The gods are no longer resident: An Obituary for Habermas

Habermas and Dreher seem to offer opposite answers to late liberal exhaustion: procedural repair on one side, intentional retreat on the other. Porphyry shows that both may rest on the same mistake by assuming the future becomes intelligible in theory before it becomes real in formation.

Jürgen Habermas spent his life asking how modern societies might justify authority after moral catastrophe. It was an honourable question but also a second-order one. Before asking how authority is justified, one must first ask what binds a polity strongly enough that justification matters at all. Habermas never quite got there, and that omission shaped everything else he built. His death is an occasion for saying so, and for saying something larger that his career both illuminates and obscures.

Born in 1929 in the country that had produced both Kant and the camps, he became the supreme philosopher of postwar western Europe's restoration project, which sought to rebuild legitimacy without returning to blood, myth, hierarchy or fate. He grasped, more clearly than most, that legitimacy was constitutive; that modern states cannot endure as mere systems of management. But he grasped this in a manner tightly bound by the moral and political grammar of the order he was trying to save, which is to say, he grasped it too late and from the inside.

That order rested on an evasion. Postwar Europe wanted to preserve the moral yield of a civilisation whose grammar had been primarily Christian and national — however awkwardly those traditions had coexisted — after discrediting the sources that had produced it. It wanted obligation without piety, ethics after metaphysical bankruptcy, the fruits of inheritance without acknowledging the estate. It wanted, in short, to go on drawing a moral income after selling the property. Habermas never invented this wish but he did give it a vocabulary elevated enough to mistake itself for a solution.

He spent his life answering, in a sterilised key, questions Carl Schmitt had posed in darker forms: what binds a polity, what sustains obedience, what remains when law and life diverge. Schmitt's answer was sovereignty (exception, decision, enemy etc.) playing Ahriman to the Ahura Mazda of Habermas's procedure, deliberation and constitutional reason. What Habermas could not admit was that the parts he wanted to keep and those he wanted to discard belonged to the same structure.

Liberalism is a moral formation that has learned to describe itself as neutral. The liberal subject is not a natural fact but a historical achievement, produced by institutions, disciplines and expectations that took centuries to build. What Habermas could not admit was that liberalism, far from a solution to the problem of moral formation, is the problem's last great Western answer. And answers of that kind do not, historically, get replaced by better arguments, but different formations.

Like every such formation, it has thinned over time. A moral order built on the sovereignty of individual conscience will, pursued consistently enough, weaken the inherited practices, asymmetries of obligation and authoritative transmissions that once gave conscience its content. While liberalism may have freed the self, it also consumed the reserves that had made that self intelligible.

Those reserves are now visibly running low. One sees it in the strange thinness of late liberal public life: the state still taxes, regulates, moralises and monitors, but asks less and less that people experience as genuine obligation. Memorial forms remain while the habits that once made mourning serious have withered; civic language grows louder as social trust grows anaemic. Rather than evaporate under such conditions, authority becomes managerial, keeping all the instruments of command while quietly losing the capacity to be obeyed in any sense that matters (which is ironic in an age of behavorialism).

This is what Habermas's Motivationskrise finally points toward. The better-known legitimation crisis revolves around justification, while the deeper issue stems from motivation: the evaporation of the will to be claimed by the order at all. The state goes on extracting, regulating and instructing long after the social world that once made those impositions feel meaningful has grown threadbare. It can still fine, tax, lecture and survey political topography. What it can no longer do, at least with much success, is ask something serious of its members in the expectation of obedience.

Habermas saw this much but struggled to go further without sawing through the branch on which the whole postwar settlement was sitting, so he offered duct tape: better communication, stronger procedural mediation, more inclusive deliberation, "constitutional patriotism" etc. Few phrases better capture the pathos of postwar Europe than that last one. It always had the air of an attempt to make loyalty survive translation into committee prose — the hope that men might yet be induced to die for a well-drafted preamble. Yet once a society becomes sufficiently conscious that its cohesion rests on inherited forms it no longer quite believes, it cannot simply reinstall them by argument. Critique can dissolve myth but cannot generate an equivalent. What follows is a repertoire of official substitutes: managed memory, civic ceremony, moral instruction without metaphysical confidence. Belief after irony is still disbelief.

By its nature solidarity is enacted long before it is explained. People become bound through shared ordeals and the grassroots improvisation that dealing with them requires — a village fast, a flood embankment built by hand, the night everyone turns out because a neighbour's roof has caught fire. These create social facts long before theory arrives to tidy them into concepts. Habermas understood that legitimacy had to become reflective after the twentieth century's catastrophes. What he could not concede was that a society may become too reflective to bind — or a state too trauma-phobic to bank the solidarity that shared suffering produces. A people cannot be argued back into existence every election cycle.

