Theodor W. Adorno’s Critical Theory of Society

philosophy  11. September 2018  1  Harald Sack

On September 11, 1903, German philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno was born. Adorno is known for his critical theory of society. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Freud, Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. He is widely regarded as one of the foremost thinkers on aesthetics and philosophy in the 20th century.

“Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
— Theodor W. Adorno, Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft [Cultural Criticism and Society] (1951)

Youth and First Philosophic Studies

Adorno was born in 1903 in Frankfurt as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund. He was the only child of the wine wholesaler Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870-1946) and the singer Maria Calvelli-Adorno (1865-1952). After skipping two classes, the “privileged high-flyer” passed the Abitur at the age of 17 in 1921 at the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Gymnasium (today Freiherr-vom-Stein-Schule) in Frankfurt as the best pupil in his class. He was trained in philosophy by his 14 years older friend Siegfried Kracauer, whom he had met at a friend of his parents. Kracauer was an important feature editor for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Together they regularly read Immanuel Kant‘s Critique of Pure Reason on Saturday afternoons over the years, an experience that, according to Adorno’s self-testimony, was formative for him.[1]

University Studies in Frankfurt and Vienna

From 1921 he studied philosophy, musicology, psychology and sociology at the University of Frankfurt; at the same time he began his career as a music critic. He heard philosophy from Hans Cornelius, sociology from Gottfried Salomon-Delatour and Franz Oppenheimer. In 1922 he met Max Horkheimer in a seminar at the university, with whom he shared theoretical views and made friends. He also maintained a close and lasting friendship with Walter Benjamin, whom he had met as a student through Kracauer’s mediation. At the end of 1924 he completed his dissertation on Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology with summa cum laude.[2]

In March 1925 Adorno moved to Vienna, the birthplace of twelve-tone music.  He began postgraduate studies in composition with Alban Berg, Arnold Schönberg‘s pupil, and simultaneously took piano lessons with Eduard Steuermann. Later (1949), he praised Schönberg’s twelve-tone compositions in the Philosophy of New Music. For Adorno, the years of his stay in Vienna were the most intense in terms of composition. Among his compositions, a series of piano song cycles make up the most extensive and weighty part. He also wrote orchestral pieces, chamber music for strings and a cappella choirs and arranged French folk songs.

Music Publishing and Composing in Frankfurt

Back in Frankfurt, he devoted himself to music publishing and composing. Adorno also began work on a habilitation thesis. He processed the results of an extensive study of psychoanalysis in an extensive philosophical-psychological treatise entitled Concept of the Unconscious in Transcendental Psychology, which he presented to his doctoral supervisor Cornelius. After the latter had expressed reservations, which his assistant Horkheimer joined, Adorno withdrew his habilitation application in 1928. Cornelius had complained that the work was too little original and paraphrased his own, Cornelius’ thinking.

Successful Habilitation on Kierkegaard

The years 1928-1930 were years of professional uncertainty for Adorno. He tried in vain to find a permanent position as a music critic for Ullstein in Berlin. Adorno also concentrated on writing a second habilitation thesis. He had accepted the offer of the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, newly appointed to a philosophical chair in 1929, to habilitate with him. After writing down the work on the Danish existential philosopher and Hegel critic Kierkegaard within a year, he submitted it under the title Kierkegaard – Construction of the Aesthetic and was thus habilitated at Frankfurt University in February 1931.

After Adorno had been awarded the Venia legendi, he gave his inaugural lecture as a private lecturer in philosophy in May 1931; its title: “The topicality of philosophy“, which contained many thoughts that went into his later complete works. Before his emigration to the USA, Adorno was not yet one of the official collaborators of the Institute for Social Research, but he already published the essay Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik (On the social situation of music) in the first issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung published by Horkheimer since 1932. In it, he critically examined the production and consumption of music in contemporary capitalist society.

Emigration to Oxford

Adorno’s teaching activities ended in the winter semester of 1933, when the National Socialist regime withdrew his authority to teach academically from his father’s side because of his Jewish ancestry. Like many other intellectuals of his time, he did not expect the new regime to last long and, in retrospect, admitted that he had completely misjudged the political situation in 1933. He went to Great Britain, retaining his officially registered residence in Frankfurt, where, although he was already a German philosophy lecturer, he was accepted only as an advanced student in philosophy at Merton College in Oxford. He planned to earn a Ph.D. with a thesis on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl.

