On the Relation of Public Opinion and Religion: Theoretical Considerations

Abstract

Facing the modern expectations about publicity and the high esteem of public opinion, it can be challenging to disclose the sources of these expectations. After sketching the origin of the idea and reality of publicity from the 18th century onward, practical and theoretical concerns about public opinion are discussed alongside the criticism of Walter Lippmann, evoking seminal conceptions of collectivity and of the crowd. It was the German philosopher Ferdinand Tönnies who, from a sociologically informed perspective, systematically analyzed the idea of public opinion. As a stakeholder of religious demands, public opinion is a metaphysical instance. Publicity seems to be socially centered around public intellectuals peculiarly legitimized by scientific knowledge, who have an immense influence on the shape of public opinion through social imagineries (Charles Taylor). The challenge of having a religious relationship with the world has changed due to the public, but self-transcendent need specific responsibilities even in modern circumstances.

1. Public Sphere: The Rise of an Idea and a Reality

In modern times, Western culture is intensively interested in a new form of sociality called publicity. To understand the relevance and implications of this interest, the historic and systematic place of this idea should be cleared. As we explore, public opinion proves to be intimately interrelated with religion in the sense of a transcendent dimension for man: a secularized stakeholder of some religious demands.1

After the short period of the ancient Greek “politeia”, which required the whole person beyond his most private life in the household,2 the need for an all-encompassing “public” and corresponding “public opinion” arose for the first time in the modern age. However, between these two public spheres, a significant transformation of man took place; mainly due to the Christian influence, he was transformed into an individual who considers himself unique and for whom freedom and its compatibility with others became the most important personal and common issue (cf. Dumont 1986). The public is a social space of shared freedom, a possibility of access to shared will and shared control; the standard of judgment is, in particular, tension with our desire for diversity and plurality, a universal reason that is wanted to be absolutely abstract and principally general. Recently, Western people have been looking for the possibilities of joint world-shaping and the common formation of opinion and will in the reality and the concept of a “public sphere”.3 As its counter-term, “public opinion” assigns private thinking a genuinely collective orientation: it is an issue charged by the tension between individuality and generality, which are both highly estimated by modern culture. In any case, the carreer of opinion (doxa) (e.g., Plato 2000, 479d–e) that was Platonically separated from true knowledge as a mere presumption, is carried by the modern self-consciousness, which―in the social figure of the citizen―trains itself to be independent both externally and internally (Hegel 2001, §§ 187, 197; cf. Lepsius 1987, pp. 79–100).

The very first principled conception of public opinion was elaborated by Hegel two hundred years ago, systematically following the dialectical development of the Spirit with all its internal and external self-contradictions. Although Hegel was already aware of the difference between a society based on free agreements and a community organized by the state, he still wanted a real synthesis: the totality of order and unlimited freedom.4 The universal that becomes reality is the most reasonable and, at the same time, is the freest; it is the unfolding of the divine infinity in singular time.

Discussing the socially institutionalized unfolding process of free will, Hegel dedicated a paragraph to the public, near the top of the hierarchy, below the highest level of the state, which realizes the rationally segmented generality of freedom. “The principle of the modern world demands that what every man is bound to recognize must seem to him justified. He, moreover, wants to have a voice in the discussion and decision”. According to the definition of § 316 of the Philosophy of Right, in “public opinion”, which is the inorganic form of the will of the people and their opinion about themselves, “what is absolutely universal, substantive, and true is joined with its opposite, the independent, peculiar, and particular opinions of the many” (Hegel 2001, pp. 252–54). The people cannot be deceived in regard to their own spirit and character, but they can easily deceive themselves in regard to the way they know this spirit and judge their own actions. Here, Hegel comes to speak about the valid vehicle of the public: “In public opinion there is all false and true, but to find out the truth in it is the affair of the great man. He who tells the time what it wills and means and then brings it to completion, is the great man of the time. In his act the inner significance and essence of the time is actualized. Who does not learn to despise public opinion, which is one thing in one place and another in another, will never produce anything great”.

Later thinking about the public placed less and less trust in the rationality of the state, which was considered as being empty, bureaucratic, or rather oppressive. The place of the public and public opinion is the social space developing in the spirit of rationality―outside of the state as a still reasonable central order. The greatest story of the creation of the public, i.e., its conceptional creation and foundation, is the work of Jürgen Habermas, whose main issue has been the escape from the totality and one-sidedness of reason that had led to historical tragedies.

