Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion (3 Volume Set) 9789004184367, 9789004184404, 9789004184428, 9789004184435, 9004184368

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Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion

Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor

David Fasenfest

Wayne State University Editorial Board

Chris Chase-Dunn, University of California-Riverside G. William Domhoff, University of California-Santa Cruz Colette Fagan, Manchester University Martha Gimenez, University of Colorado, Boulder Heidi Gottfried, Wayne State University Karin Gottschall, University of Bremen Bob Jessop, Lancaster University Rhonda Levine, Colgate University Jacqueline O’Reilly, University of Brighton Mary Romero, Arizona State University Chizuko Ueno, University of Tokyo

VOLUME 20

Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion The Wholly Other, Liberation, Happiness and the Rescue of the Hopeless Volume 1

By

Rudolf Siebert

Leiden • Boston 2010

On the cover: “The Machine” (1988) by Diane Thomas Lincoln, Wichita, Kansas, USA. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Siebert, Rudolf J., 1927Manifesto of the critical theory of society and religion : the wholly other, liberation, happiness, and the rescue of the hopeless / By Rudolf Siebert. p. cm. -- (Studies in critical social sciences ; v. 20) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18436-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Religion--Philosophy. 2. Frankfurt school of sociology. I. Title. II. Series. BL51.S52555 2010 261--dc22

ISSN: ISBN: ISBN: ISBN: ISBN:

2010001670

1573-4234 978-90-04-18436-7 (set) 978-90-04-18440-4 (vol. 1) 978-90-04-18442-8 (vol. 2) 978-90-04-18443-5 (vol. 3)

Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. Typeset by chs:p [Leiden, Netherlands]

printed in the netherlands

Visiting: The Rose in the Cross Hello, clean Kalamazoo! Sunny boiling pot on the rolling land of flowing green. Hello, House of Shalom! Yes, yes, this may be seen! Hello, you gentle Master! A heart of gold, a mind of burning fire. Hello, hello! Oh, oh, In a noble mold, a rose in a cross of brown-reddish stone, and longing, longing for her, who went before, alone. Being is one, with joy and grief, a tear, a smile, a laugh. How good it was to be with thee, however brief, how good it was to share delight and grief. (Reimon Bachika, Kobe, Japan, August 11, 2006)

DEDICATION In gratitude to Karen Lynn Shoup-Pilarski for over two decades of light, friendship and love; and for a most loyal and faithful productive and creative cooperation in home and university; and for teaching me what it means not to be enslaved to what is the case, and for showing me the potentiality in it, and how to transcend it in longing and hope for alternative Future III–the reconciled and free society, and for the entirely Other than nature and history.

contents Volume One Acknowledgements ......................................................................................... xi Introduction ................................................................................................... xiii Chapter One.  The Critical Theory of Society ............................................... 1 Chapter Two.  The Neo-Conservative Trend Turn .................................... 57 Chapter Three.  The Three-fold Critical Theory of Religion .................... 97 Chapter Four.  From Quantitative to Qualitative Infinity ...................... 153 Chapter Five.  Theory Formation . ................................................................ 189 Chapter Six.  From Traditional to Critical Theory .................................. 229 Chapter Seven.  Universal Pragmatic ........................................................ 257 Chapter Eight.  Truth and Justification . ...................................................... 287 Chapter Nine.  Toward a New Model . ......................................................... 331 Appendices A. Mottoes, Impulses and Motives . ...................................................... 375 B. Special Considerations and Inspirations ......................................... 390 C. The Five-World Macro Model .......................................................... 414 D. The Fundamental Potentials, Categories, and Spheres of Action . 416 E. Heuristic Model of the History of Religions . ................................. 418 F. Antagonisms of Modern Civil Society and their Resolutions ...... 420 G. Possible Alternative Futures . ............................................................ 423

Volume Two Chapter Ten.  External and Internal Perspective ..................................... Chapter Eleven.  Conscious-making and Rescuing Critique . ............... Chapter Twelve.  Necrophilous and Biophilous Elements . .................... Chapter Thirteen.  From the Jus Talionis to the Golden Rule . .............. Chapter Fourteen.  Religion and Revolution . .......................................... Chapter Fifteen.  Concrete Utopia ............................................................. Chapter Sixteen.  Religion in Socialist Society . .......................................

425 473 509 555 599 643 677

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Chapter Seventeen.  From Magic to the Dialectical Notion . ................. 725 Chapter Eighteen.  Truth as Meaning of Language and Work . ............. 767 Chapter Nineteen.  Religion in Liberal Society . ...................................... 815 Chapter Twenty.  New York: The Capital of Liberalism .......................... 873 Chapter Twenty-One.  Religion in Fascist Society .................................. 959 Chapter Twenty-Two.  The Owl of Minerva . ............................................. 995 Chapter Twenty-Three.  Critical Religion: Against Aggression, Force, Violence, and Terror . ................................................................ 1041

Volume Three Chapter Twenty-Four.  The Jewish-German Tragedy ........................... Chapter Twenty-Five.  From the Westphalian Peace to the Bourgeois and Socialist Revolutions ............................................ Chapter Twenty-Six.  The Expansion and Contraction of God ........... Chapter Twenty-Seven.  The Desperate Hope and the Rescue of the Hopeless . ..................................................................................... Chapter Twenty-Eight.  Trust in the Eternal One . ................................

1111 1183 1243 1319 1385

Epilogue: God, Freedom, and Immortality . ........................................... 1445 References . .................................................................................................. 1577 Name Index ................................................................................................. 1693 Subject Index . ............................................................................................. 1715

acknowledgements I am most grateful to my wife, Margaret Charlotte Siebert, nee Noyes, and our 8 children and 14 grandchildren, to the critical theorists of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, to my colleagues and students in Dubrovnik and Yalta, to President Dr. Diether Haenicke of Western Michigan University, to my colleagues and students at Western Michigan University, to my friend Rev. Professor Dr. Michael Ott, to my friend Karen Lynn Shoup-Pilarski, to the priests and parishioners of St. Thomas More Student Parish at Western Michigan University. Without their continual support throughout the past 5 decades, the critical theory of society and religion could not have come into existence. Their contribution to the evolution of the comparative, dialectical theory of religion is recognized, acknowledged and described in detail in Appendix B. I would like to express my great gratitude to Dr. Walter Dirks, Professor Dr. Hans Küng, Professor Dr.Dr. Johannes B. Metz, Professor Dr. Gregory Baum, Professor Dr. Karl-Heinz Haag, Professor Dr. Helmut Peukert, Professor Dr. Edmund Arens, Professor Dr. Reimon Bachika, Professor Dr. Thomas Lawson, Professor Leo Semashko for most fruitful discourses in Germany, Yugoslavia, Russia, Ukraine, USA, Canada, and Japan throughout the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and into the first decade of the 21st century. Such discourse has become part of the very foundation of the critical theory of religion and its praxis in civil society. The many works of these scholars, registered in the References, give witness to the great influence they had on the development of the comparative, dialectical religiology.

INTRODUCTION This three volume Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion: The Wholly Other, Liberation, Happiness, and the Rescue of the Hopeless is the magnum opus of the life and work of Rudolf J. Siebert, Professor of Religion and Society in the Comparative Religion Department at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan. As such, this work is the manifestation of over 50 years of Siebert’s academic teaching, research, and world-recognized scholarship in the field of the famed Frankfurt School’s critical theory of society. However, this work is much more than just an academic treatise on the subject as it also incorporates and is illustrated by the lived narrative of his and his family members’ experiences, struggles, sufferings and longings for a more reconciled, just, rational, merciful, equitable, moral and peaceful future society in the socio-historical context of modern civil society. In terms of Th. W. Adorno, Siebert gives a “working definition” of the critical theory as a social theory that comprehends modern civil society as an antagonistic social totality based on the non-equivalent exchange process through which the society produces and reproduces itself. From this critical perspective, the resulting antagonisms of modern civil society are the consequences of the capitalistic production and reproduction system wherein the capitalist class systematically appropriates the surplus value/profit that is collectively produced by the working classes. It is this concrete, historical struggle, in both theory and praxis, that seeks in hope and longing to transcend the systemic antagonisms and the resulting dehumanization and barbarity of the modern globalizing neo-liberal/neo-conservative capitalist society for what Siebert has named “alternative Future III”–the reconciled, free, and classless future society and for the entirely Other than both nature and history–that is the beginning, the inherent historical dynamic and purpose of the entire critical theory. As Siebert states, “The critical theory cannot be understood without its historical genesis and context” [p. 5]. As he relates in Chapter 21, in 1942 at the age of 15 while he was a member of the Catholic Youth Movement, a student at the Protestant-humanistic Lessing Gymnasium in Frankfurt

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and just before he was conscripted into the German Luftwaffe to man the anti-aircraft batteries against the allied bombing of German cities, Siebert was introduced to the great Christian idealist and humanist G. W. F. Hegel by the communist Müller as they watched the bombing of Mainz by the British air force. Müller’s brief introduction to the dialectical idealism of the Protestant Hegel to the young Catholic Siebert in the midst of the horror and insanity of war opened the door to his life work of research not only into the works of Hegel but also those of Immanuel Kant and the bourgeois Enlighteners, of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Bertholt Brecht, et al. Yet, these modern critical philosophical, political economic, psychological, and cultural theories are only one facet of the dynamic historical and future-oriented origins of the Critical Theory. As Siebert explains, a critical predecessor to these theories and an essential yet all too often missed dynamic force of the entire critical theory is religion, particularly, the prophetic, Messianic, eschatological/apocalyptic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and their critique of social injustice and class domination in the spirit of and longing for the creation of a more reconciled future society and beyond that, for the history ending advent of the God of the Exodus and of the longed for Messianic future wherein the “wolf will live with the lamb [Isaiah 11]; where weapons of violence, war and death will be transformed into instruments that provide life and happiness [Micah 4]; not for the “Alpha” but for the “Omega” God of a New Creation [Revelation 21]; for the Christian mystics’ “God beyond god”– the ineffable, unimaginable, “totally/wholly Other” [die Sehnsucht nacht dem ganz Anderen–Max Horkheimer/Adorno]. In his explication of this critical theory of society and religion Manifesto, Siebert also incorporates both a biblical scholarship as well as a profound comprehension and command of the works of such theologians, mystics and Christian humanists as Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm of Canterbury, Joachim of Fiore, Meister Eckhart, Jacob Böhme, Thomas Münzer, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Maimonides, the Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem, Walter Dirks, Eugon Kogon, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Rahner, Johannes Baptist Metz, Jürgen Moltmann, Dorothee Sölle, Helmut Peukert, Edmund Arens, et al. As will be seen throughout the 28 chapters of this work, the past theological, philosophical, socio-political, psychological, cultural and everyday life struggles against the forces of exploitation, oppression, fear and death in the hope, longing and commitment for a better future world

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are determinately negated–negated, preserved, and advanced–into the critical theory of society and religion. As Siebert–who is the author of this field of research known as the critical theory of religion–explains, it is this determinate negation of religion that is a fundamental dynamic factor of the entire critical theory. For the critical theorists–Horkheimer, Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, et al.–the religious notions of and longing for the radically transcendent “wholly Other” than either nature or history could and can no longer be expressed in their religious form. For the critical theorists, in terms of the bourgeois, Marxist, and Freudian enlightenment movements, religion per se has become socially irrelevant and obsolete in the face of the increasing “irrational rationality” and horror of modern civil society. Historically, the truthfulness and viability of a religion rises and falls according to its ability to answer the “theodicy” question: How does a religion justify its proclamation of God and of the divine in the midst of the suffering of innocent victims on the “slaughter-bench” of nature and history? As the critical theorist Adorno and many others have expressed, the prophetic religions’ proclamation of God as almighty, all-loving, providentially-liberationally-redemptively involved in the history of the world, who will apocalyptically come “to make the whole creation new” disintegrates at the very name of Auschwitz and all the insanity and horror throughout history that that name symbolizes even to the present, i.e. the hundreds of thousands of innocent victims in war of aggression in Iraq, the torture and murder in the U.S. prisons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the genocide in Darfur, etc. In terms of Jürgen Habermas, there has been and continues to be no divine “counter-movement” to the suffering of the innocent nor to their prayers for redemption, and because of this religion as a practical solution to this horror is deemed obsolete. However, the critical theorists do not follow the either-or methodology of positivism that abstractly negates and thereby discards religion and its expression of the infinite and of transcendence. Rather, in terms of a materialistic inversion of the Hegelian dialectical methodology, the critical theorists determinately negate the mythological form and metaphysical expressions of religion so as to allow religion’s longing for that which is totally Other than the natural world and human history to be expressed concretely in humanity’s cry and longing for transcendence and redemption from the socio-historically and naturally produced destruction to migrate into its own secular critical theory and praxis. Thus, by means of the determinate negation of the pre-modern dialectical tradition of the Jewish and Christian religions as well as of the modern thought of Kant,

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Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, et al., the critical theorists developed a theory of religion that was a dynamic and integral part of the entire project of the critical theory of society. Their dialectical theory of religion presented a new, liberating, and secular reformulation of the form and content of religion, particularly that of the prophetic Judeo-Christian religions, into a modern, secular theory and praxis for the transformation of an increasingly one-dimensional, capitalist class dominated, unjust and oppressive modern society toward a more humane, reasonable, emancipatory future society. In a historical materialistic form, the critical theorists sought the dialectical sublimation of the human, emancipatory content of religion into the secular form of the critical theory (Horkheimer, 1972c, pp. 129-131). As Siebert explains, without the inclusion of this dialectical materialist theory of religion as an essential dynamic element of the entire critical theory, the continued discourse on the critical theory and its goal of human enlightenment and emancipation in a better future society is in danger of being distorted. According to Siebert’s analysis, there are three forms of the one critical theory of religion that is driven by this dialectical method of determinate negation. The first form is that of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s radicalization of the second and third commandments of the Jewish Decalogue in which the totally Other is not to be imaged or named. This is the substance of the critical theory as “idology critique,” whereby nothing finite can be made or identified with the infinite. The second version of the critical theory of religion comes from the work of Adorno and Benjamin in their development of the critical theory in terms of an inverted, cipher theology, which focuses on the suffering of the innocent victims of society and nature and on their cries and longing for redemption and for that which is wholly Other than what is. The third expression comes from the work of Jürgen Habermas and development of his theory of communicative action. Particularly for the first two forms of this theory, the religious wholly Other is materialistically inverted or, in other words, is determinately negated into the concrete expressions or “ciphers” of human longing that loneliness, human abandonment, alienation, injustice, exploitation, violence, terror, torture, murder, wars, etc, will not have the last word in history. As Horkheimer stated, this longing and hope certainly is not a scientific wish. This determinate negation of religion into the critical theory is the dynamic substance of the negative, inverse or cipher theology of the entire critical theory, through which the critical theorists searched for the traces of the lost God, the totally Other, in nature, society, history, cul-

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ture, even into the smallest and seemingly most meaningless expressions, e.g. Adorno’s bus ticket, Benjamin’s trash/rag picker, Kafka’s image of a picture’s negative or black edge indicating that which is “other” or “nonidentical” to the given status quo. As Adorno has stated, it is this inverted, negative, cipher theological perspective that the standpoint of redemption can be produced from which all things can be contemplated and thus, revealed in all its despair and distortion “as it will appear one day in the messianic light.” This inverted theology was something on which, Adorno always insisted and into which he would have happily seen both his and Walter Benjamin’s work dissolve. It is through this dialectical theory of religion that the critical theory as a whole stands in anamnestic, present, and proleptic solidarity and mimesis with the innocent victims of nature and history, particularly that history which has spawned the present day catastrophes of globalizing of neo-liberal and neoconservative capitalism, as it seeks in hope and longing for the revolutionary creation of a more reconciled future society. However, unlike the idealistic dialectics of Hegel and others, which proclaim to know the positive outcome of the struggle to negate nature’s and history’s negativity, the critical theory is driven by a negative dialectics, through which the struggle to negate the negative is not a given, nor is it granted that anything positive will develop out of such negativity. This negative dialectic is rooted in, expressive of, and illustrates the first form of the critical theory of religion–the radicalization of the second and third commandment of the Decalogue. Thus, in terms of this negative dialectic as well as the science of Ossip Flechtheim’s Futurology, for the critical theory of society and religion there are three alternative futures toward which history can develop. As Siebert explains, alternative Future I of the globalization of modern civil society and its antagonisms is the totally administered, cybernetic, instrumentalized, functionalized, computerized, “signal” society, in which human love and hope for that which is other than the dominant status quo is meaningless as people are reduced to being cogs of the established social system. This future expresses the possibility of the antagonisms of modern capitalist society being imperialistically finalized with no alternative to the advantage of the world wide capitalist class and the national power they wield. The social antagonisms of Cultural expressions of this dystopia abound as expressed in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and in more contemporary images of a totally controlled and dehumanized future society in the Matrix and V for Vendetta. However, there are also and there have been far more realistic his-

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torical overtures to this future in the world wars of the 20th century, the so-called Cold War and its various “police actions” conducted in Third world or “peripheral” countries, as well as the development of the system and structures of neoliberal and neoconservative globalization through such policies as the Structural Adjustment Programs/Poverty Reduction Strategy of the International Monetary Fund, the neoconservative preventive war and regime change strategy announced in The National Security Strategy of the United States of America of 2002 of which the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was its first test case, the undermining of the U.S. Bill of Rights and of habeas corpus by the U.S. Patriot Act of 2001. Alternative Future II announces the possible “resolution” of the existing class-dominated, system antagonisms of modernity through the creation of a totally militarized society that aims at and prepares for always new conventional wars or civil wars and finally, at wars with weapons of mass destruction with the consequent ecological and human carnage. Regretfully, preparation in the direction of this future has been and continues to be laid, again in terms of the globalizing neo-conservative imperialism of the United States along with other supporting first-world nations. As Siebert states, both of these futures must be resisted at all costs. There is, however, another alternative future life and world rescuing possibility. Alternative Future III is the very real possibility of creating the realm of freedom on the bases of the realm of natural necessity; a global society of reconciled humanity, wherein human autonomy and solidarity are mutually supportive of each other; in which the relationships among all human beings would be “characterized by what Bertolt Brecht and Jürgen Habermas have called the friendly living together of human beings; in which a communicative or discourse ethics would be practiced; in which truth would count again and not only correctness; in which instrumental action and rationality would be balanced by communicative action and rationality; in which nationalism would be overcome once and for all; in which naturalism would be mediated through a transformed religion; in which sensuous impression would continue to lead to symbolical expression; in which humanity would ethically codetermine its own nature through interventions into its own genome; in which a communicative-rationally planned development would be predominant; in which the other would be included; in which autonomy and solidarity would be reconciled; in which subject and object, thinking and being, human need and satisfaction, reason and reality, facticity and validity would concretely have identified themselves with each other; in which historical materialism would be reconstructed and realized; and in which the totally Other of history would be discovered in history” (Siebert, Manifesto, Volume I, Chapter 1, Appendices G).

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As stated as both the theoretical and practical tasks in this Manifesto, it is this alternative Future III that is purpose and goal of the entire critical theory of society and religion. It is to the socio-historical struggle for this alternative Future III that this Manifesto and this Introduction are dedicated. Michael Ott Grand Valley State University Allendale, MI

chapter one

The Critical Theory of Society The critical theory of subject, society, culture and history of the Frankfurt School originated in the experience of the horror of World War I and the immediate post-war period with its rise of nationalism (Horkheimer 1987b; 1987k; 1988a; 1990j; 1995o; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: chaps. 1-6; Rosen 1995; 1997: 89-116; Plumpe 2002: 31-44; Noerr 1996: 81-101; Dubiel 1992; App. A, B, C, D). Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Friedrich Pollock, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Leo Löwen-thal, and others tried to make sense out of the senseless war experience and to resist the nationalistic and fascist wave in Frankfurt a.M., Berlin, Stuttgart, and elsewhere in Germany, by exploring the writings of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich W. J. Schelling, Georg W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud (Adorno 2002d: vii-xi, xiii-xv, 1-82; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973; Scheible 1989; Witte 1985; Schnädelbach 2006: 15-17; Gestrich 2006: 1720; Camman 2004: 72; Ullmann 2004: 4-8; Seitz 2004: 53-59; Dubiel 1993: 5-11; Noerr 1995: 69-78; 1995: 66-81; 1996, 81-1001; 2000: 7-40; Friedeburg 1998: 5-24; Siebert 2007).

Root Causes The critical theorists–from Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno to Ludwig von Friedeburg and Jürgen Habermas to Axel Honneth and Helmut Dubiel, etc.–hoped with the help of those thinkers to discover the social-psychological, economic, political and cultural root causes of World War I, as well as of the different forms of nationalism and fascism, and of World War II, and of the following restoration and cold war period and the neo-conservative and neo-liberal counter-revolution (Horkheimer 1985g; 1985l; 1987b; 1987e; 1987k; 1988a; 1988c: chap. 14; 1988n; 1990j; 1991f; 1995o; 1995p; 1996q; 1996r; Friedeburg 1995: 53-68; 1995: 24-43; Dubiel/Friedeburg 1996: 5-12; Schumann 2001: 17-34; Offe 2001: 35-40; Kocyba 2001: 43-54; Honneth 1996: 13-32; 2001: 54-63; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973; Rosen 1995; Demirovic 1990; 1999: 5-14; Dubiel 1994: 5-13;

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1996: 33-40; 1998: 25-35; Demirovic/Paul 1995: 44-65; Campani 1994: 78-109; Schumm 1996: 41-58; Plumpe 2002: 31-44; Rush 2006; Kesting 2006: 59-62). The critical theorists thought that if they would be able to understand theoretically the causes of those events, they could then maybe help to prevent practically something similar from happening again in the future (Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 40; Rosen 1995: part II; Gumnior/ Ringguth 1973: 98-132). In this hope Horkheimer began the formal and systematic development of the critical theory in the Institute for Social Research at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität in Frankfurt a.M. from 1930 to 1933, the year in which Adolf Hitler came into power and drove the critical theorists, the “negativists”, out of the “Cafe Marx” in Frankfurt a.M., at least for the time being (Adorno 2002d vii-xi, xiii-xv, 1-82, 373-390; Hitler 1943; Taylor 1961; Rosenbaum 1999; Kershaw 2000; Paassen/Wise 1934; Horkheimer 1974c: 49, 200-202; 1981c: 7-64; 1985l; 1987b; 1987k; 1987j; 1988c; 1990j; 1995o; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 7-62; Wiggershaus 1987: chaps. 1 & 2; Frei 2006; Lersch 2006: 72-74). The critical theorists had indeed been dissidents under the Weimar democracy, to which they were loyal at the same time. Now under the rising Hitler dictatorship they were dissidents without any loyalty to the fascist regime and refused any adaptation (Priester 2006: 27-30; Lucke 2006: 31-35; Kesting 2006: 59-62). They opposed the counter-revolutionary fascism in the spirit of the critically perceived and received bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment, understood as an attempt to free people from their fear and to make them masters of their fate (Osten 2006: 62-66).

Revolution and Counter-Revolution Between the World Wars I and II, Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, SohnRethel, Marcuse, Fromm and other critical theorists hoped in vain that the workers in Germany and Europe would rise against their fascist leaders and would continue their socialist post-war revolution and thereby conquer the nationalist, völkische, national-socialist counter-revolution, which disguised itself as a revolution not only in Europe but also in the United States (Adorno 2002a: vii-xi, xiii-xv, 1-82, 373-390; Speer 1970: Part I; Taylor 1983; Matheson 1981; Reimer 1989; Krieg 2004; Erickson 1985; Brinkley 1982; Coughlin 1932; Fromm 1973: chap. 13; 1980; Mosse 1975; 1999; Witte 1985; Siebert 2006: 61-114). However, the critical theorists were disappointed, and their disappointment had a great impact on the development of the critical theory of society. Instead of moving toward alternative Future III–the realm of freedom on the basis of the realm

the critical theory of society

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of natural necessity as they had hoped, history would move toward alternative Future I–the totally administered society, and/or toward alternative Future II–the entirely militarized society, of which they were from now on afraid, and the arrival of barbarism rather than socialism as applied humanism (Marx 1961c: 873-874; Zamyatin 1999; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34-37, 39, & 40; Adorno 1997j: 97-122, 254-288, 362-366, 375-395, 573-594, 702-740; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Stockmeier 1970; App. G). The fascist counter-revolution overcame the socialist revolution and even initiated a war against the only socialist country at the time, the Soviet Union, on Sunday, June 22, 1941 (Bethel 1977). The critical theorists had the bitter experience that it took a hellish war, which cost the lives of 60 million people, including 27 million Communists in Eastern Europe and 6 million Jews, rather than a revolution to defeat European and Asian fascism (Adorno 2002a: vii-xi, xiii-xv, 1-82, 373; Collier 1977; Zich 1977; Bailey 1977; Bethel 1977; Ryan 1987; Persico 1994; Stone 1998; Fest/Eichinger 2002). The revolution could have made the war unnecessary. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, since fascists elements in advanced capitalist society had preceded Adolf Hitler’s coming to power in January 1933, and since they have survived his death on April 30, 1945, a new enlightenment and revolution may in the future set into motion again the historical dialectic arrested by fascist and neoliberal counter-revolutions and restoration periods, and thus may avoid further wars like those of the 20th and early 21st centuries in the future: dialectics understood in terms of Plato’s Diotima: as the old worn-out mortality leaving another new and similar one behind; or in terms of Hegel’s concrete, determinate negation; or in terms of Marx’s and Benjamin’s dialectical leap under the sky of history free from the commanding capitalist class (Platon 1905: 500; Hegel 1986c: 68-76; 1986e: 48-53, 105-106, 193; 1986l: 520-540; Marx 1906: 391, 492-493, 497-501, 495, 502-505, 553, 554, 555, 558, 563, 633, 778, 788-805, 817, 830; Benjamin 1977: 258-259; Adorno 1979: 354-372, 397-407, 408-433, 578-587; 2002a: vii-xi, xiii-xv, 1-82, 120, 373; Zamyatin 1999; Flechtheim 1939; 1959; 1971). The critical theorist of religion cannot speak about fascism, neo-conservativism, neo-liberalism and colonialist, imperialist, and hegemony wars without speaking about liberal, or monopoly, or oligopoly capitalism and the increasingly globalized corporate ruling class and its political and even religious and cultural-industrial agents and functionaries: what President Eisenhower called in his famous departure speech the industrial-military complex (Adorno 1979: 354-372, 578-587; 1997i/1: 7-142; 1997i/2; 1997j: 608-616; 1997o: 7-146; Reuters 2006: 1-4; Scherer 2006: 70-71).

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chapter one Counter-Revolutionary Victory

As the fascist counter-revolution won its victory over the socialist revolution in Germany and all over Europe in the 1920’s, the 1930’s, and the early 1940’s, the critical theorists saw their Frankfurt Institute for Social Research closed and expropriated by the fascist Cultural Minister or Empire Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust, in Berlin (Gumnior/Ringguth 1975: chaps. 4-7; Krieg 2004: 28, 50, 51, 53, 67, 68-70, 77, 78, 92, 96, 97, 101, 111, 118, 119, 143, 144, 145, 148, 197-238, 202-38, 213-51; Erickson 1985: 47, 168, 169-170). Later, the Institute building was destroyed through Allied air-attacks on Frankfurt a.M. The critical theorists had to spend the years between 1933 and 1945 in exile from fascist Germany, first in Geneva, Switzerland, then in Paris, France, then in London, England, and in New York, New York, and finally in Pacific Palisades, California. The critical theory cannot be understood without its historical genesis and context. In spite of their experience of the destruction of human reason in World War I, and in spite of the victorious nationalist and fascist counter-revolutions in Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan etc, and in spite of World War II, and in spite of their critique of instrumental and functional rationality, the dialectic of enlightenment and positivism, the critical theorists held on to the unity and power of the history of human reason through its religious, philosophical and scientific phase. They promoted the genuine secular bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment, which they knew had its roots in the great world religions, particularly in Judaism and Christianity, and that into it semiotic and semantic materials and potentials had been concretely superseded out of the depths of the myths (Exodus 20; Mathew 5-7; Horkheimer 1967b; 1974c: 5, 8, 9-10, 15, 18, 28-29, 41, 45-46, 49, 62, 96-97, 98-99, 101-104, 116-117, 120121, 127; 1988a; Horkheimer/Adorno1969; Adorno 1973b; Negt 1964; Siebert 2006: 1-32, 61-114; Rush 2006). The first, second, third or fourth generation of critical theorists never agreed with the for a time popular Right-Wing Hegelian, neo-conservative, neo-liberal Francis Fukuyama’s post-histoir thesis, that the history of revolutions and counter-revolutions had come to its end in civil society, leaving the bourgeois as the “last man” (Hanselle 2006: 78-79). Rather, they came closer to those European intellectuals who ridiculed the American history-teleologist as a Disney-Hegelian. They were rather inclined to agree with the great German/French writer Günther Grass and his continual critique of the post-war German Federal Republic, the Bonn Republic and also still the Berlin Republic, and particularly the Adenauer Restauration (Harprecht 2006: 57-59;

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Zimmermann 2006: 60-63). In the meantime, as of 2006, Fukuyama himself has tried to find a way out of and to say goodbye to the religious and political neo-conservativism of a Ronald Reagan and a George W. Bush and the Catholic and Evangelical supporters: the neo-liberal, counterrevolutionary political and ecclesiastical corruption of the revolutionary nature of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (Hendricks 2006, part III; Hanselle 2006: 78-79; Siebert 2002: chaps 2, 6; 2006: 61-114; Reuters 2006: 1-4). It is one of the main tasks of the new critical theory of religion to explore and to identify the politics of great religious figures, like Moses, Jesus, Paul, Origin, Augustine, Mohammed, Benedict, Francis, Dominic, Thomas of Aquinas, Martin Luther, Thomas Münzer, Ignatius of Loyola, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Mahatma Gandhi, Karl Barth, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X as well as that of their fundamentalist counterparts: the prophets of deceit (Bloch 1970a & b, 1971; Löwenthal 1990; Dirks 1968; Küng 1994; Bielefeld/Heitmeyer 1998; Siebert 2006: 61-114; 2006, part II; 2007; Soderstrom 2005).

Continuation of Neo-Conservativism Unfortunately, today, the history of religious and political neo-conservativism continues (Habermas 1985b: 30-58; Reuters 2006: 1-4). The U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney of the neo-liberal second G. W. Bush Administration has even tried to conjure the specter of a new Cold War in the form of a dangerous strategy of confrontation with the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, in order thereby to avert world attention from the disaster in Afghanistan and Iraq (Harprecht 2006: 14-18; Reuters 2006: 1-4). The striving neo-conservative American hegemony penetrates every corner of the earth from Venezuela to Croatia (Chomsky 2003; Gamel 2006: 2-5; James 2006: 2-4; Harprecht 2006: 1417; Reuters 2006: 1-4). In May 2006, Vice President Cheney even went to Dubrovnik to test the representatives of the NATO candidate Croatia (Harprecht 2006: 17). Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who played a key role in ending the Cold War, said in Berlin on October 18, 2006 that the United States had wasted its chance and had squandered an opportunity to improve global politics after 1989 (Reuters 2006: 1-4). He compared U.S. foreign policy since then to one of the deadliest diseases on the planet: AIDS. He called the American disease: the victor’s complex. While the critical theorist Walter Benjamin hoped in the 1930’s that historical materialism would take theology into its service, today it is rather neo-liberalism that has taken religion into its service (Benjamin 1977:

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251). While Pope John Paul II allowed himself to be instrumentalized in the neo-conservative counter-revolution of 1989 in Poland and in Eastern Europe, Pope Benedict XVI permitted himself to be functionalized in the neo-liberal crusade against the so called Islamo-fascism (Leicht 2006: 1-4; Ryback 2006: 66-73).

Faith and Reason Pope Benedict XVI’s lecture on Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections in the Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg on Tuesday, 12 September 2006, stirred up a furor in the Islamic world (Benedict XVI 2006: 1-7; Leicht 2006: 1-4; Soderstrom 2006: 1-4; Nasser 2006: 1-4; Dyer 2006: 1-2; Nor 2006: 2-3; Brown 2006: 2-5; Cito 2006: 1-4; UPI 2006; Habermas 2001a; App. E). The Pope was criticized for having put a Catholic stamp to the U.S. war against Afghanistan and Iraq, which his predecessor John Paul II had condemned just as he did the first Iraq war as being unjust in terms of the Seven Point Just War Theory of Augustine, the initiator of the Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity (Nasser 2006: 1-4; Küng 1994a: 336-601). An Italian nun was shot dead by Islamic Somali gunmen in revenge for the Pope’s lecture in Regensburg (Nor 2006: 2-3). Protests continued as the Pope stopped short of an apology (Brown 2006: 2-5). Of course, a prelate never rescinds himself and never apologizes in order to protect the faith of the believers (Brown 2006: 2-5). The Pope was, nevertheless, deeply sorry for the reaction to his Regensburg remarks in the Muslim world (Thavis 2006: 1, 8; Cito 2006: 1-4). Benedict XVI had intended his lecture to establish frank and sincere dialogue. There were obviously mutual non-understandings and misunderstandings and a mutual lack of knowledge of the other between the Pope and his Islamic opponents (Leicht 2006: 1-4). The Pope was backed by the head of the Anglican Community, Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury (UPI 2006: 1). The Pope, of course, could have delegated the ecumenical theologian and his former professorial colleague in Germany, Hans Küng, to lead the dialogue of the Roman Catholic Church with representatives of Islam (Küng 2004). Unfortunately, since Christmas 1978, the Roman Curia has not allowed Hans Küng to teach as a Catholic theologian because he has been under heresy suspicion in ecclesiology, Christology, Mariology, etc (Küng 1976; 1990b; 1992; 1994a; Dulles 1974: 73-74, 82, 94, 97, 141, 148-149, 155-156, 198, 202; Häring/Kuschel 1978; App. E).

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American Exile Horkheimer, Pollock, Adorno, Fromm, Marcuse and other critical theorists reopened the Institute for Social Research finally at Columbia University, New York, where they further developed the critical theory throughout World War II: exploring themes like materialism and metaphysics, the writings of Henri Bergson, materialism and morality, prediction in the social sciences, the writings of Oswald Spengler, the rationalism struggle in present social philosophy, planned economy, philosophical anthropology, the problem of truth, authority and family, the authoritarian state, the psychology of Nazism and fascism, politics and the social, reason and self-preservation, the sociology of art, the psychoanalysis and sociology of anti-Semitism, the classification of Jewish emigrants, the philosophy of Ernst Simmel and Sigmund Freud, prejudices, the authoritarian personality, religion and the prophets of deceit on American religious radio stations (Horkheimer 1995o: 99-812; 1995p: 9-788; 1996q: 9-1051; 1985l; 1987e; 1988c: chaps. 5-18; 1988d; 1981a: chaps. 1-3; Löwenthal 1990; Adorno 1997i: 7-141, 149-509; Adorno 1969a: part IV; Gödde/Lonitz 2003; Baldwin 2001: chap. 19; Caughlin 1932; Brinkley 1983; Rosen 1995, part I: chaps. 7-9; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: chaps. 7, 8, 9; Wiggershaus 1987: chaps. 2-4). It became finally the International Institute for Social Research at Columbia University. Later on, during World War II, Horkheimer and Adorno resettled in Pacific Palisades where they wrote– besides a variety of studies e.g. on culture industry and the enlightenment as mass-fraud, anti-Semitism and the limits of enlightenment–their main cooperative work, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which gave direction to the further research in the Institute for Social Research, particularly after its return to Frankfurt a.M. after the defeat of fascism and the end of World War II (Horkheimer 1987e: 25-238, 423-452, 453-457). Originally the work was planned to be a materialistic reconstruction of Hegel’s idealistic dialectical logic (Hegel 1986e; 1986f; 1986h; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969). The first titles of the cooperative project were the Dialectic of Mythology and Philosophical Fragments. In reality the work was concerned with the dialectic between mythology or religion on one hand, and secular enlightenment, on the other; the dialectic of religion–its perversion into ideology; and the dialectic of the bourgeois enlightenment–its perversion into positivism and its regression into mythology. The by now classical and still very actual and very useful work reflected very much the critical theorists’ experiences of the fundamental antagonisms of German and American civil society. Following Kant and Hegel and the whole

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critical tradition, Horkheimer and Adorno traced the historical development from the original traditional unity of the religious and the secular, through the modern disunion, to a possible future resolution of that modern antagonism (Kant 1929: 485-572; 1970: 180-204, 205-234; 1982, part I & II; 1981; 1975; 1974a; Hegel 1986p: 9-88; Horkheimer 1990j; 1987e; 1987i; 1987k: 13-79; 1987b: 21-74, 75-148, 295-311; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969; Fackenheim 1967: chaps. 6 & 7). However, the critical theorists envisioned that resolution quite differently from Kant, Hegel, Goethe or Beethoven; not in idealistic terms as the mediation of the sacred and the profane in the sacred extreme, but rather in materialistic terms in the secular extreme. They envisioned the reconciliation of the religious and the secular in terms of a negative and inverse theology, which had its roots in Jewish and Christian mysticism as well as in Kant’s and Hegel’s historical idealism and in Marx’s historical materialism: the migration of semiotic and semantic material from the depth of the myths into the secular modern discourse of the expert cultures and through it into communicative and political action. This action was directed not toward alternative Future I–the totally administered society, or toward alternative Future II–a militaristic society aiming at and preparing always new conventional wars or civil wars and finally at NBC wars and the consequent ecological disasters, but rather at alternative Future III–a reconciled humanity, in which the relationships among all human beings would be decent, friendly, cooperative and mutually helpful (Zamayatin 1999; Adorno 1970b: 103-162; 1997j: 608-616; 2002d: 373-390; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 23-30, 32-40, & 42; Habermas 1990: 13-15; 2001c; 2005; 2006b: 1-25; 2006a: chap. 5; Eco 1984: 195-196; 1997; 2000; Mouton de Gruyter 1987; Rush 2006; Albers 2006: 75-77; App. E).

Rationalization and Integration The main thesis of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment was that the so called irrational institutions, e.g. family, military, and religion, were not merely archaic residuals from a pre-modern period of social evolution, as Anglo-American sociologists like Herbert Spencer or Thorstein Veblen had asserted (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969; Adorno 1993b: 45, 56, 72-73, 75, 141, 163, 165-166, 219-222, 244-245, 254, 272273, 274, 277, 292, 296, 306, 308). They were rather the result of the extreme rationalization of civil society: in globalizing late capitalist society, characterized by a fast growing post-industrial service information and knowledge sector, modern rationalization has turned into irrational-

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ity and modern systemic integration has turned into social disintegration (Adorno 1979: 354-391, 578-587; Schmiede/Schudlich 1977; Geraets 1979; Mosdorf 2006: 33-37; Schnädelbach 1984; Priller 2006: 38-41). Extreme rationalization has produced extremely irrational conditions: such as two bourgeois world wars, European and Asian fascism, the cold war between the capitalist and socialist blocks, new and more extreme forms of anti-Jewish and anti-Islamic prejudices and sentiments, and the trend toward alternative Future I–the totally administered world (Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: ix-x, 1-7, 177-217; Adorno 1979: 397-407, 408-433). Their main thesis lead the critical theorists to the central question of their cooperative work: why Western Civilization, which had developed all the productive forces to move toward the concrete utopia of alternative Future III–the reconciled society characterized by freedom in and through the state, justice and solidarity, aimed, nevertheless, at alternative Future I–the totally mechanized, instrumentalized, functionalized, bureaucratized, computerized and robotized signal society and alternative Future II–the entirely militarized society (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 33-37, 40; Heil 2006: 42-45; Merkel 2006: 45-48; Kocka 2006: 49-52). This question remains of greatest actuality up to the present wars and civil wars in the Near East and in Africa and the tensions between North America on one hand, and Central and Latin America on the other (Hegel 1986l: 105-141; Yacoub 2006: 1-4; Hamilton Spectator 2006: 1; Chavez 2006: 1-7; Chomsky 2003; Herzinger 2006: 53-56; Mann 2006: 1-2; James 2006: 2-4; Gamel 2006: 2-5; Nor 2006: 2-3; Brown 2006: 2-5; Soderstrom 2006: 1-4; Westfeldt/McClam 2006: 1-4; Mroui 2006: 1-4; Macintyre 2006: 1; Garwood 2006: 1-3; Gardiner 2006: 1-4; Kay/Grey 2006; Hartson 2006: 2-4; Santana 2006: 1-3; Feller 2006: 2-4; Sallaheddin 2006: 2-3; Sampson 2006: 1-3; 2006: 1-4; Sinnan/Mroue 2006: 1-4).

Return and Rebuilding After World War II, Horkheimer and Adorno returned from California to Frankfurt a.M. and established anew the Institute for Social Research at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität (Adorno 1997u; Gumnior/ Ringguth 1973: 91-132; Scheible 1989: 104-146; Wiggershaus 1987: chaps. 5, 6, 7, 8). The Institute was rebuilt near its old location on the Campus of the Frankfurt University with the financial help of the City of Frankfurt and of the American Military Government in the American Zone of Germany. Throughout the 1950’s and the 1960’s, the critical theorists unfolded an intense empirical and theoretical work program at the Institute

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(Schopf 2003: 7-692, 695-697, 698-702). They combined German social philosophy with American empirical sociology. From 1967 to 1969 the Institute was deeply involved in the student movement and revolt (Scheible 1989: 131-146; Wiggershaus 1987: 676-704). The students were not only motivated by the Frankfurt School, but they also most thoroughly misunderstood the critical theorists and their enlightenment project. The students moved unconsciously toward positivism, the very opposite of the critical theory of society. They considered the critical theorists longing for the totally Other to be romantic. The critical theorists agreed with the students’ non-conformism and their will to break out of what Max Weber had called the iron cage of capitalism, but they disagreed with the violence that happened during the student upheavals in Germany and elsewhere in 1968 and 1969. Horkheimer felt that the initiators of the critical theory had been misunderstood particularly by their young followers, just as once the founders of Christianity had felt similarly misunderstood. Jürgen Habermas was highly appreciated as a theoretician of society in the Institute for Social Research under Adorno, who followed Horkheimer in the directorship of the Institute (Wiggerhaus 1987, chaps. 7, 8). However, Horkheimer found Habermas standing too far to the Left, and thus also being somewhat–in Max Weber’s words–unmusical in religious matters. Habermas played, nevertheless, a somewhat mediating and mitigating role between the first generation of critical theorists and the rebellious students. After the student revolt and the departure of the first generation of critical theorists, the second, third and fourth generations have continued the development of the critical theory in the Frankfurt Institute up to the present, particularly through empirical studies about labor unions and later on about Right-wing extremism in Germany and Europe and the United States (Demirovic 1990). Sohn-Rethel from the first generation of critical theorists, and Ludwig von Friedeburg and Jürgen Habermas from the second generation became particularly influential for the third and fourth generation and their research projects (Sohn-Rethel 1973; 1975; 1978; 1985; Habermas 1969; Friedeburg 1995: 53-68; 1998: 5-24; 1995: 24-43; Wagner 2001: 9-11; Siegel 2001: 12-14; Bartholomäi 2001: 14-17; Schumann 2001: 17-34; Offe 2001: 35-40).

Antagonistic Totality Friedrich Nietzsche once stated that what has a history cannot be defined (Adorno 1993b: 38, 53, 270-271, 274; Ullmann 10/2004: 4-6). The critical theory of society has a history and therefore cannot be defined. However,

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in terms of a working definition we can say that the critical theory is a social theory, which understands modern civil society as an antagonistic totality of non-equivalent exchange processes (Adorno 1993b: 9-22, 2336, 37-50; App. F). The critical theorists do not join those liberals who consider the open society to be entirely harmoniously pluralistic. It also differs from the neo-conservatives or neo-liberals, i.e. disgusted former Roosevelt liberals–like Ronald Reagan, who see the contradictory character of civil society but consider its competitiveness as a vehicle for progress, ignoring the immense human suffering involved: personal and collective selfishness, egoism, greed, avarice are good and right! (Colpe/ Schmidt-Biggemann 1993). According to Adolf Hitler’s (1943: 64-65) aristocratic principle of nature, there has to be individual and collective predators and prey. According to President George H. Bush, there has to be winners and losers. To the contrary, the critical theorists of society are deeply moved by the great human pain and suffering connected with the antagonistic character of modern capitalist society. Therefore, the critical theorists try to fight through the painful antagonisms of bourgeois society toward alternative Future III, i.e. a society that will no longer reproduce itself through–what Thomas Hobbes and his student, Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s jurist and political theologian–called the bellum omnium contra omnes, a war of everybody against everybody–individually, nationally, and internationally: everybody can kill everybody; everybody wants to dominate everybody (Hegel 1986g: 153; 1986r: 79; 1986s: 108; 1986t: 224, 225-229; Adorno 1993b: 159; Groh 1998; Meier 1994). The new society was rather to reproduce itself in terms of an autonomy mediated through universal, i.e. anamnestic, present, and proleptic solidarity and vice versa (Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Flechtheim 1971; Habermas 1976; 1983; 1986; 1991c; 1998a). In the new society, universal solidarity and personal autonomy and sovereignty were to be reconciled. In the new society, those human actions that do not carry a price tag on them and which have not been commodified were to be considered valuable. Egoism, greed and avarice and the consequent exploitation were no longer considered to be right. The Few were no longer to be allowed to live through the labor and money produced by the Many.

Friendly Living Together Despite all the disappointments concerning a socialist revolution in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and the actual trends in antagonistic civil society toward alternative Future I and II, the critical theory of society remained,

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nevertheless, in the present transition period between modernity and post-modernity based on the longing and the hope for and the assumption of the possibility of alternative Futures III: a society, which would be characterized by what Bertolt Brecht and Jürgen Habermas have called the friendly living together of human beings; and in which a communicative or discourse ethics would be practiced; in which truth would count again and not only correctness; in which instrumental action and rationality would be balanced by communicative action and rationality; in which nationalism would be overcome once and for all; in which naturalism would be mediated through a transformed religion; in which sensuous impression would continue to lead to symbolical expression; in which humanity would ethically codetermine its own nature through interventions into its own genome; in which a communicative-rationally planned development would be predominant; in which the other would be included; in which autonomy and solidarity would be reconciled; in which subject and object, thinking and being, human need and satisfaction, reason and reality, facticity and validity would concretely have identified themselves with each other; in which historical materialism would be reconstructed and realized; and in which the totally Other of history would be discovered in history (Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 34-40; Brecht 1961; 1980; 1993; Habermas 1976; 1983; 1986; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 1997a; 1997b; 1998a; 2001a; 2001b; 2003b; 2004a; 2005; Gadamer/Habermas 1979; App. F, G). The critical theorists follow the idea of a future society as a community of free and solidary human beings. The critical theorists work and fight for the agreement between thinking and being, which in civil society appears as merely accidental, but which ought to become in the future world the behavior of rational intent and realization. The critical theory’s idea of a not only instrumentally but also communicatively rational society differentiates itself sharply from any abstract utopia through the proof of its possibility on the basis of the grown and still growing productive forces of the human beings. To be sure, the goal of a communicatively and not only functionally rational society, which today in liberal democratic or socialist society seems to be superseded of course only on the level of dialectical imagination, is nevertheless grounded as a potential in every individual human person: particularly in the evolutionary universals of language and memory and anticipation and expectation, of erotic love, of the struggle for mutual recognition, and of community (Hegel 1972; 1979; Gadamer/Habermas 1979).

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Religious Prototype From its very start, the critical theory of society contained in itself more or less latently a dialectical theory of religion, the core of which was a theology as theodicy (Theos–God; dikae–justice), a theory of human suffering, which reached deeply into Judaism as the religion of Sublimity, and had its prophetic tradition for its religious prototype (Horkheimer 1971: 9-53; 1972: chap. 4; 1985g, chaps. 37, 40). According to the Rabbis, Malachi was the last Hebrew prophet (Malachi 1-2; Hegel 1986p: 50-95; Hertz 5716-1956: 102; Küng 1991b: 132-168; App. E). Nothing is known of his life, except what can be taken from his prophecies, which seem to have been made some time about the year 450 before the Common Era: during the Theocratic Paradigm of Post-Exile Judaism. The Second Temple had been rebuilt, but the high hopes of the exiles who had returned from Babylon with the help of the great Persian Cyrus had not been fulfilled. The lamp of religious enthusiasm burned but dimly in that period of Jewish history, and both priests and people treated sacred things with weary indifference. Though from East to West, God’s name was recognized and revered among the nations, it was Israel that began to doubt whether there was a righteous Governor of the universe, and was losing belief in itself as God’s people. Malachi (1: 2; 3: 13-14) expressed most adequately the theodicy problem, when he let Yahweh say: I have loved you. Yet you say ‘Wherein have You loved us?’ … Your words have been stout against Me. You have said. ‘it is vain to serve God, and what profit is it that we have kept His charge?’

In the view of the Rabbis, it was to such a desperate generation that Malachi brought his burden, i.e. his utterances, his message. Malachi solved the theodicy problem for the contemporary Israelites by reaffirming and boldly proclaiming the Divine election and deathlessness of Israel.

Universalism Confronted by sordid irreligion and cruel selfishness, Malachi preached the reality of the unseen wholly Other, and gave eternal expression to the universal brotherhood of man (Malachi 1-2; Hegel 1986p: 50-95; Hertz 5716-1956: 102). Thus Malachi (2: 10) asked: Have we not all one Father, has not one God created us all? Why then, do we deal faithlessly every man against his brother?

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Malachi’s universalistic theodicy contained a universalistic anthropodicy (anthropos–man; dikae–justice). According to the Rabbis, even the heathen nations that worship the heavenly hosts in their astral religions and myths pay tribute to a Supreme Being and in this way recognize and honor the name of El Shaddai or Yahweh: i.e. I Am who I Am, or I shall Be who I Shall Be (Exodus 3: 1-15; 4: 2-13; Malachi 1: 11; Hegel 1986p: 50-95; Hertz 5716-1956: 103-11; Bloch 1993: chap. 53). The offerings they thus present indirectly to God, the wholly Other, were animated by a pure spirit: God looking to the heart of the worshipper. The Rabbis developed further this religious and ethical universalism in the Rabbinical Paradigm of Judaism as the religion of Sublimity (Hertz 5716-1956: 103-11; Hegel 1986p: 50-95; Bloch 1993: chap. 53; Küng 1991b: 169-222). It is characteristic of the universalism of Judaism (Deuteronomy 4: 19). The critical theorists of society stressed this universalistic rather then the particularistic or nationalistic elements in the Jewish religion (Horkheimer 1967b: 216-228, 302-316, 317-320; App. E).

Theodicy In December 2006, shocked by the horror of two world wars, Auschwitz and Treblinka, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden, Vietnam, Chile, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and first and second Iraq war, two of the most outstanding theologians of the 20th century–Hans Küng and Johann Baptist Metz–agreed that a theoretical answer to the theodicy problem as it had been tried in Modernity from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz through Hegel to Hans Jonas–be it rooted in Judaism, or in Christianity, or in Islam, or in any other world religion–did not exist (Leibniz 1996; Kant 1975: 77-93; Hegel 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Küng 1991b: 726-731; Metz 1977; 2006; Klingen 2006: 7; Bess 2006: 1-3; Reuters 2006: 2-2; Gallardo 2006: 1-5; Vicini 2006: 1-2). According to Küng, senseless suffering cannot be theoretically understood, but only endured in confidence and trust. Along the line of notions like theodicy, God crisis, apocalyptic, Metz unfolded more concretely the thesis that the remembrance of foreign suffering–memoria passionis–meant more than a theological, or even aesthetical construct. For the Catholic theologian Metz, as for the Protestant theologian, pastor, pacifist, Nazi resister, and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer a generation earlier, the memoria passionis presented a universal criterion, where pluralism had long destroyed all universalistic ideas: the scream of the victims, that their suffering may no longer be (Till 2000; Meter 2003; PBS 2006; Metz 1977; 2006; Klingen 2006: 7; Bess 2006: 1-3).

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In Metz’s view, the theodicy question, the question concerning God in the face of the history of the suffering of humanity, was precisely not to be answered theoretically, but was on the contrary to be born and carried in order to make noticeable and perceptible the redeeming power of God in a new way, and thereby make the sources of inner-worldly solidary action alive again.

No Counter Movement Of course, for the critical theorist of religion there arises the question of who should respond to the scream of the innocent victims, and who should stop the terror of God, and the terror of men, and the terror of nature, and all the human pain and suffering connected with them (Genesis 34, 35: 5; Hertz 5716-1956: 130/5; Horkheimer 1989m: 143-152; 1988d: 102-104; 1967: 252; Wallace 1911: 203; Siebert 1966; 1987a, chaps. 1317; 1987c, chaps. 1-2; 1993; 1994: chaps. 2, 6; 1995a; 2000; 2001: chap. 3; 2003; 2004; 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007a; 2007c). The terror of men reached its climax when Hitler and Stalin used it in their brown and red fascist totalitarian and authoritarian systems and war-empires in order to generate and impose order and homogeneity on the variety, diversity and plurality of racial, national, ethnic, political, economical, cultural, and religious groups and movements all over Europe, which they considered to be a threat and menace (Baberowski 2006). Particularly during the war, Hitler and Stalin helped to produce this heterogeneity, which they then again tried to repress through terror, violence, and annihilation. Prisoners stood in Dachau, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Buchenwald and cried Adonai, but there was no divine response (Kogon 1965; Horkheimer 1989m: 143-153; Wiesel 1982; Harprecht 2006: 9-10). There were only the SS, and their helpers, and their terror and their dogs and their gas chambers, and their smoking crematoria (Horkheimer 1985h: 9-37). In February 1945, refugees fleeing from the approaching Russian army cried out for God in the streets of Dresden, as one British and American air attack followed the previous one. There was no divine answer, but only the increasing firestorm, which would swallow them up only too soon, and would incinerate them.

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The critical theory of society evolved under the old and the new globalization of civil society in the forms of colonialism and imperialism before and after the triumphant neo-liberal conservative or counter-revolution of 1989 (Hegel 1986g: 382-392). Even after 1989, terror and violence were not stopped but remained connected with the patriotically-nationalistically motivated, modern globalizing and colonizing empire-stateand nation-building, and was promoted by neo-conservative politicians, who shared the definition of politics by Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s jurist and political theologian: politics as the identification and annihilation of the enemy, be he a socialist, or a Jihadist, or somebody else, depending on the circumstances (Hegel 1986g: 382-392; Meier 1994; Groh 1998; Colpe/ Schmidt-Biggemann1993; Bielefeld/Heitmeyer 1998; Lenk 2006: 5-8; Goldsmith 2002: 18-36; Shariff/Littig 2002: 38 51; Ekbladh 2002: 52-64; Siebert 2006: 1-32). Already in 1871, Marx declared that the nationalism or patriotism of the bourgeoisie degenerated into utter hypocrisy at that moment when its finance, commerce and industry activity assumed a cosmopolitan character (Marx 1871; Lenk 2006: 5). Nevertheless, the bourgeois globalization continues as old wine in new bottles (Hegel 1986g: 391-393; Marx 1871; Lenk 2006: 5-8). Already at the time of the Roman Empire, civil society, and bourgeoisie, Horace (60: 3l; Hegel 1986g: 391) was wrong when he stated in his Carmina: …deus abscidid, Prudens Oceano dissociabili Terras (A wise God has separated the countries from the inhospitable ocean).

Globalization means growing social inequality at home as well as abroad (White 2006: 1-2). At this time, December 2006, U.S. income figures show a staggering rise in social inequality. Sixty million Americans are living on less than $7.00 a day. While socialists and progressive and critical religious people fight against such social inequality as being unjust, fascists and neo-liberals defend it as necessary for the survival of the human species.

Alliances When the first, mostly Jewish generation of critical theorists were in exile in America and worked at their International Institute for Social Research

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at Columbia University in the 1930’s and 1940, only a very small percentage of American Jews were Zionists (Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 53-90; Wiggershaus 1987: chaps 2, 3, 4). None of the critical theorists of society ever became a Zionist (Horkheimer 1967b: 302-316, 317-320; 1974: 148-151,164-165; Gumnio/Ringguth 1973: 51-90; Scholem 1982: 1989). The critical theorists also found only a very few Jews in New York and elsewhere in America who were liberal enough to speak with about issues connected with the critical theory (Dubiel 1992). In the first years of the 21st century in the U.S.A., while the majority of Jews belong to the reformed or liberal communities, the orthodox minority, which is more vociferous and which exercises the greater political influence because of its hardness and harshness, is allied with the Fundamentalist Evangelicals and the Authoritarian Catholics, who all together constitute the fanaticized spiritual bodyguard of President George W. Bush, and who support his nationalistic, imperialistic and colonizing globalization, and who thus voted him into office a second time in 2004, after already almost 3,000 American soldiers had lost their lives in Iraq, and 25,000 had been wounded, and over 600,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed and the casualties were climbing daily not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan (Küng 1991b: 169-222, 223-274; 1994a: 336-601, 602-741; Harprecht 2006: 9-10; Black 2001; Cornwell 2000; Dalin 2005; Stone/Weaver 1998; Erickson 1985; Matheson 1981). At the same time, the General Secretary of the UN, Mr. Kofi Annan, continually criticized and accused the second Bush Administration of human rights abuses and Washington of the abandonment of its democratic ideals in the war on terror (Goldenberg 2006: 1-2; Fayez 2006: 1-2). All that happened as the second Bush Administration led the American people in retaliation of September 11, 2001 through Orwellian and Huxlian lies into the war against Afghanistan and into the second Iraq war, which was even more unjust than the first one, and has kept them in this war staying the course for years, under orders of the globalized corporate ruling class, particularly the most powerful oil corporations (Orwell 1961; Huxley 1968; Küng 2004: 19-28, 29-42). However, at the same time in Germany, liberal or Reformed Judaism was allied with Protestant Liberal Modernism, initiated by the liberal theology of Schleiermacher and Harnack (Küng 1991b: 223-274, part II & III; 1994a: 742-899; Harprecht 2006: 9-10). This alliance has recently–in 2006–found a wonderful expression in the common declaration of the Evangelical Lutheran community in Hannover-Leinhausen and of the Foundation of Liberal Judaism that the local Lutheran Gustav Adolf Church would be transformed into a synagogue and would also become the home for the

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Central Office of the Union of Progressive Jews. Such symbolical action is indeed consoling and a sign of hope. Ironically enough, the name of the Lutheran church points to the terrible religious wars in the Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries, which made the bourgeois enlightenment and revolution and the consequent modern secular, religiously neutral state necessary: a necessity which is only reinforced by the present religiously based civil wars in the Near East.

Allah Akbar However, in spite of such consoling and hopeful symbolical actions and alliances, the brutal process of the modernizing globalization of civil society continues relentlessly all around the globe and particularly in the Near East. Thus, in 2005 and 2006, Islamic women, dressed in black, stood in the streets of Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq and in Lebanon and in Palestine and in Afghanistan and in the Sudan, etc, in the midst of their bombed out or bulldozed-down houses, and devastated fields and olive trees, and dead relatives, and their wounded or killed children, and screamed: Allah Akbar. Yet, there was no divine counter-movement, only the American, or British, or Israeli, or other tanks driving around and helicopter gunships flying above (Gamel 2006d: 1-4; App. E). God was missing and missed every time, and everywhere! Where else should the countermovement come as a response to the cries and prayers for justice of the victims, and the end of suffering? (Greinacher 1986; Sölle 1972; 1974, 1993; 1994). Between 1898 and 1934, the American Marines invaded Cuba 4 times, Nicaragua 5 times, Honduras 7 times, the Dominican Republic 4 times, Guatemala once, Panama twice, Mexico 3 times, and Columbia 4 times, etc (Sullivan III 2006; Hamilton Spectator 2006: 1; Chavez 2006: 1-7; Andrist 2001; Basu 2000; Walker 2000; Amir 2006). Since the end of World War II, which had its own dark side, Washington has intervened militarily directly or indirectly in foreign countries more than 25 times, most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq (Blum 2006; Quigley 2006; Chomsky 1988; 1989; 1994; Bess 2006: 1-3; Kandell 2006). Through his wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, President Bush and his Administration have created a comprehensive political, military, economic and social catastrophe across the Middle East (Ash 2006). In every vital area–from Afghanistan to Egypt–President Bush’s policies have made the situation worse than it was before he initiated the two wars in violation of international law.

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War and Peace Unfortunately, in the past 200 years, it was not Kant’s theory of peace but Hegel’s theory of war that again and again was verified (Kant 1953; Hegel 1986g: 499-514; Zinn 1967; 1968; 1972, 1973, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1999, 2001, 2002). Before World War I, Fritz Haber was a cosmopolitan and a pacifist like his friend Albert Einstein (Siebert 2006). However, at the beginning of the war Haber became a nationalist and the father of the gas war. During this war, Einstein declared that war cannot be humanized but only be abolished. In World War II he helped to produce the most advanced murder weapons: the atomic bombs, which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nothing is so devastating for the traditional theoretical or practical theodicies as the modern wars and their continual escalation of weapons of mass destruction (Horkheimer 1974c: 37-38, 40, 41, 54, 90; Oelmüller 1990; Colpe/Scmidt/Biggemann: 1993; Rosenbaum 1999; Zinn 1967; 1968; 1972, 1973, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1999, 2001, 2002). For the critical theorists there remains merely the longing that the finitude of the finite may not be the ultimate, but without any certitude supported by any religious authorities (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986: 115-173; Horkheimer 1974c: 22-23). Unlike abstract atheism, the critical theorists do not negate abstractly the totally Other, the Infinite, the absolute Truth, which is freed from all mythological baggage and which shines into the most insignificant existences of the present and of the remembered lost time of the human Odyssey. They rather take the totally Other itself as the determinate negation of that, which on earth is called injustice, human abandonment, alienation, war, violence, torture, terror: shortly what Hannah Arendt, the cousin of Walter Benjamin, named in her political theory the triviality of evil in a broken world, or what the critical theorist of the third generation, Axel Honneth, identified as a world torn apart (Proust 2004; Joyce 1975; Schoenherr-Mann 2006: 1-10; Horkheimer 1974c: 4041; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30, 50-87; Honneth 1990; Honneth 2005). Like Arendt, the critical theorists are searching for the traces of the lost God in nature, society, history, and particularly in culture, i.e. art, religion, and philosophy (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps.14-19, 21, 25-30, 32, 34-37, 40; Arendt 1968).

Theological Legitimation Often wars are even made by leaders who legitimate themselves theologically by calling upon the name of God, and it seems not to matter if they

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come from fascist or liberal democratic states. Adolf Hitler said in March 1936, three years before he started World War II: “I would like to thank Providence and the Almighty for choosing me of all people to be allowed to wage this battle for Germany.” President George W. Bush stated in the framework of his theology of empire at the beginning of the Afghanistan and Iraq war: “I believe that God wants me to be President” (Harris 2003; Wallis 2006). Hitler stated at the Harvest Thanksgiving Festival on the Buckeburg held on October 3, 1937: “If we pursue this way, if we are decent, industrious, and honest, if we so loyally and truly fulfill our duty, then it is my conviction that in the future as in the past the Lord God will always help us.” President Bush stated: “God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice. Our finest moments (as a nation) have come when we faithfully served the cause of justice for our citizens and for the people of other lands.” Hitler stated in Nuremberg on September 13, 1936: “Never in these long years have we offered any other prayer but this: Lord, grant to our people peace at home, and grant and preserve to them peace from the foreign foe.” President Bush stated: “…freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them”. However, on February 18, 2006, the Archbishop of New York, Dr, John Sentamu of the Church of England criticized the Americans for breaking international law, and launched a passionate attack on President George W. Bush, saying his Administration’s refusal to close the notorious Guantanamo Bay camp reflected a society that was heading towards George Orwell’s Animal Farm, or 1984, or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or alternative Future I–the totally administered society predicted by Horkheimer and Adorno 36 years earlier (Orwell 1945; 1961; Huxley 1968; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34-37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 17, 25, 31, 37, 659-664; Faiez 2006: 1-2; Herbert/Russel 2006: 1-2; Hendricks 2006).

The Theocons Nevertheless, the authoritarian Catholic and fundamentalist evangelical theo-conservative movement or the so called theocons, e.g. Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, Pat Robertson, Robert Sirico, etc. who for 25 years–following older examples from the 1930’s and 1940’s like Martin Luther Thomas and Charles E. Coughlin–have put secular America under siege, know exactly how Jesus endorsed President Bush’s invasion of Iraq, or how he wants to deal with socialist Venezuela or Cuba (Adorno 1997i: part I; Coughlin 1932; Ward 1933; Linker 2006a: 1-6; 2006b; Küng 1994a:

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336-601, 602-741; Siebert 2006d: 11-30; Brinkley 1983: chap. 4; Krieg 2004; Goldhagen 2002; App. E). Likewise the fascist conservative or counterrevolutionary Catholic political theologian Carl Schmitt knew precisely how Jesus endorsed Hitler’s invasion into Poland, or Holland, or Belgium, or France, or the Soviet Union (Meier 1994; Groh 1998; Krieg 2004; Goldhagen 2002). Already at that time, alternative Future I was rehearsed (Flechtheim 1971; Orwell 1961; 1945; Huxley 1968; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34-37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 17, 25, 31, 37, 659-664). Of course one cannot speak about the fascist or neo-conservative trend toward alternative Future I and the theological apologists, who legitimate it consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally without talking about the further globalizing monopoly and oligopoly capitalism (Adorno 1979: 354-372, 397-407, 408-433, 578-567). The theocons of the past 25 years as well as their predecessors use or, better stated, ideologically abuse traditional religion for Right-wing economic and political purposes: to produce a false consciousness among believers, and to mask entirely profane national and class interests, shortly to promote the untruth. In contrast to the theocons, the critical theorists of society stress critical religion pointing toward a possible socialism as practiced humanism beyond a free market and a central administrative society: i.e. not alternative Future I–a totally bureaucratized signal society, or alternative Future II–an entirely militarized society, but alternative Future III–a reconciled society, in which unconditional meaning and love and unreified Transcendence shall be possible (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34-37, 40; Habermas 1991a: part III; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Dubiel 1992; Habermas 2002; Mendieta 2005; Siebert 1993; 2001; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c).

Moral and Ethical Comments There are other fascist moral and ethical comments that have similarity with present–2006–political and military events. Ten days before the date Hitler had set for the planned invasion of Poland, he told a meeting of military commanders and chiefs of staff that the regime would find a propaganda pretext for war: “It will make no difference whether the reasons will sound convincing or not, after all, the victor will not be asked whether he spoke the truth or not. We have to proceed brutally. The stronger is always right” (Kershaw 2000: 155, 175, 178, 179, 190, 212, 216, 218, 217). At another time Hitler stated: As long as we win nobody would ask any questions; only losers will be criticized (Shirer 1970). Shortly before his death Hitler predicted that now because Germany had lost the war, he would be

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called the worst of all human beings (Fest/Eichimger 2004; Kershaw 2000: chaps. 15, 16, 17). It is of course also the victor who writes the history (Benjamin 1977: chap. 10). Hermann Goering described the moral alibi or whitewash concept, which is also used today, quite well in an interview conducted in his Nuremberg jail cell in 1945: Naturally, the common people don’t want war, neither in Russia nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship… All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country… (Persico 1994: ix-x, 5-6, 51, 294-295, 296, 360, 388-389, 418-419, 422-424, 445-446, 431-433, 446-447).

As Hegel put it, the critical theorist of religion must admit that sometimes it may happen that world history turns into world judgment (Hegel 1986g: 197, 373-382, 503-512; 1986l: 19-55, 74-105; Fest/Eichinger 2004).

First Charter of Human Rights For the critical theorists of religion, in comparison to many political leaders of the 20th and 21st centuries in America, Europe and the Near East, the pre-modern Zoroastrian Cyrus the Great, the Monarch of Persia or Iran, Babylon and the four continents, appears to be so much more truthful, honest, rightful, tasteful and linguistically competent (Hegel 1986n: 395-405; Suren-Pahlav 2006; Heitner 2006: 1-2; App. E). Cyrus stated, according to his Charter (www.iranchamber.com/history/cyrus/cyrus_charter.php) which was discovered in 1878 in Babylon, Iraq, and according to the Greek philosopher, politician and historian Xenophon after he had entered the City of Babylon in 539 BC during his coronation after the winter on the first day of spring: My numerous troops moved about undisturbed in the midst of Babylon. I did not allow anyone to terrorize the land of Sumer and Akkad. I kept in view the needs of Babylon and all its sanctuaries to promote their well being. The citizens of Babylon; I lifted their unbecoming yoke. Their dilapidated dwellings I restored. I put an end to their misfortunes.

Cyrus also liberated the Hebrew captives and exiles in Babylon and allowed them to go home to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple. Cyrus’ Charter has been hailed as the first charter of human rights. In 1971 The United Nations published a translation of it in all the official U.N. languages. According to the book The Eternal Land, Cyrus prayed during his corona-

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tion in Babylon in terms of his Religion of Ahura Mazda and Arhiman, Light and Darkness, Good and Evil: “May Ahura Mazda protect this land, this nation from rancor, from foes, from falsehood, and from drought.” In his Charter of Freedom, Cyrus promised in the name of Ahura Mazda, that he would respect the traditions, customs and religions of the nations of his empire; that he would never let any governor or subordinate look down or insult the people; that he would never impose his monarchy on any nation; that he would let each nation freely accept his monarchy; that he would never resolve on war to reign in case any nation would reject his monarchy; that he would never allow any one to oppress any others, and if it occurs, that he would take his or her right back and penalize the oppressor; that he would never let anyone take possession of movable and landed properties of the others by force or without compensation; that he would prevent unpaid forced labor; that he would allow everyone to freely chose a religion; that he would allow people to be free to live in all regions of his empire and take up a job provided that they do not violate other’s rights; that he would not allow anybody to be penalized for his or her relatives’ faults; that he would prevent slavery; that he would oblige his governors and subordinates to prohibit exchanging men and women as slaves within their own ruling domains; that he would hold that such traditions of slavery should be exterminated the world over. Cyrus implored Ahura Mazda to make him succeed in fulfilling his obligations to the nations of Iran, Babylon, and the ones of the four directions. According to the Iranian-Islamic perspective, Cyrus’ Charter of freedom could be considered to be religiously and ethically superior to the modern secular Human Rights Manifesto issued by the French revolutionaries in their first national assembly in Paris in 1789. To the Iranian-Islamic scholars, the Human Rights Manifesto of the French bourgeois revolution seems to be interesting. However, in Iranian-Islamic perspective, Cyrus’s Charter of freedom, issued twenty-three centuries before the modern bourgeois revolutions, was still deeply rooted theologically and it was therefore more valuable considering its age, explicitness, and rejection of the superstitions of the world of Antiquity, and thus more spiritual in the genuine sense of the word. Of course, the critical theorist of religion remembers that also the modern Declaration of Human Rights has concretely superseded in itself and inverted into secular terms the great Jewish, Christian, and even Islamic traditions, all of which have been influenced not at last and not at least by the old Persian Religion of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil, Ahura Mazda and Arhiman, i.e. by Zoroastrianism (Hegel 1986p: 395405; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Küng 1970; 1991b; 1994a; App. C, D, E).

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chapter one History and Nature

It seems to the dialectical theorist of religion that even if human beings were able to reconcile the personal autonomy of atomistic liberalism with a universal, i.e. anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity, and to put an end to religious and secular terror and human suffering on the slaughterbench of history, which is under the law of freedom, it would still continue in nature, which is under the law of gravity, where almost everybody eats everybody, and men and women would still be deeply involved in this eating process through their assimilation and metabolism for the purpose of their self-preservation via their innumerable slaughterhouses of innumerable big cities, and there would still be the deadly hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, and animals killing humans, etc. (Hegel 1986i: 337-539; 1986l: 19-55; 1986q: 447-535; Horkheimer 1987e: 320350; AP 2006c: 1-2; Cassey 2006: 1-3; Bess 2006: 1-3; Barzak 2006: 1-3; Ghattas 2006: 1-4; Wagner 2001: 1-4; Hyland 2006: 1-3; App. C, D). In December 2006, the American Congress decided that embryos suffer extreme pain in the process of their abortion, and had therefore to be anesthetized. In the natural evolution, as soon as the first organism with even the smallest nervous system developed many millions of years before man separated from the chimpanzee seven million years ago, pain and suffering became possible on this planet.

The Missing and Missed God Thus, there remains the question concerning the missing and still missed God, who allows the suffering of plants, animals and humans to go on for millions of years in this world, which he created through his Logos (John 1: 1-5; Hegel 1986i: 337-539; 1986l: 19-55; 1986q: 447-535; Peters 1998; Greinacher 1986; Sölle 1994; App. C, D, E). Is this universal suffering to continue on this earth until–as the astronomers put it–the sun will age a billion years from now and will expand and will burn up all life on this earth, and will transform it into another Mars, and will maybe even swallow it up, and then will contract and will shrink and will move on as a small, mostly extinguished star without planets through the cosmos for another billion years? A horrible perspective! Or will, as Walter Benjamin believed and hoped on the basis of the Jewish and the Christian prophets, the parousia delay, the most painfully open flank of all three Abrahamic religions end, and the Messiah will come and will break vertically into the horrible historical continuum of nature and history, and will

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interrupt it and will connect the innocent victims with the Kingdom of God, and thus will respond to their screams for justice and will end their most cruel suffering (Isaiah 66; Revelation: 21, 22; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11)? Metz is honest and truthful enough not to want to let God off the hook! After all, according to Elie Wiesel, there was a Rabbinical trial of God in Auschwitz and He was found to be guilty, after which not all the Rabbis went back to pray again (Wiesel 1960; Oelmüller 1990; Peters 1998: 125-136). For Hegel, informed by Master Eckhart’s mystical theology, the concentration and fixation on the negative in history, the horrible suffering, which he saw as clearly as his opponent Arthur Schopenhauer, could only lead into hopeless theoretical as well as practical illusions, delusions, antinomies and aporias. (Blakney 1941: xiii, 95-305; Hegel 1986l: 19-55; Horkheimer 1967b: 252, 260; Fromm 2001: 55-72; Mann 1891: 82-84). Therefore, Hegel, of whom Metz was very critical, demanded that people should take upon themselves the “cross of the present” and bear it, and endure it, and work hard at it, in order thereby to discover the “rose” of the Logos in the world of nature, the inner world of humanity, the social world, and the cultural world, which had been and continually was, and ultimately would be powerful enough to conquer the negative and the suffering (Hegel 1986l: 19-55; 1986g: 26-27, 42-43; 1986p: 272; Küng 1970: parts VI and VII; App. C, D). This Rose of Reason could reconcile people with the old heaven and the old earth so full of suffering until the comprehended history of individuals and nations shall constitute the remembrance and the Golgotha of God’s absolute Spirit, the reality, truth and certainty of his throne, in which all suffering will end in a new creation: “See, I make all things new” (Isaiah 66; Revelation: 21, 22; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Hegel 1986c: 591; Bloch/Reif 1978: 70-74, 78-89, 282284, 284-287, 312-313, 316, 317-318, 319-320, 322; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11). According to Ernst Bloch in 1977, this arch-Christian word was still alive today–and beyond. The critical theorists’ energy of the longing for the totally Other than any something in nature or history, or for the Infinite, which was radically transcendent but which was, nevertheless, also present in even the smallest and most irrelevant finite something, appeared out of the disappearance of the God of ethical monotheism in the pain, suffering, and despair of Auschwitz, and of all the horror and terror this name stands for in the 20th and 21st century (Hegel 1986e: 125-173; Tillich 1972: 186-190; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1979: 397-407, 408-433; App. C, D, E, F).

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chapter one Good and Bad Days

The idealistically and optimistically minded Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who agrees here with his friend Hegel, let his Werther say that we human beings complain often that there are so few good days and so many bad ones (Goethe 2005: 49-51; Hegel 1986l: 35-36; Horkheimer 1988n: 201-202, 207-208, 412). Werther thought that such complaint was unjustified. If we, so Werther argued, had always an open heart to enjoy the good, which God gave us for each day, then we would also have energy enough to bear and carry the evil when it came. For the materialistically minded Arthur Schopenhauer, suffering with the suffering of the other had been the way to redemption from the inherited original sin, which he had interpreted as the evil of man’s will to life that negates the other individual, and his searching for his happiness at the price of the happiness of the others (Schopenhauer 1989: I, 226, 371, 379, 447, 450, 484, 550-554; Kaufmann 1968: 374-376; Horkheimer 1985g: 391-392; 1988n: 89-90, 306-307, 382). Horkheimer agreed with Schopenhauer (1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 21, 37). Metz moved between Goethe’s idealism on one hand, and Schopenhauer’s and Horkheimer’s materialism on the other (Metz 1977; 2006; Klingen 2006: 7). While the optimistic idealists gained energy from the good in order to overcome evil, the pessimistic materialists received their energy of longing from the negative in order to transcend it (Goethe 2005: 49-51; Hegel 1986l: 35-36; Horkheimer 1991f: 190-191, 287-288; 1988n: 97, 103, 330-331, 346, 405-406, 536).

God Crisis However, as Metz argued in theological terms, wherever the history of human suffering was made to fade away, and wherever the anamnestic culture of remembrance was allowed to become brutalized, as it was indeed often the case in globalizing late capitalist society in Europe and America, there a God crisis threatened to become a crisis of the humanum. For Metz the humanum meant precisely the human ability to perceive the suffering of the other human being. Metz formulated his practical theodicy answer very much under the influence of the cabalist Gerhard or Gershom Scholem and of the Frankfurt School, particularly Benjamin, Adorno and Bloch (Scholem 1967; 1970; 1973; 1977; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1997j: 608-616; Bloch/Reif 1978: 78-89). On the Hegelian continuum between the sacred and the profane, Metz placed himself between Scholem and Benjamin (Hegel 1986p: 9-26; Metz 1977; 2006; Klingen

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2006: 7; App. E, F). It was particularly the inability of theology to answer the theodicy problem on this earth–which according to Schopenhauer was merely a little ball with some mildew on it rolling around in the universe under a sky full of stars, and which according to Hegel’s statement to Heinrich Heine was just a leprosy scientifically emptied out of Gods, angels and departed souls–and the fact that God, who was love and logos, allowed a history to go on for millions of years, in which almost every organism was programmed to maintain itself in existence through tearing to pieces and consuming many other organisms that, as Benjamin put it, caused it to become small and ugly and could not let itself be seen any longer in public (Hegel 1986q: 487-535; Kaufmann 1968: 353-354; Benjamin 1955c: Vol. 1, 494; Adorno 1997j: 608-616; App. C, D, E, F).

New Impulse For Horkheimer and Adorno, nevertheless, every theodicy event was always again a new impulse for a new wave of the insatiable longing for the totally Other than the horror and terror of natural and social evolution and its often most cruel laws, as well as of the corresponding communicative solidary and autonomous action toward light, friendship, love and global alternative Future III–a free and just society (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23, 27-29, 34, 37, 40; 1988n: 469-470; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; App. C, D, E, F). For Horkheimer, this longing which he expressed already in his early poetical writings during World War I, climaxed in his confession “In you Eternal One I trust,” which is written on his gravestone in the cemetery of Bern, Switzerland, and without which there was also no freedom and no immortality, without which–what Kant had called postulates–there could also be no personal or collective ethics and morality (Genesis 33: 20; Psalm 91: 2; Hertz 5716-1956: 126/20; Horkheimer 1988a: 100-157; 1985g, chap. 17; Goldstein 2006: 61-114, 115-120). Both Metz and Küng learned their practical theodicy answer not only from Judaism and Christianity directly, but also through the mediation of the critical theorists, as they concretely superseded in their critical theory of society Judaism as well as Christianity (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23, 25-30, 32, 34, 37, 40-43; 1991f: 195, 219-220, 243-244, 248, 288-289, 292-293, 319-321, 324, 325-326, 340-341, 344-345, 347-350, 389-390, 414-415, 423-424; 1988n: 37, 57, 75, 77, 79, 80, 108, 112-114, 117, 126, 139, 144, 162-163, 165-166, 200-201, 215, 222, 233, 304-305, 331-333, 346, 347, 351, 352, 369, 373-374, 382-384, 387-391, 394-395, 398-399, 399-400, 404-406, 410-412, 418, 445447, 452, 455-456, 481-482, 489-490, 499-501, 503-504, 507-509, 510-412,

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513-514, 517-519, 533, 535-536, 1974: 247-248, 254-255, 260, 258, 286287, 288-289, 316-320, 352-353, 353-355; Adorno 1997j: 608-616; Küng 1994a: 904-905; Metz 2006; Klingen 2006: 7; App. E).

Transcendence According to the Rabbis, the description of Jacob’s dream of the ladder set up on the earth, with the top of it reaching to heaven, and of the angels of God ascending and descending on it, was among the most beautiful in world literature (Genesis: 28: 10-22; Hertz 5716/1956: 196/12; App. E). The Rabbis found here wonderful imagery, which, in its symbolism, spoke universally to each person according to his mental and spiritual outlook. Its message to Jacob was its message to all people in all ages: that the earth was full of the glory of God, and that He was not far off in his Heavenly abode and heedless of what people did on earth. Every spot on earth may be for humanity the gate of heaven. The story connects Transcendence and immanence. Transcendence is the bridge between Jewish, Christian and Islamic ethical monotheism on one hand, and the great bourgeois enlightenment, without which there would be no Marxian or Freudian enlightenment (Adorno 1997j: 608-616; Habermas 1990: 13-15; 2001a; 2006a: chap. 5; App. E). The Christian philosopher Hegel searched for the Rose of Reason or the Divine Logos not only in the beginning of creation, when God created through the Word or the Logos, but also in the Cross of any all too dark present moment in the biography of the individual and in the history of family, civil society, state, and culture and religion, which one had to take upon oneself if one wanted to pluck the former (Genesis 1: 1; John 1: 1; Hegel 1986g: 26-27, 42-43; 1986p: 124, 178, 272; 1986q: 286-292). For Hegel, the Other was logically the negative of Something (Hegel 1986e: 115-173; 1986q: 93, 243, 246, 273). The Other contained as the negative, the affirmation–the principle of identity.

The Breaking of the Chains According to Marx, humanity had to break the chains of the present capitalistic society in order to be able to pluck the living flower of reason and to reach alternative Future III–the realm of freedom on the basis of nature as the realm of necessity (Marx 1964: 44; 196319-20, 44, 121; 1961c: 873-874; App. G). The Christian theologian Dorothy Sölle believed it atheistically possible to find God in the rubbish or garbage heaps of the big cities of all

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continents of the earth (Sölle 1994). Even Adorno, Benjamin and Horkheimer agreed with Karl Kraus that the origin is the goal, and turned from the Alpha to the Omega, from the beginning to the end, from ontology to eschatology, from philosophia prima to philosophia ultima, yet still connected Transcendence and immanence, the wholly Other than any something, somebody or someone on one hand and the most insignificant and contingent events on the other (Hegel 1986e: 124, 125-131; 1986f: 1986i: 216; 1986p 93, 243, 246, 247, 273, 458; 1986h: 196-197; 1986p: 124, 178; 1986q: 272-273; Horkheimer 19845g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; 1996s: 62-67; Benjamin 1977: 258-259; Adorno 1970b: 161-200, esp. 191; App. E, F). In contrast to Hegel’s idealistic logic, which started with Being, Nothing and Becoming, Adorno wanted to begin his own materialistic logic with Something and its negative, the Other, which as the negative, the Other, did not necessarily contain the affirmation, the principle of identity (Hegel 1986e: 124-131; 1986q: 273; Adorno 1962). For Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin and even still for Habermas, the totally Other was the determinate negation of all the perils of human existence: unhappiness, injustice, alienation, misery, guilt, abandonment, loneliness, fear of sickness, old age, dying and death (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1986: 53-54).

The Name of God According to the outstanding musicologist, composer, and pianist Adorno, in comparison to signifying language music was a language of a completely different type (Adorno 2002c: 114; Siebert 2006b). In Adorno’s view, therein lay music’s theological aspect. What music said was a proposition at once distinct and concealed. For Adorno music’s idea was the Gestalt or the form of the name of God, the Absolute, the Transcendence, Heaven, Eternity, Beauty, the totally Other (Adorno 2002c: 114; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 29). Music was demythologized prayer. It was freed from the magic of making anything happen. It was the human attempt, futile as always, to name the name of God itself, not to communicate meanings. Adorno and Horkheimer even radicalized further the already radical second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue: the prohibition against making images or naming the wholly Other (Exodus 20: 1-8; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30). Signifying language would say the Absolute in a mediated way, yet the Infinite, the wholly Other escapes it in each of its intentions, which, in the end, are left behind as finite (Adorno 2002c: 116). In Adorno’s view, music reaches the Absolute immediately, but in the same instant the Absolute is darkened,

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as when a strong light blinds the eye that can no longer see things that are quite visible. For Adorno, music showed its similarity to language in that, like signifying language, it was sent, failing, on a wandering journey of endless mediation to bring home the Impossible, the Kantian Thingsin-themselves–God, Freedom and Immortality–Ens Realissimum, the imageless and nameless entirely Other (Kant 1965: 24, 27, 71-73, 74, 87, 149, 172-173, 230, 482-484, 490; Adorno 2002c: 116; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37). Music’s mediation, however, unfolded according to a different logic and law from that of signifying language. Music unfolded not in meanings that referred to each other, but in their moral absorption into a context that preserved meaning even as it moved beyond that meaning with every motion. According to Adorno music refracted its scattered intentions away from their own power and brought them together into the configuration of the name: the name of God (Horkheimer 1968: chap. 4; Horkheimer/Adorno 2002: 7-8, 17-18; Adorno 2002c: 114, 116). According to Adorno and Habermas, without Transcendence there was in the immanence of the world no personal autonomy of the ego, and no sovereignty in relation to the internal environment of the id–the will to life with its libidinous and aggressive aspects, and to the superego, with its internalized values and norms and its aggressive pressures, and to the forces of the external natural, social, economic, political, historical and cultural and religious worlds, and thus also no universal, i.e. anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity (Freud 1977; 1992; Adorno 1997j: 608-616; Habermas 1990: 9-17; Siebert 1994; App. C, D, E). For the critical theorist of religion, the idea of music and in general of genuine art, religion and philosophy remains as for Hegel and Adorno before the external Gestalt of the name of the wholly Other, and the entirely Other remains the content of genuine art, religion and philosophy, which once was called the sphere of the absolute Spirit based on the dimensions of the objective and the subjective spirit, and of nature (Hegel 1986c: 495-592; 1986i; 1986j; Adorno 2002c: 114; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 29; App. C, D). The name of God became most explicit e.g. in the Christian composer Beethoven’s small piece Thanks-Giving to the Divinity and his Missa Solemnis, which he wrote after he had freed music from the realm of the cultic and had secularized it (Adorno 1993a). This was so confusing for the great musicologist Adorno that he could never complete his Beethoven book. Like Hegel and Wolfgang von Goethe, Beethoven hoped for and even practiced the reconciliation of the modern antagonism between the religious and the secular through a return of reason to faith (Hegel 1990p: 16-17; 1986q: 342-344; App. E, F).

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Abrahamic Religions The deeper theological prototypes for the critical theory of society were the monotheistic Abrahamic religions, particularly Judaism and Christianity (Hegel 1986c: 545-574; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; 1986l: 115, 140, 428-430; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004; App. E). Abraham from the first Tribal Paradigm of the Pre-state Period of Judaism was the pioneer of monotheistic faith. (Genesis 12-25; Hertz 5716-1956: 89; Hegel 1986c: 545-574; 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991b: 87-97). Undazzled by the polytheistic splendor of a Nimrod or a Hammurabi, Abraham, the father of faith, broke away from what the Rabbis called the debasing idol-worship of his contemporaries in the civilizations of the Euphrates and Tigris and devoted his life to the spread of the world-redeeming truth of the One God of Justice and Mercy, which was held on to through the centuries not only by Jews, but also by Christians and Muslims. (Genesis 12-25; Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; 1986l: 115, 140, 428-430; Hertz 5716-1956: 89; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004). Abraham forsook home and family in Ur to brave unknown dangers moving west because the voice of God bade him do so. Throughout his days Abraham showed that faith in God must manifest itself in implicit and joyful surrender to the Divine will. Abraham set an example to his children to sacrifice the dearest things in life, and if need be, life itself, in defense of the spiritual heritage entrusted to their care. While Abraham preached renunciation in the service of God, he practiced loving kindness and truth towards his fellow men. Abraham practiced magnanimity in his treatment of his nephew Lot. He showed fine independence in the refusal to accept any of the spoils won by the men of his household. He demonstrated benevolence in the reception of strangers. He stood for justice when he was pleading to God for the doomed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. He showed all-embracing human pity that extended even to those who had forfeited all claim to human pity. Finally, the closing stage of his life shows his anxiety that the spiritual treasures he had acquired should be transmitted unimpaired through his sons Isaac and Ishmael to future generations. For the Rabbis, Abraham was indeed the prototype of what the Jew should aim at being. “Look to the rock from which you were hewn … look to Abraham your father” is the Divine exhortation addressed to Israel by the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 51: 1). While the first generation of critical theorists were critical of the religion of their parents, Judaism, they preserved their monotheistic faith in their longing for the imageless and nameless wholly Other than the finite world of nature and history, including their yearning for light, friendship and love, and alternative Future III–the realm of

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freedom beyond nature as the realm of necessity (Hegel 1986a: 43, 204, 335-336, 394-395; 1986f: 271, 563; 1986g: 74, 248; 1986h: 307; 1986j: 25, 200, 220, 222-225, 288, 301, 303, 309, 311, 312, 318, 332, 333, 404; 1986k: 85, 104, 331, 388, 527, 528, 529, 532, 543, 548, 550, 553; Marx 1961c: 873874; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-316; 1969: 29-31; 1974c: 8, 16, 17-18, 28-29, 33; 1988a: 100-157; 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; 1996s: 62-67; App. E, F, G).

Sermon on the Mount While the critical theorists of society were no less critical of Christianity than of Judaism, they nevertheless had the greatest respect for the historical Jesus of Nazareth from the Jewish-Apocalyptic Paradigm of the Primordial Christianity and the collection of his statements called the Sermon on the Mount, his inaugural discourse, over 90% of which was taken from the Torah in the broader sense, not only including the five books of Moses, but also the Psalms and the Prophets (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6; Horkheimer 1974c: 8, 16, 18, 28-29, 80, 92-93, 96-97, 116, 121-123, 127, 131-132, 141-142, 157-158, 168, 169, 175, 218-219, 247-248, 260, 268, 288-289, 316-317, 352-353; Adorno 1997j: 608-616; Fromm 1966: 231236; Küng 1994a: 89-144; App. E). For the critical theorists of society, unfortunately Christianity was more than just the Sermon on the Mount. Greek and Roman Church fathers transformed the mimesis which was demanded in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount into his adoration, and thus his teaching into a religion with dogmas and institutions, wealth and power, but admittedly also with great educational successes and remembrance (Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, as Manchester capitalism and its later even much more predatory globalized monopolistic and oligopolistic forms and appeal to the lowest in human beings individually and collectively, their egoism, selfishness, avarice and greed, so the Sermon on the Mount appeals to the highest in humanity, individually and collectively, their gentleness, compassion, hunger and thirst for perfect justice, their mercy, purity of heart, and longing for peace (Matthew 5: 1-12; Horkheimer 1974c: 20-21, 33, 3839, 45, 62, 94-94, 161, 167-168, 180-181, 187, 202-203, 203-204, 265-266, 289-290, 292-293, 300, 307, 333-334, 350-351; 1981b: 95-161; Reinhardt 2004: 73-75; Kater 2004: 4-7). According to the Sermon on the Mount, no one could be the slave of two masters: God and capital (Matthew 6: 24). One will either hate the first and love the second, or treat the first with respect and the second with scorn.

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Golden Rule One of the main elements of the Sermon on the Mount is the Golden Rule, the very opposite of the lex talionis (Matthew 7: 12; 5: 38-42; Eco 1980: 340-342, 344-345). The Golden Rule can also be found in the Chinese Religion of Measure, in Hinduism as the Religion of Imagination, in Jainism, in Buddhism as the Religion of Inwardness, in Judaism as the Religion of Sublimity, and in Islam as the Religion of Law in slightly different formulations (Küng 1990b: 18-19; App. E). The Sermon on the Mount motivates Christians to make a decisive contribution to the human progress of modern civil society in its present transition period from Modernity to Postmodernity–toward alternative Future III–the reconciled and free society rather than to alternative Future I–the totally administered society or alternative Future II–the entirely militarized society (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23-29, 32, 34-43; App. C, D, E, G). Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount does not opt for counter-force and retaliation and reprisal, but rather for the love of the neighbor and even of the enemy, freedom from violence, mercy and justice (Matthew 5-7; Luke: 6; Horkheimer 1969: 177-217; 1967: 317-321; 1974c: 8, 20, 28-29, 36, 45-46, 52-53, 61, 69, 85, 89, 92-93, 94-95, 96-97, 115-117, 121-123, 148-151, 164-165, 168-169, 196-197, 198199, 200-202, 202-203, 213, 214-215, 247, 254-255, 288-289, 295, 316-320, 321-322, 348-349, 352-353). What counts in present globalizing capitalist society, is to replace the dominant logic–the spiral of violence and counter-violence, of exclusion and exploitation–through the disarming logic of the Sermon on the Mount. It is therefore necessary to take the Sermon on the Mount, this heart piece of Christianity, this crown-jewel, out of the strongbox of the dogmatized, stiff, rigid, and petrified Christian traditions–Orthodox Traditionalism, Roman Catholic Authoritarianism, Protestant Fundamentalism, and Liberal Modernism–and to make this light of life shine in the form of a contemporary, world-open, Post-modern, Ecumenical Paradigm of Christianity (Küng 1994a: 817-906; App. E, G). The Sermon on the Mount remains a provocation also still in late bourgeois society. When the Sermon on the Mount is directed toward contemporaries in civil society in the language of today, it unfolds visionary energy and power. Leo Tolstoy inverted the religious Sermon on the Mount into the secular language of the great bourgeois enlightenment and practiced it, when he freed his serfs (Tolstoy 1960; 1961).

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In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the Sermon on the Mount can also be inverted, translated, secularized, rationalized together with the Christian teaching on humanity as the image of God and its ethical values into the secular language of all the modern enlightenment traditions from the proclaimed human rights of the French and the American Revolutions, Kant’s ethic, Hegel’s dialectical philosophy of history, Marx’s critique of capitalism, through Bernstein’s critical Marxism, Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of spontaneity and critique of Bolshevism, and Schumacher’s free socialism to the newer contributions of Bloch, Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas, as well as of Leszek Kolakowski, and Milovan Djilas and other thinkers of a democratic socialism as applied humanism (Seitz 2004: 53-59). The Golden Rule, which is an essential part of the Sermon on the Mount as well as of other world religions can also be inverted into the Kantian categorical imperative or into the Peircian, Apelian, or Habermasian apriori of the unlimited communication community. This is possible because all these religious and secular ethical principles are rooted in the human potential of language and memory and in the evolutionary universal of the struggle for mutual and reciprocal recognition between the one and the other, and have thus the same anthropological foundation. (Hegel 1972: 1979; App. A, B, C, D, E). Only when the Sermon on the Mount is no longer ridiculed as naïve, goodhearted fantasy, and its revolutionary biophilous logic unmasks the present social conditions in late capitalist society as being necrophilous shall history move toward alternative Future III–a life-friendly world of Being, rather than toward alternative Future I–a death-friendly totally administered society, or toward alternative Future II–an even more necrophilous militaristic society (Fromm 1973; 2001; Adorno 1979: 354-372, 578-587; 1997j: 97-122; Bloch 1970a & b; 1993: 1622-1628; App. A, B, E, G). What counts is to actualize, to practice, and to concretize the 2,000 year-old Sermon on the Mount, or its possible secular inversion in terms of the categorical imperative or the a priori of the unlimited communication community.

Philosophical Prototype The immediate philosophic prototype of the critical theory of religion contained in the dialectical theory of society was Hegel’s phenomenology, his logic, and particularly his philosophy of religion dealing with the beginning of the history of religion in terms of magic and fetishism; and

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then with the Chinese Religion of Measure; with Hinduism as the Religion of Imagination; with Buddhism as the Religion of Inwardness; with Zoroastrianism as the Religion of Light and Darkness, or Good and Evil; with the Syrian Religion of Pain; with the Egyptian Religion of Riddle; with the Jewish Religion of Sublimity; with the Greek Religion of Fate and Beauty; with the Roman Religion of Utility; with Christianity as the Absolute Religion of Freedom; and with Islam as the Religion of Law; and with the modern antagonism between the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane, faith and reason, revelation and enlightenment and its philosophical reconciliation; and all this as a gigantic theodicy (Hegel 1986c: 495-574; 1986e: 124-165; 1986f; 1986h: 196-1971986p; 1986q; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969; Adorno 2002c: 114-116; Küng/Ess/Staietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng 1991b; 1994a: 204; App. A, B, E, F). The critical theorists’ dialectical theory of religion can be defined in terms of a working definition as a theory which explores the position of religion in the antagonistic social totality of modern civil society. It tries to discover, to what extent religion is ideology–understood not only affirmatively as the mere combination of ideas and motivating values, but rather critically as the masking of national and class interests or simply as the untruth–or to what extent religion legitimates the interests of the ruling classes and nations, or to what extent religion identifies with the oppressed and exploited poor classes and masses and their interest in liberation and happiness. However, the critical theorists’ critical theory of religion is as political theology not only interested in the notion of happiness, but also in that of redemption, as it occurs in different world religions, particularly in Judaism and Christianity (Hegel 1986p: 50-95, 185-346; Benjamin 1977: chap. 11; Küng 1991b; App. E). The two notions are different and even contradictory, but they can also support each other. The critical theorists of religion see the free, friendly and happy living together of human beings, characterized by communication without domination, as the very location from which arises the longing for redemption: the hope for the totally Other as the radical, but nevertheless still determinate negation of what on earth is called injustice, human abandonment and alienation (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; 1996s: 1996: 62-66). The critical theory of religion, intrinsic to the critical theory of society as its very core, differentiates sharply between the bad religion of domination, which guilds ideologically the unjust world, on one hand, and the good religion of emancipation, which states, that it has to become different, i.e. right (Horkheimer 1972: chap. 4; 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Marcuse 1962: 6566; 1970: 3-10; Breines 1970; App. A, B, E). Certainly, the critical theory of

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society is not value-free like the great German positivist sociologist Max Weber, but rather value-conscious-and centered like the great French positivist sociologist Emile Durkheim.

Dialectical Sociology of Religion In spite of Marx’s critical opposition to the restauration-philosopher Auguste Comte, the father of positivism and a positive sociology, the critical theorists of society spoke sometimes of a critical or dialectical sociology (Adorno 1993b; Negt 1964). It is possible to call the critical theory of religion intrinsic to the critical theory of society also a critical or dialectical sociology of religion, if one takes into critical consideration the very beginning of the so-called dogma-history of sociology: Auguste Comte (Adorno 1993b: 20-23, 26-27, 94-96, 163-165 217-220, 266-268 305-307; Siebert 1987d: 2005). Thus, we can speak of a dialectical sociology of religion, if positivism and sociology can be separated: if a non-positivistic sociology is possible. Comte’s positivistic sociology, the Course de philosophie positive, orientated itself according to the great dichotomy between the static and the dynamic laws of society: i.e. the static laws of order and the dynamic laws of progress. The primitiveness and crudeness of Comte’s dichotomy is only too obvious. It is also only too clear that one cannot reduce in any way something so immensely differentiated and complex as the modern civil or socialist society to merely two dimensions. To do that would be as much a miserable simplification, as if we would with Carl-Gustav Jung reduce all human beings into two groups: introverts and extroverts (Jung 1990; 1933; Fromm 1970: chap. 2; Funk 2000: chaps. 8, 9, 10, 11; App. F). During exile, Adorno was asked by a coed in the cafeteria of an American University if she could ask him a very personal and intimate question. When Adorno said yes, the student asked him: are you an introvert or an extrovert? Adorno was so shocked and horrified by the question, that he never forgot it, and even talked about it still decades later. Adorno could not understand how a young lively woman could possibly differentiate people in terms of those two abstract categories, which were both untrue precisely because of their unmediated, abstract character.

Thought and Reality According to Adorno’s Minima Moralia of 1951, the positivism from Auguste Comte through Max Weber and Emil Durkheim and the Vienna

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School to Carl Popper has narrowed down the distance of thought from reality; a distance that was already no longer tolerated by the reality itself (Hegel 1989g: 26-27; Adorno 1980a: 164-167; 1980b: 7-80, chaps. 1-9; App. F). As the intimidated thoughts no longer wanted to be more than provisional arrangements, mere abstract abbreviations for the subsumed facticities under them, the energy to penetrate and permeate reality also disappeared along with thought’s independence in relation to reality (Hegel 1989g: 26-27; Adorno 1980a: 164-167; Habermas 1992a). For Adorno, only in distance to life in civil society, does the life of thought take place, which really and successfully strikes into the empirical life. While, so Adorno argued, thought related itself to the social facts and while it moved in the critique of the social data, it moved no less through the held-on-to difference. According to Adorno, then precisely the thought expressed thereby exactly that what is the case: that it is never entirely so as thought expressed it. In Adorno’s view, to thought belonged essentially an element of exaggeration, a moment of shooting beyond things, a moment of emancipation from the gravity of the factual, in the power of which thought performed strictly and freely at the same time, instead of the mere reproduction of being, its determination and destination. For Adorno, in that every thought was similar to play or game, with which Hegel no less than Nietzsche compared the work of the human spirit. Here, Adorno learned even more from Nietzsche than from Hegel. According to Adorno, the non-barbarous in philosophy rested in the silent consciousness of that element of irresponsibility, of happiness, of laughter, which stemmed from the transitoriness of thought, which continually escaped from that what it judged, and which historically went back not only to Nietzsche and Hegel, but even to Aristotle (Hegel 1989g: 26-27; Adorno 1980a: 164-167; Eco 1984: 471-479; Habermas 1992a; App. A, B, C, D).

The Positivistic Spirit From its very start, the critical theory of society profiled itself in its critical opposition to the positivistic spirit in modern European and American civil society (Hegel 1989g: 26-27; Horkheimer 1988a; Adorno 1980a: 164-167; 1980b: 7-80, chaps. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). According to Adorno, such excess of thought was avenged and punished by the positivistic spirit and it was handed over and delivered up to foolishness. In a session of my international course on the Future of Religion, in Dubrovnik, Croatia when it still belonged to the former Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, the great Heidegger student and scholar Hans Georg Gadamer told a student

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of Adorno that he would fall into insanity if he would continue to follow his teacher and not find himself another one from the positivistic spirit, be it of science or of the Heideggerian ontology (Adorno 1997f: 413-524; 1980a: 7-80, chaps. 1, 3, 5, 7). In the same session, Gadamer explained the fascism of his master Heidegger through his political naiveté, and through the ambitions of his wife. Of course, National Socialism, the German form of fascism, was also of the positivistic spirit (Horkheimer 1974c: 101-104, 116-17, 148-151, 200-202, 213). If Hitler and Goebbels had won the war against the Soviet Union and had not lost it in Stalingrad, and Kursk, and Berlin, then they would have been praised in civil society not only as the greatest conservative revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries, but also as the greatest positivists.

Fascist Renaissance The positivistic spirit may play a role once more in any possible future renaissance of fascism in Europe, in the Americas, or elsewhere (MenzelAhr 2005; Pufendorf 2006; Scheer 2006: 75-76; Ullrich 2006: 72-74; Hille 2006: 76-79). In the first half of the 20th century a world war was needed in order to overcome fascism in Europe and Asia. This option is no longer open considering the further evolved and evolving weapons of mass destruction. In the future, revolutionary Leftwing movements and parties will have to resist a fascist renaissance (Lucke 2006: 9-12). This will be easier to do in Europe, where each state of the European Union has more or less powerful Left parties: social democratic or labor parties. This resistance against a fascist renaissance will be much more difficult in the United States, which has only two powerful parties, the Republican and Democratic, which are both bourgeois and capitalistic, and which are both secular, and which both instrumentalize religion more or less for their profane purposes, and which both send millionaires and billionaires into both houses of Congress. The United States has no relevant labor party, so that 180 million American workers have either no political representation and are thus disenfranchised, or are under the false consciousness that they are middle class, and thus let themselves be represented by the class opponent, the two bourgeois parties. This problem could be settled only if the Democratic Party would become a labor party. However, such a party would not be paid by the corporate ruling class like the two bourgeois parties, and thus would have to finance itself, which would not be an easy, but nevertheless worthwhile doable task.

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The Time Clock According to Adorno, for the positivists the difference of thought from the facts turned into mere falsity and wrongness (Adorno 1980a: 165-166; App. F). The moment of play in thought turned into mere luxury in the world of civil and socialist society, before which the intellectual functions must justify themselves concerning every minute according to the time clock. In the American universities of 2010, this is called assessment, performed a la factory style, if it fits or not. While the universities in Michigan have as of yet no time clock at their entrance doors, sometimes they and their administrations look similar to the well organized plants of General Motors and Ford Motor Company with their bureaucracies and assembly lines, showing a tendency toward global alternative Future I–the totally administered society. Even the churches in Michigan look sometimes a little bit like factory halls: e.g. the former Episcopalian Cathedral of Christ the King in Kalamazoo. In Adorno’s view, as soon, however, as thought denied or disowned its insurmountable distance from data and wanted to talk itself out toward literal correctness with thousand subtle arguments, it lost more and more ground. Adorno had to concede to the positivists that in case the thought fell out of the medium of the virtual, an anticipation, which could not be fulfilled entirely by any singular givenness or, shortly, in the case that the thought was seeking instead of the interpretation to become simple expression, then everything that the thought said was indeed false. The apologetic of thought, inspired by insecurity, could according to Adorno be refuted step by step with the proof of the non-identity, which thought denied, and which after all alone made thought into thought (Adorno 1973b: 3-60; 1980a: 165-166; App. A, B).

Field of Tension In case, so Adorno argued, thought would attempt to talk its way out of its positivistic submission to facts in the direction of distance as well as of a privilege, then it would not do any better, but would merely proclaim two types of truth: (a) the truth of facts; and (b) the truth of notions (Adorno 1980a: 165-166; App. E). This, however, would dissolve truth itself, which must be one, and it would denounce thinking all the more determinately. For Adorno, the distance between thought and reality was no security zone. It was rather a field of tension. The distance manifested itself less in the decrease of the truth claim of the notions or of the claim to the Absolute, than in the tenderness and the fragility through which thinking took

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place (Adorno 1980a: 165-166; Siebert 2005d: 11-13, 15-18). It was not proper for the critical theorist in relation to the positivist to be dogmatic, or to pretend to be distinguished, refined or polite. Rather, what was needed was the epistemological-critical proof of the impossibility of a coincidence between the notion and what fills it: its form and its content; the universal and the particular and the singular (Hegel 1986f: 243-300; Adorno 1980a: 165-166; App. E). According to Adorno, searching after the supersession of the reality and the notion into each other was not always the striking effort, to which redemption waves at the end, but it was rather naïve and inexperienced. What positivism reproached critical thinking for, thought itself has thousand times known and forgotten. Only through knowing and forgetting, so Adorno insisted, does thinking become genuine thinking. In Adorno’s view, this distance of the thought from reality was itself nothing else than the sediment of history in the notions. While for Hegel the singular was the synthesis of the universal and the particular, for Adorno this synthesis had become problematic. While Adorno emphasized the chorismos between the universal and the particular, he, nevertheless, continued Kant’s, Fichte’s, Schelling’s and Hegel’s attempt to determinately negate the idealism of Plato–universale ante rem–and the realism of Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas–universale in re–and the modern nominalism or formalism intrinsic to all types of positivism–universale post rem–now not into historical idealism, but rather into historical materialism and beyond that into the critical theory of society (Hegel 1986s: 11-249, 541, 546, 570-579, 564565, 573, 579; 1986t: 267-453; Adorno 1980a: 165-166; App. A, B, E).

Transcending Thought For Adorno, it was a matter for children to operate with the notions in a distance-less way despite of all resignation or maybe precisely because of it (Adorno 1980a: 165-166). This was so for Adorno, because the thought had to aim beyond its object precisely because it did not quite arrive at it. For Adorno, positivism was uncritical when it credited itself with being able to arrive at the object, and when it was conceited about it, and imagined to hesitate only out of conscientiousness. According to Adorno, the transcending thought took into account its own inadequacy more thoroughly than the positivistic thought, which was steered through the scientific control-apparatus. The transcending thought extrapolated, in order to master through the overstretched effort of the too much the however always hopeless and unavoidable too little. What the positivists accuse philosophy of as illegitimate absolutism, the supposedly conclusive

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formation, originated precisely in the abyss of relativity (Adorno 1980a: 166; Siebert 2005d). Horkheimer and Adorno proposed in American exile on April 5, 1939, as they discussed the relationship between fact and theory, and following Hegel’s phenomenology and logic, a non-conclusive dialectic, or a determinate negativity (Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53; Horkheimer 1985l: 483-492). For Adorno a formulation of the conception of the truth was not possible without a determinate notion of a post-Kafka, a post-Baudelaire, a post-Brecht, a post-Proust, a post-Beckett, a postMann, or a post-Grass negative and inverse theology, which was extremely and exaggeratedly obedient to the second and the third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue, and to the Kantian prohibition against penetrating the realm of the thing in itself, or the things in themselves, or the Ens Realissimum, and which in terms of his student Jürgen Habermas could very well be called a formal or methodological atheism (Exodus 20: 4-7; Hosea 12, 13-14, 10; Hertz 5716/1956: 118/1, 2; Kant 1965: 24, 27, 71-74, 85-87, 89, 149, 172-173, 265-267, 278-280, 282-284, 346-348, 351-353, 356-358, 381-383, 440-449, 453-455, 457, 460, 466-468, 482-484, 490; Benjamin 1978c; Schweppenhäuser 1981; Adorno 1970b: 103-125; 1973; Adorno/Mann 2003; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37; Habermas 1991a: part III; Kesting 2006: 63-66; Faulenbach 2006: 69-71). Like Kant and Hegel, the critical theorists knew negatively what God, Freedom or Immortality were not, but not positively what they were (Kaufmann 1968: 353-354; Horkheimer 1967b: 251-252, 259-261, 311-312).

The God above the God of Theism Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s totally Other, the Heaven, Eternity, and Beauty of the former world religions and metaphysics, were in the words of Adorno’s teacher, and both Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s life-long friend, Paul Tillich, the God who appeared when the God of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic ethical theism had disappeared in the massive anxiety, meaninglessness and doubt in the face of the horror and terror of the 20th century: in Auschwitz and Treblinka, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and we may add in the face of the moral catastrophes that followed the Vietnam war, in the Balkan, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq (Tillich 1972: 186190; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1997c; Bess 2006: 1-3; App. E). It was the God above the God of theism. According to Adorno, the exaggeration of the speculative metaphysics was the scar of the reflecting understanding (Adorno 1980a: 166). Only the unproven revealed the proof as tautology (Hegel 1986e: 49; Adorno 1980a: 166). For Adorno,

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contrary to this, the immediate reservation of relativity, the limiting that what remained in the marked out conceptual circumference, withdrew itself precisely through such caution and care from the experience of the boundary, which to think and to transcend had been the same according to Hegel’s great and splendid insight (Hegel 1986c: 590; 1986d: 14-15, 95, 126, 167, 187, 221; 1986e: 125, 131-139, 312-314; 1986p: 109, 179, 310311; 1986q: 117; 1963; Adorno 1980a: 166; Gadamer/Habermas 1979: 9-32; Schnädelbach 2001). The practice of Hegel’s great insight reached its climax in his dialectical reconstruction of the proofs for the existence of God against their destruction by his great teacher Immanuel Kant and his denial of the possibility of a philosophical theodicy (Kant 1929: 485570; Kant 1975: 77-93; Hegel 1986q: 347-535). It lay on Hegel’s desk unfinished when he died in Berlin on November 14, 1831 (Küng 1970: 499500). While Kant stopped short of the boundary of the other dimension of God, Freedom and Immortality and referred to postulates and religious faith, Hegel thought the limit and thus transcended it toward a positive dialectical metaphysics. The critical theorists moved continually between Kant’s critique of pure and practical reason, and Hegel’s absolute idealism, and thus arrived at a negative metaphysics: they could not say what the things in themselves were, but only what they were not (Fromm 1966a; Haag 1983: chaps. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Lundgren 1998). The critical theorists thus avoided the secret metaphysics of Marx and the official metaphysics of Marxism, as well as any regression into the restorative philosophizing of neo-scholastic objectivism and neo-Kantian subjectivism, or into any form of positivism, but searched for ways to overcome them.

The Claim of the Unconditional According to Adorno, thus the relativists, who withdraw from the experience of Hegel’s equation of thinking and transcending the boundary of the other dimension of the things in themselves, would be the bad absolutists and beyond that, the bourgeois, who would like to assure themselves of their knowledge as of a possession, only in order to lose it even more thoroughly (Adorno 1980a: 166-167). For Adorno, only the claim of the Unconditional, the leap beyond the shadow, lets justice happen to the relative (Adorno 1980a: 167; Siebert 2005d). As this claim or this leap of the Unconditional took upon itself untruth, it lead to the threshold of truth in the concrete consciousness of the conditionality of human knowledge (Adorno 1980a: 167; Eco 1994: 490-492). As for Hegel, Schelling and Bloch before, so for the critical theorists thinking continued to mean transcending

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(Hegel 1986c: 590; 1986d: 14-15, 95, 126, 167, 187, 221; 1986e: 125, 131139, 312-314; 1986p: 109, 179, 310-311; 1986q: 117; 1963; Adorno 1980a: 166-167; Bloch/Reif 1978; Bloch 1970a; 1970b: 1971; 1975a). Thinking as transcending has been connecting ethical monotheism and modern enlightenment from the very beginning of modernity, and in spite of their departure from each other: transcending boundary and limit in dreams; in the struggle for health; in the medical utopias; in social utopias; in the technical utopias; in architectonic utopias; in the geographical utopias; in painting, opera and poetry and even artistic movies; in wish-landscapes, and wisdom sub specie aeternitatis, and in processes; in shorter labor hours, a world of peace and leisure time; in wish images of the fulfilled moment–nunc stans; in house and school; in guiding images of humanity; in guiding boards of the dangerous and the happy life; in guiding boards of the tempi of will and of meditation, of loneliness and solitude, and of friendship, of individual and community; in guiding figures of limit-transcendence: Faust and the bet and the wager of the fulfilled moment; in non-renouncement; in guiding boards of abstract and mediated boundary transcendence indicated through Don Quixote and Faust; in the intensity-richest human world of music; in images of death on Greek and Roman columbaria; in self and grave lamp, or images of hope against the strongest non-utopia: the death; in the growing entrance of man into the religious mystery, astral mythos, exodus, realm, atheism and the utopia of the kingdom of God; in the ultimate content of wish and the highest good; in humanity as the material of hope; in morality; in religion, in human nature; in the upright carriage: concrete utopia; etc. (Bachofen 1992; Bloch 1985b; 1971; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-617; 1997s: chaps. I, II, V; 1997o: 7-146, 147-156; Habermas 1990: 9-19; 1991: part III; Siebert 2007a, b, c, d, e, f, g; App. A, B, E, G).

Dialectical Mediation For the critical theorists, Auguste Comte’s simplification was particularly not possible in sociology because his two social dimensions, social static and social dynamic, were dialectically mediated through each other (Adorno 1993: 20-23, 26-27, 94-96, 163-165 217-220, 266-268 305307). That means that the dynamic of modern civil society was brought into play precisely through the so-called static moments. In Marx’s case, the movement of the dynamic productive forces was initiated precisely through the fact that the static productive relations have fettered and halted the productive forces in Comte’ and Marx’s time, as they still do

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today in the late capitalist society (Adorno 1993b: 12, 27-28, 42-4360-61, 115-116, 140-141, 143-144, 162-164, 236-237, 239-241, 243-244 250-251, 275-277 292-293 307-39; 1979: 354-372, 578-587; Bloch 1971; Fromm 1967). Of course, Marx also opposed Comte’s positivism and his sociology as conservative, restorative bourgeois expressions. However, the critical theorist of religion must admit with Adorno that this whole question of the dialectic of productive relations and productive forces as it then determined the theory of Marx, and as it is still of central significance for the critical theorists of society up to the present, was expressed the first time in Comte’s relatively crude and primitive concepts, social statics and dynamics, in a very drastic and dramatic way.

Actuality Adorno confessed in his Introduction into Sociology at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität in Frankfurt a.M., Germany, in 1968, shortly before his death, that he began to comprehend a very determinate aspect of the dialectic only through Comte’s antithesis of social static and dynamic (Adorno 1993: 20-23, 26-27, 72, 94-96, 135, 163-165, 217-220, 222, 228, 240, 266-268, 305-307; App. F). In the case of Comte’s theory of social static and dynamic, Adorno learned that theoretical elements, which in their traditional form have definitely become obsolete and thus belonged to the history of dogma, could nevertheless–if one reflected and developed them further–give occasion to reflections about the present situation of extraordinary actuality. Such reflections of highest actuality were not delivered–at least not to the same extent–by the formalized, systematic social sciences on the Hegelian Right, e.g. the structural functionalism of a Talcott Parsons, Edward A Shils, Robert Merton, Thomas F. O’dea, or Nicholas Luhmann and their disciples in America and in Europe (Adorno 1993b: 18, 39 165, 176, 186, 265, 271, 296, 299-300; Parsons/Shils1951; Parsons 1965; 1964; O’Dea 1966; Luhmann 1977). Such reflections of greatest actuality could, however, and should be delivered by the critical theory of society. Adorno did some of this delivery himself (Adorno 1993b).

Religion as Productive Force In this context it makes sense for the critical theorist of religion to speak not only of a critical theory of society as dialectical sociology, but also of a critical theory of religion as dialectical sociology of religion (Siebert

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1987d; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d). In the framework of such dialectical sociology we may discover that religion precisely because it is an element of the social order or the productive relations can also turn over dialectically into a factor of social progress or a productive force of revolutionary development toward an identity change in late capitalist society, which would make possible alternative Future III–a society characterized by the prosperity, freedom and happiness not only of the Few, the slaveholders, the feudal lords or the bourgeois corporate elite, but for All (Hegel 1986: 133-141; Marx/Engels 2005; Laski 1967; Flechtheim 1976; Flectheim/Lohmann 2003; Scherer 2006: 70-71; App. G). Precisely because–e.g. in Central and Latin America–the Roman Catholic Church had been for centuries a colonial church, with the exception of the short-lived Jesuit state in Uruquy, and had as such been a pillar of the dominant feudal or capitalist order or productive relations, in the 20th century it could turn over into a factor of social progress and a productive force of revolutionary, qualitative change, and it can continue to do so into the future: as e.g. the Christian base communities and their liberation theologians in Latin America, or the Brothers Cardinal in Central America, or the Berrigan Brothers and the Christian peace movement in the U.S.A. have shown and still demonstrate (Berryman 1987; Casey/Nobile; Bonfiglio 2005). In November 2006, the Sandinista leader Ortega returned to power again in Nicaragua, with whom the brothers Cardinal had cooperated, after he had been replaced for some time by the grandson of the former fascist dictator Somoza, who had been supported by the United States. These people do this in spite of all the neo-conservative counter-revolutions in the name of law and order for the protection and increase of corporate surplus value. The Christian base-communities and the liberation theologians do so, in spite of the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, or more precisely the School of the Assassins, the products of which terrorize the colonized populations in Central and Latin America and elsewhere into producing the highest amount of surplus labor for the lowest price for the native bourgeoisie and for 80 percent of North American industry. They do so even against the resistance of the Roman Curia, as the example of Archbishop Romero of San Salvador and his and other liberation theologians have shown. Critical religion does not have an easy time in the old paradigms of Christianity or of any other world religion, which are often conservative and more inclined toward counter-revolutions: particularly when it is faced with the symphony of throne and altar, emperor or imperial president and pope, the ruling class and the bishops (Hegel 1986p: 236-245; 1986g: 398-514; Habermas 2002; Mendieta 2005; Küng 1994a:

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C; App. E). Revolutions do–like wars–take place, nevertheless, when that is–as Hegel and Marx would say–in the nature of things (Hegel 1986g: 52, 158, 493-494; 1986l: 111, 161, 194, 428, 520-540, 535; 1986o: 335, 415; 1986p: 245; Marx 1956: 231-240; Niebuhr 1964: 80, 82-83, 142, 272; Nasser 2006: 1-5; Siebert 2007b).

The Five-World Model The critical theorists of society inherited from Plato and Aristotle through Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel a five-world macro model, which contains in itself: (I) the World of Logos–God’s thoughts before he created nature and the human spirit; (II) the World of Nature; (III) the Internal World, including of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity, (IV) the Social World, including family, civil society, state and history; and (V) the Cultural World, including art, religion and philosophy (Hegel 1986e: 43-44; 1986h; 1986i; 1986j; App. C, D). As for the three Abrahamic religions, so for Hegel’s metaphysical sublation in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1: 1; Graf 2006; Kallscheuer 2006; Rorty/Vattimo 2006; Lohmann 2006: 66-69; App. E). As for Christianity, so for Hegel’s metaphysical sublation in the beginning was the Logos: the Logos was with God and the Logos was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things came to be. Not one thing had its being but through him. All that came to be had life in him and that life was the light of men, a light that shines in the dark, a light that darkness could not overpower…. The Logos was made flesh. He lived among us and we saw his glory, the glory that is his as the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1: 1-18; Hegel 1986q, part III; Küng 1970; Arcais/Ratzinger 2006; Lohmann 2006: 68).

Hegel’s Science of Logic as logos-theology describes what Kant had called the Thing in itself (Kant 1929: 490; Hegel 1986e: 43-44, 91-92, 115-173). Hegel’s Science of Logic contains a series of definitions or better self-definitions of the Absolute (Hegel 1986e: 130, 131, 138-139, 145-149, 149156). Even when Hegel’s positive logos theology turns like the Jewish and Christian and Islamic mystical theologies into a negative theology, it remains still necessary for the formulation of the truth (Horkheimer 1967b: 311-313; 1985l: 483-492). For Hegel his logos theology is in the words of Meister Eckhart the eye through which God sees man and through which man sees God (Blakney 1957: XIV; Hegel 1964: 35-65; Siebert 1987b: 30). In Hegel’s view, the Logos was concretely negated in the world of nature,

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the social world and the cultural world (Hegel 1986h; 1986i; 1986j; Küng 1970: chaps. 6, 7, 8; App. C, D). Each next world in Hegel’s macro-model concretely supersedes as superstructure the previous one as base structure: the individual subject nature; the family the individual; the society the family; the state the society; history the state; culture history; the Logos culture. The order moves from below or materialistically. However, Hegel has also shown that this order can be inversed idealistically or from above. Then the materialistic result becomes the idealistic basis: then the family becomes the basis of the individual; the society the basis of the family; the state the basis of the society; history the basis of the state; culture the basis of history; the Logos the basis of culture and of everything else. Then the lower unite can be sacrificed mythologically or idealistically for the higher one: the individual for the family, civil society, state history, or culture, particularly religion; the family for civil society, civil society for the state, the state for history, history for culture, particularly religion (Walther/Hayo 2004; Hegel 1986g: 92-514; App. C, D). That order precisely makes Hegel the great idealist, whose dialectical philosophy, nevertheless, contains already strong materialistic elements (Hegel 1986: 339-397; Hegel 1979; Benjamin 1977: 252). The worlds are idealistically turned upside down and stand on their head. Finally, like other great idealists, Hegel combined the idealistic and materialistic tendencies. According to Hegel, “the pure religious idealist and the pure religious materialist were only the two shells of the mussel, which contained the pearl of Christianity” (Siebert 1987a: 169).

From Idealism to Materialism For Hegel, the sentence in his logic that the finite was ideal constituted his and every other genuine idealism (Hegel 1986e: 172-173). In Hegel’s view, the idealism of philosophy consisted in nothing else than in the fact that the finite was not recognized as a true being. Every philosophy was essentially idealism, or had it at least for its principle. Then the question was only to what extent the principle of idealism was really carried out. Philosophy was as much idealism as was religion. This was so because the religion recognized finitude as little as philosophy as a true Being, as an Ultimate, as an Absolute, or as a Non-posited, Uncreated, Eternal Something (Hegel 1986e: 172-173; 1986p: 9-88). In Hegel’s perspective, therefore the opposition between idealistic and realistic or materialistic philosophy was without relevance or significance. For Hegel, a philosophy that would ascribe to the finite existence as such true ultimate, absolute being would not deserve the name of philosophy. The critical theory of society

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is genuine philosophy insofar as it–according to its founder Horkheimer– contains in itself and is carried by the longing at least that the finitude of the finite human life may not be the last word of history (Horkheimer 1971; 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; 1981b: chaps.11-13; 1981c: 2-3, 5-7, 1013; 1974c; 1972: chaps 1, 2, 4-8). For Horkheimer, the idealistic dialectic turned necessarily over out of itself into a materialistic dialectic (Horkheimer 1985l: 246-247, 260-261, 286, 294, 299-302, 306, 483-492). Maybe also the opposite is true!?

Suffering and Misery In his letter from New York of June 6, 1936, the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse invited Adorno in Oxford, England, to participate in the creation of a reader, which would contain materialistic teachings of the occidental philosophy from Antiquity to the end of the 19th century (Horkheimer 1995o: 517-518). According to Marcuse, such a reader had become necessary because there existed in the present philosophical literature quite some confusion about the differentiation between idealism and materialism. In Marcuse’s view, in the reader were to be expressed particularly such tendencies of materialism that were overlooked, or at least neglected, in the usual philosophical portrayals or depictions. To such materialistic tendencies belonged particularly the following problem-circles: suffering and misery in history; meaninglessness of the world; injustice and oppression; critique of religion and morality; connection between theory and historical praxis; demand of a better organization of society; etc. Marcuse wanted to organize and structure the material of the materialism reader under the following main titles: the task of the theory; history; man and nature; man and man; the demand for happiness; ideology critique; and the person of the materialist.

Marcuse wanted to have treated in the reader particularly such thinkers, who were considered in the professional historiography merely as outsiders and mavericks, or who were mentioned only in the footnotes. Marcuse wanted to see in the reader also sections from non-materialists or idealists, like Aristotle, Kant or Hegel. Certainly, Hegel’s idealistic philosophy contained materialistic inversions or sublations (Benjamin 1977: 252;

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Habermas 1973: chaps. 3-5). However, so Marcuse argued, materialistic nature philosophy, e.g. the atomistic philosophy of Greek Antiquity and the so-called vulgar materialism, were to be moved into the background of the reader (Hegel 1986e: 172-174; Horkheimer 1995o: 517-518). According to Marcuse, not only professional philosophers were to be considered in the materialism reader, but also heretics, people from literature, critics, economists, sociologists (Horkheimer 1995o: 517-518; Marcuse 1970: 3-10). The materialist-reader project was not carried out. However, Marcuse’s estate contains several extended excerpts for it. The confusion about the differentiation between idealism and materialism of the 1930’s continues into the 21st century. One reason for this confusion is the fact that materialistic elements can be found in idealistic philosophies and vice versa. Certainly the historical-materialist critical theory of society concretely supersedes in itself idealistic impulses together with the results of the secular expert cultures, like psychology and psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, aesthetics, particularly musicology and literature, comparative science of religion and theology (Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 2, 4-9; App. A, B).

Materialistic Inversion Contrary to Hegel, the critical theorists concentrated on the subjective, social and cultural world, including art, religion and philosophy, and inverted these worlds materialistically, or from below (Marx 1961a: 17-18; Horkheimer 1985l: 286, 294-295, 483-492; App. C, D). There was no incarnation of the Divine Logos, but rather the growing entrance of man into the religious mysterium, into astral mythos, exodus, atheism and the utopia of the Kingdom of God, and into the highest Good, and humanity became more and more the material of hope (Bloch 1993: Vol 2: chaps. 53, 54, 55). The logic was no longer the eye through which god sees man, and man sees God, as it had been the case for the Jewish, Christian and Islamic mystics and for Hegel, but logic became rather the eye through which man saw his world and himself. Ontology became eschatology. Alpha became Omega. The beginning became the end. The first creation was still to occur in the future (Bloch 1972; Siebert 2007c). Genuine human history had not even started for the critical theorists. The world started out not with God’s logos, but rather with nature as the base structure, on which is grounded the individual, the family, society, state, history and culture, including art, religion, philosophy and science. Now the sacrifice of the lower level for the higher one is challenged and inversed. It is now possible, that the higher units, the life world, including family, neighbor-

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hoods and culture, and even the whole social system, including the economic and political subsystems, are sacrificed for the lower unite, the individual: not the life world and system, but only the speaking, working, loving, recognizing, social individual subject is concrete, true and really real (Hegel 1972; 1979; 1986g: 92-514; Horkheimer 1986a; App. C, D). It is possible, that not only the family is sacrificed materialistically for the individual, but also civil society for the family, and the state for civil society, and history for the state, and culture, including religion, for history. The pre-natural, theological logos-sphere is secularized and transformed into the post-natural, profane world of language.

Critical Religion Throughout the whole development of the historical-materialist critical theory of society critical religion played, nevertheless, in its idealistic and materialistic shapes, a most important role besides the other two components of the cultural world, namely art and philosophy (Horkheimer 1967b: 216-228, 229-238, 239-247, 302-316; 1974a: chaps. 2, 3, 4, 6, 7; 1988a: 100-157, 158-169, 170-256, 257-263, 298-322; 1972: 129-131; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1980b: 333-334; 1997j/2: 608-616; 1977: chaps 10, 11; Marcuse 1962: 65-66; 1970: 3-10; Fromm 1952; 1966; 1992: 3-94, 203-212; 2001: chaps. 3, 7; Fromm/Suzuki1960; Lundgren 1998; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1982: 48-95, 127-143; 1987d: chap. 5; 1991a: part III; 2002; 1986: 53-54, 125-126; 139-140, 204-215; 2001a: 9-31; Mendieta 2005; App. C, D). Like Jewish mysticism, and Kant, and Hegel before, so the critical theorists left open and indeterminate the universal direction of the five-world model: the Absolute or the Unconditional (Horkheimer 1967b: 311-313; App. C, D). Of course, there is no scientific proof or disproof for the religious, idealistic or materialistic Alpha or Omega presuppositions (Kaufmann 1968: 350-361). However, there are different degrees of plausibility and acceptability, which decide over the survival or the demise of these presuppositions. In any case, Nietzsche’s insight is still valid, that it was still a metaphysical faith upon which the faith in science rested and that even the devotees of knowledge today, the godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, still took their fire, too, from the flame, that a faith, thousands of years old, had kindled that Christian faith, which was also the faith of Plato, that God is truth, that truth is divine (Kaufmann 1968: 358). The critical theorist of religion may add to Christianity as the religion of Becoming and Freedom also the Jewish Religion of Sublimity, and other high-cultural religious faiths like Taoism, the Religion of Measure,

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or Hinduism, the Religion of Imagination, or Buddhism, the Religion of Inwardness or Zoroastrianism, the Religion of Good and Evil or Light and Darkness, or the Greek Religion of Fate and Beauty, or the Roman Religion of Utility or Islam, the Religion of Law, as well (Hegel 1986p: 319406; 1986q: 50-184, 185-346; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; App. E). In any case, the scientist who attacks the unproven faith-presuppositions of religion and metaphysics–e.g. the Creator God, the Logos, the Redeemer God, etc–undermines at the same time his own scientific faith presuppositions, and thus makes his own science implausible and unacceptable. The critical theorists of society were fully aware of this Nietzschean insight (Adorno 1993b: 38, 53, 270-271, 274; Horkheimer 1989m: 111-120). Genuine faith is not without reason and genuine reason is not without faith. An irrational faith is as abstract and untrue as a faithless reason. In spite of Schleiermacher’s definition of religion as feeling of dependence, and Hegel’s ironical conclusion, that according to such definition dogs must be most religious, dogs do nevertheless not have reason and therefore also no religious faith, and vice versa (Hegel 1986b: 13; 1976g: 317; 1986q: 322; 1986r: 20). The history of human reason is one in spite of the deep divisions, which August Comte, the father of positivism, introduced into it: the religious or theological, the metaphysical or philosophical, and the scientific epoch (Adorno 1993b: 20-23, 26-27, 72, 94-96, 135, 163-165, 217-220, 222, 228, 240, 266-268, 305-307). The new critical theory of religion concretely supersedes into itself all five worlds of the macro-model (App. C, D).

The Five Human Potentials In the world of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity in the five world model in its idealistic or materialistic form, precisely on the phenomenological level between the anthropological and psychological level, are located the five human potentials or evolutionary universals: embracing language and memory; work and tool; sexual and erotic love; struggle for recognition; and nationhood (Hegel 1986b: 199-228; 1972; 1979; App. C, D). While the first generation of critical theorists of society focused materialistically with Adam Smith, Jefferson, Marx and Engels on the human potential of work and tool, instrumental and functional action and rationality, in order to decode materialistically the personal, social and cultural world, the second generation, particularly Habermas, and the third generation, especially his student Axel Honneth, performed materialistically a linguistic turn in the development of the critical theory of society from

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the evolutionary universal of work and tool to the human potentials of language and memory and of the struggle for recognition, mimetic and communicative action and rationality, without, however, forgetting the former (Habermas 1981a; 1981b; Habermas/Joas 2002; Honneth 1994; 1996a; 1996b; App. C, D). Communicative actions were actions between (1) subjects, through (2) determinate texts with (3) a content and a structure, produced in (4) particular situations or contexts, with (5) a certain intention and toward a determinate goal (Habermas 1981a & b; 1984; Arens 1982: 13-17; 1989: 9-13). The new critical theory of religion concretely and determinately negates into itself the five world model and the five evolutionary universals, as well as the linguistic shift intrinsic to the present status of the critical theory of society: with a particular emphasis on the human potentials of language and memory and of the struggle for recognition, and on the mimetic rationality intrinsic to them, and on communicative action with its 5 constitutive elements of subject, text, structure, context and goal, without abandoning in any way the dialectical methodology (Hegel 1986e; 1986f; Adorno 1969b; Habermas 1981a & b; 1984a and b; Arens 1982: 13-17; 1989: 9-13; Honneth 1990; 1994; Fraser/ Honneth 2003; Siebert 2001; 2002a; 2005c; App. C, D).

From Traditional to Dialectical Methodologies Hegel once tried through his dialectical methodology to penetrate and comprehend the qualitative inside of the natural and human reality–God’s logos or thoughts before creation, the quantitative outside of which the empirical-mathematical natural and social sciences try to explore and present through their traditional positivistic methodologies (Genesis 1: 1-31; John 1: 1-18; Hegel 1986e: 13-18, 19-34, 35-56, 209-386; 1986f; Adorno 1969 a and b; Haag 1983: chap. 4; App. C, D). In his logic or logos theology, Hegel superseded, i.e. not only criticized, but also preserved, and elevated and fulfilled through his new dialectical methodology the traditional quantitative, mathematical, positive methodologies in the works of great mathematicians, and natural and social scientists, and poets, and philosophers, and theologians, like Cavalieri, Newton, Descartes, Spinoza, Tacquet, Valerio, Fermat, Barrow, Roberval, Leibniz, Kant, Haller, Euler, Taylor, Lagrange, Landen, Carnot, Dirksen, Spehr, etc. (Hegel 1986e: 209-386). As the critical theorists tried to determinately negate Hegel’s idealistic logic into their materialistic logic, starting with the antagonism of something and other, they also wanted to supersede, i.e. not only to criticize, but also to preserve, elevate and fulfill, in their ma-

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terialistic critical theory of society the positivistic methodologies of the quantitative, empirical social sciences through their dialectical methodology (Hegel 1986e: 115-173; Horkheimer 1974a: 101-104, 116-117; 1981a: chaps.1, 2, 4, 6, 13, 14; 1981b: chaps. 4, 6, 10, 12, 13; 1985l: 69-75, 131-222, 286-287, 319-320, 349-397, 398-416, 431-435, 436-492, 524-552, 593-605; 1987e: chaps. 13-238; 248, 250, 253-256, 274-276, 276-277, 406-412, 415; 1988c: chaps. 1-9, 17, 18; 1988d: chaps.2, 4-8, 12-17; Haag 1983: chaps. 7, 8). The same remains true for the new critical or dialectical theory of religion, as it concretely supersedes the traditional psychologies and sociologies, particularly those of religion, and their positivistic methodologies, as they limit themselves to simply that which is the case (Mills/Bunt/ Bruijn 2006: 619-632; Ragin 2006: 633-646; Kittel 2006: 647-678; Rihoux 2006: 679-706; Gerring 2006: 707-734; Mjaset 2006: 735-766; Alba 2006: 347-358; Amerman 2006: 359-364; Hartman/Kaufman 2006: 365-387; Kotler/Berkowitz 2006: 387-391; Rebhun/Levy 2006: 391-414; Klaff 2006: 415-438; Hurst/Mott 2006: 439-464; Kadushin/Kotler-Berkowitz: 465486; Philips/Fishman 2006: 487-506; Philips/Kelner 2006: 597-524; Lindsay 2006: 207-228; Bender/Cadge 2006: 229-248; Lu/Lang 2006: 249-270; Richardson 2006: 271-294; Leong 2006: 295-312; Bader/Desmond 2006: 313-330; Siebert 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c).

History of Religions In the cultural world of the five-world model is situated between art and philosophy the dimension of religion (Hegel 1986j: 366-398; App. C, D). Religion evolves through three epochs: Nature Religions, including Magic and Fetishism, the Chinese Religion of Measure, Hinduism the Religion of Imagination, and Buddhism, the Religion of Inwardness; the Religions of Subjectivity, including Zoroastrianism as the Religion of Good and Evil or Light and Darkness, the Syrian Religion of Pain, the Egyptian Religion of Riddle, the Jewish Religion of Sublimity, the Greek Religion of Fate and Beauty, the Roman Religion of Utility, and the Islamic Religion of Law; and Christianity as the Religion of Becoming and Freedom including the Primordial Jewish-Christian Eschatological-Apocalyptic Paradigm, the Old-Church Hellenistic Constellation, the Medieval Roman Catholic Macro-Model, the Reformation-Protestant Paradigm, the EnlightenedModern Constellation, and the Contemporary Post-Modern Ecumenical Macro-Model (Hegel 1986p: 64-88, 249-442; 1986q; Küng 1994a: C; 1994b; App. E).

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chapter one Contradictions in Civil Society

The critical theorist of religion discovers in the social world of the five world model, particularly in the dimension of civil society, situated between family and state and including need-system, administration of justice, and police and corporation a large number of antagonisms: between the Religious and the Secular, Nature and Man, Matriarchal and Patriarchal, Collective and Individual, Bourgeois and Worker, Left and Right, Intellectuals and People, Order and Progress, Productive Forces and Productive Relations, Society and State, Theory and Praxis, Dialectic and Positivism, Authoritarian and Democratic Personality Theory and Empirical Reality, Validity and Facticity, Older Generation and Younger Generation, Communicative and Functional Rationality and Action, Language and Work, Language and Recognition, etc. (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986j: 317-366; App. D, E, F). While the critical theory of society deals with all contradictions in modern civil society and their tensions and explosions and possible reconciliation, the dialectical theory of religion is mainly concerned with and concentrates and focuses on the antagonism between the Sacred and the Profane, and its tensions and explosions, one of which occurred on September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington D.C., and their possible reconciliation.

Alternative Futures The critical theory of religion, inspired by the critical theory of society discovers in the religious dimension of the cultural world of the five world model three future trends (Bloch 1970a; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37, 40; App. C, D, E). They are rooted in the dialectic between the religious and the secular, in the dialectic of the religious, and in the dialectic of secular enlightenment (Hegel 1986p: 16-27; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969). One tendency in the dialectic between the religious and the secular points to a religious-fundamentalist society; another one toward an entirely secular society; and a third one toward a society characterized by a possible reconciliation between the sacred and the profane (Hegel 1986q: 333-344; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40). In family, society, state and culture trends point to a post-modern global alternative Future I–the totally administered society; a postmodern global alternative Future II–the entirely militarized society; and global alternative Future III–the reconciled society (Flechtheim 1971; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Horkheimer 1985g:

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chaps. 34-37, 40; App. C, D, F, G). While Future I is very possible and probable, it is not very desirable. While alternative Future II is also very possible and probable, it is entirely undesirable. While alternative Future III is very desirable, it is at this time–2010–not very possible or probable. The critical theory of religion aims in terms of a communicative ethics at the mitigation at least of Future I, the complete avoidance of Future II, and the passionate promotion of alternative Future III (Flechtheim 1971; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34-37, 40; 1988n: 458-459, Habermas 1991a; 1983; 1991b: part III; App. C, G).

Diagnosis and Prognosis The critical theory of society evolved through the mediation of continual time diagnosis and time prognosis (Erickson 1942; Aleotti 1975; Habermas 1968; 1969: chaps. 1, 2, & 3; Habermas 1979a: vol. 1; 1979b: vol. 2; 1981a: vol. I; 1981b: vol. 2). Through time diagnosis and time prognosis the critical theory of society is verified or falsified in detail and as a whole. Before World War II, the critical theorists prognosticated the secular alternative Future III: the realm of freedom above the realm of natural and economic necessity (Horkheimer1985g: chap. 37). After World War II the critical theorists predicted more and more the arrival of secular alternative Future I–the totally administered society, and secular alternative Future II–the entirely militarized society, but without ever giving up the longing not only for light, friendship and love and the wholly Other, but also for secular alternative Future III (Horkheimer 1996s: 62-67; 1985g: chap. 34, 35, 36, 37; App. G). Also a genuine critical theory of religion can evolve further only through continually being engaged in time-diagnosis and–even more so–in time-prognosis no matter if it is concerned with (1) a fundamentalist, or (2) a secular society, or with (3) a society, in which the sacred and the profane would be dialectically open for each other, or in which they would be newly reconciled (Habermas 2001a; 2001c; 2006a; 2006b; 2006e; Siebert 1985g: chap. 37; 2006a: 91-138; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; App. G). Also, the dialectical theory of religion as well as religion itself is to be verified or falsified in detail and as a whole through time diagnosis and time prognosis.

chapter two

The Neo-Conservative Trend Turn After World War II, the critical theory of society, including its dialectical theory of religion, developed and became globalized in the context of an economic change in late capitalist, or commodity-exchange society: the neo-conservative or neo-liberal trend turn or transformation (Hegel 1986g: 339-405; Weiss 1974: part VI; Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; Horkheimer/Adorno1984; Adorno 1979: 354, 372, 578, 587; Löwenthal 1989; Fetsher/Schmidt 2002: chaps. 1, 2, 5-10; Best/Kellner 1991; Wigershaus 1987; Scheible1989; Rosen1995; Gumnior/Ringguth1973; Reijen1982; Habermas1987b; Honneth 1990; 1994; Honneth/Joas1986; Fraser/Honneth 2003; Beams 2006: 1-5; Harprecht 2006: 11-14; Zinn 1967; 1968; 1973, 1991; 1993; 1994; 1997; 1999a; 1999b: 18, 19, 122, 202; Zinn/Chompsky 1972; Sim/Loon 2004; App. B, C, D). The economic transformation was most clearly reflected in the works of the economists John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedmann.

The Economic Context In his Afterward to the second edition of his Capital in 1873, Marx had noted that the scientific character of bourgeois economics had come to an end at about 1830, when the communist commune rose up in Paris (Horkheimer 1974a: 67-68, 77; 1974b; Niewöhner 1997: 6; Beams 2006: 1-5; Weiss 1974). For Marx, at that point the class tensions in civil society, which had been generated by the development of the liberal capitalist mode of production, made further advances in economics as a social science impossible (Hegel 1986g: 382-397; Marx/Engels1960: 583-593; Niewöhner1997: 6; Beams 2006: 1-5). According to Marx, into the place of disinterested inquirers there now stepped forward hired prize fighters. Into the place of genuine scientific research moved the bad conscience and the evil intent of bourgeois apologetics. The economist Milton Friedmann, who died on Thursday, November 16, 2006, is and will be remembered as one of the classic representatives of this tendency described by Marx. Friedmann’s own career culminated in his rise to the position of

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intellectual godfather of the free market, since the 1960’s. Friedmann’s career was a graphic example of the very processes of the ideologization of the social science of economics, to which Marx had already pointed. Economics turned from a genuine social science into false consciousness and the masking of class and national interests, shortly, into the untruth.

Keynesianism In the post-World War II boom, which is now–in 2010–looked back on in economics as a kind of Golden Age for monopoly and oligopoly capitalism at least in the most advanced bourgeois countries, Friedmann had been very much on the margins of the economic discourse (Niewöhner1997: 6; Beams 2006: 1-5; Hofmann 2006g: 52-56). In the latter half of the 1960’s, Friedmann and the free-market Chicago School, in which he was a central figure, were regarded as eccentrics, if not oddities. This was still the heyday of Keynesianism. It was based on the notion that regulation of effective demand by government policies, increased spending in times of recession and depression, and cutbacks in periods of economic growth and expansion could prevent the reemergence of the kind of crisis that had devastated world capitalism in the 1930’s, and that had helped to produce fascism and World War II. As leader of the British delegation to the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, Baron Keynes of Tilton had played a mayor role in the formation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Conservative Revolution In the 1970’s, the age of Keynes was about to change in industrial or late capitalistic society (Adorno 1979: 9-19, 177-195, 217-237, 280-353, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 440-456, 478-493, 547-568, 569-573, 578587; Beams 2006: 1-5). The breakdown of the post-war economic boom in the early 1970’s brought a deep recession, as well as a rapid inflation, and high unemployment. It saw the collapse of the Keynesian prescriptions. Under the Keynesian program inflation had been regarded as the antidote to unemployment. Now the two were taking place in combination. They both gave rise to the phenomenon of stagflation. In the perspective of the Marx-inspired critical theory of society, the boom’s demise was not the product of the failure of Keynesianism. It was rather caused by the new emergence of deep-seated contradictions within civil society

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and its capitalist economy (Hegel 1986g: 382-397; Verene 1980; Marx/Engels 1960; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 177-195, 217-237, 280-353, 354-372, 373391, 392-396, 440-456, 478-493, 547-568, 569-573, 578-587; Niewöhner 1997: 6; Beams 2006: 1-5). This meant that the bourgeoisie in the most advanced capitalist countries could no longer continue with their program of class compromise based on concessions to the working class, the pursuit of full employment, and the provision of social welfare measures that had characterized the previous boom. The bourgeois, corporate ruling class had rather to undertake a sharp turn: the neo-conservative or neo-liberal trend turn in the context of the Nixon, Reagan and Bush senior conservative revolution or counter-revolution, which climaxed already in a massive rearmament, which was good for the free market economy, and helped what President Eisenhower had called the military-industrial complex. However, this counter-revolutionary trend turn did not and has not helped the lower social strata in civil society: the poor, the under class, the proletarians, or now the precarians, the people with a very precarious life style, and in the consequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, and in a modern neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism, which still continued under the second Bush Administration nationally and internationally, through the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere:–the endless turn (Rother 2006: 50-51; Meyer 2006g: 52-56; 2006: 44-47; Opitz 2006: 4144; Hypping/Heymeyer 2006: 37-41; Grafe 2006: 33-36; Blaes/Hermanns 2006: 28-32; Kämpchen 2006: 44-49). The neo-liberal trend turn and the globalized free market continues to produce social crises, social disintegration and the change of the social climate even in the most advanced capitalist societies, e.g. the German Federal Republic and in the U.S.A. up to the present–2010 (Hüpping/Heitmeyer 2006: 37-41).

