Habermas Kierkegaard and The Nature of T PDF

Habermas Kierkegaard and the Nature of the Secular
Ada S. Jaarsma
The mode for nondestructive secularization is translation

Jurgen Habermas
Whereas I doubt that anyone would approach me today in this way, many years ago, a
classmate asked me in casual tones if I was religious. I had just begun my graduate studies
and left behind a close-knit community in order to study philosophy, and this unexpected
question was both startling and vaguely vexing. Despite my awareness of the perception of
others that I was indeed religious, at the time I did not, and actually would not have wanted
to, identify in those terms. Were I pressed to self-identify, it would have been in the terms
of belonging to specific communities in my case, the Anabaptist peace-church tradition
and the somewhat ethnically based community of Dutch Canadian neo-Calvinists, or, more
generally, Christianity.
At that time, the term religious struck me in some ways as a secular identification,
reflecting an outsiders overly imprecise perspective on my subjective sense of religious
participation. In other words, I resisted the label religious because it seemed to reduce
complex confessional affiliations to an uncomfortably external vantage point. Moreover, to
cede ground to the outsider suggested the acceptance of an implicit judgment of Christianity
namely as marking the nonsensical or at least highly problematic co-existence of religious
faith with the scientific context of graduate school. As a member of a religious community,
I had a highly attuned awareness of the boundaries of community, including not only a
robust understanding of precisely who else belonged to the fold but also a sense of how
differently these boundaries might appear to an outsider. Anthropologists identify this tension
between a participants self-understanding and an observers perspective as the indeterminate
relationship between emic and etic analyses; and this indeterminacy plays an important role
in current debates about the nature of the religious, the secular, and the fraught relations
between the two.
I recall this anecdote in order to reflect on the ambiguity of the term religious, especially
in terms of its meaning for religious participants and its relationship to its companion term
secular. In what follows, I describe Habermas normative program for the successful and
mutually beneficial co-existence of the religious and the non-religious, looking especially
at his reliance upon a particular reading of Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard himself wrote as a
self-described Christian, or at least as someone invested in the possibilities of Christian
existence, and so it is instructive to examine how Habermas, an admittedly non-religious
thinker, renders Kierkegaards project. As I argue below, the specific ways in which Habermas
employs Kierkegaards thought demonstrates what Habermas himself advocates for others: an
appreciative respect for religious insights and simultaneous self-reflection on the limitations
of both secular and philosophical thinking.
Especially in his recent writings, Habermas expresses a great degree of empathy with
religious believers. His frequent use of the term post-secular society expresses hope for
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meaningful, mutually edifying relations between those who believe and those who do not.
Moreover, Habermas theoretical understanding of the very processes of communication
includes considerable attention to the problem of the participants perspective. To translate
effectively between the religious and non-religious, therefore, means to respect the subjective,
first person investment of another, while generating the inclusive participatory third person
we necessary for moral judgment. On Habermas terms, such translation is only possible if
tolerance is able to mediate between sincere cognitive and cultural differences and between
religious and non-religious stances. The concept of the secular plays an integral role in this
liberal project because its boundaries help determine the nature of successful translation
namely, generally accessible terms that can be publicly debated in terms of validity and
legitimacy.
In tension with Habermas use of the term secular are recent debates within the emerging
field of secular studies. Research into the nature of the secular by theorists like Talal Asad,
William Connolly, and Saba Mahmood often brings to light implicit judgments about religious participation that are presupposed by the liberal conception of tolerance. To question
the secular, along these lines, is to ascertain the stakes involved with assessing the subjective understanding of religion. Such an approach takes seriously the tensions between
the perspectives of the observing theorist of religion and the religious participant. It also
considers the methodological predicaments of critique as caught up in the preconditions of
the secular, and so willingly confront the limits of so-called secular critique. This involves,
among other things, considering what stands in for Christianity, for belief more generally, and, perhaps most fraught these days, for the secular when a liberal framework sets
up the religious/secular divide in the name of tolerance. As Mahmood has demonstrated,
one of the consequences of liberal tolerance is that judgments tend to be supported, rather
than scrutinized, about certain disliked acts or dogmas, judgments about what social theorists have named the culturally repugnant other.1 Mahmood notes that while the religious
culturally repugnant other is often understood in terms like anti-modern, fundamentalist,
and backwards, such repugnant practices and ideologies are products of the conditions
of secular morality.2 In other words, the characterization of repugnance is reinscribed,
rather than undermined, in the liberal framework. The stakes are clearly very high here in
how the secular is defined and understood because it plays a key role in how boundaries
are determined about acceptable and non-acceptable behavior in contemporary democratic
society.
To return briefly to my opening anecdote, I used to resist identifying myself as religious
in part due to a discomfort with the implied judgment that religious people tend to be
close-minded imperialists who over extend the reach of their own truth claims. Although I
therefore eschewed the term religious to describe myself, I now find myself using the term
fairly often, employing it for example in the classroom to explain that I grew up in a religious
community. I have, in general, become more comfortable with the term religious, and
this shift coincides exactly with my own move away from a participatory perspective within
the religious communities to which I once belonged. Having come out as feminist and
queerand hence am now living out of the fold, so to speakthe question of who is the
culturally repugnant other seems both pressing and highly contingent.
When I willingly make use of the religious/secular divideexpressed, for example, in the
phrase I grew up religiousam I thereby implicitly endorsing an understanding of faithful
living as ultimately culturally repugnant? Does the categorical divide between religious and
secular, especially when employed by someone who self-identifies as secular, result in a
willful misrecognition of religious belief as less rational, insufficiently liberal, or essentially
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Habermas Kierkegaard and the Nature of the Secular: Ada Jaarsma
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anti-modern? These questions seem to be at the heart of the emerging debates within secular
studies because they challenge the ideal of inclusive tolerance that is presupposed by liberal
democratic rhetoric. By way of reflections on my own use of the category religious, I
seek to ascertain the degree to which Habermas, as a liberal proponent of secularization, is
open to critical challenges by those who employ a greater degree of skepticism towards the
religious/secular divide.
In his recent writings on religion, Habermas maintains a commitment to a categorical
divide between the religious and the secular in order to put forward a normative program that
will enable citizens, regardless of religious affiliation, to learn how to co-exist peaceably.
In what follows, I examine Habermas understanding of the secular by reconstructing
his use of Kierkegaards writings. I argue that Habermas interpretation of the Christian
existential thinker models his argument about how philosophy can and should engage with
religious thought. His specific rendering of Kierkegaard thereby brings to light Habermas
own existentialist presuppositions, and it opens up the opportunity to recast Habermas project
in light of recent arguments about the religious/secular divide, the nature of tolerance, and
the problem of cultural repugnance.
I. Habermas and the Suspension of the Ethical

