Introduction: Rationalization in Religions

Abstract

Philosopher Carl Friedrich Gethmann, a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy, has described rationalization as the “targeted, structured and reproducible operation of optimization.”1 Gethmann’s broad definition covers rationalization across a range of very different areas – in the economy, in society, even in the mind of the individual. In our own field of religious studies, the first scholar who comes to mind in this context is the philosopher and sociologist Max Weber, who introduced the term “rationalization” to the field.2 Maintaining that religious rationalization preceded social rationalization, Weber identified rationalization structures within the Judeo-Christian tradition that, as Gethmann puts it, “encouraged the establishment of rational conceptions of the world and the emergence of a modern consciousness.”3 In his studies of the “economic ethics of the world religions,” Weber developed the notion of a universal historical process of “disenchantment” (Entzauberung4) of the religious-metaphysical conceptions of the world and argued for a “unidirectional rationalization of all world religions.” According to Weber, all paths of religious rationalization lead towards an understanding of the world that is purified of magical notions. Only the occidental path of development, however, leads to a fully decentralized understanding of the world.5 It is not my intention, at this juncture, to provide a full recapitulation of Weber’s view of the rationalization that is inherent in all world religions. His basic assumptions concerning an occidental rationalism, and thus a particularly marked rationalism in the occidental religions, which he set against the Orient and its religions,6 appear highly problematic to us today. In view of the obvious problems in Weber’s conceptualization, I believe it makes more sense, in talking about “rationalization in religions,” to stick with Gethmann’s definition of rationalization and to speak of an optimization of the “rationality” of religion. But what is rationality? I turn again to Gethmann, who defines “rationality” as “developing processes for the discursive upholding of claims to validity, to follow these and to