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I Wanna Hold My Hand
Ritual, Discipline, Practice And the Social Integration of Post-Secular Societies
Matteo Bortolini
University of Padova, Italy
Abstract
In his most recent work on “post-secular societies” Jürgen Habermas has argued
for a renewed understanding of the social and political relationships between
religious and secular citizens. He has argued in favor of establishing a reciprocal
dialogue between believers and non-believers aimed at strengthening social and
societal integration and constantly rejuvenate the moral bases of modern political
and juridical institutions. According to Habermas’s proposal, the dialogue between
religious and secular citizens should focus on the translation of the varied and deep
symbolic heritage of religious traditions into rational, non-religious. Habermas has
also analyzed the social functions of rituals and has rejected any Durkheimian
understanding of public rituals as mechanisms for fostering social integration. In
this paper, I (1) summarize Habermas’s early foray on the problem of “the place of
religion in the public sphere,” and (2) assess his recent shift in the direction of an
appreciation of the ritual and practical dimensions of religious life. I then single out
the “Habermas dilemma” about religious rituals and try to find a way to go beyond
it. After proposing a (paradoxical) point of view on (3) “religion” as both a form of
hesitation and a search for transcendence, I argue that the most precious heritage of
religious traditions is the panoply of techniques for the elevation of individual
human beings—Michel Foucault’s “techniques of the self.” I conclude with a brief
remark (4) on the translation of religious and secular “anthropotechnics” and the
prospected role of critical social scientists.
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I Wanna Hold My Hand
Ritual, Discipline, Practice And the Social Integration of Post-Secular Societies
Matteo Bortolini
University of Padova, Italy
The main interest in life and work is to
become someone else that you were
not in the beginning
Michel Foucault
In his most recent work Jürgen Habermas has traveled far from the classic
Enlightenment-ispired critical outlook on the place and the function of religion in
modern and contemporary societies, and has envisioned a renewed understanding
of the social and political relationships between religious and secular citizens. He
has argued in favor of establishing a reciprocal and continuous dialogue between
believers and non-believers aimed at strengthening social and societal integration
and constantly rejuvenate the moral bases of modern political and juridical
institutions. According to Habermas’s proposal, dialogue between religious and
secular citizens should focus on the translation of the varied and deep symbolic
heritage of religious traditions into rational, non-religious arguments that could be,
in principle, become a common, shared moral heritage for pluralist societies.
Habermas has famously termed this outlook a proposal for a “post-secular society.”
In his latest publications on religion, strongly inspired by the work of Charles
Taylor and Robert Bellah on the continuities between the so-called Axial societies
and our own, Habermas has analyzed the social functions of rituals and has rejected
any Durkheimian understanding of public rituals as mechanisms for fostering social
integration—in his view, rituals are the heritage of specific religious traditions that
can be neither generalized nor “secularized” at the advantage of pluralistic societies.
In this paper, I first (1) summarize Habermas’s early foray on the problem of the
place of religion in the public sphere, founded on a cognitive and normative
understanding of religion, and (2) assess his recent shift in the direction of an
appreciation of the ritual and practical dimensions of religious life and their effects
on the social integration of contemporary societies. I then single out what I call the
“Habermas dilemma” about religious rituals and try to find a way to go beyond it.
After proposing a (paradoxical) point of view on (3) (Axial) “religion” as both a
form of hesitation and a search for transcendence, I argue that the most precious
heritage of all Western and Eastern religious traditions is to be foound in the
panoply of techniques for the elevation and the individuation of human beings—
what Michel Foucault called “techniques of the self.” I conclude with a brief remark
(4) on the process of translation and diffusion of religious and secular
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“anthropotechnics” and the role social scientists (and intellectuals in general)
might, and should, play within it.
1. Jürgen Habermas On Religion, Take One
Habermas’ groundbreaking work on post-secular societies first emerged in the
context of a prolonged debate on the pre-political foundations of contemporary
liberal states. In his discussion with Joseph Ratzinger in 2004, Habermas started
from Ernst W. Böckenförde’s “dilemma” on the solidary bases of constitutional
states and proposed to see social and cultural secularization “as a twofold learning
process that compels the traditions of the Enlightenment and religious teaching to
reflect on each other’s limits” and to engage in a reciprocal dialogue aimed at
creating specific practices of translation1.
Habermas first accepted Böckenförde’s dictum that on its motivational side,—
and especially on the side of the citizen seen as “the author,” and not only the
subject, of law,—social integration in contemporary societies depends on specific
resources that the constitutional state cannot produce nor reproduce; solidarity has
to be found, so to say, “ready made” within civil society and in the mores of a
citzenry socialized and “habituated” into “the practices and attitudes of a liberal
political culture.”2 In accepting the sociological argument, and in trying to find a
sociological and normative way to guarantee this general solidarity, avoiding the
progressive atomization of the citizens of liberal societies into “isolated, selfinterested monads,”3 Habermas got interested in religious traditions and
communities of faith.
His point of entry, here, was the relationship between Western philosophy and
its religious sources. Pointing to the work of Walter Benjamin, among others,
Habermas called our attention to that continuous work of translation and
adaptation by way of which classical European philosophy assimilated and
absorbed the heritage of the Western Christian tradition. He saw this process as
both continuous and unending:
Althought philosophy transformed the original religious meanings of
these terms, it did not deflate them and exhaust their meaning. The
translation of the theological doctrine of creation in God’s image into the
idea of the equal and unconditional dignity of human beings constitutes
one such conserving translation4.
