This book has engaged the sacred in a journey across a very selective range of subject matters and problem areas in politics. It does not purport to impose a model of conducting political enquiry in a very rapidly changing world. Following the lead of many scholars, my claim has been that the sacred has never left us. And yet, for ‘rational observers’, there is hardly any more blatant certainty about contemporary political life in states than the absence of the sacred. I would therefore restate the book’s underlying puzzle: why is it that notions of the sacred and of the political have come to be rigidly opposed binary categories although this claim is unsustainable?
The tentative answer has at least two parts. First, the modern age of secular critique has ‘forgotten’ that values and truths are not absolute quantities. The external world of political institutions, action, and structure is not only the object of our perception but also the creation of our soul. Critical minds are ‘bound spirits’ as well. Critics who assert the incompatibility of the sacred and politics themselves operate within cultural frames that seek ultimate ends and acquire transcendent value. As Albert Camus put it, ‘The ideologies which guide our world were born in the time of absolute scientific discoveries on the grand scale’ (Camus Reference Camus2000: 258). If we want to make a case for the sacred, it will be necessarily a matter of judgment. Such judgment cannot be made in a disinterested or abstract fashion. It must insert itself in the historical process and be end-rational in the sense that intrinsic values are created by human beings. ‘Secular’ projects such as the nation state, communism, European unification, democratic government, or humanitarianism are end-rational goals with their own intrinsic value (Eigenwert). One might argue that the less a value is reflected – and thus becomes absolute – the more the action becomes irrational. The irrationality lies in the unconditional focus on the intrinsic value (Eigenwert) such as pure conviction, beauty, absolute goodness, or duty (Weber Reference Weber1980: 13). As Thomas Kuhn suggested, different scientific paradigms are incommensurable because their proponents live in different worlds. Copernicanism took a century to attract converts, and Newton’s work was not generally accepted for half a century after the publication of the Principia. As Max Planck put it, ‘a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it’ (quoted in Kuhn Reference Kuhn1962: 151).
Second, in the sense that they inspire awe, order, and verticality, intrinsic values such as sovereignty, democracy, secularism, or human rights are also projects of power and can be defended as truths. The administrative-bureaucratic, secularised, and technological state has not ceased to draw on epistemic truths. In Weber’s terms, ‘the old gods … leave their tombs, they strive for power over our lives and start among each other again the eternal struggle’ (Weber Reference Weber1980: 589). Human fabrication does not make secular values any less persuasive as epistemic truths. The faith in a constitution expresses a moral commitment about some essence that is seen as inalienable or inviolable. Epistemic truths are powerful as social imaginaries and cultural frames precisely because they are unattainable. According to St Augustine, human beings desire a good and happy life but they do not really know what this good life means. The desire for real and genuine life is as intense as it is impossible to achieve. We are incessantly moving towards a goal but we ignore the real qualities of this hope. The goal is the real hope which pulls us forward but also the cause of despair, given the unknown future and certain death. We are all endowed with learned (enlightened) ignorance (docta ignorantia). When people make sense of political order, their imagination continues to be driven by learned ignorance.
As an experiential fact, the sacred is not only an outcome but also an active factor of change. As a moving and transitional phenomenon, it establishes the horizons but also the limits of possible experience. The sacred usually expresses the presence of something higher and awe-inspiring. It gives meaning to fractures of identity by proposing new limits and boundaries. They refer the believer to realities that transcend the measurable, quantifiable world. Such boundaries, however, are never entirely impervious to transgression. The ‘old gods’ are not eternal in terms of trans-historical realities. Ideas of cosmic truth have been supplanted by claims of a connecting meaning between apparently disparate and conflicting dimensions. It may, therefore, be contestable to consider the sacred as a container that would capture different phenomena such as religious belief systems, secular political utopias or humanitarianism. If the sacred is to maintain analytical power, we have to insert creative processes of quests for the sacred into the historical reality of existential threats to political societies. Political societies threatened by the unlimited require limits. As Bruno Latour put it, this is precisely the reason why the rejection or the killing of gods, or the destruction of religious images will not stop the erection of new temples, the self-elevation of communities as good against evil, or the carrying out of sacrifice (Latour Reference Latour2009).