In his engagement with Kierkegaard, Habermas models his own suggestion that philosophy
can learn from religion in order both to salvage otherwise inaccessible insights and to
make sense of the limits of philosophy itself. It may seem surprising that Habermas makes
use of Kierkegaard at all, given the presuppositions of Habermas project. In modern life,
according to Habermas, neither tradition nor convention provide sufficient resources for our
moral decision-making, and this has enormous consequences for the scope of philosophical
reflection. In contrast to the premodern era, in which philosophy accorded with religious
faith, in modernity, Habermas explains, philosophy retires to a metalevel and investigates
only the formal properties of processes of self-understanding, without taking a position on
the contents themselves. That may be unsatisfying, but who can object to such a well-justified
reluctance?3 This reluctance is well-justified because, like John Rawls, Habermas argues
that practical philosophy must be limited to abstract questions of justice and morality.4 In
other words, whereas we all make ethical judgments about how to live, we cannot extend
substantive claims about the good life beyond the bounds of our own contexts. Only formal
principles, like the equality and respect for each individual, have rational validity across
different settings.5 Philosophy itself must thus be postmetaphysical in its commitments to
formal, rather than particular and substantive, claims about justice.6
This argument reflects Habermas consistent position that the right maintains priority
over the good. Moral claims about rightness, which are inclusive and universalizable, are
inherently open to ongoing public debate about their validity and legitimacy. They assert
validity in principle for every individual, setting out abstract norms of rightness that apply to
each of us. Ethical claims, in contrast, are limited in scope to debates about the conventions
and norms of specific communities. Corresponding to Hegels descriptions of Sittlichkeit,
the ethical consists of visions about the good life in relation to our own identities and
communities: who we are and who we would like to be. In contrast to Hegels argument that
the ethical is rational and ultimately universal, Habermas maintains that only moral claims
about rightness are binding, rationally, across cultural divides.
On these terms, to be modern is to be able to differentiate between the moral and the
ethical. It is a mark of maturity to be able to distinguish between a communitys claims to
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goodness and those formal principles of rightness that extend to all and, more significantly,
to accept that not everyone will likely agree with one communitys ethical norms and values.
Moreover, maturity also means taking seriously the subjective import of moral norms to
every individual who is affected by that norms scope and application. There is rational
import to anothers participant perspective because the legitimacy of a norms recognition
depends on its inclusivity, which is brought about discursively. And so to be able to adopt
a moral point of view which transcends ones particular social and historical context is also
to adopt the perspective of all affected by the norm in question.7 In other words, mutual
perspective-taking and impartiality are necessary skills for the rational determination of
moral rightness.8
This differentiation between the moral and the ethical gives rise to certain quandaries, resolved in part by Habermas reading of Kierkegaard. Habermas maintains that the
motivations that drive ones actions and decisions must be embedded within ones ethical self-understanding.9 It is through specific socialization practices that we gain ethically
grounded convictions and the motivation for moral discernment.10 However, as stated above,
philosophy is precluded from intervening in assessing ethical judgments about the good
life because it is only able to set out formal claims that are context-transcending and thus
universalizable.
Given this committed restraint, several questions arise: how can we theoretically determine
what specific ethical conditions should be established in order to motivate moral maturity?
What must be ethically or culturally true of ones participant perspective so that universal
moral principles are not experienced subjectively as imperialist or violent? Habermas admits,
Theories of justice that have been uncoupled from ethics can only hope that processes
of socialization and political forms of life meet them halfway.11 The nature of this hope,
which is essential for Habermas vision of contemporary post-secular society, is articulated
through Habermas reading of Kierkegaard.12
Habermas looks to Kierkegaard because he finds Kierkegaards approach to ethics to be
sufficiently restrained and formal. In other words, he can be read as a postmetaphysical, but
ultimately religious, thinker. Restraining himself from adjudicating between different ethical
norms or values, Habermas wants to account for moral action without prescribing any reliance
upon divine revelation or religious teachings, not solely because of the social and epistemic
realities of pluralism but because of the subjective implications of his postmetaphysical
project: namely, that we ourselves, as modern and autonomous subjects, are the source
of morality, and that moral rightness is established through inclusive, intersubjective and
ongoing debate.
Habermas is not simply reviving Kantian rationality here. Rather, agreeing with
Kierkegaard, Habermas explains that Kantian projects of self-knowledge are ultimately
insufficient in that reason itself cannot move the will. If we ground morality solely in human
knowledge, we will lack the motivation for acting morally.13 Rather than relying on the
abstractions of Kantian morality, then, Habermas looks to Kierkegaard, in whose writings
we find the structure of the ability to be oneself.14 This structure consists of the existential conditions necessary for ethical subjectivity: responsibility, transparency, self-choice,
and a sufficiently impassioned will. This structure coincides with Habermas search for a
sufficiently formal description of an ethical self.
It is not Kierkegaards explicitly religious writings where this structure is articulated.
Rather, in Kierkegaards pseudonymous writings, it is the ethicist who displays the selfconscious fallibility and finitude that enables him to take himself as a task.15 The ethical
stage of existence consists of choosing to choose, taking responsibility for the very act of
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making ethical decisions. In other words, the ethical self makes the decision to be a moral,
as opposed to an amoral, actor. The ethicist, whose existence reflects a sufficiently formal
depiction of what it means to engage with the project of discerning moral rightness, supplies
Habermas with the resources for conceptualizing the motivated moral actor.
Of course, the ethicist is exposed as deeply despairing, when we read Kierkegaards most
Christian pseudonym, Anti-Climacus. In terms of his overall project, Kierkegaard is not
pointing to the ethicist as either the most passionate or the most faithful exemplar. Rather,
Kierkegaard is inducing the reader to go beyond Kant and Socrates, beyond the very selfreliance of the ethicist, to Christ. As Habermas acknowledges, Kierkegaard wants the reader
to recognize the dependence of the self on the Other as the very ground of its freedom.16
Whereas we ourselves are responsible for choosing to choose, Anti-Climacus demonstrates
that the ethical self ultimately fails to achieve the goal of becoming a self through its own
powers. The task of selfhood thus requires the acceptance that it is my own despair, rather than
external circumstances, that pushes me to recognize my dependence on the Other.17 Habermas
acknowledges that this total reliance marks the overturn of a secular self-understanding. It
motivates the finite mind to transcend itself and recognize the dependence on an Other in
whom its own freedom is rooted.18 Whereas for Anti-Climacus, this Other refers to the
Christian God, for Habermas, its referent must be carefully translated into terms that are as
inclusive as possible.
I want to examine how this specific translation of Kierkegaard demonstrates the limitations of philosophy, as described above. Under the premises of postmetaphysical thinking,
Habermas explains, we cannot identify the power beyond us as the God in time,19 despite
the fact that this is Kierkegaards insistent claim. Because he hopes to secure the means by
which both believers and non-believers are able to discern moral validity that is universal
and worthy of recognition across the chasms of ethical differences, Habermas translates
Kierkegaard into what he calls generally accessible terms. Whereas Anti-Climacus describes
a religious formula for selfhood in which the self rests transparently in the power that establishes it, Habermas interprets the absolute power as the intersubjectively shared powers
of language. Reaching an understanding with one another about something in the world
and about ourselves, we encounter a transcending power20 in and through the discursive
practices that no one owns or authorizes exclusively. While we depend on these practices,
they exceed our own control. In line with postmetaphysical thought, we presuppose the unconditionality of truth and freedom, and yet we accept the impossibility of their ontological
guarantee. And so, Habermas concludes, the enabling power built into language is of a
trans-subjective, rather than an absolute, quality.21
Subjectively, we are free to choose to choose to be morally engaged, as demonstrated
by Kierkegaards ethicist. However, Habermas points out that we are free only in virtue
of the binding force of the justifiable claims that we raise toward one another: The logos
of language embodies the power of the intersubjective, which precedes and grounds the
subjectivity of speakers.22 While we do not own or control language, it still remains ours;
since it is intersubjective, it cannot be ruled over by any one individual, and so how we
make use of our freedoms when we engage discursively with each other is not arbitrary. We
achieve the right ethical self-understanding together, as a joint effort, and this is manifested
in our discursive practices as we take up what Habermas calls the participant perspective
of the we necessary for moral discernment.23 Our capacity for the awareness of anothers
perspective is only disclosed because our understanding of authorship and accountability is
not limited to our autonomous selves.24 And thus we construct our moral order ourselves,
together.25
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What then is the relationship, in Habermas terms, between the morally engaged individual, who demonstrates the existential structure of selfhood, and the particular socio-ethical
context in which he or she lives? This question is a central preoccupation of Kierkegaards
own writing, as it highlights the tensions between the single individual and the leveling effects
of society. One striking formulation of this question is found in Fear and Trembling, where
Kierkegaards pseudonym Silentio asks: Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical?26
The ethical, which corresponds to Hegels Sittlichkeit, refers to those historically specific
norms and values with which one is socialized. Posing the possibility of a suspension of
the ethical, Silentio is ascertaining the finite limitations of those norms and values for the
faithful individual.
There is an echo here of the limits of the ethical that Habermas acknowledges, in light of the
universalizing scope of the moral. Looking at Abrahams faithful response to God, Silentio is
struck by the incommensurabilities between the knight of faiths subjective obedience and his
cultures normative expectations: either Abraham is a murderer, or he is an exemplary model
of what it means to be faithful. As the knight of faith, Abraham cannot speak; in principle,
he cannot make his actions understandable to anyone else, and his silence thus marks the
existential limitations of intersubjective discourse and other ethical social relations.27
Like Silentio, Habermas describes the passionate individual in terms of a suspension of
the ethical. Unlike Silentios knight of faith, however, Habermas suspension does not result
in silence, nor does it signal obedience to the divine. Rather, it reflects the translation of faith
into terms consistent with Habermas postmetaphysics and his hope in the trans-subjective
powers of language. The Kierkegaardian divine becomes, in Habermas rendition, the
transcending force of discourse, and this means that the source of truth and morality is both
innerworldly and context-transcending. We can rely on our own shared resources as we
seek to discern and establish social justice, and we can place real hope in our understanding
of what is morally right, not solely for our own communities, but for all of us, in a binding
way and in principle.
Habermas has made the continual case that moral rightness must be differentiated from
ethical conceptions of the good and that philosophy must willingly forego the task of prescribing substantive ethical visions of how to live.28 Likewise, as individuals, we must suspend
the question of substantive ethical truths because, as we accept the plural makeup of our
democratic societies, we acknowledge the unresolvable difficulty of adjudicating between
competing conceptions of the good.29 Whereas we cannot hope to resolve conflicts about
ethical norms, we can and must work towards discerning together, across real cultural divides, what is morally and universally right. Habermas has consistently argued that moral
judgments can be right or wrong.30 Suspending the ethical, therefore, does not mean resigning oneself, in apathy or cynicism, to the impossibility of asserting moral claims. Conversely,
it does not mean maintaining an impartial or observers assessment of moral rightness.
In other words, the priority of the right over the good, discussed above, is only possible
because of our willingness to participate in the discursive search for universal morality. We
can only suspend the ethical if we ourselves are engaged participants in inclusive discursive
practices. In fact, moral judgment is only accessible from a participants perspective, a
participant who is able to take seriously the views of others in the shared world that reveals
itself only from within.31 To only operate from the first-person perspective would be to
prejudice the view in favor of ethical issues, closing off moral judgment.32 Such a refusal to
suspend the ethical risks the very possibility of a legitimate social order because it calls
into question the principle that all individuals, regardless of social and cultural backgrounds,
must be able to take part in democratic debates and processes.33
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As we know from Kierkegaard, to subjectively will something for example, willingly

