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A Critical Understanding of the Religious OtherPeter Jonkers

0. IntroductionAccording to Charles Taylor, “the great challenge of this century, both for politics and social science, is that of understanding the other. The days are long gone when European and other Westerners could consider their experience and culture as the norm toward which the whole of humanity was headed, so that the other could be understood as an earlier stage on the same road that they had trodden.”1 As we all know, there is always a temptation to make too quick sense of the other, that is, make sense of her in one’s own terms. Therefore, we need to understand how we can move from making the best sense of the other in our initial terms, which she will usually experience as an alien imposition, to making the best sense on her own terms. According to Taylor, such a move will be impossible “without allowing into our ontology something like alternative horizons or conceptual schemes.”2

Yet, the co-existence of different conceptual schemes confronts us with a fundamental problem, namely to decide which of those schemes is the right one, or is at least more appropriate to interpret someone else’s religion. Obviously, one cannot simply impose one’s own conceptual schemes as a universal standard, and apply them unreservedly to all other religions. This problem becomes even more difficult when it comes to criticizing the religious other: which scheme can legitimately function as an objective standard for our critique of the other? Traditionally, the ideas of rationality and truth have provided us with a cross-religious standard of our judgements. Yet when these ideas themselves turn out to be part of conceptual schemes that are culture- or religion-specific, can we still legitimately use them for a critique of the religious other? If this really is the case, criticizing the religious other is nothing more than an expression of one’s personal disapproval.

The above remarks illustrate the predicament, in which we often feel stuck. On the one hand, the need to understand the (religious) other in her own right is timely. On the other hand, if this means allowing a plurality of conceptual and religious schemes in our own mental world, the stability of our intellectual, practical and even moral orientation-marks crumbles. Among others, these marks function as standards for the justification or criticism of our own ideas and practices, as well as those of the (religious) other. Therefore, the fundamental question is how

1 Taylor, Understanding the Other, 24.2 Taylor, Understanding the Other, 35.

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we can understand the religious other and how we can criticize her on fair ground in a world that has largely become heterogeneous and centerless due to the multiplication of conceptual and religious schemes.

In order to answer this complex question, we have to examine, first, what it means that the religious landscape has become heterogeneous and what this implies for an understanding and critique of the religious other. In the section thereafter, a hermeneutic approach of how to understand the (religious) other in her own right will be explored with the help of the ideas of Taylor, MacIntyre, and Ricoeur on this matter. Yet, this exploration will also show the limitations of this hermeneutic approach, especially when there is a need to criticize the religious other. This will lead us, in the final section, to the question whether a critique of the religious other is possible in a situation of religious heterogeneity, and what this implies for the idea of religious truth.

1. Religious truth in a heterogeneous landscape

In order to analyze the problem of an understanding of the religious other and the possibility of religious critique in a heterogeneous landscape, let us start with examining the introduction of religious truth-claims into the public debate of a liberal democracy. As ample historical evidence has shown, religious truth-claims have often been used to justify the intolerance and violence of a religious community against other creeds and secular philosophies of life. Hence it is no surprise that prominent advocates of political liberalism, such as Habermas and Rawls, have argued that we would be better off without the notion of religious truth in the public sphere. In their view, religious truth-claims are incompatible with the plural character of modern democracies, and can even lead to illiberalism.

Let us examine this argument in more detail. Habermas distances himself from the idea that a transcendent, metaphysical concept of truth could serve as a pre-political normativity of liberal democracies, because such a concept is by definition authoritarian and contradicts pluralism. However, this does not mean that religious insights would have to be excluded from the public debate. Rather, religions need to translate their teachings into the generally accessible language of reason. When this is done, religious insights can be introduced on an equal footing with secular doctrines into the forming of public opinion, thus contributing to an unforced consensus about the core values of liberal democracies.3

In a similar vein, Rawls also refuses to ‘upgrade’ the reasonableness of (religious and secular) comprehensive doctrines to a transcendent idea of truth, since this would give a preferential treatment to one comprehensive doctrine (the true one) over all others, thus inevitably leading

3 Habermas, Pre-political Foundations of a Democratic State, 24ff. See also: Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 131, 143.

