Верующие и неверующие. Обществу требуются переводчики

Видный немецкий философ Ю.Хабермас о необходимости перевода с секулярного языка на религиозный и наоборот для современного демократического общества. Перевод — единственная форма «недеструктивной секуляризации», благодаря которой современное общество может сохранить нравственные чувства, поскольку только религиозный язык выражает их достаточно ясно.

Habermas prefers to speak of “translation” as the only mode of “nondestructive secularization” whereby modern society might salvage the moral feelings that “only religious language has as yet been able to give a sufficiently differentiated expression.” The idea of translation works especially well in the context of modern democratic society where we all have to be ready, if pressed, to furnish intelligible reasons for our arguments and the policies that we advocate. Yet if these reasons are to be binding for all members of our society, they cannot be reasons that presuppose everyone shares allegiance to the very same metaphysical vision of reality. As John Rawls explained, it is one of the burdens of modern democracy in a culturally non-homogeneous setting that each of us must submit to a certain relativization of moral vision: I can no longer expect that my neighbor draws from the same “comprehensive doctrine” as I do. Instead I must be willing to back up my claims with reasons that all other citizens could recognize as at least potentially binding no matter what comprehensive doctrines they may hold. This is the price one must be willing to pay if democratic procedures are to survive.

HABERMAS IS AWARE, however, that this requirement seems to place an unequal burden on religious members of a society, since it is only they who are asked to translate their policy claims into the religiously unmarked terms that are intelligible to all members of a polity. But he tries to present the task of translation as a reciprocal learning process in which burdens are symmetrical.