© Columbia University Press
The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment
June, 2008
Cloth, 256 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14072-0
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Introduction
Diverse and far apart though our cultures might be, the world that you and I inhabit is shaped by three great forces. The first and most powerful of them is the force of what exists, of what is already there, in place—the force of things. We experience this force in two fundamental ways. Sometimes we encounter it as the force of habit and routine, of tradition, of mores and custom, of culture, of convention, of usage, of established practice and received wisdom. Society as we know it would simply be impossible if we were to reinvent the terms of our cooperation each time anew, if we found chaos instead of order upon coming into the world or if the fabric of common meanings and shared expectations that we manage to create, often through laborious negotiations, were to vanish as soon as we disappear from the scene. At other times we experience the force of things in a symbolically less textured but no less objective mode, in the guise of an invisible hand or of a ruse of reason that shapes our destinies through the unintentional consequences of what we do intentionally: just think of the way we experience the oscillations of the market or the tidal tempo of historical efficacy at turning points such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. In either mode the force of what is manifests itself most obviously as the resistance met by our efforts to change the world—natural, social, and internal. This is perhaps one of the reasons why—despite the evidence that no social or internal world could exist unless some originary free agency coalesced in persisting patterns, whether intended or unintended—the world would seem to us a prison, inimical to freedom, if the force of what exists or the force of things were the only force that shaped it.
The second force that concurs in turning the environment in which our life unfolds into a human world is the force of what ought to be the case—the force of ideas. Again, regardless of the culture or historical context in which we are thrown, we experience the world and its manifestations as subject to evaluation and susceptible of being assigned a positive or negative value. Helpless though at times we may feel vis-à-vis the powers of the world, we always retain the capacity to match reality against the normativity of what we think should be the case. This normativity may take diverse forms, and, [whenever we are able to identify them,] we experience it as the force of principles: the force of moral commands, of the moral point of view in general, of conscience, of the law, of faith, of cultural values as conceptions of the desirable, the force of the best argument, the force of justice, the appeal of the good life. Nowhere are these normative standards fully satisfied, but we do not consider them inadequate for this reason: it is our world that has to match up to them, ideally, and not the other way around. The picture begins now to convey a familiar scene in familiar nuances of coloring. For us to grasp or to gain an insight into the world shared in common by a group, a people, a religious congregation, a political party, a social movement, a generation or an entire civilization requires that we get a sense of these two things: namely, what the people in question take to exist and what they think should be the case.
If we took this picture to be exhaustive of the dimensions along which the world is constituted for us and conceived of the world as shaped solely by the force of what is and the force of what ought to be the case—the force of things and the force of ideas—the world would now no longer resemble a prison but would be the locus of an unbridgeable gap between these two realms, the locus of a fracture, the locus of a permanent clash between necessity and freedom.
Fortunately, the picture is not yet complete. Alongside the force of
Two distinct kinds of exemplarity appear as well. Sometimes what is exemplary embeds and reflects a normativity of which we are fully aware: we already know of what the example is an example. Examples of virtuous conduct, of best practices in the professions, of statesmanship in politics, of courage in combat or of parental care are often of this kind. At other times, however, the exemplariness of the example is so pure and innovative that we first vaguely sense it by drawing on the analogy with past experiences and only subsequently do we succeed in identifying the normative moment so forcefully reflected in the object or action at hand. Fully grasping exemplarity in this case requires that we formulate ad hoc the principle of which it constitutes an instantiation. Political revolutions, the founding of new religions, groundbreaking works of art are often of this kind: with one and the same gesture they disclose new vistas on what exists and new dimensions of normativity. The appeal and force with which they inspire everybody to follow their teaching rest on pure exemplarity: neither the necessity of a reality that could be otherwise nor the implications of a norm as yet unrecognized can account for their capacity to shape our world.
