Postsekularne konstelacje nowoczesności. O historycznych związkach religii i nauk społecznych
Postsecular Constellations in Modernity. On the Historical Links Between Religion and Social Sciences

Summary/Abstract: Modernity has usually been regarded as a war zone between religion and secularism, faith and reason, theology and ”science”. In this context the concept of postsecularism appears as some sort of a light in the tunnel: the possibility not so much to pass over that debate (more and more sterile today) as to change its terms and look at its protagonists from the new perspective. Postsecularism is a historical concept which enables the new interpretation of modernity. My paper is a modest contribution to this new interpretation stressing those phenomena in the historical development of modern discourse which cross over the entrenched oppositions of secularity and religion. These phenomena I propose to call postsecular ”moments” or ”constellations” – as they are indeed constellations of both ideas and particular authors.The first constellation of this kind is Romanticism – esp. so called frühe Romantik in Germany and High Romanticism in Great Britain. The second constellation appears in the period of modernism. It consists of three elements, two of which at least are closely related to the social sciences: the sociological discourse on religion represented by Max Weber, the pragmatic defense of faith by William James, and, finally, the idiosyncratic re-discovery of their own religious heritage by the Jewish philosophers such as: Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin.

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