Can the sacred ‘do anything’ in secular politics? What really counts, it could be argued, is the norm, not the faith and the affects that brought these norms into being in the first place. A critic may therefore insist that linking the sacred to politics disregards the agency and autonomy of individuals. In a post-Copernican world, there can be no legitimate way to fabricate gods, truths, or sacredness. Political analysis takes a position of intellectualist distance, aiming to demystify, unveil, and critique. Empirical scrutiny dissects epistemic truths. It needs to explain events as driven by social conditions and structures or individual rationality and agency. Political enquiry refuses to abide by claims to sacrality because references to mysterious truths challenge tenets of radical critique. It cannot accept justifications that are beyond what is measurable, quantifiable, or transparent. It needs to rationalise unspeakable atrocities such as terrorist acts as driven by causality, be it social conditions, individual rationality, or strategic aims.
As a transitional reality, the sacred frames people’s consciousness, hopes, and aspirations. The task is therefore not so much to understand the contrived uses of the sacred by manipulating political actors. It is not about taking the sacred for the mask of power that must be unveiled and made transparent or visible. It rather aims to counter the spirit of critique. It is obvious that human fabrication underlies iconic symbols or intrinsic values. Nevertheless, they attract critical scrutiny, are deconstructed and attacked, precisely because they embody meaning – because they are icons (Latour Reference Latour2009). Contemporary politics is full of revelations, conspiracy theories, and incredulity. And yet, it is obvious that theories, methodologies, or concepts will not disclose the sacred. Nor will critique abolish human propensities to transcend fractures by quests for the sacred. As a manifestation of the incomprehensible, a theory of the sacred in politics is not possible. Following Schmitt, Kahn argues that ‘political theology rests on an experience beyond discourse. It rests on faith, not argument, and on sacrifice, not contract’ (Kahn Reference Kahn2011: 153). And he adds: ‘An authentic political theory must be one that simply stops. There can be no conclusion; there is only a pointing beyond to that which theory cannot express’ (Kahn Reference Kahn2011: 154).
Rather than proposing a theory of the sacred, we have engaged in investigating events that have led us to constitute ourselves. The transformative power of the sacred is really that by its presence it provides reassurance in the face of existential insecurity. We may call such a position a minimalist one. As Michel Foucault argued, an event-oriented focus on contingencies of power needs to abstain from all projects that claim to be global and radical, or that search for formal structures with universal values (Foucault Reference Foucault and Rabinow1984). Anchoring the enquiry in limit situations, ‘measurement’ is irreducible to impartiality, detachment, or cold rationality. Rather, the focus needs to be on the ethical dispositions of humans, their acts and their deciding being, which all refer to a specific point of view in time and space. As contingent acts of interpretation, the sacred cannot be discovered out there. Within the extraordinary, sacred ends somehow derive from end-rational action, which depends on evaluations of possible ends. Decisions between competing and colliding ends and consequences can be value rational, and then action is only end-rational as to its means. However, according to Max Weber, there can be subjective motives (subjektive Bedürfnisregungen) as ‘commandments’ (Gebote) or demands (Forderungen), which orientate action according to a scale of urgency (Weber Reference Weber1980: 13). Such urgency, applies, for instance, to transcendental frames such as secularism, sovereignty, rule of law, or victimhood. It also characterises the idea of human rights, which Weber called an extreme rationalistic fanaticism (Weber Reference Weber1980: 2). In his plea for moderation, Camus emphatically said that ‘unadulterated virtue, pure and simple, is homicidal. That is why humanitarian cant has no more basis than cynical provocation’ (Camus Reference Camus2000: 260).
