Reasoning Between Athens and Jerusalem_Mark Redhead

Reasoning between Athens andJerusalem

Mark RedheadCalifornia State University

Jrgen Habermas, in his recent work on post-secular public reasoning, attempts tocraft a model of democratic deliberation in which theistic and non-theistic selves canlearn from each other and develop bonds of democratic solidarity. His proposedmodel raises questions about the abilities of democratically oriented individuals in thetwenty-first century to reflect critically upon their own cherished beliefs, to compre-hend the beliefs of others, and then to engage critically with the beliefs of others dur-ing deliberations about matters of common concern. I argue that these questions arebest addressed by focusing on how individuals reason from within and through(rather than independently of) the cultural and ethical forces that make the subjectswhat they are. The work of many grassroots organizers today illustrates this lesson.Polity (2015) 47, 84113. doi:10.1057/pol.2014.29

Keywords public reason; deliberative democracy; secularity; Jrgen Habermas;identity; grassroots organizing

Over the past decade, a number of Western-based political theorists have urgedtheir colleagues to open their eyes to the difficulties of distinguishing faith discoursesfrom those of public reason. One such thinker is Jrgen Habermas. He has recentlypromoted what he calls a post-secular1 brand of public reasoning, in which non-theistic and theistic citizenssuch as those he describes as adherents of the traditionof reason that originated in Athens, and those whose theistic traditions he saysoriginated in Jerusalemcan debate matters of common concern in a manner thatallows each camp to be receptive to and learn from the ethical impulses of the othercamps. Habermas hopes that such deliberations will nourish the slender bonds ofdemocratic solidarity that democratic practices, such as his model of a globaldomestic politics, require.

Habermass work on post-secular public reasoning is interesting not onlybecause he attempts to craft a model of public reasoning in which theistic and

1. Habermas uses the term post-secular to depict a collective shift in consciousness in largelysecularized or unchurched societies that by now have come to terms with the continued existence ofreligious communities, and with the influence of religious voices both in the national public sphere and onthe global political stage. Jrgen Habermas, Reply to My Critics, in Habermas and Religion, ed. CraigCalhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (London: Polity Press, 2013), 348.

Polity . Volume 47, Number 1 . January 2015 2015 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/15www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/

non-theistic selves can learn from each other and develop bonds of solidarity. It isalso interesting because his thinking alludes to but leaves unfulfilled numerousquestions and conceptual tasks. These include the asymmetrical obligationsplaced on theistic as opposed to non-theistic citizens, the limits of translatabilityof religious reasons into secular reasons, and the limited senses of learningundertaken by secular citizens. These dilemmas belie deeper issues about theabilities of twenty-first-century democratically oriented individuals to reflectcritically upon their own cherished beliefs, to comprehend the beliefs of otherdemocratically oriented citizens, and then to engage with others within delibera-tions about matters of common concern.

In this article, I will argue that these problems are best addressed by focusing onhow individuals reason from within and through (rather than independently of)the cultural and ethical forces that make subjects what they are. I first will workthrough Habermass ideal of post-secular public reasoning and the problems thatbefall it. I then will introduce the concept of reasoning through baggage and willhighlight some of its virtues. To illustrate the practice of reasoning throughbaggage, I will turn to recent writings by Jeffrey Stout and other observers ongrassroots organizing in the United States. Stouts work, in particular, offers severallessons on how individuals can reason through their fundamental beliefs whileengaging in political deliberation with others and can, thereby, cultivate theslender bonds of solidarity Habermas craves. Reasoning through baggage thus canprovide one manner of keeping liberal democratic thinking relevant in the earlytwenty-first century.

Cultivating Post-Secular Bonds of Solidarity

Habermass thoughts on post-secular public reasoning are linked to his proposalsfor democratic global governance, or what he sometimes refers to as a globaldomestic politics. His vision might serve as a counter-weight to Hobbesian/Schmittian forms of political theology, which are increasingly popular within theacademy and with not-so-democratic actors, and to versions of global politics thatare driven by the dictates of neo-liberalism. Contra Schmitt, Habermas contendsthat the ideal of an impersonal democratic process has become the modern formof the political and, like earlier versions of the political, religion still has a place.At its core, a democratic process involves a mutual learning process on behalf ofcitizens. He writes:

Any democratic constitution is and remains a project: Within the framework ofthe nation-state, it is oriented to the ever more thorough exhaustion of thenormative substance of constitutional principles under changing historicconditions. And, at the global level, the universalistic meaning of human rights

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reminds us of the need to develop a constitutional frame for an emergingmulticultural society.2

Habermas spells out some features of the global constitutional frame that heproposes. His ideal of a global democratic politics is built upon a compulsorycosmopolitan solidarity that can mitigate the functionalist and instrumentalistimperatives of neo-liberal economics and that can thereby achieve a renewedclosure of an economically unmastered world society.3 Like David Held, MaryCaldor and others, Habermas imagines a global politics that draws upon amultileveled system of local, national, and supranational governing institutions aswell as a world organization with the power to impose peace and implementhuman rights. In theory, both nation-states and citizens will exercise their voicesas members of a global public that influences extra-national political common-wealths.4 This stands in stark contrast to Kants original notion of a federation ofrepublics. Yet Habermas maintains that his vision embodies the cosmopolitanideal that Kant articulated in Perpetual Peace, because the participants in aglobal domestic politics will think from the perspective of the universal conditionof humankind even as they remain members of particular nation-states.

According to Habermas, the institutionalization of this proposed cosmopolitanorder turns on the question of whether global communication in an informalpublic, without constitutionally institutionalized paths for translating communica-tive influence into political power, can secure a sufficient degree of integration fora global society and whether it can confer a sufficient level of legitimacy on thedecisions of the world organization.5 Both integration into a global society and thelegitimacy of the actions of supranational institutions depend on the generation ofnorms arising from an overlapping consensus and shared understandings that actsof democratic deliberation cultivated. From what contemporary moral sources canthese shared understanding be drawn?

This is the point where Habermass notion of post-secular public reasoningcomes to the fore. The notion is a response to Kants philosophy of religion, whichHabermas praises not only for clarifying the division of labor between theologyand practical reason, but also for distinguishing the justified uses of practical

2. Jrgen Habermas, The Political: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of PoliticalTheology, in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and JonathanVanAntwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 27.

3. Jrgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy, in ThePostnational Constellation: Political Essays, ed. and trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001),11112.

4. Jrgen Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union: A Response, trans. Ciaran Cronin (London:Polity Press, 2012), 42.

5. Jrgen Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use ofReason by Religious and Secular Citizens, in Between Naturalism and Religion (London: Polity Press,2008), 142.

86 REASONING BETWEEN ATHENS AND JERUSALEM

reason from excessive metaphysical claims to knowledge, on the one hand, andfrom supersensible religious truths of faith, on the other.6 Habermas contends thatKants philosophy of religion can be read as a warning against religiousphilosophythat is, a brand of secular reasoning that fails to learn from otherforms of thought.7

Despite these insights, Kants legacy in this area is wanting, says Habermas.John Rawlss account of public reason, for example, offers an important butlimited starting point for post-secular public reasoning. The logic of Rawlssinfamous proviso cannot satisfactorily account for religious citizens who areunable to generate liberal rationales for their politics8 yet might practice the virtueof reciprocity towards other deliberators and potentially take part in the justifica-tion of legal and/or political norms.

Contra Rawls, Habermas argues for a translation proviso. According to thisproposal, religious languages are fine for public discourse so long as those who usereligious language agree to translate their potential truth contents into a generallyaccessible language before the notions find their way onto the agendas of formalpublic bodies.9 The generally accessible language would serve as an institutionalfilter between the informal and formal public spheres. In Habermass opinion, thetranslation proposal achieves the liberal goal of ensuring that all legally enforce-able and publically sanctioned decisions can be formulated and justified in auniversally accessible language without having to restrict the polyphonic diversityof voices at its very source.10

Habermas finds an additional shortcoming in the arguments of neo-Kantians,like Rawls. Their models fail to cultivate the slender bonds of solidarity that aglobal domestic politics requires. According to Habermas, the models of neo-Kantians do not have the power to awaken the cosmopolitan ideal and to keepawake, in the minds of secular subjects, an awareness of the violations of solidaritythroughout the world, an awareness of what is missing, of what cries out toheaven.11 Habermas insists that a change in mentality on the part of both religiousand non-religious individuals is necessary, so that both groups can becomereflexive enough to engage in complementary learning processes. In his opinion,Rawlsians and many other Kantian (and Lockean) inspired liberals do notrecognize the need for generating solidarity in their approaches to religious

6. Jrgen Habermas, The Boundary between Faith and Knowledge: On the Reception andContemporary Importance of Kants Philosophy of Religion, in Between Naturalism and Religion, 24243.