The significance of the public is given by its historico-philosophical relevance, which is evident from Habermas’ large-scale interpretive gesture. The calculating mind enclosed in the circles of goals and means has made it possible to effectively dominate the world, even ‘progressing’ as far as the methodical extermination of human beings. However, the human mind is also capable of operations of a radically different kind: the mind operating in communication does not search for pre-existing generalities but arrives at conclusions in power-free relations to others in conversations that are always based on language. According to the founding story of publicity, the commitment to public affairs was born in coffee houses, salons, and secret societies in the early 18th century, and public citizenship evolved toward the civic forum of the parliament. The invention of the printing press made it possible to practice debate about the increasingly questionable past and especially about the increasingly open future (Habermas 1989, §§ 5–7). And even if direct conversation remained the primary medium for creating and re-creating the life world networks and virtual connections widely expanded the range of possibilities: not only the relatively “free floating” intelligentsia but―due to the demand for a universality inherent in language―also all non-strategic contact that can now reach every point of the globe and work on the common issues of humanity (Mannheim 1954, pp. 136–45). Others project their hopes regarding true judgments into generalities abstracted from every concrete and specific content.5

According to the original idea of the ideal speech community, personality unfolds through common actions, and consciousness is founded on direct contact with others. The crucial internal instance of the person who is not fixed by his instinctual order is his self in relation to others (Me), whereas the unsocial self (I) operates spontaneously (Mead 1972).6 The increasingly comprehensive picture of the world expands, according to George Herbert Mead’s theoretical vision, from direct self-reflections in significant others through the roles occupied in real groups to the “most generalized other”, i.e., the highest instance of “society”, which is constructed through gradual abstraction. Although well-organized common reactions may harden into oppression, the common meaning conceived and negotiated in interpersonal world-forming activities adjusts the common order towards universal problems and solutions that more and more suitably serve the individual. This increasingly common mind judges the same situation in the same way: “everyone’s voice is the general voice”. The meaning–horizon of the broadest speech community is the abstract generality of a supposed humanity, the content of which may be, however, considered lifeless (Mead 1972, p. 379).

Later, with the experience of historical orders of alienation and terror, Habermas theorized the hope of man’s “better mind” as “communicative action” beyond every kind of instrumentality striving for domination. According to his world-historical narrative, the effectiveness of the functional aspect gave rise to economic and political systems parallel to the birth of the modern public. This sheer materiality interpenetrates―e.g., via the commodification of culture―the spiritual reproduction of our lifeworld (Habermas 1981). Still, in communicative acts that seek to understand each other―and in a utopian perspective carried by the universality of language that even tends to total agreement―the better argument triumphs (see Habermas 1989, § 18; Horkheimer and Adorno 1968, pp. 94–136). Except for the principle of communication, this new world situation has no taboos, and its rationality is the discourse taking place in the general human publicum. According to Michel Foucault, power is at work in all discourses, and even our concepts serve the creative possession of the world and others―what is more, every human manifestation is created and carried by this discourse that takes place as an impersonal and dynamic structure. Yet, in the course of the scientific and everyday mass use of this term, it is expected that an emancipated self-will can emerge (Foucault 1981). Despite the ongoing strategic battles of opinions, the order of the discourses is nourished by the modern spirit of criticism, which intends to clarify and, lastly, to question everything down to the very fundaments of our world.

The basic dilemma of the inherent political category of the public sphere is, of course, the broadest legitimacy: how can the common good be identified by a mass audience? However, this question implies a more profound one as follows: in the history of the social formation of our common issues, what is the place of this new and increasingly decisive authority?

