Ultimate Questions

Habermas’s interest in religion springs from his engagement with the utopian dimension of the social theory of the first generation of the Frankfurt School. At the same time, although Habermas rejects the philosophical claims of emphatic conceptions of truth, from the beginning he has refused to describe these as merely irrational. Just because philosophy renounces the metaphysical question of the meaning of human existence and the worthwhileness of entire ways of life does not mean that these questions do not matter – only that philosophy cannot resolve them. Without retreating from this position, in his theological debates Habermas has nonetheless qualified this claim as reductive, because it suggests that the symbolism of the holy is exhausted by its normative content. What else the sacred might represent, something that Habermas expresses under the category of religious experience, is the substance of the present discussion.