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to authoritarianism and the exclusion of pluralism. Instead, he proposes “that in public reason comprehensive doctrines of truth or right be replaced by an idea of the politically reasonable addressed to citizens as citizens.”4 Since a public and common basis of justification that applies to all comprehensive doctrines is lacking in the public culture of a democratic society, the best one can reasonably expect is an overlapping consensus resulting from the debates between (the representatives of) these reasonable doctrines. Just like Habermas, Rawls notes that, in order to realize this consensus, “reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or nonreligious, may be introduced in the public political discussion at any time, provided that in due course proper political reasons – and not reasons given solely by comprehensive doctrines – are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines are said to support.”5

In spite of its obvious appeal in times of (religious) pluralism, the proposal to replace the idea of religious truth by that of overlapping consensus, combined with the preliminary requirement that religions should translate their doctrines (insofar as they have political implications) into the language of public reason, have met substantial criticism from religious as well as philosophical angles. The core of this critique is that this proposal erroneously assumes that secular reason can serve as a neutral arbitrator of all religions and secular philosophies of life, and that it presupposes a homogeneity, which is at odds with the growing diversity of today’s societies.

From a religious perspective, the ‘translation-proviso’ shows that the secular is privileged over the religious in the social sphere. Yet such a demand is unfair, since it puts an essentially heavier burden on religious people than on secular ones, because the requirement of such a translation only concerns the convictions of the former, not those of the latter. What is more, one can ask whether such a translation is even possible, let alone desirable: can the thick language of religious truth be translated in the thin language of public reason? And is this thin language indeed the only common language in which overlapping consensus in a pluralist society can be reached, or is it rather a thick secular language in disguise?6 Furthermore, the idea of religious truth is so closely connected with divine revelation and a sacred tradition that committed faithful perceive the requirement to translate it into the language of public reason as a betrayal of everything they stand for, while religious leaders see it as an illegitimate intrusion upon their authority.

Habermas’s and Rawls’s critique of religious truth in the public sphere is also problematic on philosophical grounds. Both assume that the universe of discourse, in which political reasons (stemming from a religious background or not) are discussed, is a homogeneous one with a

4 Rawls, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, 441. See also: Rawls, Political Liberalism, 216f.5 Rawls, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, 462.6 D’Costa, Christianity and World Religions, 113.

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stable center. In their view, the political debate is guided by a set of reasonably argued, politico-ethical principles and goods, such as respect for human dignity, freedom and equality, the rule of law, etc., which enable people with very different comprehensive doctrines to reach overlapping consensus. Yet these principles cannot be separated from the comprehensive notions of the good in which they are embedded. As the political ethic extends to further, specific cases, “it will be interpreted in the light of the entire background of justification from which it springs. When there are several such backgrounds, the interpretations are going to diverge, often seriously,” as the diverging interpretations of the ethical principle ‘right to life’ in the case of abortion show.7 Hence, as (religious and secular) comprehensive doctrines tend to diverge more, which is obviously an ongoing trend in many contemporary societies, overlapping consensus will be susceptible to more dissensus and to conflicts of a new kind, in which the truth claims of these doctrines will play a prominent, although of course not a decisive role. By all odds, this situation will rather increase negotiated compromises between the conflicting truth claims of comprehensive doctrines than overlapping consensus.

The above not only shows that societies have become far more heterogeneous than before, but also explains why it has become so difficult to settle debates about substantial societal values. Not only the traditional ‘thick’ notion of a common ground, societal normality, or (religious) truth has become obsolete, but also the much ‘thinner’ language of public reason can no longer be considered as a neutral ‘Esperanto’, in which all the individual comprehensive doctrines could be translated without substantial loss, and which could function as the objective standard for criticizing the religious other. The result is that we are confronted with a Babel-like confusion of conceptual schemes, while lacking a more or less stable criterion or standard to distinguish them qualitatively.

2. A hermeneutical understanding the religious other

The above throws us back to the thorny question of a critical understanding of the religious other in a heterogeneous world, i.e. in a world ‘after Babel’. In this section I will examine the answers of Taylor and MacIntyre, as well as that of Ricoeur, which are related through their hermeneutical approach.

2.1 A fusion of horizons

In his answer to the question of the understanding of the (religious) other Taylor builds on Gadamer’s fundamental idea of a fusion of horizons, which is basically a fusion of different

7 Charles Taylor, Modes of Secularism. In: Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and Its Critics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 49f.

