The Critical Theory of Society:

The Longing for the

Totally Other
1
Rtrorr J. Sirnrn+
Ans+n.c+
This essay is concerned with the religious and theological
dimension of Max Horkheimers, Theodor W. Adornos, and
Walter Benjamins and other theorists critical theory of society.
It aims at a new critical theory of religion, which would go
beyond the religious and theological concerns of the critical
theory of society. The essay concentrates on the way, in which
the critical theorists of the rst and second generation dealt
with the modern dichotomy between the religious and the sec-
ular, the sacred and the profane, revelation and enlightenment,
religious faith and autonomous reason, church and state. The
critical theorists have left behind the idealistic attempt to rec-
oncile the modern dichotomy of the religious and the secular:
e.g., that of Leibnitz, Hegel, Goethe, or Beethoven.
The essay focuses on the critical theorists materialistic attempt
not to reconcile faith and knowledge, that is not possible at
this point in history but at least to prevent the modern con-
tradiction between monotheism and enlightenment to be closed
prematurely either fundamentalistically or scientistically and
positivistically. Adorno and Benjamin have initiated an inverse
theology, which presupposes a. that religion has indeed con-
tributed to the humanization of mankind, and b.that the sec-
ularization process cannot be stopped. The inverse theology
allows semantic and semiotic materials and potentials to migrate
1
All correspondences should be directed to Rudolf J. Siebert, Department of Comparative
Religion, Western Michigan University. E-mail: RSieb3@aol.com
Critical Sociology, Volume 31, Issues 1-2 also available online
2005 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden www.brill.nl
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58 Siebert
from the depth of the mythos into the secular discourse among
the expert cultures sociology, psychology, anthropology, phi-
losophy and through it into communicative and political
action, in order thus to prevent the further rebarbarization of
the Western civilization. The inverse theology is a test in so
far as that semantic or semiotic material, which cannot be
translated into the profane discourse of expert cultures, can-
not be rescued and will be lost. One central semantic element,
which Adorno and Horkheimer intended to rescue, was the
longing for the totally Other than the slaughterbench, holo-
caust altar and Golgatha of history. In this longing for the
entirely Other is concretely superseded, i.e., criticized, but also
preserved and elevated and fullled, what once in the world
religions and philosophies had been called: Eternity, Beauty,
Heaven, God, Innite, Transcendence, Being, Idea, Absolute,
Unconditional. The critical theorists transform once certain
religious dogmas into longings. The longing for the totally
Other has been the fundamental motive and motivation of the
critical theorists, which gave them manifestly or latently energy
for almost a whole century, and which allowed them to sur-
vive two world wars, and fascism, and emigration, and to make
it possible for them on one hand not to regress into mythol-
ogy, and on the other hand not to fall victim to positivism as
the metaphysics of what is the case.
Krv vonrs: critical theory, philiosophy, religion, theology,
theodicy, Marxism, historical materialism, dialectics, fascism.
It is the goal of this presentation to trace and explore Max Horkheimers
and Theodor W. Adornos notion of the longing and hope for the fun-
damentally nameless and imageless entirely Other than nature and history
and the laws governing them, as the most powerful motive and moti-
vation of their critical theory and praxis, as they developed them in their
discourses and writings from the 1930s to the 1960s (Horkheimer 1972,
1985, 1996; Habermas 2003; Solomon 1996). What the Left-Hegelian
critical theorists, Max Horkheimer, the initiator and spiritus rector of the
critical theory of society and the third director of the Institute for Social
Research at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universitt in Frankfurt
am Main, and Theodor W. Adorno, his most gifted cooperator, friend,
and successor called the totally Other, can best be understood and com-
prehended against the background of Georg W.F. Hegels dialectical
philosophy: particularly his philosophy of religion ( Hegel 1986a-o;
Horkheimer 1988a-c, 1981a; Adorno 1997:247-382, 1966:293-351; Marcuse
1966, 1987; Lwenthal 1989; Habermas and Henrich 1974:9-22, 23-84;
Habermas 1973, 1976, 1985; Habermas and Luhmann 1971; Habermas
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1973b; Gadamer and Habermas 1979:9-64; Taylor 1983; Butler 1977;
Kaufmann 1965; Fredrich 1954; Rosen 1995; Scheible 1989; Witte 1985;
Best and Kellner 1991; Noerr 2000; Arato and Gebhardt 1982; Wiggershaus
1987; Jay 1981; Merton 1957:9, 280, & 328). As Hegel struggled to his
last days with Kant, so Adorno did with Hegel (Hegel 1986n:347-535;
Adorno 1966:293-351). As the critical theory determinately negates Hegels
philosophy, it does not only criticize it, but also tries to preserve and
elevate and fulll some of it (Hegel 1986c: 72-75, 1986e:48-53; Horkheimer
& Adorno 1969:29-51; Adorno 1966:135-206; Horkheimer 1986:483-492,
1985b; Schmidt & Altwicker 1986; Adorno 1997a:247-382). Continually
the critical theorists criticize Immanuel Kant through Hegel and Hegel
through Kant, but nevertheless learn from both of them (Horkheimer
1987b; 1985b:483-492). In this sense, not only Kants but also and par-
ticularly so Hegels philosophy remains the prototype for the critical the-
ory of society: that is not only true for his phenomenology of spirit, his
science of logic, his philosophy of law and history and his aesthetics, but
also and especially so for his philosophy of religion. Here the critical
theorists notion of Otherness is mainly rooted (Hegel 1986n:329-344).
Purpose
The main purpose of Hegels philosophy of religion was the reconciliation
of the modern antagonism between the religious and the secular, between
faith and reason, between revelation and enlightenment (Hegel 1986m:
9-88, 1986n:329-344, Findley 1958; Ch. Taylor 1983). This is still the
purpose of the critical theory of society, insofar as it is concerned with
religion and theology (Horkheimer 1985a:30-37). This is so, because
Hegels idealistic reconciliation between the sacred and the profane has
not succeeded: as little as that of Goethe or Beethoven (Hegel 1986n:329-
344). Of course, also the materialistic critical theory of society is not able
to reconcile the modern antagonism between the religious and the sec-
ular (Siebert 2002). But it tries at least to keep open this dialectic between
the sacred and the profane, and to prevent under all circumstances that
it is closed prematurely either fundamentalistically or scientistically and
positivistically. It is the purpose of this paper to clarify and even to
develop further in direction of a dialectical theory of religion this open
dialectic between the religious and the secular. The goal of this essay is
indeed to develop further a critical theory of religion, which would have
its foundation in the theological dimension of the critical theory of soci-
ety, but would also go beyond it (Horkheimer 1985a). The essay also
aims at the clarication of the fact that the longing for the imageless
and nameless totally Other than what Hegel had called in his philosophy
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60 Siebert
of history the slaughterbench, or the holocaust altar, or the Golgatha of world
history was indeed the manifest fundamental motivation of the critical
theory of society of the rst generation of critical theorists, and remains
that also at least latently for the second and third generation (Hegel
1986k:29-55; Horkheimer 1985a:30-37, 1974; Adorno 2001:7-258;
Habermas 2002; Todenhofer 2003:2-11). This longing for the entirely
Other has prevented so far the critical theory of society from falling vic-
tim to the dull positivism, into which the great bourgeois enlightenment,
and sometimes even the Marxian and Freudian enlightenment, have
degenerated (Horkheimer 1988c; 1985a; Adorno 1970:7-80; Horkheimer
and Adorno 1969:29-51; Adorno 1966:135-206; Marx 1972:18-20, 1964:43-
44, 1961, 1953; Feuerbach 1957; Freud 1964:1-92, 1962:11-92; Jones
1961; Benjamin 1978:671-683; Lonitz 1994; Kogon 1958a:392-402;
Adorno 1997c:608-616). This longing for the totally Other alone guarantees
that the critical theory of society or the new critical theory of religion
will not turn into an uncritical one. The longing for the imageless and
notionless entirely Other is not the basis of religion, but rather the con-
crete supersession of all the God-hypostasies present in the still living as
well as in the dead world religions in terms of what Ernst Bloch has
called humanism as religion in inheritance. (Hegel 1986m, 1986n; Bloch
1985, 1970:7-30). But the longing for the totally Other is indeed the
basis and the motivation of the critical theory of society as well as of
the dialectical theory of religion to be developed out of it, and remains
necessary for their survival under the enormous identity and confor-
mity pressure of a more and more globalizing late capitalist society
(Horkheimer 1985a; Adorno 1979:354-372, 578-587; Siebert 2002, 1989).
Redemptive Quest
The longing and the hope for the fundamentally imageless and nameless
totally Other as a redemptive quest for the rescue of the hopeless is the
main motive of the critical theory of society as well as of the dialectical
theory of religion to be developed out of it (Horkheimer 1985a; Siebert
2002, 1989). This longing is to be translated into a post-Enlightenment
era that has seen Auschwitz and Treblinka, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This paper is concerned with the development of a critical theory of reli-
gion in a post-religious and post-metaphysical as well as post-enlightenment
world, which has lost not only its religious eschatologies, but also its sec-
ular political utopias, and is thus characterized by positivism as the as
Adorno put it metaphysics of what is the case and the consequent uni-
versal despair, which may be more or less conscious (Adorno 1993:7-
258; 1998:7-226, 1970a). The new dialectical theory of religion is informed
CS 31,1-2brill_f7_56-113 1/26/05 11:11 AM Page 60
by a vision of alternative Future III the right or reconciled society,
beyond the present antagonistic civil society, which is not as it ought to
be, measured by its own cultural closure values, and which daily con-
tradicts its own most noble institutions and aspirations (Horkheimer 1985a;
Flechtheim 1976; 1970; 1962a; 1962b; 1966; 1959; Vilmar 1979:51-57;
Fromm 1973; Habermas 2001a; 2001b:9-10, 11-33, 34-125; 1991; 1998;
1990: parts 1-5, 19). The critical theory of religion aims at the mitiga-
tion at least of the fast approaching alternative Future I the totally
administered, bureaucratized, computerized, robotized signal-society, at
the resistance against the arrival of alternative Future II the more and
more militarized society continually involved in conventional wars or civil
wars and preparing NBC wars (using nuclear, biological and chemical
weapons of mass destruction) and the consequent ecological catastrophes,
and at the passionate promotion of alternative Future III a society, in
which personal autonomy and universal, i.e., anamnestic, present and
proleptic solidarity would be reconciled (Horkheimer 1985a; Flechtheim
1976; 1970: chap. 1-9, 1962a, 1962b, 1966, 1959; Vilmar 1979:51-57).
Unfortunately, while alternative Futures I and II are not desirable, they
are, nevertheless, very possible and probable, and while alternative Future
III is very desirable, it is under the present neo-conservative and neo-
liberal conditions of advanced capitalist society less possible and probable.
The movement toward alternative Future III the longig for and the
solidarity with the human other without loss of autonomy is not the
same as, but rather the necessary presupposition for the longing and
the hope for the totally Other than the slaughterhouse of nature and
history, in which almost everybody is programmed to eat everybody for
the purpose of self-preservation and self-maintenance (Siebert 2002, 1989).
Theology cannot and must not be reduced to anthropology.
Negative Theology
While for Hegel the nite was the other of the Innite, for the critical
theorists the Innite was the Other of the nite: the totally Other of the
nite world as nature and history as gigantic sacricial altar (Hegel
1986n:347-535; Horkheimer 1972). Like Karl Marx before, the critical
theorists turned Hegel upside down once more and put him on his feet,
on which to a large extend he stood already anyway. Thus, what
Horkheimer and Adorno called the totally Other is what once in the
great world religions and world philosophies had been called the
God or Gods, Jahweh, Ala, Eternal One, Father, Lord, Eternity, Heaven,
Beauty, Innite, Transcendence, Being, Idea, Absolute, Unconditional, Absolute
Spirit. (Horkheimer 1985a)
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62 Siebert
The great Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, the friend of Horkheimer
and Adorno, had spoken of the Ultimate Reality (Tillich 1963, 1957).
Talcott Parsons, the father of American structural-functionalism, the great
positivistic competitor of the critical theory of society, took over Tlllichs
theological notion (ODea 1966; Parsons 1965, 1964). Parsons opened
up his system of human condition, and particularly his human action
system, embracing culture, society, personality and behavioral organism,
upward through culture toward the Ultimate Reality, and downward
through the behavioral human organism toward nature. Horkheimer dis-
covered, that Hegel did not only have a very well developed positive
theology, but also a negative one, which reached, of course, far back to
the Second and Third Commandment of the Mosaic Law, i.e., the pro-
hibition against making images of the Absolute or naming it and thus
disclosing its nature and attributes; and into Jewish, Christian and Islamic
mysticism, and even to the scholastic Thomas Aquinas the great
Christian and Aristotelian counterpart to the Jew Moses Maimonides or
Rambam, and to the Muslims Alfarabi and Avicenna who stated openly
and clearly, that what God is we do not know; and to his great teacher,
Kant, who forbid human reason to enter the intelligible realm, the thing-
in-itself, the sphere of God, Immortality and Freedom, and transformed
it into a set of postulates of practical reason, and beyond that counseled
to leave it to religious faith alone (Aquinatis 1937:8-14; Horkheimer
1996c:101-113).
Inverse Theology
Likewise, Adorno and Walter Benjamin developed on the Island of Ibiza
in the early 1930s out of Hegels positive theology a new or an other, or
an inverse theology, particularly in response to Franz Kafkas work (Witte
1985:104; Adorno 1970:103-162; Scholem 1989:9-268). This new inverse
theology allows some religious and theological contents to migrate from
the mythos into the secular discourse of the expert cultures of psychol-
ogy, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, etc., and through it into com-
municative and even political praxis, in order to stem the always new
waves of rebarbarization of Western civilization, which took place through-
out the 20th century and reaches even into the 21st century: World War
I with 10 million human beings killed, the fascist period, World War II
with 60 million casualties, and the following restoration and cold war
period with one smaller conventional or civil war after the other in the inter-
est of neo-liberal or neo-conservative counterrevolutions, neo-nationalism,
neo-colonialism, neo-imperialism, or globalism. Benjamins and Adornos
inverse theology is still and even in a further radicalized form at work
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in Habermass universal pragmatic, theory of communicative action, dis-
course or communicative ethics, discourse theory of the constitutional
state under the cover of his methodological atheism (Habermas 1990:9-18,
1991). Habermas admittedly takes the Second and Third Commandment
of the Mosaic law and the inverse theology so radically seriously, that
unlike his teacher Adorno he never mentions the concept of the totally
Other, in spite of the fact that he knows very well its origins not only
in Hegel, but also in Kant and Sren Kierkegaard. Methodological athe-
ism simply means the formal exclusion of theological or metaphysical
presuppositions: e.g., the religious apriori of the Hebrew prophets, that
Divine Providence governs the world; or the metaphysical presupposi-
tion of the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, that Reason rules nature and
history (Hegel 1986k:19-29).
