THRESHOLDS

Questioning between Philosophy and Religion

Contact: ncthresholds@gmail.com

Operating as part of the UCD Newman Centre of the Study of Religion, Thresholds hosts an informal fortnightly Webinar for Faculty and Graduate Students where we study a text or series of texts addressing the relation between philosophy and religion; whether written from a philosophical, theological, historical, political or literary perspective.

Thresholds is an expansive initiative meant to raise questions relating to all branches of philosophical and religious discourse and is not limited to one tradition, and open to all researchers who are interested and respectful regardless of academic background or particular interdisciplinary interests.

Thresholds attempts to open and call a space into question. The contemporary ever-evolving realities of interconnected global societies have re-opened questions of the relationship between rationality and religion, between sacred and secular, between thought and belief, even between humanity and divinity. Despite instant recognition, any discussion of ‘religious’ matters, be they contemporary or historical, inevitably falls into the vague, the ignorant, and the polemical, and more importantly they fail to grasp any deep meaningful significance which ‘the religious’ may or may not carry. An overly simplified view of the sacred, of ‘religion’ (whatever that may or may not mean) is reductive thinking, and as such, unphilosophical.

Thresholds seeks to open a dialogical space between these poles: philosophy and religion. Through countless oppositions the space between remains mysterious and begging countless more questions, and the ambiguities of the relationship between philosophical and religious ideas and experiences remain. Through different focal lenses, Thresholds seeks to ask what the relations between philosophical and religious problems are. Whether they are ambiguous, enigmatic, antagonistic or essential, be they metaphysical or socio-political, and whether rigid distinctions and boundaries can be maintained or whether the space between the two is greyer than first appearances, and whether the true answers to these problems are more complex than they seem; Thresholds hopes to ask why and why not?

Webinar Format:

We meet fortnightly over Zoom and read the selected texts together in the room. The texts are
provided via a Google Drive folder which will made available to all participants upon
request; the Zoom-link will also be sent out upon invitation. There is no required reading in
advance, this is purely up to the will of the participants. A small selection of relevant and
insightful critical material will be made available to participants via the Google Drive
alongside the main texts. We will always read the text through in English, with reference to
the original language if in translation.

First Theme:

SECULARIZATION

Focus:

The Contours of the Löwith-Blumenberg Dispute.

Readings:

1. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History

Originally published in English in 1949 then in German in 1953, it would eventually be collected in German in Löwith’s Sämtliche Schriften Bd. 2: Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen: Zur Kritik der Geschichtsphilosophie (1983)

2. Hans Blumenberg, Parts One & Two of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Die Legitimität der Neuzeit), published separately as ‘Secularization and Self-Assertion’ (Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung)

Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age was initially published in 1966, but it was revised and expanded over the following years and republished as three separate volumes in 1973, 1974, and 1976.

Description of the Material:

Many have disputed the meaning of the term ‘secularization’, whether in philosophical, sociological or simply historical discourse the term remains ambiguous, indicating many, often contradictory aspects of a historical process. What is generally agreed upon is that ‘secularization’ is a historical process which has occurred in which the public relationship between the sacred and the secular, or between the religious and the irreligious altered entirely. However, immediately questions arise such as: ‘Is secularization limited to Europe and ‘the West’ or is it global?’, ‘Is secularization a movement from within Christianity or Judeo-Christian history, or something entirely political?’ and so on ad infinitum. Some scholars have even gone so far as to say that the question of secularization is the question of modernity itself, and that without definition of the former there is none of the latter.

Karl Löwith (1897-1973) and Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) were two such thinkers, though they had very different conceptions of what ‘secularization’ and thereby ‘modernity’ meant. For Löwith, as explicated in his Meaning in History, the secular was essentially Christianity emptied of its contents and still bore the irreducible trace of its sacramental heritage, the absence of which was responsible for the ambiguous, broken and often tragic essence of modernity. To him, the modern notion of ‘progress’ was a secularized eschatology emptied of transcendent quality. Though he was not a nostalgic thinker, and Löwith never argued that this sacredness should or could be restored. Blumenberg, who began writing his own views in explicit response to Löwith in what would become his Legitimacy of the Modern Age, saw modernity as an independent epoch, inherently secular, which grew out of a specific religious context, and which was self-sufficient and legitimate under its own humanistic criteria, which while deeply complex were based on a fundamentally shared conception of selfhood and self-assertion.

However, Blumenberg did not thereby deny the persistent importance of the genuinely religious for modern secularism. Both thinkers had survived the horrors and violence of the Second World War, and both had been persecuted under Nazi Germany as Jewish-Germans, despite Blumenberg having been raised Roman Catholic and at one point trained for the priesthood, and Löwith’s family having been Lutheran converts. This shadow of the Holocaust, or Shoah, hung over both their lives and writings, as did the situation of Germany in the wake of 1945 in which the question of guilt (Schuldfrage) was first raised by philosophers and theologians. Despite the importance of this context in shaping their concerns, both thinkers wrote as philosophers and addressed the problems of secularization and modernity as universal philosophical problems rooted in historical particularities. In brief, they approach the problems as both historical genealogists and speculative philosophers. Both were rooted in the phenomenological tradition but departed from it in crucial ways, constructing their own distinctive views and both were prolific writers whose work remains underappreciated.