HABERMAS ON RITUALS AND THE ROLE OF ART
HABERMAS ON RITUALS AND THE ROLE OF ART

Summary/Abstract: Extra-ordinary communication, Habermas analyzes in Nachmetaphysisches Denken II, is represented by religious rituals that reveal the human fundamental relationship with the divine. The anthropological research of Ernesto De Martino showed that the experience of precariousness of human life has a cognitive value as a source of reassuring models constituted in the tradition. The sociologist Emile Durkheim and the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski pointed on the function of rituals for the cohesion of communities. The antropologists Arnold van Gennep and Meyer Fortes considered the social and cultural role of the myth that extends to the religious sphere. The ongoing philosophical discussion on the nature and function of rituals presents several fundamental perspectives. Art is a fundamental dimension that seems to belong to the very nature of rituals.

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