engaging in moral discernment brings with it extensive qualitative changes to the self. In
the case of Habermas portrayal of the participant who takes on the perspectives of others and
exercises the discursive skills necessary for mature rational debate, this individual becomes
the author of the law. It is not simply that, as participants, we recognize that we are affected
by moral judgments because, as universal, they are binding on all of us. Rather than solely
understanding ourselves to be addressees of the law, we understand that we ourselves are
authors of the law.34 As we participate in these legitimation practices, we not only discern
and make sense of objective truth or morality, we ourselves are becoming, in crucial
ways, gaining specific capacities and goals.
Habermas maintains that a shared world is not a given but a mandate that has to be
achieved, dialogically.35 Seeking the validity of moral norms is not separate from the modes
and practices by which it is secured. We therefore need to be socialized, through ethical
activities like education, in order to learn the meaning of validity and gain the necessary
tools for participating in and, indeed, the motivation for participating in public debate.36
Ultimately, then, we are motivated to live together peacefully in a particular order because,
as authors of the law, we can rely on our own understanding of how that order is justified;
we know that the legislative arguments that ground our democratic systems can be justified
on bases that we, as rational participants, can follow and evaluate. As these discussions are,
in principle, open-ended, we owe it not only to each other but also to ourselves to expect that
our democracies are, in Habermas terms, truth-sensitive.37
In Fear and Trembling, it is the knight of faith who demonstrates the teleological suspension of the ethical.38 The knight of faith, heeding the call of the divine, suspends the
ethical norms of the community in order to become religious. The individual who refuses to
suspend the ethical can be understood as either defiant or as existentially lacking in passion.39
Translated into the terms of Habermas project, the knight of faith becomes the citizen. For
Habermas, it is the citizen who, responding to the project of seeking and establishing morality and democratic legitimacy, suspends his or her own particular ethical norms in order to
become the author of the law. On his terms, those who are unwilling to undertake or participate in the learning processes which involve suspending the ethical can be characterized
as immature, irrational, or, in more extreme cases, immoral.
It is the citizen who is motivated, by solidarity with others and by the achievement of
the legitimation of society itself, to suspend the ethical. The citizen, on these terms, is
a more existentially intense version of the ethicist. By identifying Habermas citizen as
a translation of Kierkegaards knight of faith, I am making the case that the learning
process the decentering as Habermas calls it which the citizen undergoes is analogous
to the learning process or existential transformation of Kierkegaards religious individual.40
As the author of the law, I have the freedom and responsibility to say yes or no to
how I participate within my own cultural traditions and to choose one tradition reflectively
over multiple alternatives.41 However, I must suspend any substantive ethical commitments
in light of the formal procedures by which we adjudicate rightness. This is how I can
participate in the self-correcting functions of democracy, listening to individuals who protest
disrespect and discrimination and thus seek to extend universal principles like civic equality.
We can hope to achieve, together, ongoing progress in what Habermas calls a self-correcting
learning process,42 reflecting on past mistakes and achieving more inclusive justice.
When we broaden our respective social worlds and include one another in a world
[we] jointly construct, we are able to assess our conflicts in light of shared standards of
evaluations in order to resolve them consensually.43 The verb broaden is an important
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one in this context. Habermas defines moral learning in terms of an increased inclusivity
of claims and persons such that their worthiness of universal recognition is legitimated
intersubjectively.44 He claims that discrepancies between normative ideals like equality
and actual material conditions produce, for participants, a highly motivating cognitive
dissonance45 that prompts moral learning. According to Habermas, we can place real hope
for improved social justice in the insights and debates that such dissonance calls forth.46
This hope is not the Kierkegaardian hope for Christian ethics, where individuals love each
other as neighbors and seek to follow Christs example above all else.47 Rather, it is the hope
of postmetaphysics, where individual as well as social learning enables all of us to progress
towards more egalitarian and fully actualized social justice.
II. Habermas and the Gap between Knowledge and Faith

I began this paper with a brief anecdote about a shift in my reaction to and use of the term
religious. I described my unwillingness, several years ago, to identify myself as religious
because of an intuition that this category reflected assumptions about the culturally repugnant nature of religious belief. The term seemed to solidify the affirmation of a contrasting
term, secular, as if it coincided with qualities of open-minded tolerance and impartiality.
Whereas I was once uneasy with identifying as religious, in contrast, I now employ the
term religious fairly frequently in order to describe my own socio-ethical background, and
this shift corresponds exactly with my transition away from the bounds of my original faith
communities.
In this story, I want to draw attention to a tension between two different formulations
of what it means to be religious. The first concerns the categorical distinction between
religious and secular, where the categories imply certain essential differences between
what it means to belong to a religious tradition and, conversely, what it means to self-declare
as not religious. From the perspective of the faithful person, this is the distinction that is
potentially open to the charge of intolerance, even as it promises to model the very meaning of
tolerance. This distinction also seems to indicate the presence of an observer someone who
is determining where exactly the line between religious and non-religious life should be
drawn. From the perspective of the religious person, this observer is presumably aligned
with the category of the secular.
In contrast, the second formulation of religious is one that precludes the possibility of
formally distinguishing between religious and secular modes of life. Living a religious
life, on this account, entails performing specific actions which produce, teleologically, a
certain kind of self: a virtuous self, a faithful self, a self with the capacity and the inclination
to continue performing these particular actions. There may be an invocation of a difference
between religious and secular here, but it does not reflect a firm categorical distinction.
Rather, it refers to boundaries that are subjectively meaningful to the religious self, boundaries
that delineate those prescribed goals and actions from non-religious, potentially destructive,
goals. This latter formulation can be found in the research of scholars like Talal Asad and
Saba Mahmood, who draw our attention to the ways in which religious lives are oriented
towards the production of specific capacities. According to this methodological approach,
the scholar of religion or the observer of the religious practice is encouraged to approach the
religious/secular divide with skepticism and self-reflexivity. This is especially because of an
intuition that the category of the secular promotes, rather than undermines, dislike and the
political rejection of those who appear to be religious. Given the political, economic, and
military power that often backs liberal discourse on secularism, this intuition is critical, in
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the sense of calling for much more substantive awareness of culpability for violence against
others.
I want to take seriously the question: is Habermas open to the charge of intolerance against
those who, according to the terms of his project, appear repugnant? In other words, despite
his use of the word tolerance in relation to religion, does his use of the religious/secular
divide justify an unintentionally dismissive, perhaps even violent, attitude towards religious
believers? In my reconstruction of his use of Kierkegaard in the preceding section, I argue
that the religious knight of faith becomes the citizen; the religious in this Habermasian
translation becomes the discursive decentering of the mature citizen. The suspension of the
ethical, enacted by the engaged citizen, is something that every mature adult needs to learn,
and so it has universal import. At least ideally, the term citizen is applicable to all members
of society, and it reflects the social achievements of inclusivity, impartiality, democratic legitimation, and ongoing collaborative learning about how to further the ideals of social justice.
This suspension of the ethical, however, is not in itself sufficient, according to Habermas,
for the necessary legitimation of the state. In his recent writings on religion, Habermas
acknowledges that the realities of pluralism give rise to predicaments that require citizens
to undertake additional practices beyond solely learning how to suspend ethical differences.
Because Habermas now accepts the ongoing existence of religious communities within the
broader context of secularized society, he makes the case that there is a separate form of
learning that is necessitated by the presence of religious claims within the public sphere
and that this occurs through translation.48
In order to examine Habermas approach to religious pluralism, I want to reconstruct an
alternative, potentially competing way in which Habermas translates Kierkegaard namely,
Habermas interpretation of a claim by Climacus, a Kierkegaardian pseudonym, that there
is a gap between faith and knowledge. This employment of Kierkegaard will not result in a
formally universal concept of existential selfhood. Rather, as a key premise for Habermas
commitment to a secular state, it sets out a categorical divide between those citizens who are
believers and those who are not. In contrast to learning by suspending ones own ethical
norms, this second interpretation of Kierkegaard leads Habermas to claim that tolerance
results from translation specifically from the translation of religious claims into generally
accessible, secular terms. Since this is the argument where we see Habermas relying upon a
categorical religious/secular divide, this is the interpretation of Kierkegaard that is most open
to critique from contemporary secular studies, specifically in terms of the methodological
assumptions about what counts as religious in the first place.
By arguing that religious claims must be translated, rather than suspended, Habermas is
relying in part upon a claim that Climacus makes in Philosophical Fragments. Referencing
Climacus, Habermas maintains, The gap between knowledge and faith cannot be bridged by
reason,49 and because of this gap, secular and religious citizens need to look to translation
as the mediating bridge that enables them to communicate. Religious convictions must be
translated into generally accessible validity claims; there is an implied equation, here, of
generally accessible with secular.50 Habermas maintains that translation serves as a
bridge because it successfully meets the epistemic conditions of pluralism: namely, that
discourse that purports to be inclusive and universal is limited by scientifically generated
secular knowledge.51 secular knowledge provides the conditions by which discourse renders
itself accessible. It is therefore the religious believer who is asked to translate claims into
generally accessible terms because of his or her acceptance that an exclusive claim to truth
by one faith can no longer be naively maintained.52 Translation is, however, a task for both
secular and religious citizens,53 and so the translation imperative goes in two directions:
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openness on the part of secular citizens to their own fallibility and to the insights found in
religious claims; acceptance on the part of the religious citizens to the secular nature of
the state and to the necessity of generating inclusive debates.
Translation reflects a categorical difference between the secular and the religious
citizen, and while both categories of citizen must participate in translating, the burden is
asymmetrical. Only religious believers, Habermas acknowledges, must split their identities into public and private elements in order to have the possibility of gaining majority
support for their arguments.54 The burden is asymmetrical because, on Habermas terms,
the believers ethical self-understanding derives from religious truths claiming universal
validity.55 Religious individuals justify their claims by referencing a divine perspective
or a view from nowhere, which are metaphysical sources that, according to Habermas,
contrast sharply with the limited metaphysical baggage of the secularized citizen.56 The
secular citizen is able to suspend ethical truths, as described in the earlier section, in light of
the formal priority of universal rightness. This category of citizen needs not struggle with
cognitive dissonance because of a robust capacity for rational adjudication, made possible
because the priority of the right makes good secular sense.
Descriptively, then, Habermas sees the religious believer as encumbered with an approach
to knowledge that is permeated by faith, meaning that what is legitimate and reasonable
refers to the specific, transcendentally grounded dictates of the religious worldview. To
translate religious claims is to accept that such dictates, although they are eminently legitimate
in the eyes of the believer, are not universal in the eyes of the broader democratic society.
Religious citizens hereby demonstrate what the secular grounds for the separation of religion
from politics actually mean:57 namely, that the neutral state responds to the competing claims
of knowledge and faith by abstaining from prejudging political decisions. Thus believers must
accept the independence of secular from sacred knowledge as an important part of coexistence
within pluralist society, accepting that secular reasons have priority in the political realm.58
Conversely, for the secular individual, knowledge is always a matter of cultural conditions
and constructions, and so the burden of translation simply reflects the necessary neutrality of
the state.59 For all citizens, however, translation does require a change in consciousness,
namely, an increasing acceptance of the normative claim that both religious and secular
mentalities must take each other seriously and examine themselves self-reflexively.60
The gap between faith and knowledge has two different meanings according to Climacus. In his two pseudonymous texts, Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific
Postscript, Climacus is drawing the readers attention to the two contradictions between subjective existence and external or objective knowledge. First, he is pointing to the gap between
willed certainty and finite historical knowledge. Faith in this sense does not necessarily
involve religious claims but rather the leap of belief involved with claims about knowledge.61
Climacus explains that it is the will, rather than competing knowledge claims, that excludes
doubt.62 When we heed Climacus words and accept that objective knowledge is only an
approximation,63 we can reflect on our existential relations to knowledge claims our own
interested investment in the very processes of seeking certainty in knowledge.
As individuals, we are thus challenged to accept the uncertainty of knowledge and,
conversely, embrace the truth of subjectivity and the task of passionate existence. If
someone refuses to acknowledge the uncertainty of knowledge, Climacus explains that
this can result in real violence; an individual who seeks to secure with force the requisite
eyewitnesses of an event, for example, is a tyrant who hereby refutes his or her own
nature as an existing self.64 Such a tyrant refuses to take responsibility for the riskiness
of knowledge, preferring instead to ground knowledge through the view from nowhere,
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as Westphal characterizes such appeals to objectivity.65 Based on this account, Habermas

