MORAL FOUNDATIONS OF A FREE REPUBLICattempting to maintain their own identities. African and Latin American tribal cultures,
the latter of which have been reawakened by certain Christian theologies, complete the
picture. They seem, to a large extent, to call Western rationality into question, but also to
call into question the universal claim of Christian revelation.
What follows from all of this? First, it appears to me, the de facto nonuniversality of
both major cultures of the West—the culture of Christian faith as well as that of secular
rationality—much as they might both, each in its own way, be involved in the shaping of
all cultures throughout the world. It is for this reason that the question of Habermas’s
colleague in Tehran—namely, whether, from the point of view of comparative culture
and sociology of religion, it might not be European secularization that is the exception in
need of correction—seems to be of considerable weight to me. I would not really, at
any rate not necessarily, reduce this question to the atmosphere associated with Schmitt,
Heidegger, and Le ́vi-Strauss—that is, so to speak, to a European context that has tired of
rationality. It is, in any case, a fact that our secular rationality, plausible as it might seem
to our Western reason, is not plausible to everyratio. It is a fact that secular rationality,
as rationality, in its attempt to make itself evident, comes up against limits. Its evidence
is, in actuality, closely connected with certain cultural contexts, and it must recognize that,
as such, it is not comprehensible to the whole of humanity and that it cannot therefore be
operative throughout it. In other words, there is no rational or ethical or religious univer-
sal formula about which everyone could agree and which could then support everyone.
In any case, such a formula is presently beyond our reach. It is for this reason that the
so-called world ethos remains an abstraction.
Conclusion
What, then, is to be done? With regard to practical consequences, I find myself largely in
agreement with what Habermas has articulated concerning a post-secular society, the
willingness to learn, and mutual self-limitation. I would like to conclude by summing up
my own view in two theses.
- We have seen that there are pathologies in religion that are highly dangerous and
that make it necessary to regard the divine light of reason as a tool, so to speak, a means
by which religion must be purified and put in order again and again—which, by the way,
was also the intention of the Church Fathers.^5 But our reflections have also shown that
there are—and mankind today is, in general, not as aware of this—also pathologies of
reason, a hybris of reason that is not any less dangerous but that, considering its potential
efficiency, is even more threatening: the atomic bomb; man as product. And because of
this, reason must, in its turn, also be reminded of its limits and learn to be ready to listen
to the great religious traditions of humanity. If reason puts aside this correlativity, this
willingness to learn, and fully emancipates itself, it will become destructive.
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