module 4 (contemporary) Flashcards
Jurgen Habermas – On Modernity.
Duality: System and life: The world can be seen as composed of
“finite province of meaning” and a public sphere of communicative
action
Jurgen Habermas - religion and revolution are interlinked
Modernization resulted in
secular knowledge independence while religion diminishes in terms
of how meanings and purposes are redefined.
Advancement in (undistorted) communication bred liberation of
minds, undermining religious authority.
o “The authority of the holy is gradually replaced by the authority of an
achieved consensus” (Habermas, 1987:77)
Jurgen Habermas – The Theory of Communicative Action– Linguification of the sacred:
Nominalization of the sacred through
new forms of communicative structures.
* Mythical views became associable with cultural differentiation
typical of multiple view in modernity.
* It is believed that full communication is impracticable under
religious conditions
* The notion of truth is, thus, debatable as religion does not create a
room for communicative actions.
Jurgen Habermas – Criticisms of overgeneralization
This is evident in how Habermas assumed a
single public sphere, ignoring multiplicity of public spheres
jurgen habermas - too monolithic
He assumed a one-
way interpretation of how religion responds to social changes.
Jurgen Habermas criticism - secularism
Laying too much emphasis on secularism has
made some critics of Habermas refer to him as a secularist.
Pierre Bourdieu – Religious Field
Gleaning from Weber, Bourdieu saw an array of possible objective
relations between positions (Bourdieu, 1987:121).
* Division of labour and specialization paved a way for creation of
relational positions for different individuals
* Different religious interactions are symbolic of different interests of
the interactors
* Competition for religious powers are not unconnected with
competition for religious legitimacy. E.g., the Evangelicals and others
in America
Pierre Bourdieu – Religious Habitus
Those who control the religious field control the space of habitus
(the matrix of perceptions
- Power is symbolic in how it is used to establish social order –
creation of social realities
pierre bourdieu’s religious habitus created in social realities can be forms of
“misrecognitions” of what
is real.
* Religious legitimacy reflects religious powe
pierre bourdieu- rleigious habits. religions serves as a system of classification
Possibility of analyzing tastes and classes
o A system of knowledge and communication
Michel Foucault – Knowledge and Power
Christianity is a strong force in the western hemisphere of the
world.
* The central focus in the work of Foucault is the role of knowledge in
power relations.
* Foucault is vocal about the negative impacts of religion
* Religion as a culture that influences perceptions about madness and
medicine that spanned across different historical periods (The Order
of Things, 1970)
Michel Foucault – Knowledge and Power- the docile body
Through a system of confession, region
revives guilts
* Pastoral modality of power enshrines a system of government
that makes people subservient
Peter L. Berger – Dialectics. why is religion a thing? what is culture?
- For Berger, religion grows out of a fundamental human
predicament. - It is the idea that humans are born unfinished, lacking the biological
programming to survive - As such, we all learn how to cope with our environment. We do this
through our adoption of culture - Culture is what therefore constitutes the true ecology of our
behaviour and the quality of our lives depends, to a large degree on
the stability of our cultural creations
Peter L. Berger – Dialectics - As a result of our continued interactions with the culture that we
identify with, human activity becomes
very regular and predictable,
providing practical and psychological reassurance to everyone about
their own behaviour and that of others.
Peter bergers. stable human environment called
- how can this be illusory?
nomos (a meaningful world order)
- However, there is a way in which the stability that is achieved is in
some sense illusory because human cultures are by their nature
inherently unstable
The world we live in, the world as perceived by humans, is constantly
being created and re-created by us through a
“dialectical process” of
world construction
dislectical process - three aspects
“Externalization, objectivation
and internalization”.
* By externalization, we speak of how our thoughts become embodied
in the things we make and do in the world.
* As soon as they are out there, these products of our thought (such as
machines, art forms, belief systems, etc.) take on an independent
existence as objects of our awareness. Objectivation occurs.
We then internalize the lessons of living in the world of these object
(physical, social and cultural), adapting ourselves in thought, word
and deed to the presumed requirements of “reality”
because the world we live in is the ongoing product of human
externalizations,
t is subject to constant flux and change.
* Religion, therefore, becomes the ultimate response to this
predicament.
-berger- On the margins of everyday life are less predictable experiences that
resist being incorporated, that threaten us with
anomie, an anxiety inducing sense of normlessness
In Berger’s words, “every nomos is an edifice erected in the face
of the potent and alien forces of chaos”
Religion seeks to provide the “ultimate shield against the terror of
the anomie” (1967:25) by supplying the social order
with
ultimate legitimation