No Political Theocracy
Of course, the longing for the totally Other is not a moment of a post-
religious political theocracy. Not only Benjamin, but also the other crit-
ical theorists learned early on from Ernst Blochs famous book Spirit of
Utopia, to deny and resist with all intensity at least the political signicance
of theocracy (Benjamin 1977:262-263). The recent history of the Near
East has shown the horrible consequences of attempts to posit under
modern or post-modern conditions as the goal of national or world his-
tory a political theocracy, instead of a democracy, or the happiness of
the people: e.g., Islamic or other forms of clerico-fascism. The goal of
the happiness of the people may as Benjamin put it as the very
opposite of the goal of political theocracy, nevertheless support and pro-
mote dialectically enough the most quiet approach of the Messianic
Kingdom (Benjamin 1977: chap. 11).
Agnosticism and Atheism
For the critical theorists, the totally Other is indeed unknowable in its
entirety. In this sense they are following Kant agnostics. In the crit-
ical-theoretical perspective, the entirely Other does not reveal itself in
the traditional sense. At best, traces of the totally Other may be dis-
covered in terms of what Adorno has called micrology: in the small-
est, not yet socially preformed detail of nature or society (Adorno
1980:7-12). Horkheimer practiced such micrology in his aphoristic notes
under the title Dusk and Adorno in his Minima Moralia, dedicated and
devoted to his eight years older friend and teacher Horkheimer (Horkheimer
1974:223-354; Adorno 1980:15-334). There had been a methodological
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64 Siebert
atheism at work in the critical theory of society long before Habermas
member of the second generation of critical theorists invented and
used the name (Habermas 1991:part III). It is true, that once Horkheimer
and Adorno broke the Third Commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue:
the former named the Unconditional perfect justice and the latter called it
unconditional love. But these instances have remained the exceptions to the
rule of agnosticism or methodological atheism. Thus, we may not even
get a glimpse of a tip of the Absolute, or the totally Other in itself
(Theunissen 1983:41-65; Habermas 1988:278-279). The same must, of
course, also be true of the description of the entirely Other in this paper.
But while we cannot determine the entirely Other, we can nevertheless
certainly describe the longing, or the hope for the Innite, which has been
the very motivation for the whole critical theory of society throughout
the past almost ninety years. We can also describe in this paper more
concretely what negative, or inverse theology, or agnosticism, or method-
ological atheism is. All this can be done best ex contrario: that means
against the background of Hegels dialectical philosophy (Hegel 1986a:218;
1986b:10, 15, 55, 100, 101, 109, 111, 122, 161, 176, 251, 403-453;
1986c:11, 14, 29, 31, 37, 38, 47; 1986d:10, 105; 1986e:21; 1986f:494;
1986g:339-514; 1986h: part I; 1986i: part II; 1986j: part III; 1986k:29-
33, 107-115; 1986l:352; 1986m:249-442; 1986n:7-346; 1986o:62).
Anti-Systematic Attitude
In contrast to Hegel, the last great all-embracing systematician in the
history of philosophy, the critical theory of society is characterized by
an anti-systematic attitude (Adorno 2003:7-262, 1997c:238-253; 1973: part
II & III). In this sense, the critical theory of society may appear to be
fragmented. This is intentional. Of course, corresponding aphoristic struc-
tures appear very frequently in the works of Horkheimer, Benjamin,
Adorno and Bloch: often in imitation of Friedrich Nietzsches work. But
it must not be overlooked, that in the critical theory of society the the-
oretical fragments again and again crystallize and shoot together into
embracing models or constellations. It is typical for dialectical texts in
contrast to positivistic ones that while their sections are directly related
to each other, at the same time there occur not only quantitative, but
also qualitative breaks or leaps between groups of them, causing obvi-
ous discontinuities. These discontinuities may certainly be annoying for
the positivists among the readers, who like to have things more linear,
geometrical, orderly, shortly more Descartian, and hate to leap. But these
leaps and discontinuities are nevertheless the necessary result of the dialec-
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tical methodology, without which the critical theory would cease to be
critical: the methodology of radical, but nevertheless still determinate
negation of one life or thought form by the following one in terms
of not only its critique, but also at the same time of its rescue, preser-
vation, elevation and fullment (Hegel 1986c:72-74, 1986e:48-53; Adorno
2003, 1973). The critical theorists were anti-systematic, because they
thought that in Hegels case his grandiose system, which was the result
of his positive dialectics, arrested and strangled it at the same time
(Horkheimer 1985b:483-492; Adorno 1973:300-360; 1963). The critical
theorists also saw, how the Soviet system of Eastern Europe arrested
its own dialectics. The result was the Stalinist red fascism. This undialec-
tical red fascism was at least one of the main reasons for the successful
neo-conservative or neo-liberal counterrevolution of 1989, after the mis-
erable failure of the earlier bourgeois counterrevolutions of the 1920s,
and the 1930s, and most of all in the 1940s, which reached their cli-
max with Hitlers criminal attack against the Soviet Union and his defeat
in Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin. As the neo-liberal counterrevolution
overcame red fascism in 1989, it opened up to be sure unintention-
ally the opportunity for a new beginning of a truly dialectical histor-
ical materialism (Habermas 1976a, 1990:179-204). In any case, because
of their experience of the anti-dialectical tendencies in philosophical or
political systems, the critical theorists insisted on an open, or even a neg-
ative dialectics (Horkheimer 1985b:483-492; Adorno 2003:7-262, 1973).
This paper can not be less dialectical than its object the critical theory
of society, or the critical theory of religion: since otherwise it would miss
both of them entirely, as all the positivistic approaches continually do.
This essay must, therefore, also share the critical theorys anti-systematic
attitude, even if doing so it risks the appearance of fragmentation.
Positivistic Logic
Thus, this essay is not written in the more linear, developmental form
typical of writings in terms of the positivistic logic of the social sciences
dominant in late capitalist society as instruments of harmonization and
conformity (Habermas 1976b; 1973). The dialectician is not allowed to
give examples. But I may use for the purpose of clarication what the
positivists call models. According to one model, this essay moves dialec-
tically like a tree with many branches and some lead away from the
trunk or main line of argument in order to return later. According to
another model this presentation may be seen as a shnet that pulls a
magnicent catch of sh of dierent species, all of which are great but
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66 Siebert
usually do not swim together. But they will ultimately be ordered and
prepared and come together in a magnicent bouillabaisse: a constella-
tion. But neither of the two models may lead to the realization of that
identity principle, which the positivistic reader has in common with the
great bourgeois enlightenment, and which he always desires to nd, but
which the dialectician can not deliver, because it is ideological: ideology
understood critically as false consciousness and as the masking of national,
class and race interests, shortly as untruth (Hegel 1986n:329-344). All
syntheses remain fragile: even already in Hegels most advanced system,
which moves from one weak synthesis to the other: weak because the
antitheses they contain tend always again to assert themselves in thought
and even more so in reality. Only when antagonistic civil society will
change its identity toward alternative Future III a reconciled society
peace can also be achieved in thought. Adorno sometimes expressed the
opinion, that dialectical thought could not at all be expressed in the
medium of the English language. That was an exaggeration! Horkheimer,
and Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm, and even Adorno himself have
proven, that dialectical thinking can express itself also in English, if
sucient space and time is patiently and tolerantly given for its devel-
opment through contradictions. It is hard, if not impossible, shortly to
sum up dialectical thought, as it is indeed possible in positivistic thinking
(Hegel 1986a:218; 1986b:10, 15, 55, 100, 101, 109, 111, 122, 161, 176,
251, 403, 412, 435-453; 1986c:11, 14, 29, 31, 37, 38, 47; 1986d:10, 105;
1986e:21; 1986f:494; 1986g:339-514; 1986h: part I; 1986i: part II; 1986j:
part III; 1986k:29-33, 107-115; 1986l:352; 1986m:249-442; 1986n;
1986o:62; Adorno 2003, 1973: part I-III).
Attitude Toward Theology: No Apologetics
It is, of course, astonishing that the critical theorists, who have been much
more secularized than Kant or Hegel or even Marx, not to speak of
Kierkegaard, have, nevertheless, developed not only a critical but also a
positive relationship not only to the positive social sciences and philosophy,
but also to an admittedly radically transformed theology (Horkheimer
1985a). For Horkheimer, theology is, of course, not any longer the pos-
itive science of the Divine, or of God. Theology means for Horkheimer
rather the consciousness, that the world is appearance: that it is not the
absolute truth, the ultimate reality. Theology is the hope, that the injus-
tice, by which the world is characterized, will not remain: that this injus-
tice may not be the last word of history. Theology is the expression of
a longing that the murderer shall not triumph over the innocent victim:
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at least not ultimately. This is, of course, an originally Jewish as well as
Christian notion of theology. This critical as well as positive attitude
toward theology was not only present in the rst, mostly Jewish gener-
ation of critical theorists, e.g., Horkheimer, Benjamin, Adorn, or Bloch,
but also still prevails manifestly or latently in the second generation, e.g.,
Habermas, Karl-Heinz Haag, or Alfred Schmidt. It is even so, that the
critical theory of society has itself a theological dimension in the sense
of the earliest forms of theology: namely a theodicy. Theodicy can indeed
serve as a lens for reading the critical theory of society in its totality.
Theodicy, when taken together with the Mosaic Decalogue, particularly
the Second and the Third Commandment, i.e., the prohibitions against
making images of, or not only profaning, but even just naming the
Absolute, can bring into a new light something that has long been
neglected within the interpretation of the critical theory of society. That
the critical theory is a theodicy does, of course, not mean that it is an
apologetical project. Precisely because the critical theory is a materialis-
tic, negative and inverse theodicy, no trace of apologetics is left. Not
only Adorno, but also all the other critical theorists found to be repul-
sive any trace of apologetics in the contemporary philosophy, or posi-
tive social sciences, or positive theology or reliology.
Theology as Theodicy
However, while the critical theory of society has remained deeply rooted
in modern science and philosophy, it has contained in itself, neverthe-
less, a very precise more or less hidden theological idea: a theodicy
(Horkheimer 1972, 1985a). The critical theory is no less a theodicy than
Hegels historical idealism, or Marxs historical materialism, or Sigmund
Freuds psychoanalytical philosophy (Hegel 1986k:28, 540; 1986m:88;
1986o:248, 455, 497; Horkheimer 1970:37; Marx 1964:43, 44, 167-171;
1972:18-20, 142; 1961: chap. 1, 15; 1953: chap. 3; Freud 1964:1-92; Fromm
1962:11-92; Jones 1961; Horkheimer 1985a). The critical theory embraces
in itself not only a theodicy in the sense of Max Weber (Weber 1963:chap.
IX; Horkheimer 1970:37). According to Weber, a theodicy was every
theoretical eort to explain the suering on this earth. In the Weberian
sense also the teaching of Marx, or Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche, or Freud
can be called a theodicy (Horkheimer 1989, 1985a, 1985b:398-416, 436-
492, 1970:37). Beyond that, the critical theory of society is a theodicy
also in the original sense of the word, which Hegel still used: a justication
of God in opposition to the injustice, the evil dominant in his world
(Hegel 1986k:28, 540, 1986m:88, 1986o:248, 455, 497, 1985a). The total-
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ity of Hegels dialectical philosophy was nothing else than a gigantic
attempt to renew the theodicy after Kant had declared any philosophi-
cal theodicy to be impossible after his destruction of the cosmological,
teleological and ontological proof for the existence of God (Kant 1981:105-
124, 1965:485-572; Hegel 1986n:347-535, 1986k:28, 540, 1986m:88,
1986o:248, 455, 497, 519). As little as the critical theorists could talk
about false consciousness or ideology critique without careful recourse to
Hegel, so little could they speak about theology as theodicy without ref-
erence to him (Benjamin 1978a:682). After Auschwitz and all the hor-
ror and terror this name stands for, the Jewish critical theorists had
inspired by Hegel to remind the Christian theologians of the 20th cen-
tury again that their theology had been originally a theodicy and that
they had forgotten their own origin and that it was time for them to
remember it again (Oelmller 1990; Neuhaus 1993; Schuster & Boschert-
Kimmig 1993; Metz 1995; Greinacher 1986; Slle 1989; Hinkelmann
1985). Of course, in the critical-theoretical perspective, after Auschwitz
and Birkenau, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hegels instrumental
theodicy is not possible any longer and is gone for ever: God instru-
mentalizing the slaughterbench of history as sacricial altar for the pur-
pose of the achievement of the realm of freedom. Hegels gravestone in
the socialist Dorotheen Cemetery in Berlin still represents the holocaust
altar of the rst and second Temple in Jerusalem. Up to the present,
Jewish friends put little pebbles on Hegels gravestone. Certainly, in this
sense for the critical theorists Hegels philosophical system, which was a
last gigantic theodicy attempt, has indeed broken down once and for all.
The critical theory of society is an eschatological theodicy: what Hegel
had called most realistically the slaughterbench or holocaust altar of his-
tory will not prevail.