7. Ibid., 247.8. Habermas, The Political: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political

Theology, 25.9. Ibid.10. Ibid., 26.11. Jrgen Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing, in An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith

and Reason in a Post-secular Age, ed. Habermas, trans. Ciaran Cronin (London: Polity Press, 2010), 19.

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pluralism12 because these thinkers focus more on liberal justifications of laws thanon the solidarity-building consequences of deliberation. Habermas hopes that analternative perspective on the genealogy of reasona perspective which isaware of the shared origin of philosophy and religion in the revolution ofworldviews of the Axial Age (in particular the two traditions based respectivelyin Jerusalem and Athens)will address this need.13

Working down this alternative path, Habermas casts a receptive eye upontheistic thinkers like Aquinas. Like Alasdair MacIntyre, Habermas regards Aquinasas an authentic intellectual voice whose absence today is simply a fact. In ahomogenizing media society, everything loses its seriousnessperhaps eveninstitutionalized Christianity itself.14 Habermas is not a cheerleader for Thomism.Rather, he understands cultural and societal secularization as a double learningprocess that compels both the traditions of the Enlightenment and religiousdoctrines to reflect on their own respective limits.15 According to Habermas,tolerance demands that believers and unbelievers alike expect dissent when theyexpress their views. Without a reasonable expectation of disagreement betweentheists and non-theists, neither group can engage in public reasoning becauseneither will feel compelled to translate its morally compelling intuitions into agenerally acceptable language.16

Crucial here is the self-realization among secular citizens of the limits ofrationally comprehending religious experience. Faith, Habermas points out,remains opaque for knowledge in a way which may neither be denied nor simplyaccepted. This reflects the inconclusive nature of the confrontation between a self-critical reason which is willing to learn and contemporary religious convictions.Exchanges between believers and non-believers can heighten post-secular publicreasonings awareness of the unexhausted force of religious traditions, whilethose devoted to religious beliefs can come to experience secularization as atransformer which redirects the flow of tradition so as to make a given religioustradition accessible to non-devotees.17 Habermas notes that for non-believers, this

12. Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of Reasonby Religious and Secular Citizens, 143.

13. Ibid., 17.14. Jrgen Habermas, A Conversation about God and the World (1999); reprinted in Jrgen

Habermas, in Time of Transitions, ed. and trans. Ciaran Cronin and Max Pensky (London, Polity, 2006),154.

15. Jrgen Habermas, Pre-political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State? in TheDialectics of Secularization, ed. Jrgen Habermas, and Joseph Ratzinger (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press,2006), 23.

16. Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of Reasonby Religious and Secular Citizens, 13940.

17. Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing, 18. See also his Religion in the Public Sphere:Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of Reason by Religious and Secular Citizens, 143.


means that they must acknowledge that there can be linkages between faith andknowledge that are not exclusively irrational.18

Habermas distinguishes the secular from the secularist. The former adopts anagnostic stance towards religious claims, while the latter adopt a polemical stancetowards religious doctrines which retain a certain public influence even thoughtheir claims cannot be scientifically justified. Today, secularism often appeals to ahard, that is, scientifically grounded, version of naturalism.19 A liberal demo-cratic state might slide from secular to secularist when the state fails to realize thatwhen attempting to protect all citizens freedom of belief and conscience, it maynot demand anything of its religious citizens which cannot be reconciled with alife that is led authentically from faith.20 Post-secular public reason tries topromote a democratic common sense that, in the case of devotes of Athens andJerusalem, remains osmotically open to both camps while maintaining itsindependence.21

Habermas, in addition, argues that a liberal democratic state can guaranteeequal freedom of religion to its citizens only under the proviso that they do notbarricade themselves within the self-enclosed lifeworlds of their religious commu-nities and seal themselves off from each other.22 All groupsincluding those withstrident neo-liberal, Hobbesian, or neo-Kantian orientationsneed to loosen theirholds on individuals so that individuals can recognize others both as citizens andas members of a larger democratic political community, who are capable oflearning through public reason. As citizens, individuals collectively give them-selves laws and rights, which enable each and all, as private selves, to uphold thecollective practices that define their personal identity. In the case of theists,religious consciousness, be it in the form expressed by the American evangelicalor by the Muslim immigrant to Europe, must become reflexive when confrontedwith the necessity of relating its articles of faith to competing systems of belief andto the scientific monopoly on the production of factual knowledge.23 It followsfrom his translation proviso that religious citizens who regard themselves as loyalmembers of a constitutional democracy must accept the proviso as the price to bepaid for the neutrality of the state toward competing worldviews.24 Theistic citizens

18. Habermas, Pre-political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State? 5051. See also hisAn Awareness of What Is Missing, 22.

19. Jrgen Habermas, What Is Meant by a Post-secular Society? A Discussion on Islam in Europe, inEurope: The Faltering Project, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 74.

20. Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing, 21. See also his Reply to My Critics, 372.21. Jrgen Habermas, Faith and Knowledge, in The Future of Human Nature, trans. Max Pensky

(London: Polity, 2003), 105.22. Habermas, What Is Meant by a Post-secular Society? A Discussion on Islam in Europe, 74.23. Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing, 21.24. Habermas, Reply to My Critics, 371 and 376.

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must realize that the translation of sacred beliefs into profane ethical claims is thefundamental feature of a secularity that is not anathema to their faiths.25

According to Habermas, the ethics of citizenship entails a complementaryburden for non-theistic citizens. Because of the duty of reciprocal accountabilitytowards all citizens (including religious ones), non-theistic citizens are

obliged not to publicly dismiss religious contributions to political opinion andwill formation as mere noise, or even nonsense, from the start. Secular andreligious citizens must meet in their public use of reason at eye level. For ademocratic process the contributions of one side are no less important thanthose of the other side.26

The liberal state must expect its secular citizens, in exercising their role as citizens,not to treat religious expressions as simply irrational.

Neither side of the ethics-of-citizenship imperative will be easy to follow. Itforces secular citizens to practically resolve the question of how modern reason,which has turned its back on metaphysics, should understand its relation toreligion. Of course, the expectation that theology should engage seriously withpostmetaphysical thinking is by no means trivial either.27 Both expectationsappear even more demanding when one considers the changes in mentality thatare needed to foster the forms of solidarity upon which Habermass democraticvision rests. According to him, deliberations that are learning processes andthat are not simply changes in point of view only from the perspective of a secularself-understanding of modernity will produce solidarity. These changes in theorientations of theistic and non-theistic citizens cannot be prescribed. Nor canthe changes in orientations be politically manipulated or forced through law .Learning processes can be fostered, but they cannot be morally or legallyordered.28

What Forms of Post-Secular Learning Are Actually HappeningToday?

Today, many individuals are open to learning through practices of public reason-ing a great deal about their own beliefs and those of their fellow democraticallyoriented citizens. Yet, it is unclear if Habermas accounts for the various forms of

25. Habermas, Faith and Knowledge, 114.26. Habermas, The Political: The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political

Theology, 26.27. Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing, 22.28. Habermas, What Is Meant by a Post-secular Society? A Discussion on Islam in Europe, 75. See

also his Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of Reason by Religiousand Secular Citizens, 13940.


democratic learning currently taking place. Part of the problem lies in his framingof post-secular public reasoning as a mutual-learning process between theists andnon-theists, in which the former have a much higher set of demands than the latter.Even sympathetic readers like Craig Calhoun admit that Habermas seems to placea heavier burden on theistic citizens then on non-theists.29

According to some theorists of deliberate democracy, contemporary demo-cratic civil societies should provisionally treat all citizens as equals. This means, asCharles Taylor aptly puts it, that public spheres cannot be overtly Christian orMuslim or Jewish, but by the same token it should also be neither Marxist norKantian nor Utilitarian.30 The state should be a locus for free-flowing discourseson values, identities, and common goods that arise from genuinely reciprocalposition-taking among all sections of the populace. Equally stringent demands ofcritical reflexivity should be made on all democratically oriented citizens (espe-cially those of a neo-liberal, Hobbesian, neo-Kantian, or other non-theistic variety),not just theistic ones.