Adorno used the Oxford years not only for his Husserl studies. He wrote a critical treatise on Karl Mannheim‘s sociology of knowledge and articles on music theory for the Viennese music journal 23, which was committed to the avant-garde, as well as the essay Über Jazz, which appeared in 1936 in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung under the pseudonym Hektor Rottweiler and caused the most fierce reactions even after Adorno’s death. During this time Adorno maintained an intensive exchange of letters with Max Horkheimer, who was already living in American exile, whom he had met in Paris in December 1935 and visited in New York for two weeks in June 1937. Horkheimer finally made him an offer to take up a scientific activity in the USA that would secure his existence and to become an official member of his Institute for Social Research.

“Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.”
— Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951)

Emigration to the U.S.

Following Horkheimer’s invitation, Adorno and his wife moved to the USA in February 1938 and thus emigrated from Nazi Germany. Upon his arrival, Adorno joined the Princeton Radio Research Project, a major research project led by the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. At the beginning of 1942 Adorno and Horkheimer began to work on the book, which would later bear the title Dialectic of the Enlightenment. With the help of Adorno’s wife Gretel, the main work of Critical Theory was created as a joint effort of the two. It was first published in 1944 by the New York Institute of Social Research in the production process of mimeography under the title Philosophische Fragmente (Philosophical Fragments) and was published in its final form in 1947 by Querido Verlag in Amsterdam.

During these years he also collaborated with Thomas Mann, who for his novel Doctor Faustus received numerous suggestions from Adorno’s manuscript on the philosophy of new music, especially from the first part on Schönberg.[3] After the manuscript of the Dialectic Book – initially titled Philosophical Fragments – had been completed at the beginning of 1944, Adorno entered the large-scale research project on anti-Semitism jointly conducted by the University of Berkeley and the Institute of Social Research. His last position in the USA was as research director of the Hacker Psychiatric Foundation in October 1952, where he conducted content analysis studies on newspaper horoscopes and television series. After getting into conflict with the aggression researcher Friedrich Hacker, he resigned his position and returned to Germany in August 1953.

“Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.”
— Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment] (1944)

Back in Frankfurt

According to Adorno, his motivation to return to Germany was subjectively determined by homesickness and objectively by language. He was dependent on the German language, which for him had a “special relationship to philosophy“. He had returned to Frankfurt as a scientist in order to follow up his private lectureship in philosophy at his home university, which he had withdrawn in 1933. Adorno was jointly responsible for the reopening of the Institute for Social Research in the new building in 1951 as deputy director from the very beginning. The Institute was the first academic institution to enable sociology studies in post-war Germany.

After Horkheimer’s retreat to Montagnola in Switzerland, the main work rested on Adorno’s shoulders. In 1958 he officially took over the management of the institute. The scientific productivity that Adorno had developed in the USA in the field of social research contributed to his recognition in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s as one of the most important representatives of German sociology. In addition to his work as a university lecturer and director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Adorno has written important philosophical writings.  As early as 1951, the collection of aphorisms: Minima Moralia, which he had dedicated to Max Horkheimer and which had been brought back from emigration and expanded, had appeared.

Later Life and the 1968 Student’s Protest

The last years of Adorno’s life have been marked by conflicts with his students. It was Adorno’s students who represented the spirit of revolt and tried to draw “practical consequences” from critical theory. Adorno’s lectures were repeatedly blown up by student activists, a particularly spectacular action was in April 1969, when Hannah Weitemeier and two other students pressed Adorno on the podium with bare breasts and sprinkled him with rose and tulip blossoms.

“When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.”
— Theodor W. Adorno, quoted in The Dialectical Imagination : A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research (1973)

In 1969 Adorno was forced to stop his lectures. On 31 January, when students had invaded the Institute for Social Research in order to categorically impose an immediate discussion on the political situation, the directors of the Institute – Adorno and Ludwig von Friedeburg – called the police and reported the occupiers. Adorno, who had always been an opponent of the police and surveillance state, suffered from this breach of his self-image. In the summer of 1969, weary from these activities, Adorno returned once again to Zermatt, Switzerland, at the foot of Matterhorn to restore his strength. On August 6, 1969 Theodor W. Adorno died of a heart attack at age 65.

