Stabilized Passion

In his contribution to Radical Secularization, John Milbank contests Habermas’s Kantian notion of public reason, arguing that reason is not “self-grounded” but “inseparable from our affective and elective intuitions concerning the nature of reality. Reason is always conjoined with feeling and can even be considered to be a reflexive intensification of feeling: passion become more distanced and yet more constant and stable.”

This isn’t subjectivism because feeling, in contrast to reason which can trend solipsistic, “is always feeling of or about.” Feeling roots us in reality because it is rooted in the body, and this “ensures also its radically ecstatic, external object-directed intentionality.” Insofar as it is subjective, feeling involves an “experience of irreducible qualia,” more contoured and responsive to external reality than “coldly regular, formally rational procedures” might be (84).

Public feeling also conceives of freedom in a way different from public reason: “A merely procedural reason, whether regarded as spiritual or mechanical, can only entertain freedom as negative refusal, arbitrary spontaneity or else an affirmation of its own emptiness.” Feeling leaves open the option of a positive construal of freedom, the freedom to develop a specific habitus, freedom as “a substantive capacity for self-shaping toward socially definable ends” (84).

Somewhat counterintuitively, negative conceptions of freedom do not underwrite tolerance: “most exercises of negative freedom interfere with the liberties of others, resulting both in the endless rise of the power of a police executive with its ever-extended surveillance, and in the need continuously to expand the sphere of ‘emancipated’ negative liberty, but then once more to call it into check when this release is seen to inhibit the free choice of other people” (84).

Milbank is concerned with how the Habermasian/Kantian conceptions of public reason characterize religion as an irrational intrusion into reasoned public discourse. His emphasis on feeling aims to deconstruct the binary of universal-secular-reason/particular-religion-feeling. In place of this binary, Milbank suggests that we mediate “faith and reason . . . by feeling.” When we do, “they are actually less likely to take sinister forms than when they are corralled against one another. It is the fluid but not thereby necessarily nebulous realm of feeling tat may allow us a new sense of toleration of religious and non-religious perspectives which goes beyond a mere ‘agreement to differ’ – which in reality ensures that some arbitrary imposed difference will always generally prevail at the expense of corporate valuations, religious or otherwise” (84).