characterization of religious belief is, on Climacus terms, not belief at all. The view
from nowhere that, for Habermas, grounds religious claims is merely, for Climacus, the
temptation of external, rather than internal, truth.66
The gap between knowledge and faith also has a more intensely religious meaning for
Climacus. In this second meaning, the gap corresponds to contradictions between human
existence and the eternal divine. Beyond accepting the fallibility of knowledge claims, he
states, ones own understanding must surrender itself.67 Such surrendering results in the
religious expressions of guilt and sin consciousness. Ultimately, in the face of the contradictions between human finitude and the absolute, Climacus explains that the learner must
develop the consciousness of sin as the condition for understanding.68 For Kierkegaard, such
sin-consciousness results in the Christian existence of transparently relating to the divine, as
described above in the terms of Anti-Climacus.
Habermas, as a secular thinker, is translating Kierkegaard into terms that accord with
his postmetaphysical approach to philosophy. As stated above, Habermas seeks to model an
approach to philosophy that is ethically abstinent, in which every universally obligatory
concept of a good and exemplary life is foreign.69 This ethically abstinent approach is
necessitated by the diverse pluralism of society, and it hopes to secure the means by which
citizens collaboratively determine the truth and rightness of morality. In contrast, whereas
morality can be right or wrong, religious insights cannot be verified as true or false by
philosophy.70 Philosophy must therefore be bound by what Habermas calls methodological
agnosticism: [Agnostic philosophy] refrains on the one hand from passing judgment on
religious truths while insisting (in a non-polemical fashion) on drawing a strict line between
faith and knowledge.71 Philosophys agnostic approach means that it cannot determine what
part of religious doctrines is irrational and what part rational.72
The first meaning of the gap between faith and knowledge aligns with this nonpolemical acceptance of the inability of secular knowledge to judge religious truth. The
boundaries between secular and religious reasons are fluid,73 according to Habermas,
and therefore religious claims can be converted into terms that are generally accessible
and extend beyond the bounds of particular communities.74 In order for translation to be
successful, both the religious and the secular citizen must accept an interpretation of the
relation between faith and knowledge that enables them to live together in a self-reflexive
manner.75 Constitutional guarantees like freedom of religion, while necessary, are not in
themselves sufficient for securing peaceable and free coexistence. Citizens must themselves
be able to accept compelling reasons for the necessity of tolerance.76 In other words, through
tolerance, I recognize you as a worthy member of society, deserving of equal rights, and so I
commit to the substantive inclusion of all members of society through education, democratic
processes, and equal access to the labor market.77 While I need not ignore real disagreements
with you, I accept as reasonable the need to tolerate you because of, not despite, my sense
of the wrong or unpleasant qualities of your way of life.78
Where Climacus challenges the individual to consider the existential limitations of epistemology foregoing certainty in the name of subjective inwardness Habermas challenges
the individual to accept that inevitable disagreements result from the incommensurabilities
between religious and secular perspectives foregoing repugnance in the name of tolerance.79 This acceptance of tolerance does not require the same task for the secular and the
religious citizen. Because, on his terms, the absolutist tendencies of metaphysical religion
are missing, Habermas states that the secular individual does not struggle with the cognitive
dissonance facing the religious self when he or she accepts the fact that each individual has
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subjectively interested relations with knowledge claims. This secular ease does not, however,
legitimate any sense of rational superiority to the believer but rather prompts acceptance of
the impossibility of verifying the rational validity of belief claims.
The gap between faith and knowledge has higher stakes for societal harmony when it
comes to the religious believer. The religious citizen must, from within his or her own
participants perspective, willingly accept the need to translate his or her beliefs because of
an acknowledgement that faith claims are not ultimately inclusive because of a commitment
to solidarity that extends beyond the bounds of religious community. Tolerance consists of
the acceptance on a cognitive level, by religious individuals of religions nonexclusive place
in modern pluralist society.80 As described in the previous section, in order for us to become
the authors of the law, we must open up our own perspectives to the learning processes of
translation. No one can do this for us, and the will to learn must be subjective and sincere.81
In the case of religious belief, this task is more demanding, given that public discourse is
limited by secularly generated scientific knowledge. Habermas acknowledges that religious
persons are not likely to rate themselves as cognitively backward.82
To self-identify as culturally repugnant is, of course, nonsensical. Religious communities
must generate the normative principles of secular society from within, cultivating in their
members the motivation and capabilities necessary for tolerance.83 This means that their
own religious doctrines must be convincingly and cognitively connected with the constitutional and democratic principles of equality and morality.84 There are real social dangers,
Habermas warns, when religious communities do not confront and respond to the cognitive dissonance that arises from their co-existence with both different belief systems and
the authoritative secularly generated scientific knowledge.85 They become fundamentalist
when they either combat the modern world or withdraw from it into isolation.86 Fundamentalism is thus a modern phenomenon87 and terrorism is a symptom of the miscarrying
of secularization.88 Religious believers need to align themselves on the right side of the
faith/knowledge separation, accepting that public democratic debate must be inclusive and
generally accessible.89
The second meaning of the gap between faith and knowledge corresponds to the recent
turn in Habermas reflections on religion. In response to his increased acceptance of the
ongoing existence of religious communities, Habermas makes the case that the translation of
religious claims has real cognitive value for secular thinkers.90 He states explicitly that there
are places that secular thinking, and philosophy more generally, cannot go; but rather than
rendering them obsolete, this limitation makes religious insights highly valuable for their
ability to semantically regenerate secular thinking.91 Something was lost, Habermas
explains, when religious concepts such as sin were converted into their modern secular
concepts like culpability.92 While we lament for what we now miss in our modern society,
we can place hope in the semantic potential inherent within religion that we can access
through translation. Conversely, we risk impoverishing our collaborative search for truth
and rightness if we do not have access to such inspiration and insight. On one reading of
Habermas, secularization hereby carries with it a hope of eventually achieving the kind of
moral insights now still limited to religion.93
III. Secularization and a Rereading of Kierkegaard