References and Further Reading:

• [1] Immanuel Kant – Philosopher of the Enlightenment, SciHi Blog
• [2] Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology, SciHi Blog
• [3] Thomas Mann and the illustrious Mann Family, SciHi Blog
• [4] “Theodor Adorno”. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• [5] The Adorno Reference Archive at Marxists.org
• [6] Theodor W. Adorno at Wikidata
• [7] Timeline for Theodor W. Adorno, via Wikidata

 aesthetics, Ernst Bloch, Frankfurt School, Germany, Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, sociology, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin

 

Theodor W. Adorno: An Introduction (Part 1)

 Merlin CCC December 30, 2018News & Research

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, and a classically trained pianist and composer.  An only child to Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana (a devout Catholic from Corsica and former professional singer) and Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (an assimilated Jew who had converted to Protestantism and a successful wine-export businessman), his childhood was marked by a love (and wunderkind proficiency) for music and a growing tendency toward intellectual nonconformism.

A founding member of the Frankfurt School and the philosophical style or approach known as critical theory, Adorno’s critiques of modern society (by way of Bloch, Marcuse, and others) significantly impacted Freud, Marx, and Hegel; and, his commitment to music and composition (in conjunction with critical theory) yielded significant contributions in aesthethics and sociology, including studies on authoritarianism and antisemitism that became models for the Institute for Social Research.  

The Culture Industry & the Power of Art

Adorno immigrated to the U.S. in 1937 and was horrified by a culture he thought would descend into fascism and repeat the worst mistakes of the 20th century.  Adorno’s dissatisfaction with American life was ultimately a reaction to a society which he believed was fully dominated by the economic mode of production.

This economic order created a “culture industry” where the form determined and controlled all content. The process of manufacture, reproduction and distribution of culture as an exchange ready commodity was the true content of the culture industry and all the professed content was merely a set of interchangeable and incidental cliches.

However, contrary to what he saw as a vacuous, useless culture in 20th century America, Adorno was an ardent believer in the radical transformative power of art. 

In a recent Philosophy Now article by Justin Kaushall, “Can Art Fight Fascism?”, Adorno’s aesthetic theory is explored. How can art change transform us and change how we think?  How can it reveal injustices in a system and produce political change?  For Adorno, art does this not by making explicit political statements but, rather, by transcending the ideology of mass culture and opening up space for new ways of thinking.  In a nutshell, art: protests, challenges, opens, inspires, abides.

To understand Adorno’s critique of American art and culture it is useful to first look to his critique of western philosophy.  

Adorno’s Critique of Western Philosophy & the Enlightenment

In Dialectic of Enlightenment (written with Max Horkheimer) Adorno argues that the horrors of the twentieth century were not a bug in the liberal system, but a rational end. As they write in the opening paragraph: “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.” If the ideas of the enlightenment took hold across Europe why did Europe descend into fascism and violence?

Adorno argues against (a) commonsensical notions of history as a progressive process where the enlightenment overturns superstition and barbarism in favor of rational humanism, and (b) the marxist dialectical history which is concerned with the synthesis of opposing concepts and historical periods — in this case antiquity, myth, and religion vs. modernity, reason and science.

For Adorno, they cannot be easily separated as opposites and in retrospect (he claims) one can see the naturalistic and mythological contained within the enlightenment: “In the enlightened world, mythology has entered into the profane…Under the title of brute facts, the social injustice from which they proceed is now as assuredly sacred a preserve as the medicine man was sacrosanct by reason of protection of his gods.” In other words, Adorno maintains that choices about how we organize society and distribute resources which arise from contingent political conditions, are imagined as neutral and universal facts through the application of science and rationality.

This mistake is not so much a corruption of the enlightenment from without as it is an internal tendency. Adorno characterizes the enlightenment project (as it has developed throughout history) as one which loses its ability to self reflect and dismisses critique as superstition.

For Adorno and Horkheimer the enlightenment lost its relationship to Truth (a metaphysical and thus “irrational” category) and instead became a process which is defined only by its methodology irrespective of its ends.

They write: “Knowledge consists of subsumption under principles. Any other than systematically directed thinking is unoriented (sic) or authoritarian. Reason contributes only the idea of systematic unity, the formal elements of fixed conceptual coherence. Every substantial goal which men might adduce as an alleged rational insight is, in the strict Enlightenment sense, delusion, lies, or ‘rationalization’.” So the process of unifying the particular and the general, the facts and the principle, displaces the need for any moral or metaphysical consideration, any goal behind the reasoning.

