Abstract
The members of the Frankfurt school, though influenced by Marx, are not as hostile as Marx was towards religion. They do not necessarily advocate religious belief or practice, yet they are interested in analyzing these items as an element of culture from an historical and sociological position. Their own orientations, however, are informed by their Jewish backgrounds, and tend towards an idiosyncratic interpretation of Messianism and the utter historical unrealizability of the utopian ideals toward which it aspires.
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Notes
- 1.
Walter Benjamin died, apparently by his own hand, as he was fleeing into exile in Spain. I have left Erich Fromm and Paul Tillich off of this list. Fromm left the Institute in 1939 in disagreement first with Adorno and then with Horkheimer over the status of psychoanalysis. After that point, he made very few references to anyone involved with the Institute. Tillich worked closely with both Horkheimer and Adorno and taught courses with them.
- 2.
“Ideology” is, in its broadest definition, any kind of political ideal that guides political decisions. Often, however, ideologies are philosophical or religious notions masking as political. For example, religious notions of transcendence, which affirm the existence of an afterlife or of a realm above the material world, can be used as political ideologies which can justify a political order to dispense with aid to the lower classes of societies (since their reward will be in the next life).
- 3.
- 4.
With these views on the importance of the inclusion of the mores and insights of past persons, it is thus not too surprising that Benjamin entertained a positive estimation of G.K. Chesterton. He once described Chesterton’s work to Adorno as having “the irresistible music of healthy common sense.” See Adorno and Benjamin (1999: 178). For a good description of Benjamin’s understanding of the way tradition is transmitted, see Arendt (1968: 1ff).
- 5.
For a good discussion of Benjamin’s understanding of this, see Habermas (1985: 138–141).
- 6.
Habermas will claim that Benjamin in this process “rediscovered allegory as the key to knowledge” (Habermas 1985: 33).
- 7.
For Habermas’s remarks on this, see Habermas (1985: 33).
- 8.
It is idiosyncratic, but redolent of much that is valuable. Recently, even Catholic theologians are becoming interested in Benjamin’s work. But theological appropriation is difficult until much of his vocabulary has been clarified. See Wunder (1997: 12).
- 9.
- 10.
For Horkheimer and Adorno, however, the Jews uniquely stand outside of this schema of history. See Seymour (2004: 148). This “idea” of the Jews as standing outside of history contributed to the anti-Semitism that some fascist writers adopted.
- 11.
The widespread growth of new Churches and religious movements in the United States would seem to be an exception to what Horkheimer is proposing here.
- 12.
Thus Horkheimer has a fairly positive assessment of Aquinas himself. He speaks positively of “the combination of acuteness and precision, knowledge and imagination to be found in the Summas.” See Horkheimer (1974a: 37).
- 13.
Thomas reconciled and yet kept the basic autonomies of science and religion in a highly complex fashion. He did such a good job, that for centuries thereafter society gave the clergy the job of administering this “highly developed ideological instrument.” See Horkheimer (1974a: 67).
- 14.
- 15.
For a description of Bloch’s influence on Adorno, see Mendieta (2004: 12).
- 16.
For a good treatment of Adorno’s position on the priority of the object and its ramifications for subjectivity, see O’Connor (2004: Ch. 2).
- 17.
Adorno (2001: 548). When Aquinas addresses the Jews and says that they cannot be saved because they don’t believe in the Son who is the only way to the Father, Adorno responds that this claim is not anti-Semitic as such. But it becomes more so since Aquinas makes few positive references to the relation between the Old and New Testaments.
- 18.
Adorno (1973: 29). But Adorno notes that Kierkegaard’s philosophy of inwardness actually accelerated the downfall of inwardness that was to accompany the bourgeois revolution in Germany (72).
- 19.
Peirce (1839–1914) developed a logic of inquiry based on the fact that all inquiry requires a sign, a speaker, and an interpreter. There is a necessary community of inquiry, then, which is guided by an ideal consensus that remains beyond the immediacy of the interpreters themselves. Mead (1863–1931) stressed the importance of role coordination among all social actors. He argued that one individuates oneself from a prior community of actors formed by coordinated interactions. One becomes self-conscious by taking on the perspectives to others in a performative attitude of a second person point of view. From Peirce, Habermas adopted and modified the notion of an ideal consensus; from Mead he adopted and modified the role of the second person performative perspective as that by which all social actions are guided.
- 20.
See, for example, his comments on Gershom Scholem’s writings on cabalism in Habermas (2001: 31–45).
- 21.
This title is a bit of a misnomer: Habermas is really laying out a close, yet nonetheless tenuous, link between the two.
- 22.
Habermas (1993: 134). Much of my analysis here follows from my article, “Habermas’s “Unconditional Meaning Without God.”
- 23.
For a similar notion of transcendence in a communicative paradigm, see Peukert (1976: 277ff, esp. 284).
- 24.
Probably the theologian who has done most to effect this interface is Edmund Arens. Arens even thinks that certain eschatological issues that Habermas fails to take up, like that of death, are implicitly embedded in his theory and can be appropriated for theological reflection. See Arens (1997: 135).
- 25.
Schopenhauer, in World as Will and Representation, had claimed that only a thoroughgoing negativism can salvage the spirit of the gospels. The life force suffused through the domination of one creature over another in a continuous fight for survival actually reveals, according to Horkheimer, that if one can conceive of “a will that affirms itself in everything finite, that is mirrored in a distorted fashion in multiplicity, and yet that remains at a profound level identical, then everyone has reason to view himself as one with all others.” See Horkheimer Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, 1987: 12).
- 26.
Habermas holds that an interest is an interpreted need, not simply an impulse (whether natural or unnatural). As interpreted, it is cognitive and thus able to be subjected to rational analysis as to whether it is normative or not.
- 27.
This indicates, in fact, a trend in Habermas to make remarks that seem to contract his systematic position that religion and communicative action are incompatible. See, Arens (2005: 383).
- 28.
Horkheimer did not understand materialism in a monolithic sense. He basically divided up materialism into three epochs: in antiquity, the need to develop an interior life in the face of suffering; in the early bourgeois period, the need to develop technology to transform nature; and now in our time the need for social theory to redevelop the structure of society. See Horkheimer (1991: 24).
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Swindal, J. (2011). Critical Theory, Negative Theology, and Transcendence. In: Joy, M. (eds) Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion. Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0059-8_9
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