Demographic Turn and Dividend While already before the neo-liberal trend turn started in the 1970’s, the international corporate ruling class had invested 10 million dollars for the new birth control pill, since the neo-conservative turn, the use of this pill was globalized, and the working classes were put on it, and thus a demographic turn was achieved with a human reproduction rate of 2.1 not only in the capitalist core countries in Europe and North America, but even in some third world countries, like India (Rothermund 2006: 28-31). With the demographic turn came also a demographic dividend: savings because of a lower number of children for families and societies and states. Now every worker reproduced himself only once. Thus, the workforce

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was stabilized. There were not too few workers, who would bring up the price of labor and lower the profit rate. There were now also not too many workers, which would lower the price of labor below an acceptable level, and would lead to massive unemployment and social unrest and destabilization of the capitalist system in spite of a rising profit rate. The average of 2.1 birthrates would also stabilize the military force. It guaranteed a sufficient number of soldiers to fight, under the pretense of globalization, the neo-colonial and neo-imperialistic wars as planned by neo-conservative strategists like Paul Wolfowitz, the former U.S. Undersecretary of Defense and former President of the World Bank. The Malthusian problem had been in principle solved by chemistry. However, the patriarchal problem of war would continue undiminished during the neo-conservative trend turn and would even increase after it had established itself.

From Matriarchal to Patriarchal Societies Since the patriarchal societies took over from the matriarchal societies some 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, the culture of peace had been replaced with the culture of war (Bachofen 1992; Fromm 1966; 1969; 1973; 1999; Marcuse 1962; 1980; Kellner 1991: chap. 6; Eller 2000; Mercieca 2007; App. F). With the neo-conservative trend turn, this culture of war intensified and increased through the further escalation of the proliferation of atomic programs, nuclear reactors, and nuclear weapons from one patriarchal society to the other: India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa, Iran, North Korea, etc (Thränert 2006: 32-35; Baron 2006: 49-51). In the process of neo-liberal globalization one patriarchal society after the other tried to become a nuclear weapon-state not only because of real security needs, but most of all in order to gain international prestige and status. Third world countries rejected anti-proliferation treaties because they saw in them neo-colonial and neo-imperialistic instruments of domination used by first world states who reserve for themselves the right to have nuclear weapons, and to have policies of regime change wherever they want to in their own particular national and class interest, and to have policies of unilateral first strike policies on the presupposition of the general inequality of people and nations. Matriarchal societies had behaved differently. From excavations, anthropologists found that in the matriarchal time the world had been characterized by true love, dedicated care and genuine recognition and respect (Mercieca 2007). People offered assistance to each other in universal, i.e. anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity. Women tended to rule from the heart, in terms of mimetic and communicative rationality,

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which is the seat of love and compassion, rather than in terms of an extreme instrumental and functional rationality (Horkheimer 1985l: 590593; Habermas 1981a; 1981b; 1985a; 1985b). Capitalist patriarchy continued through the neo-liberal trend turn, and so did the wars, with the exception that now also women could be wounded and killed in battle, e.g. in the new wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. The late capitalist society under neo-conservative leadership was far from alternative Future III–a post-conflict society (Flechtheim 1971; Mercieca 2007; App. G). It rather moved fast toward alternative Future II–a totally militarized society (Flechtheim 1971; App. G).

Warnings In 1968, Pope John Paul VI warned in his Encyclical Humanae Vitae: On the Regulation of Birth that the new birth control pill would not only bring about a demographic turn and dividend, but would also lead to promiscuity (Paul VI 1968). While Horkheimer considered the birth control pill to be a great scientific, technological and social progress, as the father of the critical theory of society he had, nevertheless, to warn and to point to the extremely high psychological and cultural, and in general human price that people would have to pay for the new, as such progressive invention and measure (Horkheimer 1985g: 393-397; Battacharya 2006: 39-44). Horkheimer predicted that the de-tabuization and de-sublimation of sexuality through the new, more perfect birth control device under continuing patriarchal-capitalist domination may lead to the diminishment of the energies of longing, and thus to the death of erotic love not only in the family, but also in art, religion, and philosophy. It may endanger the longing for light, friendship, love, and alternative Future III–the reconciled democratic-humanist–socialist society, as well as for the wholly Other as Perfect Justice (Horkheimer 1985g, chap. 7; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1997; Marcuse 1962; Fromm-Reichmann 1960; Flechtheim 1971; Mercieca 2007; Eggebrecht 1980; App. G). The light may go out, which according to the Book Genesis was present and burned already before Sun, moon and stars had been created: the Divine light (Genesis 1: 1-19; Kaufmann 1986: 95-96). The Pope and the critical theorist were warning modern civil society, as once the prophets had done in Israel (Amos 3: 7; Hertz 5716/1956: 154/3-8).

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chapter two The Enemies

In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, the neo-conservative revolution or counter-revolution against the enemies socialism and/ or radical, extremist Islam has reached its ultimate height of social and political immorality in the Afghanistan and particularly in the Iraq war (Hegel 1986l: 111-114, 130-131, 134-137; Best/Keller 1991; Fetscher/ Schmidt 2002; Scheller 2006: 66-69; Mercieca 2006: 1-5; Sherrill 2006: 1-6; Andreas 2006; Hofmann 2006g: 52-56). The bourgeois conservative revolution, i.e. counter-revolution against bolshevism outside and socialist tendencies inside the country, e.g. in the student movement, initiated by the U.S. Presidents Nixon, Reagan, Bush senior and Bush junior, which– unlike that of Hitler, who called himself the most conservative of all revolutionaries–had, of course, no plebeian or proletarian traces in itself. The students who rebelled came mainly from the low or middle bourgeoisie. Hitler, the employee of the Herren Club in Düsseldorf, Germany, the Krupps, the Thyssens, and the rest of the German corporate ruling class, and even of Henry Ford, of course stamped out most radically and brutally the genuine revolutionary tendencies in the SA in the Night of the Long Knives (Sohn-Rethel 1973; 1975; 1978; Baldwin 2001; Reimer 1989; Sayer/Botting 2004). Likewise in the 1970’s, in the service of the American corporate ruling class and its rackets, the neo-conservatives repressed most effectively the third youth movement, and sent the youngsters back into what Max Weber had called the iron cage of capitalism, from which they had wanted to break out, and thus restabilized again the American action system, including its life-world (Weber 1964; Miller 1964; Parsons 1964; 1965; Habermas 1970; 1981a: chaps 1 and 2; 1981b; 1984; Hearit 2006). The consequent conformism of the students has prevented them up to the present–2010–to be as critical toward the Iraq war as they once had been toward the Vietnam war, in spite of the fact that the former has been in many ways worse than the latter. That restabilization of the American action system was connected with increasing lawlessness and social, political, and military immorality with hypocritical religious legitimation internally and externally, and that the more so, the longer it lasted.

Lawlessness and Immorality In the meantime, global protest has, nevertheless, arisen against the increasing lawlessness and immorality connected with the neo-conservative agenda, particularly the war against Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Lebanon

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(Wettig 2006: 18-21). As an example of this, in April 2003 the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem, Israel, decided to ban President Bush junior and Prime Minister Blair from the birthplace of Jesus of Nazareth (Global Research 2006). The Church of Nativity stands under the authority of the Greek Orthodox Church (Matthew 2: 1-23; Küng 1994a: 145-335). The Church remembers not only the birth of Jesus of Nazareth in Bethlehem, but also in connection with it, the killing of all the two year old male children in Bethlehem and the surroundings by Herod, the King of Judaea, Idumaea, and Samaria, who governed from 37-4 B.C. The Church of Nativity decided to ban Bush’s and Blair’s access into the Nativity Shrine forever, because they were war criminals and the murderers of children. Their entry into the Church would tarnish it as (Bush’s) hands were covered by the blood of the innocent. The spirit of Christmas consists in spreading peace and justice. The spirit of Christmas was, when war criminals were banned from the birthplace of Jesus, the Christ. The Church of Nativity banned the American President Bush and the British Prime minister Blair in Israel, in spite of the fact that the U.S.A. and Britain are the closest allies of Israel (Grosbard 2001; Rebhuhn/Levy 2006: 391-414). The U.S. news media have so far–2010–not yet reported this story of the Church of Nativity in Israel.

Regime Change The neo-conservative lawlessness and immorality and the global protest against it reached a new climax with the unilateral regime change in Baghdad, and with the trial and execution of President Saddam Hussein. As the transfer of President Hussein by the American authorities to the Iraqi authorities and his long planned execution through hanging approached in the last days of the so bloody year 2006, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in Lebanon and Palestine and elsewhere, the Vatican, the center of the Roman Catholic Church, which had condemned the first and second Iraq war as unjust and immoral, announced that this death penalty imposed by an Iraqi court under American occupation and influence meant only the retaliation for one crime by another one (Küng 1994a: 336-601; Global Research 2006; Schwartz 2006: 1-4; Wadlow 2006: 3-5; Grosbard 2001; Rebhuhn/Levi 2006: 391-414). Already when the neo-conservative President Bush junior was still Governor of Texas, the Vatican had tried several times to intervene into and prevent one or the other of the 150 executions that took place under his governance: more than in any other state of the Union. Not only the Roman Catholic

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Church but also members from the World Council of Churches started to resist neo-conservative economic, political, and military lawlessness and immorality.

Legal and Psychological Preparations However, in spite of the protest and resistance of the Churches, the American and Iraqi legal and psychological preparations for President Saddam Hussein’s execution went ahead for months in a trial in Baghdad, which suffered from many procedural flaws, some of which were intended to hide the American complicity in his war against Iran (Horkheimer 1988n: 67; MacFarquhar 2006; Canetti 1960: chaps 1, 4, 5; Opitz 2006: 41-44; Harprecht 2006: 11-14). One of the flaws of the trial was the court’s lack of independence from the Iraqi and the American government. The Iraqi government changed the judges at least three times, when they did not perform according to its intentions. Another flaw was that President Hussein could not confront and question the witnesses appearing against him, etc. Beyond that, President Hussein and his codefendants, and his defense team, including the former American Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, knew very well that the American corporate ruling class, and the American government and its Iraqian puppet government, had already preordained the death penalty through hanging for all the defendants before the trial even started. In psychological preparation for the execution of President Hussein, as the execution date approached, i.e. the end of the year 2006, the American and global mass media showed in graphic detail what the hanging of a human being entailed, so that all citizens would know exactly how cruelly the American Empire punishes high level government officials, democratically legitimated or not, in dependent states, who do not obey the commands of the American corporate ruling class and its rackets (Hearit 2006). After President Hussein’s execution, Human Rights Watch released a report calling the speedy trial and subsequent hanging of Saddam proof of the new Iraqi governments disregard for human rights (Abdul-Zhara 2007: 1-4) The director of the Human Rights Watch’s international justice program stated: “The tribunal repeatedly showed its disregard for the fundamental due process rights of all the defendants.”

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Service to the Corporate Ruling Class The global corporate ruling class, engaged in corporate globalization and faced by Middle East terrorism, treats people very differently depending on whether they serve it well or not (Sullivan 2006: 1-3; Reese 2006: 1-2). Some are rewarded and others punished. Thus, President Gerald R. Ford and President Saddam Hussein, both died in the last week of the bloodiest year 2006 (Woodward 2006: 1-4; Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4; Harprecht 2006: 11-14; Auken 2007: 1-4). Both had served the same trans-national, globalized corporate ruling class, particularly the oil magnates and their many rackets: the bourgeois masters of the free market and the globalized economy, and its social, political, and military consequences (Meyer 2006: 344-47; Hearit 2006). However, President Ford obeyed humbly the many mediated commands of the corporate ruling class throughout his life and work as a lawyer, a politician, a president, and a commander in chief, and thus became wealthy, and reached peacefully the ripe, satisfied, and fulfilled age of the patriarchs in the Hebrew Bible in the midst of his loving family, and had a funeral, attended by many friends, including many old conservatives and neo-conservatives, and with all state honors in Washington D.C., and then was flown with his family and friends in the stately Airforce One for an honorable burial in a grave close to his museum in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan (Woodward 2006: 1-4; Canetti 1960: 66-92). Sic transit gloria mundi! In contrast, President Hussein somewhere in his carrier as a lawyer, a politician, a president, and a commander in chief began to misunderstand or to rebel against the many mediated commands of the international corporate ruling class, consisting of bankers and industrialists, particularly oil magnates, and all their rackets (Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4; Canetti 1960: 66-92; Fisk 2006: 1-2). He made the mistake of nationalizing the large Iraqi oil resources, and using part of the profits to have free schools and free hospitals for his people. He made the mistake, not only of committing crimes, e.g. his war against Iran, that served the interests of the corporate ruling class but also those against them, like the invasion of wealthy Kuwait, in order to overcome the bankruptcy of the Iraqi state caused by the costly war against Iran. Thus, Saddam was demonized and was hanged by his taunting political enemies, and had to die without his family, and was thrown–as one of his accusers said–on the garbage dumb of history. He had a small, poor, miserable burial without any family or close friends, and without all honors in his hometown of Ouja, outside Tikrit. Sic transit gloria mundi! Nearby, Saddam had sur-

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rendered to the invading American troops as a prisoner of war, stating that he was the President of Iraq, and that he could be helpful in negotiations. He was not taken seriously any longer. Saddam was a dictator, first created and then destroyed by America, as so many others in the Near East, and in Latin and Central America, and elsewhere around the globe in the past 100 years of American invasions and regime changes in the interest of American big business (Hegel 1986l: 111-114; Mercieca 2006; Fisk 2006: 1-2; Sherriff 2006: 106; Harprecht 2006: 11-12). Thus, Saddam’s life was one of many political tragedies! That at least is what the historical equation appears to be. However, it is only for the positivists that appearance and essence are identical: not so for the dialecticians (Hegel 1986f: 17-185; 1986l: 19-55, 215-274; Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4; Canetti 1960: 66-92; Fisk 2006: 1-2; Sherriff 2006: 1-6; Meyer 2006: 44-47).

Lex Talionis President Saddam Hussein was finally executed in a prison in Baghdad on Saturday, December 30, 2006, on Eid al-Adha, a Suni-Islamic feast day, at 6:00 A.M. (Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Frayer/Mattar 2007: 1-4). The execution took place during the year 2006’s deadliest month for the U.S. troops with the toll reading 113 American soldiers. At this time over 3,000 members of the US military had died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003: i.e. more human beings than were killed in the attacks on New York and Washington D.C. two years earlier, on September 11, 2001. As of Sunday, March 23, 2008, the number of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq topped 4,000. In addition there were over 22,000 wounded American soldiers. The Iraqi civilian casualties–collateral damage in army jargon–count probably over 600,000, over half of them women and children (Davies 2006: 1-3). Iraq’s death penalty had been suspended by the U.S. military after it toppled President Hussein in 2003. However, the new Iraqi government reinstated the death penalty two years later, in 2005, when President Saddam Hussein’s trial started, saying that executions would deter criminals (Hegel 1986a: 440-442, 614, 620; Torchia/AbdulZarah 2006: 1-3). Saddam’s request to be shot honorably like a soldier, instead of being hanged shamefully like a common criminal, had been denied by the American guided Iraqi courts, together with all other appeals. The American military authorities delivered President Hussein, a Suni, to his Iraqi executioners, who were Shiites, and who were very much intent on revenge and retaliation for the crimes he had committed against them:

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Lex Talionis (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-48; Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4; Siebert 2006a). In the pre-execution turmoil, the American authorities wanted very much the execution to be postponed by two weeks, in order to make it more orderly. The new President of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, was against the death penalty, and therefore refused to sign the constitutionally required execution order. The new Prime Minister Malakhi, a Shiite, wanted Saddam to die before the New Year 2007 began. He declared the President’s signature to be unnecessary, and signed the execution order himself. As the American military authorities delivered Saddam to his revengeful Shiite executioners, they took sides, as once in the Vietnamese civil war–on the side of the Diem-fascists against the Giap-communists–now with one of the Iraqi civil war parties, the Shiites, against the other, the Sunis, and the residuals of the Baath-Party andgenerals, and Al-Quaeda and foreign volunteers, etc.

Execution The American authorities did not tell President Saddam Hussein, when he went to bed on Friday night, December 29, 2006, that early the next morning he would be pulled out of bed, and would be delivered to the Iraqi authorities in order to be hanged (Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3). Maybe in the general turmoil not even the American guards of the President knew what would happen early next morning. Shortly before his execution, when President Saddam Hussein was delivered by the American military to his Shiite executioners, he carried The Holy Qur’an in his hand. He had nothing to say any longer to his American captors. However, he spoke to the Iraqi mainly Shiite crowd, which had gathered for his execution. Before his black-hooded hangmen put the rope around his neck, Saddam shouted: Allah Akbar! The nation will be victorious and Palestine is Arab! Arabic nationalism, including Islamic and socialistic elements, prevailed with Saddam up to his end! Saddam appeared calm but scornful with his Shiite captors as he stood on the metal framework of the gallows (Hurst 2006: 1-4). He exchanged taunts with them. He engaged in give and take with the crowds gathered to watch him die (Canetti 1960; 1972: 66-92, 104-132; Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4). Saddam insisted that he was Iraq’s savior, not its tyrant or scourge. Saddam stated that he and his friends were going to heaven, and that their enemies would rot in hell. Saddam also called for forgiveness and love among the Iraqis. He also demanded that the Iraqis should continue to fight the Americans and the Persians. One of the Shiite guards shouted at Saddam:

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“You have destroyed us. You have killed us. You have made us live in destitution.” Saddam responded: “I have saved you from destitution and misery. I have destroyed your enemies, the Persians and the Americans.” “God damn you,” the guard said. “God damn you,” Saddam responded (Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4). The dialectic of mass and power, of the one and the many, of the one on one side, and the crowd in the execution room and the masses watching the execution on Iraqi and global television on the other, worked itself out with all brutality and cruelty (Hegel 1986e: 174-208; Canetti 1972: 122-124; 1960; Mosse1977). However, Saddam seemed to smile at those Shiites taunting him to the end from below the gallows. Some voices chanted Mokthada, Mokthada, the given name of the radical anti-American Shiite cleric Mokthada al Sadr, whose Mahdi army militia is believed to be connected with Iran, and to have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Sunnis in the past year 2006 (Ladurner 2006: 16-18). President Hussein looked statesmen like in his long black coat. Saddam said to the Shiite crowd that they were not showing manhood. Then Saddam began to recite the Shahada. It is a Muslim prayer, which says that there is no god but God, and Muhammad is his messenger. Saddam made it to midway through his second recitation of the verse, when his hangmen cut him off. His last word was Muhammad. Then, the floor dropped out of the gallows. The tyrant has fallen, some Shiite shouted in the crowd of immediate onlookers. Then came another Shiite voice from the Shiite hanging pack: Let him swing for three minutes (Canetti 1972; 1960). It appeared through the cell phone cameras as if Saddam had fallen victim to a Shiite lynch mob, tolerated by a Shiite government. A post-execution picture showed a large bloody spot at the front of the neck of Saddam, and thus made obvious to the world the extreme cruelty and inhumanity of the whole lynch procedure, following the other crimes in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, initiated and inspired by the neo-conservative agenda.

Public Reactions Soon afterwards, far away from the Baghdad prison in which President Saddam Hussein had been hanged, Sheil Yahya al-Attani, a Suni cleric at the Saddam Big Mosque, said: “The President, the leader Saddam Hussein, is a martyr, and God will put him along with other martyrs” (Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4). Do not be sad or complain, because he has died the death of a holy warrior. The Vatican condemned the execution. In the first days of 2007, the City of Rome lighted

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up the Coliseum, in which many Christian martyrs had been executed, in remembrance of President Hussein’s execution and in protest against it. Also the U.S.A.’s closest ally in the war against Iraq, the British Government, which had abolished the death penalty after World War II, which was fought by the Allies against the Axis Berlin, Rome, Tokyo–against European and Asian fascism–, condemned the execution of President Saddam Hussein, whom it had helped to depose against international law and against the will of the U.N. Security Council. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that the execution of Saddam Hussein prevented the exposure of the secrets and the crimes of the former dictator committed during his brutal rule (Ladurner 2006: 16-18). He meant particularly the secrets and crimes connected with Saddam’s war against Iran, which had been supported by the United States. During the war, the neo-conservative Donald Rumsfeld, the former Secretary of Defense, led an American delegation to President Saddam Hussein, which expressed support. The U.S.A. supplied to Iraq the mustard gas, a weapon of mass destruction, developed by the German-Jewish General Fritz Haber, early in World War I, in support of the German attacks against France. The American partisanship in the Iraq civil war for the Shiite government would have serious consequences for the ongoing war and the future fate of Iraq. The immediate consequence of President Saddam Hussein’s execution was large, but peaceful Suni protest rallies all around Baghdad and Iraq. There was also a rise in Suni violence not only in Baghdad, but also all over the country. It was already clear in January 2007, that the Shiite Unity Government, and the American and British Government would be held responsible for the rest of Iraqi history, no matter how long it would last, not only for President Hussein’s in many ways flawed trial in Baghdad, but also for his lynch execution, and beyond that for the two wars against Iraq, and their military casualties on both sides, and for their large civilian, so called “collateral” damages, and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and for all the consequent misery, pain and suffering in the present and in the future, no matter how much they would try to correct this impression and judgment of the people in Iraq, in the whole Near East, and even in Islamic communities and states around the globe, or whitewash them, or re-write history (Scheurer 2007: 1-2; Miller 2007: 1-2; Abdullah 2006). It is thus no wonder that the neo-conservative television evangelist and preacher, Pat Robertson, predicted on January 3, 2007 a deadly terror attack on the U.S. during the new year, which would cost the lives of millions of people (Torchia 2007: 1-3; AP 2006: 1-4; Siebert 2006d: 94-99). He claimed that God told him so. Lex talionis all over again (Siebert 2006). Maybe it was

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Robertson’s own scrupulous, if also somewhat selective Protestant conscience, which told him so: selective in relation to socialist and Muslim enemies, which according to the Sermon on the Mount he is supposed to love (Matthew 5: 43-48). Robertson did not say that God intended to do something about the impending new horrible theodicy and prevent it, or that humanity would finally in the year 2007 be redeemed, or would be liberated from the ugly age-old, primitive and archaic urge to revenge him, privately or collectively, through wars, terror attacks, flawed showtrials, or public executions. (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; Hegel 1986a: 440-442, 613-614, 619-620). An American toy factory reached the peak of the general tastelessness of the culture industry and of enlightenment as mass deception, when it produced a doll of Saddam Hussein with a robe around its neck (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 120-167). The Saddam doll sold well to the children of America on the free market. The only positivistic excuse of the producer was that this was the kind of things he was doing: making dolls for children out of contemporary public events and issues.

Investigation In response to the national and international upheaval about the barbarous execution of President Hussein, the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri alMaliki, ordered an investigation into it on January 2, 2007: but not concerning the in-human taunting, which occurred during its procedure, but rather concerning the making of it public through the use of several cell phone cameras. (Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4; Scheurer 2007: 1-2; Miller 2007: 1-2; Abdullah 2006; Abdul-Zhara 2007: 1-4). The supervisor of the execution and two guards came under suspicion. The Prime Minister promised that the next executions of two co-defendants of Saddam Hussein would be more orderly (Frayer/Mattar 2007: 1-4). When President Hussein’s younger half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim, was executed together with another co-defendant, Awad Harmed al-Bandar, like President Hussein in the Saddam-era military intelligence headquarters building in the Shiite north Baghdad neighborhood of Kazimiyah at 3:00 a.m. on January 16, 2007, they were merely wearing Guantanamo-style red/orange jumpsuits, but they were not taunted. They also prayed like President Hussein before the Shahada, shortly before they were executed. However when Saddam’s younger brother was hanged, his head was severed: the hanging turned into a decapitation. By days end at least 3,000 angry Sunnis protested by firing their guns in the air, or they were weep-

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ing, or they were cursing the government at the burial of Ibrahim in Ouja. Another global outcry of protest followed.

Human Rights The American mass media, particularly the powerful Rightwing, Neoconservative, most government conformed Fox News and radio-stations described the crimes of the two co-defendants of President Hussein in detail, in order to justify the new public crime of their gruesome hanging or decapitation (Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4; Scheurer 2007: 1-2; Miller 2007: 1-2; Abdullah 2006; Abdul-Zhara 2007: 1-4; Frayer/Mattar 2007: 1-4). One of the men asked in grief and frustration: “Where are those who cry out and demand human rights: Where are the UN and the world human rights organizations? Barzan had cancer. They treated him only to keep him alive long enough to kill him. We vow to take revenge even if it takes years.” Ibrahim’s son-in-law Azzam Saleh Abdullah said: “We heard the news from the media. We were supposed to have the information a day earlier, but it seems that the government does not know the rules. It reflects the hatred for the Sunnis felt by the Shiite-led government. They still want more Iraqi bloodshed. To hell with democracy.” (Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4; Scheurer 2007: 1-2; Miller 2007: 1-2; Abdullah 2006; Abdul-Zhara 2007: 1-4; Frayer/Mattar 2007: 1-4). The new Iraqi government has obviously not only inherited the Iraqi sectarian hate but also the American neo-conservative disrespect for legal and moral rules from the Nixon through the Reagan to the two Bush Administrations. A spokeswoman for the new U.N. Secretary-General, Ban Kimoon, said he “regrets that despite pleas from both himself and the High Commissioner for human rights to spare the lives of the two defendants, Ibrahim and al-Bandar, they were both executed.” On Monday, January 15, 2007, Martin Luther King Day, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said during a press conference with her Egyptian counterpart in Luxor, Egypt that the executions in Baghdad had been mishandled, and that she hoped that those responsible for making the cell phone videos of Saddam’s execution would be punished: of course not those who taunted and mocked him or executed him. Rice stated with the usual neoconservative hypocrisy: “We are disappointed that there was not greater dignity given to the accused under these circumstances.” (Torchia/AbdulZarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4; Scheurer 2007: 1-2; Miller 2007: 1-2; Abdullah 2006; Abdul-Zhara 2007: 1-4; Frayer/Mattar 2007: 1-4).

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On Monday, January 15, 2007 the Iraqi government reported that at least 55 people were killed or found dead in Baghdad (Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4; Scheurer 2007: 1-2; Miller 2007: 1-2; Abdullah 2006; Abdul-Zhara 2007: 1-4; Frayer/Mattar 2007: 1-4). On the same Martin Luther King day, the U.S. military announced the death of two more soldiers killed in Baghdad. The mutual application of the lex talionis, revenge against revenge, continues without redemption in the Jewish, Christian or Islamic sense (Küng 2004: 19-55; Siebert 2005b; 2006a; 2007c; 2007d; 2008a). On Tuesday, January 16, 2007, in reaction to the execution of President Hussein and his two aids over 109 Iraqis were killed outside a Baghdad University and over 200 people were wounded as students were heading home for the day, and 4 American soldiers were killed in Northern Iraq (Gamel 2007: 1-4). A few days later, on January 20, 2007, 20 U.S. service members were killed in Iraq (Mroue 2006: 1-4) A few days later, on January 22, 2007, the Al-Quaeda Deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, mocked and challenged U.S. President George W. Bush’s plan to increase Iraq troop numbers by over 21,000 troops in a video message intercepted by the UD-based terrorism think-tank Site, to send the entire U.S. army to Iraq (BBC News 2007: 1). He threatened that the Iraqi insurgents would bury 10 armies like those of Mr. Bush. His strategy in Iraq was going to fail. Al Zawairi asked the President, why send 20,000 troops only? Why not send 50,000 or 100,000? He asked President Bush: “Aren’t you aware that the dogs of Iraq are peeing on your troops’ dead bodies?” That is the hateful archaic language of revenge. On January 16, 2007, the U.N. announced that the death toll in Iraq for 2006 topped 34,000 Iraqis. The Golden Rule, which all three Abrahamic religions share, and the global ethos project built on it as well as on the categorical imperative and the a priori of the universal communication community remains mute and unrealized as Modernity continues un-negated in the neo-conservative and neo-liberal form of globalization. Only its Orwellian and Huxleian lies, hypocrisy and lawlessness point to a global post-Modern alternative Future I–the totally administered, loveless and meaningless and corrupt world, and to global post-modern alternative Future II–the entirely militarized more and more murderous world (Adorno1997j/2: 9-10, 47-71, 97-122, 375-395, 573-594, 608-616, 674-690, 702-740, 785-802; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Küng 1990b; Siebert 2005b; 2005d; 2006a; 2006d; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; Meyer 2006: 22-27; App. G).

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Facticity and Validity In his press conference with the Christian-Democratic German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, on January 4, 2007, the neo-conservative President Bush junior supported the investigation by the Iraqi Prime Minister, but– like his Secretary of State–refused to condemn the Shiite henchmen who taunted President Hussein during his execution. (Frayer/Mattar 2007: 1-4; Abdul-Zhara 2007: 1-4) It seems that like Machiavelli or Pareto, the teacher of Benito Mussolini, before, so President Bush junior and his cabinet often seem to be blind for the essential difference between facticity and validity: namely that the mere fact that a President whose government has been recognized internationally for over three decades has factually and effectively been removed by a foreign government through overwhelming power, force, war, and execution, does not yet mean that this procedure was rightful, moral, ethical, or legal, and that it thus has validity in any religious or secular sense (Habermas 1992a). Not even the United Nations has the right to perform a regime change in any of its member states or in any other state outside itself. Only a nation itself may have the right to remove its government, if it threatens its existence. Regime change in one nation through unilateral intervention, first strike, war, occupation, terror or executions by another state can never be ethically or legally universalized. The very fact that often before in American or European history might has been right de facto, does not mean that, therefore, this principle has validity and can be an excuse for present or future overwhelming military interventions. This principle of might is right also does not gain validity through the very fact that the enemy practiced it as well nationally or internationally. If I imitate my enemy and thus become like him, what is the purpose in fighting him? Injustices have the tendency to generate further injustices and even escalate them, rather than to restore the violated order of right and personal, social, political, or historical morality: that has been the curse of the jus or lex talionis through centuries, which is under all circumstances to be broken, and not to be continually reproduced, so that the horrible theodicy problem is further increased (Genesis 34; Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-48; Hertz 5716/1956: 127-129/1-31; Leibniz 1996: vols. I and II; Hegel 1986l: 28, 540, 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Oelmüller1990; Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4; Siebert 1993; 2006a). Shortly, the reduction of validity to facticity, or of right to might, can not possibly be universalized in terms of the Golden Rule, or of its secularization and rationalization in the form of the categorical imperative, or of the a priori of the unlimited commu-

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nication community (Apel 1975: vol. II, 155-436; Habermas 1983; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 1992b; 1995; 1997a; Küng 1990b; Siebert 2006a; 2007c; Lee 2006). If these universalizing principles are continually violated, only the always-escalating lex talionis and the consequent horror of the deepening theodicy problem are left (Kuschel,/Schlenson, 2008; Siebert 2005b; 2006a; 2006d; 2007c; 2007d; 2008a).

Abolishment of the Death Penalty The dialectical theorist of religion remembers that Christian social ethics evolved only very slowly to the point, when finally in the 20th century, it was ready to find the death penalty implausible and unacceptable, and agreed with the modern enlighteners’ attempts to abolish it (Hegel 1986a: 440-442, 613-614, 6-19-620; Canetti 1960; 1972; Opitz 2006: 41-44). The death penalty had been quite customary in Medieval and modern Europe, under the feudal lords as well as under the bourgeois ruling class (Hegel 1986a: 440-442, 613-614, 6-19-620). Before World War II, only Norway had been humanistic and social-minded enough to abolish the death penalty in its territory. From 1945 on, however, when the European nations wanted to extract themselves from the bestiality of two world wars and wanted to rediscover their normative identity and base in their seedbed societies of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome–the Golden Rule and its inversion into the categorical imperative and the a priori of the unlimited communication community, autarky, humanism, scientific rationality, universalistic humanity, democracy, constitutional state, and social market economy–they, as well as the U.S.A., were so repelled and disgusted by the all too frequent and criminal application of the death penalty by the fascist regimes, particularly by the most revengeful Adolf Hitler, that they were ready and willing to abolish the capital punishment altogether (Kant 1929: 472-474, 633-634; 1946; 1975: 40-54, 55-61, 77-93, 113-122, 129-131; Hegel 1986g: 398-514; 1986q: 50-95, 96-154, 155-184, 185-346; Fromm 1973: chap. 13; Canetti 1972: chaps. 1, 4, 5, 7; 1960; Sohn-Rethel 1975: chaps. 10, 11; Apel 1976a & b; 1982; Habermas 1983; 1991a; 1991b; 1991c; Küng 1990b: 84-85; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Häring/Kuschel 1993; Nida-Rümelin 2006: 5-10; Harprecht 2006: 11-14). The death penalty remained abolished in the West for several years, and still remains so in the European Union up to the present– January 2010. However, during the social crisis and social destabilization in the West in the 1960’s and 1970’s, which was caused particularly by economic setbacks under the Keynesian system, and by the War in Vietnam,

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and by the student rebellion, and which led to the neo-conservative revolution, or bourgeois counter-revolution, and to the neo-liberal trend turn, the Supreme Court of the U.S.A. permitted the particular states of the Union to reintroduce the death penalty again. Over 20 states did do so. Recently, however–in 2005/2006–several of these states have felt serious doubts concerning different aspects of the death penalty, but not enough yet, in order to abolish it again and suspend it everywhere and forever. To do so would help greatly to reduce the general necrophilia in the late capitalist commodity-exchange societies, and it would be an important step on the way to global alternative Future III–a society characterized by a possible socialism as practiced humanism, and situated beyond both, the free market economy on one hand, and the centrally administered economy, on the other (Adorno 1979: 354-372, 397-407, 408-433, 434-439, 578-587; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002, chaps. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; App. G). According to Canetti and Adorno, even the most modern and enlightened societies are still built on a latent coercive violence behind all commands of the international corporate ruling class and its rackets. It becomes manifest and immediate in a most extreme way not only in wars, but also already in the praxis of the death penalty, and in the particular executions–as e.g. that of President Saddam Hussein (Canetti 1960: 90-91). Following Hegel, Adorno argued that every execution is directed toward the others, toward those, who are not executed (Hegel 1986a: 440-442, 613-614, 619-620; Canetti 1960: 90-91). Already his great teacher, Friedrich Nietzsche, the son of a Protestant pastor and the self-proclaimed anti-Christ–Dionysus versus the Crucified–spoke, nevertheless, the great sentence in conformity with the Sermon on the Mount, and quite in the spirit of Hegel: that man had to be redeemed from the mythological spell of the jus or lex talionis, from revenge, from retaliation (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; Hegel 1986a: 440-442, 613-614, 619620; Canetti 1960: 90-91; Kaufmann 1968: chap. 12; Canetti 1960: 91-92; Siebert 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007c; 2007d; 2008a).

Ideological Justification From the very beginning of the neo-conservative trend turn, long before the neo-conservative contra war against Nicaragua and the civil war in El Salvador, and the victory of the neo-liberal counter-revolution in Eastern Europe, and the Yugoslav civil war, and the first war against Iraq, and the war against Afghanistan, and the second war against Iraq, and the civil war in Iraq and in Afghanistan, the economist Friedmann provided the

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ideological justification for the new neo-conservative free market orientation and globalization, which in evolutionary terms regressed back into the middle, or even into the beginning of the 19th century and its colonialisms and imperialisms (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 520-542; Marx 1977; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Horkheimer 1988n: 273-274, 276277; Beams 2006: 1-5; Blaes-Hermanns 2006: 28-33; Grafe 2006: 33-37; Hüpping/Heitmeyer 2006: 37-41; Opitz 2006: 41-44; Meyer 2006: 44-48; Hofmann 52-57; Honneth 1990; Fraser/Honneth 2003). Certainly the globalizing free market orientation has meant an evolutionary de-differentiation and regression behind President Roosevelt’s socially modified liberalism of 1933, containing the principle of subsidiarity from the Papal Social Encyclical Letter Quadragesimo Anno of 1931. The principle of subsidiarity mitigated somewhat the atomistic character of liberalism. While recognizing the responsibility of the individual, the principle of subsidiarity also guaranteed public support and solidarity on the local, state and federal level, when the individual came to his or her limits in the face of collective problems or catastrophes, e.g. the great depression from 1929-1939 or from 2008-2010.

Cancellation of Subsidiarity From the 1970’s on, the neo-conservatives cancelled again to a large extent the principle of subsidiarity and solidarity in the name of personal autonomy, and thus left the individuals free but rather helpless in the face of collective catastrophes, like e.g. the hurricanes, which hit the southern coast of the U.S.A. in 2005. Friedmann’s neo-conservative approach opposed radically the policies of Keynes. Friedmann favored limits for the federal manipulation of moneys, the elimination of price supports and of protective tariffs, and a negative income tax. Friedmann denounced government intervention as the cause of the 1970 economic crisis. Friedmann insisted on a return to the principles of the free market, which had existed before the great depression and before President Roosevelt’s reforms of the–from its Protestant origin on–now entirely secular, and totally atomistic liberalism, which emphasized personal autonomy, but knew little of solidarity, and which had been so thoroughly discredited by the economic catastrophes of global capitalism in the 1930’s (Habermas 1986). Already a century earlier, Hegel had criticized the physical and social atomism constituting liberalism: the lack of universal solidarity (Hegel 1986e: 185186; Taylor 1983: 306-329; Horstmann 1978: chaps 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, Henrich 1971: chaps 3, 4, 6; Siebert 1987a; 1987b; 2002a; 2002b;

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2003a; 2003b; 2003c; 2003d; 2005b; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2008b; 2008c; 2008d; 2008e; 2009). According to Hegel, already the determinations by the Greek philosophers of Antiquity about the form, and the position of atoms, the direction of their movements, were arbitrary and external enough, and stood thereby in direct contradiction to the fundamental theory of the atom. For Hegel, the contemporary physics as well as the other natural sciences suffered in the molecules or particles from the atoms, the principle of the highest externality, and thereby of the most extreme notionlessness, as much as the science of the state, including family, civil society and history, shortly the social sciences, which started from the singular will of the individuals instead from the social totalities: from the particular rather than from the universal, from personal autonomy rather than from universal, i.e. anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity (Hegel 1986e: 185-186; 1986g, part III; Habermas 1986; Siebert 1994). In contrast to neo-conservativism, the critical theory of society has aimed from its very start at the reconciliation of personal sovereignty and universal solidarity (Horkheimer 1988a; 1987k: 289-328; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Habermas 1986; Siebert 1994a; 1994c; 1987a; 1987b; 2002a; 2002b; 2003a; 2003b; 2003c; 2003d; 2005b; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2008b; 2008c; 2008d; 2008e; 2009).

New Economic Orthodoxy Less than a decade after the collapse of the post-war economic boom in the late capitalistic societies of the 1950’s and 1960’s, Friedmann’s eccentric theories became the new economic orthodoxy, and Keynesianism turned into the new heresy (Hegel 1986g: 382-397; Marx/Engels 1960: 583-593; Adorno 1979: 354-372, 578-587; Niewöhner 1997: 6; Beams 2006: 1-5). In October 1976, the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, sensing the shift in the economic winds, the neo-liberal trend turn, awarded Friedmann the Nobel Price for Economics. The global protest against his nomination followed Friedmann into the acceptance celebration in Stockholm, concentrating on his affiliation with General Pinochet, whom he had visited personally, and with whom he had cooperated, and to whom he was as close as the U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger, who had used him to overthrow the democratically elected socialist Government of Dr. Allende: another bloody neo-conservative regime change connected with massive human rights violations. One month before Friedmann received the Noble Price for Economics, in September 1976, Prime Minister James Callaghan summed up in a major speech to the British Labor Party Conference, what

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was to become the new conventional wisdom and its implication for government policy in all advanced capitalist countries for the rest of the 20th century and for the beginning of the 21st century. Callaghan confessed that he and his colleagues used to think that they could spend their way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes, and boosting government spending. Now, Callaghan told his colleagues in all candor that that option no longer existed. In so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since World War II by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.

Three Youth Movements In the 1960’s, still under the Keynesian system and shortly before the beginning of the neo-conservative trend turn and all the misery and suffering it has produced in the meantime, the critical theorists of society inspired the third youth movement: Adorno in Europe, and Marcuse and Fromm in America (Horkheimer 1988n: 444-445, 451-452, 452-453, 459, 512-513; Scheible 1989: 131-47; Fetscher/Schmidt2002: chaps 1, 2, 3; Marcuse 1960; 1969a; 1969b; 1973; 1984; 2001; Macintyre 1970; Fromm 1967; 1968; 1972a; 1973; 1980a; 1992; Best/Kellner 1991: chaps 7 and 8; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002). The critical theory of society was to be put into praxis nationally and globally (Habermas 1973). There had been a first international youth movement before World War I, which wanted to break out of what Max Weber called the iron cage of capitalism, as it was longing and striving for new love, new politics, and new religion (Weber 1952; 1962; 1963; 1964b; 1969). Only too soon the young people found themselves fighting against each other on Europe’s battlefields for their own capitalist nation state. There was a second international youth movement, partially religious and partially secular, between the two world wars, which rebelled against bourgeois society in the name of new love, new politics, and new religion. Only too soon, this youth movement was integrated into nationalistic youth organizations with militaristic tendencies, like the Hitler Youth, and soon the youngsters found themselves once more fighting against each other on Europe’s and other battle fields for the traditional values of nationalism, national patriotism, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and militarism (Hegel 1986g: 382-397, 490-514; Cannetti 1972: chaps. 1, 4, 5, 7; Walker 1970; Bessel 2001; Stoddard 1940; Mosse 1999; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993).

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The Third Youth Movement The third youth movement in the 1960’s remembered the fate of the earlier generations, and therefore fought for the democratic-socialist values as pronounced by the young Marx, or Lenin, or by Trotsky, or by the anarchist Michael Bakunin, or by Mao Tse-tung, or by Ho Chi Minh: shortly by the Left and Ultra Left all around the globe including the critical theorists of society (Marx/Engels 2005; Marx 1953; Bottomore 1956; 1964; Laski; Bloch 1971; Fromm 1967; Marcuse 1966; Bakunin 1960; Dastider 2006: 36-39). The critical theory of society helped the German students to remember more adequately the involvement of their parental generation in the evilness and the guilt connection of the Dritte Reich: the sins of their fathers (Kesting 2006: 57-62; Pollack 2004; Brandt 2006; Franzen 2006: 70-72). In the meantime of course it has become obvious that what the Allies have called the good war, and rightly so because it had the good goal to overcome fascism in Europe and Asia, had a dark side, namely the criminal means, which were used sometimes in order to reach it, e.g. the saturation bombing of civilian populations in European cities as promoted and conducted by the British Air Marshall Harris, and in Japanese cities, or the collective rape at the Eastern front or the torpedoing of refugee ships in the Baltic sea in 1945 (Anonymous 2006; Grass 2005). During the student revolt in America, I was the liaison-professor between Western Michigan University and the student movement, and particularly with the SDS in Detroit, working for mutual understanding (Horkheimer 1988n: 472). When afterwards I was Senator George McGovern’s presidential campaign manager in Michigan, we became aware that he had been an American bomber pilot bombing German cities, while I had been defending them as a member of the German air force: until today–January 2010– we both are convinced that we did the right thing, as we both face–as he puts it–the mystery of the Beyond. Senator McGovern former professor of history and Methodist minister thinks rightly that he was right when he fought as a bomber pilot because the war goal of the Allies was right: the defeat of fascism. I think rightly, that I was right, when I defended civilians, mostly women and children and old people, against the Allied saturation bombing, which was an unethical and criminal means to achieve the right goal (Hils-Brockhoff/Piccard 2004). Only recently the Germans have started to emphasize, that they suffered too (Grass 1998; 2002). The revolting students of the 1960’s were more concerned with the dark side of the war, which their fathers had fought, the war of the Axis powers, who used criminal means–e.g. the killing of 27 million communists and 6

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million Jews–for criminal purposes, e.g. the Aryan colonization of Slavic Eastern Europe (Bethell 1977; Sakowskiej 1988). The revolutionary students of the 1960’s were not inclined to accept the moral equivalence between the Allies and the Axis, which Reich Marshall Hermann Göring had asserted in the Nuremberg Trial, and rightly so.

Changed Times In the meantime the revolutionary students have turned into conservative students. In January 2007, after over 30 years of neo-conservativism and neo-liberalism, political activism by members of Western Michigan University’s chapter of the Rightwing College Republicans has garnered this group the designation of the nation’s Best Chapter in 2006 from the College Republican National Committee (Lee 2007). The WMU chapter was chosen from more than 1,700 college chapters nationwide. The WMU chapter was active in hosting the Rightwing speakers Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter and lead large numbers of chapter members into the field to work on Republican campaigns during the 2006 election as they had done during the 2004 presidential elections. In both elections the WMU Chapter of young Republicans had the help of the Evangelicals and many Catholics among the students. At the same time, the large majority of the WMU students remained silent concerning the Afghanistan and Iraq war in contrast to the WMU students of the 1960’s and 1970’s, who had protested passionately against the Vietnam War. Times had indeed changed

Against Social Injustices The critical theory of society helped the rebellious students of the 1960’s not only to reflect on the sins of their fathers, but it also assisted the revolutionary students globally in articulating and formulating and expressing their protest against the social injustices of the war against Vietnam as well as in Central and Latin America. Thus, the young Cuban medical doctor and socialist revolutionary, Ernesto Che Guevara, was the great hero and ideal of the third youth movement (Viviani 2006: 74-76). When the most corrupt dictator Fulgencio Batista and his American puppet government fled Cuba in 1958, Che with the other Barbados–Fidel Castro, son of a Cuban sugar cane plantation owner, Jesuit student and lawyer, and his brother Raul, and Camilo Cienfuegos, and thousands of other

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young revolutionaries–marched victoriously into Havana. In 1959, Fidel Castro took power in Cuba and held it up to his illness–October 2006– when his brother Raul moved into his national place in Cuba. President Castro sent Che into a mission impossible, on which he died a martyr’s death. The picture of his naked corpse went through the whole bourgeois and socialist press. For the third youth movement the picture looked like those medieval images of the body of Jesus of Nazareth, after he had been taken from the cross. The picture motivated the mostly middle class youngsters world wide in their struggle against monopoly and oligopoly capitalism, in which their fathers may have been deeply involved, on one level or the other.

From Theory to Praxis In 1967/1968, the courts and the police in Frankfurt a.M. held Adorno responsible for the whole rebellious youth movement, which reached from Tokyo through New York and Washington to Berlin, Paris, and which seemed to try to put his critical theory of society into social and political praxis (Adorno 1951; 1952; 1960; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1970b; Habermas 1970; 1971a; 1971b; 1978; 1978c: 33-47; 1987b: 160-179; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Scheible 1989: 131-146). As in the earlier 1960’s the youth movement did indeed follow the teachings of the Frankfurt School to some extent, and wanted to make Adorno their leader worldwide, and intended to put the critical theory of society into praxis. Horkheimer and Adorno and the other critical theorists had been happy about the young people no longer being conformists to the system, but asking critical questions concerning it and the connection between fascism, and war, and late capitalism, and resisting its tendency toward alternative Future I–the entirely administered society, and toward alternative Future II–the militarized society, and longing for global alternative Future III–a reconciled society in place of the antagonistic civil society, and its familial, economic, political and religious subsystems, from which they felt deeply alienated (Horkheimer 1985g: 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Scheible 1989: 131-146; Gumnior/Ringgu 1973: 91-132; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002: chaps 1 & 2; Habermas 1970; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; App. C, D, G).

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In the second part of the 1960’s, the student movement began to protest not only against late capitalist society in its Keynesian form, but also became critical against the critical theory, critical of that same society (Horkheimer 1888n: 444-445, 451-452, 452-453, 459, 512-513; Habermas 1969: chaps, 1-3; 1981b; Scheible 1989: 131-147; App. C, D). In the Summer Semester of 1969, two topless coeds interrupted Adorno’s lecture at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität and protested before him and 400 other students that the critical theory of society was not sensuous enough. Two socialist PhD candidates of Adorno interrupted his lecture and agitated that the critical theory of society was not revolutionary enough. The students tried to turn the critical theory of society against itself. The rebellious students began to consider Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s longing for the wholly Other, the Infinite, the Truth to be romantic in the negative sense, as Goethe and Nietzsche had understood the word (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 29, 37, 40; Kaufmann 1968: 374-386; Glotz 2005; 2006: 15). When the great practitioner and theoretician of music, Adorno, listened to Bach’s Matthew Passion, or Mozart’s Don Giovanni or his Jupiter Symphony, he had to say that all this could not possibly be untrue (Hegel 1986e: 115-173; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Schreiber 2006: 62-65; Siebert 2006b). Adorno’s careful admission sounded as if there was something like an artistic or aesthetical proof for the existence of God, the imageless and nameless wholly Other, the Infinite, the Truth in the form of Bach’s or Mozart’s music: a distant echo of what theologians and philosophers from Anselm of Canterbury through Master Eckhart, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant to Hegel had once called the specifically Christian ontological proof, originally still expressed in the second person: Therefore Lord, thou art not only that than which a greater cannot be conceived, but thou art a being greater than can be conceived. For, since it can be conceived that there is such a being, if thou art not this very being, a greater than thou can be conceived. But this is impossible…a being than which a greater can not be conceived exists in reality…Truly Lord, this is the unapproachable light in which thou dwellest: for truly there is nothing else which can penetrate this light, that it may see thee there… (Exodus 20: 4-7; Saint Anselm 1962: 22-23, 153-153, 156; Hegel 1986q: 518535; 1986e: 115-173; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 29-30; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Fromm 1976: chaps. 3, 7; Schreiber 2006: 62-65).

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Dialectical Notion In his ontological proof of the existence of God, Anselm of Canterbury had presupposed on the basis of his Christian faith the unity of Logos and being, or of Notion and being, or of Idea and being, or of God and being, in order thus to prove the teaching of the Church in a philosophical way: credo ut intelligam–intelligo ut credam; reconciliation of faith and reason (Genesis1: 1; John 1: 1-18; Saint Anselm 1962: 22-23, 153-153, 156; Hegel 1986e: 115-173; 1986f: 462-573; 1986q: 209-211, 210-212, 351, 523, 526527; 1986s: 554-560, 591; 1986t: 138, 360; Habermas 2001c; 2003a: 249262; 2006b: 1-25). As philosopher, Hegel found this presupposition to be deficient. He, therefore, developed this unity of Notion or Idea and being in his science of logic, and in his own dialectical reconstruction of the traditional proofs for the existence of God (Hegel 1986e: 115-173; 1986f: 462-573; 1986q: 209-211, 210-212, 351, 523, 526-527; 1986s: 554-560, 591; 1986t: 138, 360). For Hegel‘s logic, the Idea was the synthesis of being and essence (Hegel 1986e; 1986f). For Hegel’s philosophy of religion, the ontological proof for the existence of God was the synthesis of the cosmological and the teleological proof (Hegel 1986p; 1986q). The proofs for the existence of God, concluding with the ontological proof, lay on the Lutheran Christian Hegel’s desk as a torso when he died in Berlin in the afternoon of November 14, 1931, from the most intensive form of cholera (Küng 1970: 499-500). According to his likewise Lutheran wife Maria, nee von Tucher, Hegel slumbered into Eternity peacefully and painlessly like being transfigured and like a saint. Maria always believed what Hegel knew and vice versa. For Hegel’s positive theology, that than which a greater could not be conceived was the absolute Spirit, who appeared in the forms of art, religion and philosophy, which were sharply differentiated off from the spheres of the subjective and the objective spirit (Saint Anselm 1962: 22, 153-157; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986j; App. C, D). The absolute Spirit was for Hegel the deepest notion, which had the most universal significance and application (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986e: 257-258). Beyond this, Hegel’s theology became negative like stories from the Talmud, or like the Jewish, Christian and Islamic mystical theology (Eckhart 1979; Blakney 1941: xii; Fox 1989; Hegel 1986a: 43, 365-367, 375; 1986b: 534, 536; 1986k: 161, 226, 227, 230; 1986e: 122; 1986h: 28; 1986m: 416, 474, 478, 1986n: 169; 1986p: 209; 1986q: 327; 1986s: 425-430, 512, 583-587; 1986t: 15, 91; Horkheimer 1967b: 311-312; 1988n: 228-233). The LeftHegelian critical theory of religion contains a mostly negative theology as

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theodicy (Horkheimer 1971; 1985g: chaps 17, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40; 1985l: 483-492; Habermas 1988a: 277-279; 1991a: part III).

The Subject and the Other According to Horkheimer, informed and inspired by his and Adorno’s Roman-Catholic student and assistant for Greek and scholastic philosophy and theology, Karl Heinz Haag, from St. Georgen, a Jesuit Theological University in Frankfurt a.M., Anselm of Canterbury was a great Medieval scholar (Hegel 1986e: 115-173; 1986f: 462-573; 1986h: 167, 348-349, 1986p: 29; 1986q: 209-210, 210-212, 351, 523, 526-527, 529; 1986s: 54560, 591; 1986t: 138, 360; Haag 1983: chaps, 1, 2, 3, 8). According to Kant’s and Hegel’s, as well as Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s dialectical notion of the differentiated, which is likewise inseparable, an identical which is in itself inseparably difference, the demythologized and de-anthropomorphized wholly Other, the Eternal, the Infinite, the Truth on one hand, and the believing, knowing, hoping, longing human subject on the other were not only different, but also inseparable (1 Corinthians 13: 12; St. Augustine 1958: 232-233, 235; 1952; 1958: Book 9, chap. 12; Blakney 1941: 288289/19, 302; Hegel 1986e: 115-173, 240; Hegel 1964: 35-65; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40; Küng 1978; 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008; Siebert 1987: 30-31; 1987d; 1989; 1994a; 1994c; 1994d; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2003b; 2003c; 2003d; 2005b; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f). For Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury, Master Eckhart and Hegel, God had been closer to the soul than the soul was to itself, and the eye with which humanity saw God, was the same eye with which God saw humanity and the world (St. Augustine 1952; 1958: 232-233, 235; 1958: Book 9, chap.12; Blakney 1941: 288-289/19, 302; Hegel 1986e: 115-173, 240, 247; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 14, 15, 16, 17, 29, 37, 40; Küng 1978: 157-222). Posited between naturalism and super-naturalism, the critical theorists materialistically emphasized in their inverse theology, the non-identity in the dialectical notion rather than the identity (Horkheimer 1985l: 483-492; Adorno 1970b: 103-110, 111-125; 1973b: 300-360, 361-408; Habermas 2001a; 2001c; 2005: part III & IV; Küng 1978: 18, 356362, 363-368, 376-379, 533, 540-542, 539-541, 559, 615, 617-618). In any case, for the critical theorists the longing for the totally Other, the name of God which was not allowed to be used, characterized, constituted, and expressed man’s humanity, and held them together in solidarity with each other, and with the suffering oppressed and exploited classes in modern civil society, and gave them their great energy not only in the 1960’s

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and 1970’s, but through almost a whole century (Löwenthal 1980: 80-81; 1990a; 1990b; 1989).

Trend toward Positivism The protesting, revolutionary-minded students of the late 1960’s could not see that the critical theorists were much closer to the Hebrew Bible, or to Aristotle, or to the New Testament, or to Anselm of Canterbury, or to Master Elkhart, or to Hegel, or to Nietzsche, or to Heinrich Heine, or for that matter to Adalbert Stifter and to Gottfried Keller, than to the Romantics, e.g. to the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich von Schlegel, who had already been criticized and condemned by Goethe, Hegel and Nietzsche (Hegel 1986j: 383; 1986k: 215; 1986l: 200; 1986d: 420; 1986g: 277, 286, 317; 1986k: 61; Weiss 1974: part VII; Heine 2005; Stifter 1990; Keller 1994; Laumont 2004: 5-76; Kaufmann 1968: 371-386). Often unconsciously, the students fell victim to the trend toward positivism present in the same late capitalist society, which they were critical of and which they protested against. After all, the students’ post-war education had stressed more positivistic pedagogics than dialectical education, more instrumental than communicative rationality and action, more notionless mathematics than what Hegel had called the qualitative rather than quantitative good, honest, reliable, substantial contents of the ethical and social-ethical and spiritual life (Hegel 1986e: 249; Horkheimer 1987e: 144-196, 377-395, 412-415, 415-422; 1985g: chaps. 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1985h: chaps. 5, 7, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40; 1988n: 36, 37-38, 42-43, 47, 55, 59, 63, 65-66, 68-69, 73, 76-77, 120121, 123, 128-129, 132, 163-164, 204, 214-215, 219, 225-226, 228, 240-241, 247-248, 276-277, 302-303, 321-322, 237-328, 330-331, 336-337, 338-339, 348, 36-361, 364, 366-367, 369, 369-370, 370, 370-371, 372-373, 378-379, 405-406, 425, 443, 444-445, 445-447, 451-452, 452-4523, 455-456, 458459, 459, 489-490, 520-521, 527, 531, 535-536, 537, 538-539, 544-545; 1991f: 21-188, 190, 197, 198, 199-200, 203, 203-206, 207, 207, 212-213, 213, 215-216, 217, 219-220, 221, 221-225, 227-228, 232-233, 233-234, 236-237, 237, 238-239, 240-241, 242-243, 245, 246, 249-250, 2458-259, 268, 275, 277, 290-291, 298-301, 307-308, 314-315, 319-321, 326-327, 327-328, 329-331, 337, 340-341, 346, 370, 371-372, 376, 377-378, 385386, 382-383, 389, 397, 399, 400-401, 403-405, 409-410, 410-411, 414-415, 416-417, 417, 424). The numbers and geometrical figures were often connected with mythical and poetical images and religious signs and symbols situated between sense perception and sense certainty on one hand, and

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thoughts on the other (Hegel 1986e: 247-249; 1986c). Counting is not yet thinking. The external and mechanical counting and number-crunching and measuring business objectified itself in always better machines, which could perform the arithmetical operations with greatest perfection. The age of the computer would begin and would overwhelm the schools and universities. As counting in all its forms was made into the main means of education, the spirit of the young generation was tortured into the imitation of the perfection of the continually improving machines–the computers. Soon, with the beginning of the neo-conservative trend turn students reached such perfection in counting, e.g. in the always more perfected statistics, that they seemed to turn into computers themselves.

Constitutional Patriotism This computer-positivism pointed toward alternative Future I–the totally administered world rather than to alternative Future III–the rational and free society, which the revolutionary students found still most desirable in spite of their unconscious positivistic tendencies (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971a; 1971b; 1973; 1975; 1976; App. G). On January 31, 1969, Adorno asked the Frankfurt police to throw the rebellious students out of the Institute for Social Research. The revolting students tried even to occupy the Institute for Social Research because for them its critical teachings seemed not revolutionary and sensuous enough (Scheible 1989: 131-147). Being warned by Jürgen Habermas that the police awaited them in the Institute, the students stayed at home. Later on, Habermas developed out of and against the estrangement and alienation of the students not only from their bourgeois families, but also from civil society, and from the liberal state his notion of constitutional patriotism pointing to alternative Future III–a not only instrumentally and technically, but also communicatively rational society: in contradistinction to the blind irrational, bourgeois, nationalistic patriotism present in the pre-fascist and fascist as well as in the later, neo-conservative and neo-liberal period of the USA and the Western civilization, after the liberal leadership had been wiped out through assassinations or political manipulations. (Habermas 1969; 1970; 1978a; 1979a; 1979b; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1992a: 632-660; 1995; 2006c; Pannen 2006: 65-67; App. G). In the meantime, this notion of constitutional patriotism has spread beyond the German into the European and American public discourse.

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Unreified Transcendence For Horkheimer, Habermas was too revolutionary and–in Max Weber’s words–not religiously musical enough (Weber 1969; 1964; Miller 1964; Habermas 1981: chaps. 2, 7, 8). The future would prove to the critical theorist of religion that Horkheimer was wrong concerning Habermas on both accounts: in reality later on Habermas reconstructed Marx’s historical materialism in terms of the critical theory of society, and he, the grandson of a Protestant seminary director, became religiously quite sensitive (Habermas 1976; 1982: 127-142; 1990: 9-17; 1991a: part III; 2001a: 9-31; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2005). When Habermas participated in our international course on the Future of Religion in the IUC, Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, in April 1978, he himself believed that he was religiously unmusical, and that he had no theory of religion (Reimer 1992). Yet, we were able to convince him of his own religious sensitivity and of his own attempt to find the sparks of communicative rationality–logoi spermaticoi–also in religion, and thus of his own beginnings of a communicative theory of religion. The future development of Habermas’s communicative theory of society proved that he was as open for critical religion as his teachers Horkheimer and Adorno, in spite of the fact, that he always refused to use their definition of religion: the longing for the totally Other (Siebert 2001; 2003b; 2003c; 2003d; 2005b; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f). Habermas’s negative and inverse theology was even more radical, negative and inverse than that of his teachers: methodological atheism (Scholem 1977: 1-50; Benjamin 1955c: 493-494; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1971b: 172227; 1982: 11-32, 33-47, 95, 127-143; 1990: 14-15; 1991a: part III). For Habermas, a formal methodological atheism certainly does not mean a material abstract atheism. As Hegel concretely sublated with the help of Friedrich Schiller the God of the Torah, and of the New Testament, and of the Koran–Elyon, El Shaddai, Yahweh, Adonai, Allah–into the absolute Spirit, so the critical theorists of society inverted his absolute Spirit with the help of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Hegel, Rudolf Otto and Karl Barth into the wholly Other as the radical, but nevertheless determinate negation of the horrible negativity in nature and history. This negativity continually makes the natural and more still economic, political, military and historical slaughter bench or Golgotha appear, as if on it God was missing or dead, and as if on it the actions, and sufferings, and lives of individuals and nations, were all meaningless, and loveless, and in vain, and for nothing (Psalm 91: 1-2; Schelling 1977; Hegel 1986e: 115-173; 1986c: 590-591; 1986l: 30-55; 1986q 290-293; Kaufmann 1968:

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95-96; Otto 1991; Barth 1950; Horkheimer 1971: 40-41, 54-90; 1985g: chaps 17, 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1988a: 278-279; 1990: 14-15; 1991a: part III; Kempowski 1990; 2006; Hamann 2006: 67-69; Vahanian 1967). Habermas translated the entirely Other, for which his teachers longed insatiably, through his theory of communicative action and his methodological atheism after a long march through the ruins of the negative theology, into the even more completely de-reified Transcendence (Psalm 91: 1-2; Hegel 1986: 115-173; 1986c: 590-591; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 17, 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1988a: 278-279; 1990: 14-15; 1991: part III; 2002; Mendieta 2005: parts 1-7 and 9). In other words, Habermas radicalized further than his teachers the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue, the prohibition against making images or naming the Absolute, and the Kantian tabu against human understanding entering and penetrating the sphere of the things-in-themselves, or the Thing-in -itself: the Ens Realissimum (Exodus 20: 4-8; Kant 1929: 24, 27, 71-73, 74, 85-87, 89, 149, 172-173, 230, 265-267, 278-280, 282-284, 346-348, 351-353, 440, 449, 490; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 14, 17, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 40; Habermas 1988a: 278-279; 1991a: part III; 2002; Mendieta 2005: parts I-VII and IX).

Progressive Evolution It is the task of the dialectical religiology to translate or invert newly religion, in the present transition period toward Post-Modern, alternative Future III–the reconciled society, beyond Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Otto, Bultmann, Barth, Habermas, Küng, not to speak of Pope Benedict XVI: in terms of a non-reified Transcendence, or a completely demythologized wholly Other than the world of appearance and its corruption, of which also religion is a part (Habermas 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006b; Bultmann 1997; Otto 1969; Barth 1950; 1959; Küng 1965; 1970; 1972; 1976; 1978; 1980; 1987; 1989; 1990a; 1990b; 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b: Part VII; 2003; 2004; Benedict XVI 2005; 2006; 2007; App. G). Religious people have always newly re-translated and re-inverted their interpretations of reality and orientations of action. Thus, e.g., Sheol was the most frequently used term in Biblical Hebrew for the abode of the spirits of the dead (Genesis 37: 35; Lieber 2001: 232-35). The region was imagined as situated deep beneath the earth. Enclosed with gates, it was a place of unrelieved gloom and silence; it received everyone, good and bad, great and small. All were equal there, and none, who entered it, could ever leave again. There was no concept of heaven and hell in the Hebrew Bible.

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But in the later Rabbinical Judaism, as well as in Christianity and Islam, concepts like resurrection of the dead, judgment day, heaven for the good people and hell for the bad people were introduced, invented, or revealed (Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Küng 1979; 1991b; 1994a; 2004). When my wife approached her terrible cancer death in London, Ontario, Canada on October 20, 1978, she asked me, what the concept Sheol meant, which she had found in one of the Psalms which she had prayed, and I answered her, that this notion had no validity any longer in our Roman Catholic or PostModern Ecumenical Paradigm of Christianity (Küng 1982; 1994a; 1994b; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; Berrigan 1978).

From Talion- to Test-Theodicy In the view of the dialectical theory of religion, there is indeed progressive evolution taking place not only from one religion to the other, but also from one paradigm to the other in each religion (Hegel 1986c; 1986e; 1986f; 1986p; 1986q; Kuhn 1963; Küng 1965; 1970; 1972; 1976; 1978; 1980; 1989; 1990; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Küng/Ess/ Stietencron;/Bechert 1984; Küng/Kuschel 1993; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/ Schlenson 2008; App. E). According to the Rabbis, e.g., early levels of the Hebrew-biblical narrative of Er, Judah’s first-born son, who had been displeasing to the Lord, and whose life the Lord had therefore taken, could understand the untimely death of a young person only as being caused by some sin on that person’s part (Genesis 38: 7; Lieber 2001: 234-7). Otherwise, the world would make no sense. Here the critical theorist of religion speaks of the primordial, primitive talion theodicy. In the Rabbi’s perspective, later in the biblical period, and in the time of the Babylonian Talmud, a more nuanced, less judgmental approach to misfortune emerged. The dialectical religiologist thinks e.g. of the test theodicy of the Book of Job, which was derived from outside of Israel. In the perspective of the critical religiology, religions evolve progressively no less than the Hellenistic or modern secular enlightenment movements (Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Küng 1970; 1978; 1979; 1980; 1989; 1989a; 1991b; 1993b; 1994a; 2004). Religious believes and moral and ethical norms, which once seemed to be orthodox, later on may appear to be blasphemous.

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Likewise also the dialectical religiology–which is rooted in religion as well as in enlightenment, and in the communicative-anamnestic rationality, which both share–evolves progressively like the religions, which it studies (Genesis 38: 14, 24, 26; Book of Ruth 1-4; Lieber 2001: 235/14; 236/24; 237/26; Matthew 1, 5, 6, 7; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1993; Bachofen 1992; Eller 2000; Bloch/Reif 1978; Fromm 1997; Habermas 1970; 1971a; 1971b; 1973; 1975; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981a; 1981b; 1982; 1983; 1984a; Küng 1990b; 1991a; Siebert 1966; 1980; 1985; 1986; 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 1984d; 2001; 2002a 2002b; 2003a; 2003b; 2003c; 2003d; 2004a; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2006a; App. D, E, G). Thus, in the history of religions as well as in its reflective, scientific re-interpretations progressive tendencies can be noticed: Thus, the death penalty in the form of stoning, hanging, burning, electrocution, poisoning, etc. has slowly been abolished in religion as well as in secular society, admittedly with some exceptions up to the present–2010–even in the most advanced American civil society and constitutional state. The notion of Onanism, which was originally connected with the Jewish levirat institution, as well as with the death penalty, is today no longer used for identifying masturbation and all forms of negative artificial birth control, as it had been the custom for a long time in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The levirat institution itself was modified by restricting the obligation only to the birth of a child, and no longer also to marriage, and the responsibility only to the brothers of the deceased. Because Tamar had been unafraid to assert herself in the face of social disapproval in the context of the Jewish patriarchy, which was older than the Near Eastern matriarchies, she was considered in later Judaism to be a heroine, like Ruth, and like Ruth she was worthy of being an ancestress of David, and for the early and later Christians even of Jesus, the Messiah or the Christ, from the House of David, and in the perspective of the dialectical religiology could in Modernity even serve like Ruth as prototype of the emancipated woman.. There took place around the Mediterranean a historical movement from the early matriarchy, through the patriarchy, to the Modern equal and solidary partnership between the genders. The Lex Talionis was later restricted to one eye for one eye. Finally, the Lex Talionis made room for the Golden Rule at least in theory. Again and again new hope arose out of old despair from one religion or religious paradigm to the other, and from one enlightenment movement to the other. Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theocracies became obsolete and impossible, except maybe still in

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the Middle East for the time being, There is today, in 2010, a certain hesitation to talk about primitive religions, or sects, in order not to hurt modern feelings and sensitivities. Again and again, the principle of hope in religious and secular form, asserted itself against the old despair. Progressive changes in religion and secular society, also made necessary progressive, paradigmatic evolution in religiology in the present transition period between Modernity and Post-Modernity.

Critique of Critique Faced with the student’s rebellion not only against antagonistic civil society, but also against the Institute for Social Research, which had returned from New York to Frankfurt in order to promote democracy and prevent the return of fascism, and its critical theory of society, the critical theorists on their part became critical of the criticism of the students, their former faithful followers (Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 30, 31, 32-34, 37, 40; 1988n: 444-445, 451-452, 452-453, 459, 512-513; Horkheimer 1996s: 3274; Scheible1989: 131-147). Horkheimer and Adorno even asked themselves if they had been right, when they decided in1949/1950 to return from the U.S.A. to Germany, or if they had made a mistake. Both had kept their American citizenship just in case. Horkheimer’s criticism was directed against the students because they had lost the longing for the wholly Other, and were therefore gliding unconsciously into positivism. He was of the opinion that he and Adorno and all the critical theorists and their dialectical theory of society were misunderstood not only by the student movement, but also by the whole public of the German Federal Republic, just like Jesus and his friends had been misunderstood by their contemporary Jewish and Roman environment, and later on by the Greek and Roman Church fathers (Horkheimer 1971; 1974c: 96-97, 207-208, 210, 21, 22, 13, 215, 218, 218-219, 219-224; 1985g: chaps. 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Scheible 1989: 131-146; Gumnio/Ringguth 1988: 91-132; Rosen 1995: 44-55; App. E). The critical theorists became critical of the student movement when it as well as the police became violent. The critical theorists had taught the students how to enter discourse in the public sphere and not how to make Molotov cocktails and become violent. Discourse, not violence, was the soul of democracy (Glotz 2006: 15) The critical theorists were afraid that the student unrest could destabilize the German Federal Republic in the tension of the divided Germany and Russian politics; that the former German Democratic Republic and the former Soviet Union could take advantage of such destabilization

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(Horkheimer 1996s: 28-31; Seiffert 2006; Brandt 2006: 73-75; Pragal 2006: 11-14). Like other critical theorists, Habermas called not only the conditions in Eastern Europe red fascism, but he named also Rudi Dutschke, a rebellious student leader, personally a red fascist, partially because he had come from the former German Democratic Republic. Habermas rescinded the bad name for Dutschke after the assassination attempt against him by a German worker, from which he died later on (Bloch/Reif 1978: 284287, 316-317). Dutschke was not only a socialist revolutionary, but also a Christian and a theologian, and at the time he was by far not the only one who wanted to connect Christianity and socialism in Germany, Europe or America (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 30, 32, 33; Martenstein 2004: 49, 52; Reitz 2006: 75-77; Brandt 1992; Betz 2006: 78-79; Kerber 2006). One Christmas evening, Dutschke entered with his comrades one of Berlin’s famous churches, which had been bombed out by one of the terror attacks by the British or the American air force, and had been rebuilt out of its ruins which were nevertheless preserved as memoria passionis for the future, and gave a wonderful materialistic, critical, Christian homily to the astonished community of believers.

Beyond Free Market and Central Economy During the student protest movement, critical theorists were painfully aware that they did not have a fully developed critical theory of economics, which would be adequate to the extant monopoly and oligopoly capitalist system of the German Federal Republic, and which could realistically compete with the still prevailing Keynesian paradigm, or with the upcoming Friedmann constellation and the consequent free market policies and the new push of globalization. They were aware that they did not have a developed critical theory of economics that could even replace these advanced capitalist paradigms, in case the student-worker revolution would be successful in introducing qualitative change into Western Europe and would overcome the just restored liberal or neo-liberal bourgeois system by a democratic-socialist one; or which could successfully resist and prevent the Friedmann model of economics, which would soon arise through the neo-conservative trend turn at the historical horizon of late capitalist society and would remain dominant up to the crisis of neo-liberalism, starting with the catastrophe of the Afghanistan war and the second Iraq war, which it had initiated in the first place (Horkheimer1888n: 444-445, 451-452, 452-453, 459, 512-513; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 42-85, 93-121, 122146, 177-195, 196-216, 117-237, 238-244, 280-353, 354-372, 373-391,

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392-396, 434-439, 440-456, 478-493, 538-546, 547-568, 569-573, 578-587; Lenk 2006: 5-10; Niewöhner 1997: 6; Beams 2006: 1-5; Hofmann 2006g: 52-56; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002: 50-88, 111-141). Also without doubt, one main reason for the alienation of the third youth movement from and its conflict with the critical theorists of society in 1968 and 1969 was the lack of an adequate critical theory of economics in the materialistic-humanistic tradition of the young Marx (Horkheimer 1888n: 444-445, 451-452, 452-453, 459, 512-513; Bloch 1971; Fromm 1967; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002: 50-88, 89-110, 142-189, 193-2006; Fletcher/Lohmann 2003). Adorno alone of all critical theorists, the genius of the group and finally the director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, could have developed such a critical theory of economics adequate to the neo-liberal trend turn: a theory of economics beyond state socialism and globalized capitalism; a theory of the social universal subject, a theory of cooperative-communitarian planning beyond the Western free market economy on one hand and the Eastern central administrative economy on the other; a theory of the outlines of an economy of a possible socialism as applied humanism (Adorno 1979: 9-19, 42-85, 177-195, 217-237, 280-353, 354-372, 473-391, 392-396, 440-456, 569-573, 578-587; Scheible 1989; Wiggershaus 1987; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002: 190-193, 207-250, 251-268).

Possible Democratic Socialism However, Adorno died from a heart attack in Visp, in Wallis, Switzerland on August 6, 1969, in the midst of the student rebellion and was buried on the Frankfurt Hauptfriedhof (Scheible 1989: 131-146, 151). At the time of Adorno’s death, the outlines of a possible democratic socialism were hardly visible in concreto (Fetscher/Schmidt 2002: 251-268). Still today– in 2010–the development of such a dialectical economic theory as intrinsic part of the critical theory of society adequate for the transition from the antagonistic late capitalist civil society toward a postmodern global alternative Future III–a reconciled peace society, remains a most necessary requirement for the new generations of critical theorists (Bloch 1971; Fromm 1967; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002: 50-88, 89-110, 142-189, 193-2006; Fletcher/Lohmann 2003; App. G). As the neo-conservative trend turn was consolidated into a whole historical period which had now lasted for a whole generation, most of the rebellious students shocked by the shooting of students at Kent State University by the National Guard, by the killings of students at Jackson State University by Mississippi State Police officers, and the killing of three hundred students in Mexico City, etc. conformed

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to the newly restored iron cage of global capitalism and become disinterested in politics for ever. Other students withdrew into their inner world and joined mystical religious groups. Other students fell into despair and broke down psychologically for the rest of their lives.

Despair and Mental Illness My student John, from a good middle-bourgeois family, was also part of the third student-movement. John was one of those students, who could not resign himself to the restoration and restabilization of the iron cage of globalizing capitalism, and the injustices, and the wars and civil wars it continually produced and reproduced, and who thus fell into despair when the revolutionary youth movement was successfully repressed by the Nixonian neo-conservative counter-revolution. John studied the critical theory of society, particularly that of Bloch, Marcuse and Fromm, and tried to apply it in his daily social and political praxis. Thus, for example, John used the money that he made from selling encyclopedias, not only to pay for his tuition at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, but also to help the poor people in the slum on the north side of the town beyond the railroad station. Every summer, John and his likeminded friends took groups of poor children of different races and ages from their slum dwellings for two week-vacations in camps at the shores of Lake Michigan, so that they did no longer have to jump around broken water hydrants on hot days, but could swim in the lake and learn to sing and to play games together, and to create little works of art. During the year, John tried with his friends and his self-earned money to fix the broken down houses on the north side, and. to restore the streetlights. John was a friend with many people on the north side and beyond. After John had graduated from Western Michigan University, he went to Georgetown University in Washington D.C. to study law. John returned after one year. At the Catholic Georgetown University, John, the Christian, had become a Marxist. After his return, John was supposed to join the army and fight in Vietnam. John asked me to write a letter to the draft board and ask for his deferment so that he could continue to study. In my letter to the draft board, one of many, I wrote that John was a Christian and therefore he could not kill Christians or any body else in Vietnam. I wrote that John also had recently become a Marxist and therefore he could not kill communists or anybody else in Vietnam. I wrote that my student John believed that in America he could be a Christian and a Marxist at the same time, and that therefore he had to be nuts. I concluded the letter by saying

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that John, because of his issues of conscience could not possibly be useful to the army, and that in any case it would be more productive if he could rather continue his studies at the university, in which he was very good, and become a scholar, and a good lawyer and a good politician in the service of the poor. The draft board agreed and deferred John from military service right away. When the third youth movement dissolved and with it its longings and dreams of new love, and new religion, and new politics, and justice and peace broke down under the onslaught of the neo-liberal counter-revolution, John moved from Kalamazoo to California. There, John lived for a while. He did not only fall in despair, because all his and his friends’ good works of liberation and justice and peace seemed to have been in vain, but he also became more and more depressed and finally became mentally ill, and he castrated himself. John then tried to walk all the way back home to Kalamazoo. John was intercepted and picked up by the police on his way home. John was put into one of Michigan’s mental hospitals, where he is still kept on drugs until today–January 2010. Through the years, I have visited John and have taken him out for a good lunch in one of Kalamazoo’s restaurants. During our visits, John often told me that he spoke with God, and that God spoke to him, and that God told him about peace and justice, and all the good things which should be done in Kalamazoo and in the country, but that when he tried to tell people what God had told him, nobody listened to him. I used to console John by saying that the great Hebrew prophets had had similar frustrating experiences. Then I brought John back to the mental hospital again, where he continues to age fast as a still living symbol for lost youthful dreams of new love, new politics, new religion, and peace and justice.

The Task Here the task is not to develop a new critical, democratic-socialist political economics as integral part of the critical theory of society, in opposition to the continuing neo-liberal globalization, as necessary as indeed such work really is. Rather, the task is, in its support and supported by it, the further evolution of a humanistic, dialectical theory of critical religion as it is situated in the capitalist exchange or commodity society in the spirit of the first three generations of critical theorists of society, and in anamnestic solidarity with the innumerable victims fist of the fascist and then of the neo-liberal counter-revolution all around the globe: until most recently–August 2008–in Georgia (Fromm 1966a; 1966b; Eggebrecht 1980; Best/Keller 1991: chap. 8; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Siebert 1978a;

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1987d; 1993; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 1994d; 1995b; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2003a; 2003b; 2003c; 2003d; 2004a; 2004b; 2005a; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c). From its very start, the extremely secular critical theory of society contained, nevertheless, a three fold critical theory of religion, and even a theology as theodicy like all great art, religion, and philosophy before (Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 6, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40; 1985l: 483-492; 1988a; Adorno 1970b: 103-161). A merely scientistic or positivistic philosophy, without such theology as theodicy, is neither genuine philosophy nor genuine science, in spite of all the massive work and brainpower invested in it (Horkheimer 1967b: 7-174, 203-216, 229-239, 248-268; 1974: 10, 79-85, 101-104, 116-117, 320, 352-353; 1990j: 170-180; 200-211, 241-256, 257-266, 299316, 317-333, 340-377-398; 352, 353-377; 1989m: chap. 31; Adorno 1970a; 1980a). In any case, without a determinate notion of negative theology as theodicy such positivistic philosophy can no longer formulate the notion of truth: it gets lost in the jargon and ideology of authenticity, not to speak of its fascist or neo-conservative consequences (Horkheimer 1985l 492; 1989m: chap. 1926; Adorno 1979: 397-407, 408-433, 457-477; 1997f: 413523; 1997j/2: 608-616; Benjamin 1955c: Vol. 1, 493-495). After Auschwitz and all the horror and terror of history this word stands for in the 20th and 21st centuries, which makes living, writing poetry, or praying much more difficult than ever before, the new materialistic, i.e. suffering-conscious and -sensitive, and as such dialectical and critical theory of religion aims in spite of the powerful trends in late capitalist society toward global alternative Future I–the totally administered society, and toward global alternative Future II–the entirely militarized society, nevertheless, at global alternative Future III–a society, in which emancipation happens as reconciliation (Flechtheim 1971; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25, 32, 34; Adorno 1997u; Fetscher/ Schmidt 2002; App. G).

chapter three

The Three-Fold Critical Theory of Religion According to Hegel, in the Catholic Middle Ages, e.g. with Meister Eckhart and his disciples, humanity had a heaven, decked and fitted out with an endless wealth of thoughts and pictures (Blackney 1941; Quint 1963; Fox 1966; Hegel 1986c: 16-17; 1986r: 190-192; Rosenzweig 1921: 12; Barth 1959: 268-270; Fackenheim 1967). For Hegel, the significance of all of that lay in the thread of light by which it was attached to heaven: instead of dwelling in the present as it is here and now, the eye glanced away over the present to the Divine, away, so to speak, to a present that lay beyond.

Experience According to Hegel, in secular Modernity to the contrary, the mind’s gaze had to be directed under compulsion to what was earthly and kept fixed there (Hegel 1986c: 16-17). It needed a long time to introduce that clearness that only celestial realities had in the Middle Ages, now in Modernity into the crassness and confusion shrouding the sense of things earthly, and to make people pay attention to the immediate present as such, which was called Experience, of interest and of value. In Hegel’s perspective, now in Modernity people had apparently the very opposite of all that was interesting and of value in the Middle Ages: modern man’s mind and interest were so deeply rooted in the earthly that he required a like power to have them raised again above that level. Modern man’s spirit demonstrated such poverty of nature that it seemed to long for the mere pitiful feeling of the Divine in the abstract, and to get refreshment from that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for the merest mouthful of water. By the little that could thus satisfy the needs of the human spirit, modern man could measure the extent of its loss. As the critical theorists of society felt most intensely this loss of modern man, they longed to move beyond Modernity, but not romantically back into the Middle Ages, but rather forward toward post-Modern alternative Future III–a society, in which the antagonism between the Medieval and the Modern, the Universal and the particular, the Infinite and the finite, the Transcendence and the im-

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manence, as well as universal solidarity and personal autonomy would be reconciled: as had been indicated already by Hegel (Hegel 1986a: 218; 1986c: 16-17; 1986g: 339-514; 1986j: 303-365, 366-398; 1986l: 107-115, 412, 418, 490-491, 513; 1986o: 352; 1986p: 9-88; 1986t: 62; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14-18, 20, 21, 23-30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40; App. G).

The Movement of Thought The Lutheran Hegel saw that thought had begun to move within Christianity–more specifically within the Roman Catholic Paradigm of the Middle Ages–accepting it as its absolute presupposition (Hegel 1986r: 190192; 1986q: 185-346; Küng 1965; 1993b; 1970; 1976; 1989; 1994a: 336-601; 1994b: Parts III, IV). Later on, when the wings of thought had grown strong, i.e. in the Protestant/Evangelical Constellation of the Reformation and in the Reason and Progress Orientated Paradigm of Modernity, philosophy rose to the sun like a young eagle, a bird of prey, which sooner than later struck religion down altogether: down to atheism and nihilism; to the death of God (Hegel 1986q: 290-292; Kaufmann 1986; 95-96; Küng 1978c; 1978d; 1994a: 742-1039; 1994b: Parts V, VI, VII). However, so Hegel predicted, it would be the last development of speculative thought to do justice to faith, and to make peace with religion in what today we could call the Post-Modern Paradigm of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Hegel 1984: 11-14; 1986r: 190-192; 1986p: 9-88; 1986q: 521-535; Küng 1978e; 1978f; 1978g; 1991b: 537-561; 1994a: 742-1039; 2004e). According to the great Jewish scholar, Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel saw philosophy as the consummator of what had been promised by Revelation: the Torah (Rosenzweig 1921: 12). Philosophy did not exercise this office only sporadically or at the height of its career, but rather in every moment, with every breath it drew. Philosophy automatically confirmed the truth predicated by Revelation. Thus, to Rosenzweig, the old quarrel between the religious and the secular, revelation and philosophy, seemed to have been composed: heaven and earth seemed to be reconciled (Hegel 1986p: 9-88; Rosenzweig 1921: 12). It is thus not astonishing for the critical theorist of religion that up to the present–January 2010–Jewish friends of Hegel come to his grave in the Dorothean Cemetery in East Berlin and put little pebbles on his grave stone, which constitutes a small replica of the sacrificial altar in the second Temple in Jerusalem (Rosenzweig 1921: 12; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-316).

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Philosophical and Theological Achievement The great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, asked why Hegel did not become for the Protestant World something similar to what Thomas of Aquinas was for Roman Catholicism (Barth 1959: 268-270; Küng 1994a: 336-601, 602-741, 742-906)? Barth asked how it could have come to pass that, very soon after Hegel’s death in Berlin in November 1831, it was exactly his great philosophical and theological achievement, the reconciliation between the religious and the secular, faith and reason, which began to be looked upon with a pitying smile, as representing something that was already superseded? (Hegel 1986p: 9-88; 1986q: 332-344, 347-535; Barth 1959: 268-270). According to Barth, this happened by the same people who were at the same time pitying his achievement while nevertheless still secretly drawing intellectual sustenance from certain isolated elements of his thought. Barth asked in all seriousness, in the words of the imprisoned John the Baptist, if Hegel was not the one who should come as the fulfiller of every promise, and if it was worth waiting for another after he had come? (Matthew11: 2-8; Barth 1959: 268-270). The critical theorist of religion dares to ask, why Hegel could not also have become for the Jews in Modernity what Maimonides had been for them in the Middle Ages (Rosenzweig 1921: 12; Solomon 2000: 42-44, 70, 72, 81, 82-83, 100, 102, 119, 136; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-316; Küng 1991b: 61, 203, 221, 224, 413, 493, 509, 514, 519-520).

Open Dialectic As the critical theorists of society continued the movement of dialectical thought, which had started in the Middle Ages, and which emancipated itself completely in Modernity, they–unlike Hegel, Rosenzweig and Barth–were rather inclined to keep open for a while the dialectic between the sacred and the profane, between revelation and autonomous reason and secular knowledge, and not to let it be closed prematurely, and not to let it be arrested either fundamentalistically, on one hand, or positivistically, scientistically, or naturalistically, on the other (Horkheimer/Adorno 1972; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 12-18, 20-30, 32, 34, 37, 40; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1990: 9-20; 1991a: Part III; 2001a; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; 2007: 1-5; 2002; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005; Mendieta 2005, part II, V, VI, VII, IX, XI; Vogel 2007). It seems to the dialectical theorist of religion that without the help of Hegel’s great dialectical philosophical and theological achievements, all three Abrahamic religions

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would have a rather difficult time, not only to move from the Middle Ages into Modernity, but also, and more importantly even, from Modernity into Post-Modernity: more precisely into post-modern global alternative Future III–a post-national constellation beyond a peoples’ front socialistically or communistically planned economy on one hand, and on the other a bourgeois, neo-conservative, or neo-liberal, antagonistic commodity exchange society and a coordinated free market economy, characterized by being socially torn and tattered; and by the mega-trends of de-limited national markets and work through restructuring of the production process; of a new financial architecture; of a de-industrialization, which admittedly broadens the exit options of capital, but which at the same time cuts down the unions’ ability to act, and their political levels of operation (Hegel 1986p: 9-88; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-316; Pollock 1932: 8-27; Habermas 1998a; 1998b; 1981a; 1981b; 1981c; 1981d; 1987b: chaps. 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 22; 2002: chap. 1; 1978a: chaps. 3, 4, 5; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005; Küng 1970; 1991b: 537-762; 1994a: 742-1039; 2004e; Mendieta 2005; Jacobi 2007: 108-109; Hoffmann 2006; Honneth 1990; Fetscher/ Schmidt 2002; Schöler 2007: 110; Langkau-Alex 2004/2005; App. G). The globalizing antagonistic late capitalist society continually increases what Pierre Bourdieu has called social struggles as well as social suffering (Adorno 1979: 354-372, 578-587; Honneth 1990: chaps. 8, 9; Eder 2002: 5168; Schallberger 2002: 97-110). The new post-national global paradigm, however, will allow for the growth of political rules and social standards, like personal autonomy and universal solidarity, on a transnational level (Habermas 1981a; 1981b; 1981c; 1981d; 1986; 1998a; 1998b). This postnational constellation will be characterized by undistorted, symmetrical, mutual recognition, and equal participation among individuals and nations, and by the corresponding redistribution of wealth and by the consequent social justice (Fraser/Honneth 2003). The post-national paradigm will be characterized by emancipation as reconciliation (Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002). The post-national constellation will be essentially communitarian (Honneth 1993).

The Other Sphere Like Hegel before, the critical theory of religion of the Frankfurt School– including its other, inverse theology as theodicy as it developed from World War I on, through the fascist period, and through World War II, and through the Cold War period, to the neo-conservative trend turn and the neo-liberal period–was certainly concerned with the so actual

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and relevant relationship between the often instrumentalized religion on one hand, and the not necessarily laicistic, but nevertheless neutral, secular state, including family and civil society, on the other (Hegel 1986p: 236-245; Habermas 1992a; Resing 2004: 16-20; Kater 2004: 4-7; Rulff 2004: 8-13; Fuhr 2004: 20-23; Seitz 2004: 24-27; Wiegenstein 2004: 28-30; Thierse 2004: 30-36; Maschler 2004: 36-39; Priester 2004: 39-42; Schultz 2004: 43-45). However, like Kant’s, Schelling’s, Schopenhauer’s and Hegel’s philosophies of religion, the critical theory of religion also went beyond the not only familial and economic, but also the political, military, historical, and cultural dimensions of the modern system of human condition and the human action system to the other sphere of that, which once was called by Kant the “Thing in itself,” or the “things in themselves,” or by Hegel the “absolute Spirit” versus the subjective and objective spirit: what later on Paul Tillich called the “God above the God of theism,” or the “God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt;” and what his friend Erich Fromm called in his book You Shall Be As Gods the post-modern, post-theistic “x-experience;” and what Horkheimer and Adorno called “the longing for the wholly Other” (Kant 1929: 74, 87, 149, 490; Hegel 1986o: 236-245; 1986j; Tillich 1972: 186-190; Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 2-6; 1981a: chaps. 1-3, 9, 11-13; 1981b: chaps. 5, 6, 11, 13; 1985g: chaps. 14-18, 23, 27-29, 37, 40; 1987e: 13-143, 293-319, 354-359, 377-395; 1988c: chaps. 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 16, 17, 18; 1988d: chaps. 2, 3, 5-7, 15, 16; Fromm 1966b: chap. 2; Habermas/Rartzinger 2005; Ott 2001; Resing 2004: 16-20; Kater 2004: 4-7; Rulff 2004: 8-13; Fuhr 2004: 20-23; Seitz 2004: 24-27; Wiegenstein 2004: 28-30; Thierse 2004: 30-36; Maschler 2004: 36-39; Priester 2004: 39-42; Schultz 2004: 43-45; App. C, D, E, G). This x-experience could be found in religious and in philosophical systems, regardless of whether they did or did not have a concept of God: e.g. in that of the Gautama, the Buddha; in Master Eckhart’s mystical theology; in that of Spinoza’s work; in that of Paul Tillich, who spoke in his books The Shaking of the Foundation, The Courage To Be, and the Systematic Theology of the “Ground of Being,” or simply of “the Depth,” as a substitute for the God of theism; in that of Altitzer, who spoke of “atheistic Christianity; ” in that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who spoke in his Letters from Prison of a “non-religious Christianity; ” in that of John A. T. Robinson’s book Honest to God; in that of Rudolf Bultmann in his book Kerygma and Myth; in that of D. T. Suzuki’s book Mysticism, East and West; in that of the fundamental theology of Johann Baptist Metz, who spoke of the “mystical-political dimension of Christianity,” and confessed to “a passion for God,” who was “missing and missed;” in that of Dorothy Sölle, who

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found God in the garbage of the cities of Central and Latin America, and who “believed atheistically; ” or in the critical theory of society of Horkheimer and of Adorno, who discovered the Infinite or “wholly Other” in the immediate, smallest, most irrelevant, limited, finite existence or something in nature or in society; or in the theory of communicative action of Habermas, who spoke of the radically “non-reified Transcendence,” which was shared by theists and enlighteners alike (Hegel 1986e: 387-390; Meister Eckehart 1979; Fox 1980; Hegel 1986e: 115-173; Tillich 1963: 126, 127, 128, 138, 140, 190, 209, 284; 1972: 156, 157, 160, 172, 180181, 186; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23, 25-30, 32, 37, 40; Fromm 1966b: chap. ii; 1970; 1976: chaps. 3, 7; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Sölle 1977; 1992; 1994; Sölle/Habermas 1975; Dewart 1967; Küng 1978: B-G; 1994C; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Metz 1997; Metz/Peters 1991; Lundgren 1998).

Christian Humanism The critical theorists’ longing for the wholly Other, the X-Experience, the non-reified Transcendence, shortly the qualitative, or good Infinity, which does not continue but interrupts and ends the bad infinity of space and time, mathematics and geometry, as well as of society and history, could find expression in finite artistic as well as in finite religious, and philosophical forms (Hegel 1986e: 115-165; 1986j: 366-398; Klein 2007: 94-97). There was, of course, also the Christian, i.e. Catholic or Protestant more or less radical and even revolutionary humanism of Teilhard de Chardin, Theodor Haecker, Karl Rahner, Walter Dirks, Eugen Kogon, Hans Küng Johannes Baptist Metz, Gustavo Guttierez, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, or Paul Tillich, which sometimes climaxed even into the extreme concept of a Godless Christianity (Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 38-40, 42, 43; Adorno 1997t/1: 310-318; Marcuse 1970: 3-10; Fromm 1970: viii; Lundgren 1998). Horkheimer and Benjamin were very much aware of the Christian humanism of Haecker, who also suffered much from the national socialists in Germany while the critical theorists were in American exile (Haecker 1933; Benjamin 1955a: 315-317; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; 1995o: 632-634, 799-801; 1995p: 9-11). Horkheimer, Adorno and Fromm learned from Tillich (Horkheimer 1995o: 692-695, 808-811). Dirks, Kogon, Tillich, Metz, Guttierez, and Küng learned much from the critical theorists for their theologies and their humanism (Küng 1978: 356-362, 533-536, 540-642; 1990: 63-66, 70-71; 1994: 904-905).

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Hellish World For the dialectical theorist of religion, who has learned from Kant and Hegel, from the critical theorists of society, as well as from the Christian humanists, the wholly Other appears after God has disappeared in the guilt, the meaninglessness, and the death in the disintegrating hellish world of antagonistic bourgeois society: in the world of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, of Franz Kafka and Bertholt Brecht, of Charles Baudelaire and Paul Valery, of George Bataille and James Joyce, of Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett, of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, of Rudolf Borchardt, Thomas Mann and Rolf Hochhuth (Adorno 1973b; 1973c: chaps. 5, 7, 8, 9, 10; Habermas 1985a: chap. 8; 1985b; Joyce 1975; Valery 1973). These thinkers and poets reflected in their writings the torn apart, antagonistic, continually conflict and war producing industrial or late capitalist society, the endgame of which is characterized and steered by the logic of decay, disintegration and decline, as once was the late Roman Empire (Psalm 22; Hegel 1986g: 92-202, 203-291, 339-395; 1986l: 339-412; 1986q: 289-292, 341-344; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23-29, 32, 34-37; Adorno 1970a; 1970b: 103-125; 1979: 354-372, 397-407, 408-433, 440-456, 578-587; 1997t/1: 140-149, 197-200; Benjamin 1974; 1977: chaps. 10, 11; 1978; 1981; Fromm 1966a; 1966b: 231-236; Adorno/Dirks 1974, chaps. 1, 5, 8, 12, 14, 15, 18, 19, 21; Schweppenhäuser 1981; 1978; Scholem 1989: 123-125; Lüdke 1981; Honneth 1990; 1994; Siebert 1966; 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 1987d; 1993; 1994a; 1994c; 1994d; 1995; 2000; 2001; 2002; 2005b; 2006a). According to Hegel, in this Roman Empire the imperial power had withdrawn recognition from and had dishonored everything that had had respect and dignity among men (Hegel 1986l: 339-412; 1986q: 289-291, 342-344; Adorno 1963). The life of every individual was delivered into the arbitrariness of the Emperor, which was not confined or limited by any internal or external state right or law (Hegel 1986g: 398-514; Hegel 1986g: 92-202, 203-291, 339-395; 1986l: 339-412; 1986q: 289-292, 341-344). However, besides life, all virtue, dignity, age, status, and gender were dishonored through and through. The slave of the Emperor was after him the highest power, or he had even more power than he did himself. The Roman Senate disgraced itself as much as the Emperor violated it. Thus, the majesty of the world power, as well as all virtue, right, venerability of institutions and conditions, shortly the majesty of all that had validity for the world, was pulled down to the level of excrements.

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Thus, the secular Regent of the world made on his part the Highest into the most contemptible, and turned upside down most radically the mentality, dispositions and views of the people, so that in the interior of the Roman Empire nothing could any longer be opposed to the new Christian religion, which on its part elevated the most despised, the cross, the torturous execution instrument for run away slaves and insurrectionists, into the highest symbol, into its flag and standard (Hegel 1986q: 289-292; Ott 2001, chap. 7; App. E). As the non-recognition, the dishonor and the disgrace of the cross was made by the new religion into the highest recognition and honor, all bonds of human living together in the Roman empire were fundamentally attacked, shaken, and dissolved. When the new religion elevated the cross into the standard, the positive content of which was at the same time the Kingdom of God, then the innermost religious and moral mentality and disposition of the people was in its deepest ground withdrawn from the life of the Roman civil society and state and their substantial foundation was taken away. The consequence was that the whole edifice of the Roman Empire had no reality any longer but was an empty appearance, which soon had to crash and fall, and which had to manifest also in the external existence that it was no longer essential in itself. For the time being, however, everything firm in the Roman Empire, all social morality, everything that had validity and force in public life and opinion, was destroyed. For the status quo, against which the new religion of Christianity was directed in terms of a most polemical and revolutionary spirit, remained only the entirely external cold power, violence, and terror: shortly death, which, of course, the degraded life which with the new religion felt itself internally to be infinite, was no longer afraid of, and did no longer shrink away from (Hegel 1986q: 279-292). From this Roman Empire had disappeared the general unity of religion. In this Empire, the Divine was profaned. In this Empire the political life was at a loss and helpless and without great deeds, and without confidence and trust. In this Empire reason took refuge alone in the form of private or abstract right, e.g. property, contract, coercion and crime (Hegel 1986q: 342-343; 1985g: 92-202). In this Empire the personal morality–intention and guilt, personal good and conscience, and most of all the private purpose and the well-being of the individual–was elevated into the highest goal and good, because what had been of objective socio-ethical and socio-moral value in and for itself–family, civil society, the republican state, the world-historical status–had been given up (Hegel 1986q: 289-292, 341-344, 342-343;

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1986g: 92-202, 203-291, 292-514, 339-395; 1986l: 339-412; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23-29, 32, 34-37; Adorno 1970b: 103-125; 1979: 354-372, 397-407, 408-433, 440-456, 578-587; Benjamin 1974; 1977: chaps. 10, 11; 1978a; 1978b; 1978c; 1978d; 1980; Fromm 1966b: 231-236; Adorno/Dirks 1974: chaps. 1, 5, 8, 12, 14, 15, 18, 19, 21; Schweppenhäuser 1981; 1978; Scholem 1989: 123-125; Lüdke 1981; Honneth 1990; 1994; Siebert 1966; 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 1987d; 1993; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 1994d; 1995; 1995b; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2005b; 2006a).

Modern Civil Society In Hegel’s view, as in the Roman Empire before, so already at the beginning of the 19th century, only a few decades after the American and French Revolution, in the European and American civil societies and in the colonial empires arising from them, the individual’s own moral view, his or her own private opinion and conviction without objective truth, had made itself through the bourgeois enlightenment and liberalism into what alone had validity against facticity (Hegel 1986q: 342-344; 1986g: 203-291, 339-397; 1986l: 105-133, 491-542; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23-29, 32, 34-37; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1970b: 103-125; 1979: 354-372, 397-407, 408-433, 440-456, 578-587; 1997t/1: 140-149. 197-200; Benjamin 1974; 1977: chaps. 10, 11; 1978a; 1978b; 1978c; 1978d; 1980; Fromm 1966a: 231-236; Adorno/Dirks 1974: chaps. 1, 5, 8, 12, 14, 15, 18, 19, 21; Habermas 1992a; 1992b; 1995; Schweppenhäuser 1981; 1978; Scholem 1989: 123-125; Lüdke 1981; Honneth 1990; 1994; Siebert 1966; 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 1987d; 1993; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 1994d; 1995a; 1995b; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2005b; 2006a). Already since the beginning of the 19th century, the mania and addiction of abstract private right and of pleasure and consumption had been the agenda of the day in bourgeois society, under the philosophical or ideological umbrella of liberalism (Hegel 1986q: 342-344; 1986g: 92-203). For Hegel, in the beginning of the 19th century the time was fulfilled that the justification through philosophy, the philosophical notion–the self-negation, the self-particularization, the self-alienation of the universal, and its negation of its self-negation, its self-affirmation, its self-singularization, its self-reconciliation–had become a public need (Hegel 1986e: 115-165; 1986f: 243-300; 1986q: 342-344; Adorno 1963; Taylor 1983: parts I-III; Küng 1970: chap. 4; 1978: 155-190). The justification through the philosophical notion had become necessary because, in the immediate consciousness of the people and in the reality of the modern civil societies and empires, the unity of

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the internal world of the individuals and the external social, economic, political, military, historical and cultural world was no longer present. The philosophical justification had become necessary, because nothing was any longer justified through religion: through faith (Hegel 1986q: 342-344; Küng 1991a; 1991b: 726-728; App. C, D). Also nothing could be straightened out any longer, or brought into line in socio-ethical or sociomoral terms by the harshness of an objective command, or by an order, or by a law, or by a merely external insistence, or even by the very power and force of the authoritarian or the constitutional state (Hegel 1986q: 342-344; 1986g: 92-203; Horkheimer 1987e: 293-319, 354-359, 364-372, 377-395, 406-411, 412-414, 415-422; 1988d: 89-101; Baberiowski/Doering-Manteuffel 2007; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1966; 1993). For such re-ordering or re-structuring of civil society the decline, the decay, and the disintegration had already penetrated too deeply into the very structure of modern Western civilization (Adorno 1997t/1: 140-148, 197-199, 287-292, 360-383, 386-389, 390-393, 394-396, 396-397, 287-292). Since Hegel, again and again the magic calls for a new bourgeoisie or new bourgeois values have ended in waves of religious and secular hypocrisy (Seitz 2007: 6-11). Thus, some of the neo-conservatives who agreed to or even promoted and worked for the impeachment of President Clinton because of his adulterous behavior and lying about it, at the same time committed adultery themselves and were hiding it: e.g. the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, or the former Mayor of New York, Rudi Giuliani.

The Evangelium According to the Lutheran Hegel, genuine Christianity lost vitality, substantiality, and influence in the public sphere of modern bourgeois society (Hegel 1986q: 342-344; Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; 1974c: 96-97, 268, 286-287, 316-320, 351-354; Ott 2001, chap. 2, 3, 4, 6, 7). The Evangelium was less and less preached to or received by the proletariat in civil society, and thus it lost even more or less the consolation of religion (Hegel 1986q: 342-344; 1986g: 387-388). What the Sermon on the Mount called the salt of the earth had become tasteless, and could not be made salty again, and thus it was good for nothing and could only be thrown out, to be trampled under foot by men (Matthew 5: 13-16; Hegel 1986q: 343). According to the Sermon on the Mount, the believers were supposed to be the light of the world. They were to be a city, which was built on a hilltop, and which therefore could not be hidden. The believers were not to light a lamp in order to put it under a tub. The believers were supposed to put the lamp

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on a lamp stand, where it could shine for everyone in the house. In the same way the believers’ light had to shine in the sight of men, so that, seeing their good works, they may give the praise to their Father in heaven. The neo-conservative President Reagan’s pronouncement that America was the city on the hilltop, which gave light to the world, was somewhat over-optimistic and premature considered from the perspective of the following darkness of the present time of terror: the almost apocalyptic catastrophe of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington D.C., the consequent War against Afghanistan, the Second War against Iraq, the War against Lebanon, the Second Intifada, etc. (Borradori 2003; Labor Research 2006: 1-2).

Enlightenment As a matter of fact, the light of the believers in modern civil society became dimmer and dimmer from one century to the next. (Hegel 1986q: 29; Kaufmann 1986: 95-96; Adorno 1997a; 1997b; 1997i/1: 7-142; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997g; Apostolidis 2000; Viviani 2007: 98-99; Specht 2006; Franzen 2007: 82-86). God died and civil society and its enlighteners had killed him, together with the destruction of the family on one hand, and the corruption of the state, on the other. Everything Eternal and everything True was gone, which resulted in the highest pain, and the complete hopelessness, and the giving up of everything Higher. There was no inversion of the death of God: no return, no resurrection, and no ascension. There was no death of death. There was no negation of the negation, and thus no affirmation. The medieval cathedrals became God’s burial sites and museums, and this was even more so the case the darker the world became already long before the First World War, the Third Reich and fascism, and the Second World War, and before Auschwitz and Treblinka made living, writing music, or poetry, or praying even more difficult (Adorno1997i/1: 7-142; Apostolidis 2000; Ulrich 2007: 102-104; Evans 2006). Atheism was followed by nihilism. Christianity, which had arisen in the Roman Empire and which had reached its cultural climax in the Middle Ages, declined in Modernity (Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Küng 1970; 1978; 1994a; 1994b; 1998; 2003). In Hegel’s perspective, the bourgeois enlightenment turned dialectically into mere abstract analytical understanding and positivism, and thus quietly removed all mythical, mystical, religious, and metaphysical foundations of Western civilization, and replaced them with positive science and technology (Hegel 1986a: 21-33; 1986b: 183, 292, 294; 1986c: 327, 362, 398-431; 1986p: 37, 40, 121, 154, 210-211,

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259; 1986q: 329, 333, 340-341, 385, 343-344; 1986r: 80, 410, 422; 1986s: 320; 1986t: 269, 292, 292, 293, 294, 295, 308-313, 325, 327, 332, 333). The masses of the workers and the farmers, whose reason had remained thickset and brutish since Thomas Müntzer had lost his Christian-socialist revolution in Mühlhausen, Turingia, in 1525, and for whom, therefore, the Truth could only be in the form of representations, images, stories, music, myths and rituals, did no longer know how to help the urge and the yearning and the longing of their innermost life for the Absolute, for the wholly Other than their miserable existence, be it under the feudal lords or the bourgeoisie (Hegel 1986q: 343-344; 1986g: 382-392; Bloch 1972; Siebert 2007b).

The Infinite Pain of Love According to Hegel, even as late as the beginning of the 19th century, the proletariat was still standing closest to the infinite pain of the love of God and man suffered by the crucified founder of Christianity, the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, named by his friends and disciples the Messiah, or the Christ (Matthew 27; Fromm 1966b: 231-236; Laumont 2003: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 12). In the negation of the infinite pain of love lay the foundation for a human subjectivity, which had grasped and comprehended its infinite value, which climaxed in the belief in the immortality of the soul (Hegel 1986q: 303; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17). This purity of subjectivity, which mediated itself in love out of infinite pain, was and existed only through this mediation, which had its objective form and perception in Golgotha and in the cross: in the suffering, and dying, but also in the resurrection, and ascension of the Messiah, or the Christ (Matthew 27, 28; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986g: 26-27, 42-43; 1986p: 272; 1986q: 291-292). In cruce salus est! According to Friedrich Schiller and Hegel, out of the chalice of the whole realm of spirits, individuals and nations, foamed to the absolute Spirit his Infinitude (Schiller 1830; Hegel 1986q: 273-299; 1986c: 590-591; Horkheimer 1967b: 252, 259-261, 311313). The pain, which the finite life felt in this, its concrete supersession, did not hurt, because thereby it elevated itself into a moment in the process of the Divine. With his friend, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hegel asked if such pain should torment men since it increased their delight and joy? (Goethe 1830; Hegel 1986q: 273-299). There was painful negation of God’s other, i.e. man in his finitude, weakness and frailty, but there was also the negation of this negation in God as the totally Other of man: affirmation of man in the unity of human and Divine nature–in infinite love

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(Hegel 1986q: 263-299). In terms of this purified human subjectivity, mediated in love out of infinite pain, all differences of power, of rule, of the master-servant relationship, of force, of might, of status, of class, of race, and even of gender were given up: before God all men were equal (Hegel 1985c: 137-154; 1986g: 26-27, 42-43; 1986p: 272; 1986q: 303). In the negation of the infinite pain of love also lay first of all the possibility and the root of the truly universal right, the realization of the freedom of All, and not only of the One, or the Few (Hegel 1986g: 26-27, 42-43, 398-514; 1986p: 272; 1986q: 303; 1986l: 29-33, 133-141). Of course, the more recent analytical or scientific philosophy and positivism in general has not only lost the dialectical notion, but it has also come out of touch with the infinite pain of love intrinsic to it, and had to leave it to art and religion (Horkheimer b: 259-261; Habermas 1988a: 58-60; 1988b). That precisely is the reason why religion and philosophy continue to live side by side, and why the latter remains even dependent on the former, concerning its appellative language and its force of motivation, while the former sometimes takes into itself positivistic elements and thus goes together vry well with positivism (Horkheimer 1936: 4-6; 1974c: 101-104, 116-117; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-609; Benjamin 1955c: vol. 1, 494; Marcuse 1962: 65-66; Habermas 1988a: 59-60).

Roman and Modern Formal Right According to Hegel, once Roman formal right had started from the positive standpoint, and from analytical understanding, and it had no principle in itself for the absolute proof and legitimation of the rightful position: equal human and civil rights for All (Hegel 1986q: 393). The Roman formal right had been thoroughly secular. The formal right of modern civil society and the constitutional state is exactly the same (Hegel 1986g: 360-381, 398-502; Habermas 1992a; 1995). In Modernity, the bourgeois enlighteners turned Christian love into a secular sexual and erotic love and pleasure, without all pain and suffering (Hegel 1986q: 343-344; Paul VI 1968; Horkheimer 1985g: 396-397). Thus, the farmers and workers felt forsaken by their enlightened teachers, who on their part had helped themselves through reflection, and who had found satisfaction in finitude, and in subjectivity, and in its virtuosity, and thereby in vanity: dialectic of enlightenment and of secularization (Hegel 1986a: 21-33; 1986b: 183, 292, 294; 1986c: 327, 362, 398-431; 1986p: 37, 40, 121, 154, 210-211, 259; 1986q: 329, 333, 340-341, 385, 343-344; 1986r: 80, 410, 422; 1986s: 320; 1986t: 269, 292, 292, 293, 294, 295, 308-313, 325, 327, 332, 333; Horkhe-

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imer/Adorno 1972: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006). However, the substantial core of the people, the proletariat, could not find its satisfaction in such reflection, finitude, subjectivity, virtuosity and vanity. Hegel argued against, what Paul of Tarsus had called, the enemies of the cross, e.g. Goethe, and most of all those modern enlighteners who had become like the sophists of the Greek Antiquity, that one had to do hard work and to take the cross of the empirical present family, civil society, state, and history upon one self in order thus to comprehend the Rose of Reason, of the Logos, concretely superseded in them, as what was the substantial core in their reality; and thus to gain one’s subjective freedom in them; and thus to reconcile oneself with them; and thus to resolve the riddles of Providence, the theodicy problem; and thus to avoid getting lost in the particular, the accidental, the contingent, and in vanity and self-conceit; and thus to escape the fruitless sublimities of the so sensitive and expressive reflections about the bad social and historical reality, which continually end in merely abstractly-negative results, and in the bad infinity of the chorismos between the universal and the particular (Hegel 1986g: 26-27, 42-43, 292-514, 512; 1986p: 272-278; 1986l: 35-36; Küng 1970: parts VVII).

Dialectical Synthesis Hegel thought in all seriousness to have reconciled through his dialectical philosophy of religion the antagonism between religion and reason in Modernity, as once Saint Augustine, the initiator of the Medieval Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity had done as well as Saint Thomas Aquinas, its intellectual climax, and beyond Kant, Jacobi, Fichte, Hölderlin and Schelling (Saint Augustine 1952; 1958; Saint Thomas 1955; Hegel 19856b: 287-433; Jamme/Schneider 1984: 11-14; Küng 1994: 336-601). Yet, Hegel was fully aware of the fact that his dialectical synthesis of religious faith and autonomous reason, revelation and enlightenment was only a partial one and without external universality in civil society (Hegel 1986q: 242-344). For Hegel, in this modern relationship between the religious and the secular, philosophy was a separate sanctuary, the servants of which constituted an isolated priestly status group, which was not allowed to go together with the modern world and its bourgeois enlightenment, and which had to guard, watch over, and care for the Truth: i.e. the religious Truth in philosophical form. Hegel left it to the temporal, empirical present, i.e. to modern civil society, to find its way out of the conflict, rift, and gulf between religion and reason, and how it would shape itself. To

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do so was not the immediate practical task, thing, affair, business, matter, case or cause of philosophy. Philosophy could only in a mediate and theoretical way help to resolve the practical problem of the empirical discrepancy between religion and reason: e.g. the separation of church and state (Hegel 1986p: 236-245; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; App. E, G). Thus, since his youthful meeting with Schelling and Hölderlin in Frankfurt and their common idealistic program and agenda of 1800, Hegel had in his later years somewhat resigned himself to the status quo of civil society, and to its secularization process, and had engaged himself in discourse avoidance concerning it (Jamme/Schneider 1984; Hegel 1986q: 342-344). Thus, since Hegel’s death in 1831, the antagonism between the sacred and the profane has de facto continually deepened for the bourgeoisie as well as for the proletariat in civil society up into the most recent–January 2010– European and American culture wars and the corresponding social-scientific, philosophical, and theological public discourses (Hegel 1984: 11-14; 1986b: 287-433; Habermas 2001a: 9-31; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; Dürrenfeldt 2007: 104-106; Müller 2007: 106-108; Jacobi 2007: 108-109; Vollmer 2006; Semprun/Villepin 2006). It is in this antagonistic socio-cultural-historical context and in continual correspondence with it that the critical theory of society and of religion has developed and continues to do so into the future. In spite of the fact that the dialectical theorist of religion is not too afraid of the ivory tower position of philosophy, he considers it, nevertheless, to be his task to break out of Hegel’s resignation and to try in public discourse to reconnect and mediate in civil and socialistic societies the religious and the secular, religion and rationality, God and reason and modernity, religious truth and modern reason and knowledge, religion and the neutral constitutional state, and theory and praxis (Adorno 1997t/1: 149-168, 169-189, 190-193, 203-205, 214-215, 221-228, 402-412; Habermas 1973; 1978a; 1978c; 1991a: part III; 2001a: 9-31; 2002; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Siebert 1993; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2006a; 2006b: 91-137;; 2006d: 61-114; 2006c: 1-32; 2009a; 2009b; 2009c). For this task, the linguistic trend turn in the social sciences, in philosophy, and also in theology since the 1970’s has been and still is most helpful: the apriori of the universal communication community (Apel 1976a; 1976b; 1982; Habermas 1981a; 1981b; 1984a; 1984b; 1986; 1987d; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2002; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Edelstein/Habermas 1984; Honneth/Joas 2002; Peukert 1976; Arens 1989a; 1989b; 1992; 1995; Zerfass 1988; Mendieta 2005: parts IXXI; App. A, B, E, F, G).

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From its very start and throughout its existence, the critical theory of religion, intrinsic to the Frankfurt School’s critical theory of society, was rooted in the Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Buddhist mystical theologies, and in the Kantian, Fichtean, Schellingian, Schopenhaurian, and Hegelian philosophies of religion (Kant 1981; Schelling 1977; Schopenhauer 1986: 1: 24, 75, 284, 527-529, 543, 552, 572-574, 683-686; 2: 208, 212-219, 438440, 826; 3: 150, 306, 395, 462, 634, 638, 679, 717, 723, 734, 768-769, 800; 4: 122, 132, 138-140, 144, 151, 152, 225, 226; 5: 238, 408; Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986p: 9-88; Taylor 1983: chap. 18; Weiss 1974: part VII; Fackenheim 1967; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1972: chap. 4; 1985g, chaps. 3, 4, 9, 13, 21, 37; 1987b: 15-74, 75-148; 1987k: 13-69; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1971b; Scholem 1967; 1973; 1970; 1977a; 1977b: 1-50; 1982; 1989; Habermas 1971b: 172-227; 1982: 11-32, 33-47, 48-95, 126-143; Weigel 1997; App. A, E). Throughout almost a century, Horkheimer and the other critical theorists of four generations have continued to develop more or less explicitly or implicitly in different forms the one non-positivistic, critical theory of religion, or the one non-positivistic, dialectical sociology of religion, as an integral part of their overall critical theory of subject, inter-subjectivity, civil or socialist society, authoritarian or constitutional state, history and culture, including art, mainly music and literature, religion, philosophy, and the social sciences, particularly social psychology, political economics, history, anthropology, and sociology, all integrated into a historical materialistic theory of society (Horkheimer 1967b: 216-228, 229-238, 239-247, 302-316; 1972: chaps. 1, 2, 5, 6, 7; 1974a: chaps. 2, 3, 4, 6, 7; 1974b; 1988a: 100-157, 158-169, 170-256, 257263, 298-322; 1972: 129-131; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1980a; 1980b: 333334; 1997j/2: 608-616; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b; 1977: chs 10, 11; Marcuse 1962: 65-66; 1970: 3-10; Fromm 1952; 1966a; 1966b; 1992: 3-94, 203-212; 2001: chaps. 3, 7; Fromm/Suzuki 1960; Lundgren 1998; Habermas 1976; 1978a: chap. 5; 1982: 48-95, 127-143; 1987d: chap. 5; 1991a: part III; 2002; 1986: 53-54, 125-126; 139-140, 204-215; 2001a: 9-31; Honneth 1990: chaps. 4, 5; Dubiel 1993: 5-11; 1994: 5-14; 1998: 25-35; Briegleb 1993: 12-29; Claussen 1993: 30-39; Schmid-Noerr 1994: 69-78; 1996: 81-101; 2000: 7-40; Mühlleitner 2000: 41-56; Bonss 2000: 57-82; Krais 2002: 111126; Campani 1994: 78-90; Rosen 1997: 89-116; Bergmann 1998: 70-91; Gelder 1995: 79-94; Friedeburg 1998: 5-24; Schallberger 2002: 97-110; Ott 2001; Siebert 1987d; 2001; 2004a; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b). Horkheimer and his collaborators in the Frankfurt and

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New York Institute for Social Research continued to evolve their critical theory of religion by determinately or concretely, or specifically negating, i.e. not only criticizing, but also preserving, and elevating and fulfilling the studies on religion by Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Rudolf Otto, Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, and Gershom Scholem (Kant 1981; 1975: 77-93; Schelling 1977; Feuerbach 1966; 1957; Hegel 1986c: 72-77, 495-574; 1986e: 48-53; 19896p; 1986q; Marx/Engels1967; 2005: 177-182; Marx 1963: 41-60; Schopenhauer 1946: 173-182; 1986: chaps. 15, 18; 1977: 743-717; Nietzsche 1983: 95-96; 657660; 1967; Löwith 1967; Freud 1964; 1962; 1939; 1946; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1993: caps 53,54,55; Bloch/Reif 1978; Scholem 1967; 1973; 1970; 1977; Fackenheim 1970; Kaufmann 1968: chaps. 12, 13; Löwith 1967; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1991a: part III; 2004b; 2004c; 2004d; Ott 2001; Siebert 2005b; 2005c; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b). That meant that while the critical theory of society was as such the concrete supersession or sublation of the bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment movements, thus also the dialectical sociology of religion not only criticized the earlier modern theories of religion, but it was also engaged in their conscious-making as well as in their saving critique (Habermas 1978c: 48-95). Today, the critical theory of religion consists of and exists in three forms, which are different from each other, but which are, nevertheless, also connected with and support each other (Habermas 2002: chaps. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Mendieta 2005: parts II, V-VII, IX). All three forms have in common that they focus on the modern dichotomy between the religious and the secular: myth and enlightenment, faith and knowledge, revelation and autonomous reason, religion and naturalism, religion and positivism, religion and atheism (Hegel 1984: 11-14; 1986b: 287-433; Horkheimer 1974c: 18, 92-93, 96-97, 101-104, 116-117, 120-121, 127, 131-132, 218-219, 259-260, 268, 286-287, 316-320; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 3-167; Habermas 2001a: 9-31; 2001c; 2005).

Thinking about Religion The first form of the critical theory of religion has been developed by Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Löwenthal, (Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53; Horkheimer 1970c: 1-7, 125-144; 1972: chaps. 4, 5; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 47, 40; 1988a: 100-157; 1972: chap. 4; 1985l: 294-296, 483-492; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 23-25; Adorno

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1970b: 111-161; 1997j/2: 608-616; Fromm 1970: 28-54, 253-277; 1966a; 1966b; 1976: chaps. 3, 7; 1992: 3-94, 203-212; Löwenthal 1989: 49, 57-58, 64, 65-69, 73-84, 113-114, 137-139, 141-142, 146-148, 186, 150-217, 221229, 231-232, 235-236, 239, 240, 241-243, 246-247, 250-251; 1990; 1980: 80-81, 150, 155-157, 161-163, 166-167, 175-176; Marcuse 1962: 65-66; 1970: 3-10; Mendieta 2005: parts II-VI). From the poetical beginnings of the critical theory of society in 1914 on, Horkheimer as well as his colleagues had been thinking not only about society, but about religion as well (Horkheimer 1988a). Already in 1935, in American exile from fascist Germany, Horkheimer determined for himself and for his colleagues religion as the sphere of Otherness and Transcendence (Horkheimer 1972: 129-131). According to Horkheimer, the Abrahamic religions’ concept of God had been for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there were other norms besides those to which nature and society gave expression in their operations. In Horkheimer’s view, dissatisfaction with this worldly, earthly destiny had been the strongest motive for the acceptance of a transcendent Being. Horkheimer argued, if perfect justice resided with God, the totally Other, then it was not to be found in the same measure in the world. Thus, Horkheimer defined religion psychologically and psychoanalytically as the record of the wishes, desires, longings and accusations of countless generations concerning, perfect justice, God, the wholly Other.

Perfect Justice For Horkheimer, it was impossible that such perfect justice could ever become a reality within the immanence of history (Horkheimer 1972: 129131). For, so Horkheimer argued, even if a better society would develop, e.g. alternative Future III–the realm of freedom beyond the realm of natural necessity or the reconciled society–there will be no compensation for the wretchedness of past ages: the injustices in the slaveholder societies of Antiquity, and the feudal societies of the Middle Ages and the earlier capitalist societies of Modernity, and no end to the distress in nature (Hegel 1986i: 464-497; 1986q: 515-516; 1986l: 28, 31, 33-55; Marx 1961c: 873874; Horkheimer 1967b: 251-252, 259-261; 1985g: chap. 37; App. G). Here therefore, the historical materialist Horkheimer thought the idea of perfect justice to be an illusion, the spontaneous growth of ideas that probably arouse out of primitive or archaic economic exchange. According to Horkheimer, that each man and woman had to have his or her share in goods and that each of them had the same basic right to happiness was

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a generalization of economically conditioned rules: their extension into the Infinite. However, so Horkheimer explained, the urge to such a conceptual transcending of what is given, of what is the case and the possible, to this impotent revolt against the empirical reality, this longing for the wholly Other beyond the horror and terror of nature and society, was part of man as he had been molded by history. What for Horkheimer distinguished the progressive type of man from the retrogressive one was not the refusal of the idea of perfect justice, but rather the understanding of the limits set to its fulfillment.

Preservation and Transformation Like his colleagues, Horkheimer was convinced that mankind would lose religion as it moved through history (Horkheimer 1972: 129-131). Yet, so Horkheimer predicted, this loss of religion would leave behind its mark. Part of the drives, desires and longings, which religious belief had preserved and kept alive would be detached from the inhibiting religious form and would be transformed into productive forces in the social praxis toward alternative Future III. In this process, so Horkheimer argued, even the immoderation characteristic of shattered religious illusions would acquire a positive form and would be truly inverted and transformed. According to Horkheimer, in a really free mind the concept of Infinity or of the totally Other would be preserved in an awareness of the finality of human life, and of the inalterable aloneness of men and women, and it would keep modern civil and socialist societies from indulging in a thoughtless optimism: an inflation of their own secular knowledge into a new, false, idolatrous religion (Horkheimer 1972: 129-131; Fromm 1968; 1970; 1976; 1990; 1992; 2001; Marcuse 1966; Schaar 1961; Lundgren 1998).

The Second and Third Commandment All five critical theorists–Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm and Löwenthal–emphasized the radicalization of the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Law far beyond its original intent: the prohibition against the making of images of and the naming of the Absolute (Horkheimer 1972: 129-131; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 23-25; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; Lundgren 1998). All five critical theorists were passionately engaged in the radical re-interpretation of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and their traditions, and thus, in the fight against the idols of

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polytheistic modern society, state, and history: their devotion to Mars and Wotan (war), to Pluto (wealth), to Aphrodite and Venus (the porno culture), to Bacchus (the drug culture), and in general to the idolatry of nation and leader (Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; 1988d: chap. 2, 5, 6, 7, 11, 15; Fromm 1966b; Lundgren 1998). They struggled against regressive and for progressive religion; against authoritarian and for humanistic religion; against mythology and for true realism, enlightenment, and an enlightened post-theism; against ideology and for the truth; against authoritarian irrationalism, mass culture, and the culture industry, and for genuine, critical religion; against positivism and naturalism and for the imageless and nameless Reality beyond the positive religions, the “X-experience,” and the longing for the wholly Other: for what once had been called Heaven, Beauty and Eternity, and concrete, qualitative, good Infinity (Hegel 1986e: 115-165; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97, 101-104, 116-117; 1985g: chaps. 23, 28, 2937, 40; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Adorno 1970b; 1980a; 1991a; 1994a; 1997t/1: 149-168, 203-205, 214-216; 2002a; 2002d; 2003d; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; Habermas 1978: chap. 5; 1987b:: chaps. 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; 1999; Habermas/Luhmann 1975; Lundgren 1998: part II). They let the two Mosaic commandments against idolatry migrate into their profane enlightenment discourse governed by the dialectical method: determinate negation (Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-34). Each positive religion determinately or concretely negated the previous one: it criticized the previous one, but also preserved, elevated and fulfilled certain of its structural elements. The 5 critical theories of religion concretely superseded the Godhypostasies of the world religions into their highest notion: the longing and the hope for the totally Other than the identity of this unredeemed world: its absolute Non-Identity (Adorno 1973b: parts II, III; App. E). The critical theory of religion may as enlightenment discourse be called–in terms of Ernst Bloch–humanism as religion in inheritance (Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Horkheimer 1988a: 100-157; 1987k: 289-332). As such, it gathered into itself all the logical characteristics that Hegel once attributed to the different world religions: particularly the inwardness from Buddhism, the sublimity from Judaism, the fate and beauty from the Greek religion, and the becoming and freedom from Christianity (Hegel 1986p: 374-389; 1986q: 50-154, 218-346; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30, 5087; Fromm 1966b; 1992: 3-94, 203-210; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5).

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Peace, Love, and Justice Horkheimer’s, Fromm’s, Adorno’s, Marcuse’s and Löwenthal’s critical theories of religion contained from the very start not only a strong philosophical and sociological but also a sometimes even stronger psychological, psychoanalytical, and social-psychological component (Horkheimer 1985l: 294-296; Fromm 1980a; 1980b; 1992: 3-95; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 20-41, 42-85, 217-237, 245-279, 354-372, 397-407, 408-433, 434-239, 440456). In Horkheimer’s psychoanalytical perspective, which in its criticality was representative also for that of Adorno, the earlier Fromm, Marcuse and Löwenthal, the Jews had taken over the teaching on peace, love and justice from the mouth of the Hebrew prophets (Isaiah 65, 66; Revelation 21, 22; Horkheimer 1985l: 294-296; Fromm 1966b: 231-236; 1967; 1968; 1972a; 1976; 1980b; 1992: 203-212). Horkheimer admitted that the Jews grumbled and groused and acted against that teaching on peace, love and justice, but they nevertheless honored this prophetic speech as human and humane. In Christianity however, so Horkheimer argued, the messenger Jesus of Nazareth, who proclaimed, pronounced, preached, and practiced this teaching on peace, love and justice, was elevated into God: Elohim, El Shaddai, Yahweh, Adonai (Psalm 91; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; 1985g: chap. 17; 1985l: 294-296; Fromm 1966b: chaps. 2, 3, 9; 1992: 3-91, 203212; Küng 1970). According to Horkheimer, those principles of peace, love and justice had to excite, arouse, and provoke a high measure of alienation, hate, nausea and disgust among the Aryan nations of Europe, if they had to move the Jewish prophetic teachers of these principles so far beyond themselves, in order not to push them aside contemptuously. It was no lesser measure of alienation, hate, nausea, and disgust, than that of the grim and dogged lust, joy, delight and desire, which the metaphysical moralization and eternalization of evil and of the Evil One betrayed in the Christian theology (Matthew 5: 37; Horkheimer 1985l: 294-296; Colpe/ Schmidt-Biggemann 1993; Rosenbaum 1999; Specovius 2007: 90-94). For Horkheimer, not heaven, but rather hell constituted the stimulus, charm, and attraction of the–what Dante Alighieri had called–the divine comedy of Christianity: concerning the misdeeds as well as the punishments (Alighieri 1970; 1961; Horkheimer 1985l: 294-296; Adorno 1969c; 1970b: 103-110, 111-125; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Apostolidis 2000).

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Through the deification of Jesus of Nazareth–which supposedly took place mainly through the mediation of the Greek and Latin Church Fathers, and of the Roman Government sponsored Ecumenical Councils of the third and fourth centuries with the help of Greek philosophy and Roman power–, Horkheimer, informed by Friedrich Nietzsche, still felt the aversion, the distaste, and the reluctance, which Jesus’ teaching encountered among all those people in Greece, Rome, and Europe, who were not slaves (Hegel 1986c: 145-154; 1986q: 185-346; Kaufmann 1968: chaps. 3, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12; Wright 1954: parts II, III; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97. 1985l: 294-296; Küng 1970; 1994a: 145-601). According to Horkheimer, the Aryan nations of Europe could endure Jesus’ teachings only through re-inventing the Devil or Satan (Matthew 12: 27; Luke 11, 18, 19, 20; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; 1985l: 294-296; Specovius 2007: 90-94). The Devil was, so to speak, the compensation for the Immaculate Conception. Since the Europeans could not officially make–because of whatever economic or social reasons–Jesus himself into Beelzebub or Satan, they therefore let the role that they had intended for him, to be played at least by a double, a substitute, on whom they could now unload and discharge their hate, which he continually kindled among them through his teaching: particularly through the Sermon on the Mount, its 4th and 5th commandment, which had come into existence in the Jewish-Apocalyptic Paradigm of the Primordial Christianity (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6: 20-49; Hegel 1986q: 241319; Hitler 1943: 93, 100, 108-110, 112, 113-117, 119, 122, 267, 268, 314, 336, 379, 380, 403, 411, 432, 454, 459, 475, 561-564; Trever-Roper 1988: 6, 7, 15, 29, 34, 38, 46, 51, 59, 75, 85, 89, 90, 143, 144, 145, 189, 253, 304, 306, 320, 325, 341, 342, 409, 410, 412, 411, 418, 606, 671, 718, 722; Küng 1994a: 89-144; 1994b). Of course, long before Aryan Europeans, Muhammad invented a double for Jesus, but in a very different way and out of a very different motivation. Muhammad let–against all historical evidence– a double substitute for Jesus and die on the cross. Muhammad did this because of his theodicy problem: he could not imagine, that Allah would let such a just man, messenger, and prophet as Jesus die so torturously and miserably (Küng 2004: 188-241).

Sermon on the Mount Hegel was still fully aware of the central significance of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6; Hegel 1986q: 281-282). For Hegel, the

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core of the Sermon on the Mount was the announcement of the kingdom of God. Into this kingdom as the realm of the love to God, man had to posit himself, so that he may throw himself immediately into this truth. The Sermon on the Mount expressed this in the purest and most enormous parrhesie: Happy the pure in heart: they shall see God. According to Hegel, such words were of the highest of what had ever been said. Such words were an ultimate center point that superseded all superstition, all un-freedom of man. It was infinitely important for the Lutheran Hegel, that through Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible a people’s book had been given into the hand of the people, in which the heart and the spirit could find its way in the highest, infinite mode. While in Catholic countries there was a great deficiency concerning Bible reading, in Protestant countries the Bible was the means of rescue against all servitude of the spirit. However, in the Ecumenical-Hellenistic Paradigm of Christian Antiquity, surviving into Modernity, Leo Tolstoy, who knew Hegel well, was excommunicated because he demanded in all seriousness and radicality the praxis of the Sermon on the Mount, which contained the negation of the Lex Talionis as well as the Golden Rule, including in itself the whole Law, the Torah, and the Prophets (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6; Hegel 1986q: 320-328; Tolstoy 1961; Küng 1994: 145-335). In the Roman Catholic Paradigm of the Middle Ages, which survived into Modernity, the Sermon on the Mount was usually reserved for the monks and nuns, to be practiced in the monasteries, while the less perfect laity was supposed to follow the Mosaic Decalogue (Hegel 1986q: 320, 346; Küng 1994a: 336-601; 1994b). In the Protestant-Evangelical Paradigm of the Reformation, which has been contemporaneous with Modernity, the Sermon on the Mount became the mirror in which individuals and nations could recognize their sinfulness, rather than being a genuine orientation of action in the secular world (Hegel 1986q: 320-346; Küng 1994a: 602-741; 1994b).

Superman In 1942 Adorno, Günther Anders, Bertolt Brecht, Hans Eisler, Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Ludwig Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock, Hans Reichenbach and Berthold Viertel met in Los Angeles and discussed in a seminar the theory of needs (Horkheimer 1985l: 559-570). Here in July 1942, Ludwig Marcuse gave a paper about the relationship between need and culture in the work of Nietzsche. Marcuse stated that only with the superman did the new come into history: the specifically Nietzschean element. For Marcuse, in the superman all utopias of history found a place:

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the Sermon on the Mount as well as the classless society. What connected Marcuse with Nietzsche and Marx and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School was the longing that the utopias had expressed. The fulfillment of this longing was infinitely questionable. There remained for the critical theorists only to be brave, whatever may be the outcome, and to long, i.e. to hope filled with doubts. There was only one measure: in the direction of longing. Yet, there was also a chance, because the longing had maintained itself during man’s history as stubbornly as the hunger or the sexual needs, which were subdivisions of longing. Contemporary modern man is not lost completely, because paradise is not there only at the end of history. All cultures were also anticipations of the utopia: Sermon on the Mount or classless society, Jesus or Marx. Thus, the dead and the presently still living critical theorists were early and poor participants of what may come or what may not come: the realm of freedom or the kingdom of God.

Longing During the discussion on July 14, 1942 in Los Angeles, the historical materialist Herbert Marcuse asked the Nietzschean Ludwig Marcuse why there was a contrast in Nietzsche’s work between the longing for the superman and the longing for the blond Aryan beast: between the kingdom of God or the classless society on one hand and the fascist Third Reich on the other, which at that time was aggressively expanding in the Soviet Union up to Petrograd and Moscow, murdering 26 million Russians and 6 million Jews (Hegel 1986a: 344-345; 1986c: 169; 1986e: 267, 270; 1986l: 174; 1986m: 135, 1986r: 173; 1986t: 386, 399, 416; Horkheimer 1985l: 565-576). For Marcuse, there was no contrast. According to Horkheimer, with the largest part of humans it was so that they lived under a terrible and dreadful pressure, burden and weight, and the Nietzschean notion of longing could be understood or comprehended as a thin abstraction out of its concrete longings. Marx would have defended himself against basing his theory on the Nietzschean notion of longing as a critical one. For Adorno, longing had to do with the fact that humans have the feeling that something is not right in spite of the apparent satisfaction of their material needs. Yet this longing of the people was nothing internal, but it was probably connected with the other feeling that they had the more certainly to expect: that tomorrow they shall be annihilated through the mechanisms of society and history. That longing was the attempt to think beyond the next step of the material satisfaction. What about the question of being full and saturated materialistically? According to Adorno, what

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repelled Nietzsche in the satisfied faces of the bourgeois in the late 19th century was the fact that the contentedness and satisfaction of the full, well fed, saturated, smug bourgeois was paid for with the senseless and meaningless suffering of the many, the proletariat, and that it reflected it through malice and spite. Nietzsche did not believe that one could remove or put away hunger from antagonistic capitalist society through concessions. Adorno believed that it was the same with the notion of longing. In Adorno’s perspective, the critical theorists should try to accomplish this translation work, and to bring about what went beyond the short term.

The Last Man According to Herbert Marcuse, if Marx was right, then Nietzsche was wrong. (Hegel 1986a: 344-345; 1986c: 169; 1986e: 267, 270; 1986l: 174; 1986m: 135; 1986r: 173; 1986t: 386, 399, 416; Horkheimer 1985l: 565576). Nietzsche’s image of the last man was factually the image of the first man. Nietzsche had the image of a mankind without longing, the needs of which were all technically fulfilled and satisfied. Yet, for Marcuse it did not have to be that way: that humanity with fulfilled material needs did not have any longing any longer. To the contrary! Marcuse could imagine very well that humans have longing exactly first, because their needs were fulfilled. According to Horkheimer, before the beginning of World War II it had been made credible to the critical theorists that in the Soviet Union everything happened in order to satisfy the material needs of the people. Horkheimer asked if there was in spite of that still a motive to be against Russia? Marx stood up for the satisfaction of hunger and Nietzsche for the longing. Horkheimer asked if not the demand of longing was contradictory in itself. Adorno believed that here existed a dialectical relationship. When all people were well fed, then they shall not be a crowd of bourgeois, but the bourgeois shall then die out. Here precisely lay the motive, which connected the critical theorists with Nietzsche. According to Horkheimer Nietzsche did not treat longing in an intoxicated way. For Nietzsche the longing was rather the negation of very concrete things. For Nietzsche the last man was not the one who had enough meat to eat. Nietzsche signified rather the whole bourgeois moderation culture. Horkheimer did not believe in a social system, in which there existed primary and secondary needs. The critical theorists believed that the society was a Whole, and that one could not take out of it particular things. Horkheimer remembered that Marx had said that as long as there existed in society determinate want, people had nothing else to do than to abolish it.

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For Horkheimer, all literary work which, under such conditions of want, did not call things by their name and did not say that what counts was to change the conditions, was afflicted with a deep contradiction. According to Ludwig Marcuse, in Nietzsche’s longing stuck nothing else than what Marx meant by the classless society.

Denouncing Bourgeois Society According to Horkheimer, Marx did not speak about longing or love, but he was satisfied and content with denouncing bourgeois society. (Hegel 1986a: 344-345; 1986c: 169; 1986e: 267, 270; 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 174; 1986m: 135; 1986r: 173; 1986t: 386, 399, 416; Horkheimer 1985l: 565576). One could not do anything else than to formulate that denunciation. The need to know could not be isolated from the social reality. For Horkheimer, knowledge could not calm down, pacify and soothe people about what could lay behind this present life. Humanity did not fall into despair because it did not know. The critical theorists could not know something else than the social conditions, in so far as their change in the sense of their improvement and correction, namely in terms of alternative Future III–a non-exploiting society, was at all thinkable. Horkheimer comprehended longing as the expression of an embarrassment and a difficulty in the present historical situation. Without certain praxis also the classless society was an expression of embarrassment. Adorno did not want to take over from Nietzsche such notions as love and longing as positive correctives. Nietzsche did not reproach the extant bourgeois society, but its critics for a lack of longing and love. The new critical theory of religion must never be without longing and love.

New Creation About 50 years after the critical theorists’ Los Angeles discourse of 1942, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union and Empire, Hans Küng and I had lunch in a restaurant in the former German city of Breslau, the present Polish Wrawlaw. We had visited the Concentration Camp of Auschwitz, which was only a few miles away, and had found it to be–as Hans put it– well cleaned up. We had just given our lectures at the International Hegel Society. Hans came from the Roman Catholic Paradigm, and then became one of the initiators of the Post-Modern Ecumenical Paradigm of Christianity. While in our theological discourse we did not speak about

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the classless society we nevertheless discussed the Sermon on the Mount and the kingdom of God. Hans emphasized the great importance and significance of the Sermon on the Mount. Hans recommended to me a very measured, reasonable, and reasoned approach to it: Augenmass! (balanced judgment) (Küng 1994a: 879-901; 1994b). The new critical theory of religion stresses with Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Walter Dirks, and Johannes Baptist Metz, that the arch-Christian phrase–Now I am making the whole of creation new–is still alive: the fulfillment of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6; Revelation 21; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1993: chaps. 54, 55; 1972; Bloch/Reif 1978: 88-89; Dirks 1968; 1985; Peters/Urban 199; Kuschel 1990; Metz/Peters 1991; Siebert 2007a; 2007b). The critical theory of religion emphasizes the really believed old Jewish expectation, that every moment can be the gate through which the Messiah can enter, and the heavenly Jerusalem can vertically break into the horrible continuum of history, against the reformist interim payments of always new religious paradigm changes, which come to terms harmoniously and in an ameliorating way with the unjust present, and seem to move into a bad infinity. The critical theory of religion takes seriously the classless society as well as the kingdom of God, the Communist Manifesto as well as the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus of Nazareth as well as Marx: liberation as well as redemption (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6; Marx 1953: chap. 10; 1961c: 873-874; Marx/Engels 2005; Bloch 1971; Benjamin 1977: chs 10, 11; Fromm 1967; Niebuhr 1967; Bottomore 1956; 1964; Laski 1967; Habermas 1976; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; App. G).

Civilization In Horkheimer’s psychoanalytical perspective, the Germans and other wild nations of Europe, who did not bother too much about the Sermon on the Mount, also did not undergo for the Jews, who had brought and conveyed Christianity to them, the trouble of doubling up Jesus of Nazareth into Satan: the Jews were immediately identified with the Devil (Matthew 12: 27; Luke 11: 18-20; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer 1985l: 294-295; 1967b: 302-316, 317-320; 1974: 8, 15, 27-28, 33, 41, 52-53, 77, 91-92, 98-99, 148-151, 157-158, 175-176, 177-178, 208, 213, 289-290; Küng 1991b: 169-274; Specovius 2007). Without beating about the bush and straight out, the Jews were considered to be the God-be-with-us, Beelzebub, the Devil, Satan (Matthew 12: 27; Luke 11: 18-20; Horkheimer 1985l: 295; Specovius 2006). Thus, the Jews experienced all the foaming rage and fury that the hammering in of the civilization elicited from

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those Europeans, who first felt its full force only through the mediation of Christianity. Because the civilization spread from the Mediterranean Sea, anti-Semitism increased the further one came in Europe toward the East (Horkheimer 1985l: 294-295; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; 1974: 28-29, 316-320). In Germany, the Devil carried Jewish traits and the Jews carried the disgrace and the ignominy, which was intended for the love, the logos, and the truth.

The Character of Christianity Horkheimer had to admit that much of what he had to say psychoanalytically about Judaism and Christianity and other religions had already been seen by the psychoanalysts Freud, Reik, Samuel, and others (Freud 1939; 1946; 1962; 1964; Horkheimer 1985l: 295; App. E). However, so Horkheimer argued, where these psychoanalysts were swaying, staggering, reeling, fluctuating, hesitating and wavering it was due to the very character of Judaism and Christianity themselves (Horkheimer 1974c: 16, 18, 28-29, 56, 96-97, 98-99, 121-123, 127, 148, 158-160, 208, 210-211, 213, 216, 247, 248, 254-255, 259-260, 260, 268, 286-287, 316-320, 352-354; 1985l: 294295; 1988d: chap. 2; Küng 1970; 1978: B-G; 1991b; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; App. E). Horkheimer searched for the ground of anti-Semitism not so much among the converted masses, but rather in Christianity itself, which has deified the virtues of civilization. This deification was only the other side of the alienation and the be-Deviling demonization, and condemnation of the Jews. According to Horkheimer, as true as the teachings of the Evangelium may be, particularly the Sermon on the Mount, which to a large extent contained old Jewish semantic and semiotic potentials, they turn over dialectically into the untruth through their transformation into religion (Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; 1985l: 295). What Adorno had been willing to say concerning the St. Matthew Passion Play by Johann Sebastian Bach, namely that it could not be entirely untrue, Horkheimer would also admit concerning the Evangelium as a whole (Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Horkheimer 1985l: 295). Horkheimer suggested, like the martyred Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a religionless Christianity based on the Sermon on the Mount (Bonhoeffer 2003; Horkheimer 1985l: 295). Also, the Catholic theologian, Alfred Delp, who belonged to the Kreisauer Kreis, which dared to think of and plan for a post-Hitler German constitutional state and who was likewise executed by the Naziregime, had similar thoughts.

