The Time of Religion and Human Rights

The Enlightenment's distinction between positive and natural religion furnishes a useful point of departure for thinking about the relationship, in today's world, between religion and human rights. According to eighteenth century rationalism, natural religion consists in the simplest form of those beliefs that reason can admit to without contradiction, such as the existence of God and the immortality of the soul (Voltaire); whereas positive religions are merely the multitude of diverging institutions, dogmas, ceremonies and beliefs that human beings have created for themselves during the course of history. In natural religion, consciousness finds divinity within itself, and thus is co-responsible for the laws that it constructs and obeys; in positive religion, God imposes His commands from without. Despite their differences, however, both forms of religion rely on the same conception of temporality to make their claims understood: they conceive of time as a pure linear sequence (t1, t2, t3, etc.) that is divided into the tripartite form of past, present, and future. For positive religion, this structure supports the existence of a well-formed past-time during which sacred grounds for respecting human rights were first revealed to a privileged founder; the record of this past-time, in the form of holy writ, then becomes a stable meaning which is thought to ground (and require) any subsequent action that aspires to be righteous. And while natural religion, for its part, attempts to avoid dogmatism by permitting practical reason to deduce right action from the God-given moral law within, the very concept of deduction in general entails the same tripartite structure of time: that is, rational people can lay down the law for themselves only in a past-time which, even if it is very recent, must always precede (and hence pre-authorize) the rightness of all right action. According to positive religion, God gives people moral laws; according to natural religion, God gives them a faculty (reason) that allows them to produce valid moral laws for themselves. Just like the conventional idea of positive law in general, both forms of religion display a kind of pre-rational "faith," so to speak, in what can and should happen after the moral law comes into being. That is, law, natural religion, and positive religion all adhere to the proposition that the past in general—and appropriately sanctioned human rights norms, in particular—can provide a secure foundation for right action, both in the present and in the future. But of course philosophers are hardly ever univocal when it comes to this or any other topic. Against the foregoing conventional interpretation of time, Western thought has also delivered us an altogether different concept of temporality, one that supplants sequential time's staid historiography of dates, laws and eras with the notion of "historical" time (Heidegger). The latter is characterized by the sheer persistence of a unitary spatial-temporal milieu that ceaselessly reproduces itself. Although this unity supports all modes of becoming, it provides no stable pause, or platform, on which a secure foundation for action could ever be established definitively, once and for all (Nietzsche). To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, the concept of this sort of temporality holds that the true site of history is not homogeneous, empty time, but rather time filled by the presence of the now (Die Jetztzeit). From this point of view, time does not "pass"; rather, human beings are seen as living their entire lives in (or as) a now-time in which they are caught, inescapably, between the warring forces of past and future. Franz Kafka's extraordinary parable, He, paints an image that vividly illustrates this concept of time: He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both. To be sure, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded momentCand this would require a night darker than any night has ever been yetChe will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other. Kafka's man is a figure for human freedom: the fateful "place," as it were, where the struggle between past and future eternally transpires. But this human freedom should not be confused with the kind in which reason lays down or acknowledges universal laws that then warrant the rightness of future actions (Kant), or even with the kind of Hegelian freedom that permits the individual to recognize and identify with the rational universal that is immanent within the institutions of his time and place. Nor is this a non-rational, religious, sort of freedom, founded on grace or revelation, by means of which one can let oneself become a vehicle for accomplishing God's will (Meister Eckhart). Rather, the kind of freedom that besets the man in Kafka's parable is tragic, in the precise Greek sense that it betrays itself as un-free and self-defeating whatever it does. This is why the man dreams, impossibly, of escaping from the fighting line, for having to constantly experience oneself as the living site of a tragic confrontation between past and future is far less comforting than resting on the self-certain knowledge that one's actions are grounded on an absolute and indubitable foundation. The difference between historiographical time and historical time corresponds to the differences between subservience and freedom, thought and action, and determinacy and indeterminacy. Linear time attempts to reconcile reason and history by giving human rights a proper ground; but as Goethe says, in the beginning was the deed, not the word. Unitary time is history by providing a site for the inherently groundless enactment of human rights; but as Kant says, intuitions without concepts are blind. This essay elucidates the rich contrast between these two modes of temporality, and meditates on their significance for the task of thinking about the relationship between religion and human rights.