J. Habermas, “Prepolitical Foundations of the Constitutional State?,” in J. Habermas,
Between Naturalism and Religion. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008, p. 102. The “Böckenförde
dilemma” reads as: “The liberal secularized state lives by prerequisites it can not guarantee
itself.” See E.-W. Böckenförde, State, Society, and Liberty: Studies in Political Theory and
Constitutional Law. New York: Berg, 1991.
2 J. Habermas, “Prepolitical Foundations of the Constitutional State?,” p. 105.
3 Ibidem, p. 107.
4 Ibidem, p. 110. It should not be forgotten that Habermas was writing this kind of
arguments long ago. See for example this quote from an essay which was first published in
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3
At that point, Habermas defined a “post-secular society” as a complex, multicultural
society where not only the presence of religious communities in public life is fully
recognized, but where a normative insight about the contribution and the value of
religious traditions for the reproduction of the prepolitical foundations of its
solidarity is commonly accepted.5
Accordingly, Habermas proposed to forge a new relationship between secular
and religious citizens as a reciprocal and complementary learning process, in which
both groups should be ready to learn from each other and, in order to do so, should
be ready to consider each other’s “comprehensive doctrines” as something worthy
in itself and never as “irrational nonsense.” On the part of both categories of
citizens, in other words, a process of deep self-reflexivity about the limits of one’s
own worldview is necessary in order to welcome, so to say, what others have to say.
In the case of “religiously tone-deaf citizens” this means adopting “a critical stance
toward the limits of Enlightenment.”6
In his much discussed “Religion in the Public Sphere,”7 Habermas refined this
model in a close confrontation with John Rawls’s conception of the “public use of
reason.” He argued, on the one hand, that it is perfectly legitimate for religious
citizens and communities to voice their concerns, ideas, and political proposals in
the general public sphere of free interpersonal and mass communication. On the
other hand, since the secular, liberal state depends on neutral and strictly political
principles, and since secular reason is the capstone of modern democratic
institutions, the restricted public sphere of government—that is, where laws are
made and administrative decisions are taken—can only accept proposals and
arguments cast into the neutral language of secular reason.
The main point—one that was hugely controversial8—was that in his discussion
Habermas somehow accepted a neo-Durkheimian argument about the “integral
role,” or “the seat,” that religion plays in the life of religious citizens:
A devout person conducts her daily existence on the basis of her faith.
Genuine faith is not merely a doctrine, something believed, but is also a
1991: “Even viewed from the outside, it could turn out that monotheistic traditions have at
their disposal a language whose semantic potential is not yet exhausted [unabgegoltenen],
that shows itself to be superior in its power to disclose the world and to form identity, in its
capability for renewal, its differentiation and its range.” See J. Habermas, “Transcendence
from Within, Transcendence in this World,” in J. Habermas, Religion and Rationality.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002, p. 71.
5 Ibidem, p. 111
6 Ibidem, p. 112
7 J. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the ‘Public Use
of Reason’ by Religious and Secular Citizens,” in J. Habermas, Between Naturalism and
Religion.
8 See, among many others, C. Calhoun, E. Mendieta, J. VanAntwerpen (eds.), Habermas and
Religion. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013; M. Junker-Kenny, Habermas and Theology. London:
T&T Clark, 2011. M. Dillon, “The Authority fo the Holy Revisited: Habermas, Religion, and
Emancipatory Possibilities,” Sociological Theory, 17:3, pp. 290-306.
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source of energy that the person of faith taps into performatively to
nurture her whole life.9
If we accept this argument, we are forced to reflect normatively on the burden that
the “splitting” of one’s life into a public, neutral self and a private, religious one puts
on the shoulders of religious citizens. From here, Habermas extracts two different
principles.
On the one hand, “the necessary institutional separation between religion and
politics” should not be transformed into “an unreasonable mental and psychological
burden” for the religious citizen.10 In other words, the strict use of neutral, secular
arguments and justifications should be mandatory only for state officials and those
who administer the public good. All other citizens should be free to voice their
concerns in their own vocabulary.
This first principle is also justified on functional grounds: the liberal state has an
interest in letting, so to say, “a hundred flowers bloom” in order to renew its
sources of meaning and identity. As we said, religious traditions have a “special
power to articulate moral intuitions”11 and possess a depository of images, symbols,
and arguments that has not been exhausted by two thousand years of translations
and re-definitions on the part of philosophy and science. Since listening to,
understanding, and “using” these images, symbols, and arguments is in the interest
of all citizens, both secular and religious, who accept the authority of the neutral
liberal state and aim to contribute to the creation of constitutionally-valid and
politically legitimate laws and decisions, the translation of religious traditions into
the language of secular, neutral reason cannot be left to religious citizens alone.
That would put another “asymmetrical burden” on their shoulders.
Rather, the process of translation should be a cooperative effort which asks both
categories of citizens a serious existential effort. On the part of religious citizens,
this entails the acceptance of a self-reflexive epistemic stance toward the
relationship between their own tradition, other religious traditions, modern
science, and secular reason within the political arena.12 In a nutshell, this means
accepting the authority of “fallible reason” in mundane matters.13 On the part of
secular citizens, this entails a deep change in mentality, that is the acceptance of
both the continued existence of religious communities and the fact that they may
give a decisive contribution to the self-clarification of the polity14. On their part, in
J. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the ‘Public Use
of Reason’ by Religious and Secular Citizens,” p. 127.
10 Ibidem, p. 130.
11 Ibidem, p. 131.
12 Ibidem, p. 137.
13 The expression in used in J. Habermas, “An Awareness of What is Missing”, in J. Habermas
et al., An Awareness of What is Missing. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010, p. 16.