In order to think more carefully about the nature of this hope that Habermas places in
secularization, in this final section I reconstruct another way in which Habermas interprets
Kierkegaard. I then examine challenges posed to Habermas by contemporary scholars of
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secular studies and point beyond Habermas Kierkegaard to Kierkegaards own religious
texts. I suggest that by clarifying specific limits of Habermas rendering of Kierkegaard, we
can view certain critical affinities between Kierkegaard and secular studies.
This final interpretation of Kierkegaard concerns what we might call a third meaning of
the faith/knowledge gap, and we find it in Habermas normative description of the ethical
self-understanding attained by citizens who fulfill the tasks described above: suspending the
ethical in light of collaboratively discerned moral rightness; either translating religious claims
into generally accessible terms or being receptive to salvaged meaning in such translations.
In this third interpretation, the gap between faith and knowledge is overcome through the
common sense attained by the modern self. To participate in secularization is ultimately to
participate in what Habermas identifies as the historical achievements of democratic human
rights, and this constitutes a commitment that his project will neither compromise nor fully
question.94
It is important to be clear about terminology here. Habermas does not want to reinstate
a culturally specific, ethical vision because, as described above, the ethical must be
suspended before formal rightness. Politically prioritizing an ethically-permeated common
good over formal rights and freedoms guaranteed to every individual leads to discrimination
and, globally, helplessness in the face of a clash of civilizations.95 However, what motivates us and enables us to prioritize universal rightness is our ethical self-understanding,
in other words, the modern selfhood that emerges out of the ongoing learning processes
undertaken by individuals and communities about epistemological and moral fallibilities.96
The religious/secular divide does not disappear with this modern common sense. Rather,
what Habermas calls nondestructive secularization shapes individuals into tolerant selves
who are able to either translate or listen to translation within the terms of liberal discourse.
This conflation of modern self-understanding with the processes of secularization is under
strong critique by various social theorists.97 As Saba Mahmood points out, arguments in favor
of global secularism have intensified tremendously after September 11, 2001 because of
the widespread assumption that secularism is the best way to ward off the dangers of
religious strife.98 According to Mahmood and other scholars within secular studies, the
policies, which are aimed at confronting the dangers of religious strife, rigorously define
and circumscribe the very meaning of being religious. The liberal project of secularism, on
this account, is better understood as a reshaping of religion through reforms, state injunctions,
and, most significantly, the authorization of a kind of subjectivity that complies with the
normative demands of secularism.99 It is therefore a secular conceit, according to William
Connolly, that liberal hopes for global harmony depend upon a single, authoritative basis of
public reason and/or public ethics that governs all reasonable citizens regardless of person
or private faith.100
On these terms, the assumption that secularism has a certain moral superiority needs to be
urgently rethought. As Mahmood writes, Apart from the fact that this secular vision does
not command broad allegiance in the world today, I fear that it is premised on a propensity to
violence that is seldom questioned.101 She points out that the secular strategy seeks to make
provisional, if not extinct, those religious life-forms that are deemed incompatible with the
liberal global order, risking more rather than less violence;102 conversely, secularism seeks
to produce religious subjectivities that are essentially compliant with liberal political rule.
This line of thought challenges Habermas to acknowledge the substantive or ethical forms
of selfhood prioritized by his commitments to secularism.
Habermas explicitly identifies what he sees as the necessary presuppositions of his project:
participants must always already buy into the egalitarian universalism of our shared world,
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lest they forfeit the cognitive import of their undertaking.103 Underlying the will to suspend
the ethical, to translate religious claims, is a commitment to a common standard of universal
equality, mutual respect, solidarity, and the protection of everyones individuality.104 In other
words, Habermas postmetaphysical commitments can be seen, in this final translation of
Kierkegaard, as specific liberal constraints: As soon as the ethical self-understanding of
language-using agents is at stake in its entirety, philosophy can no longer avoid taking a
substantive position.105
If we look at Kierkegaards understanding of the third gap between faith and knowledge,
we find a possibility that Kierkegaard might challenge Habermas approach to the secular.
Colin Jager has recently suggested that Kierkegaards writings contain an alternative genealogy of the secular, one that does not marginalize the religious in the name of liberal
secularism,106 indicating that Kierkegaard might serve as a helpful ally for secular studies.
Kierkegaard aimed his texts at the single individual, hoping that his writings would serve
as a corrective to each reader. His texts therefore differ significantly in how they pitch their
arguments because they take aim at qualitatively varying existential modes. The Kierkegaardian arguments described in the previous sections correspond to the generically religious
reader, the individual who is willing to accept that there is a telos that is higher than the
ethical realm, that truth is subjective and uncertain.
In contrast, the third meaning of the divide between faith and knowledge corresponds to
Kierkegaards most religious mode of existence, which he called Christian existence. What
ones life proclaims is a hundred times more powerfully effective than what ones mouth
proclaims. This is a statement from one of Kierkegaards explicitly religious texts,107 and
it reflects Kierkegaards understanding of how authentic faith is expressed outwardly. More
existentially intense than Climacus descriptions of religious inwardness, Kierkegaard states
that the ultimate religious expression of faith is action.108 This understanding of faith is, above
all, a corrective to established Christendom. Kierkegaard condemns the Christian community
of his own society as not being at all really Christian, and so he is especially targeting
those individuals who wear the guise of religion. Seeking to disrupt the complacency of
so-called Christians, Kierkegaard explains that the only gap between faith and knowledge is
one that the secular individual enacts, by keeping a chasmic abyss between knowing and
living.109
In societies where Christianity is dominant, this abyss between faith and action results in a
secularized guise of religion. Secularized faith echoes the truth as accurately as possible110
by sticking solely to facts and objective knowledge.111 In contrast, the religious individual
approaches life as essentially action,112 relinquishing the security of knowledge probability.
The faithful person thus foregoes access to power, profit, and popularity, venturing instead
to express faith by acting.113 Kierkegaard identifies tolerance as an especially secularizing
temptation, which promotes a lack of existential passion. Tolerance, he explains, can be
found in a eulogy of an enlightened centurys matchless progress towards a society where
being a Christian became practically nothing.114 As tolerant Christians, he explains, we
insist on a version of Christianity that is in harmony with our increasing enlightenment and
culture.115 The only pious action that results from Christianity is careerism and tolerance,
which Kierkegaard maintains is actually secularism.116
Secularized religion fundamentally misunderstands the role that doctrines play in ones
existence. Christianity is not a doctrine, Kierkegaard maintains, but it has gained immense
imperialist power because of its secular self-identification as objective doctrine.117 Given
these admonitions that objective knowledge leads only to secularized versions of religion, to
what can we objectively point to in the name of productive critique? Kierkegaard provides an
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explicit answer to this question: we have the right, he states, to require that secular versions of
Christianity admit openly that they are not actually Christianity: there must be truth in this
matter.118 In contrast to seeking truth in interpretations of scripture, we should read scripture
as a mirror, seeing ourselves in the text119 in order to relate subjectively to the Word.120
As opposed to external doctrines, the only assurance is what my own life expresses.121
Kierkegaard thus defines religion in terms of subjective capacity, rather than objective belief:
how one lives and inhabits ones beliefs matters, rather than what specifically one believes.122
Rather than pointing the finger of scorn at someone else, Kierkegaard advises that we devote
ourselves to becoming spirit,123 knowing that we will be deemed repugnant in the eyes of
the establishment.
Kierkegaards description of faith as cultivated action corresponds to the recent findings
of secular studies. In her ethnography of the mosque movement in Egypt, for example,
Mahmood describes piety in terms of a continuum of practices that are performed not for
the sake of external prescriptions but rather for the realization of specific forms of selfhood.
Particular rituals and practices, for example, are undertaken because they produce specific
desires and capacities in the self.124 Pedagogical programs are geared towards making
certain prescribed behavior become natural to ones disposition, thereby making an a priori
separation between individual feelings and socially prescribed behavior unfeasible.125
This understanding of the religious self as one particular form of selfhood leads to highly
uncomfortable methodological challenges for liberal readers. Mahmood acknowledges the
likelihood that cognitive dissonance will arise when differing ethical projects encounter
each other, for example, when contemporary feminist liberalism seeks to understand the
womens piety movement occurring within Egyptian Islamic mosques.126 Habermas gives
us a way to deal with such dissonance, namely, to translate Kierkegaards expressive faith
into the terms of liberal secularism and thereby benefit from the learning process that will
result.
However, Mahmood prompts us to reflect on the way in which such secularism produces
a highly specific rearrangement of religion into beliefs and doctrines from which the individual believer can stand apart from, examine, and translate.127 To be religious, according
to secularism, is to be able to identify and analyze ones specific objective beliefs. Not coincidentally, this kind of analysis accords exactly with the critical reason that accompanies
the modern ethical self, according to Habermas. Rather than describing such an approach to
religion in terms of transparent reason, Mahmood exposes the modern self as one, among
other possibilities, form of ethical subjectivity. Kierkegaard also seems to dispute the socalled neutrality of the modern self. He claims that religious passion cannot be translated,
only performed, because it is the mode of belief that produces ones capacity for ongoing
pious expressions.
I do not think that the ramifications of Mahmood and Kierkegaards challenges to
Habermas include having to forego insisting upon the repugnance of certain actions. However, the locus of the critique has to shift from one of dogma, of objective statements about
religious belief (that Habermas identifies as the source of potential strife, if they are not
translated into secular terms) to a critique about the mode by which creeds are enacted. So
instead of looking at what beliefs someone upholds, we think about the ways in which those
beliefs are inhabited. Connolly has recently proposed that the stakes are enormous here for
the struggle against extremist forms of Christianity, imperialism, and cowboy Capitalism,
each of which have very similar repugnant modes of spirituality. He is suggesting that we
look for spiritual affinities that advocates of different creeds share in common in order to
forge critical productive alliances.128 If we accept his argument, that the same creed can be
inhabited by generous or by domineering forms of spirituality,129 then we can relinquish
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our hold on a strict religion/secular divide and instead rely upon a methodology that acknowledges our own passionate, affective investment in our ideas and, maybe the most
controversially, acknowledge our own arguments as forms of ethical practice. That we too
want to become certain kinds of selves. That this might make us even resemble certain
religious forms of practices or at least that we can no longer rely upon the appearance of
neutrality or inevitability in our commitments to feminist or liberal forms of selfhood.
NOTES
I presented an earlier version of this article at the Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy Meeting
in Windsor, ON in October, 2008, and I thank the participants for their insights. I also thank Tara Pedersen,
Namrata Mitra, Noelle Oxenhandler, and Alexis Shotwell for invaluable conversations and suggestions.
1. The phrase culturally repugnant other, coined by Susan Harding (see, Representing Fundamentalism: The Repugnant Cultural Other, Social Research 58, no. 2 (1994): 37393), refers to the challenges
of studying communities that, especially in the eyes of the academy, seem to reflect antimodern or fundamentalist practices and ideologies. For a more recent use of the term, see Brian Howell, The Repugnant
Cultural Other Speaks Back, Anthropological Theory 7, no. 4 (2007): 37191.
2. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005, 37 note 56.
3. Jurgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge: Polity Press 2003), 4.
4. On Habermas terms, truth and morality are analogous, both requiring rational debate and the
successful warranting of claims; despite the loss of religiously grounded metaphysical guarantees, morality
can thus be right or wrong, but only in terms of the rational validity of moral norms as established by
inclusive, dialogical inquiry into the worthiness of their recognition. While truth and morality are analogous,
they are corroborated in different ways. Where truth asserts what is the case, empirically, in an independently postulated objective world, morality asserts what ought to be the case, in the shared symbolically
structured social world. Truth is thus justification-transcendent, and rightness is justification-immanent,
and both depend upon discursive practices in the lifeworld. Habermas acknowledges that these guiding intuitions are at odds with certain methodologies of cultural anthropology, as I explore below. See Habermas,
Rightness versus Truth: On the Sense of Normative Validity in Moral Judgments and Norms, Truth and
Justification, trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005): 23775, 246). For a recent discussion
of the relative similarities between Habermas and Rawls, see James W. Boettcher, Habermas, Religion,
and the Ethics of Citizenship, Philosophy and Social Criticism 35, nos. 12 (2009): 21538.
5. Habermas, Rightness versus Truth, 263.
6. Habermas, Equal Treatment of Cultures and the Limits of Postmodern Liberalism, The Journal
of Political Philosophy. 13, no. 1 (2005): 128, 1.
7. Habermas, Remarks on Discourse Ethics, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse
Ethics, trans. Ciaran P. Cronin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994): 19112, 24.
8. Habermas, Fundamentalism and Terror A Dialogue, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues
with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003): 2544, 41; Rightness versus Truth, 260.
9. Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, 4.
10. Habermas writes, for example, An abstract solidarity, mediated by the law, arises among citizens
only when the principles of justice have penetrated more deeply into the complex of ethical orientations
in a given culture (Habermas, Pre-Political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State? The
Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion, with Joseph Ratzinger, ed. Florian Schuller, trans.
Brian McNeil (C.R.V. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005): 1952, 34). As I will argue in the final section
below, these ethical orientations, differentiated in Habermas project from the abstract moral claims of
universal justice, are called into question by contemporary secular studies.
12. My reconstruction of Habermas interpretation of Kierkegaard informs my understanding of
Habermas use of the term post-secular. The term is both descriptive and normative; it refers to a shift
in the degree to which Habermas accepts the ongoing co-existence of religious with non-religious citizens,
and it also marks his hope that such co-existence can be mutually satisfying and peaceful. I agree with
Austin Harringtons suggestion that we can locate a meta-theoretical meaning in the term post-secular
as it signals a turn in Habermas project towards the normative inclusion of believers within democratic
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society (Harrington, Habermas and the Post-Secular Society, European Journal of Social Theory, 10,
no. 4(2007): 54360, 547).
13. Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, 7; How to Respond to the Ethical Question, The
Derrida/Habermas Reader, ed. Lasse Thomassen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006): 11527,
120.
15. Kierkegaards ethicist, Judge William, demonstrates the structure of the moral actor, which is
actualized through the formal choice to engage with choice itself: you are not supposed to give birth to
another human being; you are supposed to give birth only to yourself, Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, ed. and
trans. Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 206.
17. In the algebraic terms of Anti-Climacus, the self who wills to be a self, entirely on its own
resources, is in defiant despair. While we need to take up the existential tasks of selfhood, ultimately resting
transparently in the power that established us is what makes becoming-self possible, Kierkegaard, The
Sickness Unto Death, ed. and trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 14. The
identity of this power that established the self is what Habermas translates into generally accessible terms.
18. Habermas, How to Respond to the Ethical Question, 121.
20. Ibid.
23. In Merold Westphals succinct words, I am the general will more deeply than I am my particular
will. As a member of the conversational we, I am the source of moral authority to which I submit
(Westphal, Kierkegaards Teleological Suspension of Religiousness B, Foundations of Kierkegaards
Vision of Community: Religion, Ethics, and Politics in Kierkegaard, ed. George B. Connell and C. Stephen
Evans (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1998): 11029, 270.
26. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. and trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1983), 54.
27. I follow the line of argument that Silentios teleological suspension of the ethical is a formal
suspension. Westphal, among others, makes this point in Kierkegaards Religiousness CA Defense,
International Philosophical Quarterly 44, no. 4 (2004): 535482, 539. This claim leads to fraught debates
among Kierkegaard scholars about the nature of the substantive ethics expressed by Kierkegaards more
religious pseudonyms and his self-authored Christian writings. On Westphals terms, we can best understand
Christian ethics as Religiousness C, the full consummation of the less intense existence spheres of
Religiousness A and B. In Religiousness C, in contrast to Silentios formal teleological suspension of the
ethical, we find a Christian teleological suspension of the ethical namely, a rich description of how to live
a Christian life by imitating Christ as the prototype. In Religiousness C, then, the teleological suspension
of the ethical is both assumed and subsumed by outward expressions of faith. However, Religiousness C,
where religious existence enacts Christian ethics, heightens the tension between Religiousness A and B,
and so neither ones rational understanding nor ones sense of ethical living can be sufficient for faithful