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Idolization According to Horkheimer, it was possible that the Devil or Satan or Satanas had many different psychological sources (1 Chronicles 21: 1; Job 1: 6; 2: 7; Matthew 4: 1, 5, 10, 11, 24; 7: 22; 9: 34; 10: 8; 11: 18; 12: 22, 26, 27, 28; 13: 39; 16: 23; 17: 17; 25: 41; Mark 3: 22; Luke 11: 11, 15, 18, 19, 20; Horkheimer 1985l: 295). However, for Horkheimer, the lie out of which the Devil drew his eternal life strength, power and force was the idolization of the Son of Man: a violation of the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue (Exodus 20: 4-7; Psalm 8: 5; Ezekiel 38: 2; Daniel 7: 13; Matthew 8: 20; 9: 6; 10: 23: 11: 19; 12: 8, 32, 40; 16: 13, 27, 28; Mark 2: 10, 28; Luke 5: 24; 6: 5; 7: 34; 9: 58; 12: 10; Horkheimer 1985l: 295; Horkheimer/Adorno 1973: 23-24). It is possible that the prophetic concept of the Son of Man was really the only title that Jesus gave to himself. In Horkheimer’s view, this idolization of the Son of Man happened in the process of the direct and indirect worldly power and rule. Besides the sword of Charles the Great, so Horkheimer argued, the cashbox of the Jewish traders and dealers played a part in this idolatry, for whom admittedly this business turned out to be a bad one in the course of the centuries (Horkheimer 1967: 302-316, 317-320; 1985l: 295; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1972: 168-208; Meyer 2003: 303-399). In Horkheimer’s view, the horror of civilization stemmed from the fact that the Europeans had to pay for it with the lie of the idolization of the Son of Man. Thus, antiSemitism is finally less the disguise of the hate against Christianity than the consequence of the circumstance that already Christianity itself represented this disguise. The hate against God was secondary. The primary and genuine hate lay in the idolization of the Son of Man. For Horkheimer, the cross, which was worshipped instead of being detested and abhorred, was already the infamous vow of the torture machine, which European history has faithfully kept. It seemed to Horkheimer, that since the cross became sacred and holy, every kind of wood has been predestined by nature to become material for gallows and stakes. It seems to the critical theorist of religion that this happened once again most recently in December 2006 and January 2007 with the gallows for the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and members of his cabinet in Baghdad under Western occupation. Up to the present–February 2010–the West has not been able to free itself from idolization and thus, it has also not been able to depart from the Devil or from Satan, be it in its imagination, or in its literature, or in its music, or in its movies, e.g. the recent and famous movie The Exorcism of Mary Rose, or in its plays, or, for that matter, maybe even in its

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familial, economic, political, military and historical reality (Specovius 2007: 90-94).

The Other Theology The second form of the dialectical theory of religion has been developed by Theodor W. Adorno and his eight years older teacher and friend Walter Benjamin against the background of the works of Franz Kafka, Bertoholt Brecht, and Sören Kierkegaard and Scholem’s studies on the Kabbala and Chassidism: most positivistic studies for entirely non-positivistic goals (Kafka 1964; 1993a; 1993b; 2001; Adorno 1962; 1997b; 1997t/1: 169189; Benjamin 1955a; 1955b: Vol. 2, 196-228; 1971; 1978a; 1978c; 1978c; 1983a: Vol 1; 1983b: Vol. 2; 1980; 1985; 1987; 1988; 1993; 1996; Schweppenhäuser 1981; 2000; Scholem 1989; Habermas 1987b: chaps. 7, 14, 15; Lohmann 2007: 100-102; Mendieta 2005: parts V, VII; Brändle 1984b; Opitz/Wizisla 2000; Buchholz/Kruse 1994; Scholem 1981; Bolz/Reijen 1996; Witte 1985; Blau 1992; Kramer 2003). Adorno and Benjamin spoke of their other, or inverse, or cipher, or negative, or political theology as theodicy, as the very core of their critical theory of religion, since the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, e.g. on the Island of Ibiza (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b: 103-146; Horkheimer 1974c: 218-219; 1985l: 483492, 499-504, 509-525, 543-552, 563-564, 565-570, 571-586, 588-605; Habermas 1988a: 277-279; Witte 1985: 144; Schweppenhäuser 1996: 193). Benjamin’s and Adorno’s theology was other insofar as it differentiated itself from Karl Barth’s dialectical theology and other forms of Christian, Jewish or Islamic theology. The other theology was an inverse theology insofar as it inverted, transformed, translated or sublated progressive semiotic or semantic materials and potentials from the depth of the mythos into the modern, secular discourse of the expert cultures. It was a negative theology insofar as it could only say what the wholly Other was not rather than what it was. Adorno and Benjamin could not formulate the notion of the truth without the determinate notion of a negative theology. The other theology was a political theology insofar as it attempted a restitution of theology, or better still, a radicalization of the dialectic down into the theological glowing fire, which meant at the same time an extreme sharpening of the social, economic, political motive. The other theology was once more a theodicy insofar as it was concerned with the innocent victims of history, and in general with the perils of human existence: misery, unhappiness, abandonment, loneliness, suffering, pain, meaninglessness, injustice, poverty, alienation, illness, old age, dying, and death–shortly, the

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curse of finitude. Particularly, Benjamin collected theodicy stories from the destruction of the Herculanum and of Pompeii through the earthquake in Lisbon to the theater fire of Kanton and the railroad catastrophe of the fifth of May, and the Mississippi flood of 1927, and even enlightened the children of Berlin about these events over the radio before his own life turned into a theodicy (Benjamin 1985: 160-165. 166-171, 172177, 178-183, 184-189; Scholem 1989: 267-268).

The Perspective of the Redeemed Life Adorno had urged Benjamin toward such another theology already in his critique of Benjamin’s Passage Work: the inverse theology was to introduce the Passage Work (Benjamin 1983b: 655-1066; Adorno 1970b: 103104). Adorno wanted to let his and Benjamin’s thoughts converge and disappear in the image of such an inverse or cipher theology: like, so we may say, two parallel lines converging and being united in the Infinite (Hegel 1986e: 115-165; Adorno 1970b: 103-104). For Adorno, this image of theology was nothing other than that out of which Benjamin’s Passage Work received its sustenance. In terms of Benjamin’s and his own inverse theology, Adorno saw in Kafka’s work a photography of the earthly life out of the perspective of the redeemed life (Benjamin 1955c: Vol. 2: 196-228; Adorno 1980b: 333-334; 1970b: 103-104). On this Kafkaesque photography nothing appears of this redeemed life than a corner, or tip, or end of the black cloth, while the horribly shifted optics of the picture was nothing other than that of the camera itself, being put at an acute angle. According to Adorno, 17 years later, after Auschwitz, philosophy, as alone it could still be done responsibly in the face of the universal despair, would be the attempt to consider things as they represented themselves from the standpoint of redemption. For Adorno knowledge had no light except that which shined from the redemption on the world: everything else exhausted itself in the reconstruction and remained a piece of technique. The inverse theology’s perspective of the redeemed life remains fully valid and becomes even more urgent 56 years later as times and situations become even more Kafkaesque in the global American Empire and beyond: after September 11, 2001, and after Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay (Habermas 2001a: 9-31; 2006d: 1-36; Borradori 2003; Derkacz 2007: 1; Gumbel 2007: 1-2; Labor Research 1-2; Smith/Baxter 2007: 1-2; Johnson 2007: 1-4). The redeemed life would be one liberated from the present perils of human existence: unhappiness, misery, guilt, abandonment, loneliness, fear of and reality of sickness, old age, death, as well as injustice, social

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repression, crimes, humiliations, and alienation (Adorno 1970b: 103-104; Horkheimer 1970c: 40-41; Habermas 1986: 53-54).

Between Naturalism and Super Naturalism In 1934, Adorno posited his and Benjamin’s inverse or cipher theology between and against the naturalistic and the super-naturalistic interpretation of Kafka’s and Kierkegaard’s works: between psychoanalysis on one hand, and Karl Barth’s dialectical theology on the other (Kafka 1964; 1993a; 1993b; 2001; Adorno 1970b: 103-104; 1962; 1997t/1: 169-189; Benjamin 1955c: Vol 2: 196-228; Schweppenhäuser 1981; Scholem 1989; Habermas 1987b: chaps. 7, 14, 15; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; Lohmann 2007: 100-102; Mendieta 2005: part V). The inverse theology was opposed to the connection between Kafka on one hand, and Pascal and Kierkegaard on the other, as well as against the connection between Kierkegaard and Pascal and Augustine (Benjamin 1955c: Vol 2: 215; Adorno 1970b: 103104). Nevertheless, the inverse theology held on to a certain relationship between Kierkegaard and Kafka. However, that was not the relationship that Karl Barth or his student Hans-Joachim Schoeps had in mind in the context of their dialectical theology. For the cipher theology, the relationship between Kafka and Kierkegaard lay rather precisely at the location of the writing or the script. What Kafka thought to be the relic of the script, the critical theorists believed to be able to understand better socially as its prolegomenon (Benjamin 1955c: vol. II: 227-228; Adorno 1970b: 104). For Adorno and Benjamin, that was indeed the cipher being of their inverse theology: nothing more and nothing less. This cipher theology had broken through already with enormous force in the early fragments of Benjamin’s Passagework. (Benjamin 1983a; 1983b; Adorno 1970b: 104). Since 1929, this breakthrough of the cipher theology in the Passage Work was for Adorno the most beautiful surety and guarantee for the philosophical success of Benjamin’s whole philosophy (Adorno 1970b: 104; Adorno/Benjamin 1994: 32, 59, 85, 90-95, 96-98, 99-100, 102, 143, 147, 148, 152, 172, 327, 339, 347, 352, 395, 400, 404-405, 419, 420-421, 423. 428; Benjamin 1996a: 449; 1996b; 1997; Weigel 1997: 24, 47, 77-78, 80, 120-122, 132, 143-144, 177-179, 193, 252, 254, 259, 260, 273). After the suicide of Benjamin in Port Bou on September 26, 1940, Adorno contributed–next to Gerhard Scholem–most to the success of Benjamin’s philosophy, including its cipher theology, and made it his own, and developed it further.

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Alienation and Reversion Both critical theorists, Adorno and Benjamin, shared in their cipher theology concerning Kafka the categories of real alienation and reversion as well as of beauty and hopelessness (Benjamin 1955c vol. 2; 2001; Adorno 1970b: 104-105). Both are convinced of the nullity, invalidity and futility of the official theological Kafka interpretation. For both thinkers, the platitudes of the psychoanalytical emperors disguised less of the truth than the bourgeois profundity of the dialectical theologians (Kaiser 1931; Adorno 1970b: 104-105). Adorno reminded Benjamin that for Sigmund Freud neutrum and father-imago belonged together (Freud 1977: 189-190, 207, 269, 273, 275, 333-334, 337, 370. 290, 332-333, 335-338, 455-456; Adorno 1970b: 104-105). Both critical theorists preferred in their inverse theology Freud’s psychoanalysis over Barth’s dialectical theology concerning the interpretation of Kafka’s inferno (Kaiser 1931; Adorno 1970b: 104-105). The critical theorists were fully aware that their cipher theology was not only significant, but also fragmentary and incomplete. Particularly, the relationship between primordial history and Modernity, the archaic origin of subjectivity and modern self-preservation run wild, had not yet been–in Hegel’s terms–elevated to the level of the dialectical notion. The success of a Kafka interpretation depended ultimately on such elevation to the level of the notion.

Ages of the World Adorno and Benjamin differentiated in their inverse theology between the historical ages’ history and what Schelling had called the ages of the world (Adorno 1970b: 105). For Adorno, there existed an antagonism between the historical ages and the ages of the world, and it could become fruitful not as mere contrast, but only dialectically. According to the critical theorists, the notion of the historical age was as little existent, as they knew decadence, or progress in the open sense, which they deconstructed. The critical theorists only knew the world age as extrapolation of the petrified and corrupted present nature society, and history: the corruption and petrification of which already Schelling had noticed, and which for Hegel had been the Cross everyone had to take upon himself or herself, who wanted to pluck the Rose of Reason (Hegel 1986g: 26-27; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b: 104-106). According to Adorno, in Benjamin’s work on Kafka the notion of the age of the world remained abstract in the Hegelian sense (Adorno 1970b: 105; Schweppenhäuser 1981. It was astonishing

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for the Left-Hegelian Adorno, and probably not conscious for Benjamin, what close relationship his work on Kafka had to Hegel (Adorno 1969b; 1969c; 1970b: 105). What Benjamin said about nothing and something fit most sharply into the dialectical movement of the notion at the beginning of Hegel’s Science of Logic: being-nothing-becoming (Hegel 1986e: 82-114, 115-165; Adorn 1970b: 105; Benjamin 1955c: vol. 2: 225; Schweppenhäuser 1981). Adorno was aware that the motive of the turnover of mythical right into guilt had been taken over not only from the Jewish tradition but also from Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (Hegel 1986g: 203-291; Adorno 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b: 105). For Adorno, that said nothing else than what Benjamin had interpreted in his work as the anamnesis–or the forgetting–of the primordial history in Kafka’s work in the archaic and not the dialectiziced-through sense. The same regression, the same deficient articulation of the notion of the mythos, had happened to Adorno in his work on Kierkegaard (Adorno 1962; 1970b: 105-106). In both cases, the notion of mythos was not yet determinately or concretely negated. For Adorno, it was thus no accident that in Benjamin’s interpretation the anecdote about Kafka’s childhood picture remained without exegesis. Such exegesis would have been equivalent to the neutralization of the world age in a flashlight. For Adorno, that meant symptoms of the archaic bias and of the fact that the mythical dialectic–determinate negation–had not yet been carried out. According to Adorno, that was particularly true for Benjamin’s interpretation of the figure of Odradek in Kafkas’s story The Care of the House Father from the volume A Country Doctor (Benjamin 1955c: vol. 2: 220; Adorno 1970b: 106). It was archaic only when Benjamin let Odradek arise out of pre-world and guilt and not read him again as prolegomenon, which he had fixed so urgently and forcibly before the problem of the script. Adorno asked whether Kafka’s Odradek really had his place with the father of the house? Was he not precisely the father’s care and danger? Had he not been predestined as the supersession of the creaturely guilt relationship? Was not the care–truly a Martin Heidegger put on his feet–the cipher, even the most certain promise of hope, precisely in the supersession of the house? (Heidegger 2001: 180-230; Adorno 1970b: 106; 1997f: 413-523). Adorno admitted that Odradek was certainly as the backside of the world of things a sign or cipher of distortion and disfigurement. However, precisely as such Odradek was for Adorno also a motive of transcending, namely of the removal of the boundary and of the reconciliation of the organic and the inorganic, of the supersession of death: Odradek survived. According to Adorno, in other words, to the thing-like perverted life had been promised the escape from the nature

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connection. For Adorno, here was more than cloud, namely dialectic. Certainly the form of the cloud was not to be enlightened, but to be dialectiziced through, i.e. to be determinately negated (Adorno 1970b: 106-107; Benjamin 1985). In Adorno’s view, this remained the innermost concern of a Kafka interpretation in terms of the inverse theology. In the same way Benjamin’s dialectical image had to be dialectiziced through. Indeed, for Adorno, Odradek was so dialectical that what could be said about him was: so much as nothing has made everything good. Precisely such Hegelian dialectic, such concrete negation, was the fundamental methodology of Adorno’s and Benjamin’s inverse cipher theology (Hegel 1986c: 72-75; 1986e: 48-53; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-31; Adorno 1970b: 103-110).

Mythos and Fairy Tale For Adorno, to the same complex as Odradek belonged what Benjamin had said about mythos and fairy tale, which he criticized pragmatically by stating that the fairy tale in Kafka’s work really appeared, behaved and arose as the outwitting of the mythos, or as its breaking or refraction (Benjamin 1955c: vol. 2: 203; Adorno 1970b: 107). According to Adorno, the Athenian tragedians Sophocles, Aeschylus or Euripides were not at all fairy tale poets. For Adorno, the key figure of the fairy tale was the premythical, even the sinless world, as it appears to the critical theorists today in the reified or thingified ciphers of the totally Other. In Adorno’s view, it was extremely curious and strange that precisely here started the matter of fact mistakes of Benjamin’s work on Kafka. This was so, for Adorno, because the offenders in Kafka’s narrative In the Penal Colony were tattooed by the machine not only on their backs, but also on their whole bodies (Benjamin 1955c: vol. 2: 221; Adorno 1970b: 107). Kafka even talks about a process, in which the machine turns around or inverts. For Adorno, this inversion was the very heart of the narrative. It was also given in the moment of the understanding when Adorno admonished Benjamin that precisely–concerning this narrative of Kafka, which in its main part had a certain idealistic abstractness like the aphorisms about sin, suffering, hope and the true way–the disparate conclusion must not be forgotten: with the grave of the old Governor underneath the coffee-house table (Benjamin 1955c: vol. 2: 214-216; Adorno 1970b: 107-108). Adorno also thought Benjamin’s interpretation of The Nature Theater of Oklahoma, the last chapter of Kafka’s novel America, to be archaic in the expression of the country fair or kermis, or children’s festivity (Benjamin 1955c: vol. 2: 212; Adorno 1970b: 107-108). In Adorno’s view, the image of a city singer

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festival of the 1880’s would have been truer. For Adorno, the village air in Soma Morgenstern’s Kafka interpretation was always suspicious. Adorno smelled village air in Christianity and other pre-modern world-religions (Benjamin 1955c: vol. 2: 212; Adorno 1970b: 107-108; 1997j/2: 608-627). Adorno and Benjamin agreed that Kafka was not the founder of a religion (Benjamin 1955c: vol. 2: 212-213; Adorno 1970b: 1-108). For Adorno, Kafka was likewise also not a poet of the Jewish homeland. Both Benjamin and Adorno considered the crossing of the German and the Jewish element in Kafka’s work to be significant. The unbound wings of the angels in Kafka’s work were no deficiency or deficit but their very trait: they as the obsolete appearance were the hope itself and there was no other than these (Benjamin 1955c: vol. 2: 212-213; 1977: 255; Adorno 1970b: 107-108; Scholem 1989: 79-80). While Kafka was not the founder of a religion, he became, nevertheless, one of the most important foundations of Benjamin and Adorno’s inverse cipher theology (Adorno 1970b: 103-110, 111-125, 126-134).

The World as Theater of Redemption To Adorno, from Kafka’s work interpreted in the context of the inverse theology, from the dialectic of appearance as prehistoric modernity, the function of theater and gesture, which Benjamin had rightly put into the center of his Kafka interpretation, seemed to have become completely clear (Benjamin 1955c: 206-207; Adorno 1970b: 108-110; Adorno/Mann 203: 59-66). For Adorno, the tenors in Kafka’s The Trial were entirely of this kind. If Adorno wanted to search for the ground of Kafka’s gesture, it could maybe less be found in the Chinese theater than in modernity: namely in the dying of the language. According to Adorno, creation releases and delivers itself in Kafka’s gestures, just as words had been taken from the things, which in theological terms had once been given to them by Adam when he named them (Genesis 2: 18-21; Adorno 1970b: 139140; 1979: 103-125). Adorno and Benjamin agreed that thus the creation certainly opened itself up to deep consciousness, thinking, reflection and remembrance and to study as prayer. Adorno criticized Benjamin for taking into his work on Kafka categories, like research arrangement, from his friend Bertholt Brecht’s epical or dialectical theater, which are completely foreign to his material and did not contribute to its understanding (Benjamin 1955c: 206; Adorno 1970b: 108). This was so for Adorno, because Brecht’s world theater, which was only played to God, and was only acted out as a sham of the world in front of him, did not tolerate any stand-

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point of redemption outside of it, for which it would as stage join itself together and amalgamate itself with itself, as it happened with the work of Kafka (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986q: 273-27, 299; Adorno 1970b: 103110; 1980b: 333-334). According to Benjamin and Adorno, as little as the heaven in Brecht’s epic theater could be hung up in a picture frame on the wall, so little did there exist a stage frame for the scene itself: except the heaven over the race course (Benjamin 1950: 207; Adorno 1970b: 108109). Therefore, according to Adorno, Kafka’s form of art belonged constitutively to the conception of the world as the theater of redemption, in the speechless taking over and acceptance of the word. Kafka’s form of art stood in the most extreme antithesis to the Brechtian theatralic or dialectical theater form: it was the art form of the novel. Adorno could not abstract and refrain from Kafka’s form of art after the rejection, disapproval or refusal of the unmediated form of teaching.

Gesture, Animal, Music: Attention as Prayer Kafka’s art form of the novel reminded Adorno of the early forms of film or movie (Adorno 1970b: 109). Kafka’s novels were not direction books for the experimental theater, because they have in principle no spectator who could intervene into the experiment. Kafka’ novels were rather the last, disappearing connection texts to the silent film. The silent film did not accidentally or in vain disappear almost exactly contemporaneously with Kafka’s death. For Adorno, the ambiguity of Kafka’s gesture was that between sinking into dumbness with the destruction of language and its rising out of it and above it in music. Thus, according to Adorno, the most important piece concerning the constellation gesture-animal-music is expressed in Kafka’s portrayal and depiction of the group of dogs who silently make music in his narrative Researches of a Dog (Benjamin 1985: 196; Adorno 1970b: 109). Adorno did not hesitate to put these notes or recordings of a dog on the same level as the Sancho Panza from Kafka’s The Truth about Sancho Panza commented on by Benjamin at the end of his Kafka essay (Benjamin 1955b; Adorno 1970b: 109). Adorno found the relationship of forgetting and remembering in Benjamin’s Kafka essay to be central (Benjamin 1955b, vol. 2: 219-220). Adorno reminded Benjamin that he himself had written a small piece entitled Leveling Down a year earlier, in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came into power, in which he took positively the extinguishing of the individual character in the same way as Benjamin had done in the passage of his Kafka essay about the Lack of Principle (Benjamin 1955b: 206; Adorno 1970b: 109; Fromm 1992: 107-

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130, 147-168). Adorno also reminded Benjamin that in Spring 1934 in London, he had a piece about the innumerable colorful ticket models of the London bus lines. This came peculiarly close to Benjamin’s color piece from his Berlin Childhood around Nineteenhundred (Benjamin 1955b: 609-610; 1987: 70-71; Adorno 1970b: 109). For Adorno’s inverse theology, the yellow tickets of the London bus lines became a cipher for the longing for the wholly Other. Most of all, Adorno wanted to underline and emphasize the meaning and significance of attention as prayer in Benjamin’s Kafka essay. Adorno knew nothing more important from Benjamin than his statement about attention as prayer. Also for Adorno, nothing than this statement could give more precise information about the innermost motives of Benjamin’s and his own inverse theology and critical theory of religion. For the critical theorists’ other theology, prayer was the attentive study of the smallest, most insignificant something as cipher of the concrete Infinity, the totally Other (Hegel 1986e: 115-173; Benjamin 1955b: 609-610; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 28, 29; Adorno 1970b: 109, 110, 139140, 145-146).

Autonomy and Universal Solidarity It became the purpose and task of Adorno’s and Benjamin’s critical theory of religion, particularly their cipher theology, not only to interpret and to make conscious and to criticize, but also to rescue dialectically– through determinate or concrete negation, through inversion–the works of religious as well as secular abstract materialistic and atheistic musicians, poets, philosophers and theologians, who had produced, like Kafka, photographs of the unredeemed, antagonistic, modern civil society: e.g. Blasé Pascal, Sören Kierkegaard, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Haecker, Karl Barth, as well as de Sade, Georg W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sigmund Freud, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Kraus, Richard Wagner, Gerhard Hauptmann, Gottfried Keller, Adalbert Stifter, Thomas Mann, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Alban Berg, Anton von Webern, Arnold Schönberg, Gustav Mahler, Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, and others. (Goethe 2005; Baudelaire 1982; Adorno 1995; Adorno/Mann 2003; Kaufmann 1968; Habermas 1978c: 33-47, 48-95, 127-143; Steinert 1993; Pals 2007; Laumont 2003: 5-76, 509-555). Thus, it was the purpose of the inverse theology to resolve the theodicy problem, the problem of evil and suffering, as it appeared in religious and secular works of art and philosophy: how there can be universal solidarity with the victims of the merciless histori-

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cal process, when the crimes, and the sufferings, and the humiliations and the misery of past generations appeared irreversible and beyond redress particularly to the secular perspective (Habermas 1986: 53-54) As Benjamin and Adorno were groping for a response to the horror and terror of nature and history, they developed and practiced the idea of universal, i.e. anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity, which could bring about atonement, redemption, salvation through the power of Messianic remembrance. Benjamin’s and Adorno’s inverse cipher theology contained the outlines of a way of thinking which would pose a serious answer to the theodicy problem. This problem was one which faced all modern civil and socialist societies once their religious traditions that pointed beyond what is the case in the purely earthly, human realm have largely lost their former authority and vitality. From Adorno and Benjamin to Habermas and Alex Honneth, critical theorists have observed palpable regressions into new forms of paganism, which undercut the ego-identity that had been achieved by means of the major world religions since the axis time. From these observations arose the question as to how could, if not the substance, then at least the humanizing power of religious traditions, which protect people against such regression, be salvaged for the secular world. The critical theorists have answered: not as a religious legacy. From its very start the inverse theology was directed not only against the leap into philosophically disguised religious revelation, but also against the newly developing mythologies and polytheism in the 19th and 20th century, which give up the majority of the subject and which had no similarity with the mythology of reason that had once been conjured by the friends Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling in Frankfurt in 1800. Against these new mythologies, which have arisen since that time and continue today, Adorno’s and Benjamin’s inverse theology emphasized what connected the radical, non-positivistic enlightenment with the monotheism of the three Abrahamic religions: the moment of self-transcendence and non-reified Transcendence that grants first of all for the Ego, which is caught in its environments, distance from the world and from itself. Thereby, this Transcendence opened up a perspective, without which autonomy on the basis of mutual recognition and universal solidarity and individuality could not be acquired. Adorno and Benjamin’s inverse cipher theology contained the conviction that nothing of theological content could continue to exist unchanged. Each theological content had to expose itself to the test of migrating into the secular discourse of the expert cultures and through it into personal, social and political praxis. However, for Adorno and Benjamin as later on for Habermas, this secularizing inversion of theologi-

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cal contents into the universe of argumentative speech and autonomous as well as solidary friendly living together of human beings has been the very opposite of a neo-pagan regression behind the self-understanding of autonomy and solidarity, which had entered world history with the prophetic teachings of the three Abrahamic religions. Thus, from its start Adorno’s and Benjamin’s inverse theology was engaged in the rescue of semantic and semiotic materials and potentials from the depth of the myths through an inversion: i.e. by letting them migrate into the discourses of the different secular expert cultures, and into profane political action. Under the presupposition that religions had supported humankind on its long march from animality to freedom, such theological inversion was not only to rescue the religious contents from the mythos, but it was also to rescue the modern world from itself: to help the modern world to resist the always new attacks of repaganization, re-mythologization and most of all rebarbarization, for which our present abortion rate, divorce rate, suicide rate, euthanasia rate, death penalty rate, or rate of undeclared wars, of bombings of neutral territories and even of open cities and of colonialist invasions are only a few most cruel and monstrous examples. While the other or inversion theology was like all theology from the start also a theodicy, it was not the oldest, most primitive and most archaic talion-, or retribution-, or revenge-theodicy, which can be found in many religions, also still in Judaism, in the Torah (Genesis 42: 21-22; Hertz 57161956: 160-161/21-22; Lieber 2001: 260-261/21-22). This talion-theodicy had already been concretely superseded to some extent in Christianity, in the New Testament, in the Sermon on the Mount, according to which the “Father in heaven causes his sun to rise on bad men as well as good, and his rain to fall on honest and dishonest men alike” (Matthew 5: 3848). Likewise, the followers of Jesus should not practice the talion or revenge against their enemies, but should offer to them their other cheak as well, and “love them and pray for those who persecute them.” Then they would be “sons of their Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5: 38-48; Blakney 6366) At this point the inverse theology is as theodicy closer to the Sermon on the Mount than to the Torah: e.g. in relation to the case of the trial of the SS-Colonel Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Israel (Horkheimer 1967b: 216-228, 229-238, 239-247, 317-321; 1974c: 96-97, 148-151, 164-165, 213, 218-219; 1967b: 216-228, 229-238, 239-247, 317-321).

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Interpretation of Reality and Orientation of Action The third form of the critical theory of religion has been developed by Habermas (Habermas 2001a; 2002; 2005; 2004b; 2004c; 2004d; 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007; Mendieta 2005: part IX; Vogel 2007: 87, 90; App. E, G). While for Horkheimer and Adorno the main and final goal of the critical theory was not only alternative Future III, but beyond that the totally Other, the Non-identical, the absolutely New, for Habermas it aimed in the form of his universal pragmatic, theory of communicative action, discourse-ethics, and discourse theory of the constitutional democratic state exclusively at alternative Future III–a society characterized by the reconciliation of personal autonomy and universal, i.e. anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity, or by the friendly living together of human beings in communication without domination. For Habermas, the world religions as systems of interpretation of reality and orientation of action have become obsolete because they can no longer solve the theodicy problem. Of course, Habermas’s own theory of communicative action also cannot resolve the theodicy problem under the circumstances of modern systems of human condition or human action systems. Even the most friendly living together of human beings, even the most undamaged interaction and inter-subjectivity leads finally to the absolute damage in the death of the other, and in the survivor’s possible loss of identity. Here, where Habermas’s theory of communicative action faces the issue of time, it also reaches its aporia–its dead end street. A future critical theory of religion will have to resolve this aporetical situation. However, Habermas remains as serious a theological discourse partner as his great teachers, Adorno and Horkheimer, and through them Benjamin (Adam 2006). Habermas also wants more than the power and the inspiration of critical religion and theology, and he knows of the danger connected with them, while he is indeed talking about religious traditions, e.g. Jewish mysticism, as well as about the religious and theological ancestors of the modern enlightenment movements, and their underlying modern self-consciousness. If Habermas had ever forgotten the danger involved in religion and in theology as theodicy certainly his friend Johann Baptist Metz would have reminded him of it.

Faith and Knowledge A month after the terror attacks against the World Trade Center in New York and against the Pentagon in Washington D/C, on September 11,

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2001, Habermas received the Peace Price of the German Book-Trade in the Frankfurt Paul’s Church (Habermas 2001a: 9-31; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; Fuhr 2004: 20-23; Vogel 2007: 87-90). In his expression of thanks, Habermas spoke about the very core of his communicative theory of religion: faith and knowledge (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; Habermas 2001a: 9-31; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; Fuhr 2004: 20-23). According to Habermas, this problem had been discussed so far mainly in the context of the public discourse on bio-ethics. However, now after September 11, 2001, so Habermas argued, the antagonism and the tension between secular civil society and constitutional state on one hand, and religion on the other, had exploded in a very different way. It seemed to Habermas as if the delusionary assassination had put into vibration and oscillation a religious string in the innermost being of the secular civil society. The critical theorist of religion can trace this vibration into the very argumentation of the post-metaphysical thinker Habermas. Since September 11, 2001, Habermas has described even more than before the secularization process as a history of loss and casualty. As Adorno and Horkheimer before him, Habermas was looking even more than before for a way to translate what was contained in religious stories, representations, images, and modes of speaking, into secular language (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1997j: 608-616; Habermas 1990: 9-18; Fuhr 2004: 20-23). Habermas demanded that what could only be grasped and expressed religiously had to be preserved in a conscious-making and rescuing critique, and was not allowed to be eliminated (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Habermas 1987b: chaps. 6, 7, 14, 15, 18; Fuhr 2004: 20-23). According to Habermas, the post-secular society had to adjust to the continuation of religious communities. Certainly, neither Habermas nor any other critical theorist of the first, second, third, or fourth generation has ever defended laicism or a laicistic state, which wants to push religion out of the public life (Thierse 2004: 31-36; Maschler 2004: 36-42). The not only neutral but laicistic constitutional state has denied what Ernst Bloch has called the contemporaneousness of the non-contemporaneous, i.e. the religious traditions, and has relegated it to the Middle Ages or Antiquity (Priester 2004: 39-42). The not only neutral but laicistic authoritarian or totalitarian state has practiced Carl Schmitt’s, Adolf Hitler’s jurist and political theologian, definition of the essence of the political as the differentiation between friend and enemy and has declared religion to be an enemy, which as such has to be removed from the public sphere, and in the extreme case has even to be annihilated (Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; 1987e: 293-319; Priester 2004: 39-42). The critical theorists rather opted for the secular, neutral,

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constitutional state, which allows religion to unfold itself freely in the private and the public sphere, without identifying itself with it, and without letting itself be instrumentalized for its purposes, and without functionalizing it for its political or military purposes.

New and Old Modernity-Skepsis In the beginning of the year 2004, two spiritual powers encountered each other in the Catholic Academy of Bavaria, Germany: Jürgen Habermas entered into discourse with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Prefect of the Vatican Congregation of Faith, and later Pope Benedict XVI (Habermas/ Ratzinger 2006; Fuhr 2004: 20-23; Vogel 2007: 87-90). The two discourse partners came to an astonishingly close agreement in terms of Habermas’s new and Ratzinger’s old modernity–skepsis. Of course, Habermas’s modernity skepsis was not entirely new, since he was well informed by Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which had already dealt with the dialectic between the religious and the secular, as well as with the dialectic of secularization, and the dialectic of religion (Horkheimer 1987e: 13-238; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Fuhr 2004: 20-23). Habermas and Ratzinger recognized and admitted the pathologies of religion as well as of reason, and tried to find ways to heal them. For Ratzinger, the healing of these pathologies demanded that both faith and reason remain related to each other. An irrational faith was as untrue and dangerous and destructive as a faithless rationality. Habermas spoke instead of a correlation between faith and knowledge, rather of a complementary learning process between them, which could not be closed and concluded but which had to remain dialectically open into the future. Frankfurt and Rome became locations of a common spiritual universe. Yet, at the same time, to be sure, there remained worlds of difference standing between the fallible discourse ideal of the Frankfurt School and the Vatican’s concept of an infallible ordinary or extraordinary teaching office. However, today modern and post-modern people move astonishingly fast and unproblematically between Rome and Frankfurt on the path of an enlightened common sense, which remains receptive for religious oscillations. My great teachers, Walter Dirks and Eugen Kogon, never had a problem with moving between Frankfurt and Rome, and neither did I (Dirks 1968; 1983a; 1983b; 1985; Fuhr 2004: 20-23; App. E, F). In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, faith and reason have gone already through so much with each other in Europe and America that they can depend on each other quite well.

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On February 2007, Habermas stated that Pope Benedict had given with his recent speech in Regensburg on Faith and Reason an unexpected modernity-critical turn to the old argument concerning the Hellenization of Christianity, and even already of Judaism, and finally also of Islam, and the three fold de-Hellenization of Christianity through Reformation, Enlightenment and the most recent cultural pluralism (Benedict XVI 2006; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Habermas 2007: 1-5; Küng 1992: 132-222; 1994a: 89-601, 602-906; 2004b: 226-523). Thereby, so Habermas argued, the Pope had also given a negative answer to the question of whether theology had to work and slave away on the challenges of the modern, postmetaphysical autonomous reason. Benedict XVI appealed to the synthesis of Greek metaphysics and Biblical faith, which had been founded in the Middle Ages by great thinkers and theologians from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas. Thereby, the Pope disputed implicitly that there existed good reasons for the polarization of faith and knowledge, which de facto had come about in European Modernity. In spite of the fact that Benedict criticized the idea that one had now to go back behind the modern enlightenment again, and one had to say goodbye to the insights of Modernity, he nevertheless stemmed himself against the forceless force of the arguments, through which the medieval world-view synthesis between revelation and reason had broken down (Küng 1989; 1992).

From the God of Reason to the God of Will Habermas, informed by Max Weber’s theory of modern rationalization, had to admit to Benedict XVI that the step from Johannes Dun Scotus– who produced the quodlibetan method, and for whom the universal became the individual one–to nominalism did indeed bring about the first wave of de-Hellenization and de-rationalization, and thus did lead from the Catholic God of Logos and Reason and rational discourse rather than force, violence and war, to the Protestant God of Will (Genesis 1; John 1; Hegel 1986s: 541, 573, 565-566, 574; Benedict XVI 2006; Habermas/ Ratzinger 2006; Habermas 2007: 1-5; Küng 1994a: 336-601, 602-741, 742906; App. E). Yet, Habermas insisted against the German Pope that this step from Johannes Duns Scotus to nominalism did also prepare the way to the modern natural sciences. Habermas also insisted against Benedict XVI that the enlightenment, which produced the second wave of de-Hellenization and de-rationalization, particularly with the German enlight-

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ener Kant’s critical turn, did not only lead to a devastating critique of the cosmological, teleological and ontological proof for the existence of God stemming from Antiquity and the Middle Ages and the denial of the possibility of any philosophical theodicy, but also to the modern notion of personal autonomy, which made possible the modern understanding of right, personal and social morality, freedom and democracy. Habermas also insisted against the Pope that historism, which initiated the third wave of de-Hellenization and de-rationalization, did not necessarily lead to a relativistic self-denial of reason. As a child of the enlightenment, historism also made modern people sensible for cultural differences and protected them from the over-generalization of context-dependent judgments. Habermas admitted to Benedict XVI that the Catholic Fides quaerens intellectum, the search for the rationality of faith, was indeed welcome. Yet, it did not appear helpful to Habermas when the Pope faded out of the genealogy of the common history of reason of believers, different believers, and non-believers, the three de-Hellenization pushes that have contributed to the modern self-understanding of secular autonomous reason. While Habermas stresses in his communicative theory of religion the progressive character of the three de-Hellenization processes, he is nevertheless also willing to recognize the human costs involved in any kind of progress. Yet, while Habermas is obviously willing to pay the price of the human progress produced by the three de-Hellenization shoves, Benedict XVI is willing to recognize the value of the progressive three de-Hellenization pushes, but he finds their human costs to be too high.

Bond Beyond Reason In spite of the fact that Habermas had confessed in earlier years that he was–in the words of Max Weber–supposedly unmusical in questions of religion, in more recent years he has been thinking intensely about the question of whether man did not need a bond beyond all reason, which would go beyond the rationality of the radically inner worldly communication community, for which he had fought for over three decades: a Transcendence without reification (Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1990: 9-18; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Wiegenstein 2004: 26-30; Vogel 2007: 87-90). At the same time, there is the American President Bush junior, who says that he is a born-again Christian, and who seems to have such a transcendent bond or tie, and who has been praying with his co-workers in the White House in Washington D.C. every morning before the work be-

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gins while, at the same time, he has been conducting the war against Afghanistan and the war against Iraq, which Pope Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI and 20 churches in the World Council of Churches have called unjust according to the Seven Point Just War Theory of St. Augustine long before it started, and in which up to February 2007–over 3,000 American soldiers had died, and over 20,000 American servicemen had been wounded, and over 600,000 Iraqi civilians, among them many children, had been killed. He also allowed the Israeli war against Lebanon to continue, which likewise cost the lives of many non-combatants, including a large number of children. Of course, also the Jihadists pray and fight for Allah. The dilemma is obvious: the one God of the three Abrahamic religions seems to give very contradictory messages to Jews, Christians and Muslims. There are also good reasons to assume that the enlightened liberal Western society, which can merely deal with numbers and measuring, and in which quantity seems to have swallowed up quality, and which thus can no longer be pious, merciful, and solidary–in any case not without at least minimizing the principles of its own Keynesian or Friedmannian free market prosperity–is in a crisis (Hegel 1986e: 209-446; 1986g: 339-397; Wiegenstein 2004: 26-30). Likewise, there are good reasons for the suspicion that the other two monotheisms besides Christianity, namely Judaism and Islam, can see a solution against the deep historical insults and offences– that often reach back into distant times, and with which also more recent experiences with persecution, and mass murder, and colonialism, and imperialism are connected–only in the total reconstruction of society according to their divinely revealed images and ideas.

Deficit of Enlightenment While the wars raged on in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, Habermas moved with his theory of communicative action between religion and naturalism (Habermas 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9). His focus points was religion in the public realm of the neutral constitutional state. Habermas explored the cognitive presuppositions for the public use of reason by religious and secular citizens of the secular liberal constitutional state. Informed by Kant’s, Hegel’s, Fichte’s, Schelling’s, and Hölderlin’s philosophy of religion, Habermas tried to determine the boundary between faith and knowledge (Kant 1975; 1981; Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986p: 9-88; Jamme/Schneider 1984; Schelling 1977; Taylor 1983: chaps. 18, 19, 20; Fackenheim 1967; Henrich 1971: chap. 1; Horstmann 1978: chaps. 6, 9, 12, 14; Weiss 1974: part VII; Habermas 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9). Habermas traced the whole ef-

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fect history of Kant’s philosophy of religion and pointed out its actual significance even for the present political and religious context in the secular constitutional state. He developed this history of religious tolerance as pacemaker of cultural rights in the modern, secular constitutional state. He also discussed the consciousness of what is admittedly missing in the modern enlightenment: its deficit (Habermas 2007: 1-5). He reflected on faith and knowledge and the defeatism of modern reason. According to Habermas, religion and reason entangle and ensnare themselves mutually in learning processes still in Modernity. Habermas was convinced that the self-critical argument of secular reason with the faith convictions of the great world religions could sharpen the consciousness for the unsatisfied claims of religious traditions, and that it could strengthen reason against defeatism, which is intrinsic to it. It was in the context of Islamic terrorism and Israeli and Christian counter-terrorism in the form of bombings and assassinations that all three forms of the critical theory of religion gained through Habermas new recognition in the public realm of European and American constitutional states. The philosopher Habermas received many public honors and academic awards for showing a way through his theory of communicative action and discourse–the forceless force of the better argument–and for many political interventions into the public sphere of the German Federal Republic and the European Union between the world-religions on one hand, and secular knowledge, and enlightenment, and modernity on the other (Vogel 2007: 87-90; App. E, F). Habermas has asked himself sometimes, whether it would not have been better for him to become a politician. However, the philosopher Habermas has done more good in the public sphere of Germany and the European Union than any politician could possibly have accomplished (Vogel 2007: 87-90).

Religious Rite de Passage On February 10, 2007, Habermas remembered the funeral service of Max Frisch that had taken place on April 9, 1991 in the Foundation Church St. Peter in Zürich (Habermas 2007: 1-5). At the beginning of the funeral celebration Karin Pulliod, the life-partner of Frisch, read a short declaration of the deceased. In the declaration it said that Frisch wished to leave the word to the neighbor and that without Amen. In his declaration, Frisch thanked the pastors of St. Peter’s Church, which belongs to the ProtestantEvangelical Paradigm of Christianity, for giving permission that his coffin could stand in their church (Küng 1994a: 602-741; Habermas 2007: 1-5). Frisch’s ashes would be dispersed somewhere. Two friends gave their

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eulogies. There was no minister. There was no blessing. The funeral community consisted of intellectuals, most of whom had not much to do any longer with religion and church. For the meal following the funeral celebration in the church, Frisch himself had still put together the menu.

Agnosticism In 1991, Habermas did not find the event of Frisch’s funeral celebration to be odd (Habermas 2007: 1-5). Yet, in 2007, Habermas considered the form, the place and the course of Frisch’s funeral celebration to be odd. Max Frisch had been–like Habermas himself–an agnostic, who had refused any kind of a confession of faith. According to Habermas, Frisch had obviously felt the painfulness of a non-religious form of funeral. Through his choice of the place for the funeral, Frisch had publicly documented the fact that the enlightened Modernity had no appropriate and suitable equivalent for a religious way to cope with the last rite de passage, which would conclude a life history. In contrast to the agnostic Frisch, Max Horkheimer, the founder of the Frankfurt School, had after he had died in Nürnberg on July 7, 1973, a Rabbinical funeral in the Jewish community of Bern as a few years later the Cabbalist Gerhard Scholem, in whose Rabbinical funeral Habermas participated in Jerusalem (Habermas 1982: 438-440; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 91-132, 140-141). Horkheimer had the second verse of Psalm 91: “In you Eternal One alone I trust” written on his gravestone in the cemetery of Bern (Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 17). That was obviously something more than agnosticism. It was a confession of faith in the context of the modern Assimilation Paradigm of Judaism (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 37, 40; Küng 1991b: 169-222, 223-274). In general, the critical theorists of society, who had concretely superseded Jewish ethical monotheism into the modern enlightenment, were also not satisfied with the Kantian agnosticism, or its Hegelian supersession, and thus determinately negated both into their post-theistic negative, radically demythologized, inverse, cipher theology as theodicy (Kant 1929: 74, 87,149, 490; 1974a; 1975; 1981; Hegel 1986q: 347-536; Adorno 1970b; 1997j/2: 608-616; Kogon 1967; Adorno/Kogon 1958a; 1958b; Adorno/Dirks 1974).

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Two Readings Habermas had two readings of Max Frisch’s last agnostic gesture (Habermas 2007: 1-5). Habermas could first of all understand Frisch’s gesture as an expression of melancholy in the face of something irretrievably lost (Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247; Peukert 1976: 273-282; Lenhardt 19751975; Habermas 2007: 1-5). Secondly, Habermas could also see Frisch’s funeral celebration as a paradoxical event that tells modern people something about the secular autonomous reason: this reason is disturbed, alarmed and worried about the opaqueness of its only apparently clarified relationship to religion. In Habermas’s view, the Church, even the reformed Church of Zwingli, had to leap over its own shadow when it allowed this secular funeral celebration without Amen to take place in its holy halls. For Habermas, there existed a peculiar dialectic between the philosophically enlightened self-understanding of Modernity on one hand, and the theological self-understanding of the great world religions, which tower and rise as the most bulky element from the past, from what Jasper’s called the Axis-Time of about 500 before Christ, from Antiquity and Middle Ages into the present Modernity (App. E, F).

No Foul Compromise In his communicative theory of religion, Habermas did not want to enter any foul compromise between incompatible sides: the religious and the secular, faith and world-knowledge, a relationship that also prepared the way to the modern natural sciences (Habermas 2007: 1-5). According to Habermas, modern people were not allowed to dodge the alternative between the anthropocentric perspective and the views from the distance of the theo- or cosmo-centric thinking. Yet for Habermas, it made a difference if religious and secular people spoke with each other or just about each other. For such speaking with each other of religious and secular citizens two presuppositions had to be given and fulfilled. First of all, the religious side had to recognize the secular authority of the natural reason: the fallible results of the institutionalized sciences and the principles of a universalistic egalitarianism, private right as well as personal and social morality. Secondly, secular reason was not allowed to make itself out to be the judge over the truths of faith. That had to happen, even when the secular autonomous reason could accept as rational in result only that religious semantic and semiotic material and potential, which it could invert or sublate or translate into its own, in universally accessible public

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discourse. For Habermas, as the presupposition from the theological perspective was not considered trivial, so too was that from the other out of the philosophical view not trivialized (App. E, F).

Expansion According to Habermas, from the perspective of geographical expansion, it was not the nationally constituted religious communities–like the Protestant Churches in Germany or in Great Britain–that were successful, but rather the Catholic World Church and most of the decentralized and interconnected and world-wide operating movements of the Evangelicals and the Muslims (Habermas 2007: 1-5). The Catholics and Evangelicals are extending through Latin America, China, South Korea and the Philippines. The Muslims are spreading through the Near East into Africa and beyond the Sahara as well as into South-East-Asia, where Indonesia has the largest Islamic population. In Habermas’s view, with this revitalization of several world religions grew the frequency of the conflicts among different religious groups and confessions. While Habermas was aware that many of these religious conflicts have originated from non-religious reasons as well, he nevertheless insisted that their religious codification has increased and intensified the conflicts’ ardour. In Habermas’s perspective, since September 11, 2001 everybody has talked most of all about the political instrumentalization of the Islam. However, Habermas also knew very well that the born again Christian, George W. Bush, could not have found a majority and could not have won the Presidency twice without the cultural-political struggle of the Christian Right, which Thomas Assheuer has called a convincing connection and association of democracy export and neo-liberalism. This happened in spite of the obvious antagonism between the mentality of the hard core born-again Christians characterized by a fundamentalism which is grounded in the literal exegesis of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, on one hand, and the fundamental convictions of Modernity and the neutrality of the modern state, i.e., the same religious freedom for all citizens and the emancipation of science from religious authority, on the other.

Inner Criticism Unfortunately, Habermas did not apply–like Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse and Fromm, Benjamin and Loewenthal had done before–an in-

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ner criticism to Judaism and Christianity in Europe and particularly in America. He was therefore not able to differentiate between its genuine and its phony form, by simply confronting the religious theory of the born again Christians, their dogmatic interpretation of realty and their moral orientation of action, with their personal and political praxis through the introduction of the only functionalistic sentence in the New Testament, specifically in the Sermon on the Mount: “You will be able to tell them by their fruits” (Matthew 7: 16, 17, 18; Luke 6: 43). There seems to be a slight contradiction between the fundamentalist mentality of millions of American Catholics and Evangelicals, on one hand, and their vote for a President, who had initiated two wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, and who had been directly responsible up to February 2007 for the deaths and wounds of thousands of American soldiers, and Iraqi civilians, and two million Iraqi refugees, and indirectly for thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian civilian casualties and refugees, and who had threatened further violence against Iran, on the other. (Vance 2007; Mercieca 2007; Freedman 2007; Philipps 2004; Donnelly 2006; Derfner 2007; Fair 2007: 19; Zinn 2005; Lando 2007; Shadid 2007; Geiger 2007; Gardiner 2007; Schwartz 2007; Cockburn 2007. Aris/Campbell 2004; Santora 2007; Gordon/Cloud 2007; Wafa/Gall 2007; Opel/Mizher 2007; Zeleni 2007; Reese 2006; Wokusch 2006). How does all that fit together with the Augustianian Seven Point Just War Theory, which Catholics and Protestants confess to, not to speak of the Sermon on the Mount, which they all have in common? There exists a complete split and abyss and disassociation between validity and facticity, as well as between theory and praxis. Inner criticism could easily discover this. The neo-conservative movement continues to lead the world community into always deeper tragedies in direction of alternative Future II–a global collision of religiously determined civilizations, which could climax into a third world war with the help of weapons of mass destruction like atomic and hydrogen bombs. (Vall 2007: 2-5; App. E, F, G). For the critical theorist of religion, there are certain forms of behavior and action, and even of character, which are simply incompatible with the haggada and the halacha of the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, be they Hellenized or de-Hellenized. The Rabbi’s teachings do not only enlighten people about their sinfulness, but also demand from them and encourage them to break with it individually and collectively, and to stop stealing, and to cease murdering in support of stealing, and not to lie any longer about stealing and murdering (Mathew 5-7; Luke 6).

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Habermas, who has rejected, like all the other critical theorists, a narrowminded enlightenment, which is not enlightened about itself, and which therefore denies that religion has any rational content at all, has unlike Hegel, for whom religion was indeed a form of the spirit, but only as a kind of a representing thinking subordinated under philosophy, a difficult time to see the frequent antagonism between appearance and essence: here the center of Christianity, or also of Judaism, or of Islam, or any other world religion, on one hand, and their manifest historical paradigms, on the other (Hegel 1986e: 445-457; 19861: 7-185; App. E, F). While the postmetaphysical and thus, also post-Hegelian thinker Habermas has rejected Hegel’s dialectical sublation of religion into philosophy, he nevertheless is willing, together with Adorno and Benjamin, to invert or translate semantic or semiotic materials and potentials from the depth of the mythos or religion into the secular discourse of the scientific expert cultures and through them into communicative action in the life world of the human action system and maybe even into economic and political praxis: e.g. the religious concept of man as the image of God into the enlightenment notion of human dignity, or theological meaning into linguistic meaning (Habermas 1988a; 1988b). At least Hegel’s dialectical method belongs to an enlightenment that is enlightened about itself and has not been perverted into positivism (Horkheimer/Adorno 1972). It is this dialectic that underlies Hegel’s sublation of religion into philosophy as well as Adorno’s, Benjamin’s and Habermas’s inversion of rational religious contents into the secular discourse of the expert cultures: e.g. into the critical theory of society and religion as on-going discourse.

Loss of Metaphysics According to Habermas, after the breakdown of Hegel’s philosophical system and the end of metaphysics, philosophical theory has lost its extra-everyday status. (Hegel 1986a: 234, 458; 1986b: 255, 575; 1986c: 427; 1986d: 164, 419; 1986e: 13, 14, 38, 61, 87, 131; Habermas 1988a: 59-60). Of course, already the young Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin had predicted around 1800 that the entirety of metaphysics would in the future fall into morality (Hegel 1986a: 234; Jamme/Schneider 1984: 11-14). Yet, Hegel continued to insist that the limitations of life received through metaphysics their limits in the connection of the whole, which was the truth (Hegel 1986a: 458; 1986c: 24-25). With metaphysics, the whole and the

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truth in the emphatic sense also got lost. For Hegel, metaphysics had always brought to consciousness the identity of thinking and being, which the common consciousness presupposed (Hegel 1986b: 255). However, now after Kant, metaphysics had become the word, like abstract and almost also thinking, from which everybody ran away as from something that was afflicted by the plague (Hegel 1986b: 575). Metaphysics became something like objective logic, and its categories and determinations of reflections. Its categories and determinations of reflection took the place of the metaphysics. (Hegel 1986d: 164; 1986e: 61, 87, 131). Also for those thinkers who still held on to the philosophy of the Antiquity and the Middle Ages, metaphysics had collapsed, perished and gone under in Modernity (Hegel 1986d: 419). It had been stamped out and exterminated and eradicated root and branch (Hegel 1986e: 13). Already earlier than this, Hegel saw the peculiar spectacle that an educated nation, like Germany, was without metaphysics: it looked like a highly decorated temple without the Holiest (Hegel 1986e: 14, 38). Objective logic took the place of metaphysics. (Hegel 1986e: 61, 87, 131). Hegel still remembered that in earlier times, in the Middle Ages, more precisely in the Medieval Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity, theology had been the keeper and savior of the speculative mysteries and of the admittedly dependent metaphysics (Hegel 1986e: 14-15; Küng 1993a; 1993b; 1994a: 336-601; 1994b; 1998). Hegel’s philosophy was not without a certain crypto-Catholicism. However, already in Hegel’s time, at least Protestant theology had given up metaphysics in exchange for good feelings, for the practical-popular and for the scholarly historical things. For Hegel, this loss of metaphysics corresponded to the disappearance in Modernity, more precisely in the Protestant Evangelical Paradigm of the Reformation, of those solitary men and women, e.g. the monks and nuns, who were sacrificed by their nations and were taken out of the world for the purpose that the contemplation of the Eternal would be present, as well as a life devoted to and serving the Infinite alone (Hegel 1986e: 14-15, 38; Küng 1994: 602-741; 1994b; Dirks 1968). These solitary men and women left the world not for the sake of utility, but rather for the sake of the blessing. Thus, according to Hegel, after the expulsion of the so called darkness of metaphysics, the colorless occupation of the human spirit turned into itself, and with itself, human existence seemed to be transformed into the cheerful and bright world of flowers, among which, as is well known, there were no black ones.

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chapter three The Post-Metaphysical Philosophy

The post-metaphysical thinker Habermas did not only know very well his Kant, Schelling and Hegel, but he was also fully aware that there were quite a few black flowers in the more or less bright world of the somewhat derailed Modernity (Fromm 1968: chap. 3; Habermas 2006d; 2007: 1-5; Borradori 2005). For Habermas, after the departure of metaphysics, philosophical theory had lost and forfeited its extra-everyday status (Habermas 1988a: 59-60, 181-183). Particularly after the linguistic turn, so Habermas explained, the explosive contents of the extra-everyday experiences have migrated into the art, which had become autonomous, and into the critical religion, which had become self-reflective (Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1982: 11-32, 48-95, 127-143; 1986: 53-54; 1990: 9-18; 1991a: part III; 1998a; 1998b; 2002; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; Thompson/Held 1982: 238-250). Habermas had to admit that also after this deflation and after Hegel, even more and more of the secularized everyday life-world had in no way become immune against what he called the cross of the empirical present: the shaking, deeply moving, subversive breaking in of extra everyday events, as e.g. a cancer diagnosis and death (Hegel 1986g: 26-27, 42-43; 1986p: 272; Habermas 1988a: 59-60; Siebert 1994c: chaps. 2, 6; 2001: chap. 3). According to Habermas, the worldreligions, which had been robbed and deprived to a large extent of their world-view function, were, nevertheless, considered from an external sociological point of view, irreplaceable for normalizing the extraordinary, extra-everyday events in the everyday life world of modern action systems. Therefore, so Habermas argued, post-metaphysical thinking still coexisted with the religious praxis. This did not happen in the sense of what Bloch called the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous. For Habermas, the continuing coexistence of post-metaphysical philosophy and practical religion even threw light on an odd dependence of a philosophical theory that had lost its contact with the extra everyday events in the everyday life world in modern and postmodern social systems. According to Habermas, as long as religious language brought along with it inspiring semantic and semiotic contents, materials and potentials that could not be given up, and that for the time being, withdrew from and escaped the power of expression of a philosophical language, and that still waited for their inversion or translation or sublation into argumentative discourse, philosophy also in its post-metaphysical form would not be able to replace, to oust, to displace, or to repress.

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Return to the Sources The new dialectical theory of religion concretely supersedes into itself all three forms of the critical theory of religion: the first form, which concentrated on the negation of all forms of idolatry; the second form which emphasized the longing and the hope for Messianic redemption; and the third form, which engaged in the dialectic of the religious and the secular, faith and knowledge, revelation and autonomous reason, religious mythos and enlightenment. For the new dialectical religiology, there is only one way out of the present cul-de-sac or dead-end street of the religious-secular antagonism, which seems to end in a long tunnel before a shooting wall, or at the stake, and the resolution of which all so called realists consider to be completely and abstractly utopian: the return in mutual discourse and symmetrical recognition between believers, who have repented the dialectic of religion and enlighteners, who have reflected on the dialectic of enlightenment, to the essence, or the center of the living worldreligions on one hand, and to the roots and the sources of the modern enlightenment as a movement to free people from their fears and to make them into masters of their fate, on the other (Wiegenstein 2004: 26-30). For the dialectical theorist of religion, the Christian Churches could be truly credible again in the strictest sense of the word, if they could emancipate themselves from all secular economic and political power; and if they could return to the Sermon on the Mount and could replace the Lex Talionis by the Golden Rule, and by forgiveness; and if they could preach and live again the Evangelium of love without claiming for that anything else than the witness of their believers; and if they could ban as obsolete into the old libraries the last residuals of the traditional crusader-fantasies. An Islam, which could expose the Holy Qur’an to modern higher criticism and to a critical revision as it has been accomplished by Bible criticism for Judaism and Christianity in the Occident, and which could bring again such Suras and Sura sections into splendor, which know more of the love of human beings than of punishments–and there are such– would not have to prepare 16 year old boys or girls for becoming living bombs in Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa, Sudan, Indonesia, and elsewhere. Also, a Jewish monotheism that would not transform the pious wish “Next year in Jerusalem” into a geo-political maxim, and would follow the Golden Rule, which it shares with the other two Abrahamic monotheisms and with all other still living world religions and which contains much of the law and the prophets, and a Judaism which could act like the great Joseph, who replaced the revenge against his 11

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brothers, who first wanted to kill him and then sold him into Egyptian slavery, with a free, full and loving forgiveness after their sincere contrition for their crime–could help to overcome the present crisis and deadend situation in the Near East, and elsewhere around the globe (Genesis 42; Hertz 5716-1956: 159/7; Horkheimer 1974c: 8, 28-29, 52-53, 148-151, 157-158, 164-165, 169, 208, 218-219; Grosbard 2001; Wiegenstein 2004: 26-30; App. E, G). Certainly, such religions having become self-reflective and self-critical and their subsequent reformations having taken seriously again their promises of redemption, could lead closer to post-modern alternative Future III–a more just and peaceful reconciled society, in which not only everybody could become blessed, blissful and happy in his own way, but also his or her ill neighbor as well. It would, of course, also be helpful if the bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian enlighteners would return to their original humanistic sources and impulses before the dialectic of enlightenment and secularization started, and would pursue their original program of liberation (Horkheimer/Adorno 2002). The presupposition of such metanoia would be to assert the origin against the long and certainly not always fatal tradition to concretely supersede the history, no matter how powerfully formative it has been so far. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, which moves between religion and naturalism, the hope may not be all too great that such metanoia will really happen and be achieved in the globalized late capitalist society and in the present transition period from Modernity to Post-Modernity: however, only through such metanoia would liberation and redemption be possible. (Habermas 2001a; 2002; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Siebert 2005a; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c). To be sure, while all three forms of the critical theory of religion are post-enlightenment, they still preserve strong enlightenment elements (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969). Also, while all three critical theories of religion are post-theistic, they nevertheless still contain strong theistic elements (Horkheimer 1988a; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 29, 37, 40; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1976; Habermas 2002). So does the post-modern, post-theistic new dialectical religiology, in which all three forms of the critical theory of society and religion are concretely superseded (Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1972 chaps 2, 4,5, 6; 1969; 1971a; 1987k: 289-328; 1988a; Tillich 1972; Habermas 2001a; 2002; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Siebert 2000; 2001; 2002a).

chapter four

From Quantitative to Qualitative Infinity According to the critical theorist of the second regeneration, Karl Heinz Haag, over the course of centuries the medieval universality struggle had pushed metaphysics back more and more into the alliance with the natural sciences, which emancipated themselves from theology and philosophy and concentrated on quantitative space and time infinity rather than on the qualitative Infinity, the concrete Universality (Hegel 1801: 1-22; 1986h: 181-230; Healan 2007: 2-22; Haag 1983: chaps. 1-3; 2005; App. A, B, C, D, E, F). However, metaphysics was still making a noise right into the 20th and 21st centuries, and even into the post-metaphysical Frankfurt School.

Critique of Philosophy In his newest book Metaphysic as Demand of a Rational World Conception (2005), Haag traced this philosophical development as in the modern centuries it yielded to nominalism and positivism even where it wanted to oppose it through the construction of an absolute Spirit and as it finally came to its end in neo-positivism, which abolished philosophy altogether (Haag 1983; 2005). The problems of such philosophy were well known: chorismos and methexis. First of all, there existed a deep antagonism between universal ideas and particular singular things. The main questions concerning the dialectical notion were: how could the particular participate in the universal? How could it do that? How did the universal particularize or singularize itself? How could it do that? Why should it do that at all? Secondly, in the static philosophical world systems no change was thinkable. Progress could not be comprehended. Already in his earlier book, Progress in Philosophy (Haag 1983) emphasized two positive points of reference where philosophy poisoned itself against itself: Kant’s and Marx’s–what the second generation critical theorist Alfred Schmidt called–negative ontology, and their synthesis in the dialectical philosophy of Adorno. According to this negative ontology, one could say, that there was something ontically given, but one could not say anything positively about it. According to Kant, this was so because all one could know of it

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was its appearances. For Marx, one only knew of its socially mediated form. In his new book, Haag developed these two bases, beginnings, or starting points through extending his critique of philosophy to the natural sciences and to theology.

Critique of Theology For decades Haag, who himself came from a Catholic family in Frankfurt (Höchst) and from the Jesuit Philosophical-Theological University of St. Georgen in Frankfurt (Niederrad) where Adorno had grown up, observed that in the Catholic theology of Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, Johann B. Metz and Cardinal Ratzinger–now Pope Benedict XVI–as well as in the Protestant theology of Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich and Karl Barth, nominalism and positivism and the natural sciences had been yielded to and how they were at the same time avoided (Rahner 1964; 1968a; 1968b; 1976; Lehmann/Raffelt 1979; Haag 1983; 2005). The theologians cleared and vacated the field of the empirical world. They shifted a radically de-mythologized and de-substantialized God into a safe and secure but exactly also inaccessible Beyond. Instead, the theologians insisted on the act of faith. In a thoroughly positivistically dominated world, the theologians admittedly recognized the results of the natural sciences, but they held against them a defiant nevertheless. The theologians could not say any longer why one should engage in such a nevertheless of faith because they had given up an objectively given God a long time ago. Already in October 1969, Haag told Horkheimer that the Roman Catholic Church had practically given up Transcendence (Horkheimer 1988n: 535-536; Haag 1983; 2005). The work of Thomas Aquinas played no role any longer. The participation in the sacrament of reconciliation decreased rapidly. Since Duns Scotus and the beginning of the de-Hellenization process, the natural law became limited to the four first commandments. Pope Paul VI saw the role of the natural law purely biologically (Paul VI 1968; Horkheimer 1988n: 535-536; Haag 1983; 2005). According to Haag, faith had become an irrational act in which no God stepped towards the believer any longer or got in contact with him or her as it had happened in the Torah, the New Testament and in the Koran: transcendence without counter-movement (Haag 1983; 2005; Siebert 2000). The theologians reduced the existence of religion and God to the decision and achievement of the believers. Thereby, this existence of religion and God became itself still a piece of unrecognized mythology. In the believer, human subjectivity was made into an idol. In the perspective of the new critical theory of religion, in-

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formed by Haag, modern civil society is characterized by the antagonism between an irrational faith, which stresses quality and neglects quantity, and a faithless rationality, which emphasizes quantity and neglects quality, and which leaves both ideas without objective measure (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986h: 181-230; 1986p: 9-53; Siebert 1987a; 1987c; 1993; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 1994d; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2003a; 2003b; 2004a; 2004b; 2005a; 2005b; 2006c; 2006d; App. E, F). Both extremes are equally abstract, and thus untrue and destructive.

From Exact to Rational Explanation of Nature In Haag’s view, the exact explanation of nature as expressed by the contemporary natural sciences could turn into a rational explanation of nature if it would turn to its opposite: to metaphysics (Haag 1983; 2005). With the natural sciences one drifted toward consequences, which run counter to and contradicted most strongly its own claim. With the natural sciences one came closest to a rational metaphysics. Here one could see how a discipline, which did not want to be philosophy, was nevertheless stretched and spread out into a philosophical thinking without being aware of it. Haag tried to develop a philosophy beyond nominalism and universalism/realism as well as materialism and idealism. Nominalism had to escape them if it drew merely the consequence out of the mistakes of metaphysics. Nominalism was the counter-position to metaphysics, which took seriously the latter’s principle: the reduction of the world to abstract determinations.

All-powerful Reason Like his teachers Horkheimer and Adorno, Haag was engaged in the determinate negation of metaphysics (Adorno 1971; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; Haag 1983; 2005). To be sure, Haag was critical towards metaphysics. Yet, he also did not only want to negate what was false in it. Haag wanted to recognize the true in the midst of the untruth of metaphysics. Haag wanted to rescue the right intention in metaphysics. Haag asked himself, how he could possibly move from the natural sciences to a rational metaphysics, and how he could possibly transcend legitimately the boundary of knowledge of physics. For Haag, a rationally constructed nature, which the natural science proved and presupposed, pointed toward the prevailing of an all-powerful Reason. Thus, Haag reached in logical strictness

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and sharpness for the knowledge of God. Haag could not say anything content-wise about the almighty Reason. This precisely was Haag’s negative theology or respectively his negative metaphysics. According to Haag, one had to assume a God and one had to start from metaphysics, but one could not make any positive statements about it. Haag could merely show that the assumption of an all-powerful Reason was indispensable for a rational world understanding. According to Haag, the critically thinking human spirit had in principle to renounce, forego, and give up any statements as regards content about the being and the work of the Divinity. Haag stands in the long line of thinkers between Anaxagoras and Hegel, who taught that Reason–the Nous, the Logos–governed the world, but– unlike them–he cannot say anything concretely any longer about this divine world-government (Hegel 1986c: 54; 1986e: 44; 1986j: 45; 1986l: 1929, 328, 529, 1986p: 379; 1986r: 124, 189-404, 406, 429, 441, 442-443, 448, 468; 1986s: 196, 373). Haag had lost what his teacher Adorno, who had dedicated his Hegel book to him, had called the primordial power of the dialectical notion, which once had been a theological one (Hegel 1986h: 181-230, 307-393; Adorno 1970b: 111-112; 1871). For the new critical theory of religion, recourse not only to critical theorists of the first generation like Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm, Marcuse, Löwenthal, etc. but also to Hegel remains unavoidable (Hegel 1986c: 54; 1986e: 44; 1986j: 45; 1986l: 19-29, 328, 529, 1986p: 379; 1986r: 124, 189-404, 406, 429, 441, 442-443, 448, 468; 1986s: 196, 373; Adorno 1970b: 123-124).

Rationality of Faith The critical theorist of religion is somewhat pleasantly amazed by the goal of the most recent development in Haag’s philosophy (Haag 1983; 2005). For Haag, the critical philosopher or theorist was the better theologian in relation to the philosophical systems, which were built on God as well as on theology. While the critical theory rescued God, it at the same time stood up for human beings and their world. According to Haag, theology also disappointed that person, who admittedly put or laid down, got rid off, discarded or cast off faith and knowledge, but who nevertheless was of the opinion to still find in it–abstracting from its content–a residuum where one held on to the absolute truth. Yet, on top of it, theology was also still irrational. Theology was irrational not because it believed in another, super-sensual, super-sensuous, super-sensory dimension, but because it was not able to justify and to give specific reasons for the rationality of this faith. Theology had evaporated just as the systems of the

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pantheistic metaphysics had done. Here God had been limited to pure identity, and in the same move the world had been reduced to be nothing else than a mode of divine existence. However, so Haag asked, what kind of divine existence? God had become a completely non-personal identity system into which nothing could penetrate. As such, God was not out of himself an unfathomable secret or mystery or riddle, but only a mysterium established through a human thinking that abstracted from the world and from its own achievements.

Emptiness Certainly, for the critical theorist of religion, also God, whom Haag kept back after his critique of philosophy and theology, was oddly empty (Haag 1983; 2005). In Erich Heintel’s words, Haag’s God was one without qualities, properties or attributes. In the perspective of the new dialectical theory of religion, precisely in relation to the possibility of thinking and speaking about God, i.e. in relation to the supposed incompatibility of God and thinking which Haag asserted, a detailed argument with Hegel would be interesting, fruitful, and productive. However, Haag had inherited a certain hostility against Hegel not from Schopenhauer, Marx, or Kierkegaard, not to speak from his teachers Horkheimer and Adorno, but rather from his Roman Catholic background. In this hostility Haag immediately put aside Hegel’s dialectical philosophy as the worst and most awful pantheism and identity philosophy. Haag did this as if Hegel had not himself already sharply criticized pantheism and identity philosophy, and that partially with the same arguments as he himself used. In our discourse at his home in Höchst near Frankfurt in May 1982, shortly before the publication of his book The Progress in the Philosophy, Haag’s hostility against Hegel climaxed in the statement that he was the arch-positivist (Haag 1981; 1982; 1983: chap. 4; 2005).

Exhaustion of Pantheism and Identity Philosophy In his dialectical logic, Hegel had opposed the sentence that being was the transition into nothing and that nothing was the transition into being. He opposed the Judeo-Christian notion of the creatio ex nihilo or the sentence of becoming to the most significant sentence of the thinkers of Greek Antiquity–ex nihilo nihil fit, and that something came only out of something, the notions of the creatio aequivoca, or the creatio sui ipsius, or the sen-

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tence of the eternity of matter; shortly, the sentence of pantheism (Genesis 1 and 2; Job 26: 7; 2 Maccabees 7: 28; John 1; Hegel 1986e: 85; 1986h: 191-192). From the very start of his logic, Hegel’s dialectical philosophy was opposed to all forms of oriental and occidental pantheism (Hegel 1986e: 82-114, 115-173; 1986h: 181-230). That nothing is not at all, was the core sentence of every metaphysical pantheism (Hegel 1986k: 422). According to Hegel, the old Greek philosophers made the reflection that the sentence–out of something became something or out of nothing became nothing–did indeed supersede becoming. This was so because that out of which becoming came, and that what became existence or something, were one and the same. This was only the sentence of the abstract identity of analytical understanding. For Hegel, the sentence that God was the measure of all things, and the sentence that God was being, Ens a se, were both equally pantheistic; only the first sentence was more truthful. In Hegel’s perspective, however, it had to strike somebody as wonderful and marvelous to see the sentences–that out of nothing came nothing, or that out of something became only something–recited and delivered completely uninhibited even still in the beginning of the 19th century without some consciousness that they were the foundation of pantheism: i.e. without knowledge that the old Greek philosophers had completely exhausted the consideration of these sentences and that therefore, they could no longer be used. For Hegel, pantheism had been superseded once and for all by theism. In Hegel’s perspective, God was no longer merely Substance, as in oriental and occidental pantheistic religions, but also Subject as in the theism of the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Küng 1978: 155-190; 1984; 1991; 1994; 2004; App. E).

Atheism and Pantheism According to Hegel, the accusation of atheism that had been made against philosophy earlier in Modernity, namely, that it had too little of God in itself, had become far less frequent around 1800 (Hegel 1986j: 380-381; Horkheimer 1967b: 216-228; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19; 37, 40; Küng 1978: 221-380). However, at the same time the accusation of pantheism against philosophy, that it had too much of God in itself, had spread further to the extent that the charge of atheism retreated. In Hegel’s time, the accusation of pantheism was no longer only considered to be merely an accusation, but rather to be a pure factum. In consensus with the empty philosophy of analytical understanding of the bourgeois enlightenment to which it wanted to be so opposed, but on which it indeed

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rested completely, it was particularly the pious people, so Hegel argued, who felt so distinguished in their piety that they believed themselves to be in no need of proof, that grounded themselves on the assurance, which was, so to speak, mentioned only as a generally known matter of fact, that philosophy was the all-one teaching, or pantheism. In Hegel’s view, it was more to the honor of religious piety and to theology itself to accuse a philosophical system, e.g. that of Spinoza, of atheism than of pantheism, in spite of the fact that this accusation looked at first more harsh and hostile (Hegel 1986a: 74; 1986b: 10, 37, 106, 106, 327, 339-352; 1986h: 160-161; 1986j: 381-382). Hegel’s philosophy was neither atheistic nor pantheistic (Hegel 1986d: 448; 1986h: 161-162; 1986j: 380-381; 1986p: 57, 94, 99-100, 323; 1986q: 386; 1986k: 190, 390-466; Küng 1978: 155-190, 221-380). After the great bourgeois revolutions in England, France and America, atheism as well as pantheism have taken on the form of modern skepticism, which, unlike that of Greek and Roman Antiquity, was not only directed against the finite world but against the Infinite as well (Hegel 1986b: 137, 213-272; 1986c: 63, 72-73, 73-74, 79, 90, 155-177, 184, 356-357, 400, 459; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 18).

God in General For Hegel, in order to find atheism and the faith in God in experience spread out more or less, what mattered was if one was content with the determination of God in general or if a more determinate knowledge of him was demanded (Hegel 1986h: 161-162; Fromm 1966b: chap. 2). According to Hegel, in the Judeo-Christian world at least it was not admitted that the African fetishes, or the Chinese and Indian idols, or even the Greek and Roman gods were God (Hegel 1986h: 161-162; 1986k: 249389; 1986q: 96-184; Fromm 1966b chap. 2; Lundgren 1998; Küng 1984b, 1984c; App. E). Therefore, those people, who believed in those idols, did not believe in God. However, so Hegel argued, if in contrast to that JudeoChristian position, the consideration was made that in such belief in idols in itself lies the faith in God in general–just as in the particular individual is found the genus, then idol worship was also valid as a faith not only in idols but also in God. Vice versa, so Hegel remembered, the Athenians had treated the poets and philosophers as atheists, who considered Zeus and the other Greek gods to be merely clouds, and so on, and who asserted only a God in general. Likewise, for almost three hundred years the Roman courts imposed on the Christian’s non licet esse vos and sentenced them to death for atheism because they did not sacrifice to the gods who

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protected the Roman state and empire, and consequentially also for high treason.

The Principle What really mattered for Hegel was not the in-itself of the object, but rather what of it had come out and thus was for the human consciousness (Hegel 1986h: 161-163). Even the most common and insignificant sensual or sensuous perception, view, or experience of man would be religion, if one let be valid the confusion of these determinations of particular and universal, individual and genus, idols and God in general. This was so, because there was admittedly contained in itself in each of such sense perception, in each spiritual element, the Principle, the Absolute, which developed and purified would raise itself into religion. In Hegel’s view, however, it was something else to be capable of religion on one hand, and to have religion, on the other. The in-itself of religion expressed the capability and the possibility of religion. Thus, by 1819 captains Sir John Ross and Sir William Edward Parry had discovered people like the Eskimos, of whom they denied to have any religion whatsoever: even such kind of religion which historians like Herodotus had still wanted to find even in the African magicians, the goetes. According to Hegel on a completely different side, an Englishman who had spent the first months of 1800 in Rome said in his travel story concerning the present day Romans that the common people were religious bigots, but that those people who could read and write were all atheists. In Hegel’s perspective, the reproach of atheism had probably become more rare in more recent modern times, because the content and the demand concerning religion had reduced itself to a minimum.

The Unknown God Finally, so Hegel observed, in recent modern time the immediate knowledge of God was to extend itself only to the sentence, that God existed, not to what God was (Hegel 1986h: 163). This was due to the fact that the latter taken as a form of knowledge would lead to mediated knowing. Thus, in the time shortly after the French and American Revolutions, God was an object of religion expressively limited to the God in general, to the indeterminate Super-Sensuous, and religion was in its content reduced to a minimum. Hegel argued that if at least the faith that there

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was a God would still be preserved and maintained, or even that such faith would come into existence at all, then one would only be astonished about the poverty of the modern time, that lets the poorest and most inadequate content of religious knowledge be considered as a gain and that it has come to the point in the Christian Church to return to the altar, which existed a long time ago in Athens and which was dedicated to the Theon Agnoton, the Unknown God, whom Paul of Tarsus in the Council of the Arepagus wanted to make known to the Epicureans and Stoics, who with their logos and nous were complete pantheists (Acts 17: 16-34; Hegel 1968g: 259; 1986h: 163; 1986j: 300; 1986k: 469; 1986l: 96; 1986r: 125, 523, 540, 551, 544, 554; 1986s: 255-296, 411, 412, 495; Rudolphi1949: 56-62; Küng 1994a: 13-44; 1994b). Here in Athens, Paul, who as a good Jew was horrified by the beautiful gods standing in front of the temples in the streets of the great city, spoke about the God, who was not far from any human being, since it was in Him that every man and woman lived, and moved, and existed, as suggested by the poet Epimenides, and all humans were His children, as taught in the Phainomena of Aratus. Christianity was Hellenized from the very start, and it was indeed admittedly closer to pantheism than to the modern deism of Rousseau and Voltaire, the result of the bourgeois enlightenment (Hegel 1986k: 278; 1986n: 115; 1986p: 259). Hegel was not satisfied with the modern God in general on one hand, or with the oriental or occidental idols on the other. He took the Judeo-Christian position of a dialectical theism, which reached from Paul through Anselm of Canterbury, and Meister Eckhart, and Jacob Boehme to Martin Luther (Rudolphi 1949: 56-62; Küng 1994a: 13-44; 1994b; 2003). While Hegel had like Goethe and Beethoven moved in terms of a closed dialectic from the religious believers through the bourgeois enlighteners, back to the religious believers, the critical theorists of society moved in terms of an open dialectic from the religious believers through the bourgeois, Schopenhaurian, Nietzschean Marxian and Freudian enlightenment movements toward a post-modern, post-theistic, humanistic religiosity (Hegel 1965; 1969; 1972; 1970; 1986a; 1986b; 1986c; 1986q; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1987a; 1969; 1970; 1971a; 1972 chaps 2, 4, 5, 6, 7; 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40; Fromm 1950; 1966b; 1966c; 1976; 1992; 1995; 2001; Bottomore 1963; 1964; 1975; App. E, F).

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According to Hegel, the accusation of atheism presupposed after all a determinate representation of a content-full God (Hegel 1986j: 381-382). Atheism came into existence, then, because the representation could not find and recognize the proper forms, to which it was bound, in the philosophical notions. As Hegel explained, this was because philosophy could recognize very well its own forms in the categories of the religious mode of representation as well as its own content in the religious one and could do justice to it. However, the reverse was not possible because the religious mode of representation did not apply to itself the critique of thought and it did not comprehend itself. Shortly, it was not reflective. Thus, the religious mode of representation was exclusive in its immediacy. For Hegel, the accusation of pantheism rather than atheism fell particularly into the more recent modern education and culture, into the more recent piety and new theology, for which philosophy had too much of God in itself, and that to such an extent that according to their assurances the One who was even All and All was supposed to be God. According to Hegel, this was so because this new theology–as expressed, for example, by his opponent Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher in Berlin, which made religion merely into a subjective feeling of dependence and which denied the knowledge of the nature of God, retained thereby nothing else than a God in general without any objective determinations (Hegel 1986b: 13; 1986g: 317; 1986j: 381-382; 1986r: 322; 1986s: 20; Fromm 1950: chaps. 2, 3). According to Hegel, the nature of God was the only object of theology (Hegel 1986d: 143). For Hegel, philosophy was theology, and as such showed the rationality of religion (Hegel 1986q: 341). Philosophy was the metaphysics of God, the so-called natural theology (Hegel 1986q: 392). According to Hegel, philosophy was theology as the knowledge of the absolute Being (Hegel 1986s: 546). Theology was only what philosophy was because it was thinking about the nature of God (Hegel 1986t: 64). Hegel’s logic was theology, which considered the evolution of the idea of God in the ether of pure thought: the representation of God in his eternal Essence before the creation of nature and of humanity’s finite spirit (Hegel 1989e: 43-44; 1989q: 190, 200, 341, 392, 419; 1986r: 32; 1986s: 425, 484-485, 503, 543, 546, 560; 1986t: 64). For Hegel, the theology of the middle ages stood much higher than that of Modernity (Celano 1955; Hegel 1986s: 560; Rudolphi 1949; Küng 1994). The dialectical philosopher Hegel, who had gone through the Lutheran Seminary in Tübingen, had indeed become more theological than the contemporary and later theo-

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logians. Most importantly, he was the better theologian and also the better religiologist (Hegel 1986p; 1986q). Hegel’s dialectical philosophy was a theology even in its most original sense of that word: namely, a gigantic theodicy (Leibniz 1996, Vol. 1, 2; Hegel 1986l: 28, 33-55, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1967b: 259260; 1969; 1971a). For Hegel, the life of the notion of the Absolute as qualitative Infinity was the contradiction, the negative and the pain. The great philosophical achievement of Hegel and the consolation his philosophy gave was precisely that the notion of the Absolute as concrete Universality did not exist only externally and independently from the generations of living beings in nature and history, but was also internally in their coming and going, production and destruction. These generations of humanity were at the same time not only negated, but also preserved, and elevated, and fulfilled in the Absolute (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986q: 273-274).

Historicism According to Hegel, without proper interest for the concrete, fulfilled notion of God, the evolution of which he traced in his Logos-logic, the new theology considered and looked at such conception only as an interest, as others had once upon a time in Antiquity or in the Middle Ages (Celano 1955; Hegel 1986j: 381-382; 1986s: 560; Rudolphi 1949; Küng 1994a). Therefore, the new theology treated that which belonged to the teaching about the concrete nature of God merely as something historical. The new theology had become historicistic and relativistic. In Hegel’s perspective, the indeterminate God could be found in all positive religions (Hegel 1986h: 162-163; 1986j: 381-382). For the new theology, immediate knowledge was supposed to be the criterion of the truth of all the world religion. From that followed that all superstition and all idolatry was declared to be the truth, and that whatever was against private right, personal morality, and social morality in the content of the will was justified. In Hinduism, the cow, the ape, the Brahmin, or the Dalai Lama did not have validity as god because of so-called mediated knowledge, rationality, or conclusions. They were rather believed in (Hegel 1986p: 331-389; 1986h: 162-163; 1986j: 381-382; Küng 1984b, 1984c; App. E). However, so Hegel argued, the natural desires and passions and inclinations put out of themselves their interest into the consciousness. The immoral purposes found themselves quite immediately in the consciousness. The good or bad character expressed the determinate being of the will, which would be known in the interests and purposes, and that in the most immediate way.

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According to Hegel, every kind of piety–the Indian piety toward the ape, the cow, or against the Dalai Lama, the Egyptian piety toward the ox, and so on, was always the veneration and worship of an object, which contained besides its absurd determinations also the abstractum of the genus, the God in general (Hegel 1986j: 381-382; 1986p: 331-389; 1986h: 162163; 1986j: 381-382; Küng 1984b; 1984c; App. E). If, so Hegel argued, according to the opinion of the new theology such god in general was adequate and sufficient, then in order to find God in everything that was called religion, it had to find such God recognized at least also in philosophy, and could not thereby any longer accuse it of atheism. Therefore, according to Hegel, the mitigation of the reproach of atheism into that of pantheism in recent Modernity had its basis only in the superficiality of the religious representation into which the new theology’s mitigation had diluted and emptied out. In Hegel’s perspective, as this representation of the new theology held firmly on to its abstract universality, outside of which fell all determinateness, then this determination was merely the non-Divine, the worldly or earthly existence of things, which thereby remained in firm, undisturbed substantiality. Concerning the universality, which was in and for itself, which philosophy asserted of God and in which the being of the external things has no truth, the new theology remained also of the opinion that the worldly things retained anyway their being nevertheless, and that they constituted the determinateness in the divine Universality or Infinity. Thus, the new theologians made that Universality into what they called pantheistic: that all, meaning the empirical things without difference, those who are recognized as higher and those who are considered to be lower, had being in the emphatic sense and possessed substantiality, and that this being of the earthly things was God. For Hegel, it was only the thoughtlessness of the new theology and a falsification of notions originating from it, which generated the representation and the assurance of pantheism.

Concrete Universality According to Hegel, if the new theologians, who consider any philosophy to be pantheism, were unable and unwilling to see this genesis of their assurance–because it is precisely the insight of notions which they do not want–then they would have to accept most of all only as factum that never had any philosopher or any human being ascribed reality in and for it-

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self or substantiality to all things, nor considered them to be God, or that even such representation had never come into the head of any one except into theirs alone (Hegel 1986j: 382-383). Hegel wanted to throw light on this factum through an exoteric consideration. This could not happen otherwise than through putting the facta before the eyes of the new theologians. If in Hegel’s view one wanted to take the so-called pantheism in its most sublime or–in terms of the new theologians–in its crassest and most extreme form, then–as was very well known–one had to look around among the oriental poets. Hegel found the broadest representations of pantheism among the Indian poets. (Hegel 1986j: 382-385; 1986p: 331373). From the wealth of material that was available to Hegel from Indian poetry, he chose the Bhagavad-Gita that was most authentically translated and edited by the romantic August Wilhelm von Schlegel. More specifically, Hegel focused on the tenth lecture, in which Krishna said of himself: I am the breath, which lives in the body of the living; I am the beginning, the center of the living, as well as their end. I am among the stars the radiant sun, among the lunar signs the moon. Among the holy books the book of hymns, among the senses the sense, the understanding of the living. Etc. (Prabhupada 1974; Schlegel 1823; Hegel 1986j: 382-386.)

Here the all is meant in the sense of Pan, All, which meant the one Substance of the universe, God as universal power, the immanence of the Divine in the finite objects, the freedom of which and their being for themselves was not recognized, or only as something accidental, and for which there was no dialectical development in the Being or Oneness in this pantheism as acosmism: Hen kai Pan (Hegel 1986m: 470, 474; 1986p: 302, 331; 1986q: 498; 1096r: 297; 1986s: 262). While for Hegel the Indian pantheism was certainly a moment in the evolution of the idea of God, it had long been concretely superseded by Jewish, Christian and Islamic monotheistic theologians and metaphysicians, and certainly by the new understanding of God as good qualitative Infinity or as concrete Universality in his own dialectical philosophy (Hegel 1986j: 379-395; 1986k: 190, 390-466, 422; 1986l: 176-177; 1986m: 416, 469, 470-478; 1986p: 97-98, 206-208, 302, 316-318, 331, 379-380, 404; 1986q: 51, 490, 492, 498; 1986r: 297; 1986s: 262, 265, 267, 411, 412, 495, 519, 522; 1986t: 25, 164; Küng 1978: 155-190).

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Like the earlier Christian metaphysicians, Hegel rejected the pantheistic sentence that out of nothing, nothing came (Hegel 1986e: 85, 388; 1986h: 191-192). In pantheism the Being, the One, the Substance was the First. With the old Christian metaphysicians, Hegel asserted a transition from nothing to being. The Christian metaphysicians may have taken this sentence about a transition from nothing to being as merely synthetical or merely representational, there was contained nevertheless, even in the most incomplete union, also a point in which being and nothing met and in which their difference disappeared. The pantheistic sentence, that out of nothing became nothing, that nothing was just nothing, there was present not only a contrast to becoming in general, but also specifically against the Judeo-Christian idea of the creatio ex nihilo, against the creation of the world out of nothing (Genesis 1 and 2; John 1). For Hegel, those modern thinkers, who asserted the sentence that nothing was just nothing and were even excited about it, agreed unconsciously with the abstract pantheism of the Eleates, and as a matter of fact also with that of Baruch Spinoza (Hegel 1986a: 74; 1986b: 10, 37, 106, 106, 229-230, 263, 327, 339-352). In Hegel’s view, those philosophies that accepted as principle the sentence that being was only being, or that nothing was only nothing, deserved the name of identity systems. This abstract identity was the essence of pantheism. For Hegel, pantheism and the abstract identity system of analytical understanding had become obsolete with the Judeo-Christian ideas of the creatio ex nihilo. Jerusalem had transformed Athens. Hellenization had been radically modified by Hebrewization or Judaization. Shortly, Hegel did not consider his dialectical philosophy to be a form of pantheism or abstract identity philosophy of analytical understanding, but rather as a form of dialectical theism of dialectical reason, and rightly so (Hegel 1986e: 85, 388; 1986h: 191-192; 1986k: 190, 390-466, 422). Hegel was not a pantheist, but rather a modern Lutheran Christian (Hegel 1986k: 390466, 422; Küng 1970; 1978: 155-197).

Panentheism Of course, the Catholic mystical, panenthestic theologian Meister Eckhart, the Lutheran Hegel’s most important teacher in theological dialectics from Bern to Berlin, besides Anselm of Canterburry and the Protestant mystical theologian Jacob Boehme, had also been post-humously excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church 800 years ago because of

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pantheism, in spite of his rather thorough defense, and the ban has still not been lifted by the Roman Curia up today–in March 2010–against the great Dominican (Saint Anselm 1962: xvii-xx; Blackney 1941: xiii, 258303; Fox 1980; Hegel 1986a: 62-64; 1986b: 534, 536; 1986e: 122; 1986p: 29, 209; 1986h: 28, 167, 348-349; 1986i: 30, 133; 1986j: 293; 1986k: 198, 227, 227; 1986p: 209; 1986q: 209-211, 210-212, 240, 244, 351, 523, 526-527, 529; 1986r: 132; 1986s: 64, 69, 70, 74-119, 142-143, 166, 182, 196, 232, 233, 256, 445, 554-560, 591; 1986t: 138, 360). In the case of Master Eckhart as well as of Hegel, the Holy Inquisition misunderstood dialectical theism or panentheism in terms of pantheism and abstract identity philosophy. In both cases, the Holy Inquisition misunderstood in the Greek formula Hen kai pan (One and All) in the sense of the identity of the identity and the non-identity of the One and of all; the pan as the multitude of particular and singular things instead of the universality or totality of the finite world created out of nothing. Even still very recently the American Dominican Matthew Fox, the editor of the works of Meister Eckhart, left his order and the Roman Catholic Church over the old pantheism debate and joined the Episcopal Church (Fox 1980).

Against Pantheism and Dualism Hegel considered even the proofs for the existence of God produced by the natural or rational theologies of the modern bourgeois enlightenment to be pantheistic, because they had the rules of the identity of analytical understanding for their foundation instead of the rules of dialectical reason (Hegel 1986h: 103-104; 1986q: 347-536). These proofs were caught up in the difficulty of making the transition from the finite to the Infinite. They could not liberate God from the finitude of the existing world, which remained positive, so that he had to determine himself as the immediate substance of it. That precisely was pantheism. It was also possible that God remained as object opposite to the human subject, and that God was in this way something finite, an idol. That precisely was dualism. In his dialectical philosophy, Hegel rejected pantheism as well as dualism. Since Adorno and the critical theorists of society start their materialistic logic with the dialectic of the something, other and the infinite, they have the dialectic of being and nothing and becoming already behind themselves and were therefore immune against pantheism as well as its very opposite, dualism. The same is true for the new dialectical theory of religion. The critical theorist of religion will continue the argumentative dialogue not only with Haag and the other critical theorists, but also with Meister Eck-

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hart, Anselm of Canterbury, and Jacob Boehme, and Hegel, and in this process he will determinately negate them, meaning: he will not only criticize them, but he will also try to preserve, elevate, and fulfill them.

Political Dimension For the critical theorist Haag, the reconciliation of the antagonism between metaphysics and the rational world explanation of the modern natural sciences had also a political dimension (Haag 1983; 2005). Haag wanted to work against the nihilistic hollowing out or undermining of the modern culture through nominalism and positivism. For Haag, to prove or demonstrate what human beings need for a meaningful existence did not mean what Adorno had called ironically the metaphysical Winterhilfswerk of fascist remembrance: namely, to reintroduce again God into a de-secularized world out of pragmatism as threatening moral instance and as meaning-creating offer, in order thus to keep people good, worthy, industrious, honest and quiet. According to Haag, if the nihilism of the nominalistic, and positivistic, and finally deconstructionistic thinking, in other words, the struggle against the essences or universals in the individuals, was successful, then also would be lost the fact that their existence reminded people of solidarity (Haag 1983; 2005; Habermas 1985a: chaps. 6-12). According to Haag, the thinking which misunderstood itself as enlightening, and which wanted to liberate human beings from ideological bias through reconstructing teachings on substances and essences did not only make the nuisance and mischief of the prevailing dominant conditions unrecognizable. Such nominalistic, positivistic, and deconstructing thinking also contained its dialectic of enlightenment: that it isolated men into parcel service for the globalized and globalizing corporate ruling class (Horkheimer/Adorno1972; Haag 1983; 2005; Habermas 1985a: chaps. 6-12). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion in the present civil society of 2010, the currently still dominant neo-liberalism is as atomistic as the old liberalism, and thus, stresses the autonomy of the individual, but neglects solidarity among the people. President Roosevelt’s social modification of liberalism in terms of the principle of subsidiary, taken from the Roman Catholic natural law tradition, has been cancelled again by the neo-liberal American administrations from Nixon through Reagan to Bush senior and junior. The present antagonistic liberal society is without solidarity except for traditional residuals in certain subcultures, such as the Roman Catholic one.

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From Negation to Negation Long before Haag habilitated himself under Horkheimer and Adorno with a Heidegger critique that was published in 1960 under the title On the Critique of the Newer Ontologies, they and their early, mostly Jewish collaborators in the Frankfurt and New York Institute for Social Research were already driven, motivated, and held together in their thinking and acting by an insatiable longing for the wholly Other than the finite world of nature and history: the qualitative Infinitude or concrete Universality– what Adorno’s friend Thomas Mann still called the motive of longing for Beauty beyond the curse of finite life, which–in Hegel’s words–carried as such and from the start the seed of death, the negative, in itself, and which Martin Heidegger had called in his Being and Time the being toward death (Hegel 1986h: 197-198; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 23-24; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; 1985l: 588-592; 1988n: 332, 369-371, 400, 418, 507-509, 527-528, 536, 550-553; 1991f: 423-428; Löwenthal 1980: 80-81; Mann 1974: 6-76; Heidegger 2001: 235-266). For Master Eckhart, Hegel’s great teacher, this curse of finite life was overcome as men were to sink eternally from negation to negation in the One, the not-god, the none-ghost, the apersonal, the formless, in whom there was no duality: what Adorno called in the restitution of his and Benjamin’s other, inverse, cipher theology the radicalization of the dialectic down into the theological glowing fire, into which also all social, economic, political, and historical dialectic would be included, into the wholly Other, or what Fromm named the post-theistic X-Experience, –the X standing not only as in mathematics for the quantitative unknown, but rather for the qualitative Unknown -, or what Haag called the prevailing almighty Reason (Meister Eckhart 1941: 47/43, 248/42, 329/41; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 29; Adorno 1970b: 116-117; Fromm 1950; 1966b: chap. 2; 1976: 48-68, 133-167; Haag 1983; 2005).

The Absolute Other Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s longing was far from being any kind of utopianism (Horkheimer 1985l: 559-586; 1991f: 312-313; 1996s: 62-67). The critical theorists’ longing was not–in Hegel’s terms–a relationship of the ego to its other as a non-being, because the ego has fixed its contentless and untenable emptiness on one hand, and in the negation, nevertheless, remained the fullness of the other as its beyond, on the other (Hegel 1986e: 264-271). In a certain sense, already Hegel was a post-religious

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thinker in so far as he concretely sublated religion into philosophy, and he was already a post-metaphysical thinker in so far as he concretely transformed metaphysics into his objective and subjective logic (Hegel 1986e; 1986f). However, in his dialectical philosophy of religion and in his logic, Hegel did not only criticize religion and metaphysics, but he also preserved, elevated, and fulfilled strong religious and metaphysical elements and motives. Thus, for Hegel’s objective logic, the non-ego did not merely remain a badly, or quantitatively, infinite impetus or initiative, an abstract absolute other (Hegel 1986e: 264-271). The ultimate relationship of the totally Other and the ego toward each other was not merely a bad infinite or merely quantitative progression, longing, striving or endeavour (Hegel 1986a: 344-345, 417; 1986c: 169, 423, 424; 1986e: 267, 270; 1986l: 114, 174; 1986m: 135; 1986r: 173; 1986t: 399, 407, 418; Siebert 2005). It rather came close to the pure, infinite longing of religious faith for the lost life, or to the internal movement of the pure heart, which felt itself painfully as the disunion of the Sacred and the profane, the Infinite and the finite, the Transcendent and the relative. It did not have the deficiency of the unsatisfied longing of the bourgeois enlightenment. It meant not only the ego in the loneliness with itself. It was not only the relationship toward an other as toward a non-being, which merely remained a longing. It was not merely like a romantic longing of the beautiful soul for another country, or culture, or social and cultural condition like Greece, or India, or America.

True Infinity The critical theorists were longing not toward, in Hegel’s words, a bad, merely quantitative, irrational, and untrue infinity of space–the innumerable galaxies, stars and planets, or infinity of time–the innumerable natural and historical ages and paradigms, or the infinity of the inner man with all its archetypes and symbols, shortly, a progression of the quantitative into the infinite. Rather, the critical theorists longed toward what once had been called in religion and metaphysics Heaven, Eternity, and Beauty full of concrete images and thoughts; a good, qualitative, rational, true Infinity, in which all natural and historical forms of quantitative infinity are determinately negated (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986f: 462-573; 1986h: 367-393; 1986i; 1986j; 1986q: 218-346; Jung 1958; 1990; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 40; Küng 1978: 155190, 529-768). The critical theorists’ longing was not in Kantian or Hegelian terms a continual over-flying of the limit, border, or boundary of the world of the senses, which was the powerlessness to concretely supersede

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it, and the perennial regression back into it. The critical theorist did not, like Kant in his critical philosophy and unlike Hegel in his dialectical philosophy, consider such powerlessness and perennial regression as something sublime, or as a kind of divine service or worship, or as something ultimate. This modern philosophical sublimity–in contrast to the sublimity in Judaism–did not make the entirely Other great, but only the human subject, which swallows into itself such great quantities (Hegel 1986c: 590591; 1986f: 462-573; 1986h: 367-393; 1986i; 1986j; 1986q: 218-346; 1986q: 50-91; Küng 1991b). The inadequacy of this elevation, which remained entirely subjective and which climbed upward on the ladder of quantity, manifested itself through the fact that it admitted that in all its vain and futile work it was not able to come closer to the infinite goal, which in order to be reached had to be tackled in a very different, namely, in a qualitative way. This becomes obvious if one looks at where such elevation goes and where it ceases. (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; Horkheimer 1967b: 311-313).

Heaven and Moral Law According to Kant, informed by Judaism–the Religion of Sublimity and by the modern natural sciences, two things had filled the human heart with always new and increasing admiration, awe, and deep respect, the more often and the more persistently thinking was concerned with it: the heaven full of stars above me and the moral law in me (Kant 1982: 300302; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 13; 1987b: 15-74, 75-148; 1990j: 24-63, Habermas 2005: chap. 8). In Hegel’s interpretation, Kant had considered it sublime when the subject through its thought elevated itself beyond the place that it took up in the world of the senses, and when it broadened the connection into the infinite, unknown quantity: a connection with stars over stars, with worlds over worlds, with systems over systems, and beyond that even with the limitless times of their primordial movement, their beginning and their continuance (Kant 1982: 252-254, 254-264, 300-302; Hegel 1986e: 264-265; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 13; 1987b: 15-74, 75-148, 295-311; 1988n: 390-391; 1990j: 2463, 152, 168, 423-428; 1991f: 208, 421-422). The representation was overcome by and subjected to this progress into the immeasurable distance, where the most distant world had an always still more distant one, and where the so far traced back past had still a further one behind itself, and where the however far gone beyond future had always still another one before itself. Thought succumbed to this representation of the immeasurable and immense reality. Hegel compared this representation and this

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thought with a dream, in which a man walked on and on in a long corridor always further and immeasurably and unforeseeably further without seeing an end, and finally ended with falling into an abyss, or into dizziness. For Hegel, this portrayal or depiction summed up the content of the quantitative elevation in a wealth of description and portrayal. In Hegel’s view, this portrayal also deserved particularly praise for the truthfulness and realism with which it showed what happened to this quantitative elevation at the end: the thought succumbed. The end was falling and dizziness. What made the thought succumb and what produced the falling and the dizziness, so Hegel explained, was nothing else than the boredom of the repetition that let a limit disappear and again reappear and again disappear, and which let always come about and pass away again the one into the other, in the beyond this life, and in this life the beyond. This boring repetition gave only the feeling of the powerlessness of this infinite, and of this thought, which wanted to master the finite and could not do it. According to Hegel, only through the giving up of this empty infinite quantitative progression could the true, qualitative Infinite itself become present for the human subject.

Freedom of Will According to Hegel, Kant posited opposite to the infinity, which related itself to the external sensuous perception, the other Infinity (Kant 1982: 300-302; Hegel 1986e: 267-271). This other Infinity occurred when the individual went back to his or her invisible ego, and when it posited the absolute freedom of his or her will as a pure ego against all the terror and fright of fate and tyranny. It happened when the ego started from its next environments, and when it let them disappear for itself, and when it–like Horace in his Carmina–let what appeared to be permanent, worlds over worlds, crash down into ruins, and when at the same time it recognized itself being lonely and solitary as equal to itself (Horace 2007; Hegel 1986e: 91; Siebert 2003a; 2003b; 2004a; 2007a; 2007g). Hegel had to admit that this ego in this loneliness and solitude with itself was indeed the achieved beyond. The ego had come to itself. It was with itself in this life. In the pure self-consciousness the absolute negativity had been brought into affirmation and into the present, which in that progression beyond the sensual or sensuous quantum had only fled or escaped. However, so Hegel argued against Kant, as this pure ego had fixed itself in its abstraction and contentlessness, it had the existence as such, the fullness of the natural and spiritual universe as a Beyond opposite itself. Here the same contra-

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diction represented itself, which underlay the badly infinite progression: namely, a having-returned into itself, which was immediately at the same time a being outside of itself: a relationship to its other as to its not-being. This relationship remained a longing because the ego had fixed for itself as a beyond its own contentless and untenable emptiness on one hand, and the in the negation, nevertheless, remaining present natural and spiritual fullness, on the other.

Between Subjective, Objective and Absolute Idealism The critical theorists vacillated continually between Kant’s subjective idealism on one hand, and Hegel’s objective and absolute idealism, on the other, while they concretely superseded both into their historical materialistic theory of society (Horkheimer 1985h: chaps. 28, 32, 33, 34, 35, 41; 1987b: 15-74, 75-148, 237-251, 295-311; 1987i: chap. 18; 1988c: chaps. 8, 15, 16; 1991f: 208, 246, 254, 256-258, 261-263, 353-355, 421-422, 423; 1987k: 17-69, 70-75, 76-79, 100-118, 138-144, 202-208, 221-232, 268269, 284-288, 409-417; 1985l: 246-247, 285-287, 349-397, 398-416, 436492, 593-605; 1990j: 12-23, 24-63, 75-80, 81-93, 152, 168; 1988n: 204-205, 240-241, 302-303, 390-391, 419-420, 426; Marcuse 1961; Habermas 1976; Haag 1983: chap. 4, 5, 8). When they came closer to Kant, they showed strictest obedience to the radicalized second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue and to the Kantian prohibition against penetrating the realm of the thing in itself, God, Freedom and immortality, and engaged in a negative ontology or metaphysics and were criticized by critics on the Hegelian Right and Center for not having enough of religion in their critical theory of society (Horkheimer 1987e: 25-238, 253, 423452; 1988d: 8, 9; 1989m: chaps. 7, 8, 13, 16, 28, 35; 1991f: 191-192; 1985g: chaps. 13, 18). When the critical theorists came closer to Hegel, then the comprehension of the boundary of the world of the senses meant for them that they were also already beyond it, and they spoke not only about the existence of the totally Other, but also named it the Eternal One, or Infinitude, or the highest Being, or the eternal Truth, or Transcendence, or Beauty, or God in the form of music, or the Good, or perfect Justice, or unconditional Love, or eternal Bliss, or the Unconditional, and discovered it in the ciphers of the smallest and most irrelevant things and events in nature and history, and were criticized by the critics on the Left for having too much of religion and theology in their critical theory of society (Hegel 1988d: chaps. 2, 5, 6, 7; 1986e: 267; Horkheimer 1988a: 100-157; 1988c: chaps. 5, 8, 15, 16; 1989m: chaps. 12, 19, 20, 26, 29, 33, 34; 1985g:

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chaps. 29, 37, 40; 1985l: 298-299, 313-314, 1989m: chaps. 7, 10, 12, 16, 19, 20, 26, 29; 1988n: 75, 77, 78-79, 105-106, 114-115, 117, 119-120, 121-122, 124, 125, 126, 139-130, 154-155, 162-163, 165-166, 209-210, 215, 228-232, 240, 277-278, 296-297, 315-316, 321-322, 338-339, 346, 347-348, 495-406, 466, 507-509, 527-528, 535, 536; 1996: 62-67; Adorno 1963; Habermas 1970a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1982; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006b; 2007; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247; Haag 1983: chap. 4; Gadamer/Habermas 1979; Siebert 1994a; 1994b). According to the Rabbis Joseph’s character and story have of old been held by the Jewish people and others to be typical of the character and story of Israel (Genesis 49: 22-26; Hertz 5716/1956: 186-187/22-26). Like Joseph, the Jew has been the dreamer of the ages, dreaming Israel’s dream of universal justice and peace and brotherhood. Like Joseph, the Jew has everywhere been the helpless victim of the hatred of the step-brethren, hatred that drove him from home and doomed him to Exile. In that Exile the Jew has like Joseph, times without number, resisted the Great Temptation of disloyalty to the God of his father. In the dreams of Joseph, the sun, moon and eleven stars bowed down to him. It is the stars that bow to Joseph, and not he to the stars. This is characteristic of both Joseph and Israel. The critical theorists continued to dream the anti-idolatrous dream of Joseph and Israel of perfect and absolute justice and unconditional love even in exile and in spite of all temptations there and at home (Horkheimer 1985h: chaps. 15-17, 25, 31-35, 38-40; 1987b: 326, 329, 336-338, 346-349, 351, 354-355, 355357, 359, 360-363, 366-367, 379, 381, 381-389, 391-392, 396-401, 405-406, 408, 410-420, 429-430, 437, 438-440, 450, 454; 1988d: chaps. 11, 12; 1991f: 195, 199-200, 201-202, 203-304, 205-206, 206-207; 1991f: 209-211, 214215, 219-220, 220, 221, 225, 232, 240, 241, 243-244, 247, 248, 253, 254, 263, 264-265, 267-268, 273-274, 278, 284-285, 287-288, 288-289, 292-293, 294-295, 298-301, 307-308, 312-313, 313-314, 314-315, 315-316, 329-331, 340-341, 344-345, 350-351, 356-357, 363-364, 370-371, 372-373, 376-377, 376-377, 380-381, 389, 389-390, 401, 405, 411-412, 416-417, 419, -420, 423-424; 1985g: chaps. 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43; 1985l: 261, 294-296, 303-306; 1988n: 57, 75, 332, 340-341, 351, 352, 356, 362-363, 369, 369-371, 400, 513-514, 517; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247).

Deficiency of Sublimities Kant had added to these two sublimities, the external and the internal one, the remark that the admiration for the first external sublimity, and

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the respect for the second internal sublimity admittedly stimulated exploration and research, but that could not possibly overcome the deficiency of these sublimities. According to Hegel, Kant thereby declared those elevations to the external and internal sublimities as being unsatisfactory for reason, which could not remain standing with them and with the feelings connected with them, and which could not consider that beyond and emptiness as the ultimate reality. The same was true for the critical theorists’ longing for the wholly Other than nature and history (Hegel 1986e: 267; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1991a: 110-126). The same remains true for the new critical theory of religion.

Morality However, according to Hegel, Kant had taken, nevertheless, as an ultimate reality the badly infinite progression particularly in its application to the sphere of morality (Kant 1982: 252-302; Hegel 1986e: 267-268). For Hegel, the above mentioned second contradiction between the finite and the Infinite as the manifold world of nature and spirit on one hand, and of the ego, which was elevated into its freedom, on the other, was to start with a qualitative one. The self-determination of the ego aimed at the same time at the determination of nature and at the liberation from it. Thus, the ego related itself through itself toward its other, which as external existence was something manifold and also quantitative. The relationship to something quantitative became itself quantitative. Therefore, Kant had represented the negative relationship of the ego to the quantitative something, the power of the ego over the non-ego, over the internal nature of sensuality and the external nature in such a way, that morality could and should become always greater, and the power of the sensuality always smaller. However, Kant had posited the complete appropriateness, suitability, and commensurability of the will concerning the moral law into the progression that went into the bad infinitude. That meant that Kant had represented the moral law as an absolute unreachable beyond, as he did with his idea of eternal peace, which was always only approximated and never completely reached, and which therefore allowed for always new wars (Kant 1946). Precisely that, so Hegel criticized, was supposed to be the true anchor and the right consolation that this absolute beyond was unreachable and unachievable. Thus, Kant’s notion of morality was supposed to be a continual struggle toward this end. However, this struggle happened only under the condition that the human will was not appropriate and suitable to and commensurable with the moral law. Thereby, this

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moral law was absolutely a beyond for the will. To be sure, the critical theorists’ totally Other was not identical with such an absolutely unreachable beyond. Not such quantitative beyond, but the qualitative wholly Other as perfect justice was the true anchor and consolation for the critical theorists, particularly of the first almost completely Jewish generation (Hegel 1986e: 268; Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; 1988n: 369-370, 405-406, 469-470, 517-518, 518-519, 527-528, 530531, 535, 536, 544; 1996s: 62-67; Löwenthal 1980: 80-81; 1989).

Powerlessness In Hegel’s view, because of his powerlessness in his morality to master the contradiction between the finite and the Infinite and to comprehend the idea of the true will, the substantial freedom, Kant had taken refuge to quantity (Kant 1982: 252-302; Hegel 1986e: 269-270). Kant escaped into quantity in order to use it as a mediator, because it is the superseded qualitative: the difference which had become indifferent. However, so Hegel argued, since both members of the contrast or the opposition–finite and Infinite–remained underlying as something qualitatively different, but nevertheless behaved in their mutual relationship as quanta, each of them was posited at the same time as indifferent against this change. Nature was determined through the Ego and sensuality through the will of the good. The change which was produced through the Ego in nature and through the will in sensuality was only a quantitative difference. Such quantitative difference let nature and sensuality continue to exist qualitatively as what they had been. Thus, for example, wars, torture, executions, retaliation, the lex talionis, and so on, continue in spite of all religious or secular morality standing against them and trying to transform human nature and sensuality (Kant 1946; 1981; Hegel 1986g: 497-515; Habermas 1997b; Siebert 2005a; 2005b; 2006a; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007g; 2008b; 2008c; 2009a; 2009b; 2009c).

Infinite Progression According to Hegel, in the more abstract portrayal of the Kantian philosophy, at least of its principles, in the philosophy of science of Johann, Gottlieb Fichte, the infinite progression constituted the foundation and the ultimate in the same way (Kant 1982; 252-302; Hegel 1986b: 9-139; 1986e: 269-270). The first principle of Fichte’s philosophy of science, Ego=Ego,

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was followed by a second principle, which was independent from the first one, the opposition of the Non-Ego. The relationship of the two principles was also immediately assumed as a quantitative difference: that the Non-Ego was both partially determined through the Ego, and partially not. The Non-Ego continued itself in this way into its non-being so that in its non-being it remained opposite as something which was not superseded. Therefore, as the contradictions, which lay in Fichte’s system, had been developed in it, the ultimate result was the same relationship that had been there in the beginning. The Non-Ego remained an infinite impetus, an absolute Other. The last relationship between this Other and the Ego to each other was the infinite progression, longing, striving, and endeavor: the same contradiction with which Fichte had started his philosophy of science. The critical theorists of society have tried to overcome this Kantian as well as Fichtean contradiction in their not quantitative, but rather qualitative longing for the totally Other: quantity turned into quality (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; 1988n: 369-370, 405-406, 469-470, 517-518, 518-519, 527-528, 530-531, 535, 536, 544; 1996s: 62-67; Löwenthal 1980: 80-81; 1989).

The Unity of the Absolute According to Hegel, because for Kant and the Kantians, like Fichte, the quantitative was the determinateness posited as superseded, therefore they believed that they had won much or rather everything for the unity of the absolute Other, for the Absolute, for the Unconditional, for the one Substantiality through lowering and reducing the contrast between the finite and the Infinite in general into a mere quantitative difference (Kant 1982: 252-302; Hegel 1986b: 9-139; 1986e: 269-271). For some time, the sentence All contrast is merely quantitative was a main principle of the newer philosophy from Kant through Fichte to Hegel. The opposite determinations–the finite and the Infinite–had the same essence, the same content. They were real sides of the opposition, in so far as each of them had in itself both of the contrasts, determinations, both of its factors. Only on one side of the opposition, the one factor was predominant, and the other factor on the other side. On one side of the contrast one factor, one matter or activity was present in a larger quantity or in a stronger decree than on the other side. Insofar as different materials or activities were presupposed the quantitative difference confirmed and completed rather their externality and indifference of the sides of the contrast against each other and against their unity.

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While, according to Hegel, for Kant and the Kantians the absolute Unity or the unity of the Absolute was only to be quantitative, and while they had to admit that the quantitative was for them the superseded immediate determinateness, it was nevertheless only the imperfect, only the first negation, not yet the qualitative Infinity, not yet the negation of the negation (Kant 1982: 252-254, 254-264, 300-302; Hegel 1986e: 270-271). As being and thinking, so Hegel explained, were imagined and represented as quantitative determinations of the absolute Substance, they also became as quanta–as in the subordinate sphere–the carbon, the nitrogen, etc., completely external for each other and without interrelation. It was a third way of knowing, an external reflection, which abstracted from their difference, and which recognized their internal Unity, but only as it was in itself and not as it was for itself. Thereby, this Unity was indeed represented first only as an immediate one or only as Being, which remained equal with itself in its quantitative difference, but which did not posit itself as equal with itself through itself. Thus, this Being was not comprehended as negation of negation, as qualitatively infinite Unity. Only in the qualitative contrast the posited qualitative Infinity, the Being for itself, emerged and resulted, and the quantitative determination turned over into the qualitative. Here the critical theorists were closer to Hegel than to Kant. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the wholly Other, the absolute Truth, was not a quantitative but rather a qualitative Infinity: it was itself the determinate negation or the negation of the negativity of what on this earth was called injustice, human abandonment and alienation (Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1970c: 40-41; 1971a; 1972 chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; 1985g: chaps. 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40). Traditional religious people had seen God’s providence appear most powerfully in the smallest and in the least something, for example, in the life of an insignificant fly (Dahlberg 2006). Shekinahs and theophanies happened in ordinary objects, like a thorn bush (Exodus 3: 1-6). Adorno discovered the entirely Other as being reflected in the closest and most irrelevant something: in the yellow ticket of a London bus or in the names of small, archaic, medieval or older places, like Amorbach, which was full of happy childhood memories and utopian images, or Mainbullau, Zittenfeld, Engelberg, Miltenberg, Wertheim, Reuenthal, Taldorf, Monbrunn, Schnatterloch, Hambrunn, Ottorfszell, Ernsttal, Breitenbuch, Preinschen, Mörschenhardt, or Sils Marie, where Nietzsche wrote his Zarathustra (Adorno 1997j/1: 302-310, 326-330). Beyond this, the critical theorists found–like Hegel before–the entirely Other manifested

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especially in the true moments, elements and fragments of the forms of genuine great art, particularly, literature and music, of religion and of philosophy (Hegel 1986e: 115-174; 1986m; 1986n; 1986p; 1986q; 1986r; 1986s; 1986t; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1972; 1985, chaps 53, 54; Adorno 1981k; 1986; 1997g; 1997j/2: 608-617; 1997k; 1997l; 1997m; 1997n; 1997q; 1997k; 1997p; Benjamin 1974a; 1974b; 1977; 1978a; 1980; 1988; 1993; 1995a; 1995c; 1996a; 1996b; 1997; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1976; 1992: 3-94, 203-212; Löwenthal 1990; Habermas 2001a: 9-31; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; Bloch/Reif 1978: 78-89). Bloch spoke about the wholly Other as the outstanding Messianic identity of the human subjects and the whole, so dark world-subject, and Fromm about the X-Experience (Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1972; 1985a; 1985b; Bloch/Reif 1978: 78-89; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1976; 1992: 3-94, 203-212; Kramer 2003: parts 2 and 3).

Absolute Affirmation Long before Marx and the critical theorists, Hegel determinately negated the great heretical Jewish thinker Benedict de Spinoza, who as Hegel, had been deeply influenced by Anselm of Canterbury and probably also by Meister Eckhart, into his dialectical philosophy (Saint Anselm 1962: xi-xiii; Blakney 1941: xiii, xv-xxvi, 247/41, 248/42, 271/12, 272/16, 274/7, 275/12, 282/12, 16, 288/19, 289/23, 329/41, Hegel 1986a: 74, 1986b: 10, 37, 106, 229-230, 263, 327, 339-352; 1986d: 430, 456-457, 459; 1986e: 48, 98, 121, 178-179, 214, 290-292, 388, 390, 454-455). According to Hegel, already in the first definitions of the Causa Sui of Spinoza, the pure notion of freedom was contained (Hegel 1986d: 456-457, 459). Spinoza transformed the external operation of the notionless quantity into the course of the notion: Omnis determinatio est negatio (Hegel 1985: 48-53; 121). Spinoza had posited the notion of the true Infinity against that of the bad infinity and had explained it through examples (Hegel 1986e: 291). First of all, Spinoza defined the Infinite as the absolute Affirmation of the existence of any kind of nature. To the contrary, Spinoza defined the finite as determinateness, as negation. The absolute affirmation of an existence was namely to be taken as its relationship to itself: not to be through the fact that there was an other. In contrast, the finite was the negation, a stopping as relation to an Other, which started outside of it. In Hegel’s critical view, to be sure, Spinoza’s absolute affirmation of an existence did not exhaust the notion contained in itself, that the infinity was affirmation, not as immediate but only as being restored through the reflection of the other in itself or as negation of negation. However, according to Hegel, with

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Spinoza the Substance and its absolute unity has the form of an unmoved unity, in other words, a unity which did not mediate itself with itself: the form of a rigidity in which the notion of the negative unity of the Self, of Subjectivity, could not yet be found (Hegel 1986e: 178-179, 214, 291293, 388-390, 454-455; 1986f: 195-200). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, this notion of the negative unity of Self, Ego, Subjectivity is present later on in the critical philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Marx and the critical theorists (Hegel 1986f; Marx 1953: chaps. 3, 6-8, 10; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 5, 14, 15, 16, 17, 28, 29, 30, 3234, 35, 37, 40; 1985l: 349-397, 398-416; 1987b: 15-148, 295-311; 1987i: 196242; 1987k: 13-79; 1988a; 1990j: 24-63, 96-128, 129-151, 152-168; Fromm 1967; Bloch 1971).

Trust and Confidence For Horkheimer and Adorno, the entirely Other, which they longed for, was no longer a mere postulate, as it was for Kant’s God, Freedom and Immortality without which a moral life would not be possible on this earth (Kant 1965: 74, 87, 149, 211, 239-244, 247-252, 444, 490, 526-527; 1974; 1982: 220-302; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40). The wholly Other had rather become for the critical theorists a matter of longing as well as of trust and confidence (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 28, 29, 34, 37, 40; Habermas 1991a: part III). The entirely Other was the concrete supersession of what was called in the Jewish Religion of Sublimity Elyon, El Shaddai, Yahweh, or Adonai, without anthropomorphic mythology forbidden by the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue and Kant’s prohibition for human understanding to penetrate into the sphere of the Thing-in-itself or the Ens Realissimum (Exodus 20: 4-7; Psalm 91; Kant 1965: 24, 27, 74, 87, 149, 172-173, 490; Hegel 1986l: 50-95; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Küng 1991b; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247; Siebert 2005b: chaps. 1, 5, 6, 9; 2005c; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f). The wholly Other was not quantitatively distant in space or time. The entirely Other was not the bad irrational, untrue, quantitative infinite, but the good, rational, true, qualitative Infinity as the radical, but nevertheless determinate, concrete negation of the negativity in nature, man, family, society, state, and culture: of all that was called natural or moral evil on earth (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 12, 17, 19, 21, 34-37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 17, 21, 24). The wholly Other is rooted more in Judaism, the Religion of Sublimity than in Christianity as the Religion of Freedom, in so far as the latter contains in itself

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the most extreme anthropomorphism: The Logos was made flesh (John 1: 1-18; Hegel 1986c: 409, 420; 1986l: 304, 393; 1986n: 23, 109-120, 149, 461; 1986s: 508; 1986t: 496-497, 503; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Küng 1970; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; Siebert 2005b: chap. 6). The critical theorists did not yet have to face the Sweet Jesus of Easter 2007, whom a Catholic artist in New York produced out of 200 pounds of chocolate, and who was rejected by the Roman Catholic Church not as kitsch, but rather in a Manichaeic and monophysitistic manner, because his sexual parts were portrayed, and who was thrown out of a museum and a hotel-exhibition, and was not accepted in any local church, and thus had to spend the feast days in a refrigerator on a truck. Some of the revolutionary students of the late 1960s, who had been inspired by the critical theorists in Europe or in America, were driven by their own longing to the airport, where they watched for hours airplanes taking off to unknown, foreign places, where they had never been, and the names of which promised to them something other than what they encountered in the reified and petrified late capitalist society: new love, new politics, new religion, and most of all happiness (Horkheimer 1988n: 49-50, 50-52, 57, 72-73, 124, 138-139, 433-436, 444445, 445-447, 458-459, 469-470, 472, 474, 512-513; Habermas 1970). For the students, the airplanes departing into foreign countries became ciphers of the Other than antagonistic civil society, the iron cage from which they wanted to escape. Other rebelling students turned consciously or unconsciously to positivism already before the national and international Nixon-Reagan-Bush senior and junior counter-revolution became effective throughout the whole American Empire, and considered their teachers’ longing to be romantic (Horkheimer 1988n: 512-513, 518-519, 520-521, 525-526, 527-528, 536; Habermas 1970).

The Negation of Human Perils The non-Jewish, second-generation critical theorist Habermas was not able to take up, to share, or to work out further the longing for the wholly Other of his teachers Horkheimer and Adorno as the radical, determinate negation of what he called the perils of human existence; what Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel, and the earlier critical theorists had called theodicy: unhappiness, misery, injustice, guilt, loneliness, abandonment, alienation, meaninglessness, fear of and fact of illness, aging, dying and death (Leibniz 1996: vols. 1 and 2; Kant 1975: 77-93; Hegel 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Habermas 1986: 53-55; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247; Küng 1978: 137, 511, 601, 636-638, 779, 822, 823, 831, 836, 839,

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840; 1990b: 63-64, 70-71, 77-79, 146-147; 1991b: 726-728; 1994a: 904-905; Siebert 1966; 1987c; 1994c). Habermas could not see any countermovement to human transcendence (Siebert 2000). In Auschwitz or Birkenau, the prayers of the believers in their most extreme distress seemed to have gone nowhere. The Adonai, Adonai, Adonai!!! cries of the innocent victims in extreme distress had remained consistently unheard. Habermas could share in Adorno’s and Benjamin’s inverse theology and in Brecht’s idea of friendly living together, which the latter rescued from the mythos– it was a dream in most world religions–into his secular epical or dialectical theater (Adorno 1970: 103-125; Benjamin 1978; Brecht 1993a: 212213; Bentley 1961; Habermas 1990: 9-18). On the Hegelian continuum between the religious and the secular, faith and reason, Brecht stood at the opposite extreme of Scholem (Hegel 1986p: 9-26; Scholem 1989; Brecht 1993a: 212-213; Bentley 1961). According to Adorno, Brecht’s vulgar atheism could be rescued for the critical theory of society only through the inverse cipher theology (Adorno 1970: 103-125; 1997j/2: 608-616; Benjamin 1978; Brecht 1993a: 212-213; Bentley 1961; Habermas 1990: 1415). However, Habermas was so deeply impressed by the bad quantitative infinity of the perils of human existence, the unending theodicy problem, that he could not find any evidence for its turning over into a good, qualitative Infinity, the totally Other. A theory of society could maybe provide or offer a perspective, hopes and starting points for the conquest of unhappiness and misery, which were generated by the structure of antagonistic civil society. (Habermas 1986: 53-54) Yet, informed by Kant, Habermas argued that such theory of society could do nothing in order to solve or overcome the theodicy problem as such. It offered no consolation. It had no bearing on the individuals or society’s need for redemption or salvation. Marxist hopes were of course directed towards a collective project (Habermas 1976; 1986: 53-54). They hold out to the individual and the collective the prospect that forms of life with greater solidarity would be able to eradicate, or at least to diminish, that part of the theodicy problem for which social repressions bear the responsibility. Yet, Habermas had to admit that this was a poor substitute for the consolation, which the great world religions had once been able to offer. Habermas could even say that a consciousness of the radical absence of consolation was fostered in the first place by social theories, which informed people about the stages of social development, more mature forms of social organization, and the practice through which new social formations could be brought into existence. In so doing, social theories repudiated even religious notions of redemption and salvation.

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Voluntas Ordinata Thus, according to Habermas’ theory of communicative action, people could ultimately not refer any longer in the context of the positivistic culture of the antagonistic civil society to an entirely Other as the radical, but nevertheless still concrete sublation of the God-hypostasies of the world religions, and thus as the source for the possible solution of the theodicy problem, and thus, of redemption and of consolation (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1980a; 1980b: 333-334; 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1981a 1981b; 1984a; 1984b; 1986: 53-54; 1987d). Ultimately, people had to live disconsolately in late capitalist society (Habermas 1975; 1973). However as little as Kant or Hegel, Horkheimer or Adorno, not to speak of Benjamin or Fromm, Habermas would never arrive at the abstract materialistic atheism of the God-Delusion, recently newly re-discovered by Richard Dawkins. Habermas rather came closer to the de-Hellenized Jewish, Christian and Islamic thinking (Benedict XVI 2006: 1-7; 1999; Habermas 2002; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Mendieta 2005: part IX-XI). According to the de-Helenized Muslim teaching, God was absolutely transcendent: totally Other (Benedict XVI 2006: 1-7; Benedict 2007; Küng 2004: C). He was so totally Other, that His will was not bound up any longer with any human logic or any human categories, not even that of rationality. The great de-Hellenizing Muslim scholar, Ibn Hazm, went so far as to state that God was not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to human beings. Were it God’s will, humans would even have to practice idolatry. In contrast with the so-called Hellenistic intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, there arose with the great Christian theologian and philosopher, Duns Scotus, not only a process of de-Hellenization, which has continued through William of Ockham, the Protestant Reformation, and the bourgeois enlightenment into the present–February 2010–multi-culturalism, but also a nominalism and voluntarism, which in its later developments led to the claim that humans could only know God’s voluntas ordinata (Benedict XVI 2006: 1-7; Küng 1994c). Beyond this was the realm of God’s freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the very opposite of everything he had actually done. This gave rise to positions in Christianity, which clearly approached those of Ibn Hazm in Islam, and might even have lead to the image of a capricious God, who was not even bound to Truth and Goodness. For Duns Scotus and Ibn Hazm and their followers, God’s Transcendence and Otherness were so exalted, that human reason, man’s sense of the True and the Good, were no longer an authentic mirror

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of God, whose deepest possibilities remained eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity has always insisted that between God and the human beings, between his eternal Creator Spirit and human created reason, there existed a real analogy–analogia entis–in which, as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 had stated, unlikeness remained infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language and images and symbols and notions altogether (Benedict XVI 2006, 1-7; Küng 1994a: 336-602). Thus, for Benedict XVI as for Haag, God remained almighty Reason and man as his image was rational and could speak and could enter discourse rather than engage in war and terror, crusades and jihad (Benedict XVI 2006: 1-7; 2007; Healan 2007: 2-22; Borradori 2004; Haag 1983: chaps. 1-3; 2005). Even for the critical theorists the holy images and names are concretely superseded through the ciphers of the inverse theology, which no matter how irrelevant, small and finite they may be, point nevertehles toward the wholly Other than a petrified and corrupt nature and history (Adorno 1970b: 103-110; Horkheimer 1985g: caps 17, 29, 37, 40). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, what for Benedict XVI may be an image of God–Adam and Eve, or Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of God and the Messiah–may remain for the critical theorists a cipher directing human longing and yearning toward the otherwise completely demythologized imageless and nameless Absolute, or qualitative Infinite, or wholly Other than the so torn- apart world of late capitalist society (Genesis 1 and 2; John 1; Adorno 1970b: 103-110; 1979: 354-372, 578-587; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 17, 29, 37, 40; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 23- 24; Habermas 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; Benedict XVI 2006: 1-7; 2007; Healan 2007: 2-22; Borradori 2004; Haag 1983: chaps. 1-3; 2005).

Methodological Atheism While Horkheimer and Adorno may not have abolished analogy between the finite world and the wholly Other completely in their critical theory of society, they were certainly infinitely more inclined toward unlikeness than likeness between them (Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 23-24; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 24, 29, 37, 40; Benedict XVI 2006: 1-7). Yet, without some measure of likeness, one cannot even speak rationally about the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Law, or the Kantian inhibition against moving into the realm of the Thing in itself (Exodus 20; Kant 1965: 24, 27, 74, 87, 149, 172-173, 490; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30).

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Certainly, Adorno’s and Benjamin’s cipher theology presupposed some measure of analogy (Adorno 1970b: 103-125). For Horkheimer and Adorno the imageless and nameless totally Other was the determinate negation of all forms of idolatry (Exodus 20; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 23-24). For the critical theorists, the totally Other was the guarantor of absolute truth and goodness (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40). In contrast, Habermas’s not methodological pantheism, but rather methodological–not necessarily substantial -atheism may indeed have approached a complete abolishment of the analogia entis without any longer positing any kind of likeness, for example, a divine voluntarism (Horkheimer 1967b: 216228, 229-238; 1985g: chaps14, 15, 16, 17, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 40; Habermas 2001a: 9-31; McCarthy 1994). While Kant and Hegel still combined Jerusalem and Athens, faith and reason, and while Haag tried to initiate a new phase in the Hellenization of theology and philosophy, which had its roots in the Septuaginta and in the Gospel of St. John, Habermas carried further the de-Hellenization process into the post-religious and post-metaphysical age (Hegel 1801: 1-22; 1986h: 181-230; Habermas 1988a: 278-279; 1988b; 1990: 9-18; 1991a: part III; Habermss/Ratzinger 2006; Benedict XVI 2007; Healan 2007: 2-22; Haag 1983: chaps. 1-3; 2005). In good Kantian terms, Habermas did not want, like Carl Gustav Jung or his disciples, to confuse psychology or any social science with theology: the psychological archetype of self with the reality of God, the images with the imagined, the signs with the signified Absolute (Jung 1933; 1958; 1990; Fromm 1970: chap. 2; Drewermann 1982). Habermas did not want to return with Dieter Henrich to metaphysics (Habermas 1988a: 278-279; Habermas/ Henrich 1974; 1990: 9-18; 1991a: part III; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Benedict XVI 2007). Unlike Benjamin, Adorno, or Michael Theunissen, Habermas did not want to catch at least a corner, tip, or tail of the Absolute after a long march through the ruins of the negative theology, if also this time with the help of notions of inter-subjectivity (Adorno 1970b: 103125; Habermas 1988b: 278-279). According to Habermas, in a presentation on Negativity in Adorno in the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in 1983, Theunissen made Hegel’s notion of the concrete Universal supple and malleable–admittedly without the help of linguistic-analytical means but nevertheless inter-subjectivity-theoretically–so that it could serve him as key for the time–diagnostic interpretation of actual escape movements (Friedeburg/Habermas 1983). However, so Habermas criticized, Theunissen stopped short as soon as truth began to dissolve itself into rational acceptability (Habermas 1988b: 278-279; 1999). Theunissen insisted on a metaphysical moment. For Theunissen, the demand that the thing had to

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be rational in itself, or that the reason had to be in itself readable, warded off the danger of a subjectivization, which the truth would fall victim to if one wanted to search for it in the mere broadening of the subjectivity into the inter-subjectivity (Habermas 1984a; 1984b; 1986; 1987d; 1988a: 278-279; 1992a; 1992b; 1997a; 1998b; Theunissen 1982). For Habermas, there was no return to metaphysics, be it with Henrich, or with Theunissen, or with Haag. Thus, what was left was the bad infinity or the abstract universality of progression into unlimited space, and unending past and future, and universal despair, from which there was no real escape into linguistics or into anything else finite. What was missing, but still very much missed, was the good, qualitative Infinite, and the concrete Universal, which was transcendent as well as immanent, be it mediated through subjectivity or through inter-subjectivity (Metz 1998; Peters 1998; Peters/ Urban 1999). In spite of all his optimism, Habermas has suffered much from the fact that–in mathematical terms–things did not come out exactly in this world, or–in Hegelian terms–from the riddles of Providence, which were posed by the horror and terror of history, and from its bad infinity of analytical understanding instead of the true and present qualitative Infinity of dialectical reason, and concrete Universality (Hegel 1986c: 367, 385; 1986d: 16, 87-88, 185-187; 1986e: 145, 149-166; 1986l: 35-36; Horkheimer 1967a; 1967b: 248-268; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 17, 21, 25, 30). Thus, Habermas has remained open for an inter-subjectively mediated, radically dereified, and maybe even not only linguistic, but genuinely religious and metaphysical Transcendence, without which human autonomy and solidarity, and most of all the normalization of tragic extra-everyday events, i.e. an at least practical theodicy, and an unconditional meaning of human existence are not possible (Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; 2002c: 564-568, 569-583; Habermas 1986: 53-55; 1988a: 59-60; 1990: 9-18; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; Benedict XVI 2006: 1-7; Benedict 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006). In a modern Euro-American culture, which since 200 years has been more and more obsessed with measuring the quantitative aspects of things in all spheres of life, the critical theorists have tried from 1914 on, to make–as Hegel before–people aware of this obsession, as well as of the possibility of the dialectical turning over of quantity into quality, and of the superiority of quality over quantity, as well as of the dimension of the qualitative Infinite or the wholly Other, which lies beyond and may even be critically opposed to the authoritarian state, including masses of authoritarian individuals and families and a civil society with many likewise authoritarian corporations and unions, and which sphere is the ultimate concern of genuine religion, as well as

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of great art, and of great philosophy(Hegel 1972; 1976; 1979; 1986b: 287433, 434-532; 1986c: 495-592; 1986e: 115- 173; 209- 444; 1986f: 243-573; 1986g; 1986j; 1986q: 185-346, 347-536; Horkheimer 1972L chaps 3, 9; 1988a; 1985g: chaps 14, 15, 16, 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988d: 419-440; 1987k: 284288, 289-328, 329-332; Fromm 1932a; 1932b; 1980a; 1981; 1990; Adorno 1950; 1970a; 1980a; 1993b; 1997u; 2000a; App. C, D, E)

Atheism as Transitory Moment According to the dialectical religiology, theistic religion, the goal of which is the qualitative Infinitude, the wholly Other, becomes utterly perverted into ideology as false consciousness, if it allows itself to be functionalized in the interest of the survival of a particular authoritarian state, no matter how big it may be quantitatively, and thus to be drawn into the terror, horror and cruelty of history, and thus leads necessarily to substantial atheism–the abstract negation of the qualitative Infinite or Unconditional, or the totally Other, and to the absolutization of the finite world of appearance with all its injustices as the last word of history: the final victory of the murderer over the innocent victim (Horkheimer 1987e: chaps. 293-319, 320-350, 377- 395, 412-414, 415-422; 1988d: chaps. 6, 11, 1985g: chaps. 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 29, 37, 40; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1989h chaps. 6, 7, 9, 11, 1`3, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 37). Thus, while members of the three Abrahamic religions murder each other with the hope for paradise or heaven in the Middle East year after year, the atheists sing on American television week after week the song, that they are not afraid of Jahweh, or Jesus, or Allah, but that they are afraid of what the believers are doing in the name of their God. There is unfortunately some justification for this atheistic fear. Problematic believers, who misunderstand or ignore the law of their God, produce the justified and necessary, but hopefully transitory moment of a more or less enlightened atheism (Küng 1978: B, C; 1990a; 1990b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel 1990; Küng/ Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008). The critical theorists tried to find their dialectical way from the ethical monotheism of the Abrahamic religions, through modern atheism, to a postmodern, posttheistic religious humanism driven by the Ex-Experience or by the unsatiable longing for the wholly Other than the horror and terror of a petrified, corrupted finite nature and history (Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967b; 1969; 1972l chaps 2, 4, 5, 6; 1985g: chaps; 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 29, 32, 37, 40; 1985l: 294-296; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966b; 1976; 1984; 1992, 1995, 1997; 2001). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, atheism is

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a necessary and legitimate but nevertheless transitory moment in the history of religions as well as in the scientific reflection on it, including even the self-negation or contraction of God in the Hebrew Psalms and Jewish mysticism, without which there would be no creation or redemption of the world: And Where in the World Are You? before The Lord Is Lord, Our Refuge, Our Strength (Psalm 46; Psalm 73; Psalm 91; Hegel 1986d: 448; 1986h: 161-162; 1986j: 380-381; 1986p: 57, 94, 99-100, 323; 1986q: 290292; 386; 1986r: 99, 148, 160, 376-377, 499; 1986t: 162-163, 194, 197, 288, 291, 318, 520; : Bloch 1972; 1975b; Horkheimer 1972: chaps 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 29, 37; Habermas 1971b: chap 5; Berrigan 1972; 1978: 35- 37, 53- 56; 1989; Siebert 2001: chap III; 2002a: chap 6). The critical religiology continues up the same dialectical road from the polytheistic, pantheistic, and monotheistic religions, through atheism as the–what the great mystic John of the Cross called–the dark night of the soul, toward post-modern humanistic post-theism as the radical, but nevertheless determinate negation of all forms of theism, pantheism and polytheism and their images and names of the qualitative Infinity, the wholly Other, in which the bad infinity of time and space and causation is concretely superseded (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Tillich 1951; 1955; 1957; 1963; 1972; 1983; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967b; 1969; 1972: chaps 2, 4, 5, 6; 1985g: chaps; 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 29, 32, 37, 40; 1985l: 294-296; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969; 1972; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966b; 1976; 1984; 1992, 1995, 1997; 2001; Küng 1978; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008; Siebert 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2004b; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007e; 2007f; 2007g; 2008a; 2008b; 2008c; 2009a; 2009b; 2009c; App. E).

chapter five

Theory Formation According to Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which has become a philosophical classic and has not lost its relevance and actuality as the very core of the critical theory of society and of religion up to the present–February 2010–66 years after its first publication in New York in 1944 (Horkheimer 1996q: 24-25; Horkheimer / Adorno 1969; Sünker 1997: 129-137). Its dialectic of mythos and enlightenment gives insight into the formation of the critical theory from its very beginning, rooted in Judaism, Christianity, German idealism, and secular modern Enlightenment to the present transition period from the modern to the post-modern paradigm (Vollgraf, Sperl, & Hecker 2000; Wiggershaus 1987, chap. 4; Dubiel 1992, chaps. 1-3; Westend 2007; News Letter 2007: 2-6; App. A, C, D, E, F).

Heirs of German Idealism Horkheimer and Adorno, who were the genuine heirs of German idealism, and who did not fall into bourgeois skepticism and thus sent all those with visions, promises of salvation, expectations of happiness, and utopias pragmatically to the psychiatrist, and who had transformed Ernst Bloch’s principle of hope into the principle of longing, had originally planned to develop a materialistic logic out of Hegel’s idealistic Logic as the evolution of the Idea of God (Exodus 2: 23-25; Hertz 5716 / 1956: 212-213 / 23-25; Hegel 1986e: 65-114, 15-173; Horkheimer 1967: 302-316; 1985g: chaps. 37, 40; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; Haag 1983: chap. 4; Gadamer / Habermas 1979; Kesting 2006: 67-69; Mayer 2006; Bloch 1993: vol. 1 & 2; Eggebrecht 2007: 61-63; Dornuf 2007: 228-231; Maker 2006: 99-126; Fischer 2006: 127-158; Gooch 2006: 159-190). However, the critical theorists did not want to start their materialistic logic like Hegel in his idealistic logic with Being, Nothing and Becoming, but rather with Existence–with a particular emphasis on Something and an Other–, Finitude and Infinitude. Of course, already a century before, Lenin transformed Hegel’s idealistic dialectical logic into the materialistic Alphabet of Revolution. Hegel knew

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that God transcended His own Logic and all its categories, and that they were valid and true only in relationship to His finite other, the creation of nature and of man, as it had been clear to the Torah and the Talmud long before (Genesis 1 and 2; Hegel 1986e: 43-44; Horkheimer 1967: 311-312; 1987k: 171-188, 418-425; 1990j: 257-266, 340-352). As Hegel disclosed, Jacob Boehme, the philosophus Teutonicus, had already unveiled through his dialectical philosophy the Rose of God’s Trinitarian Logos as it was veiled, covered up, and hidden behind the hardened and petrified bark or crust of the substantial core of reality, and in the Cross of the natural, personal, social historical and cultural present (Hegel 1986b: 534; 1986e: 122; 1986g: 26-27, 42-43; 1986h: 28; 1986p: 272; 1986t: 116). Hegel differed from Boehme through avoiding his enthusiastic and often barbarous irrationalities and particularly his Trinitarian pantheism (Hegel 1986t: 64, 69, 70, 74-119, 91-92, 94, 96-99, 109, 113, 118-119, 142-143, 166, 182, 196, 232-233, 256, 445).

Disposition However, instead of an idealistic or a materialistic logic, the critical theorists produced the Dialectic of Enlightenment, starting out from the modern antagonism between the religious and the secular, religion and rationality, God and reason and modernity; mythos and enlightenment, faith and knowledge, but without its possible reconciliation, as Hegel had done in his Philosophy of Religion and in his anti-Kantian dialectical reconstruction of the proofs for the existence of God, which continued his Logic, and which concluded his Philosophy of Religion (Hegel 1986b: 287433; 1986p: 16-26; 1986q: 342-344; Horkheimer / Adorno 1972: 3-42, 4380, 168-208; Habermas 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; Mendieta 2005: part IX; Habermas / Ratzinger 2006). Already in his letter to Friedrich Pollock from Los Angeles of April 27, 1941, Horkheimer was clear about the disposition of the Dialectic of Enlightenment or Dialectic of Culture and Barbarism, or Philosophical Fragments: about the theme, the main theses, the most important means of style, and the meaning of the whole enterprise (Horkheimer 1996q: 24-25). The project would be similar to Horkheimer’s essay on the Authoritarian State of 1940, but it would be broadened into the question: what did the breakdown of Western culture mean? (Horkheimer 1987e: 293-319) The project would deal with three most important theses:

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1)

The first thesis was that this Western culture had itself been untruthful, false, hypocritical, contradictory, brittle, fragile as had become manifest in its critique by Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche. 2) The second thesis was that the decay, disintegration and decline of the forms of being of modern civil society was connected with its opposition to the truth as it had become manifest in Hegel’s idealistic and Marx’s materialistic dialectic. 3) The third thesis was that the truth was the principle through which the badness was melted and dissolved. The truth was critical and negative. (Marx: 1953: 225-316; Flechtheim / Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1971; Fromm 1967: 87-196; Bottomore 1964; Horkheimer 1996q: 17-20, 24-25, 28, 31-32, 56, 60, 78-79, 80-81, 91-92, 95, 168-176, 168-191191-212, 213-214, 240242, 266-270, 273-279, 280-283, 283-286, 298-300, 312, 313-327, 328-329, 378-383, 386-387, 390-394, 415-430, 433-434, 434-437, 444-451, 470-473, 494-495, 496-506, 549-551, 579-582, 583-590, 636-638, 665-652, 673-674, 694-701, 717-720, 738-742, 748-749, 934-939; Horkheimer / Adorno 1969).

The Critical Truth Along with Arthur Schopenhauer, Horkheimer asked the question whether one could possibly live with this negative and critical truth? Horkheimer intended in his project to research and explore the European idea of culture, which rested on an affirmative answer to this question. Horkheimer thought that maybe the representation that one could make use of the truth for one self, as Hitler had in mind, instead of fulfilling the truth, as Jesus of Nazareth taught, was the secret conflict of modern world history (Matthew 22: 16; Luke 1: 4; John 1: 14, 17; 3: 21; 4: 23; 5: 33; 8: 32, 40, 44, 14: 6, 17; 15: 26; Hitler 1943: 64-65). For Horkheimer, art and philosophy, but not religion, were of such central significance because only they at least intended the fulfillment of the truth, which Jesus had demanded. Here, for Horkheimer, Jesus and religion were not the same thing but rather opposites (Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97). In Horkheimer’s view, science was inseparably connected with the domination of nature. Horkheimer identified as one of the main tasks of the Dialectic of Enlightenment to give expression to the dialectic of the domination of nature. Horkheimer wanted to make sure that the project would not follow the road, way, or track of Max Scheler. Horkheimer was sure that the Rockefeller Foundation in New York would reject the project, which at the time went under the title Cultural Aspects of National Socialism, but he wanted to try at least to get support, nevertheless. The project was finally rejected (Horkheimer

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1996q: 28-30). I have had many such disappointments in the past 42 years with critical theory projects in America.