Habermas counters Taylors point by claiming that because a democraticorder cannot simply be imposed on its authors, the constitutional state confronts itscitizens with the expectations of an ethics of citizenship that reaches beyond mereobedience to the law. Religious citizens and communities must do more thanmerely conform to the constitutional order in a superficial way. Like Rawls,Habermas maintains that citizens and communities must appropriate the secularlegitimation of constitutional principles under the premises of their own faith.31

Theists have to engage in a triple reflection. They must come to terms with theincommensurable faiths of other theists; they must recognize the authority ofscience and its monopoly on secular knowledge; and they must accept thepremises of a liberal democratic order grounded in a profane morality.32 Theistsmust split their identities up into private and public elements, and must translatetheir arguments into a non-theistic language before their arguments can be takenseriously.33 Non-theistic citizens simply need to open themselves to the possibilitythat religious citizens might have something important to say. Religious citizens,meanwhile, not only must recognize that non-theists might indeed be reasonable.They must also try to find, within their own faith, analogues to secular forms ofpolitical theorizing.34

29. Craig Calhoun, Secularism, Citizenship and the Public Sphere, in Rethinking Secularism, ed.Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (Oxford, Oxford University Press,2011), 83.

30. Charles Taylor, What Does Secularism Mean? in his Dilemmas and Connections (Cambridge, MA:Belknap Press, 2011), 321.

31. Habermas, What Is Meant by a Post-secular Society? A Discussion on Islam in Europe, 75.32. Habermas, Faith and Knowledge, 10405.33. Ibid., 10934. Ibid.

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At play here seems to be an implicit assumption by Habermas that faiths holdon a theistic citizen is much more problematic for public reasoning than are theforces in the mental topography of a non-believerbe the believer a neo-Kantian,a neo-liberal, or something else. But, Taylor responds,

how can you discriminate discourses on the basis of a deep psychologicalbackground? I could make another story about the psychological backgroundthat Kantians have and why they get excited by certain things which dontexcite me. But what has that got to do with the discourse out there? Can peoplenot understand it? Why discriminate on those grounds?35

According to Taylor, Habermasian post-secular public reasoning, far from promot-ing a form of public reasoning that promotes mutual perspective taking, seems tobe built upon a not quite defended inequality vis--vis the reasonableness of non-theistic versus theistic perspectives.

The asymmetrical demands that Habermas places on theistic citizens vis--visnon-theists brings to the fore the unjustified role played by secular reason (or reasonalone, as Taylor defines it) in Habermass account of post-secular public reasoning.According to Habermas, secular reasons do not expand the perspective of onesown community, but push for mutual perspective taking so that different commu-nities can develop a more inclusive perspective by transcending their own universeof discourse.36 Religious forms of reasoning can either come to the sameconclusions, which makes them superfluous, or can come to different conclusions,which makes them at best valid only for members of a given religious community.37

According to Taylor, underlying Habermass argument is a latent myth that theEnlightenments celebration of reason was an unmitigated cultural gain. Habermasappears to subscribe to a non-religious account of practical reason that resolvescertain moral-political issues in a manner that can legitimately satisfy any honest,unconfused thinker, and presumes that religiously based conclusions will alwaysbe dubious, and in the end only convincing to people who have already acceptedthe dogmas in question.38 Taylor finds the distinction between religious and non-religious discourses here to be utterly without foundation. It may turn out at the endof the day that religion is founded on illusion, and hence that what is derived from itis less credible. But until we actually reach that place, there is no a priori reason forgreater suspicion being directed at it.39

35. Jrgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, Dialogue: Jrgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, in ThePower of Religion in the Public Sphere, 63.

36. Ibid., 66.37. Habermas, Reply to My Critics, 384.38. Habermas, What Does Secularism Mean? 323.39. Charles Taylor, Why We Need a Radical Redefinition of Secularism, in The Power of Religion in

the Public Sphere, 53.


The problems of an unjustified asymetricality that Taylor detects belie threedeeper issues with Habermass framework: First, his theist versus non-theist frame-work is built upon Western historical origins. Second, accounting for the variousspiritual positions between Jerusalem and Athens (as well as from elsewhere) thatare expressed today in Western public spheres. Third, determining which beliefs canbe engaged in acts of post-secular public reasoning and which are not as malleableand are often implicitly invoked when engaging the former set.

With regard to the first issue: Habermas does not take into account thecontingent nature and historical origins of his post-secular optics. As works likeTaylors A Secular Age have documented, Western secularity (and the consequentneed to think through a post-secular orientation) arose from a series of historicalshifts that include the emergence of a disenchanted view of reality, exclusivelyhumanist moral codes, and, most importantly for Habermass concerns, theproliferation of universalizable codes of human behavior derived from the correctuse of reason. Two problems arise here. First, as scholars like Scott Appleby haveargued, this historical narrative itself gives rise to so-called fundamentalistmovements. To deliberate with members of such movements is to partly engagein a peculiarly modern discourse of public reason that engages some of theirconcerns over the complex and varied manners they articulate a loss of the sacredin contemporary public spheres. Even though these public spheres are nowunderstood through a rather historically contingent manner of understandingthem.40 Second, setting aside Habermass historically contingent framing of theproblem of religious life in a post-secular society, are there other questions thattheistic citizens might call on secularists to reflect on? 41 After all, why do manychoose not to travel down the Athenian path and, instead, think in religious terms?Are other non-secular frameworks in play today? And could some of the theisticframings be in certain respects more productive than secular reasoning? 42

40. R. Scott Appleby, Rethinking Fundamentalism in a Secular Age, in Rethinking Secularism,24344.

41. As MacIntyre points out, for theists like himself the main issue in contemporary secular discourseson religion is not the issue of Gods existence or nonexistence, but the contrast between His presence andHis absence, between those occasions when He manifests Himself in and through particulars and thosedark nights of the soul when He withdraws from us. To someone engaged in prayerful practice of thepresence of God the thought that perhaps God does not exist would be an idle thought, certainly not athought to be responded to by philosophical argument any more than the fanciful thought that somehuman friend whom one only hears from at long intervals has perhaps never existed. Alasdair MacIntyre,On Being a Theistic Philosopher in a Secularized Culture, Proceedings of the American CatholicPhilosophical Association 84 (2011): 2332.

42. Colin Jager, This Detail, This History: Charles Taylors Romanticism, in Varieties of Secularism in aSecular Age, ed. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 2010), 171.

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Consider the Muslim experience of European secularity, which partly motivatesHabermass work. Nilfur Gole, Talal Asad, and other scholars have shownthat European secularity and religious Islam increasingly have a symbiotic relation-ship.43 Some features of European secularity, such as the Kantian forms of autonomythat Habermas loves, become clearer through comparisons with practices ofreligious Islam.44 Intellectual creations, like a supposedly monolithic Arab identity,also play central roles in contemporary articulations of what it means to be a secularWesterner.45 To promote effective forms of public reasoning, post-secular publicreasoning needs to account for and critically engage these moments of mutualimbrication and, in the process, account for the divergent manners in which a post-secular Europe is experienced by groups like Islamic Westerners. Democraticallyoriented citizens of all ethical persuasions should at least be able to engage theabstract question of how a specific version of secularity is historically framed, as wellas the more concrete topics of how those who work through different optics engagecurrent European secularity. Many within contemporary public spheres in factengage such questions and issues, as they develop their own unique identities anddiscern previously un-thematized points for possible concord.

This last point draws our attention to a second area where more conceptualwork is needed. Habermass focus on mutual learning between devotees of Athensand devotees of Jerusalem neglects many spiritual positions within contemporarypolities. Part of the problem with Habermass dichotomy of believer versus non-believer is its failure to account for the myriad of spiritual positions today as well asthe many ways individuals can and do live between (in Habermass language)Athens and Jerusalem. Numerous ethical orientations either lie between Athensand Jerusalem or are external to both, and can and do play significant rolesin modern politics. Given the deeply diverse assortments of beliefs, balancingfreedom of thought (particularly for new religious immigrants) with equal respectfor ways of life that many belief systems might find objectionable becomes crucialif new arrivals are to see themselves as dignified members of their post-secularsocieties. Furthermore, the cultural terrain on which twenty-first-century politics

43. Nilfur Gole, The Civilizational, Spatial, and Sexual Powers of the Secular, in Varieties ofSecularism in a Secular Age, 246.

44. Asad shows how the contemporary liberal understanding of autonomy, which come from theChristian ethical tradition, sanctifies a markedly different political division of public and private realmsthan is found in Islamic states. The contemporary liberal state allows social workers, police, and others tointrude into the private realm in the name of individual rights, while permitting freedom of expression anddissent in the public realm. In the Islamic tradition, this is reversed: the private realm is private, butconformity in public space may be much stricter. Talal Asad, Free Speech, Blasphemy and SecularCriticism in Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech, ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, JudithButler, and Saba Mahmood (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 37.

45. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (London:Polity Press, 2013), 74.


operates provides many spiritual and anti-spiritual possibilities, which manypeople are increasingly open to sampling without having to commit to a singleone. Deliberatively democratic practices must involve learning how fellow citizensengage beliefs between and beyond the rather rigid theistic and non-theistic polesthat Habermas seems to work within.

Habermas also doesnt account for how thinkers like Taylor and MacIntyre,who have spent their life working between Athens and Jerusalem, actually practicepost-secular public reasoning. Habermas seems to presuppose a binary betweenphilosophy and religion, in which philosophy circumscribes but does notpenetrate the latters alien core. According to Habermas, democratic actors deeplyinformed by religious questions must evoke a social cognitive shift in attitude andthereby adopt the supposedly impartial perspective of a reasonable deliberator.46

This response ignores what profoundly theistic yet secular thinkers like MacIntyreand Taylor actually do. Certainly their philosophical work is deeply informed by theirtheistic commitments. Likewise, their faith-based practices draw sustenance fromtheir careers as professional philosophers. Contra Habermas, when these demo-cratic reasoners practice philosophy, it does not simply circumscribe the core oftheir religious experience. In many respects, their faith drives and frames theirpractice of philosophy.

From Taylors vantage point, positions like Habermass exemplify modernliberal philosophys exclusive focus on the horizontal dimension of ethicalthinking, on our moral relations with other humans, and modern liberal philoso-phys consequent marginalization of the vertical dimension of mans relationshipto some higher calling, purpose, or sense of order.47 Actions in the vertical openthe possibility that by rising higher, youll accede to a new horizontal space wherethe resolution will be less painful/damaging for both parties.48 Habermas, as hiscritique of Rawls indicates, is cognizant of the power of the vertical dimension ofethical thinking. Yet, he does not deploy this insight and conceptualize how achange of mentality among non-theists can occur, so as to allow the verticaldimension to occupy a more prominent place within post-secular publicreasoning.

This leads to the third area in which Habermass post-secular public reasoningneeds more clarification. In his discussions of post-secular democratic discourses,Habermas places a great deal of hope in the mutual learning of all participants.The question, though, is what can and cannot be learnt? What deeply held beliefs(if any) are foundational and not subject to change? What beliefs are moremalleable? Habermas tells us that non-theistic philosophers can learn from religion

46. Habermas, Reply to My Critics, 379.47. Charles Taylor, Perils of Moralism, in Dilemmas and Connections, 350.48. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 706.

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while keeping their distance and remaining agnostic.49 Philosophy has toomuch respect for the glowing embers, rekindled time and again by the issue oftheodicy, to offend religion.50 Post-secular public reasoning abandons therationalist presumption that reason alone can differentiate rational from non-rational elements of faith and, instead, insists on the difference between thecertainties of faith and publicly criticizable validity claims. Post-secular publicreasoning, furthermore, recognizes that the core of a given faith remainsas profoundly alien to discursive thought as the hermetic core of aestheticexperience, which likewise can be at best circumscribed, but not penetrated, byphilosophical reflection.51

This move by Habermas is a refreshingly honest though problematic, given hisstress on translatability. When encountering the public dictates of a secular polity,theists are often forced to work through their most fundamental positions. The non-theist, meanwhile, is never asked to think critically (in a manner that mightchallenge some of her most cherished beliefs) about some distinctly non-secularconcerns that theistic citizens bring to democratic politics. For example, the neo-liberal is seldom asked to justify why (to use Foucaults language) a homoeconomicus perspective on social relations and individual subjectivity shouldenjoy high standing within popular and some academic discussions of publicpolicy.52 For many theists (as well as some scholars like Habermas), the uncriticalacceptance of that perspective seems hardly justifiable.

Moreover, even though Habermas has attempted to engage some sojourners ontheir path to Jerusalem (like Pope Benedict XVI), his proposed translationexercises might simply be moments of assimilating a religious perspective into thatof secular citizens, instead of being acts that also involve critical reflection on theethical biases that frame a specific non-theistic viewpoint.53 Like undergraduatestudents who dismiss ideas from Plato or Aquinas simply because they seemforeign to the students contemporary historical milieu, the non-theist is onlycompelled to engage theistic iterations of viewpoints that he or she already holds.The non-theist does not need to think through how she or he could learn fromideas that might come from foreign metaphysical and ethical sources. Habermassdichotomous thinking blinds us to what it takes to change ourselves and, also,prevents us from seeing that today there can be vastly different modes of life (as say

49. Habermas, Faith and Knowledge, 113. See also his Religion in the Public Sphere: CognitivePresuppositions for the Public Use of Reason by Religious and Secular Citizens, 143.

50. Habermas, Faith and Knowledge, 113.51. Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the Public Use of Reason

by Religious and Secular Citizens, 143.52. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978-1979, trans.

Graham Burchell, ed. Michel Senellart (New York: Picador, 2008).53. Friedo Ricken, Postmetaphysical Reason and Religion in An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith

and Reason in a Post-secular Age, ed. Habermas, 57.


celibate priests and non-celibate believers) that are equally important and valid,equally essential.54

A related point, which many theists like Taylor and MacIntyre and non-theistslike Connolly are aware of, is the fragility of all faiths today. The large array ofdiverse and, on some level, incommensurable beliefsthat is, beliefs which areincapable of scoring an intellectual knock-out over the competitionin contem-porary polities not only calls forth the need for inclusive public reasoning, but alsomakes ones own fundamental commitments more fragile or uncertain. For theistslike Taylor, this fragility is central to the experience of their faith because thefragility brings forth a tension between the acknowledgment of the fallibility of thebelievers own faith and the extra-rational pull that faith has on any believer:

For what believer doesnt have the sense that her view of God is too simple, tooanthropocentric, and too indulgent? We all lie to some extent cowering underthe agnostic vetoes upon faith as something weak and shameful. On the otherside, the call to faith is still there as an understood temptation. Even if we thinkthat it no longer applies to us, we see it as drawing others. Otherwise the ethicsof belief would be incomprehensible.55

Habermas and many of those who are drawn to his work seem blind to this point.They are satisfied with becoming aware of the ethical motivations missing fromtheir manners of reasoning, but they do not work through the fragility of their corecommitments. In this respect, they often mirror more dogmatic theists. Both typesof thinkers build their world views on deprecatory stories about others, and thiscan reinforce blindness. For Taylor, MacIntyre, and many other theists, the failureto acknowledge the fragility of ones faith(s) is a missed opportunity to learn. Theopportunity can be regained only if those like Habermas are willing to engage insomething akin to the self-reflexive manners used by theists and some non-theists,like Connolly, who openly address their spiritually fragile condition.

A crucial task for Habermas and others who yearn to cultivate viable forms ofsolidarity is not only to point out the need today for mutual-learning processes, butto think about ways that mutual learning can get many but not all potential

54. Habermas, Perils of Moralism, 364.55. Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 2002), 57. MacIntyre points out that this dilemma can only be avoided at the cost ofliving either a divided life or a life in denial. As he puts it, theistic belief has a double aspect, at onceproblematic and unproblematic. As the former, it invites ruthless and systematic questioning. As the latter,it requires devoted and unquestioning obedience. Theists, who recognize one of these aspects of theism,but not the other, have an imperfect understanding of their own beliefs. Yet it seems impossible toacknowledge both aspects without tension and conflict. So theists have, it seems, a dilemma. Either theymust willfully ignore some aspect of their own beliefs or they must live as divided selves, agonizing overthe incompatible attitudes to which their beliefs give rise. Alasdair MacIntyre God, Philosophy,Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield,2009), 8.

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participants a little out of their comfort zones. I say many because I assume thatunabashed fundamentalists and those who see their ethical orientation as a priorigiving them privileged access to the truth (be they Marxists, neo-liberals, Hobbesians,neo-Kantians, or what not) will not partake of such deliberative exercises. Instead,they frequently will view others with different orientations as Schmittian-styleenemies rather than as individuals with whom reciprocity could occur. Moreover,as Peter Levine notes, many people find the latter, absolutist-style of politics morereassuring.56 A democratic politics of public reasoning can feel too uncomfortablefor some, and such individuals would, instead, prefer to associate with citizens whothink like themselves, rather than engage with and learn from others.