The Concept of Innity
While the critical theory had been a theodicy from its earliest poetical
beginnings implicitly, at least since Horkheimers essay Thoughts on
Religion written and published in American exile, in the International
Institute for Social Research at Columbia University in New York, in
1935, it became one explicitly concerned with the fundamental perils of
human existence: mans nality, loneliness, abandonment, sorrow, guilt,
meaninglessness, alienation, sickness, aging, dying and death (Horkheimer
1970:37, 40-41, 1972, 1988, 1985a: chap. 40; Habermas 1986:43-54). In
this essay, Horkheimer stated that in a really free mind the concept of
Innity was preserved in an awareness of the nality of human life and
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of the inalterable aloneness of men, and that it kept civil society from
indulging in a thoughtless optimism, an ination of its own knowledge
into a new religion. The critical theory is a theodicy also in the sense
of Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason of 1947 (Horkheimer 1972:129,
1947). Here Horkheimer stated that without the thought of truth and
thereby of that what guaranteed it, the Innite, the Absolute, the totally
Other, there was no knowledge of its opposite, the abandonment of the
human beings for the sake of which the true philosophy had to be crit-
ical and pessimistic. Without this thought of truth and what guaranteed
it, the Unconditional, there was not even sorrow, without which there
was no happiness. While Horkheimer never mentioned Adornos and
Benjamins negative, inverse theology, he nevertheless practiced it con-
tinually as theodicy: which again was possible only because the theodicy
had been present in the inverse theology from its very start as well (Adorno
1970b:103-161; Lonitz 1994; Horkheimer 1970:9-53, 1985a: chap. 37).
Absolute Truth
Thus, Horkheimer did not negate the entirely Other, the absolute truth,
abstractly, but it was rather itself the determinate negation of that what
on earth was called the theodicy problem: injustice, human abandon-
ment and alienation (Horkheimer 1970:37, 40-41, 1985a). According to
Horkheimer, without the thought of an unthinkable innite happiness
there was not even the consciousness of the earthly transitory happiness,
which in the face of its unchangeable transitoriness could never be with-
out sadness. The critical theory is a theodicy in so far as it remembers
the martyrs of our time (Horkheimer 1947: chap. IV, 1985a, 37-40; Siebert
1993). In the perspective of Horkheimer, the real individuals of our time
were the martyrs who have gone through infernos of suering and degra-
dation in their resistance to conquest and oppression: not the inated
personalities of popular culture, the conventional dignitaries. These unsung
heroes consciously exposed their existence as individuals to the terrorist
annihilation that others undergo unconsciously through the social process
in civil society. The anonymous martyrs of the German and European
fascist concentration camps were the symbols of alternative Future III
the free humanity that was striving to be born (Horkheimer 1947: chap.
IV, 1985a). For Horkheimer, the task of philosophy was to translate what
the martyrs had done into language that would be heard, even though
their nite voices had been silenced by the fascist tyranny. As philoso-
phy fullls this task it turns into theodicy.
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70 Siebert
Semblance of Otherness
Horkheimer received the notion of the longing for the totally Other from
Adorno, who was the better Hegelian, not vice versa (Horkheimer 1985a).
Thus, it is not amazing that the theological dimension in the critical the-
ory of society reaches its climax in Adornos conclusive work entitled
Negative Dialectics (Adorno 1973: parts 1-3, 2003). Toward the end of this
extraordinary book, which embraces the main accomplishment of his
whole philosophical life work, Adorno speaks about the great Anselm of
Canterburys specically Christian ontological proof for the existence of
God: that God is the highest Notion or Idea, which a greater one can
not be conceived, and which therefore must contain being or existence,
since otherwise a greater one could be thought of: ergo God exists
(Anselm 1962:iii-xxvi, 1-9; Adorno 1973:402-405). According to Adorno,
Hegel had in opposition to Kant tried to determinately negate, i.e. not
only to criticize, but also to resurrect dialectically, and thus to preserve,
and to elevate, and fulll Anselms ontological argument for the exis-
tence of God (Anselm 1962:xv-xx; Hegel 1986n:347-535). In Adornos
view, Hegel failed in his attempt to restore the ontological proof (Adorno
1973:402-405). Adorno rather sides with the monk Gaunilon and Kant
against Anselm of Canterbury and Hegel: he denies the identity of the
Notion, or the Idea, and being, and stresses their non-identity, and thus
negates Anselms proof once more, but still not merely abstractly, but
rather determinately and concretely (Anselm 1962; xv-xx, 145-170; Hegel
1986n:347; Adorno 1973:402-405). In Adornos perspective, in Hegels
consistent resolution of non-identity into pure identity, the notion becomes
the guarantor of the non-conceptual. According to Adorno, Transcendence,
captured by the immanence of the human spirit, was at the same time
turned into the totality of the spirit and thus abolished altogether.
Radical Objectivity
Adorno was truly and honestly convinced, that his negative dialectic with
its emphasize on non-identity preserved and protected better the radical
objectivity of the Absolute or the totally Other than Hegels positive
dialectic with its emphasize on identity and its consequent pantheistic
tendencies (Hegel 1986n:347; Adorno 1973:402-405). Adorno observed,
that the more after Hegel Transcendence crumbled under the pressure
of the bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment movements both
in the world and in the human mind, the more arcane would it become,
as so concentrating in an outermost point above all mediations. In this
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sense, so Adorno argued, the anti-historical Barthian theology of down-
right Otherness has its historical index. For Adorno, the question of the-
ology and metaphysics was sharpened into the question, whether this
utter tenuousness, abstractness, indeniteness of the Absolute was the last,
already lost defensive position of theology and metaphysics: or whether
theology and metaphysics survived only in the meanest and shabbiest
refuse of the phenomenal world, whether a state of consummate insigni-
cance will let it restore reason to the autocratic reason that performed
its oce without resistance or reection (Adorno 1973:402-405; Theunissen
1983:41-65; Habermas 1988:278-279). In Adornos view, theology and
metaphysics could possibly survive in the micrology of the smallest, shab-
biest, meanest detail of reality. While this micrology is certainly far
removed from any post-ontological proof for the existence of God, it is,
nevertheless, almost a Judeo-Christian idea: to see the resemblance of
the entirely Other in the oppressed, exploited, tortured, hanged, shot, gassed,
crucied, hopeless innocent victims of the what Hegel and Schopenhauer
had identied as the slaughterbench, or the holocaust altar of world-
history (Hegel 1986k:29-55, 1986n:50-95, 185-346; Horkheimer 1996c:
chap. 4, esp. 76-78, 1974a; Adorno 1973:402-405; Habermas 1978:11-
95, 127-143, 1986:53-54; Oelmuller 1990; Neuhaus 1993; Schuster &
Boschert-Kimmig 1993: parts I-II; Metz 1995; Greinacher 1986; Slle
1989; Hinkelmann 1985). Hegel had also spoken of the little owers, or
the foul existences, on which the powerful were stepping all the time (Hegel
1986k:29-105). While Hegel took already suering into the dialectical notion,
for the critical theorists the extreme suering of the 20th century exploded
and shattered the dialectical notion altogether: the result was the negative
dialectics (Hegel 1986f: part II, 1986n:185-346; Adorno 1973: parts I-III,
esp. 300-360). While Adorno stressed the non-identity between even the
highest notion and the smallest existence, micrology could at least still
discover a semblance of the former in the latter (Adorno 1973:402-405).
Such semblance of the totally Other in the smallest existential detail of
nature, society and history is not entirely without consolation.
Positivism
According to Adorno, the thesis of positivism from Auguste Comte to Max
Weber, Emile Durkheim, the Vienna School, Carl Popper, Talcott Parsons
and Niclas Luhmann and the cognitivists was, that even a theology or
metaphysics that had escaped to profanity was, nevertheless, void (Hork-
heimer 1974b:101-104, 116-117; Adorno 1973:403, 1970a:7-80). In Adornos
view, even the idea of truth on the account of which positivism had
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72 Siebert
once been initiated, was sacriced by contemporary positivists. Adorno
gave credit to Wittgenstein for having pointed this out, however well his
commandment of silence may otherwise go with a dogmatic, falsely res-
urrected theology and metaphysics, that could no longer be distinguished
from the wordless rapture of Heideggerian or Tillichian believers in Being
(Adorno 1997b:413-524, 1973:403). In Adornos perspective, what demythol-
ogization would not aect without making it apologetically available was
not an argument. For Adorno, the sphere of arguments was antinomi-
cal pure and simple. It was rather the experience that if thought was
not decapitated, it would ow into Transcendence: down to the idea of
a world that would not only abolish extant suering, but revoke even
the suering of the innocent victims that was irrevocably past (Adorno
1970b: parts 1-2, 1973:403; Habermas 1978:11-95, 127-143, 1986:53-
54). As Adornos micrology does not decapitate thought, it turns into an
other, inverse theology engaged in what his friend Benjamin had called
anamnestic solidarity with the innocent victims (Adorno 1970b: parts
1-2, 1973:403; Benjamin 1977: chs. 10, 11; Habermas 1978:48-95). In
the perspective of a dialectical theory of religion, Adornos and Benjamins
inverse theology, which allows semantic potentials to migrate from the
depth of the mythos into the secular social scientic discourse, can
indeed mediate between monotheism on one hand and radical enlight-
enment on the other (Adorno 1969:22; Habermas 1990:9-18, 1978:33-
95). While we can not at this point in history reconcile the deep
contradiction between faith and knowledge, revelation and autonomous
reason, and must express it honestly and truthfully, we can at least point
already the direction out of it in terms of an open dialectic.
Between the Religious and the Secular
After Auschwitz and Treblinka, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the hor-
ror and terror of the slaughterbench of the 20th century, which these
names indicate, the critical theorists could not share any longer with
Hegel the Jewish, Christian, Islamic prophetic presupposition, that Divine
Providence, Plan, Purpose, Law and Judgment govern the world as nature
and history (Hegel 1986k:29-105). Thus the critical theorists also nd it
impossible to share with Hegel the Greek-Anaxagorian metaphysical pre-
supposition, that Reason governs the world. In this sense, the critical
theory of society is denitely post-religious and post-metaphysical (Habermas
1988). But the critical theorists still discover in terms of Adornos microl-
ogy traces of the religious and the metaphysical in the smallest detail of
the life world. In this sense, the critical theorists move on the modern
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continuum between the religious extreme represented, e.g., by Gershom
Scholems mystical theology on one hand, and the secular extreme, repre-
sented, e.g., by Bertolt Brechts historical materialism and epical or dialec-
tical theater, on the other (Hegel 1986m:9-88; Scholem 1957; 1977; 1973;
Brecht 1961; Fuegi 1994). Being post-religious and post-metaphysical, the
critical theorists, nevertheless, do not fall victim to the dominant positivism
in its many forms, by the dull conformity of which they are horried
(Horkheimer 1974b:101-104, 116-117; Adorno 1970a: esp. 7-80, 1973:403).
Such positivism sometimes even creeps into the otherwise most critical
poetry of Brecht (Adorno 1970b:103-162; Benjamin 1978).
Radical Enlightenment
It is against the Hegelian background and prototype that this essay
explores the fundamental motive and motivation of Horkheimers and.
Adornos critical theory of society, which were no longer constituted by
faith in the Kingdom of Heaven, Eternity, or Beauty as it had been pre-
sent in the old world-religions and world-philosophies, but rather by the
longing and the hope for the totally Other than nature, civil society,
political state, or world-history ( John 18:28-40; Horkheimer 1985a, 1996,
1985b:349-397, 439-440, 526-541, 593-605, 1981a:131-136, 145-155;
Schmidt and Altwicker; Kng 1978:540-542). To be sure, concerning
the deep and still further widening and globalizing modern dichotomy
between the religious and the secular, revelation and autonomous rea-
son, mythology and enlightenment the critical theorists stood decisively
on the side of radical enlightenment (Hegel 1986m:16-27; Horkheimer
and Adorno 1969:9-49; Kogon 1958a:392-402; 1958b:484-498; Adorno
1997:608-617; Habermas 1990:14-15). As this had been true for the rst
generation of the critical theorists Horkheimer and Adorno thus this
is still true today for the second and third and even fourth generation.
For Horkheimer, the process of enlightenment was marked out in the rst
thought a human being conceived of (Horkheimer 1996b:446). According
to Horkheimer, of this same process of enlightenment Hegel had said in
his Phenomenology of the Spirit that if it had once started, it was irresistable
(Hegel 1986c:327, 362, 398-431, 496; Horkheimer 1996b:446). Horkheimer
remembered that when Hegel spoke of the enlightenment in his phe-
nomenology, he explained that even the struggle against it betrayed the
infection that had happened by it. It was too late now. Every means
against the enlightenment only made the disease worse and aggravated
it. That was so, because the enlightenment had touched the very marrow
of the spiritual or intellectual life: namely the consciousness in its notion,
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74 Siebert
or in its pure essence. Therefore, there was no energy present in the
spiritual or intellectual life anymore, which would be beyond the enlight-
enment. It is the purpose of this essay to follow the critical theorists as
they as radical enlighteners and as being at the same time motivated by
their longing for the totally Other tried to mitigate at least alternative
Future I the totally administered society, to resist alternative Future II
the militaristic society, and to promote in theory and praxis alternative
Future III the right society, inside the wrong one the extremely
antagonistic late capitalist society (Horkheimer 1985a; Adorno 1979:354-
373, 578-587; Flechtheim 1985:152-160).
The Notion of Dialectic
According to Horkheimer and Adorno, with the notion of dialectic or
determinate negation Hegel had emphasized an element which dierentiated
genuine enlightenment from its positivistic and pragmatistic decay (Hegel
1986c:72-77, 1986e:48-53; Horkheimer and Adorno 1969:29-31). However,
according to the critical theorists, as Hegel made nally the known result
of the whole process of the determinate negation the totality in sys-
tem and history after all into the Absolute, he violated the Second
and Third Commandment of the Mosaic Law the prohibition against
making images or naming the Unconditional as well as their secular-
ization, i.e., Kants taboo against any excursion of the intellect into the
realm of the Intelligible, or the Thing-in-itself, or God, Immortality and
Freedom, and thus himself fell victim to the dialectic of enlightenment
as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud after him (Exodus 20:4-7; Kant 1965:485-
572; Hegel 1986n:347-534; Horkheimer and Adorno 1969:30; Horkheimer
1985b:349-416, 436-492, 487-605, 1989b, 1990, 1987a, 1987b:15-74, 75-
148, 1990:152-168, 1987c:467-482; Zerin 1998:46-49). As the critical the-
orists determinately negated Hegels philosophy, they preserved its dialectical
form the process of determinate negation but uncoupled the latter
from the formers totality in system and history and in the strictest
obedience to the radicalized Second and Third commandment of the
Decalogue and to Kants prohibition against any penetration of the realm
of the Intelligible, considered its result to be unknown and thus rescued
themselves from the dialectic of enlightenment: departing from Hegel
they engaged in an open dialectic, or a determinate negativity (Horkheimer
1985b:439-440, 483-492).
