In his paper entitled 'Israel or Athens: Where does Anamnestic Reason Belong?' Habermas usefully summarizes Johann Baptist Metz's argument mentioned in the previous post. As the Habermas paper is not online I will briefly outline his summary of Metz, then the criticism by Habermas.

Habermas says that the diagnosis by Metz holds that:

".. a philosophical conception of reason derived from Greece has so alienated a Hellenized Christianity from its origins in the spirit of Israel that theology has become insensitive to the outcry of suffering and the demand for universal justice. So a eurocentric Church, which sprang up on the ground of Hellenism must transcend its monocultural self-conception and, remembering its Jewish origns, unfold into a culturally polycentric global church."

"This critique...implies that, in pushing aside its Jewish origins, a Hellenized Christianity has cut itself from the sources of anamnestic reason. It has become one expression of an idealistic form of reason, unburdened by fate and incapable of recollection and historical remembrance.. In opposition to the division of labour between philosophical reason and religious belief Metz insists on the rational content of the tradition of Israel: he regards the force of historical remembrance as an element of reason."

Although this may apprear to be an arcane dispute between philosophy and theology, it is not. It is very relevant to us today. Consider for the moment an instrumental economic reason that runs the public policy of Australia sees itself as the embodiment of an enlighting reason doing away with prejudice, bias, superstition and myth. One can reasonable say that it has become insensitive to the outcry of suffering, historical catastrophe and the demand for justice.

Instrumental economic reason is a truncated (Platonic) reason, as it is concerned with models, ideal competitive markets (forms), numbers and systematic theory building. This is imperial economic reason as it reduces the political to the economic.

So we Australians turn to other ways to remember the past sufferings in our nation's history, such as those suffered by the Aborigines from being the dispossessed of their land by white settlers; the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the negative impacts of globalization on those regional communities that are left to waste and rot.

Let us call that anamnestic reason--the capacity to recall the human suffering of past events eg., Gallipoli.The stand in, or placeholder, for anamnesic reason has been an ethical reason, which, more often than not, has its roots in the Christian Churches. An anamnestic reason therefore enables us to enlighten an enlightened economic reason about the terrible harm it has caused.

To put this in a more Heideggerian language of Hannah Arendt the impact of limitless instrumentalism of utilitarian economic reason has rendered human beings "homeless" and forgetful of the phenomenological power of ecologcal being as a letting be. Moreover, our technological mastery over nature has (as in the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Scheme) as undermined human freedom by making us slaves to the necessity of profitmaking in a free market economy.

What then are the Habermas' criticisms of Metz?

The first is that it flattens out the philosophical tradition by subsuming it under Platonism. The history of philosophy is not just the history of Platonism: it is also the history of a revolt against Platonism (eg., Aristotle, nominalism, empiricism, Nietzsche, existentialism and historical materialism) and a movement to incoporate some form of concern for suffering and historical remembrance. Habermas says:

"The Greek logos has tranformed itself on its path from the intellectual contmplation of the cosmos, via the self-reflection of the knowing subject, to a linguistically embodied reason. It is not longer fixated on our dealings with the world--on being as being on the on knowing of knowing, or the meaning of propositions which can be true or false."

I concur with this criticism by Habermas. It is not a case theology versus philosophy. Both philosophy and theology need to develop a culture of remembrance. Since Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit philosophy the reflection on history has been a constant theme in continental philosophy. In doing so it has broken with the old idea of progress is a unilinear, homogeneous and continuous process in favour of a more dialectical account.

However, philosophy needs to make the shift from historical reflection to remembering the suffering of those who have been sacrificed on history's slaughter bench; and to become more aware of the narrative structure of histories we are caught up in and the fateful character of the events that shape and confront us.

Moves have been made in this direction.Thus Hannah Arendt sees human beings as essentially storytelling animals who achieve freedom in the act of storytelling by which they make things significant and meaningul.

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