Ultimately, Adorno believed the formal style of the enlightenment outlived its purpose; the technique of deriving conclusions from axioms survived while the goal of improving society and the interior lives of humans was replaced by purely economic and political motives. Unlike earlier, ethical motivations behind reasoning, these economic goals are treated as natural – a universal feature of the world, not a result of social relations.

To condense these into a more succinct form:

1. Myth contains elements of enlightenment; enlightenment contains elements of myth.
2. The enlightenment (as its is applied by historical capitalism) mythologizes social relations which arise out of human desires or needs into mere natural facts. This obfuscates the historical conditions from which “facts” arise.
3. The dominant form of scientific rationalism central to capitalist society cannot self reflect so forms of domination are mistaken for natural, unchanging principles.

In contemporary society rationalism has turned irrational – the technological and scientific refinement of how we do what we do has obscured why we do what we do. The enlightenment must regain its powers of self reflection to see why the rational forces of technology and markets meant to liberate us from fear and superstition have instead led to global catastrophe and cultural decline.

An Important Caveat: Industrial Capitalism

Before moving on to how this phenomenon manifests in popular culture, it is important to make note of an important caveat about Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory.

Their criticism of the enlightenment is a criticism of philosophy under industrial capitalism; the irrational turn of the enlightenment is not a necessary feature but a historical development. They are, in fact, great admirers of enlightenment thought: “We are wholly convinced – and therein lies our petitio principii – that social freedom is inseparable from enlightenment thought… [however,] If consideration of the destructive aspect of progress is left to its enemies, blindly pragmatized, thought loses its transcending quality and, its relation to truth.”

Adorno and Horkheimer are most definitely not advocating a return to the past, nor do they romanticize the premodern world. This is why they apply their dialectical method of myth and enlightenment containing each other – ancient ways of understanding contained useful reflections on meaning, truth, and morality which contemporary society appears to lack, while the enlightenment contained the ability to turn matters of historical contingency or human relations into matters of fate.

Hence, to “save” the enlightenment from “blind pragmatism” we must rediscover self-reflection and critically examine what reason can accomplish and how it functions in contemporary society.

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**NOTE:  This article was authored by Merlin volunteer and scholar Jonathan Drake.  Stay tuned for more articles by him on the philosophical contributions of Theodor W. Adorno.**

MARXISM AND THE GOD QUESTION: PERSPECTIVES FROM THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

By Rob Clements
July 22, 2013

In the contemporary theological and political order, the Frankfurt school of critical theory receives scant attention.1 This is unfortunate as it provides useful tools for the critique of religion and a useful framework to explore the possible dynamics between religious and so-called progressive social movements. Since the 1960s the school, or the institute as it is sometimes referred, has taken a turn toward issues of language and culture, most notably in the work of Jürgen Habermas. In its most prolific phase, from the 1930s to the 1950s, the school consisted mainly of dissident Marxists who believed that orthodox Marxist theory could not adequately explain the turbulent development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century, particularly with regard to the rise of fascism as a working-class movement. This led many of these dissident Marxists to take up the task of reappropriating Marxism in light of conditions that Karl Marx himself had never considered. The school has a clear genealogy, appropriating elements of Marxist materialism, Hegelian philosophy, German idealism, Gestalt psychology, and atheistic Jewish Messianism.2 This synthesized analysis gave expression to a transdisciplinary, anticapitalist intellectual tradition with both immanent (material) and transcendent (metaphysical or spiritual) themes.

In this essay I focus on the literature of the Frankfurt school, with attention to Marx and the neo-Marxist scholars Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Block. Through a theological examination of these contributors, I will show that religion and Marxism are not antithetical but that both draw upon a common ground in the struggle against totalizing forms of capitalist power which leave the vast majority of the world’s population in misery. Both Marxism and Christianity have at their center a prophetic messianism, which is the belief in social transformation through action or event. Both share a belief in an alternative future whereby every tear will be wiped away and justice and equality will be achieved. By bringing the two together, I suggest that they may collaborate in serving those who experience the tyranny of advanced capitalist most severely.

Marx: A Re-examination of the Opium of the People

Orthodox Marxists have tended to dismiss religion, extracting a militant atheism from Marx’s writing.3 In contrast, a number of commentators have located Marx within a messianic tradition or within the utopian projects associated with the Judeo-Christian West. Such writers tend to be drawn to the dense and varied set of references and allusions to religious texts in Marx’s writings. Sympathetic Christian scholars have tended to soften Marx’s critique of religion by acknowledging his rejection of Christianity as an assault on the fetishism of religion and its use by elites rather than religion itself.

