Berkley Center

A leading sociologist of religion, Prof. Casanova led a discussion of recent work by Hans Joas, whom he described as a philosophically astute sociologist and a foremost interpreter of American Pragmatism. The assigned material consisted of selections from Joas’s book, The Sacredness of the Person (2013), which was based on lectures given at Georgetown. As Prof. Casanova summarized it, this material develops two key ideas: the methodological or metaethical claim that an affirmative genealogy of values is possible and a story about the sacralization of the human person, which serves as Joas’s prime example of an affirmative genealogy.

Joas explains the methodological or metaethical claim by reference to a stylized contrast between Kant and Nietzsche. For Kant, ethical values can be given an account that is purely philosophical, i.e., a priori and so ahistorical. This account will defend the universal validity of some values or principles. Nietzsche, in stark contrast, gives an anti-cognitivist account of values that sees them as being enmeshed in subjective senses of what is self-evident and so in affective commitments and also, not coincidentally, as emerging contingently in history and thus lacking in validity or universality.

Taking up the concept of the sacred raises these issues because it embeds, as Durkheim noted, the idea of a source of obligation. The sacred is, or is surrounded by, taboos, which not only mark certain responses as wrong but are also accompanied by a strong subjective sense of self-evidence and strong affective attachment. Thus far, then, the idea of the sacred seems to lie on the Nietzschean side of the above contrast; but Joas’s overall question in the assigned reading was how values that emerge in history can have universal validity, and his star illustration of how this is possible is the case of the sacralization of the person. As with John Rawls’s idea of overlapping consensus, the sort of universality sought is satisifiable by the right sort of agreement—in Joas’s case, agreement by all people that something is self-evidently valuable. Unlike a Rawlsian overlapping consensus, however, which is modeled as a product of public, discursive argument, the type of agreement that Joas focuses on arises from a process of “value generalization” driven by a spread of emotional commitments and influential stories. The resulting genealogy is positive in that it supports the universal validity of the result rather than debunking it.

One line of questioning concerned whether the sharp split between cognitive or epistemic and noncognitive or affective attitudes and processes that underlies these questions postulates a straw opponent on the epistemic side and dooms value theory to historicism. Many philosophers now see affective elements as central to cognition of all kinds. Prof. Casanova clarified that Joas’s position is not to support non-cognitivism about value, but to attack the view that values are adequately addressed in purely non-affective terms. In fact, Joas insists that values must be provided with a philosophical justification—it is only that such justification can only come after the fact.

Much of the remaining discussion concerned the related questions of what that justification could possibly look like, given the salience of the genealogical story, and of whether the story about the spreading sacralization of the person convincingly establishes global agreement on this idea. Do not those of different cultures and religions understand the relevant terms in incommensurable or nonsuperimposable ways? Prof. Casanova suggested that full consensus requires a moment of mutual recognition among “we, the people.”