Metaphysics or Politics?

 The Clash Between Two Orthodoxies

 

 

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.

 

Unfortunately, the current discourse of politics is degenerating into a virulent indictment of Muslim activism and an atavistic exercise in the vilification of Islam itself. Primeval passions rather than reasoned arguments inform the public debate, just as invective and diatribe are the order of the day. Not even academic outputs, hallowed by their claim of ‘scientific’ objectivity, provide any solace: theirs is an idiom that is as crassly utilitarian and self-aggrandizing as that of the media. Nor is there an abundance of intellectually and morally challenging studies emerging from other quarters, which, though remote from the Muslim’s revivalist concerns but offering humane ideas and insights about the political realm, may merit our attention. All one encounters today is polemics and calumny; or, facts, upon facts, unredeemed by any theoretical vision at all! Given this situation, when simply remaining within the ideational ambit of Islam is becoming more and more of a political challenge and a personal liability, it is matter of some relief that we occasionally come across incisive works, like the ones presented here, which neither insult the Muslim’s intelligence nor banish him/her to the netherworld of barbarity and inhumanity. As such, they demand our close involvement, for they may assist us in our strivings to envision a future where being Muslim in the world is less of a historical curse and more of a moral calling. Given also the fact the two discourses, modernity’s search for legitimacy in the age of postmodern relativism and Islamism’s espousal of a transcendent basis for political existence, are now firmly locked in a polemical embrace, it is but natural for the Muslim thinker to be attentive to the philosophical debate that involves the modernist establishment itself. Hence, this survey will begin with ideological controversies that are symptomatic of the inner tensions of the modernist discourse today.

 

 

BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS REVIEW:   The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. By Jürgen Habermas. Ed. by Ciaran Cronin & Pablo De Greiff. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999. Pp 300. ISBN 0-262-08267-5.   The City of Man. By Pierre Manent. Translated by Marc A. LePain. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998. Pp 225. ISBN 0-691-01144-3.   Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism. By Roxanne L. Euben. Pp 239. ISBN

Any contemporary Muslim effort to strike a bargain with modernism and overcome the aporias of modernity must contend with the formidably fecund thought of Jürgen Habermas, undoubtedly the most resolute defender of European reason and normative modernity today. Not only is Habermas indispensable to any Muslim dialogue with modernity, significantly because he is the last of the philosophers committed to the modern project who neither upholds Hegelian historicism nor ascribes to the transcendent rationality of the sovereign subject of Enlightenment, he has also been introduced to the readers of this journal in an earlier review essay (Faith and Law: At the Cross-section of Transcendence and Temporality. MWBR, 18:3, (Winter 1998), pp. 3-11). Habermas’s present work, 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.’ (79). 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.’ (11) 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’.

 

Habermas panoramic examination of the cognitive landscape of the moral discourse of our times is - though it cannot be held against him - neither exhaustive, nor non-partisan. However, in terms of its erudition, incisiveness and lucidity, it is an extremely rewarding piece of writing. (Yes, Habermas is far more accessible in this volume than in his earlier works, where the proverbial turgidity and opacity of his German style always posed a formidable obstacle to the average reader.) Apart from supplying a philosophically perceptive summary of the all-encompassing morality that informs and sustains the traditionally theistic worldview, it is distinguished by its critical posture towards ‘secular’ epistemic options. Nonetheless, with the underlying assumption of the modernist worldview, namely that with ‘the transition to modernity, the ‘objective’ reason embodied in nature or sacred history was displaced by the ‘subjective’ reason of the human mind’ (79), he has no quarrel.

 

Not surprisingly, Habermas can confidently assert that ‘after religion and metaphysics’, communicative agreement (Ijma´ in the Islamic parlance) ‘represents the only remaining source on which the justification of a morality of equal respect for everybody can draw.’ (23). Further, cognizant as he is of the fact ‘the question of justice’ exposes the limit of ‘the ethical point of view’ (27), he is convinced that ‘neo-Aristotelian approaches fall short of the universalistic content of morality of equal respect and solidaristic responsibility for everyone.’ (28). (Habermas distinguishes between ‘value-orientations’ (Wertorientierungen) and ‘obligations’ (Verpflichtungen). The former, value-orientations and evaluative self-understandings of individuals and groups, are judged from the ethical point of view; the latter, duties, norms, categorical imperatives, from the moral point of view (26).) Thus, for Habermas, ‘the abstract question of what is equally in the interests of all goes beyond the context bound ethical question of what is best for me or us.’ (28). In sum, though in this general survey, Habermas expounds the theories of other thinkers, his critique reveals his own voice. Hence, one may justifiably argue that it is the question of justice, ‘what is equally in the interest of all?’, that underpins the Habermasian morality of discourse ethics.

