Phenomenology and the Post-Secular Turn

Contemporary Debates on the 'Return of Religion'

Michael Staudigl, Jason W. Alvis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351007146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Are we living in a 'post-secular age', and can phenomenology help us better understand the discontents of secularism? From Habermas' claim that the secular hypothesis has failed for democratic reasons to the fact that religion, far from its predicted dwindling, is as strong as ever (or even stronger than before), some have concluded that secularism as we know it is over. Others have questioned whether we have ever truly been secular, if the concept applies only to European societies, or whether the very notion of religiosity is merely a weapon of pacification in the hands of Western universalism. The post-secular notion thus lingers between sociological fact and philosophical theory, and it is the latter that we need to investigate if we want to confront the challenges that any 'return of religion' entails.

Although phenomenology has furnished manifold devices to rethink religious experience in a post-metaphysical way, its investigations often remain individualistic and beholden to unproductive dichotomies. This volume assembles investigations into secularism's discontents by addressing religion's role in forming the fabric of contemporary societies and unveiling new constellations of faith and reason beyond many beloved modernist dichotomies (e.g. theism/atheism, myth/Enlightenment, fundamentalism/tolerance) that often go under-investigated.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.

The Role of the Moral Emotions in Our Social and Political Practices

Anthony J. Steinbock

ABSTRACT
In this article, I address problems associated with ‘Modernity’ and those encountered at the impasse of post-modernity and the newly named phenomenon of ‘post-secularism’. I consider more specifically what I call ‘moral emotions’ or essentially interpersonal emotions can tell us about who we are as persons, and what they tell us about our experience and concepts of freedom, normativity, power, and critique. The moral emotions, and retrieving the evidence of the ‘heart’, point to the possibility of contributing to the social imaginary of the Modern and its post-modern variants, playing a significant role in shaping civic life and relations of power.

Modernity can be credited with many things, among them the recognition of individual subjectivity, the value of freedom, the practice of critique, and the prominent role that rationality plays in them. Modernity also marks the emergence of innovative social imaginaries, the consequences of which we are still living. I want to call attention here to what has been dismissed both in the enthusiasm for these Modern features, and in the contemporary criticism of Modernity, e.g. from criticism levied by psychoanalysis, post-modernism, critical theory, and even phenomenology. What have been sidelined are the emotions, especially, the moral emotions.

It is well known that having identified cognition with rationality, and rationality with the meaning of (predominately male) human beings, the emotions became the province of what is non-human, instinctual, and characteristic of women, children, animals, and the mentally impaired. Far from having any evidential import, far from being able to disclose the meaning of persons, emotions were customarily regarded as irrational ruptures of objectivity, violations of human potential, and ultimately devoid of any spiritual and/or philosophical significance. They became merely subjective matters devoid of an objective or rational grounding, and thus had no legitimate bearing on the purpose or meaning of human existence. How many times do we still hear the words of caution: ‘Don’t let your emotions get the better of you!’ As Max Scheler (1957) observed, Modernity no longer understood the emotional sphere as a meaningful symbolic language; it was no longer allowed to govern the sense and meaning of our lives. Instead, emotions were regarded as blind processes running their course in nature; as such, they required a rational technology for restraining them so that we would not come to harm, and so that human activity could be truly spiritual, cognitive, and meaningful. The entire realm of the emotions, and everything a-logical, was surrendered, becoming either an object of the psychology of inner perception, a matter of individual interior ethics, or the subject of intellection belonging to the province of judgment as inferential acts of thought.¹

Rather than hearkening, say, to a feeling of calm or agitation at an event, the love of a person before us, the shame of communal inaction, the guilt of a deed, the trust of a stranger, or even the self-centred pride at our own doings – in order to examine how and what they can reveal to us about ourselves and our being with others in the world – we instead become very practised in ignoring them, and as a result, we dull our sensibilities to them as providing an interpersonal social and political compass. Yet, if logic wants to investigate the structure of interconnections and relations, or the acts through which we grasp these logical interconnections, it is a sign of unsurpassed arbitrariness, asserts Scheler, to carry out these kinds of investigations into modes of givenness and essential connections only in the case of perception and thinking, but to abandon to psychology the remaining part of spirit (see Scheler 1957; also 1960). It is arbitrary because our experience shows that there are different kinds of cognition and evidence which have their own integrity and which are not reducible to, say, rational, volitional, or even to instrumental knowledge – even if the latter have become for us the predominant ways ‘to know’, or rather, to experience something given in an evidential manner.