14 J. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” p. 139
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other words, secular citizens should “understand their non-agreement with
religious conceptions as a disagreement that it is reasonable to expect.”15
2. Ritual, Solidarity, and the Habermas Dilemma
Habermas’s first approach to the problem of post-secular societies was, by all
measures, a remarkable shift in the understanding of importance of religion in our
contemporary world. At the same time, however, though Habermas always spoke of
“religious traditions and communities of faith”16 it seems that his work on the place
of religion in the public sphere shares an understanding of “what religion is” which
carries a specific, and in my view sociologically (and normatively)17 unacceptable,
overtone.
The very concept of religion we find in these early Habermasian writings on
religion and the public sphere has a strong Western and Christian (in fact,
Protestant) bias. This is how Robert A. Orsi, an American sociologist specialized in
the ethnography of Roman Catholics, described how “(true) religion” has been
defined by the sciences of religion in the 19th and 20th century:
True religion, then, is epistemologically and ethically singular. It is
rational, respectful of persons, noncoercive, mature, non
anthropomorphic in its higher form, mystical (as opposed to ritualistic),
unmediated and agreeable to democracy (…) emotionally controlled, a
reality of mind and spirit not body and matter. It is concerned with ideal
essences not actual things.18
On his part, Ivan Strenski singled out “six clichés” about religion which may
contribute to our understanding of this biased definition of religion: according to
the “standard view,” religion is always good or bad by default; it is pure belief, and
mostly a belief in God; it is a deeply personal and spiritual matter which can be
easily separated from political concerns.19 Strenski calls this understanding of
religion “confessionalism.” According to it, “religion” can be almost reduced to a set
of interconnected beliefs which might be expressed as propositions. These beliefs
are an object of identification and the “believer” is expected to admit/declare (that
is, to confess) her adherence to them.20 “Religion” is thus a deeply intimate matter, a
Ibidem. Last but not least, Habermas underlines that religious traditions have an “opaque
core” that can never be fully grasped by a postmetaphysical thinking which “is prepared to
learn from religion while at the same time remaining agnostic” (ibidem, p. 143).
16 J. Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” p. 114.
17 Why “normatively”? Because it is a conception which does not respect (that is, it does not
try to understand) the way the majority of religious people live their being religious.
18 R. A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth. Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005.
p. 188. Here Orsi is speaking of American science of religion, but the same is true at the
international level (Ibidem, p. 189). Ivan Strenski narrated a similar story about France in
his The New Durkheim. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006.
19 I. Strenski, Why Politics Can’t Be Freed From Religion. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010,
pp. 1-6.
20 Ibidem, p. 27.
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inner belief which might control and direct the life of the individual in a powerful
and sometimes ultimate way.
Last but not least, the British sociologist, Richard King, has characterized this
very understanding of “religion” as follows:
[It places] a great deal of emphasis upon a faithful (sic) adherence to
doctrine as indicative of religious allegiance, upon sacred texts as of a
central importance to religious communities and to questions of truth
and falsity as of paramount importance to the religious adherent or
‘believer.’21
According to King, this conception has serious flaws that might be synthesized as
follows: (a) takes for granted the existence of some “religion” in each culture; (b)
has a literary bias in favour of written texts as the locus of religion; (c) coming from
a Protestant conception of what “religion” is, it ends up considering Christianity as
the prototype of every religions.22
In other words, he who thinks of “religion” according to this disembodied,
cognitive, idealistic conception is destined to transform it into a “book of ideas” or
symbols, which might be used for understanding, comfort, or inspiration. The
recognition of the power which “religion” might have on the individual and
collective lives of its adherents remains strictly bound to the content of these ideas,
and systematic theology is considered as the avantgarde, and the best
representation, of “religion” itself. Closer to our theme, he who embraces this
understanding can only frame the problem of “the place of religion in the public
sphere”—itself an aspect of the problem of the social integration of complex, liberal
societies—as (1) giving existing religious traditions the right to voice their ideas
and values and (2) finding the way to let those ideas and values circulate in the
public sphere so that they can foster mutual understanding between different
worldviews, whether religious or not.
It is my contention that Habermas’ first foray into the problem of religion in the
public sphere shared this modern, Protestant understading of religion and could
only deal with its cognitive and argumentative sides.23 The fact is, as the sociologists
we cited, among many others, have remembered us, there’s much more in religion
than ideas, texts, and symbols.
What is lacking in our modern, Protestant understanding of “religion” is
practices, that is, rituals. This Durkheimian intuition has been developed by a
R. King, Orientalism and Religion. London-New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 38.
Ibidem, pp. 40-43. Among the works which explain the rise of this conception of
“religion,” see B. Nongbri, Before Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013; G. G.
Stroumsa, A New Science. The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2010; T. Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions. ChicagoLondon: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
23 See, in addition to already cited papers, J. Habermas, “Reply to my Critics,” in C. Calhoun,
E. Mendieta, and J. Van Antwerpen (eds.), Habermas and Religion; J. Habermas, “Von den
Weltbildern zur Lebenswelt.” in J. Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken II. Berlin:
Suhrkamp, 2012.