Mass conscription, common sacrifice and collectively mourned dead produce solidarity more reliably than any procedural compact. This is hardly a mysterious observation, a shared burden sacralises obligation, converts strangers into heirs of the same loss, gives the state a claim on the body that no constitutional formula can replicate. Postwar western Europe understandably wanted peace. What it also wanted, less plausibly, was to retain the obligations of common life without any equivalent to sacrifice. It hoped peace alone could keep generating the same depth of mutual implication but hope's not a theory.

Schmitt, however, might be the laziest contrast for Habermas when there's Porphyry who's usually cited as the author of the Isagoge (an intro to Aristotle's Categories) and editing of the Enneads. In the late third century, as the imperial order entered its long thinning, Porphyry produced the most sophisticated defence of the polytheist inheritance then available. Born in Tyre, educated at Athens (under Longinus) and later part of Plotinus' clique in Rome, he was the kind of man whom a dying civilisation characteristically produces at its end: the great systematiser who arrives just in time to show how elegant the structure was before it falls. He gave the old order one final philosophical self-interpretation and subjected Christianity to criticisms that took centuries to answer. As an intellectual achievement it was impressive, as an historical intervention, however, it was beside the point. While Porphyry wrote, Christian communities were producing thousands of (fully-formed) people a year. And arguments, no matter how good, do not outbreed formations.

Porphyry could see the thinning himself. In a fragment preserved by Eusebius, he remarks: Νυνὶ δὲ θαυμάζουσιν εἰ τοσοῦτον ἐτῶν κατείληφεν ἡ νόσος τὴν πόλιν, Ἀσκληπιοῦ μὲν ἐπιδημίας καὶ τῶν ἄλλων θεῶν μηκέτι οὔσης — "And now they wonder why plague has gripped the city for so many years, when Asclepius and the other gods are no longer resident among us." Porphyry could see that the old gods no longer seemed present as they once had — that the sacred had thinned; that the rites were going through motions they had once animated. And though attacked Christianity as a serious rival, albeit intellectually corrupt and socially base, his error was not contempt but a more basic refusal. He could see Christianity as a threat to the old world without conceding that it might also be the bearer of a successor one. This meant the question was no longer how the imperial order might be better justified but how to address the monotheistic communities that were forming identities more successfully than the polytheistic empire.

Habermas occupied a similar position — not identical but dotted with structural rhymes. He was also the status quo's last great systematiser, the man who arrived in time to show how elegant the procedural structure was before the motivation drained out of it. Like Porphyry, he could describe the crisis more clearly than many of his admirers yet still misrecognise its nature. What he could not quite grant was that the forces unsettling the inherited order might have to be understood not simply as error or regression but as alternative modes of formation. In that sense, he too mistook a crisis of formation for a crisis of interpretation.

That is the decisive question in periods of civilisational exhaustion: before legitimation comes formation, which is the slow, mostly invisible work of making people who carry a world inside them rather than merely inhabiting one.

That was the question being answered in late antiquity. The monastery, the parish, the diocese, the madrasa and ummah were not, in the first instance, bids to capture the imperial machine. They were answers to the harder problem of managing how durable ways of life are made, and what disciplines or webs of obligations, as well as transmission methods, are required if a community is to reproduce not merely bodies but world(view)s.

The crucial fact about late antiquity in the West is not that it produced the axial figures of Cassian at Marseille, Honoratus at Lérins, or Benedict at Monte Cassino, nor that we can now arrange them neatly into a tradition with a clear logic, but that no one living in AD 350 or 450 could have told you in advance which thick social formats would prove generative. The field was crowded with candidates, most of which failed.

Mithraism, for instance, had real density but it was effectively male-only and had no mechanism for forming children. The Manichaeans attracted intellectuals of the calibre of the young Augustine yet they fractured under sustained pressure and left almost nothing behind. The Donatists held North Africa for generations yet were so defined by their quarrel with the wider church that when it ended they dissolved with it. Each had thickness of a kind. None had the full formation package: a serious account of what humans are geared towards; the capacity to absorb strangers and integrate them; the ability to transmit itself through children as well as converts, and a core that persecution clarified rather than broke.