While the force of what is accounts for much of the continuity of our shared world over time, and the force of what ought to be accounts for our sense that the world is a place worth living in, the exemplarity of what is as it should be accounts for much of the change undergone by our world over time, for the rise of new patterns and the opening of new paths. Historical change of great magnitude is often spurred by the capacity, possessed by exemplary figures, actions, and events, to illuminate new ways of transcending the limitations of what is and expanding the reach of our normative understandings. Over and beyond providing us with a sense of our possibilities for transformation, the force of the example often provides us with anticipatory prefigurations of reconciliation in the first place—a reconciliation of the tragic rift of necessity and freedom reverberated by a world shaped only by the force of what exists or the force of things, on one hand, and the force of ideas or of what ought to be, on the other hand.
This book is about making sense of this third force, which, for various reasons, never has, in the history of Western philosophy, received an attention comparable in scope and depth to that dedicated to the other two, with the notable exceptions of Aristotle’s notion of phronesis and of Kant’s concept of reflective judgment revisited by Arendt in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. The tools with which we can theorize about exemplarity come basically from these sources, but they will remain in the background, with the exception of Arendt, because my primary intent is not philological, historical, or even primarily reconstructive. Rather, my aim is to explore the uses to which the notion of exemplarity can be put for us in our contemporary philosophical predicament. What is exemplarity? How can something singular possess universal significance? What is the nature of the force exerted by exemplarity? How does it compare with the force of law? How can it bridge the difference between the various contexts that lie within its reach?
I will start with an assessment of our philosophical context that will highlight the special relevance that exemplary normativity—the force of the example—acquires for us. In a nutshell, the force of the example becomes more salient to us as the force of principles becomes more dif. cult to ground in the light of a philosophical horizon not yet overcome: that of the critique, generated by the Linguistic Turn, of the whole range of versions of modern foundationalism. Unlike twenty-five years ago, when I began to outline this philosophical perspective in terms of the more specific concept of authenticity, now the culturalist and intersubjective bent of philosophical theorizing on normativity and subjectivity inaugurated by the Linguistic Turn has come under attack and new forms of naturalism—spurred by the achievements of the neurosciences, of genetic research, of computer science, of sociobiology—seem to carry more promise as general research programs and to exert more influence as horizon-shaping paradigms. Yet this book builds on a somewhat skeptical appraisal of such promise.
I will not try to develop a defense of the undiminished relevance of the Linguistic Turn in the book—for that argument would require a volume of its own to be properly articulated—but will rather take its relevance for granted. I find it more interesting to explore what can be done in the way of defusing the relativistic implications that have thus far been drawn from its premises and main theses. Yet allow me merely to recall some of the moves that inaugurated the Linguistic Turn in the first half of the twentieth century.
The horizon of modern universalism, wherein the validity of propositions and norms is conceived as resting on their matching the standards of theoretical and practical human reason, already is thrown into question and superseded when Wittgenstein, in proposition 5.6.2 of his Tractatus, states that “the world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.” In this passage he is denying that the world can be grasped independently of the mediation of one language. And since a plurality of languages has existed ever since Babel, there is no way of avoiding the conclusion that the diverse limits of the worlds conceivable by you and me are not unrelated to the diversity of the languages through and within which they are conceived.
The modern understanding of universalism is once again questioned in § 217 of Philosophical Investigations, where Wittgenstein suggests that after a certain point our attempts to account for what to follow a rule means run against a deep geological bedrock—the pure facticity of a life form—against which the spade of philosophical reflection is inexorably turned and must stop. Again, there is no way of avoiding the consequence that the normativity of a rule and the facticity of the life form wherefrom the rule originates are inextricably linked.
The same modern horizon is radically subverted when Quine, in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” undermines the fundamental distinction—at the core of both idealist and realist, both rationalist and empiricist philosophy—between what is true by virtue of the facts of the matter (e.g., that it is raining today in Rome) and what is true “a priori” or “analytically,” without any need to check how things are in the world (e.g., that a bachelor is an unmarried man). The distinction crumbles, according to Quine, when we realize that the supposedly “a priori,” “analytical” quality of the relation between “being a bachelor” and “being unmarried” cannot, just as Wittgenstein’s notion of “following a rule,” be grasped independently of the lexicographic apprehension (usually recorded in dictionaries) of the “linguistic usage” or practice of a concrete community.