existence. Note that it is crucial here not to confuse Sittlichkeit, which is fully transformed by the life of
faith, with the ethical mode of existence, which is less intense and quite distinct from the religious stage of
existence; for a helpful explanation, see Calvin O. Schrag, Note on Kierkegaards Teleological Suspension
of the Ethical, Ethics 70, no. 1(1959): 6668.
29. Maeve Cooke also identifies a suspension of the ethical in Habermas recent writings: Habermas does not see this suspension of the question of ethical truth as a problem since he takes for granted that
the citizens of contemporary democracies, recognizing the plurality and intractability of ethical viewpoints,
share his view that the truth content of strong evaluations is not open to public assessment and that they are
not troubled by this (Cooke, A Secular State for a Postsecular Society? Postmetaphysical Political Theory
and the Place of Religion, Constellations 14, no. 2 (2007): 22438, 193, italics mine).
30. Habermas, Pre-Political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State? 9.
31. Habermas, Remarks on Discourse Ethics, 49.
32. Habermas, Remarks on Discourse Ethics, 180, note 39.
33. For example, refusing to suspend the ethical might result in the imposition of one specific
ethical viewpoint or approach to the violent exclusion of others: Legal procedures thus stand to lose the
force to found legitimacy if notions of a substantial ethical life slowly creep into the interpretation and
practice of formal requirements (Habermas, Religious Tolerance the Pacemaker for Cultural Rights,
The Derrida/Habermas Reader, 203).
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34. Habermas, Pre-Political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State? 3, 29; Religion
in the Public Sphere, European Journal of Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2006): 125, 5. I always find it interesting
to ask students whether they indeed consider themselves to be authors of the law. Since this phrase marks
the achievement of communicative action, we can employ it symptomatically to test the relative health of our
own democratic communities. More often than not, students, upon reflection, will begin to articulate ways in
which they feel alienated, misrecognized, or simply disinterested in those procedures that Habermas deems
vital. Following Habermas descriptions, we can begin to think about the learning deficits exemplified by
the lack of political motivation and solidarity (Habermas, How to Respond to the Ethical Question, 18).
In the terms of Habermas Enlightenment project, the classroom can be an apt space for diagnosing and
remedying such learning deficits.
35. As stated above, Habermas argues that while truth and morality are analogical, they are different
in that moral norms refer solely to our social world which has no constitutive outside. As moral actors,
we produce the conditions of possibility for the determination of moral rightness: By directing ourselves
toward the goal of a single right answer even in moral controversies, we presuppose that a valid morality
applies to a single social world that includes all claims and persons equally (Habermas, Rightness versus
Truth, 260). This social world is a mandate, not a given, and the legitimation of moral rightness depends
upon the inclusive We-perspective brought about by participants.
37. Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere, 18.
38. In addition to Silentios depiction in Fear and Trembling, there are other suspensions of the ethical
in Kierkegaards writing. See note 27 above, as well as Martin Matustk, Kierkegaard as Socio-Political
Thinker and Activist, Man and World 27 (1994): 21124.
39. Silentios Fear and Trembling describes these various types in detail.
40. When he uses the term decentering to describe the learning that happens through reciprocal
debates, Habermas is making use of Piagets understanding of moral learning practices (Habermas, Rightness versus Truth, 244270). Our perception of self and other is decentered, and so we are able to gain
the impartiality necessary for productive debate because we can take on a progressively more inclusive
participant-perspective.
41. One of the characteristics of modern society that Habermas emphasizes is the fact that individuals
enjoy the choice to reflect on the degree to which they participate within the tradition where they were
socialized (Pre-Political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State? 24). This is why he can
argue that the universalist project of the political Enlightenment by no means contradicts the particularist
sensibilities of a correctly conceived multiculturalism (Habermas, A Post-Secular Society What
does That Mean? Reset Dialogues on Civilizations, http://www.reset.doc.org/EN/Habermas-Istanbul.php,
accessed August 13, 2008, 3). This point is one key site of debate between Habermas and Charles Taylor.
Where Taylor argues that cultural rights are in need of political intervention, for example in Quebec
(The Politics of Recognition, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann
(Princeton University Press, 1994), 2574), Habermas disagrees, stating, Young people must be convinced
that they can lead a rich and meaningful life within the horizon of the acquired tradition (Habermas,
Pre-Political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State? 22). This is also where contemporary
debates about the nature of the secular expose asymmetrical assumptions within liberalism about what it
means to choose culture. For example, Wendy Brown points out the tendency to equate western liberalism
with choice and Islam with a tyrannical lack of choice. Pointing to the nearly compulsory baring of skin by
American teenage girls, Brown asks, What makes choices freer when they are constrained by secular and
market organizations of femininity and fashion rather than by state or religious law? (Regulating Aversion:
Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton UP 2006), 189). For a helpful overview of
this debate, especially in relation to Browns argument, see Anastasia Vakulenko, Liberalism, Civilization
and the (Non-)Oxymoronic Limits of Tolerance, International Journal of Law in Context 3, no. 4 (2008):
32341.
44. Ibid., 257.
46. Habermas, Equal Treatment of Cultures and the Limits of Postmodern Liberalism, 910.
47. See Matustk, Kierkegaard as Socio-Political Thinker and Activist, for a Kierkegaardian critique
of Habermas postmetaphysics.
48. There is a noteworthy shift in Habermas approach to religious pluralism. Whereas in his
earlier writings he indicated that the secular, manifesting in the rational consensus of debate, would
fully replace the holy (Westphal, Kierkegaards Teleological Suspension of Religiousness, 269), he
now accepts and recognizes the ongoing existence of religious community. Referring to this recent
turn, Harrington asks, for example, How can Habermas speak without contradiction of an ongoing
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process of secularization in this post-secular society (Habermas and the Post-Secular Society,
547)?
50. Cooke makes this point, clarifying that this is where Habermas differs from Rawls, who distinguishes between public reason and secular reason (A Secular State for a Postsecular Society? 230).
51. Habermas, Fundamentalism and Terror, 31.
52. Ibid., 31.
54. Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, 109. In terms of what translation necessitates on the part
of the religious believer, Habermas explains, But all that is required here is the epistemic ability to consider
ones own faith reflexively from the outside and to relate it to secular views (Habermas, Religion in the
Public Sphere, 9). Michael Warner provides a skeptical analysis of the ways in which purportedly neutral
critique is thus made synonymous with the formation of a particular kind of subject (Warner, Uncritical
Reading, Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, ed. Jane Gallop (Oxford: Routledge, 2004): 1338, 18). At stake
here is what Warner identifies as a Protestant metareligious understanding of religion as a matter of belief,
generalized as an understanding of religion per se (Warner, Is Liberalism a Religion? Religion: Beyond a
Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008): 61017, 613).
56. Ibid.
59. In line with these descriptions of the religious and secular citizens, Habermas suggests that the
religious believer will struggle more than the secular citizen with the acceptance of abortion rights, even
if they both hold pro-life/anti-choice positions, because of the cognitive dissonance that emerges from the
conflicts between the formal rights and the religious worldview (Habermas, Pre-Political Foundations of
the Democratic Constitutional State? 10). The secular citizen will not need to deal with such dissonance.
60. Habermas, Pre-Political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State? 47, 50. The
secular state is a historical achievement, for Habermas, and today it faces the challenge of accommodating
the continued existence of religious believers (Habermas, A Post-Secular SocietyWhat Does That
Mean? 2). Habermas calls such accommodation a post-secular achievement. In other words, secular
citizens have the obligation to transcend a secularist self-understanding of modernity, achieving a postsecular acceptance of the limitations of secular reasons, Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere, 15.
Whereas the term secularist denotes a polemical rejection of all religious claims in the public sphere,
secular refers to what Habermas calls an indifferent stance which relates agnostically to religious
validity claims (Habermas, A Post-Secular SocietyWhat Does That Mean? 5). The secularist position
risks a kind of fundamentalism unless it too willingly undertakes the learning processes of tolerance which
will then involve becoming post-secular.
61. Climacus explains that all historical knowledge is only an approximation: The reason is partly
the impossibility of being able to identify oneself absolutely with the objective, and partly that everything
historical, inasmuch as it must be known, is eo ipso past and has the ideality of recollection (1992,
574). Whereas some philosophers, most famously Hegel, claim to have produced a system of existence,
Climacus explains that such claims are attempting something that is only possible for God (Kierkegaard,
Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, vol 1., ed. and trans. Hong and Hong
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 119).
62. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton UP,
1987), 84.
63. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, 577.
64. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 92. As well as the tyrants violence, the misrecognition
of the passion of knowledge leads to societal apathy: because of much knowledge people have entirely
forgotten what it means to exist and what inwardness is (Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript
to Philosophical Fragments, 242).
65. Ibid., 118.
66. Describing existential faith in terms that reflect Climacus descriptions of the first gap between
faith and knowledge, William Connolly writes, An existential faith is not immune to argument and evidence;
commitment to it, rather, is not exhausted by them. Better, the presentations of argument and evidence are
themselves invested with an element of faith (Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Duke
University Press, 2008), 70. Connolly understands the subjective intensity of faith in Climacus rather than
Habermas terms. Whereas Habermas translation leads him to posit a secular/religious divide, Connollys
alignment with Climacus prompts him to conclude: The secular division between private faith and public
life is compromised by these considerations. The private-public division is not nearly as sharp as some
pretend (ibid., 70).
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67. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 54. In the first case, a teacher can act like Socrates and
serve as an occasion for a learner to embrace the passionate uncertainty of knowledge. In this latter case,
we must receive the condition for faith from what Climacus calls the god-in-time. He reminds us that
knowledge refers either to the eternal or to the purely historical; no knowledge can have as its object this
absurdity that the eternal is the historical (ibid., 62).
68. Ibid., 93.
70. Ibid., 42, 52.
71. Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere, 16, italics mine.
72. Ibid., 17. I want to clarify that Habermas maintains that this translation of Kierkegaard hopes to
remove a temptation for philosophers and for those who identify as secular to identify religious affiliation
as repugnant. He points out, for example, that the distinction between faith and knowledge does not permit
philosophers, or non-religious thinkers more generally, to demean religious claims as purely and simply
irrational (Habermas, Pre-Political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State? 51).
74. Harrington points out that this statement risks contradicting Habermas other claim, namely, that
there is a gap between faith and knowledge (Harrington, Habermas and the Post-Secular Society).
Rather than reading these claims as contradictory, I identify here the hope that Habermas is placing in the
very real workings of translation. As one example of this hope, he describes translation as the crucial filter
between the two spheres of church and state, a filter through which only translated and hence secular
contributions may pass from public debates into the formal agendas of state institutions (Habermas, A
Post-Secular SocietyWhat does that Mean? 5).
75. Ibid., 5.
76. Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere, 5, 13.
78. Habermas, Pre-Political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State? 25
79. Habermas writes, This concession [that you have the right to convictions and practices that I
reject] must be supported by a shared basis of mutual recognition from which repugnant dissonances can be
overcome (Habermas, A Post-Secular SocietyWhat does that Mean? 3).
81. Habermas, A Post-Secular SocietyWhat does that Mean? 5.
83. Habermas, Religious Tolerance, 201.
85. Habermas, A Post-Secular SocietyWhat does that Mean? 2. Habermas notes that religious
communities can risk unleashing a destructive potential (The Future of Human Nature, 104), as seen for
example in the 2004 conflicts over Gods, gays, and guns in the United States (Religion in the Public
Sphere, 3).
86. Asad directly refutes this thesis, arguing instead that Western imperialism, including the coercive increase of economic and ideological power over non-European peoples, is part of the conditions of
possibility for modern liberal arguments about tolerance and rational progress (Habermas, Remakrs on
Discourse Ethics, 229. He highlights the violence of processes of Westernization in non-Western contexts,
asking pointedly if we should distinguish between the liberating powers of transcendental reason and the
secular powers that destroy and reconstruct (Habermas, Remakrs on Discourse Ethics, 231).
88. Ibid., 103.
89. Elizabeth A. Castelli provides a vivid portrait of various communities within the Christian Right
in the United States who see themselves as victims of religious intolerance because of what they identify as
the perilous ascendancy of American secularism (Castelli, Persecution Complexes: Identity Politics and
the War on Christians, differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 18, no. 3 (2007): 15280, 156).
Here we see an inversion of Habermas formula of faith and knowledge, where religious faith exclusively
lifted up as a particularly patriarchal version of evangelical Christianity reflects an inevitable progress of
historical redemption, and secular knowledge represents an obstruction to religious freedom.
90. This reflects Habermas own admission that nonbelievers, like himself, might be unmusical in
religious matters (Habermas, Pre-Political Foundations of the Democratic Constitutional State? 51) and
so might benefit from translation.
93. Simone Chambers, How Religion Speaks to the Agonistic: Habermas on the Persistent Value of
Religion, Constellations 14, no. 2 (2007): 21023, 219.
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94. The mode for nondestructive secularization is translation. This is what the Western world, as
the worldwide secularizing force, may learn from its history. If it presents this complex image of itself to
other cultures in a credible way, intercultural relations may find a language other than that of the military
and the market alone (Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, 114). Cooke agrees with this admiration
for the secular state, linking the 16th and 17th century religious wars in Europe to the insight that freedom
of opinion is a basic political right (Habermas, A Secular State for a Postsecular Society? 233). See
also Cooke, Salvaging and Secularizing the Semantic Contents of Religion: The Limitations of Habermas
Postmetaphysical Project, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 60 (2006): 187207, 199.
It seems noteworthy that there is an assumption here that the secular state is one important structural factor
in the reduction of religiously based violence. Cooke describes the danger, for example, that dispensing
with the requirement of a secular basis for political authority will create the conditions for the kind of
religiously-based, authoritarian state that the secular state sought to overcome (Habermas, A Secular State
for a Postsecular Society? 234).
96. Ibid., 23.
97. The critique leads to an affirmation that there are, in fact, many ways to be modern. For example,
anthropologist Richard Shweder questions the widespread assumption that the only way to be modern
is to be part of the mainstream, and the only mainstream that counts is the one that runs through the
West (Shweder, The Cultural Psychology of Suffering: The Many Meanings of Health in Orissa, India
(and Elsewhere), Ethos 36, no.1 (2008): 6177, 66). He highlights the implicit secular/religious divide
animating such an assumption: In India even the most enlightened of medical scientists will tell you that
religion is observed for better health, while in the United States, at least among those who view themselves
as enlightened, the very idea of religion is opposed to ideas of science and medicine, and such notions
as atma, preta and chuan (soul, ghost, ritual pollution) are associated with darkness, superstition,
irrationality, and an antique or premodern cast of mind. One of the surest ways to bring a dinner party to a
halt on the Upper West Side of Manhattan or Bethesda, Maryland, is to speak earnestly about the soul or
to use the word God (Ibid., 63).
98. Mahmood, Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation, Public
Culture 18, no. 2 (2006): 32347, 325.
99. Ibid., 328.
100. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, 5.
101. Mahmood, Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire, 347.
102. Ibid., 328, note 11.
105. Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, 11. This limitation is encountered in current debates
about genetic interventions, debates in which the boundary between who we are and what we give
to ourselves, the boundary between persons and things, is at issue, thus threatening the fundamental
symmetry of responsibility that exists among free and equal persons (ibid., 14). In line with postmetaphysics,
freedom here is defined by our ability to give ethical shape to our own lives in light of the contingencies
of our very beginnings.
106. Colin Jager, After the Secular: The Subject of Romanticism, Public Culture 18, no. 2 (2006):
30121, 321.
107. Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination/ Judge for Thyself , ed. and trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991), 132.
108. To use technical terms for these existence modes, as stated above, Westphal identifies this
as Religiousness C, a term which Kierkegaard himself did not employ. The first two meanings of the
faith/knowledge gap correspond to Climacus descriptions of Religiousness A (the immanence of generic,
Socratic religiousness) and Religiousness B (the transcendence of sin-consciousness). Somewhat controversially, Westphal posits that these stages are, in turn, teleologically suspended, in light of the actual life
of faith. Religiousness C is the mode of existence that seeks to follow Christ as the prototype: faith here
is essentially imitative. I find Westphals analysis both convincing and highly relevant to contemporary
challenges to the religious/secular divide.
109. Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination/ Judge for Thyself , 117.
110. Ibid., 114.
111. Ibid., 96.
112. Ibid., 11.
113. Ibid., 100, 116.
114. Ibid., 68.
115. Ibid., 15557.
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116. Ibid., 169.