2. The Concern of the Public Opinion: Between the Individual and the Crowd

Just as the measurement of market demands and the statistic aggregation of individual expressions started in the world’s first mass culture, the first qualms about the formation of general knowledge arose in the United States too. A hundred years ago, Walter Lippmann, with his intimate knowledge of the mass press, discussed the unavoidable abuses of public opinion. The starting point of his analyses is man’s limited ability to review the increasingly complex conditions of the world, which leads to simplified images and the display of an increasingly fictitious “pseudo-environment” instead of reality. A person who is born first and foremost to act but who by nature also creates an image of the world adapts herself to a realistically mediated pattern of political circumstances that are inaccessible to him; it is precisely this group-imagined image that is public opinion. The entry point of external interests is the natural gap between the chaotic external world and the images, which is the birthplace of all meaning ready for action (Lippmann 1922, chap. 1).7 The economy of the “moulds” of our verbal world-management, called for the first time by Lippmann with a printing metaphor, “stereotypes”, is based on self-protective relief through generalizations. The source of the press’ power is the fact that fixed expectations usually prove to be stronger than the world itself. Neither the self-centered individual nor the self-contained community can resist the power of the most general and, therefore, most obscure symbols, which create the strongest togetherness and the deepest exploitation at the same time. In a world organized into codes of customs, the authority of the spoken, written, and then printed word has been replaced by the enchanting image. After enumerating a multitude of the unblessed effects of the printed press, Lippmann tends to entrust the collection of knowledge to an intelligentsia appointed for this purpose because of the impossibility of an exhaustive knowledge of common matters for everyone. This is how the motto of Lippmann’s work, taken from Plato’s Republic, becomes clear: intellectuals should illuminate the increasingly opaque world for the inhabitants of the cave and for those who make decisions about common life.

The sharpest attack against the modern needs of the public is, however, not these empiric revelations of abuses of public opinion. Modern social thinking looks for the possibilities of existence for the individual amidst the fears of isolation from others and of dissolution into the collective. From the beginning, the public sphere, this “shared space above places” (Charles Taylor), seeks its stand between singularity and massification. The orientation point of public opinion is hereby the high-demanding concept of the responsible free man, who, however, according to many, is unable to carry himself without transcendental help. The real counterpart of the individual is the “crowd”, with the mass becoming more and more homogenous, which Rousseau, even before the first vivid mass experiences, contrasted with the general human will.

The first theoretical explication of the crowd―also called people-mass, herd (Nietzsche), everyone or anyone (Heidegger)―was made by Kierkegaard in a voluminous report written about a Danish novel, as a diagnosis developed from the relationship of two generations in an existentialist manner. According to the lucid dialectical deductions, the present age is opposed to the age that preceded it. It is repeated seven times that “the revolutionary era is essentially passionate”. In a situation of fossilized life conditions, the immediate passion of a sincere devotion to an idea gives, despite its temporary nature, direction and shape to both exterior and interior life (Kierkegaard 1994, p. 56ff). The “well tempered orchestra” of individuals has been, however, replaced by the dispassionate mass of reflections and abstractions: the excited stirring on the surface and the enthusiastic flaming of reflection do not turn into inwardness. In the age of measuring reason, action is replaced by advertising, speech by chatter, and Christianity becomes superficial knowledge about itself: the participating person is tamed into an observer and calculated thinking finds money in search of a general equivalent for everything. The power of leveling transforms the true association of groups to the common denominator of the crowd. The bearer of the generalizing power of reflection is the “audiance”, in which sober and self-satisfied philistines are striving for a numerical majority―or minority―in their own interest. In the modern age without a spiritual center, the adding operations of this leveling reflection produce the quantities of “generation” or even “mankind” instead of the quality of communities like congregations and peoples. The press, as the main support of the “demon” of impersonality, recruits the nameless horde of irresponsibility in public opinion and of dull universality. Instead of real simultaneity with concrete others, simultaneity with the abstract totality of the audience is a phantom and phantasm. The associated individuals can transcend all universalities only in the state of a concerned interest (inter-esse) and with the movement of a decision.8 Dissolving into these ready-made patterns of mass-cultural production, the person reproduces the eminently outstanding en masse. The seemingly individualized men are living faceless lives that fit into schemes and questionnaires. Loneliness gladly casts off the burdens of individuality for the charm of the multitude or even to the numerosity of statistics: the mass makes people form an opinion even about things they otherwise have no opinion about (Bourdieu 1997).9

For Émile Durkheim, the creative effervescence of group gatherings is the only authentic source of value. Yet, most theorists discuss the irrational power of the impersonal mass falling back into myths as a frightening characteristic of modernity. The flâneur is a characteristic figure of the city which represents the environment of anonymity. According to a broad agreement of the emerging mass psychologies, human rationality is replaced by passions in the extraordinary state of mass gatherings, i.e., in the heated state of the crowd.10 In the liminal state of collective concentration, the existing world is suspended so that a new one may be born (Durkheim 1995, pp. 207–41).11 According to Max Weber’s sociology, the emotional momentum of a common expression can overwhelm even a dispersed multitude: the mass feeling of the press supports the birth of a mass audience (Weber 1978, p. 23). What is at stake is the legitimacy of domination.

