JU ̈RGEN HABERMASattempt along the path, initially adopted after 1945, toward the constitutionalization of
international law.
Postmodern theories comprehend these crises in a manner that is critical of reason:
not as a result of a selective exhaustion of the potential of reason that, after all, was always
inherent in Western modernity but rather as logically following from the program of a
self-destructive spiritual and societal rationalization. It’s true that a radical skepticism
concerning reason is alien to the very nature of the Catholic tradition. But Catholicism
has, as recently as the 1960s, struggled with the secular thought of humanism, Enlighten-
ment, and political liberalism. Thus, the theorem that only a religious orientation toward
a transcendental reference point could help a remorseful modernity out of its impasse
again finds resonance today. A colleague in Tehran once asked me whether, from a cultur-
ally comparative and religio-sociological perspective, it wasn’t in fact European seculariza-
tion that was the special path [Sonderweg] in need of correction. The question reminds
one of the situation during the Weimar Republic, recalling Carl Schmitt, Heidegger, or
Leo Strauss.
I think it is better not to exaggerate, in the manner of a critique of reason, the
question of whether an ambivalent modernity will be able to stabilize itself merely by
drawing upon the secular forces of communicative reason. I would prefer to approach it
undramatically, as an open, empirical question. By this, I do not intend to introduce the
phenomenon of the continued existence of religion in a continually secularizing environ-
ment as a mere social fact. Philosophy also needs to take this phenomenon seriously, as a
cognitive challenge from within, as it were. But before I take up this thread in the discus-
sion, I would like to mention an obvious turn, in another direction, that the dialogue
could take. As a result of the tendency to radicalize the critique of reason, philosophy has
allowed itself to be moved to a self-reflection upon its own religio-metaphysical origins
and to occasionally become entangled in conversations with a theology that, for its part,
has sought to connect with philosophical attempts at a post-Hegelian self-reflection of
reason.^7
A digression. The starting point for the philosophical discourse on reason and revelation
is a continually recurring topos: reason, reflecting upon its most basic foundation, dis-
covers that its origin lies in an Other; and it must recognize the fateful power of this
Other if it is not to lose its rational orientation in an impasse of hybrid self-empowerment.
What serves as a model here is the exercise of a reversal, of a conversion of reason through
reason—accomplished or at the very least initiated by reason’s own efforts. This is the
case whether reflection begins with the consciousness of the discerning and active subject,
as in Schleiermacher, with the historicity of the always individualized existential self-
assurance, as in Kierkegaard, or with the provocative disintegration of ethical relations, as
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