“Secularization” or Plurality of Meaning Structures? A. Schutz’s Concept of a Finite Province of Meaning and the Question of Religious Rationality

Abstract

Referring to basic Weberian notions of rationalization and secularization, I try to find a more accurate sense of the term " secularization " , intending to describe adequately the position of religion in modernity. The result of this query is—or at least should be—a new, original conceptualization of religion as one of finite provinces of meaning within one paramount reality of the life-world, as defined by Alfred Schutz. I proceed by exposing a well known, major oversimplification of the Weberian concept of secularization, very well outlined in Peter Berger's The sacred canopy, in order to point to the genuine, much more dif-ferentiated position of Max Weber in this matter (especially from the period of Foundations of social economic and Economy and society), and, consequently, to return to the roots of Berger's thought: phe-nomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz, an attempt to assure the philosophical foundations of Weber's sociological theory. At a closer glimpse, transformation of religion in the modern process of rationaliza-tion does not consist—according to Weber—in eliminating religion and thus depriving society of the reli-gious source of meaning, but in parallel emancipation of many different domains of rationality, including religion itself. Using Schutz's analysis of the social world as a complex structure of many different final provinces of meaning, I describe religion as such a province and show what does the process of rationali-zation of this province consist and what it should consist in: a complex, ongoing exchange of cognitive relevances and contents, combined with growing autonomy of many different sub-worlds. Schutz's theory of symbol, rooted in Edmund Husserl's description of constitution of complex objects in mono-and polythetic acts of consciousness, moves the analysis to the epistemological level, pointing to a chance of intensifying our cognitive relation to reality through increasing interpenetration of various sub-universes of meaning. Irrespective of what we think of the claim of religions to their truths and of their place in the modern society, they con-tinue play an important role in shaping social institutions, pat-terns of behavior and ways of thinking. But, contrary to the situation a century ago, we seem to know less and less about the social role and position of religion, in spite of common theorems and descriptions pertaining to this domain of social world, theorems and descriptions that we use to take for granted. A paradigmatic example of such a theorem, only seemingly evident, provides the notion of secularization, introduced to reflection on society mostly by Max Weber's social theory and reinterpreted subsequently in the second half of the twentieth century in the analyses of such authors as Peter L. Berger (The sacred canopy, 1967), Thomas Luckmann (The invisible relig-ion, 1963), David Martin (The religious and the secular, 1969), Bryan Wilson (Religion in sociological perspective, 1982), and most recently Jose Casanova (Public religions in the modern world, 1994). It is interesting that all these analyses prevails the oversimplified understanding of secularization as a process of elimination of religion as the main (or only) source of meaning in society and of its replacement by other social domains, such as science, state and the like. With such a notion of seculariza-tion, it seems to be really difficult to know what we are talking about. Jose Casanova, considered to be one of the most eminent and pertinent secularization theorist, describes the recent dis-cussion on this subject as " the often fruitless secularization debate " (Casanova, 2006: p. 8). Even he, however, although (mostly under influence of Talcott Parsons' functional theory) recognizing " differentiation of the secular spheres " as one of the aspects of secularization, defines this phenomenon in the first place as " decline of religious beliefs and practices in mod-ern societies " (Casanova, 2006: p. 7). The purpose of the present analysis is, however, not to study the history of the notion of secularization or to take stance to-wards every—be it even the most important—view formulated in this regard. Taking reinterpretation of the Weberian notion of secularization as its point of departure, it wants first of all to profit from the ambiguous theoretical situation outlined above to reformulate the question about religion and its claims and to ask about its cognitive and social potential, other than being the unique source of meaning in society. An expected result of such an approach may be not only a new understanding of religion,