Cultural and Economic Modernization Today–February 2010–the cultural aspects of neo-conservativism would have to be explored, which have been canceling all cultural modernization, which can be noticed in all American universities, while it has inexorably pushed forward the economic modernization. This way the Dialectic of Enlightenment could be further developed. It is however very doubtful if the Rockefeller Foundation would be more generous toward such a critical project today than it was 60 years ago. Critical thinking is problematic in antagonistic civil society. However, at this time as neo-conservativism continues to dominate, particularly in North America, and wide-spread Rightwing extremism and the intensification of the trends in globalizing civil society toward alternative Future I and II continue to be realized, it is of greatest importance to remember the critical theorists’ heroic struggle against fascism in theory and praxis, and to take most seriously the warning of the great American philosopher George Santayana: whoever can not remember the past, is condemned to repeat it (Horkheimer 1996q: 37-40, 40-42, 111-115, 216-218, 766-767, 860-866, 876-884; Vogel 2007: 18-22; Institut für Sozialforschung 1994b; Potok 2007; App. G). According to the founder of Chassidism, Baal Shem Tow, forgetfulness leads to exile, while remembrance is the secret of redemption, i.e. the rescue of the poor and the hopeless (Exodus 3: 1-22; Hertz 5716 / 1956: 213-218 / 1-22; Hegel 1986c: 548, 590, 591; 1986d: 45-46; 1986f: 13-14, 122; 1986j: 158-262; 1986l: 17; 1986m: 248; 1986s: 44 & 404; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10-11; Jander 2007: 73-75; Siebert 2002a; xii).

Remembrance of Things Past According to Adorno, the glance of Marcel Proust, –the poet from a French Catholic background–at men and things was so close that even the identity of the individual, his character, was dissolved (Proust 1981; Adorno 1962: 652-653). However, in terms of Adorno’s inverse, cipher theology, it was Proust’s obsession with the concrete and unique something–with the taste of a madeleine, or the color of the shoes of a lady, worn at a certain party–which became instrumental with regard to the materialization of a truly theological idea, namely that of immortality. It

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was this, together with the idea of God and Freedom that constituted what Kant had called the Thing in itself, which was prohibited by his philosophy to penetrate, but being unknowable was nevertheless thinkable. This was also expressed by the second and third commandment of the Mosaic law before, and by Hegel’s dialectic, determinate negation, afterwards, and which for Proust, Adorno and Benjamin presented itself, nevertheless, through remembrance in ciphers or hieroglyphs (Exodus 20: 4-7; Kant 1929: 27, 71-74, 87, 149, 490; Hegel 1986b: 310; 1986d: 439-44; 1986e: 26, 40, 41, 60, 129-130; 1986f: 20-21, 129-133, 135-135-136, 140, 307, 320, 489-490, 503; 1986g: 106; 1986h: 120-121, 254-255; 1986q: 434; 1986t: 338; Proust 1982; Adorno 1962: 652-653). In Hegel’s view, Kant’s agnostic attitude toward the Thing itself was refuted by the behavior of the longing and hoping free will (Hegel 1986b: 310; 1986d: 439-44; 1986e: 26, 40, 41, 60, 129-130; 1986f: 20-21, 129-133, 135-135-136, 140, 307, 320, 489-490, 503; 1986g: 106; 1986h: 120-121, 254-255; 1986q: 434; 1986t: 338). For Hegel, the Thing itself was not only not empty or nothing, as for the Buddhists, but its content was rather the Notion, the self-alienating and selfreconciling Universal; or more concretely, the dialectical evolution of the Idea of God, Freedom and Immortality, as developed in his Logic, or Logos theology, which he found continually concretely superseded in nature and history in spite of all their horrible riddles (Hegel 1986e: 43-44; Küng 1970). It was Proust’s concentration of attention–like in a prayer–upon opaque and quasi-blind details, through which he achieved that remembrance of men and things past, by which his novel undertook to brave even death by breaking the power of oblivion that engulfs every individual life. It was Proust, who–in a non-religious world, in profane antagonistic civil society–took the theological phrase of immortality literally and seriously, and tried to rescue and salvage life, as an image, from the throes of death. However, Proust did so by giving himself up to the most futile, the most insignificant, the most fugitive traces of memory. By concentrating his attention upon the utterly mortal, Proust inverted or converted his novel, which in the 1960s was blamed for its self-indulgence and decadence, into a cipher or a hieroglyph of the old, Catholic as well as general Christian confession of faith and hope: O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory (1 Corinthians 15: 55; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986q: 273-274, 286-299; Schiller 1986c: 591; 1986q: 273-274; Goethe 1830; Adorno 1962: 652-653; 1993a; 2002c: 564-568, 569-583; Küng 1970; 1972; 1976; 1982; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a: 336-601; 1994b; 1998; Kuschel / Schlenson 2008).

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In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the remembrance of things and men past, particularly of the innocent victims of society and history, who are in need of redemption, as well as the always new theodicy experiences, are the very source not only of Adorno’s and Benjamin’s inverse cipher theology, but also for the very longing intrinsic to it, for the wholly Other, liberation, and rescue of the hopeless which has been the driving force, energy and vitality of the great world religions, and which in modernity has taken on the form of secular enlightenment (Adorno 1970b: 103-110; 1962: 652-653; Brändle 1984). When Luther was asked once, what he would do if he knew that tomorrow the world would go under, he answered: I would plant an apple tree. The same, heroic old Roman and Christian longing for, trust and, confidence in, and hope for the totally Other, which is indifferent concerning having or not having, being or not being, and which was expressed in religious form in the Luther story through the cipher of the apple tree, was present in secular form among the critical theorists, when they spoke of their critical theory of society in terms of the hieroglyph of the Flaschenpost (mail in a bottle), which would be carried by the stormy sea of the transition period from the old paradigm of Modernity to the new paradigm of Post-Modernity, which is concretely superseding the former: alternative Future III–the reconciled society (Hegel 1986e: 91-92; Horkheimer 1987k: 289-291; App. G). Already Horaz had formulated this indifferent heroic longing in the turmoil of the late Roman Empire, before its destruction, and the transition to the new paradigm of the Middle Ages, which served Hegel and the critical theorists as prototype for the present world historical transformation: Si fractus illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinae (When the structure of the world collapses and crashes down, the ruins still strike a hero) (Horaz 60; Hegel 1986e: 91; 1986q: 289-291, 342-343; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 122-147, 354-372, 373-391, 397-447, 408-433, 440-456, 457-477, 569-573, 578-587; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Siebert 2007g).

Nominalistic Movement For Adorno and Horkheimer, the bourgeois enlightenment had been a nominalistic movement (Horkheimer / Adorno 1969: 23-24). As such it was the result of the de-Hellenization process, which had started with

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Dun Scotus and William of Ockham who still belonged to the Roman Catholic Paradigm of the Middle Ages, and had gone through the Protestant-Evangelical Paradigm of the Reformation into the Reason-and Progress-Oriented Paradigm of Modernity, the bourgeois enlightenment, and as such had continually deepened the antagonism between Jerusalem and Athens, between religion and philosophy, between theism and deism, agnosticism and atheism, faith and knowledge (Hegel 1801: 1-22; 1986h: 181-230; Horkheimer / Adorno 1969: 23-24; Mendieta 2005: part IX; Healan 2007: 2-22; Haag 1983: chaps. 1-3; 2005; Benedict XVI 2006: 1-7; Habermas / Ratzinger 2006; Küng 1978: B; 1994a: 336-601, 602-741, 742-899; 1994b; App. F). In the view of the critical theorists of society, the nominalistic movement of the bourgeois enlightenment had called a halt before the nomen, the exclusive, precise concept, the proper name (Horkheimer / Adorno 1969: 23-24). Tönnies had asserted that proper names had originally been species and genus names as well (Tönnies 1908: 31). The critical theorists could no longer ascertain if this assertion was true (Horkheimer / Adorno 1972: 23). However they were sure that the proper names had not yet shared the fate of the species and genus names. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, David Hume and Ernst Mach had refuted the substantial ego. (Hegel 1986a: 446; 1986b: 376-377, 394-395; 1986d: 430; 1986f: 490; 1986h: 112-113, 124, 131, 138; 1986t: 269, 270, 275-281, 287, 311, 333, 335, 335, 337; Horkheimer 1987i: 425-450; 1990j: 257-266; 1987k: 171-188; Horkheimer / Adorno1972: 23). The ego could not be rescued. However, for the critical theorists the substantial ego was not synonymous with the proper name.

The Jewish Religion According to the Jewish or half Jewish scholars Horkheimer and Adorno, in the Jewish religion the idea of the patriarchate culminated in the destruction of myth (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer / Adorno 1972: 23; Küng 1991b). In the Jewish religion the bond between name and being was, nevertheless, still recognized in the ban on pronouncing the name of God (Genesis 2: 18-20; Exodus 20: 7; Horkheimer / Adorno 1972: 23). In the view of the critical theorists, the disenchanted world of Judaism conciliated magic by negating it in the idea of God (Hegel 1986p: 259-301; 1986: 548-573; Horkheimer / Adorno 1972: 23). For the critical theorists, the Jewish religion did not allow any word that would alleviate the universal despair of all that was mortal. The Jewish religion associated hope only with the prohibition against calling on what is false as God: against

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invoking the finite as the Infinite, lies as Truth. In Judaism, the guarantee of salvation lay in the rejection of any belief that would replace it. The guarantee of redemption was the knowledge obtained in the denunciation of illusion.

Evolution of the Idea of God For Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s student, Karl-Heinz Haag, precisely these statements on Judaism were the very core of their theory of religion (Healan 2007: 2-22; Haag 1983: chaps. 1-3; 2005). The critical theorists found Kant’s enlightenment prefigured and prepared already in the demythologization taking place in the Jewish religion. The critical theorists opened up and continued, what Hegel had called in his Logic, the evolution of the idea of God through determinately negating not only the Jewish Religion of Sublimity, but also the Religion of Magic, the Greek Religion of Fate and Beauty, Buddhism as the Religion of Inwardness, and Christianity as the Religion of Freedom, as well as the nominalistic bourgeois enlightenment, the Marxist enlightenment, and the Freudian enlightenment (Hegel 1986e; 1986f; 1986p; 1986q; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 40; 1985h: chaps. 9, 16, 17, 23, 24, 27, 28, 30, 32, 41; 1987i: chaps. 13, 18; 1987k: 2269, 70-75, 76-79, 100-118, 119-132, 138-144, 171-188, 202-208, 221-232, 268-269, 277-279, 284-288, 345-408; 1990j; Horkheimer / Adorno 1972: 23; Fromm 1992: 3-94, 203-212; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1980b; Küng 1990a; App. E). Doing so, the critical theorists were continually driven by the energy of the insatiable longing for the nameless and imageless wholly Other than the horror and terror of nature and particularly history (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; Horkheimer / Adorno 1972: 23). Also the new critical theory of religion has no higher ambition than to continue the dialectical evolution of the idea of God beyond the world-religions and the modern enlightenment movements motivated by the longing for the imageless and nameless entirely Other than the corrupted world of nature and history (Hegel 1986e; 1986f; 1986p; 1986q; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 40; Horkheimer / Adorno 1972: 23; Siebert 1987a; 1987c; 1987d; 1993, 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 1995b; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2003a; 2003b; 2004a; 2004a; 2004b; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b). Long before Fichte, Novalis, and the Lutheran Hegel, Paul of Tarsus had spoken of this insatiable longing for the totally Other:

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From the beginning till now the entire creation, as we know, has been longing in one great act of giving birth; and not only creation, but all of us who possess the first fruits of the Spirit, we too long inwardly as we wait for our bodies to be set free. For we must be content to hope that we shall be redeemed-our salvation is not in sight, we should not have to be hoping for it if it were-but, as I say, we must hope to be redeemed since we are not saved yet-it is something we must wait for with patience (Romans 8: 22-26; Hegel 1986a: 417, 344-345; 1986c: 169, 423, 424; 1986e: 2671986t: 386, 399, 407, 418; Küng 1994a: 904-905; 1994b; 1998; Benedict XVI).

Buddhism, Pantheism, Skepticism Horkheimer and Adorno had to admit that this negation of religious illusion or delusion was not merely abstract, but rather concrete (Horkheimer / Adorno 1972: 23-24). For the critical theorists, the abstract negating or contesting of every positive content without distinction, the stereotype formula of vanity of everything finite as it has been used by Buddhism, set itself above the radicalized Mosaic or Kantian prohibition against naming the Absolute (Hegel 1986p: 374-389; Horkheimer / Adorno 1972: 23-24; Küng / Ess / Stietencron; Bechert 1984: C). It set itself just as far above this prohibition as its contrary: pantheism. It also set itself just as far above the prohibition as the caricature of pantheism: namely bourgeois skepticism. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, explanations of the world as all–pantheism and skepticism, or as nothing as in Buddhism, were mythologies, and their guaranteed roads to salvation were sublimated magic practices. The self-satisfaction of knowing in advance, as it has happened in pantheism and skepticism, and the transfiguration of the negative into redemption as it has happened in Buddhism, were untrue forms of resistance against deception. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, not only bourgeois skepticism, but also Marxism and Freudianism may be rooted in pantheism, and in the assertion that the world is all. Bourgeois and socialistic movies have in common, that for them there is no Other than the world as it is. Elements of positivism–the metaphysics of what is the case–can be found even in Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud.

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Hegel’s as well as Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s dialectical pursuit, or determinate negativity, did not receive from the sovereignty of the abstract concept any immunity against corrupting intuition as does bourgeois skepticism, for which both, true and false, were equally vain (Horkheimer/ Adorno 1972: 23-24). Through determinate or concrete negation, the critical theorists rejected the defective ideas of the Absolute, the fetishes, the idols, differently in the evolution of the idea of God, than the rigorism, which confronted them with the Idea of God to which they could not possibly match up (Hegel 1986p: 259-301; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; Lundgren 1998; Horkheimer / Adorno 1972: 23-24). On the contrary, dialectic–i.e. determinate negation–interpreted every image of the Absolute, which was prohibited by the third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue as well as by the Kantian philosophy, as a cipher to be decoded, or as a writing to be read. (Exodus 20: 4-6; Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53, 121; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1972: 23-24; Adorno 1970b: 103-110; 1971; 1997j-2: 608-616). The dialectic showed how the admission of the image’s falsity was to be read in the lines of its features. This was a confession that deprived the image of its power and appropriated it for the Truth. The critical theorists admitted that Hegel had revealed an element that distinguished the bourgeois enlightenment from the positivistic degeneracy to which he attributed it (Exodus20: 4-6; Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53; Adorno 1970a; Horkheimer / Adorno 1972: 23-24). However, Horkheimer and Adorno criticized Hegel for ultimately making supposedly the conscious result of the whole process of determinate negation, the dialectical evolution of the idea of God, the totality in system and history, into an absolute. In doing so, Hegel contravened the Mosaic and Kantian prohibition against naming or making images of the Absolute and thus, he himself lapsed into mythology. Through the radicalization of the second and third commandment of the Mosaic law and through the Kantian prohibition against penetrating the realm of the Thing in itself, the critical theorists were able to deal with mythological anthropomorphisms in the Tanakh, the New Testament and the Holy Qur’an, for example, the retaliating wrath of the God who terrorizes the believers, who dominates them by the introduction of great fear (Tanakh: Genesis 34; Exodus 12; 14; Numbers 31: 17-18; Deuteronomy 2: 34-35; 3: 6-7; 7: 1-6; 13: 12-18; 20: 10-18; Joshua 6: 17; 8: 2, 24-28; 10: 28, 40; 11: 14; Judges 3: 12-23; 4: 21; 1 Samuel 15: 3; Ezekiel 16: 35-43; 23; New Testament: Matthew 5: 29-30; 10: 28; 11: 23; 16: 18; 23: 15, 33; Mark 9: 42; 44; 48; Luke 10: 15; 12: 5; 16: 22; James 3: 6; 2 Peter 2: 4;

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Revelation 6: 15; Qur’an: Suras 2: 190, 193, 194; 9: 29, 36). Thus, the critical theorists were able to move beyond the Abrahamic religions into the modern bourgeois, Marxian, Nietzschean, and Freudian enlightenment movements, which had been prepared by the latter, and thus to try to free themselves and others from fear, and to make themselves into masters of their fate (Horkheimer/Adorno 1972; App. E).

Wrath of God and Hell However, according to the Rabbis the Pharaoh’s power, symbolized in the basilisk, became an instrument of punishment by the–anthropomorphically understood–anger and wrath of God, and thus, of the consequent liberation and triumph of his enslaved enemy, the Hebrews (Exodus 4: 4, 14; Hertz 5716 / 1956: 216 / 3, 219 / 14). In terms of Hegel, as the criminal decided for his crime, he also decided for his punishment (Hegel 1986g: 198-202)). Walter Dirks–who was a member of the Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity, and who had suffered much under fascism, and who shared with his Jewish friends Adorno and Horkheimer the longing that the injustices of this world would not be the last word of history–considered the wrath of God and hell somewhat justified in the face of the great tyrants and mass murderers of the 20th century–and we may add the beginning of the 21st century as well (Genesis 2; Hertz 5716 / 1956: 210-211 / 10-14; Küng 1994a: 336-601; Siebert 2000; 2001: chap III; 2002a: chaps 2, 6; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b). He could not imagine that a Hitler would share the same fate as his victims in world history as world judgment, and beyond. However, for Dirks’ friend, Eugen Kogon, who also belonged to the Roman Catholic Paradigm and who spent seven years in the concentration camp of Buchenwald, even the cruel death of Ananias and his wife Saphira as expression of God’s wrath and as punishment for their fraud in the early communist Christian community, was too much (Acts 5: 1-11; Kogon 1965; Küng 1994a: 336-601). Both friends knew, of course, from Origin, the father of the Ecumenical-Hellenistic Paradigm of Christian Antiquity, that hell was incompatible with God’s love, and they took this theological insight very seriously (Küng 1994a: 45-778; 1994b: 145-335). Also, Dirks wanted hell to be limited, even for the greatest mass murderers. The Center-Hegelian theologian and religiologists Hans Küng has stated in private discourse in a restaurant in a town near Auschwitz that God does not punish anybody, but that people punish themselves through their own sins and crimes, and thus produce their own hell. Human beings continue to practice horrors against other human beings–bombings,

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torture, lynchings, stoning for adulterous women, honor deaths for young girls who fall in love with men from another tribe, captivity in concentration camps, invasions, occupations, etc. Insofar as we Americans, particularly Catholics and Evangelicals, have consented in the past eight years, and already earlier, to violate the Golden Rule in Afghanistan or Iraq, Palestine or Lebanon, or elsewhere directly or indirectly, and to practice the Lex Talionis, and have thus become co-responsible for the 1 million civilian deaths, collateral damage, in Iraq alone, we must expect retaliation for generations to come. We can decide if we want to continue to meet terror with counter-terror, or to break the horrible spell of revenge. The choice is ours: hell or no hell? The American atheists have a song that is directed against believers, particularly Catholics and Evangelicals, but also Muslims and other religious people, and which is spread through the mass media, who continually repeat one verse: “We are not afraid of your God, we are only afraid of what you do in his name.” Unfortunately, in this case the American atheists are not far from the truth, no matter how vulgar and unsophisticated and unenlightened their abstract atheism may otherwise be. Also unfortunately, throughout the 20th century atheists in Eastern Europe and elsewhere did not only crucify Christianity and other religions, but also committed crimes against believers of all kinds (Vrcan 1986; 2001; Vrcan/Vucovi 1980; Bosnjak 1961; 1966; Bosnjak/Kvork 1969).

The World as Nothing, All, or Something For Kant the world was not nothing, as for the Buddhists, nor all, as for the pantheists, but something beyond which he postulated the Thing in itself, the most real Being, or Ens Realissimum (Kant 1965: 24, 27, 7174, 87, 149, 490). For Kant’s greatest student, Hegel, the world was neither nothing, as for the Buddhists, nor all as for the pantheists and the bourgeois skeptics, but rather something which transcended itself toward the Absolute: the remembrance and the Golgotha, and the reality, truth, and certainty of the throne of the absolute Spirit. (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986q: 115-165). For Marx and Freud, the world had not been nothing, as for the Buddhists, but it may very well have been all, as for Spinoza: Deus sive Natura (Hegel 1986a: 74; 1986b: 10, 37, 106, 106, 229-230, 263, 327, 339-352; 1986e: 48, 98, 121, 178-179, 214; Marx 1953; 2005; Freud 1939; 1946; 1962; 1964; Horkheimer 1987k: 171-188, 418-425). The critical theorists tried to demythologize not only religion, but philosophy as well, particularly the Hegelian philosophy (Horkheimer/Adorno 1972:

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23-24). For the critical theorists, the world was neither nothing, as for the Buddhists, nor all, as for the pantheists, the bourgeois skeptics and possibly also for the Marxists and the Freudians, but rather as for the Abrahamic religions, something, which they tried to transcend with all its finite qualities and quantities through their longing and hoping for a qualitative Infinity, or for the Eternal One: searching in nature and history not only for a transcendence from inside into this-worldliness, but rather tracing in nature and history the ciphers of the wholly Other than the world as it is given through the natural and social sciences (Hegel 1986e: 115-165; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 34, 37, 40; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1982: 127-143; 1987b: chaps. 6, 7, 14, 15, 18; 1991a: part III; 2002: chaps. 3, 4, 78; Mendieta 2005: parts V-VII, IX). For Horkheimer, Adorno, and Benjamin, to seek to salvage an unconditional meaning in nature and history without God was an entirely futile undertaking (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 40; Adorno 1970b: 103-125; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10-11; Habermas 1991a: 110-126; 2002: chap. 4). The totally other, nameless, and imageless Something, for which the critical theorists were longing, was no longer the pantheistic and skeptical God as Being itself, as One, as Substance, as Essence, as the First, as the Measure of all things, as abstract all-embracing Identity, as of Hinduism; or the Buddhist Nothingness and vanity, but rather like the God of becoming, flowing, objective, dialectical process, development and evolution, as found in the philosophy of Heraclitos, and in the three Abrahamic religions, particularly in their mystical branches: the Kabbalah, and Chassidism, the mystical theologies of Master Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, Sufism and German idealism (Hegel 1986b: 534, 536; 1986c: 507, 510; 1986e: 84, 85, 115-173, 185, 226, 388; 1986h: 28, 57, 103, 192, 193; 1986i: 30, 133, 146, 336, 522; 1986j: 293, 380-381; 1986k: 198, 227; 1986l: 190, 209-214, 390-466; 1986l: 180, 499; 1986p: 209, 305, 376-278, 348; 1986q: 240, 244; 1986r: 14, 194, 215, 238, 302, 319-343; Fromm 1966b; 1976: chaps. 3, 7, 8, 9; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; 1978d: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 6; Adorno 1970b: 103-125; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1982: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 6; Reimer 2007: 115-131; Siebert 2007a: 99-113).

Bourgeois Skepticism In the late 1960s, Herbert Marcuse, the representative of the critical theory and the leader of the revolutionary youth movement in America, France and Germany, struggled on the basis of his popular book One-Dimensional Man particularly against Governor Ronald Reagan in California, who

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had become the most outstanding representative of neo-conservativism and neo-liberalism at that time (Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a: 3-10; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; Schneider 2007: 2-3; Abromeit / Cobb 2004; Claussen 1981; Wolff / Moore 1968). Marcuse fought against the trend in late capitalist society toward post-modern, global, alternative Future I: the one-dimensional society, man, and thought. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, it would be a society without the other dimension: the sphere of the totally Other than the horror and terror of nature and history. It would be the fulfillment of bourgeois skepticism: the world would indeed be all and there would be no hope that the present injustices would not be the last word of history (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 8, 37, 40). Against this trend toward alternative Future I, Marcuse announced “the Great Refusal” (Marcuse 1960; a1966: 257; Löwenthal 1980; App. G). He quoted what Walter Benjamin had written at the beginning of the fascist era: Nur um der Hoffnungslosen willen ist uns die Hoffnung gegeben (It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.) (Marcuse 1964: 257).

Benjamin had practiced this great refusal throughout his life up to his suicide under the pressure of German, French and Spanish fascism. Like fascism before, so neo-conservativism today has been characterized by bourgeois skepticism: the world is all. Reagan was honest enough never to go to church. Only the reason he gave for his not going to church was dishonest: the danger of assassination. Whoever, after the victory of the neo-conservative counter-revolution of 1989, wants to know what neoconservativism or neo-liberalism really means must go to Croatia, where almost all of the once worker-owned hotels, airlines and banks have been re-appropriated by the sons and grandsons of the former Ustasha bourgeoisie, and where by now the German and other speculators have moved in and push the prices of the land up and transform the whole country into one gigantic foreign real estate market and one huge commodity. That happened after nationalism had been used as a blockbuster, which led to the Yugoslav civil war that cost the lives of 200, 000 people. Whoever wants to know what neo-conservativism really means must go into the Ukraine, where a similar bourgeois re-appropriation takes place. In both countries, positivistically inclined sociologists receive huge grants in order to study the possible eu-, non-, or dys-functionality of traditional religion–Roman Catholicism or the Orthodoxy–, for the survival of the newly introduced more and more one-dimensional civil society: as integrative

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factor; as normalizing contingency experience-management subsystem, purified from all wisdom, or mystical, or prophetic elements, which may produce indifference or even disturbance of the anyhow precarious social equilibrium, and which may point beyond the present unjust world, which is supposed to be all there is and ever will be: a world without redemption (Exodus II; Hertz 5716 / 1956: 210 / 7, 10; Marcuse 1966; 1970: 3-10). Whoever wants to know what neo-conservativism and neo-liberalism really means must follow the waves of the American empire, the U. S. hegemony and imperialistic activity of the past two centuries from the shores of Tripoli into the ruins of Baghdad and Iraq, where in April 2007 alone over 100 American soldiers died, not to speak of the 1 million Iraqi civilian casualties, or into the ruins of Kabul and Afghanistan, or into the ruins of Beirut and Lebanon, or into the ruins of Palestine (Herz 2007: 8-32; Mekhennet / Moss 2007: 3-4; Go 2007: 5-40). At this time, the neo-liberal globalization of civil society deepens continually the antagonism between the poor and rich classes and nations (Hegel 1986g: 339397; Lersch 2007: 75-78; Stiglitz 2006). Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” a secular inversion of the Providence of the Abrahamic religions, who once liberated the slaves, serfs and workers, is invisible in the present neoconservative globalization, which continually increases the poverty rate in first and third world countries, and thus impoverishes more and more millions of people all around the globe, simply because it is not present in it for the time being (Exodus 3: 21-22; Hertz 5716 / 1956: 216-218, 21, 22; Lersch 2007: 75-78; Stiglitz 2006). Only those countries are diminishing their poverty rate that resist the neo-liberal mainstream, or the so-called “Washington Consensus, ” for example, China, or Venezuela. In China, communism seems to work after all in the form of a very intensive and extensive intervention of the state into the market in solidarity and in favor of the poorer population. The critical theorist of religion is convinced that a different and a better world would be possible if new, post-neo-liberal political rules, pointing to alternative Future III–a just society, could be imposed on the as such necessary globalization process.

Suicide Epidemic Recently an American General hired a just graduated doctor of comparative religion, in order to find out, why so many young Muslim men and women and sometimes even children blow themselves and others up in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, etc. (Küng 2004: 19-55, D, E). The General being committed to bourgeois skepticism, that this world was far from

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nothing and sheer vanity, as the Buddhists think, but that it was rather all there is, could not understand why any body would kill himself in order to leap into another world which did not even exist. The General, who was formally also Christian, was nevertheless not aware of the fact that for all three Abrahamic religions the world was neither only nothing nor all, but that it was something which transcended itself into the dimension of God, freedom and Immortality, and that all three of them had produced innumerable martyrs, who had hoped to enter paradise or the kingdom of God through their martyrdom. If the General would give up bourgeois skepticism and would become a substantial Christian, he would have no problem to understand all the new Islamic martyrs, even if he would be convinced that they are misguided and wrongly conditioned and that their deeds are terrible crimes not only in terms of secular international law but also even by some readings of their own religious code: the Decalogue or the Sharia (Küng 2004, D, E). The General may even become aware of the fact that his own bourgeois skepticism, that the world is all there is, and the consequent separation of religion and state, and privatization of religion, and his own military and political plans, purposes, agendas, and actions, are important factors in the Islamic suicide epidemic. Unfortunately, every martyr does not only give witness to God, but also to His absence, the theodicy, as he is helplessly abandoned and forsaken and delivered to his executioners: except, of course, if this world is not–as the Abrahamic religions promise–sheer nothingness and vanity, and also not all, and the injustices done to the innocent victims will not be the last word of history (Psalm 22; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 40; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 23-24; Fromm 1966b: 181-185; Kogon 1967: 616-630; Frick 2007: 135-152; Siebert 2000a; 2007b).

Love and Theory From its religious and aesthetical origin in the little group of three friends, called the L’ile heureuse or “Island of Happiness, ” the development of the critical theory of society, including its theory of religion, has continually complied with the highest standards of theory formation established in the Heracleitian-Kantian-Hegelian-Marxian-Freudian critical, dialectical tradition: Panta rei! Polemos pater panton (Hegel 1965: Vol. I & II; 1986e: 84; 185, 226; 1986h: 57, 193; 1986e: 146, 336, 522; 1986q: 499; 1986r: 14, 194, 215, 238, 301, 319-343; Horkheimer 1988a; 1987k: 289-328, 409417; 1972; 1970; Habermas 1970; 1971a; 1971b; 1973; 1975; 1976; 1978a; Peukert 1969; 1976; Siebert 1979b; 1979c). As Hegel had seen land in the

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objective dialectical philosophy of becoming of Heracleitus, but determinately negated it nevertheless, so also the critical theorists saw land in the philosophy of the great German subjective, and objective, and absolute idealists from Kant through Fichte and Schelling to Hegel, and in the materialistic theories of Marx and Freud, but concretely superseded them nevertheless. The critical theory of society allowed for no regression or de-differentiation behind Kant, Schelling, Fichte and Hegel to the positivists Hume or Locke, or even further (Horkheimer 1987b: 15-148, 295-311; 1987i: 306-345, 425-450, 459-482; 1987k: 22-79, 80-99, 100-118, 171-188, 202-208, 221-232, 418-425; 1988c: chaps. 3, 5, 8, 11, 15, 16, 1990j: 11-168, 169-335, 334-422; 1988d: chaps. 5, 6, 7; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 2324). According to the young Hegel, in his time–toward the end of the 18th century–the syntheses of theory had become completely objective and entirely opposed to the subject (Hegel 1986a: 242-243). The practice annihilated the object and had become completely subjective. For Hegel, only in love alone could a person became one with the object. Only in love did the object not rule or govern over the subject, and the subject did not control or master the object. In Hegel’s view, the religious imagination made this love into the essence: into a Divinity (Hegel 1986a: 242-243; Bataille 1973). Then the person, who was separated from him / herself, had awe and deep respect for and paid attention to this Divinity of love. To the contrary, the person, who was one with her / himself, had love. To the person, who was separated and torn in her / himself, this bad conscience gave the consciousness of division and fear of the Divinity of love. Hegel called that association the union of something and an other, or of subject and object, or of freedom and nature, or of reality and potentiality (Hegel 1986a: 242-243; 1986e: 115-173). When, according to Hegel, the subject kept the form of the subject, and when the object retained the form of the object, and nature was still nature, then no union had been established. Then the subject, the free being, was the superior and the overwhelming side, and the object, the nature, was the ruled, governed and controlled side. Wherever these ideas of association or union of something and other, subject and object, appear–in Jacob Boehme, in the young Hegel, in Schelling’s World Ages, in Adorno’s Eichendorff remembrance and quotation, in Brecht’s experience of friendly living together, in Habermas’s sphere of relations with others, undisturbed intersubjectivity, relation between freedom and dependence, interactive models, –they all are always ideas of felicitous interaction, of reciprocity and distance, of separation and of successful, unspoiled nearness, of vulnerability and complementary caution (Hegel 1986a: 242-243; 1986e: 115-173; Adorno 1981: 69-94,

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647-653; Habermas 1986: 125-126). They all are images of protection, openness, and compassion, of submission and resistance. This kind of association, union, friendliness does of course not exclude conflict, rather it implies those human forms through which one can survive conflicts. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the formation of a theory in the emphatic Hegelian sense, which follows and concentrates on the process of the union, disunion and reunion of something and other, subject and object, has not only deep theological, philosophical and scientific, but also aesthetical and erotic roots, and as such can become the source of great happiness and fulfillment.

Closeness and Separation According to Hegel, in early oriental and occidental Antiquity, the God or the Gods walked among human beings, and both were close to each other (Genesis 1 and 2; Hegel 1986a: 242-243; 1986e: 115-173; Floerke 1922, vol. 10; App. E). However, the more the separation between God and God’s on one hand and humanity on the other increased, the more the former dissolved their relationship with the latter. Instead of this close relationship, God and the gods gained sacrifices, incense, and services. God and the Gods were feared more than loved. This continued until the separation between God and Gods and humans went so far, that the union could only happen through power, force, and violence. In Hegel’s view, love could take place only toward an equal, toward the mirror, toward the echo of the human being. Genuine theory, which deserved its name, was like love–the reconciliation of the antagonism between something and an other, subject and object, freedom and nature, actuality and potentiality in the qualitative Infinite. It was the separation between God and Gods and humanity that drove religion beyond itself into philosophy and into theory and into the dialectical notion as the attempt to bring about reconciliation between the divine and human opposites. While in modernity, theory sank down into positivistic hypotheses, and while most recently the Post-Modernists deconstructed all great narratives, the critical theorists have continued to hold on to its original meaning in the context of the divided West and of the torn apart world of the social (Habermas 1970; 1971a; 1971b; 1973; 1981b; 1984a; 1984b; 1985a: chaps. 6-11; 1986; 2004d; 1997a; 1997b; Honneth 1985: part 2; 1990; Keller 1989: part 6).

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Theory and Praxis According to Hegel, in Germany Kant’s philosophy had established in theory the same enlightenment principle that the French bourgeoisie practiced in its great Revolution of 1789 as had done the North American bourgeoisie in its revolution of 1776 (Hegel 1986l: 488-542, esp. 525; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 13; Böckenförde 1991; Habermas 1992a; 1997a: 192-236; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006: 19-52; Neunner/Wenz 2002). In the Kantian theory, the simple unity of the human self-consciousness, the ego, the independent freedom, was impenetrable and could not be broken through, and was the source of all universal determinations of thinking: the theoretical reason, and likewise the highest of all practical determinations, as free and pure will. It was precisely the reason of will to keep itself in the pure freedom–to will in everything particular only it itself: the right only for the sake of right, and the duty only for the sake of duty. In Hegel’s view, that principle of freedom remained for the German bourgeoisie only a quiet theory. The French bourgeoisie, however, and also the American bourgeoisie wanted to execute this principle of freedom practically. For Hegel, theory was to turn over dialectically into praxis (Hegel 1986l: 488-542, esp. 525; Habermas 1978a: chaps. 3-5). Thus, Hegel asked himself the double critical question: 1) 2)

Why did the freedom principle remain only formal with Kant and the Germans? Why did only the French and the Americans and not also the Germans work for the realization of the theory: the principle of freedom?

For Hegel, the American World or also the Slavic World would be the post-European, post bourgeois land of the future (Hegel 1986a: 218; 1986g: 465; 1986l: 107-115, 413, 418, 422, 490-491, 500, 513; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62). Here, alternative Future III would be achieved: the universal and the particular, solidarity and autonomy, would be reconciled. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the Germans had a Reformation in Wittenberg in 1517, but they missed the great bourgeois revolution in Frankfurt in 1848, and may have paid for this deficiency with the catastrophic rise of fascism in Berlin in 1933. The Germans made the revolution in their heads, which the French and the North Americans carried into the streets. Instead of a bourgeois revolution against the nobility, or a socialist revolution against the bourgeoisie, the Germans made a petite bourgeois fascist counter-revolution against the revolutionary socialist proletariat in Western and Eastern Europe (Hitler 1943; 1988; Kershaw 2000). Hegel’s philosophy aimed at a material principle of freedom and at

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its historical realization in terms of a theory-praxis dialectic. So did Marx, and so did and still does the Frankfurt School: against alternative Future I–the totally administered society, and against alternative Future II–the entirely militarized society, and toward alternative Future III–the realm of freedom on the basis of the realm of the necessity of nature, characterized by the reconciliation of personal autonomy and universal solidarity (Hegel 1986a: 218; 1986g: 465; 1986l: 107-115, 413, 418, 422, 490-491, 500, 513; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; App. G). As the critical theorists struggled against fascism in the first half of the 20th century, so they have fought against neo-conservativism and neo-liberalism in the second half of the 20th century and in the first years of the 21st century (Kinzer 2006; Habermas 1975; 1976; 1979a; 1979b; 1981c; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1987c; 1990; 1991c; 1992a; 1995; 1997a; 1998a; 1998b; 2001c; 2003a; 2003b; 2003c; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2004d; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; Kellner 1989; 1991; 2001). Neo-conservativism and neo-liberalism are not yet fascism, but they are nevertheless very often acting already fascistically from one regime change to the other, from Hawaii to Afghanistan and Iraq, toward global alternative Futures I and II: not to speak of the environmental destruction and the extremist rightwing hate-groups and hate crimes, which have happened under the neo-conservative watch from the 1970s on (Kinzer 2006; Byrd 2007a; 2007b; McKibben 1989; Boyle 2007; Boyle 2007: 47; Potok 2007).

Subject and Object According to Hegel, in the dimension of theory the subject was finite and unfree through the objects, the things, the independence of which was presupposed (Hegel 1986m: 154; 1986p: 357-359; 1986q: 164-166). In the sphere of praxis, the subject was finite and unfree through the onesidedness, the struggle, and the internal contradiction of the purposes, and of the drives and passions, which were stimulated, excited, aroused, provoked, infuriated, and worked up from outside, as well as through the resistance of the objects, which could never be completely removed. That was so because the separation and the opposition of the two sides, the objects and the subjectivity, constituted the presupposition in this relationship, and was considered to be the true notion of it. In Hegel’s view, the object met with the same finitude and unfreedom in both relationships. In the realm of theory, the object’s independence was–in spite of the fact that it was presupposed–nevertheless only an apparent freedom. This was so, because the objectivity as such was only without its notion being as sub-

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jective unity and universality inside of it and for it. The notion was outside of the objectivity. Therefore, every object in this externality of the notion existed as mere particularity, which was with its manifoldness turned toward the outside, and which appeared to be exposed in an infinitelysided relationship to the genesis, and origin, and change, and finally the downfall and destruction through others. In the practical dimension and relationship this dependence was as such expressively posited. Here the resistance of things against the will remained relative, without having the power of the independence of the latter in itself. For Hegel’s aesthetic, however, the consideration and the existence of the objects as beautiful ones, was the union and association of both perspectives, the theoretical and the practical one, as it determinately negated the one-sidedness of both concerning the subject as well as its object, and thereby their finitude and their unfreedom. However, in Hegel’s view this theory praxis dialectic did not remain limited to his aesthetics, but remained valid for all other social and cultural parts of his philosophy as well, and it remained binding for the whole critical tradition of the Hegelian Left.

The Claims of a Critical Theory Certainly the critical theorists never allowed themselves to fall behind or below the level of dialectical theory formation reached by Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Marx or Freud into traditional or positivistic theory or social technology (Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Habermas 1971a; 1971b; 1973; 1976; 1978a; 1978b; 1981a; 1981b; 1983; 1984a; 1984b; 1987b; 1987d; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; Negt 1964; Habermas / Luhmann 1975; Peukert 1969: 7-14; 82-95; 1976: 283-323; Siebert 1979a: chap. 1; 1979c; 1979d; 1980; 1985; 1987a; 1987b; 1987d; 1989). The claims of a critical theory of society after Hegel, August Comte, Marx, Charles Darwin, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas, Talcott Parsons, Merton, and Niklaus Luhmann, which reached beyond partial spheres of social life and turned toward such a phenomenon as the total system of human condition or action system, were threefold: 1) 2)

Such a theory must try to comprehend the object of the theory in its constitution. Such a theory must try to make evident the interdependence between the mode of the constitution of the object and the constitution of the subject, including his or her ability to theorize.

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Such a theory has to try to make understandable these objective and subjective processes of constitution out of the over-reaching process of natural and social evolution. (Peukert 1969: 7-14, 82-95; 1976: 283-323; Parsons 1965; 1964; O’Dea 1966; Luhmann 1977; Habermas 1973: 164-183; Siebert 1979a: chap. 1; 1979c; 1979c; 1979d; 1980).

Since Hegel, the fundamental problems of such a global type of theory, including a theory of religion, have been under debate. Since Hegel, also the comparative science of religion, and the theology of religions, and the theologies of the three Abrahamic religions have seriously to take into consideration theories of this type, in spite of all the resistance of deconstructionism and its attempts to cancel all great narratives, and be satisfied with small hypotheses, and to carry the process of de-Hellenization, and nominalism, and positivism to an extreme at which thinking in the emphatic Hegelian sense becomes very difficult or is no longer possible at all: the de-construction of the dialectical notion as the self-particularization and self-singularization of the universal in terms of its absolute particularization to the point of the complete loss of the universale pre rem, in re, or even post rem (Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53; 1986f: 273-300; Adorno 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1971; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; Haag 1983: chap. 4; Habermas 1985a; 1986; 1987b; 1987c; Borradori, 2003; Gadamer/Habermas 1979; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Honneth 1985: part II; Siebert 1979a: chap. 1; 1979c; 1979d; 1980; 1985; 1987a; 1987b; 1987d).

Motion In conformity to this standard of the critical tradition all the components of the critical theory are continually in motion: 1)

2)

There is the subject, who produces and reproduces the theory (Hegel 1986m: 154; 1986p: 357-359; 1986q: 164-166; Peukert 1976: part II & III; Arens 1989: 10-13). The critical theorist changes continually from one social and historical context to the other. There is the object, which is studied and researched by the critical theorist, the individual, society and its culture, including religion. Also the object, like the subject, is continually in motion and changes particularly in so far as it is first of all simply like objective nature, a second nature, which may be even more compulsive than the first one. However, its objectivity contains, nevertheless, in itself the subjectivity of humankind at least as a potential. In the last analysis, in the critical theory of society, man studies and researches himself in his personal, social and cultural objectifications and reifications with the practical intent to overcome

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this his alienation: Gnoti seauton! Therefore, the critical theorist cannot simply imitate the very successful natural sciences. He cannot become a positivist (Horkheimer 1974c: 101-104, 116-117; Adorno 1970b; 1970a: chaps, 1, 3, 5, 7; 1971; 1973b). He rather has to transcend the positivistic, naturalistic, and scientistic attitude in the traditional social sciences if he wants to comprehend individual, society and culture including religion (Marcuse 1962: 65-66; Habermas 2005). Otherwise, the critical theorists will miss the potential human subjectivity in the positivity and objectivity of individual, society and culture, including religion. While the critical theorist agrees with the positivist in so far as he collects data, and quantifies and connects them, he, nevertheless, departs from him when he acquiesces with the collected and registered facts, no matter how unjust they may be, and in so doing becomes inhuman, or engages in mere social technology or social engineering in the service of the survival of antagonistic civil society, or beyond that of post-modern alternative Future I–the entirely technocratic, computerized society, instead of in the critical theory and praxis toward alternative Future III–a society, in which personal autonomy and universal solidarity would be reconciled (Habermas/Luhmann 1975). There is the relationship between the continually changing subject on one hand, and the likewise continually changing object on the other; it is itself in permanent flux. Changes in the object–in individual, society and culture, including religion–cause changes in the theorizing subject, the critical theorist, and in the text of his critical theory. Transformations in the theorizing subject can bring about–when all goes well– through communicative revolutionary praxis changes in the object, in individual, society and culture, including religion. There is a productive conflict going on between subject and object, critical theorist and society and religion that includes creative destruction: Polemos pater panton. (Hegel 1986e: 84, 185, 226; 1986s: 14, 194, 215, 238, 301, 319-343).

Factors of Communicative Action In summary, theory formation concerned with human interaction or communicative action rooted in the human potential of language and memory and in the evolutionary universal of the struggle for recognition, and systems of human condition and action systems, has to deal with five fundamental factors: 1) 2) 3)

subjects are interacting communicatively with each other; and doing so they produce a text concerning objects in the world of nature, in the inner world, in the social world, in the cultural world, and in the world of language; with a certain structure;

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In theorizing about religious phenomena, the critical theorist may emphasize subject, text, textual structure, context, or motivation and goal, or may stress them all equally. Certainly, a new dialectical theory of religion must fulfill all those subjective and objective, theoretical and practical requirements most adequately, in order to gain and maintain validity on the modern and post-modern level of social evolution and learning.

Interdependence of Facts According to Hegel, theory had to have a firm empirical foundation (Hegel 1986e: 451-452). Theory had to avoid the destruction of facts as well as its own emptiness. The contradiction between facts and theory had to be superseded. In the natural sciences, the simple fact may be, for example, that in the elliptic movement of the heavenly bodies their speed accelerates as they approach the perahelium, and it diminishes, as they approach the aphelium. The quantitative side of this fact is precisely determined through the indefatigable diligence and industry of observation. Furthermore, this fact is reduced to its simple law and formula. That is all that may be demanded from a traditional theory to be achieved. Of course, this definition of theory may in the long run not satisfy the further reflecting analytical understanding, not to speak of dialectical reason. However, it belongs nevertheless to the essential notion of the traditional theory of nature and society that the hypothetical judgments relate themselves to exchangeable and replaceable data (Horkheimer 1972: 188-252; Siebert 1979a: chap. 1; 1979c; 1979d; 1980). This fundamental attitude gives to the dominant traditional social theory, such as functionalism or social technology, an extremely static character (Weber 1993; Luhmann 1977; O’Dea 1966; Habermas 1973: 164-183; Habermas / Luhmann 1975). It makes traditional social theory incapable of comprehending genuine social movements and structural changes (Habermas 1976; 1981b: chap. 8; 1981c; 1981d; Negt 1964). Comte’s social statistics prevails over social dynamics, and Marx’s productive relations over the productive forces (Horkheimer 1996q: 220-223). To the contrary, the logic of the thoughtconnection called the critical theory of society can be summed up in the one sentence: that in the social process the facts are dependent or better still interdependent. That is also the simplest formulation of the essence

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of dialectic: determinate negation of one thought or life form by the following one (Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 23-24). It is at the same time a formulation that emphasizes the strictness of the thought connection, called the critical theory. Every constellation calls forth a process, which changes the initial constellation. The business cycle is a good symbol for the logic of this thought connection, called the critical theory. At the same time here the strictness means something else than the merely explicative necessity of the usual traditional analysis. With every step of thought, or with every change in reality, something new enters into the connection or equation. This connection cannot–like the usual traditional deduction–be concluded immediately from the original premises. However, the process can also not go in any other way. Of course, not only society and religion have a history, but also nature, in spite of the fact, that in the perspective of our immediate life world the sky full of stars seems to be frozen. In reality it is not. The structure of the universe is determined by gravity, or attraction, and by repulsion: it moves, it expands, it contracts. After Albert Einstein had discovered the expansion of the universe, more recent scholars have become aware of an immense power of contraction in the dead stars, or the black holes. Maybe even the universe moves dialectically: like human history, including the history of religion. In any case, it moves! By the way, Einstein did not in advanced age rediscover his faith in God, because of the quantitative infinity of the universe, but rather through the beautiful music of a Jewish master-violinist: art more than nature or religion was the medium and the form in which the qualitative Infinity appeared to him (Hegel 1986e: 115-173).

The Temporal against the Eternal Horkheimer was not only the founder of the critical theory of society in general, but also more specifically of the critical theory, or sociology, or psychology of religion as its integral part (Horkheimer 1973: 129-131, 188-243; Ott 2001; 2007: 1-68, 167-186; Siebert 2005b). Already in its earliest beginnings, namely in Horkheimer’s novels and diary pages of 1914-1918, particularly his dialectical theory of religion was the response to his “greatest philosopher” and “spiritual father, ” Arthur Schopenhauer’s work, especially his theory of religion (Schopenhauer 1986: 5, chap. 13; Horkheimer 1988a: 25-28; 1987k: 289-328). Here in Schopenhauer’s work, for Horkheimer, was rooted the principle and motive of insatiable longing. Horkheimer’s artistic and philosophical life started shortly before World War I, when his friend, Friedrich Pollock, gave him a little book by

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Schopenhauer as a gift: Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life (Schopenhauer 1946; 1986, vol. 1: 268; vol. 2: chap. 44; Horkheimer 1995o: 9-11, 13-15, 22-25, 25-28). In a literary sense, Horkheimer’s early novels were obligated to Art Nouveau and to expressionism. However, in spite of all sensuality and desire to tell imaginative stories, Horkheimer’s early novels show already the didactic traits of his whole later theory of society and religion. The texts came about, when Horkheimer did not yet think of any academic study, not to speak of any academic career. His philosophical education was very fragmentary. He did not yet have at his disposal the form of a scientific treatise or discourse. It is even more astonishing how far developed already was the intellectual and spiritual tension that has been characteristic of the whole formation and evolution of the critical theory of society and religion: the tension between the radical critique of the extant social conditions in advanced antagonistic civil society on one hand, and the pessimism and sadness in relation to the world as a whole. However, already for the young Horkheimer, this tension was resolved not in a comfortable inconsequential bourgeois skepticism, for which the world is all, but rather in the demand and challenge taken over from Schopenhauer: “to assist the temporal against the merciless Eternal” (Schopenhauer 1986, vol. 2: 114, 472, 618, vol. 3: 187; Horkheimer 1988a). This Schopenhaurian demand can be called the innermost impulse and motive of the critical theory of society and religion. Later on, through this motive Horkheimer tried to connect Marx and Schopenhauer. It is highly ironical that Horkheimer’s arch enemy, Adolf Hitler, a soldier in the German army like him, was also deeply devoted to the “great man” Schopenhauer, and carried his work with him throughout the First World War, and even throughout the Second World War, and discussed it with Joseph Goebbels up to their last days in Berlin in 1945 (Schopenhauer 1986, vol. 2: 623; vol. 4: 177; vol. 5: 406, 421, 437; 447-450; Hitler 1943: 305-306; Trevor-Roper 1988: 89, 358). In contrast to Horkheimer, however, Hitler did not make the connection between Marx and Schopenhauer, but rather turned the latter, particularly his Anti-Semitism, or more precisely Anti-Judaism– “the Jews are liars”–against the former and developed his whole folkish and national-socialist theory against dialectical materialism (Schopenhauer 1986, vol. 2: 623; vol. 4: 177; vol. 5: 406, 421, 437, 447-450; Hitler 1943: 215, 362, 363, 373, 374, 378-385, 382, 391, 448, 452, 453, 458-462, 472, 475; Trevor-Roper 1988: 5, 6, 7, 10, 17, 20, 22, 33, 36, 38, 39, 58, 61, 75, 79, 88, 89, 90, 95, 145, 255, 322, 336, 490, 614, 568, 724).

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Psychological and Sociological Interest Horkheimer himself knew only too well that his early novels, e.g. the L’ile heureuse could not stand up firmly against literary judgment (Horkheimer 1988a; 1987k: 289-328). Yet, according to Horkheimer’s own final judgment, shortly after the start of the neo-conservative counter-revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the collapse of the third youth movement, and shortly before his death on July 7, 1973, his early novels could, nevertheless, still at that time claim psychological and sociological interest. For Horkheimer, the social, religious, erotic, and rebellious ideas in his early novels were decisive elements as they gave expression at the end of puberty to the harmonies and contrasts of the thinking and feeling of the young generation, which approached an independent life. Reasons for the restlessness in the immature stage of life were: the unconditional confession; the faithfulness to a particular belief; the complete devotion to justice and equality, no matter how much their devotee may have to suffer through the loss of his or her own privileges; even the erotic love and the sacrifices connected with it; every virtue without compromise and its role in this world. The fate of such radicality, the expression of the contrast between ideal and reality, determined the content of many of Horkheimer’s early novels and narratives. From his conservative-Jewish, bourgeois, industrialist family in Stuttgart, Horkheimer had received the will to truth and toward the right life, without nuances brought about through knowledge of the complicated reality of antagonistic industrial or late capitalist society. (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 122-146, 177-195, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 434-439, 440-456, 569-573, 578-587; Horkheimer 1988a; 1987k: 289-328; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 11-21).

Religious and Moral Imperatives In Horkheimer’s early, very much poetical critical theory, religious as well as moral imperatives appeared still without any differentiation through professional, political, economical, or other interests as motives, which determined immediately the individual, or were negated by him or her (Horkheimer 1988a; 1987k: 289-328). At that early time, Horkheimer was not yet familiar with the doubtful adaptation of theological and moral, allembracing principles to the particular everyday life world, not to speak of the economic and political subsystems of industrial society, of which his father Moses or Moriz Horkheimer, the owner of garment factories, was very much a part (Adorno 1979: 354-372, 578-587; Gumnior/Ringguth

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1973: 11-21). Young Horkheimer experienced painfully the contradiction between religious and moral confession of the members of the German and European bourgeoisie on one hand, and its real secular behavior in the time before and during World War I on the other: between religious and moral validity, and secular facticity (Horkheimer 1988a; 1987k: 289-328; Habermas 1992a; Gumnior / Ringguth 1973: 11-21). No critical theorist has ever been willing to deliver religion or morality to–what Marcuse called–the scientistic, positivistic, or naturalistic attitude–e.g. behaviorism, structural functionalism, or cognitivism, which is not able to rescue the emancipatory semantic and semiotic material from the depth of the religious mythos, and to allow it to migrate into secular discourse and praxis toward the accomplishment of alternative Future III–the right society, but rather instrumentalizes and functionalizes them together with science in the service of the status quo of civil society and toward alternative Future II–the entirely bureaucratized signal society: as contingency experience control and management subsystem (Marcuse 1962: 65-66; Luhmann 1977; Flechtheim 1971: 117-230; Bloch 1970; 1971; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; App. G).

L’ile heureuse In his novel L’ile heureuse or Island of Happiness, Horkheimer portrayed the idea, realization and the failure of a sworn quasi-religious-moral community, which existed in 1914, shortly before World War I, and which consisted of two men–Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock–and one woman–Suzanne, or Suze Neumeier, a relative and friend of Horkheimer, who later married Lucien, These three friends, in connecting spiritually and erotically, were unreservedly devoted to each other (Horkheimer 1987k: 289-328; 1995o: 11-13; 1996q: 979-981). It was a kind of religious utopian community in the tradition of the Jewish prototype of all utopias: “a land flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3: 8; Hertz 5716 / 1956: 214 / 8). It was the purpose of this utopian union to make its members’ own free conviction the rule, measure, and standard of all actions. The simple wisdom of life of all three members of the union was to despise everything material. They wanted to stand opposite all changes, which fate may introduce, in a Schopenhauerian or Nietzschean coldly observing attitude. This way they wanted to strive toward their goal: the L’ile heuereuse. They wanted to live for the knowledge of the beautiful world and for their mutual love. The friends’ contempt was directed against the world of bourgeois prejudices and its laws of base and mean self-preservation (Horkheimer

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1987e: 320-350; 1987k: 290-291). The friends’ life together was to be a witness (Horkheimer 1987k: 290). Their utopia was to be realized into the smallest detail. They were driven by the longing for the wholly Other, the New, and the Unconditional (Horkheimer 1987k: 290; 1985g: chaps 17, 29, 37, 40). For the friends the bourgeois social laws of European antagonistic civil society were not to be valid any longer.

Memorandum Almost four decades later, on August 8, 1951, Horkheimer and his lifelong friend Friedrich Pollock, the two men in the former utopian union, declared in a common, private Memorandum, that their life should be a witness to their original utopian design of the critical theory of society (Horkheimer 1996r: 218-221; 1987k: 290-291; 1991f: 34, 37, 329-331, 361-362). They wanted to realize the original utopia in the smallest detail. They willed the totally Other, the New, the Unconditional, which once had been present in religion, before it became hollow, empty, and dumb and its Transcendence burned out in modern bourgeois society, and through which the extant world proved itself as what was bad (Horkheimer1991f: 329-331), For Horkheimer, it was wrong to return to this kind of bourgeois religion, deprived of its essential and substantial longing for the wholly Other, be it after the break down of fascism, or of the real socialism of the Soviet empire. As nothing was more foreign to the Torah, or to the New Testament, or to the Holy Qur’an, or to the three Abrahamic religions in general, than the Theon Agnoton, the Unknown God, and as also the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Law did not exclude the knowledge of God, but rather presupposed it, and as also Kant’s prohibition against analytical understanding penetrating the realm of the Thing in itself, was not merely a simple, abstract agnosticism, so was also the longing of the critical theorists for the imageless and nameless totally Other or the X-experience, not simply or abstractly agnostic: whoever identifies the unknowable but nevertheless thinkable wholly Other as the negation of the apparent bad world, the horror and terror of nature and history, must know something about it after all (Exodus 3: 13; 20: 4-7; Hertz 5716 / 1956: 215 / 13; Acts 17: 23-34; Kant 1929: 24, 27, 7174, 85-87, 89, 97, 149, 172-173, 230, 365-367, 278-280, 282-284, 346-348, 351-353, 350-352, 381-383, 440, 441, 443, 444-446, 447-449, 453-455, 457, 460, 466-468, 482-484, 490; Horkheimer 1991f: 329-331; Adorno 1997j2: 608-616).

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Resistances According to Horkheimer’s and Pollock’s’ Memorandum of 1951, the life of the critical theorists was to be serious (Horkheimer 1996r: 218-221). With the critical theorists, the societal laws should have no validity. In 1951, when it was so late in the day, the critical theorists were no longer allowed to waste any time. The critical theorists had to create conditions, under which all their energies would be effective in their very own sense: in the sense of the original utopian program and its realization in the further formation and transformation of the critical theory of society devoted to absolute justice and truth, and to the remembrance of the innocent victims, and to the longing for the Unexplorable, and for the ultimate Messianic redemption and rescue (Horkheimer 1974c: 218-219, 247-248, 352354; 1985g: chaps. 37, 40; 1996r: 218-221; Adorno 1980b: 333-334), To those energies belonged particularly Horkheimer’s disposition, talent and experience. Already early in his teaching activity at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität in Frankfurt a.M., Horkheimer had received from the psychoanalyst Karl Landauer a clear bill of mental health (Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 1; 1995o: 516-517, 644-648, 703-704, 808-810; 1995p: 9-11, 25-27, 27-30, 59, 118-121, 140-143, 207-209; Landauer 1991). Horkheimer went to Landauer for treatment because he was not able to lecture without reading from a manuscript. However, Landauer broke off the psychoanalytical sessions with Horkheimer after a few weeks because the latter was much too happy and healthy. The two men remained friends for life, until Landauer was transported together with many other Jews from Amsterdam, Holland, Breughelstraat 10, into a German concentration camp, where he starved to death while Horkheimer was in American exile. The realization of the goal of Horkheimer and Pollock, which was also shared by Landauer, the full actualization of their original program as contained in the L’ile heureuse in the form of the critical theory of society and its practical application, was hindered by external and internal resistances and problems: 1)

2)

the external problems to be faced in the young German Federal Republic, characterized by Conrad Adenauer’s restoration policies preceding and preparing the later neo-conservative trend turn, were, for example: old, high national socialist functionaries received their pensions, or were even re-employed in the new republic, and a quasi authoritarian consensus journalism (Horkheimer 1991f: 361-362; 1996r: 218-221; Ullrich 2007: 78-79; Hodenberg 2006); and the internal problems to be faced by Pollock, namely his compulsory neurosis, consisting of symptoms like absent-mindedness, hard to speak

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and appeal to and irresponsiveness, paralysis of the will, lack of enthusiasm and love, destructive tendencies, conformism and the inclination to take on in the case of conflict the standpoint of the world (Horkheimer 1991f: 361-362; 1996r: 218-221).

The experience of many years had shown to the friends that this disastrous drive structure of Pollock had been their most crafty, cunning, and malicious enemy. The friends had to fight with all their passions against both these resistances from outside and inside, if at the end they were not still to be deprived of the best in their lives. The friends were clear about the causes of Pollock’s compulsory neurosis and took measures to overcome it.

Fundamental Insights Horkheimer and Pollock planned to formulate continually fundamental insights, which could serve them as guidelines, for example: 1)

There existed nothing in their realm of life, which would be more important than their community and their goal; everything else had to fit into this framework and had thereby to gain its value. 2) Each friend had to act in such way that each of his actions was an expression of their community, in which the laws of the world have no validity. 3) As long as the friends willed something together and in common, it was never impossible. 4) The friends were aware that they had only little time left and that, therefore they should use every minute that could be made serviceable to their common knowledge and insight 5) The friends were not concerned with the possibility of failing in the external world as they were allowed to be convinced to have done together the best they possibly could and to have acted according to their own principles. (Horkheimer 1991f: 361-362; 1996r: 218-221).

New Community Horkheimer’s original quasi-religious community had finally failed because of the lack of seriousness, the conformism, and the betrayal of Suzanne Neumeier (Horkheimer 1987k: 289-328; 1995o: 11-13; 1996q: 979981). Neumeier suffered from her betrayal for the rest of her sad life. In the new community of Horkheimer and Pollock of 1951 and beyond, the devoted Rosa Riekher, called Maidon (maid = girl and don = gift), took to some extent the position and role that Suze Niemeier had in the origi-

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nal religious-utopian community of 1914 (Horkheimer 1995o: 15-17). Maidon was a Christian, who later on converted to Judaism. According to Pollock, Horkheimer never tried again to initiate and establish a religious community as the original one of 1914. The group of young intellectuals, who gathered around Horkheimer in the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research from the later 1920s on was and remained entirely secular (Horkheimer 1972: 129-131, 188-243, 244-252, 253-272; Gumnior / Ringguth 1973: 22-50). Yet, the new community, which engaged in the philosophical and social-scientific formation of the critical theory, retained and preserved something from the original religious-utopian group: namely, the insatiable longing for the entirely Other, which bourgeois religion had lost, but through which the first and the following generations of critical theorists were held together manifestly or latently (Löwenthal 1980). However, the critical theorists have always had the greatest respect for any form of non-conformist, critical religion, in which was still present the energy, dynamic, and vitality of the unsatiable longing for the totally Other than the present world characterized by injustice and unending wars, invasions, occupations, regime changes and terror and counter-terror, and which was not only hoping for the Messianic age, but also working and struggling for alternative Future III: a friendly culture of life, love and peace (Adorno 1951; 1997j/2: 608-616; Küng 1994a: 902-906; 1994b; Metz 1959; 1965; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1978; 1980; 1981; 1984; 1995; 1997; 1998; 2006; Metz/Sölle 1994; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/Wiesel 1993; App. G).

Decision These sentences by Horkheimer and Pollock were introductory sentences for a decision–one out of a long series of similar decisions through many years–about the forms of their common life and work and the formation of the critical theory of society from one context and situation to the other (Horkheimer 1987k: 289-328). These sentences could be taken unchanged from the novel L’ile heureuse. The impulse to explore the societal laws in order not to recognize them, in other words, the paradox of a historical materialism, which–to speak with the words of the Island of Happiness– despises the material, was a fundamental trait of Horkheimer’s critical theory of society. Thus, the novel reveals in poetical form a life design of the young Horkheimer that he held on to, in spite of all later modifications, throughout his life. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, an adequate understanding of the novel L’ile heureuse will neither deny or

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overestimate the questionable aspects not only of the literary style but also of the content: its Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean pathos of distance of a community which was seemingly free from all prejudices in opposition to the masses of the timid people in antagonistic civil society. This pathos, which was originally shaped through the consecrating Art Nouveau and the rebellious expressionism, was practically denied by Horkheimer in his further philosophical and social-theoretical work and formation of the critical theory of society. Nevertheless, already in the novel The Island of Happiness and the other novels and narratives became visible some central motives also of the later theoretical work and formation of the critical theory, such as, the critique of the principle of self-preservation, which in bourgeois society has become independent, in the portrayal of life in Manchester. There remained also in the later formation of the critical theory the feeling of a so to speak permanent spiritual emigration: exile! It needed only from the later years the appropriated technical insights in psychology and sociology, and the knowledge of the complicated reality of late capitalist society in order to entrust from the always still striven for and in the beginning even achieved L’ile heureuse to the stormy ocean in, what Adorno had called, a Flaschenpost (a letter in the bottle), which carried the title critical theory of society. In spite of the fact that the so-called Frankfurt School has been globalized in the past 60 years, it is still, nevertheless, in many ways a Flaschenpost today–in 2010–and will probably remain precisely that, until Modernity will have been concretely superseded by Post-Modernity, and the original program of the critical theory, contained in the L’ile heureuse, will be fulfilled in alternative Future III–the reconciled society driven by the longing for the totally Other rather than by hunger for profit (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 40; App. G).

Primacy of Will Already early in his life, Horkheimer observed that the crisis of religion and morality, which became characteristic and manifest for European civil society through the bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment movements, had formed–consciously or unconsciously–an important element in the personalities of the youth of the Western countries for more than a century: as a matter of fact, already since German Idealism or Transcendentalism (Horkheimer 1988a; 1987k: 289-344; 1988n: 36, 63, 336-337, 386-387, 408-409, 433-436, 444-445, 445-447, 451-452, 459, 472-474, 471-474, 512-513). For Horkheimer, the cast of mind of youthful individuals and groups throughout the 19th century and the beginning

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of the 20th century, as well as the aggressiveness of a part of the youth of the 1960s, was a proof for Schopenhauer’s insight that in puberty the will overbalanced the intellect–the primacy of the will in self-consciousness (Schopenhauer 1986/2: 259-316; 3: 174-175, 532-544). However, not only the young generations of already past epochs and periods of history were inclined to such psychological structure, in which the will has the primacy over the intellect, but also not a few individuals of the older generations of past and present as well. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said once to his secretary Eckermann about these youthful individuals of the older generations: They experience a repeated puberty, while other people are young only once. Horkheimer’s critical theory of religion is not only characterized by the primacy of the will over the intellect, but also by the primacy of continual youthfulness over the resignation, cynicism and despair of old age. It is thus not astonishing that Horkheimer and Adorno finally defined religion–at least in terms of a working definition–not only as the longing that the murderer shall at least ultimately not triumph over the innocent victim, but also as the hope for the totally Other, understood as the radical, but still determinate negation of all the perils of human existence–abandonment, loneliness, injustice, alienation, illness, aging, and deaths–and against the otherwise continually confessed to second and third commandments and the dialectic as their secularization–as perfect justice, and as unconditional love (Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37, 40). The entirely Other is seen by the critical theorists as the ultimate solution–if there is any at all–of the theodicy problem, to which all great art, religion and philosophy have been devoted: the problem of the cursed finitude, the problem of suffering, the problem of evil, the problem of meaninglessness, the problem of dying and death (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Oelmüller 1990).

Change of Form In its further formation, the new dialectical theory of religion remains fully aware of this primacy of practical reason, of the will over the intellect, i.e. of longing and hoping as the very core of all world religions, as well as of all the enlightenment movements (Hegel 1986a: 344-345; 1986c: 169; 1986e: 267; 1986l: 174; 1986m: 135; 1986r: 173; 1986t: 386, 399, 418; Schopenhauer 1986/2: 259-316; 3: 174-175, 532-544; Horkheimer 1988a; 1987k: 289-344; 1988n: 36, 63, 336-337, 386-387, 408-409, 433-436, 444445, 445-447, 451-452, 459, 472-474, 471-474, 512-513; Küng 1994a: 904905; 1994b). The same theoretical and practical reason has been active

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and effective throughout the centuries in religion and secular enlightenment. The enlightenment movements have their roots in the religions, against which they have turned in Modernity. The energy of human will and longing has driven the world religions as well as the enlightenment movements. However, in Modernity, this will, this longing has changed its religious form into a secular one -like a snake sheds its skin and develops a new one (Horkheimer 1972: chap. 4). This happened because the traditional religious form of the longing for the qualitative Infinity had hardened and was petrified, and thus had become a hindrance and an obstacle for the content’s free expression in progressive and liberating action. However, even today–in 2010–there is sometimes present in the post-secular society a critical religion, which is still motivated by the will and longing for the entirely Other, while much of this energy has already migrated into the secular form of modern enlightenment movements (Horkheimer 1972: chap. 4; Fromm 1976: chaps. 3, 7, esp. 201-202; Marcuse 1962: 65-66; 1970: 3-10; Habermas 2001a; 2002; 2005: chaps 5, 8, 9; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Mendieta 2005: chaps. 8-11; Küng 1994a: 904905; Siebert 2007a; 2007b). This transformation seems to be necessary in spite of all the religious revival movements and so-called new religions. However, critical religious people and enlightened secular people can cooperate in the realization of the tendencies toward postmodern alternative Future III–a just, free and reconciled society, against the forces of positivism and naturalism, which aim at consciously or unconsciously strengthening the trends toward post-modern alternative Future I–the dehumanized technocratic, one-dimensional, bureaucratized, signal society, and at post-modern alternative Future II–the totally militarized society continually engaged in conventional wars and civil wars, and preparing through heating up the collision of the religion-based civilizations the future ABC war and all its environmental destruction (Marcuse 1964; Fromm 1968; Adorno 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1997u: 133-250; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Flechtheim 1971; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; App. E, F, G). Carl Schmitt considered his own conservative theory formation to be an Epimetheus work, and the critical philosophical and theological theory formation to be Prometheus work (Meier 1994; Groh 1998; Spanknebel 2010: 98-101; Mehring 2009). The formation of the critical theory of religion happens on the side of Prometheus rather than Epimetheus. Zeus sent Pandora, the first woman, from the Olympos to earth as a punishment for Prometheus’ crime of stealing fire from the gods and giving it to human beings. Zeus gave her a box, which when opened let loose all human misfortunes. Yet, hope remained on the bottom of the box to comfort

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humankind. The formation of the critical theory of religion and its praxis is driven by this residual but nevertheless revolutionary principle of hope and longing still present at the bottom of all human misfortunes (Bloch 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1979; 1985a; 1985b; 1985c; 1993: chaps. 4355; Bloch/Reif 1978; Fromm 1968; 1973: 435-438; Siebert 2005a; 2006a; 2007a; 2007b).

Rhetoric Finally, the critical theorist of religion is interested in the question, what happens to theory formation, when it must turn itself into rhetoric, in order to enter the public and the political sphere and there make itself understood and gain power among different political parties through the mass media of civil society and the constitutional state (Amos 2: 6-3: 8; Lieber 2001: 246; Plato 2008; Hegel 1986g: 339-514; Habermas 1992a; Himick 2008: 2-4). This question is of particular importance and actuality during election campaigns in preparation for the transfer of power in republics, as e.g. the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in the U.S.A. of August and September 2008, when the national discourse turned to important economic, social, and political as well as religious and moral issues. Politicians gave many primetime speeches, in order to persuade and convince the masses of the citizens to share their opinions, and to vote for them in November 2008, and to bring them into high political offices and power positions, and to allow them to govern them. Ancient political commentators like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero have given their advice on how those politicians should persuade the masses (Hegel 1986a: 82, 85, 205; 227, 244, 314, 386; 452; 1986b: 182, 490, 505, 558; 1986c: 26, 66; 1986d: 344; 1986e: 114; 1986g: 37, 335; Habermas 1992a; Himick 2008). Aristotle, whom Jewish, and Christian, and Islamic theologians and philosophers have followed during the Middle Ages, had to admit, that emotional appeals could be as powerful as rational arguments in the public arena of the Areopag in Athens, where 4,000 citizens, who owned 100,000 slaves, entered regular democratic political discourse. Cicero said that politicians in Rome should use every tool at their disposal, to win friends and influence people. Plato, whom Jewish and Christian theologians and philosophers followed through Antiquity and into the Middle Ages, had been familiar with a great orator of his time, His name was Gorgias. He thought, that anyone superbly trained in rhetoric could gain political power, just because he could speak and convince the masses. But Plato was not convinced by Gorgias. Plato was philosophically opposed

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to this kind of political rhetoric as Gorgias and his friends, the sophists, presented: who arose when the religious and socio-ethical authorities in Athens were no longer plausible and acceptable, and did no longer suffice; and who were the products of Athenian antagonistic civil society; and who reduced truth and right to mere subjective opinion; and who were alienated from the realm of ideas; and who’s sophistic was opposed to genuine dialectics; and who had always been fought by real philosophy (Hegel 1986g: 21-22; 1986h: 158, 173, 251-252; 1986k: 61, 270; 1986l: 309, 327-328; 1986q: 181; 1986r: 276, 301). Plato opposed the sophistic through the dialectic. With the sophistic began the reflection on what was at hand and given, facts and data. For the sophists, as members of civil society, man was the measure of all things. The critical theory of religion stands with Plato and Hegel on the side of dialectics, and in opposition to all traditional and modern bourgeois sophistic and sophistry (Siebert 1979a; 1979b; 1979c; 1979d; 1985; 1986; 1989; 1993; 1994a; 1994c; 1994d; 1995; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2003a; 2003b; 2004a; 2004b; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007f; 2007g; 2008a).

The Popular Audience and the Experts According to Plato, Gorgias said, that there was no subject on which he could not speak before a popular audience more persuasively than any professional or expert (Plato 2008; Hegel 1986b: 97-98, 228, 234, 243, 318, 372, 422, 485, 492- 493, 497, 500, 558, 560, 1986c: 66, 245; 1986d: 272, 277; (Plato 2008; Hegel 1986g: 339-514; Habermas 1992a; Himick 2008: 2-4). But in Plato’s view, rhetoric was really not that powerful. In Plato’s perpective, a popular audience meant necessarily an ignorant audience on the Areopag in Athens, or anywhere else. Gorgias or any other sophist would not be more convincing before experts. This was so, because an ignorant person was more convincing than the expert before an equally ignorant audience. It was enough for Gorgias to have discovered a knack, or a trick, for convincing the ignorant, that he knew more than the experts. Plato meant a knack for producing a kind of gratification and pleasure in the masses. Plato gave to the trick the generic name of pandering. For Plato the knack was pandering because knowing–real and genuine theory formation like his own–on one hand–and believing, on the other, were not the same, but there was a difference between them. Plato proved, that knowing and believing were different. For Plato there were such things as true and false beliefs. But there were not such things as true and false

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knowledge. As a matter of fact, false knowledge was no knowledge at all. Likewise for the critical theorist of religion, false theory formation is no theory formation at all. Plato concluded, that, therefore, knowledge and belief were clearly not the same thing. However, so Plato had to admit, men who believed may be just as properly called convinced as men who knew. Thus, Plato posited the existence of two kinds of conviction: one, which gave knowledge, and one, which gave belief without knowledge.

Conviction about Right and Wrong Plato asked, which kind of conviction about right and wrong was created by oratory in courts of law and elsewhere: the kind, which engendered knowledge–true theory formation–or the kind, which engendered belief without knowledge–without theory formation? (Plato 2008; Hegel 1986d: 272, 277; 1986e: 22, 31, 33, 44, 105-106; 119, 126, 193, 245; 1986f: 109, 495, 557; 1986g: 21-22, 24, 25, 84, 108, 251, 277, 282, 339-514; Habermas 1992a; Honneth 1985; Himick 2008: 2-40; Mayer 1976). Plato answered himself, that the orator did not teach juries and other bodies about right and wrong: he merely persuaded them without any genuine theory formation. In Plato’s view, the oratory of sophists, like Gorgias, was a spurious counterfeit of a branch of the art of government in a city state, like Athens, which was threatened to be destroyed by contradictory civil society and its armies of sophists or lawyers with their pseudo-philosophies, and which was in need to be rescued by true philosophers like himself on the basis of true knowledge and theory formation. The branch of the art of government, which Plato had in mind, was the administration of justice. The dialectical theorist of religion is aware, that today–February 2010– American television programs, called Law and Order, daily throw critical light on this branch of the American Government: the administration of justice, particularly in the City and State of New York. For Plato the difference was, that pandering paid no regard to the welfare of its objects, the masses of the people, but rather caught fools with the bait of ephemeral pleasure. It made pleasure its aim instead of good. In Plato’s perspective, the politicians of his time had become panderers rather than true administrators of justice. The speakers on the Areopag did not make it the constant aim of their speeches, to improve their fellow citizens as much as possible, but they rather set out merely to gratify their hearers, sacrificing the public interest to their own personal success, and treating their audience like children: as did–in September 2008–the politicians and the anchor-men and -women and the pandits on American television in

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preparation of the American Presidential Election of November 2008, particularly when they concentrated passionately on lipstick politics, while two bloody wars were going on, and people were loosing their jobs, and their houses, and their health insurance, and mayor banks like Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac had to be nationalized in order to rescue the American economy nationally and internationally, and beyond all that used religion as an ideological plaything. The dialectical religiologist understands Plato to say in modern terms, that the bourgeois, the member of civil society, interested only in his private good, conquers the citoyen, the member of the constitutional state, interested in the common good, and thus destroys the state–political corruption–as well as the family as the foundation of state and civil society–raising and climbing divorce rates. According to Plato, there were in the old city-states two kinds of political oratory. One of them was pandering and base claptrap. For Plato, only the other kind was good, which aimed at the edification of the souls of the citizens and was always striving to say, what was best, whether it be welcome or unwelcome to the ears of the audience. In the perspective of the dialectical religiologist, more would be demanded in modern civil societies and states than mere edification. But Plato believed, that the people of his time had not even ever experienced the second type of political oratory, which would be the translation of true knowledge and theory formation into public speech. Of course, Plato, the master of genuine theory formation, was himself very good at the rhetoric of the second kind: political oratory on the basis of true knowledge and theory formation, and as such remains prototypical for the critical theory of society and religion as ongoing discourse (Hegel 1986g: 339-514; 1986h: 22, 31, 55, 106, 157-158, 174, 198, 202, 276, 281; 1986i: 19, 23, 256, 286,; 1986j: 30, 48, 136, 297, 361, 361, 362, 363, 373; Adorno 1963; 1969a; 1969b; 1973b: 300-408; Mayer 1978; Habermas 1970; 1971a; 1971b; 1973; 1975; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1979a; 1979b; 1981c; 1983; 1984a; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1987b; 1991b; 1992a; 1995; 1998a; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Honneth/Joas 2002). While Plato negated abstractly the Athenian civil society in order to rescue the Athenian state and failed, Hegel negated concretely the modern bourgeois society and its liberalism, and thus understood it as a necessary evolutionary moment in the historical process toward–not the state of analytical understanding and necessity and emergency and of the self-interested bourgeois–but toward alternative Future III–the state of dialectical, communitarian reason and of autonomous and solidary citizens, or the realm of freedom, into which antagonistc civil society is to be determinately superseded, through periods of class struggle,

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colonialism, imperialism, and final globalization (Hegel 1986g: 339-514; 1986l: 107-115, 413, 418, 420, 422, 490-491, 500, 513; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; App. F, G). Here the critical theory of religion follows Hegel’s rather than Plato’s theory formation.

chapter six

From Traditional to Critical Theory For Horkheimer, theory formation did not consist in mere rejection or condemnation, but precisely in the analysis of the forms and contents, which in thinking and living have hardened and petrified (Horkheimer 1988c: 285-293; 1988d: 291-292; 1988n: 224-225). Critical theory consisted, in contrast to the traditional theory, in the particular knowledge of the reasons why the forms and contents of thinking and living were one-sided and contradictory (Horkheimer 1988d, chap. 6).

The Whole Thought Process According to Horkheimer, the result of theory formation was not the standpoint that the theoretician was allowed skeptically to forget everything, because everything had after all no value whatsoever: taking, so to speak, the emptiness of consciousness as ideal (Hegel 1986c: 73-77; 1986e: 48-53; Horkheimer 1988n: 224-225). The result and standpoint of real theory formation was rather the whole thought process with all assertions, analyses, limitations, and so on. In this total process of thought, opinions were not merely seen addressed, but also the real conditions in their relativity and transitoriness, not as simply true or simply false, but in such a way as they were known according to the condition that knowledge had reached in the respective historical moment. Hegel had called the speculative idea the truth in such critical and historical form. (Hegel 1986: 9, 10, 11, 19, 30-35, 39, 41, 43, 47-48, 47, 56, 60, 113, 217, 406, 406, 429; 1986c: 55, 61, & 554; 1986d: 12, 416, 454; 1986e: 52, 93-94, 168; Horkheimer 1988n: 224-225). This speculative idea had the energy in itself to activate the negative in every determinate structure and in every moment peculiar to it. For Hegel, the speculative idea was connected with the concrete history, in which it showed itself as the negative: that every transitory element went under because of its limitation, and because of its internal contradiction, and that it thus went over into a more differentiated and better adapted being. According to Horkheimer, in contrast to the idealistic dialectic, the materialistic dialectic, into which the former had turned over,

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did not accept the unity of thinking and history (Horkheimer 1985q: 286287; 1988n: 224-225; Adorno 1969a; 1970a; 1971; 1973b: 300-360). While Adorno stressed determinate negativity, for Horkheimer the dialectic was not closed (Horkheimer 1985q: 483-492; 1988n: 224-225). For both critical theorists, there existed no harmony between thinking and being. According to them still in 1953, the contradiction between thinking and being proved itself as the driving force of the formation of theory as well as of its praxis. Therefore, in Horkheimer’s view the overcoming of the contradiction between thinking and being happened in the real historical struggle between those individuals who represented the universal, the universal interests, and those who represent the particular, the particular interests. While Horkheimer insisted with Hegel that the truth shall be the whole, and that what is rational shall be real, and what is real shall be rational, Adorno stressed that in present antagonistic late capitalist society the whole was still the untruth, and that the rational was still not yet the real, and that the real; was still not yet the rational (Hegel 1986c: 23-25; 1986g: 24-27; Horkheimer 1988n: 224-225; Adorno 1973b: 300-360; 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 440-456, 457-477, 569-573, 578-587).

Incarnation of the Infamous According to Horkheimer, for the formation of the critical theory it was important to know that it was not its purpose to say what is, as did the traditional positivistic theory, but rather what ought to be (Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; 1974c: 101-104, 116-117; 1988n: 268). The critical theory is not value-free. As such it is closer to Emile Durkheim than to Max Weber, in spite of the fact that both thinkers were engaged in the type of traditional positivistic theory (Timasheff 1967: chaps. 9 & 14; Horkheimer 1970c; 1971a; 1972; 1873; 1974a; 1974b; 1974c: 101-104, 116-117; 1988n: 268). Thus, the critical theorist did not, for example, find the notion of fascism in the historical reality, but rather derived it out of his theory (Fromm 1973: chap. 13; Horkheimer 1988n: 268). The critical theory should not describe the historical reality. To the contrary, the historical reality should find its judgment, direction and adjustment in the critical theory. For Horkheimer as well as for Adorno, what mattered was to find the right aspect or perspective under which that which was the case in the world came together into the form in which it ought to be seen. There was for Adorno the perspective of the right life: there was no right life in the life lived in antagonistic civil or socialist society (Rossberg / Möbius 2007: 69-72). There was only the damaged life (Adorno 1951; 1952; 1966; 1980a;

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1980b). There was no true life after Auschwitz, and no true poetry, and no true prayer (Adorno 1997u; 1998a) There was Adorno’s perspective or standpoint of redemption and the rescue of the hopeless, from which all things had to be considered (Adorno 1980b: 333-334; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1980b: 333-334; Horkheimer 1988n: 268; Brändle 1984). There was Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s perspective of the wholly Other or the Eternal One (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988n: 268). To be sure, the critical theorists needed the historical material. However, the critical theorists had to see this historical material as that which it was; namely, the incarnation of the infamous: terror, war, torture, etc. (Adorno 1973b 211-299; 1973d; 1973e; Horkheimer 1988n: 268; Colitt 2007: 1-2; Wolf 2007: 1-9; Mickum 2007: 2-5; Waldmann 1998; Friedrich 1987; Taylor 1971; Tredici 1987; Hickman 1971; Marshall 1968).

No Loving Father in Heaven The pacifist and anarchist Ernst Friedrich has reflected this historical material as incarnation of the infamous, and particularly the role of religion as ally of militarism in it, in his book The Proletarian Kindergarten in the form of a poem written in the context of the horror and terror of World War I: We have no loving father in heaven. If there were a Father in the heavens up above, Who watched the dismal happenings here below, Who witnessed the ruthlessness and the devilish fury Of animals devouring animals and the children of man. And man waging war on animals and on his own kind: How they tear up one another with their teeth and with poison and with steel, With deliberate and premeditated torture. His Divine Heart would endure it not And He would hurl His thunderbolts into their midst, And with a thousand lightenings Would He destroy the murderers and executioners (Friedrich 1987: 62-63; Tredici 1987).

This poem could have been written in the context of the present–February 2010–wars and civil wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Sudan, as well.

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In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, unfortunately, the militaristic role of religion has not diminished since World War I (Friedrich 1987: 62-63; Tredici 1987; Vien 1974; Ginsberg 1969). War in the past and the present consists largely of acts that would be criminal if performed in time of peace–killing, wounding, kidnapping, destroying or carrying off other peoples’ property (Taylor 1971: 19-41). Such conduct is not regarded as criminal if it takes place in the course of war, because the state of war lays a blanket of immunity over the warriors. This concept is very ancient. It is clearly stated already by the 12th century compiler of the Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church, Gratian: The soldier who kills a man in obedience to authority is not guilty of murder (Küng 1994a: 336601; Taylor 1971: 19-41). The Mosaic Decalogue, not to speak of the Sermon on the Mount, is suspended. Thus, the churches can pray with good conscience for the protection and victory of the heroic soldiers of the respective nations fighting against each other, and can declare their actions as a form of the Imitatio Christi. Of course, the wrathful and revengeful God of thunder and lightening, tsunamis and earthquakes, who appears in Friedrich’s poem, would only be too similar to his murderous creatures, and would only extend the Lex Talionis, and the theodicy problem into the bad quantitative infinity (Friedrich 1987: 62-63; Tredici 1987). He is one anthropomorphic projection too many. As such he also falls under the Mosaic, Kantian, and Hegelian dialectical prohibition against making images of the Absolute: against idolatry (Exodus 20: 4-7; Kant 1929: 27, 74, 87, 149, 490; Hegel 1986c: 73-77; 1986e: 48-53; Horkheimer / Adorno 1972: 23-24; Friedrich 1987; Tredici 1987; Arendt 1997: 7-9). It would indeed be better for such a god not to exist. To deny the existence of such false god is the legitimate task of a concrete atheism (Arendt 1997: 7-9).

The Absolute in Relativization Still in 1967, six years before his death, Horkheimer was convinced that the critical theory of society was the only philosophy that was fitting and adapted to the present condition of civil and socialist society: stressing the time core of the truth (Horkheimer 1985g: 340-341; 1988d: chap. 6; 1988n: 380-381; Horkheimer/Adorno 2002: xi). Every positive element that was held against the happening or the opinion of other people, became false. The Absolute could be signified only in terms of relativization: that meant, in the critical attitude toward all that appeared with the claim to say the

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truth. In the critical theory of society, along with the representation of all problems–soul, individual, nationalism, religion, Anti-Semitism etc. –vibrated and sounded a critical under-tone (Horkheimer 1988n: 380-381; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 18, 19). Everything finite was relative and had to be relativized if it posed as infinite or absolute, in strictest obedience to the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue, the Kantian concrete agnosticism, and Hegel’s dialectic or determinate negation.

Science as Instrument Still in June 1967, Horkheimer declared that the traditional theory, the positivism, the natural or social sciences were all the same, and were as such nothing else than an instrument (Horkheimer 1988d, chap. 6; 1988n: 414415, 418-419). However, according to Horkheimer, science could not say for what purpose it was an instrument. When science declared that it was an instrument for the domination and control of nature, the critical theorists asked ‘for what purpose’–to dominate or control nature? Then science would answer: for the good society. However, when science is to explain what the good society is and why people should strive for it, then it can give no scientific answer. Science is an expression of instrumental reason and as such cannot explain its purpose scientifically (Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; 1974c; 1978; Horkheimer 1988d, chap. 6; 1988n: 414-415). As such, science was unable to answer the question concerning the meaning of human life. Science could prove that every statement regarding the content of the meaning of human life was mere superstition. In Horkheimer’s view, the critical theory was establishing this instrumental character of science. The critical theory knew that scientific statements about good and evil did not exist, except that the psychologist, or the anthropologist, or similar specialists could explain to people how these superstitious representations had originated, if indeed they were genetic and not apodictic.

Human Community According to Horkheimer, the human community started beyond science (Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 6; 1988n: 414-415). The human community began where individuals engaged in an effort with each other to realize the values that each of them felt to be such. There existed for Horkheimer no authority–no Father, Mother, Rabbi, Priest, Minister, Mullah, or Guru–for the fact that by following his or her values the individual acted

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correctly or that he or she even had to act that way. Once in traditional society, individuals had referred or appealed to the authority of God (Exodus 4: 21; Hertz 5716 / 1956: 220 / 21; Horkheimer 1988n: 414-415). However, in 1967, in modern civil society the sparrows were whistling it from the roofs that God was dead and that science had killed him, and that he remained dead (Hegel 1986q: 291-199, 41-344; Kaufmann 1986: 95-96; Horkheimer 1988n: 414-415). For Horkheimer, since science was a mere instrument it was as such not superior to the personal decision that an individual made living in a particular culture. When Horkheimer said that a particular mode of behavior was considered in science as superstition, the statement also contained the protest against the untruth of science. The doubt concerning the meaning of the decision of the individual lay in the language, which looked as if science had the ability and the right, to decide over what was true and false, good and evil (Fromm 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966b; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1976; 1990; Fromm / Xirau 1979; Horkheimer 1988n: 414-415).

Longing and Truth For Horkheimer, the truth began where their longing lead human beings beyond science (Horkheimer 1988n: 414-415). Horkheimer knew, of course, that this was a matter of practical reason, and thus could not be proven in the court of theoretical reason. Yet, what, so Horkheimer asked, did it mean to prove something? Such proof meant that the expectations formulated in scientific sentences will be fulfilled in that place and at that point in time, which were determined precisely in those scientific sentences. For Horkheimer it was a great paradox: Science explained that everything what makes life worth living was mere superstition. Yet, science could not say anything about the truth. It was a mere instrument. It did not even know the purpose for which it was an instrument or a tool. The question what for–the former scholastic causa finalis–lead to a regression, which was everything else than infinite. After a few steps, only science had to go silent and die away because it moved into a dimension that it itself had just dismissed and pushed aside as being superstition: the other dimension or the dimension of the wholly Other. According to Horkheimer, humanity began to be human only where s / he became most seriously concerned with the things that science had degraded as superstition. Humanity started to be human with the wishes and longings–represented in dreams, images, symbols and thoughts–for the totally Other as the determinate negation of the horror and terror of society and history

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in which positive science, as instrument of the domination of nature and of human self-preservation run wild, was so deeply involved (Horkheimer 1974; 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1988n: 414-415; 1991f: 21-188; Arendt 1997: 7-9).

Expression versus Communication of Information In July 1967, Horkheimer determined the purpose of the critical theory was to represent, critically, the world as it was so it could be used as a shining example how it ought not to be and, therefore, to give an idea and presentiment how it ought to be (Horkheimer 1988n: 97-98, 110111, 418-419). He argued that critical theorists could not say what the true was. They could only signify what was untrue. In order to do so, the critical theorists had to use science, otherwise that which the critical theorists wanted to represent would become false. However, science was only a means for the critical theorists, and not the last word. For the critical theorists, the decisive element of philosophy lay in the expression and not in the communication of information. According to Horkheimer, that the critical theorists were not able to formulate the positive was characteristic for the human condition. The Jewish Religion of Sublimity had in all its paradigms an idea and a presentiment of this inability to formulate the positive as consequence of the human condition, as it forbid to make an image of or name God (Exodus 20: 4-7; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer 1988n: 418-419, 491; Horkheimer / Adorno 1969: 23-24; Küng 1991b).

Abstract and Concrete Agnosticism However, the critical theorists’ formulation of the negative was as little an abstract agnosticism as the second and third commandment of the Mosaic law, or the Kantian prohibition against theoretical reason or analytical understanding penetrating the realm of the Thing in itself, or Hegel’s dialectic: determinate negation (Exodus 20; Kant 1929: 27, 74, 87, 149, 490; Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53). The phenomenon of an abstract agnosticism was much older than the name, and reached deep into Antiquity (Exodus 5: 2; Hertz 5716 / 1956: 222 / 2; 395). Merenptah, Ramses’ II son, did not know Adonai, and did not recognize and acknowledge His right to command him. The Rabbis said that the Pharaoh turned to his seventy scribes, who knew all the languages spoken on earth, and asked them: ‘Do you know a god who is called Adonai, the God of Eternity?’

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They answered: ‘We have sought in all the books of all the peoples among the names of all the gods; but we have not found Adonai among them.’ According to the Rabbis, the scribes spoke the truth. It was a new revelation, a new conception of God that Moses brought to the children of humanity. None of the heathen empires or emperors of old knew the God of Freedom, Holiness and Righteousness. This God was not in their pantheon. While the peoples surrounding Israel were polytheists in general, they were abstract agnostics concerning the one God of the Hebrews. The critical theorists rather confessed to a non-positivistic, concrete agnosticism, which also preserves and elevates and fulfills what it negates in the negation itself, and is thus compatible with the fundamental thoughts of the Torah, and its exegesis, and the innumerable martyrs who died for it, and the Jewish people as a whole, who gave witness to it through 4,000 years (Horkheimer 1988n: 418-419, 517). Such concrete agnosticism allows intuition to experience at least a piece of the truth: for example, what Schopenhauer, Horkheimer and Adorno said about the mythos of the fall of humanity–that all in the world stands under a curse (Genesis 3: 1-24; Horkheimer 1985g: 391-392; 1988n: 491). The critical theory is based on a paradox: It knows that there is no god, or better still, it does not know if there is a God, but it believes in God, nevertheless (Horkheimer 1988n: 507-509, 544; Adorno 1997j / 2: 608-617; 1970b: 103-161; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11). The critical theorists of society always tried to break out of their vascillation between Kant and Hegel, and to transcend Kant’s philosophical agnosticism like Hegel, but also against him, through their longing for the wholly Other than the world of appearance with all its terror, and cruelty, and injustice, and damaged life (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986q: 347-536; Horkheimer 1988n: 507-509, 544; 1989m: chaps. 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 30, 31, Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1997j / 2: 608-617; 1970b: 103-161; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1966b; 1976; 2001). Up to the end of his life in 1831 Hegel had tried to concretely supersede the critical philosophy of his great master Kant, and up to the end of his life in 1969 Adorno had tried to determinately negate the dialectical philosophy of his great teacher Hegel: to some extend with the help of Kierkegaard and Marx (Hegel 1986q: 347-536; Adorno 1962; 1963; 1969a; 1969b; 1971; 1973a; 1973b: 300-360).

The World of Appearance The critical theorists followed the concrete agnosticism of Kant, who represented the world that we are able to know through our intellectual

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functions, not as an absolute world–like the pantheists and the bourgeois skeptics, for whom the world is all–but as a relative one, as the world of appearances, and announced and explained that there had to be necessarily an Absolute opposite this relative world: namely the world of the things-in-themselves (Kant 1929: 27, 74, 87, 149; 1946; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Hegel 1986f: 17-34; Horkheimer 1985g: 310-311; Siebert 2005c). Horkheimer thought that it was not possible to remove or abstract from human action and feeling the need and the longing that this Absolute was a positive reality. Based on this and in the face of the injustice and horror that characterizes history, it was not possible that this Absolute would make it all good again in some form, and that it thus would gain a meaning. For Horkheimer there existed no logical impossibility to develop this thought, this concrete agnosticism, further. To do so, is one task of the new dialectical theory of religion (Siebert 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2006a. 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c).

Ciphers One way to develop this concrete agnosticism further was through Adorno’s and Benjamin’s inverse cipher-theology (Adorno 1970b: 103-161). Ciphers may not only be small and insignificant things, but also fundamental notions or categories of religion or enlightenment (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 32, 33, 37). Thus, Hegel called the state not only a great architectonic building, but also a hieroglyph or a cipher of God’s almighty Logos or Reason (Hegel 1986e: 44; 1986g: 449; Küng 1970: chap. 6). For Horkheimer, the modern secular cipher of the attitude of human decency was an inversion of the religious, Judeo-Christian cipher of the attitude of the love of the neighbor (Leviticus 19: 18; Matthew 5: 43-48; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 32, 33, 37; 1989m: chap. 20). According to Horkheimer in 1969, civil society developed with necessity toward alternative Future I– the totally administered society, in which the behavior of the individuals toward each other was less and less determined through theological and moral principles and more and more through seemingly self-evident social regulation. For Horkheimer, that was a process that was dangerous for the theological cipher, and maybe also for the secular moral cipher, which originated from the former. In Horkheimer’s view, also the Marxian cipher of solidarity was an inversion of the Judeo-Christian cipher of the love of the neighbor (Leviticus 19: 18; Matthew 5: 43-48; Horkheimer 1985g: 312-313). According to Horkheimer, theology had gone too far in its assertion about what God was doing, and about God’s being, not at last

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how God was treating human beings after death, and thereby it got into a logically entirely unnecessary conflict with the natural and social sciences. Yet, that did not mean that theology no longer had any actuality today–in 1969. Horkheimer thought particularly of the notion or cipher of the love of the neighbor (Leviticus 19: 18; Matthew 5: 43-48; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 32, 33, 37; 1989m, chap. 20). Marxism had taught that through the misery of the proletarians, a relationship would come about among them, which Marx did not signify as love but rather as solidarity (Marx 1953; 1964; Marx / Engel 2005; Flechrheim / Lohmann 2003; Laski 1967; Bottomore 1964; Fromm 1967; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 32, 33, 37). Marx was of the opinion that out of such solidarity would originate alternative Future III–the realm of freedom on the basis of the realm of natural necessity (Marx 1961c: 873-874; App. F, G). Horkheimer thought that Marx had been wrong in this prediction, because it had become clear in the meantime, that the impoverishment of the proletariat did not progress further, and that if a socialist revolution would take place in 1969, freedom would not become more positive for the life of the people. While Horkheimer was correct to some extent concerning the farmers and workers in advanced capitalist societies, Marx and the Marxists remained correct in relationship to the global proletariat, particularly in the third and fourth world (Dillon 1960; Birns 1974; Fenton / Heffron1990; Merleau-Ponty 1969; Roche 1977; Miller 2002). According to a report of the World Bank of May 2007, one billion people around the globe live on one dollar a day and more and more people fall daily into this category in consequence of the process of globalization. What the historian Thucydides said in the slaveholder states of ancient Greece is unfortunately still valid today in the modern capitalist societies dominated by monopolies and oligopolies: the strong did what they could, and the weak suffered what they must (Arendt 1965: 2-3). The massive protests against the G8 Meetings, for example, in Heiligendamm, Germany, in June 2007, express the frustration about the global deepening of the antagonism between the rich and the poor classes and nations, not to speak of the capitalist catastrophe of 2008-2010 (App. F).

Love and Solidarity Horkheimer found, nevertheless, a great affinity between the JudeoChristian cipher of love of the neighbor and the Marxian cipher of solidarity (Leviticus 19: 18; Mathew 5: 43-48; Marx 1953: chaps. 6-10; Fromm 1967; Horkheimer 1985g: 312-313; 1989m: chap. 20). Horkheimer could imagine that human beings were bound together through the very fact

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that they all recognized themselves and each other as finite beings, and that thereby a solidarity would come about between the so-called progressed nations and those who had remained behind. Horkheimer saw beginnings of this already in 1969: indications of trends toward alternative Future III–the reconciled society. In his boldest dreams it appeared to Horkheimer that a condition could come about in which a kind of mentality, which was connected with theology, could unfold in which people see it as their essential task to stand together, so that nobody was hungry any longer, that everybody would have a decent home, and that also in the needy countries there would be no epidemic any longer. People would try to resolve their problems together as finite beings and to make their existence not only longer but also better and more beautiful. Horkheimer went even so far to think that solidarity would finally be extended also to the other creatures. For Horkheimer, these ideas were at least as deeply rooted in theology as in the sciences. However, the representation of the goal would condition a close cooperation between theology and science.

Human Fellowship In 1969, Horkheimer would agree, that theology could create a new cipher for the cipher of Christian love and for the Marxian cipher of solidarity: namely, the cipher of human fellowship (Horkheimer 1985g: 312-313). Horkheimer remembered that this cipher of human fellowship found its expression in early centuries in something that today is gravely threatened: namely, in the structure of the family and its patriarchal authority structure (Horkheimer 1972: chap. 3; 1989m: chap. 23). For Horkheimer, religion, theology, and family were deeply connected with each other. Horkheimer emphasized the fact that in theology the Absolute, God, is often referred to as “Father.” In Horkheimer’s view, it did not take much intellectual effort to establish that the authority of the father decreased everywhere in the developed states. The older the father became, the less authority he had. This development necessarily had repercussions for the idea of theology, according to which God was the Father in heaven. This notion of the Father no longer had the same meaning as in the past early liberal capitalist, feudal or slaveholder societies. Horkheimer believed that this process of the father-less society and religion would continue with relatively great speed not only through the equality of the mother, but also through a series of other social developments.

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According to Horkheimer, the cipher of human fellowship played a role in history in the form that the people of a district, community, parish, or congregation held and stuck together among and with each other in solidarity (Horkheimer 1985g: 312-313). For Horkheimer, it was not accidental that in modern history the notion of democracy was connected to a large extent with the Genevan philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), who together with Voltaire discovered the principles of deism, tolerance and morality, and who probably thought of an easily comprehensible community as the democratic body in terms of the atomistic Contract Social (Hegel 1986a: 56, 74, 85, 438; 1986g: 80, 239, 304, 400; 1986h: 312-313; 1986k: 278; 1986l: 61, 419; 1986o: 210; 1986r: 358; 1986s: 129; 1986t: 275, 290, 204, 300, 306-308, 311, 331, 365, 413; Horkheimer 1987i: 377-388; Moore 1972). In the meantime, democracy has become –without connection with what Puritan theology intended, but did teach nevertheless–a form of state, which determined in very large countries the life of the people: for example, in the U.S.A. If now Horkheimer asked himself to what extent democracy was politically decisive in the sense of Rousseau, he had to answer that it corresponded less to its original meaning, the more that political decisions no longer concerned immediately the internal life of a nation, but were rather focused on foreign policy issues that needed very quick decisions. When the political representative had to take a position concerning foreign policy questions, then he was in a difficult situation because in order to know all the moments that were decisive, he would have to study these questions together with the experts. However, the representative could not do this in the most cases because of a lack of time. Thus democracy, in the emphatic sense, has lost its meaning because of the foreign policy conditions. The recent catastrophes of Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine have proven Horkheimer’s insight to be accurate, as far as the Representatives and Senators in the American Congress were concerned. According to Horkheimer, in 1969, it had become the task of those forces who were still connected with theology–for example, Walter Dirks and his friends in the SPD and CDU and their political theology–not to let democracy fall into oblivion, and to point out that people in a nation, and finally in all nations, must understand each other (Horkheimer 1985g: 314-315; Dirks 1968; 1983a; 1987b; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007c). Horkheimer postulated for democracy an ethos characterized by the cipher of human fellowship.

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Freedom of the Press According to the critical theory of society, one criterion for the health of a democracy was the freedom of the press (Hegel 1986g: 480-490; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007c). According to the Associated Press, Paris, France, October 20, 2006, in the annual report of an international media advocacy group, the United States had fallen in the World Press Freedom Ranking. European countries led the world in providing freedoms to news media, while the United States lost ground. North Korea retained the last spot on the 167 countries World Press Freedom Index for 2005, published on Thursday, October 20, 2006 by Reporters without Boarders. Eritrea, in the Horn of Africa, ranked 166, and Turkmenistan, in Central Asia, came in 165. Iraq was 157th on the list. The group said the safety of journalists became even more precarious there in 2005 than in 2004. A total of 72 members of the media have been killed since the U.S.-led fighting began in March 2003, with at least 24 journalists and their assistants killed in 2006. The United States dropped more than 20 spots, to 44th place, mainly because of the imprisonment of New York Times Reporter Judith Miller and judicial action that was undermining the privacy of the journalistic sources. The top ten countries were European, led by Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, Norway and the Netherlands. Here, robust press freedom was firmly established. A growing number of African and Latin American countries earned higher rankings, including Benin, which ranked 25th, and El Salvador, 28th. The freedom of the press is definitely a necessary ingredient of an ethos characterized by the cipher of human fellowship.

Remembrance According to Horkheimer, theology had still the task of remembrance–of reminding people of the cipher of human fellowship (Horkheimer 1985g: 312-315; Habermas 2002: chap. 6). For Horkheimer, in the face of the progressing complex division of labor and specialization in civil society after the industrial revolution not only in the life of the occupations and professions, but most of all particularly in the sciences, it was necessary for a theology stressing the cipher of human fellowship to remind civil society that what counted were not only technical skills, but ultimately also the truth, namely the question that Kant already had posed: ‘What is truth?’ ‘What should happen?’ ‘What should we do?’ (Kant 1946; 1968; 1970; 1975, 1981; 1982; 1983; Durkheim 1997; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 3, 7, 10, 12, 16, 19-20, 26, 29-31, 35). While in 1969 the European and Ameri-

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can universities were indeed concerned with science, there was, nevertheless, really no discipline, that was concerned with the motives that determined the course of the natural or social sciences. Was it determined only through the will to the truth? Horkheimer did not think so: there was much more a compulsory mis-education (Horkheimer 1985g: 312315; Goodman 1964). According to Horkheimer, the course of the sciences was very much determined by too many factors that were too little explored and researched by the community of scholars: for example, foreign policy, the armament industry, and so on. It appeared to Horkheimer that the natural sciences particularly, the sciences of physics, chemistry and biology, were to a large extent determined by the fact that the nations defended themselves against each other, and that they had to produce the necessary instruments for this purpose. For Horkheimer, in 1969, science was to a large extent the servant of this need for national self-defense. In the perspective of the critical theorist of religion, the situation in the European and American universities is not much better today–in 2010–than it was in 1969 in spite of the victorious neo-conservative counterrevolution of 1989 and the breakdown of the Soviet Empire. In 1969, according to Horkheimer, because science served as the basis for the critique of theology, then vice versa, theology could behave critically toward science and could recall into consciousness its real motivations and impulses. According to Horkheimer, theology had to remind people that in the will to the truth prevailed the wish for that totally Other: the desire to have a presentiment at least of that which was not only relative but also absolute. While theology could not describe and determine what Kant had called the dimension of the Intelligible, it could at least say what science did not take note of in such ways, as it was really to be observed: the truth. Thus, a theology concerned with the cipher of human fellowship could maybe build the bridge between the Christian cipher of the love of the neighbor and the Marxist cipher of solidarity (Horkheimer 1985g: 312-315; Habermas 2002: chap. 6).

Language For Horkheimer, this bridge-building between religious and secular ciphers was closely connected with the problem of language (Horkheimer1985g: 315-316). According to Horkheimer, in 1969, theological representations were still formulated in a terminology that no longer expressed what was originally meant by them in correspondence with the conditions of earlier periods of history, be it of Antiquity or the Middle

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Ages or even the earlier Modernity. What had once been meant by the theological representations had to be expressed anew, while giving expression to the same meaning. Not only theologians but also human beings, who were somewhat serious, were interested in this inversion or translation of religious ciphers. According to Horkheimer, in this serious thinking was not only included the purpose thinking, but also the right action, and into the right action entered the cipher of the human fellowship, which could not be justified purely by analytical understanding or rationalistically. That again led to the question of language. It was a phenomenon that was concerned for theology as well as for the natural sciences and most of all for philosophy. Here a hermeneutical bridge building could be ventured and dared, precisely from the sometimes isolated theology to the natural and social sciences. For Horkheimer, this had to happen since not only theology but also the sciences were in danger. Horkheimer thought particularly of sociology, its theory, its nature and its growth (Horkheimer 1985g: 315-316; Timasheff1967). Here Horkheimer found that a series of insights concerning society was really not formulated in a differentiated way. The reason for this was what seemed to matter in sociology was statistical exactness. However, for Horkheimer, there existed also another exactness: namely, the precision of true language. Science was not sufficiently concerned about such linguistic precision in 1969, and it is still not yet today–in 2010, as all sociology students in America and Europe can give witness to. Jürgen Habermas has devoted his life work to such linguistic precision not only for philosophy but also for the social sciences and for theology, and thus, for the possible inversion of religious into secular ciphers (Horkheimer 1985g: 315-316; Habermas 1970, 1971a; 1971b; 1973; 1976; 1981a; 1981b; 1984a; 1984b; 1987d; 1992a).

Loss of Religion In 1969, Horkheimer criticized that the progressive loss of religion in civil society was not compensated in public schools and universities, even when it was taught and was taken seriously and equally with other disciplines (Horkheimer 1972: chap. 4; 1985g: 339-340; Eister 1974). According to Horkheimer, in spite of the fact that religion could no longer be held up against the science in the simple, plain, and exact literal sense, as it once was in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, or still in early Modernity, and in spite of the fact, that the religious assertions could no longer be simply taken over by science, the thought of the horror of history, of the terrible and awful events in which the present modern culture also participates,

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should not remain unmentioned (Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 11, 14-15, 17, 25, 37; Kogon 1985). In Horkheimer’s view, courses on religion in public schools and universities were to be shaped in such a way that at least the longing should remain alive in the students, and in the human beings in general, that the terror, and the fright, and the injustice, and the unfairness in the world, would some day be made good through the eternal justice of–as Ignatius of Loyola put it–the always greater God (Isaiah 27: 6-9; Hertz 5716 / 1956 / 225: 6-9; Horkheimer 1985g: 339-340; 1989m: chaps. 15, 25; Kogon 1985; Dirks 1968: 197-207; Kuhn 1964; Philipps 1955; Williams 1966; Arendt 1965; Burke / Pain 1961; Brunner 1958). For Horkheimer, that was to be done and could be done, in spite of the fact that the teacher could no longer say that the almighty, benevolent God had created this world, because the gods or the God of the mythos had become too small in the face of the scientific social and cultural revolutions (Horkheimer / Adorno 1972: 43-80; Guthrie 1966; Hadas 1962; Platon 1955; Graves 1968; Nilsson 1961; Barret 1961; Malinowski 1954; Neihardt 1977; Festinger / Rieken / Schachter 1964; Kuhn 1964; Philipps 1955; Williams 1966; Arendt 1965; Burke / Pain 1961; Brunner 1958). That the God of the mythos has become too small has not prevented American creationists to open a large 6,000 acres exhibition still in May 2007, in order to prove that the world was only 6,000 years old, and that Adam and Eve lived together with the dinosaurs and that the latter were also saved on Noah’s arch. Also, if the critical theorists did not know that putting right, or correcting or making good of the injustices would really happen, or even if they had to assume that it would not happen, then a deep sadness and sorrow would permeate their lives. Horkheimer was of the opinion that what was disappearing had to be compensated, namely, religion. Horkheimer was fully aware of the fact that his knowledge of the Absolute was rather miserable, pathetic and pitiful in comparison to what the great world religions once had to say about God or perfect justice, or to what Hegel had to say about Kant’s “Thing in itself ” in his logic as evolution of the idea of God (Kant 1929: 24, 27, 71-74, 85-87, 89, 149, 440, 449, 490; Hegel 1986b: 310; 1986d: 439-440; 1986e: 26, 40, 41, 60, 129-130; 1986f: 20, 129-133, 135-136, 140, 307, 320, 489-490, 50; 1986g: 106; 1986h: 12021, 254-255; 1986q: 434; 1986t: 338; 1986f; 1986g; App. E, F). To be sure, through his return to Kant, Horkheimer had removed himself quite far from Hegel’s dialectical reconstruction of Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological proof of the existence of God, according to which the absolute Notion turned over into being (St. Anselm 1962; Hegel 1986g: 450; 1986q: 518-355). According to Hegel, this turn-over constituted the very depth

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of the Idea in the modern time (Hegel 1986g: 450; 1986q: 518-355; 1986f: 462-573). Yet in the most recent time, this turn-over had been declared by Kant, and the Kantians, and even by public opinion to be incomprehensible: what Nietzsche later called Kant’s joke (Hegel 1986g: 450; Kaufmann 1986: 96). In Hegel’s view, since only the unity of the notion and existence was the truth, Kant and the Kantians, together with popular prejudice in civil society had renounced and given up the knowledge of the truth altogether (Platon 1955: 53-141; Hegel 1986g: 450).

Institutions However, Horkheimer thought that it would at least be good to create institutions which are concerned with the question about what is getting lost–religion–through the development in civil society, and how it could be balanced, reconciled or equalized to some extent in order to maintain the humanum in humanity and to spread it (Horkheimer 1985g: 339-340) In May 2007, the Baptist community in the U.S.A. dedicated a 25 million dollar library in honor of the life and work of the evangelist Billy Graham, who had been the unofficial chaplain of the White House, and the spiritual guide for several Presidents, and who had considered both Iraq wars to be just according to the Augustinian Seven Point Just War Theory, and who first resisted, but then nevertheless agreed to the project devoted to him. Was this library one of those institutions that Horkheimer had in mind 38 years earlier in order to rescue religion? In any case, perfect justice was for Horkheimer one of the central religious ciphers that needed to be inverted, translated, and thus rescued into the secular discourse of the expert cultures, and through them into action in civil society. Paradoxically enough in the sense of the Kantian unknowable but nevertheless thinkable and believable Thing-in-itself, in spite of his miserably poor knowledge of the Absolute, Horkheimer, nevertheless, trusted in the Eternal One of Psalm 91, who has four names–Elyon, Shaddai, Elohim, and Yahweh (the Most High, the God of heaven, the Lord, God)–to the end of his life, and hoped to go home to his good parents and his beloved wife Maidon, who had been buried in the Jewish cemetery of Bern, Switzerland, after his work on this earth had been completed (Psalm 91: 1-2; Kant 1929: 27, 74, 87, 149, 490; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 34, esp. 343-344). Up to the end of his life, Horkheimer combined Jerusalem and Athens, theology and philosophy, and shared the longing and the confidence present in David’s Psalm 91 and in Platon’s Phaidon (Psalm 91: 1-2; Platon

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1955: 53-141; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 17, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, esp. 344, 37, 40, 38; Habermas 2002: chap. 6; Metz 1965; 1967).

Conservativism against Pseudo-Conservativism According to Horkheimer, also the radical critique of the status quo of civil society must be clear about the fact that it, as being a great collectively planned undertaking, nevertheless, remained immanently connected with this status quo, and thus, made necessarily everything only worse (Horkheimer 1988n: 419, 545). Often my Marxist and Bakuninist students stated during the third youth movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s, that things must get worse in the capitalist system before they could get better. In 1967, Horkheimer thought of the experiences of the former Eastern European socialist states and of the force of their political and military apparatus for the purpose of the achievement of the better world as Ladislav Mňačko had described it in his book The Taste of Power (Mňačko 1967; Inkeles 1971; Horkheimer 1988n: 419; Marcuse 1961; Habermas 1976). According to Horkheimer, he and his earlier cooperators in the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, stood for the radical change of the status quo in antagonistic civil society toward alternative Future III–the realm of freedom on the basis of the realm of natural and economic necessity (Marx 1961: Vol. III, 573-874; Horkheimer 1988n: 419, 469, 545; Schmidt / Altwicker 1986). It was the mark of their kind of writing. However, what was characteristic for them was the confession to a genuine conservativism in the sense of the preservation of the extant positive elements in civil society, and the struggle against the pseudo-conservativism, which wanted mechanically hold on to the whole status quo in so far as it served the invested interests of the bourgeois ruling class. In this sense, the Adenauer restoration in Germany of the 1950s, the McCarthyism in the America of the 1950s, and the following spanning from the Nixon to the second Bush administration, have been fought by critical theorists from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse through Jürgen Habermas to Axel Honneth, Oskar Negt, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, and others (Horkheimer 1988n: 419; Marcuse 1964; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971b; 1975; 1976; 1985a; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; Best / Kellner 1991; Goldstein 2006; Gorer 1956; Friedrich 1987: 9-17: Arendt 1997: 37-43; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Negt 1964; 2006; 2007; 2008). President Eisenhower represented a genuine conservativism, which meant that he knew that to preserve the positive aspects of civil society and its constitutional state implied the need of social

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change, and thus warned against the danger of the military-industrial complex, which today–in 2010–constitutes the very core of the neo-conservative or neo-liberal movement as a radical form of pseudo-conservativism (Hickman 1971; Marshall 1968). Certainly the neo-conservative trend turn of the 1970s and the neo-liberal counter-revolution of the 1980s and 1990s and of the beginning of the 21st century was not the genuine revolution, which Charles A Reich foresaw and predicted at the time, and which would originate with the individual and with culture, and which would change the political structure only as a final act, and which would not acquire violence to succeed, and which could not be successfully resisted by violence (Reich 1971). This genuine revolution of the new generation did not occur: the Greening of America did not happen. The dialectical theory of religion does not only contain a negative critical moment, but also a positive, conservative, rescuing, equilibrating element, no matter if it on the basis of the principle that the truth has a time core, resists fascism or neo-conservativism: different as they are, they are nevertheless two forms of pseudo-conservativism and counter-revolution opposed to genuine socialism in all its shapes (Hegel 1986c: 68-77; 1986e: 48-53; Horkheimer/ Adorno 2002: xi; Habermas 1978: 48-95). The critical theory of religion discovers in the mythos not only regressive, but also progressive elements: not only Epimetheus but also Prometheus motives. For the dialectical theory of religion, the mythos demythologizes itself when the prophecy that it contains fails (Festinger / Riecken / Schachter 1964; Guthrie 1966; Hadas 1962; Platon 1955; Graves 1968; Nilsson 1961; Barret 1961; Malinowski 1954; Neihardt 1977; Kuhn 1964).

Romanticism For Horkheimer, traditional theory, positivism and science were identical (Horkheimer 1972: chap. 6; 1988n: 419). However, all three of them were instruments and tools and as such were unable to determine an ultimate goal, which would not itself again be a means for another purpose. For Horkheimer, positivism immediately became false when it wanted to elevate itself into a philosophy (Horkheimer 1974: 101-104, 116-117; 1988n: 302, 306-308, 348, 351-351, 419; Adorno 1970). In this case a particular human mode of behavior was hypostatized as metaphysics: the metaphysics of what was the case. Thereby, positivism made itself into what it rejected and disapproved of: into romanticism. (Hegel 1986c: 15-17; 1986d: 450; 1986g: 279; 1986m: 209-210; 1986r: 377; Horkheimer 1988n: 419, 425). Also, present-day positivistic neo-conservativism or neo-liberalism

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contains as pseudo-conservativism a strong element of romanticism (Seitz 2007b: 23-28).

The Miracle For Horkheimer, it was easy to demonstrate the naïve errors great thinkers committed when they wanted to make a matter of insight the miracle of all that what was happening (Horkheimer 1988n: 469-470). Kant and Marx were good examples: 1)

Kant, the subjective idealist spoke of an Absolute, but in doing so he forgot that this Absolute was grasped through the same finite categories, the relativity of which he had proven. 2) Marx, the historical materialist, stated that everything spiritual depended on the material. Yet, Marx did not notice that this sentence underlay the same verdict. Horkheimer did not even want to speak about the fact that Marx took the bourgeois demands ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ by their word and seriously, as real demands, while according to his very own theory, historical or dialectical materialism, they are nothing else than bourgeois ideology, understood in the critical sense as false consciousness and the masking of class and national interests.

According to Horkheimer, the miracle of all that is happening in nature and history was usually understood as a process, which in principle could not be expanded through the laws of nature. Yet, so Horkheimer asked, what were these so-called laws of nature? For Horkheimer, they were nothing else than the summary of experiences and of their abstract formulation. The laws of nature did not grant any insight into the essence of things (Hegel 1986f: 17-242; Horkheimer 1988n: 469-470). According to Horkheimer, what these laws of nature spoke about, fell itself under the category of miracle. In Horkheimer’s view, the longing for the wholly Other, which could not be formulated, could nevertheless be explained historical-materialistically: e.g. as a special case of the horror vacui–the abhorrence of emptiness. However, in Horkheimer’s perspective, this longing was not only the relationship of an ego, being lonely with itself, to an Other as toward a non-being, an emptiness that remained just a longing (Hegel 1986e: 267, 270). In Horkheimer’s view, the longing for the posttheistic, imageless and nameless totally Other–as, in the words of Master Eckhart, the One, as being pure, sheer and limpid, as negation of negations, as not-god, as not-ghost, as a-personal, as formless, as the fullness of being, in whom there is no duality, in whom the creatures sink eternally from, negation to negation–was the driving motive for all thinking about some-

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thing and for the further formation of the critical theory of society and of religion (Blakney 1941: 247 / 41, 248 / 42, 329 / 41; Hegel 1986e: 115-173; Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 1, 2. 4. 5, 6, 7, 8; 1985g: chaps 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988n: 52, 58, 77, 105-106, 114, 117, 124, 126, 215, 216-217, 228-232, 301, 333, 356, 369-370, 374, 405-406, 436-439, 466, 490-491, 498-499, 499-501, 503-504; 507-509, 510-512, 517, 536, 544, Fromm 1966b: chap. 2; 1976: chaps. 3, 7, 8, 9).

Adaptation According to Horkheimer’s critical theory of society of November 1968, which concretely superseded in itself Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Darwin, Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, and which must be sharply differentiated from his Mosaic, Jesuanic, and Kantian theology, like other species of animals could only survive when they adapted themselves to their environment most suitably, so also the human species was in need of such kind of adaptation (Exodus 20: 4-7; Kant 1929: 24, 27, 74, 87, 149, 172-173, 490; Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; 1974c: 96-97; 1978; 1988n: 503). The critical theorist of religion finds a more or less strong or weak naturalism in Hegel as well as in Horkheimer and Habermas and other critical theorists (Hegel 1986h: 145; 1986i; 1986q: 501-535; 1986t: 122, 291, 294, 303). For Horkheimer such human adaptation took place in many different modes. To those modes of adaptation of the human species belonged the kind of satisfaction of the elementary needs, like food, clothing and housing. Yet, that was not all! The living together of human beings, who could not survive in an isolated way, needed the taming, controlling, and restraining of the aggressive forces in them, their malignant forms of destructiveness, their necrophilia, their narcissism and incestuous fixations (Freud 1966; 1958; 1955; 1992; Mitscherlich 1993; Horkheimer 1988n: 503; Fromm 1956, 1957: 9-11; 1964; 1966; 1969; 1972: 1-9; 1973; Funk 1999: 47-58). Such taming was served through the commandment of love in the Abrahamic religions (Leviticus 19: 18; Matthew 5: 43-48; Horkheimer 1988n: 503; Fromm 1956; 1964: chap. 3; Funk 1999: chap. 13). Such commandment of love helped to mitigate the tribal struggles and warfare, and finally to overcome them in an always broader national and international framework.

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Horkheimer argued that modern civil society was moving toward Alternative Future I–the totally administered signal society, and thus human beings were being leveled out, and individuals were becoming automatically functioning robots (Hegel 1986h: 145; 1986i; 1986q: 501-535; 1986t: 122, 291, 294, 303; App. G). Christianity, the religion of love, became nonfunctional (Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1989m: chap. 20; 1988n: 503; Durkheim 1984; Toynbee 1957; Küng 1994a; 1994b; 2003; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel / Schlenson 2008). The economically conditioned decline, decay, disintegration of the specific type of family, which Christianity as the religion of love itself had established, and which it had integrated and kept together, meant at the same time the fading and disappearance of the authority of the father (Hegel 1986g: 292-338; Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 3, 4; 1989m: chap. 23; 1985g: 396-397; 1987e: 377-395; 1988c: 336-420; 1989m: chap. 23; Siebert 1979b; 1986; 1987c). However, so Horkheimer argued with Freud, the authority of the father was the foundation for all other authority representations: it created the super-ego in the children (Freud 1977; 1992; Horkheimer 1985g: 313; 1985h: chaps. 9, 28, 32; 1988n: 503). For Horkheimer, under such circumstances the idea of God had to lose its energy, since it was nothing else than the father imago projected–in Ludwig Feuerbach’s sense–into the Infinite (Feuerbach 1957; 1996; Horkheimer 1988n: 503; Friedrich 1987: 62; Gorer 1956: chap. 1 & 2; Arendt 1997: 8-9).

Projection According to Horkheimer’s friend, the theologian Paul Tillich, Feuerbach, the student of Hegel, who turned his teacher materialistically upside down already before Marx, emphasized the material conditions of human existence, and derived religious faith and projections from the desire or longing of man to overcome finitude in a transcendent world (Tillich 1972: 136, 142; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 25, 26; 1989m: chap. 29). Feuerbach explained God away in terms of the infinite desire and longing of the human heart. However, according to Tillich, this human desire, longing, and projection presupposed an ultimate concern and most of all an Ultimate Reality, or Ultimate Sacred Power, to continually elicit them: including the projection of the father image, for example, in Judaism since the end of the Babylonian exile (Tillich 1955; 1957: 9, 14, 26, 30, 87, 116; 1963: 102, 125, 130, 154, 223, 283, 287, 289, 293, 349, 422; 1959; Fromm 1959; 1966b;

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Parsons 1965: chap. 1; 1964: chap. 1; O’dea 1966: 27-28; Küng 1991b: 132168). The critical theory of religion is not only concerned, like Feuerbach, Freud, and Marx, with the psychological and sociological genesis of the religious desires, longings, and projections, but also with their theological content: the wholly Other (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 29, 37, 40). While the critical theory is not theology, it contains, nevertheless, besides the psychological and sociological, also theological elements (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 32, 37, 40; 1987b: 313-314, 345-346, 359-360, 379, 381-382, 411-415, 450-452; 1987p: 268-269, 278-279, 345-408; 1988n: 52, 64, 117, 133, 134, 138-139, 152, 203-204, 228-232, 240, 301, 315, 321-322, 331332, 346, 347-348, 356, 369, 370, 374, 388-389, 391, 418, 456, 469-470, 498-499, 507-509, 510-512, 517, 522, 530-531; 1991f: 195, 202-203, 203204, 205-206, 219-220, 275-277, 283-284, 295, 303-304, 319-321, 324, 329, 340-341, 347, 389-390, 414-415, 417, 419-420, 423).

Objections Horkheimer made a few valuable objections against his own critical theory of religion: 1)

The Jewish and Christian religions embraced only a third of humanity. What about the other world religions, past and present? 2) In the not too distant future, religion may become superfluous as means of domination of minorities over majorities–namely in alternative Future I. 3) The principle of the ‘love of the neighbor’ has made a fool of itself and has disgraced itself again and again in the history of Christianity. Horkheimer had to admit that this did not mean that without this principle of love of the neighbor things would not even have been much worse in the world. (Horkheimer1988n: 503).

These objections will have to be answered in the further formation and development of the critical theory of religion (Siebert 1979a; 1979d; 1985; 1987a; 1987d; 1993; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2003a; 2003b; 2004a; 2004b; 2005a; 2005c; 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b). For the dialectical theorists of religion, it is a sad truth that in spite of much very honorable private and collective organized charity, the Christian ‘love of the neighbor’ did not prevent nor even mitigate any of the horrors of the 20th century: World War I, fascism, World War II, the ‘cold war,’ neo-conservativism, or the civil wars in Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Palestine, Sudan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and so on. Sometimes, Christian love even became–instead of the solution of the problem of aggressiveness by engaging in war against war–a part of it. For example, when nations with

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a Christian heritage, on both sides of the front line, made their fallen war heroes, who had been killed as they were killing, into examples of Christian love of the neighbor by using Jesus’ message that a man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends as a tool to perpetuate nationalistic goals (John 15: 13; Friedrich 1987; Waldmann 1998). It was, as if the young Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth had not commanded not only the cancellation of the Lex Talionis and the love of the neighbor, but also even the love of the stranger, of the enemy, and of the persecutor as cipher of being the sons of the Father in heaven, and of being perfect like Him. It was as if Jesus had not taken on the whole Roman Empire without using any weapons, and as if he had not conquered it entirely in the power of the spirit without ever killing anybody, no matter how some of his followers may have again and again misunderstood, or abused, or betrayed him and his message, up to the present–February 2010 (Leviticus 19: 18; Psalm 108: 5; Proverbs 5: 19; 10: 12; Song of Songs 8: 6; Ecclesiastes 24: 24; Isaiah 63: 9; Jeremiah 31: 3; Hosea 11: 4; Mathew 5: 38-48; 27: 11-26; Mark15: 1-15; Luke 23: 1-7, 13-25; John 18: 28-40; 19: 1-16; Horkheimer 1974: 9697; Friedrich 1987; Kasser / Meyer / Wurst 2006; Ehrman 2006). Jesus gave his life for his friends, but he did not speak of falling in fratricidal national battles, and up to Augustine’s Seven Point Just War Theory Christians considered all wars to be unjust and thus, were forbidden to participate in them. Ideologically and blasphemously, nationalism has turned the curse of killing and being killed in battle into a blessing; the Golden Rule into the Lex Talionis (Mathew 5: 20-48; 7: 12; Friedrich 1987). In spite of all this historical foolishness and abuse, the Judeo-Christian love religion remains an option in a desperate war-torn and terror-stricken world because the alternative Futures I and II have not yet completely arrived. Alternative Futures I and II can still be mitigated, or resisted, or maybe even avoided and prevented entirely and alternative Future III can thus still be accomplished (Mathew 5-7; Luke 6; Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim / Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 49; Fromm 1968; Marcuse 1966; Friedrich 1987; Waldmann 1998; Toynbee 1957; Küng 1994a; App. E, F, G).

No Morality without Theology According to Horkheimer, alternative Future III cannot be established morally without theology and in a completely secular way (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 40). In Horkheimer’s view, all secular attempts to ground morality, instead of theologically through reference

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to a Beyond–the wholly Other, on earthly prudence alone rested on harmonistic illusions (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 32, 37, 50, esp. 388-390). Even Kant, so Horkheimer had to admit critically, had not always resisted this secular inclination to establish an ethics without theological foundation. For Horkheimer, everything that was connected with morality went in the last analysis back to theology. All morality was grounded in theology, at least in the Occident. In contrast, Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s student Habermas tried once more, starting out from Kant, and with the help of. Georg H. Mead, Charles S. Peirce, Jean Piaget, L Kohlberg, J. Rawls, and Karl-Otto Apel, to develop a communicative ethics without theology, and even via a methodological, but not yet material atheism (Mead 1969; Piaget 1970; Apel 1975; 1990; Rawls 1998; Habermas 1983; 1991a: part III; 2002: chap. 6; Mendieta 2005, part IX). Here, indeed, a theological break or discontinuity occurred in the formation of the critical theory of society between the first, and the second, and the further generations of the critical theorists. Thus, it was quite understandable that Habermas objected and insisted that the Golden Rule in all its forms was religious and was not the secular Kantian categorical imperative (Siebert 2007c). The critical theorists of religion must admit that the Golden Rule was, of course, pre-modern, religious, and material in all its forms (Küng 1991a: 18-19). To the contrary, the Kantian categorical imperative was modern, secular and formal (Kant 1929b: 128, 158, 472-474, 633-634; Küng 1990b: 84-85; 1991a). Considering the religious Golden Rule, Habermas followed together with Apel the secular path of Piaget and Kohlberg. In the present post-secular European and American civil society, Habermas, informed by Mead, Peirce, Piaget, Kohlberg and Apel, has so far stood even more clearly and decisively and firmly with his post-metaphysical universal pragmatic, theory of communicative action and discourse ethics on the side of the secular enlightenment movements, than the first generation of critical theorists ever did (Benjamin 1977: chaps 10, 11; Adorno 1970b: 103-125; 1997j / 2: 608-616; Piaget 1970; Habermas 1976; 1981a; 1981b; 1983; 1984a; 1984b; 1985a; 1986; 1987d; 1988a; 1988b; 1991a; 1991b; 1997a; 2005). Also the critical theory of society has in its formation fully participated in the progressing secularization process of the post-secular civil society in Europe and even in the U.S.A., in spite of all the most problematic return to religion, and the likewise questionable massive neoconservative political use, or-more precisely, abuse of religion (Adorno 1997l / 1: 7-142; Apostolidis 2000; Siebert 2005d: 57-114; 2006d: 61-114).

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Thus, the neo-conservative Republican candidate for Vice-President during the U.S. Presidential Election 2008, Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska and member of the Pentecostal Church, has stated, that the American soldiers had been sent to Iraq on a task that is from God, and that there is a plan, and that this plan was God’s plan, and intent, and purpose (Amos 2: 9-11; Lieber 2001: 248 / 9-11; Hegel 1986l: 19- 33; Sataline 2008: A 5; Wilson 2008: 1-4; Siebert 2006d: 61-114). For Palin also the natural gas pipeline in Alaska was God’s intent, purpose, and plan. A secular television interviewer called the Governor’s readiness for the Vice-Presidency and, in case of the death of the old President, for the Presidency utter hybris, which for the Greeks was the greatest sin of man against the Gods. For the neo-liberal Roman Catholic Priest, Father Robert Sirico, President of the Action Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who had already become notorious for recommending the assassination of President Chavez of Venezuela, the present U.N. President Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann was a grim reminder of the hated liberation theology, which has been strongly influenced by the Frankfurt School (Sirico 2007; 2008: 1-2; Siebert 2006d: 61-114). According to Father Sirico, the new President of the United Nations General Assembly, Father Brockmann, was a communist and a Catholic priest. Father Brockmann was a retired member of the Maryknoll missionary order. He was Foreign Minister under the Sandinista Government in Nicaragua from 1979-1980, and won the Lenin Peace Price in 1985-1986, which the old Soviet Union had issued as a competitor to the Noble Peace Price. Father Brockmann remained a staunch defender of the Sandinistas and a dedicated partisan of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. Since his election as U.N. President Father Brockmann seemed not to have backed off from his extreme statements of the past, although now he speaks of reconciliation. In view of Father Sirico, who wants to give capitalism a religious face, in Nicaragua communism emerged with a a religious face, Some priests made this possible by putting a spin on the Gospel to say Jesus taught revolution. They said the Gospel implied socialization of the means of production. Father Sirico says this at a time, when the American Government nationalized mayor banks, like Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, in order to rescue the American economy from further disasters, caused by neo-liberalism a la Friedmann’s Chicago School. During and after the Hurricane Ike in September 2008, the U.S. Government introduced price control against massive price gouching by the oil companies at the gasoline sta-

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tions. American businessmen talked about socialism (Andrews 2008: 1-4). Father Sirico was terribly upset, that a priest such as Father Brockmann could be rewarded with the U.N. Presidency, while those who fought tyranny were largely unrecognized for their bravery. Father Sirico has completely forgotten that the liberation theologians and the Basic Christian Communities in Nicaragua fought bravely the tyranny of the Samosas. In his interpretation of the Papal Social Encyclical Letters from 1891 to the present–2010–Father Sirico stressed all the statements against socialism, and de-emphasized all the statements against liberalism and capitalism. Father Sirico did also not mention the treaties and concordats, which the Vatican concluded with fascist states in the 20th century, some of which are still valid today in 2010, the betrayed Covenant and the unfulfilled duty of repair (Habermas 1973: 322-329; Rosenbaum 1999; Stone / Weaver 1998; Dalin 2005; Deschner 1998; Kertzer 2001; Goldhagen 2002) There have always been priests and ministers in antagonistic civil society, who served the capitalist ruling classes and allied themselves with liberalism and fascism (Caughlin 1932; Baldwin 2001: chap. 19; Siebert 2004a: 63-97; 2005b; 2006d: 61-114; Lernoux 1980). There also have always been priests and ministers who served the exploited working classes and fought against fascism and liberalism and neo-liberalism (Marcuse 1970a: chap 1; Gutierrez 1973; Hinkelammert 1985; Lernoux 1980; Stone / Weaver 1998; Schneider 1995). The Christian clergy has been split between the Right and the Left. In contrast to the traditional theory it is not difficult for the critical theory to find out who stands closer to the Gospels: the priests who serve the rich, or the priests who serve the poor, and to differentiate between the ideological abuse of religion on one hand, and the faithful commitment to it, on the other. The critical theory is better able than the traditional theory, to differentiate, in St, Paul’s terms, between the spirits, or more concretely and in the context of the present historical situation of 2010, between the genuine commitment of the liberation theologians to the redeeming, and liberating, and egalitarian message of the Gospels in the interest of the working classes on one hand, and their neoconservative or neo-liberal ideological abuse for the rescue and survival of the corporate ruling classes in late antagonistic civil society, on the other: Then Jesus said to his disciples: “I tell you solemnly. It will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Yes, I tell you again, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven… And Mary said in the Magnificat: He (the Lord) has pulled down princes from their throne and exalted the lowly.

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chapter six The hungry he has filled with good things, the rich sent empty away…. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount “But alas for you who are rich: you are having your consolation now, Alas for you who have their fill now: you shall go hungry. Alas for you who laugh now: you shall mourn and weep. Alas for you when the world speaks well of you! This was the way their ancestors treated the false prophets. (Matthew 19: 23-26; Luke 1: 52-53; 6: 24-26; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1970c; 1971a; 1974c: 91-92, 92-93, 96-97, 101-104, 116-17, 131-132, 247-248, 260, 286-287, 316-320, 352-352; 1978; 1981a; 1981b; 1981c; Adorno 1997l / 1: 7-142; Apostolidis 2000; Siebert 2005d: 57-114; 2006d: 61-114).

The rich and the powerful people resented the critique of the poor and powerless prophetic Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, and they murdered him (Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; Fromm 1966b; 1976; 1992: 3-84; 1995; 2001; Reich 1971; 1976). Before the young Rabbi was tortured and hanged by the rich and powerful people he made his only functionalistic statement: Beware of false prophets who come to you disguised as sheep but underneath are ravenous wolves: you will be able to tell them by their fruits. (Matthew 7: 15-16; Parsons 1964; 1965; 1971: 2007-245; Parsons / Shils 1951; Habermas 1973: 164-183, 313-321, 322-329; Habermas / Luhmann 1975; Siebert 1979c; 1979d; 1980).

This is an early, pre-modern form of the critical theory as ideology critique: ideology understood as false consciousness and as the disguise and masking of particularistic racial, national, and class interests (Adorno 1979: 397-408, 457- 478).

chapter seven

Universal Pragmatic After several previous private meetings in the 1970s, I invited Professor Jürgen Habermas, student of Horkheimer and Adorno and most outstanding second-generation critical theorist, to my second international course on the Future of Religion in the Inter-University Center for PostGraduate Studies, Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, in April 1978 (Reimer 1992; Ott 2007). At that time, Habermas was in the process of introducing into the critical theory of society the linguistic turn–which had long been prepared by Benjamin, Adorno, and even by Horkheimer on the basis of what Hegel had called the human potential of language and memory–in the form of his universal pragmatic, or his theory of mimetic or communicative rationality and action (Hegel 1972: chap. 1; 1979; Habermas 1973; 1981a; 1981b; 1984a; 1985a; 1986; 1987c; 1987d; 1988a; 1988b; 1991b; 1992a; 1998b; 2004a; 2004b; 2006b; 2006d; App. A, C, D).

From Instrumental to Communicative Rationality As Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, or Marx, the early critical theorists also emphasized what Hegel had called the human potential of work and tool. However, they never neglected the evolutionary universals of language and memory, sexual and erotic love, struggle for recognition and community (See Vol. 1: Appendix C; Hegel 1972; 1979). While Horkheimer was deeply engaged in the critique of instrumental rationality and action, rooted in the human potential of work and tool, he did not name precisely its opposite, namely communicative rationality and action (Horkheimer 1967b; 1969; 1970a; 1970b; 1970c; 1972; 1974a). While Habermas concentrated on communicative action, rooted in the evolutionary universal of language and memory, his student Axel Honneth and others emphasized the human potential of the struggle for recognition, or its negation, disrespect and contempt (Habermas 1981a; 1981b; 1984a; 1984b; 1986; 1987d; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 1997a; 1998b; 2004a; 2006d; Honneth 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2004; 2005; Honneth/Joas 2005; Fraser/Honneth 2003). Habermas went to the very roots of Hegel’s system in the five human potentials, and

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thus critically negated and circumnavigated it. Yet, Habermas also reconstructed Hegel’s system and thus preserved it at least partially in the process of the further transformation of the critical theory of society on the principle of mimetic or communicative rationality and action (Habermas 1981a; 1981b; 1983, 1984a; 1984b; 1985a; 1992a).

Communicative Theory of Religion During our public discourse in the IUC, Dubrovnik, in April 1978, Habermas confessed to us–sociologists, phenomenologists, psychologists, philosophers, religionists, theologians, etc., coming mainly from the Americas, Eastern and Western Europe, and Israel–that he was like Max Weber, “religiously unmusical” (Weber 1952; 1962; 1963: chap. 17; 1969; 1992; 1993; 2002; Reimer 1992; Ott 2007). He proposed what later on he called a methodological atheism (Habermas 2002: chap. 6). He took a further step of secularization beyond Horkheimer and the first mainly Jewish generation of critical theorists. They had still remembered and preserved in their critical theory of society and in their longing for the wholly Other, the Hebrew Psalmists’ and Prophets’ likewise pessimistic and hopeful principle–Though all be lost, turn to God in perfect trust, call Him your Father, and his love will regenerate you (Jeremiah 1: 1-10; Hertz 5716/1956: 229-230/1-10; Psalm 91; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 16; Fromm 1966b: 231-236). To the contrary, Habermas and the next generations of critical theorists followed methodologically at least the likewise old principle to think as if Deus none datur (Jeremiah 1: 1-10; Hertz 5716/1956: 229230/1-10; Psalm 91; Horkheimer1985g: chap. 16). In Dubrovnik, in April 1978, Habermas was not even aware that his theory of communicative action, which was still in statu nascendi at the time, contained in itself the beginnings of a theory of religion as integral part. However, my colleagues and I were able to convince Habermas that his universal pragmatic, his theory of communicative action, his form of the critical theory of society, did indeed embrace also something like a critical theory of religion. Habermas had to admit that he was searching in all dimensions of social life, so also in religion, for fragments of mimetic or communicative rationality: logoi spermaticoi, so to speak. Since 1978, Habermas has written and spoken so much about religion that there can be no doubt any longer that he has a communicative theory of religion, and that it constitutes a third form of the overall critical theory of religion (Habermas 1978: 127-143; 1981a: chap. 2; 1981b: chap. 5; 1982: 438-440; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2002; 2005: chaps 5, 8, 9; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006).

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Appellative Semantic and Semiotic Material and Potential Those who have any doubts whether Habermas, unlike Weber, was indeed religiously musical already in 1978, must just read his essay on the Disguised Torah in honor of Gerhard Scholem’s 80th birthday of the same year, or his essay on Death in Jerusalem of four years later, 1982, describing the funeral of Scholem as the end of an era (Habermas 1978c: 127-143; 1982: 438-440). For Habermas religion, which he defined as system of interpretation of reality and orientation of action, has remained important from 1978 on up to the present–February 2010–because it contained an appellative semantic and semiotic material and potential that could not be replaced either by philosophy or by the social sciences. Religion was necessary for the normalizing of extra-everyday events–contingency or theodicy experiences–breaking into the everyday life world (Habermas 1988a: 59-60). That precisely has been the reason why after magic and fetishism had been replaced by technology, religion has, nevertheless, continued to exist side by side with the positive natural and social sciences, because the latter know of no absolute truth, or unconditional meaning, or absolute ethical validity claims (Hegel 1986p: 249-301; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Luhmann 1998; Apel 1975; 1990; Habermas 1983; 1986; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 2001c; 2001d; 2002; 2005; 2007; App. E). In this sense, Habermas finds himself today–in February 2010–in a post-secular civil society, in which religion has not disappeared as fast as some enlighteners had predicted or hoped for (Marx 1953: 171-224, 253; Niebuhr 1964; Schopenhauer 1977; 1986b: 382-466; Nietzsche 1967a; 1967b; 1967c; 1968; 1974; 1990; Wright 1954; Kaufmann 1967: 95-96; 1968: 657-800; 1968: chap. 12; 1982: 95-96; Freud 1962; 1964; Habermas 2001a; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006). Schopenhauer, Horkheimer’s great teacher, hoped for the decline and disappearance of religion, because all religion stood supposedly in antagonism to culture (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1986a; 1986b: 382466). According to Schopenhauer, in earlier centuries the religion was the forest behind which armies could hold and could take cover. The attempt to repeat this still in the 19th century had turned out badly. This was so for Schopenhauer, because after so much felling only bushes, shrubs, and tuft were left, behind which occasionally rogues were hiding. Therefore, Schopenhauer recommended that one should guard oneself, and watch out against, and take care against and beware of those people, who would like to pull religion into everything, and encounter them with the Spanish proverb: Detras de la cruz esta el Diablo (Behind the cross stands the devil). Certainly the Christian symbol of the cross has continually been ideologi-

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cally abused privately and collectively in Western traditional and modern civil society from the Medieval to the Modern crusades of the second Bush Administration (Küng 1994a; Lawrence 2005: 7-8). According to the Rabbis, the Jews saw themselves as subservient to God and dependent on God, while idolaters saw themselves as superior to their gods: thus Pharao saw himself as superior to the god Nile (Genesis 41: 1; Lieber 2001: 250/1). In the view of the Rabbis, Judaism taught its believers, how to serve God, but Pagan religions taught their followers, how to use and to manipulate their gods. In the Rabbis’ perspective, the ideological use or abuse of religion was Pagan and not Jewish, and–so the critical theorist of religion may add– also not Christian, and also not Islamic (Küng 1970; 1972; 1978; 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 2002; 2004; Küng/Ess; Stietencron/Bechert 1984; App. E).

Theory-Praxis Dialectic The critical theorist of religion cannot deny that while the world religions are learning to share their wisdom with each other in the post-secular civil society, there still remains the task also to share it with the secular modern or post-modern world; and most of all, to practice it in it with vitality (Habermas 1978c; 1981d; 1988b; 2004b; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2002; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006). In the face of the present wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Sudan, etc. the chronicle theory-praxis antagonism of the world religions seems to deepen, and their wisdom seems to become less and less effective against the positivism, naturalism, and Realpolitik of the belligerent nations. They often are not even able to keep themselves out of the conflicts, and thus become part of the problem, which endangers their own existence (Nietzsche 1990: 1517; Habermas 2005). Being part of the globalizing civil society, which Hegel (1986g: 339-397) called the spiritual animal society, the world religions allow their wisdom to become part of its necessary spiritual, or more exactly, ideological appearance, and thus once more they shorten their own existence. By their fruits you shall know them (Matthew 3: 8, 10; 7: 16, 17, 18; Luke 6: 43)! Without realistic fruits the religious trees, no matter how old and how big they may be, become non-functional, and thus will disappear and will make room for the entirely secular alternative Futures I and II (Flechtheim 1971; App. G). In the Middle Ages, it was enough for religious people to be concerned with their theory, and do their best, and to leave the rest to the Lord. In Modernity and Post-Modernity, the religions will be tested according to their effective theory-praxis dialectic

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(Habermas 1978a). The truth will make believers and non-believers free, but only if they justify it through practicing it (John 3: 31; 8: 32, 40, 44, 45; 18: 37, 38; Habermas 1998b). In February 2010, what weakens Christianity further is, what Nietzsche called, the three-quarter-Christians, what I call the dark-age politicians, as well as the two-quarter-Christians and onequarter-Christians, who continually focus on and emphasize the death of Jesus, usually expressed as “Christ has died for my sins” and “Christ is my Savior.” They forget, however, all about his haggadah and halacha, particularly the Sermon on the Mount, and his corresponding actions; shortly, about what the Jews once called the Imitatio Dei, and what the Christians once called the mimesis or Imitatio Christi (Matthew 19: 16-22; Luke18: 18-27; Nietzsche 1990: 17-18; App. E).

