Jürgen Habermas came to Georgetown on October 19, 2011 to deliver a paper on Myth and Ritual. The lecture was sponsored by Georgetown's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. He explored the relationship between myth and ritual, part of his most recent set of concern,s which involve, controversially no doubt for many, an engagement with the public role of religion, including dialogue with Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. He identified myth and ritual as a sacred complex of narrative and action, and then proceeded to disentangle them for the purpose of pursuing a discussion of ritual and rites as gestures and actions which became part of the semiotics of social cohesion. He also drew upon his own theory of communication and its anthropological origins and variations as well as making gestures part of the world of speech and speech acts that become the shared sphere of consensus. Presumably his previous rejection of "top down" semiotic images by rulers to dazzle the masses a la Louis XIV or via corporate mass media consumerism, about which I need to learn more by reading much more of his work, is not repudiated. Rather, he brings the originally pre-rational religious rites and also (I think, not clear to me from the essay he read) their successors in "liturgical practices of world-wide religious communities" into the public sphere as "a source of solidarity" in society and, more importantly in my own view, "access to an archaic experience."
Under questioning from the audience, which I sensed was made up more of those interested in the political science implications of his theories than religious or semiotic contexts per se, he readily assured his listeners there that human rights are, in his view, a secular source of meaning and value. He also returned to known themes such as whether modernity can reproduce itself out of its own resources, such that religiously originating communication vestiges might prove valuable (but how exactly not made clear there) and he continued to defend Enlightenment principles of rationality, presumably the same principles that caused him to find Derrida's discourse so hermetic and less open to the shared dialogue in the healthy critique society requires to avoid extremism and oppression.
My questions, upon later reflection, are as follows: he mentioned but glossed over the Axial Age religions and their transformative aspects in relation to primitive religions based on fear and the desire to control nature (and which may have grown out of the primate world of our prehistoric ancestors). That is, to quote the traditions mentioned in the essay, "Zoroastrianism in Iran [sic], monotheism in Israel, Confucianism and Daoism in China, Buddhism in India [why not Hinduism in Brahmanic form?], and even Platonism [!- mentions it "lacked roots in the cult of the polis"]" introduced holy books and sophisticated traditions. But he points out that rituals and rites "survived" these developments. True, but what one might argue is that indeed the rites themselves came to have spiritual meaning within those traditions when the magical and sacrificial meanings were either rejected, as in Buddhism and the Chinese traditions, or tamed in important ways in Judaism and Christianity (whose relationship both to Judaism and Platonism were not explored). Acquiring spiritual meaning may have involved a process akin to, and I believe in many cases one with, the development of art. Nowhere did he consider Greek tragedy, a major complex of religious ritual and mythic narrative that brought together gesture, dance, poetry, music, dance, and rich visual effects. One would think this is precisely the narrow meaning of rites that he referred to when he reminded the audience that he was using rite in a narrow sense. He also must have thought of the deep meanings of good rituals or ritual phenomena as being unavailable to create new rituals of ideology such as were attempted in the French Revolution (about which he has written much but that I've not read).So my interest is now in his perspective on that. Examples today of cohesive ritual might be sacraments and tea ceremonies. These seem to provide access to archaic sensibilities that are non-violent and not fear-based.
Through ritual, access to an invisible world became the goal, as opposed to control of the natural world (to appease storms and their gods, for example). Any cohesive function in the larger society might well be related to ritual's origins in biological survival and its development subsequently through the emergence of shared beliefs. Finally, he did not mention the effect of the re-entry of narrative with the Axial Age religions' particular emphasis on scriptures and sacred texts. I myself would like to use the identity creation project I'm engaged in to explore the relationship between rule and ritual, where rule refers to a rule of life and a mechanism of self-governance that may have implications for the larger collectivities in which human beings need to learn to work and live in peace.
Added to my Library Thing for review and reception:
Jürgen Habermas:
The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol1)Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason Jürgen Habermas 1985.
Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) Jurgen Habermas 1998. l
The Derrida-Habermas Reader Lasse Thomassen 2006.
Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought).
Under questioning from the audience, which I sensed was made up more of those interested in the political science implications of his theories than religious or semiotic contexts per se, he readily assured his listeners there that human rights are, in his view, a secular source of meaning and value. He also returned to known themes such as whether modernity can reproduce itself out of its own resources, such that religiously originating communication vestiges might prove valuable (but how exactly not made clear there) and he continued to defend Enlightenment principles of rationality, presumably the same principles that caused him to find Derrida's discourse so hermetic and less open to the shared dialogue in the healthy critique society requires to avoid extremism and oppression.
My questions, upon later reflection, are as follows: he mentioned but glossed over the Axial Age religions and their transformative aspects in relation to primitive religions based on fear and the desire to control nature (and which may have grown out of the primate world of our prehistoric ancestors). That is, to quote the traditions mentioned in the essay, "Zoroastrianism in Iran [sic], monotheism in Israel, Confucianism and Daoism in China, Buddhism in India [why not Hinduism in Brahmanic form?], and even Platonism [!- mentions it "lacked roots in the cult of the polis"]" introduced holy books and sophisticated traditions. But he points out that rituals and rites "survived" these developments. True, but what one might argue is that indeed the rites themselves came to have spiritual meaning within those traditions when the magical and sacrificial meanings were either rejected, as in Buddhism and the Chinese traditions, or tamed in important ways in Judaism and Christianity (whose relationship both to Judaism and Platonism were not explored). Acquiring spiritual meaning may have involved a process akin to, and I believe in many cases one with, the development of art. Nowhere did he consider Greek tragedy, a major complex of religious ritual and mythic narrative that brought together gesture, dance, poetry, music, dance, and rich visual effects. One would think this is precisely the narrow meaning of rites that he referred to when he reminded the audience that he was using rite in a narrow sense. He also must have thought of the deep meanings of good rituals or ritual phenomena as being unavailable to create new rituals of ideology such as were attempted in the French Revolution (about which he has written much but that I've not read).So my interest is now in his perspective on that. Examples today of cohesive ritual might be sacraments and tea ceremonies. These seem to provide access to archaic sensibilities that are non-violent and not fear-based.
Through ritual, access to an invisible world became the goal, as opposed to control of the natural world (to appease storms and their gods, for example). Any cohesive function in the larger society might well be related to ritual's origins in biological survival and its development subsequently through the emergence of shared beliefs. Finally, he did not mention the effect of the re-entry of narrative with the Axial Age religions' particular emphasis on scriptures and sacred texts. I myself would like to use the identity creation project I'm engaged in to explore the relationship between rule and ritual, where rule refers to a rule of life and a mechanism of self-governance that may have implications for the larger collectivities in which human beings need to learn to work and live in peace.
Added to my Library Thing for review and reception:
Jürgen Habermas:
The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol1)Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason Jürgen Habermas 1985.
Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) Jurgen Habermas 1998. l
The Derrida-Habermas Reader Lasse Thomassen 2006.
Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought).
