Conceptions of the Self for Post-secular Emancipation: Towards a Pilgrim’s Guide to Global Justice

Abstract

Global capitalism claims to offer emancipation as liberation from the bureaucratic cage of working routines, and justice as a result of global growth. The price for this model of emancipation and justice is constant change and flexibility of the self. I agree with Richard Sennett, who I take here as a representative of a pragmatic approach in critical theory, that this development leads to a corrosion of character, ultimately threatening the foundations of democracy and preventing the creation of a global community of political agency. What is needed is a cultural narrative enabling the self to act for a global community of political agency that favours ways to global justice. However, contrary to Sennett, I argue that this new self cannot be reinvented as the classical homo faber. I argue that the homo faber concept still breathes the obsolete notion of a powerful working class which is, like capitalism, based solely on production and consumption and cannot meet the ongoing fundamental change of the global age where the rise and fall of powerful subjects is as uncertain as is material growth. Drawing upon a constructivist perspective and engaging with critical theory, I turn to the post-secular concept of Jürgen Habermas. In the perspective of Habermas’s post-secular society, I search for a narrative informed by religious semantics. The semantics of the pilgrim, common to almost all traditions of faith, stand for this emancipated self searching for ways to global justice and are offered here in a post-secular translation.