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conceptual and religious schemes. As already noted in the introduction, understanding the (religious) other is inevitably ‘party-dependent’, that is depending on the whole, tacit understanding of what it is to be a human being against the background of her specific societal, cultural, religious etc. context. Therefore, we can only understand the religious other in her own right “when we allow ourselves to be challenged […] by what is different in their lives.”8 Ideally, these different life-contexts and conceptual schemes, which not only distinguish, but sometimes even divide me from the other, are bridged by a fusion of horizons. In this never-ending, dynamic process, both I and the other undergo a shift: my horizon is extended so as to make room for the horizon of the other and vice versa. The logical conclusion is that the ideal of understanding is to give the most comprehensive account, allowing as many alternative horizons or conceptual schemes as possible into our ontology. This fusion of horizons also serves as the standard for a critique of all kinds of distorted, culturally or religiously biased, or simply prejudiced understandings, including those of the religious other.

This means that the dynamics of this kind of fusion of horizons presupposes that we share the same humaneness, so that the (religious) other is not completely alien to us. As long as this communality is situated on this abstract level, it will not give rise to many objections, but when one needs to specify this in a particular case things become far more difficult. Taylor rightfully notes that, when we try to define a fusion of horizons between the Roman Catholic mass and the Aztec practice of human sacrifice, we have to admit that we have no stable, culture-transcendent name for these rival construals of a dimension of the human condition.9 Taylor thinks that this situation of cultural and religious heterogeneity points to the need to change our self-understanding. In particular, we should allow ourselves to be interpellated by the other, and refrain from categorizing ‘difference’ as an ‘error’. In other words, our task is to take the stance of a fundamental openness towards the (religious) other, even if she cannot be integrated into our identity, but rather challenges it. Although Taylor recognizes that these changes imply a painful ‘identity cost’ and that the religious other confronts us with disconcerting ways of being human and being religious, he is convinced that we are also enriched by knowing what other possibilities there are in our world, and that the ideal of a fusion of horizons will prevent us from losing our way in this religious and conceptual plurality.10

Yet, although Taylor presents such a fusion of horizons as a true epistemological ideal and a real human challenge, it raises some fundamental problems. First, I think that his project grossly overestimates human’s capacities to integrate the conceptual and religious horizon of the other. The above example of the Roman Catholic mass versus the Aztec human sacrifice clearly shows that a fusion of horizons is practically impossible when the distance between them is too

8 Taylor, Understanding the Other, 29.9 Taylor, Understanding the Other, 36.10 Taylor, Understanding the Other, 38f.

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big. As long as there is a reasonable degree of communality between my horizon and that of the other, their fusion is certainly possible and potentially enriching, since it enables me to see myself and the religious other in a different way. It is also a moral obligation to see the other’s ideas and behaviors from a broader perspective than my own. However, when the conceptual and religious schemes differ too much, our capacity to understand the religious other arrives at an impasse. In the above example, Taylor himself admits that he has no idea what a stable, culture-transcendent name for these rival construals could be, even though this is a minimal condition for a fusion of horizons. Therefore, Taylor’s appeal to change our self-understanding for a proper understanding of the religious other risks to remain a vacuous demand and is overly optimistic as to the human capacity to integrate different conceptual and religious schemes.

Second, Gadamer’s idea of a fusion of horizons stems from his work on the interpretation of classic works of pictorial art and literature in different spatio-temporal situations. These works serve as the primary, stable point of reference for every interpretation. This focal point does not only make a fusion of interpretational horizons possible, but also enables the reader to decide, in principle, whether an interpretation is loyal to the original, and to distinguish such an interpretation from a distorted or biased one. This shows that hermeneutics in general and the idea of a fusion of horizons in particular rest on the belief that the universe of textual or artistic interpretation is a stable and homogeneous one, referring to a given body of texts and art works, so that different interpretations can be seen as complementing each other, and the erroneous ones can be easily discarded. Yet, although this example shows that hermeneutics has enormous merits as an underlying theory of interpretation, its use raises fundamental problems in other contexts of understanding. In particular, when one tries to apply the hermeneutic paradigm to the understanding of the religious other, there is no such thing as a stable, trans-cultural or trans-religious point of reference. Admittedly, the ideas of humaneness and religiosity or, in a different context, human dignity, rationality, etc. are often invoked as such reference points, but these notions are too abstract to serve as an effective focal point for the understanding of the other in a concrete situation of substantial religious differences. Especially because the societal and religious landscape has become so heterogeneous in our times, there is rather dissemination and deferral of meaning than complementary understanding and fusion of horizons.