I have illustrated through the description of several moral emotions how the emotions have their own structure, their own kinds of evidence, their unique ‘cognitive’ styles, and how they are revelatory of the person as interpersonal – without them either somehow being tied to rationality in order to be meaningful, or on the contrary, being ostracized from the sphere of evidence because they are not rational (see Steinbock 2014). Thus, in distinction to some contemporary thinkers on the emotions, these analyses show that some emotions are directly interpersonal, and further that moral emotions have an evidential dimension and are not merely supports for judgments (see Prinz 2009). Showing this, however, requires overcoming the prejudice that the human person is exhausted in the dualism of reason and sensibility.

The moral emotions have far reaching consequences not only for how we view our place in the world, but for world-transformation. For example, because we have conflicting views of freedom, for example, (1) from pride – as individual, subjective self-will – and (2) from the internal normative critiques of pride given in other moral emotions such as trust – freedom as interpersonal – the moral emotions have important implications, consequences, and significance for our Modern social imaginaries as well as for its post-modern variants.

I understand by ‘social imaginary’ that configuration of convictions and practices, institutional procedures, customs and techniques of living, as well as ideas and pre-reflective experiences that articulate interactions in the social sphere. In effect, the social imaginary orders and expresses how we interact with one another.² The political philosopher, Claude Lefort (1978, 1979, 1981), for example, describes a pre-ideological or pre-critical social imaginary, on the one hand, and the era of ideology, on the other, which is a novel mode of the social imaginary and which ushers in new forms of Western Modernity (or Modernities) (see also Koselleck 1973).

In the pre-Modern social imaginary, in which power regulates social life and its hierarchies in specific ways, the social sphere was governed by a power or powers outside of the social sphere. A sphere of ‘Transcendence’ directed the interactions within the social without necessarily being a part of the social interaction, giving some persons different worth and integrity than others. For example, God and God’s representative on earth, the King – with the King’s two bodies (Kantorowicz 1957),the clergy, et al. – articulated a social hierarchy (e.g. oratores, bellatores, and laboratores), but this was accomplished essentially from outside of that social sphere in which these divisions and power relations are played out (see Taylor 2007, 11).

With the advent of an innovative social imaginary, what Lefort (1978, 1979, 1981) calls the ‘era of ideology’, a new framework for the confluence of power and the social, of the political and civil space emerges. Transcendence is now integrated into immanence such that it is the sphere of immanence which accounts for the movement of transcendence. The social imaginary in which the Monarch ruled and devised the people is overcome, and this overcoming can be symbolized in the effects of guillotine and the image of the ‘body politic’. Modernity is, in part, this project of giving an account of transcendence by a turn vis-à-vis transcendence in and through the critical (reflective or pre-reflective) turn to immanence. One can see this philosophically from Kant to Husserl to Derrida, and in a way that post-modernity is itself a further working out of Modernity.

This is also why Charles Taylor can rightly designate this movement as radical secularity. Secularity is not the fact ‘God’ cannot be present in the internal lives of individual believers in this social imaginary, what we call the era of ideology: ‘God’ can be present in our political identity as in ‘my’ individual life; in fact, we do see this in the West in the Protestant reformation all the way down to the myriad forms of evangelism. The decisive point, however, is that sacredness does not govern the action carried out within the social sphere. Rather than social action taking place from ‘higher times’, it occurs literally in a secular manner, in profane time, mono-dimensionally: foundings are common actions in profane time (see Taylor 2007, esp. 95–99, 186, 194). In the secularism of this kind, Scheler and Taylor would agree, impersonal benevolence of a practical kind as a teleological striving or duty replaces the movement of infinite loving (see Taylor 2007, 117; Scheler 1973, 145–146).

