accepts the collapse as constitutive of respecting the authority of the self. The
preservation of this distinction, which I readily acknowledge needs to be
reconsidered in many respects, is necessary if mutual understanding between
those working in established health care institutions (hospitals, hospices, etc.)
and the dying individual is to be possible.
While Habermas’s comment that religious language is indispensable sug-
gests that there is a grammatical uniqueness to religious language that stands
apart from poetic expressions, this uniqueness should not be understood
without ambivalence. What makes religious language “religious” requires
careful elaboration. For Habermas, the unique character of religious language
is not original in the sense of manifesting itself independently of human activ-
ity (Habermas 2002:74). Religious experience, from which religious language
is typically thought to extend, is not accepted by Habermas as such, since
such expressions are always caught up in structures of power and authority
derived from the semantics of particular religious communities. A post-
metaphysical approach, Habermas argues, must regard religious or mythic
language operative within the framework of modernity in terms of its func-
tion rather than in terms of its normative validity, since it is the very valid-
ity structure of religious thinking that is subject to authoritative norms and
an undifferentiated worldview (Habermas 2002:67–91). The distinction
Habermas makes between intersubjective validity (the legitimacy of norms,
for example) and subjective experience, as private and resistant to transla-
tion, is helpful. I have depicted this difference in terms of public knowledge
and private faith or belief.
Owing to private character and cultic experiential basis of religious lan-
guage, Habermas argues that it must be acknowledged that religious or the-
ological forms of reflection have exhausted their rational potential because
they are not open to critical scrutiny nor are they comprehensible within a
public forum. This would not be the case if religious language was not resis-
tant to translation into other discourses, an instance which would of course
put an end to the grammatical uniqueness of religious language, its singular
claims about transcendence and its spell-binding authority. Thus, religion,
when considered from within the framework of postmetaphysical thinking,
is theorized as rhetorical and functional, a semantic form of expression bereft
of a communicative potential (open context awareness) and therefore a pri-
vate or subjective concern. In short, religious discourse cannot reasonably be
expected to lay claim to normative validity within a pluralistic and secular
Intersubjectivity and Religious Language • 193