The limits of the ideal of the fusion of horizons becomes particularly acute in the case of religious critique. If this ideal is really the standard for critique, it becomes impossible to accept a critique that is non-paradigmatic, out of the box, because it by definition cannot be integrated in the existing horizons of understanding. Yet, as the words and lives of prophets, saints, or those of women in a predominantly male society, etc. show, a critique from outsiders, from

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people who are not part of the established order, often turns out to be far more poignant and relevant than a critique that can easily be integrated and thus made innocuous.

In my view, MacIntyre’s approach of a critical understanding of the religious other builds also on the idea of the fusion of horizons and therefore suffers from the same problems. He formalizes his approach into three rules of engagement, the third of which is most important for our discussion. “One must […] explain how and why those weaknesses [i.e. of other religious and secular traditions] arose and how they might be better attended to from within an alternative tradition of inquiry. Clearly, ‘better’ here requires qualification, because this ‘alternative’ resolution removes the problem only by changing the grounds upon which it is resolved.”11 Actually, this approach requires a conversion of the other, which is hardly realistic in a heterogeneous religious landscape. On a more fundamental level, the presupposition of MacIntyre’s approach is that there is enough communality between these various grounds for a ‘rational dialectic’ between diverging definitions of the term ‘better’. MacIntyre is convinced that this dialectic takes seriously intellectual differences and attends to them. Indeed, in the ongoing discussion about the problem of different voices in the public square – the example D’Costa gives in this context –, one can argue that Catholic thought gives a ‘better’ answer than principled secularism and certainly than ideological secularism. In this case, there is enough communality between these three positions, as regards their history (the tragedy of the religious wars), political setting (liberal democracy), ways of rational argumentation (the unity of faith and reason) etc.

However, Taylor’s example of the completely different horizons that enable the understanding of the Roman Catholic Mass versus the understanding of the Aztec practice of human sacrifices, as well as many more ones show that interreligious dialogue fails when there is a basic lack of communality. Moreover, MacIntyre’s requirement to make such a dialogue work in practice, consisting of “a set of institutionalized forums in which the debate between rival types of enquiry was afforded rhetorical expression” to create a common ground is of no avail.12 It offers only a formal framework, which may work well as long as there is enough communality regarding the substance of the debate. Yet when the religious landscape is really heterogeneous, there is no shared substance to debate about, especially when one descends from general principles to specific situations. MacIntyre’s use of the term ‘rational dialectic’ reflects the same problem on a more principled level. The aim of dialectics is to mediate reasonably between opposite positions through a ‘definite negation’ of the negative, exclusivist aspect of these positions, eventually resulting in an encompassing, reasonable affirmation. This dialectical idea of teleological rationality is a concretization of Hegel’s famous saying that “the

11 I rely here on Gavin D’Costa’s interpretation MacIntyre’s ideas. See, D’Costa, Christianity and World Religions, 124.12 MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, 234. Quoted in: D’Costa, Christianity and World Religions, 124.

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True is the whole.”13 This shows that the idea of rational dialectics is quite similar to the ideal of a fusion of horizons. The problem of this approach is that it is prone to reducing the otherness of the religious other to a moment of an enlarged totality, in other words to reduce the heterogeneity of the religious landscape to an, admittedly amended homogeneity. In sum, rational dialectics is at odds with understanding the religious other in her own right and risks to pervert a reasonable critique of this other into a hostile take-over.

2.2 Religious hospitality14

In comparison with Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s overly optimistic suggestion that a critical understanding of the religious other is possible through a fusion of horizons or a rational dialectic, Ricoeur’s response to this problem is far more modest, since he acknowledges that there is an unbridgeable gap between my and the other’s religious horizons, thus taking distance from the ideal of their fusion. For Ricoeur, the intellectual and ethical challenges and opportunities in the case of an understanding of the other are quite similar to those of translation in a situation of linguistic heterogeneity.15 Ricoeur summarizes these challenges with the catchword ‘linguistic hospitality’: it carries the double duty “to expropriate oneself from oneself as one appropriates the other to oneself.”16 Fulfilling this duty offers a pragmatic way out of the ruinous alternative of complete untranslatability or incommensurability versus perfect translatability or homogeneity.

