The Future of Religion

Richard Rorty, Gianni Vattimo, William McCuaig, Santiago Zabala

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231509107
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Hermenéutica filosófica

Though coming from different and distinct intellectual traditions, Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo are united in their criticism of the metaphysical tradition. The challenges they put forward extend beyond philosophy and entail a reconsideration of the foundations of belief in God and the religious life. They urge that the rejection of metaphysical truth does not necessitate the death of religion; instead it opens new ways of imagining what it is to be religious—ways that emphasize charity, solidarity, and irony. This unique collaboration, which includes a dialogue between the two philosophers, is notable not only for its fusion of pragmatism (Rorty) and hermeneutics (Vattimo) but also for its recognition of the limits of both traditional religious belief and modern secularism.

In "Anticlericalism and Atheism" Rorty discusses Vattimo's work Belief and argues that the end of metaphysics paves the way for an anti-essentialist religion. Rorty's conception of religion, determined by private motives, is designed to produce the gospel's promise that henceforth God will not consider humanity as a servant but as a friend. In "The Age of Interpretation," Vattimo, who is both a devout Catholic and a frequent critic of the church, explores the surprising congruence between Christianity and hermeneutics in light of the dissolution of metaphysical truth. As in hermeneutics, interpretation is central to Christianity, which introduced the world to the principle of interiority, dissolving the experience of objective reality into "listening to and interpreting messages."

The lively dialogue that concludes this volume, moderated and edited by Santiago Zabala, analyzes the future of religion together with the political, social, and historical aspects that characterize our contemporary postmodern, postmetaphysical, and post-Christian world.

1

Anticlericalism and Atheism

Richard Rorty

SOME DAY, INTELLECTUAL historians may remark that the twentieth century was the one in which the philosophy professors began to stop asking bad questions—questions like “What really exists?” “What are the scope and limits of human knowledge?” and “How does language hook up with reality?” These questions assume that philosophy can be done ahistorically. They presuppose the bad idea that inspection of our present practices can give us an understanding of the “structure” of all possible human practices.

“Structure” is just another word for “essence.” The most important movements in twentieth-century philosophy have been anti-essentialist. These movements have mocked the ambitions of their predecessors, positivism and phenomenology, to do what Plato and Aristotle had hoped to do—sift out the changing appearances from the enduringly real, the merely contingent from the truly necessary. Recent examples of this mockery are Jacques Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy and Bas van Fraassen’s The Empirical Stance. These books stand on the shoulders of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy, and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. All these anti-essentialist books urge us to fight free of the old Greek distinctions between the apparent and the real and between the necessary and the contingent.

One effect of the rise of anti-essentialism and of historicism is insouciance about what Lecky famously called “the warfare between science and theology.” A growing tendency to accept what Terry Pinkard calls “Hegel’s doctrine of the sociality of reason” and to abandon what Habermas calls “subject-centered reason” for what he calls “communicative reason” has weakened the grip of the idea that scientific beliefs are formed rationally, whereas religious beliefs are not. The antipositivist tenor of post-Kuhnian philosophy of science has combined with the work of post-Heideggerian theologians to make intellectuals more sympathetic to William James’s claim that natural science and religion need not compete with one another.

These developments have made the word “atheist” less popular than it used to be. Philosophers who do not go to church are now less inclined to describe themselves as believing that there is no God. They are more inclined to use such expressions as Max Weber’s “religiously unmusical.” One can be tone-deaf when it comes to religion just as one can be oblivious to the charms of music. People who find themselves quite unable to take an interest in the question of whether God exists have no right to be contemptuous of people who believe passionately in his existence or of people who deny it with equal passion. Nor do either of the latter have a right to be contemptuous of those to whom the dispute seems pointless.

Philosophy resembles music and religion in this respect. Many students—those who walk out of the final examination in Philosophy 101 determined never to waste their time with another philosophy course and unable to understand how people can take that sort of thing seriously—are philosophically unmusical. Some philosophers still think that this attitude toward the discipline to which they have devoted their lives is evidence of an intellectual, and perhaps even a moral flaw. But most are by now content to shrug off an inability to take philosophical issues seriously as no more important, when evaluating a person’s intellect or character, than an inability to read fiction or to grasp mathematical relationships or to learn foreign languages.

This increased tolerance for people who simply brush aside questions that were once thought to be of the highest importance is sometimes described as the adoption of an “aestheticist” attitude. This description is especially popular among those who find such tolerance deplorable and who diagnose its spread as a symptom of a dangerous spiritual illness (“skepticism” or “relativism” or something equally appalling). But the term “aesthetic” in such contexts presupposes the standard Kantian cognitive-moral-aesthetic distinction. That distinction is itself one of the principal targets of anti-essentialist, historicist philosophizing.

