In the last chapter I considered, via a detailed examination of the contemporary practice known as Scriptural Reasoning, how Humboldt’s philosophy of language (especially his concepts of “dialogue” and “translation”) can contribute to communication between faith-based traditions. In this chapter I will consider the equally important question of how it can contribute to communication between such traditions and secular modes of thought in the contemporary world. My purpose is not to argue that Humboldt’s idea of translation as dialogue can resolve any of the actual problems of communication between secular and religious worldviews in the modern world. It is to propose that the Humboldtian framework might enable us to understand some of those problems better than some of the most influential alternative paradigms, especially that offered by Jürgen Habermas, who has devoted much of his recent work to the problem of dialogue with communities of faith in the contemporary secular world.

Language is central to Humboldt’s thought because of the conflict at the heart of the idea of enlightenment between the personal and the social expression of reason. Language both expresses that conflict and, by the same token, can partially and yet progressively overcome it. As we have seen, the conflict was especially acute at the time Kant, Mendelssohn, and Humboldt were writing. At that time, European society was neither a democracy nor liberal. The right of reason to speak truth to power which Kant so confidently affirms was anything but politically or legally guaranteed. His hope that the progressive extension of intellectual freedom would eventually lead to the realization of political rights was not fulfilled in his own time, let alone its aftermath. Therefore the separation of the private and the public uses of reason, which for Kant guaranteed the coexistence of subjective intellectual freedom with obedience to an objective but rationally based political order, raised and continues to raise multiple questions. In Kant’s time and since, it has been persistently questioned in that medium which Moses Mendelssohn acutely identified as the link between the two spheres: the human world of language. Whether the “Western” or “European” world can be described as a “liberal democracy,” whether it is a vehicle of “enlightenment” and what “enlightenment” might mean in and for the two-thirds of the world outside the “West” remain open questions in our own time.