In the consequent functional system theory of Niklas Luhmann, who had a purely theoretical debate with Habermas, the public is nothing more than the internal environment of the social system, in which the system’s operations are observed according to the duality of publicity and non-publicity. The reality-creating (in-forming) operation of the mass media, which selects some of the happenings in the world as information, i.e., simplifies and multiplies the observed infinity, is not a distortion but a selection that is peculiar to all human systems (see Luhmann 1970, 1998, pp. 1096–109). It is quantity, novelty, and conflict that are made public by this second-order observation: growth, acceleration, and sharpening discord become news-making distinctions. As a contribution to the self-description of the political system, the media offer forms to the public in this way; for consumers, the possibility of choosing from the chosen ones, and for political actors, the mirror in which they see not the thoughts of the public but their selves that are constantly created by the news. In any case, the consumer and actor do not see each other because they cannot see each other, which is due to the impenetrability of these systems for each other. The logic of functionality eliminates precisely what was most important in the concept of the public: the rationality of communication about the public. According to formal criteria, anything can become news.

3. Public Opinion and Religion

In the meantime, the theoretical foundations of modernity have been shaken. As concerns the unity of reason, contradictions have become clear, such as between predictability and freedom, universality and plurality. The nature of theoretical abstraction, as well as the reasonability of ethics, is debatable, and sometimes more vital forces of man, such as feelings, are considered valid even against reason (Eisenstadt 2000, p. 24ff).

But why is publicity and public opinion such a significant issue beyond its practical role of asserting power in politics? What is the deeper meaning of the public expectation? If, according to our current social self-interpretation, assigning the public good is possible with the involvement of the public, what kind of authority has been replaced by public opinion in this foundational role?

Auguste Comte was the first to sociologise public opinion in his proposal statement that the arbitrariness of kings should not be “replaced by the arbitrariness of the people, or even more so of individuals”: it is sociology that should be entrusted with leadership because of its ability to overview social relations (Comte 1914, p. 44). The bearers of true knowledge about common life are the scientists summarizing the empirical observations of the most complex reality of society.

Beyond the initial conceit of the nascent science of sociality, Ferdinand Tönnies reached deeper insights in his huge work entitled The Critique of Public Opinion, published at the same time as Lippmann’s book (1922). The stake here is social cohesion again, which is encumbered by our limited ability to overview complex situations and―in Habermas’s words―the new lack of transparency of the world (Tönnies 1981, pp. 71ff, 131ff, 219ff; 2001, pp. 241–43). Tönnies’ theoretical criticism is based on his discourse-creating distinction between “community” (Gemeinschaft) and “society” (Gesellschaft), which ideal-typically separates two forms of association from each other; in traditional-archaic communities, organically unfolding relationships prevail whereas in modern society, contractual market relations have dominance. In the former, thinking is part of the human will; in the latter, thinking is, so to say, outside the will and increasingly governs according to arbitrary goals. This form of will no longer strives to realize the inner essence of association, i.e., community. As the momentum of arbitrariness becomes substantive, everyone follows her own personal goals.

In “community”, members maintain a comprehensive way of life as such in the forms of “liking”, “habit”, and “memory”, and even the means belonging to it are considered as ends in themselves. The general mood called “natural will” (Wesenswille), does not fix an established order but organically unfolds what exists as inherited. This original form of agreement is possible in the maternal relations of non-dominion, the paternal relations of affirmed rules, in kinship and neighborhood realities, and even in the transparency of medieval cities. The new interpersonal relationship of “society” is impersonality: the relationship with others is contract, the model of which has already been developed by Thomas Hobbes. In the midst of the consideration that separates means and goals, the arbitrariness of choosing from a multitude of possibilities (“rational will”, Kürwille), togetherness is based on the principle of a mutually beneficial exchange. The commodity of everything shows that society is the world of capitalism grasped by Marx, which “creates its own concept as paper-money”; that is, in the general concept of a contentless relationship, society is “nothing but abstract reason” (Tönnies 2001, p. 57ff). Individuals live in withdrawwl and maintain essence-less relationships, but their belonging, i.e., their fellowship, still has a common, new authority: public opinion.