Kantians think that once you have given up hope of attaining universal agreement on an issue you have declared it “merely a matter of taste.” But this description strikes anti-essentialist philosophers as just as bad as the Kantian idea that being rational is a matter of following rules. Philosophers who do not believe that there are any such rules reject Kantian pigeonholing in favor of questions about what context certain beliefs or practices or books can best be put in, for what particular purposes. Once the Kantian trichtomy is abandoned, the work of theologians like Bultmann and Tillich no longer looks like a reduction of the “cognitive” claims of religion to “merely” aesthetic claims.

In this new climate of philosophical opinion, philosophy professors are no longer expected to provide answers to a question that exercised both Kant and Hegel: How can the worldview of natural science be fitted together with the complex of religious and moral ideas that were central to European civilization? We know what it is like to fit physics together with chemistry and chemistry together with biology, but that sort of fitting is inappropriate when thinking about the interface between art and morality or between politics and jurisprudence or between religion and natural science. All these spheres of culture continually interpenetrate and interact. There is no need for an organizational chart that specifies, once and for all, when they are permitted to do so. Nor is there any need to attempt to reach an ahistorical, God’s-eye overview of the relations between all human practices. We can settle for the more limited task Hegel called “holding our time in thought.”

Given all these changes, it is not surprising that only two sorts of philosophers are still tempted to use the word “atheist” to describe themselves. The first sort are those who still think that belief in the divine is an empirical hypothesis and that modern science has given better explanations of the phenomena God was once used to explain. Philosophers of this sort are delighted whenever an ingenuous natural scientist claims that some new scientific discovery provides evidence for the truth of theism, for they find it easy to debunk this claim. They can do so simply by trotting out the same sorts of arguments about the irrelevance of any particular empirical state of affairs to the existence of an atemporal and nonspatial being as were used by Hume and Kant against the natural theologians of the eighteenth century.

I agree with Hume and Kant that the notion of “empirical evidence” is irrelevant to talk about God,¹ but this point bears equally against atheism and theism. President Bush made a good point when he said, in a speech designed to please Christian fundamentalists, that “atheism is a faith” because it is “subject to neither confirmation nor refutation by means of argument or evidence.” But the same goes, of course, for theism. Neither those who affirm nor those who deny the existence of God can plausibly claim that they have evidence for their views. Being religious, in the modern West, does not have much to do with the explanation of specific observable phenomena.

But there is a second sort of philosopher who describes himself or herself as an atheist. These are the ones who use “atheism” as a rough synonym for “anticlericalism.” I now wish that I had used the latter term on the occasions when I have used the former to characterize my own view. For anticlericalism is a political view, not an epistemological or metaphysical one. It is the view that ecclesiastical institutions, despite all the good they do—despite all the comfort they provide to those in need or in despair—are dangerous to the health of democratic societies.² Whereas the philosophers who claim that atheism, unlike theism, is backed up by evidence would say that religious belief is irrational, contemporary secularists like myself are content to say that it is politically dangerous. On our view, religion is unobjectionable as long as it is privatized—as long as ecclesiastical institutions do not attempt to rally the faithful behind political proposals and as long as believers and unbelievers agree to follow a policy of live and let live.

Some of those who hold this view, such as myself, had no religious upbringing and have never developed any attachment to any religious tradition. We are the ones who call ourselves “religiously unmusical.” But others, such as the distinguished contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, have used their philosophical learning and sophistication to argue for the reasonableness of a return to the religiosity of their youth. This argument is laid out in Vattimo’s moving and original book Credere di credere.³ His response to the question “Do you now once again believe in God?” amounts to saying: I find myself becoming more and more religious, so I suppose I must believe in God. But I think Vattimo might have done better to say: I am becoming more and more religious, and so coming to have what many people would call a belief in God, but I am not sure that the term “belief” is the right description of what I have.

The point of such a reformulation would be to take account of our conviction that if a belief is true, everybody ought to share it. But Vattimo does not think that all human beings ought to be theists, much less that they should all be Catholics. He follows William James in disassociating the question “Have I a right to be religious?” from the question “Should everybody believe in the existence of God?” Just insofar as one accepts the familiar Hume/Kant critique of natural theology but disagrees with the positivistic claim that the explanatory successes of modern science have rendered belief in God irrational, one will be inclined to say that religiosity is not happily characterized by the term “belief.” So one should welcome Vattimo’s attempt to move religion out of the epistemic arena, an arena in which it seems subject to challenge by natural science.