However, as Taylor, MacIntyre, Connolly, moderate theists like Luke Bretherton,and democratic thinkers like Levine point out, many humans today hold ethicsand embrace faiths in a manner that is less absolutist, and such believers can bepersuaded to partake of the not-so-comfortable democratic practices of publicreasoning. This population includes many with an affinity for neo-liberal andHobbesian/Schmittian orientations to politics. Often, many of those who are notabsolutist (either in their faiths about markets or in their love for a strongsovereign) can be opened to at least thinking about their collective existence in amore democratic manner. This can sometimes be seen during the rebuilding ofcities, such as post-Katrina New Orleans, in which market rationality is notnecessarily the most efficient starting point for thinking about how to rebuild acommunity. Likewise, there are often cases of public safety, where a politics ofmutual solidarity building with those whom one potentially views as enemiesmight be more pragmatic than a Hobbesian/Schmittian approach of simplyexposing those one does not like to the forces of the state.

How, though, to engage in such processes? How to entice people to problema-tize one set of prejudices (such as either a love of the market or a Schmittianorientation towards different groups) while holding onto others? An awareness ofwhat Taylor calls the vertical dimension of ethical reasoning offers a good startingpoint. Likewise, what Habermas calls a post-conventional level of discourse cancompel subjects to distinguish between what is from what is not necessary to theirfaith and to the identity that it generates.

The ideal of a post-conventional discourse is both chimerical and distorting,however. It is chimerical in that one always reasons from somewhere, from sometradition of practical and public reasoning that circumvents much of what can beput up for critique and discussion. The ideal is distorting in that many insightfulthinkers, like Taylor and MacIntyre, draw sustenance from their ability to bedistinctly non-post-conventional. They reason through the ethical premises that are

56. Peter Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013),101.


central to the theistic traditions from which they draw sustenance, rather thanvainly reasoning apart from those traditions.

This brief outline of a set of tasks confronting Habermass model points to theneed to make post-secular public reasoning more cognizant than it already is of thecontingent, ambiguous, yet interdependent features of the pluralistic terrain uponwhich it attempts to conceptualize mutual-learning processes that can generate thepartial and incomplete forms of solidarity that a global domestic politics requiresfor its initial development. Today, a wide range of divergent and interconnectedcultural and ethical sources informs the on-the-ground practice of deliberativedemocracy (or as Habermasians prefer to say, communicative reason). Many ofthese sources draw from either Athens or Jerusalem; some draw from other points.These cultural and ethical sources offer different readings of history and differentframes through which actors who are sincerely committed to democratic delibera-tion can practice democracy. Political theorists who wish to conceptualize theseactivities need to be aware of the large number of democratically orientedindividuals who reason through and modify some of their cherished beliefs (evenas they hold on to others). Such individuals attempt to learn from others byreasoning through differing and on some level incommensurable beliefs. Politicaltheorists need to comprehend, in other words, how individuals reason through(rather than reason independently or in abstraction from) baggage.

Reasoning through Baggage

When I speak of reasoning through baggage, I am referring to wrestling with atension, in which the political deliberatorbe it a fellow citizen, judge, activist, ora political theoristis at once above the fray and is attempting to generate the bestaccount of reality, yet comes from an ethically or politically biased position.Paradoxically, this position prompts the deliberator to defend it, even though thedeliberator is frequently unaware of the constraints that the position places on thedeliberators efforts at defense.

Reasoning through baggage thus combines two notions. We reason through ourbaggage in an ontological sense whenever we attempt to diagnose how ourbaggage framesfor example, how we reason, how we articulate the claims ofothers, how our language shapes what we recognize about and in others, whatends we advance, and what ends we do not even consider. We also reasonthrough baggage in a moral sense whenever we attempt to deliberate sincerelywith others and try to tell truths about ourselves and about the standpoint fromwhich we reason (while appreciating the fact that we can never do so in acompletely free manner).

A large and eclectic array of thinkersfrom those firmly outside theliberal tradition of political theory to those somewhat within ithave devoted

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considerable efforts towards conceptualizing alternative manners of reasoningthrough baggage and have produced a plethora of often conflicting recommenda-tions. These include hermeneutical forms of self-understanding (such as Taylorsdoctrine of strong evaluation), Aristotelian models of practical reasoning (likeMacIntyres tradition constituted inquiry), various models of representative think-ing inspired by Kants Critique of Judgment, and Parrhesiastic attempts at proble-matizing who we are and what we have become.

Despite their profound differences, these recommendations share some com-mon features. All point to the centrality of truth to public reason and question nottruth per se but how participants articulate the truth claims that they seek toadvance. All of these versions of reasoning through baggage compel individuals tomake contingent (or at least problematize) many of their beliefs that they took tobe foundational, and encourage participants to think through how such adiscourse might be framed otherwise. For example, why should certain culturalforces (like the market-oriented directives of neo-liberalism) and certain specificviewpoints prevail and predominate in many public policy disputes in the UnitedStates today? All of these methods of reasoning through baggage also providedynamic means of engaging a wide variety of voices. One asks oneself andfellow democratic deliberators to identify the comprehensive visions and the othersocial, historical, and/or culturally generated baggage that they bring with them toacts of public reasoning. Talking in this way allows individuals to take a morecritical and responsible approach to their views, and compels individuals, who areexpected to give good reasons in support of their views, to be accountable for theirvisions.57 More specifically, participants must discuss how particular elements oftheir ethical visions shape the moral parameters through which they deliberatewith others, and must provide arguments for how they and how others might learnfrom adopting what to them might initially appear to be an unduly limited moralhorizon. They must show why the holds that particular social forces have on agiven participant can (or cannot) be taken to be legitimate. Each participant mustask how and to what extent the other deliberators should tolerate the optics, aswell as the parameters for engagement that the optics place on the participant. Incompelling interlocutors to speak as best they can the truth of themselves,reasoning through baggage thus opens them to potential sources of learning aboutthemselves and others.

By seeing the interrelationships between the truths that a participant speaks andthe constitution of the self that engages through the process of truth telling,individuals better appreciate the contingent natures of who they and their fellowinterlocutors are and what each has become. This allows us, as Foucault hadhoped, to loosen and strengthen the holds certain practices have on our individual

57. Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 30.


identities.58 Reasoning through baggage can also allow for both a strengtheningand loosening of allegiances to certain moral and ethical truth claims advanced byoneself and others. It thereby opens oneself and others up to the possibility offinding new and not-so-predictable points of accord. As a result, post-secularpublic reasoning becomes the mutual-learning enterprise that Habermas yearnsfor, as it becomes more contestable and multifaceted. Through the process ofcritically reflecting on practices of truth telling, participants, who momentarilytransgress the boundaries of their perceived moral horizons, open themselves toideas and ethical sources previously considered off limits. At the same time, theyrespond critically to other moral horizons and thereby develop the potential to putforth new contestable arguments that force others to re-appraise their own moraland ethical allegiances, even as the participants strengthen their commitments toother moral and ethical directives. As a result, deliberation is based on engage-ment with comprehensive visions rather than on elisions of such visions.

Athenian-oriented deliberators, in opening themselves to the possibility offinding other powerful ethical sources of moral motivation and other manners ofconceptualizing the normative terrain upon which they are deliberating, engage inpossibly more sincere forms of democratic deliberation with theistic citizens,including those who take their ethical bearings from somewhere between Athensand Jerusalem as well as elsewhere.Many (but not all) citizens can then potentiallylearn from each other as they think, as best they can, through the contestable fromthe non-contestable (or, the not-so-fundamental from the fundamental) features oftheir beliefs. Sincere attempts at mutual learning in the eyes of their fellow citizenscan go a long way towards creating the respect and trust necessary for a commonendeavor of democratic self-governance, which draws on ethical traditions flowingfrom Athens, Jerusalem, and elsewhere. This can, in turn, facilitate moments ofdeliberation in which many individuals, gaining a greater awareness of themalleability of previously considered bedrock beliefs through a comparison withother foundational beliefs, can reach novel points of concord with their fellowdeliberators, and can thereby cultivate those slender moments of solidarity amongdemocratically oriented individuals that post-secularist public reasoning waspartially tasked with producing.

By way of example, consider Jeffrey Stouts Blessed Are the Organized and theseveral experiences of reasoning through baggage that his writing describes. Theseinclude activities synonymous with what Connolly calls critical responsiveness.They also include actions that exemplify Taylors work on understanding thepartiality of ones own ethical vision and on coming to understand the voices ofothers.