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Monotheism and Enlightenment
In spite of the fact that Horkheimer and Adorno were completely com-
mitted to enlightenment, there existed nevertheless for them a connection
between monotheism and radical enlightenment: the moment of
Transcendence, or the totally Other (Horkheimer 1996a: chap. 13; Adorno
1997c:608-616; Habermas 1990:14-15). This Transcendence or Otherness
granted to the ego, which was held captive in its environments, rst of
all the distance to its world in its totality and to itself and thereby opened
up a perspective, without which neither personal autonomy nor univer-
sal, i.e. anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity were not possible
and could not be acquired (Habermas 1990:15; Siebert 1989). From this
connection remained untouched Adornos conviction, that nothing of the-
ological semantic or semiotic material or potential could continue unchanged
(Kogon 1958a:392-402, 1958b:484-498; Adorno 1997c:608-616). Each
theological content would have to pass the test to migrate from the depth
of the mythos into the secular sphere. However, so his disciple Habermas
argued, this secularizing taking in of theological materials or potentials
into the universe of argumentative discourse and solidary and friendly
and helpful living together was the very opposite of a neo-pagan, this-
worldly-polytheistic cancellation of the majority of the subject and the
consequent ego-weakness and the neo-mythological regression behind that
self understanding of autonomy and solidarity, which entered world his-
tory the rst time through the teachings of the Jewish, Christian and
Islamic prophets (Isaiah 61:1-66:24; Revelation 21:1-22:21; Adorno
1993a:99, 1997c:608-616). The contemporary new mythologies claim
absolutely no similarity any longer with the Mythology of Reason, which
had once been entreated, implored, invoked and evoked by Hegel and
his friends Friedrich Hlderlin and Friedrich W.J. Schelling in the con-
text of his oldest system program of German idealism in Frankfurt a.M.
in 1800 ( Jamme and Schneider 1984:11-14; Habermas 1990:15).
Theology and Agnosticism
In Horkheimers and Adornos notion of the longing for the entirely
Other sometimes characterized as non-reied Transcendence, or the
Innite, or the Absolute, or the Truth, or Perfect Justice, or standpoint
of Redemption and Messianic Light, or Unconditional Love, or simply
the Theological united with each other Jewish negative and inverse
theology, on one hand, and Kantian philosophical agnosticism on the
other (Kant 1965:495-531; Horkheimer 1970:45-47, 1985b:483-492, 1985a:
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76 Siebert
chap. 37; Adorno 1970b:103-146, 1980:333-334). For the critical theo-
rists, in the face of radical evil in the most murderous 20th century the
religious dogma of an all-powerful and all-benevolent God had become
almost unbelievable (Horkheimer 1985a; Zerin 1998:46-49). However, in
the critical theorists perspective the longing for the totally Other could
still be concretized, expressed and preserved through commitment to eth-
ical norms and the celebration of cultic or liturgical events in the con-
text of the old world-religions (Hegel 1986m: part 1, 9-88; 1986n: parts
2 & 3; Horkheimer 1985a; Fromm 1976). As a matter of fact, according
to the critical theorists the world-religions could possibly continue to exist
and survive for some time if they would be willing and able to trans-
form their dogmatic interpretations of reality and orientations of action
into such longing and hope for the totally Other as the source of uncon-
ditional meaning, ethical validity claims, and possible theoretical or at
least practical theodicy solutions (Horkheimer 1970:9-53, 1985a; Habermas
1991: part 3). In any case, for Horkheimer and Adorno the reference
to the totally Other was no utopianism (Horkheimer 1996a:62-67). In
the critical theorists perspective, without an object in the theological sense
the very notion of theory became meaningless, archaic and obsolete. An
atheistic-communistic theory was a contradictio in adjecto: the pure con-
templation of something, which did no longer exist.
The Other Dimension
To be sure, the critical theory of society claims to be thoroughly scientic
and participates fully in the argumentative discourse among the positive
social sciences (Horkheimer 1972, 1981a:33-46, 78-89, 145-155; Schmidt
and Altwicker 1986; Habermas 1971, 1973c, 1973b; Habermas and
Luhmann 1971). However, it remains nevertheless deeply rooted in phi-
losophy and even theology (Horkheimer 1970, 1972, 1987c: 345-408,
1989a, 1981a:47-58, 68-116, 122, 155, 1985a; Schmidt and Altwicker
1986; Kng 1981). While the Hegelian philosophy contained the dimen-
sions of nature, subjective, objective and absolute spirit including art,
religion and philosophy and the structural-functionalist theory of the
human condition embraced the subsystems of the telic system, nature,
the human biological organism and the action system subdivided into
culture, society, personality and behavioral organism, the critical theory
is dierentiated into the spheres of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, fam-
ily, civil society, state, history and culture: particularly the spheres of art,
especially music and literature, and of religion, as well as of philosophy
(Hegel 1986h: part 1, 1986i: part 2, 1986j: part 3; Parsons 1965, 1964;
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Horkheimer 1985a, 1985b:483-492, 1988a:65-157, 170-256; 365-375,
1988b, 1988c; Adorno 1986, 1993b, 1997d, 1997e, 1997f, 1997g, 1998;
Benjamin 1977, 1988, 1983, 1985). While the Hegelian philosophy had
for its other dimension the absolute Spirit, and the Parsonian structural-
functionalism had for its highest sphere what Paul Tillich had called the
Ultimate Reality, the leading critical theorists, Horkheimer and Adorno,
had for their highest longing and hope the totally Other (Hegel 1986j:366-
395; Parsons 1964; 1965; Tillich 1961: vol. 1, pp. 14, 24-25, 110-111,
214-223, vol. 2, pp. 9, 14, 26, 30, 87, 116, vol. 3, pp. 102, 125, 130, 154,
223, 283, 287, 289, 293, 349, 422; Horkheimer 1970:46, 1985a). While
according to Hegel the nite realms of nature, subjective and objective
spirit had been the other of the Innite, for Horkheimer and Adorno
the Innite was the entirely Other of man and society. It is precisely
through its determinate negation, or turning upside down, or turning
inside out, or concrete inversion that the critical theorists like Marx
had done before preserved in their social theory the Hegelian philos-
ophy: even some of its positive theology in the form of their other or
negative or inverse theology (Marx 1961: vol. 1, pp. 17-18; Hegel 1986e:48-
53; Horkheimer 1985b:286; Adorno 1970b:103-125). While Hegels and
Marxs philosophy and Horkheimers and Adornos critical theory of soci-
ety were radical in the sense of penetrating to the very roots of things,
i.e., to the dialectical notion as the universality, which alienated itself
into its particularity and reconciled itself with itself in its singularity
in the things themselves, and thus discovered the relational conception
of bourgeois society as antagonistic totality, the contradictions of which
drive it beyond itself, the structural functionalists stay like all other pos-
itivists consciously, intentionally and purposively at the very surface of the
social reality and use entirely subjective concepts and are thus continu-
ally engaged in the harmonization of the fundamental dichotomies of
civil society and thereby in its stabilization and normalization, no mat-
ter how unjust its conditions may be (Hegel 1986f: part 2, 1986g:339,
397; Horkheimer 1985b:131-222, 349-416, 436-541). While Hegels and
Marxs philosophy aimed at alternative Future III the realm of free-
dom, and structural functionalism consciously or unconsciously, inten-
tionally or unintentionally points toward alternative Future I the totally
administered society, the critical theory and praxis tries to mitigate at
least alternative Future I and to resist under all circumstances alternative
Future II a militaristic society, and to promote passionately alternative
Future III (Hegel 1986a:43, 335-336, 394-395, 1986l: part 2, pp. 186-
187, 1986o: part I, pp. 175, 373, 455, part II, p. 109; Marx 1961: vol. 3,
pp. 873-874; Horkheimer 1985a: chap. 37, p. 7; Adorno 1993a:7-258;
Flechtheim 1985:152-160; Habermas 1973a, 1986, 1990:202-203).
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78 Siebert
Structure of Thoughts
While the Frankfurt Schools critical theory of society is admittedly unsys-
tematic, it is nevertheless a very methodological and rather organized
body of ideas, or structure of thoughts and categories, or connection of
knowledge related to alternative Future III the truth of human society
(Horkheimer 1988a:19-157, 365-375, 1988b, 1988c, 1972:131; Lwenthal
1989; Arato and Gebhardt 1982:vii-viii, ix-xxi, 3-25, parts 1-3; Wiggershaus
1986; Jay 1981). While contrary to all forms of positivism the critical
theory of society transcends facticity in terms of relational notions, like
e.g., the antagonistic totality of civil society, it is nevertheless derived
from the study of a large amount of psychological, social and cultural
facts and data relating particularly to traditional and modern civil soci-
ety: the relational essence of society which overshoots facticity is never-
theless real only in its particular data (Adorno 1993a:37-92; Theunissen
1983:48, 50, 54 59; Schmidt 1981; Zerin 1998:46-49). The critical the-
ory of society is not only the result of the study of psychological, social
and cultural phenomena, but it is also to some extend the result of the
exercise of the dialectical method and imagination: of radical negative
dialectics (Adorno 1966: parts 2-3). It includes in itself the knowledge of
several social sciences, particularly psychology and sociology, and artis-
tic, religious and philosophical forms derived from such study of facts
and from such dialectical method and imagination. The critical theory
is a general body of assumptions and principles worked out already to
a large extend in Hegels Science of Logic as well as in its materialistic
inversion by Marx (Hegel 1986c:72-75, 1986e:48-53, 1986k:19-105, 439-
440, 483-492; 1986o: part I, p. 94, part II, p. 502; Marx 1953: chap. 3,
4, 7-10, 1961:15-18; Horkheimer 1988b:326-327, 1985b:439-440, 483-
492; Hegel 1986k; Adorno 1997b:293-351). The critical theory is as such
dialectically related to communicative and political praxis: directed toward
the modication at least of alternative Future I; the prevention of alter-
native Future II; and the promotion of alternative Future III (Horkheimer
1985a; Flechtheim 1970:152-160).
Origin
For almost a century the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School have
theorized about human society: particularly the social static and dynamic
of traditional and modern civil society (Horkheimer 1985a; Jay 1981;
Wiggershaus 1987; Wellmer 1971; Dubiel 1992; Arato and Gebhardt
1982; Schweppenhauser 1996, esp. 22-25). Through almost the whole
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20th century the critical theorists have formulated and constructed always
new stages of the critical theory of subject, intersubjectivity, marriage
and family, civil society, political state, history and culture, including art,
religion and philosophy: responding from one station to the other to
always new historical situations. The critical theory originated mainly in
the experience of the bourgeois societies in Europe before World War
I, of the horror of World War I, of fascism, of the American exile, of
the terror of World War II, and of the Cold War period. Horkheimer,
Benjamin, Adorno, Friedrich Pollock, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse,
Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Leo Lwenthal, and other critical theorists of the
rst generation tried to make sense out of the senseless war experience,
be it in Frankfurt a.M., Berlin, Stuttgart, Paris, New York, Los Angeles
or elsewhere in European or American civil societies. The critical theo-
rists were rooted in and stood on the shoulders of the enlightenment
movements and the older critical theories of the 18th and 19th centuries
(Schweppenhauser 1996:22-25; Gumnior and Ringguth 1973; Rosen 1995:
part 1; Scheible 1989; Wiggershaus 1987; Witte 1985; Bolz and Reijen
1996; Reijen 1982: parts 1-2). They looked for support particularly in
the writings of Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Marx,
Nietzsche, and Freud.
From Idealistic to Materialistic Dialectic
Already in 1942, Horkheimer had stated in American exile, that if one
thought through precisely Hegels teaching that the notion was the inte-
rior of the thing itself, then its execution, the idealistic dialectic, became
materialistic all by itself (Horkheimer 1985b:289). For Horkheimer that
was like with certain puzzle pictures: if one looked at them long enough
then they turned over into another form, which was likewise the image
as the previous one. Marxs attempt to put Hegel from his head on his
feet was so cogent only, because he stood already on them in the rst
place. That became quite obvious from Benjamins Hegel quotation in
his nal essay On the Notion of History of 1940, according to which
in 1807 Hegel had turned the idealistic sentence from the so called
Sermon on the Mount
Set your hearts on his Kingdom rst, and on his righteousness, and all these
other things will be given you as well.
into the materialistic sentence
Set your hearts on food and clothing rst and the Kingdom of God will fall
to you by itself. (Matt 6:25-34; Benjamin 1977:252-253)
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80 Siebert
The critical theorists were engaged in such inverse theology no less than
Hegel or Marx before. It is in its materialistic form that the religious
text is not only negated but also preserved, elevated and fullled.
Notion in Objectivity
According to Adorno, the original power of the Hegelian notion as in
its self-particularization self-alienating and in its self-singularization self
reconciling universal, was to be sure a theological one (Hegel 1986f:243-
300; Benjamin 1978a:672). At the same time the notion was not only a
matter of the thinking subject but also of the objective reality. Still as
late as May 2, 1968, a year before his death, Adorno taught in his 4th
Lecture on his Introduction to Sociology at the University of Frankfurt,
that in modern civil society as functional interconnection and exchange
process, in the totality of which everything was mediated with every-
thing, one abstracted necessarily from the specic form of the objects
which were to be exchanged with each other in terms of the average
social working time (Adorno 1993a:51-63). In the market place the
exchange-objects were reduced to a universal unity. However, so Adorno
argued, the abstraction did not lay merely in the abstracting thinking of
the sociologist. It was rather so, that in the capitalist society itself such
an abstraction was present. There was present in the civil society as an
objectivity already something like a notion. According to Adorno, the
decisive dierence between a positivistic and a dialectical teaching about
society was that the latter, the critical theory, referred to the objectivity
of the notion which lay in the thing itself, while the former, the posi-
tivistic sociology denied the process or removed it at least into the back-
ground and posited the formation of the concept exclusively into the
looking, watching, considering, contemplating, meditating, examining
observing, ordering and concluding subject (Adorno 1970a, 1993a:51-63;
Popper 1961, 1967: vol. I, 1973; Zerin 1998:46-47).