21
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minority strain of the sociology and the sciences of religion in three different, albeit
interwined, directions. First, on a descriptive level, sociologists in this tradition have
emphasized the deeply practical, “immediate,” non-argumentative e non-verbal side
of religion, pointing their attention on those shared practices that, in the everyday
life of religious communities, cannot be translated into symbols, propositions, and
“theologies.” New theories of ritual as the construction of common subjunctive, “as
if” worlds meant to tame disorder and ambiguity, such as that proposed by Adam
Seligman and Robert Weller point to this direction.24 Second, Durkheim’s functional
hypothesis on the production and renovation of social solidarity has been
developed in a host of different directions. Whether it has become a praise of
everyday micro-ceremonies or the search for secular public and meso-level rituals,
the solidary-building function of rituals has become a cornerstone of practiceoriented sociologies.25 Through rituals, social conventions are affirmed, morality is
renewed, social bonds are restated, and the sense of “the sacred” is heightened.
Third, another Durkheimian intuition, that about what Robert Bellah called “the
ritual roots of society and culture,” has been explored in a more cautious, but also a
more interdisciplinary way. Here the point is to hypothesize the role played by
religious rituals in the primeval emergence of language, music, social conventions,
and morals. Sure enough, this outlook is both evolutionary and highly hypothetical,
and sociology is supplemented by archaeology, evolutionary psychology, and
material and cultural anthropology. The work of Merlin Donald and Bellah’s most
recent Religion in Human Evolution are examples of this third strain of research.26
Interestingly enough, we find these three strains in Habermas’ most recent work
on religion. As his take on our third problem, the ritual roots of society and culture,
is, in my view, his most radical thesis, it is appropriate to start from there.
Habermas re-phrases the question of “ritual roots” as an analysis of the role played
by ritual in the solution of a general social problem, the strains that the very use of
symbolic communication and language opens between the individual as a speaker
and other social actors. Ritual is thus seen as a response to the fragility that emerges
when a new kind of socialization is “injected” in human interaction by the use of
intersubjectively shared, conventional symbols.27 In brief, the egocentrism or
solipsism of even the most advanced primates is surpassed when the use of shared
symbols allows a more complex level of coordination and cooperation, which raises
a peculiar problem:
The cognitive challenge goes hand in hand with a psychodynamic
challenge: In the course of the revolution in the individual’s relations to
See especially A. B. Seligman et al., Ritual and Its Consequences. Oxford-New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008.
25 See, among many others, E. Goffman, Interaction Ritual, Garden City: Doubleday, 1967; R.
Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004; M. Rosati,
Ritual and the Sacred. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.
26 R. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2011. M. Donald, A Mind so Rare. New York: W.W: Norton & Co., 2002.
27 What follows summarizes Habermas’ argument in “Myth and Ritual.” Lecture at
Georgetown University, Washington (DC), October 19, 2011.
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his social environment, the egocentric consciousness succumbs to the
pull of a communicative socialization of individuals who become aware
of their own intentionality.
This first experience of individuation, along with the renewed dynamics of
cooperation, however, would not be possible without a firmer normative basis, one
that cannot be “extracted” from, or guaranteed by, symbols and language alone. This
normative basis—created in interaction and internalized as socially-produced
motivational structures28—has to be renewed from time to time, as the unstable
balance between individualization and socialization can never be completed once
for all.
Ritual action, then, comes to the fore as that kind of action which might renew
and reinforce, from time to time, this shared normative basis. Lacking an external,
jointly-identifiable empirical referent, ritual can be described as a fully selfreferential behavior which responds to the social disturbancies produced by the
rupture between the individual and society emergent in linguistically-mediated
interaction. In other words, the precarious balance between two “competing and yet
complementary imperatives, that of the self-preservation of individuals on one side
and that of the survival of the collectivity on the other” can be amended—always
temporarily, never once and for all—by shared practices which reassure individual
members of society of their dependence on the power of the collectivity.
This bold hypothesis—which sets the “individual vs. society” problem back in
time of some 150.000 years—allows Habermas to assess and incorporate a
Durkheimian argument about ritual “as self-referential practices that stabilize the
cohesion of social groups” as a general feature of every society (our second point
above). If we go back where we started—that is, the problem of the social
integration of complex, liberal societies—we find ourselves on solid ground.
Cultural sociologists from Durkheim to Jeffrey Alexander have underlined the
importance of rituals for the renewal of social solidarity and have looked for new,
public rituals that might perform the same function of age-old religious and religiopolitical rituals—one needs not recall here the last chapter of Durkheim’s
Elementary Forms or Bellah’s reflections on the ritual aspects of the American civil
religion to illustrate a mostly familiar theme.29
Here, however, Habermas seems somehow stuck in a dilemma. On the one side,
he does not want to employ the word “ritual” to describe any kind of fixed,
crystallized collective behavior.30 He wants to save the term for religious rituals, and
See J. Habermas, “Die Lebenswelt als Raum symbolisch verkörperter Gründe,” in J.
Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken II, pp. 54-76.
29 E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press, 1995; J. C.
Alexander, Performance and Power. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. J. C Alexander, The
Performance of Politics. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. R. N. Bellah and S.
M. Tipton (eds.), The Robert Bellah Reader. Durham: Duke Universoty Press, 2008.
30 See for example “A Postsecular World Society? On the Philosophical Significance of
Postsecular Consciousness and the Multi-Cultural World Society. An Interview by Eduardo
Mendieta.” The Immanent Frame 2, 2010.