58. Michel Foucault, What Is Enlightenment? trans. Catherine Porter [1984]; reprinted in PaulRabinow, The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 4849.

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Cultivating Solidary on the Ground

Habermas admits that the prospects of generating the forms of solidarity amongprogressive actors, which are needed to promote a larger global social movementthat can inspire the development of institutions and procedures of a democratizedglobal order or pacified global domestic politics, are bleak at best.59 Many findit hard to argue with Habermas here. However, twenty-first-century democraticpolitics is not completely hopeless. In fact many vibrant grassroots democraticorganizations exist that can generate the slender forms of solidarity needed to forgealternatives to not-so-democratic local practices of governance. Stouts Blessed Arethe Organized chronicles a number of such entities.

Stout focuses on IAF (Industrial Areas Foundation) groups in New Orleans, theRio Grande Valley, and Southern and Northern California. Many commentatorshave argued that today democratic politics seems under threat in these places,60

yet IAF citizen organizations have successfully promoted grassroots democracyamong the disadvantaged and vulnerable. Many of these IAF organizations drawinspiration from the life and writings of Saul Alinsky, who saw the complete man asdevoted both to the promotion of social welfare and to practices that makecollective life meaningful, and who took the denial of political participation as adenial of both human dignity and democracy. 61

Religious groups, such as local Catholic churches, constitute the cornerstoneof these IAF organizations. IAF activists include Opus Dei priests and otherCatholics who espouse beliefs on issues like abortion that folks like Stout do notshare, and whose framing of the theist/non-theist divide diverges from that ofHabermas. The activists build coalitions, such as COPS in San Antonio, Texas,which often include secular activists, Jewish groups, and members of Protestantchurches.62

Stouts stories are interesting partly because the activists encourage practices ofreasoning through baggage. Of course, these IAF groups are eliciting relativelylocal forms of solidarity, in comparison to the global ones that Habermas consi-ders essential for his global domestic politics. Nevertheless, Stout describes howpractices of post-secular public reasoning not only hold power holders accoun-table, but generate solidarity among citizens.63 The moments of democraticactivism that Stout chronicles therefore can be read as iterations of broader lessonsthat actors in other contexts can use.

59. Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing, 74. See also his Reply to My Critics, 355.60. Luke Bretherton, Christianity & Contemporary Politics (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 216.61. Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Vintage Press,

1989), 123. Taken from Christianity & Contemporary Politics, 73.62. Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 127.63. Jeffrey Stout, Blessed Are the Organized (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 290.


One of these lessons involves the virtues of shared work. According to Levine,deliberation is most valuable when it is connected to work and work isespecially valuable when it is collaborative: when people make things of publicvalue together.64 IAF actors and the citizens they organize attempt to create newmeans of holding those in power accountable. In doing so, the activists try toenhance the capacities of ordinary citizens to deliberate, to conceptualize, and torespond collectively to common malaises, even as they problematize or justifyspecific power relationships and laws.65 In the course of promoting accountability,IAF organizers try to help citizens cultivate civic relationships with each other,which are non-exclusive and predicated on the value of the other person as afellow citizen, seen as someone who should be encouraged to participate in thecommon life.66

Contra Habermas, the actors whom Stout describes promote not an impersonaldemocratic process, but very personal democratic experiences fuelled by pas-sion.67 Organizers plan intimate one-on-one conversations, neighborhood walks,and house meetings, as well as broader assemblies of diverse constituencies.68

All of these activities illustrate an under-resourced and under-appreciated genre ofpolitics that Levine has called open-ended politics.69 Open-ended politics have nopredetermined goals. Instead, citizens decide what to do as they work together.70

Hence, they might arrive at neo-liberal or Hobbesian/Schmittian goals. What isimportant, however, is how public reasoning between the participants transpires.

According to Stout, many IAF actors integrate concepts of sacred value andhuman dignity into public defenses of those most vulnerable to oppression byeconomic and statist forces.71 Collective activities are fraught with incommensur-ability and disagreement because sacred value is a highly contested term amongtheists as well as between theists, non-theists, and those betwixt and between thesepolarities. The not-so-malleable beliefs that participants bring to their grassrootsactivities always limit public reasoning. Ethical disputes revolve around suchpractical questions as what symbolic rituals, if any, should be used; what publicbehavior should be prohibited; and who should enforce said prohibitions?72

To cultivate the bonds of solidarity and gain the trust of those they seek torepresent, IAF activists reflect on how they engage with the concerns of constitu-ents, from what moral presumptions are the activists coming, and how the activists

64. Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 14.65. Ibid.66. Ibid., 56.67. Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 218.68. Ibid., 44.69. Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 83.70. Ibid., 14.71. Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 225.72. Ibid., 223.

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might mitigate the problem of their own distorted understandings of their presentand future representees. Stout explicitly alludes to the first type of practice ofreasoning through baggage but not the second or third.

Like Habermas, Stout believes that when ameliorating sacred disputes, peoplecannot reasonably take for granted a single conception of sacred value, whenconversing or debating with one another. The discussion does not proceed from aconsensus on sacred value, but it does give expression to multiple, contestedconceptions of sacred value.73 IAF activists are fully aware that the public sphereswithin which they work within are (as, Luke Bretherton among others points outmore forcefully than does Habermas) sites for multiple and conflicting under-standings of living ethically in modern times.74 IAF organizers have thereforelearned that the core beliefs of actual individuals must be the starting point foropen-ended democratic deliberations about social justice and public account-ability. Deliberation alongside those who hold conflicting accounts of the sacredcan generate experiences of public reasoning in which individuals criticallyexamine parts of their acculturated beliefs and values but only while takingothers, for the moment, as the default starting point of our questioning.75 Bycompelling interlocutors to speak as best they can the truth of themselves and toreason as sincerely as possible through parts of their baggage, IAF activists allowinterlocutors to open themselves up to new and unexpected potential sources oflearning about themselves and others. These moments of learning throughengagement with deep ethical diversity can generate moments of deliberation thatmany of those affected by the outcome will regard as legitimate because their mostsignificant concerns and sources of identity have been given a fair hearing. Due tothe relative fairness of the proceedings, IAF activists not only can obtain a sense ofsomebodys interests but also can challenge participants to think constructivelyabout the situation (that is, to see the contingent, arbitrary features of it), totranscend bitterness, and to produce constructive power76 so that they and some oftheir perceived oppressors can more amenably participate in a more just politicalarrangement.77

What Stout calls critical thinking could be re-labeled critically responsivethinking because it involves what Connolly calls critical responsivenessor, amanner of critical engagement in which rival viewpoints are scrutinized even assome positions are taken as fundamental starting points. More specifically, incritical responsiveness, participants in a discussion open themselves to new ethicalorientations, social movements, and identities in a manner that critically engages

73. Ibid., 224.74. Bretherton, Christianity & Contemporary Politics, 15.75. Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 14776. Ibid., 206. See also Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 167.77. Bretherton, Christianity & Contemporary Politics, 79.


them and does not simply tolerate them, on the one hand, or accommodates themonly to the degree that they conform to ones own moral horizon, on the other.Critical responsiveness entails altering ones recognition of difference, whichmeans revising ones own terms of self-recognition as one goes about recognizingothers. A critically responsive agent does not reduce the other to what some wealready is. Rather, through their critical engagement with an other they seek toopen up cultural space through which the other might consolidate itself intosomething that is unafflicted by negative cultural markings.78

Critical responsiveness resembles what Arendt calls thinking without banis-ters. There are no fixed procedures for opening oneself to and then criticallyevaluating the viewpoints of not quite consolidated identities.79 How and to whatdegree one is critically responsive can never be determined a priori by some fixedanalytical, transcendental or theistically informed criteria.80 Critical responsivenessinvokes something like a conversion experience on the part of all who practice it.According to Stout, participants, through their critical receptivity of others,experience a self-perceived awakening of their identity, their powers of percep-tion, their judgment, and often their faith.81 Because critical responsivenessinvolves determining what beliefs can be called into question and modified inresponse to demands from other beliefs, critical responsiveness brings about apolitics of becoming. Unexpected points of solidarity emerge through and within apolitical discussion and become a new basis upon which diverse assemblages ofdemocratically oriented actors can organize so as to influence and contest thedecisions of not-so-democratically responsive power holders.82

By seeing the interrelationships between the truths that one speaks and theconstitution of the self that engages in critically responsive thinking, individualscan better appreciate the malleable yet coherent identities of themselves and oftheir fellow interlocutors. This can allow for both a strengthening and loosening ofallegiances to certain moral and ethical truth claims advanced by oneself andothers. Critical responsive thinking can thus open oneself and others to thepossibility of finding not-so-predictable points of accord.

