Ludwig Nagl

Encounters with and impulses from Charles Taylor

Among the more prominent contemporary philosophers I have known personally and repeatedly reference in my own work (Stanley Cavell, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor and Hilary Putnam), Charles Taylor was decisive to my own attempts to contribute to the differentiation of contemporary religious-philosophical discourse. When we first met at a workshop led by Jürgen Habermas at the Inter-UniversityCenter in Dubrovnik in the late 1970s, “Philosophy and Social Sciences,” I was, of course, unaware that Taylor was about to engage in extensive research on religious questions. We spent lunch discussing the merits and limitations of Habermasian theory, particularly with regard to certain intellectual impulses (not entirely acknowledged by Habermas), which can be derived from Hegel’s work for the present day. I was intrigued by Taylor’s argument that “in so far as this search for a situated subjectivity takes philosophical form, Hegel’s thought will be one of its indispensable points of reference.” One outcome of this initial contact was a presentation on “Charles Taylor’s Hegelian critique of ‘mainstream analytical philosophy’,” which I delivered at the 3rd Congress of the Societas Hegeliana at the Université de Paris X-Nanterre in 1988. This talk dealt with the question of how Taylor’s “qualitative concept of action” could be positioned against misappropriations thereof in the Davidsonian “theory of action” and in “artificial intelligence theory.” While participating in the annual meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association on Prince Edward Island in the early 1990s, I became aware of the book The Malaise of Modernity – Taylor’s Massey Lectures, soon republished by Harvard under the title The Ethics of Authenticity. I managed to finish the book in a single reading on the sidelines of the conference. Most impressive about Taylor’s analysis of modernity was the complexity of his argumentation. On the one hand, Taylor stresses that “the effective re-enframing of technology” necessitates political action “to reverse the drift that market

„James’s book The Varieties of Religious Experience does me a lot of good.“

Abstract Wittgenstein zitiert in seinen Schriften nur wenige Autoren, den amerikanischen Pragmatisten William James bis in sein Spätwerk hinein jedoch mit auffallender Häufigkeit. Das hängt - so die Leitthese des Beitrags - vor allem mit der Rolle zusammen, die James‘ Erkundungen des Religiösen für Wittgensteins Nachdenken über Religion spielen. Der intrikaten Verbindung Wittgenstein-James wird in sieben Reflexionen nachgegangen: 1. Krisis der Lebenspraxis: „The Sick Soul“ (James, Tolstoi, Wittgenstein); 2. Das existentiell dimensionierte „Paradoxon“ als rektifizierte/dekonstruierte Dialektik? Wittgensteins (beredtes?) Schweigen im Tractatus; 3. Kann Reflexion stillgestellt werden? „Therapie“ als „Ende der Philosophie“? 4. Kritische Eindämmung des „Szientismus“: Wittgensteins und James‘ Einsprüche gegen die „survival theory of religion“; 5. Exkurs zum Jamesschen Thematisierungsversuch des „Mystischen“; 6. James und Wittgenstein über das „institutionalisierte“ Religiöse: „Religion - a matter between me and God only“? - „Subjektive“ Religiosität vs. „korporative“ Religion; 7. Coda. Die (innere) Ambivalenz religiöser Motivation: Sami Pihlströms (post‐) Wittgensteinsche Reflexionen.

Experiencing life and (religious) hope: pragmatic philosophies of religion

Is pragmatism, as focused on a future considered producible by our finite actions, ill equipped to analyze religion (or “Erlösungswissen”, as Max Scheler said); is it unable, as Stanley Cavell writes, to sufficiently explore “skepticism” and negativity? This paper argues that William James succeeds in pragmatically re-thematizing “Erlösungswissen”, and that Josiah Royce—who develops a post-pragmatic, pragmaticist concept of; religion—carefully re-investigates “negativity”, in a Peirce-inspired mode, by focusing on the “mission of sorrow”.