Similar results were generated even earlier, within a vocabulary unrelated to a linguistic perspective, by Max Weber in his methodological reflections on the nexus of knowledge and values. We need not commit ourselves to any dubious metaphysical statement about the infinity of the elements constituting the object of our knowledge. We only need to concede that any object, whether natural or cultural, contains many more constitutive elements than the number we can possibly be able to investigate during our finite lives. It is our finitude that enjoins us to adopt a perspective and to select the elements worth knowing more closely from the exorbitant number of knowable aspects, lest we end up knowing nothing. A map of a continent as large as the continent itself, which leaves out nothing, is totally useless. Now the point is that such selection of what is worth knowing and what we need not bother to know is an act that cannot be justified solely along cognitive lines, in terms of an adaequatio intellectus et rei, which obviously cannot have taken place yet. On the contrary, only on the basis of the hermeneutic foreunderstanding concerning the “worth-knowingness” of the object of knowledge—a foreunderstanding of which we need not be aware—can we speak of truth in a nonsubjectivistic sense.
Thus to those of you who wonder whether the moment may have finally come to dismiss the Linguistic Turn and its postmodernist, deconstructionist, poststructuralist, culturalist, hermeneutic aftershocks as something passé, I would address the following questions: do you have a convincing argument, against Wittgenstein, for the claim that we can gain differentiated and not just immediate sensory knowledge of the world independently of any language? Do you know of such a way of ascertaining whether a rule has been followed that, against Wittgenstein, is independent of any practice typical of a life form? Do you know how to draw once again, against Quine, the line that separates what is true by virtue of a state of affairs and what is true by virtue of the meaning of the terms with which we describe it? Are you in a position to deny, against Weber, that all forms of cognition embed a moment in which we single out what is worth knowing of our object and that such attribution of salience is linked with the pursuit of distinct and often rival values not reducible to a neat and uncontestable hierarchy? Are you not in a position to provide conclusive answers to these questions? Then the postmodern horizon opened up by the Linguistic Turn is still entirely before you, unsuperseded, and so will remain until you are able to meet these challenges.
Nevertheless, I find it worthwhile to address the kernel of truth embedded in the exhortation, so appealing since the last decade of the last century, to distance ourselves from the hermeneutic, postmodernist, postcolonial, cultural studies sirens. For much as the hermeneutic, culturalist, and post-modernist philosophies maintain an undiminished critical bite with respect to modern foundationalist universalism, their unabated shortcoming consists in a persistent failure to ever move beyond this critique. Of all the philosophical streams issuing from the common source of the Linguistic Turn, postmodernism in particular seems doomed to bore us with its litany of difference constantly repeated and never followed by a positive proposal of a new, truly postfoundationalist way of conceiving true and false, just and unjust.
On this philosophical context, which forms the backdrop of the present book, more will be said in chapter 1. What I will add here is that instead of seeking to rescue a universalist perspective via the return to some kind of neonaturalism predicated on that philosophical chimera, second only to the “thing in itself,” constituted by the appeal to uninterpreted “facts”—the “facts” of the mind, the “facts” of neurobiology, the “facts” of social complexity—a more promising path seems to me connected to a thorough revisiting of the very concept of universalism. Although occasionally contemporary authors have suggested nonfoundationalist forms of universalism, such as “reiterative universalism” and “universalisme de parcours,” they have never gone beyond suggestive remarks and have never investigated the philosophical underpinnings and structure of a possible nonfoundationalist universalism. In fact, the most articulate, reflective, and fine-grained thematization of a nonfoundationalist universalism has rather taken a proceduralist direction, captured in Jurgen Habermas’s “postmetaphysical” program of a discursive foundation of validity, on whose problems I will not expand here.