The gap between the visibility of the question and the invisibility of the answer is the typical condition of people living through civilisational transition. The temptation is to escape that uncertainty by seizing on either a defence of the old order or a wild, utopian blueprint for the new one. Porphyry embodied the first temptation, while the Benedict Option embodies the second. Dreher's mistake is the belief that successor formations can be consciously designed by people who know themselves to be founding them, which is usually a sign that one is dealing not with a civilisation-in-embryo but a theory of one.

Benedict [Nursiensis] emphatically did not set out to save western civilisation. He set out to live under a demanding rule with a small company of men, and prepare those men for what came after death, or the Second Coming, whichever arrived first. That horizon was eschatological, not civilisational. Medieval monks did not possess the modern abstract concept of “civilization” as a singular historical process or a comparative category among plural civilizations. That vocabulary is an eighteenth-century development, especially in French and English, where “civilization” enters mainstream elite usage as part of Enlightenment talk about refinement, progress, and later the comparative study of distinct historical blocs.

The monastery was emphatically not a seedbed for cultural renewal in the civilisational sense but an antechamber to eternity. That Carolingian rulers would later conscript monastic networks into a project of 'renovatio' was real enough, but it was their anachronism, not Benedict's intention — the imposition of a political logic onto communities that had been organised around an entirely different question. The generative power of these formations was a byproduct of something else entirely. They were trying to save souls. If cultural worlds were saved in the process then such events occurred only in the margins of that greater project.

To know, after the fact, that Benedict mattered is not the same as knowing, in the present, what will matter next. What the historical record permits is something narrower, and involves not the advance identification of the winners but a fairly limited judgment about the conditions under which successor formations fail.

One failure mode is mistaking opposition for substance. Communities that define themselves primarily against the surrounding order remain dependent on that order for their own coherence. Remove the enemy and they dissolve. Many reactionary subcultures have this structure, being constitutively dependent on the order they denounce for the identity that order's presence provides, and unable to generate an alternative social world that would survive the disappearance of what they are against. They can raid attention and win offices but they cannot lay down new track.

The late antique Christian case suggests that a fruitful strategy was a combination of surface flexibility and core irreducibility. Early Christianity could appear, at different angles, as a burial society, philosophical school, family network, food network, or ethnic community. It was intelligible to Roman administrative categories without being reducible to them, and that status bought time. It delayed, though it could not prevent, the empire's loyalty-enforcement reflex (in oaths to Caesar). But the core remained non-negotiable. The refusal to sacrifice to Caesar was not a style of provocation. It was a limit quietly maintained, and when persecution came, it clarified a pre-existing formation rather than creating it.

This points to a broader rule. What matters is not the willingness to suffer but the inability to be reduced. Formations that court persecution usually get it and then dissolve on impact. Formations that survive pressure without seeking it reveal something more serious: their core is prior to the approval of the surrounding order, which is another way of saying it can ignore all verdicts delivered upon it that are not materially disastrous.

The other is time. Liberal administrative states optimise for short horizons: elections, news cycles, quarterly figures, budget rounds. A formation operating on a genuinely multigenerational timescale is playing on a different board. Its effects are too slow, too dispersed and too social to register early as a threat. By the time it becomes visible as a civilisational force, the discourse has often begun shifting around it already — not because anyone executed a long march through the institutions, but because the formation has been producing people whose habits, loyalties and competencies are thicker than the ambient culture.

That is about as close as the historical record allows us to come to a structural description of succession. In many ways it's pretty negative, preferring to offer only what kinds of answers to distrust, yet it provides the tools to see the field more clearly than competitors.

The liberal order, meanwhile, can register density as a security concern, which is why deep formations so quickly draw the attention of counter-extremism frameworks, deradicalisation programmes and scrutiny of religious education. What it struggles to recognise is formation as such, because that would require admitting that liberalism was itself a formation, one now in its own late phase of learned self-interpretation. The Roman charge of superstitio against Christians was formally about impiety and public order. Functionally it marked the point at which alternative formation had become alternative loyalty. Liberal states still draw the line in much the same place.

Habermas could not ask the formation question because his framework left room for moral communities as background conditions, not sovereign sources of formation. After fascism, only what could be translated into postmetaphysical procedure could appear as fully legitimate. The result was an inability to think that any formation might rival the supervisory horizon of liberalism itself. In other words, he could diagnose thinning, but not see clearly what might be taking shape beyond it. To do so would have required admitting that liberalism was one historical formation among others, and no less subject to exhaustion.

What comes next is practical, liturgical and reproductive and primarily concerns the communities that build world(view)s in people, well or badly, while the old administrative order continues to process paperwork.