Six Stages In the formation of his universal pragmatic, theory of communicative action, discourse ethics, and communicative theory of religion, Habermas proceeded methodologically as if the Absolute, or God, or the wholly Other was not given (Habermas 1991, part III; 2002). Concerning this theological point, Habermas behaved like all the other natural and social scientists, no matter if, like Parsons, they still spoke about an Ultimate Reality, or left it out like his German successor Luhmann and replaced it by indeterminacy (Adorno 1997j/1: 31-46, 72-96, 337-345, 375-395; 1997j/2: 595-598, 608-616, 674-690, 702-740, 783-784, 785-802; Parsons 1964: chaps. 1, 2; Parsons 1965: chaps 1, 2; O’Dea 1966; Luhmann 1977; Siebert 1980: 27-55). While for Parsons people still related themselves through their culture to the Ultimate Reality, it itself did not intervene into the system of human condition or action system like the God of the three Abrahamic religions. If this was acknowledged, there could be no structural functionalism as determinate scientific system at all. In the formation of his universal pragmatic and particularly of his communicative theory of religion, Habermas found great help in the work of Lawrence Kohlberg, who had discovered the Sermon on the Mount, or more specifically the Golden Rule, on some of the six levels of his theory of the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of moral consciousness (Matthew 7: 12; Alt 1983; Apel 1990: 317-340; Fletscher 1952). In his essay From Is to Ought, Kohlberg tried to show through his stage scheme how the progressive equilibration process of the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of the moral judgment, which had been postulated by Piaget’s cognitive theory of development, could be comprehended as hierarchy of forms of moral

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integration in terms of the growing sense of justice (Piaget 1970; Kohlberg 1971: 165). Kohlberg explicated his claim in the following four theses: 1) Moral judging is based on a process of role taking, as in the sense of Mead (Apel 1990: 317; Mead 1969). 2) Role taking demonstrates on each level a new logical structure corresponding to the logical stages of the thinking process in Piaget’s theory. 3) This structure can be grasped as justice-structure. 4) This justice-structure is as such in every following stage more embracing, and at the same time more differentiated, and more equilibrated than on the previous level.

Kohlberg explicated and proved these four theses on the passage through the six stages of his scheme: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6)

The Pre-conventional Stage I The Pre-conventional Stage II The Conventional Stage III The Conventional Stage IV The Post-conventional Stage V The Post-conventional Stage VI

Kohlberg noticed, that people perceived and understood the same Golden Rule of the New Testament very differently on the different stages of the evolution of the moral consciousness (Matthew 7: 12; Küng 1990c: 18-19).

Different Conceptions of Justice On the Pre-conventional Stage II, Kohlberg spoke of a naïve-instrumental or better still, a naïve-strategic conception of the essence of justice and fairness (Apel 1990: 340). Correspondingly, Kohlberg perceived the Golden Rule on this level in the sense of the reciprocity of the actual exchange of favors, or also of the retaliation or reprisal for evil deeds in terms of the Jus or Lex Talionis (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; 7: 12; Alt 1983; Piaget 1970; Kohlberg 1971: 165; Apel 1990: 317-318). As a matter of fact, on this level in the development of moral consciousness, the Golden Rule and the Lex Talionis could fall together and become identical. On the Conventional Stage III, children or young adults were for the first time able to do role-taking in a reflective way. Now they could put themselves at the same time into two different roles, which were related to each other. Correspondingly, they also now understood the Golden Rule appropriately and suitably in the sense of an ideal reciprocity of the formula: Treat others in such a way, as you would like to be treated by them (and not in such a way as you are factually treated by them) (Matthew 7: 12;

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Küng 1990c: 18-19). Now, the Golden Rule and the Lex Talionis could no longer be mixed up with each other. According to Kohlberg, the beginning of the universalization of role-taking respective to the Golden Rule was on this Conventional Stage III not yet possible. Likewise, precision of the role obligations and rights was not yet possible in the sense of a social function-system: of an order of society, which had fixed the roles through rules belonging to them, or through norms of the correct behavior. All that would happen only on Conventional Stage IV, and on the Post-conventional Stages V, and VI.

Possibility of Universalization Kohlberg used the application of the Golden Rule as an example to explain the precedence of the possibility of universalization on the Postconventional Stage VI of Piaget’s and his own ontogenetic, developmental logic of the moral consciousness (Matthew 7: 12; Küng 1990c: 18-19; Piaget 1970; Apel 1990: 11, 317-340, 330-331, chap. 10). For Kohlberg, while the application of the Golden Rule became possible during the Conventional Stage III in the development of moral consciousness, it did not yet lead on this stage to a completely equilibrated solution of possible conflicts between human legal entitlements. The reason for that was here in Conventional Stage III as also still in the sacrosanct and closed social order of Conventional Stage IV of the development of the moral consciousness, that the role-taking was still too much prejudged through the reciprocity-relationships of the respective reference group, or through a pre-given order of role-obligations. Here, the role taking did not yet get to the point where it carried out completely the demand of reversibility in the sense of the principle of equal rights of all human roles. Kohlberg exemplified this through the New Testament story of the rich young man, to whom Jesus recommended that he give all his goods to the poor classes: And there was a man, who came to him (Jesus) and asked. “Master, what good deed must I do to possess eternal life?” Jesus said to him: “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is One alone, who is good. But if you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” He said, “which?” “These,” Jesus replied, “You must not kill. You must not commit adultery. You must not steal. You must not bring false witness. Honor your father and mother, and: you must love your neighbor because he is like you.” The young man said to him, “I have kept all these. What more do I need to do?” Jesus said: “If you wish to be perfect, go and sell what you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, then come, follow me.” But

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chapter seven when the young man heard these words, he went away sad, for he was a man of great wealth. Then Jesus said to his disciples, “I tell you solemnly, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Yes, I tell you again, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” When the disciples heard this, they were astonished. “Who can be saved then?” they said. Jesus gazed at them, “For men,” he told them, “this is impossible; for God everything is possible.” Then Peter spoke. “What about us?”. He said to him, “We have left everything and followed you. What are we to have then?” Jesus said to him, “I tell you solemnly, when all is made new and the Son of Man sits on his throne of glory, you will yourselves sit on twelve thrones to judge the twelve tribes of Israel. And everyone who has left houses, brothers, sisters, father, mother, children, or land for the sake of my name will be repaid a hundred times over, and also inherit eternal life. Many who are first will be last, and the last, first.” (Matthew 19: 16-22; Luke 18: 18-27; Exodus 20: 12-16; Deuteronomy 5: 1620).

In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the young rich man in Rabbi Jesus’ story indeed originally had the longing for the wholly Other–eternal life. However, according to Jesus, the fulfillment of this longing presupposed the praxis of the Mosaic Decalogue, and of the Sermon on the Mount, and of communism (Exodus 20; Mathew 5-7; Luke 6; Saint Thomas More 1960; Marx 1953: 150-152, 233-235, 333, 361-563, 399, 539-541; Marx/Engels 2005; Fromm 1961: 257-267; Smith 2007: 145-164; Waldenfels, Brockman, Pazanin 1977; Beto 1970; Hoeven 1976). Capitalism, in the broadest sense of the word, as the instrumentalization and commodification of others, such as slaves, serfs, or wage laborers, and as the private appropriation of their surplus labor and surplus value by the rich non-workers, even on the lowest and most primitive level of economic exchange, suffocates the longing for the totally Other–the kingdom of heaven–and the mimesis of God or of the Christ through Decalogue and Sermon on the Mount in the exploiting classes, and thus made its fulfillment for them impossible, except through a Divine miracle, in which they usually do not believe (Marx 1961a: 6, 12, 16, 30, 39-40, 54, 55, 56-57, 6162, 63, 64, 66, 67-69, 77-79, 85, 89, 90, 96-97, 99, 128, 161, 167, 192, 196, 198, 203, 263, 272, 317, 345, 832, 834, 835, 874, 881, 882, 915; Betto 1970). If the young man was really able to become and remain rich on one hand, and to follow the Decalogue–for example, you should not steal–as he said, on the other, and that Jesus even accepted his argument, remains a problem, which is probably the consequence of a lack of economic knowledge concerning how and through whom wealth is produced, which was wide spread in Jerusalem as well as in Athens and Rome.

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Distributive Justice For the bourgeois thinker Kohlberg, Rabbi Jesus’ recommendation to the young rich man to give his goods back to the poor classes, from which they had been stolen in the first place, did indeed not solve the problem of distributive justice, which Aristotle, a member of the upper classes of the Athenian slaveholder society, had precisely formulated the first time in reference to the dyadic reciprocity-relationship between the rich man and the poor people (Apel 1990: 330-331). Jerusalem departed from Athens (Habermas 2002: chap. 6; Mendieta 2005: chap. 20). According to Kohlberg, what was missing in the recommendation of Jesus to the rich man was the complete reversibility of the role-taking in the sense of justice. However, here Kohlberg has not only not yet made sufficiently clear to what extent the principle of the complete reversibility of the role-taking constituted not only the possible end point of a theory of the development of the moral competence to judge, a la Piaget, but he has also not given a sufficient normative justification of a theory of justice, such as, in the sense of Rawls’s liberalism (Rawls 1971; Apel 1990: 191-192, 331; Habermas 2001b: 17-18, 52-53; 2005: 106, 117, 123-129, 131, 138, 152-154, 267-269, 289-291, 295-296, 320, 347). Kohlberg himself confirmed this impression through his essay Justice as Reversibility: The Claim to Moral Adequacy of a Highest Stage of Moral Judgment (Apel 1990: 191-192, 331; Habermas 2001b: 17-18, 52-53; 2005: 106, 117, 123-129, 131, 138, 152154, 267-269, 289-291, 295-296, 320, 347). It seems to the critical theorist of religion that only on Post-conventional Stage VI in Kohlberg’s theory of the evolution of moral consciousness could the Golden Rule, or the cancellation of the Lex Talionis, or the Sermon on the Mount in its totality, possibly be comprehended and acted out adequately. However, the Sermon on the Mount is not only a moral issue, but it has also a theological presupposition: it is a cipher for the totally Other, the completely Unidentical, the absolutely New (Matthew 5, 6, 7; Luke 6; Alt 1983; Hegel 1986f: 33-80; Horkheimer1985g, chaps. 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 37, 40). There has of course always been evolution in the theology as well as in the moral codes not only of Judaism and Christianity, but of other world religions as well (Exodus 6: 20; Hertz 5716/1956: 234/20; Tillich 1951; 1955; Dirks 1985; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1976: chaps. 3, 7, 8, 9; App. E).

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chapter seven Abstraction from Theology

In the view of the critical theory of religion, Kohlberg abstracted from Jesus’ central demand of mimesis or imitation, as well as from his eschatological reservation concerning eternal life and the kingdom of heaven, which were expressions of–what Horkheimer and Adorno have called–the longing for the wholly Other than the horror and terror of nature, society and history, the yearning for the absolutely New, and which constituted for them the very core of religion (Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 29, 37, 40; Apel 1990: chap. 11; Fromm 1961: 257-267). Shortly, Kohlberg abstracted from theology. However, in the perspective of the dialectical theorist of religion, such abstraction could be rescued in terms of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s other, or inverse theology, moving between super-naturalism and naturalism (Adorno 1970b: 103-125; Habermas 2005). In terms of this inverse, cipher theology, the religious Golden Rule could also be inverted, translated, sublated, rationalized, formalized, and secularized into the modern, post-modern, post-religious and post-metaphysical, philosophical and social-scientific discourses (Adorno 1970b: 111-161; Habermas 1990: 9-18; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; Küng 1990b: 84-85). This way, the religious Golden Rule could be translated into the secular principle of– what Immanuel Kant had called–the categorical imperative: Act in such a way, that the maxim of your will can at any time also be valid as principle of a universal legislation, or Act in such a way, that you use the humanity in your own person as well as in the person of every other human being always also as purpose, never merely as means (Kant 1929: 113, 114, 128, 143, 158, 160, 472-474, 633-634; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1982; 1983; Küng 1990b: 84-85). As a matter of fact, Mead, Peirce, Apel and Habermas have translated, sublated, rationalized, and formalized the religious Golden Rule not only into the Kantian categorical imperative, but beyond that also into their own secular communicative or discourse ethics, and into their principle of the a priori of the unlimited communication community: Your action is ethically valid, when it honors the five validity claims–truthfulness, honesty, rightfulness, tastefulness and understandability–and when it realizes the law of universalization, and finds the consensus of the universal communication community, particularly of the possible victims (Apel 1976: vol. 2; 1982; Edelstein/Habermas 1984; Habermas 1983; 1991a). In the same way, humanity created in the image of God has been inverted into the secular dignity of humanity; love of the neighbor into secular solidarity; the common good into striving for a secular always more perfect union; etc. (Habermas 2001a: 29-31).

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Exodus Theology Carl Schmitt, who participated actively in Adolf Hitler’s counter-revolution against Marxist socialism in all it forms, and who was his jurist, and political theologian, and much travelled propagandist, differentiated between an Epimetheus (After-thought) and a Prometheus (Fore-thought) theology, and characterized his own mythological and anthropological political theology as Epimetheus theology (Meier 1994; Groh 1998; Spanknebel 2010: 98-100; Mehring 2009). The Prometheus theology was really a revolutionary theology, and the Epimetheus theology was really a counter-revolutionary theology (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007c). In the 1960s and 1970s, the revolutionary theology had preference over the counter-revolutionary theology in Europe and even in America. Since the neo-conservative trend turn in the late 1960s and early 1970s up to the present–February 2010, the counter-revolutionary theology in all its forms has triumphed again over revolutionary theology on the pulpits in the churches, as well as in the theological seminaries and denominational colleges and universities particularly in America, but also in Europe. The religious super-structure followed the economic, political, and historical base-structure (Marx 1953: chaps. 6-10; 2005; Weber 1962; 1992, 1993; App. C, D). The revolutionary theology was rooted originally not in Athens, but rather and mainly in Jerusalem: in the writings of the Hebrew prophets (Habermas 2002: chaps. 6, 7, & 8). According to the Prophet Jeremiah, it was the longing and the love of a most affectionate, youthful bride that caused Israel gladly to follow the call of Yahweh into the Exodus and liberation and redemption from the enslavement and bondage in Egypt into the Unknown, the New, the Other, on a novel quest of the Divine, that was to fill man’s earthly existence with new hopes; on an unheard of adventure in religion that was to change the current of history and humanize mankind (Exodus 12-15; Jeremiah 2: 2; Hertz 5716/1956: 231/2). Here the critical theorist of religion may speak of an Exodus theology. For the dialectical theory of religion, the Exodus from Egypt remains a most important cipher of liberation, redemption, rescue, and humanization (Siebert 1993; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2003a; 2003b; 2004b; 2005a; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2005a; 2007b; 2007c).

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chapter seven Prometheus Theology

Yet, the revolutionary theology was not only rooted in Jerusalem but also in Athens (Habermas 2002: chaps. 6, 7, 8; 1973: 322-329b). In contrast to Schmitt’s Epimetheus theology, Adorno’s and Benjamin’s inverse cipher theology was a Prometheus theology (Marx 1953: 12-13, 256; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Adorno 1970b: 103-125; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11). According to Greek mythology, Zeus sent the first woman Pandora (All-giving), wife of Epimetheus, from Olympus to earth as a punishment for Prometheus’s crime of stealing fire from the gods and giving it to the humans (Aeschylos 1968; Flashar 1987: 99-145; Graves 1961; 1968: 4/b/ c3, 4/3, 38/c, 39/h/j8, 47/b/d/2, 57/a, 83, 89, 92/9, 126/c, 133, 152/g, 169/3; Hamilton 1973; Marx 1953: 13, 256; Guthrie 1966: 23, 121, 207). Zeus gave Pandora a box that when opened let loose all human misfortunes. However, longing and hope remained on the bottom of the box. Marx characterized Hegel’s philosophy as a Prometheus philosophy (Marx 1953: 13, 256; Siebert 1987b; 1987c). According to Marx, as Prometheus, who had stolen the fire from heaven and who started to build houses of light and to settle on earth, so Hegel’s philosophy, which had widened, enlarged, expanded, and broadened itself into the world, turned against the appearing world. In Marx’s view, the houses of light, which Prometheus in Aeschylus’ tragedy signified as one of the great gifts through which he made the savage into a human being, ceased to exist for the proletarians in capitalist society, e.g. in New York’s tenement houses (Aeschylos 1968; Hegel 1986g: 382-392; Marx 1953: 256; Meissner 1966). Light, air, water, etc, and the most simple animal cleanliness ceased to be a need for the workers in the slums of the big cities of civil society (Hegel 1986g: 382-392; Marx 1953: 256; Meissner 1966). For Marx, through his gifts, Prometheus produced a situation in which humanity’s natural existence became human existence, and nature became human. Also the society, so Marx stated, not only following Greek mythology but also Jewish and Christian mystical theology, became the completed essential unity of humanity with nature, the true resurrection of nature, the carried out naturalism of humanity and the implemented humanism of nature.

Reconciliation of Humanity and Nature Greek mythology symbolized Prometheus through the swastika (Aeschylos 1968; Flashar 1987: 99-145; Graves 1961; 1968: 4/b/c3, 4/3, 38/c, 39/h/ j8, 47/b/d/2, 57/a, 83, 89, 92/9, 126/c, 133, 152/g, 169/3; Hamilton 1973;

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Guthrie 1966: 23, 121, 207). Adolf Hitler abused the revolutionary sign of the swastika, imitating the victorious sun disk, on the flags of his counterrevolutionary National Socialist German Workers’ Party and movement, as Benito Mussolini abused the Roman fasces, the bundle of sticks with the ax in the middle as symbol of justice for his counter-revolutionary Fascist Party and movement (Trever-Roper 1988: 214, 404; Kershaw 2001: 5-6). Like the Roman Emperor Julian Apostata, who’s prophetic sense and reflections he liked very much, the Catholic Hitler rejected the cross, which the early Christians had transformed from a sign of repression and enslavement–10,000 rebellious slaves, followers of Spartacus, were crucified along the Appian Way–into a symbol of redemption and liberation: a conformist Epimetheus cipher into a polemical Exodus and Prometheus hieroglyph (Exodus 6: 6; Hertz 5716/1956: 233/6; Matthew 27: 32-61; Hegel 1996q: 289-299; Trevor-Roper 1988: 76-79, 87-92). For the critical theory of religion, which preserves in itself the Marx-inspired, inverse theology, Prometheus remains–together with the Hebrew Exodus cipher–a most important cipher for alternative Future III-the free society, which is the reconciliation of humanity and nature, and in which, therefore, also all the environmental problems could and would be resolved (Marx 1961c: 873-874; 1953: 12-13; 237, 256). Through its Exodus and Prometheus ciphers, the dialectical theory of religion can help to provide a powerful motivation for communicative action in civil society toward alternative Future III, and beyond toward the wholly Other than the finite world of appearances, the finitude of which is continually indicated today–February 2010–through the endangerment and even disappearance of the rainforests, and of many plant and animal species, and through the possibility of a super-volcano outbreak, or of a super-tsunami, or of a massive apocalyptic asteroid impact, or of ABC wars and the consequent environmental destruction (Siebert 1993; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2003a; 2003b; 2004b; 2005a; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2005a; 2007b; 2007c). According to Carl Schmitt, Johannes B. Metz’s political theology and its derivation, the Latin and Central American liberation theology, have been the most recent forms of Prometheus theology. (Bloch/Reif 1978: 78-89; Metz 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1978; 2006; Peters 1998: 12-13, 18, 41-42, 45-46, 48, 51, 53, 57, 59, 60-61, 70, 104, 135, 145; Klingen 2006: 7; Gutierrez 1973; 1988). To be sure, today–February 2010–most of the mainstream theologies in the three Abrahamic religions and in the other still living world religions are conformist Epimetheus theologies rather than revolutionary Exodus or Prometheus theologies, and can thus easily be used as elements of the contingency-experience-management subsystem

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for the fulfillment of the functional survival requirements of integration, tension-management, and normalization in globalizing antagonistic civil society on its way to alternative Future I -the totally bureaucratized signal society (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Luhmann 1977).

The Claim of Hebrew Dialectics versus the Claim of Greek Ontology The religiologist Klaus Heinrich unfolded the claim of Hebrew dialectics from Jerusalem in confrontation with the claim of the Greek ontological thinking from Athens, which did not search for nor overcome the powers of origin, which threaten the humanity with destruction, but did only repress them, and was as helpless in encountering and dealing with the return of these repressed primordial forces, as was modern positivism (Horkheimer 1974c: 101-104; 116; 117; Adorno 1970a; 2002a; Heinrich 1964; Haag 1983: chaps 1, VI, VII, VIII; 2005; Habermas 1973: 322-329). Greek ontology appeared to Heinrich as a vain attempt to transform the positivity of the threatening non-being into the simple and plain negation of a purified being; into an authenticity, which was differentiated from inauthenticity; into the true, the right, the conscience, which were painstakingly separated from the false and the bad and the dangerous (Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1970a; 1997f: 413- 523; . Horkheimer 1974c: 101-104; 116; 117; Heinrich 1964; Haag 1983: chaps 1, VI, VII, VIII; 2005; Habermas 1973: 322-329) Thereby, of course, Greek ontology only concealed the contradictory, conflicting reality. Heinrich explained against Parmenides and the Greek ontology, the claim of dialectical thinking through the topos of the covenant community in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 9: 12; 15: 18; 17: 11, 19; Exodus 2: 24; 19: 5; 24: 8; Deuteronomy 5: 2; 7: 9; 9: 11). The prophets of Israel comprehended the life-founding and -creating and -maintaining connection not like the philosophers of Greece as the sphere of the successful union of all forms of life in an original and perfect Being, lifted out of the dimension of nullity, invalidity, futility, void, volatility, fleeting, and mere appearance. The Hebrew prophets did not comprehend the life-giving and -maintaining connection as a cosmos, but as a universal covenant, the energy and power of which had to prove itself alone in the communication of the traitors through the history of the societal humanity. (Genesis 9: 12; 15: 18; 17: 11, 19; Exodus 2: 24; 19: 5; 24: 8; Deuteronomy 5: 2; 7: 9; 9: 11; Horkheimer 1974c: 101-104; 116; 117; Adorno 1970a; Heinrich 1964; Haag 1983: chaps 1, VI, VII, VIII; 2005; Habermas 1973: 322-329; Siebert 2008b; 2008c). The dialectical religiologist remembers, that tradition came from the Latin word tradere, which did not only

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mean to transfer, but also–dialectically–to betray. However, even still the betrayed covenant community held together the torn-apart social and historical world: namely as guilt connection (Genesis 9: 12; 15: 18; 17: 11, 19; Exodus 2: 24; 19: 5; 24: 8; Deuteronomy 5: 2; 7: 9; 9: 11; Horkheimer 1974c: 101-104; 116; 117; Adorno 1970a; Heinrich 1964; Haag 1983: chaps 1, VI, VII, VIII; 2005; Habermas 1973: 322-329; Honneth 1990; 1994; Fraser/Honneth 2003; Siebert 2008b; 2008c) As long as this guilt connection was as such not repressed, and remained a moving energy, it held on to justice, the idea of a successful union, if also only in a reversed or inversed form, The place, which was given in the Greek ontology to the forgetfulness of being was taken in the prophetic tradition, which searched in the dead for the traces of the living, in the being-torn apart the unity, by another category: the self-destructive treason. This treason, which did even still deceive the traitor about the fact, that thereby he betrayed himself and sold himself out, appeared in two forms of untrue life: 1) in the form of the loss of identity, which extinguished the ego, which had been formed in and through the world; and 2) in the form of the breaking off of communication, which did not let the speaker be silent, but rather made him speechless. The critical theory of society moved from Parmenides, and Greek ontology, and Heidegger, and modern positivism to Hebrew dialectics of the always betrayed and always through atonement restored again covenant community, which is much sharper than the Greek ontology or dialectics. So does the dialectical religiology move from the claim of Athens–the Greek ontology and dialectics–to the claim of Jerusalem–the Hebrew covenant community and its dialectical discourse between God and man, and man and man (Genesis 9: 12; 15: 18; 17: 11, 19; Exodus 2: 24; 19: 5; 24: 8; Deuteronomy 5: 2; 7: 9; 9: 11; Horkheimer 1974c: 101-104; 116; 117; Adorno 1970a; 2002a; Heinrich 1964; Haag 1983: chaps 1, VI, VII, VIII; 2005; Habermas 1973: 322-329; Siebert 1979a; 1979b; 1979c; 1979d; 1980; 1985; 1986; 1993; 1994a; 1994c; 1994d; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2003a; 2003b; 2004a; 2004b 2008b; 2008c).

Motivation Habermas has admitted that modern secular ethics has a problem with motivation (Habermas 1983; 1991a; 1991b: part III; Küng 1990b: 84-85). Even after Apel’s and Habermas’s communicative or discourse ethics has verified the validity of an ethical norm and has universalized it, for example, that it is better to love than to hate, or that one should not kill if one finds that convenient for oneself or for one’s country, there still re-

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mains the question, why a person or a group or a nation should follow it? The profane categorical imperative, or the likewise secular communicative ethics, has no adequate answer to this question of motivation. It has no higher absolute Instance to which it could refer or appeal in order to motivate a person, or groups, or nations to act according to the verified and universalized norm. The critical theory of religion has to admit that certainly the world religions have always been and still are tempted to command human beings in a most authoritarian manner, and to demand from them blind obedience, and to do violence to their consciences (Küng 1990b: 85). However, if they want to, the world religions can still deliver convincing socio-ethical motivations. In the midst of and against so much frustration, lethargy, and apathy particularly in the younger generations in antagonistic civil society since the neo-conservative trend turn of the1970s, the world religions can still offer out of their primordial traditions and stories and images convincing motives of action, if they are translated into a contemporary form. The world religions can still present eternal ideas, abstract principles and general norms like the philosophies, but also as the living incarnation of a new attitude toward a new style of life: for example, great models or ideals like Mahatma Gandhi, or John XXIII, or Mother Theresa, or Martin Luther King, or Bishop Tutu, or Bishop Romero and his liberation theologians and members of the Basic Christian Communities, and so on. All these models have been teachers of the Golden Rule. They all have shown and demonstrated in a down to earth way, how it can be practiced in the real world. Also Adorno’s and Benjamin’s inverse cipher theology did not only criticize, but also rescue the religious motivations in secular form–the energy of the unsatiable longing for the totally Other, without which Apel’s and Habermas’s communicative ethics would indeed turn out to be a harmonistic illusion (Horkheimer 1985g: 389; Habermas 1991b: part III; Küng 1994a: 904-905). The present wars and civil wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan, Darfur, etc. particularly the torture scenes of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and the lynch execution of President Saddam Hussein show how easily people in power can regress in terms of Kohlberg’s scheme from the Post-conventional Stage VI of the evolution of moral consciousness to the Pre-conventional Stage I and lower, and how easily the Golden Rule was forgotten and was turned into the most brutal, primitive and archaic application of the Lex Talionis, and how easily those good men and women, who want to resist this regression into animality fall into despair and resignation in the face of overwhelming hardened and petrified systems, and of the more or less democratic, or tyrannical,

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or robot-like agencies who run them (Exodus 5: 22-23; Hertz 5716/1956: 224/22-23; Adorno 1997j/2: 794-803; Apel 1990: 317-340; Brown 2007: 1-2).

Life World and System In Habermas’s view, religious groups were part of the life world together with artistic and philosophical associations, as well as with family, neighborhood, friendships, etc. (Habermas 1970; 1978c; 1981a; 1981b; 1984a; 1984b; 1986; 1987d; 1991a: parts I, III). For Parsons and his German disciple, Niklas Luhmann, the whole human action system was life world, a concept taken from Husserl’s phenomenology: including culture, being open upward toward the Ultimate Reality, the concept of which was borrowed from Tillich’s existential and socialist theology. Society was structured in terms of family, economy, polity and religion; personality was patterned according to Freud’s psychoanalysis; and, the behavioral organism was understood according to B. F. Skinner and was open toward nature below (Parsons 1965: chaps. 1 and 2; 1964, chaps. 1 and 2; Luhmann 1977a; 1977b; 1997; 1999; Döbert 1973; Yinger 1969; Siebert 1980). Parsons’ structural functionalism reflected the real social development since Hegel’s death in 1831. For Hegel, as social totality, the state included family and civil society and was legitimated by religion (Hegel 1986g: part III; 1986p: 236-245) For Parsons, civil society included in itself family, economy, polity, and religion as subsystems, which had to fulfill the fundamental functional requirements for its survival: the function of pattern maintenance, adaptation, goal attainment, and integration. In Habermas’s view, the life world was the basis from which the system, meaning, the economic and the political subsystems of society, had been differentiated out in the process of social evolution from the primitive and archaic societies, through the historical intermediate societies, to the modern societies, beyond which he has hesitated to move as much as his friend Parsons or Luhmann before (Parsons 1965; Luhmann 1977a; 1977b; 1997; 1999; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971b; 1973; 1975; 1976; 1978a; 1978b; 1978c; 1979a; 1979b; 1981a; 1981b; 1981c; 1984a; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1990; 1991c; 1995; 1997a; 1998a; 1998b; 2001c; 2002; 2003a; 2003b; 2004a; 2006d; 2007). According to Habermas, the overall life world was still characterized by mimetic or communicative action and rationality and steered over the medium of ethical and moral norms. The economic and political subsystems have been differentiated out of the life world as the location of family, neighborhood, religious and other immediate human associations. The economic subsystem was characterized by instrumental or functional

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rationality, and steered over the medium of money. The political subsystem was also characterized by instrumental and functional rationality, but it was steered over the medium of power. In the perspective of the critical theorist of religion, the more later generations of critical theorists yield to the temptation to give up the Hegelian dialectical notion of social totality, the more they approach the positivistic and liberal camp, and move consciously or unconsciously toward alternative Future I–the entirely bureaucratized society rather than alternative Future III–the reconciled society (Marcuse 1960: 323-388; Huxley 2004; Fromm 1961: 257-267; Adorno 1997j/1: 97-122; App. G). Abstract atomism has a tendency to turn over into a likewise abstract collectivism.

Colonization and Protest Movements According to Habermas, the economic and political subsystems have the tendency to colonize the life world (Habermas 1981b: chap. 8). Against such internal colonization arise protest movements from the periphery of the life world and the system, which seek to stop it: the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the ecology movement, the peace movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the environmental movement, and so on. These movements try to generate communicative power against administrative power, in so far as it tends to violate the life world of the people in terms of a one-sided application of instrumental or functional rationality and action. Habermas sided with religion, in so far as he saw its semantic and semiotic material and potential, its meaning-reserves, being threatened by such internal colonization in antagonistic civil society (Hegel 1986g: 382-392; Habermas 1981b: chap. 8; 1988a: 22-23, 60; 1988b; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9). Habermas wanted to rescue this semantic and semiotic material and potential present in the depth of the mythos from such colonization of the life world, if also in secular form. He wanted to do so because the modern world needed these semantic and semiotic materials and potentials desperately in its fierce struggle against the continual new waves of re-barbarization and the new mythologies, which accompanied it and which were very different from the mythology of reason, which Hegel and his friends Schelling and Hölderlin had developed in Frankfurt am Main in 1800 (Jamme/Schneider 1984; Habermas 1990: 14-15). Here Habermas came closest to Adorno’s and Benjamin’s inverse cipher theology, and to some extent concretely superseded it into his universal pragmatic, theory of communicative action and discourse ethics (Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; 1970: 103-161; Benjamin

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1977: chaps. 10, 11; Habermas 1990: 14-15). Habermas’ universal pragmatic was deeply rooted in the semantic and semiotic material and potential that has been unearthed from the depth of the mythos by Jewish, Christian and Islamic mystics, and by German idealism, as well as more recently by great Jewish scholars like Gershom Scholem, Ernst Bloch, and Martin Buber (Bloch 1972; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1986; 1987b; Habermas/Henrich 1974; Gadamer/Habermas 1979; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007c). Habermas, considered Benjamin, who had been inspired by Bloch and Scholem, to be a genuine theologian (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10-11; Habermas 1982: 48-95; 1987b: chap. 14). It was out of this background that Habermas has been able to criticize the positivistic social sciences in general and Parson’s structural-functionalism in particular (Habermas 1971a; 1971b; 1973: esp. 164-183). In criticizing Parson’s and Luhmann’s structural functionalism, Habermas not only differentiated sharply between life world and system, but he also emphasized that the system was not merely a mechanism or a biological organism, but that it was rather a social organization, which had been produced by the interaction of human beings, and which therefore could also be re-appropriated, changed, modified, and transformed by them through social movements. This was particularly true if the social organization had become alienated from its citizens, and from their fundamental human potentials or evolutionary universals tending and striving toward alternative Future III–a society in which personal autonomy and universal solidarity would be reconciled and a friendly living together of human beings would be possible (Vol. 1, Appendix F; Hegel 1972; 1979; Flechtheim 1959; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Habermas 1981b: chap. 8; 1986; App. G).

Antagonisms in Modern Civil Society Inspired and instructed by the critical theory of society and religion of the first, second, third, and fourth generation of critical theorists, the dialectical theory of religion responds to the main specific challenges of the different antagonisms in modern civil society with the practical intent to contribute to their resolution or reconciliation. These antagonisms are: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

The dichotomy between the sacred and the profane, revelation and autonomous reason, faith and knowledge. The contradiction between life-world and system. The antagonism between the genders. The antagonism between homosexuals and heterosexuals. The contradiction between the races.

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276 6) 7) 8) 9) 10) 11) 12) 13) 14) 15) 16) 17) 18) 19) 20) Etc.

The antagonism between the nations and ethnic groups. The dichotomy between the generations. The contradiction between the individual and the collective, between autonomy and solidarity. The gulf between the social classes. The antagonism between the pure or theoretical reason and practical reason. The abyss between the educated and the un-or half-educated. The contradiction between the conservatives and the liberals. The contradiction between social appearance and essence. The antagonism between necessity and contingency. The opposition between conformists and non-conformists. The contradiction between man or freedom and nature. The antagonism between production and consumption. The opposition between traditionalists and modernists The antagonism between sexuality and civilization The contradiction between aggression and civilization

(Adorno 1979: 93-121, 574-577; 1997j/1: 97-123; Schmidt 1972; App. F). There are many other antagonisms present in globalizing modern civil society (App. F).

Cover up and Harmonization Structural functionalism and other positivistic social theories have the tendency to ignore, or to cover up, or to interpret away, or to harmonize the dichotomies of civil society (Marcuse 1960: 323-388; Adorno 1952; 1976; 1980a; 1980b; 1980c; 1993b; 1993c; 1994; 1996; 1997b 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997h; 1997i/1; 1997i/2; 1997j/1; 1997j/2; 1997u; 2000a; 2001a; 2001b; 2002d; 2003b; 2003c; 2003d; App. F). They may refuse to define the essence of civil society in the first place, and to admit a difference between essence and appearance at all (Hegel 1986f: 17-34; 1986g: 339-397; Marcuse 1966: 323-388). They may abstract from social praxis altogether. They may hesitate to formulate the contradictions as social problems at all, if they are convinced that they cannot be resolved under conditions of the extant social system. They may be in denial concerning fundamental crises in particular subsystems, for example, the bourgeois family or religion, and even if they admit that the glass is half empty, they stress with all their energy that the other half is still full, and that after all this or that institution is still around no matter how damaged or de-vitalized or ineffective it may have become, and that way console themselves and others (Zhai/

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Ellisob/Glenn/Marquardt 2007: 125-144; Smith 2007: 165-178; Regnerus/ Uecker 2007: 145-164). However, what really matters is not if the family is still around, but how painfully dysfunctional it may have become (Horkheimer 1972: chap. 3; Siebert 1987b). The question is not if there are still religious people around who believe in God, but rather if they are effectively the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matthew 5: 13-16; Adorno 1997j/1: 97-122). The question is not if there is still something like society around in spite of all atomization and lonely crowds, but rather if it is emancipated and right, and abolishes its suffering-producing irrationality (Adorno 1979: 9-19, 122-146, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 578587; 1997j/1: 9-30, 47-72, 254-288, 375-395, 674-690; Riesmann 1970; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; 2009).

Global Corporate Ruling Class In contrast to the dialectical theory of civil society, the conformist positivistic social sciences have little to say about the global corporate ruling class and its highly paid professional economic hit men (EHMS), who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars (Hegel 1986g: 339-405; Marcuse 1960: 261-388; Perkins 2004; Wessel/Davis 2007). They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other foreign, so-called aid organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and into the pockets of a few wealthy families, who control the planet’s natural resources (Perkins 2004; Hitt/ King 2007: 17). Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as Empire, but one that has taken on new terrifying dimensions, since the neo-conservative trend turn in the 1970s and 1980s, and since the old colonization and empire building carried out by modern civil societies and their states of analytical understanding and necessity in the past 400 years has been now called globalization (Hegel 1986g: 339-405; Marcuse 1960: 169-223; 261-388; 1987). The economic hit men convince developing countries to accept enormous loans and to funnel that money to U.S. corporations. The American government and international aid agencies then request their pound of flesh including access to natural and human resources–cheaper and cheaper labor, military cooperation, and political support. Often, the economic hit man is followed by the CIA agent, and then sometimes even by the Marines and by military interventions. The hit man’s experiences lead him inside the intrigue, greed, corruption, and publicly little known government and corporate activities that

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America has been involved in since World War II, and which have dire consequences for the future of democracy and the world. The economic hit men help to push the historical process toward alternative Future I–global fascism, and alternative Future II–always more intensive global militarization (Hegel 1986g: 339-405; Marcuse 1960: 261- 420; 1987; Flechtheim 1971; Perkins 2004; App. G). Fascism is the most adequate political form for corporate domination of civil society in crisis. One cannot speak about fascism, or Auschwitz and Birkenau, or Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and all the other horrible events these names stand for in the 20th and 21st centuries–no matter how great may be the quantitative differences–without speaking about monopoly and oligopoly capitalism (Adorno 1997j/1: 97-122; 1997j/2: 674-690, 702-740; Perkins 2004; 2006). Even non-fascists can sometimes think and act in a fascist way, and thus help to promote alternative Futures I and II (Adorno 1979: 397-407, 408-433; 1997j/2: 674-690; Byrd 2007a; 2007b; App. G).

The American Empire In contrast to the critical theory of society, the conformist positivistic social sciences reveal little of the secret history of the American Empire, which has had a long prehistory, but which has come into its own since the neo-liberal trend turn, and which is greatly promoted by economic hit men, jackals, and which is connected with tyrannical corporate globalization, greed run wild, international corporate intrigues, cronyism, corporate manipulation, and global corruption (Hegel 1986: 105-114; Marcuse 1960: 224-250; 261-388; 1987; Perkins 2004; 2007). They do not make manifest the secret history of the American Empire behind the events that have defined our recent world, for example: the current Latin-American revolution and its possible lessons for democracy; the defeats in Vietnam and in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how they have benefited big business and the corporate ruling class; the role of Israel as Fortress America in the Middle East, which at this chaotic moment in history–February 2010–is surrounded by Hamas in the East and by Hezbolah in the North, which both are supported by Iran and Syria; the tragic repercussions of the International Monetary Fund’s Asian Economic Collapse, and President Clinton’s African Renaissance; the U.S. blunders in Tibet, Congo, Lebanon and Venezuela; jackal forays to assassinate democratic presidents, such as President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela (Perkins 2004; 2007; Cordoba 2007). Sometimes even priests and ministers cooperate with the hit men and jackals. Thus, the Evangelical Reverend Pat Robertson and the Ro-

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man Catholic Priest and President of the Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Robert Sirico, encouraged the assassination of President Hugo Chavez and even the invasion of Venezuela in the name of a more or less critical or uncritical nationalism (Siebert 2006d: 87-99). While the young Rabbi Jesus took on the whole Roman Empire and died as a martyr of the truth in the process, and many believers followed him into martyrdom sentenced to death for atheism and high treason by the Roman courts for 300 years, after Diocletian and the Constantinian turn the Church went to bed with the state, and for 1,700 years served well a whole series of Empires, up to the present–February 2010– when Catholic priests and Protestant ministers serve well the American Empire in his name: for example, in a most outstanding way Billy Graham and his wife, who died in June 2007 and was buried in the Graham Library complex like a First Lady. That happens in spite of the fact that Thomas Jefferson had made clear from the start that the U.S.A. was not a Christian country (Dershowitz 2007). Since the Constantinian turn, revolutionary theology has turned into counter-revolutionary theology, admittedly with some, often heretical exceptions (Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007c). The Jewish, and the Christian, and the Islamic Right must have forgotten Pharao’s dream: But presently, seven other cows came up from the Nile closely behind them (behind the seven handsome and sturdy cows) and stood beside the cows on the bank of the Nile; and the ugly, gaunt cows ate up the seven handsome sturdy cows (Genesis 41: 3-4). According to the Rabbis this had to be every tyrant’s and every ruling class’s nightmare, that one day the weak will rise up and overthrow the powerful (Lieber 2001: 250/4) This Rabbinical insight is very plausible particularly in the present economic crisis in the U.S.A. and world wide–February 2010–when the extreme greed and corruption of the corporate ruling class is once more revealed, and when even the neo-liberal second Bush Administration had–against its own philosophy, a socially unmodified liberalism, and its own will–to nationalize mayor banks and industries, and to bail out others with billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, and had to let others simply go under: socialism for the rich!

Exceptions There are, of course, exceptions. In May/June 2007, Cardinal Mahony from Los Angeles has stood up firmly and bravely for the rights of 12 million poor workers and their families from Mexico and other Central and Latin American states who live and work illegally in the U.S.A. The char-

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ismatic populist Bishop of the Poor, Msgr. Fernando Lugo Mendez in Paraguay, who has been strongly influenced by liberation theology, has threatened the Colorado Party, which has been in power since 1947 (Rohter 2007). The fascist General Alfredo Stroessner led a dictatorship notorious for corruption and brutality from 1954-1989, but thanks to its tight control of patronage and the bureaucracy, the party managed to retain control of the government under the current system of free elections, just as the fascist Arena Party in El Salvador. Since the 1960s, liberation theology has contended that the Roman Catholic Church has a special obligation to defend the oppressed and downtrodden people. In his speeches, Bishop Mendez railed against corruption and injustice, saying that there are too many differences between the small groups of 500 families, who live with a first-world standard of living, and the great majority of people, about 6.5 million of them, who live in a poverty that borders on misery. Of course, Bishop Mendez has been suspended by the conservative Vatican.

Corporate Skullduggery The positivistic social sciences do little to expose the web of corruption and corporate skullduggery from the U.S. military in Iraq to the infrastructure development in Indonesia, from Peace Corps volunteers in Africa to jackals in Venezuela (Hegel 1986l: 105-114; 1986g; Marcuse 1960: 224250; 261- 388; 1987; Perkins 2004; 2007). The recent development of the American Empire has lead into the current geopolitical crisis. Chaotic instability has become the norm. The world, which the American Empire has created, is obviously dangerous and no longer sustainable. The war against terrorism is conducted in the name of liberty. Yet, when President Bush junior spoke of freedom, it was not the freedom of All that was introduced into world history through Christianity, but rather the freedom of the Few, the corporate ruling class of the American Empire, who appropriates the cheap natural and human resources of developing countries: that, precisely, is the pseudon proton, of which the other Orwellian or Huxleyan lies, e.g. about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or about its connection with Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, which lead into the catastrophic second Iraq war, were merely derivations (Hegel 1986l: 133-141; 1986g: 339-514; Orwell 1961; Huxley 1968; Adorno1997j/1: 97-122; Byrd 2007a; 2007b; Perkins 2004; 2007).

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Questions In contrast to the positivistic social sciences, the dialectical theory of society and religion asks: how did we Americans get here (Marcuse 1960: 251-322; 323-388, 389-420; 1961; 1962: 65-66; 1966; 1969b; 1995; 2001; Perkins 2004; 2007)? Who is responsible? What good have we Americans done, and at what cost? What can we Americans do to change things for the next generations? The critical theory provides a clear-eyed look toward the alternative global Futures I, II, and III, and a compassionate plan to re-imagine the world in terms of alternative Future III: a stable, sustainable, peaceful society, characterized by the genuine freedom of All, and a caring rather than an exploitative economics; shortly, a living material democracy (Flechtheim 1971; Marcuse 1960: 224-250; 261- 388; 1987; Perkins 2004; 2007; App. G). There is a greater need even for the dialectical theory of society and religion today in the neo-conservative period of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, than there had been in the fascist period of the first half of the 20th century, if further re-barbarization is to be avoided.

Partial Social Change Positivistic social scientists may engage in partial social change and fix some aspects of a subsystem, if that seems to be necessary in order to keep the social system in its totality unchanged and alive, for example, in the field of criminology (Parsons 1964; 1965; Wallerstein 1966; Inkeles 1971). They would not think of changing the system in its totality, in spite of the fact that its antagonisms are the cause for the problems in the subsystems. For the positivists, social change, if it occurs at all, consists of two types: 1) The disturbance of the equilibrium of modern civil society. 2) The restoration and normalization of the social equilibrium of bourgeois society.

Fascist or neo-liberal theoreticians recognize openly the dichotomies in civil society, but consider them productive forces of social progress (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Marcuse 1960: 402-420; App. F). For them, there must be predators and prey! There must be winners and losers! At best, the contradictions can be somewhat mitigated through religious or secular welfare for the poor classes. In contrast, the critical theory differentiates between the essence and the appearance of civil society and defines it essentially as exchange society, or as commodity society, or late capitalistic society, or

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simply as system (Adorno 1979: 9-19, 42-85, 122-146, 177-195, 196-216, 217-237, 245-279, 280-353, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 440-456, 478493, 500-531, 538-546, 547-568, 569-573, 578-587; 1993b; 1994; 1997h; 1997i/1; 1997i/2; 1997j/1; 1997j/2; App. C, D, E). The dialectical theorists of society, from Hegel through Sören Kierkegaard, Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx to Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm also recognized the antagonisms of civil society in its totality. However, in contrast to positivists from Auguste Comte through Friedrich J. Stahl, Lorenz von Stein, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim to Talcott Parsons and Nicolas Luhmann, and fascists, national socialists, neo-conservatives and neo-liberals, they were deeply disturbed by the immense human suffering that these social contradictions continually produced, and therefore tried to work and fight through those dichotomies in the direction of alternative Future III–the reconciled society characterized by less human and maybe even animal suffering (Marcuse 1966: 251-420; Adorno 1997j/1: 9-30, 47-72, 72-96, 97-122, 238-253, 254-288, 367-374, 375-295; 1997l/2: 507-517, 518-532, 533-554, 555-572, 573-594, 608-616, 617-638, 674-690, 708-740, 741-758, 759-782, 816820; App. C, D, F, G). The critical theorists were and are promoting not only quantitative, but also qualitative suffering-reducing personal, social, economic, political and cultural change concerning the antagonism between the sacred and the profane, between the genders, between the races, between the classes, between theory and praxis, between man and nature.

Conformity and Non-Conformity While the positivistic social sciences promoted the conformity to the trends in civil society, which point toward global alternative Future I–the completely automated and robotized society, the dialectical theory of society encouraged non-conformity and refusal concerning these same tendencies (Huxley 1968; Orwell 1945; 1961; Fromm 1961: 257-267; Adorno 1997j/1: 97-122; Flechtheim 1971; App. G). According to Aldous Huxley, the increasing mental sickness in antagonistic modern civil society may find expression in psychosomatic, neurotic symptoms (Huxley 1968: 253254; Fromm 1961: 257-267; Adorno 1997j/1: 97-122; Habermas 1973: 322-329; Woksuch 2006; 2007). These symptoms were conspicuous and extremely distressing. However, the critical theorist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm warned against defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such were not our enemy but our friend; where there were symptoms there was still conflict, and conflict always in-

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dicated that the forces of life, which strove for integration and happiness, were still fighting. The really hopeless victims of mental illness were to be found among those who appeared to be most normal. Many of them were normal because they were so well adjusted to the mode of existence in late capitalist society. This was the case, because their human voice had been silenced so early in their lives that they did not even struggle, or suffer, or develop symptoms as the neurotics did. They were normal, not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word. They were normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal, insane society–modern antagonistic civil society moving toward alternative Future I: the completely mechanized, automated, and robotized society (Huxley 1968; Fromm 1961: 257-267; 1990; Adorno 1997j/1: 97-122; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969b; 1980a; 1995; 2001; Habermas 1973: 322-329; Woksuch 2006; 2007; App. G). The conformists’ perfect adjustment to that abnormal society was a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a civil society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherished the illusion of individuality. However, in fact, they had been to a great extent de-individualized. Their conformity was developing into something like uniformity. Yet, uniformity and freedom were incompatible. Uniformity and mental health were incompatible too. According to Fromm, human beings were not made to be an automaton or a robot, and if they became one, the basis for mental health was destroyed (Huxley 1968; Woksuch 2007). It was human nature to long for the wholly Other, and when this longing was suffocated through conformity and uniformity, humanity was not only ill, but was not even human any longer (Huxley 1968; Fromm 1961: 257-267; 1990; Adorno 1997j/1: 97-122; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1973: 322-329; Woksuch 2006; 2007; App. G).

Antagonistic Perspectives Each of the antagonists in civil society has his own perspective, through which he rewrites nature and history, including the history of religions. Thus, the socialists rewrite history in the perspective of the class struggle, and the fascists in terms of the conflict between the races (Trevor-Roper 1988: 75-79, 87-92). Some antagonistic perspectives are stronger, more dynamic, filled with more tensions and more explosive, more effective than their opposites at a certain time and location, and prevail over them. Thus, the gender perspective, attraction, love and solidarity between the 35 year old fascist and anti-Semitic philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and

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his 18 year old Jewish student Hannah Arendt, a relative of Walter Benjamin, was stronger and more powerful than their racial perspectives, convictions, differences, or solidarities (Heidegger 1968; Arendt 1996; 1997; Grunenberg 2006; Lohmann 2007: 64-66; King/Bratter 2007: 343369). Heidegger had been a theology student in a Jesuit Seminary in Munich, and Arendt had written her doctoral dissertation under Karl Jaspers in 1928 on the notion of love in the work of Augustine, the father of the Roman Catholic Paradigm of the Middle Ages and of Latin-Western theology (Küng 1994a: 336-602; 1994b: 79-116; Lohmann 2007: 64-66; Grunenberg 2006; App. E). In the famous movie Schindler’s List, in spite of his Aryan perspective on the world, a most fanatic and most racist SS officer falls in love with his Jewish maid. Old Soviet movies show that in the great patriotic war the national perspective and solidarity of the Russian soldiers was much greater than their international socialist perspective and class solidarity with workers in the German army. In one movie, when a German prisoner told his Russian captors that he was not an SS man but that he was a worker like them, he was shot, nevertheless. The reconciling perspective and power of the national identity and solidarity can be greater than the antagonistic perspectives and hostilities between the generations, as has been shown more recently in Germany in the case of Günter Grass, Jürgen Habermas, Joachim Fest, Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Richard von Weizäcker, Helmut Schmidt, or Walter Scheel, as well as in England and America and other countries, who participated in World War II (Thies 2007: 15-17; Gorer 1956).

Religious Texts and Phenomena Each antagonistic group sees and interprets consciously or unconsciously religious texts and phenomena through its own particular perspective differently: men differently from women; Aryans differently from Semites; old people differently from young people; Germans differently from Americans, or Frenchmen, or Italians; slaveholders differently from their slaves, feudal lords differently from their serfs, bourgeois differently from proletarians; market-liberal or social-liberal individualists differently from solidary collectivists or communitarians; educated people differently from un-or half-educated people; theoreticians differently from practitioners; liberals differently from conservatives; socialists differently from structural functionalists, and so on (Adorno 1979: 93-121; 1997j/2: 656-673, 674690; Offe 2007: 28-31; Trevor-Roper 1988: 75- 79, 87-92; App. E, F). Thus, for the socialist and communist Karl Marx, Jesus of Nazareth had been

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a poor man and the rich people murdered him. For the critical theorist Max Horkheimer, Jesus was the man who died for all human beings, and could not keep himself back avariciously for himself, and who belonged to all that suffered (Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97). For the racist and nationalist Adolf Hitler, Jesus had been a great man, a great theoretician, and precisely, therefore, he could not possibly have been a Jew, but had to be an Aryan (Trevor-Roper 1988: 76). For the bourgeois structural-functionalist Talcott Parsons, Jesus belonged to the low middle class and had a prosperous carpenter business going for him and his friends were well to do owners of mostly successful fishing companies along the shores of the Sea of Galilee. The world religions are divided in themselves between traditionalists, who oppose the modernization and secularization process, and modernists, who more or less adapt to it, and who both interpret the holy texts in a more orthodox or a more liberal way (Hegel 1986q: 340-344; Hoyt 1967). Thus, Judaism is divided into orthodox conservative and reform or liberal groups, who write quite different commentaries on the Torah in the broader sense or the Tomak (Solomon 1996; Küng 1991; App. E, F).

Role Exchange In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, all antagonists share as human beings in the human potential to speak, to remember and to anticipate, as well as in the evolutionary universal of mutual recognition and therefore, are able to enter into discourse with each other, and therefore they must not necessarily kill each other over some religious dogma or moral principle: such as, creationism or evolutionism (Hegel 1972; 1979; Piaget 1971; Kohlberg 1971: 165; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1076b; 1982; 1990: 340; Habermas 1981a; 1981b; 1983; 1984a; 1984b; 1986; 1991b; 1997a; 2004a; Honneth 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2004; 2005; Honneth/Joas 2002; Cohen 2007; App. C, D, E, F). In discourse, the antagonists can exchange their perspectives. They can look through each other’s eyes. They can take each others’ roles, and can thus come to a consensus of what the truth may be, at least in a negative sense, or at least to the agreement, that they can or must disagree. Men can take the perspective and look through the eyes of women, and thus can look at a religious text or phenomenon like they do, and vice versa; Aryans through the perspective of Semites and vice versa; bourgeois through the eyes of the workers, and vice versa; theoreticians through the perspective of the practitioners, and vice versa; educated people through the eyes of uneducated or half-educated people, and vice versa; American’s through the perspectives of Iraqis, or Irani-

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ans, or Syrians, and vice versa; liberals through the eyes of socialists, and vice versa; critical theorists through the perspective of functionalists and other positivists, and vice versa (Marcuse 1966: 251-419; App. F). Such exchange of perspectives in discourse can help all antagonists to overcome their bigotry, and to transcend their particularity, and allow themselves to be universalized, and thus to come closer to whatever truth a religious text or phenomenon may contain (Habermas 1991a: Part III; App. E, F). Where there is no discourse, there is war, be it in or among families or tribes, or in or among nations, or in or among civilizations, or in or among the world religions, in which the former are rooted and grounded (Habermas 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; Ratzinger/Habermas 2006; Küng 1990b; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2002; 2004; App. C, D, E, F). That should be a strong motivation for discourse, weak as it may be, and for perspective–and role–exchange among the antagonists. In the last U.S. Presidential campaign–September 2008–the Democratic candidate, Senator Obama, and the Republican candidate, Senator McCain, reflected on the deepening antagonism between the outraged masses of tax-paying citizens on one hand, and the greedy, irresponsible, unaccountable, predatory financial power elite on Wallstreet, which enriches itself while its banks are collapsing and have to be bailed out or nationalized, and invited the citizens, who have to pay for all this through their taxes, to a national discourse about further federal regulation or not of the economy, in order to avoid and prevent for the future such national and international economic catastrophes, in which the citizens lose their savings, their pensions, their houses, and their jobs, In any case, the dialectical religiology, which is driven by the insatiable longing for the wholly Other than the horror and terror of nature, society, and history, and is guided by the discoveries of the universal pragmatic, as well as by a global ethic, is committed to foundational research in the world religions, in order to make possible discourse among them, without which there can be no peace among them, and without which there can be no peace in and among nations and civilizations (Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Horkheimer 1996s: 32-74; Habermas 1970; 1971a; 1971b; 1973; 1975; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981a; 1981b; 1981d; 1982; 1984a; Küng 1978; 1980; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2002; 2004; Küng/Ess/ Stietencrojn/Bechert 1984; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008; Siebert 1979a; 1979b; 1979c; 1979d; 1985; 1989; 1994a; 1994b; 1994d; 1995; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2003a; 2003b; 2004a; 2004b; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007e; 2007f; 2007g; 2008a; 2008b; App. E, F, G).

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Truth and Justification No matter how much the critical theorists of society were concerned with religion and theology, or how deeply religious they were themselves personally, they never considered themselves or their great teachers–Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer or Freud–to be prophets or mystics of any kind, in spite of the fact, that they learned from them and concretely superseded them into their critical theory of society (Trotsky 2006; James 1958: 363-364; Schmidt 1972; Plant 2005; Schmölders 2007: 59-61; O’Brian 1965; Leeuw 1968). They rather saw themselves as nonconformistic intellectuals before and after the pragmatic and linguistic turn in philosophy in terms of the human potential of work and tool and of the evolutionary universals of language and memory and of the struggle for recognition, which led to the problematic of truth and justification in discourse and life world, in religion and morality, in the socially tornapart and reified late capitalist society (Hegel 1972; 1979; Marx 1953: 339340; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Rorty 1970; 1985; Rorty/Vatimo 2006; Adorno 1997h: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 440-456, 569-573, 578-587; Demirovic 1999; Habermas 1970; 1971a; 1971b; 1973; 1975; 1978a; 1978c; 1981a; 1981b; 1981d; 1982; 1983; 1984a; 1999; 2001; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; App. A, B, C, D, E).

From Prophecy to Non-Conformist Intellectualism The prophets, for example Moses and Aaron in Exodus, were inspired spokesmen of God’s will in the face of the powerful and the ruling classes in different societies on different levels of social evolution and revolution (Exodus 7: 1; Hertz 5716/1956: 235-/1; Trotsky 2006). The prophets warned the people and their leaders of the consequences of disobedience in relation to the will of God. They often foretold events, but this was not their primary function. The critical theorists of society inherited the sublimity of Jewish dialectical imagination (Hegel 1986o: 397-399; Wiggershaus 1987; Arato/Gebhardt 1982). Thus, the critical theorists have also promoted the liberation and redemption of the suppressed and ex-

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ploited working classes, as Moses and Aaron had done, and they also have warned the ruling class of the consequences of the painful antagonisms in modern civil society, and of immoral decisions and actions, and of oppression and exploitation. They also have made predictions concerning alternative Future I–a totally administered and cyberneticized society, alternative Future II–a society dominated by technological militarism, and alternative Future III–the free and reconciled society based on the realization of human rights, and the image of a new autonomous as well as solidary humanity, and of their ecological consequences (Trotsky 2006; Flechtheim 1971; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 49; Demirovic 1999; Müller 2007: 4-9; Marshall 1968; Hickman 1971; Manuel 1966; Ulanov 1962; Perruci/Pilisuk 1971; Merton 1963; 1978; Bennis/Benne/Chin 1969; App. G). Yet, the critical theorists never did all this in the name of God or on the basis of divine inspiration. They rather did all this in a very fallible scientific way in resistance to barbarism and in the name of the humanization of humanity. As the critical theory of society evolved into the Frankfurt School, the critical theorists emphasized that reason and truth were not a theme reserved alone for philosophy, but they constituted in a specific sense a political praxis (Gerhardt 2007: 77-79; Seitz 2007: 26-31; Decker 2007: 32-37; Touraine 2007: 37-39). This praxis compelled and forced the critical theorists of all four generations into a socialtheoretical expansion of the object domain of political theory and of the history of ideas. Particularly, the first and second generation understood reason as a material relationship. In this sense, the critical theory can be approached as the object of a political archeology of theoretical praxis. According to Habermas, the political public became only in the constitutional state the medium and the amplifier of a democratic will formation (Hegel 1986g: 339-514; Habermas 2003; Naumann 2007: 10-14; Mika 207: 15-17; Kesting 2007: 22-23; Harprecht 2007: 24-26; Gerhardt 2007: 77-80; Meyer 2007: 40-41). Here the non-conformist intellectual, who rescued and preserved critically prophetic elements, found his place. According to a normative self-understanding, this type of a non-conformistic intellectual belonged into a world in which political praxis was not shrunk and shriveled and atrophied into mere state-activity. In the world of the nonconformistic intellectual, a political culture of contradiction supplemented and complemented the institutions of the state (Naumann 2007: 10-15; Mika 2007: 15-17). In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, here side by side and in cooperation with the non-conformist intellectual, was also the location for a prophecy-inspired, new, critical, revolutionary, political Prometheus theology, like that of Metz, which would replace the

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traditional, counter-revolutionary political Epimetheus theology, which reached its climax in Schmitt’s mythological and anthropological political theology (Metz 1973; 1978; Klingen 2006; Meier 1994; Groh 1998; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; McKiel 2007; Schmölders 2007: 59-62; Decker 2007: 32-37; Toutaine 2007: 37-40; Meyer 2007: 40-41).

The Other Dimension As such, the critical theory deals with the modern estrangement from religion (Gabor 2006; Schmölders 2007: 59-62). The not prophetic but rather intellectual other, or dialectical, inverse theology, which worked with ciphers, including signs, symbols, images, parables, riddles, allegories, metaphors, and so on, and which was intrinsic to the critical theory of society, has revealed also a continued presence of the other dimension, or the dimension of the totally Other in modern culture, particularly in literature and music, despite the discontinuity of the general historical turn toward secular atheism in the past two centuries (Benjamin 1977, chaps. 1, 11; Adorno 1970: 103, 125). The critical theorists called the wholly Other what the great world religions had called the Holy, and which was originally symbolized by high towers like the Tower of Babel or the Tower of Belus, which had contained no god-sculptures, or places for sacrifices, or a priesthood (Genesis 11: 1-9; Hegel 1986n: 276-278; Otto 1991). Goethe and Hegel had defined the Holy as that “what bound together many souls” (Hegel 1986n: 276). The longing for the wholly Other was what also held together in a community those critical theorists, who did not express their religious feelings so clearly as did Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, or Fromm (Löwenthal 1980; 1989; Horkheimer 1985g, chap. 28-30, 32, 34, 37, 40; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11). The critical theorists of society were able to rescue, not prophetically but rather intellectually, the atheistic literature or music by showing that its a-theism did not only critically negate theism abstractly, but rather determinately and concretely, and that, thus, it preserved and strengthened through its negativity the longing for the totally Other: as did Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann: a Modern Mystery Play; Wolfgang Borchert’s Draussen vor der Tür: Expressionism without a Vision; Bertholt Brecht’s Der gute Mensch von Sezuan: The Break with Illusions; Friedrich Dürmatt’s Ein Engel kommt nach Babylon: Dispair of Language and Faith in the Divine; Alban Berg’s Wotzek; Arnold Schönberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw and Moses und Aron (Benjamin 1977: part III; 1988: part III; Adorno 1973a; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1981; 1993a; Schönberg 1997; 1996; Gabor 2006; Schmölders 2007: 59-62). While the

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critical theorists were certainly also critical of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic prophets, they also tried to rescue some of their semantic and semiotic material and potential. Thus, like the prophets, the non-conformistic intellectuals of the Frankfurt School dealt with the problem of the past as the future (Habermas 1991). Habermas knew only too well that the 1990’s were not the 1950’s any longer. Yet, it seemed to Habermas that the inclination to chose models from the past as patterns for the interpretation of the future seemed to be irresistible for the Germans, the Europeans, and the Americans at the beginning of the 1990’s. However, if Habermas preserved for himself a residual of utopia at all in the neo-conservative context, then it was alone the still utopian representation of alternative Future III–that a discourse-mediated democracy and the struggle for its best form including an ecological New Deal could cut the Gordian knot of the almost unresolvable problems of the globalizing late capitalist society (Adorno 1979: 354-372; 578- 587; 1991; Decker 2007: 32-37; Meyer 2007: 40-41; Naumann 2007: 10-14; Mika 2007: 15-17; Merseburger 2007: 17-21; Touraine 2007: 37-49; Nida-Rümmelin 2007: 73-76; Gerhardt 2007: 77-79; Müller 2007: 4-9; Lipton 1966; Siebert 2007a, 2007b; 2007c; Manuel 1066; Ladurner 2007: 4-7; Hillebrand 2007: 8-15; App. G).

The New Right Habermas stated, shortly after the neo-conservative and neo-liberal trend turn in the 1970’s, that the New Right warned–very much like the Old Right of national socialism–against the discursive liquidification of values; against the erosion of naturally grown traditions, particularly also religious traditions; against the deprivation of the power of the automatically valid institutions; against the overburdening of the subject; against the overdrawn individuation, against an exaggerated intellectualism, and against extreme criticism (Hitler 1943: 267, 268, 379, 380, 454; Sohn-Rethel 1973, part II; Canetti 1972: 7-39; Habermas 1979a; 1979b; 1981; Kuko 2006: 373-384; Jacobs 2006: 357-366). The New Right would like to limit modernization to the economic modernization and growth, and to technological progress. It would like to stop at the same time the cultural modernization and transformation, the identity formation, and the motivation and attitude change. It also would like to freeze the extant stock of traditions, particularly of religion as functional contingencyexperience-management subsystem of modern civil society, but not any critical and thus dis-equilibrating wisdom, such as mystical or propheticreligion (Habermas 1979a; 1979b; 1981; 1985; Parsons 1964, chaps. 1, 2;

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1965, chaps 2. 2; Luhmann 1977). In contrast to the Old Right and the New Right, the critical theorists tried to make conscious again the notion and the dignity of Modernity: i.e. of the dimension of a non-abbreviated rationality. The critical theorists tried to make clear that in the posttraditional representations of abstract right, personal morality and social morality, and in the release of subjectivity and the setting free of spontaneity, and in that–what the sociology had called since Emil Durkheim– institutional individualism, an admittedly vulnerable independence and autonomy of a moral-practical and of an expressive-aesthetical rationality asserted itself. Max Weber spoke of the internal logic of out-differentiated spheres of value (Weber 1962; 1969; 1992; 1995; Habermas 1979a; 1979b; 1981). According to the critical theorists, whoever would like to sacrifice this autonomy to a one-sided cognitive-instrumental rationality on one hand, and to a faded or vague traditionalism, including a religious traditionalism, on the other, would risk the price of costly regressions. Habermas reminded the Germans that they had made once before under National Socialism–Blut und Boden (blood and soil, meaning race, nation and land)–the experiment of a modernization that was limited to economic growth and to technical progress: particularly, well functioning tanks, Stukas, and rockets (Speer 1976; Persico 1994; Fest/Eichinger 2004). As is well known, the experiment turned out badly and deadly. Since the 1970s and 1980s, the neo-conservative and neo-liberal plan to stop the cultural modernization and to promote economic and technological modernization–the globalization of monopoly and oligopoly capitalism–has produced disastrous consequences in the economic, political, military and cultural sphere so far (Habermas 1985). This preference of economic-technological over cultural modernization can be felt painfully also in the financial and academic crises of the schools and universities in the U.S. and elsewhere up to the present–February 2010–and beyond for years to come. The critical theory of religion aims at a balance of communicative and instrumental rationality, economic-technological and cultural modernization (Trotsky 2006; Siebert 1979; 1980; 1986; 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 1987d; 1993; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 1995b; 2001; 200).

Facticity and Validity According to Habermas’ studies in Facticity and Validity of 1992, the theory of right, law, and politics, and of the democratic constitutional state, as it was torn back and forth between facticity and validity, fell apart into different camps that had almost nothing to say to each other any longer (He-

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gel 1986g; Habermas 1992). Habermas understood the tension between normativistic starting points–which were always in danger of losing contact with the social reality of antagonistic civil society and its history, on one hand, and the objectivistic beginnings, which faded out all normative aspects, on the other–as a reminder and warning not to fix himself to the perspective of one academic discipline, but to proceed in an interdisciplinary way, and to remain open for different methodological approaches, such as, participant versus observer approaches in the discourse on right, law and the democratic constitutional state. From its very start, the critical theory of society had an interdisciplinary agenda (Horkheimer 1972, chaps. 6, 7; Habermas 1978b; 1987b; 1992; Siebert 2005c; Ott 2007). Habermas also wanted to keep himself open for different theoretical goal positions: meaning-understanding explication and conceptual analysis versus description and empirical explanation. Habermas also wanted to remain open for different role-perspectives: the perspective of the judge, the politician, the lawmaker, the client, the businessman, the bourgeois, and the citizen. Finally, Habermas wanted to be open for research-pragmatic attitudes: the hermeneutical researcher, the critic, the analyst, and so on. Habermas’ examinations, investigations, and inquiries concerning right, law and the democratic constitutional state have moved in this very broad interdisciplinary and inter-perspective field (Habermas 2001d). If Habermas had not only observed but rather participated more actively in the political life of the German Federal Republic or the European Union by becoming a politician in one role or the other instead of being a philosopher and a social scientist, as he always longed to do, he could hardly have helped to evolve further the critical theory of society in such a multi-disciplinary, multi-perspective and multi-methodological way. He could not have influenced so productively so many fields of academic study, including the comparative science of religion and theology, as indeed he has in the past 40 years (Habermas 1990: 19-21; 1991: part III; Arens 1982).

Positive Right and Law Up to 1992, Habermas’ discourse theory had been mainly concentrated on and limited to individual will-formation (Hegel 1986g; Habermas 1983; 1991; 1992). It had proven its worth in the moral-philosophical and ethical arena. However, from 1992 on, Habermas became aware of the fact that already under the functional view point specific reasons could be given and justified as to why the post-traditional form of a principle guided morality was dependent on complementation and compensation through

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positive right and law. Therefore, so Habermas found out, questions of the theory of right or law blew up from the very start the framework of a merely normative mode of consideration. Habermas’ discourse theory of right, law and constitutional state broke out of the conventional ways and orbit of the philosophy of right and state, in spite of the fact that it took up its questions and problems. Habermas’ studies in the field of political theory of 1997, which were contained in his The Inclusion of the Other, came into existence after the publication of his Facticity and Validity of 1992 (Habermas 1992; 1997). The two books were connected through Habermas’ interest in the question, of what consequences resulted from the universalistic content of republican principles for the pluralistic civil societies, in which multicultural opposites became always sharper (Habermas 2002; 1995; 1997, 1008a). Habermas also asked, about what consequences resulted from the universalistic content of republican principles for the nation states, who would join themselves together into post-national constellations and supra-national units, as the European Union (Habermas 1992; 1997; 1998a; 2001; Naumann 2007: 10-15; Mika 2007: 15-17; Merseburger 2007: 17-22; Harprecht 2007: 24-26). Habermas wanted to know what consequences resulted from the universalistic content of republican principles for the citizens of a world society, who behind their back had been united into an involuntary risk-community (Habermas 1992; 1997; Macke 2007: 70-72; Kesting 2007: 22-24; Honneth 2002).

Naturalism and Realism As Habermas and his students spearheaded the formation and evolution of the critical theory of society from the 20th into the 21st centuries in opposition to positivistic and neo-positivistic, fascist and neo-fascist, neo-conservative and neo-liberal, deconstructionist theories, and against the paradoxes of the present global monopoly and oligopoly capitalism, their works were circling around two fundamental questions of theoretical philosophy (Marcuse 1960: 251-420; Habermas 1978a; 1978b; 1985; 1988; 1999; 2005; Habermas/Bovenschen 1978; Edelstein/Habermas 1984; Demirovic 1999; Honneth 1990; 1994; 2000; 2002; Honneth/Joas 1986; Fraser/Honneth 2003). The main two questions were: 1) 2)

The ontological question of naturalism. The epistemological question of realism.

According to Habermas, the ontological question of naturalism was: how could the normativity of a linguistically structured life world, in which all

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speaking and acting subjects could never go or fall behind from a participant perspective in any discourse, and in which they found themselves already from the very start, be brought into harmony with the contingency of a natural-historical development of social-cultural forms of life (Habermas 1999; 2001; 2005). For the critical theorist of religion, this question concerned particularly the antagonism of religion and naturalism in modern civil society, and its possible resolution (Habermas 2005). The epistemological question of realism was: how could the assumption of a world, which was independent from the descriptions of the discourse partners and which was identical for all observers, be harmonized with the language-philosophical insight that the speaking and acting subjects were denied a direct, and linguistically unmediated access to the naked reality (Apel 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Honneth/Joas 1986; Edelstein/Habermas 1984)? For the dialectical theory of religion, this epistemological problem climaxed in relation to the other dimension, or the dimension of the wholly Other (Siebert 1979; 1980; 1987d; 1993; 1994a; 1994c; 2001; 2005c; Ott 2001; 2007). Habermas had answered already the two fundamental questions of theoretical philosophy in his early work Knowledge and Interest of 1968 in the sense of a weak naturalism and a transcendental-pragmatic knowledge-realism (Habermas 1971). However, for Habermas since the 1970s, these themes had somewhat faded away. In Habermas’ view, this had happened since the desideratum of an epistemological justification of the critical theory of society had supposedly become superfluous through his attempt of its direct linguistic-pragmatic justification. Since the 1970s, Habermas has analyzed the pragmatic presuppositions of the understanding-orientated action independently from the transcendental conditions of knowledge. Toward the end of the 20th century, Habermas dealt with the ontological question of naturalism and with the epistemological question of realism out of the perspective of the newly, not only universal, but also formal pragmatic. This is of decisive importance for the further formation and evolution of the critical theory of society, as well as of the dialectical religiology into the 21st century (Habermas 1997; McKiel 2007; Schmölders 2007: 59-62).

Religion and Naturalism According to Habermas, at the beginning of the 21st century, two antagonistic tendencies have characterized the intellectual and spiritual, and even political situation in modern civil society:

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1) 2)

The spreading and expansion of naturalistic worldviews. The continuation or return of religious orthodoxies, particularly in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but in Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism as well. (Habermas 1981; 1991; 1997a; 1997b; 2003; 2005; 2006; Küng 1991: Dritter Hauptteil; 1994c; 2004d; 2004e; Küng/Stietencron/Bechert 1984).

According to Habermas, with the progression of biogenetics, brain research and robotics, a natural-scientifically objectivated self-conception of persons penetrated the action connections of the everyday life world of modern civil society (Habermas 2001; 2005; Gold/Engel 1998). For the philosopher, with this tendency was connected the challenge of a scientistic naturalism. Habermas also observed an unexpected revitalization of faith-traditions and of the global politicization of faith communities. For the philosopher, the challenge of a fundamentalistic critique of the principles of a post-religious and post-metaphysical self-understanding of Western Modernity and Post-Modernity also was connected with this revitalization of religious energies (Habermas 1988). Habermas has sounded out the field of tension in the antagonism between naturalism and religion. Habermas pleaded on one hand for an adequate, appropriate naturalistic understanding of the cultural evolution, including the development of the world religions, which took into account the normative character of the human spirit (Habermas 1997). Habermas pleaded on the other hand for an adequate and suitable interpretation of the consequences of the secularization, of a social and cultural rationalization, which the defenders of the faith, the champions of the religious orthodoxies have denounced, as the actual special way of the occident. Habermas heard this latter criticism in Teheran, the capital of Shiite Iran. Habermas was convinced that if the West renounced the moralization of human nature, a dense inter-generational cord or track could come into existence, that, in an one-sided, vertical direction, reached through the contemporary network of interactions (Habermas1997; 2001). According to Habermas, here following his Heideggerian teacher Gadamer, the effect history of cultural traditions, including religious traditions, and educational processes unfolded itself in the medium of discourse, of questions and answers. However, the genetic programs would not allow the new generations to enter discourse and to question and to decide. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, these genetic programs would lead to alternative Future I–a society, in which the collective would totally triumph over the individual, and ultimately to alterative Future II–an entirely militarized war society (Flechtheim 1971; Skinner 1968; Toynbee 1958; App. G). According to Hegel, the justice that would reduce the excess weight and preponderance

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of the universality of society and state, which was becoming overwhelming for the individual, to the equilibrium and balance, would likewise be the simple spirit of the person who has suffered injustice (Hegel 1986a: 136; 1986b: 486; 1986c: 340; 1986g: 188, 198, 382; 19856q: 60; 1986s: 106, 107, 115, 117). Such reduction would lead to alternative Future III–a free society, in which individual and collective, personal autonomy and universal solidarity would be reconciled (Trotsky 2006; Flechtheim 1971; Habermas 1986; Lipton 1966; Neznanov 1978; Siebert 1994c). Habermas’s student Axel Honneth called this equilibrium, balance, reconciliation of individual and collective, which would make good the injustice suffered by the individual, the other of justice (Honneth 1990; 1994; 2000; Frazer/Honneth 2003). This other of justice likewise pointed the way to alternative Future III (Habermas 1986; Siebert 1979, 1987b; 1987c; 1994c; 2001; 2002; App. G).

Friends of the United States From the 1930’s on the critical theorists of society were friends of the United States of America, in spite of their critical attitude toward American positivism and their fear of a future American anti-Semitism, or more specifically anti-Judaism, of which not even Hegel had been free, and American fascism, as it appeared then as well as again today–February 2010–particularly on the Christian Right with its many authoritarian personalities (Hegel 1986a: 45, 48, 105, 133, 174, 184, 208-209, 226-228, 285, 292, 297, 355, 372-373, 381, 436, 436, 218; 1986l: 107-115, 413, 418, 490-491, 513; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; Ford 1920; 1921a; 1921b; 1922; Marsden 1922; Lee 1993: 28- 31; Coughlin 1932; 1932-1933; Brinkley 1983; Valentin 1936; Hedges 2997; Matheson 1981; Gilbert 1995; Baldwin 2001; Paasen/Wise 1934; Adorno 1979: 397-407, 408-433; 1997j/2: 702-740; 1997i/1; Horkheimer 1985h, chap. 31; Dershowitz 2007; Siebert 2006d: 61-114; Warner 1962; Siebert 2007a: 2007b: 1-70, 419-458). Most critical theorists preferred exile from fascist Europe in the U.S.A. rather than in the Soviet Union. The critical theorists were grateful for the hospitality they found in the U.S.A. between 1930 and 1950. After World War II some of the critical theorists stayed in America for the rest of their lives, such as Fromm, Marcuse, and Löwenthal. Others returned to Germany, as did Adorno and Horkheimer. However, they remained American citizens after they returned to Frankfurt a.M. in order to rebuild the Institute for Social Research, which had been bombed out by the American Air force. The High Commissioner for the American occupation zone of Germany helped the critical theorists financially in rebuilding their Institute. Throughout

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the 20th century, the critical theorists recognized the normative authority of the United States as it was expressed in the war against European and Asian fascism, in the Nürnberg and Tokyo trials, in the foundation of the U.N., through the Marshall Plan, in the support for the initiation and formation of the European Union, and so on (Achterberg 1964; Gilbert 1995; Persico 1994). Habermas and even large parts of the New Left had a positive attitude toward America at least up to the Vietnam War, and the neo-conservative trend-turn of the 1970s. Through four decades, Habermas made the most passionate efforts to build intellectual bridges and friendships between Europe and America. He even had a positive attitude toward the first Gulf War that most of the Christian Churches had declared to be unjust on the basis of the Decalogue, the Sermon on the Mount, and/or the Augustinian Seven Point Just War Theory. Habermas agreed with the Churches that the second Gulf War was unjust from the start but not for the same reasons. They based their argument on revelation and/or natural law. Habermas based his argument on Apel’s and his own discourse ethics, the lack of the consensus of the U.N., and the unlimited communication community that takes into consideration particularly the possible innocent victims, who at this time–February 2010–count over a million Iraqis, mainly old men, women and children, called by the U.S. military collateral damage, who were never asked for their consensus (Apel 1975, 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Habermas 1981a; 1981b; 1983; 1984; 1991b; 1992a; Malreau/Verjee/McIntyre 2007; Tawfeeq 2007).

Normative Authority In 2006, Habermas stated in deepest disappointment, reflecting on the political repercussions of the second war against Iraq and on the consequential deepening of the political, philosophical, and religious antagonism in the West between Europe and America: “Make no mistake, the normative authority of the United States of America lies in ruins” (Habermas 2006; Tillmar/Lindkvist 2007; Barrera/Buskens 2007; Philipps/Aarons 2007; Warner 1962). In Habermas’s view, the decision of the second Bush Administration to go to war against Iraq, without the explicit backing of a U.N. Security Council Resolution, had opened up a deep fissure in the West, which continued to divide erstwhile allies, and to hinder the attempt to develop a coordinated response to the new threats posed by international terrorism. Habermas has responded most actively and frequently to the dramatic political events of the period since September 11, 2001.

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Habermas has mapped out continually a way to move the political agenda forward, beyond the acrimonious debates that have pitched opponents of the second Iraq war against the second Bush Administration and its coalition of the willing. According to Habermas, what was fundamentally at stake was the Kantian as well as Hegelian project of overcoming the state of nature between states through the constitutionalization of international law (Kant 1970; 1974; 1975; 1981a; 1981b; 1981c; 1982; 1983; Hegel 1986g: 398-514; Habermas 1992; 1998a; 2006).

Cosmopolitanism Habermas has developed a detailed multi-dimensional model of transnational and supra-national governance inspired by Kantian cosmopolitanism (Habermas 2006; Macke 2007: 70-72). Hegel had been opposed to such cosmopolitanism and had been pessimistic concerning the possible success of the Kantian international constellations, like the Holy Alliance, or later on the League of Nations, or the United Nations, as well as concerning the Kantian idea of eternal peace through approximation, because of his dialectical insight into the negativity, the antagonisms, intrinsic to all particular nation states (Kant 1970; 1974; 1975; 1981a; 1981b; 1981c; 1982; 1983; Hegel 1986g: 398-514). Even any combination of nation states had such negativity in itself again, and thus would establish its own unity through the creation of an external enemy: rogue nations, axis of evil, and so on. Peace on earth could be established only if an enemy could be found on some other planet in the universe, against whom the nations could overcome their internal negativity and contradictoriness and could thus unite themselves; or if their particularity would be concretely and eschatologically superseded by and into what Hegel called the absolute Spirit and what the critical theorists called the wholly Other (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 29, 37). Unfortunately, the brutal political and historical reality of the past 200 years has only too often affirmed the pessimistic position of Hegel against the optimistic position of Kant. Nevertheless, concerning cosmopolitism and international organizations, Habermas has sided definitely with the optimistic Kant and not with the pessimistic Hegel (Habermas 2006; Macke 2007: 70-72). Habermas has situated his cosmopolitanism in the context of the evolution of international law toward an always broader and finally world-wide constitutional order during the 19th and 20th centuries. Habermas has defended his cosmopolitanism against the new challenge posed by the hegemonic liberal vision underlying the aggressive unilateralism of the second Bush

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Administration, which has been rooted precisely in what Hegel had called the dialectical negativity intrinsic to the particularity of every nation state, especially the more powerful it was. Habermas, the most highly regarded political thinker of this time–February 2010–has been engaged in a major intellectual intervention in favor of the further constitutionalization of international law, specifically the creation of a European constitution, which is of great relevance for sociology, politics, international relations, international law, the current and future course of European and international politics, as well as for philosophy, the comparative study of religion, theology, and not at last and not at least for the new dialectical theory of religion (Habermas 1992; 1998a; 2003; 2004; 2006; McKiel 2007. Gupta 2007; Cao 2007; Krays 2007; Sherikat 2007; Sager 2007; Alatas 2007; Meyer/Rizzo/ Ali 2007; Phillips/Aarons 2007). To be sure, Habermas has had his disappointments with the cosmopolitan attitude in the past decade of terror (Borradori 2003). Already long before it started, outstanding natural scientists like Fritz Haber, the father of the gas war, or Albert Einstein, the father of the atomic bomb, and Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb were cosmopolitans during peace time, but became nationalists when wars broke out among nations, in World War I and II (Borradori 2003; Habermas 2006; Siebert 2006a). Not only the secular cosmopolitanism but also the ethical universalism intrinsic to their Jewish Religion of Sublimity could not make the three great chemists and physicists immune against the temptation of a militaristic nationalism (Küng 1991: 245, 288, 719, 802, 810; 1994: 622). Also Werner Heisenberg was not protected by the ethical universalism of Christianity, the Religion of Becoming and Freedom, from the temptation of nationalism (Küng 1991: 245). In the face of the problematic of cosmopolitanism in the more recent so called war against terrorism, Habermas may have been tempted, to shift from Kant to Hegel, and even to Schopenhauer (Horkheimer 1967: 259- 260; Borradori 2003). Of course, the price of such a move would be the loss of popularity in liberal civil society. It is the intent of the dialectical religiology, to determinately negate Kant into Hegel, and to concretely supersede Hegel into a further reconstructed and evolved critical theory of society, and into itself (Adorno 1969; Habermas 1976; Gadamer/Habermas 1979; Habermas/Henrich 1974; Siebert 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 1987d; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 1995b; 2001; 2004a; 2004b; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2006a; 207a; 2007b; 2007c).

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While the dialectical theory of religion can never ignore the analysis and possible accommodations and resolutions of the dichotomies, tensions and conflicts between Europe and America, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, naturalism and realism, individual and collective will formation, facticity and validity, the New Right and the New Left, the genders, the races–Aryans and Semites or Africans–, the generations, the collective and the individual, the social classes, the educated and the un- or half-educated, the conservatives and the liberals, the socialists and the structural functionalists, the folkish and the Marxist philosophers, the Kantians and the Hegelians, hermeneutical and analytical philosophies, correctness and truth, justification and truth, communicative and instrumental rationality, economic-technological and cultural modernization in civil society, theory and praxis-aliud est theoria, aliud est practica, and while it respects most tolerantly the plurality of their perspectives, its main concern and emphasis remains the fundamental contradiction and tension between (a) the sacred and the profane; (b) prophecy, mysticism, and intellectualism; (c) religion and positivism; (d) religion and naturalism; (e) this world of appearances and the other dimension, the Thing in itself, or the wholly Other; (f) mythology and radical enlightenment; (g) creationism and evolutionism, which, of course, admittedly is always interconnected with all the other antagonisms in globalizing industrial or late capitalist society, and can, therefore, never disregard them (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986p: 9-53; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 569-573, 74-577, 578-587; Horkheimer/Adorno 1978; Habermas 1999; 2001; 2005; McKiel 2007; Wheelock/Hartmann 2007; King/Bratter 2007; Osborne 1967; Epstein 1962; Schmitt 1969; Atwater/Forster/Prybyla 1967; Alland 1973; Leeuw 1968; O’Brian 1965; App. F). The antagonisms in civil society are interconnected: while American businessmen have seen in Jesus of Nazareth the greatest salesmen in the world, working class people remember that he quite angrily expelled the dealers and salesmen from the second Temple (Mark 11: 15; Mandino 1975; Warner 1962). Marx saw the interconnection between religious and economic alienation: the religious alienation as such takes place in the dimension of the consciousness of the human interiority. However, the economical estrangement, which religion mirrors, is that of the real life. Therefore, its supersession embraces both (Marx 1953, chaps. 5-10; Lukacs 1978). Marx was aware of the connection between religious theory and social praxis: all social life is essentially practical. All mysteries, which cause the theory to engage in mysticism,

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find their rational solution in human praxis and in the comprehension of this praxis. However, it is far from being fundamentalistic to point out the mutual limitations of religious faith and secular knowledge: the very fact that the possibility of interpretations of religious or secular texts is not unlimited, and that the interpreting subjects are not allowed to overstep their intrinsic limits subjectivistically and arbitrarily, and that there are objective truth and justification concerns, and truth and correctness issues involved in hermeneutics (Adorno 1979: 238-244; Theunissen 1982; 1983: Habermas 1988: 277-279; 1999; 2001; 2002; 2005, chaps. 5, 8, 9; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005).

Appearance and Substance Thus, on the basis of a reading which takes the fundamental structure and tendencies of the New Testament seriously, the Christologies of Marx and Horkheimer are certainly truer and more justified than those of Hitler, or Parsons, or the American businessmen (Trevor-Roper 1988: 76; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97; Mandino 1975). Sacred texts are–like profane texts–not without boundaries or measure. Thus, it is a matter of mutual recognition, respect, and honesty, that when the interpreting subjects come to the point where they overstep the internal, structural limits of religious texts, that they make a decision and openly and clearly declare and confess that they either remain religious, or that they have now become for all practical purposes secular people, and that they are happy with whatever they have become. Admittedly, such decision may not be easy. There are deeply religious people, like John Paul II, who sometimes appear to be secular. There are deeply secular people, like President Bush junior, who sometimes appear religious. It is not easy in civil society, where a continual stream of propaganda and advertisement in the mass media serves as normalizing ideology or necessary appearance covers up its essence–its commodity exchange character–to differentiate between appearance and essence or substance (Hegel 1986f: 17-34, 35-79; Adorno 1979: 457- 477, 532-537; 1993). It is hard for many American Christians to admit that the United States is not a Christian Nation; that the God of the Declaration of Independence is not the God of the Abrahamic religions, and also not the God of the Christian Right, but rather nature’s God connected with laws of nature; and that there is no God in the American Constitution at all (Dershowitz 2007). The Declaration of Independence or the Constitution can certainly not be turned into a Christian Baptismal Certificate. Only too easily, religious texts are integrated into the general necessary appear-

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ance, and thus turn into ideologies, and thus become part of the universal false and unhappy consciousness, which contributes to the normalization and to the equilibrium, and thus to the survival of late capitalist society, no matter how unjust it may be (Adorno 1972: 354-372, 547-568). There are too many people in civil society, who have become totally secular for all practical and theoretical purposes, but still pretend to be religious. There are also many people, who are still genuinely religious, but pretend to have become secular, in the interest of an overwhelming conformity pressure. I once had a Dean who confessed to atheistic or agnostic professors coming into his office that he was also an atheist or an agnostic, and he told still believing visitors that he was also a believer, and a Presbyterian minister, and a former army chaplain, and that he had been a student and assistant of Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. The Dean was indeed all things to all people. However, clarification of the actual boundary between the religious and the secular would indeed contribute to the mental health of individuals, and to the development of a sane society (Fromm 1990). Lack of clarity and muddied waters concerning such issues in the present crisis of antagonistic civil society can only help to prepare alternative Future I–a fascist society, and Future II–the militaristic society (Trotsky 2006; Adorno 1997i/1, chaps. 1-4; Gavin/Hadley 1968; Toynbee 1958; App. E, F, G).

Recognition In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the New Testament criterion–by their fruits you shall know them–as well as Hegel’s Phenomenology on the struggle for recognition and his Logic on appearance, on the essential and the non-essential, and on reflection, could be helpful for the subjects interpreting religious texts to differentiate between appearance and substance: a genuinely Christian nation would not annihilate a whole race, and enslave another race, and even subjugate large parts of its own race; and it would not bomb out open cities with the most advanced murder weapons; and it would not invade other countries and kill large numbers of its non-combatants, its women and children (Matthew 3: 8, 1; 7: 16, 17, 18; 12: 33; 13: 8, 26; 21: 19, 34, 43; Mark 4: 7, 28; Luke 6: 44; 12: 16; 13: 6, 9; 21: 30; John 4: 36; 12: 25; 15: 2, 4, 5, 8, 16; Hegel 1972; 1979; 1986c: 145-154; 1986f: 17-34; 1986g; 1986j: 219-226). A genuinely Christian nation would evolve in its moral consciousness from the Jus Talionis to the Golden Rule as moral grammar of social conflicts in a civil society torn apart through adultery, stealing, murdering and lying: that one per-

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son, or group, or nation recognizes the other person, group, or nation in his, or her, or its human dignity, and rights, and duties, as he or she would like to be recognized (Matthew 5: 38-42; 7: 12; Honneth 1990; 1994; Siebert 2007a; 207b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007e). It seems that genuine Christianity has not even yet started to exist in the West, or anywhere else! (Habermas 2004; Bioradori 2001). One central problem of the critical theory of society has been the connection between normative theory and historically situated morality (Hegel 1986g; Honneth 1990). If the critical theory did not only want to assert appellatively the ethical criteria, on which it based its critique of civil society, it had to demonstrate empirically effective forms of morality, with which it could connect itself with good reasons. The critical theory has asked, which conditions have to be fulfilled that human beings could achieve alternative Future III–a society that did not only allow but also made possible and did facilitate external as well as internal freedom (Hegel 1986g; Honneth 1992; App. G). Only this external as well as internal freedom would allow human beings to participate with a confident self-consciousness in the democratic life of society and constitutional state, and to claim really and effectively the rights that belong to them (Hegel 1986g; Habermas 1992; Honneth 1992). According to the dialectical theory of religion, the world religions could be helpful, in so far as they take themselves seriously and overcome their own theorypraxis deficiency, and develop a common world ethos on the basis of the religious Golden Rule or its inversion and translation into the secular categorical imperative or into the discourse ethics: the apriori of the unlimited communication community (Hegel 1986g; Apel 1975; 1976b; 1990; Habermas 1970; 1971b; 1978a; 1983; 1986; 1991a; 1991b; 1001b; 2004a; 2005; Küng 1990; App. E, F, G).

The Traditional Union The dialectical religiology, informed by the German idealists and the critical theorists of society, traces the evolution from the original traditional union of the sacred and the profane, faith and knowledge, longing for and love of the Infinite, the Absolute, the Unconditional, the eternal Beauty, and the totally Other than the finite world of appearance and sober, transitory understanding and enjoyment of finite things, through their modern disunion toward their possible post-modern reunion (Hegel 1986b: 287433; 1986p: 9-88; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972; Habermas 1978, chaps. 3-5; 1991, part III; 2001; 2005, parts II, III; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005; App. E, F, G). To be sure, there was a differentiation between the religious and the

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secular already in primitive, archaic and historical-intermediate societies (Hegel 1986p: 249-441; Parsons1964; 1965; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; James 1958; Suuzki 1956; Lukacs 1978; App. E, F). When the Tobriand Islanders went fishing in the shallow lagoon, they used their traditional tools and worked in an entirely secular way (Malinowsky 1954). However, when the Tobriand Islanders went fishing in the deep, open ocean, where their technology was not entirely sufficient, they turned to the Balona, the Spirits, for help. The critical theorist of religion may expect that if the Tobriand Islanders’ ocean-fishing-technology would evolve further, the Balona would lose their function more and more, and would slowly lose their vitality and fade away from one generation to the other, and secularization would increase. In reality, of course, the technology of the Tobriand Islanders changed very little through the lifetime of the tribe, and thus, the sacred world of the Balona’s remained rather stable. There were beginnings of modernity and secularization in the historical inter-mediate societies of old China and old Greece (Hegel 1986l: 142-173, 275-338; 1986p: 302-330; 1986q: 96-154; Parsons 1964; 1965). The Chinese invented gunpowder, but did not develop it into weapons of mass destruction. They rather used it in festivities for their enjoyment. The Greeks invented the steam engine, but were prevented by the many river and field gods, and their altars and requirements of sacrifices, to utilize it and to put it on rails into the real landscape. They rather played with it. Thus, neither in China nor in Greece did the project of modernity ever fully develop beyond the early start. Thus, merely a difference came about between the sacred and the profane in China or in Greece, but no antagonism, as it then happened in the final and successful attempt at modernity in the West on the basis of Greek science and Jewish and Christian religion: of Athens and Jerusalem, which in the meantime has been globalized (Hegel 1986j: 219-224; 1986b: 287-433; 1986p: 9-88; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972; Habermas 1978, chaps. 3, 4, 5; 1991, part III; 2001; 2005, parts II, III; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005; Mendieta 2005, chap. 20; Dore 1967; App. E, F).

Dialectical Evolution Thus, the traditional relative unity between the religious and the secular lasted throughout the known history of religions: from the African and Asian Religions of Magic and Fetishism; through the Far Eastern religions of Taoism–the Religion of Measure; Hinduism–the Religion of Imagination; Buddhism–the Religion of Inwardness; and through the MiddleEastern religions of Zoroastrianism–the Religion of Light and Darkness,

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Good and Evil; the Syrian Religion of Pain, the Egyptian Religion of Riddle, the Jewish Religion of Sublimity, and the Islamic Religion of Law, to the Western religions: the Greek Religion of Beauty and Fate, the Roman Religion of Utility, and the Greek and Roman Paradigms of the Christian Religion of Becoming and Freedom (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Küng 1991; 1994; 2004; Küng/ Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Suzuki 1956; Lukacs 1978; James 1958; App. E). Each new religion determinately negated in a process of dialectical evolution the previous one: it critically negated it, but also preserved some of it, and tried to elevated it, and to fulfill it: in this sense the Gautama, called the Buddha, concretely superseded Hinduism; and Jesus, called the Messiah, determinately negated Judaism (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6; Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53). Each new religion grew out of the negativity, the antinomies of the previous one. Each new religion developed a theodicy, which tried to overcome the deficiencies of the previous one. Each new religion was the truth of the concretely superseded previous one in terms of a growing concreteness, derived from the Latin concrescere–growing together (Hegel 1986a: 193, 288, 374-375; 1986b: 31, 39, 153, 460-461, 511, 540, 545; 1986d: 413, 441; 1986f: 279, 295, 298, 382, 387, 565-566; App. E). The Neo-Platonic Trinity is more concrete than the Hindu Trimurti, and the Christian Trinity is more concrete than the Neo-Platonic Trinity (Hegel 1986l: 386, 392; 1986p: 38, 46, 342-343; 1986q: 221-240; 1986r: 253; 1986s: 413, 481, 508, 510, 530, 577; 1986t: 98, 265; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: Küng 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; App. E). Whatever element had become thematic in the previous religion, like measure in Taoism, or imagination in Hinduism, or Inwardness in Buddhism, was preserved in all the following religions, even into a post-religious secular humanism understood as religion in inheritance (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Bloch 1970a; 1979b; 1971; 1972; 1985b; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; App. E). These elements grew together in time in a process of enrichment. In this sense all world religions were true, but their truths differed in the degree of their concreteness (Hegel 1986a: 193, 288, 374-375, ; 1986b: 31, 39, 153; 1986c: 15, 40, 41-43, 46, 47, 64, 76-77, 137-177, 178-323, 387, 430, 431, 582, 582-583, Concreteness did not mean syncretism.

Paradigm Changes In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, in each particular world religion paradigm changes have taken place, as in the history of the positive sciences: one paradigm concretely sublated the previous one (Kuhn 1963; Küng 1991; 1994; 2004; App. E). Thus, Judaism went from

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the Tribal Paradigm of the Pre-State period, and the Empire Paradigm of the Monarchistic Time, through the Theocratic Paradigm of the PostExile Judaism, and the Rabbinical-Synagogical Paradigm of the Middle Ages to the Assimilation Paradigm of Modernity and the Paradigm of Post-Modernity (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991; App. E). Thus, Christianity went from the oldest model of the Primordial Christian Apocalyptic Paradigm, and the Old Church Hellenistic Constellation, through the Roman Catholic Medieval Model and the Reformation-Protestant Paradigm, to the Enlightenment-Modern Model and the Contemporary PostModern Ecumenical Constellation (Hegel 1986q: 218-346; Küng 1994; App. E). Thus, Islam went from the Primordial Community Paradigm and the Arabic Empire Constellation, through the Classical-Islamic World Religion Paradigm, and the Ulama-Sufi Paradigm to the Modernization Model and the Contemporary Post-Modern Constellation. (Hegel 1986j: 61-62; 1986l: 73, 86; 115, 122, 140, 285, 428-434; 1986m: 141, 416, 473478; 1986n: 175; 1986o: 285, 288, 367, 535; 1986p: 216, 318; 1986q: 30, 2781986r: 92; 1986s: 314; 1986t: 293-294; Küng 2004; App. E). A religion lives as long as it can still produce new paradigms and thus, continues to evolve. The dialectical theory of religion promotes the macro-paradigm change from Modernity to Post-Modernity, particularly the concrete utopian alternative Future III–the reconciled society, which implies a postmodern constellation change in the world religions as well, particularly the reunion of a changed religion and a transformed enlightenment (Manuel 1967; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; App. E, G).

The Death of Religions In the history of science an old paradigm came to its end and a new paradigm was born through new empirical research, discoveries and inventions, microscopes and telescopes, and mathematical formulas: thus, in the natural sciences the paradigm of Ptolemy was superseded by that of Galileo and Copernicus; the paradigm of Newton was sublated by that of Einstein and Heisenberg (Kuhn 1963; Küng 1991; 1994; 2004). In the history of religions, an old world-religion, or one of its paradigms, came to its end because its theodicy and connected teachings were no longer plausible or acceptable to the believers, and thus it lost more and more in vitality, and was finally no longer taught and learned by the next generations. Religions as well as their paradigms can die like languages do: the Syrian Religion of Pain is dead, and so are the Egyptian Religion of Riddle, the Greek Religion of Beauty and Fate, and the Roman Religion

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of Utility (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Kiado 1978; App. E). Religions can be destroyed from outside only when they have lost vitality already inside, because of irresolvable antinomies: for example, the Greek Religion by the Romans and their Religion of Utility, or the Germanic Religions by the Romans and Christianity; or Persian Zoroastrianism by the Arabs and Islam. It happens when the cognitive-philosophical factor in the religion weakens in comparison to the ethical or moral, and particularly to the expressive-aesthetical aspects. Then, inertia sets in and no paradigm change can occur any longer, so that the religious structures become petrified. Then, the external appearance or facade of a religion may still stay around for decades and centuries, while the internal truth substance has long moved on. Thus, residuals of Aryan Zoroastrianism, with its cognitive weakness that two infinites cannot coexist, Ahura Mazda and Arhiman, are still present in Iran today, 1,400 years after it had been superseded by the Semitic Islamic Religion of Law, which recognizes only one infinite God, like Judaism as the Religion of Sublimity, and Christianity as the Religion of Becoming and Freedom, and which similarly transformed the infinite Ahriman, the liar, into the finite Satan, the father of lies and the murderer from the start (1 Chronicles 21: 1; Job: 1: 6; 2: 7; Zacharias 3: 1, 2; Matthew 4: 1, 5, 10, 11, 24; 7: 22; 9: 34; 10: 8; 11: 18; 12: 22, 26, 27, 28; 13: 39; 16: 23; 17: 17; 25: 41; App. E). Today–in February 2010–the Abrahamic religions cannot possibly apply their talion-theodicy or their testtheodicy to Auschwitz or Treblinka, Hiroshima or Nagasaki, Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, or to the whole horror and terror of the 20th and 21st centuries, for which these names stand. The difficulties that Islam as the Religion of the Sharia has today–in February 2010–to move into a modern or post-modern paradigm, has to do with the early repression of its cognitive-philosophical element through the Ulama and the Sufis (Küng 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; App. E).

The Modern Disunion In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, the modern radical disunion between the sacred and the profane in evolving civil society took place first of all in the influence-sphere of Christianity as the Religion of Becoming and Freedom, rather than in the dimension of Taoism as the Religion of Measure, or of the Greek Religion of Beauty and Fate, or of any other world religion (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Trotsky 2006; Kiado 1978; Suzuki 1956; James1958; Küng 1994; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; App. E). This disunion was characterized for centuries by attacks of scientific and

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political enlighteners against Christian mythologies, theologies, philosophies and organizations, as by religious rearguard struggles and counter-attacks carried out mainly by the Roman Catholic Paradigm of the Middle Ages and by the Protestant-Evangelical Constellation of the Reformation and by the Reason and Progress-orientated Paradigm of Modernity (Küng 1994: 336-601, 602-741, 742-906; App. E). All the rearguard struggles of Christianity against the social, economic, political, and cultural modernization process were lost. Yet, this struggle continues today through the conservative American politicians of the Christian Right, who still do not accept evolution and hang on to creationism, and are convinced that Noah took dinosaurs into his ark that supposedly is sitting on Mount Ararat in Turkey, and confessed openly to all of this in the Presidential campaign of 2008 and through all of this hoped to attract masses of voters, which they indeed did (Genesis 6-9; Warner 1962). Otherwise, the mainstream churches have for quite some time accommodated themselves to Galileo Galilei, as well as to Charles Darwin (Küng 1994: 567, 570, 587, 620, 622, 729, 731, 743, 754, 760-762, 764, 769, 772-773, 784, 792, 845, 855, 10241025). Even Pope John Paul II admitted and declared openly toward the end of his Pontificate that the two natural scientists had been right. Unfortunately, neither the Pope nor the Archbishop of Canterbury apologized for all the pain and suffering their churches had caused for Galileo, as well as for Darwin, and for their followers, and for their unnecessary resistance against and retardation of social evolution as learning process (Brecht 1966). Christianity’s anti-modernism and consequential lost battles against the bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment movements led to an intense diminishment of credibility of its sacred texts and to an extreme weakening of its normative authority (Küng 1978: C and D; 1994: 742-906). While Christianity had to suffer the onslaught of the modern enlightenment for several centuries, other world religions–Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and Islam–have become exposed to it fully only more recently as the consequence of the globalization of modernity (Hegel 1986q: 299-346; Küng 1991b: part II and III; 1994a; 1994c; 2004d; 2004e; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; App. E). It is therefore not amazing that the critical theory of religion–being itself an enlightenment product–has, nevertheless, still deeper roots in Christianity, which helped to produce modernity together with Judaism and Greek science and technology, and suffered from what it produced, at the same time. The dialectical religiology takes seriously all the religious and secular attempts in modernity to bring about a reconciliation between the sacred and the profane, not only in Judaism and Christianity and the other living

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world religions, but also in humanism as religion in inheritance (Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1975; Bloch/Reif1978; 1985a; 1985b; Siebert 2005c; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2997d; 2007e; App. E). Unfortunately at this time–February 2010–Islam engages in the same misguided humanly so costly anti-modernism, which produces the most extreme human casualties, through which Christianity, particularly its Roman Catholic Paradigm, has gone through the past four centuries. Islam has not learned from the latter and is therefore doomed to repeat them. It, thus, not only continues but even radicalizes the modern abyss between the sacred and the profane, and all the human suffering that has been entailed in it on the religious as well as on the secular side (Küng 1994: 336-601; 2004d; 2004e; App. E, F).

The Post-Modern Reunion As in our international courses in Dubrovnik and Yalta, over the past thirty years we have developed further the critical theory of religion in confrontation with traditional psychologies, sociologies and philosophies of religion, as well as theologies, we foresaw in terms of the inverse cipher theology intrinsic to it, the possibility of a post-modern dialectical reunion of the sacred and the profane beyond religious fundamentalism and secularism as the result of the inversion and migration of religious semantic and semiotic materials and potentials from the depth of the mythos into the secular discourse of the different expert cultures, and through it into the social praxis of the life world, including friendship, family, neighborhood religious, artistic, and other cultural associations, and into the whole social system, particularly the domains of economic and political action (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 1-87; Adorno 1973: 300-408; 1997j/2: 608-616; Fromm 1966; Habermas 1976; 1990: 9-18; 1991a, part III; 2001; Eggbrecht 1980; Reimer 1992; Ott 2001; 2007; App. C, D, E, F). Such praxis, informed by the translated religious meanings, could move toward alternative Future III–a form of society that no longer reproduces itself competitively and antagonistically like the late capitalistic or industrial society, but rather through personal autonomy and universal solidarity, and ultimately toward the horizon of the totally Other, the absolute truth, as the not abstract, but rather the most radical, but nevertheless still determinate negation of what on this earth was called injustice, human abandonment, and alienation: i.e. toward the conquest of unhappiness and misery generated by civil society, and toward the resolution of the problem of the fundamental human perils–guilt, loneliness, sickness and death, and even already the fear of them; or of the so-called theodicy

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problem (Leibniz 1996; Hegel 1986l: 278, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Horkheimer 1971: 22-23, 37-38, 40-41; 1985, chaps. 37, 40; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 569-573, 578-587; Habermas 1986: 53-54; App. G). In alternative Future III, the antagonism between redemption or salvation on one hand, and earthly happiness, on the other, would be reconciled (Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11). In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, without the thought of the wholly Other, the absolute Truth, and thereby of that which it guaranteed, there was also no knowledge about its opposite, the abandonment of the human beings, because of which the true philosophy had to be critical and pessimistic: not even the sorrow, without which there was no happiness (Horkheimer 1971: 22-23, 40-41; 1972, chap. 4). Without the religious thought of redemption or an unthinkable infinite happiness, there could also be no finite happiness, which in view of its transitoriness–which can never be sublated–will never be without sorrow and grief. In a really free human being, the concept of God, the good, qualitative Infinity, was preserved in an awareness of the finality of human life, and of the unalterable aloneness of human beings in civil society. The concept of qualitative Infinity kept civil society from indulging in a thoughtless and mindless optimism, an inflation of its own scientific and technological knowledge into a new, idolatrous religion.

The Finitude of the Finite In the view of the dialectical religiology, the post-modern reunion of the religious and the secular would not end with the rational choice theory, or with the Weberian perspective, or with the exchange of some salvation goods among civilizations, or merely with an armistice between religion and the regulating state or empire, or with national churches, or with noninstitutional religion, or with a movement beyond beliefs, or with merely belonging to a religious institution, or with mere discourses about religious differences and crises, about the intersection of faith and life, about compromises, rules and the good community, about private and public religion, about religious identity, about religious borders or frontiers, about conventional and non-conventional sociology of religion, about Orthodoxies and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, about the puzzle or the oxymoron of the Catholic citizen, and about further secularization. It would rather aim at its culmination in the longing that the finitude of the finite may not be the last word of world-history (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 37, 40; Stolz 2006: 13-32; Pace 2006: 49-64; Burger 2006: 81-96; Varga 2006: 457-466; Laermans 2006: 479-490; Turcotte 2006: 505-514; Ji: 2006: 535-

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549; Yamane 22007: 33-48; Dialmy 2007: 63-76; Longman 2007: 77-96; Turina 2007: 161-174; Niemela 2007: 187-200; Sterchelle 2007: 211-224; Pedziwiatre 2007: 255-266; Goldstein 2006; Forgues 2006: 379-398; Ollagnon 2006: 491-504; Bauberot 2006: 155-168; Agadjanian 2006: 169-184; Corten 2006: 185-194; Campiche 2006: 195- 200; Barker 2006: 201-214; Vrcan 2006: 215-226; Davie 2006: 243-250; Tomka 2006: 251-266; Borowick 2006: 267-278; Marinovic Jerolimov/Zrinscak 2006: 279-290; Baggett 2006: 291-310; App. G).

Dialectic of Enlightenment In developing further the dialectical theory of religion, as in our international courses in Dubrovnik and Yalta, we tried to deduct alternative futures of religion not only from the dialectic between the sacred and the profane, but also more specifically from the dialectic of enlightenment and from the dialectic of religion (Hegel 1986a: 21-33; 1986b: 183, 292, 294; 1986j: 403; Horkheimer/Adorno 1952; 1964; 1969; 1987a 2002; App. E, F, G). The present dialectic of enlightenment is the result of the fact that the enlighteners negated the religious mythology only abstractly. They forgot to preserve some of the semantic and semiotic materials and potentials from the depth of the mythos, and to elevate it, and to fulfill it in secular discourse and communicative action. Thus, early on, the bourgeois enlightenment became a matter of analytical understanding, as well as positivistic, naturalistic, and shallow: understanding triumphed over dialectical reason. A dogmatism of enlightenment developed. Dogmatism and eudemonism transformed the spiritual subjectivity of the ProtestantEvangelical Paradigm of the Reformation into an empirical one (Hegel 1986b: 294; Küng 1994: 602-741, 742-899). The bourgeois enlightenment completed the human alienation (Hegel 1986c: 327, 362, 398-431, 496; 1986d: 347, 431; 1986h: 15, 36). The enlightenment struggled with all the superstitions from the Middle Ages. It aimed at pure insight and at the in and for itself Universal. It was the still unconscious activity of the pure Notion as unity of universal, particular and singular. It developed its own religion, i.e. deism, which was very different from the three Abrahamic religions. It was one of the prejudices of the enlightenment that the youth should not learn moral concepts and religious teachings early in their development. The enlightenment gave up and rejected the traditions of venerable religious teachings and customs. The enlightenment of analytical understanding was content with insight and with religion in the limits and boundaries of mere analytical understanding (Kant 1974; Hegel 1986c:

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327, 362, 398-431, 496; 1986d: 347, 431; 1986h: 15, 36). Through its formal and abstract thinking the enlightenment of analytical understanding has emptied out religion from most of its concrete content. Thus, because of its emptiness, the enlightenment of understanding would at the first opportunity turn dialectically over again and regress into religious or secular mythology, for example, into the mythology of the fundamentalists, or into the bourgeois mythology of progress (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 37, 40; Stolz 2006: 13-32; Pace 2006: 49-64; Burger 2006: 81-96; Varga 2006: 457-466; Laermans 2006: 479-490; Turcotte 2006: 505-514; Ji 2006: 535549; Yamane 22007: 33-48; Dialmy 2007: 63-76; Longman 2007: 77-96; Turina 2007: 161-174; Niemela 2007: 187-200; Sterchelle 2007: 211-224; Pedziwiatre 2007: 255-266; Goldstein 2006; Forgues 2006: 379-398; Ollagnon 2006: 491-504). This happened most recently in the neo-conservative movement under the American Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush senior and junior (Habermas 2006; Borradori 2003). Thus, President Reagan spoke on the radio every Saturday in terms of Zoroastrian and Manichaeic mythology about the Evil Empire, and in terms of Jewish mythology about the Battle of Armageddon. President Bush junior continues to speak in terms of Zoroastrian and Manichaeic mythology about the Axis of Evil and the rogue nations, and in terms of Medieval Christian mythology of crusades against the terrorist Islamo-fascists (Habermas 2006; Borradori 2003; Byrd 2007a; 2007b). In this sense, in July 2007 the deconstructionists, i.e. disgusted Marxists, and the neo-conservatives, i.e. disgusted Rooseveltliberals, could speak of the present time as a post-enlightenment period. At present the consequence of the dialectic of enlightenment is that the further functional rationalization of modern civil and socialist society produces more and more irrationality (Horkheimer/Adorno 1952; 1964; 1969; 1987a 2002; Habermas 2006; Borradori 2003; Byrd 2007a; 2007b; App. F). The further integration of modern bourgeois or socialist society produces more and more disintegration: for example, the disintegration of the life world of modern civil and socialist societies, including marriage and family, neighborhood, the inner city, artistic and religious associations, and of their system, including the economy and the polity (Horkheimer 1974: 58-81; Habermas 1969; 1975; 1978b; 1981a; 1981b; 1984; 1988; 1991c; 1992b; 1998a; 2003b; 2006a; 2006d; 2007; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 1996b; Borradori 2003; Byrd 2007a; 2007b; App. C, D, E, F). It is not the task of the critical theory of religion to cover up or whitewash the dialectic of enlightenment, but rather to expose it in order to be able to help negate the negativity in the enlightenment in

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all its forms, so that it can fulfill its promise to free people from their fears and to make them into masters of their fate.

Dialectic of Religion In Dubrovnik and Yalta, we discovered not only a dialectic of enlightenment, the degeneration of enlightenment into positivistic enlightenmentideology, but also a dialectic of religion, the degeneration of religion into an ideology (Hegel 1986a: 21-33; 1986b: 183, 292, 294; 1986j: 403; Horkheimer/Adorno 1952; 1964; 1969; 1987a 2002; Habermas 2006; Borradori 2003; App. F). We saw the religion of truth turning dialectically into the ideology of slaveholders, feudal lords and owners of movable capital. We saw the religion of love turn dialectically into bloody crusades, the killing of heretics and witches, and the sanctioning of army chaplains as morale-officers blessing the deadly weapons of both hostile armies (Horkheimer 1974: 16, 18, 28-29, 33, 52-53, 56, 60-61, 91-93, 9697, 121-123, 127, 131-132, 148, 157-160, 192, 208, 210-211, 212-213). In the past century, quantum physicists blasphemously called the first atomic bomb by the Christian name Trinity and army chaplains even blessed the at the time most advanced nuclear murder weapons, the atomic bombs, before they were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More recently, in India a Right-wing Hindu Party initiated the first nuclear explosions in Asia by Asians, thereby eliciting the development of an Islamic bomb in and around Pakistan, imitating the Western Trinity-bomb. Why can’t at least religious people stay out of the bombing business and leave it to the profane people? Because religion is obviously not able to do that, it is not amazing that it can no longer resolve the theodicy problem, of which it itself has become so much a substantial part. Obviously often religion is not only able–as Freud had hoped–to mitigate the aggressions in people, and diminish necrophilia, but it is also very often not even able to sublimate adequately the libidinous forces into a genuine biophilia. In July 2007, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles had to pay over 600 million dollars in order to settle over 500 male and female child abuse cases in which priests were involved. Earlier the Archdiocese of Boston had to pay over 200 million dollars for the same purpose. In July 2007, the Republican senator David Vitter of Louisiana, an American neo-conservative fundamentalist, who for years had stood up for the strictest Christian family values, had to publicly admit on national television, while his brave forgiving wife stood by his side, that his name was in the address book of the “D.C. Madam,” Deborah Jeane Palfrey. Madam Palfrey, who was facing federal charges of

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racketeering for allegedly running a prostitution ring out of homes and hotel rooms in the Washington area over the last 10 years, was found dead in her home on May 1 of an apparent suicide. Earlier television evangelists had been involved in similar affairs. Shortly, in Dubrovnik and Yalta, we were forced to admit by overwhelming recent and century old evidence that religion could turn over dialectically into its opposite, and that there was a criminology and a pathology of religion (Habermas 2006a, parts I and III; 2006b; 2006c; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Borradori 2003). The critical theory of religion was not allowed to harmonize or whitewash this dialectic of religion, but had to expose it in order to be able to help to negate the negativity not only in the enlightenment, but also in religion, and thus to fulfill its promise of the redemption and the rescue of the hopeless and the fulfillment of the longing for the totally Other (Horkheimer 1974: 131-132; Brändle 1984; Adorno/Tobisch 2003).

Religious Future I In Dubrovnik and Yalta, taking into consideration the dialectic between the religious and the secular, and the dialectic of enlightenment and the dialectic of religion, we arrived first of all at the possibility of religious alternative Future I: the retreat of people into Jewish, Christian, Islamic, or other forms of religious fundamentalism, understood as the return to the religion of the fathers out of disgust for the project of modernity: more precisely, the dialectic of an enlightenment turning against itself, rationalization turning into irrationality, integration turning into desintegration, as it became horribly manifest in the September 2008 collapse of Wall Street and speculative capital, which imposed immense sacrifices on Main Street, the working class, and on productive capital, as the second Bush Administration, which always preached free market, privatization and deregulation now nationalizes one super-bank and industry after the other (Hegel 1986a: 21-33; 1986b: 183, 292, 294; 1986j: 403; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1952; 1964; 1969; 1987a 2002; Habermas 2006; Borradori 2003; App. C, D, E, F, G). According to Habermas, in spite of its traditional religious language, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon, like nationalism with which it is often connected (Habermas 1998a; 2001a: 10-11). The actions of the fundamentalist Jihadists, Mohammed Attah and his 18 followers, who attacked the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington D. C. on September 11, 2001, were characterized through the highly problematic non-contemporaneity of traditional motives and goals on one hand, and the modern means on the other.

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In it was reflected a non-contemporaneity of culture and society in the Near-Eastern home countries of the fundamentalist Jihadists. This noncontemporaneity had constituted itself only in consequence of an accelerated and radically uprooting modernization process. What people in the Occident had experienced in the past four hundred years under happier circumstances as a process of determinate negation or creative destruction, offers in the Orient no promise for a compensation that could be experienced–for the pain of the disintegration of traditional forms of life. In this process the prospect of an improvement of the material conditions of life is only one factor. Decisive in this, is the feeling of degradation and humiliation and the blocked transformation of the consciousness, which expresses itself politically in the opposition to the Western enlightenment idea of the separation of religion and state. Also in Europe, to which history granted centuries in order to find a sensible and reasonable attitude to the Janus head, the ambiguity of modernity, secularization is still connected with ambiguous feelings, as the struggle concerning gene technology shows only too clearly (Habermas 2001b; 2001a: 10-11). There are hardened and petrified orthodoxies in the Occident as well as in the Orient, among Christians and Jews as well as among Muslims and other religious believers (Küng 1991; 1994; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Habermas 2001a: 10-11). Whoever wants to avoid a war of cultures must remember the non-concluded dialectic of the occidental process of secularization. In Habermas’s view, the war against terrorism is no war at all (Habermas 2006; Borradori 2003; 2001a: 11). In terrorism is also expressed the fateful, speechless collision of civilizations, which must develop a common language if they do not want to destroy each other. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the fundamentalist in the Orient or in the Occident is a person, who has come in touch with one or the other of the modern enlightenment movements–bourgeois, Marxist, or Freudian–and has been shocked by the encounter. Because of this, the fundamentalist has lost his or her center and hold, and is thus no longer able to give valid moral direction to his or her children or grandchildren living in antagonistic civil society. Instead of moving through the higher criticism of the sacred writings, or enlightenment in general, and reach a second naivite, the fundamentalist tries to return to the first naivite of the religion of the fathers. Here he hopes to find hold and binding orientation. Thus, he understands the religious writings literally, as they have been seldom taken by the fathers. There is, of course, a great price to be paid for such fundamentalist return and religious Future I. The fundamentalist must cut himself off from modern history and all its scientific

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and technological achievements, or he becomes a hypocrite, who on one hand condemns modernity, while on the other hand at the same time he enjoys its fruits: cars, airplanes, hospitals, schools, science, technology, sophisticated weaponry, and so on. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, while the option for a second religious naiveté that would concretely supersede in itself all the great achievements of the enlightenment movements, would be a better way, the fundamentalist return to the religion of the fathers seems to be false.

False Return Already in 1960, Horkheimer spoke of a false return to religion after World War II and during the cold war between the capitalist and socialist block (Horkheimer 1974: 131-132). The social function of religion appeared to the critical theory of society as application of the Feuerbachian projection of earthly conditions into the Beyond for the purpose of domination (Feuerbach 1957; Marx 1953, chap. 8; Horkheimer 1974: 131-132). In 1960, this projection had already become transparent and weak and dull for many people living in civil society. The space rockets and stations did not leave undisturbed the heavenly realm of the departed souls. Of course, Hegel and Schopenhauer knew of this disturbance already over a century earlier. However, the world religions continued the application of the projection undisturbed. It continued to function according to the law of inertia, in spite of all scientific and technological progress. According to Horkheimer, the application of the projection, identified as means of social control, had been built into the full employment strategy of capitalist society. It also served well in the preparation of the next attempt to prevent the fate of the West through war, and precisely thereby to fulfill it against its own will. As religion had become hollow through such functionalization, what once had been its very content and definition became manifest to the critical theorists: the longing for the wholly Other, in the perspective of which this earthly life proved itself to be bad and evil (Horkheimer 1974: 131-132; 1985g, chap. 28). The critical theory of society saw–like Kafka and even Baudelaire–modern antagonistic civil society from the perspective of the redeemed society, and the dialectical religiology continues to do so today–in 2010 (Kafka 1964; 1993a; 1993b; 2001; Adorno 1970b; 1951: 333-334; Benjamin 1974; Schweppenhäuser 1981). No matter how much religion took under control its intrinsic contradiction, its polemical and revolutionary attitude against the status quo of antagonistic traditional and modern civil society, it had to preserve it at the same time

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as it continually inflamed itself again (Hegel 1986q: 278-292; Horkheimer 1974: 131-132). This went on until this polemical and revolutionary contradiction intrinsic to religion took off the religious form as theism and atheism of the enlightenment, and helped another form of social life to be born. The contradiction in religion, which had been conditioned through nature like hunger and thirst, aimed, nevertheless, beyond nature, toward secular alternative Future III: the just and right social order (Horkheimer 1974: 131-132; 1985g, chaps. 28, 37, 40; Flechtheim 1971; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; App. G). Fundamentalism meant the return to a religion that harmonized the polemical, revolutionary, contradictory element in itself, and the counter-revolutionary function of which was the application of the projection of earthly conditions into the Beyond for the purpose of domination (Hegel 1986p: 236-245; Feuerbach 1957; Marx 1953, chap. 8; Horkheimer 1974: 131-132). Religious fundamentalism was an important ingredient of the victorious neo-conservative and neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1989. Religious and political fundamentalism even continued to function in a counter-revolutionary way in the September 2008 collapse of American high finance in New York and Washington D.C, particularly through the campaign speeches of the Republican candidate for the U.S. Vice-Presidency, the fundamentalist, Pentecostalist Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, while the failing CEOs of the corporate ruling class gave themselves 50 to 100 million dollar bonuses even in the midst of their financial decline and downfall, and thus continued to exploit the working classes, who as taxpayers will have to pay for their irresponsible plunder and for first the de-regulation and privatization and now the nationalization of their banks and industries.

The Contradiction According to Horkheimer, the polemical contradiction intrinsic in religion and then secularized in the enlightenment movements received its productive force through the fact that the extant worse social order awoke it as justified, but that it at the same time denied it (Horkheimer 1974: 131-132). While in 1960 in the Soviet Empire the pressure of terror experienced already the presentiment of the future resistance, which aimed after the migrations and catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century at a higher social order–a new socialism, in the West the illusions of a better world disappeared almost completely. The arrested dialectical materialism, to which people were forced in the Soviet Empire, carried in spite of all the power that it exercized, and in spite of all the obstinacy and stub-

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bornness which it kept up, the stamp of the provisorium in itself, which may as in the Middle Ages in Europe last a thousand years. Horkheimer did not foresee that already 29 years later the Soviet provisorium would break down and yield to the neo-conservative counter-revolution and the nationalisms it unleashed as block busters, and that no new socialism would follow but rather the old capitalism in neo-liberal form, and that the likewise counter-revolutionary nationalistic religious fundamentalism would play an important role in all of this (Hegel 1986p: 236-245). According to Horkheimer, in the West of 1960, all people knew secretly already that the Idea could only withdraw completely and entirely from it (Hegel 1986f: 462-573; Horkheimer 1974: 131-132). Horkheimer saw in 1960 that the firmer and stronger social structure, in which Western civil society took its refuge, was forced upon it through the competition with the Soviet Empire. However, Western bourgeois society was not able to supersede concretely in this firmer and sturdier structure its own thoughts, the freedom and the right of the individual. It rather could only give them up in always new dictatorships and in alliances with them. At this moment in history–February 2010–Islamic terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, etc. forces the Western civil societies to take refuge in even stronger social structures, particularly in the American Empire, which threaten their own democratic constitutions and the human and civil rights of the individual citizens more and more from day to day, and to move closer and closer to secular alternative Future I–the entirely administered society, and alternative Future II–the totally militarized society (Horkheimer1985g, chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Flechtheim 1971; App. G). The September 2008 collapse of the financial system in the U.S.A. and in all the–since the victorious neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1989–globalized nations, intensified this movement (App. G).

The Implementation of the Enlightenment According to Horkheimer, instead of implementing and carrying out with full consciousness the enlightenment into the form in which the polemical, revolutionary, non-conformist, critical and contradictory content of religion had migrated, and of driving forward the fraudulent freedom of the bourgeois revolution toward secular alternative Future III–the just society, Western civil society has fallen into resignation (Horkheimer 1974: 131-132; 1985g, chaps. 37, 40; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; App. G). The fundamentalist return to religion didn’t mean that Western civil society would begin to believe in Heaven again, but that it lacks the faith

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for the better organization of the earth toward secular alternative Future III, and that it does not want anything else any longer than itself: its own reproduction and its own expansion. Western bourgeois society has lost the faith and the ability to transform itself into a higher social form, and in general the will to find itself in an Other, this substance of religion, as it declared the religion as a firm social and cultural structure with the function of integration and tension management as its own affair for its own survival (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 29, 37, 40; 1996s: 21-28, 28-31. 40-44, 44-49, 49-52, 52-54, 54-57, 60-62, 71-72, 72-75, 62-67; Luhmann 1977; App. C, D, E). Of course, one firm structure could always be exchanged for another strong structure. That happened in fascist Germany in the form of Aryan Christianity and everywhere else in any form of nationalism (Horkheimer 1974: 132; Trevor-Roper 1988: 412, 521). It is still happening in February 2010–particularly in the so-called post-communist or post-soviet nationalist Eastern European states (Horkheimer 1974: 132; Agadjanian 2006: 169-185; Tomka 2006: 251-266; Borowik 2006: 267-266; Vrcan 2006: 215-226; Marinovic Jerolimov/Zrinscak 2006: 279-290).

The Nationalists After World War II and their own debacle, the folkish people or the nationalists have often transformed themselves back again into religious Christians and often even into fundamentalists, without having really changed themselves in terms of the Christian metanoia (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6; Horkheimer 1974). Horkheimer predicted that the game could easily go on that way until the European continent would go over into other hands: possibly and probably in terms of alternative Future I and II, or hopefully, in terms of alternative Future III (Hegel 1986a: 218; 1986g: 465; 1986l: 107-115, 413, 418, 422, 490-491, 500; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 404; Horkheimer 1974: 132; 1985g, chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Flechtheim 1971; App. G). While Habermas did not accept into his theory of communicative action what Adorno and Horkheimer considered to be the substance of religion, namely, the longing for the wholly Other, he maintains it, nevertheless, in the negative form of its opposite: the painful experience of the bad infinity of globalizing late European and American capitalist or industrial society (Horkheimer 1974: 131; 1985g, chaps. 29, 37; Schmidt 1972; Habermas 2001; Habermas/Ratzimger 2005). According to Habermas, in the face of the globalization that has asserted itself over economic markets, the limits of which have been removed, many Europeans had hoped for a return of the political–not in the Hobbsian primordial form of

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the globalized fundamentalistically-religiously legitimated security state as propagated by Carl Schmitt in the 1930ties, i.e. in the dimensions of police, secret service and the military, but rather as worldwide civilizing power of political formation in the enlightened Kantian sense (Kant 1975; Meier 1994; Groh 1998; Habermas 2001: 11-12; 2006, part I and IV). In 2001, there remained for Habermas not much more than the pale hope in what Hegel had called the cunning of the notion or of reason, and a little bit of self-reflection (Hegel 1986c: 53; 1986e: 398; 1986g: 452; 1986h: 365; 1986l: 49, 119; Habermas 2001: 11-12). This was so due to the fateful tear of speechlessness between the fundamentalist Islamic civilization and the secular West, which has produced disunion also in the Occident itself, particularly between Europe and America (Habermas 2001: 11-12; 2006). According to Habermas, in the Orient and elsewhere, Europeans encountered the derailing secularization only with measured prudence, if they had at all become aware of what it meant in the context of the post-secular modern society. In this context, Habermas took up again in recent years the old theme of Faith and Knowledge (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; Habermas 2001: 12; 2006, chaps. 5, 8, 9; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the right or correct return to religion in a post-secular civil or socialist society would mean the full theoretical and practical actualization of the very substance of genuine religion: the insatiable, critical, polemical, contradictory, revolutionary longing for the totally Other than the present horror and terror of nature and history, as it once was alive in the Gautama or the Jesus-movement (Hegel 1896p: 374-389; 1986q: 185-346; Fromm 1992: 3-94; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Habermas Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984c; 1994). What was for the Gautama Nirvana and for Jesus the Kingdom of God, has become for the critical theorists of society the imageless, nameless, and notionless wholly Other than the fallen and cursed, and to be redeemed and rescued finitude: individuals and nations alike (Genesis 3-4; Exodus 20: 4-7; Mark 4; 8: 11-21; 9: 33-37; Lieber 2001: 17-29, 443-444; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 29, 37, 40; Otto 1969). The Gautama, Jesus, and the critical theorists have used ciphers, symbols, parables, metaphors, stories to indicate the very substance of religion, mostly in a negative way (Mark 4; 8: 11-21; 9: 33-37; Hegel 1896p: 374-389; 1986q: 185-346; Fromm 1992: 3-94; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Habermas Küng/Ess/ Stietencron/Bechert 1984c; Küng 1994a; 1994b; Zerfass 1988). Only such longing for the totally Other could possibly satisfy the painful modern consciousness of what is missing–the missing and still missed God, and could conquer the consequent defaitism of modern reason (Metz 1959;

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1977; 1980; 1998; 2006; Sölle 1977; 1993; 1994; Peters/Irban 199; Sölle/ Metz 1990; Habermas 2007). Of course, the very substance of religion needs new translators in the present and in the future (Habermas 2004).

Religious Future II In Dubrovnik and Yalta, taking into consideration the dialectic between the religious and the secular, and the dialectic of enlightenment and the dialectic of religion, we also arrived at the possibility of religious alternative Future II–the totally secularized society (Horkheimer 1972, chap. 4; 1974: 131-132). People turn to the entirely secularized society out of disgust for religion: more precisely, the dialectic of religion turning against itself and suffocating in itself its own very substance–the longing for the good, qualitative Infinity. This alternative Future II of total secularization has many friends in the power elites of the Occidental and Oriental, capitalist and socialist societies, and has spread into the masses at least in the West. Yet, the secularists also have to pay a price. For a long time religion has contained in itself the limited and non-renewable resource of meaning. It answered the questions concerning the where-from and particularly, the where-to, as well as questions concerning the center of individual and collective human life and the whole so complicated theodicy. The secularization process has consequentially led to an endangerment and even actual depletion of the resource of meaning in modern late capitalistic or industrial societies. According to Horkheimer, to try to rescue an unconditional meaning without reference to the Absolute is utter vanity (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 29, 34, 37, 40; Habermas 1991: 110-126). Likewise it is also utter vanity to try to rescue fundamental validity claims– like truth, honesty, rightfulness, tastefulness, or understandability– without reference to an unconditional meaning. From Kant to Apel and Habermas, thinkers of the West have tried gain and again to uncouple morality from theology and to root it elsewhere: for example, in the human potential of language and memory, and in the evolutionary universal of the struggle for recognition: shortly in a dialectical anthropology (Kant 1929; 1946; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1982; 1983; Hegel 1972; 1979; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Habermas 1981a; 1981b; 1983; 1984; 1991b; 2004a; Honneth 1994). The secularization process has lead not only to the depletion of the resource of meaning, but also to the weakening of the fundamental validity claims. As science undermined religious faith, it weakened its own truth claim, and its own ability to contribute to the solution of ethical, or socio-ethical problems of civil society. It became

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itself an enormous ethical problem, when great scientists produced or facilitated ethically most problematic inventions out of nationalistic motives: Fritz Haber’s poison gas in World War I and later the insecticide Zyklon B, which, reproduced by I. G. Farben, killed millions of Jews in German concentration camps; Albert Einstein and the first atomic bombs that killed ten thousands of Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Edward Teller and the hydrogen bomb; and so on (Siebert 2006). Up to the present–February 2010–the positive natural or social sciences cannot tell their students why it is better to love than to hate, except that it is maybe better for business. Yet, sometimes it may be better for business to hate, as was the case of the Jews in Germany, or of the Blacks in the Old Confederacy of the American South. Up to the present, the sciences cannot give their students good reasons why they should not kill other human beings when they or their fatherlands find this to be convenient, or stimulating, or attractive, or necessary. Thus, in terms of meanings, values and norms, the natural and social sciences leave modern civil or socialist societies without any moral or ethical guidance whatsoever. The critical theory of religion cannot bypass such deficiency of meaning, values and norms and the consequent massive human problems. In general, the deficiency of meaning leads at least to painful boredom, and boredom leads to massive consumption of drugs and addictions of all kinds, shapes and forms. Already 200 years ago, Napoleon said concerning Europe and the West: Cette vieille Europe m’ennui (Hegel 1986l: 114). Maybe it was ennui or boredom that drove Napoleon from one military campaign to the other, even deep into Russia, and finally into defeat and exile. Today, the drug problem is more a demand than a supply problem. The quantity of drugs made available to people in modern civil society allows the critical theorist of religion to conclude the amount of boredom that exists. The amount of boredom tells to what extent the resource of meaning has already been depleted in a particular civil or socialist society. In any case, the modern positive sciences cannot create meaning, at least not yet. Thus, they cannot replace religion, at least not yet (Habermas 1988: 60, 278-279). Thus, while technology has replaced magic, religion and science are still living and operating side by side in modern civil and socialist societies. Even the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler encouraged his patients to hold on to the religious principle, that Providence governed the world, at least until the sciences would have discovered a universal steering force directing natural and social evolution. They were to behave in terms of Vaihinger’s Nietzschean philosophy, as if there was a Divine Providence, in spite of the fact that according to Nietzsche God was dead, and modern

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antagonistic late capitalistic society and the modern positivistic sciences had killed him (Kaufmann 1967: 95- 96; Adorno 1951; 1960; 1976; 1982; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1976; 1979: 354-372; 578-587; 1980a; 1980b; 2002a; Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; 1974c: 81-82, 101-104, 106-107, 108-109, 109-111, 115-116, 116-117). Those positivistic sciences were not able in the sense of Greek ontology to overcome the forgetfulness of Being and restore the unity and harmony of all beings in that Being (Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997e; 1997f; 1998a; 1997u; 1998c; 2002a; Heinrich 1964; Habermas 1973: 322-329) They were also not able in the sense of the Jewish Religion of Sublimity or of Christianity as the Religion of Freedom to overcome the guilt connection of modern antagonistic industrial society and to restore the covenants between God annd men(Hegel 1986q: 50-95; 185-346; Küng 1970; 1972; 1976; 1978; 1980; 1990a; 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b) They were also not able to resist the return of the repressed forces of nature in human history as it happened under fascism in the first part of the 20th century and under neo-liberalism in the beginning 21st century as assaults against civilization(Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997e; 1997f; 1998a; 1997u; 1998c; 2002a; Heinrich 1964; Habermas 1973: 322329; Smith/Haas 1934; Rosenbaum 1998; Klein 2007; Scahill 2007). They could not restore Being or God to late capitalistic society, no matter how much they may be needed for integration in the socially torn-apart modern world (Hegel 1986q: 289-291, 342-344; 1986g: 339-514; 1986l: 520540; Parsons 1964; 1965; 1971; Parsons/Shils 1951; Horkheimerr 1998a; Adorno 1979: 354- 372; 578-587; Fromm 1950; 1957; 1959; 1966b; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1976; 1980a; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007)

Religious Future III In Dubrovnik and Yalta, taking into consideration the dialectic between the religious and the secular, and the dialectic of enlightenment, and the dialectic of religion, we finally arrived at the possibility of religious alternative Future III: the new reconciliation of the religious and the secular, faith and knowledge, revelation and enlightenment (Hegel 1986b: 287433; 1986p; 374-389; 1986q: 185-346; Habermas 2001: 12; 2006, chaps. 5, 8, 9; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005; Fromm 1992: 3-94; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984c; Küng 1994a). We invited to our discourse on the Future of Religion in the IUC, Dubrovnik, for over 33 years, and to our discourse on Religion and Civil Society in Yalta for

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over 8 years, enlighteners from Africa, Asia, the Near East, Eastern and Western Europe, and Latin and Central and North America, who were driven by the impulse that things had to become radically otherwise not only concerning particular issues, such as health insurance for poor children, but concerning the whole system of modern societies and its evolution, and who were not only aware of the dialectic of enlightenment but had also overcome through reflection the enlightenment ideology and corruption (Parsons 1964; 1965; Horkheimer 1974: 121-123, 126-127, 128-129, 130, 131-132, 133, 134-135, 136-137, 138-139, 151-152, 141-142, 145-147, 148). We also invited believers from different positive religions on different continents, who were likewise driven by the impulse that things had to become radically different in the system of modern societies and its evolution, and who were not only aware of the dialectic of religion but who had also overcome through repentance the religious ideology and deformation. In our Dubrovnik and Yalta discourses we have continued to develop the critical theory in the direction of a reconciliation between enlighteners, who are conquering the dialectic of enlightenment, on one hand, and believers, who are overcoming the dialectic of religion, on the other, and who are thus together trying to bridge the abyss of the modern dialectic between the sacred and the profane on the basis of their common impulse toward the liquidation of institutionalized stealing, killing and lying in the evolving and globalizing system of modern late capitalist societies, and beyond that on the foundation of their shared longing for the totally Other, be it in religious or in secular form (Horkheimer 1971; Adorno 1993; 1997j/2: 608-627). The Latin American liberation theologians speak of the structural sins of civil society (Guttierez 1964). In contrast, in 2007, churches in the U.S.A. have adapted themselves further to the capitalist culture by introducing ATM machines into their sacred space in order to make it easier for the believers to contribute financially. The introduction of ATM machines into the churches seems to indicate that Christians could–against Jesus’ critical, polemical and revolutionary message–serve two masters at the same time, God and capital, and that Christianity and capitalism are compatible (Matthew 6: 24; Jeremias 1972; Hendricks 2006). The protest of some Christians against the ATM machines in the churches shows that good religion, as the impulse that things must become otherwise, has not yet been totally suffocated (Horkheimer 1974: 96-97, 131-132).

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Contemporary Religious Problems In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, at least since the 18th century, the dialectic of the religious and the secular has produced the dialectic in religion itself (Hegel 1986q: 342-344). The modernization and secularization process has produced in religion three different groups, or stages of development of religious consciousness: 1) 2) 3)

The group or stage of the immediate and impartial religion and faith of the first naiveté. The group or stage of analytical understanding, of reflection, and the enlightenment of the so-called educated people. The group or stage of the dialectical philosophy, of the second naiveté, in which group and stage 1 and 2 are to be reconciled. We may speak of the idealistic Model I.

More concretely, the modernization and secularization process has produced, for example, in Judaism, the dialectical differentiation and antagonism between the Rabbinical-Synagogical Paradigm of the Middle Ages on one hand, and the Assimilation Paradigm of Modernity on the other (Küng 1991: 169-274). In Christianity, the modernization and secularization process has produced the dialectical differentiation and antagonism between the Protestant-Evangelical Paradigm of the Reformation on one hand, and the Reason and Progress-Orientated Paradigm of Modernity on the other (Küng 1994: 602-906). In Islam, the modernization and secularization process has produced the dialectical differentiation and antagonism between the Paradigm of the Ulama and Sufis on one hand and the Islamic Modernization Paradigm on the other (Küng 2004: 377-784). It is obvious that the modernization and secularization process can cause dissonances inside and among the particular religions that may threaten their very existence if not honestly resolved and reconciled. Believers, who belong to different paradigms in the same religion or to parallel constellations in two different religions, can at any time come into actual conflict with each other, or they can try to come to an agreement with each other in discourse based on mutual recognition and respect.

Conflict Thus, in 2006 the French Jewish intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy, who belongs to the Assimilation Paradigm of Modernity in Judaism, and the Swiss, Islamic intellectual Tariq Ramadan, who belongs to the Modernization

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Paradigm of Islam, came into conflict with each other (Levy 2007; Stäblin 2007: 93). Ramadan wanted to initiate and found a Euro-Islam. He preached that as a Muslim one should adapt and accommodate to the Western civil society, and that one should become a European Muslim. However for Levy, Ramadan was a complex case. He led and entertained an ambiguous discourse. On one hand, Ramadan preached a hard and radical Islam. Levy remembered that in the 1940s Frenchmen spoke of a certain division of the German SS as steak-fraction of the SS: being externally brown and internally red. That was a line of the KPD, the Communist Party of Germany, which gave out the password or motto: we must infiltrate the SS and the SA. There were also Roman Catholics in the Third Reich, who followed the same infiltration motto (Siebert 1993; Stäblein 2007: 93). For Levy, Ramadan was a little bit externally democratic, and internally Islamistic. Here, one had to pay attention and watch carefully. Levy had a conflict with Ramadan because he belonged to those people who say that Ramadan was a real Islamist, if one listened to his sermons in the mosques carefully, which were not public. In Levy’s opinion Ramadan was also an Anti-Semite. The U.S. State Department agreed with Levy’s position, when it denied Professor Ramadan the visa that would have allowed him to take a teaching position at the Catholic University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. The State Department was suspicious that Ramadan may belong to those Muslims who obey the Constitution and the laws until they are powerful enough to introduce the Shariah. They accommodate the Western life style and are tolerant for some time, in order, when the time is ripe and right, to take over and to become intolerant. It is supposedly a trick!

Dafur Levy wanted to know what Ramadan thought and said about Dafur (Fromm 1950; 1957; 1959; 1966b; Stäblein 2007: 93; Levy 2007). Up to March 2007, Levy had not heard anything from Ramadan about Dafur. Levy admitted that there existed moderate Muslims in Dafur. There indeed existed laicized Muslims, who preach the separation of Mosque and state, and who therefore are massacred and martyrized by the Islamistic regime in Khartoum. Levy found it very peculiar that he had heard nothing from Ramadan about such massacres. Yet, for Levy, Ramadan was really unimportant. The true question was how the shock, the conflict, the collision between moderate and radical Muslims develops inside of Islam: between the laicistic Islam of the enlightenment, a minority which never-

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theless does exist, and the Islam of the Shariah and the Djihad, which burns women alive, and which insults and offends the Islamic honor. For Levy, that was indeed the great issue of our time. That would have to become the role of the contemporary intellectuals: as once certain intellectuals helped Soviet dissidents and the persecuted writers of Eastern Europe, thus intellectuals of today–February 2010–would have to support those moderate Islamic intellectuals, who under terrible risks and under danger for their very lives fight against the radical Islamism. Levy would like to form a solidarity chain for those moderate Islamic intellectuals. That is also the intent of the critical theory of religion.

Critical Theory Formation in Dubrovnik and Yalta In our 32 discourses in Dubrovnik and in our 7 discourses in Yalta among intellectuals from all five continents and from most living world religions, we have continued to form, shape and develop our dialectical theory of religion without interruption since 1977: In 1977, 1978, 1989 in Dubrovnik, we discussed the Future of Religion without specification; in 1980 we discussed the Future of Religion: Crisis and Response; in 1982 the Future of Religion: Towards the Third Millennium; in 1983 the Future of Religion: Modern Scientific and Social Revolutions and the Problem of God; in 1985 the Future of Religion: Contemporary Crisis; in 1986 the Future of Religion: Political Theology and Historical Materialism; in 1987 the Future of Religion: Culture, Class and Nation; in 1988 the Future of Religion: New Movements-Old Institutions; in 1989 the Future of Religion: The Problem of Humanism; in 1990 the Future of Religion: Autonomy and Solidarity; in 1991 the Future of Religion: Reconstruction of Socialism or Restoration of Nationalism. Our course also met each year in Dubrovnik during the 5 year Yugoslav civil war. In 1992, our theme was the Future of Religion: Toward an Ethic of Personal, National and Global Responsibility; in 1993 the Future of Religion: The End of History?; in 1994 the Future of Religion: The Role of Religion in Liberal Democratic Society; in 1995 the Future of Religion: Religious, Ethical, and Legal Attitudes Toward War-Making, Peace-Keeping and Peace-Making; in 1996 the Future of Religion: The Struggle between the Universalistic and Particularistic-Tendencies in Society and Religion; in 1997 the Future of Religion: The Migration of the Religious into the Profane; in 1998 the Future of Religion: The Rationalization or the Re-enchantment of the Life World; in 1999 the Future of Religion: Transcendence without Countermovement; in 2000 the Future of Religion: The New Century-The Inclusion of the Other?; in 2001, the Fu-

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ture of Religion: Different Conceptions of Modernity; in 2002 the Future of Religion: The Truth in Discourse and Life World; in 2003 the Future of Religion: Personal Autonomy and Universal Solidarity: Reconciliation?; in 2004 the Future of Religion: Jerusalem, Athens and Rome-Western Seedbed Societies; in 2005 the Future of Religion: Different Conceptions of Religion, Modernity and Post-Modernity; in 2006 the Future of Religion: From War to Peace among the Civilizations; in 2007 the Future of Religion: From the Lex Talionis to the Golden Rule; in 2008 the Future of Religion: The Wholly Other, Liberation, Happiness, and the Rescue of the Hopeless (Reimer 1992; Ott 2007). In our 7 international sister-courses in Yalta, we formed and shaped the dialectical theory of religion as we discussed in 2000, 2001, 2002 Religion and Civil Society without specification; in 2003 Religion and Civil Society: Towards a Global Ethos; in 2004 Religion and Civil Society: Between Nationalism and Globalism; in 2005 Religion and Civil Society: Towards a Dialogue among Civilizations; 2006: Religion and Civil Society: Main Challenges to the Civilizations and their Responses; 2007 Religion and Civil Society: The Crisis of Identity and New Challenges in the Post-Secular Society (Siebert 2003a; 2003b; 2005e; 2005f; 2008a; 2008b). In all our discourses in Dubrovnik and in Yalta, as we formed and shaped dialectically the critical theory of religion, we focused continually in one way or the other on the modern antagonism between the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane, as well as on the contradictions in religion and in the secular enlightenment, and their possible post-modern reconciliation in the postmodern religious alternative Future III in the context of the post-modern secular alternative Future III: the just society, which makes possible the first time in world history the freedom of All, and their friendly living together (Marx 1961c: 873-874; Miranda 1974; Flechtheim 1959, 1962; 1966; 1971; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 29, 37, 40; Küng 1991: 537-762; 1994: 869-906; 2004e; App. G).

