As it was recently put...

As it was recently put, “«secularism» shows a way of reflecting, of analysing and generating ideas and contents”[^39] Secularism means independence from trends of faith, but not necessarily an opposition to the belief. With regard to b): in many historical circumstances the democratisation and the well-functioning of democracies have depended a lot on cultural resources.

In one of my books, I spoke about the “cultural turn” of societies in late modernity and I drew attention to the dependence on the culture of politics and economy[^40] There is one aspect I wish to emphasize here: democracy becomes democratura (a false democracy) when the cultural resources which nurture self-respect, the trust in the rule of reciprocity, the respect for others and the solidarity on behalf of a common destiny are deficient.

The problem was signalled under other truly deep aspects. Habermas, for instance, showed once more (most recently in Ein Bewusstsein von dem, was fehlt , 2007) that “reason”, as it was understood in the modern age, as one particularly following procedures, has an “immanent defeatist tendency”[^41] The philosopher draws attention to the fact that, along with the separation of the state from the church, of politics from religion, we are left in confusion regarding the relation between “secular reason” and “religion”, even if, in fact, “there is a specific dialectic” between “modernity’s enlightened self-understanding and the theological understanding of the self of universal religions”[^42] Today, Habermas brings forth solid arguments when talking about the “complementarity ( Komplementarität )” of the two forms of conscience and the need for both to have “learning processes ( Lernprozesse )”, after the traditional “syntheses” of faith and conscience, put in motion from Augustine to Toma, the connection between Jerusalem and Athens was destroyed.

Today, “the immanent defeatism of secular reason is a major problem that specialisations encounter in social sciences and in the philosophy of the moments of “Enlightenment dialectics”, as well as in the naturalism spreading in environmental sciences.

“However, if we set in motion similar learning processes in the contexts of religious and metaphysical world, then both ways, faith and knowledge, with their traditions originating in Jerusalem and Athens, belong to the history of building secular reason, where the sons and daughters of modernity understand each other and their place in the world today.