The key point is that such intrinsic values arise without foundation, intentionality, or reason. ‘The irrational imposes limits on the rational which, in its turn, gives it moderation. Something has a meaning, finally, which we must obtain from meaninglessness’ (Camus Reference Camus2000: 259). Fundamentals are irreducible to communication with words. As Hannah Arendt put it, ‘[B]oth Plato and Aristotle, albeit in a very different manner, considered … dialogical thought process to be the way to prepare the soul and lead the mind to a beholding of truth beyond thought and beyond speech – a truth that is arete, incapable of being communicated through words, as Plato put it, or beyond speech, as in Aristotle’ (Arendt Reference Arendt1958: 291). In Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Abraham remains silent in the face of the experience of trembling before the trial inflicted by God. The ‘absolute relation to the absolute’ makes any rational-ethical justification impossible. Wittgenstein’s ending of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was the proposition ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ (‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen’). This echoes the wisdom of the book of Jesus ben Sirach in the biblical Apocrypha: ‘What is too sublime for you, do not seek; do not reach into things that are hidden from you. What is committed to you, pay heed to; what is hidden is not your concern’ (Sirach 3: 21–2).
Of course, a critic could claim that a conception of the sacred as unquestioned intrinsic values risks destroying political freedom, choice, and the capacity for transcending oneself. Hannah Arendt, for instance, regarded the unworldliness or other-worldliness of the Christian faith as incompatible with an engagement in the public realm of the polis. ‘In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy… Hatred and love belong together . … you can only afford them in private’ (quoted in Kirwan Reference Kirwan2007: 35). As Weber famously put it, ‘For while it is a consequence of the unworldly ethic of love to say, “resist not evil with force”, the politician is governed by the contrary maxim, namely “you shall resist evil with force, for if you do not, you are responsible for the spread of evil”’ (Weber Reference Weber, Lassmann and Speirs2007: 358). In short, the consequences of political action in the immanent world must not be the concern of absolutist ethics. More than thirty years after Weber’s death, Camus realised the twist in the term ‘absolutist ethics’. The revolution of the twentieth century, following the metaphysical and the historical revolts of nihilism, decrees that ‘values are intermingled with the movement of history and that their historical foundations justify a new form of mystification’ (Camus Reference Camus2000: 260). Camus’s enquiry into rebellion and nihilism as the key force for the catastrophes of the twentieth century suggested that they were based on ‘the ignorance or systematic misconception of the limit which seems inseparable from human nature and which rebellion accurately reveals’. In other words, the enlightened ignorance of technological progress in the secular age has created an absolutism, which is potentially limitless.
As Camus put it, ‘The very forces of matter, in their blind advance, impose their own limits’ (Camus Reference Camus2000: 259). One cannot reverse the advance of technology. Yet, ‘the real and inhuman excess lies in the division of labour’ (Camus Reference Camus2000: 259). While technological progress and human mastery over nature and things provide security and prosperity, they have also increased the potential for humanity’s self-destruction (Serres Reference Serres2003). It is, after all, in the name of war and human control of nature that political action has transgressed boundaries and pushed limits. The enormous technological-scientific power and its mastery over nature and things have transgressed the sacredness of environment and nature. They have also increased the risk of disaster and the potential for humanity’s self-destruction. ‘Our fundamental relationship with objects comes down to war and property’ (Serres Reference Serres2003: 32). Yet, such domination of nature dramatically reveals the limits of human knowledge. As Michel Serres argued, nature now more than ever asserts its active autonomy, reminding us of its presence. The waves of natural disasters in the recent past indicate that human interference in natural processes has been a form of transgression at too high a price and with incalculable risks for humanity. Much like the tsunamis in South-East Asia in 2004 or Hurricane Katrina in the United States in 2005, the Japanese tsunami in March 2011, the Thailand floods in the second half of 2011, or Hurricane Sandy on the US East Coast in October 2012 destroyed the built environment, the livelihoods, and the future of hundreds of thousands of people. Serres argues that humanity must revisit the divide that Western political philosophy has made between ‘the worldwide world of things, the Earth; [and] the worldly world of contracts, the law’ (Serres Reference Serres2003: 12).
