Religious convictions in normative orders

Project management: Prof. Dr. Thomas M. Schmidt

Modern principles of normativity challenge the self-understanding of religious communities. It is not only liberal and democratic principles of the rule of law, but also the rational standards and fallibilistic criteria of the empirical sciences that affect the traditional self-interpretations of religions just as much as the experience of an intensified encounter between different religious traditions under the conditions of equal coexistence in a pluralistic society.

In terms of content, religions operate in the field of tension between rituals and a specific reflexivity that exists in the form of doctrinal teachings and their dogmatic codification and institutionalized transmission. Religious beliefs have a narrative basis and an affective and volitional character, but at the same time make cognitive claims to validity. Therefore, the tension between particularity situated in the lifeworld and universality based on validity theory is built into the structure of religious convictions. This specific normative binding force of religious convictions applies not only from an epistemological point of view, but especially with regard to the basic concepts of political and legal normativity. The Janus figure of religious convictions is methodologically reflected by the various sciences of religion. While religious studies often operate from a comparative empirical and cultural studies perspective, university theology reflects the tension between particularity and universality, between narrativity and justification by means of scientific argumentation, but from the internal perspective of a specific religious tradition. Philosophy of religion, which as an epistemology of religious convictions explicitly addresses the validity dimension, the relationship between justification and narrativity, has a special role to play in this context.

An important methodological step was to reconstruct both the drama of the interreligious encounter and the confrontation of religious ideas with secular standards in terms of different normative structures, each with their own claims to validity. Particularly relevant aspects of the encounter could thus be identified along a spectrum that ranges from the question of the possibilities of appropriate mutual awareness and the possibilities of critical comment to a determination of the conditions of cross-cultural justification possibilities. The approaches of Robert Brandom and John Rawls have proven to be the primary theoretical points of reference here.
This connection resulted from the core considerations, according to which every meaningful expression has a normative dimension in that it contains a determination and is associated with obligations to inferentially further-reaching determinations. Every meaning is constituted by a social practice of giving and demanding reasons. Meaning is linked to justification.

On the basis of the inferential semantics and normative pragmatics developed by Brandom, the central communicative elements can also be determined and presented in interreligious contact, i.e. the validity claims to context-transcending validity, truth and objectivity of the statements can be described in a purely internal perspective-structural manner without promoting a superordinate perspective and the associated ethnocentric reductionisms. In addition to this, following Rawls, procedural structural elements of a cross-cultural justification practice can be determined according to desirable fair and democratic standards. Added to this is the political dimension of the institutionalization of intercultural encounters and with it the question of the limits of the public use of reason. A background concept that is helpful as an argumentative point of reference in the application of the concepts of Brandom and Rawls to the problem horizon of intercultural encounters identifies in this way differentiations of linguistic structures with regard to their normative scope – differentiations that can be used to present and locate in more detail the questions that are considered central to intercultural encounters regarding the possibilities of mutual knowledge, opinion and justification.

The most important publications of the research project include: Schmidt, Thomas M., Discorso Religioso e Religione Discorsiva nella Societá Postsecolare (trad. e cura di Leonardo Ceppa), Torino: Trauben 2009; Schmidt, Thomas M./Wenzel, Knut (eds.), Moderne Religion? Theologische und religionsphilosophische Reaktionen auf Jürgen Habermas (ed. with Knut Wenzel), Freiburg-Basel-Wein: Herder 2009; and Schmidt, Karsten, Buddhismus als Religion und Philosophie. Problems and Perspectives of Intercultural Understanding, Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer 2010.
Among the most important events of the research project are the symposium: “Religiöse Geltungsansprüche in der Verantwortung öffentlicher Vernunft”, Guest House of the Goethe University, 4-6 December 2008, the workshop: “De-Legitimierung von Staatlichkeit: Menschenrechtsaktivismus als Religionsersatz?”, Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften Bad Homburg, 26-27 February 2010 and the workshop: “Ausbreitung von Religionen und Neutralisierung von gesellschaftlichen Räumen”, Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften Bad Homburg, 25-27 June 2010.

Further research questions: The role of religiously tinged justifications in the formation of normative orders in historical and contemporary societies within and outside Europe has proven to be a fruitful topic following the research in this sub-project. A central problem here is the increase and decrease in the significance of religiously based claims to validity.
Among the terms commonly used in this context, that of post-secularism has a special meaning. This term expresses the view held by some theorists that, in view of the new vitality of religious movements and ways of life in many parts of the world, it is no longer possible to simply speak of modern societies as necessarily secularized societies; there is also sometimes talk of desecularization. This thesis should be examined and pursued further, for example by asking to what extent there are connections between “post-secularism” and “post-colonialism”, which examines the concept of religion in terms of its European character, or to what extent gender relations are affected by this. The older, more commonly used concept of secularization, which is used both historically-analytically and normatively, both epoch-related and as a general historical category, must also be reflected upon, but which was also criticized even before the emergence of ideas of post-secularism. Furthermore, the concept of neutralization, which is prominent in contemporary German debates, deserves attention, as it also refers to the temporary removal of religious symbols in a world in which religion continues to be significant. Against this background, a historical and spatial comparison should be made of how normative orders emerge (and pass away), in which the significance of religion for the normative order changes considerably, in which silence about religious differences perhaps also becomes the norm. The investigation of these questions was continued in the second term of the project “Genesis and validity of the concept of the secular”.