A different and still underexplored path consists in revisiting the modern notion of universalism—taken for granted wholesale both by its postmodern, poststructuralist, and deconstructionist critics and by its fervent neonaturalist and even proceduralist defenders—from the perspective of the paradigm of judgment and its core notion of exemplary validity. In the philosophical context in which we are immersed, more options are open to us than the alternative of returning to forms of naturalism or of embracing discursive proceduralism in the hope of avoiding a hermeneutically informed relativism. One of these additional options consists in drawing from the exemplarity of the work of art or of the well-lived life a notion of universalism that presupposes no antecedent principles and yet does not lend itself to a reduction to the reflection of locally shared and unquestionable preferences.
The aim of exporting this model of normativity beyond the realm of aesthetics in order to establish a nonfoundationalist view of validity, true to the premises of the Linguistic Turn, requires that the context to which this proposal represents a response be spelled out in greater detail, that the central notion of reflective judgment be reconstructed, and that the philosophical basis of a universalism without principles be articulated. If not transcontextual principles, what is it in judgment-based approaches to validity that can account for the reach of normativity beyond its original context? What is it that explains and justifies our confidence that our judgment, despite its being indemonstrable, will be shared by others?
In chapter 1 these questions will be addressed. If it is not our deriving examples and judgments from principles that can explain why we expect them to be accepted by or exert an appeal on others, then one possible alternative is to have this expectation rest on the sharedness of a sensus communis different from the locally variable commonsense or received wisdom. In chapter 1 this option is investigated more closely in relation to two competing and variously problematic ways of understanding the commonality of sensus communis: the hermeneutic idea of a “horizon” and the phenomenological notion of a lifeworld, on one hand, and the Kantian minimalist, naturalized concept of sensus communis on the other. A third alternative is outlined. Finally, in the same chapter the relevance of the judgment perspective for political philosophy is addressed, for the field of politics is prima facie one of those where the exportation of the originally aesthetic model of exemplary validity seems most urgent, useful, and promising at the same time.
In chapter 2 the judgment approach to nonfoundationalist universalism is further expanded with reference to Hannah Arendt’s work. More specifically, the discussion of sensus communis is pursued further by highlighting the problems inherent in Arendt’s account of the relation of examples to what Kant called schemata. In the concluding section an alternative reconstruction of the notion of exemplarity is offered that draws on the conception of sensus communis articulated in the previous chapter and aims at avoiding the reductionist implications of assimilating examples to schemata for the decoding of actions and virtues.
The judgment paradigm, however, should not be understood solely or even primarily as an assessment of the course of the world in the private forum of our conscience. Rather, the challenge with respect to which its potential must be tested consists in making sense of how shared normative evaluations and political justification are possible in the public realm of our pluralistic societies. How can the force of the example succeed where the force of principles is often contested, especially if the significance of examples has to meet the challenge posed by the diverse cultural orientations from which examples are appraised?
These questions are addressed in the next two chapters. chapter 3 pivots around the idea that the Rawlsian notion of “public reason” and its attendant standard of the “reasonable,” as distinct from principle-based “practical reason,” are but a tiny area of the largely unexplored continent of deliberative reason, a form of reason for which reflective judgment represents the fundamental organon. The different meanings of the term reasonable and the entwinement of judgment, exemplarity, and of the reasonable (at least in one of the most important of its meanings) are reconstructed. The normative force of the reasonable is argued to be best understood as one manifestation of the force of exemplarity if public reason is to be prevented from collapsing into principle-guided practical reason.
