Article
The archaic and us:
Ritual, myth, the sacred
and modernity
Philosophy and Social Criticism
2014, Vol. 40(4-5) 363–368
ª The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0191453714528406
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Massimo Rosatiy
Late of the University of Rome ‘Tor Vegata’, Italy
Abstract
This article is based on a paper given in December 2013 at a German–Italian workshop on Jürgen
Habermas’ theory. Massimo Rosati had been studying Jürgen Habermas’ thought and classical
sociology in the Durkheimian tradition for years. Because of his own Durkheimian reading of
communicative action, he had been unsurprised when Habermas began to write systematically on
religion. In this article, he addresses the new post-secular sensitivity to the remnants of mimetic
and mythic worldviews within theoretical ones and discusses the sacred as a universal historical
structure of human consciousness.
Keywords
Émile Durkheim, modernity, post-secular society, ritual, the sacred
Years ago, writing on solidarity and the sacred in Émile Durkheim, I tried to unearth a
Durkheimian core in the Theory of Communicative Action (Rosati, 2003), reconstructing
communicative action as a linguistified form of the sacred, whose normative force –
under the modern structural conditions of the world’s differentiation – keeps some echo
of the sacred itself and duplicates its inner tension between duty and desirability. As a
consequence of this Durkheimian reading of communicative action, I was not surprised
at all – as many were in Italy and worldwide – when Habermas started to write systematically on religion. This development was not only, in my view, a new post-secular
awareness of the role of the historical religions in the world after 11 September 2001,
but was also a quite predictable reflection on a nucleus of Habermas’ thought that had
always been in need of further elaboration. I welcomed this further elaboration, and I
am deeply convinced that Habermas’ work on religion – too frequently considered by
him in the singular, namely in abstract terms and far from historical differentiations,
Corresponding author:
Email: [email protected]
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Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(4-5)
particularities and specificities – is a fantastic, precious and rare lesson of openness and
intellectual generosity, despite my disagreements on many points.
What is changed over the years in Habermas’ view on religion is that nowadays he
does not believe any more that communicative action can fully linguistify the sacred; the
new awareness of the coexistence of secular and religious forms of life in a contemporary
horizon made him more sensitive towards traces of ritual and myth that are still among
us, towards what he calls the archaic that resists a full linguistification. This is part of the
new post-secular sensitivity: a stronger awareness that, to quote Robert Bellah, nothing is
ever lost, and that both mimetic and mythic worldviews coexist together within theoretical ones. Drawing from socio-anthropological literature – Durkheim, Van Gennep,
Turner: a real pleasure for Durkheimian ears – Habermas analyses in detail the working
of ritual and myth (Habermas, 2011). Despite residual modernist overtones and specific
disagreements on his analysis of ritual, I have no doubts concerning the relevance of
Habermas’ present awareness of the persistence – albeit in transformed, more reflective
forms – of ritual praxes and sacred worldviews that, in his words, keep an access open to
that ‘archaic experience to which unbelieving sons and daughters of modernity turned
their backs’ (Habermas, 2012: 95).
In my opinion, this is a great gain, in terms of our capability of understanding societies
that are fully modern and, at the same time, fully religious (Davie, 2005) – in Europe as
well as in the USA and elsewhere in the world. This said, let me highlight three persisting
limits that I see in Habermas’ position. I want to synthesize them under three labels: (1) the
refusal to fully recognize the normative dimension of the post-secular; (2) the refusal to
decouple the sacred; (3) the refusal to grasp the deep, unconscious dimension of the sacred.
1 Refusal to fully recognize the normative dimension
of the post-secular
What surprised me upon reading the chapters of the new book by Habermas on postmetaphysical thinking – especially those concerning myth, ritual and religion – was the
lack of any reference to that process of complementary learning which characterizes the
very concept of the post-secular in previous Habermasian writings. It seems that what
Habermas gained in anthropological thickness in his articulation of the role of myth and
ritual in evolutionary terms, he lost in the normative understanding of the relationship
between secular and religious forms of life.
Shadowed by a deeper understanding of the sociological relevance and of the
workings of myth, ritual and the sacred, the central idea of a complementary learning
process between secular and religious forms of life seems to recede into the background.
Habermas’ view seems to be ‘disenchanted’ and even ‘nostalgic’: the echo of the
archaic is still here, and religious people are those who have a privileged access to
it, while ‘we’ – as modern unbelievers – can just take note of this. Habermas clearly
sees that ritual practices provide for both the self-constitution and the self-expression of
(religious) communities; at the same time, he seems uninterested in reflecting upon what
we, the moderns, might learn from the workings of ritual: namely, the making of social
solidarity on the one hand, and a specific kind of reflexivity on the other.1 It is as though
that echo could work only within the small and self-contained borders of religious
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Rosati
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communities, and its inner logic might not be ‘expanded’ to the social at large. Ritual and
the sacred have nothing to do with society at large, they make sense only in the religious
domain traditionally understood.