The premise of a Marxian analysis of religion is the oft-quoted “opium of the people.” However, what does it mean to equate opium with religion? A popularist reading drifts toward literalism, whereby opium is the drug that numbs pain, distorts reality, and provides an artificial source of solace. In that sense, one may conclude that religion functions as a panacea, an alter-reality construed by ruling elites to dull the people’s critical and revolutionary capacity. But such a reading is inconsistent with Marx’s intent. As the sociologist Andrew McKinnon suggests, this interpretation of the metaphor is inaccurate, missing the different and contradictory ways in which opium was understood in the nineteenth century. A historical analysis thus encourages us to “encounter the text dialectically, including the dialectic text that is the heart and spirit of Marx’s analysis of religion.”4

McKinnon argues that in the middle of the nineteenth century opium was largely used medicinally by Europeans and was considered an unquestioned good. Toward the end of the century, its medicinal use had been largely supplanted by other medicines, and it was becoming increasingly demonized by moral puritans. Furthermore, its use was becoming increasingly “luxurious” and commodified (and therefore profitable). Opposition to opium grew, especially from the “public health” and “temperance” movements.5 It was between these two eras that Marx penned opium as his metaphor for religion, a usage that McKinnon describes as “an ambiguous, multi-dimensional, and contradictory metaphor, expressing both the earlier and later understandings of the fruit of the poppy.”6 Several connotations, then, would have been relevant at the time: medicine, a source of profit, and a source of utopian vision. For the purposes of this essay, the image of religion as a utopian vision is of particular interest.

Marx’s critique of religion owes an intellectual debt to Ludwig Feuerbach,7 yet his conclusions are very different. Whereas Feuerbach presents religion as the abstract projection of human needs and desires onto the universe, Marx roots religion in the political and the economic or, more significantly, in a material dialectic. Marx’s analysis reads as follows:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The transcendence [Aufhebung] of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To demand to give up their illusions of their condition is a demand to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore the germ of the criticism of the valley of tears whose halo is religion. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chains, not so that man may throw away the chains without any imagination or comfort, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.8

The word aufheben is often translated to mean “abolish,” but McKinnon suggests that “transcend” or “supersede” are more useful renderings. Marx uses the same word with regard to philosophy: “Philosophy cannot realize itself without transcending (aufhebund) the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend (aufheben) without realizing philosophy.”9 Marx is aware that religion, in being both an expression and a protest, points to both material oppression and the possibilities of otherness. Revisiting the opium metaphor in this context suggests the ways in which religion may point toward utopian society. Although Marx moved away from words like utopia in his later work, he uses the idea of a utopian dream in a positive sense in Towards a Critique. That is not to say that Marx does not see religion as an illusion; rather, he argues that religion may be the imagination that opens other possibilities, a dialectical overcoming whereby the promise of happiness becomes actualized. The creation of this “real happiness” is to “break the chains and pluck the living flower,” which given the context, McKinnon notes, is clearly a reference to opium poppy.10

Several theorists in the Frankfurt school later pick up on this theme. The political philosopher and sociologist Max Horkheimer, for example, suggested the following:

The concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those to which society gives expression to their operation. . . . Religion is the record of the wishes, desires and accusations of countless generations.11

Building on this utopian dream, a number of critical theorists of the Frankfurt school have explored various forms of mysticism or spirituality within a Marxist framework. Such perspectives lend authority to the possibility of a progressive Marxist conception of spirituality. As Erich Fromm notes, Marx’s socialism “is essentially prophetic Messianism in the language of the nineteenth century.”12 Prophetic messianism became a significant theme within the Frankfurt school, particularly after the Second World War. This theme still offers a conceptual map for emancipation in today’s social movements, as it facilitates common ground between the transformative aspirations of religion and Marxism.