Examples, however, are not always positive, and their force is often pernicious. Reflection about the significance of exemplarity in public life cannot dispense with facing the challenge posed by radical evil. Radical evil, evil on the scale of the Holocaust, threatens to burst the neat philosophical symmetries underlying the account of the force of the reasonable provided in the previous chapter. Radical, as opposed to ordinary, evil cannot be even remotely equated with the “merely unreasonable,” and yet how can we make its unconditional rejection independent of the foundationalist embracing of a comprehensive conception of the good? Things are complicated further by the fact that never does radical evil ostensibly present itself as such. We encounter it always in disguise, under the cover of a conception of the good that in the end turns out to be perverse. But how can a conception of the good—often shared by millions of people and for a certain period of time regarded by them as a source of inspiration and guidance for their lives—be called evil by an external observer, evil in the eyes of everyone and not just in our own, consistently with the postfoundationalist assumptions on which we want to build a liberal and democratic polity?
In chapter 4 some steps are taken toward solving this paradox by pointing to the internal inconsistency of any modern conception of the good (including the Nazi vision of the good, as reconstructed by James Bernauer) that failed to embed equal respect for all human beings and at the same time purported to present itself as a conception of what ought to be. No conception of the good can be acceptable that enjoins its proponents to embrace an inconsistent project. At the same time, radical evil is distinguished from ordinary evil once again in terms of its embedding a negative exemplarity that is missing in ordinary evil: only radical evil exemplifies us “at our worst.”
More specifically, in our effort to rethink radical evil in postmetaphysical terms we can draw on Durkheim’s understanding of the sacred. Just as the production of the sacred is part and parcel of social life and cannot be eradicated from it—secularization may be said to affect the religious sedimentation of collective experiences of the sacred and the role of religion in social life, but not the production of the sacred as such—so radical evil is best understood as the polar opposite of the sacred. Whereas the sacred is a projection of us at our best (and the world of the profane is a representation of us as we actually are), radical evil can be conceptualized as a projection of us at our worst, the worst that we can be while still maintaining those characteristics that distinguish us as a community, society, or humanity.
Evidence for this view comes from the fact that the horror we experience when facing the same evil deeds increases with the proximity of their perpetrators to our moral life. This suggests that perhaps the criterion for the radicality of radical evil ought to be internal to us rather than external. Radical evil then is perhaps best conceived as a horizon that moves with us, rather than as something that stands over against us. One of the interesting consequences then is that evil, even radical evil, cannot be overcome. Concrete manifestations of it can, of course, be overcome, but if evil is a horizon that moves with us there will always be collectively shared representations of what we, as a single moral community or we as humans, can be at our worst. The idea of a good society where evil has been eradicated is, from a postmetaphysical standpoint, as meaningless as the idea of a pacified moral world where conflicts of value no longer exist.
The discussion of radical evil completes the general outline of the paradigm of judgment—including the backdrop to which such paradigm is designed to respond, the peculiar kind of normativity it presupposes, the nature of the force of the example, its positive and negative manifestation in the public realm. In the remaining chapters the potential of this paradigm in a number of areas, all related to politics, is explored.
In chapter 5 I discuss the persisting relevance of republicanism as the one strand of political theory that exhibits the most pronounced elective affinity with the fundamentals of the judgment paradigm, including the priority of examples over principles. The “republican challenge” to liberalism is not to be found in a thicker and more robust notion of freedom, as contemporary proponents of republicanism have often contended, but rather in its greater constitutive propensity to ground its fundamental tenets in a hermeneutic appraisal of the significance of historical examples than in abstract principles of political legitimacy. Republican theory is constructed from the ground up on the basis of reflection on historical cases; it is a sort of “political criticism” parallel to art criticism in that it purports to bring to light the exemplarity of certain institutions, political arrangements, regimes, and norms: they are envisioned as demanding our consent, no less than works of art, by virtue of their capacity to set the imagination—political imagination in this case—in motion by virtue of their exceptional self-congruence.
In chapters 6 and 7 the judgment paradigm is put to the test on the issue of justifying human rights and limiting state sovereignty in a global yet culturally diversified world. The wager is that when we break free from the strictures of “methodological nationalism” and begin to rethink the major categories of politics, justice, freedom, equality, power, legitimation, and so on—assuming the globalized world and no longer a single national society as the default unit of analysis—the judgment approach affords resources that enable us to better meet the challenge of justifying binding norms and a cosmopolitan rule of law in the face of more pronounced cultural divergence. Why is this so?
