Habermas

I went to hear Habermas speak at Georgetown last week on myth and ritual. The breadth of the man's work is incredible, as is his age. He's something like 82 and traveling and speaking. Just imagine how smart you could be by 82! He used words I'd never heard of: "deictic" and "phylogenetic," for instance. Clearly, when I'm 82, I will know those words, too. His lecture was printed out and distributed at the event, which was immensely helpful as his English really is difficult to understand (he is German). Even following along on the paper, I sometimes got lost (I know, I know: I'm one to talk since I have so much trouble with other languages.). At one moment, he very cutely asked the audience how to pronounce "rites."

Because his lecture was so interdisciplinary, he relied heavily on the accepted work in other disciplines and then built off of that. I have a lot of trouble doing this myself--it requires a lot of trust that the disciplines that you're bridging are fundamentally going in the right direction.

Habermas offered his own take on what precisely makes man different from animals (or on what sort of language man has and animals don't): "What sets linguistic communication apart is a specific socio-cognitive achievement that enables participants to communicate with one another about something."

He concludes his speech: "Religious communities, in performing their cult, have preserved the access to an archaic experience--and to a source of solidarity--from which the unbelieving sons and daughters of modernity are excluded. The enduring presence of religion as a contemporary formation of mind, culture and society raises not only questions for sociology or anthropology but for philosophy as well." I know it's a bit of a stretch, but I found this Hegelian in the sense that Habermas saw religion as a crucial part of human development in the past, but that he was surprised that it remains at all.

The other quibble I have with him if I understand him correctly is that he implied that rites do not point to the objective world. He writes, "Whereas the rythmic movements and gestures in the group express shared intentions, spur the participants on to mutual perspective-taking and trigger an intersubjectively shared experience, the third arrow of the triadic structure points into the void--not into the world." I would say that in contemporary religion, which is the one of the best, albeit modified, articulations of ritual that we have, some liturgical elements point toward the void and some point toward the world. I'm thinking here of things like the biblical Jewish practices of establishing memorials and remembering the exodus and Christian rituals of baptism and confirmation, themselves initiation rites into a community both in the world and in the void, as Habermas puts it.


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