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July 15, 2008
Our contemporary history is marked by the end of Communism and the rebirth of democratic politics in its stead, the moderate left differentiating itself from the old left, which it criticized as soft on human rights.and after the virtual disappearance of the radical left from contemporary European and North American politics, if not academia. The backdrop was It was an Enlightenbd utopian ideology that used promises ofan impossible future heaven on earth in order to create hell in the meanwhile. The alleged means for the creation of utopia was the totalitarian state that used
patently unethical means in which t the state agents perpetrated unethical atrocities in the name of a
utopian vision.
Where to then in the searching for a third way between capitalism and communism, when there has been the return of religion in the last quarter of a century? That return brings to the foreground the Enlightenment's division between faith and knowledge, religion, and science, the infinite and the finite. Kant separates the world of religion from the worlds of science and politics, unties ethical value from religious dogma and ritual, places ethical motivation before religious determination, and then reties ethicsto politics in terms of analogical orientation. Science is handed
over to the empirical method of verification and consensus. Religion is contained in its form as personal conscience and collective dogma and ritual. The ethical norms untied from it are expounded as transcendental ideas of freedom/autonomy, humanity, and universality
The standard political response to the collapse of the utopian Left has been to civil society. The dissident concept of civil society was anti-political as an alternative against the state coupled to the realization that capitalism and the market endanger civil society just as the centralized, bureaucratized state did. Civil society seems to imply personal integrity, voluntary organizations and what Hegel called concrete ethical life. This ignored the technological refashioning of the life world by an instrumental reason.
That leaves the diremption (“splitting into two”) of modernity between faith and knowledge , or the Enlightenment schema that opposes critical reason to religion, untouched. Hegel argued that three were common contents between the two. Thus Critical rationality lacks foundation: it must demand implicit or explicit trust, and it must appeal, at one point or another, to others. All these acts exceed reason in that they reveal how rational deliberation must resort both to an act of faith and to an initial relation to an other in order to form, in the first place, a body of critical knowledge and/or a scientific community and corpus.
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