With regard to death, Habermas was struck by the paradoxical quality of the memorial service of the agnostic Max Frisch in 1991. The service was held, on Frisch’s instructions, in St. Peter’s Church in Zurich but without a priest in attendance and in a ceremony in which "we let our nearest speak, and without an amen." The paradox here indicated to Habermas that our "enlightened modern age" has failed to find a suitable replacement for this rite de passage. He further finds from this that secular reason is "unsettled" by its "opaqueness" in relation to religion in which religion continues to "intrude into this modernity as the most awkward element from its past" (16).

Now Habermas’ philosophy is a philosophy of human liberation. And his unique insights into the dynamics and possibilities of human liberation give his thought great significance for our time. His analysis of a "linguistically embodied reason" in communicative dialogue with others within community (our human situation in a post-metaphysical world) includes certain universalizable presuppositions that give rise to an "inner transcendence" that generates a "concept of liberation" for all humanity. These developments regarding the possibility of a human community has become a focal point for philosophy in our time. "The thought of such a community," he writes, "which would intertwine freedom and solidarity within the horizon of an undamaged intersubjectivitity, has unfolded its explosive force even within philosophy" (2002, 132).

In this respect, human beings, now dealing with a reasoning power that is "both communicative and historically situated," have discovered the elements of the "inner transcendence" arising from our situation of being linguistically embodied reason. We understand, now, "the concept of subjective freedom and the demand for equal respect for all." We understand one another under the "concept of autonomy, of a self-binding of the will based on moral insight, which depends on relations of mutual recognition." This inner transcendence gives rise to the understanding of humans as "subjects [who] can only lead a life that is genuinely their own through sharing a common life with others." We come here upon a "concept of liberation – both as an emancipation from degrading conditions and as the utopian project of a harmonious form of life." (Ibid. 132-133)

Nevertheless, Habermas continues one page later, the liberating quest of philosophy faces great challenges – "a world flattened out by empiricism and rendered normatively mute" (134). Today’s world, he continues, is infected by a relativism of paradigms or world pictures in which one is "worth as much as the next" ignoring the objectively real normative dimension that philosophy has uncovered in in the post-metaphysical world. Here we touch on the theme of "an awareness of what is missing" once again. In its quest for human liberation, how can philosophy deal with a world that is "flattened out and normatively mute"?

Are there depths and dimensions that philosophy is ignoring that might be necessary for an adequate concept of human liberation? My contention in this essay is that the "inner transcendence" revealed by discourse ethics requires an additional recognition of the non-cognitive depths that encompass our lives on every side. Without such recognition, our potential transforming and motivating power towards real human solidarity and planetary liberation can never be sufficiently activated, and human history will continue to drift helplessly toward disaster.

The concept of "inner transcendence" appear intended to exclude what might be called the "external transcendence" associated with traditional religious worldviews. Our liberation was thought to be dependent on this external transcendence thought of as God. However, God always had an immanent aspect in traditional religion, and this immanence was often thought to be directly encountered in religious experience. Were these experiences all long merely subjective and illusory? Or were they indicators of something overwhelmingly public to our human existential situation that necessarily remained non-cognitive? The three elements of "what is missing" in this essay by Habermas, each point to the need for this additional non-cognitive aspect of the inner transcendence of our human situation.

Something like this may be the consequence of a world "flattened out by empiricism and rendered normatively mute." But is the smallness of contemporary humanity entirely restored through a recognition of the inner transcendence implied by our universal linguistically embodied reason? Do we not need something universally available that has the potential for a much more radical transformative awakening? Do not the deeper existential conditions of human life give us this possibility from the very beginning?

Do we properly respond, when faced with the enormity of death and its mystery which includes within itself the entire gigantic wonder of the cosmos and life, that we lack the appropriate rite de passage? Do we encounter the fact of our own death in the death of others and then simply ‘blink’ as Nietzsche’s last man might blink? At least Habermas does not claim that secular reason has invented happiness. To his credit, he continues to insist that something is missing. But what is missing here is certainly not simply the theological self-understanding of the major world religions as the "most awkward" element from philosophy’s past. What is missing appears to be a capacity for a response of our whole being before the magnificent depths of life, death, and existence. A world flattened out by empiricism and rendered normatively mute is a world in which our capacity for response to the enormity of life and profundity of existence also rendered mute.