The Critical Notion
According to Adorno, the objective notion of civil society, in which in
the reduction of human beings to agents and carriers of commodity-
exchange was hidden the domination of man over man, became eo ipso
critical in so far as it demonstrated precisely, that the unfolding of this
in the bourgeois society itself situated notion of an supposedly equiva-
lent but in reality class-specically non-equivalent exchange process, tended
in its consequence toward the universal crisis and the downfall of capi-
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talist society (Hegel 1986g:388-393; Marx 1961:17-18; Adorno 1993a:60-
63). If civil society, so Adorno argued, was to continue to reproduce the
life of its individuals, it had to move beyond this notion of exchange
toward alternative Future III a society as his disciple Habermas put
it in which also those actions and things which could not be commodied
and expressed in prices were nevertheless still perceived and taken seri-
ously in their relevance and in their value and in which people would
help each other and in which a friendly living together would be possi-
ble (Adorno 1993a:51-78; Habermas 1990:179-204). For Adorno the tran-
sition toward the critique of capitalist society lay in this insight into the
determinateness, the notion-character of the objective social structure
itself and its objective tendencies. The concept of the critique of civil
society would not make any sense at all, if bourgeois society was noth-
ing else than a merely subjectively ordered agglomeration of facts and
data as the positivistic and pragmatistic sociology asserted it. In Adornos
view, that precisely was the hinge in which the conception of the criti-
cal theory of modern society was hanging together with the construction
of the notion of capitalist society as an antagonistic totality. This notion
of society as a relationalfunctional concept was admittedly not sensu-
ously given. It could admittedly not be immediately perceived and reg-
istered as a mere factum. However, this notion of society was nevertheless
determinable through knowledge. It was not something irrational. It could
be determined through the demonstration, to which complications and
to which contradictions the unfolding of this principle of socialization
had necessarily to lead. However, to be sure, this unfolding of the prin-
ciple of socialization did then again not take place beyond the social
facts, but only in the interaction with the determinate social data.
Dialectical Sociology
Adorno stated, in his 5th lecture in his Introduction to Sociology, that the notion
of society could not be reduced neither to the sum of individuals nor to
a social reality in and for itself, e.g. according to the image of an organ-
ism (Adorno 1993a:68-70). For Adorno, the notion of society was a kind
of interaction between the individuals and a social objectivity, which
made itself independent in opposition to them. In Adornos view, that
precisely was the macro-cosmic or better still macro-sociological model
for the critical theorists dialectical conception of society: their dialecti-
cal sociology. To be sure, sociology had to be thought of dialectically,
because here the notion of mediation of the two opposite categories
the individual on one hand and the society on the other was intrinsic
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82 Siebert
in both of them. For Adorno, on one hand there were in the social sense
no individuals, namely human beings, who could exist as persons with
their own claim and particularly who could exist as those who were
working except in respect to the society in which they lived and which
formed them down into their innermost being. On the other hand, there
was for Adorno also no society without its own notion being mediated
through individuals. That was so, because the process through which
society maintained itself was nally the life process, the production process
and the reproduction process, which was kept going through the single
individuals who were socialized in the society. That, precisely, consti-
tuted for Adorno the pressing and urging reason for the development of
a dialectical consideration of society: a dialectical sociology.
Critical Theory of Religion
The critical theory of religion was an integral part of the critical theorists
dialectical sociology (Adorno 1997c:608-616; Kogon 1958a:392-402,
1958b:484-498; Horkheimer 1985a; Siebert 1979). In their dialectical
sociology of religion, Horkheimer and Adorno were interested in reli-
gion in so far as it was situated in the antagonistic totality of civil soci-
ety and at the same time transcended it. While the Lutheran Hegel had
comprehended Christianity not only as the religion of becoming and
freedom, but also as the absolute religion, and as such as the end of the
history of religions, the Jewish critical theorists considered it to be a most
advanced, but nevertheless only relative, positive world-religion situated
among other relative, positive world-religions: like magic or fetishism,
Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Judaism, or Islam (Hegel
1986c:495-574, 1986m: part 2-3; Kogon 1958a:392-402, 1958b:483-498).
While Hegel had found the absolute goal of the history of religions in
Christianity as the religion of freedom, the critical theorists foresaw and
promoted the determinate negation, i.e., inversion of its and all other
religions semantic and semiotic materials and potentials into their own
secular critical theory of society, and beyond that into the likewise pro-
fane general discourse of expert cultures, and through them into eman-
cipatory communicative and political action in the antagonistic totality
of globalizing late capitalist society toward alternative Future III the
free, solidary, reconciled, redeemed, shortly the right society (Hegel
1986c:545-574, 1986n: part 3; Adorno 1970b:103-125, 1979:354-372,
578-587, 1997:608-616; Horkheimer 1988b: chap. 16, 1972:129-131,
1985a:385; Habermas 1990:14-15, 202-203).
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Prima Philosophia
Adorno and his eleven years older teacher, colleague and friend Benjamin
had formulated the rst time their notion of an inverse theology on the
Island of Ibiza in 1932/1933 (Adorno 1970b:103-125; Witte 1985:144).
On November 6, 1934, Adorno wrote from Merton College, Oxford, to
Benjamin, that he saw in his Arcades Project truly that piece of prima
philosophia, which was given to the critical theorists as a task to be real-
ized (Lonitz 1994:72-74; Benjamin 1985:45-78, 1983:1041-1066). Adorno
wished nothing else more than that Benjamin would now after such a
long and painful damming up be able to execute the Passagen Werk with
such power as the immense object made it necessary. If, so Adorno told
Benjamin, he was allowed to give to his Arcades Project some hope for
the way, without him taking it as immodesty or presumptuousness, then
it was that that some day this work would without consideration realize
everything of theological content and of literalism in the most extreme
theses what had been in it from its very start as design and plan. Adorno
meant the consideration of objections from the side of the Brechtian
atheism (Brecht 1957: parts 1-3; Benjamin 1988; Lonitz 1994:31, 53, 73-
74). Someday the critical theorists may be called upon, to rescue Benjamins
friend Bertolt Brechts vulgar atheism in the form of their inverse the-
ology. However, so Adorno insisted, under no circumstances should Brechts
atheism be received into the critical theory of society. Adorno told
Benjamin that he should very much abstain from the external commu-
nication with Brechts Marxist social theory in favor of the original intent
of his Passagen Werk. That should happen because it appeared to Adorno
that here, where the most decisive and the most serious was at stake, it
had to be expressed completely and fully and the total categorical depth
had to be achieved without leaving out theology. However, then Adorno
also believed that the critical theorists would in this decisive layer help
the Marxist theory the more, the less they would appropriate it by sub-
jugating it to themselves externally: here the aesthetical would intervene
and interfere in a revolutionary way incomparably more deeply into the
social reality than the Marxist class theory as Deus ex machina (Lonitz
1994:73-74; Benjamin 1977:251). Thus, it seemed to be necessary to
Adorno, that Benjamin would energize most forcefully precisely the most
distant motives of his Arcades Project: that of the always the same and that
of Hell. In Hebrew, hell or Gahanna was the name for a continually
burning rubbish dump near Jerusalem. According to Adorno, at the same
time Benjamin was to represent and expose the notion of the dialecti-
cal image in full lucidity. Nobody knew better than Adorno that every
sentence in Benjamins Passagen Werk had to be loaded with political
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84 Siebert
dynamite. But so Adorno argued the deeper the dynamite was carried
into the depth the more it would tear and sweep things away. Adorno
wanted to act as advocate of Benjamins own intentions against a tyranny
which had only to be called by its name in order to disappear: the
despotism of Brechts Marxist atheism. Of course, the prima philosophia
concern with the rst things suggested by Adorno was rather an
ultima philosophia concern with the last things or an eschatological
theodicy, which aimed in theory and praxis at the end of the Hegelian,
as well as of the Brechtian, and any other form of positivism: ultimately
at the end of the hellish slaughterbench, Golgatha, and holocaust altar
of world-history Shalom!
The Earthly and the Redeemed Life
In his letter to Benjamin from Berlin of December 17, 1934 Adorno
thanked him for his new essay on Franz Kafka (Benjamin 1988:chap.
19; Lonitz 1994:73-73, 83-85, 89-90). Never before reading Benjamins
essay on Kafka had Adorno become so perfectly conscious of the con-
sensus between them concerning the philosophical center. Adorno
reminded Benjamin of his own essay on Kafka, which he had written
nine years earlier, in 1925 (Adorno 1997i:256-286; Lonitz 1994:89-90).
Here Adorno had seen Kafkas work as photography of the earthly life
from the perspective of the redeemed one. On the photograph nothing
appeared of the redeemed life than a corner of the black cloth: a tip of
the Absolute, which is never mentioned (Lonitz 1994:90-91; Habermas
1988:278). At the same time the horribly distorted optic of the picture
was no other than that of the slantingly posited camera, Thus accord-
ing to Adorno there was no need for any further words concerning the
consensus between him and Benjamin. That was true no matter how far
Benjamins conception of Kafka pointed beyond Adornos interpretation.
At the same time, according to Adorno, that concerned also and that
in a very principle sense his and Benjamins position toward theology.
Adorno had urged Benjamin toward such a theology already at the very
entrance to his Arcades Project. Therefore now it seemed to Adorno to
be double important that the image of theology, in which he would have
liked to see his and Benjamins thoughts to disappear, was no other than
that out of which had been fed his thoughts in his recent Kafka-essay.
According to Adorno it may be called inverse theology.
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Beyond Natural and Supernatural Interpretations
According to Adorno, Benjamin had formulated the rst time in all
sharpness in his essay on Kafka the standpoint against the natural and
the supernatural interpretation at the same time (Benjamin 1988:chap.
19; Lonitz 1994:90-91). It seemed to Adorno that Benjamins standpoint
was precisely common to both of them. Adornos book on Kierkegaard
was concerned with nothing else than this standpoint (Adorno 1974). In
his Kafka essay, Benjamin had expressed his scorn against the connec-
tion of Blas Pascal with Kierkegaard. Adorno reminded Benjamin that
in his book on Kierkegaard he himself had exposed the same disdain
against the connection of Kierkegaard with Pascal and with Augustine.
However, so Adorno argued, when he held on nevertheless to a rela-
tionship of Kierkegaard and Kafka then it was not at all that of Karl
Barths dialectical theology. For Adorno, the relationship between
Kierkegaard and Kafka lay rather precisely with the location where the
former spoke about scripture, script, or text (Adorno 1974; Lonitz 1994:90-
91). Benjamin had said in a decisive way, that what Kafka meant as the
relic of the scripture could be understood better, namely socially, as its
prolegomenon. For Adorno, this was indeed nothing more or less than the
cipher character of his and Benjamins inverse theology. However, in
Adornos view, that his and Benjamins inverse theology broke through
in the latters Kafka essay with such immense force, was for him the
most beautiful guarantee for its philosophical success since he had seen
the rst fragments of his Passagen Werk. Adorno regretted it somewhat
that Benjamin had admittedly expressed in his Kafka essay the invalid-
ity and triviality of the ocial theological Kafka interpretation but that
he had not fully explicated it. Adornos and Benjamins inverse theology
was neither naturalistic, e.g., like Freuds psychoanalysis, nor supra-nat-
uralistic, e.g., like Barths and his disciples dialectical theology.
The Dialectical Image
Between August 2 and 4, 1935 Adorno wrote to Benjamin from Hornberg
in the Blackforest, that it appeared to him to be of greatest importance
that with his conception of the dialectical image in his Arcade Project,
which may be called an immanent one not merely the original theo-
logical power of the notion was threatened (Lonitz 1994:94-95, 101, 111-
112, 137-154). It was rather so for Adorno, that a simplication took
place, which here attacked not only the subjective nuance but the truth
content itself. Thus, so Adorno criticized Benjamin, he missed here thereby
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86 Siebert
precisely that social movement in contradiction for the sake of which he
was willing to sacrice theology. Adorno understood e.g., the commodity
as dialectical image. That meant for Adorno also to understand the com-
modity as motif of its going under and of its supersession in the Hegelian
sense. Adorno and Benjamins inverse theology was ultimately to include
the historical-materialist notion of the social movement in contradiction
(Benjamin 1978a:671-683; Lonitz 1994; Benjamin 1977:251-261).
The Commodity
When, so Adorno argued in his famous Hornberg letter, Benjamin put
the dialectical image as dream into the consciousness then thereby not
only the notion was disenchanted and had become sociable and aable,
but it had thereby also lost that objective key-power, which could legit-
imize it materialistically (Benjamin 1978a:672-673). For Adorno, what
Marx had called the fetish character of the commodity was not a fact
of consciousness (Marx 1961:39-89; Benjamin 1978a:672-676). The fetish
character of the commodity was rather dialectical in the eminent sense,
that it produced consciousness. That meant according to the Adorno
that the consciousness or the unconsciousness could not simply develop
the fetish character of the commodity as dream. It rather answered the
fetish character of the commodity with likewise wish and anxiety. However,
so Adorno argued through the sit venia verbo mirror-realism of the pre-
sent immanent conception of the dialectical image in Benjamins Passagen
Werk precisely that dialectical power of the fetish character of the com-
modity got lost.
Hell and Golden Age
Adorno referred back to the language of Benjamins glorious rst design
of the Arcade Werk, which had still been very theological (Benjamin
1978a:672-676, 1983:45-59, 60-78, 1985:1041-1066). Here Benjamin had
stated, that if the dialectical image was nothing else than the mode of
conception of the fetish character of the commodity in the collective con-
sciousness then admittedly the Saint-Simonistic conception of the world
of commodities as utopia may reveal itself but not its reverse side, namely
the dialectical image of the civil society of the 19th century as hell
(Benjamin 1978a:672-676, 1977). However, in Adornos view only this
dialectical image of bourgeois society as hell would be able to put the
dialectical image of the Golden Age into the right place and position.