Horkheimer: The “Yearning” for the Wholly Other

As director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research during the Frankfurt school’s most influential and prolific phase (1930 to 1958), Horkheimer is often recognized as the creator of critical theory. Protests against human suffering and social injustice, coupled with a “longing for another world,” became permanent themes through his leadership. Perhaps more than any other member of the school, the line between Horkheimer’s Jewish heritage and theoretical work is frequently blurred. As Zoltan Tar notes, in such a way as to invoke Marx’s critique, “[Horkheimer’s] Jewish haute bourgeois background was the source of both his protest and his longing.”13 Redemption, one of the central categories in Judaic thought, thus becomes an important theme for Horkheimer, and the language used in critical theory becomes saturated with biblical terminology such as truth, falsehood, salvation [Erlosung], suffering [Leid], compassion [Mitleid], and reconciliation [Versohnung].

In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and his Frankfurt colleague Theodor W. Adorno set out to answer “Why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.”14 By 1939, the possibility of a capitalist society changing into a socialist society by means of the proletariat alone had been unmasked as an illusion. Horkheimer hoped for an emancipatory notion of enlightenment, but his concern was that enlightenment had become no more than dominant positivism and instrumental reason. He believed that a dialectical critique of enlightenment showed that the championed tide of progress contained within itself the kernel of its opposite, that being regression. Enlightenment had brought domination, bureaucratic totalization, the commodification of thought and language, and the tyranny of instrumentalism. The growth of economic productivity had turned man against man and, furthermore, man against nature (the ultimate form of instrumental control). This had been done within the “myth” of enlightenment, whereby reason had lost its intrinsic nature, and its worth had come to be determined only by its operational value. An activity had come to be considered reasonable only if it served another purpose, if it served as a mode of reification, which turns all human activities into commodities.

During the final years of his life, Horkheimer moved toward theology. Being cognizant of the importance of faith for the future of the world, he argued in a 1970 interview that the liquidation of religion by the enlightenment parallels the disappearance of meaning, and that the “death of God” entails the loss of absolute truth. In a subsequent interview he stated: “I do not believe there is any philosophy, that I could accept which does not include a theological element.”15 In both interviews Horkheimer refers to religion and social transformation as the yearning for the wholly other. Although his critique of ideology is particularly interested in the immanent, his later analysis becomes increasingly preoccupied with transcendence.

Horkheimer was conscious of the elimination of transcendence and idealism in Western thought. The near annihilation of the Jewish sense of otherness led him to a more positive evaluation of the metaphysical and theological movements that uphold the concept of transcendence, without which, he suggested, enlightenment thought decays into ideology and oppression. Therefore, the socio-philosophical importance of religion lies in its appeal to the transcendent, to the wholly other. Such a notion is reminiscent of Marx’s idea of religion as a utopian dream, which points toward a vision of a better society. For Horkheimer, this has a number of effects.

Firstly, it constitutes a critique of ideology. Although Horkheimer’s critique of ideology focuses on what is immanent, he introduces the concept of transcendence. Faith in the idea of transcendence is the surpassing of what is immediate. It is the consciousness that the world in appearance is not absolute truth. For Horkheimer theology is “the consciousness that the world is ‘appearance,’ that it is not the truth or ultimate end.”16 Horkheimer is critical of religious movements that replace one oppressive idol with another, yet he proclaims religious transcendence as the critical space of the imagination.

Secondly, the appeal to transcendence forms a praxis for the enactment of a new just society. In Critical Theory, Horkheimer understands philosophy (and theology) not as “other worldly speculation” but as the “struggle towards a sane world.”17 Theology becomes “the expression of humanity’s unappeased longing for justice.”18 Drawing on the biblical metaphors of original sin and reconciliation, he identifies a common interest of humanity in abolishing suffering. The aim of this theological articulation is to provide a new foundation for morality, one where a group of secular parishioners would somehow transform into a community striving for a better existence.

Finally, the longing for the wholly other bridges the relationship between religion and materialism. In a critique of the domination of enlightenment thought, Horkheimer observes: “All these wishes for eternity, and particularly for the entrance of universal justice and goodness, are shared by materialist and religious thinkers, as opposed to the dullness of the positivistic attitude.”19

Benjamin and Bloch: De-secularization, Re-enchantment, and Remembrance

Both Benjamin and Bloch state that Marxism is a secularization of Judeo-Christian messianism. Benjamin wrote that “Marx has secularized the messianic time in the conception of the classless society,” and similarly Bloch notes, “Messianism is the red secret of every revolutionary.”20 Their distinctive contribution is that their theories of secularization are dialectical, in that the sacred and the profane relate through dynamic tension. Although the two were similar in many ways, Bloch stood for the utopian future, whereas Benjamin stood for the redemptive and the anamnestic.

