Secular Reason in the Public Sphere - a Ruse of Power

 

  

As Stanley Fish puts it HERE : There are no such thing as “secular reasons.”

He writes, "the professor of law Steven Smith does in his new book, “The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse,” that there are no secular reasons, at least not reasons of the kind that could justify a decision to take one course of action rather than another.

Secular reason can’t do its own self-assigned job — of describing the world in ways that allow us to move forward in our projects — without importing, but not acknowledging, the very perspectives it pushes away in disdain.

Insofar as modern liberal discourse rests on a distinction between reasons that emerge in the course of disinterested observation — secular reasons — and reasons that flow from a prior metaphysical commitment, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on."

Of course, liberalism simply smuggles in its metaphysics under vague abstractions like "equality" and "freedom" that it pretends are just concrete objective facts floating out there without need of context or metaphysical presuppositions.

Liberalism only allows for secular reason to "count" in the public sphere, claiming it to be neutral and accessible to all.

But there is no such thing as an unbiased, neutral, objective standpoint. What people call 'reason' is based on a set of prior commitments. It is based on a belief system.

And what counts as knowledge is not neutrally determined, but constituted within networks of power— social, political, and economic.

SO, if the fundamentalist secularist get to bring in their fundamental beliefs and commitments and pretend that they are rational and objective, then why can’t religious ?

What is outside liberalism is then viewed not as reason, but irrationality, most especially the irrationality of faith. 

In claiming the realm of reason, liberalism also claims the realm of public space, which is precisely the space that is ruled by the rules of reason, which liberalism has laid down.

That's the trick, a liberal asks for a justification, but when given a religious reasoning, will simply dismiss it as not "real" reasons.

Only liberal-approved reasoning, with its own faith commitments, is allowed in the Public sphere.

“The ambition of the liberal political philosopher,” writes Paul Kahn (Putting Liberalism in its Place, 120), is to find that set of arguments that is so compelling that every individual, not corrupted by the illogic of interest, would necessarily affirm those reasons as his own.” Because it assumes the mantle of reason, it has “its own imperial ambitions” and can conceive of “no legitimate opposition because it has preempted the entire domain of public values by making an exhaustive claim to reason.”