The Ground of Solidarity in Post-Metaphysical Polities

Abstract

The contemporary order, with its globalizing regime and communication facilitating technologies, has effectively broken open all cultures and continuously forces them to confront one another. These confrontations, sometimes allowing for celebration of heteronomy, sometimes facilitating hegemony, inevitably bring to awareness multiplicity of rationalities that define human civilizations. Confronted with this multiverse of rationalities that claim legitimacy, building of just social orders that respect otherness becomes essential. Thus, some of more important social philosophers, particularly John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas, have focused much of their work on understanding ground of social solidarity in a post-metaphysical order We borrow idea of a postmetaphysical order from Habermas. In his works that reflect on effects of modernity on Western civilization,1 he notes how modernity allowed for emergence of a post-metaphysical or post-traditional order. Marked by a loss of innocence with regard to truth of religious and metaphysical worldviews, shift to a modern rationality brought about questioning of all-encompassing ground of meaning and unity for western civilization. This is in agreement with Max Weber's observation that advent of contemporary western civilization was tied to a process of with religious-metaphysical worldviews.2 With advent of modernism, Western man lost his faith in traditional certainties. He no longer believed that metaphysical knowledge or religious worldviews could provide a true representation of of world; of universal, necessary, and eternal features of reality as such.3 Such a painful did have great repercussions in processes. To say least, it demanded a rethinking of social solidarity and governance of polities. One could say that loss of Western humanity's grounding in essence of world signaled loss of metaphysical ground to social solidarity. With such a loss, foundations of norms of justice and idea of good society were placed into question. If Western man had lost capacity to tap into ultimate foundation of all things, if humanity could begin to doubt that what is known to be reality has an essential truth, what remains to ground our sense of how we ought to be? What binds individuals in a society to a way of collective becoming if there is no one vision of society, no binding ethical worldview, no one theory of what societies ought to be? In an age of innocence, when religious and metaphysical worldviews remained unquestioned, human societies could with naivete claim to be ordered in a way that mirrored cosmos as it was ordained by Being or Divine Being. When peoples of could still accept without question worldviews founded on cosmic unity posited by metaphysics and religion, peace was founded on solidarity of a people who believed that truths that ordered their were acceptable, for they were ordained by a higher order. However, modernity brought about a serious questioning of foundations of these religious and metaphysical world-orders. With modernity came a world-historical process of disenchantment with dissolution of meaning-giving, orienting powers of holistic worldviews.4 With modernity's celebration of autonomous subject arose modern societies that became embodiments of a subject-centered reason.3 This left religio-metaphysical world-orders unjustified before subject who demanded justification before acceptance. Such a de-traditionalization brought about a loss of the features of familiarity, transparency, and reliability that had once been able to absorb all contingencies.6 This loss could be attributed to emergence of modern subjectivity as self-reflective and constantly obliged to justify its choice of models according to its own standards, and create all its normativity from out of itself. …