Second, when Habermas confronts the hotly debated issue of the place of religions in
the public and political sphere, he abstains from any immanent and ‘inner’ analysis of the
principled reasons that religious communities may have to articulate a vocabulary consistent with pluralism and democracy (i.e. Adam B. Seligman’s strategic choice; see
Seligman, 2004), ending up with the empirically (and also normatively) questionable
distinction between the wider public sphere and political institutions such as parliaments,
where the religious vocabulary should leave room for public reason. In both cases – the
sociological analysis of the dynamogenetic effects of ritual and the sacred for society at
large, and the socio-political analysis of the relationship between public reason and the
religious vocabularies needed to legitimate democratic and pluralistic principles – it
seems that Habermas’ attitude is one of marked mistrust towards empirical communities,
their concrete dealings with secular institutions, and their ability to create bonds within
and across their borders.
2 Refusal to decouple the sacred
Reading Habermas’ writings on ritual and myth is so exciting that a Durkheimian palate
gets more and more hungry line after line. From a Durkheimian point of view, to speak
of myth, ritual and the sacred in contemporary societies obviously entails decoupling the
sacred and distinguishing between a religious and a secular sacred (see Knott, 2013).2 Only
by doing so can we understand how the grammar of the sacred and the workings of ritual
affect not only religious communities but also – and in spite of any difference between the
two domains – secular identities, both individual and collective. This means that naı̈ve theories of secularization can be criticized not only by taking into account the place of the religious sacred and religious communities in a post-secular horizon, but also from the point of
view of a host of secular forms of the sacred (in the political domain as well as in the social
domain at large), including those ‘survival and camouflating’ of myth and the sacred (Mircea Eliade) that fill contemporary imaginaries. If one looks both at secular and at religious
forms of the sacred, the sacred appears as a form of sociological quasi-transcendental
(Rosati, 2003) whose main features (the properties of the sacred) are more or less the same
in the secular as well as in the religious field. From that perspective, that is a fully Durkheimian perspective, areligious societies do not exist, and actually cannot exist: the sacred has
‘just’ to be uncovered, within a historical horizon, under its camouflaged forms, but it is a
condition of the possibility of society (from a sociological point of view, the sacred is the
outcome of a human praxis – through ritual action – of self-creation and self-representation,
which, in turn, is a constitutive part of our cognitive and moral orientation and judgments).
3 Refusal to grasp the sacred as an unconscious dimension
of modernity
The above-mentioned points concern the normative and the phenomenological level:
what we can learn from the grammar of the sacred as ‘moderns’ and where religions and
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Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(4-5)
the sacred happen in contemporary society. However, there is still one level that one can
dig into. This is a deeper level so to speak, familiar to Durkheimian scholars – i.e. Émile
Durkheim himself, Marcel Mauss and Robert Hertz – when they maintained that the
sacred used to shape both our cognitive and our moral criteria of judgment. Space, time,
our sense of right and wrong, in past times everything was shaped by the sacred. They
thought that science was rapidly replacing religion in the cognitive domain, while the
sacred would have continued to play its role in the moral one. Today, cultural sociology
offers its contribution in revealing ‘to men and women the myths that think them so that
they can make new myths in turn’; according to Jeffrey C. Alexander (2003: 4), such a
Durkheimian cultural sociology is a societal psychoanalysis of sorts, well aware of the
fact that new, and hopefully more progressive, myths can replace old ones, but also that
nothing is ever lost and that even theoretical cultures cannot free themselves from both
the religious and the secular sacred (Bellah, 2011).
A neo-Durkheimian sociology, capable of making the most of the thought of classical
thinkers such as Durkheim himself and the others of the circle of the Anne´e sociologique,
but also Erving Goffman in the micro-sociological domain and Mircea Eliade in that of
the history of religions, might be able to show how ritual and the sacred in their religious
and secular forms continue to be building blocks of society at large, despite our removal
of their role.
To conclude, and to be fully honest (once again taking advantage of the present opportunity to discuss with Jürgen Habermas): my view is that the difficulties of a self-reflective
Enlightenment culture in reaching a better understanding of religions and the sacred
have a main root and cause – a Protestant-like understanding of religion. Habermas
gives a precious contribution in considering religion, within a post-Enlightenment
Protestant-like horizon, not only as a private but also as a public issue, and nowadays
in considering ritual and cult. At the same time, it seems to me that in Habermas’ view
an implicit Protestant-like understanding of religion still persists. He never writes
about religions in the plural, about concrete communities, and in so doing he frequently
considers religion(s) as a matter of belief, overemphasizing the theological and cognitive dimension and approaching the whole discussion from that point of view.
