The Disenchantment of Religious-Metaphysical Worldviews and the Emergence of Modern Structures of Consciousness

Abstract

In the second part of his essay on Max Weber’s theory of rationalization (see the previous issue for beginning) J. Habermas shows that the background of Weber’s theory of rationalization is the neokantian philosophy of values with the help of which Weber analyses a process of religious-metaphysical disenchantment of the worldviews as a result of differentiation of the cultural value spheres. This theoretical perspective allows Weber to conduct his analysis simultaneously on two levels: first, from the point of view of universal-historic emergence of modern structures of consciousness; second, from the point of view of embodiment of these structures of rationality in social institutions. Habermas makes a systematic attempts to reconstruct a complex connections between these two levels emphasizing that the logic of Weber’s historical-empirical analysis of the process of disenchantment of the religious worldviews can be adequately grasped on the basis of constitutive meaning of the philosophical concept “values embodiment.” For this purpose, Habermas reveals two main restrictions of this analysis. First, the consideration of the rationalization of worldviews only in the ethical aspect (from the perspective of the emergence of modern conceptions of law and morals) without taking into account the transformation of cognitive and expressive components (i.e. changes in the modern science and art). Second, the reconstruction of the history of the emergence of conceptions of law and morals not from the point of view of the structures of religious ethics as a whole, but on the basis of the concrete historical form — capitalistic economic ethics.