As for the place of public opinion in this historical systematization, during the transformation of community into society, new forms of collective life take the place of old ones: convention supplants consensus, legislation supplants customary morality, and public opinion supplants religion, or at least it competes with it. Just as religion is the highest order of knowledge of the community will, ever-expanding public opinion embraces the affairs of the social common. The battle of opinions, rooted in contradictions in content, takes place today in the “scattered crowd” of an impersonal audience, whose members, however, are becoming increasingly educated and readily express their opinions. The main arena of this battle is the press. This artificial form of existence is determined by common thoughts instead of common feelings. Public opinion, or more precisely, the multitude of public opinions, turns against the traditionality of religion, gradually solidifying into a unified one, and, as an invisible authority, it judges public actions according to ethically reasonable criteria.12

Religion was the highest form of community will, which attributed its own establishment and its eternal laws to higher beings, to which its members related in the form of feeling and faith. Public opinion, on the contrary, is not emotionally rooted, nor is it the majority opinion: it is rather humanity, natural law, an opinion generally based on rationality and expediency, and a highly persuasive opinion that is irresistible by itself. Its bearer is the intellectually connected, educated, and informed “public” beyond the partial opinions of various social circles. According to Tönnies, in the process of consolidation, the most general public opinion becomes more and more unquestionable and even more ruthless, often manifesting as moral indignation and impatience toward those who think differently. There is an exaggerated desire for enlightenment at work.

At the same time, the increasing generalization of ideas is thinking toward the generality of mankind; its ethics is the ethics of humanity, which comes into ever-increasing tension with the specific morality of particular collectives. The rights that are intended to be the most general are in sharp contrast with the recognized rights of social sub-structures. According to Tönnies, no discourse can help; here, a hundred years ago, he anticipated the sharpest struggles of the future.

4. Metaphysics and Modern Social Imaginary

Whatever we think about the superiority of reason over religion, the notion of public opinion elaborated by Tönnies belongs to a new world concept. In the world conceived as a cosmos or creation, man’s place is a well-defined place according to the composition of the soul and the divine order. This order was, so to speak, realized by itself, and deviation from it was rewarded and punished. The immanent order of the world lies in the laws of mathematics and mechanics, which needs restricted divine guarantee. The principle of publicity belongs to a new person: the person expressing his will, whose condition of possibility and whose inevitable task is the common shaping of the world. Although the biblical roots of this idea are obvious, the reorganization of the world is increasingly in need of earthly support.

The concept of contract (Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke) was the first to define the social possibilities of the modern world, which is now beyond divine order. Natural law derived from human nature is a normative order serving as a basis for natural rights and duties. The analytic view sees separate individuals interacting and associating for their mutual benefit, with the promise of keeping the constitutive agreement. The order and its power relations are seen as legitimate as long as the individuals associated in this way contribute to its existence: this is where the idea of the sovereignty of the “people” is rooted. The social order does not implement something a priori adopted but follows the interests of its members, i.e., the principle of the market. Individualism, motivated both theoretically and practically, led to the displacement of the community. However, as Max Weber showed, an elementary condition of this order, at least at the time of its birth, was the disciplined self, the person capable of action, shaped and strengthened by Protestant Christianity (Weber 1992). The mainstream modern self-interpretation perceives man as a world-shaping autonomous individual, more and more belonging to the widest circle of mankind: even his scientific exploration tends to start from this perception. This is not only the anthropology of most modern moral visions but also that of population censuses.

For those who seek the public order of the world in morality, originally born in a group, the symbolic universes are strengthened by mutual recognition, and the special form of good life is conceived and maintained in collective ways. According to this historico-sociological perspective, rationality is not a homogenous entity: the world can be rationalized in many ways; that is, it can be organized in many forms of intellectual consistency. These heterogeneous rationalities and justices are carried by various world cultures, which take care of specific forms of humanity developed in their own circle. Modern public thinking, which is increasingly educated on general ideas, is, on the one hand, able to strive either toward the sublimity of general humanity through abstract reflections or, on the other, work on clarifying the broadest principles of the traditional world, which appears to be more real (MacIntyre 1988). Both movements can advance the dilemma indicated by Tönnies without the possibility of mediation.