As Levines research points out, individuals are often capable of such discoverywhen they engage in deliberate forms of civic action.83 In the case of Stouts IAFgroups, because they valued both their bridge-building efforts and their capacityto learn from their interactions with others, their understanding of themselves as a

78. William E. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xvii.79. Hannah Arendt, On Hannah Arendt, in Hannah Arendt, the Recovery of the Public World, ed.

Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martins Press, 1979), 336.80. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 27.81. Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 162. See also William E. Connolly, The Augustinian Imperative

( Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Press, 1993), 56.82. Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 128.83. Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 7.

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group was flexible without being entirely amorphous. The participants under-standings of what they value and of the truths they try to speak change over timein response to the groups interactions with other groups including both the havesand the have-nots.84 Moreover, a leaders engagement in critically responsivethinking often is central to the leaders later decision to open the political processto concerns that are deeper and broader than a preference for a slightly higherwage or a slightly lower tax rate.85

However, critically responsive thinking is fraught with risk and can produceoutcomes that might be counter-progressive. Chauvinistic self-understandingsmight promote fragmentation rather than meaningful solidarity. Stout reports thatIAF activists, to mitigate this risk, pursue two other forms of awareness, two otherforms of reasoning, which resemble the sorts of reasoning through baggage that layat the heart of Taylors work. First, the activists try to understand how and whycertain beliefs have such strong holds on participants and the ethical partiality thatfollows. Second, the activists try to comprehend the ethical prisms through whichothers deliberate, and how they then comprehend our deepest ethical concerns.

The first task is vividly exemplified by the following dilemma that Taylorarticulates and that many of Stouts IAF organizers acknowledge.

Im a Catholic Christian with a strong theistic outlook, and although I recognizethat its pretty clear that when you come from somewhere you get certain ideasthat you dont when you come from somewhere elsein that sense my workreflects my standpointI nevertheless think that we can and ought to reasonwith each other . That means that I have a double stance to what I write, onthe one hand Im offering a description I think other people from otherstandpoints ought to accept, on the other hand, I evaluate the whole thing in acertain way too. So I think that there is an important loss here.86

The loss to which Taylor refers involves the following aporia. When describingthe modern social imaginary, Taylor offers not only a self-consciously partial viewof that social imaginary and of the moral conflicts that transpire under it. He also,by invoking values from the set of theistic competitors in which Taylors work isembedded, implicitly introduces a question-begging criterion for determining asuccessful resolution of the conflicts.

For our purposes, Taylors self-understanding of this aporia is quite helpful as itdramatizes both the limits to mutual learning and the enduring partiality of anycritically reflective position. Taylor concedes that his writings, like Sources of theSelf and A Secular Age lay out,

84. Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 130.85. Ibid., 12886. Charles Taylor, Taylor Made Selves, Interview by Alex Klaushofer, The Philosophers Magazine 12

(2000), 38.


unashamedly, a master narrative. The adverb bespeaks the view I hold, that wecant avoid such narratives. The attempt to escape them only means that wecant operate by an unacknowledged, hence unexamined and uncriticized,narrative. Thats because we (modern Westerners) cant help understandingourselves in these terms.87

According to Taylor, what is important about the narrative is its hold on thosesubjects living under the social imaginary whose growth the narrative charts.Taylor, well aware of the partiality and the selective genealogy that underlie hisframing of our secular age, pleads with all of us to finally put our ontologies whereour (rhetorical) mouths are.88 This is especially pertinent for critically mindedsecular thinkers like Habermas who, after constructing their own ambitiousmaster narrative, argue from it during their acts of public reasoning. Criticallyminded secular thinkers seldom spend much time thinking about how others, whopublically reason in light of different master narratives, might respond to thesecular theorists world views.

Taylor challenges those who have the courage to become at least cognizant oftheir narratives to think about how their narratives affect their receptivity to andengagement with other public reasoners who wish to frame moral and ontologicaldiscussions quite differently. He also encourages individuals to appreciate theobstacles to telling non-deprecatory stories about the alterative perspectives ofones fellow interlocutors, and to opening ones self to the many diverse ethicalorientations at play in contemporary public spheres today. Finally, Taylorscomments on his own narrative suggest how ones understanding of others canbecome more nuanced and enable the rise of a discourse in which others can feelrespected and as partners in a solidarity-generating discussion oriented towardsmutual understanding.

Awareness of the roles that other master narratives play in the lives of otherdemocratic citizens can help deliberators better engage in critically responsivethinking. They become more appreciative of the contingency of their ownperspective. This opens them up to the possibility that views derived fromheretofore un-consulted ethical sources and epistemological orientations mighthave merit. This openness is necessary for the change in orientation thatHabermasian mutual learning seeks and that Stouts reports describe.

However, the actual practice of critically responsive thinking brings to the fore athird form of awareness that IAF activists used and that Taylors illustration ofreasoning through baggage entails: awareness of others. Taylor notes that thechallenge of understanding the other comes

87. Charles Taylor, Afterword: Apologia pro Libro suo, in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age,300.

88. Charles Taylor, Reply to Baybrooke and DeSousa, Dialogue 33 (1994), 131.

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not from their place within our identity, but precisely from their challenge to it.They present us with different and often disconcerting ways of being human.The challenge is to be able to acknowledge the humanity of their way, whilestill being able to live ours.89

This problem arises because citizens, whenever trying to comprehend the ethicalvantage points of other citizens, always draw on unquestioned cultural prejudicesabout what it is to be human and what it means to lead a good life, even as thecitizens attempt to reflect critically upon these same prejudices.90 The more wethink we have sidelined it or neutralized it, as in the natural-science model, themore it works unconsciously and hence all the more powerfully to ethnocentriceffect. 91 The other, as many who have been on the less powerful side ofEuropean colonialism know quite well, is often been understood in a vocabularyincommensurable with its own descriptors. This creates the problem of distortedunderstanding.92 Habermas, as his comments on philosophys inability to pene-trate the opaque core of religion reveal, is well aware of this point. Yet he isperhaps too cautious because of it.

Distorted understanding is an intractable problem because reason itselfimposes certain demands upon us. When arguing with others (and also whenothers press claims of distorted understandings upon us), we always claim thereasonableness of our mode of argumentation. We cant treat the distinctionreasonable/less reasonable as a nonhierarchical one, because it defines how weought to think.93 We can, however, distinguish between better and worse socialpractices in various cultures and faiths, just as we can see how historical narratives(like the rise of secularism) can reflect moments of loss as well as moments ofprogress.94 In other words, we should be able to think about the conflicts betweenthe requirements of incompatible cultures on analogy to the way we think aboutconflicts between nonjointly realizable goods in our lives.95 By generating abroader understanding of both ourselves and others, we can learn what aspectsof our selves are amenable to change and reconciliation with others and whataspects are not. For Taylor, this is what the Habermasian style of mutual learning isprimarily about. It is also what Stouts organizers, when creating grassrootscollectives out of a diverse populace, cultivate.

89. Charles Taylor, Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View of Conceptual Schemes, inGadamers Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald and JensKertsche (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 296.

90. Ibid., 284.91. Charles Taylor, Comparison, History, Truth, in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1995), 150.92. Taylor, Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View of Conceptual Schemes, 295.93. Taylor, Comparison, History, Truth, 156.94. Charles Taylor, The Future of the Religious Past, in Dilemmas and Connections, 286.95. Taylor, Comparison, History, Truth, 162.


The crucial step is comparison. Understanding of others is always comparative,because we perceive many differences between ourselves and others prior to thedevising of any language of qualitative contrasts.96 The most effective contrastsare ones that simply let the other be. For Stouts activists, the key means of lettingthe other be for Stouts actors is listening. Through listening we learn from others,and as others listen to us, we come to identify with the larger work of faithfulpolitical action.97

Listening itself cannot be done passively and from a distance, however. Rather,as IAF organizers are well aware, it requires active involvement and commitmentto a particular place and the formation of relationships in that place becausebuilding trusting and stable relationships takes time and personal presence.98

Letting the other be through listening to them involves a good deal of micro-levelwork on ourselves. We try to discern how our implicit understandings of othersdistort how we perceive their realities.99 This only happens by allowing ourselvesto be challenged by what is different in the lives of other people, and acknowl-edging what we have to let be in order to let them be.