For Ricoeur, translation always takes place in a time ‘after Babel’, meaning that it is forever compelled to acknowledge the limits of language and the heterogeneity of languages.17 Every language has a different way of carving things up phonetically, conceptually, and syntactically. Consequently, there is no consensus at each of these levels, let alone at all of them, about what would characterize a perfect language that could legitimately claim universality. Moreover, no one can tell how the specific languages, with all their linguistic peculiarities, are or even can be derived from a presumably original language. In other words, there is no pre-Babylonic, paradisiac language underlying all the specific languages, which could serve as a stable point of reference of a good translation and as a focal point of their complementarity. This implies that every language is prone to mistranslation by a non-native speaker.18

13 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 11.14 I discussed Ricoeur’s ideas about translation and the connection to the understanding of the (religious) other in more detail in: Peter Jonkers, Lost in Translation?, 214-219.15 See: Ricoeur, On Translation, 72 pp. For an excellent introduction to Ricoeur’s philosophy of translation see: Kearney, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Translation, 147-159. Marianne Moyaert deserves to be credited for applying Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of translation to the understanding of the religious other. See: Moyaert, In Response to the Religious Other, 143-149.16 Kearney, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Translation, 150f.17 Ricoeur, On Translation, 3-5, 8.18 Ricoeur, On Translation, 15-8.

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These insights into the fundamental heterogeneity of languages lead to the conclusion that “we can only aim at a supposed equivalence, not founded on a demonstrable identity of meaning.”19

This equivalence without identity calls for multiple translations and retranslations, which can be compared with each other, but also for acknowledging that there will always be something untranslatable, as well as that there is no standard of a correct translation. The result is that “we can translate differently, without hope of filling the gap between equivalence and adequacy.”20 By accepting translations of our native language, we expropriate ourselves from ourselves, i.e. we give up our longing for linguistic self-sufficiency; but we also appropriate the other to ourselves, since she makes us aware of the specific expressive possibilities and idiosyncrasies that our native language offers. Similarly, we become familiar with the possibilities and idiosyncrasies of other languages. This explains why there is a desire to translate, which goes beyond constraint and utility. It enables us to prevent the bitter fate of enclosing ourselves in a monologue. This situation comes down to a call for linguistic hospitality, “where the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language is balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home, in one’s own welcoming house.”21

What, then, can we can learn from Ricoeur’s ideas about translation for understanding the religious other? Can the practice of ‘linguistic hospitality’ also play a role in the understanding of the religious other, resulting in the idea of ‘religious hospitality’? If anything, this practice is essential to keep at bay the lure of interpretative omnipotence, of interpreting the other by one’s own standards.22 Moreover, perceiving the religious other as a guest from outside also means that we have to give up the illusion of a fusion of religious horizons. Just as the universal human capacity to express oneself through language only exists in a diversity of individual languages, the capacity to live religiously manifests itself only as a heterogeneity of religions. In a similar vein, just as every language has a different way of carving things up phonetically, conceptually, and syntactically, individual religions, too, give shape to the divine mystery in heterogeneous ways. This means that we have to accept that there always will be something incomprehensible in our understanding of the religious other, just like there will always be something untranslatable when translating from or into a different language. Moreover, for the same reasons as that there is no language that could serve as an adequate translation, there is no adequate understanding of the religious other. The basic equivalence of all our translations and understanding is a consequence of the fact that we live in a world after Babel, not only linguistically but also religiously. Yet, just like learning other languages expands our linguistic horizon, so that the loss linguistic self-sufficiency is largely compensated by the awareness of

19 Ricoeur, On Translation, 33.20 Ricoeur, On Translation, 10.21 Ricoeur, On Translation, 10; see also 26-9.22 Kearney, Introduction: Ricoeur’s philosophy of translation. In: Ricoeur, On Translation, xvif.

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the possibilities and idiosyncrasies of foreign languages, understanding the religious other enriches our awareness of the heterogeneity of leading a religious life.

However, in spite of the great merits of Ricoeur’s idea of linguistic hospitality for the understanding of the religious other in her own right, its potential for a critique of the religious other is very limited, as the following observation shows. While nobody seriously wants to upgrade her native language to the ‘true’ one, thereby disqualifying the other ones as jabber, many of us are inclined to see our religion or philosophy of life as better than other ones, or at least are critical of certain ideas and behaviors of the religious other. Moreover, we think that we have good reasons to criticize these ideas and practices. Yet, the problematic consequence of the heterogeneous character of the religious world is precisely that these (religious) others do not share our standards of justification, so that the ‘objective’ character of our critique is jeopardized.23 In sum, although the correspondence between linguistic and religious diversity has proven to be very fruitful, it is unable to explain the possibility of religious critique.