Bloch offered a Marxist sociology of religion. His approach was “to read the Bible with the eyes of the Communist Manifesto.”21 He identified Moses as a precursor to a messiah and as the founder of a religion of opposition. This image was later used in various manifestations of liberation theology. Bloch recognizes the possibility of a socialist utopia in the role of the biblical prophet, a utopia in which oppression and exploitation have been eliminated. Bloch presents his readers with a Marx who took up the scourge with which Jesus chased the moneylenders out of the temple.

Like Marx and Horkheimer, Bloch was committed to the exercise of unmasking ideology. On top of presenting a religious dialectic, he articulated a commitment to a utopian hermeneutic. He built a “redemptive ontology” from the principle of hope, and within this ontology, the role of the critical theorist was the emancipation of the material.22 Bloch is known as the greatest of the utopian philosophers, particularly because of the way he blended historical materialism with anthropological, religious, and existential questions. His belief in and work toward social transformation led critics to judge that Bloch was a prophet, much like Marx and Thomas Münzer.23 Although some later criticized Bloch for tending toward mysticism, he exerted a huge influence on the work of the Frankfurt school, as well as on key liberation theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann.

Benjamin receives similar criticism for tending toward mysticism and utopianism. Although heavily influenced by the messianic radicalism of Bloch and the Jewish mysticism of Gershom Scholem, Benjamin developed a greater interest in history,24 positing that dialectical thinking confronts and reclaims the past. Benjamin saw that memory can function as an appropriation of the past for revolutionary purposes; mythology and allegory give power to memory and create “horizons” where transcendence becomes possible. Allegory also provides a structure for conceptualizing the past, allowing the “shapelessness of material to take an eternally mutable shape within an immutable context.”25 Allegories, stories, and myths thus have the ability to endow the particular with symbolic properties; this makes it possible to transform the meaning of things.

These ideas were formative in the theologian Johann Metz’s conceptualization of anamnestic reasoning, which asserts that the changes and processes of human history, as well as its etiologies, can be traced historically. Anamnestic reasoning is not just the process of historical reflection; rather, it is the memory of suffering. Metz tells of his experiences on the front line of the German army. After wandering all night through destroyed, burning villages and farms, he returned in the morning to his company and found them all dead; “I could see only dead and empty faces, where the day before I had shared childhood fears and youthful laughter. I remember nothing but a wordless cry. Thus I see myself to this very day. . . . What would happen if one took this sort of remembrance not to the psychologist but into the Church?”26

Although the memory of the suffering of others was the leitmotiv of Metz’s theological project, it also proved to be a dominant theme in the Frankfurt school. Marx himself, however, seemed to have little use for memory as a radical tool, mocking earlier revolutions, such as the English and French, for seeking legitimacy in the mantles of their historical predecessors. Christian Lenhardt is highly critical of Marx’s world-historical amnesia, arguing that those who went before us are not “dead wood in the evolution of mankind, primitive stages which had to be overcome, and whose existence had better be forgotten.”27 Benjamin concurs, noting that “under the auspice of democratic socialism, the working class soon forgot what it is to hate and sacrifice oneself. Both hatred and the will to sacrifice are fueled by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of emancipated grandchildren.”28 For Benjamin, remembrance offers a rationale for the revolution, the development of a historic consciousness. As with many of the themes in the Frankfurt school, there would appear to be a fusion between the materialism of Marx and the heritage of Jewish theology. It is in their memories that people become a people, sharing their common stories and solidarities.

Benjamin highlights the intensive and extensive amnesia within modern capitalist society that relegates large parts of its history to the subconscious. Horkheimer and Adorno also support this claim. Adorno states, “Every reification is a forgetting: objects become thing-like at the moment when they are seized without all their elements being contemporaneous, where something of them is forgotten.”29 And Horkheimer and Adorno both note that “all reification is a forgetting.”30 This comes at a cost; not only does the loss of memory exclude the suffering of past generations, it also negates anamnestic solidarity. If reification is forgetting, then it stands that de-reification is remembering.

As Warren Goldstein notes, both Bloch’s and Benjamin’s theories of secularization run simultaneously in two directions; not only do they secularize theology, but they also theologize Marxism. Goldstein writes, “When describing Benjamin’s and Bloch’s theories, one not only needs to think in terms of ‘secularization’ but ‘desecularization,’ not only in terms of ‘disenchantment’ but ‘reenchantment.’”31 Benjamin and Bloch draw on tools rarely appropriated in orthodox philosophies, such as allegory and mythos.

