© koninklijke brill nv, leiden,  | doi:./- Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion  () – brill.com/jcpr From the Unconditioned to Unconditional Claims Violence, Radical Theology, and Crisis Jason W. Alvis and Jeffrey W. Robbins Guest Editors … In memory of Thomas J.J. Altizer (†28 November 2018)  In public cases of violence, nearly without fail the topics of fanaticism or fun- damentalism arise as the insignment for their root cause, leading either to laughter or disgust at their continued possibility in our age of reason. In 2001, a most violent year, Jürgen Habermas called for the “liquidation of uncondi- tional claims.” In The Liberating Power of Symbols, he argued that both the nar- rative structure of human life and the wickedness of 20th century European conflicts should produce in us a sense of a humble fallibility that leads to the recognition that our “unconditional claims” always are raised under “contin- gent conditions.” Such a liquidation for Habermas becomes an essential task for philosophy, a means of communicative reason, yet it seems grounded in the commonsense truism that, as the German poet Novalis put it so well, “Every- where we search for the unconditioned [das Unbedingte], but always only find things [Dinge].” The two seem to go hand in hand. Perhaps studies of the unconditioned without unconditional claims are empty; studies of uncondi- tional claims without the unconditioned are blind. It is far from conclusive, however, what the “unconditional” in “uncondi- tional claims” might reference: is it the infinite absence of conditions to which 1 Jürgen Habermas, The Liberating Power of Symbols. (New York: Polity Press 2001) p. 82, cf. 37 & 33. 2 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Novalis Schriften, Eds. P. Kluckholn and R. Samuel (Stut- tgart Germany: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1983), 413. Downloaded from Brill.com05/22/2020 10:37:45AM via free access