Legitimation through Truth Already in the beginning of the 19th century, long before the pragmatic and linguistic trend turn, Hegel discovered that in antagonistic civil society, dominated by selfish opinion and conviction without objective truth and by the mania of and addiction to private right and pleasure, the time was fulfilled, that the justification through philosophy and the dialectical notion had become an urgent need, because in the immediate consciousness of the people, in the social reality, the unity of the internal and external world was no longer present and nothing was legitimated any longer

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through religion and faith (Blakney 1941: 82-91; Hegel 1986q: 342-344; 1986g: 92-202, 223-242; 339-397; Marx 1953: 339, 341; 1961: Vol. I, 1718; Rorty 1970; 1985; Rorty/Vatimo 2006; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1978b; 1982; 1990). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, since at present– February 2010–in the midst of an enormous global financial, economic and international crisis, centered in Wall Street and reaching down into every stretch of Main Street, nothing in late capitalist society is justified any longer through religious or philosophical truth and not even through positive-scientific and positivistic correctness, the time may have come to concretely supersede, i.e. not only to criticize but also to rescue, preserve and develop further in the dialectical religiology elements of truth of religion and faith, e.g. the Sermon on the Mount, as well as of the truth of philosophy, e.g. the dialectical notion, as well as of the correctness of the positive sciences, in order thereby to legitimate necessary institutional steps toward post-modern global alternative Future III, including religious Future III: a socialistic-humanistic society, in which the religious and the secular as well as the personal autonomy and universal solidarity are reconciled (Flechtheim 1959; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985a; 1985b; 1993; Bloch/Reif 1978; Siebert 1979a; 1979c; 1979d; 1985; 1987a; 1994c; 1994d; 1995; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2003a; 2003b; 2004a; 2004b; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007e; 2007f; 2007g; 2008a; 2008b; App. G). Habermas came close to Richard Rorty’s insight, that the at the same time delightful and reconciling contact with the extra-everyday Reality, which had once been promised by the metaphysics of Plato, Aristotle and Thomas of Aquinas through a purifying meditation of the Good and the Beautiful, may after the linguistic turn in philosophy possibly better be reached in the firmer and stronger forms of the prayer, than in a philosophical or scientific way (Psalm 4; Psalm 22; Psalm 46; Psalm 73; Psalm 91; Matthew 6: 7-15; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17; 29, 37, 40; Fromm 1966ba: 231-236; Parsons 1964; 1965; 1971; Parsons/Shils 1951; Rorty 1970; 1985; Rorty/Vatimo 2006; Habermas 1988a: 60, 278-279; 1999: 230-270; Berrigan 1978; Peukert 1976: 273-275, 282; Thompson/Held 1982: 246-247; McCarthy 1994; Siebert 1980). The critical theorist of religion may translate extra-everyday Reality in terms of the Ultimate Reality or the wholly Other than the everyday life world, and, in functionalistic language, the system of human condition, including the telic subsystem, nature, the unconditioned human organism, and the action subsystem, and the system of human action, including culture, society, personality and behavioral

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organism, and all their systemic functional requirements, including pattern maintenance, tension management, adaptation, goal attainment and integration (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17; 29, 37, 40; Fromm 1966ba: 231-236; Parsons 1964; 1965; 1971; Parsons/Shils 1951; Rorty 1970; 1985; Rorty/ Vatimo 2006; Habermas 1988a: 60, 278-279; 1999: 230-270; McCarthy 1994; App. C, D, E).

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Toward a New Model In Dubrovnik and Yalta, we have discovered two models of how this reconciliation between the religious and the secular could come about (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986p: 9-88). The older, first model is found in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, and in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986p: 9-88; 1986: 341-344, 501-535; Goethe 1965: 402-413; Adorno 1993a; 1993b; 1993c). The newer, second model is found in Scholem’s studies on Jewish mysticism, in Brecht’s Marxist poetry, in Benjamin’s and Adorno’s attempt to concretely supersede Jewish and Christian mysticism, in Kantian subjective idealism, in Hegelian objective and absolute idealism, in Marxian historical materialism, and Freudian psychoanalysis (Scholem 1967; 1970; 1973; 1977a; 1977b; Brecht 1961; Willet 1992; Fuegi 1994; Adorno 1969c; 1970b: 103-125; 1997j/2: 608-616; Blakney 1941: 247, 248, 249, 248; Kant 1981; Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Marx 1953: chaps. 4-10; Freud: 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1978b; App. A, B, C, D, E, F).

The Idealistic Model I According to this older model, the secular enlightenment, which had necessarily moved away from and against religion, will necessarily return to it again and will reunite itself with it in such a way that neither the absolute content of genuine religious faith nor that of secular dialectical reason are violated (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986p: 9-88; 1986: 341-344, 501-535; Goethe 1965: 402-413; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969c; 1993a; 1993c; Spender 1958; App. E, F). Only merely positive beliefs on one hand, and analytical understanding on the other have to surrender, subordinate, and submit themselves to genuine faith and dialectical reason, which are both ultimately concerned with the good, qualitative Infinity–the wholly Other. Unfortunately, this first Model has collapsed together with the subjective, objective, and absolute idealistic systems. Dialectical idealism was inverted into historical materialism (Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7,

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8; 1974c: 19-20, 49-50, 54, 61-65, 68-69, 157-158, 164, 167-168, 194-195, 208, 210, 212-213, 316-320, 324, 351-352; 1985g: chaps. 23, 25-30, 32, 34, 37, 40; Habermas 1978c: chaps 3, 4, 5, 6). Model I has been determinately negated into Model II and into the critical theory of society (Adorno 1951; 1960; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 40; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1973: 322- 329; 1976; 1978c; 1982; 1986; 1988b; 1991a: Part III; 1999; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007).

The Materialistic Model II The critical theorists determinately negated the idealistic Model I of Kant, Jacobi, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel (Hegel 1986b: 94-115, 287-433; Horkheimer 1971; 1986g: chaps. 17, 37, 40). They did not simply continue the abstract negative procedure of the bourgeoisie enlightenment, which created a core for itself through comprehending its negativity itself. They did not free themselves from the shallowness of the enlightenment through the purity and infinity of the Negative. They did not merely have for positive knowledge finite and empirical things, while they considered the Eternal to be only something beyond, so that it was empty for knowledge, and that the infinite empty space of knowledge was filled only with the subjectivity of longing and presentiment. They did not agree with the death of philosophy: that reason had to renounce its being in the Absolute, and that it would completely exclude itself from it, and that it would only behave negatively toward it. For the critical theorists, this death of philosophy was no longer its highest point, and the non-being of the enlightenment did no longer become a system for them through the consciousness about it. The critical theory is non-systematic. The longing of the critical theorists did not simply fly over the finite, as did the analytical understanding of the bourgeois enlightenment, so that it was nothing for it. Their longing did not escape the finite, nor did their subjectivity remain firm and solid in itself, so that the images would simply turn into external things, which–as the Psalmist said of the idols–have eyes but do not see, and ears but do not hear, and that the ideals would turn into mere fantastic poetry, and that any relationship to them would appear as an unessential game, or as dependence on objects, or as mere superstitions (Exodus 20: 4-7; Psalm 112: 13; Hegel 1986b: 287-433; Lundgren 1998). For the critical theorists, the highest knowledge would be this human body, in which the individual would not merely be an isolated subject, but

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in which longing and love would have come to the complete perception, look, view, and experience, and happy and blissful enjoyment: the true identity of the internal and external reality of humanity (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986e: 115-173; Adorno/Tobisch 2003). In the perspective of the critical theorists, the infinite longing, or the longing and love for the good, qualitative, affirmative Infinity that went beyond the body and the world, reconciled itself with the empirical existence and the objective material reality.

The One What once the great Jewish, Christian and Islamic mystics had called the One, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Fromm and Adorno tried to reach in their longing for the wholly Other or the X-experience (Hegel 1986e: 115-173; Scholem 1967; 1970; 1973; 1977a; 1977b; Benjamin 1977: chaps, 10, 11; Horkheimer 1971; 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; Fromm 1976: chaps 3, 7, 8, 9; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1978b: 127-143). According to Meister Eckhart, the divine One, or the totally Other was a negation of negations, and a desire of desires (Exodus 20: 4-7; 20; Blakney 1941: 247-249, 319; Fromm 1976: chap. 3; Horkheimer 1971). The One meant for the mystic something to which nothing was to be added. The soul laid hold of the Godhead, where it was pure and undifferentiated, and where there was nothing beside it, and where there was nothing else to consider. The One was a negation of negations (Blakney 1941: 247-249, 319; Horkheimer 1971). Every creature contained a negation: one denied that it was the other (Blakney 1941: 247-249, 319; Hegel 1986e: 115-173). An angel denied that it was any other creature. Yet, God contained the denial of all denials. God was that One–that wholly Other–who denied of every other that it was anything except Himself. The method of the mystics in all great world religions was often negation (Blakney 1941: 319; Fromm 1970; Fromm/ Suzuki/Martino 1960; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984). There was indeed often a double negation. The negation of negations was fullness of Being. The mystics’ reason for this dialectical circumlocution was to avoid putting a verbal description on something, which words could not and did not describe adequately, in strictest obedience to the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue (Exodus 20: 2-7; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 29-30). For Adorno and Benjamin, the mystical fullness of Being was inverted into the theological glowing fire of the totally Other, into which all dialectics, including the economic and social one, had to be radicalized and sharpened (Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53; Blakney

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1941: 247-249, 319; Adorno 1970b: 116-118; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40).

Longing and Love Meister Eckhart explained the Shema Israel: the longing for and the love of God, the One (Psalm 22; Blakney 1941: 248; Fromm 1966b: 181-185; 1976: chaps III, VII, IX). According to Meister Eckhart, people were supposed to long for and love God, no matter whether God was loving them or not, and certainly not because God was loving them, for God was nonloving, being above love and affection. People were to love God a-spiritually. That meant that their soul was to be a-spiritual; meaning being devoid of ghost likeness (Blakney 1941: 248; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 16). For as long as the soul was ghostlike, it was a mental image, and being image like, it would lack both unity and the power to unite. Thus, so Master Eckhart argued, the soul could not long for and love God rightly, for true love was union. The soul ought to be void of ghosts and be kept so always. Humanity had to get rid of loving God as a god, a ghost, a person, or as if he were something with a form. Humanity was to long for and love God as he was, i.e. a not-god, a not-ghost, a-personal, formless. Humanity was to love God as he was the One–the totally Other–pure, sheer, and limpid, in whom there was no duality. Humanity was to sink eternally from negation to negation in the One, the wholly Other. The critical theorists stood, like their friend Paul Tillich, in the post-theistic tradition of Master Eckhart (Blakney 1941: 82-94, 248; Horkheimer 1971; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 25, 26, 29, 37, 40; Fromm 1950; 1866b; 1976: chaps. 3, 7, 9; Tillich 1972; Theunissen 1982; 1983; Habermas 1988a: 59-60, 277-279; 1988b; 1990: 9-18; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Mendieta 2005; Thompson/Held 1982: 246-247).

The Little Things of Life What Meister Eckhart had called the little and trivial things of life, Adorno and Benjamin identified as the small, unimportant, irrelevant ciphers, through which the longing for the totally Other was mediated (Blakney 1941: 249; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1997j/1: 302-329; 1997j/2: 608-617; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b; Fromm 1976: chap. 3; Habermas 1988a: 59-60, 277-279; Funk 2000: 156-170). Likewise, for Umberto Eco the best way to comment on large things was to comment on small things (Eco 2007;

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Macke 2007: 97-99). According to Master Eckhart, it often happened that what seemed to be trivial to humans, was nevertheless more important to God than what people thought to be important. Therefore, people ought to take everything God put on them evenly, not comparing and wondering, which was more significant, or higher, or best. People ought simply to follow where God lead them. That meant, people should do what they were most inclined to do, and to go where they were repeatedly and most frequently admonished to go: to where they felt more drawn. If people did that, so Meister Eckhart argued, God would give them his greatest in their least, and would never fail. Meister Eckhart observed that some people despised the little things of life. It was their mistake, because they thus prevented themselves from getting God’s greatness out of these little things. Yet, Meister Eckhart had to admit that sometimes it was hard to know whether one’s inclinations came from God or not. However, that could be decided in this way: If a man found himself always possessed of a knowledge or intimation of God’s will, which he obeyed before everything else, because he felt urged to obey it, and the urge was frequent, then he may know that it was from God. According to Meister Eckhart, some people wanted to recognize God only in some pleasant enlightenment–and then they got pleasure and enlightenment, but not God–the wholly Other. Meister Eckhart remembered that somewhere it was written that God was shining in the darkness. Here every now and then people got a glimpse of God (John 1: 1-5; Blakney 1941: 249; Adorno 1970b: a 103-161; Theunissen 1982; 1983; Habermas 1988a: 59-60, 277-279; 1988b; 1990: 9-18; 1991a: Part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b). For Meister Eckhart, more often God was where his light was least apparent. Therefore, people ought to expect God in all manners and in all things evenly–even in the most trivial everyday things and occurrences. In Meister Eckhart’s view, all paths were leading to God, and God was on them all evenly, for the person who knew. It was noble to achieve rest and security through evenness, by which one might take God and enjoy him in any manner, in any thing and event. To this end all kinds of methods, techniques, and activities may contribute, and any work may be a help: but if they did not, people were to let them go.

Insignificant Ciphers Adorno discovered simple and insignificant ciphers of the wholly Other not only in the small Medieval town of Amorbach, the paradise of his youth, and in the likewise small Swiss town of Sils Marie, where Nietzsche (1967) had written his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. They were also found on

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the garbage heaps of the big American and European metropolises, the objects of which were no longer under the control of the instrumental purpose rationality of the social system (Adorno 1997j/2: 302-309, 326329). With revolutionary patience and believing atheistically, Dorothee Sölle, who had been very much influenced by the Frankfurt School, found God in the waste disposal sites of Rio and other places of Latin and Central America (Sölle 1977; 1992: 93-134; 1994; Sölle/Habermas 1975; Sölle/ Metz 1990). Critical theology and negative metaphysics seem to have moved down into the dimension of detailed anatomy, physiology, and pathology (Adorno 1998a; 1998b; 1998c: 81-200, 214-226).

Religious Contents According to the new materialistic Model II, the religious contents had to be inverted in terms of an inverse, cipher (Hebrew otot) theology, and they had to migrate into the secular discourses of the modern expert cultures, and through them into the communicative action of the life world, and even into non-Machiavellian and non-social-Darwinistic economic and political actions in the system of civil society toward global Future III–a society determined by the friendly, helpful, and solidary rather than competitive living together of human beings, and beyond that toward the horizon of the totally Other as the radical, but nevertheless still determinate negation of the historical continuum of force and counterforce; of revenge and counter-retaliation; of revolution and counter-revolution; of crime and punishment; of guilt and atonement; of murderers being murdered for their murdering; of bombers being bombed for their bombing; of the continual mythical sameness, identity and repetitiveness of human fate, even in that which seems to be modern and new; shortly of the jus or lex talionis; finally of all the very personal human perils of loneliness, abandonment, alienation, meaninglessness, illness, aging, dying and death (Genesis 1: 14; Lieber 2007: 7; Benjamin 1977: chap. 10; Adorno 1970b: 103-110, 111-125; 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1986: 53-55; 1990: 14-15; Lubrich 2007; Grayling 2007; Baron 2007; App. F, G). In this, the migration of the religious content, for example, humanity being made in the image or likeness of God, could be inverted or translated into a secular enlightenment content, such as, the dignity of man (Genesis 1: 26; Lieber 2001: 9; Hegel 1986q: 55-57, 92-94).

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Calling Things by their Name Adorno inverted the theological motive, to call the things by their names, into the secular motive of his critical theory, to negate false consciousnesses and ideologies, and to say the truth particularly about the smallest details (Genesis 2: 19-20; Lieber 2001: 16; Adorno 1970b: 139-140). Even religion itself may sometimes not call things by their name and fall into false consciousness and ideology. Thus, according to the Midrash, God’s seeing all that he had made and finding it very good included also the egocentric drive, in Hebrew the yeitzer ha-ra, sometimes described as the evil impulse (Genesis 1: 31; Lieber 2001: 11). Without this egocentric drive or evil impulse, so the optimistic Midrash explained, no one would build a house, establish a business, marry, or raise a family. God’s very good, in Hebrew tov m’od, even included the inevitability of death, in Hebrew tov moth: death was good. Knowing that our days were numbered invested our deeds and choices with greater significance. Although the death of someone we love was searingly painful, we could recognize that a world in which people die and new souls are born offers the promise of renewal and improvement more than a world, in which the original people would live forever. Of course, also the greatest Saint of the medieval Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity, St. Francis of Assisi spoke of his Brother Death, in spite of the fact that according to the Torah it was a curse, and in spite of the fact that the very heart of Christianity was precisely the radical negation of the negativity of death: the resurrection of the flesh (Genesis 3: 14-24; Matthew 28; Mark 16; Luke 24; John 20, 21; Hegel 1986q: 273-274, 290-291; Dirks 1968: 160-187; Resing 2007: 27-31). Even the sometimes optimistic Hegel considered death to be the victory and triumph of the universal over the particular, the genus or the species over the individual, the collective over the singular person (Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 274-297, 440-442, 298, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148149, 332, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486, 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559). Of course, the universal, the genus, the species, and the collective also are not eternal and will die: only the Spirit and the spirits survive (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986q: 273-274, 286-299). Thus it is no wonder that up to the present– February 2010–Jewish friends put pebbles on Hegel’s grave stone, a replica of the sacrificial altar of the second temple, and even on the cross on the grave of his wife, Marie von Tucher, and also on the grave stones of the Left-Hegelian Bertholt Brecht and Helene Weigel-Brecht, in the Dorotheen Cemetery in Berlin, Germany (Hegel 1986a: 45, 48, 105, 133, 174, 184,

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208-209, 226-228, 285, 292, 297, 355, 372-373, 381, 436; 1986g: 421; 1986l: 115, 152, 146, 230, 241, 243, 244, 274, 388-390, 391, 429, 470, 510; 1986q: 48-49, 50-95, 265, 283, 336; 1986r: 12, 116, 132; 1986s: 409-410, 419, 426, 493, 523-524; 1986t: 157; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-317).

Religious Ideology However, in the perspective of the critical theory of religion, such religious, ideological theodicy, as has appeared sometimes in the Midrash, and sometimes in Hegel, and elsewhere, does not really call things by their name, and is even able to justify the untruth of individual and collective egoism, selfishness, ethnocentricity and in general a world in which almost everybody is programmed to eat everybody, and of which the slaughterhouses of the metropolises are merely the weak ciphers of the overall slaughterbench and sacrificial altar of nature and history, which has lasted now for many millions of years (Hegel 1986l: 30-55; 1986q: 501-517; Schopenhauer 1946; 1989: 1/208, 1/553, 2/774-775, 2/796, 2/800; Horkheimer 1967b: 248-268; 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 19, 21, 37; 1989m: chap. 12; Oelmüller 1992; Susman 1948; App. C, D, F). Ideology is here, as always, understood critically as false consciousness, the masking of class, national and racial interests, shortly, as the untruth. Ideological religion is bad religion (Horkheimer 1974a: chaps 2, 3, 46; 1974c: 31-132). While most prophets and philosophers in the past 6,000 years–since Jasper’s axis time–were very critical of, and polemical and even revolutionary against, the traditional and modern civil or bourgeois society, such religious ideological theodicy could very well also justify the autonomy in its need system, which in the absence of solidarity turns into egoism and selfishness, and thus also into colonialism without which it cannot exist, and thus also into imperialism into which colonialism necessarily develops (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Horkeheimer/ Adorno 1969; App. C, D). As the Soviet empire broke down, because its solidarity was not mediated through autonomy, so the American Empire may move into an even deeper crisis, because its autonomy is not mediated by solidarity. Pure autonomy is as untrue as pure solidarity.

Capitalism, Nationalism, and Religious Criminality Such religious ideological theodicy could very well justify more specifically the egocentric drive and untruth of capitalism, in spite of the fact that it contradicts the Golden Rule, which all world religions have in common,

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and which has been inverted, secularized, formalized, and rationalized into Kant’s categorical imperative, and into Charles Peirce’s and Habermas’s a priori of the universal communication community (Matthew 7: 12; Baldwin 2001; Hinkelammert 1985; Black 1999; 2001; Apel 1976a, 1976b; Habermas 1983; Küng 1990b; 1991a; Siebert 1997c). The capitalist does not treat the worker as he would like to be treated when he appropriates his surplus labor and value and mystifies this appropriation at the same time with the help of bourgeois religion, for example, Protestantism, deism, etc. (Marx 1961a: 84-86, 158, 166, 168-169, 185, 194, 317-319, 327329, 330, 335-336, 346, 533, 534-536, 543, 592-593, 818, 827-828, 830, 844; 1961b: 9, 10, 15-17, 25, 27, 61, 112, 119, 120, 129, 131, 143, 173, 195, 214, 216, 222, 299, 318-353, 361, 388, 401, 425, 436, 461; 1961c: 220-222, 226-228, 239, 334, 389, 536, 548, 555-559, 633, 635-636, 653, 834). There is no mutual recognition and reciprocity between owner and worker, not to speak of the risks of life the workers have to take upon themselves, such as the miners in a retreat mining operation (Arrillaga 2007). The materialistic critical theory of religion does not–in Marx’s words–try to discover the earthly core of the bad religious fog formations, but rather vice versa to develop out of the real economic conditions of life their sublimated heavenly forms (Marx 1961a: 44-86, 389-390, 653). As humanity is dominated in bad religion through the creations of his own head, so in the capitalist production he is dominated through the products of his own hands, the surplus value that is appropriated by his master and gives him power over the former (Marx 1961a: 653). Marx and Engels were not only part of the great modern enlightenment, but also sometimes victims of its dialectic, particularly in matters of religion (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969; Miranda 1974; Niebuhr 1967). Such religious ideological theodicy could very well also legitimate all the Hitlers and their evil impulses and rapacious nationalisms around the world (Smith/Haas 1934; Horkheimer 1989m: chap. 17; Cohen 1972; Rosenbaum 1998; Brenner 2002; Goldhagen 1996; 2002; Kertzer 2001; Fest/Eichinger 204; Grosbard 2001; Rigg 2002; Black 2001; Cornwell 1999; Kinzer 2006; Ericksen 1985; Mosse 1999; Dalin 2005; Susman 1948; Lubrich 2007; Grayling 2007; Baron 2007). The nationalist does not treat the other nations as he would like his nation to be treated when he deprives them of their cheap labor and resources, and claims the right of unilateralism, and of preemptive strikes, and demands from other nations that they give up weapons of mass destruction while his nation keeps them and continually develops them further. For the nationalist, there is no mutual recognition and reciprocity between his and other nations, not to speak of his manifest or covered claims of racial su-

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periority. There is no equality among individuals or nations. Such religious ideological theodicy could even legitimate the egocentric or ethnocentric drive and the consequent criminality of particular world religions that accommodate themselves to and even support ideologically antagonistic civil society, capitalism, nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism (Deschner 1998; Hinkelammert 1985).

Theodicy of the Cross The Torah was very much aware of the problem of such religious ideological theodicy that did not call things by their name, when it let all animals and humans before Noah and the Flood be vegetarians, and did not consider the plants, which they ate, to be forms of life at all (Genesis 1, 2, 3, 6: 9-9: 17; Lieber 2001: 2-54). The Rabbis considered eating meat to be a concession to human desires, which was made and introduced only after the Flood. Already an ancient Sumerian myth had a bad conscience concerning a world in which almost everybody continually eats everybody, when it told of an idyllic island, a pure, clean, bright land, where all nature was at peace, and where beasts of prey and tame cattle lived together in harmony and tranquility (Lieber 2001: 13-14). Also sickness and old age were unknown on this island called “Dilmun.” It is now identified with the modern island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. Likewise, the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic had known of a mythic garden of jewels, in which nobody eats anybody. The critical theorists shifted from Alpha to Omega, from creation story and ontology to eschatology, and considered the true creation to be at the end rather than at the beginning, precisely because of the danger of the religious ideological theodicy intrinsic to the tendency of creationism; to cover up, discuss away, or even legitimate as good the untruth of the world, the horror and terror of nature and history: tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes tornados, epidemics, man-eating sharks, lions, etc., not to speak of Auschwitz and Treblinka, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam and Iraq, etc, etc. (Bloch 1972; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 17, 25, 30; Kogon 1967: 616630; 1995; Baron 2007: 94-96; Stäblein 2007: 90-93).

Patience of the Cross The critical theorist Ernst Bloch stated in discourse about the difficult theme Revolution and Theology: The New in Our Age with social scientists,

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philosophers, and theologians on a Stuttgart radio-program on Easter Sunday of 1967, that the cross of Christianity was certainly a provocation (Matthew 27: 32-56; Hegel 1986q: 288-291; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; Kogon 1967: 622-624). However, the doubt concerning the cross was, for sure, also a provocation as well: and that even more so. Bloch rejected the connection: patience of the cross. Bloch remembered what Luther–not Thomas Müntzer–had said in Wittenberg: Cross-Cross, suffering-suffering was the Christian’s part. However, Luther said this to the revolutionary farmers so that they would stick to the feudal order (Bloch 1972; Kogon 1967: 622-624; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2008a; 2008b; 2008c). These farmers had enough cross already without the Pauline theology of the cross. According to Bloch, the 10,000 slaves who were crucified along the Via Appia after the victory of the Roman army over Spartacus, also did not need first the Pauline theology in order to know what the cross was all about. Bloch pointed out that none of those slaves rose from the dead. Bloch remembered that Luther did not tell the feudal lords that cross and suffering were the part of being Christian. Their suffering was not so overwhelming after all: particularly not their external suffering. The latter was the worst and at least the most concrete for the masses of human beings, who were not really getting to the other, the internal, spiritual suffering (Horkheimer 1987b: 440-441; Kogon 1967: 622-624).

Ideological Use of Patience Bloch was utterly tired of the strongly counter-revolutionary, restorative, conformist, eye-smearing and–we may add today in the capitalist financial crisis of February 2010–neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideological use, or rather abuse, of patience (Bloch 1972; Horkheimer1988d: chap. 2; Kogon 1967: 622-624; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2008a; 2008b; 2008c). Bloch asked those critical Christians, like Sölle, Moltmann, the Berrigan and Cardinal Brothers, Metz, and others, –whose interest it was that all those who labored and were overburdened, degraded, humiliated, insulted, and offended, shortly, the lower classes in civil society, show patience, even revolutionary patience, but not the fist–if they could not at least become sensitive for the, to say it courteously and politely, misunderstandings that have resulted not from theology, but rather from the cross-theology-morality. Bloch remembered that such ideological patience tendencies had been visible already since Paul from Tarsus in the first primordial Jewish-Apocalyptic Paradigm of Christianity, which let slaves be kept in line by their masters in the framework of Christian brotherhood

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(Matthew 11: 28-30; Kogon 622-625; Sölle 1974; Küng 1994a: 89-144). Paul did not yet tell the slaves–like Augustine, the Father of the Medieval Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity 400 years later, after the Constantinian turn–to love their masters (Küng 1994a 336-601). Paul also did not yet tell the slaves–as did Thomas Aquinas to the serfs–that they are mere tools and instruments of their masters, and that they could be beaten by them when they did not obey. Paul did not yet tell the slaves, as did the Jesuit journal Abside still in the 1960s, that God was not a God of the workers but rather of the owners. According to Bloch, with this motive that the slaves, serfs, or wage laborers may under no circumstances move or stir, Christianity recommended itself, at least from the Apologists of the second century on, as an Empire religion, in difference from the Stoa, and maybe even from Aristotle, which would help to make sure that the slaves would remain conformed to their domination (Hegel 1986g: 259, 300; 1986j: 301; 1986k: 469; 1986l: 31, 78, 106, 267, 288, 322, 399, 332, 485; 1986r: 523, 544, 552, 554; 1986s: 255-296, 314, 317, 335, 338, 339, 340-341, 342-343, 344-346, 357, 388, 411, 570; 1986t: 12-13, 26, 31, 42, 45-47, 262, 300, 376, 379, 401, 455, 483, 457, 483, 498, 505; Resing 2007: 27-31). There was with Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, or Abside no mention of the rest of Christianity, which may have been engaged in the liberation of the slaves, serfs, or wage laborers, except during heresy tribunals (Eco 1983; 2000). Of course, if the Church had acted otherwise, the Empires would have struck back–not licet esse vos–as the American Empire did in recent decades through its state-terrorists trained in the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, in Central America, and produced large numbers of martyrs, including Archbishop Romero and four nuns, two of them Maryknoll sisters, who had been my students, and six Jesuit professors, and 70,000 laypeople often from Basic Christian Communities, in fascist El Salvador alone. Certainly, the survival rate of those religions that harmonize their critical, polemical, and revolutionary message is higher. The same is true for positivistic academic Departments of Religion or Theology (Marcuse 1962: 65-66; 1970: 3-11). For Bloch, the I am the resurrection and the life, and See, I shall make all things new, were only slogans and catchphrases with which Christianity became under Emperor Constantine the Empire religion (John 11: 25; Revelation 21: 5; Küng 1994a: 145-335; Resing 2007: 27-31). According to Bloch, these were doubtful, dangerous and risky historical traces that had to sensitize everybody. Bloch rejected the patience of the cross and the expression eschatologia crucis.

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The Prodigal Son Of all of Jesus’ parables, Pope Benedict XVI most of all likes the very critical and polemical one about the Prodigal Son (Luke 15: 13-31; Ratzinger/ Benedict XVI 2006; Resing 2007: 103-105). According to this parable, there was a father who had two sons. The younger son left his father’s house and wasted all his inheritance. The other, older son stayed at home. The younger son, who had sinned but had returned home, was enthusiastically received by his father. The older son, who stayed at home, was disappointed because he did not receive a reward for his faithfulness and his uprightness. Self-critically, the Pope identified himself and the believing people of the Church with the older son, who stayed at home. On Sunday morning, June 22, 1941, when the Operation Barbarossa began and 3 million German troops broke into Soviet territory, I played the socialist poet Andre Gide’s Prodigal Son in the St. Albertus Church in Frankfurt a.M., Germany (Kershaw 2001: chap. 9). According to Gide, the younger son who returned home told his even younger brother, to try it out with the world as well. The play was immediately repressed by the Church out of fear of the Nazi authorities. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, it seems that those people, who represent the critical, polemical and revolutionary content of Christianity or other world religions, sometimes even against the ecclesiastical authorities, should be allowed to identify themselves self-critically with the two younger sons in Gide’s play as they are driven by the insatiable longing for that which is otherwise, and ultimately for the wholly Other than the at least partially cursed finitude (Genesis 3: 22-24; Horkheimer 1974c: 91-92, 106-107; 1985g: chaps 17, 29, 37, 40; b 1987b: 351, 397, 401-402, 426, 381-382).

Auschwitz According to Bloch, one did not have to be a theologian in order to comprehend Auschwitz (Kogon 1967: 623-624; 1995). One did not have to have a theologia crucis in order to know that there is evil enough in the world. One had not only to go to Golgatha in order to recognize evil. That Skull Hill had many very rich representatives on earth. For Bloch, the active hope ignited itself from the unbearable, unworthy negative, in order to give a push into Satan’s back, as the old Order of the Templars used to say in the Middle Ages. The reaction, which the negative has brought about, as for example, in the theologia crucis in its Pauline form, was that wherever the negative appeared in completely absurd form, supposedly as

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the wholly Other, it would be justified by the statement–My thoughts are not your thoughts, My ways are not your ways. Wherever this resignation of the servile understanding entered the picture–You do not understand this!–there has emerged the question among the simple people: Where is God?

The Tears of the Children Bloch quoted Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (Kogon 1967: 623624; Dostoevsky 1950). Bloch remembered the discourse between Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov in the tavern, where Ivan Karamazov told the story of a farmer woman, whose children had been torn to pieces by the bloodhounds of the gracious feudal lord for absolutely nothing. That reminded Bloch of Golgotha. The mother stood by weeping and screaming. Now, when the Last Judgment comes and all becomes clear, and not only the angles but all the redeemed people sing: Just are you, O Lord, because manifest have become all your ways, and even the mother embraces the feudal lord–this beast who let her children be torn to pieces–because everything has become manifest, and all is done for the best and for the good, then as a man of honor, Ivan Karamazov will not cooperate. He will engage in the great refusal. As a man of honor, Ivan Karamazov rejects the entrance ticket to the Day of Judgment because the tears of the children have not been bought out. If all this misery, cross, blood, and murder was necessary as manure in order to fertilize the ultimate harmony, then Ivan Karamazov says: that it is not of worth to him because the tears of the children have not been bought out. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, also Auschwitz or Treblinka cannot be bought out or justified by the creation of the modern state of Israel, or by anything else. Also Hamburg or Dresden, Hiroshima or Nagasaki, cannot receive meaning from the creation of the European Union or of a new democratic Japan.

No Peace with the Cross For Bloch, Dostoevsky’s story about the Brothers Karamasow was also a reaction, which stood against the former reaction of mere resignation, and which precisely did not make peace with the cross (Hegel 1986q: 289292; Kogon 1967: 624). Bloch remembered that in the history of theology, there had still been another theology of the cross, namely, that of Marcion, and even that of Gregory of Nyssa, a man of perfect integrity. According

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to this other theology of the cross, the negative, the evil, did not come from God. It was not sent by God, but rather by Satan. Also, the light of this other theology has been extinguished again. Bloch suspected that with this that may be, but–indeed that is not nice, but think of the good that is there also and maybe you will make yourself particularly worthy of the good as you take the suffering upon yourself, and indeed, there is Golgotha, but after two days there comes the guaranteed resurrection, and Golgotha was necessary because it leads to the resurrection–was always connected a political motive that needed justification. As such means, the apologetics, the theodicy, the apology of the negative, were highly justified in order to gild something, and in order to gloss things over, and in order not to go to the roots of things. If the negative could not be justified with the understanding or reason, then there was still the wholly Other of the Barthian dialectical theology, in which the thing dissolved into lemonade (Kogon 1967: 624; Horkheimer 1991f: 423-428). Bloch was against lemonade of this ideological kind. To be sure, here Bloch argued against the wholly Other of Karl Barth’s and his friends dialectical theology, and not against Adorno’s, Benjamin’s, and Horkheimer’s other, inverse cipher theology of the totally Other as the radical, but still determinate negation of the negativity of the overwhelming horror and terror of nature and history, which was radically hostile to all forms of gilding, or instrumentalization of the negative in nature or society, and which never made any peace with the cross as means of social control (Adorno 1970b: 103-161; Benjamin 1977: chaps 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1991f: 423-424; 1991f: 423-428; Kogon 1967: 624; Habermas 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Borradori 2003; Siebert 1986, 1987c; 1987d; 1993; 1994c; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2003a; 2003b; 2004a; 2005c; 2006a; 2006b; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2008a; 2008b). Of course, persons and communities that are driven by the insatiable longing for the entirely Other will nevertheless continue to experience and feel in antagonistic civil society that things do not fit, and that the bad infinity goes on, and that they must live disconsolately at least to some extent. However, their longing will not distract them from engaging practically and actively with all available methods and techniques in the negation of the negativities–the contradictions–of late capitalist society, after they have called them by their name, but will also encourage, strengthen and sustain them in the struggle for post-modern alternative Future III–a free and just society. (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; 1987e: 241-242, 248-250, 253-256, 268-269, 269-272, 1991f: 190-191, 195, 199-200, 203-204, 319-321, 329-331; Küng 1994a: 904-905; App. C, D, E,

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F, G). It is the bad ideological religion that makes peace with the cross, and which thus also elicits events like the one of August 12, 2007, when a man broke into the service of a Micronesian congregation renting space from the First Congregational Church in Neosho, Missouri, U.S.A. and killed the pastor and two church elders, and wounded five others, while he was shouting: You liars, you are all liars! (Callebs and Skamenca 2007). It is the task of the critical theory of religion to differentiate sharply between such bad and good religion, and to negate the former and to affirm the latter (Horkheimer 1985l: 261, 263-264, 277-278, 294-296, 303-306, 313-314; 1987k: 268-269, 277-280, 289-328, 345-408, 1988n: 37, 38, 50, 52-53, 57, 66-67, 76, 77, 78-79, 90-91, 97, 117, 122, 123, 124, 126, 129-130, 133-134, 138-139, 152, 162-163, 165, 222, 236, 278, 304-305, 321-322, 330-331, 338, 346, 363, 369-370, 404, 405-406, 445-447, 458-459, 466, 469-470, 499-501, 513-514, 517, 527-528, 530-531, 535-536; 1991f: 319321, 324, 329-331, 340-341, 389-390, 394-395).

Between Magic and Positivism On the basis of his secularized theological motive to call things by their name, in a letter on November 10, 1938, Adorno criticized Benjamin’s Passage-Work for leaving open and even out not only theology in favor of Brecht’s abstract atheism, but also his own critical theory of society (Adorno 1970b: 137-138; Benjamin 1978a; 1978b; 1978c; 1978d; 1983a: 45-59, 60-78; 1983b: 655-1066; 1990; Brecht 1961; 1980; 1993a; 1993b; Willett 1994). According to Adorno, such leaving open or out of the critical theory affected its very opposite: the empirical dimension. On one hand, it gave the empirical sphere a deceptive epical character, and on the other hand it deprived the phenomena, as just merely subjectively experienced ones, of their proper historical-philosophical weight. In Adorno’s perspective, the theological motive of calling things by their name or its secular inversion in Benjamin’s Passage Work turned tendentially over into the astonishing and amazing portrayal or depiction of the mere facticity. For Adorno, Benjamin’s Passage-Work was settled and established at the cross road of magic and positivism. (Hegel 1986p: 259-301; Horkheimer 1974c: 101-104, 116-117; Adorno 1970a; 1970b b: 139-140; 1980a: 7-80, chaps. 1, 3, 5, 7). According to Adorno, this place was entirely bewitched. Only the critical theory could break the ban or the spell of this location, which for Adorno meant Benjamin’s own inconsiderate, reckless, ruthless, speculative, dialectical, critical theory. It was the matter and wish of Benjamin’s critical theory alone that Adorno wanted to register,

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announce, and declare against Benjamin himself. In terms of this critical theory, and the inverse cipher theology contained in it, religious contents, for example, humanity being made in the image or likeness of God, could be inverted or be translated and could thus migrate into a secular enlightenment content, such as, the dignity of man (Genesis1: 26; Lieber 2001: 9; Hegel 1986q: 55-57, 92-94; Habermas 2001a: 29-31; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2007).

Test In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, we can speak of Model II as a historical-materialistic inversion model, in the framework of which the dialectic of faith and knowledge, revelation and autonomous reason, could at least be kept open, and maybe even reconciled in a more or less distant future on the basis of a religious as well as secular form of the longing for the wholly Other than what is the case in nature and history (Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; 1988n: 369-370, 405-406, 418, 466, 481, 491, 498-499, 499-501, 503-504, 507-509, 510-512, 527-528, 536; 1996s: 62-67; App. F). This inversion model contains a test for the religious contents (Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1990: 14-15). Only those religious meanings in the depth of the mythos that could change, and which were able to migrate into the secular discourses and the social, economic and political actions, could possibly survive into the secular modern or post-modern alternative Future III (Flechtheim 1971; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1990: 1415; App. G). The dialectical sociologists of religion considered the semantic and semiotic materials and potentials in the depth of the mythos to be limited, and therefore an endangered resource, and precisely therefore in need of being rescued as expressions of the non-temporaneous in the contemporaneous, for the sake of the humanity of human beings: for example, elements from the Bhagavad-gita, from the Babylonian or Hebrew Genesis, from the Book Exodus, from the Decalogue, from the Book of Job, from the Psalms, from the Five Pillars, from the Sermon on the Mount, from the Story of the Good Samaritan, from the Book of Revelation, and so on. (Prabhupada 1974; Exodus 20; Matthew 5-7; Hegel 1986p; 1986q: 340-344; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969; Horkheimer 1971; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 25, 26, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Adorno 1970b; 1993a; 1993b; 1993c; 1994; 1997j/2: 608-617; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; Fromm 1976: chap. 9; Marcuse 1966: part III; Dirks 1985; Habermas 1986; 1988a: 59-60, 277-279; 1990: 9-18; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007;

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McCarthy 1994; Borradori 2003; Honneth 1990; 1994; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng 1990; 1991a; 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 2002; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; Küng/Kuschel 1993b; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008).

Religious Renaissances In his discourse with the Catholic thinkers Eugen Kogon and Walter Dirks about Revelation and Autonomous Reason at the University of Münster, Münster, Germany, in 1957, Adorno stated that the religious renaissances of today looked to him more like philosophy of religion and not like religion as such (Adorno 1997j/2: 608-617; Habermas 1990: 14; Siebert 2005c). According to Adorno, these renaissances agreed with the apologetics of the 18th and early 19th centuries, but they intended through rational reflection to conjure its very opposite. Now, after World War II, this happened through the rational reflection on the ratio itself, with a smoldering readiness to beat on it, and with an inclination toward obscurantism. That was much more malicious and malignant than all the limited orthodoxy of the 18th and early 19th centuries, because it did not really believe and trust in itself any longer. For Habermas, that statement by Adorno of 1957 already fit a neo-conservative compensation theory of 1990, which justified functionalistically the religious powers of tradition. Adorno also insisted against a negativistic critique of reason, which crossed itself out as critique, so as not to break off the dialectic of the enlightenment too early and prematurely (Horkheimer 1987e: 13-238, 248-250, 153-256, 453-457). Adorno admitted that self-reflection was demanded from a ratio, which did not absolutize itself wickedly as obstinate and stubborn means of domination, and that the religious need of 1957 expressed something of that demand. However, so Adorno insisted, this self-reflection of reason could not stand still at the mere defeatist negation of thought through itself: at a kind of mythical sacrifice. It also could not happen through a mere unmediated Kierkegaardian paradoxical qualitative leap into the absolutely Other, which was only too similar to the fascist catastrophe politics in World War II (Adorno 1962: 217-218; 1997j/2: 608-617; Habermas 1990: 14). In 1957, this sentence of Adorno was rather directed against the leap into a philosophically disguised revelation, as supposedly practiced by Dirks and Kogon. It was not yet directed against the in 1990 widely spread praise of a this-worldly polytheism and neopagan mythologies, as was done in 1990 and continues into the 21st century. The critical theorists have replaced the Kierkegaardian leap of faith

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with their own longing for the totally Other than the finite world of nature and history (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1962: 217-218; 1997j/2: 608-617; Habermas 1990: 14).

The Mythology of Reason The critical theory of religion and Model II are much closer to Hegel’s, Hölderlin’s and Schelling’s idealistic program of the mythology of reason of Frankfurt a.M. in 1800 and to Model I than to the this-worldly polytheism, propagated in the 20th and 21st centuries first under fascist and then under neo-conservative auspices, which renounces the majority of the autonomous subject (Jamme/Schneider 1984: 13-14; Habermas 1990: 14-15). The idealistic friends had looked for the union of a monotheism of reason and of the heart, on one hand, and a polytheism of the imagination and of the arts on the other. Mythology had to become philosophical, and people had to become rational. In that way, the old antagonism between the educated and uneducated people could be reconciled (Jamme/ Schneider 1984: 13-14; App. F). Philosophy had to become mythological in order for the philosophers to become sensuous. A higher spirit, sent from Heaven, had to found and to cause this new religion among the idealistic friends and among the people. It would be the last great work of humanity! The critical theorists from Horkheimer and Adorno to Habermas and beyond have emphasized what has connected the monotheism of the three Abrahamic religions on one hand, with the radical modern enlightenment on the other: namely that Transcendence–the wholly Other, which held the world together (Adorno 1970b: 103-161; Horkheimer 1985h: chaps. 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1990: 15; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006). This moment of unreified Transcendence gave first of all to the Ego, which was held captive in his or her world as a whole, that distance and thereby a perspective, without which individual autonomy and universal solidarity could not be achieved on the foundation of the human potential of language and memory, and the evolutionary universal of mutual recognition (Hegel 1972; 1979; Habermas 1986: 54; 99, 125-126; 1990: 15; 2006a; 2006b; Henrich 2007: 389-402; App. C, D, E). This reconciling moment of Transcendence between the religious and the secular did in no way weaken the test through which every religious content had to go, in order to be able to survive into Modernity and Post-Modernity. However, this secularizing integration of theological contents into the universe of argumentative speech and of autonomous and solidary living together was the very opposite of a neo-pagan regression behind that self-understanding

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of autonomy and solidarity, which had entered history first of all with the prophetic teachings of the three Abrahamic religions (Habermas 1986: 54, 99, 125-126; 1990: 15; 1991a: 91-156; 2006a; 2006b; Henrich 2007: 389402; Küng 1991a; 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 1998; 2002; 2003; 2004).

The Myth of the 20th Century I encounter again today–in February 2010–inside and outside of the religion departments of the universities of the American Empire, the Nordic, neo-pagan Aryan mythologies that I had once to learn by heart with all their gods–Wotan, Freya, and so on–not to speak of the participation in the corresponding mass cults–baptisms, weddings, funerals, equinoctial feasts, and so on–in the schools of the Third German Empire. This new Aryan enthusiasm is in no way less regressive than the old one, and no less damaging for human sovereignty and solidarity (Hitler 1943: 150, 153, 290, 291, 294-300, 304, 308, 309, 383, 391, 393, 427, 447, 452, 497, 561, 562, 640, 648; Trevor-Roper 1988: 3, 10, 76; Taylor 1962: 102, 212; Reich 1971; Gellately 2002; Mosse 2000; Cohen 1972: 259-395; Habermas 1990: 14-15; Kershaw 2001: xxix, 42, 43, 131, 146; Kogon 1995). In Nazi Germany, even the Jew Jesus of Nazareth was made into an Aryan, because he was a great man, and a great man could not possibly be a Jew (Trevor-Roper 1988: 76; Reich 1976). Heinrich Himmler, who had an honorary doctorate in anthropology, sent SS scholars up to Tibet in order to discover the origins of the Aryan race (Trevor-Roper 1988: 29, 58, 79, 87, 94, 106, 111, 128, 167, 240, 401, 402, 404, 405, 410, 434, 459, 540, 598). Adolf Hitler, who had the justified suspicion that the old Germanic tribes east of the Rhine and Main Rivers would not compare and compete very well with the Roman or any other high civilization, disagreed with Himmler’s research project as well as with Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Cohen 1972: chaps. 54. 56; Trevor-Roper 1988: 29, 58, 79, 87, 94, 106, 111, 128, 130, 142, 145, 167, 240, 381, 401, 402, 404, 405, 410, 422, 434, 459, 479, 540, 555, 572, 598, 648, 649, 655). On April 11th, 1942 in the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia, Hitler did not regard Rosenberg’s work as an expression of the official doctrine of the NSDAP. The moment the book appeared, Hitler deliberately refrained from recognizing it. In the first place, its title gave a completely false impression. There was, indeed, no question for Hitler of confronting the conceptions of the nineteenth century with the so-called myth of the 20th century, and we may add today–in February 2010–of the twenty-first century. Accord-

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ing to Hitler, a National Socialist should affirm that the faith and science of our times–the 20th century–is opposed to the myth of the nineteenth century. It was interesting for Hitler to note that comparatively few older members of the NSDAP were to be found among the readers of Rosenberg’s book, and that the publishers had in fact great difficulty in disposing of the first edition. It was only when the book was mentioned in a Pastoral Letter, that the sales began to go up, and the first 10,000 copies were sold. In short, the second edition was launched by Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich, who was clumsy enough to attack Rosenberg at a Synod of Bishops and to cite quotations from his book. Also, placing of the book on the Index as a work of heresy on the part of the NSDAP, merely gave additional impetus to its sale. By the time the Church had finally published all its commentaries in refutation of Rosenberg’s ideas, The Myth of the Twentieth Century had sold its two hundred thousandth copy. It gave Hitler considerable pleasure to realize that the book had been closely studied only by the opponents of National Socialism. Like most of the Gauleiters, so also Hitler himself had merely glanced cursorily at it. In Hitler’s opinion, the book was in any case written in much too abstruse a style. For once, Hitler was correct. However, during the development of the Barbarossa operation, Hitler ordered, nevertheless, that his troops should treat the inhabitants of the Caucasus gently, since they were the ancestors of the Aryans, in spite of the fact that their complexion was rather dark. In any case, only three years later, in 1945, Himmler betrayed Hitler to the Western Allies when he started armistice negotiations with them. When he was captured by the British army in northern Germany, disguised in the uniform of a simple German soldier, he committed suicide. Rosenberg was arrested and charged as war criminal, and he was sentenced to death during the Nürnberg Trial, and hanged in 1946, without having changed his racial views on the American Blacks, or on the Jews, or on slave labor (Persico 1994: 25, 30, 42, 47, 49, 151, 163, 210-211, 212, 214, 241, 310, 211, 322, 366, 388, 398, 403, 416, 426. 438-439). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, after the catastrophe of the myth of the 20th century, it does not make any sense whatsoever to create a new myth of the 21st century for the purpose of the re-enchantment of the life world and the system. To the contrary, the process of demythologization, meaning that of enlightenment, has to be continued under all circumstances (Habermas 1986: 54, 99, 125-126; 1990: 15; 1991a: 91-156; 2006a; 2006b; 1976; 1990: 15; 1991a: 91-156; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Henrich 2007: 389402).

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chapter nine America and Constitutional Patriotism

America is not really the land of a regressive, neo-pagan, Aryan mythology and polytheism, nor is Russia, or the Slavic World, in spite of all temptations to the contrary (Hegel 1986a: 218; 1986l: 107-115, 413, 418, 422, 490-491, 500, 513; 1986g: 465; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; Habermas 1990: 9-18; Levy 2007; Stäblein 2007: 90-93; Joas 2007: 27-31). America is rather still the land of the enlightenment, and thus of demythologization, pragmatism, and disenchantment, in spite of its neo-conservative trend turn and movement, and the neo-liberal Administrations in Washington D.C., with its secret history of the American Empire, its economic hit-men, its Jackals, their global corruption, and the attempts of the Religious Right to hijack the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution (Levy 2007; Stäblein 2007: 90-93; Joas 2007: 27-31; Dershowitz 2007; Perkins 2007). America is rather still the land of the future for the longing of masses of people from many different races, nationalities, and ethnic groups around the globe, and in which the world-historical importance beyond Europe will reveal itself. It is still where humanity will continue to discover nature and itself, and where post-modern secular alternative Future III–the reconciliation of the particular and the universal, the individual and the collective, personal autonomy and universal solidarity–will be realized (Hegel 1986a: 218; 1986l: 107-115, 413, 418, 490-491, 513; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; App. G). America is the land where the Jewish critical theorists of society, and many other intellectuals from different races, ethnic groups, and religious communities, found refuge from European fascism (Wiggershaus 1987: chaps. 1-4). The neo-conservative President Bush junior, the phallocrat, who was born in order to become like his father, without elegance, and who has been engaged in the most costly revenge of the little man, and in a catastrophic politics in the Near East and elsewhere, and under whom the Aryan mythology is blooming again, is not the true America, but only a tragic moment in its history (Levy 2007; Stäblein 2007: 90-93), For over half a century, the real tendency in the U.S.A. has not pointed to the Right, but rather to the Left (Franken 2003; Levy 2007; Stäblein 2007: 90-93). In the past 50 years, there has taken place in the U.S.A. a strong democratic and progressive movement, in terms of civil rights, the equality of rights, the rights of women, the rights of minorities. Admittedly, inside of this tendency there has existed a struggle of the arriere-garde: the last fight of the beast, the old stupid Right, with the name Bush. On August 13, 2007, Karl Rove, the President’s closest advisor and brain, resigned. One of the last rats left the sinking ship!

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President Bush junior is not the essence of the American history, but only a regressive turn of fate. America is not the land of Martin Heidegger’s very effective fascist interpretation, no matter how much he is studied at American universities; and it must not proceed–as he predicted–toward post-modern alternative Future I and become a technocratic monstrosity, which distances and separates humanity from the truth, from authenticity, from blood and soil, and its original nature (Heidegger 2001; Adorno 1997f: 413-523; Levy 2007; Stäblein 2007: 90-93; App. G). Long before Heidegger, America had been the nightmare of the Romantics, and of Johann Gottfried Herder, and of all those who believe that the nation constitutes a community that rests on biological descent and is deeply rooted in nature (Hegel 1986a: 201, 215; 1986b: 357; 1996h: 270; 1986k: 279, 311; 1986h: 349; 1986o: 288, 405, 432; 1986r: 21; Levy 2007; Stäblein 2007: 9093). America has been such a nightmare for the romantics because it has proven that there exists another type of community. America is put together out of people from Africa, Asia, Near East and Europe, Protestants, Catholics, Jews and Muslims of all colors of skin, who have nothing in common except that someday they decided, naively, in the sense of Jean Jacques Rousseau, to give themselves a constitution (Hegel 1986a: 56, 74, 85, 438; 1986g: 80, 239, 304, 400; 1986h: 312-313; 1986k: 278; 1986l: 61, 419; 1986r: 358; 1986s: 129; 1986t: 275, 290, 294, 300, 306-308, 311, 331, 365, 413; Levy 2007; Stäblein 2007: 90-93). If this constitutional America functions, then Herder and Heidegger have been wrong. That precisely elicits among the followers of Herder and Heidegger an unbelievable rage, fury and hatred that takes the form of an Anti-Americanism, and also an Anti-Semitism particularly in France and Germany against America, which denies their nationalistic law and principle, according to which only the descent from one common mother can form a nation. Here we Americans say no! According to Americans, people can form a nation because they believe in common constitutional principles, a piece of paper that they call a constitution. America–that is what Habermas calls constitutional patriotism (Habermas 1990, parts IV, V). Not Herder or Heidegger, but Kant or better still, Hegel may be–as Walt Whitman asserted–the great philosopher, who the great American constitutional nation needs, to be sure in determinately negated form (Kant 1965; Hegel 1986a: 74, 188, 230. 232, 234, 254, 299, 301, 325-326, 359, 443; 1986b: 9-10, 11, 51, 70, 80-81, 90, 103-104, 103-104, 141-154, 164, 538-539, 566, 575, 582, 582, 582, 582, 583; 1986c: 489; 1986d: 407, 422; 1986g: 12, 48, 55, 56, 84, 110, 111-112, 124, 161, 182, 230, 314, 309, 319, 338, 417, 436, 443, 492493; Whitman 1950; Habermas 1976; 1986: 54, 99, 125-126; 1990: 15, part

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V; 1991a: 91-156; 1992a; 2006a; 2006b; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Henrich 2007: 389-402; Levy 2007; Stäblein 2007: 90-93).

Three Secular Futures In Dubrovnik and Yalta, we learned from the critical theorist and futurologist Ossip Flechtheim–who often came to the IUC in Dubrovnik, as well as from Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse and Fromm, and Habermas and others, –who belonged to the Circle of Cordula, an island south of Dubrovnik, which came to an end because of a lack of hospitality in 1977 when our Dubrovnik Circle started–to see the three post-modern Futures of Religion: fundamentalism, secularism, and reconciliation of both, in the wider context of the three secular post-modern global Futures: total bureaucratization, entire militarization, and full reconciliation of civil society’s antagonisms beyond the globalizing monopoly and oligopoly capitalism, and its necrophilous metaphysics, and its ideological weapons of death, which have been the main objects of the critical political theology inside and outside of the Frankfurt School (Hegel 1986a: 218; 1986g: 465; 1986l: 107-115, 422, 413, 418, 490-491, 500, 513; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; Marx 1961c: 873-874; Cooper 1925; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Flechtheim 1959; 1962; 1966; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Vilmar 1979; Marcuse 1966; Fromm 1968; Hinkelammert 1985; Toffler 1972; 1980; Reimer 1992; Ott 2007; App. G). Since the secular alternative Futures I, II, and III do not yet exist, they cannot possibly be the objects of empirical scientific research. Yet, what does exist and can already be explored empirically are trends and tendencies in the present life world and system of civil society toward the three secular post-modern alternative Futures. We discovered social, economic, political, scientific, and technological trends in modern antagonistic bourgeois society that point toward global Future I: the totally administered society in a positivistic-technocratic, socialistic, or fascist form. We identified militaristic trends in modern constitutional states that aim at global Future II–conventional wars and civil wars, NBC wars, ecological catastrophes connected or not connected with them, and maybe even a third world war as the result of the collision of still religiously guided civilizations as predicted by Samuel Huntington, the student of Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. (Groh 1998; Meier 1994). Finally, we discovered in the life world of modern civil and socialist societies, including families, neighborhoods, schools, artistic, religious, and philosophical associations, tendencies toward global Future III–a society characterized by the reconciliation

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of personal sovereignty and universal solidarity, and a friendly and peaceful living together of all people.

Probability, Possibility, Desirability In terms of Model II, while global Future I–the totally bureaucratized and computerized signal society–may in many ways be more just than the present liberal democratic or socialist societies, it may also be more alienated (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Flechtheim 1959; 1962; 1966; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Vilmar 1979; Marcuse 1966; Fromm 1968; Toffler 1972; 1980; App. G). In this global Future I, religion may be able to continue to exist, but only as contingency-experiencemanagement-subsystem, without any wisdom, mystical, or prophetic aspects (Luhmann 1977; Yandell 1971; App. E, G). In global Future II–the totally militarized society, religion will be administered by army chaplains, who serve as moral officers, or it will be destroyed through this barbarous ideological abuse together with other social and cultural elements. In global Future III–the reconciled society, religion could possibly survive in a new critical communicative form, which would function as corrective against possible regressive tendencies. While global Futures I and II are not very desirable, they are, nevertheless, very probable and possible. Global Future II had become less probable and possible after the Soviet Union refused to continue the nuclear armament race with the United States and Western Europe, and disintegrated in a nationalist explosion together with Yugoslavia in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Horkheimer 1996s: 2831; App. G). However, global Future II has become more probable and possible again after the Hindu Right-wing party took power in New Deli, and ignited five nuclear devices, and after a Muslim government in Pakistan followed its bad example, supposedly in self-defense, and exploded five nuclear devices of its own. There was now not only a Christian atomic bomb called Trinity, but also a Hindu and an Islamic nuclear bomb. Before the creation of the Islamic bomb, Israel already had a Jewish bomb and also South Africa had already nuclear weapons. There were other events that made alternative Future II again more possible and probable: The U.S.A. did not disarm, and there was no peace dividend after the victorious neo-conservative counter-revolution of 1989. The NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia, which cost the lives of thousands of non-combatants, has further increased again the possibility and probability of the nuclear version of global Future II. Since the explosions of 10 nuclear devices in India and Pakistan and the dismantling NATO attack on Yugoslavia with

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all its repercussions in the Slavic population of Eastern Europe, the nuclear threat has come closer again. This has become particularly true after: the first American led war against Iraq in 1990; after September 11, 2001, and the American led war against Afghanistan and the beginning of the most tragic second American war against Iraq in 2003; the Israeli war against Lebanon; the American psychological warfare against Iran, and in general the whole, so-called global war against terror. Now radical Islam has been identified as the enemy instead of communism. In August 2007, the 2008 Democratic Presidential candidates have discussed publicly whether they–in case of being elected–would be willing and ready to use nuclear weapons in order to resolve the conflicts of the Middle East, particularly in relation to Iran. Those candidates, who do not want to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances, are called naïve. There are also the issues of socialism again rising in Central and Latin America, as well as the economic successes of communist China, which are perceived as a threat by the American bourgeoisie, against which it may have to protect its interests and itself in an extreme case with nuclear weapons. All these very different events or prospects have moved the nuclear “doomsday clock”, devised by the Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 at the dawn of the nuclear age, up closer toward 12 o’clock again (Cornwell 2007). While global Future III is very desirable, it is unfortunately not very probable or possible under the present world-historical circumstances in liberal democratic and socialist societies: particularly not in the present American and Slavic world.

The Tasks During its evolution through the past 31 years, the dialectical religiology has, nevertheless, established for itself a variety of tasks in the direction of alternative Future III: the reconciled society (Reimer 1992; Ott 2007; App. G). It has to maintain and strengthen the longing for light, friendship and love, for alternative Future III, and ultimately for the wholly Other (Horkheimer 1988a: 100-157; 1985g: chaps. 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40; 1996s: chaps. 3, 4, 5). It has to clarify and differentiate religious phenomena. It has to promote emancipation inside and outside the religious dimension. It has to broaden the positivistically and naturalistically limited, restrained, and even crippled notion of human experience (Habermas 1986: 54, 99, 125-126; 1990: 14- 15; 1991a; 1991b; 1991c; 1992b; 1997a; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007; Henrich 2007: 389-402). It has to help to translate religion newly for Modernity and for

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a new Post-Modern world (Habermas 2001c; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006). It has to overcome the inhuman aspects of the positivistic and naturalistic attitude in the different expert cultures, particularly those dealing with human nature and religion (Habermas 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2005; Light/Wilson 2004). It is to call for revolutionary resistance in the case of acute religiously or secularly motivated, supported, and justified fascism, or neo-fascism, or what Benito Mussolini had called corporatism, i.e. a combination of corporate and state power: established in antagonistic civil society through emergency laws made necessary through a catastrophic financial and economic crisis like the one of September 2008 (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 37, 38, 39, 40; Marcuse 1960: 389-420; Habermas 1976; 2003b; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; Borradori 2003; Byrd 2007a; 2007b; Hedges 2006; 2006; Perkins 2007; Klein 2007; Scahill 2007). Under more peaceful liberal-democratic conditions in modern civil society, the critical theory of religion has to be engaged in the critique as well as in the rescue of semantic and semiotic materials and potentials from the depth of the myths in a secular form for the secular world in its struggle against regression into mythology and barbarism (Adorno 1997j/2: 47-71, 87-122, 238-253, 264-288, 337345, 375-395, 555-572, 573-594, 608-616; Habermas 1976; 1987b: chaps. 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19; 1987c; 1988a; 1988b; 1990; 1991a: Part III; 1991c; 1992b; 1997a; 2001c; 2002; 2003b; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007). Thus, it has to work for the reconciliation of the religious and the secular in terms of Model II, or at least for keeping open of the dialectic between the sacred and the profane in the public discourse in civil, and socialist, and Islamic societies (Habermas 2001a; 2005; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Sölle/Habermas 1975; Sölle/Metz 1990; Siebert 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007). It, thereby, has to contribute indirectly to the reconciliation of the dichotomies between the genders, between the individual and the collective, between the social classes, between the races, between the nations, and of other antagonisms in modern civil, socialist and Islamic societies (App. F, G). Finally, the critical theory of religion must look for religious and secular ethical motivations to mitigate at least as much as possible global Future I, to resist as much as possible global Future II, and to promote as passionately as possible global Future III (Flechtheim 1959, 1962; 1966; 1971; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 2002; App. G).

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chapter nine Good versus Bad Religion

From 1977 on, my colleagues and I in my international course on the Future of Religion in the IUC, Dubrovnik, and in my international course on Religion and Civil Society in Yalta, have in yearly public discourses developed further the dialectical theory of religion (Reimer 1992; Ott 2007; Tsenyushkina 2000-2007). In these courses, we have concretely superseded the critical theories of religion, worked out not only by Habermas, but also by Bloch, Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm, Marcuse, SohnRethel, Flechtheim, Fetscher, Milan Machoveč, Roger Garaudy, Leszek Kolakowski, Brank Bosnjak–the first Yugoslav, socialist Co-Director of my course, and others, into our dialectical religiology (Schmidt 1972; Fetscher/Machoveč 1974). Like these authors we have critically emphasized and focused on good religion against bad religion (Horkheimer 1974c: 121-123, 125-126, 127, 131-132, 141-142, 148, 151-152). We have stressed religion of liberation against religion of domination (Marcuse 1960; 1962: 65-66; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a: 3-11; 1973; 1984; 1995; 2001). We have emphasized the most noble part in the world religions, without which they may very well not be worthy to be maintained but should rather be destroyed: their concern with the oppressed past; with the dead ancestors; with the fate of the innocent victims, who have never had their day in court; with the unlimited numbers of slaves, serfs and wage laborers, who–while they made the good life of their masters possible through the production of the surplus value–were, nevertheless, denied a good life of their own (Thompson/Held 1982: 238-250; App. C, D). We agreed fully with Horkheimer’s letter to Benjamin of March 16, 1936: The thought, that the prayers of the persecuted in direst need, that those of the innocents who must die without clarification of their situation, that the final hopes for a superhuman authority, are to no avail, and that the night, in which no human light shines, is also devoid of any divine light, is monstrous. Without God, eternal truth has just as little a foothold as infinite love-indeed they become unthinkable concepts. But is atrocity ever a cogent argument against the assertion or denial of a state of affairs? Does logic contain a law to the effect, that a judgment is false, when its consequences would be despair. (Thompson/Held 1982: 246-247; Peukert, 1976: 273-282; Lenhardt 1975)

In consequence, we have often supported the new political theology of Johann B. Metz, Gustavo Gutierrez, Jürgen Moltmann, Dorothy Sölle, Helmut Peukert, Edmund Arens, and others, rather than the traditional fascist political theology of Carl Schmitt, and others (Metz 1970; 1972a;

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1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; Groh 1998; Meier 1994). Because our critical theory of religion has been interdisciplinary from the very start, we have never had any difficulties to include in it–besides psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy–also theology, as well as all the living world religions, even the at the time most problematic one–Islam. Osama Bin Laden is not only a radical Muslim, but also a traitor to the capitalist class in Saudi Arabia, to which he originally belonged, as well as to the King and the nobility (Lawrence 2005; Byrd 2007a; 2007b). As such Bin Laden has identified with the poor, exploited and humiliated masses of the Arabic and Islamic states of Africa and the Near East–from Sudan through Khurasan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Palestine, to Iraq and Afghanistan, who cry out in their direst need Allah Akbar, and for whom Western modernization has no incentive. Among these poor Islamic masses Bin Laden and his Alcaida (The Base) movement has gained an enormous popularity and following in the recent decade. Likewise, in Christianity, the Basic Christian Communities and the Liberation Theologians have identified with the poor and exploited in Central and Latin America (Gutierrez 1971). In August 2007, a Catholic Bishop in Holland expressed the connection between Christianity and Islam by suggesting to the believers to call God Allah. Four hundred years ago, the Pope in Rome forbid the Jesuits to call God Tao (Hegel 1986p: 319-330). It remains to be seen how far multi-culturalism and thus de-Hellenization will be allowed to go in the Church, after such de-Hellenization had taken place already in the Protestant-Evangelical Paradigm of Christianity and during the bourgeois enlightenment and revolution in France (Hegel 1986l: 520-540; Küng 1994a: 602-741; Pope Benedict XVI 2005; 2006; 2007; Habermas/ Ratzinger 2006).

Against the Materialistic Atomistic While we were developing the critical theory of religion in our international discourse on the Future of Religion in the IUC, Dubrovnik, we became familiar through my friend, the late Ivan Supek–Heisenberg student, quantum physicist, partisan, novelist, the former President of the University of Zagreb, Croatia, founder of the IUC, and most generous supporter of our course–with the Dalmatian Jesuit Boscovich, in whose remembrance he built an institute (Nietzsche 1990: 15-19). Together with Copernicus, Boscovich had refuted atomistic materialism. Both scholars were the greatest and most victorious opponents of the apparent world, in distinction from the real world. While Copernicus persuaded people to believe against all

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their senses that the earth did not stand firm and solid, Boscovich taught them to renounce the belief in matter and in the earth-residual-and clotblob-atom. For Nietzsche, that was the greatest triumph over the senses that had ever been gained on earth. Nietzsche wanted to extend the victory of Copernicus and of Boscovich to the soul atomistic of Christianity. With this word, Nietzsche signified the belief, which took the soul as something nonexterminable, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atom (Plato 1955: 53141; Nietzsche 1990: 15-19). Nietzsche wanted to remove this belief from the sciences. However, Nietzsche did not engage in abstract but rather in determinate negation. Thus, for Nietzsche, it was not at all necessary to rid oneself of the soul itself, and thereby to renounce one of the oldest and most honorable hypotheses. That happened to the clumsiness of the naturalists, for example, the behaviorists a la B. F. Skinner, who lose the soul as soon as they touch it or transform it into a black box, in terms of a psychological agnosticism (Skinner 1974; Habermas 2005). For Nietzsche, the way to the new formation and refinement of the soul-hypothesis stood open. Nietzsche fought for the future civil rights of new notions of the soul in the sciences: like mortal soul, soul as subject-plurality, soul as social edifice of drives and affections. According to Nietzsche, as the new psychologist finished up the superstition, which so far had grown wildly around the soul representation with an almost tropical luxuriance, he admittedly pushed himself, so to speak, into a new wasteland and into a new mistrust, distrust and suspicion. Nietzsche considered it possible that the older psychologists had had it more comfortable, amusing, funny and cheerful than the new psychologists, who knew that ultimately they were sentenced and destined to invent and maybe even to discover and to find new aspects of the psyche. In Dubrovnik and Yalta throughout three decades we allowed great scholars, like Copernicus and Boscovich, Nietzsche and Supek, to inspire, guide, and encourage us to go beyond them, and not only to invent, but also to find, and to discover new elements and aspects in religion, as well as in modern and post-modern secular enlightenment. Ivan Supec, who unlike his brother Rudi Supec was never a member of the communist party, believed like his teacher Heisenberg and in opposition to Albert Einstein that God did indeed gamble in his creation, and that there was an element of freedom and thus newness already present in every atom. Ivan concluded from this quantum-physical insight analogically that also every human person had the potential and the right to be free and to discover and to do new things also in Tito’s Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. When Ivan was asked to build the atomic bomb for Yugoslavia, which his teacher Heisenberg never built for Germany, he courageously refused.

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Matriarchy and Patriarchy In our international discourses in Dubrovnik and Yalta over the past 30 years, as we tried to follow the history of the modern antagonism of the sacred and the profane, we did in no way neglect to trace the history of other antagonisms in modern civil, socialist and Islamic societies as well, and to search what role religion may have played in them (Reimer 1992; Ott 2001; 2007; App. F). Thus, we were particularly concerned with the dichotomies of the genders, of individual and collective, and of the classes. We were not only concerned with the battle of the sexes in the past 6,000 years, but also in present civil society, as witnessed by the unusually high divorce and abortion rate, as well as by the frequent criminality in the family, and by the homosexual and Lesbian challenge (Bachofen 1992; Fromm 1932b; 1950; 1965; 1959; 1980b; 1995; 1997; 2001; FrommReichmann 1960; Mitscherlich 1993; 1994; Eller 2000; Reimer 1992; Ott 2001; 2007; Flere 2007: 239-254; Gross 2007: 225-238). We started from the early matriarchy and then traced the development from the traditional patriarchal union of the genders through their modern disunion to their possible postmodern democratic reunion, which would transcend past forms of matriarchy as well as of patriarchy. We paid particular attention to the connection between the two dichotomies in modern civil society: the religious-secular and the gender disunion. We researched the reflection of the transition from the early matriarchy to the patriarchy in the Babylonian as well as in the Greek and the Roman mythology. We were only too painfully aware of the patriarchal character of all still living world religions, which caused infinite suffering to women in all of them. We looked for matriarchal traces in patriarchal religions, for example, Mariology in the Ecumenical-Hellenistic Paradigm of Christian Antiquity and in the Roman-Catholic Paradigm of the Middle Ages, which brought some relief to women under the over all repression by male authorities (Küng 1994a: 145-335, 336-601). We did not opt for a romantic return to pre-patriarchal, chthonic, mother-right religions. We felt much sympathy and solidarity with the feminist movement and its struggle for female emancipation in the world religions as well as in modern bourgeois and socialist and Islamic societies. We discussed new types of post-modern, post-patriarchal family life characterized by language mediated mutual recognition, respect, reciprocity, and love of the genders (Siebert 1986; 1987b).

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In Dubrovnik and Yalta, we were concerned not only with the dialectic of the religious and the secular, but also–in connection with it–with the differentiation of the races and the nations (Hegel 1986j: 50, 57-70; Hitler 1943; Trevor-Toper 1978; 1985; 1988; Paassen/Wise 1934; Reimer 1992; Ott 2001; 2007; Tsenyushkina 2000-2007; App. C, D, F). Often we remembered the horrible race struggle and national conflicts in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. There was the historical question whether all human races came from one or several pairs: monogenesis or polygenesis. This question had been of great importance because the racists of the 20th century had deducted from the polygenesis the intellectual superiority of one race over the other: for example, the Aryan race over all the other races. They developed a very ideological–the word understood critically–anthropology of race. They had hoped to prove that the races were so different from each other by nature concerning their intellectual abilities that some were allowed to be dominated and exploited like animals by the others. There was consensus in the Dubrovnik and Yalta Circle that out of the racial descent no good reason could be derived for the justification or non-justification of human beings concerning freedom or rule. We believed that humanity was as such–independently from race and nationhood–rational: animal rationale. In this universal rationality of humanity lay the possibility of the equality of right among all human beings. The rigid differentiation of human beings into those who had rights and those who had no rights was null and void. The differentiation of the races was of historical origin, and as such could also again be historically modified, and changed, and even overcome. We saw a connection between racial and geographical differentiation. Thus, we identified provisionally an African, Asian, Near Eastern, European and American race. In contrast to the racists in Europe and America, we knew that people of mixed races could be culturally superior to people coming from just one of the mixed races.

Anti-Semitism Often we concentrated particularly on one form of racism: AntiSemitism–or better still Anti-Judaism, the hate against the Jews, because it had played such a great role in Europe in the first part of the 20th century, and was rising again in the later 20th century and in the beginning of the 21st century, especially in relation to the conflicts in the Near East and

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particularly to the behavior of the State of Israel (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Levy 2007; Stäblein 2007: 90-93). There were certain French, Germans and Muslims in Europe, who were not only committed to anti-Americanism but also and in connection with it to Anti-Semitism, and who said, that America is the World Trade Center, the capital, the Jew. Today–February 2010–the personification of the Jew is–as the French political scientist Pierre Andre Targuieff put it–the Wall Street broker, the spear point of hyper-modernity. All this is not new. It had already been said in the time of the Dreyfus Affair in France. Already then Jews had been reproached for being plutocrats, representatives of high finance, the incarnation of oppression of the little man, as the Catholic writer Georges Bernanos put it. The image of the Wall Street broker or of the money Jew was already very old. The idea is an ancient issue, that there existed a structural similarity between the Jew inside of a nation and money and commodities, and that the one was a metaphor for the other. That is an invariant: the old Anti-Semitism in Germany and in France and all over Europe at one time or the other. Yet, there was also a new Anti-Semitism. It consisted in the inversion from the poor into the rich and powerful Jew. The connection between the old and the new Anti-Semitism lay in the moment of the invisible power. Even in the time when the Jew presented the image of powerlessness, of rags and beggars from Eastern Europe, there existed also the representation that the Jews exercised in a secret and hidden form a huge, enormous, and monstrous power, which made them look completely different. There existed the forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which the secret police of the Tsar invented in Paris, France, at the end of the 19th century, and which has been widely spread since the beginning of the 20th century, and which was used by Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford, and is again and again republished up to the present– February 2010 (Marsden 1922; Kershaw 2001; Gellately 2001). The Protocol stated that these seemingly powerless people, the Jews, were in reality alarmingly and frighteningly powerful. Thus, Hitler stated before the Reichstag in Berlin on January 20, 1939: Should the international Jewish financiers succeed once again in plunging the nations into a world war, the result will not be the victory of the Jews, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe (Kershaw 2001: 473). Hitler’s prophecy gained actuality when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and when he declared– following the Axis Treaty–war against the United States., and when the European war turned into a world war. At that time, the Wannsee Conference in Berlin of 1942 decided the final solution of the Jewish question: the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe through Zyklon B gassing

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(Kershaw 2001: 148, 491-402). Auschwitz has been a continual theme in our discourses in Dubrovnic and Yalta (Meier 1987; Reimer 1992; Ott 2001; 2007; Tsenyushkina, 2000-2007).

Three Pillars of Anti-Semitism According to the French writer Bernard Henri Levi, today–February 2010–the pillars of Anti-Semitism stand somewhere else than where the first generation of critical theorists of society suspected them, or discovered them to be placed (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Levi 2007; Stäblein 2007: 92-93). If Anti-Semitism has a future in Europe and America in the 21st century, then it constitutes itself on the basis of three at least formally new assertions: 1) 2) 3)

The 1st assertion–The Jews are the accomplices or supporters of a structurally murderous, even genocidal state, namely Israel. The first assertion is the content of Anti-Zionism. The 2nd assertion–In order to make people swallow that pill, the Jews have invented this immense swindle called the Shoa or the Holocaust: that is the negativism, The second assertion is the content of revisionism. The 3rd assertion–With the invention of an imaginary Shoa or Holocaust, and with the creation of the State of Israel, the accomplices of which they are, and which commits such terrible and horrible atrocities against international law, the Jews succeed in putting a veil on the actual martyrs, with whom they, so to speak, compete, as they are the victorious rivals. That is the competition of the victims.

When today–in 2010–in the fantasy of the Europeans a new distrust and suspicion forms itself against the Jews, then it will be connected to these three terrible assertions. New Anti-Judaism may prepare a new Shoa or Holocaust. One task of the critical theory is to help to prevent under all circumstances such new moral catastrophe.

National Conflicts The members of the Dubrovnik and Yalta circle have come from many different races and nations and corresponding religious traditions (Reimer 1992; Ott 2001; 2007; Tsenyushkina, 2000-2007; App. C, D, E). In Dubrovnik and Yalta we found differences among nations to be as relatively, historically firm and constant, as those among the races to whom they belonged: Greeks, Italians, Germans, Arabs, Israelis, Croats, Serbs, Polish, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Japanese, Americans, etc. (Hegel

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1986j: 63-70; Hitler 1943; Trevor-Toper 1978; 1985; 1988; Paassen/Wise 1934; Reimer 1992; Ott 2001; 2007; Tsenyushkina, 2000-2007; Jelen 2006: 329-344; D’Antonio/Hoge 2006: 345-356). We looked at the connection between the New Right and fundamentalism and nationalism in America and elsewhere (Dubiekl/Friedeburg/Schumm 1994; Dubiel 1996; 1998; Jacobs 2006a: 357-366; Blasi 2006: 367-378; Habermas 2001a; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007). Thus, the Arabs, for example, show themselves today–in February 2010–in their different nation-states in the Middle East and elsewhere as they had been portrayed in most ancient times. In Dubrovnik, we witnessed the same concerning the Croats, Serbs and Bosnians before, during, and after the most costly five-year national conflict, which destroyed the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia with the help of Germany and the Vatican. We witnessed the Yugoslav civil war among the different nations from the basement of Hotel Argentina in Dubrovnik, where we met every April. Often we were shot at by the Serbs from the mountain above Dubrovnik. We brought medicine and money for the sick and wounded people of all the nations and ethnic groups involved in the civil war. We discovered that the relative stability of the climate, of the whole geographical constitution or nature of the territory, in which a nation has its continual habitat, has contributed greatly to the relative stability of the national character of a people. A desert, the closeness to or distance from the ocean, and so on, could influence greatly the national character. Most important was the connection with the ocean. Thus, many nations in the internal part of Africa were cut off through mountain ranges from the ocean, this free and liberating element, and therefore the natives seemed to be less open in their character structure and their mind. For a long time, these natives did not feel a drive toward freedom, and allowed themselves to be enslaved by other African and particularly European nations. On the other hand, the Croats, who live close to the Mediterranean Sea, and with whom we were in continual contact, seemed to have a very strong urge for the freedom of the Western European kind. Of course, the closeness to the ocean, or any other geographical factor could not alone liberate the racial or the national character. Other historical and cultural factors must enter the picture: such as, religious influences. Particularly for the older members of our Dubrovnik and Yalta Circle, who had grown up during World War II, the European national conflicts and their concrete supersession in a post-national European constellation, the slowly evolving European Union, was of greatest interest, as well as the role religion was to play in a future European constitution (Habermas

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1992a; 1998; 2001a; 2001c; 2002; 2003a; 2003b; 2003c; 2004a; 2004c; 2005; 2006c; 2007).

Collective and Individual As in Dubrovnik and Yalta we tried to resolve the modern problem of the religious-secular dichotomy, we also traced the development from the original traditional union of collective and individual, through their modern dichotomy, to their possible post-modern reunion in terms of a reconciliation of personal autonomy and universal, i.e. anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Habermas 1986; Reimer 1992; Ott 2001; 2007; Tsenyushkina, 2000-2007; Siebert 1979; 1986; 1987a, 1987b; 1987c; 1993; 1994c; App. F). From its very start in the citystates of Antiquity, civil society was characterized by the dichotomy of the individual and the collective (Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 43-80; App. F). In so far as it is the task of ethics and social ethics to reconcile the individual and the collective, traditional and modern civil society was never ethical or socio-ethical. It was the whole agenda of Plato’s philosophy to rescue the Greek city-states from civil society (Plato 1955; Hegel 1986a: 82, 85, 205, 227, 244, 314, 386; App. C, D). For Hegel, civil society was a necessary moment in human history (Hegel 1986f; Adorno 1971; 1973b: 300-360; App. C, D). However, bourgeois society would be driven by its internal contradictions between the individual and the collective, and the class antagonism, beyond itself into the rational state. The citoyen would replace the bourgeois. This, of course, has not happened yet. Hegel is not yet history. The Soviet Empire fell because while it had collective solidarity, it lacked personal autonomy. The American Empire has personal autonomy, but lacks collective solidarity, and is therefore also in danger. From the very start, up to today–February 2010–civil society has undermined the family. The individualistic social character structure of the bourgeois, which is most successful in civil society, does not fit into marriage and family, and thus, produces a high divorce, abortion, and familial crime rate. Civil society also undermines the state, when the bourgeois is not sufficiently superseded in the citoyen. This is revealed in the high rate of corruption among politicians. The citizen is devoted to the common good. However, the bourgeois is dedicated to his private advantage: his profit. He would like to privatize everything, even the army through outsourcing. In the Soviet Empire the state repressed civil society according to the Platoic model. In the American Empire, civil society swallows up the state. Georg Sorros blames the failure in Eastern Europe, after the

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successful neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1989, on the weakness of the new Eastern European states, which were unable to control the civil society that penetrated once more their territory, particularly the multi national corporations, which robbed the newly liberated countries of whatever they may have had accomplished so far. Finally, civil society destroys the natural environment, on which it depends.

Escape from Freedom In Dubrovnik and Yalta, we treated with great respect the traditional forms of religiously grounded collective solidarity, as they had developed during the Middle Ages in the family, in the guilds of pre-modern civil society, and in the feudal state (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Habermas 1986; Reimer 1992; Ott 2001; 2007; Tsenyushkina 2000-2007; Siebert 1979; 1986; 1987a, 1987b; 1987c; 1993; 1994c; App. C, D, F). We paid particular attention to the possible connection between the two dichotomies of modern society: the religious/secular and the collective/individual disunion. We opposed any materialistic or atheistic reduction of the first to the second dichotomy as a scientifically non-permissible simplification. We noticed the crises not only in the modern secularization process, but also in the individuation process. The individual, who emancipated himself or herself during the Renaissance and Reformation felt rather lonely, and abandoned, and overburdened with decisions and responsibilities after having lived a while in his or her newly gained individual autonomy, Thus, the individuals began to try to escape their newly won freedom (Fromm 1970). By 1800, a Back-to-Rome-Movement began in Europe. Even some of the romantic friends of Hegel and Goethe tried to escape their modern independence and loneliness through returning to the Papal authority in Rome and the religiously grounded collective solidarity and commitment it had to offer. In the 20th century, the escape from freedom had no longer a religious but rather a secular form. The lonely individuals tried to rid themselves of their painful modern individuality and isolation by joining passionately nationalistic and fascist authorities and mass movements, particularly in originally Catholic countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Hungary, Austria, and the southern part of Germany, who offered a secular collective solidarity and commitment (Hitler 1943; Taylor 1986, Trevor/Roper 2000; Eberle/Uhl 2005; Kershaw 2001; Walker 1970; Machtan 2001; Gellately 2002). Existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus tried to compensate their essence- and substance-

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less individual freedom through committing themselves to socialistic or communistic mass movements and authorities like Mao Tse-tung. (Sartre 1964; Camus 1946; 1956; 1972).

From Traditional to Modern Family In Dubrovnik and Yalta, we were aware that in the religiously grounded traditional family of the Middle Ages, the collective element was more important than the individual one (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Habermas 1986; Reimer 1992; Ott 2001; 2007; Tsenyushkina, 2000-2007; Siebert 1979; 1986; 1987a, 1987b; 1987c; 1993; 1994c; App. C, D, E, F). Marriages were even collectively arranged by the family and the kinship group in cooperation with the whole village or town, as portrayed, for example, in the wonderful movie the Fiddler on the Roof. If love was not present between the individual marriage partners at the beginning, it was supposed to appear later, and if it did not, there was always the consolation of reward for all frustrations and sufferings in Heaven. The collective arrangement of marriage guaranteed uniformity among the individual partners concerning race, nationality, economic status, social class, religion and other cultural aspects. The collective-religious element found its most cruel expression in the stoning of adulterous women, or in the honor-killings, which even today–February 2010–still continue in some Islamic communities following the Sharia in the Middle East or in Africa. In modern civil society, a shift took place from solidarity to autonomy, first for the male and then also for the female marriage partner. Now the chemistry, individual inclination, or impulse, or attraction, and personal love of the individuals had priority over family or kinship interests. The specifically American dating system is the most adequate expression for this sexual or erotic individualism. The same is true of the sexual revolution since the 1960s in America as well as in Europe. While now in the modern situation the feelings of the individual marriage partners were recognized and appreciated, their individual love had to carry the burden and the risk of their possible racial, national, economical, social, political, religious and cultural differences. Divorce became more frequent than ever before, and was finally sanctioned by the secular state. Religiously sanctioned monogamy gave way to secular, state sanctioned successive polygamy, and finally even to homosexual or Lesbian marriages. This happened often against strong religious resistance, more often in Catholic than in Protestant countries, since the latter had permitted divorce already from the time of the Reformation, for example, in the case of Philipp of Hessen or Henry VIII. In

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our discourse, we considered it possible that a new form of marriage and family could anticipate post-modern alternative Future III–a society, in which personal autonomy would be reconciled with universal solidarity. Men and women would still be willing to enter into a solidary relationship, but one which was structured in such a way that it did not repress autonomy, particularly not that of the women, but to the contrary would facilitate and promote it. In discourse, marriage partners could discover whether they had either moved into the death zone of too much solidarity, or of too much autonomy, and then could grant each other either more space, or more togetherness and intimacy, and thus could avoid the arrest of the dialectic of love and the consequent separation and divorce.

Class Antagonism While in our international discourse in Dubrovnik and Yalta particularly shortly before, during and after the victory of the neo-conservative and neo-liberal counter-revolution in the 1980s and 1990s, we took seriously the linguistic trend turn in philosophy and in the social sciences from the human potential of work and tool to the evolutionary universals of language and memory and of the struggle for recognition, we never neglected in our research the former potential: including the human needs and their satisfaction in modern civil and socialist society, the division of labor, the type of work, the productive forces and the property relations, the class system and the class struggle between capital and labor (Hegel 1972, 1976, 1979, 1986b; 1986g: 339-359; Marx/Engels 2005; Marx 1961a: 12-13, 141, 282-284, 296, 302-303, 446-447, 689, 773-782; 1961b: 29-31, 35, 51, 360; 1961c: 9, 207, 221, 282, 402, 403, 649, 667, 774, 850, 941-942; Adorno 1979: 373-391, 392-396; Weber 1964: 49, 50, 64, 73, 79, 80-103, 106, 113, 115, 116, 122, 126-130, 132, 134, 135137, 140-141, 166, 180, 189, 192-193, 227, 234, 255, 272; Merton 1964: 43, 144-147, 191-192, 163, 208, 462-463, 476-479, 483, 491; Gerth/ Mills 1964: 15, 88, 144, 259, 270, 307, 328, 329, 331, 333, 339, 340, 345, 358-359, 383, 386, 394, 402, 431, 439, 443, 447, 454; Reimer 1992; Ott 2001; 2007; Tsenyushkina, 2000-2007; App. C, D, F). We never lost the political-economic ground under our feet. While we appreciated the great German idealists, the Marxian enlightenment/historical materialism remained as important for us as the bourgeois and the Freudian enlightenment movements, even after the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia had collapsed, and self-management socialism had been replaced again by nationalism and monopoly and oligopoly capitalism and the old

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Croatian bourgeois class system had been re-established again through a terrible, humanly most costly counter-revolutionary civil war, which cost the lives of 200,000 people (Bloch 1971; 1972; Habermas 1976; Tudjman 1996; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007d; 2008a; 2008b; App. C, D, E, F). The workers in Croatia and in the other 5 Republics of the former Yugoslavia, who had owned the hotels and the JAT Airline and other businesses under the socialist self-management system, were expropriated again by native and foreign owners, sometimes the children or grandchildren of former Ustasha members, who had enriched themselves in Argentine or elsewhere, and the beautiful Croatian coastline became the prey of national and international speculators, who pushed the process to an inflated financial level that the present inhabitants could no longer reach..

Religion and Class Struggle In Dubrovnik and Yalta, as we traced the modern problems of the dichotomy of the religious and the secular, and in connection with it the antagonism of the genders, of the races, of the nations, and of the collective and the individual, and others, we did in no way forget to pay the closest attention to the connection between religion and class antagonism in traditional and modern civil society (Hegel 1986a: 9, 11, 12, 12, 13-17, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 24, 28, 37, 38, 41, 42, 54-55, 55, 56, 57, 59; 1986c: 274, 386; 1986d: 63, 473, 485, 574; 1986g: 464; 1986k: 99, 553; Marx/Engels 2005; Marx 1961a: 12-13, 141, 282-284, 296, 302-303, 446-447, 689, 773-782; 1961b: 29-31, 35, 51, 360; 1961c: 9, 207, 221, 282, 402, 403, 649, 667, 774, 850, 941-942; Adorno 1979: 373-391, 392-396; Weber 1969; 1978; 1992; 1993: 49, 50, 64, 73, 79, 80-103, 106, 113, 115, 116, 122, 126-130, 132, 134, 135, 136-137, 140-141, 166, 180, 189, 192-193, 227, 234, 255, 272; Merton 1964: 43, 144-145, 146, 147, 191-192, 163, 208, 462-463, 476-479, 483, 491; App. C, D, E, F). To the contrary, the relationship between religion and the class struggle was most important for us. We did not allow ourselves to be distracted through gender, racial, national, or individual-collective, or any other problems from the class antagonism and struggle and its possible religious component. The Gautama, later called the Buddha, was a rich man, who, nevertheless, left the nobility and lived as a poor monk for the rest of his life, and opposed the Indian caste system, which made true education impossible among the people for ever (Hegel 1986k: 154, 376-390; 1986l: 80, 144, 181-183, 185, 252; 1986r: 146; Fromm/Suzuki/ Martino 1960; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: C). Later on, however, mainstream Buddhism adapted itself to the Indian caste system, with all

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its injustices, and thus legitimated it. Jesus of Nazareth, later called the Messiah, was a poor man, who identified with the poor classes of Palestine and of the Roman Empire, and threw the businessmen out of the Temple, and denied the possibility of serving God and capital, and excluded the rich classes from the Kingdom of God (Hegel 1986a: 62, 81, 8283, 85, 106, 107, 108, 113-114, 115-116, 119, 125, 138, 182, 2067, 223-224, 227-229, 319, 319-121; 1986l: 241-298; Küng 1994a). However, later on, the Church, which continually appeals to the name of Jesus, adjusted itself to the slaveholder system of Antiquity, to the Feudal system of the Middle Ages, and to the capitalist system of Modernity, and all their injustices, and thus legitimated them. In most recent times, Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II supported the nationalist-capitalist counter-revolutionary forces in Slovenia and Croatia from the very start, and the Vatican was the first state to recognize Croatia as an independent state, which thus sealed the fate of Yugoslavia, and thereby contributed to the following horrible civil war, and legitimated once more the restoration of the bourgeois class system (Tudjman 1996: xi-xvi; App. C, D). After the war, a Roman Catholic priest declared in the Parliament in Zagreb, Croatia, that God’s Providence had sent the former General Tito, and then the nationalist leader, Franjo Tudjman, in order to restore the medieval state of Croatia. As in Poland, so the Church played once more a counter-revolutionary role in Yugoslavia and other Eastern European countries.

Religion, Revolution, Counter-revolution In Dubrovnik and Yalta we asked ourselves whether religion must always be–as Napoleon suggested–on the side of the bigger battalions, or the ruling class, or whether it can also be for once on the side of the oppressed and exploited classes, and their revolutionary endeavors? (Hegel 1986a: 9, 11-19, 24, 28, 37-38, 41, 42, 54-59; 1986c: 274, 386; 1986d: 63, 473, 485, 574; 1986g: 464; 1986k: 99, 553; Marx/Engels 2005; Marx 1961a: 12-13, 141, 282-284, 296, 302-303, 446-447, 689, 773-782; 1961b: 29-31, 35, 51, 360; 1961c: 9, 207, 221, 282, 402-403, 649, 667, 774, 850, 941-942; Adorno 1979: 373-396; Weber 1952; 1969; 1978; 1992; 1993: 49, 50, 64, 73, 79, 80-103, 106, 113, 115-116, 122, 126-130, 132, 134-137, 140-141, 166, 180, 189, 192-193, 227, 234, 255, 272; Merton 1964: 43, 144-147, 191-192, 163, 208, 462-463, 476-479, 483, 491; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007d; 2008a; 2008b; App. A, B, C, D, E, F). Must religion always be counter-revolutionary, or can it also be revolutionary? These questions were most fascinating for us. We were fully aware that the class problem in civil society was often

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covered up, or distracted from, by other problems, particularly the gender, race, or national antagonism. Hitler and the National Socialists were most successful in shifting the collective interest from class to race in the form of Anti-Semitism, or better still Anti-Judaism, and of making the Jews into the scapegoats for all the evils of capitalist society, and under this cover to mislead and to betray the working classes (Adorno 1979: 397407, 408-433; Lukacs 1974; Gellately 2002; Kershaw 2001). Yet, such cover up or distractions have been happening in democratic states as well, not at last and not at least in the history of the United States (Brinkley 1983; Kinzer 2006). We traced the development of class from a possible primordial classless society, through a large variety of class societies–slaveholder societies, feudal societies, capitalist societies, socialist societies–to alternative Future III: a possible new egalitarian, democratic, classless society, which would not regress behind, but would rather concretely supersede in itself the personal, social and cultural accomplishments of all the previous class societies (Marx/Engels 2005; Trotsky 2006; Lukacs 1974; Fromm 1967; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Habermas 1976; App. C, D, F, G). We differentiated between the religions of the lower, middle and upper classes in civil society, and what use they make of them. We applied mythology and ideology critique to religion and society: ideology understood in the critical sense of false consciousness, of the masking of gender, race, national, and class, interests, or simply the untruth. We never considered religion to be nothing more than ideology. We honored critically its truth claim: we searched for the possible truth core of religion behind its ideological abuse by the ruling classes, and for its possible legitimation (Habermas 1975; 1976; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1982; 1986; 1988b; 1991a: Part III; 2001a; 2002; 2003b; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007b; Habermas/Ratzingr 2006; Küng 1990b; 1991a). We also knew always, that every truth, particularly the religious truth, has a time core, and thus changes from one antagonistic social system to the other: in Hegelian terms, from the freedom of the One, through the freedom of the Few, to the freedom of All; in Marxian terms, from the primitive, through the slaveholder-and feudal-and bourgeoisie society, to the socialist and communist society; and in Parsonian terms, from the primitive, through the archaic and the historical-intermediate, to the modern society (Hegel 1986l: 133-141; Marx/Engels 2005; Trotsky 2006; Lukacs 1974; Adorno 1973b: 300-360; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1967; Habermas 1976; Flechtheim/ Lohmann 2003; Parson 1964; 1965; Eggenbrecht 1979; Gerth/Mills 1964: 102, 157, 271, 375-377, 381, 382, 384, 386-387, 398-390, 404, 429, 451, 454; Küng 1990b: C; 1991a; App. A, C, D, E, F, G). Thomas Münzer and

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Gustavo Gutierrez gave us good models of how religion has been and could be connected with revolution in Modernity and Post-Modernity (Bloch 1972; Kogon 1967: 616-630; Gutierrez 1971; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007d; 2008a; 2008b; 2008c; 2009a; 2009b; 2009c; App. F, G).

appendix a

Mottoes, Impulses, and Motives

Here is the Rose, here dance! What lies between reason as self-conscious spirit and Reason as given reality, what differentiates that reason from this one and in it does not yet find satisfaction, is the fetter of some abstractum, which is not liberated into the notion. To recognize Reason as the Rose in the Cross of the present and thereby to enjoy it, this rational insight is the reconciliation with reality, which philosophy grants to those to whom has once come the inner demand to comprehend and to receive in that what is substantial, likewise the subjective freedom as well as to stand with subjective freedom not in something particular and contingent, but in that which is in and for itself. (Hegel 1986g: 26-27). The goal, the absolute knowledge, or the Spirit who knows itself as Spirit, has for its way the remembrance of the spirits, as they are in themselves and the organization of their realm. Their preservation looked at from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is history; looked at from the side of their comprehended organization however, it is the science of the way knowledge appears. Both together, the comprehended history, constitute the remembrance and the Golgotha of the absolute Spirit, the reality, the truth and certainty of its throne, without which it would be the lifeless, solitary One; only–out of the chalice of this realm of spirits foams to him his infinitude. (Hegel 1986h: 591). Already in the relationship that religion itself has in its immediacy to the rest of the consciousness of man, lay the seeds of disunion, since both sides are in the process of a separation from each other. They constitute already in their impartial relationship two types of activities, two regions of consciousness, from one to the other of which one moves only alternatively back and forth. Thus, man has in his real worldly action a number of work days, in which he is occupied with his particular interests, with purposes of worldliness, and in general with the satisfaction of his need–and then there is a Sunday, in which he puts all that aside, collects himself for himself, and freed from the immersion in finite activities, he lives for himself and for the Higher, which is in him, his true Being…. (Hegel 1986h: 16). Everywhere man still lives in pre-history, yes, everything and all stands still before the creation of the world as a right one. The real genesis is not in the beginning, but at the end, and it begins only to start when society and existence become radical; i.e. grasp themselves at the root. The root of history, however, is the working, creating, the given things transforming and overtaking human being. As soon as

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man has grasped himself and what is his without externalization and alienation grounded in real democracy, then something comes into existence in the world that shines into the childhood of all and in which nobody has been yet: home. (E. Bloch 1993: 1628). The real contains in its being the potentiality of a being as utopia, which certainly does not exist yet, but there is the justified and justifiable pre-appearance of it and its utopian-principled notion… (E. Bloch 1975a). For a long time in the notion of God the representation was preserved that there were still other measures than those, which nature and society express in their effectiveness. Out of the discontent with earthly fate, the recognition of a transcendent being draws its strongest energy. If justice is with God, then it is not to the same degree in the world. In religion are deposited the wishes, longings and accusations of innumerable generations. However, the more the reign of God in Christianity was brought into harmony with the this-worldly happening, the more this meaning of religion has turned into the opposite. Already in Catholicism God was accepted in a certain respect as the creator of the earthly order. Protestantism reduces the course of the world directly to the almighty will. Thereby not only the particular rule is transfigured through the appearance of divine justice, but it itself is brought down to the foul conditions of reality. Christianity has lost to the same extent the cultural function, of giving expression to ideals, as it became the ally of the state… Humankind loses religion on its way, but this loss does not pass without a trace. A part of the drives and the wishes, which the religious faith has preserved and kept awake, are removed from their inhibiting form and enter as productive forces into social praxis. And even the excessiveness of the destroyed illusion gains in this process a positive form and transforms itself into the truth. In a truly free cast of mind that notion of the Infinite remains maintained as the consciousness of the finality of the earthly happening and as the consciousness of the unchangeable desolation of men, and protects society from an idiotic optimism, from the inflation of its own knowledge into a new religion. (Horkheimer 1988c: 326-328). Jesus died for human beings. He could not keep himself avariciously for himself, as he belonged to everything that suffers. Out of this the church fathers made a religion, i.e. they made a teaching, which was still a consolation for the evil person. Since this was so successful in the world, the thought of Jesus has nothing at all to do any longer with the action and even less with suffering people. Whoever reads the Evangelium and does not see that Jesus has died against his present day representative cannot read at all. This theology is the most furious disdain that has ever happened to a thought. The early church accepted soldiers finally after many internal struggles. It did not yet bless the murder tools of two hostile armies. The religion, which refers to Jesus, steered the spiritual energies that were awakened through his unheard of deed, and which broke through the coldness of antiquity, from mimesis to cult, from action to worship. If that had not happened,

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Jesus would probably have been forgotten, his followers would have wasted themselves, they would have gone under in darkness; instead of a successful organization, which is also not poor in terms of educational results, nothing would remain, the good deeds and institutions and the bad deeds and institutions of Christianity would not have been recorded in any history book, and Jesus would have remained right. His realm would not be of this world. Who would dare to say what is better. (Horkheimer 1974a: 96-97). The theologian argues, ‘If there is no God, nothing needs to be serious for me.’ The horrid deed which I have done, the suffering which I let go on, continue to live on after the moment, in which they have happened only still in the remembering human consciousness and are extinguished with it. It is meaningless to say, that they are still true. They are no longer true: both are the same. Except that they remain preserved–in God. Can we admit this and still lead in all seriousness a godless life? That is the question of philosophy. (Horkheimer 1974c). You who live in the shelter of the Most High, who dwells in the shadow of the Almighty, Say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my stronghold, my God in whom I trust!’ (Horkheimer 1985g: 207-212). Psalm 91: 1 is written on the gravestone of Horkheimer’s parents. Psalm 91: 2 is written on Horkheimer’s own gravestone: “In you Eternal One I trust.” The appeal to an entirely Other than this world had primarily a social-philosophical impetus. It led finally to a more positive evaluation of certain metaphysical trends, because the empirical ‘whole is the untrue’ (Adorno). The hope that earthly horror does not possess the last word is, to be sure, a nonscientific wish. (Jay 1973: xii). Without God one will try in vain to preserve absolute meaning. No matter how independent a given form of expression may be within its own sphere as in art or religion, and no matter how distinct and how necessary in itself, with the belief in God it will have to surrender all to being objectively something higher than a practical convenience. The death of God is also the death of eternal truth. (Horkheimer 1985a: 173-186). …Think, e.g., of the theological. Think simply of the question: does God exist, and what can one say about this? Then he (Adorno) would have answered to this question, and the answer would correspond to the great thoughts of the past: I can not simply answer by saying: there is a God, and God is just, and God is good, because he can not at all positively formulate ultimately the word just and good as well as the word God–as he declared in the Negative Dialectic and as it is thought in the critical theory–but only through that what really is not God. In spite of

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that, there is intrinsic in this negative the affirmation of an Other, which one can signify only through this word of the Other. He (Adorno) has always spoken of the longing for the Other, without using the word Heaven, or Eternity, or Beauty, or something else. And I believe, that this is even the marvelous in his (Adorno’s) position on the question, that he, while he has asked for the world, has ultimately meant the Other, but that he was of the conviction that it did not let itself be comprehended by describing this Other, but rather by representing the world as it is, in view of the fact, that it is not the only thing, not the only one, toward which our thoughts aim... That is a negative theology, but not negative theology in the sense that there is no God, but in that sense, that he cannot be represented. (Horkheimer 1985g: 293-294). Only the Messiah himself completes all historical happenings, and that in the sense that first of all he redeems, completes, and creates its relationship to the Messianic realm. Therefore, nothing historical can of itself want to relate itself to the messianic. Therefore, the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it can not be posited as goal. In historical perspective it is not goal, but end. Therefore, the order of the profane can not be built on the thought of the realm of God; theocracy has no political but only religious meaning. It was the greatest merit of Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia to have denied the political meaning of theocracy with all its intensity. The order of the profane has to direct itself according to the idea of happiness. The relationship of this order toward the Messianic is one of the essential teaching pieces of the philosophy of history. Through it, a mystical conception of history is conditioned, the problem of which can be represented in an image. When one arrow signifies the goal in which the dynamic of the profane is effective, and another one points the direction of Messianic intensity, then admittedly the search for happiness of free humanity strives away from this Messianic direction, but as one energy can promote through its way another one that is moving in the opposite direction, thus also the profane order assists in being profane the coming of the Messianic realm. Admittedly, therefore, the profane is no category of the kingdom, but a category, and one of the most adequate ones, of its most silent approach. This is so because in happiness everything earthly strives for its going under, only in happiness however it is destined to find its destruction… (Benjamin 1977: 262-263). Energies of tranquility, which are effective from the 19th century across to the other side, disguised historical forces of tradition. What would the 19th century be for us, if tradition would connect us with it? What would it look like, as religion or as mythology? We have no tactical relationship to it. That means we are educated in terms of romantic good and distant visibility into the historical realm. It is important to give an account of the cultural heritage, which has immediately come down to us. However, it is still too early, e.g., to collect. Concrete materialistic reflection upon the immediate is demanded. ‘Mythology,’ as Aragon says, moves the things into a distance again. Only the explanation of that which has a spiritual affinity with us and which conditions us is important. The 19th century,

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in order to speak with the surrealists, is the noise that intervenes into our dream, which we interpret in the awakening... Architecture is the most important witness of the latent ‘mythology.’ And the most important architecture of the 19th century is the arcade-attempt to awaken out of a dream as the best example of the dialectical turning over. Difficulties of the dialectical technology... The awakening is a step-by-step process, which asserts itself in the life of the individual as of the generation. Sleep is its primary stage. The youth experience of a generation has much in common with the dream experience. Its historical form is the dream form. Each epoch has this side, which is turned toward the dreams, the children’s side. For the previous century these are the arcades. While however the education of the earlier generations has interpreted for them these dreams in the tradition, in the religious teaching, the present day education simply amounts to the diversion and entertainment of the children… Hegel: in itself–for itself–in and for itself. These sequences of stages of the dialectic become in the Phenomenology consciousness–self-consciousness–reason... Definition of the “modern” as the new in the connection of that, which has always already been there... The modern is the time of hell. The punishments of hell existing at the time are the newest that exist in this area. What is at stake here is not that “always the same happens again” (a fortiori there is no talk here about the eternal return), but what matters here is that the face of the world, the outsized head, never changes precisely in that which is the newest, that this “newest” remains the same always in all its pieces. That constitutes the eternity of hell and the sadist’s lust for innovation. To determine the totality of the traits in which this ‘modern’ expresses it, means to represent the hell... Dialectic in standstill–that is the quintessence of the method... On the dialectical image. In it is the time. It is already in Hegel’s dialectic. However this Hegelian dialectic knows the time only as really historical, if not psychological, time of thinking. Hegel does not yet know the time differential in which alone the dialectical image is real. The real time goes into the dialectical image in natural size–not to speak psychologically–but in its smallest form. The time moment in the dialectical image lets itself ascertain completely only through the confrontation with another notion. This notion is: the now of being able to be recognized... The Copernican turn in the historical perception is this: one considered ‘what had been’ as the fixed point and saw the present making the effort to lead knowledge toward this firm element gropingly. Now this relationship should invert itself and what has been should receive its dialectical fixation from the synthesis, which the awakening accomplishes with the opposite dream images. Politics receives the primacy over history. Thus, historical facts turn into something that has just happened to us: to establish them is the task of remembrance. In that case, we succeed in remembering that what is closest (the I). What Proust means with the experimental rearranging of furniture and what Bloch recognizes as the darkness of the lived moment, is nothing else than what is safeguarded here on the level of

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the historical and the collective. There is such a thing as not yet conscious knowledge of what has been, the promotion of which has the structure of awakening... Dialectical structure of awakening: remembrance and awakening have the closest affinity. Awakening is namely the dialectical Copernican turn of the remembering. It is an eminently composed turning over of the world of the dreamer into the world of those who are awake. For the dialectical schematics, which are the basis of this physiological process, the Chinese have found expression in their fairy tale and novel literature. The new dialectical method of the historic teaches to go through in spirit what has been with the quickness and intensity of dreams, in order thus to experience the present as world of awakening, to which ultimately every dream relates itself. (Benjamin 1983b: 998, 1002, 1006, 1007, 1010-1011, 1035, 1037-1038, 1057-1058). As it is well known, there should have existed an automaton, which was constructed in such a way, that it responded to every move of a chess player with a counter-move, which secured him the gain of the party. A puppet of Turkish attire, a water-pipe in its mouth, sat before the chess board, which rested on a broad table. Through a system of mirrors the illusion was produced that this table could be looked through from all sides. In truth a hunchback dwarf was sitting in it, who was a master in the chess game and who guided the hand of the puppet through strings. One can imagine to this apparatus a counterpart in the philosophy. The puppet should always win, who one calls historical materialism. It can compete without difficulties with anybody, when it takes theology into its service, which today–as it is well known–is small and ugly and which in any case cannot let itself be seen... There is a picture by Klee, which is called Angelus Novus. An angel is portrayed on it who looks as if he was in the process of distancing himself from something at which he stares. His eyes are torn wide open. His mouth is open, and his wings are stretched out. The angle of history must look like that. He has turned his face toward the past. Where a chain of happenings appears before us, there he sees one single catastrophe, which accumulates continually ruins on ruins and throws them before his feet. He would like to remain, to awaken the dead and put together what has been ruined. But a storm blows from paradise, which has caught itself in his wings and which is so strong, that the angle can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which he turns his back, while the heap of ruins grows before him to heaven. That, what we call the progress, is this storm. … The historical materialist approaches a historical object only and alone where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic standstill of the happening, in other words, of a revolutionary chance in the struggle for the oppressed past. (Benjamin 1977: 251, 255, 260).

mottoes, impulses, and motives Greetings from Angelus I hang nobly on the wall Looking at nobody at all. I have been from heaven sent, A man of angelic descent. The human within me is good. And does not interest me. I stand in the care of the highest And do not need a face. From where I come, that world Is measured, deep, and clear. What keeps me together in one piece Is a wonder, it would appear. In my heart stands the town Whence God has sent me. The Angel who bears this seal Does not fall under its spell. My wing is ready to beat, I am all for turning back. For, even staying in timeless time Would not grant me much fortune. My eye is darkest black and full, My gaze is never blank. I know what I am to announce And many other things. I am an unsymbolic thing. My meaning is what I am. You turn the magic ring in vain. I have no sense. (Scholem 1989: 79-80).

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On Kafka’s “Trial” Are we totally separated from you? Is there not a breath of your peace, Lord, or your message Intended for us in such a night? Can the sound of our word Have so faded in Zion’s emptiness, Or has it not even entered This magic realm of appearance? The great deceit of the world Is now consummated. Give then, Lord, that he may wake Who was struck through by your nothingness. Only so does revelation Shine in the time that rejected you, Only your nothingness is the experience It is entitled to have of you. Thus alone teaching that breaks through semblance Enters the memory: The truest bequest Of hidden judgment. Our position has been measured On Job’s scales with great precision. We are known through and through As despairing as on the youngest day. What we are is reflected In endless instances, Nobody knows the way completely And each part of it makes us blind. No one can benefit from redemption. That star stands far too high. And if you had arrived there too, You would still stand in your way.

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Abandoned to powers, Exorcism is no longer binding. No life can unfold That doesn’t sink into itself. From the center of destruction A ray breaks through at times, But none shows the direction The Law ordered us to take. Since this sad knowledge Stands before us, unassailable, A veil has suddenly been torn, Lord, before your majesty. Your trial began on earth. Does it end before your throne? You cannot be defended, As no illusion holds true here. Who is accused here? The creature or yourself? If anyone should ask you, You would sink into silence. Can such a question be raised? Is the answer indefinite? Oh, we must live all the same Until your court examines us. (Scholem 1989: 123-124). In the Jewish eschatology–of Babylonian origin–Behemoth and Leviathan designated two monsters, Behemoth ruling the land (the desert), Leviathan the sea, the first male, the second female. The land animals venerate Behemoth, the sea animals Leviathan, as their masters. Both are monsters of the Chaos. According to the apocalyptic writings, Behemoth and Leviathan will reappear shortly before the end of the world. They will establish a rule of terror–but will be destroyed by God. In other versions Behemoth and Leviathan will fight each other incessantly, and finally will destroy each other. The day of the righteous and just will then come. They will eat the meat of both monsters in a feast, which announces the advent of a realm of God. Jewish eschatology, the Book of Job, the prophets, the apocryphal writings are full of references to this myth, which is often differently interpreted and often adapted to political circumstances. St. Augustine saw in the Behemoth–Satan.

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It was Hobbes who made both the Leviathan and the Behemoth popular. His Leviathan is the analysis of a state that is a political system of coercion in which vestiges of the rule of law and of individual rights are still preserved. His Behemoth, or his Long Parliament, however, discussing the English civil war of the seventeenth century, depicts a non-state, chaos, and a situation of lawlessness, disorder, and anarchy. Since we believe National Socialism is–or is tending to become–a non-state, a chaos, a rule of lawlessness and anarchy, which has ‘swallowed’ the rights and dignity of man, and is out to transform the world into a chaos by the supremacy of gigantic land masses, we find it apt to call the National Socialist system The Behemoth. (Neumann 1942: vii). I quote to you (Walter Benjamin) my oldest attempt at an interpretation of Kafka of nine years ago: He gives a photograph of earthly life from the perspective of the redeemed, of which nothing occurs in it than the corner of the black cloth, while the horrifyingly eschewed optics of the picture is no other than that of the camera itself which has been put in a slanting way. Thus, there is no need for other words for the purpose of agreement, no matter how far even your analysis points beyond this conception. Yet, that concerns at the same time also and in a very fundamental sense the position toward theology. Since I urged toward such theology before the entrance to your Arcades, thus it seems to me doubly important that the image of theology, in which I would like to see our thoughts disappear, is none other than that out of which here your thoughts are fed–it may very well be named inverse theology. The position against natural and supernatural interpretation at the same time, which is formulated in this inverse theology for the first time in all sharpness, seems to me to be precisely my own… Now it seems to me to be of greatest importance that with this conception of the dialectical image, which may be called an immanent one, not only the primordial power of the notion, which was a theological one, is threatened, and that a simplification occurs, which attacks not only the subjective nuance but the truth content itself–but that precisely thereby also that social movement in contradiction is missed, because of which you made the sacrifice of theology... When I may be allowed to pull together with a daring grasp the bow of my critique, it would have to close itself, and how could it be otherwise, around the extremes. A restitution of the theology or better still a radicalization of the dialectic down into the theological glowing core would have to mean at the same time an extreme sharpening of the social-dialectical, yes, indeed the economical motive... Mythos is not the classless longing of the true society but the objective character of the alienated commodity itself... The notion of false consciousness demands in my opinion the most careful use and can in no way be used any longer without recourse to the Hegelian origin... (Adorno 1994: 90, 139, 143, 146, 150). For subjectivity, only the existential world of objects constitutes the immanence of being, while it posits the practical reality of being, which is intended in its truth question, as unrealizable Transcendence beyond the knowledgeable being. Thus,

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in relation to theoretical knowledge the real world stands virtually on its head and real praxis can encounter men only from beyond the world. This encounter realizes itself in Christianity, in which inside of this inverted world the problem of praxis posits itself for men the first time. The problem of praxis is that of the supersession of this upside down world, but in Christianity on its part wrongly conceived of as religious praxis. The historical-dialectical truth-critique of Christianity... has the result that the real task of this praxis is in the intentional sense of Christianity the supersession of exploitation. (Adorno and Sohn-Rethel 1991: 25-26). That in the face of the existence of bread factories the plea for our daily bread has become a mere metaphor and at the same time utter despair says more against the possibility of Christianity than all enlightened critique of the life of Jesus. (Adorno, 1951: 141). Remembrance combs the hair of the helpless, brings sustenance to the shattered mouth, and watches over the sleep of those who will not awaken. Just as they are defenselessly abandoned to our remembrance, our remembrance is the only assistance left to them. They pass away into remembrance, and if each person who dies resembles one who has been murdered by the living, then the person also resembles one who must be saved by the living, without knowing whether they will ever succeed. The rescue of the possible but not yet existent is the goal of remembrance. (Adorno, 1991a: 79-80). No remembrance of Transcendence is possible any longer than through the transitoriness in the spirit of that heretical speculation, which makes the life of the Absolute no less dependent on the finite than this on the Absolute. And those among you, who know Hegel, shall know after all, that his thesis that the Absolute and the Infinite takes place through the dialectic of the finite–that Hegel himself stood in no way so distant from this mystical-heretical speculation as the official tenor of his philosophy could let us suppose. In the finite there is more to hope for metaphysics … than in the abstract form of Eternity, which in vain tries to escape transitoriness. And the task of philosophy in the traditional sense today is to justify precisely this turn of philosophy against its traditional sense. Eternity does not appear as such but only as broken through the transitory. There, where the Hegelian metaphysics equated the life of the Absolute with the totality of the transitoriness of everything finite, there it breaks out of the mythical spell, which it catches and reinforces. (Adorno 2001a: 181-182). The idea of truth is supreme among the metaphysical ideas, and this is where it takes us. It is why one who believes in God cannot believe in God, rather he who does not believe maintains the possibility represented by the divine name. Once upon a time, the image ban extended to pronouncing the name; now the ban itself has in that form come to evoke suspicions of superstition. The ban has been exac-

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erbated: the mere thought of hope is a transgression against it, an act of working against it. (Adorno 1973b: 401-402). We will never understand the psychology of either women or men as long as we fail to acknowledge that a state of war has existed between the sexes for approximately six thousand years. This war is a guerrilla war. Six thousand years ago the patriarchy triumphed over women, and society became organized on the basis of male domination. Women became the property of men and were obliged to be grateful to them for every concession. But there cannot be domination of one social class, nation, or sex over the other that does not lead to subliminal rebelliousness, rage, hatred, and desire for revenge in those who are oppressed and exploited, and to fear and insecurity in those who do the oppressing and exploiting. (Fromm 1975). The linguistic turn allows a deflationistic interpretation of the “totally Other.” As historical and social beings we find ourselves always already in a linguistically structured life world. Already in the forms of communication, in which we come to an understanding with each other about something in the world and about ourselves, a transcending power meets us. Language is not a private property. Nobody possesses an exclusive disposal over the common medium of understanding, which we must share with each other intersubjectively. No individual participant can control the structure or even the course of processes of understanding and of self-understanding. How speakers and listeners make use of their communicative freedom to yes and no positions is not a matter of subjective arbitrariness. This is so because they are free only due to the binding power of the claims, which are in deed of argumentation and which they make valid against each other. In the logos of language embodies itself a power of intersubjectivity, which lies ahead and at the basis of the subjectivity of the speakers. This weak procedural reading on the “Other” preserves the infallibilistic and at the same time anti-skeptical meaning of “Unconditionally.” The logos of language withdraws itself from our control; but we, the subjects able to speak and to act, are nevertheless the ones who come to an understanding with each other in this medium. It remains “our” language. The unconditionality of truth and freedom is a necessary presupposition of our practices. But beyond the constituents of “our” life form they go without any ontological guarantee. Thus is also the “right” ethical self-understanding neither revealed nor “given” in any other way. It can only be gained in a common effort. Out of this perspective appears that, which makes possible our being ourselves, rather as trans-subjective than absolute power. (Habermas 2001b: 25-26). I do not believe that we, as Europeans, can seriously understand concepts like morality and ethical life, persons and individuality, or freedom and emancipation, without appropriating the substance of the Judeo-Christian understanding of history in terms of salvation. And these concepts are, perhaps, nearer to our hearts than the conceptual resources of Platonic thought, centering on order and

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revolving around the cathartic intuition of ideas…But without the transmission through socialization and the transformation through philosophy of any one of the great world religions, this semantic potential could one day become inaccessible. (Habermas 1992b: 15). The idea of God is transformed into a concept of a Logos that determines the community of believers and the real life-context of a self-emancipating society. “God” becomes the name for a communicative structure that forces men, on pain of a loss of their humanity, to go beyond their accidental, empirical nature to encounter one another indirectly, that is across an objective something that they themselves are not. (Habermas 1975: 121). The core of collective consciousness is a normative consensus established and regenerated in the ritual practices of a community of believers. Members thereby orient themselves to religious symbols; the intersubjective unity of the collective presents itself to them in concepts of the holy. This collective identity defines the circle of those who understand themselves in the first-person plural. The symbolic actions of the rites can be comprehended as residues of a stage of communication that has already been gone beyond in domains of profane social cooperation. (Habermas 1987d: 60). Against Seduction Do not be misled! There is no return. Day goes out at the door; You may feel the night wind: There is no tomorrow. Do not be deceived! That life is a little thing. Quaff it in quick gulps! It will not suffice for you When you have to leave it. Do not be put off! You have not too much time! Leave decay to the redeemed! Life is the greatest thing. Nothing more remains.

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Do not be misled To drudgery and wasting disease! What fear can still touch you? You die like all the animals And nothing comes after. (By B. Brecht, in Küng 1981a, part II). Still More To Come Do not be misled! There is a return, Day goes out at the door; You might feel the night wind: There is a tomorrow. Do not be deceived! That life is a little thing. Do not quaff it in quick gulps! It will not suffice for you When you have to leave it. Do not be put off! You have not too much time! Does decay seize the redeemed? Life is the greatest thing: There is still more to come. Do not be misled To drudgery and wasting disease! What fear can still touch you? You do not die like the animals There is not nothing after. (Küng 1981a: 70-71). No, this faith in Christ is no mere putting off toward a beyond, but a basis for protest and resistance against unjust conditions here and today, carried and strengthened by an unstoppable and unsatisfiable longing for the totally Other. (Küng 1994a: 904-905). Philosophy, as it can alone still be done responsibly in the face of despair, would be the attempt, to consider all things in such a way, as they represent themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light except that which shines from redemption on the world: everything else exhausts itself in the re-

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construction and remains a piece of critique. Perspectives would have to be established in which the world transfers, alienate itself in a similar way, alienates itself, and reveals its tears and abysses, as it once will lay prostrate as needy and disfigured in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives, without arbitrariness and force, completely out of the feeling with the objects, that alone is what matters for thinking. That is the most simple thing to do, because the condition calls inevitably for such knowledge, because the completed negativity once entirely taken into view, shoots together into the mirror script of its opposite. But it is also the completely impossible. Because it presupposes a standpoint, which is removed from the spell circle of existence, and if it was only to the smallest extent, while after all every possible knowledge has first of all to be defied away not only from that what is the case, in order to become binding and obliging, but it is therefore itself also beaten with the same distortion and neediness, which it intends to escape... The more passionately the thought closes itself up against its being conditioned for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously and thereby fatefully, it falls victim to the world... Thought must still comprehend its own impossibility for the sake of its possibility. In the face of the demand, which thereby is posed to thought, the question concerning the reality or unreality of the redemption itself is however almost indifferent and unimportant. (Adorno 1980b: 333-334).

appendix b

Special Considerations and Inspirations On the basis of the Torah and the Psalms, the Rabbis regarded gratitude and thanksgiving to God Almighty and to Divine Providence for his infinite mercies as the highest form of religious communicative action, and the thank-offering as a supreme type of sacrifice (Genesis 28: 20-22; Numbers 29: 12-38; 30: 3; Deuteronomy 8: 10, 14, 15; 11: 12; 16: 2; Hertz 5716-1956, 107 / 21-22; 697-698 / 12-38; 702 / 3. 783-784 / 10, 14, 15; 792 / 12; 815 / 2; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991b: 169-222; Mann 1991: 111-112). The Rabbis declared that in the Messianic era, all sacrifices shall have completed their educational mission: all save the one, inculcating the duty of gratitude. That sacrifice was to continue forever. The Prophets ranked ingratitude as a sin that reduced man below the level of a dumb animal. Since the cessation of sacrifices with the fall of the second temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 after Christ, the Jews instead pronounced benedictions of thanksgiving. The center of Christianity is the Eucharist: On the night before he was crucified by the Romans, the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth transformed the old Jewish Pasha-meal, which remembered the liberation of the Israelites from their Egyptian slaveholders, into a meal of thanksgiving for his friends in Jerusalem (Matthew 26: 17-29; Mark 14: 12-25; Luke 22: 7-20; Hegel 1986q: 299-346; Küng 1994a: 336-602; Steindl-Rast 1984: chaps. 1-9). Also the Qur’an recommends gratefulness (Yusuf Ali 1983, Sure 2, 185; Küng 2004: 200-202). Walter Dirks, my friend, the Christian humanist and German and European journalist and collaborator of Theodor W. Adorno, who was the successor of Horkheimer in the directorship of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, told me in the last year of his life that a man who is grateful can never be entirely unhappy (Dirks, 1968; 1983a; 1983b; 1985; 1986: 442-457). Here I would gladly follow what the three Abrahamic religions, the Rabbis, and the Hebrew, Christian, and Islamic Prophets recommend, and fulfill my duty of gratitude to all the friends on the religious and on the secular side mentioned below, who have helped me with this project of a Manifesto of the critical theory of society and religion, and to many others, who could not be mentioned here, simply because of a lack of space. According

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to the most outstanding critical theorist of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas, whoever says thank you must not only say to whom, and in which context, and for which purpose he is grateful, but also for what (Dubrovnik Discourse, April, 1978). I shall try to fulfill this requirement and demand of communicative rationality and action in the following acknowledgement explicitly and implicitly throughout this Manifesto of the dialectical theory of society and religion. My special gratitude goes to:

My Wife Margaret and Our Children and Grandchildren My gratitude to my late wife Margaret and to my 8 children and 14 grandchildren, which has already been expressed in previous books, and which practically continued throughout the 22 years of our very happy marriage, and through 32 years after her most cruel cancer death on October 20, 1978, still remains valid and goes on today–in 2010–and into the future (Siebert 2001, chap. 3; 1994, chaps. 2 & 6). Margie wrote on the first page of Daniel Berrigan’s (1978) book Uncommon Prayer: A Book of Psalms, which she gave me as a gift on Father’s Day, June 18, 1978, four months before her death, in her most loving and forgiving way the following dedication: Dear Rudi, Who brings a fiery sword yet comes also as reconciler and consoler, a man who belongs to the prophets of old and yet whose voice is new and fresh in the 20th century and into the future. You ancient and yet new man–I love you! Your Margie (Berrigan 1978: 35-36, 53-54).

The remembrance of Margie and her good life, which was as deeply religious as it was modern and enlightened, and of her premature brave death, has never ceased to give meaning to my life, and to my work, and particularly to this Manifesto of the critical theory of society and religion, concerned not only with the wholly Other and liberation, but also with the rescue of the hopeless, the innocent victims, who have been destroyed, and of whom she was one. Here I have followed the post-fascist psychoanalyst and psycho-therapist of individuation, Carl G. Jung’s more than psychological, namely wise statement, which he reasserted after the death of his wife and after a deep existential crisis, that whenever we have the experience of something very meaningful, then we should hold on to it forever (Jung 1958). Margie’s and my own relationship was wonderfully

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meaningful in an unconditional way, which is possible only in the other, the religious dimension (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 32, 34-37; Habermas 1991a: 110-126, 127-156). Margie and I agreed with Max Horkheimer, the founder of the critical theory of society, that to rescue an unconditional meaning without God was utter vanity (Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 34). Like Horkheimer, and unlike Habermas, Margie and I did not find a merely linguistic meaning, rooted in the–what Hegel had called–human potential of language and memory and in the evolutionary universal of the struggle for recognition, and in a transcendence from inside into this-worldliness, to be a sufficient or satisfactory inversion of a genuine religious Transcendence, what Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno called the wholly Other, as the determinate negation of the negativity in nature and history, particularly the perils of human existence–like abandonment, injustice, alienation, illness and death–and of the truth in the emphatic sense and of the unconditional meaning and values and norms guaranteed by it (Hegel 1972; 1979; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 34, 37; Habermas 1986: 53-55; 1991a: 110-126). Thus, I have held on to Margie’s and my own unconditional meaning grounded in religious Transcendence, the totally Other than the horror and terror of nature and personal life and history in theory and in praxis, even when there was no countermovement to our prayers, and when there prevailed the feeling of extreme God-forsakenness and despair (Psalm 22; Matthew 27: 40-41; Mark 15: 34; Hegel 1986q: 273-274, 286-293; Fromm 1992: 203-212; 1966: 231-236; Tillich 1972: 186-190; Siebert 2000; 2001: chap. 3; 2002: chaps. 2 & 6). Margie and I always knew that there was much more to religion than any social science, or even a comparative science of religion, or a philosophy, or a theology could possibly comprehend: including the critical theory of society, or even the new dialectical theory of religion, of which this book is the Manifesto (Luhmann 1977: 6; Siebert 2001: chaps. 1-3; 2002: chaps. 1-6). Our children and our grandchildren and I continue to live in grateful anamnestic solidarity with Margie (Habermas 1986: 53-64). The monument with the Rose in the Cross–taken from Dante Alighieri, Martin Luther, and Georg W. F. Hegel, who interpreted it as the Rose of Reason, or of the Logos, or of Providence in the awfully contradictory Cross of the always present slaughterbench of nature and history–on Margie’s grave on the Mountain Home Cemetery in Kalamazoo, Michigan, gives witness to this anamnestic-solidary gratefulness (Hegel 1986g: 26-27; 1986l: 34-36; 1986q: 501-535; Habermas 1986: 53-64; Benedict XVI 2006: 1-7; Siebert 2001, chap. 3; 2002, chaps. 2 & 6).

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I thank especially our sons–Karl, Thomas and Steve–and our daughters– Rosemarie, Maria, Agnes and Jeanne–and their children–Meagan, Margaret, Nicolas, Sally, Lauren, Kyle, Jacob, Paul, Mathew, Ryan, Christopher, Alexandra, Tatum and Grace-Margaret–first of all for growing up so decently in the last 50 years and particularly in the almost 30 years, since the death of their Mother and Grandmother: without her very motherly love, and understanding, and help (Siebert 2001, chap. 3; 2002, chaps. 2 & 6). In a certain sense, my sons and daughters grew up with the critical theory of society and the dialectical religiology and were educated in the critical spirit. Certainly, the critical theory of society and religion has played an important role in the children’s education. It was indeed not easy for the children to grow up in the critical spirit in the context of the post-WorldWar II restorative German bourgeois society, or of the conservative and conformist American civil society, and to transcend the American dream of sex, car and career (Maschler 2006: 25-27; Priester 2006: 27-30; Lucke 2006: 31-35; Camman 2006: 35-38). But all of the children and the grandchildren have done well and have become decent people. I am grateful to my children for all the physical and spiritual support they have given to me through the past three decades, without which my work could not have continued, and this Manifesto could not have been written. Special thanks go to my son Steve, who helped me to raise his two younger sisters, and to my daughter Agnes-Maria, a nurse and psychologist at Borgess Hospital in Kalamazoo, who for two decades has taken care of my health. I have enjoyed tremendously the many discourses with my daughters and sons through the years as they grew up and matured and became successful in their own work: during our meetings on feast days and during our yearly vacations in Holland, Michigan: about nature, abstract right, personal morality, marriage and family, civil society, political state, history and international relations, and culture, i.e. art, religion, philosophy and science (Hegel 1986i, parts I-III; 1986j: 1-3). I have particularly enjoyed the yearly barbarian invasions–Barbari ante portas–of my 14 grandchildren in the old summerhouse at Lake Michigan, and their continual criticism of my often critical and even apocalyptic-eschatological paintings, from which I have learned a lot. Many thoughts, which appear in this Manifesto, my children and grandchildren and I have discussed back and forth many times. I hope that the critical theory of society and the dialectical religiology will continue to be helpful to all of them, as they interpret the continuing carnage of the slaughterbench of nature, society and history: no matter, if it appears in liberal, or in brown–or red–fascist, or in neo-liberal or neo-conservative, or in Zionistic, or in Islamic-

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nationalistic shape–and try to act decently in spite of it, and at least try to mitigate post-modern global alternative Future I–the totally administered signal society, and to resist completely post-modern, global alternative Future II–the necrophilous, militaristic society, and to promote passionately post-modern, global alternative Future III–a society, in which all people are free from, in, and through the state, and the antagonisms of which are, therefore, reconciled (Hegel 1986l: 19-55; Flechtheim 1971, chaps. 4-9; Bonfiglio 2005: 266-288; Horkheimer 1985g, chap. 34-40, 42; Metz 1973: chap. 5, Küng 1994a: 865-906; 2004; Meyer 2006d: 22-24; App. G).

The Critical Theorists of Society I would like to acknowledge the great intellectual debt that I owe to the scholars of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer 1987a; Horkheimer / Adorno 1972: ix-x, xi-xvii, chaps. 1-5, esp. 23-24; Adorno 1970; Tiedemann 2003; Friedeburg / Habermas 1983: 7-9, 201-292; Schmid / Noerr 1996: 81-101; Vollgraf, Sperls, Hecker 2000; Demirovic 1999: 9-41; Schirmacher 2000; Haag 1983, chap. 7; Hammond 1993; Kohlenbach / Geuss 2004; Bottomore 1975, 2002; McCarthy 1990: 437-469; Negt 1964; Brosio 1980: 1-50; Hewitt 1995; Ott 2001; Habermas 1985; Best / Kellner 1991; Kosiek 2004; Habermas 2002; Mendietta 2005; Kohlenbach / Geuss 2005; Rasmussen / Swindal 2004; Habermas 1976). The Frankfurt School developed out of the Institute for Social Research founded at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität in my home town Frankfurt a.M., Germany, in 1923, four years before my birth. I am grateful to the older as well as to the younger generations of critical theorists of society of the Institute for Social Research as non-conformist intellectuals moving in the tradition of the dialectical philosophy of German idealism between the sacred and the profane; between religion and metaphysics on one hand, and positivism, e.g. cognitivism, as well as neo-conservativism, and the philosophy of departure from modernity, or deconstructionism or post-modernism, on the other; and between super-naturalism and naturalism. The critical theorists have determinately negated both sides: i.e. they criticized them, but also tried to preserve, to elevate, to fulfill and to reconcile some of their rational components and progressive elements, and thus to concretize them: only the concrete is the truth (Deuteronomy 8 & 10; Hertz 5716-1956: 783 / 10; Hegel 1986a: 9-103, 104-189, 190-217, 234-238; 1986c: 68-77; 1986e: 48-53; 1986o: 9-88; Taylor 1983; Cooper 1925: Parts I-II; Halfwassen 1999; Drilo 2004: 317-319; Singer 2001: chaps. 1-4; Neuhouser 2004; 2005: 1-2; Dudley 2005: 3-14; Kolb 2005: 15- 30; Neuhouser 2005: 31-42; Grau 2001; Peperzak 2001: chaps. 15; Dunanevskaja 2002;

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Nancy 2002; Benjamin 1955: 20; Horkheimer 1987a: 399-400; Horkheimer / Adorno 1972; Adorno 2002; Adorno 1970; Tiedemann 2003: Part I; Friedeburg / Habermas 1983: 7-9, 201-292; Schmid / Noerr 1996: 81101; Vollgraf, Sperls, Hecker 2000; Demirovic 1999; Schirmacher 2000, chaps. 1-12; Gold / Engel 1998; Haag 1983, chap. 7; Hoerster 1985, chaps. 1-10; Lawson / McCauley 1990; Emirbayer / Mische 1998: 962-1023; Light / Wilson 2003; Hammond 1993; Kohlenbach / Geuss 2004; Moland 2003: 139-170; Burbidge 2003: 171-186; Bottomore 1975, 2002; McCarthy 1990: 437-469; Negt 1964: 7-8, parts I-IV; Gartman 1991: 421-447; Hewitt 1995, chaps. 1-7; Libera 1991: chaps. 1-5; Küng 2004: 466-468, Pals 2005; Ott 2001; Habermas 1985a; Best / Kellner 1991; Summer 2004: 101-119; Philipps 2004: 139-153; Kosiek 2004, chaps. 1-5; Habermas 2002; Mendietta 2005; Thompson 1996: 7, 16, 18, 22, 26-27, 30-32, 54, 65-67, 73-74, 79, 87, 89, 98-99, 107-108, 110, 117, 126-127, 145-146, 150-156, 168-170, 173-180, 194-200; Kohlenbach / R. Geuss 2005; Rasmussen & Swindal 2004; Habermas 1976). After my return from the battles of World War II and from the Prisoner of War Camp Allen, Norfolk, Virginia, USA, to Frankfurt a.M., I still heard lectures by Professor Dr. Max Horkheimer and Professor Dr. Theodor W. Adorno at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s (Siebert 1966: 12-14; 1995: 103-116). After the completion of my studies in the critical theory of society, history, philosophy, sociology and social work, and theology at the Universities of Frankfurt, Mainz and Münster, and at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC and after my political engagement on the Left of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the spirit of the LeftCatholic journal for culture and politics, the Frankfurter Heft, edited by Walter Dirks and Eugen Kogon, the author of the SS-State, both cooperating closely with Adorno and Horkheimer, and after my immigration from Germany to the USA in 1962, I began to visit regularly the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt from 1975 on, when I founded the international course on the Future of Religion in the Inter-University Centre for Postgraduate Studies (IUC) in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia / Croatia, which continues up to the present, i.e. 2010 (Kogon 1965; Dirks 1983, 1985; Reimer 1992; Siebert 2005; Ott 2007). In April or May, in both the Institute and in the Department of Philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität I had annual discourses with members of the second, third or even fourth generation of critical theorists about the original themes of the first generation as well as about those of their own. These themes included: critical and tradition-

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al theory; the works of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Erich Fromm, and Jürgen Habermas; the German labor unions; capitalism, socialism and fascism; the present crisis of the positive social sciences; religion as critique; the respectable murderers; social injustice and Jewish, Christian and Islamic conscience; American negro slavery; the slaughter of 6 million Jews; the annihilation of 26 million Russian communists; the terror- bombing of open cities and ten thousands of bombed out, dead and wounded and displaced civilians and noncombatants; the sub-proletariat in antagonistic modern civil societies; the distribution of income and the extent of poverty in the G8 states and their dependencies; religion and metaphysics on one hand, and historical materialism on the other; authority and family; the social function of philosophy; industry and highly commodified mass culture; theism and mystical, or methodological atheism; culture wars; the capacity for empathy with the victims of modern civil society; the market-friendly abstraction named Operation Iraqi Freedom; psychic mutilation in totalitarian systems; the authoritarian personality; proto-Nazi body culture; the identification of the enemy; capitalist normativity; religious and secular antiintellectualism; national and international bullying; global hegemony, imperialism, and dictatorship; social injustice; provincialism; nationalism and patriotism on the Right and on the Left; the dumbing down of the masses; discourse avoidance; the combination of critical intelligence and compassion; the impact of capitalism not just on popular culture, particularly religious culture, but also on peoples’ perception, their bodily experience, and, ultimately, their capacity for being human; the identity of human potentiality and actuality; and finally the critical theorists’ combination of Jewish theology and Kantian agnosticism, without however becoming agnostics, since that would necessarily lead to positivism as the metaphysics of what is the case in nature, society, and history (Habermas 2003: 1-9; Mullahy 1948: i-vi, xv, xix, chaps. 1-2; Orsolic 2003: 9-307; Lee 2005: chaps. 1-5; Daniel 2005: 26-27; Özdogan 2005: 4-7; Martin 2004: 341-356; Wallerstein 2005: 121-134; Furfey 1966: chaps. 1-8, 11-13; Küng 2004: 29-42; Habermas 2001: 9-31; Özdogan 2005: 4-7; Hofmann 2006: 12-14). From year to year, I received from the critical theorists in the Frankfurt Institute the most precious information and insights concerning all those and other themes and problems that have enriched greatly the present Manifesto.

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The Colleagues and Students in Dubrovnik and Yalta I am most thankful to my colleagues and students from over 12 countries, who have met in 33 international courses on the Future of Religion in the Inter-University Center for Post-Graduate Studies, in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia / Croatia, from 1977 to 2009 and are meeting again in April 2010 (Reimer 1992; Ott 2007). They came from Canada, the USA, Central America, Germany, Holland, Belgium, England, France, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Russia, Bulgaria, Israel, etc. They came from the religious as well as from the secular side. I am thinking particularly of the most outstanding members, some of whom came to our international discourse even during the terrible Yugoslav civil war, when we had to hide in the basement of Hotel Argentina from the Serbian guns up on the hill above us: Ivan Supek, Jürgen Habermas, Gottfried Küenzelen, Denis Janz, Jan Fennema, Helmut Fritzsche, Ankica Marinovic Biobinac, Kjartan Selnes, Mislav Kukoc, Aurelia Margaretic, Nicola Skledar, Marco Orsolic, Dinka Marinovic Jerolimo, Hans Weitensteiner, Michael Ott, Dusko Travar, A. James Reimer, Diana Moxley, Trutz Rendtorff, Thomas Luckmann, Gabriel Vahanian, Gregory Baum, Johannes, B. Metz, Werner Kriegelstein, Hans Küng, Georgia. Apostopoulou, Paul Mojzes, Srdjan Vrcan, Ivica Mastruko, Branco Bosnjak, N. Gerald Shenk, Helmut. Peukert, Edmund. Arens, Michael Maidan, Kathryn Kopinak, Elisabeth Özdalga, Johann Galtung, Warren S. Goldstein, etc. (Reimer 1992; Ott 2007). Our central concern was the dialectic between the sacred and the profane, the dialectic in the enlightenment, and the dialectic in the religion (Hegel 1986p: 9-88; Siebert 2005). Through this threefold dialectic, supported by an infinite mass of empirical data, we reflected on fundamental trends in globalizing late capitalist society pointing to three alternative futures: (1) Regression into religious fundamentalism; (2) Progression into total secularity; or (3) Progression toward the reconciliation between a changed religion and a changed secularity: between modernized religion and post-secular society; between revelation and autonomous reason, between monotheism and enlightenment, between religious faith and scientific knowledge (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986p: 9-88; Habermas 2001a; 2006d: 1-25; Benedict XVI 2006: 1-7; Nor 2006; Brown 2006: 2-5; Cito 2006; Gamel 2006, 2-5; Siebert 2005). Very few of the scholars who joined us in Dubrovnik were inclined toward religious fundamentalism, which is after all a very modern phenomenon. Some scholars tended toward total secularization, leaving religion behind as a childhood affair of the human species. However, we had a majority of scholars, who–if complete reconciliation between the sacred and the profane was not possible at this time–wanted at

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least to let the dialectic of enlightenment continue for a while. Under all circumstances these scholars wanted to keep the dialectic between the religious and the secular open, and resisted any premature fundamentalistic or scientistic or positivistic closure. We often agreed. Sometimes we had to agree to disagree. In our international course on the Future of Religion, scholarly contributions came from sociologists, historians, psychologists, theologians, religiologists, anthropologists, etc. It was always interdisciplinary. Only a minority of the Dubrovnik scholars were critical theorists as such. I am very grateful for my colleagues’ critique of my papers on different aspects of the critical theory of religion through the years since I had founded the international course on the Future of Religion together with my late wife Margaret in the IUC, in March 1977, after two years of intense preparation, following the invitation of scholars from the University of Zagreb and the Director of the IUC. Such critique has certainly been most helpful for the further development of the new dialectical theory of religion, which informed by Hegel does not ignore opponents, but rather determinately negates them, i.e. does not only criticize them but also preserves and elevates and fulfills their rational elements through going into them as deeply as possible (Hegel 1986c: 11-67, 68-81; 1986e: 48-53; Reimer 1992; Siebert 2000; 2001; 2002; Ott 2007; App. E). Most of my colleagues were not committed to the critical theory of society, but instead were rather deeply immersed in the different contemporary forms of positivism, including cognitivism and rational choice theory (Adorno 1970a; Goldstein 2006). Critical theorists and positivists–in spite of all their differences–often tried to reconcile the modern dichotomy between the religious and the secular on the secular side, while the theologians tried to reconcile it in the opposite direction, on the religious side. I must acknowledge that I owe important information and insights not only to the theological critique, but also, and particularly so, to the positivistic critique. Often one can learn most from the opposition. Of course, the critical theory of religion as such is neither theology nor metaphysical philosophy, nor is it a notionless positive science. It moves rather between these opponents, learning gratefully much from both sides. Much of what has been said about the international course in Dubrovnik on the Future of Religion is also valid for the sister-course in Yalta, Crimea, Ukraine, on Religion in Civil Society. In 2000, together with my former student and present colleague Tatjana Senyushkina, Professor of Political Science at the V. I. Vernadskiy Tavrida National University, Simferopol, Ukraine, I was able to start this course. Tatjana had often par-

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ticipated in the Dubrovnik discourse. Thus, we patterned the Yalta discourse after the Dubrovnik model. However, here in Yalta our main concentration was on the question so important for the region: collision or discourse among the religiously grounded civilizations. We stressed with Jürgen Habermas and Hans Küng the discourse and cooperation among the civilizations rather than Samuel Huntington’s culture war. Professors and students have come to Yalta in the past nine years from all parts of the Ukraine, and from the Russian Federation, and from Central Asia, and from far behind the Ural. I am immensely grateful to all the professors and students who have come to Yalta in the past seven years for the new perspectives, which they have opened up for the present Manifesto. My special thanks go not only to Tatjana, but also to our interpreter Yevgeniya Leont’ Yeva, who translated our papers and discourses from English into Ukrainian and Russian, and vice versa. In the meantime, Yevgeniya has joined my Master and Ph.D. students in the Sociology Department of Western Michigan University, and lives in my House of Shalom with free room and board as many other students from the USA, Germany, Iran, Croatia, India, Colombia, etc. have done before in the past 30 years. It is not difficult to detect productive traces of the Dubrovnik discourses on the Future of Religion from 1977 to 2010 and from the Yalta discourses on Religion in Civil Society from 2000-2010 throughout the present study concerning a critical theory of religion. I would like to thank all members of the 34 courses in Dubrovnik so far, and of the 9 courses in Yalta so far, professors and students alike, for their papers, which have most intensely stimulated my own thought about the world religions, particularly about their theodicies, and their relationships toward the antagonistic modern world. I would not have started and I would not have been able to complete the present Manifesto without my continual discourse with my colleagues–psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, religiologists, philosophers and theologians–from different countries in Europe, the Americas, and the Near East in Dubrovnik and in Yalta in the past 34 years. Not at last and not at least, I thank all members for the wonderful social life that we were able to cultivate in Dubrovnik and Yalta through the years during our many excursions and excellent meals, which we enjoyed in romantic restaurants along the Adriatic Sea and the Black Sea, and for the many lasting friendships that originated from it.