117. Ibid., 131. Christianity became power, power, became the power that was able to transform the
world. It was served in that way for some three hundred years; in that way Christianity became the power in
the world. By then an enormous working capital, if I may call it that, was established; the only question was
how it would be used. Alas, the retrogression, the deception, had already begun; instead of transforming
the world, Christianity began to be deformed (ibid., 129). And what would consist a new bank, with real
capital? Actions, character-actions (ibid., 136).
118. Ibid., 135.
119. Ibid., 25, 33.
120. Ibid., 35.
121. Ibid., 125.
122. In alignment with Kierkegaards descriptions of religious life, Talal Asad argues that it is not
the justification that is used that matters, but the behavior that is justified (Asad, Genealogies of Religion:
Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1993), 236).
123. Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination/ Judge for Thyself , 110.
124. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 126.
125. Ibid., 131.
126. In this way, Mahmood models what Janet E. Halley identifies as taking a break from feminism,
as Mahmood explicitly poses to her own project the question of feminist limits: Have I lost sight of the
politically prescriptive project of feminism in pushing at the limits of its analytical envelope (ibid., 36)?
My analysis supports this intuition that questioning the religious/secular divide might include reflecting on
the limits of our own methodological commitments.
127. Mahmood, Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire, 335.
128. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, 41.
129. Ibid., 128.
Ada S. Jaarsma is an assistant professor in Philosophy at Sonoma State University. She