Conclusion

I have shown that there are a number of themes emerging from the Frankfurt school of critical theory that open the path for collaborative opportunities between religious and social movements. Critical theory does not necessarily dismiss religion; rather, it can apply reason to religious claims, exploring dialectical opportunities between the sacred and the secular. By engaging in this kind of dialectic between religion and theory, the thinkers of the Frankfurt school show how Marxism and faith may together help us assess, and eventually overcome, the social inequalities and the contradictions that seem evident in advanced capitalist societies. Through the work of Horkheimer, we can, for example, explore the transformative potential of the yearning for the wholly other. This recalls the biblical vision of the just and transformed society, the New Jerusalem where all pain is banished and wholeness restored. In Benjamin and Block, we see an emergent redemptive ontology and a utopian hermeneutic. This is a prophetic messianism that borrows heavily from a Marxist typology of social transformation, as these thinkers layer their own religious theories on top of a complex reading of Marx’s own analysis, an analysis that refuses to be caricatured.

1. This essay is adapted from work submitted to University College Dublin for the degree of MSc in equality studies; Rob Clements, “Religion, Social Movements, and Critical Theory: Opportunities for Collaborative Social Activism” (MSc dissertation, University College Dublin, 2009).

2. Eduardo Mendieta, The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Figures (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005); and Zoltan Tar, The Frankfurt School: The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1977).

3. See, notably, Nikolia Lenin’s uncompromising attack on “each and every religious organisation” in his essay “On the Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion,” Proletary, May 13 (26), http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/may/13.htm.

4. McKinnon, “Opium as Dialectic of Religion: Metaphor, Expression, and Protest,” in Marx, Critical Theory and Religion, ed. Warren Goldstein (Boston, MA: Brill, 2006), 12.

5. Victoria Berridge and Edward Griffith, Opium and the People (London, UK: Allen Lane, 1980).

6. McKinnon, “Opium as Dialectic of Religion,” 12.

7. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York, NY: Harper, 1957).

8. Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. D. McLellan (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1977), 64.

9. Ibid., 74.

10. McKinnon, “Opium as Dialectic of Religion,” 12.

11. Horkheimer, “Thoughts on Religion,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. by M. O’Connell (New York, NY: Herder and Herder, 1972), 129

12. Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York, NY: Continuum, 1961), 5

13. Tar, The Frankfurt School (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1977), 18.

14. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming (New York, NY: Continuum, 1976), xi.

15. Tom Bottomore, The Frankfurt School (London, UK: Tavistock Publications, 1984), 131 and 131

16. Ibid.

17. Rupert Seibert, “Horkheimer’s Sociology of Religion,” in The Frankfurt School: Critical Assessments, ed. Jay Bernstein (London, UK: Routledge, 1994), 284.

18. Ibid., 283.

19. Horkheimer, “Zu Theodor Haecker,” in The Frankfurt School: Critical Assessments, 290.

20. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften I, trans. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1974), 1231; and Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom, trans. by J. T. Swann (New York, NY: Herder and Herder, 1972), 240.

21. Ibid., 69.

22. Eduardo Mendieta, The Frankfurt School on Religion (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), 12.

23. Eric Bronner, Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1984), 62.

24. Scholem (1897–1982) was a Jewish philosopher widely regarded as the founder of the modern academic study of Kabbalah.

25. Bronner, Of Critical Theory and its Theorists, 133.

26. Metz, A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1998), 1, 2.

27. Ibid., 262.

28. Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. by H. Zohn (New York, NY: Schocken, 1969), 269.

29. Martin Jay, “Anamnestic Totalization: Reflections on Marcuse’s Theory of Remembrance,” Theory and Society 11, no. 1 (1982): 5.

30. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 274.

31. Goldstein, “Messianism and Marxism: Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch’s Dialectical Theories of Secularization,” Critical Sociology 27, no. 2 (2001): 247.

https://theotherjournal.com/issue/22-marxism/

About the Author

Rob Clements
Rob Clements works in Dublin as an ordained deacon of the Church of Ireland. He holds a master of theology from Trinity College Dublin and a master of equality studies from the University College Dublin’s School of Justice. He has worked in drug and alcohol services, community education (in Seattle), and reconciliation and community work (in Belfast).

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2007/04/kabbalistic-kommunism.html