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has a profound theoretical reason for that. As a matter of fact, according to
Habermas the theoretical relevance and the social effectiveness of religious rituals
depend upon their reliance on non-empirical referents—higher powers of salvation
and calamity (Heil und Unheil)31—a feature that is lost in public, secular rituals (and,
even more, in those everyday rituals that have been studied by Goffman and
Seligman). This refusal to extend the concept of ritual, however, irresistibly pushes
Habermas toward the other horn of the dilemma: seeing religious ritual—that is,
prayer and liturgy—as the heritage of specifically religious communities (of parts of
society) which is precluded to “ourselves,” that is, the secularized members of
complex, liberal societies who do not believe and who do not belong to any religious
community.32 Though crucial for the emergence and the renewal of the necessary
normative basis of any linguistically-mediated interaction, then, ritual can neither
be “used” nor generalized in post-secular societies.
Habermas’s dilemma is clear. Either we accept the general argument about the
existence of a “grammar of the sacred” which crosses, and unites, the religious and
the secular (and then we start to look for specific, particular ways in which new
rituals may sustain social solidarity), or we consider religious ritual as an “archaic
source of solidarity” which cannot be rejuvenated or generalized in contemporary
societies. In the end, we are back to where we started: a mostly cognitive
conception of religion as a depository of symbols and narratives that might be
translated by post-metaphysical philosophers and committed citizens within the
unrestricted public sphere of interpersonal and mass communication. The other
side of religion, practices and rituals, can neither be translated nor secularized. It
remains, so to say, a relic with a glorious past.
3. Exercise, Tradition, and the Individual: A Different Take on Religion
This is far from being a necessary outcome. In fact, there exists a way to recover
the significance of religious practices, from both a sociological and a normative
point of view, which follows a completely different path, one that takes as its point
of entry into religion the everyday practices performed by believers in relating
themselves to the religious tradition to which they (feel they) belong. In other words,
our best starting point is neither religious symbols and ideas (which might be too
complex and stratified for anyone to understand and translate) nor the collective
rituals which rhythmically regulate the life of religious communities (which might
be too much idiosyncratic of a specific tradition).33 Rather, it is the everyday, even
This definition comes from Martin Riesebrodt’s The Promise of Salvation (ChicagoLondon: The University of Chicago Press, 2010) and is to be found in many of Habermas’
latest writings on religion, for example in “The Political,” in J. Butler et al., The Power of
Religion in the Public Sphere. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011 p. 17.
32 J. Habermas, “Die Lebenswelt als Raum symbolisch verkörperter Gründe.”
33 It seems to me that this change of accent from public perfomance to the construction and
the reproduction of the individual is the slight, millimetric difference distinguishing my
hypothesis from Massimo Rosati’s (see his Ritual and the Sacred, and now, The Making of a
Postsecular Society. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). What follows owes a great debt to my long
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trivial practices individuals perform in their intimate relationship with the sacred:
Spiritual exercises, individual prayer, sexual interdictions, ritual fasting and dietary
rules, diary-keeping and other writings of the self, or pilgrimages. While these may
at times take the form of either a formal code of conduct or a public ritual—
common prayer, guided spiritual exercises, even mass ceremonies, such as the
hindu Kumbh Mela,—it is their “bridging” character between the mind and the
body, experience and rationality, individual life and shared traditions which permits
to approach the problems of social action and integration (Habermas’s own starting
point) from a different perspective.
In order to tackle this particular phenomenon we need to carve a conceptual
space for religion beyond both Protestant-influenced visions of religion as a purely
intimate and symbolic experience and neo-Durkheimian strongly collectivist
definitions. It is my conviction that this can be done through a paradoxical
combination of the French linguist Émile Benveniste’s thesis about the meaning of
the Latin word religio and an understanding of the Axial breakthrough which builds
on Robert Bellah’s reflections about “the renouncers” and their teachings.
In his book on Indo-European Language and Society, first published in 1969,
Benveniste worked out an etymology for the term religio which pointed to the
semantics of “carefulness,” “attention,” and “concern.” Benveniste called Cicero, who
explained the word religio as re-legere, as his main witness. The Latin verb, legere,
means “reading,” but also “gathering,” “collecting,” or even “recognizing.” Re-legere,
then, points to the very concept of “re-reading”—that is, reading (collecting,
gathering) again (and again) one’s actions in an act of continuous concentration,
reflection, and meditation. Within this reading, religio was first and foremost an
individual trait, a scrupulus:
Thus religio, “religious scruple” was originally a subjective attitude, an
act of reflection bound up with some fear of a religious kind.34
Within this semantics, a religious person is a social actor who rests before acting,
someone who has learned to restrain herself while referring to some existing
standard or tradition in order to understand when and how to do the right thing.
Thus, in this ancient Roman understanding religio is first and foremost a habit of
reluctance which holds the social actor back rather than an inspiring sentiment
which pushes her to act. In Benveniste’s very words:
In sum, religio is a hesitation, a misgiving which holds back, a scruple
which prevents and not a sentiment which impels to action or incites to
ritual practice.35
relationship with Massimo, Rahel Wasserfall, and Adam B. Seligman and their work, both as
scholars and organizers.
34 E. Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, English transl. on the internet:
http://chs.harvard.edu/wb/1/wo/jqCS8zOVNwPPM23RP4RlLM/0.0.0.0.19.1.7.15.5.1.1.1.5.