Diether Haenicke I would like to thank very much the late Professor Dr. Diether Haenicke, former President of Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan,

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who for many years supported morally and financially my international course on the Future of Religion in the IUC, in April of every year, and helped me to initiate the international course on Religion and Civil Society in Yalta, Ukraine (Haenicke 2003). Both international courses have been the main basis for my research connections with professors not only from Croatia and other states of the former Yugoslavia and from the Ukraine and Poland, and the Russian Federation, but also from Greece, Germany, England, France, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Hungary, and Israel (Reimer 1992, parts I-III). After World War II, Diether had studied at the Universities of Göttingen, Marburg and Munich. He focused on literature, and specialized in the work of Bertholt Brecht, whose idea of friendly living together he took very seriously and continually practiced it at Western Michigan University and in the City of Kalamazoo, Michigan. After he immigrated to America, Diether could hardly make a carrier by teaching the Marxist Brecht in conservative America or even in the German Departments of liberal universities. Until very recently Brecht’s plays had never been performed in the theaters of Western Michigan University because they were allegedly too difficult, or because they would not attract large enough audiences and were, therefore, not cost-effective. Thus, early on Diether transferred into administration. Yet, precisely as administrator Diether was able to preserve and realize some of that friendliness that Brecht intended in his dialectical or epical theater. When the University Committee rejected the Left-Hegelian Jürgen Habermas–who like Brecht aimed at alternative Future III–a society, in which friendly living together would be possible–as Visiting Scholar, because he had allegedly not written enough, Diether found that not understandable and ridiculous, but could not change the Committee’s decision. A few years earlier, in the middle of the 1980’s, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Registrar repressed our successful minor-program in Humanistic Future Studies because there were too many foreigners in it. We had patterned our Center for Humanistic Future Studies after the critical theorist Ossip K. Flechtheim’s critical Futurology (Flechtheim 1971; 2003). Admittedly, the Left-Hegelian Flechtheim, with whom we cooperated in Dubrovnik, had already offered his critical futurology to 100 American universities in 1943 when he was in the States as refugee from Fascist Germany, and was rejected by all of them. For a long time the future of the American civil society has been determined by the corporate ruling class and not by the universities or by the people, i.e. the 180 million workers and farmers. However, the WMU Committee allowed me to bring the Center-Hegelian Hans Küng as visiting

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professor to campus in order to talk about the possible reconciliation of the religious and the secular, and treated him very generously (Küng 1978). In contrast, nearby private Baptist Kalamazoo College has not only performed the plays of Bertholt Brecht many times in its theaters in the past 40 years, but it also allowed me to bring the Left-Hegelian J. Baptist Metz to its campus, in order to present his critical political theology, from which the Central American liberation theology was derived (Metz 1973c). In any case, Diether fulfilled in the most excellent way the very function of the perfect administrator: he facilitated research and teaching at home and abroad in the most generous way (Haenicke 2003). Without such research connections, this study on the dialectical theory of religion could not have been accomplished. Diether expressed most beautifully his understanding for my research work in his letter of April 17, 1995: Dear Rudi, I just finished reading your biographical story in the Grass Roots Review (A Literary Review by and for Working People, Vol. 5, Spring 1995). It is a moving account of our generation; full of sadness, disappointment and despair–but also laden with the unshaken determination to do good, to help and to ease the burden of mankind. I read it with great understanding. Let me know when I can help your work (Siebert 1966; 1995). Cordially, Diether.

Diether did so again in his letter of July 22, 2003, in which he responded to my German article Remembrance of Otto Schuhmann, a Christian and a Humanist, in the Context of Barbarism, when he stated: Dear Rudi, I have read your interesting essay on your teacher Otto Schuhmann with lively interest and not without melancholical memories. We both, as you know, belong to a peculiar generation, which knows the war in all its horror and which cannot get this remembrance out of its memory for life. How beautiful that there are also reminiscences of upright and courageous men like your teacher. I thank you, dear Rudi, for the beautiful essay and wish you a restful summer. Your Diether (Askenasy 2003).

During his tenure as President of Western Michigan University, Diether always appeared as a very secular person, passionately engaged in the profane business of a secular university (Haenicke 2003). Diether even got engaged in a religious-ethical controversy on the secular side. He was very interested in combining the two large hospitals of Kalamazoo: the Catholic Borgess Hospital and the Methodist Bronson Hospital. However, the union

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of the two hospitals could not take place because among other issues, Borgess Hospital found unacceptable the positive abortion policies of Bronson Hospital. Yet, after having read my book Right, Might and Love about my anti-fascist pastor in Frankfurt during the Third Reich, the prophetic political theologian Georg W. Rudolphi, in which I had also mentioned his great contemporary, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, political theologian and martyr of truth up to his death on the gallows in the concentration camp of Flossenburg, on April 9, 1945, Diether confessed to me that often he prayed the prayer from the outstanding Protestant theologian and ethicist, Bonhoeffer (Bonhoeffer 2003; Siebert 1993: chaps. 1-6; esp. pg. 178 & 184; Küng 1990b, parts A, B, & C; Adorno 1997h: 354-372, 578-587; Mayer & Zimmerling 1992: parts I-V; Bethge 1951: 7-232). The text of the prayer still hangs in the former preacher seminary and present day children’s recreation facility Zingsthof, near Rostock, where he had lived and worked in inner emigration from fascism in Spring 1935, and which I had put at the end of my book. The prayer, which I discovered during a visit at Zingsthof while I was teaching at the Protestant Theological Faculty of the University of Rostock, shortly before the Berlin Wall fell, reads: Wonderfully rescued by good powers, we await confidently what may come+++ God is with us in the evening and in the morning, and quite certainly, on every new day. (Siebert 1993: 178-179. )

Sometimes it seemed as if Diether tried, as Professor of German and as President, to reconcile Bonhoeffer, who on the modern Hegelian continuum between the sacred and the profane stood at the religious extreme, with Brecht who had his place at the secular extreme, in theory as well as in praxis, but who, nevertheless, also read the Bible daily as well as Hegel’s deeply mystical-apocalyptic-eschatological Phenomenology of Spirit, and who even wished to be and was buried close to the great dialectician’s grave on the Dorothean Cemetery in East-Berlin (Hegel 1986p: 16-27; 1986c: 589-591). Diether also did not like it when professors or students in the Department of Comparative Religion or elsewhere in the University replaced before or after Christ with before or after the Common Era. However that may be, I would like to thank Diether wholeheartedly also in the name of my colleagues in Dubrovnik, and in Yalta, and in Kalamazoo for his constant willingness to help us to do good things in spite of

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all sadness, disappointment and despair, which our generation has experienced, and thus to follow the examples of the great and brave teachers of the past: like Rudolphi, Schuhmann, Bonhoeffer, Brecht, the critical theorists of society, and many others. We certainly are in dire need of their inspiration. Diether’s generosity climaxed when he contributed to our attempt to help the innocent victims of the 5 year long Yugoslav Civil War, through medicine and financial donations, which we literally carried into the war-torn country and distributed to the wounded and sick of all nationalities involved, while 200,000 of their members were slaughtered. On December 22, 2007, Diether wrote on the occasion of my 80th birthday: Dear Rudi: I am so very sorry that I cannot attend your birthday party tomorrow night, since I’ll be out of town visiting my grandsons. But I definitely want to wish you the best on the occasion of your 80th. Rudi, you have for many years been a true inspiration to me with your seemingly inexhaustible energy, your intellectual productivity, and your endless contributions to your academic discipline. I admire you for all that and often regret that I did not do more to support your many endeavors. May you have many more years of fruitful work to the benefit of all those who cherish intellectual inquiry. With gratitude and deep respect, as always, Diether.

The ecumenical Christian and humanist Diether Haenicke died on Sunday, February 15, 2009 from a long suffered heart illness in Bronson Hospital, Kalamazoo, Michigan, after having received the Sacrament of the Anointment of the Sick from his former student Rev. John D. Fleckenstein, St. Joseph Catholic Church, Battle Creek, Michigan, whom he had supported throughout the six years of his theological studies. While Diether had been baptized and confirmed in a Lutheran church in Germany, and often visited a Baptist Church in Kalamazoo, and finally received the last sacrament from a Catholic church in Battle Creek, Michigan, he really belonged to the post-modern Ecumenical Paradigm of Christianity, and acted accordingly throughout his life (Küng 1994a; 1994b).

Colleagues and Students at Western Michigan University I would like to express my gratitude toward my other colleagues and students in Western Michigan University’s Department of the Comparative Study of Religion, Department of Sociology, and Department of Philosophy, and in the former College of General Studies, who continually provided me with new information and insights into positive religiology, positive sociology as well as into scientific philosophy. From its very start,

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the WMU Religion Department was a secular department in a secular State University carried by secular scholars concerned with the religious dimension of society and culture in conformity with the First Amendment of the American Constitution, which demands the state to be neutral in religious matters and thus, excludes the teaching of theology as the self-expression of churches, denominations, cults and sects. It was in full agreement with its environment, a State University, and the First Amendment to the Constitution, that the Religion Department chose the model of the profane sciences of religion rather than the way of sacred theology. Contrary to Medieval universities and their theology departments, and contrary to the modern idealistic, philosophical universities and Kant, Jacobi, Fichte, and Schelling, who were still concerned with religion and with God, the Religion Department in the positivistic Western Michigan University was concerned only with religion, and not with God, Transcendence, the Absolute, the Infinite, or the wholly Other than the finite world, not to speak of the proofs for the existence of God, which for centuries had been the main interest of theologians and philosophers in the Occident and in the Orient (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986p: 9-88; 1986q: 347-536; Ott 2001; Siebert 2005). For many years there was even a certain aggressive antipathy and resentment against theology prevailing in the Religion Department, in spite or because of the fact that some scholars had a very intense theological background. Early on, my predecessors, Father John Hardon, a Jesuit and theologian and the first priest who had been hired by a state university, and who was quite successful in not only teaching but also converting students, was let go in a very painful process. The critical theorist Walter Benjamin was proven right in saying that theology had become a small and ugly hunchback, which could not let itself be seen in public any longer (Benjamin 1955c: 494; 1977: 250; Adorno 1997j: 508-616). I took the title of professor of religion and society because I was very much interested in the modern antagonism between the sacred and the profane, between religion and modern society: particularly between religious and secular values and norms. Besides teaching courses on religion and social ethics, I also taught psychology, sociology and philosophy of religion. However, I continued to define religion with Horkheimer and Adorno theologically, but in a non-denominational sense, as the insatiable longing of humanity for the imageless, nameless and notion-less wholly Other than the horror and terror of nature and history (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 23-40; Ott 2001, 2007; Siebert 2005). This longing seemed to me to be the driving force not only behind Judaism, Christianity and Islam but behind all world religions (Küng 1978: 540-542; 1990b: 70-71;

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1994a: 904-905; Siebert 1966; 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 1987d; 1993; 1994; 1995; 2001; 2002; 2003; 2004; 2005; 2006). In case theological or metaphysical questions arose in this context, they were necessarily dealt with without any violation of the First Amendment. My students and my colleagues in the Department of Comparative Religion helped me immensely through more than 40 years to understand better this dichotomy between the religious and the secular, and to discover ways–if not its possible truthful reconciliation–for keeping the discourse open between them and not closing them up fundamentalistically, or naturalistically, or positivistically, or scientitistically, and cutting human reason in half modernistically with such terrible and catastrophic consequences as September 11, 2001 (Habermas 2001a; 2006b: 1-25). I hope that this Manifesto will pay back some of what I owe to my colleagues and students in the Department of Comparative Religion and the Sociology and Philosophy Departments of WMU, and others, who are its target-audience, by introducing them in a more embracing and thorough way into the new dialectical theory of religion than this had been possible so far. My special thanks go to my former Chair for over three decades in the Department of Comparative Religion, Professor Thomas Lawson (Siebert 2005; Lawson & McCauley 1990). As other positivistic scholars used the rational choice theory, so Tom employed cognitivism in order to reconcile the religious and the secular from the secular, scientific side (Goldstein 2006, parts II & III; Siebert 2005; Lawson / McCauley 1990). In spite of the fact that Tom as a cognitivist presented the positivistic majority in the religious studies programs in American and Canadian universities and overall culture, he not only protected my work in the alternative critical theory of society by guaranteeing academic freedom, but he also facilitated in many ways my development of the dialectical religiology in Kalamazoo, Dubrovnik and Yalta (Siebert 1995a). I thank all my students at Western Michigan University in all my classes for our many good discourses, which were informed by the developing Manifesto and fed right back into it. I am particularly grateful to the Saturday Roundtable Meetings at the Bill Knapp’s, Russ’s and Colonial Kitchen Restaurants in Kalamazoo every week for a free lunch. It consists of a group of undergraduate and graduate students, professors, emeriti, alumni and other guests, who are very much interested in the critical theory of society and religion: David Thomas, Brent Krohn, Walter Olinskas, Dustin Byrd, Steve and Katherine Vasetsky-Chamberlin, Alireza Shirani, Michael Ott. Karen Pilarski, Zhenia Leont’yeva, Joseph Abbott, Edward Jayne, Walter Jensen etc. Besides having a good lunch, we discuss some of the papers we

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have recently published. We connect their content with contemporary issues going on at the time. The Saturday Roundtable Circle is a mixture of a scholarly meeting, social life, and support group. Many friendships have grown out of the Roundtable Circle. In a large university, students may feel sometimes lonely and abandoned. The solidarity of the group overcomes such feelings. Sometimes there is even material help. Our friend, the businessman David Thomas employed some of our unemployed students during summer. Thus, we are even a self-help-group. Among the students of the Roundtable Circle that I owe special thanks to is Alireza Shirani for having been my student, driver, and researcher for many years. Ali has provided me almost daily with global critical information for my teaching- and lecturing-activity as well as for this Manifesto. My great thanks go to Walter Jensen, who has done his Master with me in the Religion Department, and who is now doing his Ph.D. with me in the Sociology Department. Walter has helped me for years tirelessly and with great devotion with all my computer problems: and they have been indeed and still are many. Walter has been the director of my website: http//:www.rudolfjsiebert.org. He has been the copy editor of my Internet syllabi and of this Manifesto. Without Walter’s technical help this Manifesto could not possibly have been produced. I thank especially Walter Olinskas for continually providing me with articles and books relevant for the Manifesto project for several years. Finally, I thank my retired colleagues and the alumni for their regular participation in our discourses during our Saturday Roundtable Circle, and for sharing with us their rich experiences from inside and outside of Academia.

Michael R. Ott I am most grateful to my outstanding former student, and present colleague and friend, the Reverend Professor Dr. Michael R. Ott, for our many discourses inside and outside Western Michigan University, and our many trips together to Dubrovnik, Croatia; Frankfurt, Leipzig, Wittenberg, and Berlin, Germany; Kitchener and Toronto, Ontario; Atlanta, Georgia; Yalta, Ukraine, etc. over the past 34 years, which have finally led to the present Manifesto (Ott 2001; Goldstein 2006: 115-120, 121-150). Furthermore, I thank Mike for having edited most thoroughly the present Manifesto in its last stage of its development. Mike’s insight into Hegel’s dialectical philosophy, Horkheimer’s critical theory of subject, society, state, history, and culture, particularly religion, Metz’s new political theology, Moltmann’s theology of hope, and Gustavo Guttierez’s liberation theology made him a most competent discourse partner through out the years as

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well as being the editor of this Manifesto. I appreciate most that–through his teaching and writing–Mike gives a future to this project concerned with the new dialectical theory of religion as theodicy (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10-11; Adorno 1970b: 103-125; Siebert 2001: chaps. 1-3; 1994: chaps. 1-6). I have always admired Mike’s determination to discover and– as Hegel put it–to pluck the Rose of Reason from the Cross of the Present in his personal life, as a husband and father, as a citizen in the midst of antagonistic civil society, as an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ, and as a scholar (Hegel 1986g: 26-27, 42-43; 1986p: 272). I could not have accomplished this Manifesto and previous works without Mike’s continual intellectual and spiritual encouragement as well as his humor, his joyfulness, his laughter, as well as his great seriousness and sense for the creative negativity in human life, which knows of the deep theological truth of all paradigms of Christianity–In Cruce Salus Est–which has found its universal philosophical expression in the very core sentence of Hegel’s dialectical science of logic, that the negative is just as much the positive (Hegel 1986e: 49; 1986p: 290-292; Küng 1994a: 61-65, Part C). I am especially grateful to my friend, Mike, for accompanying me not only to several international courses on the Future of Religion in the IUC Dubrovnik, to our annual Religion in Civil Society course in Yalta, Crimea, Ukraine, and to the Institute for Social Research at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt, but also to the most dynamic Berlin, Germany, where we visited together and paid our respects on the Dorothean Cemetery to the graves of Johann G. Fichte, Georg W. F. Hegel, and Bertholt Brecht, whom we always considered to be among the last great rational men of the West. (Fichte 1794: XII, 13-17, 19-39, 50-52; Hegel 1986a: 102; 1986b: 9-138; 1986l: 70, 130, 132, 153, 313, 314, 369, 386, 387- 420; Bentley 1961: 1-587; Fuegi 1994: chaps. 1-47). For Mike and me the critical theory of society and religion was never merely theory, but also always praxis: the very practical struggle for social justice at home and for peace abroad (Habermas 1976; 1978a). Often in the face of what Hegel had called the slaughterbench of history, on which the good people too often suffer much and the bad people have only too often a nice life, and on which only too often the murderers triumph over their innocent victims against all rules of right, personal and social morality and religiosity, concerning this theodicy problem, Mike was more in sympathy with David, who resented the judgment of God–which He in his anger had inflicted on Uzzah, killing him, because he had failed in bringing the Ark to Mount Zion through want of reverence–and in a petulant spirit abandoned the whole enterprise, than with Aaron, who sub-

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mitted to God in silence (II Samuel 6: 4-10; Hertz 5716-1956: 455 / 3-8; Hegel 1986q 50-95). Mike and I and our friends in the Americas and Europe and Israel have for a long time encouraged each other by paraphrasing in so many words what the Synagogue congregation exclaims at the completion of any of the Five Books of the Torah: Be strong, be strong, and let us strengthen one another! (Hertz 5716-1956: 391 / 38).

To be strong meant for us to apply and carry out the global ethos of the world religions and world humanisms, particularly as expressed in the Golden Rule, which we found in the Chinese Religion of Measure, in Hinduism as the Religion of Imagination, in Buddhism as the Religion of Inwardness, in Judaism as the Religion of Sublimity, in Christianity as the Religion of Becoming and Freedom, in Islam as the Religion of Law, and in other world religions (Hegel 1986p: 302-330, 331-373, 374-389; Küng 1990b: parts A, B, C; 2002: 18-19; App. E). It had been formulated in Judaism as the Religion of Sublimity as Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you. (Rabbi Hillel, Shabbat 31a)

or What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah, while the rest is the commentary thereof; go and learn it. (Babylonian Talmud, tractate Shabbat Folio 31a).

and in Christianity as the Religion of Becoming and Freedom as stating In everything do to others as you would have them do to you. (Matthew 7: 12). And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. (Luke 6: 31).

and in Islam as the Religion of Law as saying No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself. (40 Hadith, saying of Muhammad of an-Nawavi).

Michael would not hesitate to announce this Golden Rule publicly as an expression of a global ethos during peace marches and speeches against the Vietnam war, against U.S. backed wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, against the nuclear weapon escalation in the Reagan Administrations, and

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against the first and second Gulf war in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo, Michigan and elsewhere under the harsh conditions of the more and more globalizing late capitalist society under neo-liberal and neo-conservative leadership (Küng 1990b, parts A, B, & C). I would finally also thank Michael’s dear wife Mary Louise, and their sons, Michael and John, for their great patience with both of us, and for their continual encouragement and support for our projects in the critical theory of society and religion, which they sometimes even made their own, as difficult as that may have been under the late capitalistic circumstances in Grand Rapids, in Michigan and the USA in general. Mike’s praxis of critique in public, in church and state, came very close to the heroic, as it often carried with it a great price that had to be paid.

Karen Lynn Shoup-Pilarski I would like to thank very much my former student and later homemaker, and long-time trusted friend, Mrs. Karen Lynn Shoup-Pilarski, for helping me not only with the editing, spelling and grammar of this and previous books and the whole technical computer work connected with their production, and with composing the bibliography for the Manifesto, but also with the formation of the very content of these studies throughout the past 24 years. Karen, and more recently her dear husband Ken, have driven me many thousands of miles to churches, colleges, universities, academic association meetings in the USA and Canada, at which I had to give lectures or courses on different topics in the critical theory of society and religion. Karen has been privately as well as a teacher and administrator in public schools as committed to religion as to modern enlightenment. She has developed her own personal synthesis of religious faith and secular knowledge, sacred and profane ethical values and norms. Precisely because Karen is of such peaceful disposition in all matters, she is able to be a peacemaker in her family, among her friends, in her neighborhood, in her school and wherever she can reach in antagonistic civil society. Karen’s most lively immediacy and vitality, and her continual humaneness, friendliness and helpfulness provided the wonderful, human atmosphere, in which this Manifesto could best mature, like all the other books before. Karen is not only most competent in communicative, but also in anamnestic and proleptic rationality. In a capitalistic society, which suffers severely from amnesia, Karen has been able to keep memories alive and the traditions going: reminiscences from the histories of our families, birthdays, wedding anniversaries, remembrances of death in the family, etc. In

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August 2006 Karen helped me to restore and beautify the grave of my wife Margaret and its monument with the Rose of Reason in the Cross of the Present out of dark South Dakota granite in the European way with white rocks from Michigan, after it had been erected almost 30 years earlier. Karen is a great believer in Reason and Providence in spite of all the horror and terror of nature, biography, society, and history. Precisely because Karen has been able to remember so well, she also has always been able to develop new projects for the future: weeks, months and years ahead. Besides in mimetic and anamnestic and anticipatory rationality and praxis, Karen has also been most competent in instrumental rationality and action as well: concerning the functioning of the household, the car, the garden, the computer, etc. Karen has been the most outstanding troubleshooter in all kinds of difficult situations concerning banks, corporations, university-bureaucracies, etc. She has been as good in dealing with tools as she has been in bonding with family and friends, and in inspiring new human relationships and in nourishing, sustaining and maintaining them. Karen has been as competent in her work, as in her language skills and in her struggle for recognition and in her concern for her country in terms of a constitutional patriotism. Even in times of her own crisis and suffering, Karen was able to encourage, to console, to heal, to inspire and to bring much happiness here and now to my family and myself and my students and colleagues. At the same time Karen was able to initiate longing and hope for light, friendship and love, for alternative Future III–the reconciled and free society, as well as for the totally Other than what is going on and is the case in nature, society and history, and for the redemption of the hopeless, the innocent victims of the present, the past, and the future: that the murderer may not triumph over them–at least not ultimately, and that the present injustice may not be the last word of history. Karen embraces masterfully what seems to be divided so far: redemption and happiness. Karen’s naturalness as well as her spirituality, her wonderful clear-mindedness, her soberness and her being down to earth and hands on, and her great social skills, or better still mimetic and communicative competence, and her smile, have been a continual joy and source of happiness for me, and my family, and my friends throughout the past two decades. Karen has been able to humanize nature and to naturalize the human. For all this what Karen has been doing and has done for me and my family I am infinitely grateful to her.

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The Members of St. Thomas More Student Parish I would like to thank the Roman Catholic St. Thomas More Student Parish situated on the Campus of Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, a very secular state university, for four decades of sisterly and brotherly community life, wonderful liturgical celebrations with highly developed music, and good sermons, in that they made them open to other world-religions as well as to secular humanism. Very often the student parish came very close to represent critical religion in the otherwise very traditional Diocese of Lansing or Diocese of Kalamazoo. Our family came every Sunday to St. Thomas Student Parish to participate in the celebration of the mass. For over ten years my dear wife Margaret played the organ at Sunday mass. Here at St. Thomas More Student Parish, we had the funeral service for Margie on October 24, 1978. Here several of our children took their marriage vows and some of our 14 grandchildren were baptized here. I am particularly grateful to the priests, sisters and lay staff of St. Thomas More Student Parish for giving me the opportunity since August 1965, to give 6 public lectures on contemporary issues every semester: on racial, gender and generational problems; civil and human rights; marriage difficulties; homosexuality; private and collective appropriation of collective labor; war and peace; liberalism, fascism and socialism, Catholic solidarism and ecumenism: shortly problems connected with the relationship between the religious and the secular, Church and civil society and political state and the historical process. We spoke about the Patron Saint, Thomas More himself, the great Christian, Erasmian humanist and statesman, who in his Utopia had taught that communism was a presupposition for entering the Kingdom of God. After World War II, many Catholics and Protestants had complained in Germany that they had not been sufficiently or were even wrongly informed by the Church, the priests, the ministers, and the theologians about the National Socialist Party’s worldview and the society and state it created, in which they had lived and worked and fought, and about the slaughterbench of history with all its needs, drives, inclinations, passions, particular interests, special purposes, enormous sacrifices, fanaticism, selfish intentions and struggles, and wars: and in general all the riddles of Providence posed by it (Hegel 1986l: 27-55; Erickson 1985; Krieg 2004; Reimer 1989). At that time I made the decision to enlighten religious communities about the social and political and historical context in which they were to witness and confess their faith in theory and praxis: to engage in Christopraxis, to combine Godtalk and faith praxis (Arens 1989; 1994, chap. 10; 1992). At St. Thomas

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More Student Parish, I was able to carry out this decision from 1965 to the present, 2010, through the initiation and continuation of public lectures and discourses devoted to time diagnoses and prognoses in the perspective of Catholic solidarism and the critical theory of society and religion. There were, indeed, always enough evil things happening on the bloody, sacrificial altar of national and international world history even long after the fascist period, which were in desperate need of comprehension and redeeming action: particularly since September 11, 2001 with the retaliation wars against Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Palestine, and Lebanon. Members of three Abrahamic religions are murdering each other in utter contradiction to what they consider to be the nature of God–Love and Reason–and the nature of man as God’s image. Daily so-called suicide-bombers of so-called terrorist organizations, like Hamas or Hezbollah, engage in Islamic Jihad and kill and wound Israelis in retaliation for their own leaders having been killed by the Israeli army a few days earlier. At the same time, insurrectionists and guerillas from different Arabic countries drive cement trucks, loaded with explosives, into US and UN buildings in Baghdad in retaliation for the UN cooperation with the American occupation forces and their bloody campaign. Lex talionis! Western crusaders apply their own terror of virtue, freedom and democracy against the Jihadists and insurrectionists. Not only is the fourth commandment of the Sermon the Mount forgotten, which forbids retaliation and stands for perfect justice without retaliation, it is even forgotten that the lex talionis is a limiting law: one eye for one eye, and not ten eyes for one eye. For years a civil war has been raging in Iraq, in which Muslims are not only killing Christians, but also Muslims. On September 22, 2006, as many American soldiers have been killed as those people who died in the attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington D.C., while even more Iraqis have been killed–over one million civilians alone, many of them children. In our lectures and discourses at St. Thomas More Student Parish, we tried to explore and explain this moral catastrophe in the perspective of faith and reason in the context of the dialectical religiology. The public lectures and discourses at St. Thomas More Student Parish were often connected with communicative and even political praxis for social justice and peace. Thus, students helped the Mexican workers on the fruit farms around Kalamazoo, or traveled to El Salvador to support the poor in the villages. Sometimes they participated in the protest movement against the School of the Americas, dubbed the School of Assassins by a Panamanian newspaper, in Fort Benning, Georgia, which has trained terrorists for fascist governments in Central and Latin America

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since 1946. American taxpayers have to pay for the school. In 2001, the School of the Americas had its name changed to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Praxis of the lex talionis on all sides (Siebert 2006)! Where is the Divine Reason or Providence, in which Jews, Christians and Muslims believe (Hegel 1986l: 19-55)? How can we recognize the affirmative in history, in which all this negativity would be subordinated and overcome? Indeed we always had a lot to discuss and a lot to do. Finally, I thank the progressive priests and students at St. Thomas More Parish for trying their best to keep open the Church’s windows toward the modern world, which Vatican II had intended and promised to open up, and which the neo- conservative elements inside and outside the Church try continually to close again (Pope Paul VI 1966; Pope Benedict XVI 2007).

appendix c

The Five-World Macro Model I. World of Logos Logic

II. World of Nature Nature Human Organism

III. Internal World Human Subjectivity

Private Right

Personal Morality

A. Being B. Essence C. Notion

A. Mechanical Realm B. Physical-Chemical Realm C. Biosphere A. Form B. Assimilation C. Genus Process

A. Anthropological Level B. Phenomenological Level: (1) Language & Memory (2) Work & Tool (3) Sex and Eroticism (4) Struggle for Recognition, (5) Nation C. Psychological Level A. Property B. Contract C. Injustice A. Intention / Guilt B. Purpose / Well being C. The Good / the Conscience

the five-world macro model IV. Social World Family Civil Society

Constitutional State

World History

V. Cultural World Art Religion

Philosophy / Science

A. Marriage B. Property C. Education of Children A. Need system B. Administration of Justice C. Police A. Internal State Law B. External State Law C. World-History A. Reason / Providence B. Goal: Realm of Freedom: (1) Human Freedom-Nature (2) Agents of Change (3) Material of Change C. Course of History

A. Symbolical Art B. Classical Art C. Romantic /Abstract Art A. Nature Religions B. Religions of Subjectivity C. Religion of Freedom A. Oriental Philosophy B. Greek Philosophy C. Medieval Philosophy D. Modern Philosophy E. Postmodern Philosophy

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The Fundamental Potentials, Categories, and Spheres of Actions I. World of Nature Nature Human Organism

II. Internal World Human Subjectivity

Private Right

Personal Morality

A. Mechanical Realm B. Physical-Chemical Realm C. Biosphere A. Form B. Assimilation C. Genus Process

A. Anthropological Level B. Phenomenological Level: (1) Language & Memory (2) Work & Tool (3) Sex and Eroticism (4) Struggle for Recognition (5) Nation C. Psychological Level A. Property B. Contract C. Injustice A. Intention / Guilt B. Purpose / Well being C. The Good / the Conscience

potentials, categories & spheres of actions III. Social World Family Civil Society

Constitutional State

World History

IV. Cultural World Art Religion

Philosophy / Science

V. World of Language A. Logic B. Grammar C. Semantics D. Semiotics E. Vocabulary F. Hermeneutics

A. Marriage B. Property C. Education of Children A. Need system B. Administration of Justice C. Police A. Internal State Law B. External State Law C. World–History A. Reason / Providence B. Goal: Realm of Freedom: (1) Human Freedom–Nature (2) Agents of Change (3) Material of Change C. Course of History

A. Symbolical Art B. Classical Art C. Romantic /Abstract Art A. Nature Religions B. Religions of Subjectivity C. Religion of Freedom A. Oriental Philosophy B. Greek Philosophy C. Medieval Philosophy D. Modern Philosophy E. Postmodern Philosophy

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appendix e

Heuristic Model of the History of Religions I. Religions of Nature

II. Religions of Subjectivity

III. Religions of Freedom

heuristic model of the history of religions Paradigms of the Abrahamic Religious Traditions Paradigms of Judaism Paradigms of Paradigms of Islam Christianity 1. Tribal 1. Jewish-Christian 1. Primordial 2. Orthodox Community 2. Empire 3. Roman 2. Arabic Empire (Monarchical) 3. Theocratic 4. Reformation 3. World-Religion 5. Enlightenment 4. Ulama-Sufi (Post-exile) 4. Rabbinical 6. Ecumenical / Post- 5. Modernization modern 6. Post-Modern (Pharisaic) 5. Assimilation 6. Post-Modern

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Antagonisms of Modern Civil Society and their Resolutions Religious

Secular

Nature

Humans

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Collective

Bourgeoisie

Individual

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Intellectuals

People

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Workers

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Order

Progress

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Matriarchal

Patriarchal

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Left

Right

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Productive Forces

Productive Relations

Explosion or Reconciliation?

antagonisms of modern civil society Authoritarian Personality

Revolutionary Personality

Theory

Empirical Reality

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Older Generation

Sociology

Younger Generation

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Society

State

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Psychology

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Theory

Praxis

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Validity

421 Facticity

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Being

Having

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Dialectic

Positivism

Explosion or Reconciliation?

appendix f

422

Base Structure

Super Structure

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Communicative Action

Instrumental Action

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Agency

Structure

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Aryan Race

African, Asian, etc, Races

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Body

Soul

Explosion or Reconciliation?

Form

Content

Explosion or Reconciliation?

appendix g

Possible Alternative Futures I. Alternative Futures of Society 1. The Totally Administered Society 2. The Entirely Militarized Society 3. The Reconciled Free and Just Society II. Alternative Futures of Religion 1. Religious Fundamentalism 2. Modern and Post–Modern Secularism 3. The Open Dialectic between the Religious and the Secular: Towards a Possible Reconciliation

Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion

Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor

David Fasenfest

Wayne State University Editorial Board

Chris Chase-Dunn, University of California-Riverside G. William Domhoff, University of California-Santa Cruz Colette Fagan, Manchester University Martha Gimenez, University of Colorado, Boulder Heidi Gottfried, Wayne State University Karin Gottschall, University of Bremen Bob Jessop, Lancaster University Rhonda Levine, Colgate University Jacqueline O’Reilly, University of Brighton Mary Romero, Arizona State University Chizuko Ueno, University of Tokyo

VOLUME 20

Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion The Wholly Other, Liberation, Happiness and the Rescue of the Hopeless Volume 2

By

Rudolf Siebert

Leiden • Boston 2010

On the cover: “The Machine” (1988) by Diane Thomas Lincoln, Wichita, Kansas, USA. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Siebert, Rudolf J., 1927Manifesto of the critical theory of society and religion : the wholly other, liberation, happiness, and the rescue of the hopeless / By Rudolf Siebert. p. cm. -- (Studies in critical social sciences ; v. 20) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18436-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Religion--Philosophy. 2. Frankfurt school of sociology. I. Title. II. Series. BL51.S52555 2010 261--dc22

ISSN: ISBN: ISBN: ISBN: ISBN:

2010001670

1573-4234 978-90-04-18436-7 (set) 978-90-04-18440-4 (vol. 1) 978-90-04-18442-8 (vol. 2) 978-90-04-18443-5 (vol. 3)

Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. Typeset by chs:p [Leiden, Netherlands]

printed in the netherlands

contents Volume One Acknowledgements ......................................................................................... xi Introduction ................................................................................................... xiii Chapter One.  The Critical Theory of Society ............................................... 1 Chapter Two.  The Neo-Conservative Trend Turn .................................... 57 Chapter Three.  The Three-fold Critical Theory of Religion .................... 97 Chapter Four.  From Quantitative to Qualitative Infinity ...................... 153 Chapter Five.  Theory Formation . ................................................................ 189 Chapter Six.  From Traditional to Critical Theory .................................. 229 Chapter Seven.  Universal Pragmatic ........................................................ 257 Chapter Eight. Truth and Justification . ...................................................... 287 Chapter Nine. Toward a New Model . ......................................................... 331 Appendices A. Mottoes, Impulses and Motives . ...................................................... 375 B. Special Considerations and Inspirations ......................................... 390 C. The Five-World Macro Model .......................................................... 414 D. The Fundamental Potentials, Categories, and Spheres of Action . 416 E. Heuristic Model of the History of Religions . ................................. 418 F. Antagonisms of Modern Civil Society and their Resolutions ...... 420 G. Possible Alternative Futures . ............................................................ 423

Volume Two Chapter Ten. External and Internal Perspective ..................................... Chapter Eleven. Conscious-making and Rescuing Critique . ............... Chapter Twelve. Necrophilous and Biophilous Elements . .................... Chapter Thirteen.  From the Jus Talionis to the Golden Rule . .............. Chapter Fourteen.  Religion and Revolution . .......................................... Chapter Fifteen. Concrete Utopia ............................................................. Chapter Sixteen.  Religion in Socialist Society . .......................................

425 473 509 555 599 643 677

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Chapter Seventeen.  From Magic to the Dialectical Notion . ................. 725 Chapter Eighteen. Truth as Meaning of Language and Work . ............. 767 Chapter Nineteen.  Religion in Liberal Society . ...................................... 815 Chapter Twenty. New York: The Capital of Liberalism .......................... 873 Chapter Twenty-One.  Religion in Fascist Society .................................. 959 Chapter Twenty-Two.  The Owl of Minerva . ............................................. 995 Chapter Twenty-Three. Critical Religion: Against Aggression, Force, Violence, and Terror . ................................................................ 1041

Volume Three Chapter Twenty-Four.  The Jewish-German Tragedy ........................... Chapter Twenty-Five.  From the Westphalian Peace to the Bourgeois and Socialist Revolutions ............................................ Chapter Twenty-Six.  The Expansion and Contraction of God ........... Chapter Twenty-Seven.  The Desperate Hope and the Rescue of the Hopeless . ..................................................................................... Chapter Twenty-Eight. Trust in the Eternal One . ................................

1111 1183 1243 1319 1385

Epilogue: God, Freedom, and Immortality . ........................................... 1445 References . .................................................................................................. 1577 Name Index ................................................................................................. 1693 Subject Index . ............................................................................................. 1715

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External and Internal Perspective The critical theory of religion combines an external and an internal perspective. It approaches religion from an observer and a participant position (Habermas 2007: 669-707; Henrich 2007: 389-402; App. A, B, C, D, E).

Observer and Participant Position The critical theory of religion vacillates between the observer and participant position: between an external positivistic, naturalistic, scientistic, comparative, interdisciplinary, objectivating, quantitative religiological perspective–including anthropological, psychoanalytical, economical, sociological, politiological, and historical approaches, on one hand, and an internal, dialectical non-positivistic, non-scientistic, non-objectivating, non-naturalistic, qualitative, subjectivating, philosophical, and theological view, on the other (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 32, 34, 35, 37, 40; Habermas 2007: 669-707; Henrich 2007: 389-402; Küng 1994a; 1994b: 896-897; 2002; Charon 2004: chap. 9; Döbler 2007: 35-51). The observer position is to deliver explanations of causes and predictions. The participant position is to deliver understanding of reasons and predictions. Both positions claim to be scientific, the word science understood in the broader -not newer American–but rather older European sense. While the critical theory of religion takes seriously and practices both approaches, it has, nevertheless, a certain preference for the participant perspective. In any case, the two positions or perspectives are connected dialectically. They presuppose and supplement each other. Hitler gave the most terrible example of a schizophrenia between the participant and the observer position and personality (Fromm 1973: chap. 13; Trevor-Roper 1988; Fest/ Eichinger 2004; Küng 1994a: 25, 649, 756, 894; Habermas 2006a: 2006c; Kubizek 1955; Gun 1969; Waite 1978; Jeffreys 2008). He could be quite human, friendly and even charming with his blue eyes and Austrian accent, when he played the participant role with friends of his youth, with the Wagner family, with the Goebbels family, with Eva Braun and her sister, and with his secretaries up to the end in the bunker in Berlin in April

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1945. However, Hitler became entirely inhuman, cold, distant, and monstrous when he as the Führer of his Behemoth-Empire took on the scientific, objectivating observer position in relation to nature and history. The natural scientists and industrialists, who produced Hitler’s sophisticated weapon systems and also–namely the chemists and technicians of IG Farben–the Zyclon B for the concentration camps, shared with him this external objectivating observer perspective quite successfully, and he with them (Jeffreys 2008; Neumann 1942). Hitler was fully aware of the brutality of the isolated external perspective, and therefore whenever women or children entered the room, he would shift from the observer to the participant mode of behavior. There is of course a great difference whether a critical theorist or positive social scientist approaches a religious community as mere external observer or as an internal participant, or if he or she is able to mediate and combine both attitudes.

Theology and Politics Horkheimer and Adorno practiced an internal, participant position and perspective when they stated that theology stood behind all genuine human action (Horkheimer 1985g: 388). Politics, which did not preserve theology in itself, be it even only in a most unreflected way, remained, no matter how skillful it may be, in the last analysis mere business (Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 9-49; Horkheimer 1986g: 388; Habermas 1978c; 1981c; 1987b). For both critical theorists, theology was the opposite of positivism and naturalism (Horkheimer 1974c a: 101-104; 116-117; 1989m: chap. 31; Adorno 1980a: 7-80; chaps. 1, 3, 5, 7; Horkheimer 1985g: 388-389; Habermas 1973; 1978c; 1991a Part III; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2005; 2006a). From the perspective of positivism, no moral politics could be deducted. Considered purely scientistically or positivistically, hate was in spite of all social-functional differentiation, no worse than love. There existed no logically cogent reason why I should not hate, if through it I did not have any disadvantages in social life of civil society. In the sense of George Orwell, the positivist could say: war is as good or as bad as peace; freedom is as good or as bad as slavery, oppression and exploitation (Orwell 1961: parts I-III; 246-256, 257-267; Huxley 1968; Horkheimer 1985g: 388-389). Positivism found no instance that transcended human beings and societies, which could differentiate between helpfulness and greed for profit, between goodness and cruelty, between avarice and self-devotion. It had been part of the greatness of Hegel’s work that the life of his dialectical notion, the peak of his dialectical logic, contained in itself the element

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of pain and suffering (Hegel 1986f: 243-300; 1986l: 19-55; Horkheimer 1967: 259-261; 1989m: chap. 36). However, the positivistic forms of logic have remained mute in the face of the horror and terror of nature and history (Horkheimer 1974c: 101-104; 116-117; 1988a; 1989m: chaps. 11, 14, 15, 17, 21, 24, 25, 30, 31; 1985g: 388-389; Adorno 1980a: 7-80; chaps. 1, 3, 5, 7; Habermas 1973). They gave no preference to the moral disposition. Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Adorno and the other critical theorists stood in the long tradition of prophets, philosophers, and theologians, who have criticized the absence of ethics and morality in traditional and modern civil society (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972; Adorno 1979; 1992; Lukacs 1970; 1971; 1974; 1979; Marcuse 1966: part II and Conclusion; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1975; 1976; 1978a; 1983; 1985b; 1986; 1991b; 1992a; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a). It belongs to the archeology of civil society that Cain, the farmer and first murderer in human history, who used the earth to hide the evidence of his crime, was forever alienated from the earth and cut off from nature, became the builder of the first city, and thus became the first bourgeois in Hebrew history, as Odysseus was in the history of Greece (Genesis 4: 12, 17; Lieber 2001: 27-28, 12-17; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 43-80; Benjamin 1983a & b; App. C, D, E). According to the Rabbis, by attributing urbanization, music, and tool and weapon making to Cain and his descendants, the Torah signaled its ambivalence about human efforts to detach from and improve on the world of nature on the level of civil society, which from about 3000 BCE on moved in the city states between the family and the state (Genesis 4: 21-22; 11; Lieber 2001: 28/21-22; Hegel 1986f: 339-489; Bryant 1896; App. C, D). For the critical theorists, Marquis De Sade’s Juliette became a cipher for the dialectic of the modern bourgeois enlightenment and morality, or absence of it (Horkheimer/ Adorno 1972: 81-119; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 7-8, 10-15, 21, 23; 1988: chaps. 3, 6, 12-15, 17, 19-23, 25, 27-30, 34-35, 40-41, 43, 46-48).

Earthly Prudence According to Horkheimer, all attempts from Kant to Apel and Habermas to ground morality on earthly human prudence instead of through reference to a Beyond–an imageless, nameless, notionless totally Other–rested on harmonistic illusions (Kant 1929; 1946; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Horkheimer 1985g: 388; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Habermas 1981a; 1981b; 1983; 1984a; 1986; 1991a: Part III; 1991b; 1992a; 1997b; 2001b; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a 2006b; 2007;

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Habermas/Ratzinger 2006). All that hung together with morality went in the last analysis back to theology. All morality, at least in Western civilization, was grounded in theology. Here for Horkheimer theology did, of course, in no way stand for the traditional science of the Divine, or even of God, his name, his nature or his attributes. For the critical theorist of society, theology meant the consciousness that the world was appearance, and that it was not the absolute truth, and the ultimate reality. Theology was the hope that this horrendous injustice, through which the world was continually characterized, would not remain, and that it may not be the last word of world history. Theology was the expression of a longing that the murderer may not triumph over the innocent victim. As mystics without any God, meaning practicing a negative-theological mysticism without reified or thingified God-images, God-names, God-notions, the critical theorists spoke of the longing and the hope for and the trust and confidence in the imageless, nameless, notionless, and formless, but nevertheless real entirely Other or Eternal One (Exodus 20: 1-21; Deuteronomy 1-6; Matthew 5-7; Luke 6: 20-49; Hertz 5716/1956: 735-774; Blackney 1941: 247/41. 248/42, 288/19, 289/23, 329/40; Horkheimer 1985l: 483492; 1985g: 388-390, chaps. 17, 29; Valery 1989: 30-32, 38-40; Fromm/ Suzuki/Martino 1960: part II). This longing, hope, and trust were deeply rooted in Judaism as well as in Christianity, which both taught that there will be an imageless God, who will establish ultimate justice: punishment for the evil people and blissfulness for the good people (Genesis 4: 13; Lieber 2001: 27/13; Hegel 1986e: 115-173; Bryant 1896; Horkheimer 1986g: 388-390; 1996s: 62-67; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 1-8, 9-49; App. E). The Mosaic commandments against making images of God or misusing His name, or the Kantian agnosticism, or the combination and radicalization of both in the critical theory of society, constitute an ignorance, which is the result of much knowledge: what the mystical theologians Master Eckhart and Nicholas De Cusa called docta ignorantia–learned ignorance (Exodus 20: 1-7; Blakney 1941: 107-108; Kant 19920: 24, 27, 71-74, 85-87, 9, 149, 172-173, 230, 265-267, 278-280, 282-284, 346-348, 351-353, 356358, 440, 449, 499; Dolan 1962: 55-98; Hegel 1986q: 347-536; Dolan 1962; Horkheimer 1987b: 15-74, 75-148; 1985g: chaps 3, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 40; Habermas 1991a: Part III).

Logical Roots When Adorno thought of superseding Hegel’s idealistic dialectical logic through a materialistic one, he planned to start it, unlike Hegel’s be-

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ginning with being, nothing and becoming, with the result of becoming; namely with the antagonism of something and an Other, and with their possible reconciliation in the good qualitative Infinite (Hegel 1986e: 82-114, 115-173; Bryant 1896; Horkheimer 1967b: 259-261, 311-312; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 1-8, 9-49; Adorno 1963; 1970b: 103-110). Here lay the idealistic as well as inverted materialistic logical roots for Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s longing for the Infinite, or the totally Other, than the horror and terror of the often cursed 13 billion years old finite world of nature and history (Genesis 3-4; Lieber 2001: 17-29; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969; App. C, D). The critical theorists inverted the Jewish mythological utopia–the wish to return to Eden–to a yearning for a world where harmony would once again reign between humans and nature, between humans and animals, a world without blame or quarrel, without sickness, and without pain and death, where milk and honey flowed, and where also God was not missing–into the concrete, secular, humanistic utopia of the longing for light, friendship and love, and for alternative Future III–the reconciled society of friendly living together, and for the wholly Other (Genesis 3: 22; Lieber 2001: 23-24/22; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 28, 29, 37, 40; App. G). All these issues of theology, morality, ethics and communicative and political praxis belonged into the sphere of–what Kant, Schelling and Hegel had once called–the subjective spirit, the free will, as well as of the objective spirit, and of the Thing-in-itself, the Absolute, the Ultimate, the Highest, the Supreme Cause, the Ground of being, the Ens Realissimum, the Unconditional or the absolute Spirit; all of which dimensions could not be penetrated and comprehended completely from the external perspective of the observer position alone, and the latter of which could not be entered by human understanding at all, neither by the observer nor by the participant perspective (Kant 1929: 499-500; 1974a; 1975: 77-93; Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986c: 590-591; 1986j; 1986q: 347535; Schelling 1977; Hokheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Habermas 2001a; 2002; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Henrich 2007: 389-402; App. C, D).

Reconstruction The critical theorist of society, Habermas, has dealt with the dichotomy of external and internal perspectives, or of the observer and participant positions, in the process of his reconstruction of Kant’s and Schelling’s, or better still of Hegel’s system–embracing nature, subjective spirit, objective spirit, and absolute Spirit–in terms of his language-analytical, intersubjectivity/theoretical universal pragmatic: subjects, texts, structure,

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contexts, and goals or motivations–moving from particles, atoms, molecules, through gasses and liquids, and firm bodies, to the organic materials, and to the genes, the whole organism, and the geniuses and species (Kant 1929; Schelling 1977; Hegel 1801; 1986h; 1986i; 1986j; Adorno 1969b; Habermas 1988a: 57-60, 267-279; 1992a; 2002; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Henrich 2007: 389-402; McCarthy 1990; 1994; App. C, D). Habermas found theoretical gaps, loopholes, and breaks between the natural scientists’ and naturalists’ different stages of evolution, and between the different dimensions of their system of the causally closed world, which could not be bridged theoretically. Thus, the gap between the human organism as product of natural evolution, particularly the brain, on one hand, and the subjective spirit, for example, character, language competence, freedom of the will, work, love, recognition of norms, as well as moral or legal reward or punishment, inter-subjectivity, community, and the objective spirit, meaning the family, civil society, state and culture, including art, religion, and philosophy on the other, could not even be closed by the most advanced neurology. The meditations of a monk could not be related to the synchronically observed excitement or arousal patterns of the gamma oscillations of the brain. The correlations between the electro-encephalographically established correlation between a faith experience on one hand, and a neuronal condition on the other, could not be interpreted. The natural sciences and with them the naturalists seemed to have the tendency in their evolution to reduce the absolute Spirit to the objective spirit, and the objective spirit to the subjective spirit, and the subjective spirit to the brain and the human organism into a machine and its network, in which the human subject or person was housed as a mere observer without free will and the power of interference. While for Habermas there was Something, where Kant had placed the Thing-in-itself, and Schelling the Unconditional, and Hegel the absolute Spirit, he nevertheless–following and radicalizing the position of Horkheimer and Adorno and the underlying second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue–could no longer identify such Transcendence through any images, names, or notions, or even the concept of the wholly Other, because doing so would have meant a reification, and as such a regression into the mythos, and a betrayal of the genuine enlightenment as demythologization (Genesis 20; 1969: 23-24; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 17, 29, 37, 40; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 23-24; Habermas 19781988a: 57-60, 267-279; 1988b; 1990: 9-18; 1991a: part III; 2006b; 2007; Henrich 2007: 389-402; Küng 1978: 137, 363-367, 367-370, 511, 540542, 601, 636-638, 779, 822, 823, 831, 836, 839, 840; 1990b: 63-66; 78; 1994a: 904-905).

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Protest and Resistance In the observer–and participant–perspective of the dialectical religiology it remains nevertheless true, that religion as already now effective unsatiable longing for the totally Other, can ground the protest and resistance against unjust conditions in the neo-liberal antagonistic civil society: e.g. in the present political, financial, and economic crisis of 2008, 2009, 2010 in which the American Congress asks under the threat of the meltdown and standstill of the whole U.S. economy, as the result of two decades of neo-conservative deregulation and privatization, 180 million workers to bail out the corrupt corporate ruling class inside and outside of Wallstreet, which has appropriated their surplus value for centuries, through paying as taxpayers billions of dollars. Mainstreet pays for Wallstreet and the corporate ruling class twice, while the workers lose their jobs, their houses and their pensions (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Fromm 1981; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1975; 1976; 1978; 1981c; 1983; 1986; 1988b; 1991c; 2002; 2005; 2006a; 2006c; Borradori 2003; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994a; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; Klein 2007; Perkins 2007; Kinzer 2006; Küng 1990b: 78; 1994a: 904-905; App. C, D, F). As more and more banks are nationalized, some neoliberals cry out: socialism. But it is also possible, that in case the US Congress is not willing to bail out the corporate ruling class on the backs of the workers as tax payers, the President may govern by executive order, or he may even ask for the emergency laws, and what President Eisenhower warned against–the military industrial complex–may develop into what Benito Mussolini called corporatism. According to Mussolini fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power; or, in terms of the dialectical religiology more concretely an alliance between the Machiavellian, authoritarian state, based on the authoritarian family and legitimated by the authoritarian religion, on one hand, and the mayor corporations, on the other, both devoted to absolute self-preservation, grounded in instrumental rationality (Hegel 1986g: 292338; 339-397, 396-514; Horkheimer 1987b 179-204; 1988d: chap 2; 1987e: 293-319, 320-350, 354-359, 377-396, 406-411412-414; Sohn-Rethel 1975; Löwenthal 1990b; Fromm 1966; 1967; 1968; Kinzer 2006; Perkins 2006; 2007; Klein 2007; Stoddard 1940; Hedges 2006; Perkins 2006; Meier 2006; Brinkley 1980; Paasen/Wise 1934; App. C, D). According to Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General, we Americans are not a democracy. It is a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us Americans that. In reality we Americans are a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy. Dr. Michael Parenty stated, that the enormous gap between

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what U.S. leaders do in the world, and what Americans think they are doing, is one of the greatest propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology (Hedges 2006; Scahill 2007; Zunn 2003; Perkins 2004; 2007; Klein 2007; Kinzer 2006; Clinton 2004; App. F).

Economic Crisis In the meantime, the financial and economic crisis has spread to all countries, into which civil society and neo-liberalism had been globalized in recent decades, not only into the European Union, but also into the Russian Federation, and everywhere the masses of the workers are asked as taxpayers to bail out their masters, the corporate ruling classes. (Hegel 1986g: 339-397). When on September 29, 2008 the House in the American Congress shocked the world by voting down the 700 billion rescue package and thus elicited a loss of 777 points on Wallstreet next day, the neo-liberals on the Republican side did so, because of their dogmatic belief in the free market, which was to correct itself without government intervention and intensive policing, in spite of the fact that it had never done so since the first depression in England in 1827; and the Roosevelt liberals on the Democratic side did so, because they did not want to bail out the corporate ruling class, which had so badly mismanaged in order to enrich itself further, with the tax money from the working class, often falsely called by politicians the hard working middle class (Hegel 1986g: 339-397, particularly ## 231-249). Republican and Democratic Representatives opposed the rescue package motivated by the immense anger of their constituency at home, and being afraid of losing the upcoming election. But only a few days later, on October 1, 2and 3, 2008 the corporate ruling class pressured and coerced and thus convinced through immense losses–one trillion dollars in one day, a third of the costs of the whole Iraq war so far–on Wallstreet and high unemployment rates, first the Senate and then the House and the masses of angry workers and low middle class people engaged in a populist backlash and revenge, that it was necessary to vote for the 700 billion rescue package to bale out it and its disaster or casino capitalism (Klein 2007). According to the Rabbis, revenge was almost always sweeter in the contemplation than in the realization (Genesis 42: 24; Lieber 2001: 261-262). What Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler had called speculative capital or high finance, Aryan or Jewish, had won once more over productive capital (Baldwin 2001). Unproductive financial speculation cannot simply be stopped by mark-to-market accounting. For intellectuals in Eastern Europe, who had suffered much from the

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victorious neo-conservative counterrevolution of 1989, the financial collapse, which was prepared by it and which they were all seeing now in September and October 2008 in America and in the rest of the globalized world, was signalizing the end of capitalism and the dawn of a new and better socialism, or at least the sign of a global longing for a better political world order. These intellectuals and their families and friends, who never wanted Eastern Europe to return to capitalism, but rather to move forward to a new socialism, as Michail Gorbaschow’s Perestroika had promised it, were now looking anxiously for such a new humanistic socialism to come: alternative Future III–a more reconciled and thus freer society (Marx 1961: Vol. III, 873-874; Fromm 1957; 1961; 1966c; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1976; 1980a; 1981; 1990; Flechtheim 1959; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985a; 1985b; 1993; Bloch/Reif 1978; Horkheimer 1985g: chs. 17, 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1976; Gorbachev 1987; Schmidt-Häuer 1988; App. G). For the Eastern European intellectuals, the September-October 2008 capitalist crisis was a first signal that the neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1989 had come to its end. On Friday, October 3, 2008, a Representative appealed in his last minute speech before the successful second vote of the House for the 700 billion package to rescue globalized Amercan capitalism through entirely uncapitalistic means, namely through massive government intervention and polizing and nationalization of banks and industries–appealed to the motto above the Speaker’ s seat–In God we trust–which is also written on the one and other dollar bills, with the addition: we need Him. The Representative was serious and certainly meant his prayer. However, if this prayer was merely deistic, it was rather meaningless, since the God of deism had left the world after he had created it, and it was thus for all practical and political purposes as godless as God was worldless and thus no divine intervention could be expected, but only a very human policing of private capital and its movement by the secular state (Psalm 91; Hegel 1986g: 382-392; 1986k: 278; 1986n: 115; 1986p: 259Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 17; App. C, D, F). The prayer was meaningful only if it was directed toward the God of Judaism, Christianity or Islam, who was not only transcendent but also immanent (Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Küng 1991a; 1991b; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1993b; 1998; 2002; 2004; App. F). Voltaire and Rousseau had invented and constructed the principles of deism and tolerance and morality against faith in miracles, contingencies and unintellectual and unspiritual things not only in order to justify and legitimate the bourgeois revolution against the Catholic Kings of God’s grace, and the nobility,

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and the clergy, but also–particularly Voltaire–in satirical, funny, amusing, and cheerful response to Leibniz’s all too optimistic and thus insufficient theodicy after the tsunamy of Lisbon in 1755, which killed 60,000 people (Leibniz 1996; Hegel 1986k: 278; 1986m: 305; 345-346, 354; 1986o: 352, 370, 414, 503; 1986p: 211; 1986t: 248, 294). In any case, on October 3, 2008, the 700 billion package vote came through in the House the second time, and late capitalism was rescued once more for the time being: ironically enough by the angry workers as tax payers.

Freedom of the Will Habermas stated on the ontological level of the subjective spirit–through combining the internal and external perspective, and the participant and observer attitude–that nobody really denied the freedom of the will (Hegel 1986j: 38-302; 1986l: 30-33; Bryant 1896; Habermas 1988a: 57-60, 267279; 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007; Henrich 2007: 389-402). It depended, of course, on the adequate description of the phenomenon of the freedom of the will, which was obviously in need of an explanation. It depended on what type of explanation the scientist, or the philosopher, or the theologian used. Habermas knew of seven ways that could possibly be used in the search for a particular explanation of the phenomenon of the freedom of the will: 1.

2.

3.

The phenomenon of the freedom of the will could be looked for in the location, where it usually appeared: namely, in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s term, in the language game of the responsible originator–or authorship (Habermas 1987b: chap. 10; 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007; Henrich 2007: 389-402). Out of the everyday perspective, the problem of the freedom of the will posed itself in the form of the question, whether the prospective progress of the cognitive sciences, particularly the neurosciences, undermined this language game. That could be tested on the basis of the forensic discourse about the ascribing or attributing of responsibility for punishable actions. (Gold/Engel 1998; Habermas 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007; Siebert 2005a). In philosophical perspective, the practical limits of the natural-scientific self-objectivation of acting persons mirrored and reflected themselves in the conceptual problems of the inversion or translation from categorically different language games and patterns of explanations: some religious and some secular. In this a dualism of knowledge perspectives

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5.



6.



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expressed itself, which did not take care of, or deal with, or process adequately the ontological question concerning the monistic constitution of a world that includes humanity as a natural being. The philosophers responded to this problem, situation, or position with a polyphonous concert. The naturalists hold on to the presupposition of a materialistically comprehended and causally closed world, and follow essentially one of two strategies: (a) the compatibility approach tried to de-dramatize the problem of the freedom of the will with the proof of the language game of responsible originator or (b) authorship was very well compatible with the deterministic assumption of the not-being-able-to-act-otherwise position, such as, “I had to cut down the tree,” “I had to vote for this President” (Habermas 1976; 2001a; 2001b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007; Gold/Engel 1998; Siebert 2005a) The non-eliminative and non-reductive forms of materialism turned away from the acting subject and toward the world. Out of this perspective of a mentalistic spirit-body-ontology, these forms of materialism tried to do justice to the phenomenal independence, if not even the causal effectiveness of the subjective spirit in the environment of the objective spirit, i.e. society and culture. There was no room any longer for the unknowable, but nevertheless thinkable, intelligible things-in-themselves, or thing-in-itself or Ens realissimum, or the absolute Spirit, or God (Kant 1965: 24, 27, 71-73, 74, 85-87, 89, 172-173, 440, 449, 490; Hegel 1986a: 18, 71, 101-102, 308, 373-374, 381, 390, 394, 400, 421; 1986b: 411, 508, 537, 552; 1986c: 26-27, 62, 494-495, 551-552, 554-555, 592; 1986f: 462-573; 1986: j: 366-398; 1986l: 185-346, 347-536; Habermas 2001a; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; Gold/Engel 1998; Küng 1978: B-G; Siebert 2005b; 2005c; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007e; 2007f; 2007g; 2008a; 2008b). This scientistic, or positivistic, or naturalistic solution-strategy has failed because of the methodological fiction of an exclusive view from nowhere, which owed itself to a problematic un-coupling of the objectivating perspective of the natural-scientific observer from the participant in research praxis. If, however, the complementary crossing or folding of the observing entrance or access to the objective world with the participation in the inter-subjectively shared practices of the– what Edmund Husserl has called–life world could be recognized and sustained, then the third option of an epistemological turn offered itself (Adorno 1997a: 7-78; Habermas 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007; Henrich 2007: 389-402).

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chapter ten 7. However, also this reflection on the life world foundations of the natural-scientifically constituted realms of objects did not dispense the unresolved question of how the human spirit, which was incarnated in socio-cultural life forms, could possibly understand itself as the product of natural evolution.

In order to answer this question, the critical theory of religion has to go beyond all these seven ways, in which the scientist, or philosopher, or theologian may try to search for a particular explanation of the phenomenon of the freedom of will, or of personal autonomy, and opt for a dialectical relationship between subject and object, the internal and the external perspective, and the participant and the observer position: both perspectives and positions require each other, and reproduce each other (Hegel 1986j: 38-302; Bryant 1896; Habermas 1988a 57-60, 267-279; 2005; 2006a: 2006b; 2006d; 2007; Henrich 2007: 389-402; Siebert 1987a; 1987c; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2003e; 2003b; 2004a; 2004b; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007e; 2007f; 2007g; 2008a; 2008b; 2009a; 2009b; 2009c). The failure of the CIA project Manschurian Candidate in the 1950ties, which attempted to condition agents to carry out assassinations unconsciously and forget about them afterwards, and of similar projects in German concentration camps in the 1940s, have demonstrated the power and the resistance of the freedom of man’s will.

Hierarchy of Reasons for Actions According to Habermas, on the ontological level of the subjective spiritparticipant-perspective, pragmatic reasons of human action, which related themselves to actual wishes and given preferences, were in given cases transcended through ethical reasons, through which more long-term interests received validity (Hegel 1986j: 38-302; 1986l: 30-33; Bryant 1896; Habermas 1983; 1986; 1991b; 1992a; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007; Henrich 2007: 389-402). These ethical reasons could on their part be outdone or overtrumped through moral reasons. Ethical reasons reach further into the time dimension than pragmatic reasons. Yet, the ethical reasons remained like the pragmatic reasons closely connected to the self-reflection of what is good for me or for us. From a decentralized perspective, legal and moral reasons alone aimed at what was good equally for all or at what was just. With every operation of a hierarchical surpassing of the pragmatic through the reasons for ethical action or of the ethical through the reasons for normal action

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grew the complicity of the considerations, deliberations, and the degree of reflection. When more long-tem ethical convictions collide with inclinations, or when fundamental moral convictions clash with personal value orientations, then generalizations have to be carried out: the ethical mode of consideration generalized over biographically changing interest situations, and the moral mode of consideration generalized over socially and culturally opposed interest situations.

Autonomy In Habermas’s internal participant perspective, this logical grading or hierarchical formation of practical, pragmatic, ethical, moral, and legal reasons for human action on the ontological level of the subjective spirit explained the fact that people were able to speak about the use of freedom in a comparative sense (Hegel 1986j: 38-302; 1986l: 30-33; Bryant 1896; Habermas1983; 1986; 1991b; 1992a; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007; Henrich 2007: 389-402; Henrich 2007: 389-402). Of course, context and action situation decided the question, when from the acting persons a more or less reflected use of the freedom of will could be expected. However, the internal connection of reflexivity and freedom made it understandable why Kant reserved the name of the free will, or of autonomy, for formal self-determination, for the ability of the human acting subject to make and to execute morally rational decisions (Genesis 4: 7; Lieber 2001: 26/7; Kant 1965: 28, 29, 3031, 312, 325, 392, 409-411, 412-414, 430, 438, 464-479, 559, 600, 602-604; Hegel 1986g: 231). Kant considered every subject to be autonomous who bound his or her own will to norms that he or she had given to himself or herself out of moral insight. Only this notion of autonomy brought the cognitive and the voluntary dimension of the rationally grounded originator-or authorship into complete agreement: on one hand, the insight into what is morally demanded or commanded, and on the other hand, the adoption, compliance with, and following of the morally obligating norm. Of course, Kant still understood and comprehended this morally sharpened, critical notion of autonomy in the sense of an origin-less, unconditional causality, which worked out of the realm of the Intelligible, or of the Things-in-themselves, or of the Thing-in-itself, or God, Freedom and Immortality, into the world of lawfully varying phenomena. (Kant 1929; 1946; 1964; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983). Horkheimer, Benjamin and Adorno, inverted this Thing-in-itself, this Ens realissimum, this still theological foundation of human morality, autonomy, and

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freedom in their negative, cipher theology into the totally Other as the negation of the negativities of the phenomenal, empirical world of nature and history: its injustices, and its human perils (Horkheimer 1985g: 29, 37, 40l; 1985l: 483-402; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Küng 1978: 540-542). Their dialectic or determinate negativity was still open in the direction of an intelligible causality of the wholly Other in terms of a negative theology (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 40; 1985l: 483-493; Adorno 1973b: 300-408; Habermas 1986: 53-55; 1988a: 60, 278279; Schultz 1969).

Beyond Transcendentalism However, Habermas left Kant’s transcendentalism behind and translated his theological dimension of the Thing-in-itself, or of the Ens realissimum, and its causality in his universal pragmatic, theory of communicative action, and discourse ethics into the apriori of the universal, or unlimited communication community (Kant 1965; Apel 1976, part II; Habermas 1976; 1981a: chaps. I, II; 1981b: 1986; chaps. V, VII, VIII; 1983; 1984a; 1984b; 1990: 9-18; 1991a: part III; 1991b; Grippe 1986; McCarthy 1994; Münch 1995; Küng 1990: 63-66; Küng 1978: 137, 511, 601, 636-638, 779, 822, 823, 831, 836, 839, 840). For the dialectical religiology, ethics, morality, legality, autonomy, and communicative, and political action remain grounded in the longing for the radically demythologized totally Other, working negatively against the negativity of the empirical world, and thus, powerfully motivating autonomous subjects toward light, friendship, and love, and toward alternative Future III–a just and free society, and beyond: so that the injustices of this world shall not be the last word of history, and that the murderers shall not triumph over their innocent victims, at least not ultimately (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 23, 25-30, 32, 34, 37, 40; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1997j/2: 97-122; 608-616; Benjamin 1977: chs. 10, 11; Küng 1994a: 804-905; 1994b; App. G). In this longing or yearning is rooted all religious as well as secular humanistic critique, polemics, protest, resistance, and revolutionary attitude against what is the case in the world of nature as well as of humanity, in so far as something is wrong with it: the curse, the spell, humanity’s disturbed harmony with nature, the corruption of moral ecology by human immorality, after the fall and after the first fratricide, and after the start of sexual rivalry, economic conflict and religious quarrel as sources of violence among human beings (Genesis 3: 17; 4: 6-7; Lieber 2001: 22/17, 25, 26/6-7; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; Siebert 2007a; 1007b; 2007d; 2008a; 2008b; . 2009a; 2009b; 2009c)

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When John Steinbeck was still a socialist and had not yet become a nationalist, he described in his novel East of Eden, which was based on the story of Cain and Abel, philosophers debating the various translations of the Hebrew word timshol (Genesis 4: 6-7; Lieber 2001: 25/6-7; Steinbeck 2002b). Was it a command: you are to master sin–murder, sexual rivalry, economic conflict, or religious quarrel? Was it a promise: you will master sin? Or did it say that humanity’s fate was in its own hands? The critical theory of religion takes all three of these options seriously.

Enlightenment as Demythologization In the perspective of the critical theory, there were people who said that they were religiously unmusical, like the socialist Steinbeck, Max Weber, or Habermas but who nevertheless had this yearning for the wholly Other: the Eden of the future (Genesis 4: 6-7; Lieber 2001: 25/6-7; Weber 1962, 1969, 1992; 1993; Steinbeck 2002a & b). There were also people who said that they were religious but nevertheless did not have this longing. However that may be, the enlightenment or demythologization, which the critical theorists have practiced concerning the wholly Other, had started long before in religion itself, particularly in Judaism, the Religion of Sublimity (Genesis 3: 20; Lieber 2001: 22/20; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991a; 1991b). In August 2007, when the owner of Crandall Canyon Mine, a retreat coal mine in the State of Utah, told the families of six miners who had been trapped deep in the mine for more than a week that he had to stop the rescue operations because God had dictated the catastrophe from the start and that therefore nothing could be done any more. In saying this, he engaged in re-mythologization and in bad authoritarian rather than humanistic religion, and in bourgeois ideology, which legitimates very risky and often deadly operations for the workers, but also very profitable ones for the owners (Küng 1978; Miranda 1971; Schultz 1969; Schimmel 1997; Fromm 1932a; 1957: 9-11; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970: B699-B705; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1976; 1980a; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 2001). The September 2008 financial and economic crisis demonstrated this only too clearly on a massive, world-wide scale. In the internal perspective of the dialectical religiology, a good God cannot possibly dictate evil things. The old true believers of the Persian Religion of Light and Darkness, or Good and Evil, or of Judaism–the Religion of Sublimity, or Christianity–the Religion of Becoming and Freedom, or of Islam–the Religion of Law, would have said that bad things do not come from Ahura Mazda but from Ahriman–the Liar, and not from Yahweh or Allah, but

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rather from Satan and from human beings seduced by him and by the bad impulses and intentions coming from the depth of their own hearts (1 Chronicle 21: 1; Job 1: 6; 2: 7; Zacharias 3: 1, 2; Matthew 4: 1, 5, 10, 11; 7: 22; 9: 34; 10: 8; 11: 10; 12: 22, 26, 27, 28; 13: 39; 16: 23; 17: 17; 25: 41; Hegel 1986p: 390-405; 1986q: 50-95; 185-346; 1986l: 115, 140, 428-430; Fromm 1964; 1966b; Küng 1978; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Miranda 1971; Schultz 1969; Schimmel 1997).

Mysticism As the German idealists before, the critical theorists were attracted by Hindu and Buddhist, Jewish, Christian and Islamic mysticism because of its dialectical logic and its over all–not instrumental and functional rationality of the observer and his external perspective but rather its mimetic and communicative rationality of the participant (Hegel 1986a: 43, 365-367, 375; 1986k: 161, 226, 230, 227; 1986m: 416, 474, 478; 1986n: 169; 1985q: 327; 1986s: 583-587; 1986t: 91; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966b; 1974; 1976; Habermas 1976; 1986: 125-126; Döbler 2007: 35-51). Habermas had a conceptual motive and a fundamental intuition concerning his theory of communicative action. This intuition referred back to religious traditions, such as those of Jewish and Christian mysticism (Scholem 1967; 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; Blakney 1941: xiii, 95-108; Boehme 1930; Hegel 1986a: 191; 1986b: 9-138, 534, 536; 1986e: 122; 1986h: 28; 1986i: 30, 133; 1986j: 293; 1986k: 198, 227; 1986q: 240, 244; 1986r: 132; 1986t: 64, 69, 70, 74-119; 1986p: 209; Habermas 1978a: 49-95, 127-143; 1978b: chap. 5; 1987c: chaps, 1, 6, 14, 15). The motivating thought in Habermas’s universal pragmatic concerned the reconciliation of a modernity that had fallen apart in itself in terms of a dichotomy of mimetic and communicative action and rationality on one hand, and an instrumental and functional rationality on the other, in which the latter overwhelmed the former (Habermas 1976; 1985a; 1986: 125-126; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2004d; 2005; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Borradori 2003). Habermas had the idea that without surrendering the differentiation that modernity had made possible in the social, economic, and cultural spheres, he could move toward alternative Future III–a society with forms of living together, in which autonomy and solidarity could truly enter into a non-antagonistic relation with each other, so that the individual could–as Bloch had put it– walk upright and tall in a collectivity that did not have the dubious quality of looking backward to substantial forms of community, as, for example, the former national socialist Volksgemeinschaft (Bloch 1971: chap. 9;

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1972; Habermas 1976; 1986: 125-126; 1976; Kershaw 2000; Siebert 2007a; 1007b; 2007d; 2008a; 2008b; 2008c; 2009a; 2009b; 2009c). Solidarity was closely connected with inter-dependency, which has increased in modernity. This dependency can be painfully experienced in an American MidWestern town or city in August 2007, when a series of thunderstorms and tornados took down the electricity, and thus, the traffic lights did not function any longer, and the doctor offices were closed, and the computers, televisions, refrigerators, telephones, and air conditioners were shut down. In such a situation, solidarity arises spontaneously even in a very individualistic and autonomous society, and can become a matter of life and death, particularly for elderly and ill people, and children.

Mystical Intuition Habermas’s mystical intuition sprang from the sphere of relations of the one with the other, aiming at experiences of undisturbed inter-subjectivity (Habermas 1976; 1986: 125-126). In the internal perspective of the critical theory of religion and in the spirit of the mystics, particularly Meister Eckhart and Jacob Böhme, and of the German idealists, particularly Kant, Schelling and Hegel, it can be said that Habermas left out that the relation of the one to the other may also through undisturbed inter-subjectivity aim not at the bad quantitative, but rather at the good qualitative Infinity (Blakney 1941; Boehme 1930; Hegel 1986b: 534, 536; 1986e: 115-173; 1986h: 28; 1986i: 30, 133; 1986j: 293; 1986k: 198, 227; 1986q: 240, 244; 1986r: 132; 1986t: 64, 69, 70, 74-119; 1986p: 209; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966b; 1974; 1976; Habermas 1986: 125-126). According to Habermas, these experiences of undisturbed inter-subjectivity were more fragile than anything that history had ever brought forth up till then in 1986 in the way of structures of communication. In the participatory view of the critical theory of religion, the present structures of communication may be particularly fragile, precisely because they do not aim any longer at the qualitative Infinity of the wholly Other as the negation of the negativity of the finite world. In Habermas’s internal perspective, these fragile structures of communication were, nevertheless, an ever increasing dense and finely woven web of inter-subjective relations that make possible a connection between personal autonomy and universal solidarity, which can only be imagined from the participant perspective with interactive models.

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According to Habermas’s internal participant perspective, wherever these ideas appeared, whether in Meister Eckhart or in Jacob Böhme, or in Schelling’s Weltalter, or in the young Hegel, or in Adorno when he quoted Eichendorff, they were always ideas of felicitous interaction, of reciprocity and of distance, of separation and of successful, unspoiled nearness, of vulnerability and of complementary caution (Hegel 1986a: 191; 1986b: 9-138, 534, 536; 1986e: 122; 1986h: 28; 1986i: 30, 133; 1986j: 293; 1986k: 198, 227; 1986q: 240, 244; 1986r: 132; 1986t: 64, 69, 70, 74-119; 1986p: 209; Adorno 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1973d 1973e 1976; 2002c; 2002d; 2003a; 2003b; 2003c; 2003d; Adorno/Kogon 1958a; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Adorno/Tobisch 2003; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966b; 1974; 1976; Habermas 1986: 125-126). For Habermas, all of these images of protection, openness and compassion, of submission and resistance, rose out of a horizon of experience of what Bertolt Brecht would have termed “friendly living together” (Bentley 1961: chap. 6; Benjamin 1978c; 1988: chaps 21, 23, 48; Habermas 1986: 125-126; 1997a; 1997b; Volf 1996). Of course, this kind of friendliness did not exclude conflict. It rather implied those human forms through which one could survive conflicts. Of course, unlike for Brecht and Habermas, for Meister Eckhart, Boehme, Eichendorff, Hegel, Schelling, and Adorno the images of undisturbed inter-subjectivity still rose out of the horizon of the Absolute, the Unconditional, the wholly Other, and from there received their strength and their truth (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; 483-492). In terms of this, the critical theorist of religion still remembers the greatest commandment as expressed in Judaism and in Christianity; the second commandment–You must love your neighbor, because he is like you–was connected with the first commandment–You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul (meaning life), and with all your power (Leviticus 19: 18; Matthew 22: 34-40; 5: 43-48; Fromm 1966a; 1966b: 231-232). The two commandments are dialectically connected with each other. They are not identical with each other, and they cannot be separated from each other. An effective negative, inverse, cipher theology would have to translate the second and the first commandment from the depth of the mythos into the secular discourse of the expert cultures and into communicative action. It has indeed started to do this with the inversion of the love of the neighbor into universal solidarity, and with the translation of the love of God into the longing for the totally Other than the finite world of nature and history, or the Eternal One (Adorno 1970b: 105-161; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17,

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29, 37, 40; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 98-132). It is only a small step from longing to love.

Mediation In the internal perspective of the critical theory of religion, at least the first and the second generation of critical theorists of society were mediated with the dialectical mystical theology of Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, through Baruch Spinoza’s, Arthur Schopenhauer’s, and Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophy (Blackney 1941: xiii, 247/41, 248/42, 288/19, 289/23, 329/40; Boehme 1930; Hegel 1986c: 68-77; 1986e: 48-53; 1986b: 536; 1986p: 209; 1986l: 19-141; 1986t: 157-196; Schopenhauer 1977: chaps. 29-50; 1980; 1986: 1/526, 518; 2/784, 786, 813, 821; Horkheimer 1967: 248-268, esp. 252, 260; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Adorno 1963; 1973b: 300-408; Marcuse 1987; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966b; 1974; 1976: chaps. 3, 7, 8, 9; Schmidt 1976). The dialectical method of Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme was often negation: determinate negation (Exodus 20: 1-21; Deuteronomy 1-4; Matthew 5-7; Luke: 20-49; Hertz 5716/1956: 735-764; Blackney 1941: 247/41, 248/42, 288/19, 289/23, 329/40; Boehme 1930; Hegel 1986c: 68-77; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30). In their mystical theology, Eckhart and Boehme applied a double negation. This mystical theological negation of negations was Fullness of Being. In God, there was no deprivation nor yet negation, since there was Fullness of Being. For Eckhart and Boehme, the divine One was a negation of negations, and a desire of desires (Deuteronomy 6; Hertz 5716/1956: 769-774; Blackney 1941: 247/41. 248/42; 299/19, 289/23, 329/4; Boehme 1930). Eckhart and Boehme asked people to love God as God was: a not-god, a not-ghost, and a-personal, formless. Here, the critical theorist of religion speaks of a mystical atheism, which is essentially a methodological, meaning a dialectical atheism (Blackney 1941: 247/41, 248/42. 288/19, 289/23, 329/40; Boehme 1930; Adorno 1969a: 22; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; Fromm 1966b; 1976; Habermas 1990: 9-20, esp. 14, 15; 1991a: part III). According to Eckhart and Boehme, God was to be loved as God was the One, pure, sheer, and limpid, in whom there was no duality. In Eckhart’s and Boehme’s view, people were to sink eternally from negation to negation in the One. Eckhart and Boehme were certain that the eye with which the mystic saw God was the same eye with which God saw him (Blackney 1941: 247/41, 248/42, 288/19, 289/23, 328/40; Boehme 1931; Hegel 1986p: 209). The mystic’s eye and God’s eye were one eye, and one vision or seeing, and one knowing and one loving. The critical theorists of society further radi-

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calized Eckhart’s and Boehme’s dialectical mystical theology on the basis of the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue into a negative and inverse cipher theology and theodicy, which in terms of Hegel’s Logic or Logos-theology moved post-theistically from something to the other, and to the qualitative Infinite, the absolute Spirit, the wholly Other than the sacrificial altar and the holocaust of nature and history (Isaiah 1: 13; Hosea 4: 19; Malachi 3: 3; Letter to the Hebrews 13: 10; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986l: 33-55; 1986e: 35-62, 78, 122-130; 1986q: 474-476, 476-480, 485-486, 498, 505-506, 510-517, 518-519, 521-522, 524-525, 533-535; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37; 1985l: 483-492; Adorno 1970b 103-110, 111-125; Küng 1978: B; Fromm 1976: chaps: III, VII, IX; 1966b: chaps. II, VII, IX; Lebrun 2001: 65-83Küng 1978: B). The theme of sacrifice has reached from the Torah, Homer, the New Testament through Hegel’s dialectic, Kierkegaard’s “Abraham and Isaac,” Nietzsche’s “Dionysus,” the work of Joseph de Maistre, to Freud’s primal patricide, to the works of Georges Bataille and of Rene Girard, to Lacan’s seminars, and to Derrida (Genesis 4: 4; Leviticus 17: 4; Numbers 15: 3; Deuteronomy 16: 10; Kierkegaard 1954: 30-37; Nietzsche 1967b: 17-144; Lebrun 2001: 6583; Habermas 1985a: chaps. I, II, III, IV, V, VII, VIII). However, the longing to concretely supersede all sacrifices started already in religion long before it climaxed in the modern or post-modern enlightenment: “I (Yahweh) want mercy and not sacrifice” (Matthew 9: 13; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 3-119; Habermas 1985a: chaps. VII, VIII). That Elie Wiesel called the Shoa Holocaust, which makes Auschwitz a burned offering and Hitler into its high priest, shows the continuing power of the mythological notion of sacrifice (Wiesel 1982). In August 2007 the Bush Administration and the Christian Right were asking continually for always greater sacrifices in terms of lives and property for the war against Afghanistan and against Iraq, and maybe soon for the war against Iran.

A Being Greater Than Can Be Conceived Long before Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, according to the great scholastic Anselm of Canterbury, the qualitative Infinite had not only been that “than which a greater could not be conceived, but who was a Being greater than can be conceived; ” and it was then according to Meister Eckhart the “One as the negation of all negations;” and it was then according to Hegel the “identity of the identity and the non-identity of the Infinite and the finite; ” and it was then for Horkheimer the “place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those, to

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which nature and society give expression in their operation” (Exodus 20: 21; Deuteronomy 1-4; Matthew 5-7; Luke 6: 20-49; Saint Anselm 1962: 22; Blackney 1941: 247/41, 248/42, 288/19; 289/23, 329/40; Hegel 1986e: 35-62, 74, 78, 122-130; 1986q: 474-476, 476-480, 485-486, 498, 505-506, 510-517, 518-519, 522-522, 524-525, 533-535; Horkheimer 1972: chap. 4; 1985l: 483-492; Adorno 1970b: 103-110, 111-125; 1973b: 300-408; Marcuse 1987; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30). While much of Anselm of Canterbury and Meister Eckhart and Boehme remained in Hegel, a residual of them and particularly of their ontological proof for the existence of God is present still in the works of Horkheimer, Benjamin, Adorno, and Fromm and of their Christian friend, Paul Tillich, and in their posttheistic position (Hegel 1986q: 487-535; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 13, 14, 16, 17, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 2930, 32, 34, 37, 40; 1985l: 483493, 505-510; Adorno 1970b: 103-110, 111-125; 1973: 300-408; Benjamin 1977; Fromm 1966b: 1976; Tillich 1972; Küng 1978: B, C, D, E, F). While Hegel had stressed dialectically the identity of the finite and the Infinite without forgetting their non-identity, the critical theorists emphasized dialectically their non-identity without forgetting entirely their identity (Hegel 1986e: 35-62, 74, 78, 122-130; 1986q: 474-476, 476-477, 485-486, 533-535; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; Marcuse 1987; Küng 1976: 155-197).

Crisis, Deviations, Contradictions Of course, that the critical theory of society and religion and the corresponding praxis was deeply rooted in the yearning and longing for the wholly Other than the finite world and its injustices, in no way meant that its representatives could not fall into a crisis, or deviate from its high norms, or get entangled in contradictions (Adorno/Tobisch 2007: 271273; Wiggershaus 1987: chap. 1; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23, 27, 28, 29, 30). The critical theory and praxis was as fallible concerning its internal and external perspectives, and its participant and observer positions, as all science, philosophy, and theology, Thus, the first, second, and even third generations of critical theorists came into a crisis not in the peaceful 1950s but rather in the turbulent 1960s during the third youth movement in the West, in the last years of Adorno’s directorship in the rebuilt Institute for Social Research at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt a.M., and particularly shortly before his death from a heart attack in Zermatt, Switzerland, on August 8, 1969 (Wiggershaus 1987: chap. 1; Adorno/Tobisch 2007: 271-273; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 27, 28,

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29; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971a; 1971b; 1973; 1975; 1976; 1978a; 1979a; 1979b; 1981c; 1981d; 1983; 1984a; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1987b; 1087c; 1988b; 1990; 1991a; 1991b; 1991c; 1992a; 1995; 1997a; 1998; 1999; 2001a; 2001c; 2002; 2003a; 2003b; 2003c; 2004a; 2004c; 2004d; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007). Adorno’s argument with the revolutionary students started long before the real student revolt in the year of his death, 1969. Already in December 1962, an open letter, printed in the student newspaper Discus 1/63, confronted Adorno with his own past in fascist Germany. In 1934, in a discussion of Herbert Müntzel’s choir-songs, named The Flag of the Persecuted according to poems of the Anti-Semitic Baldur von Schirach, the founder and leader of the Hitler Youth, Adorno discovered such an unusual will of formation and organization, that this seriousness opened up for him the possibility of a new folk-music (Walker 1970; Adorno/Tobisch 2007: 272-273; Persico 1994: 84, 133, 175, 177, 198, 217-218, 219-220, 249, 250, 254, 255, 253-254, 344-345, 353, 391, 400, 404, 451, 430, Trevor-Roper 1978). Furthermore, Adorno considered it to be indispensable for his argumentation to quote Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, and to agree with him (Trevor-Roper 1978). Adorno reacted to the publication in the Discus through representing his deepest regret without any excuses, and in a credible way, and with an unbowed head: “Without the least glossing over, I would like to leave what I regret up to justice to decide, if the incriminating sentences are of any importance against my work and my life.” (Schweppenhäuser 1996; Jameson 2007; Jäger 2004; Scheible 1989; Hörisch 2003; Tiedemann 1997; Walker 1970; Adorno/Tobisch 2007: 272-273; Persico 1994: 84, 133, 175, 177, 198, 217-218, 219-220, 249, 250, 254, 255, 253-254, 344-345, 353, 391, 400, 404, 451, 430, Trevor-Roper 1978). To the half-Jewish Adorno’s endeavor to survive under National Socialism in Germany also belonged the vain and futile attempt to be accepted into the Reichsschrifttumskammer, (Empire’s Writer’s Chamber), which he called the Reichskulturkammer (Empire’s Culture Chamber). During their exile in the U.S.A., Horkheimer and Adorno made several wrong as well as many correct predictions on the basis of their critical theory of society about Hitler’s initiation and conduct of the war and its possible outcome, as it could easily happen to any social theory under complex political and historical conditions (Horkheimer 1995p: 350-787; 1996: 9-693).

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Emergency Laws At the end of May 1968, in the process of their protest against the reintroduction of the emergency laws into the German Federal Republic, the revolutionary students of the third Western youth movement occupied the office of the Rector of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt a.M. (Adorno/Tobisch 2007: 256-267). The students remembered, of course, that the Catholic Center Party under the leadership of the Prelate Karst had granted Adolf Hitler the Emergency Decree for the Protection of People and State in the Reichtag in Berlin, which made him legitimately into a dictator (Kershaw 2001a: 52; 2001b: xxxv-xlvi; Adorno/Tobisch 2007: 266-267). The students renamed the Frankfurt University Karl Marx University. In consequence, the Hessian Government ordered the police to clear the Rector’s Office of the occupying students. On July 11, 1968, in his lecture Adorno criticized the conversion of the expressionism lectures of his colleague Martin Stern into a discussion forum as a violation against the freedom of opinion of academic teachers. On September 23, 1968, the students pointed out to Adorno at the occasion of a discussion about Authorities and Revolution, the significance his participation, for example, in the Star March to Bonn would have had for the student movement. Adorno replied and retorted that it was his individual right alone to decide himself for or against such a participation. In addition, Adorno was not sure if older gentlemen with an embonpoint were the right participants in such demonstrations. In the middle of October 1968, Adorno wrote to Günter Grass that he did not let himself be extorted or blackmailed into acts of solidarity, which were not to be carried out by him: for example, into the demanded report for Fritz Teufel. Only very recently–in 2007–Grass revealed that in Hitler’s empire he had joined the SS, and that he had believed in national socialism to the very end of World War II. Of course, even Pope Benedict XVI had been a member of the Hitler Youth, if also not believing in its cause. The same is true of me. Besides being a member of the Catholic Youth Movement, I was also an obligatory member of the Hitler youth without convictions, and I was even tempted to join its glider program, because I always dreamed of flying. Yet, I resisted the temptation because I did not believe in Hitler’s overall nationalistic domestic and foreign policies, a disbelief instilled in me by my parents and by the Catholic youth movement.

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While in 1968 Adorno resisted the extortion by Grass, he refused to distance himself from the SDS, the militant core of the third student movement (Adorno/Tobisch 2007: 256-267). I myself was the liaison person between the SDS in Detroit, Michigan, and Western Michigan University. On December 4, 1968, a pamphlet of the Basis Group Sociology at the Frankfurt University attacked particularly the representatives of the critical theory of society in the Institute for Social Research. On December 8 and 9, 1968, the students occupied the Sociological Seminar of the Frankfurt University, and renamed it the Spartacus Seminar in remembrance of the great Roman revolutionary, who wanted to liberate the slaves, and also in remembrance of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the leaders of the Spartacus movement in Germany after World War I, which planned a socialist revolution in Berlin. On December 11, 1968, Adorno, Friedeburg, and Habermas responded to and went along in a differentiated way with the demands of the striking sociology students in the form of an open letter, entitled “We support the protest of our students. ” However, on December 17, 1968, Adorno and his colleagues ordered the students to clear immediately the Spartacus Seminar. The students seem not to have obeyed the order, because on December 18, 1968, the police cleared out the Spartacus Seminar. In consequence, a pamphlet criticized Adorno, Friedeburg, and Habermas in a sharp tone, and called them miserable helpers of the authoritarian state (Kraushaar 1998: 333-380).

Final Student Revolt On January 28, 1969, the Spartacus Seminar in Frankfurt reported that Adorno, Friedeburg, and Habermas forbade their students to put their protest into political praxis (Adorno/Tobisch 2007: 256-267; Kraushaar 1998: 333-380). On January 31, 1969 the revolutionary students occupied the Institute for Social Research. That at least is what Adorno and his colleagues asserted. To the contrary, the rebellious students asserted that they wanted only to go to one of the seminar rooms, which was freely accessible to them and other students, for common deliberation. In any case, Adorno and his colleagues declared that the students had trespassed and called the police. Habermas told the students over the telephone that the police were coming and they stayed away. On February 12, 1969, the Philosophy Department of the Frankfurt University asked Adorno and his colleagues to withdraw the penal petitions against the students. In April, a

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pamphlet appeared in the German Department of the Frankfurt University that characterized Adorno and his colleagues as small police informers. On April 22, 1969, Adorno’s lectures were suddenly interrupted. In the process of the rising unrest among the students, three co-eds walked toward Adorno, and encircled him and scattered rose and tulip leaves over him, bared their breasts, and tried to kiss him on his cheeks. Adorno hastily left the lecture hall. Afterwards, Adorno cancelled his lecture and his main seminar for an indefinite time. On April 27, 1969, Adorno expressed himself in the Süddeutsche Zeitung under the title: “Guilt feelings I do not have.” Adorno stated in his article that there existed no really comprehensible connection between the thinking of the critical theory on the one hand, and the present activism or pseudo-activity of the student movement, on the other. For Adorno, praxis without theory was as untrue, as theory without action. Adorno’s relationship to the third student movement often changed on the surface, and was also not free from contradictions. It fluctuated between being personally struck, hit, hurt, and wounded on one hand, and being indifferent and maintaining a sovereign distance to it on the other. His friend Walter Dirks often witnessed how vulnerable Adorno really was as a very sensitive artistic personality. To Adorno’s student Habermas, the student rebellion seemed sometimes to reflect more of the red fascism in Eastern Europe than the critical theory of society of the Institute for Social Research, or the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt courts, nevertheless, blamed Adorno for the whole third youth movement and student rebellion, stretching from Japan through America to Germany, France and Italy.

External Social-Psychological Perspective According to the critical theorists, contrary to the internal perspective of philosophy or theology, the external social-psychological and sociological perspective was concerned with the social function of religion (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 36, 37, 38, 40, esp. 388-390; Luhmann 1977; Charon 1994: chap. 9; Küng 1970; 1972; 1976; 1980; 1987; 1989; 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a: 896-897; 2004; App. E). In Horkheimer’s external sociological and social-psychological perspective, religion once had a social function, which today it has lost to a large extent (Horkheimer 1985g: 391-393; App. E). Traditional religion said: if you do the good thing in the sense of the religion, then you will be rewarded (Deuteronomy 1-4; Hertz 5716/1956: 735-774; Horkheimer 1985g: 391-393). Your soul will enter eternal blessedness.

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If you do the evil thing, and if you sin, then you will be punished. Then hell awaits you. For Schopenhauer, Horkheimer’s great teacher, the person who did evil and who negated with his will to life the will of another individual, and who thus tried to find his happiness for the price of the happiness of the other person, will be born again in some way without knowing about his former life (Schopenhauer 1977: 1/450, 484, 550-554; 2/648, 774, 779; 3/147. 4/77; 5/357-559; Horkheimer 1985g: 391-393). The person must go through all the sufferings, until for him, like for a true and genuine martyr, the suffering of the other has become as close to him as his own suffering: until he was able to feel com-passion and co-joy with the other. In the social-psychological and sociological perspective, religion was in the process of losing its social function in spite of the fact that it tried so hard to find such a function in industrial society and the technological age (Horkheimer 1972: chap. 3; Horkheimer 1985g: 391-393; App. E).

The Dialectical Method In the evolution of the critical theory of religion in Dubrovnik and Yalta, we have applied the dialectical method in its idealistic and materialistic form from the very start without, however, neglecting the consideration of traditional positivistic methods (Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53; Marx 1953; Marx/Engels 2005; Horkheimer 1972: 188-243, 244-252; 1987e; 1985l: 246-247, 294-296, 299-301, 301-302, 302-303, 306, 319-320, 323325, 349-397, 398-416, 431-435, 436-492, 526-558, 593-605; Bloch 1971; Adorno 1966; Fromm 1967; Habermas 1976). The dialectical method has always been rooted in Hegel’s idealistic dialectical methodology, as developed in his Phenomenology of the Spirit, and in his Science of Logic, as well as in the materialistic dialectical methodology as developed in the works of Marx and of the critical theorists. The critical theorists, like Hegel and Marx before, did not impose the dialectical method on society and history, including the history of religions, but rather tried to discover it inside of their movement. They were not only engaged in a subjective but also in an objective dialectics: it was present not only in their heads, but also in the world in which they lived. According to the dialectical method, one positive religion had negated the previous one: Buddhism had negated Hinduism, Christianity had negated Judaism, Islam had negated Christianity and Judaism, and Protestantism had negated Catholicism, and the Humanistic enlightenment negated all the religions–Ad maiorem Dei gloriam, as Ignatius of Loyola and Hans Küng would say (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng 1978, 1990b; 1991b;

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1994a; 2004; App. E). Inside of each world religion one paradigm negated the previous one. Thus, in Christianity Origines negated the Primordial Christian Apocalyptic Paradigm when he initiated the Old-Church Hellenistic Constellation; Augustine negated the Old-Church Hellenistic Paradigm when he initiated the Medieval Roman Catholic Constellation; Luther negated the Medieval Roman Catholic Paradigm when he initiated the Reformation Protestant Constellation; Barth negated the EnlightenedModern Paradigm when he initiated the Contemporary and Post-Modern Constellation (Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Mestrovic 1992; Küng 1994a; 1994b: chaps. II, III, V, VII; App. E). While it is not possible for the dialectician to move behind the differentiation between external and internal perspective, or between the observing and participating role, as both are always in play for him, he can, nevertheless, stress one more than the other. Thus, Hegel, Marx, and Schopenhauer emphasized the external, objectifying observer position more, while Kierkegaard and Nietzsche stressed more the internal, subjectifying participant role (Hegel 1986e; 1986f; Marx 1953; Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Kaufmann 1968; Kierkegaard 1964; Adorno 1997b). For the dialectical religiology, both perspectives are equally scientific, to be sure, not in the narrower American but rather in the broader European sense: including the natural sciences and the positivistic social sciences, which imitate the former, as well as the humanistic social sciences and the humanities (Sohn-Rethel 1978; Habermas 1970; 1971a; 1971b; 1973; 1975a; 1975b; 1976; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Habermas/Luhmann 1975; Honneth 1985; Dallmayr 1974).

Specific, Concrete, Determinate Negations However, all of these negations in the history of religions have not been indeterminate, but rather determinate; not general, but specific; not abstract, but concrete (Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53; Marcuse 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; App. E). As each religion, or each paradigm in each religion, critically negated the previous one, it also tried to preserve, rescue, elevate, fulfill and complete it; for example: 1) Critical negation: “You have learned how it was said to our ancestor: You must not kill…. but I say this to you, anyone who is angry with his brother will answer for it before the court…” (Matthew 5: 21-22a). 2) Rescue and fulfillment and completion: “Do not imagine, that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish,

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Each new religion, or each new paradigm in each religion, has combined in itself old and new structures and patterns. Each new religion and religious paradigm has become more concrete–Latin concrescere–meaning to grow together–than the previous one. The process of the concrete supersession of one religion or paradigm through the other has not happened without some internal necessity or directionality, which could be comprehended better through an internal, participant perspective than from an external observer position. The process of concrete negations has not been without some teleology, which may or may not be known. For Hegel’s mostly idealistic dialectic, the goal of the history of religions was known: Christianity, not only as religion of freedom, but also as absolute religion (Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng 1965; 1970; 1972; 1976; 1980; 1987; 1989; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 2003; App. E, G). For the critical theory, the mostly materialistically understood dialectical process of the history of religions has been openended: there may be a goal, but so far it has remained unknown (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 40; 1985l: 483-492; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; Adorno 1973b: 300-408; 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1982: 48-95; 126-143; 1988a: 59-60; 2005; 1990: 9-20; 1991a: part III). No strong or weak naturalism must necessarily win a final victory over religion.

Dialectical Notion For Hegel’s mostly idealistic dialectic, the truth had the element of its existence in the dialectical notion alone and only the whole of its development was the truth (Hegel 1986c: 140, 41-43, 45, 46, 47, 64, 76-77. 137-177; 1986h: 330452; 1986p: 1328, 38, 56, 60, 118; 1986q: 36, 53, 171, 203-205, 203, 222, 228, 236, 243, 250, 271, 370, 466, 481). For Hegel, this could be seen in relation to the history of religions. No particular positive religion was or had the absolute truth. Each following religion was the truth of the previous one. Only the totality of the history of religions was absolutely true, and was as such a real theodicy (Leibniz 1996; Hegel 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Taylor 1983: parts 5and 6). The same was true for the totality of philosophy: religion and philosophy were different only in form, not in substance. For the critical theorists’ mostly materialistic dialectic, the whole was still the untruth up to the present– February 2010–, also in relation to the history of religions (Bloch 1970a;

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1970b; Adorno 1951; 1952; 1960; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1973b: 300-408; 1997j:/2: 608-617; Habermas 1990: 9-18; App. E, G). The truth has not yet been established. It is still in the process of becoming. There was not even for the first, mainly Jewish generation of critical theorists an absolute religion, in which all other religions would be concretely superseded: not even Judaism. All positive religions were finite, relative, and transitory and thus could die, and many of them had already done so. To be sure, there was more to religion–as to reality in general–than any social theory, also the critical theory, could possibly comprehend. For a critical theory of religion, which tries to make conscious and rescue through critique what is hopeless and to prevent the false return to religion as well as the return of bad religion into secular modernity or post-modernity, it is important that a mystical-political-theologian can through his internal, participating perspective grasp more of the reality of religion than any social scientist can through his quasi-natural-scientific, external behavioristic or functionalistic, or also phenomenological observer perspective (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 7, 8, 10, 11, 21, 23, 24; 1988: chaps. 3, 5, 12, 17, 19, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29, 30, 38, 41, 43, 47, 48; Habermas 1982: 48-95; Metz 1977; 1978; 1984; 1997; Peters 1998; Metz/Peters 1991; Luhmann 1977; Küenzlen 2003). That may very well also be true for the simple believer in the everyday life world, who has preserved his first naivite at least to some extent, and who experiences religion through participating faithfully without too much reflection in his faith community, in the framework of what is called popular religion (Janz 2007).

Open Dialectic The critical theory of religion concretely negates in itself German idealism from Kant through Fichte and Schelling to Hegel, as well as the bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment movements in terms of an open dialectic being at work in world history in general and in the history of religions and humanisms in particular (Hegel 1986g: 503-514; 1986l; 1986p; 1986q; Horkheimer 1985l: 483-492; Habermas 1971b: chap. 5; 1973; 1876; 1978c; 1982; 1986; 1988b; 1991a; 1997a; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Küng 1978; 1990b; 1991a; App. A, B, C, D, E, G). Thus, for the critical theorist of religion as observer and participant, and informed by Hegel, old bourgeois Europe is no longer the center and the end of world history, but it is concretely superseded by the American and Slavic world (Hegel 1986a: 218; 1986g: 465; 1986l: 107-115; 413, 418, 422, 490-491, 500, 513; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; Küng 1990b; 1991a). Thus, for

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the dialectical theorist of religion as observer and participant, Christianity can no longer be–as it had been for Hegel–the absolute religion, which contains in itself as religion of concrete freedom all the essential aspects of the other positive religions: measure from Taoism, imagination from Hinduism, inwardness from Buddhism, light and darkness, or good and evil from Zoroastrianism, pain from the Syrian religion, riddle from the Egyptian religion, sublimity from the Jewish religion, beauty and fate from the Greek religion, utility from the Roman religion, and law from Islam (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Küng/Ess/Sietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng 1970; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2002; 2004; App. E, G). Thus, for the dialectical religiologist, Christianity can also no longer constitute the end of the history of religions. Yet, Christianity remains, nevertheless, if not the absolute religion, then still the religion of becoming, and of concrete freedom for the time being, having reached its Contemporary or Postmodern Ecumenical Paradigm (Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Küng 1970; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 2003; App. E, G). The dialectical theory of religion concretely supersedes in itself not only German idealism, but also historical materialism (Fromm 1967; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1971; 1972; 1975b; 1975c; 1985b; 1993; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976). As such the dialectical religiology sees the possibility of humanism concretely negating the history of religions, as religion in inheritance, that the alleged return of religion in secular modernity after the neo-conservative and neo-liberal counterrevolution of 1989will hardly be able to repress or to prevent (Horkheimer 1972; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Bloch; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975; Küng 1978; 1980; 1981b; 1989; 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; Küenzlen 2003; App. E, G). The present historical reality contains in its being the possibility of being like utopia, which certainly does not yet exist, but there is already the sound and to be backed up preappearance of it and its utopian-fundamental dialectical notion (Bloch 1960; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985a; 1993). Shortly, for the dialectical theorist of religion, history in all its forms–political, aesthetical, religious, philosophical, scientific history–is not yet closed, but rather open. The immediate horizon of history is the also transitory postmodern global alternative Future III–the realm of freedom beyond the realm of necessity, or the reconciled society–if indeed a rescuing world ethos can be developed throughout all civilizations and still living religions, and ultimately the passionate, remembering, hoping, liberating, redeeming longing for the wholly Other than the finite world, and all its seemingly insurmountable structural and personal sins, and curses (Genesis 3 and 4; Lieber 2001: 17-30; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; Küng

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1990b; 1991a; Metz 1959; 1963; 1965; 1967; 1969; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1981; 1998; 2006; Gutierrez 1971; App. G). Of course, religions, like art forms, or philosophical and scientific systems, as well as empires can survive and stay around for a while, and sit in a niche of world history long after they have been negated and have become obsolete and the Idea or the Truth has left them, until some day– in what Benjamin has called–the storm of progress blows away even their mere facades, ruins, and residuals: that is the task of world politics, the dialectical method of which must be called nihilism (Hegel 1986f: 462573; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; App. G). There is not only a secular, but also a religious eschatological-apocalyptic nihilism (Revelation 1-22; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Scholem 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Mestrovic 1992; Küng 1970; 1978: E; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; App. G).

The Comparative Method In our dialectical theory of religion, we have applied from its very start and throughout its evolution not only the dialectical, but also the comparative method (Reimer 1989; 1992; Ott 2001; 2007). The comparative method moves on the phenomenological level in the sphere of the subjective spirit (Hegel 1986j: 199-228; Adorno 1997a: 7-78; App. C, D). The comparative method is a function of analytical understanding rather than dialectical reason (Hegel 1986c; 1986e; 1986f). As such the comparative method follows mostly the external observer perspective. However, as dialectical reason concretely supersedes in itself analytical understanding, the comparative method also can be determinately negated in the dialectical method. Thus, the dialectical theorist of religion can compare the different religious phenomena, such as rites of passage, priesthood, sacrifices, pilgrimages, betrothals, marriages, funerals, etc. in different world religions and in their different paradigms like the phenomenologist of religion (Gennep 1969; Eliade 1961). Like the phenomenologist, the critical theorist can compare the reaction of the different world religions to secular modernity, and the related internal differentiation into orthodox and modernist believers, and the corresponding internal conflicts. However, unlike for the phenomenologist, for the critical theorist the religious phenomena or archetypes are not constant elements, but rather variables and products of history, which can change in history and which can make history, and which can also disappear again in history. This difference has also differentiated the political attitude of phenomenologists and critical theorists. While the former are Epimetheus people, the latter are Prometheus

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people, who alone can differentiate between good and bad religion, between humanistic and authoritarian religion, between religions of liberation and religions of domination, between religions that promoted the enlightenment principle–where id is, ego must be–, and religions which instead hold on to the romantic principle–where ego is, id must be (Fromm 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968a; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1975; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Marcuse 1970: 3-10). In this sense, Sigmund Freud’s enlightened psychoanalysis may in spite of all appearances to the contary be more genuinely religious than his former student and disciple Carl G. Jung’s romantic individution psychology (Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; 1992; 1993; 1995a; 1995b; Jung 1933; 1958; 1990; Fromm 1932a; 1932b; 1950; 1956; 1957; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960). Such comparative psychoanalytical insight may help the dialectical religiologists to fulfil one of their tasks in the present transition period from Modernity to Post-Modernity: namely to become new translators of religion (Adorno 1951; 1962; 1969a; 1969c; 1970b; 1971; 1973; Habermas 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b). In Dubrovnik and Yalta, we have compared dialectically, externally observing and internally participating in, the semantic material and potential in the depth of the different, mainly living world religions, as each newer one had determinately negated the previous one: Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and so on. As the critical theorists have dialectically compared the meaning-material and potential in the mythologies of the different world religions and their paradigms, they have always remained aware of the time factor of the religious as well as of all secular truth. Unlike the phenomenologists, the critical theorists also always remained conscious of the fact that not all religions and their mythologies, as they follow each other in time, operate on the same qualitative level. For the critical theorists, who unlike all positivists of all forms and shapes, can see the difference between quantitative and qualitative change and the turn over of quantity into quality: for example, the North-Germanic mythologies of Wotan (Odin) and Freya are simply not on the same qualitative level with the Greek mythologies of Zeus, Apollo, Athena, etc., in terms of the power of thought contained in them. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, in spite of being positivists in orientation, and in spite of–according to their followers–being phenomenologists with a sense of timing their actions well, were, nevertheless, more aware of the qualitative differences between religions and mythologies than Rosenberg, Himmler, Heindrich, or Eichmann (Hitler

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1943: 267, 268, 379, 380, 454; Taylor 1986: 26, 29, 57, 60-62, 92, 100, 102, 105, 108, 132, 189; Trevor-Roper 6, 15, 29, 59, 62, 83-85, 89, 122, 143-145, 189, 304, 306, 314, 409-412, 606, 718; Horkheimer 1974c: 101-104, 116115, 148-151).

Progress or Regression? More concretely, we have traced dialectically-comparatively the qualitative historical change of iconoclasm from China to Eastern and Western Europe; of the Trinitarian motive from different forms of Taoism and Hinduism through Neo-Platonism to different forms of Christianity; of the political-theological motives of domination and liberation from the Far East through the Near East to the West (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; App. E). All these moments were important elements in the humanization process of humanity. Of course, in such comparative, dialectic theory of religion the question of religious and secular progress or regression cannot be avoided (Horkheimer 1972: 129-131; 1974a; 1974b; 1974c; 1978; 1981a; 1981b; 1981c). It seems to be the destiny of humanity on its long progressive march from animality to freedom finally also to liberate itself from the religious mythos, which totalizes its life world and which interprets away the negative without really negating it in the natural or social reality, and precisely thereby keeps itself chained to nature and to its fate (Horkheimer/ Adorno 1972). Genuine human progress must move beyond the mythos, but without losing its limited, irreplaceable and un-renewable semantic and semiotic material and potential. The American Atheist Movement wants all schools to teach, to be sure non-dialectical, comparative religion courses in order to prevent the Christian Right’s white-washing of Christianity. However, in the external and internal, observing and participating perspective–or the critical theory of religion, comparison is no guarantee against the ideologization of any one religion, or for that matter even of all of them together. All nationally sponsored history books and courses are engaged in rewriting or in white-washing history ideologically in conformity with the national, race, and class interests, purposes, motivations and identities, even when they are comparative in nature to some extent (Lukacs 1970; 1971; chaps. 6, 7; 1974; 1979). The only guarantee against ideologization is a strictly dialectical epistemology and hermeneutics, be it of the history of religions or of the history of secular states: only the whole is the truth, and the whole is not yet the case (Hegel 1986c; Adorno 1951; 1960; 1962; 1967; 1969c; 1970b; 1971; 1973b; 1973d; 1973c; 1973d;

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1973e; 1976; 1980b; 1993a; 1993c; 1995; 1996; 1997b; 1997c; 1997f; 1997u; App. E, G).

Deterrence, Atonement, or Revenge? In his discussion of the Adolf Eichmann case in 1960, Horkheimer showed how helpful the comparative method could also be for the dialectician and his external and internal perspective (Horkheimer 1974c: 148-151, 164-165; 1967: 317-321; Arendt 1965). According to Horkheimer, Israeli citizens had ceased and abducted the SS-Colonel Eichmann, who had participated in the extermination of the Jews in the German Reich and in the occupied territories, from his Argentine asylum and had brought him to Israel. He was to be put on trial in Jerusalem, and sentenced, and punished. Horkheimer suggested that the court in Jerusalem should declare itself incompetent, and should send Eichmann back to Argentina. Horkheimer considered the formal and material reasons for the court procedures against Eichmann in Israel to be untenable. Israel could not possibly want the capture or seizure of political criminals in their asylum, which they had found justly or unjustly, to become the universal rule. Here, Horkheimer applied the Kantian categorical imperative (Kant 1965: 472-472, 633-634; 1970; 1982; Horkheimer 1974c; 148-151, 164-165; 1967: 317-321; Siebert 2006a; 2007c). For Horkheimer, punishment was a means through which a particular state enforced the recognition of and the respect for the laws inside its own borders. The only adequate purpose of punishment was to deter. All other penal theories were bad metaphysics. For Horkheimer, it was insanity to assume that Eichmann’s punishment in Israel would deter his possible successors from committing similar crimes in the future. Horkheimer called the illegal capture, abduction, and deportation of Eichmann from Argentina to Israel an old totalitarian behavior, which he compared with similar actions of Benito Mussolini and of the Stalinists. The resistance of the good biophilous force against the bad, necrophilous, destructive powers was paralyzed when it was supposed to use intellectual weapons that were self-evident for the opponent. Penal processes out of political calculations belonged to the arsenal of the Anti-Semites, not of the Jews. Horkheimer rejected particularly the first and last material reason for the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem: atonement or expiation. Horkheimer deeply distrusted the word atonement or expiation in general. It seemed to cover up impulses that shied away from the light of the day. They seemed to be taken from a strange world. They reminded Horkheimer of the Germanic pre-history and of the Holy Inquisi-

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tion. For Horkheimer, the idea that Eichmann could possibly atone for or expiate his deeds–the killing of four to five million Jews–after the human judicial judgment in Jerusalem, was a horrible and grotesque scorn and sheer mockery concerning the victims. Horkheimer would have understood more easily the confessed will of a Jew simply to take revenge, as poor as it would remain in the face of Eichmann’s deeds. If a Jew through Hitler’s rule had lost his father or his mother in one of the Nazi concentration camps, and as a consequence tracked down the rogue Eichmann in Argentina, and killed him on the open street, he would not have been a tactician, but a human being, whom everybody should have been able to understand: Jus Talionis (Genesis 4: 13-15; Lieber 2001: 27/13-15; Siebert 2006a; 2007c). However, for Horkheimer the Eichmann trial in Israel, no matter, how craftily or cunningly it would have been prepared for the purpose of atonement and expiation, would be simple-minded, and would produce indignation around the world at the same time.

Suffering Horkheimer admitted that the intent to render Eichmann harmless, in so far as he participated in plans of international agencies of fascism, would be entirely legitimate (Horkheimer 1974c: 148-151, 164-165; 1967b: 302317, 317-321; Arendt 1965). However, according to Horkheimer, the wish to do something to Eichmann betrayed not merely the lack of political understanding, but also coarseness of feeling. Horkheimer compared the suffering of the Jewish nation with that of other nations: no other nation had suffered more than the Jewish people. Suffering was the fundamental motive in the fate of the Jewish people. The Jewish people had made out of suffering a moment of duration, and permanence, and unity. Instead of generating most of all malice, spite, and meanness, for the Jewish people the suffering had inverted itself into a kind of collective insight and experience. Suffering and hope became inseparable in the Jewish nation. According to Horkheimer, at one point in the Jewish history the European nations had suspected all this, and they integrated into world history the pain, agony, and anguish, which the Jews suffered for that eternal Future–the New Jerusalem, the Messianic Realm, which they did not want to let go, through the confession of the tortured and crucified Redeemer– the Jew Jesus of Nazareth (Matthew 26-28; Revelation 21-22; Hegel 1986q: 218-346; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97, 150-151; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1980b: 15-16, 20, 333-334, Küng 1970; 1991b 1994a). Horkheimer compared Jews and Christians. Thus, in comparison to Christians,

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Jews were not ascetical people. They have not worshipped suffering, but they have experienced it. More than in other, mainly Christian nations, in the Jewish nation suffering was connected with remembrance of its own dead. Their suffering did not make the dead into saints. The suffering only bestowed on the thought of the dead the infinite tenderness and softness, which sometimes could even do without the consolation of eternal life. Horkheimer and his Jewish friends in the Frankfurt School participated throughout their lives in this suffering for that eternal Future. Horkheimer originally called this eternal Future, in terms of Psalm 91, which he had learned from his mother in his youth in Stuttgart, Elyon, Shaddai, Yahweh, Elohim (Psalm 91; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 17; 2006). Horkheimer spoke these names long before he received, through Adorno, the notion of the wholly Other, to be sure, in radically demythologized form beyond all possible idolatry, expressed in the Barthian dialectical theology (Genesis 4: 26; Lieber 2001: 29/26; Horkheimer 1974c: 218-219; 1985g: chaps. 23, 27, 28, 29). In a world, in which life did not live, Horkheimer prayed this Psalm 91 in spite of the fact that he knew all the psychological and sociological arguments against it (Psalm 91: 2; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 17; 2006; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969c; 1970b; 1980a; 1980b). He prayed it in the form of–what Paul Riceur called–a second naivete mediated through higher criticism. He prayed Psalm 91 up to his death in Nürnberg in 1973, after which the second verse of it was put on his gravestone in the Jewish Cemetery of Bern: “In you Eternal One I trust” (Psalm 91: 2; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 1; 2006).

The Nobility of the Dead According to Horkheimer, the Jew, to whom came the natural thought to see Eichmann suffer as a result of the trial in Jerusalem, has not yet reflected upon himself in comparison to other people (Horkheimer 1974c: 9697, 150-151). In such a Jew, his wish to see Eichmann suffer did not only violate his religion, but also everything that he had inherited from history. The undertaking to punish Eichmann without need resulted from the wish to do something to him through which the dead could receive their nobility. In Horkheimer’s view, the politicians in Israel did not only lack spirit, but also heart. They did not know, and they did not feel, what they were doing. Therefore, Horkheimer pleaded for the determination that the court in Jerusalem was incompetent, and thus, for giving Eichmann back to the country from which he had been abducted. In 1960, Horkheimer predicted that nothing good would come from the Eichmann trial, neither

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for the security and position of the Jews in the world, nor for their selfconsciousness. For Horkheimer’s comparative dialectical perspective, the Eichmann trial was a repetition: Eichmann would do great damage a second time in the future. Horkheimer’s suggestion was not very popular in Israel, and the court in Jerusalem did not follow his advice: Eichmann was tried, and sentenced to death, and he was executed through hanging, and his ashes were spread over the Mediterranean Sea. Yet, the critical theory has never aimed at popularity, but rather at the truth. Popularity and truth often miss each other. For Horkheimer, the comparison between Judaism on one hand, and other world religions, as well as secular civil society, and its administration of justice, and its history, on the other, was one basis for his opposition to positivism, scientism and naturalism (Horkheimer 1974c; 101-104, 116-117; 1985l: 436-492; Adorno 1980a; 1991a: Part III; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2005). For positivism, truth is what is the case: e.g. that most organisms in nature are programmed to eat other organisms in order to survive, or that man continually eats up most of the other species–according to the Torah, since Noah; or that in society one class dominates and exploits the other (Genesis 6-9; Marx 1961c: 332; Marx/Engels 2005; App. C, D). Unlike positivism, for the critical theory of society and religion, what is the case is precisely not the truth, and therefore must be changed, and must become otherwise (Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; 1974c; 101-104, 116-117; 1985l: 436-492; Adorno 1979; 1980a; 1980b).

The Paradigmatic Method The dialectical theory of religion has not only been engaged in the comparative, but also in the paradigmatic methodology, as it had been developed by Thomas S. Kuhn on the basis of his insight into the structure of scientific revolution (Kuhn 1963; Küng 1991a; 1991b; : 86-87, 777-778). A paradigm is a total constellation of convictions, meanings, values, norms, attitudes, procedures, and techniques, which are shared by members of a particular community. The paradigmatic method or analysis considers each world religion, dead or alive, as a macro-paradigm, or a macroconstellation, or a macro-model of the overall religious consciousness of the human species (App. E). Each world religion contains in itself a series of micro-paradigms. The paradigmatic method follows the more or less revolutionary macro- and micro-constellation changes from one world religion to the other, and inside of every world religion. These model transitions or change are dialectical in the sense that each religious macro or micro paradigm–analogically to natural-scientific constellations or

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models–determinately negates the previous one. Each new religious paradigm does not only criticize the deficiencies of the previous constellation, but it also preserves, elevates and fulfills its positive elements and its promises, and combines them with the innovations (Matthew 5-7; App. E). The critical theory of religion has never been value-free in the sense of Max Weber, but rather very much value-orientated in the sense of Emile Durkheim (Weber 1952: 89, 106, 141, 149, 170, 188, 191, 206, 222, 225, 242, 243, 252; 1969: 52, 158; Durkheim 1966; 1984; Habermas 1981a: chaps. II, IV; 1981b: chaps. V, VIII; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 3, 6; Schmidt 1972). The critical theory differentiates sharply between the damaged life, which is actually the case in antagonistic civil society, in which life does not yet live, and the right life, which is to be established on the way to postmodern alternative Future III, and toward the wholly Other (Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1971; 1973b; 1980b: 15-16, 17-18, 22-24, 68-71, 75-78, 87-89, 93-96, 99-105, 195-199, 227-228, 268270, 321-330; 1980c; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; App. G).

Inner Criticism The critical theory of society and religion engages in inner criticism (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 7, 13, 27, 28, 29; Adorno 1962; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1980b; 1980c; 1981; 1990; 1991a; 1991b; 1993a; 1993c; 1995). It judges each religious macro or micro paradigm, constellation, or model in terms of its own internal highest convictions, meanings, values, attitudes, norms, procedures and techniques. It compares it with its own praxis in itself, as well as in relation to its context, in other words, secular society and history. The critical theorist of religion does not hesitate to point out the greatness of a religious macro or micro paradigm concerning its contributions to the social evolution as learning process, and the humanization of human kind, to its long march from animality to alternative Future III–the realm of freedom beyond the realm of natural necessity, in which nature would be humanized, and humanity would be naturalized, and in which the previous period of the destruction of reason would be overcome (Marx 1961c: 873-874; Marx/Engels 2005; Lukacs 1974; Schmidt 1972). The critical theorist of religion also does not shy away from and avoid the critique of the pathology or criminology of a particular religious macro or micro constellations. If a dialectical theorist of religion, practicing the internal participant or the external observer position, can be reflectively critical of his own macro or micro paradigm, then he has also the right of being critical of other religious or

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secular constellations or models. All criticism presupposes self-criticism. The dialectical religiology rigorously tries to find out what is the case in a particular religious macro or micro paradigm, as do masterfully some of the positivistic theories of religion, if also often only from a merely external, observer position: for example, Weber and Durkheim and their many disciples up to the present–February 2010 (Weber 1952: 89, 106, 141, 149, 170, 188, 191, 206, 222, 225, 242, 243, 252; 1969: 52, 158; Durkheim 1966; 1984; Habermas 1981a: chap. II, IV; 1981b: chaps. V, VIII; Parsons 1964: chaps. 1, 2; 1965: chaps 1, 2; Luhmann 1977; O’Dea 1966; Light/Wilson 2004). Yet contrary to the positivists, the dialectical theorist of religion confronts what is the case in each religious micro or micro paradigm with its own validity claims–its own convictions, meanings, values, norms, attitudes, procedures, and techniques–and suggests constellation changes the more so the deeper the gap is between facticity and validity (Schmidt 1972; App. E). The critical theory of religion is particularly sensitive for eschatological-apocalyptic future aspirations, hopes, and expectation present in different religious macro and micro paradigms. The paradigmatic method provides the dialectical theorist of religion with an important guidance through the macro and micro constellation changes in the history of religions, which are no less complicated than those taking place in the history of science. While in the history of science paradigmatic changes are brought about through new instruments of observation, experiments, and mathematical formulas from Ptolemaeus to Galileo and Copernicus, from Newton to Einstein and Heisenberg etc., in the history of religions macro or micro constellation changes are produced through the simple fact that older religious paradigms are no longer providing theoretical or practical theodicy answers that are acceptable and/or plausible on a new level of social evolution as learning process and thus have become obsolete, as they are no longer taught from one generation to the next, and therefore, are forgotten.

The Essential Organ: Mediation It is one essential organ of the critical theory of society in general, and of the dialectical religiology in particular, to comprehend things that present themselves as being immediately existing and at hand, and thereby as being given by nature, or as being mediated and having come about socially and historically (Adorno 1993a; 1993b: 8-22; 243-258; 1993c; 1994). This organ of the critical theory of society and religion can receive the simple form that only what has come about historically can present itself from the

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very start in such a way that its possible future transformation thereby also comes into view: religious future I, II, and III (App. G). The historically constituted contradiction between the notion of religion on one hand, and what becomes of it in history and in different social contexts on the other, is an essential organ of the dialectical theory of religion. If one abstracts from the social and historical mediations and aspects of religion, then a critical theory of religion is not possible at all any longer. The medium of the dialectical theory of society and of religion, from which the dominant, traditional social sciences abstract to a large extent, is precisely and essentially to be looked for in the constitutive character of history in its most genuine and emphatic sense for society and religion. In the dominant stream of the positivistic social sciences, there exists indeed a strong tendency to cut off more or less completely the historical dimension, through which religion is always mediated (Luckmann 1991; Luhmann 1977a; Parsons 1964: chaps. 1-2; 1965: chaps. 1-2; App. E). For the critical theorist of religion, all religious phenomena appear both in an immediate and a socially and historically mediated form. In the dialectical theory of religion, the psychological and sociological and historical elements are mediated through each other. Psychology and sociology and history can as little be absolutely separated from each other, as individual and collective and world history (Hegel 1986g: part 3; Kracauer 1995; 1998). As individual, and society, and history are mediated through each other, so are psychology, and sociology, and historiography.

Anti-Historical Attitude For the dialectical theorist of religion, the sharpest expression for this anti-dialectical, anti-mediation, anti-historical attitude of the traditional, positivistic, social sciences is the famous phrase of the Hitler-friend and Anti-Semite, or better Anti-Judaist, Henry Ford of Michigan: “History is bunk!” (Adorno 1993b 248; Ford 1921a & b; Baldwin 2001). The same anti-historical formulation was in principle anticipated already in the last great speech of Mephistopheles at the end of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust II, at the occasion of Faust’s death, in a dialogue about him with the Chorus: Mephistopheles: No joy could sate him, no bliss satisfy. He chased his changeful vision to the last; This final moment, paltry, void, and dry, The poor wretch wants to hold it fast. Time masters him who could withstand

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My power, the old man lies here on the sand. The clock has stoppedChorus: Has stopped. As death-still as the midnight. Mephistopheles: It falls. And it is finished (John 19: 30). Chorus: And all is over. Mephistopheles: Over! Stupid word! Does it make sense? Over, and sheerest naught, total indifference! All this creating comes to what? To make things as if they were not. A thing is over now! What does that mean? The same as if the thing had never been, yet circles round and round as if it were. Eternal emptiness I still prefer! (Goethe 1965: 393-294; Adorno 1993b 248; Fromm 197416-21; Ford 1921a & b; Baldwin 2001).

Today of course–in February 2010–Goethe’s Mephistopheles, and Ford, and Hitler, and their American Right-wing Christian spokesman, Father Coughlin from Detroit, friend of the fascist Christian Front and of the German Bund have all become history (Goethe 1965: 393-294; Adorno 1993b: 248; Ford 1921a & b; Coughlin 1932; 1933; Baldwin 2001; Fest/ Eichinger 2004). Yet, are they, therefore, simply bunk? Hardly!

Universal Solidarity Contrary to Goethe’s Mephistopheles, or Fordism, or Taylorism, or scientific management, or behaviorism, or the structural-functional system theories, or cognitivism, and so on, the critical theorists of society and religion resist as non-conformist intellectuals, the compulsive amnesia of industrial society, and thus do not consider history to be bunk, and do not repress it, but remember its victims continually in universal, i.e. anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity (Adorno 1993b: 243-258; 1993c.; Habermas 1970; 1971a; 1971b; 1973; 1975; 1976; 1986: 53-55; Thompson/Held 1982: 238-263; Peukert 1976: 273-275; Lenhardt 1975; Haberma/Luhmann 1975; Light/Wilson 2003; Gold/Engel 1998; Demirovic 1999; Ott 2007). They refuse to forget the innocent victims of the past, or present, or future natural catastrophes–the tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes, but stay in anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity with them. They do not want to forget the innocent victims of the past, or present, or future social systems of domination and exploitation– the slaves, serfs, and wage laborers, but stay in remembering, present and

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future-oriented solidarity with them. They refuse to forget the innocent victims of the past, or present, or future technological or industrial disasters, for example, the crash of the Flight 800 near New York simply in order to renew or increase the profitability of TWA, but stay in anamnestic, present and anticipatory solidarity with them. They do not want to forget the innocent victims of the past, or present, or future conventional wars or civil wars, or even NBC wars, but want to stay in anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity with them: the victims of the wars in Vietnam, in Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Darfur, in Sudan, possibly in Iran, and on and on (Christison 2007; MacInnis 2007; Center 2007; Lardner 2007). Each family has in their albums, or on the walls of their homes photographs of members who have been victimized long ago, and with whom they want to and should stay in practical anamnestic solidarity, from which they do not let themselves be distracted into boredom, which is the result of meaninglessness (Kracauer 1995: 47-64, 259-266, 267-280, 323-330, 331-336; Siebert 2001: chap III; 2002a: chaps 2, 6; 2004a; 2005a; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2007a).

The Cries for Justice As the dialectical theorists of religion are motivated by the practical universal solidarity with the innocent victims of history, they certainly are part of the modern and post-modern enlightenment movements, and thus negate the world religions (Horkheimer/Adorno 1972; Adorno 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973c; 1980a; 1980b; 1993b; 1993c; 1994; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997u; Demirovic 1999; Kracauer 1995; Habermas 1986; Thompson/Held 1982). Enlightenment, demythologization, disenchantment, de-ritualization, de-auraization must happen on humanity’s long march from animality to freedom, collectively and individually. Driven by their sensitivity for the theodicy problem, the critical theorists of religion must ask whether Transcendence without divine countermovement in response to the cries of the victims for justice is really possible in the long run? (Habermas 1990: 9-19; Greinacher 1986; Schmidt-Biggemann 1988l; Oelmüller 1990; Siebert 2000; 2001: chap III; ; 2002a: chaps 2and 6; 2005a; 2005b; 2006a; 2007a; 2007b; 2007g; 2008a; 2008b; 2009a; 2009b; 2009c). Every martyr proves through his or her martyrdom not only his or her trust and confidence in God, but also God’s absence, in-activity and non-causality in the middle of the horror and terror cruelty (Hegel 1986l: 30-55; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps 6, 8, 9, 11, 1214, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 30, 31; Kogon 1967; Siebert 2000; 2001: chap III; ; 2002a: chaps

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2 and 6; 2005a; 2005b; 2006a; 2007a; 2007b; 2007g; 2008a; 2008b; 2009a; 2009b; 2009c 2001) However, the critical theorist’s negation of religion is not indeterminate and abstract, but rather determinate and concrete (Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 23-24). The dialectical religiology seeks not only to critically negate religious mythology, but also to preserve its relevant semantic and semiotic materials and potentials, and to elevate them, and to fulfill them through their secularhumanist inversion: by letting them migrate into the secular discourses of the everyday life world, as well as of the scientific expert cultures, and through them into communicative and political action in support of a profane modern and post-modern world, which is desperately struggling against the return of barbarism indicated, for example, by an increase in the death penalty, torture, genocide, civil wars, undeclared conventional wars, bombardment of civilian populations in open cities, hate crimes, abortion, suicide; shortly, a massive outbreak of necrophilous behavior (Adorno 1993: 243-258; Fromm 1973; 1974; Habermas 1970; 1971b; 1976; 1978; 1992a; 1973; 1975; 1976; 1986: 53-55; 1990: 9-19; Thompson/ Held 1982: 238-263; Peukert 1976: 273-275; Lenhardt 1975; Habermas/ Luhmann 1975; Light/Wilson 2003; Gold/Engel 1998; Demirovic 1999; Ott 2007; Greinacher 1986; Schmidt-Biggemann 1988l; Oelmüller 1990; Christison 2007; MacInnis 2007; Center 2007; Lardner 2007; Siebert 2000; 2006a). According to the dialectical theory of religion, as once the myths stood between culture and barbarism, or more specifically between marriage and prostitution, so in the future a secular communicative or discourse ethics may separate them, which contains in itself the dreams and the meanings that have been rescued from the depth of the old worldreligions in the course of the evolution of moral consciousness from the Jus Talionis through the Golden Rule to the Categorical Imperative and the a priori of the unlimited, universal communication community (Kant 1946; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1981, 1982; 1983; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976bl; 1982; 1990; Fromm 1997; Habermas 1983; 1991a; 1991b; 1991c; Siebert 2006a; 2007c).

In the Name of Life From World War I on, the first mainly Jewish generation of critical theorists of society read authors, who were engaged in the external and internal perspective and who expressed the cry for justice, not in order to learn, but in order to live: authors who wrote in the name of life (Fromm 1974: 16-21; Löwenthal 1965; 1966; 1980; 1989; 1990a; 1990b; Löwith

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1967). They read the books of the Hebrew prophets, not the Old Testament. They detested and abhorred more and more the warlike books about the conquest of Canaan. But for the critical theorists, the Psalms and particularly the Prophetic books were an always living spring. They read about the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament (Fromm 1966: chaps vii, ix; 1974: 16-22; 1992; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616). Besides Prophets and the Psalmists the critical theorists read a limited, but nevertheless diverse number of authors like Master Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas, Boehme, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Eichendorff, Marx, whom they considered to be religious, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bachofen, Goethe, Freud, whom they also considered to be religious, Bloch, Kraus, Brecht, Mann, Tillich, the Zen-Buddhist Suzuki, and Catholic theologians like Lobkowicz, who saw Marx’s religiosity through the eyes of Thomas Aquinas, and non-authoritarian, humanistic Catholic theologians like Rahner, Küng or Metz (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 13, 21, 25, 26; 1989m: chaps. 2, 13, 27, 28, 29; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1966b; 1967; 1972b; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1992; 1997; 2001; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1970; Dews 1986: 53-55, 125-126; Habermas 1976; 1978c; 1982; 1985a; 1987b; 1988b; 1991a: part III). What did such extremes as Master Eckhart and Marx have in common for the critical theorists of society: the radix, the root, the radicalism (Blakney 1941: 95-117; Hegel 1986g: 26-27, 4243; 1986p: 272; Marx 1953; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 19, 37, 38; 40). The mystical theology of Master Eckhart and the dialectical philosophy of Marx have in common the radicalism: namely like Hegel–who mediated them both–to penetrate and to get through the surface into the radices, the theological and anthropological roots (Hegel 1986g: 26-27; 42-43; 1986p: 272; Marx 1953) For Master Eckhart, Hegel, Marx, and Freud the root explained–in Eckhart’s words–the development of a thing (Blakney 1941: 95-117; Hegel 1986g26-27; 42-43; 1986p: 272; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1967; 1968; 196823-24; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001). That radicalism remained true for the critical theorists as well. Master Eckhart has influenced most the humanistic religiosity of the critical theorists: their restless longing for the X-experience and for the imageless and nameless wholly Other through negative-theological statements like: That is why the mind can never rest during this lifetime. For let God reveal himself here ever so much, it is nothing to what he really is. There is Truth at the core of the soul but it is covered up and hidden from the mind, and as long as that is so there is nothing the mind can do to come to rest, as it might if it had an unchanging point of reference The mind never rests but must go on expecting and preparing what is yet to be known and what is

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still concealed. Meanwhile, man cannot know what God is even though he be ever so well aware of what God is not; and an intelligent person will reject that. As long as it has no reference point, the mind can only wait as matter waits for form. And matter can never find rest except in form; so, too, the mind can never rest except in the essential truth, which is locked up in it– the truth about everything. Essence alone satisfies and God keeps on withdrawing, farther and farther away, to arouse the mind’s zeal and lure it on to follow and finally grasp the true good that has no cause. Thus contended with nothing, the mind clamors for the highest good of all. (Blakney 1941: 113-114; Fromm 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1995; 2001; Horkheimer 1985g: chs. 17, 29, 37, 38, 40).

Master Eckhart echoes Augustine’s prayer in spite or because of all Tolle, Lege, i.e. the reading of the New Testament: Our heart is restles until it rests in You (Augustine 1952, 1959; 1984; Küng 1994: 79-116). The critical theorists’ reference point was the X-experience, or the wholly Other, or Transcendence, or the Unconditional (Horkheimer 1971a; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1971; 1973b; 1980b; 1993a; 1993c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1982; 1988b; 1990: 14-15; 1991a: Part III; 2002; 2004b; 2005: 112114; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Siebert 2004a; 2005b; Küng 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 1998; 2002; 2004; 1998). Informed by Master Eckhart and all the other authors, the critical theorists themselves began to write in the name of life, be it from the external or the internal perspective, and always in support of the cry for justice coming from the masses of the suffering people before, during, and after Auschwitz (Löwenthal 1965; 1966; 1980; 1989; 1990a; 1990b; Löwith 1967; Fromm 1974; Adorno 1951; Tiedemann 1991; 1998a; 2003; Opitz 1996). The dialectical religiology continues this internal and external radicalism in the name of life and justice toward global alternative Future III: the more reconciled society (Blakney 1941: 95-117; Hegel 1986g: 26-27, 42-43; 1986p: 272; Marx 1953; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; Flechtheim 1959; 12962; 1963; 1966; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 19, 37, 38; 40; Siebert 1966; 1979a; 1979b; 1979c; 1979d; 1985; 1986; 1993; 1994b; 1994c; 1994d; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2003a; 2003b; 2004a; 2004b; 2005b; 2005e; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007e; 2007f; 2008a; 2008b; 2009a; 209b; 2009c; App. E, G).

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chapter ten The Task of the Intellectuals

According to the critical theorists of society, for the non-conformist intellectuals, like they themselves, informed by Master Eckhart and all the other authors mentioned above, there was only one task, and that was to search for the truth as good as they could, be it through the external or the internal perspective, and to say it. (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 11, 1224, 29, 30, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43; 1989m: chaps. 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25, 26, 29, 33; Benjamin 1978c, 1978d; 1980; 1983a; 1983b; 1995b; Fromm 1974: 32Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971b; 1975; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981c; 1984a; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1987b; 1990; 1982a; 1995; 1997a; 1998; 1999; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2003b; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2004d; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c: 9; Borradori 2003; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 29000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007). For that task of the intellectual, even more important than the question, if the intellectual practiced the external or internal perspective, was the other question, if he belonged to what Isolde Kurz had described already in 1895as the life-friendly schoemaker type, and not to the death-friendly taylor type, or to what Fromm called the revolutionary, democratic, biophilous, and being-type rather than to the authoritarian, fascist, necrophilous having-type (Laumont 2004: 643-680; Fromm 1932a; 1932b; 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980a; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001). The biophilous, revolutionary, democratic, being-type intellectual was not primarily called upon and it was not his or her primary function, to sketch, design, or draft political programs. But the intellectual had, nevertheless, a function–and that did or should distinguish him or her–, which was the special function of the intellectual: namely to pursue the truth–including the religious and the secular, the Transcendent and the immanent, the individual and the collective, and understood negatively as negation of untruth, i.e. illusions and delusions, without compromise and without consideration of his own or other interests, While the intellectual had to be modern or even post-modern, he had also to be rooted in pre-modern times, down to what Karl Jaspers had called the Axial Age, which referred to the period from 800-200 BCE, during which the mayor advances underlying later civilization occurred concurrently and independently in China, India, the Orient, and the West (Fromm 1974; Habermas 2006c: 10, 196). If the intellectuals limited in the service of a party program and of particular political goals, no matter how good they may be, their function to search for the full truth and to say it, then they sinned against their own most proper specific task, and ulti-

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mately against the most important political task, which they had. This was so, because the political progress depended on, how much the intellectuals knew about the truth, and how clearly, and boldly, and daringly they said it, and how much of it would impress the masses of the people in a particular society or state: in the name of life, which would be violated by a merely one-sided, abstract and thus untrue instead of a dialectically mediated and thus true external and internal perspective (Hegel 1986a 193, 288, 374-375,; 1986b: 31, 39, 153, 460-461, 511, 540, 545,; 1986c: 1540, 414346, 47, 64, 76-77, 137-177, 178-323, 387, 430, 431, 582, 582-583 (Fromm 1974; Habermas 1971; 1973; 1976; 1984a; 1999; 2004d). In the present– February 2010–global capitalistic crisis, the critical theorists of society can and must as intellectuals continue Adorno’s critique of the commodity exchange society and must give external and internal perspectives of transformation through saying the truth about and remove the illusions about the extremes of state capitalism and free market capitalism and suggest a dialectical mediation of the extremes through each other and suggest to the G8 to nationalize the major banks and industries while at the same time leaving room for civil society and the market and smaller private banks–credit unions–and smaller businesses (Fetscher/Schmidt 2002). The dialectical religiology can translate religious concepts like the love of the neighbour into secular principles like solidarity, and subsidiarity, and the priority of labor, and introduce them into the expert-discourse on the present global financial and economic crisis, and thus contribute to and promote emancipation as reconciliation toward Post-Modern global alternative Future III–a society, in which the socialized human beings, the associated producers, will regulate rationally their economic metabolism with the realm of natural necessity, and will bring it under their communicative control, instead of being domimated by it as by a blind power and fate, and will perform it with the least expenditure of energy, under conditions which are most worthy of and adequate to their human nature, and on this basis will begin the development of their human energies, which understands itself as self-purpose, i.e. the true realm of freedom, beauty and happiness, where man can be at home with himself in his body and his spirit, and can strife for his perfection, instead of Post-Modern, global alternative Future I–a barbarous totally administered, technocratic, or brown- or red-fascist society (Hegel 1986a: 43, 335-336, 394-395; 1986n: 186-187; 1986r: 175, 373, 455; 1986s: 109; Marx 1953; 1956; 1971; 1961: Vol. III, 873-874; 1963; 1964; 1974; Marx/Engels 1960; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Fromm 1966a; 1966c; 1967; 1968; 1976; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 17, 29, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 12, 20, 21, 27, 28, 29,

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34, 35; Brecht 2007; Baum 1975b; 1980a; 1980b; 2001; 2007; Fetscher. Schmidt 2002; Neumann 1942; Flechtheim 1959; 1962; 1971; Flechtheim/ Lohmann 2003; Metz1970; 1973b; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; Siebert 1979c; 1979d; 1985; 1986; 1987b; 1993; 1994b; 2004a; 2005b; 2006a; 20o6b; 2007a; 2007g; 2008b; App. G). The dialectical religiologist practices equally both the internal perspective, rooted in the mode of being, inherited from the mystics and the idealists, and the external perspective, based in the mode of having and inherited from the positivistic and dialectic materialists (Blakney 1941: 132; Fromm 1966b: chaps ii, iii; 1976: chaps III, IX). Master Eckehart stated: Nobody ever wanted anything as much as God wants to bring people to know him. God is always ready but we are not ready. God is near to us but we are far from him. God is within; we are without. God is at home; we are abroad. (Blakney 1941: 132).

The wholly Other, the critical theorists of religion are longing for, is more near and close than distant, more within than without, more at home than abroad (Blakney 1941: 132; Fromm 1966b: chaps ii, iii; 1976: chaps III, IX; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1978c; 1986: 53-54, 125-126: Siebert 1979a; 1979b; 1979c; 1979c; 1979d; 1989; 1993; 1994c; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2004a; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 20o7a; 2007g; 1118; 2008b: 215-245).

chapter eleven

Conscious-Making and Rescuing Critique The dialectical religiology is conscious-making critique of religion (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1950; 1960; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1992; 2001; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1986; 1987c: chaps. 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19; 1988b; 1990; 1991a: Part III; 1992b; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006). It is conscious-making critique of bad religion as regressive mythology and ideology, pathology and criminology (Adorno 1979: 457-477; Bendersky 207: 6-43; Steinfels 2007: 14; Larison 2007: 25; Editors 2007; Weigel 2007: 14-20; McEltoy 2007: 11-14; Mullen 2007: 11; Moran 2007; Harris 2006: 9; Cohen 2007: 4). However, it is at the same time also a saving and rescuing critique of good or critical religion. Both forms of critique give the critical theory of religion its actuality in the present macro-paradigmatic transition period from Modernity to Post-Modernity.

Rescue Only as such critique, which makes conscious the contradictions in the world religions, of which the believers may not be aware and against which they may be rather immune, the dialectical religiology may also be a rescuing and saving critique, which may be helpful to overcome and resolve such internal antagonisms and bring about a new translation of religion, as performed already e.g. by Benjamin (Hegel 1986p: 236-245; Horkheimer 1972: chap. 4; 1985l: 172-183, 294-296; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1992; 1997; 2001; Habermas 1978a: chap, 5; 1978c; 1986; 1987b: chaps. 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19; 1990: 9-19; 2001a; 2004b; 2005: chaps 5, 8, 9; 2006c: Part I; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006). Only as such critique, which saves and rescues some of the important contents of the world religions–their semantic and semiotic materials and potentials–does the critical theory of religion understand itself also as ideology- and mythology-, pathology- and criminology-critique of the religions. The dialectical theory of religion is conscious-making and rescuing critique also in relation to the dominant, tra-

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ditional, positive sciences of religion, which make no difference between good and bad religion: the positivistic psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and theology of religions (Bloch 1970a; Reich 1976; Schmidt 1972; Luhmann 1977; Parsons 1965: chaps. 1-2; 1964: chaps. 1-2; O’Dea 1966; Berger 1990; Siebert 1980). While it is critical of the positive sciences of religion because of their positivism, it, nevertheless, also continually learns from them, whatever quantitative information they may have to offer concerning what is the case in the religious dimension, and concerning new religious facts and phenomena, which they may have discovered more recently, mostly from an external, observer position and perspective (Habermas 1981a: chap. IV; 1981b: chaps. V, VIII). A positivist is so intensely glued to what is the case, also in the religious sphere, that for him the longing for something other than the immediate factual reality has been suffocated, or has never developed and taken off in the first place: the longing for the Mae On, the Not Yet, the imageless and nameless wholly Other, who is the ultimate concern of all great world religions, and who appears after the Gods of pantheism and panentheism, of polytheism, theism and deism, have disappeared in the anxiety, doubt, despair, guilt, and meaninglessness of the unresolved theodicy problem: the God above God, the Eternal One beyond–what John of the Cross or Mother Teresa, the Saint of Calcutta, called–the suffering and terrible darkness on the earth, its dark holes, its dark nights, its unknown pain, its crucified people, its nothingness–atheism in religion, and even in Christianity (Leibniz 1996; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986q: 273-274; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a 1975b; 1979; 1985a; 1993: chaps. 54, 55; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 17, 18, 19, 37, 40; Tillich 1972: 186-190; Thompson/Held 1982: 246247; Oelmüller 1990; Markun 1977; Kolodiejchuk 2007: chaps. 4, 6-10, 12; Susman 1948). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology the way of the modern history of religion seems to go from theism through deism and atheism to post-theism (Hegel 1986q; Bloch 1972; Tillich 1972: 186190; Fromm 1974; 1976; 1980b; 2001; Küng 1978; 1990a).