Thus, to Adorno Benjamins liquidation of the task of the category of
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hell in his new design of the Passagen Werk and particularly of the inge-
nious quotation concerning the gambler seemed not only a loss of splen-
dor but also of dialectical correctness. Adorno did not want to deny at
all the relevance of the immanence of consciousness for the capitalist
society of the 19th century. But according to Adorno out of this imma-
nence of consciousness could not be gained the notion of the dialectical
image. It was rather so that the immanence of consciousness was itself
as interior the dialectical image for the civil society of the 19th century as
alienation. Here Adorno had to insist on the continuing validity of the
second chapter of his book on Kierkegaard (Adorno 1997: chap. 2; Benjamin
1978a:673-683). According to Adornos book, the dialectical image was
not to be put into the consciousness. To the contrary, through the dialec-
tical construction the dream would have to be externalized and the imma-
nence of consciousness would itself have to be understood as a constellation
of the social reality. It would have to be understood, so to speak, as the
astronomical phase, in which the hell travels through humanity. Only,
so it appeared to Adorno, the star-map of such travel would be able to
open up the view on history as the primordial history of the 19th, and
20th, and 21st centuries.
The Oldest and the Newest
Adorno wanted to formulate this same objection against Benjamins new
design of his Arcade Project once more, but from the extremely oppo-
site point (Benjamin 1978a:676-683, 1985:655-1066, 1977). According to
Adorno, Benjamin had constructed in his new design in the sense of the
immanent conception of the dialectical image the relationship of the old-
est and the newest, which had already had a central position in the rst
design, as one of the utopian relationship to alternative Future III the
classless society (Marx 1961:873-874; Benjamin 1978a:674-675). Thereby,
so Adorno argued, the archaic became a complementary added thing
instead of being the newest itself. Thus it was de-dialecticized. At the
same time, so Adorno criticized, Benjamin dated likewise undialecti-
cally the classless image back into the mythos, where it had come from
in the rst place as theological semantic and semiotic potential, instead
of making it here truly transparent as hell-phantasmagoria. Thus, it
appeared to Adorno, that the category, under which the archaic arose
in Modernity, was much less the golden age than the catastrophe. That,
precisely, was for Adorno the catastrophe, that things went on in civil
society as they did namely in direction of alternative Future I and II.
According to Adorno, the most recently past represented itself always as
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88 Siebert
if it had been annihilated through catastrophes. Here and now, Adorno
wanted to say: thereby as primordial history. Precisely here Adorno knew
himself in agreement with the boldest and most daring location in
Benjamins book The Origin of the German Tragedy (Benjamin 1978b,
1978a:674).
Disenchantment
If, so Adorno argued in his Hornberg letter, the disenchantment of the
dialectical image as dream, as Benjamin used it in the second design of
his Passagen Werk and psychologized it, then it fell precisely thereby
victim to the magic and spell of the bourgeois psychology (Benjamin
1985:1041-1066, 1978a:674-675). Adorno asked, who was the subject of
the dream? He answered himself by saying that in the 19th century cer-
tainly only the individual could be the subject of the dream. However,
so Adorno argued, out of the individuals dreams neither the fetish char-
acter of the commodity nor the monuments could be read immediately
as reproductions. Therefore, so Adorno criticized, Benjamin had brought
in the collective consciousness. Adorno was afraid that in the present
conception of the collective consciousness or unconsciousness as it appeared
in the second design of the Arcade Project it could hardly be dierentiated
from that of Carl G. Jung: who had been a fascist, but who had unlike
Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, or Mircea Eliade given up fascism after
World War II ( Jung 1933, 1990:7-56, 1958: parts 1-2; Benjamin 1978a).
In Adornos view, the collective consciousness or unconsciousness was
open to critique from both sides. It could be criticized from the perspective
of the social process as it hypostatized archaic images where dialectical
ones were produced through the commodity character, just not in an
archaic collective ego, but in the alienated bourgeois individuals.
Furthermore, it could be criticized from the psychological perspective,
that the mass-ego existed only during earthquakes and mass catastrophes,
while otherwise the objective surplus value asserted itself precisely in indi-
vidual subjects and against them. According to Adorno, the bourgeois
psychologists had invented the collective consciousness or unconscious-
ness only in order to distract from the true objectivity of antagonistic
civil society and its correlate, the alienated subjectivity (Adorno 1993a:51-
78; Benjamin 1978a:674-675). In Adornos perspective, it was the task
of the critical theorists to polarize and to dissolve dialectically this con-
sciousness in terms of society and individual, and not to galvanize it as
pictorial or gurative correlate of the commodity character. According
to Adorno, that in the dreaming collective there remained no dierences
for the social classes spoke clearly enough and should be a warning.
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Mythical Thinking
According to Adorno, the mythical-archaic category of the Golden Age
had fateful consequences also for the commodity category (Marx 1961:39-
89; Benjamin 1978a:674-675). For Adorno, that was decisive particularly
in a social sense. If, so Adorno argued, in the dialectical image of the
Golden Age the decisive ambiguity, namely that in relationship to hell,
was suppressed, then instead the commodity became as the substance of
the bourgeois age the hell as such, and it was negated in a way, which
indeed may let appear as truth the immediacy of the primordial condi-
tion. Thus, in Adornos view, the disenchantment of the dialectical image
lead right away into a broken mythical thinking and, as Jung before, so
here Klages announced himself as danger. For Adorno, nowhere did
Benjamins second design of the Passagen Werk bring with it more reme-
dies than at this place. Here would be the central place for the teach-
ing about the collector, who liberated the things from the curse to be
useful. Here belonged, if Adorno understood it rightly, Haussmann, whose
class consciousness initiated precisely through the completion of the com-
modity character in the Hegelian self-consciousness the explosion and
blasting of the phantasmagoria.
Commodity as Dialectical Image
In Adornos perspective, to understand the commodity as dialectical image
meant also to comprehend it as motive of its going under and its super-
session in the Hegelian sense instead of its mere regression toward
the older (Marx 1961:vol. 1, chap. 1; Benjamin 1978a:675-677). For
Adorno, the commodity was on one hand the alienated, in which the use
value withered and died. On the other hand the commodity was the sur-
viving which having become foreign overcame and surmounted the imme-
diacy. According to Adorno, in the commodities and not for the human
beings the critical theorists had the promise of immortality. The fetish
was for the civil society of the 19th century a faithlessly last image as
only the skull. Thus Benjamin had already indicated it in his book on
the Origin of the German Tragedy (Benjamin 1978b, 1978a:675-676). According
to Adorno, at this location seemed to lay the decisive cognitive charac-
ter of Kafkas novel The Castle: particularly of Odradek as the uselessly
surviving commodity (Kafka 1993; Benjamin 1978a:675-676). In this
fairytale, so Adorno suggested the surrealism may nd its end as the
tragedy in Hamlet. However, in Adornos internal-social view, that said
that the mere notion of the use value was in no way sucient to criti-
cize the commodity character, but that it only directed attention back
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90 Siebert
to the stage of human development before the division of labor. That
had always been Adornos reservation against Brecht (Bentley 1961;
Adorno 1993a:62-63; Benjamin 1978a:676-683). Adorno always felt sus-
picion against Brechts notion of the collective as well as against his imme-
diate concept of function: namely as forms of positivistic regression. Adorno
hoped, that Benjamin would see from his critical considerations, that the
factual content corresponded directly and precisely to the categories,
which may be adequate to his expose on Brecht in his second design of
his Arcade Project, and that his resistance against these categories were
not isolated rescue attempts for autonomous art or something like that,
but that they rather communicated most deeply with those motives of
their philosophical friendship, which he believed to be the most original
ones: including the motives of their common inverse theology.
The Restitution of Theology
Here Adorno tried to sum up in a daring grasp the bow of his critique
so far carried out in his Hornberg letter (Benjamin 1978a:676, 1983:588;
Lonitz 1994). According to Adorno, this grasp had to close itself around
the extremes of the bow: theology on one hand and historical material-
ism on the other (Benjamin 1978a:676-677, 1977). For Adorno as well
as for Benjamin, that could not be otherwise. According to Adorno, a
restitution of theology, or better still a radicalization of the dialectic into
the theological glowing re, would at the same time have to be an
extreme sharpening of the social-dialectical, even the economical motif.
In Adornos view, the theology to be restituted was the other one, which
he shared with Benjamin: the inverse theology. In his Passage-Work,
Benjamin had compared this inverse theology, which he shared with
Adorno, with something so profane as a blotting paper (Benjamin 1983:588;
Lonitz 1994:143-144, 323-330). Here Benjamin confessed that his think-
ing related itself to theology like the blotting paper to the ink. The blot-
ting paper was completely sucked full of ink. If things would go in
accordance with the blotting paper, nothing what was written would
remain. Later on, in his Minima Moralia, Adorno would compare the
inverse theology, which he shared with Benjamin, with a mirror (Adorno
1980:334). According to Adorno, the fully developed negativity or con-
tradictoriness of civil society, once taken completely into view, would
shoot together into the mirror-script of its very opposite: the redeemed
society ( Rev. 21-22; Hegel 1986g:339-397; Adorno 1980:333-334).
Sometimes Adorno and Benjamin compared their inverse theology with
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a jacket which was to be turned inside out (Adorno 1970b:103-161).
According to Adorno and Benjamin, theology was to be rescued if at
all not as Scholem, or Karl Barth, or Paul Tillich, or other positive the-
ologians wanted to do it, but rather in the form of their negative as well
as inverse theology of the totally Other, the entirely Non-Identical, the
absolutely New, which theology would contain historical materialism in
itself as its political instrument (Horkheimer 1985a, 1985b:483-492; Lonitz
1994:143-144, 323-330; Benjamin 1977:251).
Commodity Production
According to Adorno the restitution or rescue of theology as negative,
inverse theology, which included in itself historical materialism, had to
be taken historically (Benjamin 1978a:676-677, 1977). In Adornos view,
the commodity character which was specic for the antagonistic civil
society of the 19th century, i.e., the industrial commodity production,
had to be worked out much sharper materially than this had happened
in Benjamins Arcade Project so far. This was necessary for Adorno,
because there had existed commodity character and alienation since the
beginning of capitalism, i.e., since the age of manufacture, since the
Baroque. On the other hand, so Adorno had to admit, since that beginning
capitalism the Unity of modernity lay precisely in the commodity character,
i.e., in the industrial commodity production, and to be sure continues
to do so throughout the 20th century and into the and 21st century.
According to Adorno, only an exact determination of the historical com-
modity production as one, which has been historically sharply dierentiated
from the older forms of production and reproduction, could deliver fully
the primordial history and ontology of the 19th century. That precisely had
been the original intent of Benjamins Passagen Werk. In Adornos view,
all relations to the commodity form as such would give to this primor-
dial history a certain character of the metaphorical, which could not be
tolerated in this serious case. Adorno assumed, if Benjamin would here
surrender himself completely to his mode of procedure, the blind mate-
rial work, the greatest interpretation-results could be achieved. If, so
Adorno apologized to Benjamin, his critique of his Arcade Project moved
in relation to this material work somewhat in a certain theoretical sphere
of abstraction, then this was certainly a predicament and a plight. However,
Adorno knew that Benjamin would not consider this emergency to be
one of world view and thereby reject his reservations.
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92 Siebert
The Concept of God
In his essay Thoughts on Religion of 1935, Horkheimer stated, that the con-
cept of God had been for a long time the place where the idea was
kept alive that there were other norms besides those cruel ones, to which
nature and society and history gave expression in their operation
(Horkheimer 1988b:326-328). At the time, Horkheimer was known in
Germany and America as a Marxist and a revolutionary and as the ini-
tiator of a new form of the critical theory of civil society and as the
intellectual leader of the Institute for Social Research, formerly situated
at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universitt in Frankfurt a.M. and
now at the Columbia University in New York (Horkheimer 1985a; Jay
1981; Wiggershaus 1987; Wellmer 1971; Dubiel 1992; Arato and Gebhardt
1982). Later on, in the development of the critical theory of society,
Horkheimer and his eight years younger friend Adorno tried to con-
cretely supersede i.e., not only critically to negate but also to preserve,
elevate and fulll the concept of God as it had been and still is pre-
sent in Judaism, Christianity and Islam into their own notion of the long-
ing for the totally Other, which continually inspired and motivated the
work of the critical theorists (Hegel 1986n:50-95; Horkheimer 1985a;
Gumnior and Ringguth 1973; Scheible 1989; Kung 1978:539-541; 1970;
1991; 1994). While the critical theory did indeed contain from its start
a more or less hidden theology as theodicy, its very center was only later
on called the entirely Other than the horror and terror of nature and
even more so of history (Horkheimer 1985a, 40; Kng 1978:540-542).
Dissatisfaction
According to Horkheimers essay Thoughts on Religion, the dissatisfaction
with their earthly destiny was for human beings always the strongest
motive for their acceptance of a transcendent Being ( Horkheimer
1988b:326). If, so Horkheimer argued, justice resided with God, then it
was not to be found in the same measure in this world and its history.