7.1.1
35 Ibidem.
11
If we combine Benveniste’s explanation of religio with the common elements of
the so-called Axial traditions emerged between the 6th and the 3rd century BCE
(Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Greek philosophy) we get a clearer picture
of what we are looking for. The Axial break has variously been described as a
broadening of horizons, as the rupture of the originally unitary cosmos of everyday
reality, or as “the discovery of the soul.”36 In his most recent work, Habermas
mainly follows Shmuel N. Eisenstadt in speaking of the emergence of a dualistic
worldview within which a transcendent order was, for the first time, clearly and
radically distinguished from a merely mundane, or immanent, one—what Charles
Taylor termed “the great disembedding.”37
Not necessarily an “other world” nor the reign of a personal deity, the
transcendent realm was considered as both sacred and higher than the mundane
one, and called those human beings who succeeded in grasping its existence beyond
the realm of phenomena to live according to its nomos. For the first time in history,
Axial religions and metaphysics introduced a vertical dimension into human
experience: after the Axial breakthrough, being “religious” meant to focus one’s
attention on this vertical axis and to discipline oneself according to its nomos. In the
words of Hebrew prophets and Greek philosophers, in the deeds of Confucian sages
and Buddhist renouncers a higher life that could not be reduced to what ordinary
people were accustomed to was foreseen and put into form. In other words, when
men abandoned the “horizontal” comfort of a unique and compact cosmos and
started to think in vertical terms, they felt the need to improve themselves crossing
and surpassing the limits and the boundaries of their present state in order to fulfill
her human potential. The vertical elevation of religious virtuosos was already
beyond customary forms of life and implicitly or explicitly criticized them.
From a societal point of view, this reflection on the chasm separating the
mundane and the transcendent order and the anticipation of its nomos in words and
deeds created a new social group. An intellectual and ascetic élite was constituted of
people who not only strived for self-perfection, but who also claimed to be able to
offer their society a better and truer self-representation than the existing fusion
between God and King.38 In other words since the very beginning Axial religious and
philosophical virtuosos felt the duty to teach others the nomos (the Way, karma, to
on, Tao, etc.) as they had discovered and experienced it—Plato’s apology of the
philosopher going back to the Cave to liberate his fellow citizens being the first and
See J. P. Arnason, “The Axial Age and Its Interpreters: Reopening a Debate,” in J. P.
Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt, and B. Wittrock (eds.), Axial Civilizations and World History.
Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2005. See also, in the same volume, B. Wittrock, “The Meaning of the
Axial Age.” R. N. Bellah and H. Joas (eds.), The Axial Age and Its Consequences. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
37 C. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham-London: Duke University Press, 2004; C.
Taylor, A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Universty Press, 2007. J. Habermas, “Von
den Weltbildern zur Lebenswelt.”
38 See S. N. Eisenstadt “Introduction. The Axial Age Breakthrougs—Their Characteristics
and Origins,” in S. N. Eisenstadt (ed.), The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations.
New York: SUNY Press, 1986.
36
12
the foremost illustration of this particular drive of the Axial sage. As Bellah wrote, in
fact,
for all the differences among what can, in most cases, only loosely be
called renouncers in the several Axial cultures, the one thing they shared
was that they were teachers, and founders of schools or orders, thus
institutionalizing a tradition of criticism.39
This is, in my view, the very point where two apparently opposite phenomena—
Benveniste’s hesitation and the push to verticality animating the Axial sage—came
together. The schools created by the Axial renouncers were the actual places where
ordinary people convened to change their lives according to some theoretical and
practical systematization of the nomos. The devotee of an hindu guru or a Confucian
master40 learned (and learns!) precisely how to be religious in Benveniste’s terms—
that is, how to be hesitant—according to a (new, evolving) tradition which pointed
to a transcendent, vertical realm.
This tradition, however, was not anything that might be comprehended or
absorbed by theoretical or noetic means alone: It was only through the assimilation
of a set of practices that hesitation became life in order to transform life in
something better and higher.41 In other words, the schools and the traditions
created by Axial sages were places where specific kinds of practices were worked
out and taught to “all men of good will.” It is time to abandon this sketchy historical
reconstruction to pay some attention to the main analytical elements of these
practices and try to show how they can contribute to our argument on the place of
religion in post-secular societies and the problems of social integration of the latter.
It seems to me that the best way to thematize these “religious” practices is
through Michel Foucault’s conception of the “technologies of the self”:
Technologies of the self (…) permit individuals to effect by their own
means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their
own bodies and souls, thoughts, conducts, and ways of being, so as to
R. N. Bellah, “The renouncers,” The Immanent Frame, August 11, 2008, on the internet:
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/08/11/the-renouncers/
40 See, for example, J. D. Mlecko, “The Guru in Hindu Tradition,” Numen 29, 1, 1982, pp. 3361; F. Jullien, Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2004; E. Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. On
the Western tradition see P. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life. Malden-Oxford: Blackwell,
1995. M. Chase et al. (eds.), Philosophy as a Way of Life. Chichester: Wiley and Sons, 2013.
41 In his research on Middle Ages monastic communities, the Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben speaks of a life that has embodied the rule up to the point that norms become
unrecognizable as such—that is, as something imposed onto life from without. See G.
Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2013.
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transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness,
purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.42
The German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, has recently spoke of “anthropotechnics,”
a concept strongly, and explicitly, indebted to Foucault’s ideas:
[Anthropotechnics are] the methods of mental and physical practising by
which humans from the most diverse cultures have attempted to
optimize their cosmic and immunological status in the face of vague risks
of living and acute certainties of death.43
We may then call “technologies of the self” those practices which train individuals to
lead that ordered and disciplined life which is necessary to achieve both modest,
everyday goals (we may call these “horizontal goals”) and, more importantly, to
reach the upper levels of human flourishing (that is, “vertical goals”). Their main
elements are exercise, tradition, and individuation.
