Rightness: On the Sense of Normative Validity in Moral Judgments and Norms in Truth and Justification, tr. B. Fultner (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 23776. 37. Nicholas Wolterstorff makes a similar point in The Role of Religion in Decision and Discussion of Political Issues, in R. Audi and N. Wolterstorff, eds., Religion in the Public Square (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 1089. 38. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 17980. 39. Ibid., 306.

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40. I discuss the problem of finalist closure in my Re-Presenting the Good Society, ch. 7, both in general and as it pertains to Habermas. 41. See my discussion in ibid., 18284. 42. I do not want to say that argumentation is the primary locus for cognitive transformation or to deny the complexity of the transformative process as it occurs in non-argumentative ways. See my discussions in M. Cooke, Argumentation and Transformation, Argumentation 16 (2000): 79108 and in Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society, 111 and 18586. 43. I owe these points to an exchange with Cristina Lafont (private correspondence, October 2006). Lafont may well disagree with the conclusions I draw from them. 44. The example is Cristina Lafonts. 45. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 583; Commonweal Interview with John Rawls, in Rawls, Collected Papers, 61910. 46. See Habermas, Religion in der Offentlichkeit. In the first twelve pages of his essay, he refers only to a language that is generally accessible. Following his discussion of Robert Audis principle of secular justification (131), however, he begins to use the terms generally accessible and secular interchangeably (see, e.g., 136). 47. J. Habermas, Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawlss Political Liberalism, Journal of Philosophy XCll, no. 3 (1995): 130. 48. A further important element of Habermass conception is the claim that political (public) autonomy and individual (private) autonomy are co-original and carry equal weight. Elsewhere I argue that this co-originality thesis can achieve its aims within Habermass theory only if private autonomy is given an ethical interpretation: if it is construed as the capacity of the human individual to develop and pursue her own conceptions of the good. See M. Cooke, A Space of Ones Own: Autonomy, Privacy, Liberty, Philosophy and Social Criticism 25, no. 1 (1999): 2353, esp. 3847. 49. On the principle of neutrality and separation of church and state, see Habermas, Religion in der Offentlichkeit, 134. Wolterstorff distinguishes between interpretations of the liberal principle of neutrality that construe it as requiring impartiality viv- -vis religious and non-religious world views a and those that construe it as requiring separation between church and state. See The Role of Religion in Decision and Discussion of Political Issues, 7576. 50. Ibid., 105. 51. Habermas, Religion in der Offentlichkeit, 13236. 52. See for example, T. McCarthy, Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism: Rawls and Habermas in Dialogue, Ethics 105 (1994): 4463; Cooke, Five Arguments for Deliberative Democracy. 53. This is one of McCarthys main points: Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism, 52. 54. Habermas, Religion in der Offentlichkeit, 140. 55. Habermas, Introduction to Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion, 9. 56. M. Cooke, Avoiding Authoritarianism: On the Problem of Justification in Contemporary Critical Social Theory, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 13, no. 3 (2005): 379404. See also Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society. I should stress that I am talking about practical reasoning in the following. 57. See Cooke, A Space of Ones Own: Autonomy, Privacy, Liberty. 58. This is one of my central theses in Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society.

Maeve Cooke is Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. She is the author of Re-Presenting the Good Society (2006) and Language and Reason: A Study of Habermass Pragmatics (1994).

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