The technologically feasible self-extinction of humanity has fundamentally altered the stakes. Ever since the nuclear bomb was used, the sense of humanity’s capacity to destroy itself has enhanced perceptions of the risks of and threats to survival. In the face of such self-made transgressive potential, we require, as Camus put it, ‘the necessity for moderation’. Either self-limitation will become an intrinsic value, or ‘contemporary excesses will find their principle and peace only in universal destruction (Camus Reference Camus2000: 259). Making a case for ‘enlightened doom-saying’, Jean-Pierre Dupuy argued that disasters help us to accept the distinctions between good and evil (Dupuy Reference Dupuy2002, Reference Dupuy2005). An ethics able to limit the extreme powers acquired by humanity needs to restore a sense of the sacred. The secular ethics of Hans Jonas, who advocates the principle of responsibility, is based – in a Hobbesian twist – on a ‘heuristic of fear’. Without humility and the possibility of ‘creature-feeling’, civilisation’s attempt at omnipotence will overreach itself. Following Jonas, Jean-Pierre Dupuy has argued that the prognostics of disaster should be given greater weight than the prognostics of salvation (salut) (Dupuy Reference Dupuy2002: 92–4). Unlike Hobbes, Jonas claims that the victims of catastrophes would not be we ourselves but our children or grandchildren. Here the imagined malum must assume the role of the experienced/suffered malum (cited in Dupuy Reference Dupuy2002: 94). Even though it is evil, this sacred still provides us with a dimension of verticality, which is arresting and overwhelming. ‘Our Archimedean point ought to be the future, this future whose existence we would like to preserve… We decide our destiny… The future is our sacred: it can be good or bad; it is fundamentally unpredictable, and we should have for it the same devotion as the primitive sacred had for its divinities’ (Dupuy Reference Dupuy2005: 106 – my translation).
The partial and local nature of limit situations and the lack of intentionality, agency, and will may suggest submitting to impersonal and general structures. The point, however, is not to pit structure against agency, resistance against domination, or universal against culturalist explanations. We have to accept that individualist ‘models’ are as inadequate as are collectivistic approaches. The sacred, conversely, must be reconstructed from the existential pluralism that governs limit situations. With its transformative power in conditions of the extraordinary, the sacred draws on the ‘passionate interests’ of people, on the participation in dramatic, communal events. Following Foucault’s plea to be ‘at the limits’, anthropologists have made the case for questioning the present, a positive form of untimely engagement with politics that demands reflective distance (Rabinow and Marcus Reference Rabinow and Marcus2008). They have claimed to maintain a capacity for surprise in the face of the self-evidence of ordinary life (Fassin Reference Fassin2012: 244). A range of dualities dominates social science enquiry, forcing scholars to straddle the line between outside and inside, between domination and resistance, between the secular and the religious. One must choose one’s position. Following a Marxist tradition, for instance, the task is to critique and unveil logics of domination and the class interests of symbolic systems, ideologies, or religious doctrines. For others, following Clifford Geertz, the task is to translate or interpret meaning (Chabal and Daloz Reference Chabal and Daloz2006). Ideas and values here are seen as a set of cultural practices by which we make sense of social relations.
Both positions are representative of widespread tendencies to adopt an outsider perspective that exercises judgment from a radical or a reflective position. Reminiscent of Plato’s cave metaphor, the position of critics is often implicitly assumed to be outside the cave, which may be coterminous with being enlightened or in possession of the truth. This book has rejected radical positions that would define political reality either by creating a distance between a critic and social order or by comparing structures and systems as objective, impersonal forces. Locating conditions of the emergence of sacred canopies in the interstices of out-of-ordinary situations, this book has asked under what conditions societies perform acts of collective self-transcendence. In the face of the extraordinary, the political imagination does not emerge from a clearly defined position of certainty. Rather, by taking a view that the brokenness of political reality is a permanent possibility, this book has argued that existentially plural limit situations are conditions of threshold, weak moments of the social, where identities are fractured. If frames of the sacred emerge in such threshold situations and thus create meanings and markers for distinguishing between true and false, before and after, or just and unjust, then critique must occur at such a threshold between the darkness of the cave and the light outside the cave. The symbolic universes of critics need to be seen, so to speak, as included in the values and meaning by which we – individually and collectively – aim to transcend the fractures that inevitably arise from the historical process.