From a general theoretical point of view, the crucial trait of technologies of the
self is their being based on exercise, that is, on the repetition of certain ways of
acting which have the effect of habituating the human body and the human mind to
certain practices and “virtues” in order to elevate it and reach new heights. In a
sense, they are sets of codified exercises for moulding the body (hexis) and the mind
(habitus) in order to being “prepared for a certain complete achievement of life.”44
As Sloterdijk puts it, with a more anthropological twist:
Hexis and habitus (…) identify man as the animal capable of doing whait
is supposed to if one has tended to his ability early enough.45
Moreover, through exercise human beings progress in their skills and in their
capacity to attain higher and higher goals. In fact, through training and repetition
humans may reach certain thresholds beyond which what at first seemed
impossible becomes a second nature—allowing the social actor to move forward to
even more apparently impossible goals.46
It is safe to say that one common trait among Axial religious traditions is the
profound understanding of the need of continuous vigilance, repetition, and selfcorrection on the part of the individual. From a theoretical point of view, this
emphasis on exercise and repetition runs counter any conception of “socialization”
which, as it happens in Talcott Parsons’s or Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of
personality, understands the internalization of practices and norms as a process
which has a clear ending and that is supported, afterwards, by social and systemic
M. Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in L. H. Martin et al. (eds.), Technologies of the Self.
A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: The University of Massachussets Press, 1988, p.
17. M. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
43 P. Sloterdijk, You Must Change your Life. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009, p. 10.
44 M. Foucalt, “Technologies of the Self,” p. 30
45 P. Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, p. 184.
46 For a creative use of Foucault’s ideas see P. Markula and R. Pringle, Foucault, Sport and
Exercise. London: Routledge, 2006.
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sanctions alone.47 The point is that no attitude, no habit, no bodily posture is ever
attained once and for all. They have to be renewed from time to time through
exercise—a thesis which recalls the Durkheimian insight about the need to re-state
and re-impose a fading conscience collective within already-socialized individuals
which has been lately renewed in Randall Collins’s theory of interaction ritual
chains.
Most religious traditions have formally codified their technologies of the self and
have reflected upon them in a continuous attempt at a self-clarification which has
both an instrumental and an expressive side. On the instrumental side, practices are
evaluated and improved according to their contribution in the attainment of some
specific goals (purity, illumination, fusion with the sacred); on the expressive side,
they reflect on how these practices symbolize and actualize religious symbols—just
think of different ways of attempting the imitatio Christi spelled by the Franciscan
or the Ignatian traditions or to samurai manuals such as the Bushido and the
Hagakure. Ritual everyday practices, in other words, have a specific kind of
reflexivity which assures that the tradition is never self-complacent or immobile.48
In all Axial traditions, the codification and the mise en forme of anthropotechnics
brings also about a degree of reflexivity on the necessary relationship between the
individual and his interactional and group networks: as all traditions have
understood, the training and the elevation of any individual always are cooperative
practices, activities which need the creation and the reproduction of deep and
interpersonal relationships—first and foremost that between master and disciple.49
Last but not least, “hooking” to these traditions, not only individuals find
guidelines and blueprints for the elevation of themselves but, more importantly,
they are pushed to further their individualization. Anthropotechnics, in other
words, intrinsically request a constant and repeated self-reflexivity—just confront
the formidable work of historians such as Guy Stroumsa, Jan Assman, and David
Shulman, or William Paden’s more circumscribed study on the “extreme poles” of
the Christian tradition on this point.50 In fact, the techniques of the self intrinsically
permit and encourage further individualization—often using the paradoxical
semantics of the “loss of the self.” Not only are anthropotechnics a way for the
individual to concretely practicing a codified tradition; they are also a means for
attaining a deeper knowledge and consciousness of oneself. At their best, they
See, for example, T. Parsons, Social Structure and Personality. Glencoe: The Free Press,
1964; P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1977.
48 Rosati’s ideas on “liturgical reflexivity” seems particularly interesting here. See M. Rosati,
Ritual and The Sacred, p. 79 ff.
49 See, on this, P. Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, chapter 8.
50 See, among others, J. Assman and G. G. Stroumsa (eds.), Transformations of the Inner Self
in Ancient Religions, Leiden-Boston: Brill, 1999; D. Shulman and G. G. Stroumsa (eds.), Self
and Self-Transformation in the History of Religions. Oxford-New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002. See also W. E. Paden, “Theaters of Humility and Suspicion: Desert Saints and
New England Puritans,” in L. H. Martin et al. (eds.), Technologies of the Self. Amherst: The
University of Massachussets Press, 1988. Michel Foucault’s work on confession is obviously
all-relevant here.
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combine the two imperatives “Take care of yourself” and “Know thyself”51 in a
virtuous way which permits further individualization and further self-reflexivity in
a never-ending spiral.
4. Religious and Secular Anthropotechnics in Post-Secular Societies
The critical hypothesis I advance can now be simply stated: The most interesting
object of cooperative translation in a post-secular society might be neither religious
symbols and narratives nor public performative rituals, but those anthropotechnics
and practices of the self that have been elaborated, reflected-upon, and codified by
the main religious traditions. Seen from this point of view, the citizens of a postsecular society might be more interested in learning and practicing (what for them
are) new forms of life drawing from the rich wellspring of religious traditions. If
rightly understood as the locus where exercise, tradition and individuation meet,
pious everyday practices, spiritual exercises, and even monastic rules may become
the privileged objects of a continuous exchange of cooperation and self-clarification
between religious and non-religious citizens. The old question—“What do you
believe? Explain it to me”—might be replaced by a new one—“What do you do?
Teach it to me.”
