Religione e razionalità comunicativa. Juergen Habermas e la " Nuova Teologia Politica"

Abstract

Jürgen Habermas’ recent work is focused on the relationship between reason and faith in what he suggest that we should name post-secular society. Habermas argues that traditional religions such as Christianity can have semantic contents very useful to uphold a moral motivation in order to contrast the instrumental reason of the globalized markets. I will try to show that these recent developments of Habermas’ theories risk to conflict with some elements of his previous approach. As a consequence, I suggest that we carefully look to the critiques that the catholic theologian J. B. Metz made to Habermas’ previous approach. In fact, I argue that Metz’s proposal of a “New Political Theology”, which is characterized by the concept of anamnestic reason, shows how to overcome, or complete, some limits of the first formulation of the theory of communicative rationality. Nevertheless, Habermas’ recent openness on these topics, even if problematic with his previous approach, stimulates to rethink on the relationship between reason and faith, religion and democracy.