Willem Styfhals and Stéphane Symons (eds.), "Genealogies of the Secular: The Making of Modern German Thought (original) (raw)
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Recent years have seen the rise of " post-secularism, " a new perspective that criticizes the dominant secularization narrative according to which " modernity " and " religion " are fundamentally antagonistic concepts. Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Gianni Vattimo are the most prominent defenders of such a post-secularist account. But though post-secularism presents itself as a necessary rectification of the secularization story, it has not been able to come up with a credible and generally accepted alternative account. In this article I will explain why, arguing that the use of " essentially contested concepts " such as " Christianity " and " modernity " rest on normative standpoints of the narrators that are incompatible with one another. To show this I will analyze the position of three older voices in the debate, namely those of Hans Blumenberg, Peter Berger, and Marcel Gauchet. These authors seem to agree in understanding the modern disenchanted worldview in relation to Christian transcendence, but I will show that beneath their similar narratives lie incompatible normative beliefs on which their use of the concepts of " Christianity " and " modernity " is founded. After having laid bare the roots of the contemporary debate by exploring these three fundamental positions, I will finally argue that we should not take their accounts as objective, historical descriptions but as what Richard Rorty has called " Geistesgeschichte " : a speculative history that is aimed at conveying a moral, in which essentially contested concepts play a constitutive role. Each author draws his own moral, and consequently each author will construct his own corresponding history. This lesson can then be applied to the contemporary debate on secularization. The value of the debate does not lie in its historical claims but in the visions of the protagonists; at the end of this article I will explain how we can capitalize on this value.
Agamben, contra Schmitt, claims that secularization is not a concept through which a ‘structural identity’ or an essential continuity between theology and politics can be determined. Neither does he thinks, with Hans Blumenberg, that a radical discontinuity between Christian theology and modernity is at stake in the notion of secularization (Agamben, 2009:76). Rather, as I will argue in this paper, for Agamben secularization functions as a signature, that is as a ‘strategic operator that marked political concepts in order to make them refer to their theological origins’ (Ibid). This paper will demonstrate that Agamben is certainly not making an argument for the theological foundation of all politics, nor is he claiming, in the case of economic theology, that Christian theology is the foundational ground of managerial administration and economics. Indeed, as William Watkin argues, ‘the displacement of oikonomia from home economics, for the Greeks, into theological economy and then political economy describes merely how certain things could be said in terms of theology and politics, rather than how one proceeds from the other’ (2014:22). Therefore, the signature of Secularisation does not indicate a structural identity between theology and politics nor does it refer to an epistemological break between the sacred and the secular, but rather it distributes and controls the political and the theological through a relation of mutual referentiality. This paper aims at examining the general coordinates of Agamben’s philosophical archaeology and his account of the signature in particular, to underscore its relevance for the understanding of secularization.
The following paper elaborates on the compound character and the importance of an intellectual discussion regarding Modernity, secularisation and theology that raged within a cluster of German scholars during the 1950s and 1960s (Hans Jonas (1903–93), Hans Blumenberg (1920–96), Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) and Eric Voegelin (1901–85)). It argues that these scholars were united discursively owing to the appearance of the concept of Gnosis in their postwar debate. Challenging the thesis of Karl Löwith (1897–1973), in which he defined Modernity as secularised Christian theology, they connected Modernity with the Gnostic theology. By innovatively returning to late antiquity and re-introducing the obscure Gnostic theology, these scholars interwove the intellectual debates of the early twentieth century – in which the concept of Gnosis was redefined – into an acute post-1945 moral crisis, in order to make a case either for or against Modernity.
2010
Against the intellectual backdrop of mounting uncertainty concerning the secular nature of modernity, the present study reconstructs a philosophical debate in Germany, concerning the origins and legitimacy of the modern age as a secular age. This debate was carried out between Hans Blumenberg, Karl Löwith and Carl Schmitt, between about 1950 and 1980. Blumenberg's little-known early work is considered as a preliminary to his best-known book, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, in which he attacked Schmitt and Löwith for propounding versions of a theorem whereby modern thought consisted of "secularized" religious matter. It is also shown to develop other core concepts, notably that of human self-assertion, whilst being charted against Blumenberg's own intellectual self-assertion, his struggle to find a distinctive voice. A historical discussion of the concept of secularization is followed by an examination of Löwith's derivation of the progressivist philosophy of history from Christian eschatology, which is shown to be less straightforward than Löwith's popularizers assumed. Löwith's personal confrontation with Blumenberg having been shown to conceal a deeper affinity in the rejection of apocalyptic thought, the focus shifts to Schmitt's political-theological critique of modernity. Schmitt deploys the secularization theorem to call into question the human autonomy on which Blumenberg founds the modern age's claim to legitimacy. Schmitt is shown to argue against what he perceived to be a human plan to terminate history in an earthly utopia, precluding a divine judgment on history and man. The subsequent debate between Blumenberg and Schmitt in letters and texts reveals fundamental differences concerning the status of man with regard to the absolute, with Schmitt's concept of antagonistic, absolute potencies being pitched against Blumenberg's vision of a division of powers, which he discusses in terms of the myth of Prometheus. In arguing for the autonomy of the modern age, Blumenberg is shown to challenge critiques of civilization which avail themselves of religious rhetoric for political ends.