Either way, according to Charles Taylor’s large-scale narrative, the public’s new ‘imaginary’ is no longer based on a teleological metaphysics of the world but on the possibility of shaping the world together as a task at every moment. Publicity is based on common activities. This purely secular arrangement is the basic framework of today’s social order in which Western communities seek their orientation (Taylor 2007, chap. I/4; 1992). Instead of the world as a well-ordered cosmos and as a divine creation in which a pre-given order is unfolded by itself, the common issues are now connected to the social division of the world. In the public, metaphorized as a unified space, aspects, and sensitivities collide so that instead of an elite search for the ideas of a higher world, the ceaseless discussions of rationality should find the earthly standards of action. According to the expectation of the consistent worldly enlightenment, this is how the unity of pure reason in an immanent world should be carried out―in the diversity of its voices.13

However, public opinion, i.e., the scope of reasoning and interpretation, is not indivisible: world knowledge has its privileged carriers. Even if the distribution of knowledge regarding common issues has―partly due to the idea and the practice of publicity―become more continuous than ever before, the social figure called “public intellectual” is a virtuoso of creating opinion, in contrast to the masses of meaning-consumers. In modernity, when neither the afterlife nor history serves as a common doom anymore, i.e., there are no fixed places, times, or directions under a comprehensive canopy of meaning, the Western man supposedly withdrew into the common space of collectively decided arrangements (see Soeffner 2000, pp. 11–22). Everyone’s opinion can punctually be of importance in the selection of directions, but as distinguished figures of rationality, people of a scientifically educated mind offer a means of reflection for the common orientation. These new advocates are not representatives of authoritative words from above: their reference is the “reality of society”,14 and they fight for the primacy of its definition through worldly prophesying, worldview agitation, argumentative derivation, metrical calculation, or professorial declaration. In the meantime, the sophist program of questioning, widely called “criticism”, has become everyone’s business: critics, as an intellectual principle of modernity, have moved from the periphery to the institutional center of our shared reality.15 However, in the flourishing arenas of everyone’s self-expression, the same few patterns seem to be circulating (Eisenstadt 2000, p. 15ff). The current public thought figures reach the same public sentiments, locked in their own circles, which most of the time leads to a limited resonation of public moods.16

Of course, as we have seen, the incessant judging of the common good takes place today in several interpretational frameworks of unity. According to Max Weber, the basis of all metaphysics, i.e., sociologically speaking, of all intellectual worldviews, is the question: “if the world as a whole and life in particular were to have a meaning, what might it be, and how would the world have to look in order to correspond to it?” What is, however, clarified in the light of reason is, at best, the respective content of faith, which cannot be rationalized in itself: the modern charisma of reason is just a new form of unconditioned authority (Weber 1978, p. 451). The world itself must reveal its true reality in the “data” extracted by appropriate procedures. At the same time, in the finite modern world order, humanities are driven not only by knowledge but also by the interest of leading to freedom: the concepts of “inequality” or “suppression” seek a person freed from specific oppressions―and they are on the way to define an infinite number of inequalities and rights. The power of discourses that intellectually divide the world explicates the salvation doctrines of intellectuals who claim totality in the name of world domination (Max Weber) (see Foucault 1970). But whereas the subjectivity of education can elevate man to common life through action and thought, with the decline of this ideal and reality, the delusional self-consciousness of the semi-educated crowd adjusts itself to the actually canonized authority of the sports field, of the television and of “true stories”. The struggles for defining the present occupy the terrain of the future: these competing visions justify their own goals by preventing the greatest evil anticipated from an open future.17 But this general scientific mode of thinking does not lead to unified knowledge of the world (see Bell 1973); only a radical leap into non-scientific imaginaries can undertake this.18

5. A Concluding Remark on Self-Transcendence

Even if in the utopias of the secular world models that consider themselves self-sufficient, a person must, so to say, carry the whole world along with herself; one of the prevailing mental perspectives is still religious transcendence, which, however, faces the challenge of legitimizing itself by the standards of the secular public. The difficult concept of neighborliness, which is always in need of renewed clarification, is, for example, a biblically inspired guideline for public thinking and practice.19

One of the crucial conditions for the possibility of public opinion worthy of publicity is responsibility, which responds to some kind of address with inner seriousness, and this goes beyond the noises of everyday life, of filtered mass news and degenerated contents. The promise of the extraordinary and the complete may even today be carried by traditional texts that have been rethought again and again. In this way, the conversation goes beyond the contemporary world to shared memories vivid in our lives in the commitment to critical self-discovery (cf. Habermas 2020). Orientation in a ‘whole’ is metaphysics; the breaking out from the everyday in trusting this whole is transcendence. The seriousness of self-transcendence is, consequently, threatened by dispersion and hybris.