For Horkheimer, religion was the record of the wishes, desires and accu-
sations of countless generations of human beings. Horkheimer, who came
like most of the critical theorists of the rst generation in the Institute
for Social Research in Frankfurt and in New York from a Jewish fam-
ily background, criticized particularly Christianity for having brought
Gods rule into harmony with the corrupt and criminal events in this
world (Horkheimer 1988b:326-327, 1988c: chap. 2; Gumnior and Ringguth
1973; Reijen 1982; Rosen 1995: part 1; Scheible 1989; Schweppenhuser
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1996; Wiggershaus 1987; Witte 1985; Bolz and Reijen 1996; Deschner
1998). The more that harmonization took place, the more the meaning
of religion was perverted. Catholicism, so Horkheimer argued, regarded
already God as in certain respects being the creator of the extant earthly
order. Protestantism went even further and attributed the worlds course
directly to the will of the Almighty. Thus it had happened most pro-
foundly in the heterodox Lutheran Hegels Philosophy of History, which
was nevertheless in his terms determinately negated in the critical
theory of society (Hegel 1986c:72-75, 1986e:48-53, 1986k:19-105, 1986o:94,
502; Horkheimer 1985b:439-440, 483-492; Adorno 1966:293-351). Not only
did, according to Horkheimer, Christianity in its dierent paradigms
Greek, Roman, Protestant transgure the state of aairs on earth at
any given moment with the radiance of Divine justice. But it was rather
so, that Christianity brought down Divine justice itself to the level of the
corrupt relations which mark earthly life. In Horkheimers view, Christianity
had lost its function of expressing the ideal to the extend that it became
the bedfellow of the state (Hegel 1986m:236-245; Horkheimer 1988b:326-
327). When Horkheimer criticized Constantinian Christianity in 1935,
the Catholic Church had just concluded the Empire Concordat with the
Hitler Government in Berlin, which is still valid today in the German
Federal Republic (Lortz 1964:514-531, 551, 793, 799-800, 835, 862, 988;
Matheson 1981; Goldhagen 2002a; Cornwell 1999; Kertzer 2001; Shandley
1998). The German concentration camps had just started and were so
far only camps for the acquisition of cheap labor and a correspondingly
high surplus value for the owners of German, and European, and American
industry according to the principle written over the camp-entrances, Work
makes free, of course, not the workers, not the slaves, but only the own-
ers (Adorno 2001:278-281; Kogon 1965: v-xxiv; Higham 1983; Black
2001; Baldwin 2001; Ford 1920: vol. 1-4; Wernicke 1977; Bethel 1977;
Schoenfeld 2003). At the time, these work camps had not yet turned
into death camps: which happened, when the European war became a
world war with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the American
declaration of war against Japan, and the German declaration of war
against the USA. At the time, World War II was still four years away,
which would cost the lives of 60 million people, including 26 million
communists from the former Soviet Union, and 6 million Jewish people.
Christianity and Anti-Semitism
Only 8 years later, on July 28, 1943, the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse
would write from Washington D.C. to Horkheimer at Pacic Palisades,
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94 Siebert
California, that the spearhead theory on anti-Semitism in the form in
which the critical theorists had formulated it so far seemed to him inad-
equate (Horkheimer 1996:466-468, 1996b). To Marcuse, this inadequacy
seemed to increase with the development of fascist anti-Semitism. According
to Marcuse, the function of this fascist anti-Semitism was apparently
more and more the perpetuation of an already established pattern of
domination in the character of men. Marcuse asked Horkheimer to notice,
that in the German fascist propaganda the Jew had now become an
internal being. As such internal being the Jew lived in gentiles, as well
as in Jews. The Jew as internal being was not even conquered through
the annihilation of the real Jews. If the critical theorists looked, so Marcuse
argued, at the character traits and qualities, which the German fascists
designated as the Jewish elements in the gentiles, they would not nd
the so-called typical Jewish traits or at least not primarily but rather
traits which were regarded as denitely Christian and humane. These
traits, so Marcuse explained, were, furthermore, those which stood most
decidedly against repression in all its forms. Here, so Marcuse suggested,
the critical theorists should resume the task of elucidating the true con-
nection between anti-Semitism and Christianity. So far, so Marcuse crit-
icized, this task had not been followed up in the critical-theorists
Anti-Semitism Project, which the American Jewish Committee had com-
missioned. What, according to Marcuse, was happening was not only a
belated protest against Christianity but also a consummation of Christianity,
or at least of all the sinister traits of Christianity. In fascist perspective,
as Marcuse saw and understood it, the Jew was of this world, and this
world was the one which fascism had to subject to the totalitarian ter-
ror. In the eyes of the critical theorists, the consummation of all the sin-
ister traits of Christianity did not only prevent Christianity from solving
the theodicy problem but made it itself part of it.
Christianity as State Religion
On September 11, 1943, Horkheimer would write to Marcuse, that he
fully shared his ideas on anti-Semitism and Christianity as expressed in
his letter of July 28, 1943 (Horkheimer 1996b:470-471; Rosenbaum
1999: parts 1-5). The more Horkheimer looked into history, the more
he found that where ever Christianity had been accepted as a state reli-
gion, it functioned in the sense indicated in Marcuses letter not only
automatically, but even consciously. Horkheimer asked Marcuse, if he
had ever taken a close look at the events connected with the extinction
of paganism in Greece and Egypt in the beginning of the 5th century?
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Particularly Alexandria oered to Horkheimer interesting examples. Some
of these examples were astonishing parallels to the period of the Protestant
Reformation. Both the extinction of paganism in Alexandria and the
Reformation were yielding to Horkheimer valuable clues for the under-
standing of what was going on today in the Europe and America of
1943. According to Horkheimer, with regard to the spirit of Christianity
such periods of transition were more characteristic than the standpoint
of the Catholic Church. In Horkheimers view, her relation to the pre-
vailing powers dened the position of the Catholic Church after all apri-
ori. Horkheimer may have thought of the Lateran Treaty between the
Curia and Mussolini and of the Concordat between the Vatican and
Hitler and of the silence of Pious XII concerning the deportation of Jews
from Rome, the fascist concentration camps in general, the saturation
bombings and the army chaplains not only in the allied armies but also
in the German army and even in the SS, who would bless the most
advanced murder weapons (Cornwell 1999; Goldhagen 2002a, 2002b;
Kertzer 2001; Erickson 1985).
Extinction of Paganism
Horkheimer reminded Marcuse concerning the extinction of paganism
in the late Roman Empire of the circumstances of the death of Hypathia
of Alexandria (Horkheimer 1996b:470-473). She had been a Neo-Platonist.
She taught Platonic philosophy in Alexandria. In 415 Hypathia was
stoned by fanatic Christians. Horkheimer reminded Marcuse of an inter-
esting gure, Schenute of Atripe or Sinutius. He was a Coptic Church
father. Since 383 Schenute was the Abbot of the White Monastery near
Atripe in the Upper Egypt. He died in 446. According to Horkheimer,
Schenute belonged to the other, not the pagan, but the Christian side
In Horkheimers view, the sermons of this gentleman Schenute against
the worldly, materialistic, commercial Egyptians resembled precisely the
sermons of up to date Antisemic radio priests or German Jew-baiters
before and during the fascist period (Lwenthal 1990: parts 1-4; Adorno
1997h:7-142, 431-435). As a courageous man, so Horkheimer remarked
ironically, Schenute had even taken part personally in the burning and
looting of Greek temples and the killing of defenseless pagan priests. As
the head of an organization of monasteries, Schenute had introduced
military discipline. Schenutes letters showed a remarkable interest in the
whipping and torturing of everybody who violated the monastic rules.
According to Horkheimer it was very possible that from the foundation
of the city of Alexandria a part of the population was Jewish. The bulk
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of the rest was of course Greek. While the two ethnic groups went along
with each other very nicely and peacefully up to the middle of the rst
century there were serious anti-Semitic riots at that time. The Greeks
who certainly were not genuine Egyptians called the Jews of Alexandria
aliens and intruders. It seemed to Horkheimer that the Jews were aliens
under all circumstances. Certainly in the 20th century anti-Semitism has
in the context of national and international fascism contributed more to
the theodicy problem than any other single factor (Elson 1977:88-92,
1988:8-80).
Clerico-Fascism
It is very much possible that Schenute reminded Horkheimer of the
Canadian-American radio priest Father Charles Coughlin from Detroit,
Michigan who spread a fascist interpretation of the Papal Encyclical let-
ter Quadragesimo Anno, on American radio every Sunday at 3.00 r.v. to
40 million listeners during the 1930s and 1940s (Adorno 1997h:38-42;
F. Taylor 1983:6; Wilson 2001:21-56). Father Coughlin also sent a man-
ager to Dr. Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler in January 1939. Father
Coughlins manager told the fascist leaders in Berlin, that America was
basically more anti-Semitic than they gave it credit for. The anti-Semitic
radio priest wanted the fascist leaders to take a more positive attitude
toward Christianity. It would help the pro-fascist propaganda in America.
Goebbels told Hitler about Father Coughlin. Hitler intended to touch
on the question of national socialist propaganda in America in his speech
to the Reichstag. Hitler planned to put out feelers to the Americans and
give an outline of Germanys general position. Goebbels believed, that
Hitlers speech would be very important. When the clerico-fascist, Father
Coughlin, became too anti-Semitic, the Roosevelt Administration put
pressure on the Cardinals to remove him from the radio. Father Coughlin
obeyed. After the war, Father Coughlin, who remained a fanatic anti-
Semite as well as anti-Communist, called Father Teilhard de Chardin
the link between the Vatican and the Kremlin. He continued to pub-
lish his clerico-fascist books. During the 1970s, up to his death, in 1979
the Cardinals celebrated Father Coughlins birthdays. Most recently, in
1999, Pope John Paul II beatied 18 clerico-fascists from Spain and 1
from Croatia, and no martyr from the other side: one who would have
fought for the Spanish Republic, or against the Croatian Ustasha State.
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Perfect Justice
According to Horkheimers programmatic essay Thoughts on Religion,
the productive kind of criticism of the status quo which had found its
expression once in earlier times in the form of a religious belief in a
heavenly Judge and a Last Judgment, today took the shape of a strug-
gle for more rational forms of societal life (Horkheimer 1988b:326-327,
1974b; Habermas 1986). But just, so Horkheimer argued, as reason after
Kant, even though it knew better, could not avoid falling back into shat-
tered, but nonetheless recurring illusions, so too, ever since the transi-
tion from religious longing for God to conscious social praxis, there
continued to exist another illusion which could be exposed but not entirely
banished: it was the image of perfect justice. Horkheimer did not con-
sider it possible, that such perfect justice could ever become a reality
within society and history. For, so Horkheimer explained, even if a bet-
ter post-bourgeois society would develop some day and would eliminate
the present disorder and anarchy in European and American civil soci-
eties, there would still be no compensation whatsoever for the wretched-
ness of past ages and no end to the distress in nature. Horkheimer was,
therefore, dealing here, like Freud before, with an illusion proper: with
the spontaneous growth of ideas which probably arose out of the prim-
itive economic exchange process in the childhood of human kind (Freud
1964, 1962; Horkheimer 1988b:326-327; Marcuse 1962:65-66; Gorlich,
Lorenzer and Schmidt 1980). For Horkheimer here following Marx
the principle that each human being must have his or her own share
and that each person has the same basic right to happiness, was a gen-
eralization of economically conditioned rules: their extension into the
Innite (Horkheimer 1988b:326-327; Marx 1953; Fromm 1966). From
its very start in the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research the critical
theory was a new form of historical materialism, which integrated into
itself most intensively and extensively the Freudian psychoanalysis
(Horkheimer 1988b:326-327; Fromm 1992, 1980; Marcuse 1962). Hork-
heimers critical theory of society concretely negated the works of both,
Marx and Freud, because they both had fallen victim to the dialectic
of enlightenment (Horkheimer 1985b:172-183, 294-259, 398-416, 436-
525, 1988b:326-327; Horkheimer and Adorno 1972). Thus, for Horkheimer,
the urge to transcend the possible conceptually and to impotently revolt
against the reality of modern civil society was part of man as he had
been molded by his history. What, according to Horkheimer, distin-
guished the progressive type of man from the retrogressive one, was not
the refusal of the idea of perfect justice, but rather the knowledge of the
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limits set to its fulllment. Erich Fromm likewise combining Marx and
Freud had from the very start of the critical theory in the Frankfurt
Institute for Social Research spoken of the revolutionary or democratic
and the authoritarian or fascist personality type (Horkheimer 1988b:326-
327; Fromm 1980:7-48). One of the most outstanding opponents of the
critical theory of society, Carl Schmitt, Hitlers jurist and political the-
ologian, and according to J.B. Metz one of the fathers of neo-con-
servativism as well as of deconstructionism, had dierentiated between
the Epimetheus character and the Prometheus character inside and
outside of Christianity and had recognized and identied himself rightly
as an Epimetheus character (Horkheimer 1988b:30, 326-327; Mehring
1994; Groh 1998, Meier 1994). The outstanding fascist Catholic politi-
cal theologian Schmitt was the by far superior teacher and role model
of Father Coughlin.
The Authoritarian State
According to Horkheimers Thoughts on Religion, when the authori-
tarian state seemed to engage in a historic conict with religion, the
essential issue was whether the two would compete, or if they would be
coordinated, or if they would go their own separate ways (Horkheimer
1988b:362, 1987a:293-319; Taylor 1983). In the authoritarian state a
bureaucracy au courant with the contemporary situation in civil society
took over and reorganized the old ideological apparatus, in which the
Church had had its own large share. Even if it involved hardship, so
Horkheimer predicted, the Church had ultimately to see that its own
social position depended on the continued existence of the basic traits
of the present system of civil society. If these social traits were to change,
the Church would loose all and gain nothing. In Horkheimers view, the
position of the Church rested on the belief, that absolute justice was not
simply a projection of mens minds as Feuerbach would have sug-
gested but a real eternal Power (Horkheimer 1988b, 1988c, 1972:129-
131; F. Taylor 1983:16, 23, 33, 36-39, 44, 46, 50, 56; Feuerbach 1957;
Marx 1953: chap. 8). Alternative Future III the right, i.e. just and rec-
onciled society however, so Horkheimer assumed, would cease to per-
petuate this believe and would verify Feuerbachs position (Horkheimer
1988b: chap. 16, 1985a: chap. 37, 1988c: chap. 2; Feuerbach 1957). Only
once, as mentioned before, did Horkheimer break the Third Commandment
of the Decalogue, and the Kantian prohibition against all wandering into
the intelligible dimension of the Thing-in-itself God, freedom and
immortality and the Hegelian determinate negation, and named the
totally Other perfect justice (Horkheimer 1972:129-131, 1985a). Otherwise,
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the absolute justice was a projection of the human mind and the entirely
Other while existing was nevertheless completely unknown (Horkheimer
1988b: chap. 16, 1985a: chap. 37). Of course, even the Hebrew Psalmist
had deviated from the Third Commandment of the Mosaic Law, taken
radically, when in Psalm 91 he gave God four names in the rst two
verses: Elyon, Shaddai, Yahweh and Elohim (Psalm 91:1-2; Horkheimer
1985a:chap. 17). Horkheimers mother used to pray Psalm 91 in Stuttgart
under fascist oppression. Horkheimers parents let the rst verse of Psalm
91 be put on their gravestone in the Jewish Cemetery of Bern, Switzerland,
where they had lived in exile for some time from fascist Germany.