One fundamental issue here involves the philosophical understanding of language that Ludwig Wittgenstein developed as his lifetime’s gift to humanity. His early attempt to articulate a picture theory of language had already understood that there were dimensions of existence that could not be gotten into language, what he called in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus "the mystical" and "the ethical." However, Wittgenstein’s great insight that there is no pictorial relation between language and world as expressed in his later thought involved profound implications for our understanding of religion and related attempts to deal with the depth dimension of human life. In his "Notes on Frazier’s Golden Bough" and other writings, Wittgenstein shows that religious statements must be now understood not as metaphysical propositions purporting to correspond to ultimate realities but as responses to the unsayable depths and mystery of our human situation.

How does secular reason, as articulated by Habermas, deal with the absolute mysteries of life, death, and existence? It cannot. For one cannot raise any "validity claims" in a spirit of communicative discourse concerning these incomprehensible depths penetrating our human existential situation. There are dimensions that confront us, vital to being a responsive, fully alive, and compete human being, that cannot be rendered in propositional form within discourse directed toward mutual understanding.

Now linguistically embodied reason living in a post-metaphysical age does not wish to speak of "ultimate reality," and, indeed, there is no necessity to do so. Many who have pointed to this dimension, whether Wittgenstein or Bugbee or Jiddu Krishnamuriti, have left it unnamed, as a pristine awareness that is nevertheless transformative of our lives and our attitudes. The non-cognitive encounter with the "vivid presence" at the heart of everyday experience need not be named. It need not be called "ultimate reality" nor rendered in any terms metaphysical or symbolic. Nevertheless, without recognition of our ultimate home as the astonishing "mystery" of existence, our experience will continue to be dominated by a world flattened out by empiricism and rendered normatively mute.

This reflection on the mystery of ordinary existence leads to the second aspect of what Habermas finds missing once "the synthesis of faith and knowledge forged in the tradition extending from Augustine to Thomas fell apart" (2010, 16): the problem of "sacred knowledge." Today, he says, "the cleavage between secular knowledge and revealed knowledge cannot be bridged." However, even in the great age of union between faith and knowledge many thinkers understood that revealed knowledge could not be reduced to simply propositions of faith as stated in the Christian creeds (often assumed to correlate with metaphysical realities). Unlike modern fundamentalism that Habermas rightly finds so problematic later in his essay, traditional theologians often understood the revealed propositions of scripture and the creeds as a symbolization of aspects of our human situation in relation to God.

For those who experienced what the Church recognized as direct, personal revelation (the mystics), this step to understanding the symbolic nature of the propositions of faith was an easy one. But Habermas appears to see theology as a form of representational thinking attempting to describe reality in the mode of true or false propositions. Like Wittgenstein, he has gone beyond metaphysics, but, unlike Wittgenstein, he fails to reinterpret the religious tradition in the light of our contemporary understanding that language, as intrinsically conventional and unable to mirror any supposed ontological realities, does not and cannot represent the depths that encompass our lives. What the tradition was doing all along in may ways was responding symbolically to the awesome depths of existence. There never was any such thing as "revealed propositional knowledge" apart from claims generated through naïve, fundamentalist, anthropomorphically conceived conceptions of God and the world.

Indeed, any standard concordance of the Bible will reveal that the words for "faith" in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the Christian New Testament do not indicate any sort of "sacred knowledge" or set of propositions that must be believed. The Hebrew word for faith (emunah) has the connotations of "firmness" as well as ‘security, fidelity, faithfulness, truly, and truth.’ Clearly, what is meant by God’s demand for faith in the Hebrew scriptures is a relationship on the analogy with a relationship between friends, members of a family, or husband and wife. This notion of faith may or may not correlate with awareness of the nameless "ultimate reality." But it clearly does not indicate a set of metaphysical propositions to be believed.

Habermas claims the cleavage between secular knowledge (using post-metaphysical reason and the methods of the sciences) and revealed knowledge is unbridgeable, but he appears to mean by this that we cannot accept the propositions found in scripture or Church creeds as genuine knowledge because they cannot be falsified or rationally established by the methods of secular reasoning. He opposes the propositions of faith to the verified and critically examined propositions of secular knowledge. However, this a category mistake, even though some classical theologians may have made the same mistake. If the propositions of faith were most fundamentally theological expressions of a response of our whole being to the pristine depths and mystery of our existence (God), then what theology was doing does not properly fit into the model of propositions claiming to objectively assess the structures of existence. Clearly, such apophatic thinkers as Dionysios the Areopagite, Meister Eckhart, and Nicholas of Cusa saw beyond this mistake.