Listening effectively can yield two interdependent moments of clarity. First, wecan see our own particularity when we see how features of our self are, for others,culturally unique and not indicative of some general human nature. Second, inbecoming aware of the partiality of our own perspective, we can perceive thecorresponding attribute of the other in a less distorted manner.100 The activists thatStout describes achieve something similar by repeatedly participating in one-on-one meetings with potential recruits and employing active listening. Through suchdialogues, IAF organizers reportedly are compelled to build an awareness of wherethey and their potential recruits are ethically coming from. They must do this todevelop the trust needed to speak for new voices during a political struggle.

For Habermas, moderate theists achieve this second sense of clarity when theypartake of post-secular public reason and confront the partiality of their perspec-tive via devices like his translation proviso (or Rawls own proviso), and realize thatthey live in a secular world in which their perspective is in some respects non-majoritarian. Clarity is more elusive for non-theists who dont have the burden of atranslation proviso and for whom learning is synonymous with an evolutionarysocial theory. They often find it hard to see the singularity and historicalcontingency of their world views unless, like Taylor, they reflect critically on the

96. Ibid., 152.97. Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 3942.98. Ibid., 215.99. As Taylor nicely puts it, If understanding the other is to be construed as fusion of horizons and not

as possessing a science of the object, then the slogan might be: no understanding the other without achanged understanding of self. Charles Taylor, Remembering Gadamer, IWM Newsletter 76 (2002), 13.

100. Ibid., 12.

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historical and cultural forces that have made their social imaginary what it is.Non-theists easily find themselves as the frequent criticism of Rawls remindsusplagued by the problem of always attempting to understand the theist in avocabulary that is foreign to the theist and, therefore, of fundamentally misrecog-nizing the theistic perspective.

To use Habermass language, these processes of other-understanding provideparticipants with a discourse oriented towards mutual understanding, never-theless. This enhances their self-understanding of the values and norms by whichthey critique others, and also helps participants determine (and then appropriate)what is of worth in other cultures. Participants expand their own contexts ofchoice, as well as transform the perspectives through which they will thenencounter future others. Without sincere attempts at hermeneutic experiences,the gaps in intuition will grow; and those individuals and groups who are adverselyaffected by acts of public reasoning will increasingly view the acts as exclusionary.They will view public reasoning as fragmenting, rather than as the solidarity-building exercises that Habermas yearns for. (Stout alludes to this problem in hisdescription of how a coalition can fall apart when leaders lose touch with theethical prisms through which constituents develop their specific politicalconcerns.)101

One, however, can never definitively say that he or she is truly encountering thevoice of the other, even when one conscientiously practices critical receptivity.102

No method exists for determining whether a new perspective has been acquiredand new truths grasped. One, after all, might be expressing previous biases,prejudices, and the like in a different manner, rather than actually cultivating anexpanded horizon or an enlarged mentality. All one can do, Taylor reasons, isapply further doses of the same medicine . Of course, in each case, somethingis gained; some narrowness is overcome. But this still leaves other narrowness-esstill un-overcome.103

In other words, one must pursue reasoning through baggage further and moredeeply. This can include micro-techniques, such as what Connolly refers to asdwelling, which involves comprehension of how we experience epiphanticmoments, as well as bicameralist thinking, which involves comprehension ofhow we, as critically responsive thinkers, simultaneously activate the side of ourself that is aware of and receptive to diverse perspectives as well as the side that iscommitted to advocating for our most cherished beliefs.104 Many of the IAFactivists that Stout describes similarly subscribe to a Christian version of time,which is open to epiphanic moments of redemption and is built around bearing

101. Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 101.102. Taylor, Comparison, History, Truth, 57.103. Taylor, Comparison, History, Truth, 15051.104. William E Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).


witness to ones deepest ethical commitments. As Luke Bretheron notes, thisunderstanding undergrids the possibility of meaningful participation not only inpolitics, but also in the family and in work as activities open to the fulfillment oftime in Christ and so having significance beyond the immediate needs andvicissitudes of the moment.105

In addition, IAF organizers periodically alter the formats of group deliberationsand the rituals that are use. The organizers thereby re-arrange the implicit powerstructures within actual meetings and provide diverse venues through whichordinary citizens can denounce elite dominance,106 tell stories about their lives,107

articulate their concerns,108 and listen to the concerns of others. Meanwhile, theorganizers, by empathetically listening to citizens stories in person, acquire abetter understanding of the importance and meaning of specific concerns for agiven storyteller.109 According to Stout, IAF activists could thereby reflect upontheir own understandings of the needs or truth claims of those they represent andlearn how to speak the plain truth about how things were going, but also how todo so without being cruel or trying to score points.110 In Stouts opinion, theactivists needed to learn how to hear criticism of their own weaknesses111 fromconstituents who believed that that their truth claims were being ignored.

Conclusion

Post-secular public reasoning does transpire today. Contra Habermas, it is a highlypersonal activity. By partaking in critically responsive thinking, by becoming awareof the larger ethical visions upon which they unavoidably draw, and by developingtheir own micro-techniques, IAF activists offer examples of post-secular publicreasoning today. The activists show that reasoning through baggage does effec-tively promote mutual learning activities, cultivate bonds of democratic solidarityamong highly diverse assemblages of contemporary democratic actors, andproblematizes and sometimes justifies forms of public power.

If a global domestic politics, as envisioned by Habermas, is to emerge, it will doso through the convergence of various efforts by activists who have found novelways to speak to broader constituencies. Reasoning through baggage will enableactivists to engage with people who hold ever more diverse epistemological and

105. Bretherton, Christianity & Contemporary Politics, 198.106. Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 120.107. Ibid., 151.108. Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, 125.109. Ibid., 162110. Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, 129.111. Ibid.

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ethical orientations and, thereby, to find previously unchartered but now compel-ling points of concord.

A key democratic challenge today, as Stout notes, is to construct effectivepublics of accountability for every existing or emerging power holder, rangingfrom the sheriff of a small town to the CEO of a company with workers,stockholders, and effects all over the world. That includes local, state, and nationalgovernments, but is hardly limited to them.112 A successful response to thischallenge will entail practices of reasoning though baggage. Because deliberativepublics are informed by a variety of ethical sources, it is incumbent on participantsto critically respond to the value orientations of other deliberators. This partlyinvolves reflection on what is and isnt a foundational feature of ones own ethicaloptics. Such reflection will contribute to the formation of a larger public that canengage in effective moments of calling power to account.

Connolly correctly notes that political theorists, as students of society, need toprovoke their own creative micro-practices of thinking and to appreciate how newethical orientations and new points of solidarity can emerge in the minds ofpolitical actors.113 Given the numerous spiritual positions at play in contemporarylife, any moments of solidarity and any norms of accountability that deliberativepublics can foster will always be fragile. We must learn to embrace pluralism, tolive with incommensurability, and to learn from others. Then the profoundmoments of overlapping consensus, which thinkers like Rawls and Habermasyearn to cultivate, can develop, fragile though they may be.

In this paper, I have sketched some possible conceptualizations for solidarity-building acts of democratic deliberation that can speak to many citizens. Reason-ing through baggage and cultivating an awareness of ones partiality can playcomplementary roles in refining not only Habermasian post-secularity, but manyother strands of early twenty-first-century liberal democratic theory. Reasoningthrough baggage can help to keep liberal democratic theory relevant in an age inwhich many of its foundational beliefs increasingly seem provincial and chime-rical to actors both within and outside Western polities. The challenge is to do so inmanners that engage not only those drawn from Athens and Jerusalem, but alsothose whose ethical orientations lie both between and beyond these poles.

Mark Redhead is an Associate Professor of Political Thought at California StateUniversity, Fullerton. He specializes in contemporary political thought as well asnineteenth/ twentieth-century political theory. He has published a book-length studyof Charles Taylor as well as a longer study of reasoning through baggage entitled

112. Ibid., 258.113. William E. Connolly, Biology, Politics, Creativity, Perspectives on Politics 11 (June 2013): 510.


Reasoning with Who We Are: Democratic Theory for a Not So Liberal Era(Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). His work has been published in a variety of outletsincluding Philosophy and Social Criticism, American Journal of Political Science,Review of Politics, Journal of Political Philosophy, and the Canadian Journal ofPolitical Science. The author may be reached at [email protected]

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Reasoning between Athens and JerusalemCultivating Post-Secular Bonds of SolidarityWhat Forms of Post-Secular Learning Are Actually Happening Today?Reasoning through BaggageCultivating Solidary on the GroundConclusionA6

Reasoning Between Athens and Jerusalem_Mark Redhead

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