On the one hand we are faced with the trends of a globalizing world: the new stage entered by the formation of an economic world system, the formation of a global financial system, where the fluctuations of currencies and equity values outdo the steering capacities of any economic actor, including the most powerful central banks, the rise of ecological risks that transcend national boundaries, the formation of migratory currents whose pressure no state is fully able to withstand, the global reach of certain media of communication that contribute to the rise of a global public sphere, which at times comes to expression in emotional, compassionate or indignant terms, the growth of a culture industry that markets its products worldwide and contributes to the growth of global pop culture.
On the other hand, these trends could be compatible with different ways of responding to the challenges they pose for the nation-state. The judgment approach starts from the idea that the best philosophical response to globalization is a thorough rethinking of politics, not just of international relations, but of politics as such in a way that reflects this new predicament. Freedom secured in one single country could lose its meaning unless freedom is guaranteed in relations between the countries of the world. Justice could easily become a travesty unless a measure of distributive justice across the various countries of the world is secured. The equality of the citizens of a single country makes little sense vis-à-vis massive inequalities in the world. Peace in one region of the world is not unaffected by the wars that ravage another part. What is considered legitimate in one country may very well fail to stand the scrutiny of a broader form of consciousness, no longer bound to a parochial locality. In a way this has always been the case, but what is new is the coming into being of the societal infrastructure of a global form of conscience and a cosmopolitan understanding of the fundamental political notions.
More specifically, the justification of human rights as fundamental limits to state sovereignty and their enforcement cannot follow the familiar liberal path of appealing to the consent of free and equal citizens of a global society, for the simple reason that, as Rawls pointed out in The Law of Peoples, we cannot project our liberal understanding of legitimation to worldwide law making and law enforcing without thereby implicitly imposing a Western modern scheme—the notion of free and equal individual citizens—onto nonmodern and non-Western political cultures that proceed from different understandings of legitimacy. The liberal idea of legitimacy cannot legitimately be projected at the global level unless we assume (quite implausibly) or we anticipate (in a quite utopian vein) that all of the 193 existing states actually are, or will soon be, based on a Western-style liberal-democratic political culture.
The judgment approach is obviously not the only one to urge these considerations on us: over and beyond, John Rawls, Michael Ignatieff, and Frank Michelman have in different terms insisted that the legitimacy of cosmopolitan governance be independent from the narrative of free and equal individuals coming to a consensus on constitutional essentials, lest our embracing of human rights should turn into yet another of those comprehensive doctrines that are universal only in the eyes of their believers.
The question then is, if we cannot rely on forms of political justification that rest on less than universal assumptions and if presumably we cannot just wait for them to become universally shared, what could the yardstick of cosmopolitan, worldwide legitimacy rest on?
The suggestion that a judgment-based approach can contribute toward answering such a question draws on the idea of public reason but disentangles public reason and the standard of reasonableness from the presumption of free and equal individuals, urging us to rely on the converging will of existing states—some of which are associations of free and equal citizens and some not—as the legitimating source for human rights and to posit humanity as the possessor of the one identity, reconstructible via public reason, whose fulfillment requires that we, among other things, establish and enforce respect for human rights.
In chapter 6 this argument is articulated in more detail. The difficulties incurred by Rawls’s and Habermas’s approaches to the justification of human rights are illustrated, then the basics of a judgment-based approach to human rights are outlined and the distinction between a moral and a political notion of humanity is drawn. At this point a judgment-based, as opposed to principle-based, argument for the universality of human rights can be vindicated and, in the final section, this perspective can be related to an appraisal of globalization trends along the lines of a revisited Hegelian analysis of the implications of modern civil society.