The fact is, this already happens between traditional religions, for example
through monastic exchanges where monks from different confessions live together
and share their practices from time to time—in this case, the expression
“interreligious dialogue” is profoundly misleading, for it may give the impression of
relationships based on the spoken word, while the bulk of these interactions
depends on the sheer sharing of everyday practices. These kind of exchanges may
even include non religious citizens: Jesuits and members of various Catholic
movements accept, and even look for, secular citizens for sharing their spiritual
exercises and prayers. The main point, however, is the translation of originally
religious practices into secular practices which maintain their original dynamics in
a changed symbolic context.
At least in its unreflexive incarnation, this is nothing new. From the Roman
Catholic sacrament of confession to the rites of atonement and self-discipline shared
by all monastic orders, from periods of isolation and self-reflection to secular forms
of pilgrimage (what Neil Smelser called “personal odysseys”),52 we find that a
panoply of techniques of the self emerged within classical religions has already been
translated and handed over into secular settings. Moreover, religious
anthropotechnics proved to be efficacious even when they were detached from
their ideal and dogmatic bases (that is, from the symbols who justify and explain the
goals that these practices are meant to achieve).
What I am proposing—in a classically Habermasian way—is to render this
process of translation a cooperative and self-reflexive activity shared by religious
and secular citizens alike. This might have very interesting effects. First, it might
51
52
M. Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” pp. 18-21.
N. J. Smelser, The Odyssey Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
16
give us some awareness of past processes of translation and alert us to their social
and power dynamics. Works such as Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body: The Origins of
Modern Posture Practice have shown the deep embeddedness of past translation
processes and their dependence upon power relationships and stereotypizations.53
A cooperative and self-reflexive process of translation would reduce the risk of a
distorted appropriation of existing anthropotechnics without hindering the
possibility of achieving creative renovations, combinations, or hybridizations.
Second, a cooperative process focused on the translation and the sharing of
anthropotechnics is a goal in itself: it already is an exercise in cooperation and
sharing. Getting to know alternative and codified ways of doing things, letting
others explain and teach what to do and how, sharing expectations and frustrations
when exercises are hard and success seems impossible to reach is social integration
in itself. Moreover, since the practices that the object of translation and diffusion are
those who help individuals to focus on themselves and their social relationships, it
is not only the form of the exchange, but also its content that matters. Using a
suggestion from Alasdair MacIntyre,54 we may say that what is at stake in the
process of translation and diffusion of anthropotechnics is nothing less that the
creation of a contemporary catalogue of virtues, those qualities and attitudes which
permit us to fulfill our practices, constitute our identities, and renew our
communities and traditions. Incidentally, exchanges on practices may influence the
development of new symbols and narratives when secular citizens understand the
long history of apparently trivial practices and daily rituals (an experience first year
students of sociology customarily have when we explain the ancient meaning of the
handshake or the origins of a particular form of greeting)55 and find that their
purposes are not that distant from their religious fellows—in fact, the very
possibility of translating religious anthropotechnics is predicated on the fact that
objectives and aims are not that different. Again, however, the symbolic, narrative
side of this cooperative translation might only be the last step in a long process
through which the technologies of the self occupy center stage with their practical,
“material” nature.
The other side of the process of translation of religious anthropotechnics is the
effect it might have on the furthering of both individuation and the awareness of the
inner relationship between individuation and social forms. Along with personal selfreflexivity, individuation can never be taken for granted, not even in a postmetaphysical, culturally liberal society like ours. It is the result of a focused effort
that should be renewed and reworked constantly—it is the result of protracted
exercise. Since this repeated exercise depends on the knowledge, the use, and the
assimilation of social forms—practices, relations, interactive processes,—the
M. Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. Oxford-New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010.
54 A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
55 See, as examples of this kind of analysis, A. Momigliano, “Religion in Athens, Rome and
Jerusalem in the First Century B.C.,” in On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 1987; T. Allert, The Hitler Salute. New York: Henry Holt & Co.,
2008.
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awareness of the intrinsic relationship between individuation and society that
Habermas finds in traditional rites might become a concrete and repeated
experience in a society founded on the cooperative elabration of the techniques of
the self.
Let me end with a radical word on the role, and the duties, of critical social
scientists and intellectuals in a post-secular society in which religious and secular
anthropotechnics become a shared heritage and the object of a continuous process
of translation and diffusion. The “family likeness” between religious and secular
anthropotechnics is so evident that Sloterdijk has been tempted to claim a radically
bold thesis about “religion”—that is, “religion” does not exist as such, but can be
easily re-defined as a particular set of self-improving practices among the others.
My point is that Sloterdijk’s thesis should be completely reversed. If, according to
our definition, “religion” is learning to be hesitant through traditional techniques of
self-reflexivity and self-improvement, then the point is precisely that everybody
might (and maybe should) learn to be “religious,” taking advantage of the
opportunities of a post-secular society where the members of religious
communities and secular citizens have finally reached a principled awareness of the
limitis of their respective traditions. Hesitating, waiting, reflecting—“holding one’s
hand” before acting—would become the foremost individual virtue and the greatest
heritage of religious traditions in a post-secular society.
As critical social scientists, it seems to me that our duty is to help our fellow
citizens to learn about traditional and contemporary practices, to help them in
finding their form of life, in abandoning their prejudices, and in learning that ideas
and symbols (or “identities”, whatever they are) may be less important than sharing
practices. Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: “Culture is a monastic rule. Or it, at least,
presupposes a monastic rule.” As intellectuals, we should start granting ourselves
the discipline, the time, and the comfort to think serious ideas and practice a
“joyously serious” form of life, one in which rule and life become one. Others will
follow.
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