3. Religious truth in a heterogeneous religious landscape

In this section, I want to examine an alternative approach of religious critique. As said, the virtue of religious hospitality leaves us rather empty-handed when it comes to criticizing the religious other. Generally speaking, if religious critique aims to go beyond the demonstration of internal inconsistencies and poor argumentation, it presupposes a common standard, which transcends my conceptual and religious schemes. Traditionally, the idea of (religious) truth has served as such an objective standard. Yet, due to the heterogeneous plurality of conceptual and religious schemes, including the idea of religious truth, a critique of the religious other seems to have become impossible. As argued in the previous sections, a less robust, hermeneutic solution to the problem of a criterion of religious truth, consisting in overlapping consensus, a fusion of horizons, rational dialectic, or religious hospitality, has fallen short of expectations. Hence, venting (religious) critique seems to be nothing but the expression of one’s personal disapproval, which can easily be dismissed as biased, irrelevant or even as a manifestation of the unwillingness to understand the (religious) other in a fair way. Yet, taking a critical stance towards one’s own ideas and practices and those of others is a fundamental intellectual capacity; it enables humans to distinguish between a true opinion and an (ideologically) biased one, between practices that promote human dignity and degrade it, between religious belief and superstition, in short between reality and appearance.

In order to find a way out of this impasse, I want to confront Ricoeur’s ideas with Derrida’s analysis of hospitality. Unlike Ricoeur, Derrida’s idea of hospitality is not confined to the horizontal level of equivalent concrete regimes of hospitality, but is also about the vertical

23 See also: Jonkers, What about unjustified religious difference?, 445-452.

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relation of these regimes to the single categorical imperative of hospitality. In my view, this ‘differential’ approach of the question of religious hospitality has far more critical potential than Ricoeur’s hermeneutic ideas.

According to Derrida, the idea of hospitality is marked by a fundamental antinomy. There is, on the one hand, the absolute and singular law of unconditional, hyperbolic hospitality, the categorical imperative of hospitality that commands to transgress all the specific conditions that are imposed on those who give or receive a welcome. On the other hand, there are the plural, concrete laws of hospitality, which define the rights and duties of hospitality, thus making it conditional, dependent on an existing ethos. These laws challenge and transgress, from their part, the absolute law of hospitality.24 The mutually transgressive nature of this relation shows that none of these plural, concrete laws, nor their combination can claim to be an adequate instantiation of the absolute, unconditional law of hospitality, just as little as the unconditional law of hospitality can be an adequate conceptualization of the multiple laws that define hospitality in concrete situations. In sum, “[t]he antinomy of hospitality irreconcilably opposes The law, in its universal singularity, to a plurality that is not only a dispersal […], but a structured multiplicity, determined by a process of division and differentiation.”25

It is crucial to realize that the two antagonistic terms of this antinomy are not symmetrical. The singular law stands above the plural laws; it is thus ‘illegal’, an imperative without order and without concrete duty, since it commands an unconditional welcome to all newcomers without exception.26 Yet, even while keeping itself above the plural laws of hospitality, the unconditional, singular law of hospitality needs the conditioning laws, it requires them. The singular law would not be effectively unconditional if it did not have to become concrete, determined; it would then risk to remain abstract, utopian, and illusory. In sum, “[t]hese two regimes of law, of the law and the laws, are thus both contradictory, antinomic, and inseparable. They both imply and exclude each other, simultaneously.”27

In order to explain the above antinomy further, in particular how its two terms are related, Derrida introduces the Kantian notion of intermediate schemas. “Between an unconditional law or an absolute desire for hospitality on the one hand and, on the other, a law, a politics, a conditional ethics, there is distinction, radical heterogeneity, but also indissociability. One calls forth, involves, or prescribes the other.”28 This quote shows how Derrida understands the possibility of a critique of hospitality in a situation of heterogeneity. First, the unconditional imperative of hospitality is not a Kantian regulatory idea, infinitely removed from the conditional ethics and politics of hospitality, yet at the same time practically postulated by

24 Derrida, Step of Hospitality / No Hospitality, 77.25 Derrida, Step of Hospitality / No Hospitality, 79.26 Derrida, Step of Hospitality / No Hospitality, 79; 83.27 Derrida, Step of Hospitality / No Hospitality, 79f.28 Derrida, Step of Hospitality / No Hospitality, 147.