In chapter 7 the problems associated with the enforcement of human rights are discussed from the angle of the judgment paradigm. Assuming that the justification aspect is adequately solved, the threshold, criteria, and procedures for overriding state sovereignty when violations of human rights occur are examined in light of the “Responsibility to Protect” Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. The transition from a normative framework centered around the “right to intervene” to a new one centered around the “responsibility to protect” is argued to constitute the main contribution of the Commission’s Report and to enhance the reasonableness of the ensuing guidelines due to the exceptional inclusiveness (measured in terms of public reason) of their normative premises.
Resuming one aspect of the previous discussion, the adequate “political” justification of human rights as endowed with priority over state sovereignty is best understood not in the guise of a philosophical, least of all “comprehensive,” argument but rather as the enacting, via some process of political will formation not premised on the image of free and equal individuals, of a new authoritative legal source that identifies, from within the undifferentiated wealth of human rights mentioned by the existing documents, the few fundamental human rights that all peoples of the world are prepared to consider as ranking above state sovereignty. In chapter 7 the nature and substance of this suggested new Charter of Fundamental Human Rights is contrasted with the resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations advocated by the commission as the proper instrument for publicizing the new limits of state sovereignty entailed by the “responsibility to protect.”
In chapters 8 and 9 the judgment paradigm is put to the test in two further areas: the articulation of European identity and the fine-tuning of separation of religion and politics in light of a new form of “postsecular” consciousness.
In recent years philosophers have often used the expression “the idea of Europe.” Taking issue with the project of deriving identity from comprehensive philosophical argument, I argue that the “Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe,” whose substantive core is incorporated in the subsequent Treaty of Lisbon, contains enough substantive pronouncements to ground what might be called a European identity in a “political” sense. In chapter 8 the reconstruction of the main components of this European “political” identity is carried out in some detail and, second, some reflections are offered about the reasons why the European Union may reasonably hope to realize the main aspects of such identity if it ever overcomes its current constitutional crisis. The political influence that a more integrated EU may exert on the global scene is finally argued to rest, more than with anything else, on the force of its constituting an example of how human dignity can be optimally protected and how diversity can be reconciled into unity without dissolving itself into homogeneity.
In the last chapter the relation of politics and religion is addressed from the angle of a judgment-based approach. During the last decades many events have forced us to rethink not the basics of the separation between politics and religion, but certain aspects of its institutionalization. The role of religion within the public space and, consequently, the meaning of the ideal of religious neutrality in what Habermas has called a postsecular society appear in need of closer examination. The nature and extent of this reconsideration of the relation between religion and politics is the subject under discussion in this chapter. The general point defended is that the demand emerging, within as well as outside Western democratic societies, for a more public role for religious faith, or at least for its deprivatization, is worth considering and obliges us to address three issues: the achievement of full equality between citizens who are believers and nonbelievers, the different evolutionary pace of religious and secular conscience, the anthropological difference between the various forms of religiosity in their adapting to the separation of church and state. In the last section of the chapter the role of historical and cultural context in the implementation of the principle of the religious neutrality of democratic institutions is examined, and again on this terrain the judgment perspective proves capable of best reconciling the reasons of universalism and our sensibility for the uniqueness of contexts.
Finally, one word of caution on what you should not expect to find in this book. True to the second clause in the title, this book is more about exploring what the paradigm of judgment can do for us in a number of areas of contemporary political theory than about laying out a philosophical justification for it. Although it provides an outline of what exemplary validity means—how it can operate in the public realm and how it can exert a force beyond the context wherein it originates—the first group of four chapters should not be expected to offer a demonstration of alternative principles of validity whose application is then illustrated with reference to cases. That way of proceeding would expose the whole paradigm of judgment to the charge of containing a performative contradiction. Consistently with its own premises, then, the case for an exemplary notion of validity is rather made in exemplary terms, by attempting to have the force of inspiring instances of application reflect back onto the general philosophical appeal of the paradigm of judgment as such, more or less as the worth of a new style is established less by its poetic manifesto than by the appeal of the works couched in it.
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