 

Far more relevant 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.’ (77). 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.’ (93). 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.’ (93. Italics added.)

 

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.’ (23). 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. 

 

Habermas is generally recognized to be the last defender of Enlightenment reason, whatever his caveats or reservations regarding its nature and dynamics. He is, however, by no means a prisoner of its legacy or hostage to his own tradition: his thought is continually appropriating new themes, revising itself and advancing. He is even, as the suggestive title of the present work shows, trying to address some of the central issues of contemporary life from the outer limits of modern discourses. Hence, the present work, which is a companion volume to his earlier study, Between Facts and Norms, contains much reflection and inquiry that is both radical and humane. Apart from the synoptic account of post-theological moral discourses (‘How Rational is the Authority of the Ought?), or his debate with the political liberalism of Rawls, the volume contains ample discussion on the history and future of the nation-state, human rights (‘The Struggle for Recognition in Democratic States’), the meaning of deliberative politics (‘On the Internal Relation between the Rule of Law and Democracy’), and much else that is singularly instructive and gratifying. For all his/her reservations about its secular parameters, the Muslim has no right to ignore this work: it does introduce us to the intellectual and moral world of the modern, ‘enlightened’, man, displaying his assets and resources but also exposing his dilemmas and anxieties.

 

In contrast to Habermas, whose project involves a modified defence of Enlightenment reason, Pierre Manent, Professor of Philosophy at l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, appears to have made it his calling to act as its prosecutor. In fact, his is as formidable a philosophic indictment of Enlightenment’s erroneous image of man as is ever likely to emerge from any quarter. And yet, Manent neither speaks in a shrill tone, nor displays any rancour or malice. There is no trace of any foundational critique or perspectival, trans-worldview, polemics either. Modernism is ambushed on its own ground. The colossal devastation of modernity’s ideational landscape that Manent brings about is accomplished by taking the moral and cognitive claims of Enlightenment thinkers quite seriously and by scrupulously following the trail of modernist arguments to their, often unenlightening, ends. The City of Man is an exciting and liberating tract of philosophical inquiry that reveals the dark side of Enlightenment thought, its aporias, demons and netherworld, in the most incisive manner imaginable. Manent continues the tradition of profound philosophical critique of modernity initiated by Leo Strauss, and he is just as meticulous, perceptive and unforgiving as the great master himself.

 

Manent’s work defies all categorisation and labelling. It does not present itself as a postmodernist tirade against the discomforts of modernity. Nor may it be compared to the traditionalist’s kulturkritik, or a believer’s bombast against modernity’s ‘renunciation of transcendence’. It does not belong to the genre of philosophy, sociology or anthropology, though it examines all these disciplines and presents its argument in the most sophisticated philosophical mode possible. Perhaps, it does belong to the category of ‘philosophical anthropology’, though its dialogue is exclusively with the Western tradition. Despite the intensity and depth of its analytical acumen, it is a lucid presentation, always demanding and rewarding but never arcane and inaccessible. For any victim of ‘the modern condition’, afflicted by alienation, Angst and loss of meaning so characteristic of our age, but especially for the Muslim oppressed by the dictatorial regime of Enlightenment discourses, Manent’s work is indispensable.

 

Manent starts his inquiry by examining the modern claim for ‘the authority of history’; for the experience of history, every modernist insists, is the most decisive and profound experiences of modernity. (In fact, the modern position is that consciousness of being modern is fundamentally and radically different from all other forms of human consciousnesses, traditional, classical, pre-modern, even non-Western. The conscience of being man tout court has therefore no further validity.) Modernity is then nothing but the authority of the present moment and the conviction that ours is the best of all existent, actual, historical worlds. Through a very judicious reading of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws – the first major philosophical work that takes becoming modern and living in history as its theme – Manent demonstrates convincingly, the Moderns were able to renounce the authority of the Ancients and replace it with that of the contemporary English regime of commerce and liberty.

 

However, Montesquieu could proclaim the pre-eminence of the modern regime, the superiority of modern ‘liberty’ over ancient ‘virtue’, on the basis of a new, sui generis authority that ignored the time-honoured classification of political regimes on ‘natural’ criteria. His move also entail