Politically one can see this in the French and American revolutions, in Bourgeois ideology, capitalism, fascist and communist variants of Totalitarian ideology, and popular movements peculiar to post-modern ideology. Put in different terms, according to Lefort, the era of ideology is the promissory note of unifying power and civic life, the political and the social, by claiming to nullify the stratifications and divisions that were imposed from the outside on the social sphere. But at each turn, we witness new divisions and hierarchies that were not supposed to have emerged. For instance, in a Bourgeois ideology, which e.g. challenged the power relations and divisions among the King and his subjects, there insidiously emerged new divisions. In the attempt to unify the social from within the social, investing the ‘citizens’ with power and equality, different rifts surfaced between those who express themselves according to the Universal Idea, Essence, Norm, Rationality as Subject and hence as ‘Free’ and having access to Power – and those who do not have access to the rule, the norm, rationality and thus appear as un-civilized, non-subject, abnormal, irrational, non-autonomous. In the process of this articulation, this ideology obfuscates the very historical emergence of this social order as an institution because it has already aligned itself with the Universal, and thus, its economic order and values appear as eternal and non-emergent.

A Totalitarian ideology, in both its fascist and communist variants, however, sought to eradicate these presuppositions and divisions by unifying the social and the political, identifying power and the people, by claiming a seamless accord between the state and civil society, denying divisions among special sectors (economic, educational, legal, personal, etc.). In this way, it purported to master its own harmonious and integral organization, providing a univocal, integrated discourse of and meaning to History. Possessing a pre-determined teleology of sense, it could identify and solve ‘crises’. The social is indeed unified, but at the cost of reallocating divisions, now by virtue of a different sphere called, appropriately, the ‘anti-social’ (the non-conformists, the ‘waste’, the ‘vermin’, in short, those who putatively threaten the integrity of the social). Here the purity of the social is at once maintained through the impurity of the anti-social.

Within the reputed social whole, however, other divisions surreptitiously sprung up, namely, those between the leaders and followers; some are closer to the Centre of power as Absolute power, nearer to the essential meaning and judgment of History; some are purer, higher, better than others; some are at or nearer the origin and more ‘original’ while others are farther, and mere supplements to the Truth; yet these others who are lower or subservient can still share in power and lord it over others (e.g. as informants, et al.).

The dismantling of this ideology has led to more contemporary efforts to overcome the once clandestine and now obvious divisions, an effort that I have called elsewhere the homogeneity of power, and what Lefort (1978, 318ff.) has called an invisible ideology (see Steinbock 1989).This new social imaginary in the era of ideology has sought to accomplish what the Totalitarian ideology promised but was unable to deliver, namely, the people as one (‘power to the people’), the unity of power and civic life. It attempts to accomplish this integration by ridding society of divisive in-groups and out-groups, eradicating hierarchies of all kinds, refraining from passing value-judgments or making discriminations, ultimately self-surrendering the exercise of power in all forms, because after all, it is thought, power is divisive, corrupting, malevolent, and authoritarian.

Thus, people sit in circles so as to be equidistant from the centre or the place of power; there is no ‘head of the class’; there are no leaders or followers, but facilitators and associates; there are no value-judgments, assertions, or discriminations, but ‘I statements’ of one’s feelings; there are no insiders and outsiders, but rather ‘affinity groups’; there are no strangers or foreigners, but internationals; there is no Truth, but truths. Knowledge is only permitted as the homogeneity of knowledges or epistemes, and since knowledge is power, Power is self-sacrificed in the name of social cohesion, where ‘power’ is eschewed and permitted only in the guise of the homogeneity of power. In fact, all differences are permitted – but so long as no difference can make a difference, historically, because it is contended that then we would putatively place ourselves back into a Totalitarian framework. Whereas previously, through the technological innovations of Modernity through Galileo – according to Husserl – ‘to be’ means to be mathematizable or quantifiable, now reality has a different sense; ‘to be’ means to be interchangeable. There are no absolutes, no essences, no foundations, since these are oppressive and harken back to static power relations of domination and the treacheries of fascisms and communisms.