Zeit und Sinn: Religionsphilosophie postsäkular

In his complex and well-argued book, Hans-Joachim Höhn, Professor for Systematic Theology and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cologne, focuses on the ‘central question: How can we spell out a critical-affirmative relationship between reason and religion which reconstructs the case of religion from the standpoint of thinking, without imposing the standpoint of religion upon the subjects of reason?’ (12) Höhn’s question is posed in full awareness of a ‘de-railing modernity’ (Jürgen Habermas) which more and more realizes ‘that the processes of rationalization unleashed by science, technology and economics have turned out to be highly ambivalent.’ (11) This challenging situation, so Höhn, ‘cannot be mastered without reason, but also not with reason alone.’ (Ibid.) Older theories which claim that the general emergence of a post-religious secularism is unavoidable have become problematic, and thus the post-secular question what to make of religion re-enters the scene. (17f) In this new situation, Höhn extensively reflects upon ‘the processes in contemporary culture that run in different directions, and thus insert post-religious as well as post-secular impulses into it.’ (16) His book assesses the inner tensions that occur when contemporary philosophy begins to (re)-investigate the status of religious rites and creeds (in view of their truth content, as well as their practical and political effects). Firstly, religion cannot avoid to be seriously scrutinized: ‘What comes to light in a philosophical elucidation of religious practices and beliefs does often proof their “untrueness,” their illusionary and projective status.’ (11) This first – general but still rather abstract – assessment defines, one could say, the (post-)Feuerbachian environment in which most philosophical re-readings of religion are located today (in dominant analytic, pragmatic, post-hermeneutic, or postmodern discourses that tend to re-affirm, at least indirectly, elements of a ‘projection theory,’ often without explicitly reconstructing the accompanying benign claim of Feuerbach that religion, in its best expressions, is valid insofar as it contains – distorted by alienation, however – the images of mankind’s own ideals). If this

SYMPOSIUM ZU CHARLES TAYLOR: A SECULAR AGE

Auf Grund seiner frühen, komprehensiven Hegel-Studie1, seiner epistemologischen und sprachphilosophischen Arbeiten und der umfänglichen Untersuchung zur Genese der modernen Identität, Sources of the Self 2, gehört der kanadische Philosoph Charles Taylor „ohne Zweifel zu den weltweit berühmtesten und angesehensten Denkern in Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaft“.3 Dass er zugleich einer der wichtigsten Religionsphilosophen der letzten Dekaden ist, nimmt die (Fach-)Öffentlichkeit erst nach und nach zur Kenntnis. Taylor hat sich in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten immer wieder mit dem Zusammenhang von gegenwärtiger Identitätsformation, Religionskritik und Religion auseinandergesetzt4, bisher freilich nirgendwo auf so umfängliche Weise wie in seinem Buch A Secular Age, das 2007 in der Harvard University Press erschien und bislang noch nicht auf Deutsch vorliegt.5 Taylor formuliert die Leitfrage seiner Erkundung der Genese unseres „säkularen Zeitalters“ so: „Warum war es um 1500 in unserer westlichen Gesellschaft unmöglich, nicht an Gott zu glauben, während im Jahr 2000 viele von uns das nicht nur für leicht, sondern sogar für unausweichlich halten?“ (24) In seinem 874-seitigen Werk sondiert Taylor, in einer Folge von Essays, „the Entstehungsgeschichte of exclusive humanism“ (26), das heißt die Möglichkeitsbedingungen für die Karriere jenes Weltbilds, das uns, im Westen, heute alle prägt, uns zugleich aber, so lautet Taylors zentrales Argument, vor eine Alternative stellt: das „immanentistische Kategoriengefüge“, durch das dieses moderne Weltbild konstituiert ist, zu schließen oder es offen zu halten im Blick auf Frageund Hoffnungshorizonte, die den „exclusive humanism“ (und sein selbst noch säkular verfasstes Kippphänomen, die post-Nietzschesche „immanente Gegenaufklärung“) sprengen6: Taylor beschreibt diese Option (dieses – wie er mit Blick auf William James’ Will to Believe formuliert – „standing in the Jamesian open

(How) Can Law be Legitimated? Habermas, Rawls, Dworkin

For Habermas, contrary to what the legal positivists and system theorists believe, law requires legitimation (and thus is dependent on the discourse of morality) in post-traditional societies too, even if no natural-law metaphysics satisfies that desideratum. Habermas is aware that neither the appeal to a classical “philosophy of subjectivity” nor a notion of “de-limited communication” is capable of supplying the necessary legitimation. In his book Faktizitat und Geltung 1, it is this basic dilemma that constitutes the problem to which a “discourse theory of law” seeks the answer.