Fish on Habermas
Stanley Fish posted an oddly long discussion of the religious turn of Jurgen Habermas. It’s well-worth reading. Let me start by saying that despite reading a bit of Habermas in graduate school, in no way do I claim to fully understand his position. This post should be seen to engage with Fish’s characterization in his article, which is by necessity incomplete.
Habermas’s argument (again, according to Fish), is that a secular liberal state does not have the tools to compel action to desirable ends.
The Liberal state, resting on a base of procedural rationality, delivers no such goals or reasons and thus suffers, Habermas says, from a “motivational weakness”; it cannot inspire its citizens to virtuous (as opposed to self-interested) acts because it has lost “its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole” and is unable to formulate “collectively binding ideals.”
I’m surprised this argument has taken such an important turn in Habermas’s thought as it seems to have been widely discredited already. (Again, this might have much to do with Fish’s characterization.) A few thoughts:
- It’s not perfectly clear here why this is a weakness. I don’t think Habermas has identified here any kind of blinding new insight on liberalism. Of course it allows a breadth of possible lifestyles; that’s the idea. It would be interesting to see if Habermas had pointed to examples of failed liberal states, and made explicit how they had failed due to lack of clear moral vision.
- Mores do seem to form quite easily in secular states. France, for example, seems to have a fairly widely-shared view of what their state should look like, despite being fiercely secular.
- This seems empirically false. Even secular states can and do decry crimes like genocide; they don’t let their lack of official faith get in the way of clear moral judgments. The secular state might not be able to distinguish shades of gray the way a theocracy could, but, to paraphrase Leo Strauss, they can distinguish a mountain from a molehill.
-John
Related posts:
- The (im)possibility of secular judgment
- Fish on the First, Continued
- Fish on the First
- Fish on Pragmatism
- The conscience clause and liberty
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