However, in discussing religions in the plural, beyond Christianity, ritualized practices and memories are almost everything, while theology and beliefs are frequently
an almost residual dimension; in other terms, religions can be discussed only from
within, starting from particularities and differences, as genuine interreligious dialogue,
for example, does; in discussing the sacred, we have to decouple it into different dimensions: unmasking those hyper-rationalistic self-understandings of modernity we have to
show that – without being an ontological structure – the sacred seems to be a universal
historical structure of human consciousness (Eliade); finally, when it comes to religions
and the sacred, we have to be ready to think about those myths that think us, b in order to
play our part, as citizens and human beings, in making those new and more humane
myths that are needed to replace the old ones.
Notes
y
Massimo Rosati prematurely passed away in Rome on 30 January 2014. The text published here is
the draft that he presented at the workshop ‘Europe, Democracy and Critical Theory. A German-
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Rosati
367
Italian Workshop on Jürgen Habermas’ Theory’, held in Bad Homburg, 5–6 December 2013. The
draft has been edited by Alessandro Ferrara in order to make it suitable for publication and to integrate the marginalia and the corrections found on Rosati’s personal printout, believed to reflect the
new additions that after attending the workshop and the debate he meant to add for final publication. Thanks are due also to Matteo Bortolini for his help in interpreting the marginalia and drafting
the final version. The acknowledgement that follows is Rosati’s own.
Being here on this occasion is not only a great pleasure, but also a great opportunity. I wish to thank
Regina Kreide and Walter Privitera for such an opportunity and Leonardo Ceppa for making his
Italian translation of Habermas’ Nachmetaphysisches Denken II [Postmetaphysical Thinking II]
(2012) available to me.
1. In Rosati, 2009 and Rosati, 2011, I tried to show the features proper to what I called liturgical
reflectivity, distinguishing it from cognitive reflectivity and postmodern reflectivity. Liturgical
reflectivity
. . . is a performative and procedural model of justification, focusing on how to justify the
specific form of an action, rather than on why it is performed. The full justification of
the reasons why it is performed depends on regressive justification, which sometimes –
as in the case of doctrinal modes of religiosity – takes the form of internally systematic and
highly rationalised theories, theologies and so on. Here the performer is not an automaton at
all. His reflectivity has four main characteristics: firstly, he reflects on how to perform certain actions (even when highly frequent repetitions make such actions almost ‘spontaneous’); secondly he reflects, even if regressively, on why to perform those actions in
that way, within an ongoing hermeneutical debate on the indexical and canonical meaning
that those ritualised actions have (a debate that takes a stronger theological form, e.g. as
in the case of Catholicism, and a weaker doctrinal form, e.g. as in Judaism); thirdly, reflectivity is related to the subjunctive dimension of liturgical rituals, that subjective as if that
allows us to look at the world around us as a conjunctural, namely, not necessary matter
of fact, as an is criticisable in the light of a subjunctive might be; liturgical reflectivity,
in other words, allows us to nurture a sort of inner-worldly asceticism that aims to bring the
divine order (hopefully in an asymptotical way) within the world (as is proper to frequent
but brief liturgical rituals), thus avoiding a fatalistic and unreflective acceptance of the
actual world. Finally, reflectivity here is related to doubtfulness, scepticism. The performer
of liturgical rituals, above all when the sacred has a totally transcendent dimension, accepts
canonical meanings in the absence of full belief. Liturgical rituals might imply obedience
and conformism in the realm of action (as, according to Durkheim, sociologically speaking,
society necessarily requires), and freedom in the domain of thought. Inner freedom is
related to the unknowable character of the sacred (i.e. of revelation), so that no one can
be judged (other than by the Lord of the Universe) because of their thoughts and beliefs,
but only because of their actions. In this case, precisely the heteronomous nature of the
sacred allows me to protect my sacrosanct inner sanctuary and, at the same time, to distance
myself from my actions, considering them as a part of a play, as something to be almost
ironically seen from a perspective of epistemic humility. (Rosati, 2009: 82–3)
When there are rituals for everything – sleeping, eating, working, dressing, washing and so on –
then simply sleeping, eating, working, dressing, washing is not enough; one has to think how to
sleep, eat, work, dress, wash and so on, and everyday practices become much more reflective.
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Philosophy and Social Criticism 40(4-5)
Reflectivity is key also in those processes of self-cultivation that are ritualistically nurtured; if
Confucianism can be considered paradigmatic under this point of view, self-cultivation is a process proper to many religious traditions (Rosati, 2009) and, as Matteo Bortolini (2013) shows,
proper to anthropo-technics at large, so that a complementary learning process can be triggered
above all at this level.
a
(Here Rosati might have possibly meant ‘the religious vocabulary should yield to public reason’,
A.F.)
2. Examples of secular sacred can be spaces (memorials) as well as ideals (the dignity of the
person).
b
(At the bottom of the page, with a sign that graphically connected his comment to the phrase
‘those myths that think us’, in his handwriting Rosati annotated some examples thereof: ‘the
Enlightenment, human rights as structures of belief with their own ritual practices, the ‘‘cult
of the individual’’’. A.F.)
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