Such attempts are, of course, not new. Kant’s suggestion that we view God as a postulate of pure practical reason rather than an explanation of empirical phenomena cleared the way for thinkers like Schleiermacher to develop what Nancy Frankenberry has called “a theology of symbolic forms.” It also encouraged thinkers like Kierkegaard, Barth, and Lévinas to make God wholly other—beyond the reach not only of evidence and argument but of discursive thought.

Vattimo’s importance lies in his rejection of both of these unhappy post-Kantian initiatives. He puts aside the attempt to connect religion with truth and so has no use for notions like “symbolic” or “emotional” or “metaphorical” or “moral” truth. Nor does he have any use for what he calls (somewhat misleadingly, in my opinion) “existentialist theology”—the attempt to make religiosity a matter of being rescued from sin by the inexplicable grace of a deity wholly other than man. His theology is explicitly designed for those whom he calls “half-believers,” the people whom St. Paul called “lukewarm in the faith”—the sort of people who only go to church for weddings, baptisms, and funerals (69).

Vattimo turns away from the passages in Epistle to the Romans that Karl Barth liked best, and reduces the Christian message to the passage in Paul that most other people like best: 1 Corinthians 13. His strategy is to treat the Incarnation as God’s sacrifice of all his power and authority, as well as all his otherness. The Incarnation was an act of kenosis, the act in which God turned everything over to human beings. This enables Vattimo to make his most startling and most important claim: that “secularization … is the constitutive trait of authentic religious experience” (21).

Hegel too saw human history as constituting the Incarnation of the Spirit, and its slaughter-bench as the cross. But Hegel was unwilling to put aside truth in favor of love. So Hegel turns human history into a dramatic narrative that reaches its climax in an epistemic state: absolute knowledge. For Vattimo, by contrast, there is no internal dynamic, no inherent teleology to human history; there is no great drama to be unfolded, but only the hope that love may prevail. Vattimo thinks that if we take human history as seriously as Hegel did, while refusing to place it within either an epistemological or a metaphysical context, we can stop the pendulum from swinging back and forth between militantly positivistic atheism and symbolist or existentialist defenses of theism. As he says, “It is (only) because metaphysical meta-narratives have been dissolved that philosophy has rediscovered the plausibility of religion and can consequently approach the religious need of common consciousness independently of the framework of Enlightenment critique.”⁴ Vattimo wants to dissolve the problem of the coexistence of natural science with the legacy of Christianity by identifying Christ neither with truth nor with power but with love alone.

Vattimo’s argument provides an illustration of how lines of thought drawn from Nietzsche and Heidegger can be intertwined with those drawn from James and Dewey. For these two intellectual traditions have in common the thought that the quest for truth and knowledge is no more and no less than the quest for intersubjective agreement. The epistemic arena is a public space, a space from which religion can and should retreat.⁵ The realization that it should retreat from that sphere is not a recognition of the true essence of religion, but simply one of the morals to be drawn from the history of Europe and America.

Vattimo says that “now that Cartesian (and Hegelian) thought has completed its parabola, it no longer makes sense to oppose faith and reason so sharply” (Vattimo, Belief, 87). By Cartesian and Hegelian thought, Vattimo means pretty much what Heidegger meant by “onto-theology.” The term covers not only traditional theology and metaphysics but also positivism and (insofar as it is an attempt to put philosophy on the secure path of a science) phenomenology. He agrees with Heidegger that “the metaphysics of objectivity culminates in a thinking that identifies the truth of Being with the calculable, measurable and definitively manipulatable object of technoscience” (30). For if you identify rationality with the pursuit of universal intersubjective agreement and truth with the outcome of such a pursuit, and if you also claim that nothing should take precedence over that pursuit, then you will squeeze religion not only out of public life but out of intellectual life. This is because you will have made natural science the paradigm of rationality and truth. Then religion will have to be thought of either as an unsuccessful competitor with empirical inquiry or as “merely” a vehicle of emotional satisfaction.

To save religion from onto-theology, you need to regard the desire for universal intersubjective agreement as just one human need among many others, and one that does not automatically trump all other needs. This is a doctrine Nietzsche and Heidegger share with James and Dewey. All four of these anti-Cartesians have principled objections to the pejorative use of “merely” in expressions such as “merely private” or “merely literary” or “merely aesthetic” or “merely emotional.” They all provide reasons both for replacing the Kantian distinction between the cognitive and the noncognitive with the distinction between the satisfaction of public needs and the satisfaction of private needs, and for insisting that there is nothing “mere” about satisfaction of the latter. All four are, in the words that Vattimo uses to describe Heidegger, trying to help us “quit a horizon of thought that is an enemy of freedom and of the historicity of existing” (31).

If one sta...