Yet this is precisely the key to the concept of revelation and the reframing of religion from a pre-secular attempt to provide knowledge of the metaphysical structure of things to a human phenomena enlivened and informed by a deep and fundamental response to the depths and mystery of our human situation. It is the mystics of all religions that have been the life-blood and creative inspiration of the theological activity, from Jesus to Buddha to Sri Aurobindo. But just as Habermas is concerned about the "violations of solidarity" throughout the world in a progressive barbarization submerging the potential of secular reason, so Berdyaev shares a similar concern. Yet Berdayev sees that mysticism is the essence of religion and that it creatively opens us to the depths of the world beyond reason in such a way that points to our potential for real transformation, for establishing the Kingdom of God on Earth:

The problem is not with secular reason in itself, to be sure. The problem is that secular reason refuses to recognize the depths and dimensions of the life within which it is embedded. Reducing knowledge to what can be discursively examined is one thing. Suggesting that reality is reducible to what can be discursively examined is quite another. The latter constitutes a tremendous mistake that diminishes our potential for human liberation.

Habermas recognizes that this situation "cries out to heaven" for a solution that hearkens back to the kind of motivating power and collective solidarity that traditional religions were able to generate around religious visions, and to which today’s contemporary religious revivals continue to point (19). However, instead of considering the energy arising from the depths of our being that authentic religion has traditionally been able to call upon, his essay launches into a critique of contemporary fundamentalism and the ways in which this excludes secular reason and, with it, the very legitimation of constitutional democracy (20).

As serious as this concern with fundamentalism may be, Habermas fails to recognize that the cosmic and human solidarity arising from authentic religious experience comes from the responsiveness of the whole human being to the depths and mystery of existence. The wholeness of our human life appears truncated in his thought and human beings become bifurcated between a limited secular reasoning power and a collective irrational dimension that includes everything else—including our relation to the mystery and depths of existence, to death, to the fullness of life, to creativity, and to God.

Secular reason does indeed need to stick to its guns in the sense of its insight into the universal structures of language from which emerge the foundations of constitutional democracy, freedom, recognition of human rights, and the elements of procedural justice for all human beings. It must never abandon this insight. But to reduce what is great, deep, and mysterious about a human being to secular reason, and its "inner transcendence," to demand that the authentic mystical and religious awareness attempt to turn the unsayable depths into propositions that can be debated with secular reason, is to abandon the tremendous hope for transformation and fulfillment around which the great religions have always revolved.

This great hope is not necessarily tied to what Habermas refers to as "religious worldviews." It has been translated into secular philosophical language by profound modern thinkers such as Ernst Bloch (1970; 2002) and Japanese thinker Nishida Kitaro. Kitaro writes:

Our common experience includes ever so much more than reason. And reason is not limited to the dialogical discourse mode articulated by Habermas. Reason must enlarge its self-conception to embrace the depths of existence, not by giving up its dialogical core, but by expanding to include, in dialectical tension, the depths of existence and of human life. This is what is done, for example, in the work of Nicholas of Cusa.

There can be no fulfillment of our human destiny, no kingdom of God on Earth, and no Kantian kingdom of ends in themselves, until those transformative creative energies flow into our lives from the unsayable depths. Habermas’ tremendous insight into the linguistically embodied structures of communicative reason is necessary but not sufficient for human liberation. It refuses recognition of the non-cognitive depths of our existential situation, which are not in the slightest "irrational" but rather simply transcendent of our limited, finite rationality (non-rational).

This is what is missing in our modern "post-secular" age. It is missing in both apparently religious people and within so-called "methodological atheists." This awareness does not require that human beings embrace the "worldview" of any religion. If we are looking for the source of human solidarity that will bring a kingdom of peace with justice to the Earth, we can find it within our everyday awareness as soon as we drop our egoistic opposition to the depths in which we are immersed. Only in this way will human beings be capable of truly transforming their lives, while simultaneously binding the human community together in unbreakable solidarity.