To be sure, this movement that characterizes the homogeneity of power and that is characteristic of post-modernism, does have a liberating moment, because it holds back an oppressive hierarchy and gives the disenfranchised an opportunity to participate in social and political affairs, yielding the voice to others who had been traditionally or formerly excluded; it has the intention of being non-dogmatic by not ruling out other perspectives in advance, but by allowing them to come out into the open.

The problem is that there is only a pretension of participation in or contribution to meaning-making, because if sense or meaning (sens) emerges, it cannot have a direction (sens) that will make a difference in the bearing of history or social transformation, because this would imply that it has a priority over others; the fear is that it will introduce new divisions, and that direction or orientation will revert to a pre-determined teleology. Thus, in the homogeneity of power, we can only ‘play’ at making a difference, and validate them only as they are important to me and how I feel – thus excluding in its own way the transformative role of the moral emotions. I no longer engage in creative activity (writing, dancing, composing, etc.) to participate in transforming the world in some way, but only to express my inner feelings.

This form of post-modernism, however, is really just a fulfilment of self-same movement of Modernity and most recently Totalitarianism, because they all share the same presuppositions. The presuppositions are these: power is identical with exercising control over others; hierarchy is domination; freedom is the autonomy of the subjective will; rationality is the province of meaning and truth; emotions are only individual, non-significant, and non-evidentiary feelings; value implies a fixed or pre-determined material order.

Yet the homogeneity of power (and post-modernism) is more than this; it is the power of homogeneity. It is so effective because it hides itself as power, which is how the homogeneity of power is really the power of homogeneity, and why it makes sense for Lefort to call it ‘invisible’ ideology. The real efficacy of the homogeneity of power is the fact that it eclipses itself as such by advancing a set of power relations in which, miraculously, there is no eclipse. It, too, hides its own historicity (in the name of non-essentialism), its role of power in societal relations, and its emergence as a form of power in them as controlling social relations from outside of social relations. It controls a situation universally in and through everyone giving up control and power individually. It is a logic of self-effacement that becomes powerful through an apparent loss of power, an imposition of value through an apparent value-neutrality, since everyone participates through self-sacrifice in advance.

That it is the power of homogeneity is evident for example when anyone who steps out of line in this model of power relations: he or she is either immediately reprimanded, or the assessments of the situation must be converted into ‘I statements’ (‘I guess I feel that…’). There are no in-groups and out-groups, but there is also no living social interaction because everyone is fragmented from one another in an equality of ‘simple location’ (Whitehead) of his or her own individual, autonomous ‘I statements’. And, of course, no one is in a position of power; no one is expounding the Truth, no one has a claim on history, no one is asserting value, so we cannot pin-point the source of power (as we could previously, say, in a Totalitarian ideology). The homogeneity of power dominates as the power of homogeneity, clandestinely – and can only function this way – because it is supported by those whom it dominates having self-avowedly already surrendered power and the process of making history. The homogeneity of power relies on our wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Phenomenology and the Post-secular Turn: Reconsidering the ‘Return of the Religious’
• 1 The Role of the Moral Emotions in Our Social and Political Practices
• 2 Deep Secularism, Faith, and Spirit
• 3 Personally Speaking … Kierkegaardian Postmodernism and the Messiness of Religious Existence
• 4 How to Overcome the World: Henry, Heidegger, and the Post-Secular
• 5 Philosophical Reflections on the Shaping of Identity in Fundamentalist Religious Communities
• 6 Murdering Truth: ‘Postsecular’ Perspectives on Theology and Violence
• 7 On Seizing the Source: Toward a Phenomenology of Religious Violence
• 8 From Mystery to Laughter to Trembling Generosity: Agono-Pluralistic Ethics in Connolly v. Levinas (and the Possibilities for Atheist-Theist Respect)
• Afterword: The “Return of Religion” and the “Post-Secular Turn”
• Index