works in continental philosophy, feminist philosophy, critical theory, and philosophy of
culture. She has recently published articles in Hypatia, Journal for Cultural and Religious
Theory, and Studies in Social Justice and is completing a manuscript currently entitled
Kierkegaard and Gender Studies: Sin, Sex, and Critical Theory.
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Habermas Kierkegaard and the Nature of the Secular

The mode for nondestructive secularization is translation

Constellations Volume 17, Number 2, 2010

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Habermas Kierkegaard and the Nature of the Secular: Ada Jaarsma

I. Habermas and the Suspension of the Ethical

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Constellations Volume 17, Number 2, 2010

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Habermas Kierkegaard and the Nature of the Secular: Ada Jaarsma

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Constellations Volume 17, Number 2, 2010

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Habermas Kierkegaard and the Nature of the Secular: Ada Jaarsma

As we know from Kierkegaard, to subjectively will something for example, willingly

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Constellations Volume 17, Number 2, 2010

II. Habermas and the Gap between Knowledge and Faith

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Habermas Kierkegaard and the Nature of the Secular: Ada Jaarsma

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Constellations Volume 17, Number 2, 2010

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Habermas Kierkegaard and the Nature of the Secular: Ada Jaarsma

as Westphal characterizes such appeals to objectivity.65 Based on this account, Habermas

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Constellations Volume 17, Number 2, 2010

III. Secularization and a Rereading of Kierkegaard

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Habermas Kierkegaard and the Nature of the Secular: Ada Jaarsma

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Constellations Volume 17, Number 2, 2010

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Habermas Kierkegaard and the Nature of the Secular: Ada Jaarsma

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Constellations Volume 17, Number 2, 2010

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Habermas Kierkegaard and the Nature of the Secular: Ada Jaarsma

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Constellations Volume 17, Number 2, 2010

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Habermas Kierkegaard and the Nature of the Secular: Ada Jaarsma

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Constellations Volume 17, Number 2, 2010

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Habermas Kierkegaard and the Nature of the Secular: Ada Jaarsma

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Constellations Volume 17, Number 2, 2010

116. Ibid., 169.

Ada S. Jaarsma is an assistant professor in Philosophy at Sonoma State University. She

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