Jürgen Habermas e Joseph Ratzinger
Ragione e fede in dialogo

Hermeneutics is rooted in the work of life that forms thoughts to the extent that the survival of socialized individuals is linked to a sure will to understand each other _{(Jürgen Habermas)}

Important for our reflections, however, is still the fact that the method as such excludes the God problem, making it appear as an ascientific or pre-scientific issue. With this, however, we are faced with a reduction of the scope of science and reason that must be questioned. [...] The subject decides, based on its experiences, what appears to be religiously sustainable to it, and the subjective "conscience" ultimately becomes the only ethical authority. In this way, however, ethos and religion lose their power to create a community and fall into the realm of personal discretion. This is a dangerous condition for humanity: we witness it in the threatening pathologies of religion and reason - pathologies that must necessarily erupt when reason is reduced to the point where questions of religion and ethos no longer concern it. What remains of the attempts to build an ethics based on the rules of evolution or on psychology and sociology, is simply inadequate_{(Joseph A. Ratzinger)}

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[With Ratzinger] I had my master, and such was the surprise, the joy, the comfort, that I told everyone continuously. It was crossing the threshold, definitive and original, concrete, of my return. Things happen, they follow, and you change. For a while, I cultivated the dream of meeting Him on the benches of a university, as a lecturer. It was what he asked for himself, but the One I had elected my master was elected pope, Benedict the sixteenth_{(Giovanni L. Ferretti)}

Rarely do contemporary history and contemporary philosophy meet and merge; when this happens, it is a great event, an opportunity not to be missed and to be valued. Such is certainly the case with this interesting book published in 2005, relating to the encounter between two of the greatest intellectuals of our times, both of German extraction and origin.

The first is Jürgen Habermas, a philosopher known primarily, along with Gadamer, for his theories on hermeneutics, that is, the science of possible interpretation of written texts, among the proponents of the fortunate image of the "hermeneutic circle," where there is a silent dialogue between reader and written text in which the prior experiences of the former (prae judicia) give authentic meaning to the text, which in turn, by coming into contact with the reader's perceptual activity, affects his own knowledge base.

Take, to simplify, the very case of a review here on Debaser: it is the prior experiences and pre-judgments matured by the reader that guide the subsequent judgments he formulates in the comments below, even before the objective nature of the text, or, more, the exact understanding of the various intentions that push the author of the review to write it (hence, a moderate reader can normally appreciate these reviews more than a leftist reader, or other extremists). Thus, obviously, in the Habermasian perspective, the same holds for even more refined and complex texts, aimed at a quite different audience.

The other protagonist of the book really needs no introduction to the general public and the average user of the site, being Joseph A. Ratzinger, a theologian and Catholic prelate who became, starting in the 1970s, a Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1981 (an institution of utmost ecclesiastical importance throughout the centuries), and, since 2005, The Holy Father with the name Benedict XVI.

The premises of Ratzinger's thought, both philosophically and, obviously, also institutionally representational, are fundamentally opposed to those from which Habermas moves, and this makes the dialogue that takes place in the book truly fruitful.

I ask especially the average user of the site to follow me well on this challenging path, which I pledge to humbly lead: if hermeneutics necessarily implies a maturity and attention of the interpreter, who in the analysis of written text must be well aware and well informed of the possible drifts connected to his journey, obligating the individual to the search for a "method", even before an "end" (almost a Kantian Ewige Aufgabe - eternal task), in the awareness of the infinite 'truths' possible, Ratzinger's position is opposite: he moves from the postulate of the Infinite Divine Good, that is, the existence of a single Creator Deity, Supreme Intelligence, who has set only one Truth as possible, and historically realized and realizable, implying for the individual the burden of discovering this Unique Truth to give the only possible meaning to his own life and creation, indicating moreover in the Gospel and in its authentic interpretation by the Catholic Church the "way" master to reach that Truth.

To put it otherwise: Habermas teaches us to read the winds to sail alone in the great sea of being, without worrying much about its dimensions and the destination of our journey (perhaps a "sweet shipwreck" in the Leopardian sense?), while Ratzinger's doctrine is the only way to navigate, through the oceans, toward a Promised Land that lies evidently beyond the enormous, but not infinite, sea of existence.

If we think about it, nothing so new on the western front: indeed, it seems that this "opposition" echoes that, ancient of now two thousand years and more, between the sophists and Plato; the former convinced of the many possible truths with respect to which it is necessary to deeply question the "form" of thought and the rigor of language; the latter of the Unique Truth, perfectly demonstrable based on an implacable deductive logic, which, however, is not able to demonstrate its own premises. Needless to say, an encounter and a genuine synthesis between these two theses, today as then, is quite difficult.

At this point, the average readers of the site will ask themselves why read this book, instead of dedicating themselves to something else, like a good concert, a demonstration against all the tyrants of the global world, a jump to the community center, a march with so many "people" for the rights of the excluded?

I think it is useful, on one hand, to grasp between the lines the implications of Habermasian theories in our daily lives and in the very use of the internet, and particularly of a site as varied as this one, as well as to consider with due respect a figure like Pope Benedict XVI, wrongly pointed out by young people as the cause of many evils and, in reality, one of the most lucid minds of our Italy and one of the few individuals who, in perfect coherence with his own values, knows exactly to what ends his political-ecclesiological-pastoral action and his very life tend; a figure that could be a solid support in perilous times like the ones we are experiencing in our country.