The argument proposed in this book should not appear as fatalist or as idealising pre-modern forms of understanding human arrangements. Rather, it claims that political communities require community-based affective bonds with a higher, ‘invisible’ authority that forms the social sacred that the participation in community is supposed to reaffirm or ‘worship’. This worship is by no means predetermined as a form of collective ideology. The worship is rather a form of state of mind or an ethical disposition to express the sublime power of a transcendent goodness. As Kant argues, it is impossible to ground freedom in a reasoning that sees freedom in terms of a causality following from the moral imperative. For Kant, the highest principle of morality remains incomprehensible (Kant Reference Kant and Timmermann2004 [1785]): 93). While foundations of morality may be incomprehensible intellectually, human participation in communal action may ‘get’ it by the intuition of a state of mind or ecstatic uplifting. Nietzsche considered culture not as an intellectual disposition but as a way of looking at things, a theory, and a faculty of good choice. As a musician is able to find his fingering in the darkness, educating a people in culture means to make them used to good models, inculcating in them noble needs. Invisibility may be reserved to and acceptable for religion and for those believing in revelation. And yet, ‘in science, invisibility is even more striking than in religion’ (Latour Reference Latour2009: 187). Economics, for instance, is, after all, a science between good and evil. Even the most refined mathematical models are in reality stories, analogies, an effort to comprehend the world around us rationally. The belief in the supranatural capacities of the ‘invisible hand’ is one of the fundamental convictions of modern economics (Sedláček Reference Sedláček2011). It is a mystery. According to this account, the invisible hand is a mystical god, who, by means of secret – or at least unaccounted for – ways, works with more than a touch of the miraculous to produce beneficial outcomes. Such outcomes, however, cannot be rationally arrived at by the profane motivations and calculations that drive self-interested actors (Sedláček Reference Sedláček2011: 322).
The ongoing challenge of the brokenness of political reality urges us to ask questions such as: Can there be a politics beyond sacrifice? What is the meaning of political theology in a secular world? Is the insistence on the sacred an obstacle to the realisation of freedom? Political enquiry cannot provide definite answer. It must, however realise that limit situations create existentially plural meanings of action. I would suggest that we follow Camus, who argued that ‘at this limit, the “we are” paradoxically defines a new form of individualism. “We are” in terms of history, and history must reckon with this “we are” which must, in turn keep its place in history. I have need of others who have need of me and of each other. Every collective action, every form of society supposes a discipline and the individual, without this discipline, is only a stranger, bowed down by the weight of an inimical collectivity. But society and discipline lose their direction if they deny the “we are”. I alone, in one sense, support the common dignity that I cannot allow either myself or others to debase. This individualism is in no sense pleasure, it is perpetual struggle and, sometimes, unparalleled joy when it reaches the heights of intrepid compassion’ (Camus Reference Camus2000: 261). As Foucault put it, this is the price to pay. We must give up the hope of achieving complete and definite knowledge of our historical limits. Therefore, ‘the theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and of the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning again’ (Foucault Reference Foucault and Rabinow1984: 47). The extreme limit situation of the trenches in World War I was, as Hermann Hesse has argued, the threshold that would allow Erkenntnis, a form of eternal beginning. ‘But just as every soldier killed is the eternal repetition of a mistake, the truth, in manifold forms, needs to be eternally repeated’ (Hesse Reference Hesse1973: 33).
