The Axial Breakthrough and Social Criticism: A Reassessment

2022

A defence of Marxist irreligiosity and opposition to religion, drawing from Lenin and both Marxist antihumanists and Marxist humanists, including Lefebvre, Bloch, and the Young Marx, especially his “Introduction to The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”.

REIS. Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 2023

A inicios del siglo xxi, se evidencia el retorno de una renovada sociología histórica en el debate sobre la secularización a través de aportaciones como las de Talal Asad, Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, José Casanova o Hans Joas, entre otros autores. El objetivo del presente texto se centra en el análisis de la recuperación de la sociología histórica, tanto a través del potencial diálogo que plantea con los clásicos de la sociología de la religión, particularmente con Max Weber, como de sus aportaciones para la investigación sobre el proceso de secularización. Para ello, y tras presentar un estado de la cuestión sobre secularización y sociología histórica, abordaremos los precedentes de este retorno de la perspectiva sociohistórica y los desarrollos metodológicos y conceptuales que proporciona esta aproximación al debate sobre la secularización

From: "The Popularization of Philosophy in Medieval Islam, Judaism, and Christianity," ed. Mareike Abram, Steven Harvey, and Lukas Muhlethaler (Thurnhout [Belgium]: Brepols, 2022), 379–88.

This is my contribution to a conference on the popularization of philosophy in the Middle Ages, convened at Freie Universität Berlin, in July 2016.

Confronting Gouldner, 2015

The purpose of this article is to show in what respects Strauss’ account of the three waves of modernity and Lonergan’s account of the longer cycle of decline mutually illuminate and add to each other. For reasons of scope, I will largely con- fine myself to Strauss’ article, “The Three Waves of Modernity,”6 and the sections of Lonergan’s Insight7 on the longer cycle of decline. I will show that the three waves of modernity as described by Strauss qualify as instances of the succession of ever lower viewpoints spoken of by Lonergan, which have their beginnings in a scotosis, which at once is productive of bias and leads both to shorter cycles and the longer cycle of decline. At the same time as Lonergan provides an explanation for what happened cognitionally in the successive waves of modernity, Strauss provides the content. Strauss also adds an important critical detail to Lonergan’s account of the longer cycle. While Lonergan mostly attends to the cognitional aspects of the longer cycle, beginning with a scotosis engendered by the disordered passions, Strauss points out that the origin of modern political philosophy began not with disordered passions (which had already produced scotosis, in Lonergan’s terminology), but with the deliberate choice to elevate the passions and the scotosis to the level of philosophy in a conscious rejection of all previous political philosophy. Failure to grasp either the cognitional aspects or the conscious, deliberate act at the origin of modernity necessarily leads to the misunderstanding of it and undercuts any attempt to deal adequately with the problems of modern thought so manifest in the totalitar- ian breakdowns of the twentieth century. I will proceed first by explaining Lonergan’s account of the longer cycle of decline, from the production of scotosis by disordered passion wanting to avoid inconvenient insights, to the formation of bias, to the systematic exclusion of theoretical concerns by practical common sense characteristic of the longer cycle. I will then outline Strauss’ argument in “Three Waves,” first by presenting the three waves and by explaining how each are waves, that is, further developments of what came before— what Lonergan calls successive lower viewpoints—and then by showing Strauss’ account of the continuity of the starting point of modernity in Machiavelli and the ending point with twentieth-century totalitarianism. Finally, I will briefly present the suggestions of Lonergan and Strauss for what is needed to engage with modern thought after its origin, character, and the root of its break-down have been grasped.

Recent years have seen the rise of " post-secularism, " a new perspective that criticizes the dominant secularization narrative according to which " modernity " and " religion " are fundamentally antagonistic concepts. Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Gianni Vattimo are the most prominent defenders of such a post-secularist account. But though post-secularism presents itself as a necessary rectification of the secularization story, it has not been able to come up with a credible and generally accepted alternative account. In this article I will explain why, arguing that the use of " essentially contested concepts " such as " Christianity " and " modernity " rest on normative standpoints of the narrators that are incompatible with one another. To show this I will analyze the position of three older voices in the debate, namely those of Hans Blumenberg, Peter Berger, and Marcel Gauchet. These authors seem to agree in understanding the modern disenchanted worldview in relation to Christian transcendence, but I will show that beneath their similar narratives lie incompatible normative beliefs on which their use of the concepts of " Christianity " and " modernity " is founded. After having laid bare the roots of the contemporary debate by exploring these three fundamental positions, I will finally argue that we should not take their accounts as objective, historical descriptions but as what Richard Rorty has called " Geistesgeschichte " : a speculative history that is aimed at conveying a moral, in which essentially contested concepts play a constitutive role. Each author draws his own moral, and consequently each author will construct his own corresponding history. This lesson can then be applied to the contemporary debate on secularization. The value of the debate does not lie in its historical claims but in the visions of the protagonists; at the end of this article I will explain how we can capitalize on this value.

2015

Over the last few years, there has been a heated debate among social scientists of religion whether we are going through a return of the sacred or an even deeper process of secularization. But this dilemma cannot be approached properly without a new gaze into religion, which may give more room to the internal logic of groups and to the disseminative character of religious-based imaginary and ethical elements across the social scenario. One must question integrationist and class-centred views, as well as their more encompassing paradigm- modernization and secularization theory. A new gaze that will not simply abandon or replace those theories, but will place itself at the margins, sometimes confronting, sometimes articulating modified versions of those more traditional views, so as to supplement them and not leave them untouched. It is a question of an inter- or perhaps post-disciplinary approach, which explores the frontiers of dominant narratives, thus defining new and old

Ars Disputandi, 2012

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) 1 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 reaffirm , 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 containsdistorted by alienation, however-the images of mankind's own ideals). If this