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these ethics as the object of asymptotic rapprochement. If this were the case, the heterogeneous nature of the antinomy between the unconditional law and the concrete conditions of hospitality would turn into something homogeneous, so that the former would lose its critical potential to intervene in every concrete condition of hospitality in the name of the unconditional. In other words, a regulatory idea would make it possible to decide which horizontal regime of hospitality can legitimately claim to be a better instantiation of the unconditional law of hospitality than another. Obviously, such a claim is at odds with the heterogeneous character of the concrete regimes of hospitality. In Derrida’s view, an intervention in or a critique of the ethics and politics of hospitality is only possible from a position that radically transgresses the horizontal field of these ethics and politics, from a position that is square to this field. If the unconditional law of hospitality could be defined as a positive concept or ‘truth’, however infinitely removed, it risks to be reduced to a simple paradigm for the policies of hospitality.

Yet if the unconditional law is to intervene at all in the conditional ethics and politics of hospitality, it has to transgress its unconditionality, even at the risk of being denied, corrupted or perverted by the conditional, multiple laws. This is why Derrida calls Kant’s schemas intermediate: they are intermediate, empty spaces between the two sides of the antinomy, as well as intermediate, not only showing the radical heterogeneity of these two sides, but also their indissociability. This indissociability determines the antinomy in such a way that without the conditional laws of hospitality, the unconditional law would remain ineffective, incapable to intervene in the field of the conditional. However, the reverse is also true: without the singular law of unconditional hospitality, the concrete rights and duties that condition hospitality would become dogmatic, unaware of their conditional and even contingent character, and eventually become self-sufficient. Hence, not only the unconditional law of hospitality runs the risk to be perverted by the conditional laws, but the conditional laws of hospitality are also liable to such a perversion.29 In order to stave off that this pervertibility turns in an actual perversion, the intermediate schemas are essential: they enable an intervention – in the sense of an unwelcome intrusion – in the conditional laws of hospitality in the name of the singular, unconditional law of hospitality by laying the finger on the conditional and thus contingent character of these laws.

In my view, the critical potential of Derrida’s approach of hospitality for the possibility of religious critique cannot be underestimated. He does not fall into the metaphysical trap of an adequate definition of the categorical imperative of hospitality, resulting in a positively given truth that could serve as an unambiguous criterion or paradigm of the heterogeneous regimes of hospitality. Such an approach would run counter to the transgressive nature of the unconditional law. More importantly, an adequate definition would make it in principle possible

29 Derrida, Step of Hospitality / No Hospitality, 79.

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that a concrete politics of hospitality appropriates the unconditional law of hospitality, claims it as the one and only true hospitality and uses it as a standard for the critique of other policies. Instead, the essence of the kind of critique Derrida has in mind is that it is asymmetric; it comes down to burdening all conditional politics of hospitality without exception with a bad conscience in the name of the unconditional law. In sum, Derrida’s response to the possibility of critique in a heterogeneous situation, i.e. when it is impossible to refer to an adequate or positively given standard of critique, is that it subjects every conditional politics to an unconditional imperative that is related to this conditional politics in an essentially asymmetric way because of its radically transcendent character.

In order to appreciate the relevance of the antinomy of hospitality for the central question of this section, namely the possibility of a critique of the religious other in a heterogeneous landscape, it is helpful to compare Derrida’s ideas about hospitality with the critical role of negative theology vis à vis all theological and religious ideas and practices. Similar to the antinomy between the unconditional law and the conditional laws of hospitality, negative theology defines the relation between God and the world as one of radical heterogeneity and indissociability. On the basis of this paradigm, negative theology deconstructs every possible anthropomorphism as an illegitimate appropriation of the divine and a negation of its ineffability. In order to make sense at all in today’s heterogeneous religious landscape, such a critique cannot be based on a positively given idea of the divine, since this would violate the ineffable character of the divine and, moreover, reduce the heterogeneous character of religious critique into a homogeneous one. By contrast, negative theology’s antinomic idea of the relation between God and the world suggests a different approach to criticize the religious other. It can be described as an unwelcome intrusion into every concrete religious tradition, rejecting every positive affirmation as a violation of the ineffability of the divine.