Talking Peace with Gods: Symposium on the Conciliation of Worldviews: Part 2: Afterword to an Introduction

The authentic introduction to this symposium—to both of its installments—comprises the first contributions to part one: Ulrich Beck's article, "The Truth of Others," and Bruno Latour's reply, "Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics?"¹ Accordingly, "Preface to an Introduction" was the title I gave to my remarks last time. For the same reason, I am calling this installment's offering (though it introduces a new set and a distinct kind of articles) an afterword. Inadequate attention to religion was the basis of Latour's critique of Beck, religious particularism being the most pressing case to which Beck's "cosmopolitan realism" might be applied. In this second group of essays—which treats the commonalities and commensuration of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and the modern faith in human rights—we are responding to Latour's challenge.

The gap between Latour and Beck is narrower, I argued last time, than Latour concedes—and Beck's own response to Latour, published as a column in this issue, seeks to narrow it further. Neither Beck nor Latour is a universalist, and neither is a contextualist unconditionally. The same may be said of all contributors to part one of "Talking Peace with Gods," and to all those in part two as well—with the exception of Cardinal Lustiger. The position that he takes here is universalist, but not in the most obvious ("catholic") sense. He regrets that so many intellectuals, including philosophers, now affiliate truths with communities of belief. He argues instead for the universal validity of reason—not on behalf of Christian doctrine, but on behalf of human rights, which he regards as a creed still in need of rational justification. In the teeth of academic postphilosophy, much of it French, the archbishop of Paris maintains: "philosophical reflection is no luxury." Santiago Zabala, in responding to this rappel à l'ordre, points the irony. Hermeneuticists and postphilosophers may be closer, now, than the cardinal is to the old Catholic position: inherited doctrines are to be taken on faith, inherited conventions followed as de rigueur.

On the other hand, Cardinal Lustiger is not alone in these pages. Caveats like his have been published in Common Knowledge recently by members of the journal's editorial board. In our last issue, J. G. A. Pocock made a case for history as a record of "what actually happened."² Despite loss of conviction (in "the republic of letters") that "experience and action persist for long enough to be spoken about," Pocock argued for historical methods sufficiently rigorous to offset reasonable doubt. In a similar mood, last winter, Mikhail Epstein compiled a list of axioms and practices that East Europeans, had they been consulted during the Cold War, would not have agreed to disclaim: "Academics in the West have been issuing death warrants to aspects of culture, as if presiding at a military tribunal: death to metaphysics, death to the author, death to history, death to utopia, death to originality, death to the human (and consequently, to the humanities)."³

The coda to this present issue accepts Cardinal Lustiger's invitation to "roll up [our] sleeves and set to work." The contributors to that coda, titled "Refreshing Philosophy," do not deliver what the cardinal solicits—humility being, these days, a philosophical virtue. While Hilary Putnam argues for philosophy as not "just an academic discipline," he does not covet its old status (as the science of science). Marianna Papastephanou shows how much of Cartesian subjectivity can be salvaged, though also how much of it cannot. And Ian Hacking comes to the defense of truthfulness but not, I think, of truth in Cardinal Lustiger's sense.

The cardinal's sense of truth derives, one might suppose, from the apostle Paul's—and while I used to assume I knew what that meant, I now am certain that I do not know. Alain Badiou, in his recent book...