Horkheimer let the second verse of Psalm 91 be inscribed on his grave-
stone in the same cemetery: In you, Eternal One, alone I trust. Obviously,
the psalmist, who wrote Psalm 91, relaxed somewhat the Third Com-
mandment of the Decalogue. It seems that the higher the religious and
moral values and norms are in a religion, the more compromises it has
to make, if it wants to keep its followers. The same may be true for phi-
losophies. Certainly, the critical theorists had radicalized the Second and
the Third Commandment of the Decalogue to the extend, that they
practically considered the use of any name for the Absolute, or the totally
Other, to be a profanization, and thus they had to pay for it with some
compromises: be it that Horkheimer called the totally Other perfect jus-
tice, or that he allowed one of the four names of God in Psalm 91,
Elohim, to be put on his gravestone, or that Adorno named the absolutely
Non-Identical unconditional love (Horkheimer 1988b: chap. 16, 1985a).
Action Instead of Patience
According to Horkheimer, it was a vain hope, that contemporary debates
in the Church would or could make religion once again the vital real-
ity it had been once in its beginning (Horkheimer 1972:129-131, 1985a:
chap. 37). Horkheimer was sure, that good will, solidarity with wretched-
ness and the struggle for alternative Future III a better world had now
thrown o their religious garb once and for all. The attitude of todays
martyrs was no longer patience, but action. The martyrs goal was no
longer their own immortality in the afterlife, but rather the happiness of
the human beings who shall come after them and for whom they knew
how to die. According to Horkheimer, good will, the solidarity with the
innocent victims of history and progress and the struggle for alternative
Future III had migrated from Judaism and Christianity and Islam into
secular historical materialism and its praxis (Benjamin 1977; Horkheimer
1988b: chap. 16). Religious contents had been inverted into a secular
theory and praxis: the critical theory and praxis.
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Resistance
According to Horkheimers Thoughts on Religion of 1935, when the
fascist states in Europe moved to their climax, a purely religious or spir-
itual resistance against the authoritarian and totalitarian state became
just a wheel in its machine (Horkheimer 1981a:109-121, 131-136, 145-
155, 1981b, 1988b: chap. 16, 1988c, 1985; Schmidt and Altwicker 1986).
True discipleship, so Horkheimer argued, to which many Christians may
once again be called in fascist Germany and Europe, did nevertheless
not lead men back to traditional genuine religion again (Horkheimer
1972:129-131, 1988c: chap. 2, 1985a: chap. 37). However, for Horkheimer
that image of perfect justice, the spreading of which would neither bring
power or respect in civil society and in its political state or in the Beyond
and which was accompanied by a growing awareness of its own vanity,
may nevertheless be more attractive to disillusioned believers like he him-
self and like his colleagues in the Institute for Social Research in New
York than the empty self-satisfaction which religion in the 19th and early
20th centuries either did not see within itself or else tolerated as well
intentioned. Obviously, the image of perfect justice was part of that
semantic material and potential which not only Adorno and Benjamin,
but also Horkheimer was willing to rescue from the depth of the mythos
and to let migrate into the critical theory of society: in terms of what
they had started to call inverse theology (Horkheimer 1988b:16; Adorno
1970b:103-125; Bolz and Reijen 1996:145).
From Religious to Secular Discipleship
As a matter of fact, Benjamin as well as Adorno was deeply engaged in
that secular, but nevertheless true discipleship, the prototype of which
was still in the context of salvation history the Jewish Imitatio Dei and
the Christian Imitatio Christi, and the task of which was the spreading of
the image of perfect justice and unconditional love, and which still would
not bring power or respect in antagonistic civil society and in its polit-
ical state, and which in the 20th century was accompanied by a grow-
ing awareness of its own vanity in the face of the fast arriving alternative
Future I the totally reied, bureaucratized signal society (Horkheimer
1972:129-131, 1985a; Benjamin 1977: chap. 10-11; Bolz and Reijen 1996;
Witte 1985; Schweppenhauser 1996; Scheible 1989; Friedeburg and
Habermas 1999:1-21; Steinert 1989; Flechtheim 1970:152-160). The more
critical Benjamin or Adorno became during the 20th century, the less
academic awards, grants, or titles they received from German, or American,
CS 31,1-2brill_f7_56-113 1/26/05 11:11 AM Page 100
or French, or any other civil society and state and the larger their police
les became. Certainly, Benjamins academic carrier was full of disap-
pointments and suerings. I remember the critical theorist Ludwig von
Friedeburg telling me in Adornos former oce in the Institute for Social
Research in Frankfurt a few years ago with greatest amazement: What
do you think Adorno never received an academic award in his whole
life! How could von Friedeburg expect anything else? Not for nothing
Horkheimer often compared in the last years of his life particularly
during the student movement the critical theorists with the initiators
of Christianity who had likewise been misunderstood. In any case, the
critique of late capitalist society out of the longing and the hope for the
totally Other has obviously its high price (Adorno 1997h:354-372, 578-
587; Horkheimer 1985a, 1972:129-131). Discipleship religious or sec-
ular is costly.
The Theological
For the critical theorists in this longing for the entirely Other the God-
hypostases of the past world religions and philosophies were con-
cretely superseded ( Hegel 1986m:64-88, 1986o:123-131, 1985a:37;
1972:129-131, 1985a: chap. 37). The notion of the totally Other not only
negated critically but also preserved, elevated, and fullled not only the
notion of the Innite or Innity, but also Thing-in-itself, the Absolute,
the Unconditional, the Ultimate, the Transcendent, the Truth, the Eternity,
the Beauty, the Summum Bonum, the Divine, the Idea, Reason, Providence,
Wisdom,, shortly the Theological, in terms of the Non-Identical, the
absolutely New, the totally Other (Hegel 1986k:19-29; Horkheimer 1970:7,
40, 46-47; 1985a). In 1970, Horkheimer could no longer remember
exactly, who had used the notion of the totally Other rst: he or Adorno
( Horkheimer 1985a:345-414). In 1971, two years before his death,
Horkheimer was certain that the notion of the totally Other stemmed
from Adorno and not from himself (Horkheimer 1985a:415-434). That
totally Other precisely was the very content of the inverse theology which
Benjamin and Adorno had initiated explicitly on the Island of Ibiza and
which Horkheimer accepted implicitely (Adorno 1970b:103-161). It does
not really matter who formed rst the notion of the inverse theology,
Adorno or Benjamin, or who articulated rst the concept of the long-
ing for the totally Other, Horkheimer or Adorno. Decisive is alone, that
all three critical theorists shared explicitly or implicitly the notion of the
inverse theology of the entirely Other and that it permeated their dierent
versions of the critical theory of society.
The Longing for the Totally Other 101
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102 Siebert
Productive Forces
In his essay Thoughts on Religion, Horkheimer was of the rm con-
viction, that human kind was in the process of losing religion as it moved
through history (Horkheimer 1988b: chap. 16). But that loss, so Horkheimer
was certain, left its mark behind. According to Horkheimer, part of the
drives and desires which religious belief had preserved and kept alive
were detached from the inhibiting religious form and became produc-
tive forces in social practice toward alternative Future III the realm
of freedom, the freedom of All rather than only the freedom of the One
or the Few (Adorno 2001:7-372; Hegel 1986k:29-33). In this process, so
Horkheimer argued, even the immoderation characteristic of shattered
religious illusions acquired a positive form and was truly transformed. In
Horkheimers critical-theoretical perspective, in a really free mind the
concept of Innity which entered world history only through the Jewish
and Christian prophets was preserved in an awareness of the nality
of human life and of the inalterable aloneness of human beings (Horkheimer
1988b: chap. 16; Adorno 1998:91-93, 106-156). The notion of Innity
kept modern civil society from indulging in a feeble-minded optimism:
in an ination of its own knowledge into a new religion. Obviously,
Horkheimer did not only want to allow the image of perfect justice but
also the notion of the Innite to migrate from Judaism and Christianity
into the secular critical theory of society in the form of an inverse the-
ology and through it into a political praxis which could successfully resist
the always new waves of rebarbarization and prepare the way to alter-
native Future III a society in which in Brechts and Habermass words
the reconciliation of personal autonomy and universal solidarity could
be accomplished and a friendly and helpful living together be made pos-
sible (Horkheimer 1988b: chap. 16; Adorno 1970b:103-161; Horkheimer
1985a: chap. 37, 40, 1970:9-90; Brecht 1957; Habermas 1986; Flechtheim
1970:152-160). This inverse theology was also a negative one in so far
as the Innite could not be imagined or named: not even as perfect jus-
tice or unconditional love (Horkheimer 1985b:483-492, 1985a: chap. 37;
Horkheimer and Adorno 1972:23-25). Later on, Horkheimer and Adorno
spoke carefully instead of the concept of Innity rather of the notion of
the totally Other: or better still, of the longing or of the hope for the
entirely Other or even of the fear that such Otherness may exist as lit-
tle as the religious notions of Heaven, Eternity, or Beauty had done
before (Horkheimer 1970:7-53, 1985a; Habermas 1991: part III).
CS 31,1-2brill_f7_56-113 1/26/05 11:11 AM Page 102
The Standpoint of Messianic Redemption
Adorno stated at the end of his book Minima Moralia of 1951, which he
dedicated as a sign of gratitude and as a promise to his friend Horkheimer
and which dealt with the damaged life people lived in globalized late
capitalist society, that philosophy, as it alone could still be done respon-
sibly in the face of the universal despair, would be the attempt to con-
sider all things in such a way as they represented themselves from the
standpoint of Messianic redemption: i.e., from the standpoint of the totally
Other (Benjamin 1977; Adorno 1980:333-334; Horkheimer 1985a). Adorno
was convinced that knowledge had no light than that which was shin-
ing from the redemption on the world. Everything else exhausted itself
in reconstruction and thus remained a piece of positivistic technique.
According to Adorno, perspectives would have to be established in which
the world would behave in a similar way as it will lay there some day as
needy and distorted in the Messianic light. Such perspectives had to be
gained without arbitrariness and force: completely out of being in touch
micrologically with the natural and social objects themselves. For Adorno
that alone was what counted for genuine human thinking, and living,
and acting.
The Appearance or Non-Appearance of the Messiah
According to Adorno, to establish such perspectives was on one hand a
most simple procedure because the condition of the antagonistic totality
of civil society called for and demanded irrefutably such kind of knowl-
edge (Adorno 1980:333-334). Furthermore, the completed contradictori-
ness and negativity of bourgeois society, once taken fully into view, shut
together into the mirror-script of its opposite: alternative Future III
the right, the free and reconciled society (Hegel 1986g:339-397; Horkheimer
1985a; Adorno 1980:333-334; Flechtheim 1970:152-160). However, for
Adorno the establishment of those perspectives was also the completely
impossible, because it presupposed a standpoint which was removed from
the spell, the magic circle, of existence: even if it was only a tiny little
bit (Steinert 1989; Schweppenhauser 1996:1-8; Adorno 1980:333-334).
To the contrary, Adorno was fully aware of the fact that every possible
knowledge had rst of all to be struggled away from what was the case
in civil society, in order to work out in a binding manner. Furthermore,
precisely therefore every possible knowledge was beaten by and stricken
with the same distortion and disgurement and neediness and want,
which it intended and planned to escape. The more passionately, so
The Longing for the Totally Other 103
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104 Siebert
Adorno argued, the thought sealed itself o from its being conditioned
for the sake of the Unconditional, the totally Other, the more uncon-
sciously and thereby the more fatefully it fell victim to the antagonistic
world. The thought had even still to comprehend its own impossibility
for the sake of the possibility. In relation to the demand which was
thereby directed toward thought the question concerning the reality or the
unreality of the Messianic redemption, the appearance or non-appearance
of the Messiah, was itself almost a matter of indierence: almost, not
completely (Adorno 1980; 334; Benjamin 1977). Once for the old Jews
every second in time had been the small gate, through which the Messiah
could enter (Benjamin 1977; Adorno 1980:333-334). The Messiah would
interrupt the sameness and the identity pressure of the horrible histori-
cal continuum of force and counterforce, crime and punishment, guilt and
atonement, reformation and counterreformation, revolution and coun-
terrevolution. The Messiah would break the law of the talion: the law
of retaliation (Exod. 21:18-36; Levit. 19:11-18; Matt. 5:38-42). The Jewish
mystics already thought that men had to do the work of redemption all
by themselves. If the Messiah would still come, he would only put his
signature underneath it. The secular enlighteners went further and thought,
that if the Messiah would not do more than merely putting his signa-
ture underneath the redemptive work done by men already, then they
may very well do the whole thing without the Messiah. But then there
occurred the dialectic of enlightenment and the moral catastrophe of fas-
cist anti-Semitism and the fraud of mass culture in civil society as described
most ingeniously by Horkheimer and Adorno (Horkheimer and Adorno
1969: chap. 1-5; Benjamin 1978). Enlightenment came to its limits. The
dialectic of enlightenment still continues in late capitalist society today.
In any case, the longing and the hope for the radically non-identical
Other, which drove the thought and praxis of the critical theorists as
enlighteners under and against the identity principle of uncivil civil soci-
ety throughout the 20th century, tolerated no reication of its Otherness
and thus no forgetfulness: certainly they agreed with Baal Shem Tovs
motto, that
Forgetfulness leads to exile, while remembrance is the secret of redemption.
(Adorno 1980: parts 1-3; Horkheimer 1985a; Siebert 1989:xi)
CS 31,1-2brill_f7_56-113 1/26/05 11:11 AM Page 104
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