Longing for God Mother Teresa, the mystic from the former socialist Yugoslavia, wrote to one of her spiritual directors about her terrible sense of loss, her untold darkness, her loneliness, her continual longing for God, which gave her that pain deep down in her heart (Kolodiejchuk 2007: 1-2). Her darkness was such, that she really did not see, neither with her mind nor with her reason.

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The place of God in her soul was blank. There was no God in her, when the pain of longing was so great. She just longed and longed for God. It was then, that she felt that God did not want her. God was not there. Sometimes Mother Teresa just heard her own heart cry out: ‘My God’ and nothing else came. She could not explain her torture and her pain. In spite of the darkness and the fact that her longing was often not answered, Mother Teresa was, nevertheless, continually driven by the energy of her religious yearning for the wholly Other to help the poor in the slums of Calcutta in India, the greatest democracy of the far East, and to pick up the dying from the dirty streets every morning, so that they may have at least a dignified death after a life of hunger and humiliation, in spite of all the wealth and power in the upper classes. Mother Teresa was fully aware that in Russia and China socialist revolutionaries, driven by the energy of their secular longing for the totally Other, had created socialist republics, in which dying people in the cities were no longer laying on the streets every morning, in spite of the widely prevailing shared poverty (Marcuse 1961; Inkeles 1971; Merleau-Ponty 1969). Mother Teresa admitted that this was a good thing, but humbly confessed that she did not understand these political things, and that therefore she practiced the old style of charity from one poor person to the next. Mother Teresa knew that the global bourgeoisie used and abused her as an alibi, and ideological cover-up and legitimation for the class and race antagonisms and struggles in civil societies (App. E, F). Mother Teresa did not feel good about her visits to the U.S. White House and to Sweden, where she received the Noble Peace Prize. Yet, she went to these places and honors, nevertheless, for the monetary awards, which she and her Congregation used immediately for the poor and the dying in the capitalist metropolises. To be sure, there would still have been much need, opportunity, and necessity for the spiritual work of Mother Teresa and her Sisters also in the hospitals of the socialist republics.

Truth as Negation of Untruth For the dialectical theory of religion, truth results from the concrete negation of religious ideology or mythology, criminology or pathology as untruth (Hegel 1986p: 236-245; Horkheimer 1972: chap. 4; 1985l: 172183, 294-296; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1974; 1976; 1992; 2001; Fromm/Suzuki 1960; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1986; 1987c: chaps. 6-7, 13-15, 18-19; 1990: 9-19; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006). Such critical nega-

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tion of religious ideology and mythology, criminology and pathology had started already in the world religions themselves, particularly in Judaism as the Religion of Sublimity (Genesis 6: 1-4; Lieber 2001: 33-34/1-4; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991a; 1991b). Certainly the critical theory of religion is not willing to critically negate the untruth of traditional religious mythologies and ideologies, pathologies and criminologies, in order then to fall victim to the untruth of secular modern, or post-modern ideology or mythology, pathology or criminology of scientific and technological progress as the solution to all human problems, be they economic, social, political, military or medical. The critical theorist is not willing to commit the idiocy of hypostatizing positive science into a new religion, no matter how great the temptation may be to do so in a secularized, science and technology based civil or socialist society on its way to alternative Future I–the one-dimensional totally technocratic society, or toward alternative Future II–the one-dimensional totally militarized society, instead of toward alternative Future III–a multi-dimensional society characterized by a humanized natural science and technology (Hegel 1986a: 218. 1986l: 107-115, 413, 418, 490-491, 513; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; Marx 1961c: 873874; Marx/Engels 2005; Bloch 1970b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40; Fromm 1967; 1968; Marcuse 1966; Flechtheim 1971; Habermas 1976; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; Hinkelammmert 1985; App. G).

Social Laws For the critical theory of society and religion as conscious-making and saving critique, the constitutive meaning of history shows itself most radically in the notion of the social law (Marx 1953: chaps. VI, VII, VIII, X, esp. 322, 347, 353, 364-366; Adorno 1993b: 228-258; Habermas 1973; Honneth 1985; Snyder 1978). From the perspective of the dialectical theory of society and religion, the famous differentiation between the nomothetical and the ideographical approach in the social sciences–or between the natural sciences, which search for generalizing laws, and the social sciences, which research the value of a singular phenomenon, in which a social or cultural good realizes itself–is so problematic precisely because there are obviously and self-evidently not only natural but also social regularities. Yet, these social laws of the social sciences differentiate themselves constitutively from the laws of the natural sciences precisely through the form of their own historicity. The form of the natural scientific laws is in general: always when, then... Whenever this or that is given in nature, when this or that natural condition is fulfilled, then this or that effect

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comes about. Contrary to this, the fundamental form of the social law is: after this or that has happened in the social world, after the society has unfolded itself in this and no other direction, then this or that social event shall come about with high probability. This high probability of the arrival of a social event can be defined through the notion of objective tendency. Thus, the form according to which the social laws direct themselves is not always when, then..., but rather the form after... then. In this after is present, of course, constitutively the element of social and historical time, and thereby the whole historical dimension. In the perspective of the dialectical theory of society and religion, social laws and tendencies are at work not only in society, but also in culture, and particularly in religion. Thus, the dialectical religiologist searches in religious texts and their social and cultural contexts for certain tendencies and interprets them accordingly: for example, eschatological tendencies (Metz 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1978; 1980; 1997; 1998; 2006; Klingen 2007: 7). The dialectical theory of religion produces awareness of the difference of these tendencies, and negates the bad and regressive ones pointing to postmodern alternative Futures I and II, and supports and tries to bring to fruition the good and progressive ones directed toward alternative Future III, and beyond toward the totally Other (Hegel 1986a: 218; 1986l: 107-115, 413, 418, 490-491, 513; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; Marx 1961c: 873-874; Marx/Engels 2005; Bloch 1970b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40; Fromm 1967; 1968; Marcuse 1966; Flechtheim 1971; Habermas 1976; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; Hinkelammert 1985; App. G)

Impoverishment of Experience According to the critical theory of society and religion, the notion of fact or of data, which is–together with the concept of method–the fetish and idol of the present traditional, administrative social sciences, including the positive sciences and theories of religion, is among other things characterized by being presented as something timeless: as punctual presence (Marx 1953: chaps. VI, VII, VIII, X, esp. 322, 347, 353, 364-366; Marx/ Engels 2005; Adorno 1970a; 1970b; 1993b; 1993c: 228-258; Marcuse 1960: part II, 389-420; Lukacs 1971; 1974; Luxemburg 1977; Habermas 1973; Honneth 1985; Leeuw 1968; Lenski 1963; Pals 1996). That is one very exact reason for the fact that the empiricism in the positive social sciences, including the traditional sciences of religion, paradoxically cuts off experience. Against its own intent, it impoverishes human experience. Real experience is cut off, insofar as this punctuality of presence, this that is

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the case, which abstracts from the eminent historicity of the fact and from its historical implications, absolutizes what in reality has come about as something that is the way it is, and cannot be otherwise (Hegel 1986l: 35; Adorno 1970a; 1993b: 228-258; 1993c). Anti-or post-metaphysical positivism or scientism is, nevertheless, the metaphysics of what is the case (Horkheimer 1974: 101-104, 116-117; Adorno 1969c; 1970a; 1993b: 228258; 1976; 2003d; Zimmermann 2003: 81-91; Habermas 1988a; 2006a: 669-707; Henrich 2007: 389-402). However, it is precisely this absolutization of what is the case that has an enormous consequence, because as the fact is absolutized and as the genesis of the social or religious datum disappears, it appears as something entirely given and natural, and therefore also as something that in principle can no longer be changed. Anti-or post-mythical positivism, nevertheless, shares the mythical belief that Chronos, the Greek God of time who gives birth to his children and then kills them again, can indeed and must be castrated, if Athens and its slaveholder society was to be stabilized and to be maintained for ever (Bultmann 1961). In the philosophical and dialectical-logical Perspective, becoming must be excluded through either saying with Parmenides, that being is, but nothing is not, and therefore there is also no becoming as synthesis of being and nothing, or through saying with the Gautama, the Buddha, nothing is and being is not, and therefore there is also no becoming as synthesis of nothing and being (Hegel 1986b: 228; 1986e: 66, 82-114, 185, 226, 390; 1986e: 84; 1986l: 80, 209-214; 1986p: 305, 376-390; 1986r: 146). Such elimination of becoming is indeed in the interest of all ruling classes, who would like to last forever.

Positivism and Neo-Positivism In this sense, both positivism and neo-positivism are the philosophies of the bourgeois ruling class in present antagonistic civil society (Horkheimer 1985l: 436-492; Lukacs 1971; 1974; 1979; Marcuse 1966: part II and Conclusion; Adorno 1970a; Popper 1968a; 1968b; 1969; 1971; Snyder 1978; Benedict 1959; App. C, D). Precisely, therefore, the positivists’ elimination of the historical dimension is an essential instrument to sanction and to justify ideologically what is at hand, the status quo of industrial or late capitalist society. To the contrary, the critical theory of religion emphasizes this connection between fact and history, this historical mediation of social data, particularly religious phenomena, as a correction against the danger that it itself can degenerate into a merely deductive system, and thus fall victim to the impoverishment of experience. In any case, for the

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dialectical theorist of religion, with the genesis of the social and religious phenomena, from which the traditional social sciences abstract, disappears also the perspective toward that which could possibly become of those facts, data, and phenomena in the future. Genuine experience includes into that fact, which is present and immediate, both its past genesis and its future development. The behaviorist psychology student has no real experience of the life of a rat, that is observed only in the Skinner box, torn between electrodes on one hand and water and food on the other; abstracting from all its hunting, protective, and reproductive activities, and their evolutionary genesis and consequences (Skinner 1965). The impoverishment of experience also becomes visible when, for example, young waitresses want to work at the thoroughly positivistically scientized, mechanized, administered, and managed McDonald restaurants, in the belief that thereby they could have a great life experience. Even the so-called religious or spiritual experiences, and the positive sciences of religion that observe them from outside and register and categorize them in civil society, participate in this experiential impoverishment, (Leeuw 1968; Lenski 1963; Pals 1996). The speed of the production, circulation, and consumption process, the pressure of natural and artificially conditioned needs and instincts in terms of immediate satisfaction, not to speak of the complete victory of exchange-values over use-values in the modern capitalist commodity society, have very much diminished the capacity of the people living in it to experience concretely small and large things and events in their immediate life world, and particularly in the other dimension: the experience of simple ciphers of the wholly Other in nature, society, and history (Marx 1953: 486-488; 1961a: 43-44, 55, 79-80, 89, 99101, 165, 178, 180, 195, 202, 211, 218-219, 331-333, 841-843; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; 1985l: 559-586; Adorno 1979: 392-396).

The Abrahamic Religions and Capitalism In his video-message of September 7, 2007 in remembrance of September 11, 2001, and of Mohammed Atta and his 18 cooperators and their socalled world-historical deed, Osama Bin Laden blamed modern capitalism for all the injustices and wars in the world, in spite of the fact that he had fought against Soviet socialism in Afghanistan before (Lawrence 2005; Merleau-Ponty 1969; Marcuse 1961). As a solution to the capitalist problem Osama Bin Laden recommended to the West, particularly to the Americans, the conversion to Islam. The critical theorists of religion remembers in February 2010, that, of course, not only Islam, but also the

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other two Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Christianity, have been critical not only of slavery and feudalism, but also of capitalism, and of its secular ideology and mythology, criminology and pathology, and of all the horrible things it has been doing to human experience and life in the form of colonialism and imperialism in the past 400 years (Hegel 1986q: 50-91, 185-346; Lawrence 2005; Hinkelammert 1985; Hedges 2007; Janz 2007; Bloch 1960; 1970b; 1972; 1975b; 1985a; 1993; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Siebert 2006d; 2007a; 2997b; 2007c; 2007g; 2008a; 2008b b). Therefore, in the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, instead of becoming Muslims, the Jews could become real Jews, and the Christians could become genuine Christians, and they could all remember their own antiusury laws and develop them further, and practice them in a new religious or secular way and in a new context. Thus, the members of all three Abrahamic religions could, on the basis of their universalistic tendencies, unite themselves with each other, and with secular humanists concerned with the problems of exchange and surplus value, in order to resolve the overwhelming global capitalist problem, as it has become so obvious to everybody–certainly to the G 8 and the G 20–in the present global financial crisis of 2008, 2009 and 2010 (Leviticus 25: 36; Deuteronomy 15: 6; Psalm 36: 231; Proverbs 22: 7; Isaiah 42: 5, 7, 16; 43: 8, 10; 44: 8; Lieber 2001: 35; Matthew 5: 42; Luke 3: 2; 6: 34-35; 11: 5-8; Weber 1963; 1969; 1978; 1992; Marx 1953: 486-488; 1961a: 43-44, 55, 79-80, 89, 99-101, 165, 178, 180, 195, 202, 211, 218-219, 331-333, 841-843; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972). Thus, the Jew Jesus of Nazareth stated against usury in conformity with the Torah in his Sermon on the Mount: And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what thanks can you expect? Even sinners lend to sinners to get back the same amount. Instead love your enemies and do good, and lend without any hope of return. You will have a great reward, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked (Leviticus 25: 36; Deuteronomy 15: 6; Psalm 36: 231; Proverbs 22: 7; Matthew 5: 42; Luke 3, 2; 6: 3435; 11: 5-8; Horkheimer 1988n: 369-370, 405-406, 466, 536).

All three Abrahamic religions have opposed usury in one form or the other (Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004).

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Credit Slavery Even Adolf Hitler and his NSDAP’s first economic struggle in the Weimar Republic, informed by Gottfried Feder, was directed against the speculative and economic character of national and international stock exchange and loan capital, and aimed at the breaking of interest–or creditslavery (Marx 1961a, b, & c; Hitler 1943: 207-215; Neumann 1942; SohnRethel 1975; Baldwin 2001; Black 2001). It helped Hitler to understand, and to misunderstand, the content of the Jew Karl Marx’s life work, Capital, which misunderstanding and following political half-measures, and counter-revolutionary betrayal of the German workers and farmers in the service of capital, led to the most horrible world-historical consequences. After World War II and Hitler’s death, credit slavery to national and international stock exchange and loan capital continued in all civil societies undisturbed and even intensified: causing one war after the other up to the present–February 2010. The victorious neo-conservative counterrevolution of 1989 was to a large extent the result of the fact that the Eastern European countries had borrowed such huge amounts of money from Western loan capital, particularly the World Bank in Paris, or the Dresdener Bank and the Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt a.M., that soon they could no longer pay the interest, and had to ask for new loans to pay them off, until the final collapse occurred in 2008, 2009, 2010 (Inkeles 1971; Merleau-Ponty 1969). What Hitler’s three million men marching into the Soviet Union could not achieve with infinite bloodshed, the breakdown of the so-called communism, Western loan capital accomplished through collective credit slavery, without a shot being fired.

The Reification of Consciousness For the dialectical theorist of society and religion, there exists a connection between the reification of consciousness and the established traditional social sciences, including the positivistic sciences of religion (Marx 1953: chaps. VI, VII, VIII, X, esp. 322, 347, 353, 364-366; Marx/Engels 2005; Adorno 1970a; 1993b: 228-258; 1993c; Weber 1952; 1962; 1963; 1969; 1978; 1992; 2002; Marcuse 1960: part II, 389-420; Lukacs 1971; 1974; 1979; Luxemburg 1977; Habermas 1973; Honneth 1985; Leeuw 1968; Lenski 1963; Pals 1996; Snyder 1978; Benedict 1959; Fox/Tabory2008: 245-272; Schieman 2008: 273-296; Duff 297-316; Loveland 2008: 317-334; Geest 2008: 335-354; Reed 2008: 665-676; Denis 2008: 677-694). The reified consciousness lets the object coagulate into something solid

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and hard, while at the same time it makes it into a punctual moment, in terms of something in itself thingified, i.e. in terms of a system of notions that are constructed according to the model of a functioning machine. What is nothing else than the here and now, namely the fact, the data, coagulates and becomes hard precisely through its establishment into that very moment without past or future. The extreme opposites of the merely momentary on one hand, and the thing-like character of the social or religious phenomenon or datum, on the other, coincide, nevertheless, insofar as they both abstract from the constitutively historical sphere (See Volume I, Appendix C; Hegel 1986g: 503-514; 1986l). That stands in absolute contradiction to the very object of the social sciences, the society, including its culture, and particularly its religion, which is a functional life process, and not only a descriptive concept of human beings living at a certain point in time, and which therefore cannot at all be comprehended in any other way than historically. This is because the functional, living, and dynamic character of society, including culture and specifically religion, cannot present itself at all, except in the dimension of time (Hegel 1986g; 1986l; 1986p; 1986q). As the traditional social sciences, including the positivistic sciences of religion, abstract from this dimension of time, their scientistic methods falsify and distort the thing, i.e. the society, including its religion, once more, by stopping, arresting, and bringing to a false standstill in their momentary state and condition the economic, social, and cultural, and particularly religious phenomena, which as such are–in terms of their regularity and lawfulness–necessarily on the move and in motion (Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; Kolodiejchuk 2007: chap. 7).

Status Quo The dialectical religiologist is aware of the fact that the status quo is a main category of the present-day ideology in antagonistic late capitalist or industrial society (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Marx 1953: chaps. VI, VII, VIII, X, esp. 322, 347, 353, 364, 366; Marx/Engels 2005; Weber 1962; 1963; 1969; 1978; 1992; 2002; Adorno 1970a; 1979: 9-19, 42-85, 122-164, 177-195, 196-216, 217-237, 238-244, 245-279, 280-353, 354-372, 373-391, 397-407; 408-433, 440-456, 478-493, 494-499, 500-531, 538-546, 547-568, 569-573, 577, 578-587; 1993b: 228-258; Marcuse 1960: part II, 389-420; Lukacs 1971; 1974; 1979; Luxemburg 1977; Habermas 1973; Honneth 1985; Leeuw 1968; Lenski 1963; Pals 1996; App. C, D). In the perspective of the dialectical theory of society and religion, this category of the status quo constitutes the blindness of the anti-historical traditional social

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sciences, including the positivistic sciences of religion, to the immanent, developmental tendencies in society and religion, and thereby to what is really decisive in these objects: namely, that these sciences really have to recognize where this antagonistic social totality wants to move tendentially–post-modern Future I, II, or III–and to deduct from this insight, whether and how religious believers or secular enlighteners and humanists may, or can at all, or must intervene positively or negatively into this tendency in order to promote or stop it (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34; 35; 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Merleau-Ponty 1969; Hall 1977; App. G). The traditional social sciences, including the positive sciences of religion that are directed toward what is momentary and which call themselves empirical, are without concrete experience in the emphatic sense, precisely because of their neglecting in principle the time dimension: the having come about of the social facts, or the religious data, in time. In general, the subjective weakness of the memory of the individual, which hangs together with the ego-weakness in civil society, that had been discovered by psychoanalysts in the 1920s and has spread intensely in recent decades, is one of the decisive traits of capitalist and socialist societies’ newly arising heteronomy. In the view of the dialectical theory of society and religion, all reification means a falling into oblivion, into forgetfulness, into amnesia. In contrast, for the critical theory of religion, conscious-making and saving critique really means remembrance and the rescue of memories, often in the form of narratives (Metz 1978; Zerfass 1988). The critical theorist mobilizes anew most powerfully the human potential of language and memory and the evolutionary universal of the struggle for recognition (Hegel 1972; 1979; Habermas 1981a; 1981b; 1983; 1984a; 1984b; 1987d; 1991a; 1991b; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Honneth/Joas 2002; Siebert 1979a 1979b; 1979c; 1979d; 1985; 1987a; 1987d; 1994c; 2001; 2004a; 2004b; 2005a; 2005c; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007f; 2008a; 2008c; App. C, D). More precisely, consciousmaking and rescuing critique means to mobilize in the social or religious phenomena precisely that, through which they became what they are now, and thereby to become aware of the possibility that they could also have become something other, and thereby to become conscious that they can still become something other than what they are factually right at this time. In any case, for the dialectical theory of religion, critique is precisely a remembrance rescuing critique. The critical theorist of religion agrees fully with Baal Shem Tov that forgetfulness leads to exile, while remembrance is the secret of redemption (Siebert 1989: xi).

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chapter eleven Between Monotheism and Enlightenment

The critical theory of religion moves between the extremes of the religious and the secular: between revelation and autonomous reason, between monotheism and radical enlightenment, between theology and genuine science (Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1990: 9-18). As a form of autonomous philosophy and reason, it must, therefore, differentiate itself clearly and sharply from the religious faith on one hand, and from the merely secular knowledge of positivism and naturalism, on the other (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986p: 9-88; Habermas 2001a; 2001b; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9). Already half a century ago, the positivists Sidney Hook, John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, and Karl Popper differentiated sharply between scientific and unscientific statements (Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; 1974c: 101-104, 116-117; 1978; 1981c; Adorno 1970a; Popper 1968a; 1968b; 1969; 1971). According to the positivists–presenting the standpoint most opposed to the one proposed here in the form of the dialectical theory of religion, on the one hand, the validity of unscientific, for example, religious statements, was decided by personal feelings, while on the other hand, the validity of scientific judgments was established by methods of public verification open to all, who submitted themselves to its disciplines. The term discipline denoted the rules codified in the most advanced manuals and successfully used by scientists in laboratories. Certainly, so the critical theorist of religion must admit, these procedures are typical of contemporary ideas about scientific objectivity. However, in the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, the positivists seem to confuse their scientific procedures with the truth itself. Science should expect philosophical thought, as put forward by either philosophers, such as the critical theorists of society and religion, or by scientists, to account for the very nature of truth, rather than simply to boost scientific methodology as the ultimate definition of truth. Positivism dodges the issue by contending that philosophy, such as the critical theory of society and religion, was merely the classification and formalization of scientific methods. The positivists present as such formalization the postulates of semantic criticism, as for example, the postulate of relatedness or the principle of the reduction of complicated statements to elementary propositions as they occur in the critical theory of society and religion. By denying an autonomous philosophy, for example, an autonomous critical theory, and a philosophical concept of truth, the positivists hand science over to the hazards of the historical development of civil or socialist society. Because science is an element of the social process, its investiture as arbiter veritatis would

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make truth itself subject to changing social standards. Civil or socialist society would be deprived of any intellectual means of resistance to a bond, which social critiques have always denounced: the connection between truth and procedures, truth and methodologies, truth and classification and formalization, truth and historical and social development, or truth and particular, always changing social norms and values. Of course, also the authoritarian and dogmatic positivistic language-regulation against the use of words like truth or meaning does not really resolve the positivistic dilemma. The Catholic priests Boscovic, Mendel, Le Mere, and Teilhard de Chardin cannot only remind the critical theorist of religion of the great Medieval synthesis between faith and knowledge, but they can also point to the fact that believers have continued to make great contributions to the evolution not only of religion, but also of science (Thomas Aquinas 1922; Hegel 1986b: 287-433; Habermas 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006). At the same time, the Belgian priest Le Mere, who cooperated with Einstein and who developed successfully the theory of the big bang, warned Pope Pious XII that he could not use his theory in order to defend and justify the three Biblical creation stories. The antagonism of monotheism and scientific enlightenment remains a reality also for those believers, who have been able to be most deeply engaged in both of them.

The Social Organization and the Spirit of Science The critical theorist of religion must admit that even in fascist Germany the notion of Nordic mathematics, physics, biology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, such as the scientific measurements of racially different Germanic roundheads and Semitic peaked heads, with domed skulls supposedly framing a noble and worthy mind, while peaked skulls, concealed a crafty mind, and similar nonsense, played a greater role in political propaganda than in the universities (Horkheimer 1974c: 101-104, 116-117; Adorno 1969c; 1976; 1978a; 1979. 1980a; 1980b; Habermas 1970; 1971; 1973; 1976). However, so the dialectical theorist of religion must insist, this was due to the momentum of science itself and to the requirements of German armament rather than to any attitude of positivistic philosophy (Horkheimer 1988n: 307, 310-311, 327, 329, 351-352, 418-419, 458-459, 466-467, 520-521, 525-526). It, after all, reflects the character of science at a given historical stage of civil or socialist society and of their power elite (Mills 1964). If organized science in fascist Germany had yielded completely to the Nordic requirements and had accordingly crystallized

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a consistent methodology, the positivists would eventually have had to accept it. This would have happened in fascist Germany just as elsewhere positivism has accepted the patterns of empirical sociology shaped by administrative needs and conventional restrictions: and most of all by the powerful trend toward alternative Future I–the totally one-dimensional, technocratic, mechanized, bureaucratized, computerized, robotized signal society (Flechtheim 1971; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Marcuse 1966; Fromm 1968; App. G). Certainly, those enemies of human kind, like Hitler and Dr. Joseph Goebbels, had the greatest confidence in scientific methods regardless if they were used in Penemünde, or in the Berlin ministry of propaganda (Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; 1974c 101-104, 116-117; 1978; Neumann 1942; Sohn-Rethel 1975; Speer 1974; 1976). The fascist ministry of propaganda consistently used controlled experimentation, testing all values by their causes and consequences, as any positivist would do. Like any existing religious or political creed, science can be used to serve the most diabolical social forces, such as through developing Zyklon B, or the atomic and hydrogen bombs and the corresponding delivery systems. Positivism or scientism is no less narrowminded than militant, positive religion. Certainly, if Hitler and Goebbels had won World War II, they would have been praised as the greatest positivists of the age. By compliantly making science the theory of philosophy, positivism disavows the spirit of science itself. Great genuine German scientists, like Werner von Heisenberg and his students, such as Ivan Supek, were consistently opposed to positivism in all its forms. While the critical theory of society and religion must surely differentiate itself sharply from all forms of positivism, it nevertheless must not abstractly negate it, but rather determinately and concretely. It must not only criticize it, but also preserve and elevate some of its great accomplishments, such as some statistical methods, like sampling, which the positivists have developed to perfection in the positive social sciences. In this sense, critical theorists like Fromm and Adorno, often used advanced statistical methods: Adorno even invented the statistical A scale (Fromm 1932a; 1932b; 1959; 1967; 1980a: 7-46, 49-79; 1980b; Adorno 1952; 1950: part IV; 1976).

No Relapse into Mythology The dialectical religiologist remembers that already over half a century ago positivists had admitted that the positivistic philosophy did not rule out on a priori grounds the existence of supranatural entities, forces, agents or agencies (Horkheimer 1974c: 101-104, 116-117; 1988n: 307, 310-311, 327,

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329, 351-352, 418-419, 458-459, 466-467, 520-521, 525-526; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1972: 23-24; Lenski 1963; Weber 1952; 1963; 1992; 2002; Light/ Wilson 2003; Bachika 2002; Bergen/Doerksen/Koop 2007; Berger 1990; Pals 1996: chaps. 1, 5, 6, 7; Leeuw 1968; Döbler 2007: 35-52). If the dialectical theorist of religion takes this positivistic admission seriously, he may expect under certain social and historical circumstances, the resurrection of exactly the same entities, spirits, angels, devils, demons, all kinds of divine agents and agencies, whose exorcism had been the very core of scientific thinking and enlightenment as a whole during the past 400years of modernity: a relapse into mythology. As a matter of fact, already long before the Hellenistic and modern enlightenment movements, each new religion often denounced as superstitious non-entities the supranatural agents and agencies of the previous one: for example, Judaism in relation to the Persian, Syrian and Egyptian religions, or Christianity in relation to the Greek, Roman and Germanic religions, or Islam in relation to the matriarchal religions on the Arabic Peninsula (Hegel 1986c: 495574; 1986j: 372-377; 1986p; 1986q; App. E). Once, positivism continued this enlightenment work of the positive religions, going beyond them only more radically. However, contrary to all this, under the present conditions of globalizing late capitalist society and its power elite, namely, the corporate ruling class, certain forms of positivism, such as cognitivism, seem–at least in some of their quarters–to consent to such a relapse into mythology as they speak once more of supernatural agents and agencies (Mills 1964; Light/Wilson 2004). They have become victims of the dialectic of enlightenment (Horkheimer/Adorno 1972). Since these forms of positivism at the same time still oppose theology, and that often quite furiously, the critical theorist of religion may assume that they do not want to give back again to those divine agents and agencies the reality that they had once been deprived of by their positivistic predecessors. Positivism does not want to explore them ontologically, but rather psychologically, simply because they are still existing in some parts of humanity. They try to find the roots of these constant supernatural agencies and agents not in the external reality, or in the personal unconscious of the individual and not even in the collective unconscious of the human species, but rather in the individual human mind-brain (Light/Wilson 2004; Gold/Engel 1998; Habermas 2005; 2006a: 5, 669-707; 2006b; Henrich 2007: 3, 389-402). However that may be, the dialectical theory of religion opposes any relapse into mythology, no matter in which form it may happen: in a religious or secular form. It emphasizes and it even radicalizes its own negation of mythology, in spite of the fact that it is also conscious-making and

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even rescuing and saving critique and as such is willing to save semantic and semiotic materials and potentials from the depth of religion (Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1982: 11-32, 33-47, 127-14348-95, 127-143; 1990: 9-18; Goldstein 2006; Ott 2007). Even theology had negated the mythos and mythology in the name of the logos from its very start, when it was still theodicy: if also not abstractly, but rather determinately (Benjamin 1955a; 1977: chaps 10, 11; Adorno 1969c; 1970b; Bloch 1960; 1970b; 1972; 1975b; Fromm 1960; 1966b; 1974; 1976; Berrigan 1971; Metz 1`973a; 1973b; 1975a; 1973c; 1978; 2006; Oelmüller 1990). Theology as theodicy had to engage in such negation of and liberation from the mythos and mythology because they had interpreted away the negative in nature, society and history, instead of genuinely and radically overcoming it, and thus had chained humanity and society and history to what was the case in nature–the deified finite natural and social forces: the myths had been positivistic in attitude (Homer 1922; McFareland 1967; Long 1963; Sandars 1968; Riccardi 2007). Almost all objects on all ontological levels can be and have been hypostatized, meaning fetishized, objectified, and reified into gods: stars, trees, crocodiles, snakes, apes, dogs, cats, buffaloes, as well as race, nation, charismatic leaders, capital, science, technology, and items of the culture industry (Genesis 20; Hegel 1989p: 409-442; Horkheimer 1972: chap. 4; 1988d: chap. 2; Bloch 1970b; 1971; 1975b; 1979c; 1985b; 1993: chaps. 43-55; Adorno 1976; 1980a; 2003b; 2003c; 2003d; Riccardi 2007; App. E). There is the original, traditional magic and fetishism, and the modern fetishism of the world of commodities and of facts and data (Hegel 1986p: 259-301; Marx 1961a: 77-80, 88-8999; Adorno 1970a: 120-122; 1971; 2003b; 2003d; Riccardi 2007). Instead of being used just in their deictic function, possible natural or social ciphers of the qualitative Infinity, or the wholly Other, have been turned into divinities with their own reality and recognition and rights (Adorno 1970a: 103-125; 1993b; 1994; 2001a). Almost everything can be made into a religion. The history of humankind has been to a large extent a history of fetishization and idolatry (Isaiah 42: 6-8; Lieber 2001: 36-37/6-8; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1958; Lundgren 1998; Riccardi 2007; App. E).

The Promises of Science In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, in the present period of civil or socialist society, the progressive ideas of the bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment can be rescued only when they are determinately negated: i.e. criticized as well as preserved, elevated and fulfilled

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(Horkheimer/Adorno 1972; Marcuse 1960: part II and Conclusion; 1962: 64-67; Lukacs 1974: part II and Conclusion; Raynes/Dean 1970). The same is true of the emancipatory ideas in religion. In the one-dimensional, late capitalist or industrial society the antagonism between religion and secular positive science, as well as their mutual functions have changed thoroughly (Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-391, 569-573, 578-587; Marcuse 1962: 64-67; App. E, F). Within the total positivistic mobilization of onedimensional humanity and of nature, which in spite of all Islamic resistance is nevertheless taking place in present–February 2010–globalizing antagonistic civil society in direction of alternative Future I–the totally technocratic and bureaucratized society, positive science has become one of the most destructive instruments (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Marcuse 1962: 64-67; 1966; Fromm 1968; App. E, F, G). This is true not only in relation to the implication of positive science in the construction of the most advanced murder weapons in two world wars and in the following period of more or less cold or hot global class struggle up to the present wars in Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, and possibly soon in Iran, as it has at least been threatened by the second Bush Administration and by Fox News, its most loyal television and radio stations. Positive science has also become destructive in terms of its original promise of enlightenment: understood as a process, in which humanity would be freed from its fears and would be made master of its fate (Horkheimer/Adorno 1972; Marcuse 1962: 64-67). Instead, positive science has produced new and even greater fears, and has even strengthened the enslavement to mythological fate and more specifically the spell of the international application of the jus or lex talionis (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; Siebert 2007c). As this enlightenment promise of science evaporated into an abstract utopia in civil and socialist society, the name “scientific” became almost identical with the denunciation of alternative Future III–a society in which personal autonomy and universal solidarity would be reconciled (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 3637, 40; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Marcuse 1962: 64-67; 1966; Fromm 1968; App. G). For quite some time, the scientific attitude has ceased to be the militant antagonist of religion, or fetishism, or mythology, or superstition. A positivistic sociologist may try to make peace with religion by saying that it is good, i.e. eufunctional, for the survival of civil society, in spite of the fact that it is not true–true in the sense of the correctness of scientific statements. In the perspective of the critical theory, such scientific compromise is, of course, implausible and unacceptable for any genuine religion or philosophy, for which

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the truth claim is essential, central, and non-negotiable (2 Samuel 7: 28; 1 Kings 17: 24; Psalms 14: 3; 24: 10; 42: 3; 88: 2; 118: 30, 43; Matthew 22: 16; Mark 12: 32; Luke 1: 4; John 1: 14, 17; 3: 21; 4: 23; 5: 33; 8: 32, 40, 44, 45; 14: 6, 17; 15: 26; 16: 7, 13; 17: 17, 19; 18: 37, 38; Saint Thomas Aquinas 1922; Hegel 1986p: 13, 28, 38, 56, 60, 118, 140, 159, 188, 378, 391; 1986q: 36, 53, 171, 203-205, 222, 228, 236, 243, 250, 271, 329, 339, 370, 466, 481; Küng 1978; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 1998; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984).

The Promises of Religion In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, on its part religion has equally effectively and successfully discarded its own promises: its own explosive elements, its own apocalyptic thorn in the flesh, its own eschatological reservation (Bloch 1970a; 1972; 1985: chaps. 43-55; Horkheimer 1972: chap. 4; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972; Marcuse 1960: part II and Conclusion; 1962: 64-67; Lukacs 1974: part II and Conclusion; Raynes/ Dean 1970; Metz 1959; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1978; 1997; 1998; 2006; Metz/Habermas/Sölle/et al. 1994; Sölle/Metz 1990; Küng 1978; Peters/Urban 1999; Mayer/Zimmerling 1993; Theunissen 1991: 321-377; App. E, F, G). Often religion has accustomed its believers to a good conscience in the face of enormous suffering and guilt in the surrounding antagonistic civil society. In the Western civilization, the functions of positive religion and positive science, which since the beginning of modernity had been contradictory, have in many ways become complementary in the interest of the survival of bourgeois society. Through their present usage in late capitalistic or industrial society, religion as well as science deny the longings and the hopes which they once aroused (Saint Thomas Aquinas 1922; Hegel 1986p: 9-88; Bloch 1970a; Horkheimer 1972: chap. 4; 1985g: chaps. 25, 26, 30, 32, 34-37, 40; Marcuse 1962: 64-67; Raines/Dean 1970; Habermas 1990; 1991: part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzimger 2006; App. E). Now–in February 2010–the bourgeois religions teach men and women to appreciate what is the case in antagonistic civil society, the facts and data, and to conform to them in a world of extreme commodification, reification, and alienation between the classes and the people, and the consequent most cruel amnesia, and to resign themselves to the enormous social injustices that are at hand and manifest, for example in the slums of the capitalist metropolies, and of which the religious and humanistic leaders are only too aware: and which all reaches its climax in

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the present global capitalist crisis and catastrophe, which elicits extensive and intensive state intervention into civil society to the point of material or even formal nationalization of mayor banks and industries, the very opposite of 20 years of neo-liberalism and neo-conservativism, Friedmann and the Chicago School, de-regulation and privatization (Adorno 1979: 8-19, 245-279, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 440-456, 457-477, 569-573, 578-587; Marcuse 1960: part II and Conclusion; 1962: 64-67; Lukacs 1974: part II and Conclusion; Kolodiejchuk 2007; Lawrence 2005; Hinkelammert 1985; Hitt/King 2007; Hinchman 2008). In this sense, religion is no longer the illusion or delusion that it once was for the bourgeois, Marxist, Nietzschean, and Freudian enlighteners, and for the whole history of positivism up to recently, when suddenly the post-secular society was announced in the face of the religiously inspired terrorist attack of September 11, 2001: the enlighteners admitted that religion did not disappear so fast as they had hoped for and predicted (Marx 1953: 207224, 339-417; Bottomore 1956; 1964: 41-60; Laski 1967; Niebuhr 1964; Niebuhr 1987; Kautzky 1925; Kaufmann 1967; 1968; Löwith 1967; Wright 1954; 1968; 1986; Freud 1962; 1964; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 13, 28; Habermas 1976; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1982; 1984a; 1987c; 1988a; 1988b; 1990; 1991a: part III; 1992b; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007). Even the academic promotion of positive religion in the Departments of Comparative Religion and of Theology in European and American universities falls often very much in line with the still predominant positivistic trend in civil society. However, so the critical theorist of religion argues, wherever religion still preserves in itself the uncompromised aspirations for redemption and happiness, freedom, solidarity and justice, friendliness and helpfulness and peace, and supports the trend toward post-modern alternative Future III–the humanistic, reconciled society, its so called illusions or delusions have still a higher truth value than a positive science, which works for their elimination (Bloch 1970a; 1972; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 40; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b: 103-125; 1973b; 1980b; 1997j/2: 97-122; 608-617; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1968; 1976; 1992: 3-94, 203-212; Marcuse 1960: part II and Conclusion; 1962: 64-67; Lukacs 1974: part II and Conclusion; Kolodiejchuk 2007; Lawrence 2005; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1987b; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Peters/Urban 1999; App. E, F, G).

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chapter eleven The Positivistic Attitude

In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the repressed and transfigured, originally critical, polemical and revolutionary semantic and semiotic content of religion certainly cannot be liberated by surrendering it to the positivistic or scientistic attitude: particularly not when positivism falls victim to the dialectic of enlightenment and regresses into mythology (Marcuse 1960: part II and Conclusion; 1962: 64-67; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972; Adorno 1952; 1970a; Habermas 1973; Gennep 1969; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007d; 2008a: 180-210; 2008b: 215-245). To the contrary, it is the task of the critical theory of religion to liberate the critical, polemical, revolutionary, anti-empire semantic and semiotic materials and potentials in the depth of the mythos precisely by letting it migrate and by being inverted into the secular discourse among the expert cultures and into communicative and political praxis directed against alternative Future I and II, and toward alternative Future III (Hegel 1989q: 278-292, 340344; Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 1-7; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975b; 1975c; 1993; chaps. 53, 54, 55; Bloch/Reif 1978; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969c; 1970b: 1997j: 97-122, 599607; Marcuse 1962: 64-67; 1966; Fromm 1992: 203-212; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1982; 1985b; 1986; 1987b; 1988a; 1988b; 1990; 1991a: part III; 1991c; 1998; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2003c; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2997; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Raines/Dean 1970; Metz 1959; 1965; 1967; 1972a; 1972b; 1973b; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1978; 1980; 1981; 1997; Sölle 1977; 1992; 1994; Sölle/ Habermas 1975; Sölle/Metz 1990; App. E, G).

Critical and Traditional Religion In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, critical and radical religion can fulfill its promises if it is driven by the insatiable longing for the wholly Other, and if it joins revolutionary humanism in its common struggle against the metaphysics and culture of death intrinsic to the present–2008, 2009, 2010–global disastrous capitalist system toward post-modern alternative Future III–a culture of life and of love, and if it thus can contribute to a–if not theoretical–then at least practical solution of the theodicy problem, which continually worsens as it is repressed or discussed by traditional religion and theologians, who have forgotten their own origin in the theodicy–even the talion theodicy, the ancient belief that suffering is divine punishment for sin, even if the sin could not be identified, and that

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the sinner had to resign himself to his misfortune–and thus have become insensitive toward it (Genesis 44: 16; Lieber 2001: 270/16; Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 1-7; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1975b; 1975c; 1985a; 1985b; 1993: chaps. 53, 54, 55; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b; 1997j: 97-122, 599-607; Marcuse 1962: 64-67; 1966; Fromm 1992: 203-212; Habermas 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Raines/Dean 1970; Metz 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1978; 1995; 1997; 1998; 2006; Hinkelammert 1985; Oelmüller 1992; Drewermann 1992; Peters/ Urban 1999; Küng 1991: 726-728; 1994a: 904-905; Lawrence 2005; Kolodiejchuk 2007; Theunissen 1991; Mayer/Zimmerling 1993; Lernoux 1980; Habermas 2002; Mendieta 2005; Burns 2007; Klein 2007; Baum 1975b; 1980a; 1980b; 1982; 1994). They may even have forgotten the Rabbis’ theodicy, that God uses the evil intentions and deeds of men to a good end, and Hegel’s instrumental theodicy, –which was rooted in the former, and according to which all evil in the world, all actions of people which start from their needs, dull passions, particular interests, characters, talents, arbitrariness, wildness, misunderstandig, confusions, errors, excesses, selfishness, violence, and unregulated power and produce immense individual and collective sacrifices on the slaughterbench of history, were means for its substantial destiny, its absolute end-purpose and its true result–the realm of freedom–and Marx’s secularization of the Rabbinical and the Hegelian theodicies (Genesis 44: 4; Lieber 2002: 268/4; Hegel 1986: 29-55; Marx 1961: Vol III, 873-874; Horkheimer 1932; 1936; 1966; 1970b; 1871a; App. G). In his theodicy, Hegel would have instrumentalized for the realm of freedom even the greedy American corporate ruling class, which produced through neo-liberal deregulation and privatization the present–2008, 2009, 2010–global financial and economic catastrophe, and which the second Bush Administration wanted to rescue paradoxically enough through nationalization and socialization–a la the fascist Peron in Argentina or the socialist Chavez in Venezuela–of the most important banks and industries, following the immediate example of the British Labor Government of Prime Minister Brown, and the European Union (Hegel 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455). Bush would have done that even in spite of the fact, that in the last debate of the Presidential candidates Senator Obama and Senator McCain on Wednesday, October 15, 2008, the latter still defended dogmatically the same atomistic liberalism, which Hegel had already declared to be obsolete and bankrupt after the first economic depression in England of 1827, and that in the face of the third loss of a trillion dollars on the New York stock market in two

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weeks–the equivalent of the whole costs so far of the second Iraq war– which falsified this same liberalism, now called neo-liberalism (Hegel 1986l: 534, 535). During the debate, Obama and McCain appealed to Joe the Plummer, a representative and symbol of the same low middle class, which now Obama defined through a yearly income of under 250,000 dollars for a family and 200,000 dollars for a person, and which was a historical left-over of the Middle Ages, and which was continually endangered in modern civil society through the labor unions form below, and through the corporate chains from above, and which had therefore been most tempted and attracted by fascist propaganda, and which became the very basis of fascist movements in Europe and America in the 20th century (Caughlin 1932; 1933; Baldwin 2001: chap. 19; Hedges 2007) In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, on the way to what Hegel and Marx had called the realm of freedom, a Roosevelt-liberal President Obama could prepare a humanistic socialism, while a neo-liberal President McCain would lead–to be sure unintentionally–toward corporatism, which his fascist-populist crowds indicated already, when they shouted at Obama names like Arab, terrorist, traitor, Muslim, socialist, etc., and even booed out McCain himself, when he tried to control them by asking for respect for his opponent and himself (Hegel 1986: 29-55; Marx 1961: Vol III, 873-874; Horkheimer 1932; 1936; 1966; 1970b; 1871a; Fromm 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1975; 1978; 1981; 1990; Sohn-Rethel 1975; DVD Media 2006; Baum 2003; 2004; 2005; 2007). The political options of the Great Depression of 1929 appear once more in the capitalist catastrophe of 2008, 2009, 2010 on a much higher, globalized, world-historical level: a Democratic Party aiming at the redistribution of wealth through government regulation similar to the Social Democratic or Labor Parties in Europe, and the Republican Party defending the millionaires and billionaires against taxation (Fromm 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1975; 1978; 1981; 1990; Neumann 1942; Sohn-Rethel 1975; Baum 1980a; 1980b; 1982; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Honneth/Joas 2002; Fraser/Honneth 2003). In the present global capitalist crisis of 2008, 2009, 2010, Osama Bin Laden may think, that after he had supposedly brought down in the name of Islam the younger socialist modernization and secularization through the victory over the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, he has now in the West supposedly been victorious over the older, bourgeois modernization and secularization, through resisting successfully the American Empire in Afghanistan and Iraq and thus causing the economic catastrophe in its very heart through very costly global terrorism (Lawrence 2005).

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Reductionism Contrary to the positivists, critical theologians–like my friend Gregory Baum, who had been a member of the Augustinian Eremites–the order to whom Martin Luther, the initiator of the Reformatory Protestant Paradigm once belonged, and who has remained faithful to the spirit of St. Augustine, the founder of the Medieval Roman Catholic Paradigm, and who followed the teachings of Maurice Blondel, and with whom I had a discourse on the Frankfurt School in the Airport of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in July 2003–wonder, if the critical theory of religion protects itself sufficiently against the traditional theological accusation of reductionism (Erikson 1962; Blondel 1963; Baum 1959; 1965; 1967; 1968; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1980a; 1980b; 1982; 1991; 1994; 1996; 2001; 2002; 2003; 2004; 2005; 2007; Küng 1994a: 336-741; 1994b: chaps. III, V). Of course, there happens reductionism in theology and religion itself. Thus in 2008the Vatican reduced or canceled the old traditional non-dogmatic Catholic belief, that unbaptized little children, including all the aborted embryos, would when they died be sent into limbo, a kind of pre-hell, where also pagan philosophers like Plato and Aristotle or Averroes were housed. Nevertheless, according to Baum, the theologians ask if there is not something that the Christian faith has to offer, to which the Frankfurt School has been blind so far. There is in Christianity the issue of repentance and forgiveness. Forgiveness is the indispensable condition for starting out anew. According to the Christian standpoint, there is the gift– or grace–dimension in human life and history. The project of universal freedom and solidarity is not a Promethean undertaking. Since Christians are–in terms of the original sin–broken and fallible, they can dare to commit themselves to the struggle for emancipation only because they believe that a transcending liberating Power is operative in the movement of history. Finally, there is for Christians the extraordinary conviction that justice and freedom are values for the sake of which a person may even sacrifice his or her own life. Christians believe that secular persons may very well participate in these spiritual currents without articulating their convictions. Christians, nevertheless, have a language for the mystery of redemption that is actually operative everywhere. Of course, that Christians have the discourse and the liturgy does not necessarily mean that this mystery of redemption is more powerful in them than in others. According to the Christian theologians, a critical theory of religion must show that even the supernatural aspects of religion have, or can have, an

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emancipatory impact and that their absence endangers the movement of history: the historical movement of liberation and redemption.

Theology and Critical Theory In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the critical theory of society is, of course, not a theology, in spite of the fact that its speaks about the fall of humanity, good and evil, the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue, Jesus of Nazareth, the theodicy, the confidence in the Eternal One or in the wholly Other, and eternal life; a critical theology is also not a critical theory of society (Horkheimer 1974c: 92-93, 96-97, 218219; 1985g: chaps. 14-15, 17, 21, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 37, 40; 1988n: 37, 50, 52, 60-61, 77-79, 97, 105-106, 117, 129-130, 138-139, 152, 159, 165-172, 215, 216-217, 218-219, 222, 228, 240, 278, 301-302, 315-316, 321-322, 329, 333, 338-339, 345346, 348, 362-363, 363-364, 369, 369-370, 382, 396-397, 398399, 405, 410-411, 418-419, 469-470, 490-491, 499-501, 517, 518, 522, 530531, 535-536; 1988d: chap. 2; Habermas 1991a: part III; 2002; Habermas/ Ratzinger 2006; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247). That critical theorists can learn from theology does not yet make them into theologians, and that theologians can learn from the critical theory does not yet make them critical theorists (Mendieta 2005). When Habermas asks his theological friends why they still call themselves theologians and not rather theorists of communicative action, then something has gone wrong with theology, which is the talk about God and not about human inter-subjectivity and interaction. When German journalists suspect that Habermas’ theory of communicative action is a crypto-theology, then, if their suspicion could be verified, something would have gone wrong with his critical theory of society, which is concerned with intersubjectivity, society, culture and evolution, and not with God, which is clearly expressed in his methodological atheism. While the Catholics Walter Dirks and Eugen Kogon on one hand, and the critical enlighteners Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer on the other entertained discourse with each other for decades before and after World War II, and respected each other deeply, one pair of Dioscuri represented theology and the other the critical theory, and there was never any mix up, or conversion, in spite of the fact, that Dirks even worked for some time in Adorno‘s Institute in Frankfurt and both edited together the Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie, and Horkheimer and Adorno like Habermas later on wrote essays in Dirks’s and Kogon’s Frankfurter Hefte (Horkheimer/ Adorno 2002; Adorno 1952; 1969c; Kogon 1967; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Haselberg 1962; Siebert 1986; 2005a). All that

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did not yet make Dirks or Kogon a critical theorist, or Adorno or Horkheimer a theologian. Theology is not reductionistic when it concentrates on God, and the critical theory is not reductionistic when it emphasizes human society and history. Deus non est natura!

Longing and Grace In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, what critical theorists and theologians have in common is the insatiable longing for Transcendence, for the totally Other than the cursed finitude (Genesis 1-3, 44: 16; Lieber 2001270/16; Matthew 6: 7-15; John 1; Blakney 1941; 82-91, 95124; Hegel 198a: 18, 71, 101, 102, 308, 373-374, 381, 390, 394, 400, 421,; 1986b: 411, 508, 537, 552; 1986c: 590-591; 1986e: 43-44; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346. 347-536; 1986l: 19-29; 1986t: 337-338; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1990: 9-18; 1991a: part III; 2001a). Even the great Medieval Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides had no doubts that Christianity was a form of ethical monotheism, as long–so the dialectical religiologists may add with Master Eckhart–the natural form of Jesus of Nazareth does not get in the way and becomes an object of fetishization and idolatry in terms of a primitive deification (Matthew 6: 7-15; John 1; Blakney 1941; 82-91, 95-124; Hegel 198a: 18, 71, 101, 102, 308, 373-374, 381, 390, 394, 400, 421; 1986b: 411, 508, 537, 552; 1986c: 590-591; 1986e: 43-44; 1986p 259-301; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346. 347-536; 1986l: 19-29; 1986s: 515-516, 518-519; 523-524; 1986t: 337-338; Fromm 1950; 1974; 1976; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Fromm/Suzuki 1960; Lundgren 1998; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008). This yearning for Transcendence is the energy in the mythos of Prometheus that drives human beings to use the gift of fire and to move out of their caves into houses above ground, full of light. This longing is the energy, in the seventh book of Plato’s Republic, that pulls the people out of the cave and its shadows upward to the real figures, and behind them to the fire, and beyond them to the sun, as ciphers of the absolute Goodness, and Beauty, and the Perfect Justice from which all things derive, and which are the foundation of the good state. It is the energy that motivates Virgil and Beatrice in Dante Alighieri’s Divina Comedia to lead him up from the Inferno through Purgatory into Paradise (Alighieri 1961). It is the energy that in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet makes the little mole bravely dig its way up to the surface of the earth and to the truth about the murder of his father, the King. It is the energy that drives the lovers through the dialectic of love to objectivate themselves in marriage and family (Siebert

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1987). It is the energy that in Hegel’s Phenomenology dialectically drives the human consciousness through one state of evolution after the other to the reunion with the absolute Spirit (Hegel 1986c) It is the energy in Hegel’s Logic that dialectically pushes divine and human thoughts from one categorical notion to the next up to the Idea of life, knowledge, and Goodness, and finally to the Absolute Idea itself (Hegel 1986e; 1986f). It is the energy in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis that drives the human individual and collective from where there is Id, to where there is Ego (Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; 1992; 1993; 1995a; 1995b; Jones 1961; Küng 1990a). This longing is the energy that drives not only great art, philosophy, and even politics, but which also moves the world religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam–the yearning for the Messianic realm (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Jameson 2007; Lukacs 1971; Küng 1981a; 1990b; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 1998; 2002; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984). If the Christian theologian can make plausible and acceptable the silence of God in the face of the continual horror and terror of nature, society and history, which has gone on for millions of years all around our small globe and far beyond, and that this human longing finds, nevertheless, support in divine grace, forgiveness, and redemption, then the critical theorists will certainly be in no way blind to this: while redemption and human happiness may–as Benjamin put it–be like two arrows flying in opposite directions, they may also like antagonistic forces in nature support each other (Isaiah 42: 14; Lieber 2001: 37/14; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11). While theocracies are no longer possible at this point in world history, no matter how hard Muslims may try in the Near East to the contrary, and while the Kingdom of God can no longer be the goal of world politics, the longing for the achievement for more and more happiness for more and more people on this earth may nevertheless also help to bring about the most quiet and silent coming of God’s realm (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Küng 2004). While the critical theorists are open for the offer of Divine grace, forgiveness, and redemption, they also speak for those who have lost their religious faith in God’s gracious and benevolent Providence after the limitless cruelties of Auschwitz and Treblinka, and of Hamburg and Dresden, and of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of Vietnam, and Afghanistan, and Iraq, but who, nevertheless, would like to live a good life in a bad world and to make life worth living, and to heal its damage. Maybe some things are too cruel in order to be forgiven, and a new beginning may not be possible. Can there be genuine life, poems, or prayers after Auschwitz? (Adorno 1997). On October 16, 2008, the Archdiocese of New York organized close to Ground Zero and in the midst

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of the catastrophic breakdown of Wall Street and of the heated Presidential campaign a charity-fund-raising event, the Alfred Smith Memorial, in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and invited both Presidential candidates, the Democratic Senator Obama and the Republican Senator McCain, who through their most humourous speeches to members of both parties and other guests expressed in remembrance of Al Smith, the first Catholic and socialist Presidential candidate of the USA, their longing for change, for something other than the past dark 8 years of the second Bush Administration, for something new, for somethig better, in the presence of the Cardinal of New York: it was a moment of grace–of mutual acceptance (Horkheimer 1988n: 527-528, 536, 540, 541-542; 1996s: 40-43, 44-48, 5253, 54-56, 50-61, 62-65, 67-70, 71-71, 72-74).

Deus Absconditus In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, the Essential cannot be formulated: Theon agnoton–Deus absconditus (Acts 17: 23; Horkheimer 1988n: 301-302, 333, 345, 396-397). The longing for God can continue in the believer even after he or she feels utterly abandoned and without grace, and while there seems to be no end to the parousia delay (Kolodiejchuk 2007). It may also happen that grace may continue while all longing in the believer or disbeliever has been suffocated under the pressures of the late capitalist system and its culture industry, and its ideological television, and its positivistic, naturalistic, and scientistic attitude, which seems to leave no room any longer for concrete utopian thinking and hope (Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1972; 1975; 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 569-573, 578567; 1985a; 1993Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Habermas 1970; 1973; 1975; 1978a; 1978b; 1979a; 1979b; 1981c; 1981d; 1985b; 1987a; 1990; 1991c; 1995; 1998; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2004b; 2005; 2006c; Jameson 2007; App. C, D, E, F, G). While the critical theorist can no longer accept the dogmas of Providence, grace, redemption, repentance, forgiveness, and so on, he may, nevertheless, deeply long for them all, and they all may remain for him so many ciphers of the wholly Other than a world full of perils of human existence (Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37, 40; Habermas 1986: 53-54). In the face of the slaughter-bench and the Golgotha of nature and history, as it is hourly reflected in the news reports of the major networks coming over the televisions, the radios, and the newspapers, and listening to the cries of the infinite number of innocent victims, the critical theorist of religion yearns that some day the Greek philosophers’ statement, that Reason governs the world, may become true;

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and that some day the Jewish, Christian and Islamic prophets’ statement, that a gracious and benevolent Providence governs the world, individuals and nations alike, may become true; and that the rational will become real and the real will become rational and that there will be no longer any Auschwitz and Treblinka, Dresden and Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Darfur, and on and on (Hegel 1996l: 19-55; 1986g: 24-25; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Metz 1995). Only the whole shall be the truth! (Hegel 1986c: 24-25). The whole, however, is only the concrete Universality, the wholly Other, which completes itself through its development. The Absolute, the totally Other, is essentially result. It is only at the end, what it is in truth. In this precisely consists its nature, to be something real, or becoming-itself: the painfully self-particularizing, self-alienating, as well as self-singularizing, self-reconciling concrete Universal (Hegel 1986c: 24-25, 590-591; 1986f: 243-300, 548-573). In other words, God alienates himself from himself into nature, and God returns to himself through history, particularly the history of art, religion and philosophy (Hegel 1986h: 67-393; 1986i: 9-40, 337-539; 1986j: 9-37, 367-398; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 63-65).

Revelation or Autonomous Reason While the critical theory of society and religion may very well be open for the development of a new critical political theology, it is nevertheless not grounded in a specific religious faith or divine revelation, not even in Judaism, but rather in human autonomous reason, and can therefore not be a political theology itself (Adorno/Kogon 1958: 392-402; 484-498; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616). Of course, the originally mostly Jewish Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and New York had not at all been blind to repentance, forgiveness, new beginnings, the original sin, the brokenness and fallibility of humanity, the gift-dimension, the liberating Transcendence, and the sacrifice of life for freedom, justice, and redemption, and the priority of God’s providential actions before humanity’s revolutionary praxis. It rather had and has a highly differentiated language, in order to express all these notions (Isaiah 43; Lieber 2001: 39-41; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969; Adorno/Kogon 1958: 392-402; 484-498; Adorno 1969c; 1970b; 1980; 1997j/2: 608-616). There is after all a difference between being blind to Reason and Providence being at work in personal and collective life on one hand, and their non-appearance in the dark world characterized by absolute contingency: that the cries of the innocent victims for justice in whatever landscape

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seem simply not being heard or responded to by any highest power of Reason or Providence (Isaiah 43; Lieber 2001: 39-41; Metz 1995; Metz/ Wiesel 1993; Hinkelammert 1985; Thompson/Held 1982: 246-247). To the critical theorists as well as to their friend, the theologian Tillich, these old traditional theological notions of Reason and a gracious and benevolent Providence seemed simply to have gone under in the doubt and the despair, the guilt and anxiety in the face of the horror and terror of the 20th century, and seemed thus no longer tenable (Hegel 1986l: 19-55; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 404, 243; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 24, 25, 29, 30, 31, 37; Tillich 1972: 186-190). However, precisely out of this going under arose the longing for what Tillich called the God above God and his friends, Horkheimer and Adorno, called the imageless, and nameless, and notionless wholly Other (Tillich 1972: 186-190; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40). How otherwise could Horkheimer, the initiator of the critical theory of society and the Frankfurt School, have possibly been able to pray–like his mother before under fascist threat in Stuttgart, Germany–Psalm 91, to be sure in a radically demythologized reading; and how could he possibly have determined that the second verse of this Psalm–In you, Eternal One, alone I trust!–would be written on his gravestone in the Jewish cemetery of Bern, Switzerland, after his death on July 7, 1973 in Nürnberg, Germany, the city where National Socialism or German Fascism had celebrated its highest triumphs and had found its deepest final defeat (Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 17; Persico 1994; Siebert 2005d; Goldstein 2006: 61-150)? Yet, even if the original Frankfurt School would have been blind to such religious notions, which certainly has not been the case, that would not mean that the new critical theory of religion, which is derived from it and which here is developed further, would or could or should not be concerned with or appreciate all these theological semantic and semiotic contents and potentials, and the still very appellative and motivating religious language (Isaiah 43; Lieber 2001: 39-41; Habermas 1988a: 59-60, 277-279; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; Siebert 1979a; 1979c; 1979d; 1987a; 1987d; 1993, 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 1995b; 2001; 2002a 2004a; 2004b; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2006a; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2008a; 2008b). Furthermore, since the dialectical theory of religion is also comparative, it discovers and appreciates similar semantic materials and potentials in other world religions as well, and also in world humanisms, if also in inverted form. There is no reason why the dialectical theory of religion should not try to allow such religious semantic and semiotic materials and potentials to migrate from the depth of the mythos

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into secular discourse and praxis (Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1990: 14-15).

Theological Idea In spite of the fact that the critical theory of society and religion is not a theology, it does, nevertheless, contain in itself as an autonomous philosophy, a theological idea, even a theodicy: the longing for perfect justice; the hope for unconditional love; the longing that the murderer shall at least ultimately not triumph over the innocent victim; the urge for liberation (Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37, 40). It can compare a world religion with its own theological principles and ideals in terms of inner criticism. In sadness, it can observe that the initiators of Christianity promised the Kingdom of God, and that all that came was the Church, up to the present, February 2010: up to the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, and a new version of the Holy Inquisition directed against new forms of theology, for example, the liberation theology of Central and Latin America, or the psychoanalytical theology in Germany and Europe (Gutierrez 1971; 1988; Peters/Urban 1999; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Drewermann 1989: Vol 1-3; 1992; Küng 1965; 1970; 1972; 1978; 1978; 1980; 1981b; 1987; 1989; 1990b; 1991a; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a). In the meantime, the Center-Hegelian and Jungian theologian Drewermann and his followers in Germany have been excommunicated by the Vatican and he has left not only the priesthood but also the Roman Catholic Church. Also some of the Left-Hegelian liberation theologians have at least left the priesthood in consequence of their problems with the Curia in Rome, Since Christmas 1978, the Central-Hegelian liberal theologian Hans Küng has not been allowed by the Vatican to teach as a theologian in the name of the Church, but he has remained nevertheless a member of the Roman Catholic Church and stayed in the priesthood, in spite of all his sufferings from the Papacy on account of heresy suspicions (Küng 1981b; Kuschel/ Schlenson 2008). The liberation theologians have been as far to the Left as the Curia has been on the right. That together with the alliances of the Church with European fascism in the first half of the 20th century, and with Latin and Central American fascist dictatorships, particularly in Argentine, Chile, Brazil, and El Salvador, and with North-American neoconservativism toward the end of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century circumscribe the moral catastrophe of a whole great world religion: fascist and neo-conservative patriotism and its crimes–not constitutional patriotism–were unfortunately associated with Catholicism

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(Cornwell 2000; Krieg 2004; Dakin 2005; Walker 1970; Barrionuevo 2007: 1-3). In the face of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Hamburg and Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq and maybe soon Iran, the critical theorist of society and religion can understand very well Sigmund Freud’s statement that the Christian people were badly christened, and that under the veneer of Christianity they have remained what their ancestors had been, namely barbarically polytheistic (Freud 1939: 145; Marcuse 1962: 64-65).

The Liberating Gospels According to the critical theorist, Herbert Marcuse, the Christians were badly christened in so far as they accepted and obeyed the liberating Gospels only in a highly sublimated form, which left the social, economic, political, and historical reality as unchanged as it had been before (Marcuse 1962: 64-65). Repression–understood in the technical Freudian sense–played only a minor role in the institutionalization of Christianity. The transformation of the original theological idea or content of the Gospels, the deflection from the original theological objective–the kingdom of God, took place in broad daylight, consciously, with public argumentation and justification. Equally open was the armed struggle of institutionalized Christianity against the heretics, who tried, or allegedly tried, to rescue the unsublimated theological idea or content and the unsublimated theological objective of the Gospels. There were admittedly good rational motives behind the bloody wars against the Christian revolutions that filled the Christian era. However, the cruel and organized slaughter of the Cathars, Albigensians, Anabaptists, Enthusiasts, particularly Thomas Müntzer, of slaves, peasants and paupers, who revolted under the sign of the cross, the burning of witches and of their defenders, this sadistic extermination of the weak people suggested that unconscious instinctual forces broke through all the rationality and rationalization (Hegel 1986q: 278299, 341-344; Bloch 1972; Marcuse 1962: 64-65; 1970: 3-10; Barrionuevo 2007: 1-3; Siebert 2006a; 2007a; 2007b). The executioners and their bands and lynch mobs fought the specter of a liberation, which they desired and longed for, but which they were compelled to reject. The crime against the Son had to be forgotten in the killing of those whose practice recalled the original crime: the murder of Christ (Fromm 1992: 3-94; Reich 1976; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2008a; 2008b; 2008c; 2009a; 2009b). It took centuries of progress and domestication before the return of the repressed was mastered by the power and progress of the modern industrial civiliza-

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tion. However, at its late stage, its rationality seemed to explode in another return of the repressed: in the form of international fascism (Paasen/Wise 1934; Hershaw 2000; Baldwin 2001; Marcuse 1962: 64-65; Barrionuevo 2007: 1-3). The image of liberation, which had become increasingly realistic in the socialist revolutions, was persecuted the world over by brown and red fascism. Concentration- and labor- and death-camps, the trial and tribulations of non-conformists, released a hatred and fury that indicated the total mobilization against the return of the repressed. In any case, the development of religion contains the basic ambivalence: the image of domination on one hand, and the image of liberation, the theological idea, on the other.

New Vision According to the critical theory of religion, the only hope for late capitalist society lies in what the critical theorist Erich Fromm has called the energizing attraction of a new vision (Fromm 1976: 201-202). The proposal of this or that partial liberal reform that cannot possibly change the monopoly and oligopoly capitalist system in its totality is useless in the long run, because it does not carry with it the impelling force of a strong motivation as it has been provided, for example, by the liberating Gospels (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6; Marcuse 1962: 64-65; Fromm 1976: 201-202). The utopian goal of post-modern alternative Future III–the free and reconciled society–is more realistic than the realism of the liberal and neo-conservative or neo-liberal political leaders in present antagonistic civil society and constitutional state (Marx 1961c: 873-874; Bloch 1970b; 1971; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37, 40; Fromm 1976: 201-202; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/ Lohmann 2003; App. G). The realization of post-modern alternative Future III–the new multi-dimensional human being and society–is possible only if the old motivations of capitalist society, like profit, power, having, and intellect, are replaced by new ones: being sharing, understanding, and comprehension (Marcuse 1966; Fromm 1976). Alternative Future III can be realized only if the marketing or commodity character is replaced by the productive, loving character, and if the cybernetic religion is replaced by a new non-authoritarian, non-dogmatic, radical humanistic-religious spirit (Marx 1961a: chap. 1; Fromm 1967; 1976; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975b; 1985a; 1985b; Bloch/Reif 1978; 1993: chaps. 53-55; Habermas 1976; 1978a: ch. 5; 1978c; 1982; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; ). For those people who are no longer authentically rooted in the theistic religions–

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Judaism, Christianity, or Islam–or in any other world religion, the crucial question is that of a conversion to a post-theistic humanistic religiosity without religious dogmas and institutions (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976: 201-202; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng 1978; 1980; 1981a; 1981b; 1989; 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 2004). Such new religiosity has long been prepared by the movement of non-theistic religiosity, from the Gautama–Buddha, through Master Eckhart and his reading of the Torah and the New Testament, to the young Marx and his humanistic writings and to the modern advocates of humanity: Goethe, Mozart, Beethoven, Gustav Mahler. Freud Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Charles Baudelaire, Aldous Huxley, Gottfried Keller, Andre Gide, Paul Valery, Arnold Schönberg, Karl Kraus, Samuel Beckett, Heinrich Böll, Hermann Hesse, etc, and of course the critical theorists (Fox 1980; Marx 1871; 1906; 1953; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1963; 1964; 1974: 243-257; 1977; Marx/Engels 1960; 2005; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1970a; 1970b, 1971; Fromm 1967; 1976: chaps. III, VII, VIII, IX; Adorno 1951; 1960; 1993a; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970b; 1973b; 1976; 1980b; 1993a; 1993c; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997j/2: 97-122, 152-180, 238-253, 254-288; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000a; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d; Adorno/Bebnjamin 11994; Adorno/Kogon 1968a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Adorno/Mann 2003; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Adorno/Sohn-Rethel 1991; Adorno/Tobisch 2003; Schweppenhäuser 1992; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 5, 12, 22, 23, 23; 24, 25, 26; 1988: chaps. 17, 19, 21, 23, 29, 30, 47, 48; Küng 1981a; 1990a; 1994b; 1998; Jens/Küng 1993). Those people, who are no longer firmly and authentically and honestly rooted in the Abrahamic religions or in other world religions are not simply confronted with the choice between the selfish materialism of bourgeois society on one hand, and the acceptance of the Jewish, Christian, or Islamic, or any other concept of God, on the other. For these people, social life itself in all its aspects–in language and memory, work and tool, sexual and erotic love, reciprocal recognition, community–can be the expression of the religious spirit, so that no separate religion will any longer be necessary (Hegel 1972; 1979; Fromm 1976: 201-202).

Conversion In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion as conscious-making and rescuing critique, this possibility of and demand for a new, post-theistic,

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non-institutionalized, non-dogmatic, non-authoritarian religiosity is in no way an attack on the still existing theistic or pre-theistic religions (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Fromm 1976: 201-202; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng 1978; 1980; 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 2002; 2004). While the critical theory of religion is certainly not an attack on the existing theistic or pre-theistic religions, it may, nevertheless, ask that the Roman Catholic Church, beginning with the Curia in Rome and the Roman bureaucracy, should convert itself to the spirit of the liberating Gospels: to the Sermon on the Mount, to the Golden Rule, which all world religions have in common, and which for Jews and Christians and Muslims sums up the teachings of the Law and the Prophets, and to the promise of the New Earth and the New Heaven (Mathew 5-7; Luke 6; Revelation 21-22; Bloch/Reif 1978: 62-67, 78-90, 70-74; Fromm 1976: 201-202; Marcuse 1962: 64-65; Küng 1990b; 1992; 1994a: 742-906; Siebert 2005b; 2007c). Likewise, while the dialectical theorist of religion will not ask the still existing, so-called socialistic countries to desocialize themselves, he shall, nevertheless, ask that their fake socialism shall be replaced by a genuine humanistic socialism (Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1976: chap. IX; Bloch 1971; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; Raines/Dean 1970; Habermas 1976). According to the critical theory of religion, following Fromm, the culture of the Medieval Roman Catholic Paradigm flourished because people followed the vision of Saint Augustine’s City of God (Saint Augustine 1958; Hegel 186q: 185346; Fromm 1976: chaps. III, IX; Küng 1994a: 336-601). Modern society flourished because people were energized by the vision of the growth of the Earthly City of Progress (Fromm 1976: chap. IX; Küng 1994a 742-906). In the 20th and 21st centuries, however, this modern vision has deteriorated to that of the Tower of Babel, which is now–February 2010–beginning to collapse and will ultimately bury everybody in its ruins, be they caused by economics or politics, the collision of civilizations, or by global warming: climate change or lack of energy (Genesis 11: 1-9; Meyer 2007: 22-26; Müller 2007: 27-31; Leipprand/Bausch 2007: 31-35; Scheer 2007: 36-38; Zitzler 2007: 39-42; Libal 2007: 42-46). If in terms of the Hegelian logic, the City of God and the Earthly City of Progress were thesis and anti-thesis, then a new synthesis would be the only alternative to post-modern alternative Future I–the totally administered society, or to post-modern alternative Future II–the entirely militarized society: the synthesis between the spiritual core of the Late Medieval World on one hand, and the development of rational thought and science of the Modern World since the Renaissance, on the other: this synthesis would be the

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post-modern alternative Future III–the City of Being (Fromm 1976: chaps. III, VII, IX; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Adorno 1997j/2: 72-96, 97-122, 608-616; App. E, G).

Difficult Task While the critical theory of society and religion transforms religious dogmas and norms into ciphers of the longing and yearning for the totally Other, it is the task of theology to describe God’s gracious providential interventions into the biographies of individuals and into the histories of nations: God as Causa prima in and through all Causae secundae of nature and history (Isaiah 42, 43; Lieber 2001: 36-41). However, this has become a very difficult task after the moral catastrophes of the 20th century, which have continued into the 21st century. Thus, theologians can often only speak about the missing and still missed God (Peters 1998; Metz 1959; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1978; 1980; 1981; 1995; 1997; 1998, 2006; Sölle 1977; 1992; 1994; Sölle/Habermas 1975; Sölle/Metz 1990; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37; Fetcher/Machovec 1975; Barrionuevo 2007: 1-3). During Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the theologians were concerned more with God than with religion (Saint Thomas Aquinas 1922). In modernity the theologians have become more concerned with religion than with God, and apply to their religiology traditional and critical methodologies. That is why it can happen that philosophers like Schelling and Hegel, or poets like Hölderlin and even Kafka, or Beckett, as well as critical theorists like Benjamin, Horkheimer, or Adorno, can sometimes appear to be more theological than the theologians. No less a person than the arch-theologian of God’s Otherness, Karl Barth, has noticed this in the transition from Modernity to Post-Modernity (Küng 1994a: chap. VII; 1994b). That is why in Benjamin’s word, theology in this present world-historical paradigm change has become small and ugly, and can no longer let itself be seen in public (Benjamin 1950; 1955a; 1955c: 494; 1968: chaps 10, 11; Adorno 1970b; 1997j/2: 608-616; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 25-26; 1989m: 264-269). The critical theorists found in their friend Tillich’s work the last traces of theology (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 2526). Some of Tillich’s students became God is dead-theologians (Vahanian 1967). Others became teachers of Religious Wissenschaft or of the comparative study of religion (Light/Wilson 2004). Others became critical theorists, like Adorno, who wrote his dissertation on Kierkegaard under Tillich’s guidance (Adorno 1962). Certainly, the theological idea needs and

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deserves to be made newly conscious, and to be saved through radical critique. The critical theory of religion may very well participate in and contribute to this critical rescue process: religious faith does indeed need new translators for the modern consciousness, which is missing something, and in opposition to the defeatism of modern rationality! (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 17, 29, 37, 40; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Raines/Dean 1970; Habermas 1991a: part III; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006b; 2007; Mendieta 2005; Siebert 1979a; 1979b; 1979d; 1980; 1985; 1986; 1987a; 1987b; b; 1987c; 1987d; 1989; 1993; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 1995; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2002c; 2003; 2004a; 2004b; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d; 2005e: 215-231; 2006a, 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007e; 2007f: 1-68; 2007g; 2008a; 2008b; 2008c; 2009a; 2009b; 2009c).

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Necrophilous and Biophilous Elements The critical theorist of religion is fully aware of the fact that modern autonomous reason must continually be checked and protected against all forms of defeatism and hubris, and their necrophilous consequences (Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; Adrno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; 1997j/2: 608-617; Habermas 1990: 9-18; 1991, part III). Here, religious faith may very well play an important critical role in protecting autonomous reason against its inclination to and temptation by defeatism as well as arrogance, despair and abstract utopianism, and their necrophilous tendencies: as portrayed in the story of the Tower of Babel, the Ziggurat, the Hebrew archetype of traditional and modern civil society as in the evolution of the city state it moved in between the family and the state (Genesis 11: 10-32; Lieber 2001: 60, 63; Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Horkheimer 1988c, chaps 16-18; 1987e, 67-103, 104-143, 293319, 377-394, 415-422; Fromm 1976: 197-202; Mann 2004: 236-478; Heer 1967: 323-333; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549).

Prometheus Theology However, in the perspective of the dialectical religiology, religious faith can be a corrective against the defeatism or hubris, despair or abstract utopianism of autonomous reason only if it liberates itself from its own lack of Transcendence, its own deficiency of conversion, confession, and reconciliation, its own biologism, its own positivism, its own naturalism, its own lack of the courage to be, its own triumphalist hubris, and most of all its own alliances with necrophilous tendencies and forces, whether they be fascist or neo-conservative or neo-liberal (Freud 1939; 1946; 1977; 1992; Adorno 1997a: 13-45, 140-148, 197-199, 214-215, 339-341, 398401, 413-429, 430-440, 809-8121997b: 31-67; 1997j/2: 608-616; 1997t/1: 13-45; Horkheimer 1988n: 348, 535; Fromm 1966; 1973; 1976, chaps. III, IX; Tillich 1972; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549). In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Transcendence was more important than immanence (Genesis 1-11; Lieber 2001: 1-62; Saint Thomas Aquinas 1922; Horkheimer 1988n:

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535; Dulles 2005a: 25-30; 2005c: 15-20; 2006: 23-29; Dulles 2005c: 3336; Grisez 2005: 27-33). The infinite God was more important than the finite religions. The first four commandments of the Mosaic Decalogue were more important than the other six. Such preference for Transcendence over immanence constituted a protection for faith and reason against the temptation of defeatism as well as arrogance, despair and abstract utopianisms, and the consequent necrophilous tendencies and effects: such as, global warming as consequence of 200 years of capitalist industrialization (Cohen 2007: 1, 4; Klein 2007). In modernity this preference has been inverted. In this modern context, the critical theory of religion tries to strike a new balance between the Transcendent and the relative, between the longing for the wholly Other and the yearning for a better finite world (Siebert 1987). In this sense, the dialectical theorist of religion is–in the interest of post-modern alternative Future III–the realm of freedom, which flourishes on the basis of natural necessity, and which allows for the full development of all human energies as evolutionary self-purpose–closer to the biophilous, what Carl Schmitt had called, Prometheus theology of the new political- or hope- or liberation-theologians, than to his own mythological, anthropological, political rather necrophilous Epimetheus-theology (Marx 1961c: 873-974; Meier 1994; Groh 1998; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Bloch/Reif 1978: 70-74, 78-90; Schmidt 1972; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Metz 1973; 19781995; Fetscher/Machovec 1974; Hinkelammert 1981; App. G). In spite of the fact that the critical theory of religion is only too willing to make conscious, and to rescue through critique, and include constructive biophilous theological semantic and semiotic potentials from the depth of the mythos, it must, nevertheless, also be reductionistic in terms of destructive necrophilous theological semantic and semiotic materials: such death-friendly materials cannot and should not migrate from the depth of the mythos into the secular discourse among the expert cultures and into emancipatory communicative and political action, which stands against all forms of rebarbarization up to the very present–February 2010 (Genesis 6: 9-9: 17; 19: 1-29; Lieber 2001: 41-52, 104-109; Fromm 1973; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1990: 9-18; Scahill 2007; Petuchowski 1956: 543549). There are unfortunately negative elements–violence, curses, murder, fraud, regressions, reactionary and counter-revolutionary tendencies, betrayals, aggressiveness, terror, pogroms, etc. –present also in the worldreligions that should not and must not have a future.

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Sexuality and Aggression It seems to the critical theorist of religion that in the evolution of Christian morality after the Emperors Diocletian and Constantine, and after Saint Augustine, sexuality has been under-valued and aggression has been overvalued (Exodus 20; Mathew 5-7; Luke 6; Horkheimer 1988d, chap. 2; Fromm 1966, chap. V; Marcuse 1962; Lundgren 1998; Dulles 2005a: 25-30; 2005c: 15-20; 2006: 23-29; 2005b: 33-36; Grisez 2005: 27-33; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549). The commandment against adultery became much more important than the commandments against killing, stealing, or idolatry. The aggressive necrophilous forces overcame and repressed the sexual, libidinous, biophilous energies in a culture of Thanatos rather than a culture of Eros and life. An imbalance occurred between sexuality and aggression. Thomas More had to wait for his canonization in the Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity because he remarried only three months after the death of his wife and not because of the execution of heretics, whom as Chancellor of Henry VIII he let be burned alive (Küng 1994: 547, 633, 684-686, 693, 695). While in 1933, the German Catholic Bishops were quite satisfied with the Chancellor Adolf Hitler because he promised that he would purify the German soul from all kinds of things having to do with sexuality, as the source of biophilous energies, such as, men and women bathing together, nudist beaches, homosexuality, pornography, they were completely silent about the fascist unleashing of aggression, as the source of necrophilous energies, against minorities and the opening up of concentration camps, which finally would turn into death camps, in which the necrophilous tendencies of capitalist society would triumph completely (Freud 1939; 1946; 1977; 1992; Fromm 1973, chap. 13; Staff 2007: 1; Küng 1994: 25, 649, 756, 894; Cornwell 1999; Dalin 2001Walker 1970). While President Clinton was with the strong support of the Christian Right impeached for his sexual behavior, he faced no trial whatsoever for his aggressive behavior, such as, the bombardment of Belgrade and the consequent thousands of civilian casualties, including four Chinese journalists (Clinton 2004: 668, 796, 851, 854). When millions of Catholics and Evangelicals voted the born again President Bush junior into office a second time, they were much more concerned with abortion, gay marriages, and stem cell research than with the hundred thousands of people who had been killed already by this time in his wars against Afghanistan and Iraq (Scahill 2007). It seems that the Christian Right was at least very inconsistent in its struggle against the aggressive, necrophilous forces in civil society, when on one hand it resisted rightly the high level of abortions,

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but ignored on the other hand the killing of hundreds of thousands of children through the embargo and the two wars against Iraq. During the first Iraq war, over 400children were incinerated in one bunker in Baghdad alone by one rocket. Between the two Iraq wars, 500,000 children died as a consequence of the embargo, as documented through videos by Ramsey Clark, the former US Attorney General. There is not only a bad, positivistic, or scientistic reductionism–the abstract negation of religion, but also a critical and good reductionism–a determinate negation of religion directed against aggressive, necrophilous elements in society and religion, and toward alternative Future III–an erotically liberated life-friendly society, and ultimately beyond that toward the imageless and nameless totally Other than the horrible historical continuum of aggression and counteraggression, force and counterforce (Horkheimer 1985g. chaps. 28, 29, 37, 40; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1966; 1973; Marcuse 1962; App. G).

Grace and Revolution Of course, this new biophilous Prometheus theology is not without grace, understood as the acceptance of humanity by God in spite of the fact that it is unacceptable, and all that it has to do is to accept His acceptance and act accordingly (Saint Augustine 1952; 1958; Erikson 1962; Blondel 1963; Baum 1962; 1965; 1967; 1975a; 1975b; 1971; 1999; 2005; Küng 1994a: 336-741; 1994b, chaps. III, V; Dulles 2005a: 25-30; 2005c: 15-20; 2006: 23-29; 2005b: 33-36; Grisez 2005: 27-33). The envious Gods on Mount Olympus–who punished Prometheus for having given fire and housing full of light to human beings, and penalized them through Pandora, the wife of Epimetheus, who brought the box filled with all its terrible sufferings, and were, therefore obstacles to human progress and liberation–have long vanished and have been replaced by the gracious God of the Abrahamic religions. Thus, the new biophilous Prometheus theology emphasizes the just as well as the gracious revolutionary God of the Abrahamic religions, who is transcendent, but who is also immanent, and who as such enters the class struggle of human history, and who as such takes the side of the poor classes, and who as such liberates the slaves, and the serfs, and the wage laborers, as he helps to establish postmodern alternative Future III: the realm of freedom, and the coming of his kingdom; or the even more gracious post-theistic God above God without destructive necrophilous wrath (Exodus 1-19; Hegel 1986a: 218; 1986g: 465; 1986q: 50-91; 1986l: 19-55, 107-115, 413, 418, 422, 490-491, 500, 513; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; Marx 1961c: 873-874; Mann 2004: 236-374; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549; App. G).

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The God for Others and in Himself The Rabbis, of course, have been right with their paradoxical and daring rhetorical interpretation of Isaiah: “When you are My witnesses-declares the Lord-then I am God, but when you are not My witnesses then I, so to speak, am not God” (Isaiah 43: 12; Lieber 2002: 40/10). According to the Rabbis, God existed only in the recognition, confession, and witness of the believers: namely, the God for them and for others and in general for his creation, but, of course, not the God in Himself–before all internal trinitarian differentiation in the Hindu, Neo-Platonic, or Christian sense–of whom they knew nothing: nor later did the Jewish, Christian, or Islamic mystics, or the German idealists, including Hegel, all of whom were fundamentally not only positive, but also negative theologians (Lieber 2002: 40/10; Kant 1929: 24n, 99, 100, 176, 297-570; 1946; 1974a; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Hegel 1986e: 43-44, 90-92; 1986f: 73-74; 1986l: 386, 392; 1986p: 38, 46, 342-343; 1986q: 221-240; 1986r: 110, 126, 253; 1986s: 102, 413, 450, 481, 508, 510, 530, 577; 1986t: 98, 115, 344, 345, 365; Horkheimer 1967: 311-313; Habermas 1978: 48-95, 127-143; 1988: 277-279; Dulles 2005a: 25-30; 2005c: 15-20; 2006: 23-29; 2005b: 33-36; Grisez 2005: 2733). What the trinity has been for the world religions has been for philosophy the dialectical notion: only the form has been different, while the content has been the same (Hegel 1986e: 43-44, 90-92; 1986f: 73-74; 1986l: 386, 392; 1986p: 38, 46, 342-343; 1986q: 221-240; 1986r: 110, 126, 253; 1986s: 102, 413, 450, 481, 608, 510, 530, 577; 1986t: 98, 115, 344, 345, 365). Also according to Hegel, Greek philosophers and Hebrew prophets posited apriori the all powerful Reason and Providence, positions which were to be verified, confirmed, and affirmed a posteriori through the experience with nature and history, in spite of the fact that to a large extent they were a slaughter bench and a Golgotha, and in spite of the horrible theodicy problem intrinsic to them (Isaiah 42-43; Lieber 2001: 35-40; Hegel 1986l: 19-55; Berigan 1996; Scahill 2007). There remained for Hegel as for the Hebrew Bible the very difficult riddles of Providence (1Kings 3: 28; Lieber 2001: 273/28; Hegel 1986l: 35-36). According to the Rabbis, King Salomon from the Empire Paradigm of the Monarchical time in Jewish history had a divine gift to execute justice, much as he also had divine wisdom for composing parables and answering riddles (1 Kings 3: 15-4: 1; 5: 19-13; 10: 1-4; Lieber 2001: 271-273/28; Hegel 1986l: 35-36; 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991b: 98-131). God’s gift of the spirit of wisdom in judgement became in Judaism a Messianic ideal for Davidic kings (Isaiah 11: 1-5; Lieber 2001: 273/28). Hegel’s opponent Schopenhauer, and before

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him Francois de Voltaire against Leibniz, and after him Horkheimer and Adorno considered his and the Hebrew Bible’s theological and philosophical theodicy position to be a cursed optimism: strangely enough, the modern critics were not so much enemies of the more optimistic Judaism or Islam, but of the more pessimistic Christianity: not only original, but inherited sin and consequent species–disqualification (Genesis 3; Romans 1-8; 1 Corinthians; 2 Corinthians; Hegel 1986a: 452; 1986q: 185-346, 501-536; 1986t: 248, 294; Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989: Vol. 1: 17, 251, 354, 447, 551, 566, 580, 589; Vol. 2: 57, 95, 222, 239, 249, 567, 569, 729, 744-750, 756, 775, 788, 789796-797, 800, 803, 813, 826-827; Vol. 3: 136, 196, 326, 505; Vo. 4: 32, 35, 81, 94, 176, 179, 180-181, 200, 208, 224, 502, 194, 213, 217, 219, 224, 502; Vol. 5: 15, 121, 306, 354, 359, 366, 447, 450, 458, 752; Horkheimer 1967: 259-261; 1985g, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 37, 40; Küng 1991b; 1993a; 1993b; 1994b; 2004; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008). Horkheimer as well as Adorno and their friend Friedrich Pollock were Schopenhaurians like Freud and Thomas Mann, Hitler and Goebbels (Horkheimer 1988a; 1985g: 265-268; 1987k: 289-328) Like so many other bourgeois thinkers, Schopenhauer, the father of metaphysical pessimism, hated the allegedly optimistic Hegel so furiously, because he was convinced that his philosophy would necessarily lead to the concrete supersession of antagonistic civil society, based on need, emergency and exegency and analytical understanding through the constitutional state, which was based on dialectical rationality and mutual recognition of the citizens, which he supposedly apotheosized, and even beyond that to alternative Future III–the reconciliation of the individual and the collective, of personal autonomy and universal solidarity, shortly, to socialism and communism (Hegel 1986g: 339-405, 406-514; 1986o: 352; Schopenhauer. 1986, Vol. 2: 592; Vol. 4: 180, 182-183, 190, 236; 1967: 259-260; Horkheimer 1987e: 293319, 377-395; Marcuse 1960, part II; Habermas 1976; App. G).

The End of Capitalism The critical theorist of religion must admit to Schopenhauer, that Marx and Lenin did indeed invert Hegel’s dialectical logic or logos-theology into the secular alphabet of the socialist revolution, which then Stalin and his red fascism arrested, long before the neo-conservative counter-revolution of 1989 (Marx 1961a: 17-18; Lukacs1970; Horkheimer 1987k: 171-188, 418-425; 1985h, chaps. 28, 30-33). According to Marx, who confessed openly that he was the student of the great thinker Hegel, humanity and the world were, nevertheless, not the product of the Idea, the independ-

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ent, divine Subject and his thinking process; the Demiurge of all reality, which constitutes only his external appearance (Hegel 1986e: 43-44). Contrary to Hegel, humanity produced the Idea: the Ideal is nothing else than the material, which is transformed, translated, and inverted in humanity’s head (Marx 1961a: 17-18; Lukacs1970; Horkheimer 1987k: 171-188, 418425; 1985h, chaps. 28, 30-33). The idealistic dialectic turned over into the materialistic dialectic (Horkheimer 1985l: 286-287). Marx’s putting Hegel from his head on to his feet was so cogent only because he had stood already on his feet in the first place. For the dialectical religiologist, Schopenhauer’s fear that Hegel’s so-called optimistic philosophy would ultimately lead to the transition from Modernity to Post-Modernity, from capitalism and liberalism to socialism and communism, gains even more plausibility through the world-historical breakdown of capitalism in 2008, 2009, 2010 in which neo-liberal governments in Europe and America and elsewhere themselves began to nationalize and socialize banks and industries in one form or the other, either a la the fascist Peron in Argentine or a la the socialist Chavez in Venezuela, and from which crisis Senator Obama as President may make the transition toward post-modern global alternative Future III–a biophilous humanistic-socialist society, or Senator McCain as President may make the transition to post-modern global alternative Future I–a necrophilous, neo-corporatist, neo-fascist society, and/ or to post-modern global alternative Future II–a likewise necrophilous, militaristic society, depending on the results of the American Presidential Election of November 3, 2008 (Hegel 1986g: 339-405, 406-514; 1986o: 352; Schopenhauer. 1986, Vol. 2: 592; Vol. 4: 180, 182-183, 190, 236; 1967: 259260; Horkheimer 1987e: 293-319, 377-395; Marcuse 1960, part II; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; Fromm 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1975; 1976; 1980a; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1995; 2001; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975b; 1985a; 1985b; Bloch/ Reif 1978; Flechtheim 1959; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1971; Flechteim/Lohmann 2003; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1975; 1976; 1978; 1978c; 1979a; 1979b; 1981c; 1981d; 1984a; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1990; 1991c; 1992a; 1995; 1997a; 1998; 1999; 2001c; 2003b; 2004a; 2004c; 2006c; Borradori 2003; App. G). If the bourgeois governments would after years of nationalization and socialization of mayor banks and industries, deregulate and privatize again, they would thereby only produce an even deeper capitalistic crisis. The new finance-market capitalism would simply be the old disastrous one and the necrophilous culture, the culture of death, would continue (Sarrazin 2008: 18-20; Horn 2008: 21-24; Hinkelammert 1985l; Klein 2007). But maybe

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a Social-Democratic social market economy could be turned against the turbo-capitalism and the priviledged classes would no longer ruin their countries (Höpner 2008: 25-27; Rüttgers 2008: 28-31; Lauterbach 2008: 3236). Otherwise the new loss of control of the state over civil society and the capitalist system would lead to further self-endangerment of the nations (Lucke 2008: 37-40). The global capitalism must be regulated, if the nations are to survive, and maybe a humanistic Marxism as populism may counteract and balance a fascist populism, which already in the U.S. Presidential campaign, two weeks before the Presidential Election of 2008, shouted and screamed negative slogans against the Democratic Candidate Senator Obama like socialist, terrorist, Arab, Muslim, foreigner, etc., and maybe such humanistic Marxist populism could play a role in this regulation, and in this redistribution of wealth, and in this establishment of the equal mutual recogition of all people on the way to global, post-modern alternative Future III–a society in which freedom and justice would be reconciled (Marx 1961: Vol. III, 873-874; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1975b; Fromm 1966; 1967; 1968; Flechtheim 1959; 1962: 27-34; 1963: 148-150; 1966: 455464; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Fras/Honneth 2003; Altvater 2008: 40-44; Meyer 2008: 45-46; App. G). Maybe in such further regulated global capitalism social problems like the integration of the disadvantaged youth could finally be accomplished (Christe 208: 47-51). Maybe through such regulation of a new finance capitalism social progress toward global, post-modern, alternative Future III–the liberated and just society could be achieved and alternative Future I–the one-dimensional society and man, could be avoided, and the necropilous culture could be overcome in the name of life (Fromm 1974; 1976; 1981; 1995; 1997; 2001; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969b; 1970a; 1980a; 1987; 1995; 2001; Dauderstädt 2008: 52-55; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549; App. G).

The Wrath of God The dialectical religiology is guided by the practical intent to question and to liquidate the most cruel and destructive necrophilous element in the religious traditions: the wrath of God; the furious, fierce, severe, and deadly anger of God carried out by nature or by man, and God’s harsh Last Judgment on the dies illa, dies irae and the possibility of eternal Hell, which realizes the most archaic talion theodicy to the extreme (Genesis 27: 44; Exodus 32: 11, 12, 19; Deuteronomy 9: 19; 13: 17; 29: 23; 32: 22; Job 9: 5, 13; 19: 11; 20: 23; 21: 20; 40: 11; Psalm 2: 5; 6: 2; 26: 9; 36: 8; 73: 1; 76: 10; 78: 6; 84: 6; 89: 7; 94: 11; 109: 5; Isaiah 5: 25; 9: 19; 12: 1; 30: 27; 51: 20; 64: 8; 63: 3; Matthew

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3: 7; Luke 4: 28; 21: 23; John 3: 36; Romans 1: 18; 2: 5, 8; 4: 15; 5: 9; 9: 22; 10: 19; 12: 19; Fromm 1966: ii, iii v, ix; Dulles 2005a: 25-30; 2005c: 15-20; 2006: 23-29; 2005b: 33-36; Grisez 2005: 27-33; Scahill 2007; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549). Already in the Hebrew prophetic tradition there is present a tendency to move from the aggressive God of wrath to the kind and loving God of redemption (Isaiah 54-55; Lieber 2001: 64-68). The dialectical theory of religion follows the prophetic tendency, and not only criticizes it, but also preserves and tries to elevate and to fulfill it in the longing for the totally Other (Horkheimer 1986g, chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). For the critical theory of religion, informed by Feuerbach, the angry God has not created humanity, but humanity has created and projected this wrathful God in its own image, and then imitated this God in his own actions (Feuerbach 1996; 1957). Thus, this necrophilous element of a furious, wrathful God had manifested itself anew in a most sickening and barbarous way in the actions of the revengeful mass murderers, such as Adolf Hitler and others, of the 20th and 21st centuries (Fromm 1973). Wilhelm Reich contended that humanity is faced with the responsibility for the murder of Christ through all the ages: for the murder of the living in whatever form it may appear, up to the 3,000 people killed in New York and Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001, and up to the 1.2 million people killed so far–February 2010–in the war against Iraq alone, as well as in the prisons of Bagram, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay (Reich 1976; Fromm 1973; 1992; Scahill 2007). The tragedy of Reich’s own death in a prison in the USA, where he had fled from persecution and gas chambers in Nazi Germany, point up the fact that the problem of necrophilia, which is intrinsic to the unresolved master-servant relationship, or the class struggle, and which he had presented in his book The Murder of Christ, remains acute in contemporary antagonistic civil society (Hegel 1986c: 145-155; Reich 1976; Fromm 1973; 1992; Scahill 2007; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549).

Non-Violence Day Today–February 2010–it seems that not even the 28th Gandhi Week, or the October 2nd birthday of Gandhi, adopted unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Non-violence Day, does in any way diminish the necrophilous tendencies and behavior in the Near East and elsewhere, tendencies often legitimated by the three Abrahamic religions (Dalrymple 2007). No other theological notion, besides that of the deadly wrath of God, has alienated the Jews Horkheimer and Adorno more from Judaism, and the Christians Kogon and Dirks from Christi-

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anity (Siebert 2005). Already Hegel had criticized the book Job, saying that God had to do more than to thunder and thus to frighten people. The wrath of God is one of those semantic and semiotic and motivational notions that can not pass the test of being inverted into the secular discourse of the expert cultures and into the communicative action in the life world or into the economic and political subsystems of civil society (Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; 1990: 9-18). The critical theorists, informed by Marx and Feuerbach, are longing beyond the theistic wrath of God and Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum for the wholly Other, the Eternal One, the End of, the Endless One, characterized by perfect justice, and by unconditional love (Feuerbach 1957; 1996; Marx 1953, chap. VIII; Otto 1958; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Petuchowski 1956: 543549). Not only the notion of humanity but also the notion of God evolves (Fromm 1966; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549). Otherwise, how can religious people possibly fight against the barbarous death penalty in modern civil, or socialist, or fascist societies on the basis of a religious mythos, in which the wrath of God sentences to death the first parents and all following generations of the human species because of their original sin, not to speak of the Flood, Sodom and Gomorra, the Tower of Babel, the sacrifice of Isaac, the treacherous revenge for the rape of Dinah, the Egyptian plagues and the annihilation of the whole Egyptian army, down to the death of Ananias and Sapphira for their fraud (Genesis 3, 6-8, 11, 14, 19, 22; Exodus 7-11, 14, 15; Acts 5: 1-11)?

Wolves and Lambs In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, it is of course always possible, that the same Biblical story, such as that of the Flood, does not only contain a necrophilous element, namely, the murderous wrath of God that drowns humanity, except for Noah, his family, and all the land animals, but also at the same time a biophilous, eschatological moment (Genesis 7: 14; Lieber 2001: 45/14; Isaiah 11; Revelation 21, 22). Thus, in the ark of Noah wolves and lambs, predators and prey, set aside their natural enmity and lived together peacefully. Only when the danger of the flood was over, did they revert to their old habits. It will be a mark of the Messianic Age, when traditional enemies learn to live cooperatively without facing an external threat (Genesis 7: 14; Isaiah 11; Revelation 21, 22; Lieber 2001: 45/14). In view of the critical theory of religion and of the inverse theology intrinsic to it, the peaceful living together of human beings–Noah and his family–and of the animals, such as wolves and lambs,

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birds, cows, bears, panthers, calves, reptiles, flies, the cobra and the viper, and so on, is a transitory cipher of the totally Other than the destructive, necrophilous, angry and wrathful God and his world, in which almost everybody hunts, and hurts, and harms, and eats everybody: even in the new world order after the flood and after the rainbow as sign of peace, and even more so than before, when all had supposedly still been vegetarians (Genesis 6-9; Isaiah 11; Revelation 21, 22; Lieber 2001: 41-58; Hegel 1986l: 33-55; 1986q: 501-536; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b: 103-115; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1980b; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002d; 2003a; 2003b; 2003c; 2003d; Horkheimer 1967: 248-268, 302-317; 1985g, chaps. 4, 9, 17, 21, 29, 37, 40: ). The Noah covenant and the rainbow remain, nevertheless, the first ciphers for the arrival of global alternative Future III–a peace society (Baudis 1979; App. G).

Removal of Necrophilous Elements However, so the dialectical theory of religion must ask, if the necrophilous element is not removed from the religious tradition, how then can the believers possibly resist the brutality and criminality of modern security organizations, services and forces like the KGB, the Gestapo, the Stasi, the CIA, etc, for example, against the background of centuries of Holy Inquisition in the Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity (Dulles 2005a: 2530; 2005c: 15-20; 2006: 23-29; 2005b: 33-36; Grisez 2005: 27-33). A fundamentalist, who thinks that September 11, 2001was an expression of the wrath of God as it is portrayed in the Torah, in the New Testament and in the Koran, against all the great sins committed in the American civil society–abortion, homosexuality, lesbianism, stem cell research, adultery, porno business, divorce, euthanasia, and so on, will not be adequately motivated to resist terror. Maybe Hans Küng was right after all, when he said in one of our discourse that God punishes nobody, but that people punish themselves through their own evil deeds, and through their dysfunctional consequences. Would the history of the 20th and early 21st centuries maybe not have looked less violent and murderous if the world religions had made as great a contribution to the biophilous aspects of the socialist revolutions, as indeed they did to the necrophilous tendencies in the fascist and neo-conservative counterrevolutions all around the globe up to the present–February 2010 (Dalrymple 2007, Scahill 2007)? How can one prevent concentration camps in the future against the background of a mythos that asserts the pre-science of a God of wrath: he knew that

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the fascist concentration camps would happen from the very start of creation, but he created a world, nevertheless, in which almost everybody eats everybody, and maintained it, and did not interrupt its horrible historical continuum of force and counterforce, of crime and punishment, of guilt and atonement, shortly, of the talion as moral reflection of the equivalence principle of society as an inequivalent, antagonistic economic exchange process, and thus made possible, let happen, i.e. willed Auschwitz and Treblinka and Buchenwald, and all the horror of the 20th and the early 21st centuries these names stand for (Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Scahill 2007)?

Open Flank Contrary to much of traditional theology, which is insensitive to its own origin–theodicy, the dialectical theory of religion cannot avoid to witness the most painfully open flank of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: the non-appearance, or non-reappearance, of the Messiah (Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Dulles 2005a: 25-30; 2005c: 15-20; 2006: 23-29; 2005b: 3336; Grisez 2005: 27-33). The critical theory of religion cannot avoid asking the even more painful question, of whether there has ever been, or if there is now, or if there will ever be any divine counter-movement whatsoever responding to humanity’s transcending in the form of prayers and sacrifices: responding to the miserable outcry of the oppressed creatures in distress in a heartless world (Marx 1964: vii, 41-61; Horkheimer 1988d, chap. 2; Niebuhr 1967; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247). The dialectical theorist of religion, who is driven, inspired, motivated and guided not only by the longing for light, friendship and love, and alternative Future III–a lifefriendly society, but also and even much more so by the hope for and the confidence in the imageless and nameless entirely Other than what is the case in the present unredeemed often necrophilous world, must continually struggle for the unconditional truth and meaning, which no positive science can offer and provide (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 28, 29, 37, 40; Fromm 1976, chap. IX; App. G).

Transcendence Following the critical theorists of society from Horkheimer and Adorno to Habermas, the dialectical religiologist emphasizes what connects monotheism and radical enlightenment: the moment of un-reified Transcendence

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(Adorno/Kogon 1958a; 1958b; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1990: 9-17; Dulles 2005a: 25-30; 2005c: 15-20; 2006: 23-29; 2005b: 33-36; Grisez 2005: 27-33). Such Transcendence grants first of all to the Ego, which is held captive in its external and internal environments, a certain distance to the world as a whole and to itself. Thereby, the moment of Transcendence opens up a perspective without which personal autonomy and universal solidarity, rooted in the human potentials of language and memory, love and mutual recognition, cannot possibly be acquired (Hegel 1972; 1979; Adorno/Kogon 1958a; 1958b; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1990: 9-17). However, the element of Transcendence, which monotheism and radical enlightenment have in common, does not in any way touch upon or change the fundamental conviction of the critical theorist of religion, inherited from Benjamin, Adorno and Habermas, that nothing of theological content can and will continue unchanged in the future. All theological content will have to stand the test of whether it can migrate into life-friendly secular discourse and praxis. However, this secularizing integration of theological contents into the universe of argumentative discourse and into biophilous, solidary, and helpful living together is the very opposite of the neo-pagan regression into mythology and magic rituals, which is spreading in present civil society, and thus behind that self-understanding of personal sovereignty and universal solidarity that entered world-history the first time with the teachings of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic prophets (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; 185-346, 347-536; Küng 1982; 1991; 1994; 2004; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549). If there is any possibility of a post-modern reconciliation of the modern antagonism between the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane, then it will happen on the basis of the insatiable longing for meaning and love, and most of all for the imageless and nameless transcendent wholly Other than a world characterized more by necrophilous than by biophilous forces: a yearning, which both believers and enlighteners share in spite of all their prevailing disagreements, and which can give them both the energy to cooperate in the struggle against the postmodern, global alternative Future I–the necrophilous, totally mechanized, computerized, and robotized society, and against post-modern, global, alternative Future II–the even more deathfriendly, totally militarized society, which moves from one war to the other up to the endgame of ABC wars, and in the struggle for postmodern, global, alternative Future III–the most life-friendly, harmonious peace society (Hegel 1986p: 9-88; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 29, 34, 35, 37, 40; Flechtheim 1971; Bloch 1970b; 1971; Küng 1978: 531-541, 729-768; 1982; 1990; 1994: 904-906; 1982; Semashko 2003; 2006; App. E, F, G).

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According to Horkheimer, since the 1960s, Catholic and Protestant theologians aimed at a liberalization of religion, which was also to take care of the problem of necrophilia in religious texts (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 20, 37, 40; Baum 1971; 1975; 1980; Ruether 1967; Küng 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a: 742-906). The liberalization of religion means its sublimation. Religion may turn into mere idealistic philosophy of religion. However, in Horkheimer’s view, the liberalization of religion would lead to the end of religion. Everybody living in modern, secular civil or socialist society had to gain consciously or half consciously the conviction that the liberalization of theology and religion approached the common liberal, or neo-conservative, or neo-liberal politics in late capitalist societies. In the process of liberalization, so Horkheimer explained, religious people made concessions to the modern world. They conclude compromises with the bourgeois or socialist societies and states. They enter pacts with the positive sciences. They become strangely positivistic themselves (Adorno 1970a; 1997j/2: 608-616; Benjamin 1950: Vol. I, 494; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 20, 21, 23, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Dulles 2005a: 25-30; 2005c: 15-20; 2006: 23-29; 2005b: 33-36; Grisez 2005: 27-33). At the same time the sciences could not tell us more than that–in Schopenhauer’s words–the earth was nothing else than a micro-atom, a little ball, suspended in the infinite universe: a little ball with a mold covering it called life, which reproduces itself antagonistically, biophilously and necrophilously (Schopenhauer 1946; 1989: Vol. 1. 264; Hegel 1986q: 510-517; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 4, 9, 19, 21, 37, esp. 391-393). The living organisms on the earth continually ate each other up for their own sustenance and maintenance (Schopenhauer 1946; 1989: Vol. 1, 234-236; Vol. 2: 450-451; Vol. 3: 356-358, 361367, 374-377, 780; Hegel 1986q: 510-517; Horkheimer 1985g: 391-393). According to Horkheimer’s perspective, no longer could religion return to its traditional position: to its commandments and prohibitions, punishments and rewards, its necrophilous tendencies (Deuteronomy 1-4; Hertz 5716/1956: 735-774; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 37, 40; esp. 3912-393). However, in Horkheimer’s opinion, religion could still make people living in both the modern civil and socialist societies, which were moving towards postmodern, alternative Futures I and II, aware of the fact that they were finite beings, and that they had to suffer and to die, but that beyond the suffering and death there stood the longing that this earthly existence may not be absolute and the ultimate; the yearning for the imageless and nameless totally Other than the necrophilous slaughter bench and holo-

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caust altar of nature, society and history (Hegel 1986l: 107-115, 413, 418, 422, 490-491, 500, 513; 1986o: 352; 1986g: 465; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 34-40; Marcuse 1966, part III; 1969; 1972; 1980, chaps. 8-10; Claussen 1981; Breines 1970; Fromm 1968; 1970; 1990; Funk/Johach/Meyer 2000; Lundgren 1998; Flechtheim 1971; App. E, G).

Everyday Religiosity All that remained in late capitalist society after Horkheimer’s death in 1973 was an average social consciousness, which Detlev Claussen has named in the Hannoversche Schriften, a derivation from the Frankfurt School, “everyday religiosity” (Claussen 2004). It consists of a conformist, privatized faith in the context of a civil religion, which lets the chaotic manifoldness of life in modern capitalist society appear as being ordered, and which lets it seem to be resistant against the bourgeois, Marxian, and Freudian, and in general, the scientific enlightenment movements that tend to uncover and make manifest the antagonisms in modern civil society–including that between the biophilous and necrophilous forces (Klein 2007; Claussen 2004; App. E, F). This everyday religiosity or spirituality could react more flexibly than the relatively stiff and rigid traditional religious and metaphysical systems in relation to social change in civil society, characterized by a disastrous capitalism with strong necrophilous tendencies toward always new conventional wars and civil wars: disastrous already since it moved on much lower levels of exchange than today–February 2010 (Luke 16: 19, 31; Klein 2007; Hinkelammert 1985). Political action had– like every other mass-media mediated communicative or instrumental action–to relate itself to such everyday religiosity and its certainties and moods, when voters or consumers were to be motivated and mobilized: as, for example, the Catholic and Evangelical voters in the U.S. Presidential campaign were in 2004 (Claussen 2004; Raum 2004; Lester 2004; Kay 2004). Against its own claim of ideology-freedom, the public reproduced racism, anti-semitism, ethno-nationalism and xenophobia and thus gave validity to this everyday religiosity and its certainties and moods as explanatory reasons for admittedly socially undesirable, but nevertheless understandable actions. Claussen’s compressed and deepened his ideologycritical argumentation into a critique of artifacts of everyday religiosity, which were used as cues and keywords by almost everybody in civil society: for example, national identity, holocaust, reunion, globalization, terrorism, and so on (Klein 2007; Claussen 2004). The everyday religiosity is part of the common sense in present liberal or neo-liberal capitalist

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societies: common sense including in itself all the prejudices that people hold on to at a certain time (Hegel 1986b: 30-35159-160182, 182, 188-207; 1986c: 64-65, 105, 105-106; Klein 2005; Hinkelammert 1985; Scahill 2007).

God and History In spite of the fact that the critical theorists of society always had the tendency to move from the theological to the social-psychological and sociological perspective, they also always returned again to the theological dimension (Hegel 1986p: 11-88; Horkheimer 1972; 1985g, chaps. 25-40; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Adorno 1967: 103-125; 1973: 402-405; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1984a; 1986; 1987b; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: 9-18; 1991a: part III; 1992b; 2001a: 9-31, 35-57; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Kim 1996: 267-283). They never could give up the theological perspective completely. There has existed in the critical theory of society a dialectical relationship between theology and sociology. The two disciplines have continually reproduced each other. Thus, Horkheimer stated already in his 1935 essay “Thoughts on Religion,” that the notion of God had preserved for a long time the representation that there were still other rules, measures, and scales than those often terrible, necrophilous ones that nature and history expressed in their processes and effectiveness (Hegel 1986q: 501-517, 518-528; Horkheimer 1972, chap. 4; Ott 2001, chap. 4). According to Horkheimer, the recognition of a transcendent Being derived from, summoned up by, and found its strongest energy from peoples’ dissatisfaction with their earthly fate. In religion were deposited the wishes, longings, yearnings, and also the theodicy–the accusations of innumerable generations of human beings (Leibniz 1996; Kant 1974; 1981, chaps. 6, 7, 8, 9; Hegel 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 25-40; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; 1973402-405; Horkheimer 1988a; Habermas 2001; Groh 1998; Meier 1994; Oelmüller 1990; Greinacher 1986; Peters/Urban 1999; Sölle/Metz 1990: 7-71; Sölle 1977; 1992). However, so Horkheimer argued, the more the Providence of God was brought into harmony with the worldly happenings in Christianity, the more this meaning of religious longing for and protest against the Absolute inverted and transformed itself (Horkheimer 1972, chap. 4; Küng 1994). Already for Greek and Roman Catholicism, God became in some respects the creator of the extant earthly order. Protestantism reduced the actual course of the world directly to the almighty will of God. Thereby,

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not only each earthly political regime was transfigured through the appearance of divine Justice, but the latter itself was brought down and degraded to the level of the foul necrophilous conditions of natural, social and historical reality.

Fate Adolf Hitler concluded this theological development by identifying his Herr Gott, his Almighty, his inscrutable Destiny, his Unknown, his Creator, his Fate, who was always on the side of the predators and the winners, and who was merciless against the prey and the losers, with the processes of natural and social evolution themselves, and with the malignant-aggressive, necrophilous aristocratic principle of nature, which governed them, and which climaxed in I.G. Farben’s Cartell of Hell and its production of the insecticide Zyklon B, with which the Jews were murdered in the concentration camps (Hitler 1943: 64-65; Taylor 1962; Trevor-Roper 1988; Groh 1998; Meier 1994; Fromm 1973, chap. 13; Hedges 2007; Kossling/Groth 1991; Fest/Eichinger 2002; Ailsby 2004; Stoddard 1940; Sayer/Botting 2004; Gilbert 1995; Krueger 1941; Mosse 1975; Kubizek 1954; Paassen/ Wise 1934; Kogon 1995; Jeffreys 2008; Valentine 1936; Eberle/2005; Uhl; Meier 1995; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993; 1994b; 2005a; 2006a; 2007a; 2007g). Hitler’s main anti-Marxist, folkish philosophical and political interest and concern was that he, and his nation and his race, would not be among the proletarian prey or the losers, but rather among the aristocratic predators and winners. According to Hitler, Providence had punished the German nation with the loss of World War I because it had been weak. Weakness was the greatest, unpardonable sin. At the end of World War II, Hitler again blamed the weakness of the German people for the new catastrophe (Fest/Eichinger 2002). The Almighty had punished the German nation a second time because it could not stand up to the Slavic armies. It had violated the aristocratic principle of nature and thus received what it deserved: defeat (Adorno 1997b: 31-67; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993; Kim 1996: 267-283). In Hitler’s words: “Das Schicksal wollte es so!” (Fest/Eichinger 2002). That was Hitler’s authoritarian theodicy. Hitler’s Fate was as malignantly aggressive and necrophilously revengeful as he was (Benjamin 1977, chap. 14; Fromm 1973, chap. 13). This Fate was Hitler’s own unconscious projection into the Unknown, the totally Other. Hitler had completely forgotten what he had learned as a boy in his Catholic religion class: namely, that all homicide is fratricide (Genesis 4: 9; 9: 5; Lieber 2001: 50-51/5; Matthew 5: 20-26, 38-48). Hitler preferred Islam

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over Christianity because the Muslims could follow freely the Jus or Lex Talionis, and thus did not have to turn the other cheek (Exodus 21: 24; Mathew 5: 38-42; Trevor-Roper 1988: 7, 60, 143, 393, 514, 606). While Hitler’s war against the East had–like most wars–to do with thievery, his war against the West was mainly one of revenge and retaliation. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the wholly Other is not the justification but rather the end of the malignantly aggressive and necrophilous slaughter bench and Golgotha of nature and history (Hegel 1986c: 590591; Peters 1998; Metz 1994; 1995; 1997; Sölle/Metz 1990; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Berrigan 1996; Kim 1996: 267-283). Hitler’s theological projection contributes much to anthropology and psychology: the knowledge of the abyss of evilness of which humanity is capable (Rosenbaum 1998; Persico 1994). Here as always, it is the enemy who dialectically is the motivation to move to the extremes of evil in terms of the jus talionis, and far beyond its intrinsic limitation (Scahill 2007).

God’s Nothingness In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, Hitler’s theological projection of Fate contributed little to theology as longing for the wholly Other, and that little is entirely negative and expresses precisely what the Eternal One is not (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1988: 60, 277-279; Theunissen 1982; 1983). Even the atheist’s statement, that God is nothing, is a projection, and may or may not contribute to the knowledge about the totally Other (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 14, 15, 17, 18, 29, 32, 37, 40). Even religious people, particularly mystics, may also say that God is nothing (Hegel 1986e: 83). Thus, the cabalist Gerhard Scholem prayed in a poem connected with Kafka’s Trial and devoted to Walter Benjamin: The great deceit of the world Is now consummated. Give then Lord, that he may wake, Who was struck through by your nothingness. Only so does revelation Shine in the time that rejected you. Only your nothingness is the experience It is entitled to have of you. Thus alone teaching that breaks through semblance Enters the memory: The truest bequest

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Of hidden judgment (Scholem 1989: 123-124; Adorno 1973: 402-405).

Of course, neither the believer nor the disbelievers knows precisely what nothingness is, since none of them has ever experienced it. Yet, if anyone ever has come close to that nothingness, then it has been the mystics, who have spoken of something like a dark night of the soul, in which all projections go under, but in which Something–the wholly Other–nevertheless remains: for example, Meister Eckehart, or John of the Cross, or Mother Teresa, or Gershom Scholem (Meister Eckehart 1979; Kolodiejchuk 2007; Scholem 1989; Horkheimer 19855g, chaps. 29, 37, 40; Benjamin 1977, chap. 10, 11; Habermas 1971: 172-227; 1978: 48-95, 127-143; 1982: 438-440). Benjamin talked about a political-theological method of nihilism (Benjamin 1977: 262-263). There is such a thing as a religious nihilism (Hegel 1986p: 374-389; 1986q: 50-95; Scholem 1977: 1-50; Habermas 1982: 127-143). While the erotic projections of the lovers upon each other may not be entirely true, they may, nevertheless, contribute to each other’s knowledge of each other in the long run (Hegel 1986g: 292-338; Fromm 1956; Siebert 1987). Certainly, that lovers live with projections of each other does not mean that they are not real. Some projections of the lovers may come closer to the reality of the other, and others may remain more distant from it. Analogically, the same may be said to be true of the finite theological projections of believers and non-believers toward the horizon of the good, qualitative Infinity, the absolute Idea (Hegel 1986e: 115-173; 1986f: 548-573).

Immanence The critical theory of religion goes beyond Horkheimer when it observes that also already in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, God was not only the radically transcendent Other–in heaven–but that God was also immanent, meaning, present and active on earth in shekhinahs, theophanies, or ciphers in the natural, personal and historical world (Deuteronomy 1-6; Hertz 5716/1956: 735-774; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549). The God of the Abrahamic religions is not the deistic God of the American Declaration of Independence, who created the world, but then left it to itself so that the world was as God-less as God was world-less. In the Abrahamic faith communities, God as the absolute Non-Identity reached, nevertheless, into the identity of nature and history and their biophilous as well as malignantly aggressive and necrophilous tendencies: whereas Noah remained fixed in nature, Abraham

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sets out into history to proclaim God’s dominion over both (Genesis 1-9; 11: 32; Lieber 2001: 1-52, 63/32; Hegel 1986l: 32-55; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 2, 7-8, 10-11, 15, 20-21, 24; 1988, chap. 19, 21, 30, 43, 47-48; Adorno 1970: 103-125; 1973: 300-408; Fromm 1966; 1973). That precisely constitutes the often forgotten theodicy problem in the Abrahamic, monotheistic religions (Greinacher 1986; Schmitt-Biggemann1988; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Metz 1995; Oelmüller 1990; Dulles 2005a: 25-30; 2005c: 15-20; 2006: 23-29; 2005b: 3336; Grisez 2005: 27-33). However, for the dialectical theory of religion, it is most decisive that Yahweh was not on the side of the necrophilous Pharaoh, but rather on the side of the Hebrew slaves, and that God liberated them through Moses from bondage, oppression, and exploitation, and that God sent them to the biophilous land, where milk and honey flows: the first Hebrew utopia after the exclusion from paradise (Genesis 1-3; Exodus 1-15; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549). Elohim never hardened the hearts of the good biophilous people, but he only prevented the hearts of the bad, necrophilous people from learning and evolving. In Christianity, even if the Father in heaven causes his sun to rise on the bad as well as good, and his rain to fall on honest and dishonest alike, and admonishes the sinner to continue to sin, and the good people to continue to do good things, this divine indifference, which the believers were even to imitate, definitely ended on Judgment Day, when the good, biophilous people were to be rewarded, and the bad necrophilous people were to be punished (Matthew 5: 38-42; Revelation 20-22). The Greek philosopher Epicurus, Marx’s patron saint in spite of the fact that he was not a communist, had observed the indifference of the Greek Gods toward human evil and suffering, and had become a materialist and an atheist (Hegel 1986g: 19, 108; 1986j: 392; 1986l: 24; 1986p: 381; 1986r: 358; 1986s: 245, 297-336; Marx 1871; 1906; 1953: 14, 86, 327; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1863; 1964; 1974; 1977; Marx/Engels 1960; 2005; Horkheimer 1987b: 340-341; 373-379, 382-383; 391-392, 397, 434-436, 436-437; 1987e: 253-256, 453-457; 1985g: chaps; 3037, 40; 1985h: chaps.. 28, 30, 32, 41; 1987: 171-188, 409-425; 1985l: 246-247, 286-287, 320323349-397, 3978-416, 436-492; 1988n: 76-77, 90-91, 123, 132, 163164, 272-276-277, 285, 302-303, 320, 322-323, 327-328, 330, 351, 368, 378379, 419-420, 426, 433-436, 445-47, 488, 459, 514-515; Bloch 1871; Fromm 1967). Also for the Lutheran Hegel’s philosophy of history, the transcendent God was not, when he became immanent as Reason or Providence on the sacrificial altar, slaughter bench and Golgotha of world-history, on the side of the bad, necrophilous people and of counter-revolutions, but rather instrumentalized and used them on the side of and for the benefit of the good biophilous people and of permanent revolution, or determinate

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negation, or creative destruction, from one stage of human history to the next, in which process the negative was continually negated towards alternative Future III–the realm of the freedom of All on the basis of the necessity of nature (Hegel 1986l: 19-55; 1986e: 35-56; 1986l: 11-142; 1986o: 352; Horkheimer 1967: 249-252, 259-260; App. G). According to Hegel’s Logostheology, the transcendent God was thinking dialectically in relation to nature and history, and as such was a life-friendly God of revolution, rather than of counter-revolution (Hegel 1986e: 35-56).

Patriarchy In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, while the dialectic of love between the genders contains strong playful, biophilous elements, it also has–particularly under patriarchal conditions–necrophilous sadistic and masochistic tendencies (Genesis 11: 10; Lieber 2001: 60/10; Hegel 1986g: 292-338; Bachofen 1992; Horkheimer 1985g, chap. 37; 1985h, chap. 26; 1987e: 377-395; 1987k: 289-328; 1988a; 1988c, chap. 17, 18; Fromm 1956; 1973; 1997; Eller 2000; Siebert 1987; Kim 1996: 267-283). On June 31, 2004, the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith under, at that time, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation, and today Benedict XVI, and under Archbishop Angelo Amato, Secretary of the Congregation, released with the approval of Pope John Paul II a new Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World (Wooden 2004: 1; Kandel 2004: 43-44; Priesters 2004; Dulles 2005a: 25-30; 2005c: 15-20; 2006: 23-29; 2005b: 33-36; Grisez 2005: 27-33). In the Letter, the Congregation of the Faith stated that the necrophilous battle between the sexes for over 6,000 years, and particularly the sadistic subjugation of women in patriarchal societies, was the result of the original sin and not of God’s original design (Genesis 1-3; Horkheimer 1985g, chap. 37; Wooden 2004: 1). The battle was not Providential! According to the Congregation, attempts to advance the cause of women by seeing men as sadistic enemies to be defeated, as some feminists propose, or by claiming that no real difference existed between male and female, as the bourgeois enlighteners had asserted, had had necrophilous lethal effects, particularly on the family. The Document stated that rather than competing necrophilously for power, or ignoring the God-given difference between men and women, the Church, enlightened by faith in Jesus Christ, speaks instead of active, biophilous collaboration between the sexes. In an interview broadcast July 31, 2004, Archbishop Angelo Amato told Vatican Radio that the Letter was meant

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to offer a Christian criticism of two current trends: that of emphasizing a necrophilous radical rivalry between the sexes, and that of trying to cancel the differences between the sexes. From a Christian perspective, the Archbishop said, men and women were created with differences, precisely in order to enter into a life-friendly partnership and a relationship of selfgiving that would bring new life into the world. According to the Archbishop, the consequence of the Christian teaching was that the man and the woman no longer saw their differences in terms of necrophilous rivalry and opposition, but rather in terms of biophilous harmony and collaboration. According to the Letter of the Congregation, life-friendly collaboration was needed in the world, particularly in formulating political and social policies to help the poor and advance the cause of peace.

Feminine Values The Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World admitted that the Church too needed biophilous collaboration, in order to bring lifefriendly feminine values of listening, faithfulness, humility, understanding and caring more to the forefront (Hegel 1986g: 292-338; Bachofen 1992; Horkheimer 1985g, chap. 37; 1985h, chap. 26; 1987e: 377-395; 1987k: 289-328; 1988a; 1988c, chap. 17, 18; Fromm 1956; 1973; 1997; Eller 2000; Wooden 2004: 1; Kandel 2004: 43-44; Priesters 2004; Siebert 1987). However, according to the Letter, the Church continues, nevertheless, to affirm that only men can be ordained priests, and that these men who let themselves be ordained are not allowed by the Canon Law to get married–obligatory, forced and life-long celibacy. Here, obviously, the Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity still continues to bring– in Horkheimer’s words–the Providence of God into harmony with the necrophilous happenings in a patriarchal world, which in the meantime has produced a culture of death rather than of life and of love, which, of course, the Church would like to promote (Hegel 1986g: 292-338; Bachofen 1992; Horkheimer 1985g, chap. 37; 1985h, chap. 26; 1987e: 377395; 1987k: 289-328; 1988a; 1988c, chap. 17, 18; Fromm 1973; 1997; Eller 2000; Wooden 2004: 1; Kandel 2004: 43-44; Priesters 2004; Salley 2007: 1-4; Siebert 1987). For Roman Catholicism, as represented by the Vatican, God was in some respects the creator of man and woman, but their actual historical battle of at lest 6000years was not in God’s plan, but rather the consequence of the original sin (Genesis 1-3; Wooden 2004: 1; Kandel 2004: 43-44; Priesters 2004; Salley 2007: 1-4; Siebert 1987). According to

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the dialectical theory of religion, one should then, of course, continue the argument and say that also the result so far of the centuries long battle of the sexes, namely the overthrow of the matriarchal order and the establishment and the maintenance of the patriarchal order in family, society, state and religion, particularly in the three Abrahamic religions, was the result of the original sin as well, and was thus not providential and should thus be abolished. The patriarchy should, of course, not be cancelled in favor of a regression into matriarchy, but rather in favor of a progression toward a democratic, collaborative partnership and friendship of the genders not in alternative Future I–the totally administered society, in which the necrophilous oppression of the women would only be continued and fixed, and also not in alternative Future II–the death-friendly totally militarized society, in which women would become canon fodder together with men, but rather in alternative Future III–the biophilous reconciled society (Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Horkheimer 1985g, chap. 37, 40; Flechtheim 1971; App. G). Yet, it seems that the Vatican does not want to go that far, but rather wants to maintain at least some patriarchal privileges achieved in the long battle of the genders. Otherwise the ordination of women and the liquidation of the forced celibacy of the priests should not be a problem. Even the well-meant Vatican idea of feminine values, as well as the priority of procreation in gender relations, and the exclusion of women not from the universal priesthood of all believers but rather from the specific, sacramental priesthood, and the continuation of the obligatory celibacy for the priests in the Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity remain still patriarchal up to the present–February 2010. However, religious faith as well as humanistic enlightenment point in principle toward post-modern alternative Future III–a life-friendly society, which will no longer be enslaved to the pharmaceutical industries, and in which not only the non-providential and irrational struggle of the genders, but also the antagonism between the necessity of nature and human freedom, as well as between the races, and the classes, etc, will have been fought through and will be reconciled (Marx 1961c: 873-874; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Flechtheim1971; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Fromm1976, chaps. III, VII, VIII, IX; App. F, G).

Cultural Function In Horkheimer’s historical-philosophical and sociological perspective, Christianity had lost the cultural function to express ideals of personal and social morality to the same extent in which it had become the ally and

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bedfellow of the state, so often involved in necrophilous external wars and internal repression: namely, since the Constantinian trend turn, the effecthistory of which continues up to the present–February 2010–in the Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant Reformation Paradigm of Christianity (Horkheimer 1972l: chap. 4; 1986g: 392-393; Lortz 1964: 32, 54, 65, 104, 107-108, 127-128, 184, 244, 349, 907, 958; Küng 1994: 62, 218-219, 222-223, 246-248, 458, 462). Thus, the Church, for example, was more recently deeply involved in the most necrophilous dirty war of the fascist Government of Argentina, and is presently very much engaged in the not precisely life-friendly, neo-conservative agenda of the US Government (Barrionuevo 2007: 1-3; Sirico 2007: 11). In this sense, the modern separation of Church and state is of greatest advantage not only for the latter, but also for the former, and allows the former to promote its own biophilous program (Hegel 1986p: 236-246; 1986g: 398-514; Horkheimer 1988c: 326420; 1988d, chap. 2; 1987e: 293-319, 377-395, 415-422). Horkheimer was, of course, aware of the fact that modern theologians rejected this alliance between church and state. The churches wanted to take over, in terms of the imitation of their founder, the role of a critical, polemical and even revolutionary instance in the civil society and in the constitutional state (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 37, 40; Kogon 1967; Siebert 2007d; 2008). At least some theologians–like Küng, or Metz, or Baum, or the Berrigans, or Camilo Torres, or Rosemary Ruether–want the churches to be critical and revolutionary (Horkheimer 1985g: 392-393; Kung 1994: 742-906; Metz 1973; 1980; Berrigan 1977; 1978; Torres 1969; Ruether 1967; Baum 1982; 1994; 1996). They turn the validity potential of the churches against their facticity in civil society and the constitutional state. The believers were no longer to be put off the bad earthly conditions through a concern for a transcendent paradise. The Churches were to become the very carriers of society’s qualitative identity change toward alternative Future III–the reconciled society, and ultimately the kingdom of God (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 37, 40; Marcuse 1966; 1969; 1972; 1980; Claussen 1981; Breines 1970; Fromm 1966a; 1968; 1970; 1990; Funk/Johach/Meyer 2000; Lundgren 1998; Flechtheim 1962: 585-594; 1966: 455-465; Vilmar 1979: 51-57; Bloch 1970a, 1970b; Fromm 1973; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549; Habermas 1990; 1991a; 1991b; 1998a; 1998b; 2001a; 2001b; App. G). Horkheimer did not want in any way to discredit these modern critical theologians of reform or revolution (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 37, 40; Kogon 1967: 616630).

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No Secularization of Religion Yet, Horkheimer was concerned with religion rather than with the Churches (Horkheimer 1985g, chap. 37). According to Horkheimer, religion could not be secularized if one did not want to give it up altogether. In Adorno’s view, the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane was so definite, and deep, and deepening that a phenomenon like religious socialism, a connection between religion, particularly Christianity, and secular socialism, as his teacher Paul Tillich had proposed and promoted, was utter nonsense (Hegel 1986p: 11-54; Heer 1967: 323-333; Horkheimer 1985g: 392-393; Adorno 1997: 608-616; Tillich 1952, chaps. 4, 6; 1957: 25, 45; 1963: 310, 329, 330, 356, 369; 1977, part III; 1983, part III; Friedeburg/ Habermas 1983: 14-34, 35-40, 41-65, 66, 94, 138, 201-225, 226-233, 234292, 293-313, 314-326, 327-337, 351-353, 354-387; Schulz 2003: 50-53; Lenk 2003: 53-56; Schmidt 2006: 56-59; Hielsacher 2003: 60-62; MüllerDohm 2006: 63-66). For Horkheimer, it was a vain and futile hope that the actual discourses in the Churches would maintain and preserve religion as it had once been alive in its beginning because the good will and the solidarity with misery and the striving for a better world had thrown off their religious garment (Horkheimer 1972; 1985g: 392-393). In Horkheimer’s theological perspective, there remained, however, for religion the longing for the totally Other: i.e. perfect Justice (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 23, 25-29, 32, 34, 37, 40). Such perfect Justice could never be realized in secular history. This was because even if a better society would take the place beyond the present antagonistic civil society and its disorder, namely, a post-modern alternative Future III–the reconciled society, the past misery would thereby not be made good, and the need and want in the surrounding nature would not yet be superseded (Hegel 1986g: 382-392, 490-514; Horkheimer 1985g, chap. 37; App. F, G). At the beginning of the 21st century, positivistically orientated theologians, such as Gottfried Kuenzelen, who are situated on the side of the successful atomistic, always privatizing, neo-liberal and neo-conservative counter-revolution against the solidary, socialistic, revolutionary movements in different countries, for example, Cuba, Venezuela, Chile, North Korea, China, the Russian Federation, the Ukraine, and so on, assert in contrast to Horkheimer and the other critical theorists and enlighteners up to Habermas, Honneth, Joas, Best and Kellner, that the traditional religion was returning again, and that it would take over again its old cultural function in civil society and constitutional state, and even try to promote this come-back sociologically, in terms of a Right-wing Weberianism: no matter if such return

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was true or false, universalistic or nationalistic, biophilous or necrophilous, as long as it was not revolutionary but rather counter-revolutionary (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Habermas 1981a: 72, 113, 262-298, 299-331; 1981b: 69-117, 118, 170, 428-594; 1984, chaps. 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11; 2001; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 2000; Frazer/Honneth 2003; Honneth/Joas 1986; Kellner 1992; Best/Kellner 1992; Best/Kellner 1991; Kuenzelen 2003; Scahill 2007; Siebert 2006: 1-32; 2010).

Jewish Monotheism It is obvious to the critical theorist of religion that the internal philosophical as well as the external sociological perspective of Horkheimer and the other critical theorists on religion and law, reward and punishment, and particularly their emphasis on and radicalization of the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue and the corresponding continual struggle against idolatry in all shapes and forms, was deeply rooted in the totality of Judaism, which Hegel had called the Religion of Sublimity (Exodus 20; Hegel 1986p: 50-95; Horkheimer 1967: 302-316, 317-320; 1972, chap. 4; 1985g, chaps. 29, 37, 40; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30, 177-217; Löwenthal 1989, part I; Küng 1991; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549). The Rabbis remembered that after Alexander’s conquest of Asia, enlightened Greeks looked upon the Jews as philosophers of the East because of their unique monotheism (Deuteronomy 1-7; esp. 4: 6, 7; Hertz 5716/1956: 757/6, 7, 758, 761, 764, 766, 769, 774; Hegel 1986p: 50-95; Horkheimer 1967: 216-228, 229-238, 302-316, 317-320; 1985g, chaps. 14-18, 21, 25-26, 29, 37, 40; Küng 1991). Yet, so the Rabbis explained, the aggrandizement of Israel was not an end in itself; it was rather to demonstrate to the children of humanity the Divine in human history. The sudden rise to power of a small horde of slaves after their liberation and exodus from Egypt, their good government, prosperity and security, would attract attention. The peoples would ask: What is the secret of Israel’s greatness? Discovering that it rested upon fidelity to the Will of God, they might be induced to pay allegiance to the God of Israel. Here the Rabbis had in substance the idea of the missionary purpose of Israel’s existence. This idea was developed later on, and it was frequently emphasized in Prophetic and Rabbinic literature. Israel’s religion was unique because of the nearness of humanity to its Maker that it was teaching. It proclaimed that no intermediary of any sort was required for the worshipper to approach God in prayer. The Psalmist taught that the Lord was near unto all of them that called upon Him: to all that called upon Him in truth (Deuteronomy 1-7, esp. 4: 6-7; Hertz

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5716/1956: 757/6, 7, 758, 761, 764, 766, 769, 774; Berrigan 1978). The Rabbis only intended to deepen further this teaching of the Prophets and the Psalmists. According to the Rabbis, the charge often brought against Judaism by its opponents, that it knew only a distant God, was without any foundation. It was this sublime notion of God that was not the least of the reasons for so much of the suffering brought on the Jews by their polytheistic and idolatrous neighbors for centuries up to the most recent modern fascist anti-Semitic pogroms (Deuteronomy 1-7; Hertz 5716/1956: 757/6, 7, 758, 761, 764, 766, 769, 774; Wiesel 1982; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Kogon 1974; Goldhagen 2002a; 2002b; Küng 1991; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Rosenbaum1998; Dalin 2005). For the critical theorist of religion, it is important to emphasize that while the critical theorists’ notion of the wholly Other does indeed stress Transcendence and thus distance, it in no way excludes immanence and thus closeness and intimacy (Otto 1969; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Kim 1996: 267-283).

Personal and Social Morality According to the Rabbis, Israel’s religion was likewise unique through the ethical character and righteousness of its laws for the government of human society (Deuteronomy 1-7, esp. 6, 8; Hertz 5716/1956: 757-758/8, 761, 764, 766, 769, 774; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549). Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich, after reviewing the poor-laws, the rights of labor, and the administration of justice found in the Pentateuch, placed the following alternative before the fascist detractors of the Hebrew Scriptures in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s: either such laws are divinely inspired, or they are the product of a people endowed above all other peoples with positive genius for ethical and social values. According to the Cardinal, the cradle of humanity was not in Greece. It rather was in Palestine. In the Cardinal’s perspective, those who do not regard those 5 books of the Pentateuch as the word of God and as Divine revelation must admit that Israel was the superpeople in the history of the world. A generation before Cardinal Faulhaber, Leo Tolstoy paid tribute to the moral character of Israel (Genesis 12: 2; Hertz 5716/1956: 45/2, 757-758/8, 761, 764, 766, 769, 774). According to Tolstoy, the Jew was that sacred being who had brought down from heaven the everlasting fire, and had illumined the entire world with it. The Jew was the religious thought, spring and fountain out of which all the rest of the peoples have drawn their beliefs and their religions. According to the Rabbis, the Jews were never to forget that the basic principle of God’s law was the spirituality of God and his abhorrence of all idolatrous representation

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of Him: be it the moon worship of Haran and Ur or any other kind (Genesis 11: 24; Deuteronomy 4: 9-24; Hertz 5716-1956: 45/2, 757-758/8, 24; Lieber 2001: 61/24). It was this ethical character of the Jewish people, which was not the least of the reasons, that brought so much suffering to them from their polytheistic and idolatrous neighbors for centuries up to the most recent fascist anti-Semitism and pogroms (Deuteronomy 1-7, esp4: 6, 7; Hertz 5716/1956: 757-758/6, 7, 758, 761, 764, 766, 769, 774; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Horkheimer 1967: 302-316, 317-320; Adorno 1972: 397-433; 1997: 31-66, 433-471; Küng 1991; Kogon 1974; Goldhagen 2002a; 2002b). It was their Jewishness and the critical rescue of semantic potentials from Judaism, such as, monotheism and personal and social morality, particularly the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue against idolatry, into the critical theory of society that caused the first generation of critical theorists in the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research–Horkheimer, Pollock, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Fromm, Löwenthal, Sohn-Rethel, etc–to be made the victims of fascist malignant aggression, necrophilia, destructiveness and persecution as Jews, Marxists, communists, negativists from January 1933 on, when Chancellor Hitler took power in Berlin and led to the confiscation of their Institute by the Prussian Ministry of Culture, and to their being driven out into exile in Switzerland, France, England and America; and in the case of Walter Benjamin even into suicide in Port Bou, in September 1940 (Horkheimer 1967: 311-312; 1974: 20, 30-31, 36-37, 49, 91-92, 101-104, 116-117, 131132, 148-151, 164-165, 200-202, 213, 219-224, 268, 316-320, 347-348, 548, 352-353; 1985g, chaps. 23-24, 27-29, 31, 33-34, 37, 40-43; Sohn-Rethel 1973; Löwenthal 1989; Fromm 1995; Habermas 1981: chs 6-7, 13-14, 1819; Wiggershaus 1987; Scholem1989: 267-268; Witte 1985; Scheibe 1989; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973; Lundgren 1998; Funk/Johach/Meyer 2000; Siebert 1878; 1987a; 1987d; 1994c; 2001; 2002; 2004a; 2005c; Ott 2001).

The Consequence of Idolatry According to the Hebrew Bible and the teachings of the Rabbis, the consequence of idolatry was exile of the Israelites from their native land, dispersion to the four winds of heaven, and diminution in numbers (Genesis 10; Exodus 28: 29; Deuteronomy 4: 9-40; Hertz 5716/1956: 35-38/2-30, 758763/9-40; Lieber 2001: 508/29; Horkheimer 1988d, chaps, 2, 11, 17; Fromm 1966; 1992: 3-95, 203-212; Lundgren 1998). In their own land the Israelites served as symbols of something higher. Yet, in exile the Israelites would often sink to the level of magic and fetish-worshippers and grovel to idols

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of wood and stone. Such things, so the Rabbis stated, however, could not permanently satisfy human souls, which once had known higher things. This lowering of religious and moral standards always called forth a spiritual reaction among the religiously-minded remnant of the Jewish people in exile (Küng 1991: 98-274). According to the Rabbis, the sublime conception of the Unity of the Human Race, as it can be found already in the 10th chapter of Genesis, followed logically from the belief in the Unity of God, and like it formed one of the corner-stones of the edifice of Judaism as the Religion of Sublimity (Genesis 10; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991). This 10th chapter is concerned with the populating of the earth after the Flood. In the form of a genealogical tree, the chapter draws up a Table of Peoples, arranging them according to their geographical and historical relationship. It summed up the knowledge of the inhabited world possessed by Israel in Solomon’s time. The chapter expresses the universalistic rather than the particularistic and nationalistic tendencies in Judaism. The Rabbis were convinced that polytheism, or idolatry, could never rise to the idea of humanity. According to the Rabbis, heathen society was vitiated by failure to recognize the moral obligation involved in our common humanity. There was, therefore, so the Rabbis concluded, no parallel to the 10th chapter of the Genesis in the literature of any other ancient people. The Rabbis rightly called this 10th chapter of Genesis a Messianic document. The German idealists from Kant to Hegel as well as Marx and the critical theorists concretely inverted these Messianic principles of the Unity of God and the unity of humankind into there philosophies of history (Genesis 10; Deuteronomy 4: 9-40; Hertz 5716/1956: 35-38/2-30. 758-763/9-40; Kant 1946; 1965: 27, 74, 87, 149; 1970; 1974; 1981; 1981; 1982; Schelling 1977; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986gl; 1986l; 1986q: 50-95; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975; Horkheimer 1967: 177-203; 203-216, 216-229, 302-317; 335-354; 1988d, chaps, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 17; 1985g, chaps. 3, 5, 11, 13-17, 20, 22, 29-31, 33-34, 37, 39-40; 1989m, chaps. 6-7, 9, 12, 14, 15-16, 20-22, 25, 30, 32-33, 34, 35; 1996s, chap. 5; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1966; 1976; 1992: 3-95, 203-212; Habermas 1976; 1990: 9-19; 51-65; 1991; Küng 1991; Lundgren 1998; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, if the idea of the unity of God, or of the Thing in itself, or of the Unconditional, or of the absolute Spirit, or of the totally Other is given up, the unity of humankind can no longer be maintained against the divisive forces of necrophilous nationalism and racism and against the malignant aggressive tendencies present in the collisions of still religion-based civilizations. The unlimited Lex Talionis triumphs over the Golden Rule, instead of the Golden Rule being victorious over the

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Jus Talionis (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6; Küng 1990: 84-85; Siebert 2006a; 2007c; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549).

Terrible Truth According to the Rabbis, the conception of a jealous God in the Hebrew Bible saved Israel from going under in the days of ancient Near Eastern heathendom, as well as in Greece and Rome, as well as in the Medieval and Modern Europe (Deuteronomy 4: 25-31; Hertz. 5716/1956: 760-763). In the view of H. G. Wells, none of the founders of the great heathen religions had any inkling of this idea of a jealous God: a God who would have no other gods besides him (Exodus 20). He was originally a God of terrible Truth, who would not tolerate any lurking belief in witchcraft, or any sacrificing to the god-king, or any trifling with the stern unity of things. In the perspective of the Rabbis, their Hebrew fathers’ realization that truth could make no concessions to untruth, nor enter into compromise with it without self-surrender was responsible for the religious stand they took up to the days of Greece and Rome (Deuteronomy 4: 28; Hertz. 5716/1956: 760-761/28). In the perspective of T. Reinach, when Jerusalem fell in the year 70, Rome was quite prepared to give the God of Israel a place in its Pantheon, the building of which still exists today. However, Israel absolutely refused such religious annexation and integration. The one, unique and universal God of Israel alone was a living God. All the other gods were dead. Jupiter and his like were things of naught, figments of the human imagination. The same reasons that would not permit the Jews to bend the knee to the gods of pagan Rome, prevented them in later Ancient, Medieval and modern generations from allowing themselves to be absorbed by the two great religions that issued from Israel’s bosom: Christianity and Islam (Hertz 5716/1956: 760-761/28; Hegel 1986q: 185346; 1986l: 115, 140, 428-430; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: 27204; Küng 1991; 1994; 2004). Here too the Jews found, both in dogma and morality, novelties and concessions, that which was repugnant to the austere simplicity of their absolute monotheism. The Jewish foundingmembers of the Frankfurt School radicalized this absolute monotheism of the Rabbis, and even went beyond it in their post-monotheistic longing for the formless, imageless, nameless and notionless wholly Other than the Golgotha of nature and history (Deuteronomy 1-7, esp. 7: 22; Hertz 5716/1956: 781/22; Horkheimer 1972, chaps. 2, 4-7; 1985g, chaps. 14-18, 21-22, 25-29, 32, 34, 37, 40; Fromm 1952; 1963: vii-x, 3-94; 1966: ii. iii. iv, v; 1976, chaps. 3, 7, 8, 9; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; Adorno 1997: 7-142; 1997:

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7-120; 121-326; Raines/Dean 1970, part I, esp. 3-10; Tillich 1972: 182-190; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549). The critical theory of religion continues this tendency of radicalization of absolute monotheism and of post-monotheism in terms of demythologization and enlightenment, and doing so particularly stresses the prophetic transition from the necrophilous God of wrath, the mysterium tremendum, who destabilized nature and thus drowned all humankind, including the innocent children, and all animals and plants, except Noah and his family, and what ever animal life he could rescue in his arch, to the loving God, the mysterium fascinosum, who signals eternal peace through the cipher of the rainbow and his universal covenant with humankind (Genesis: 6: 9-9: 17; Isaiah 54-55; Lieber 2001: 64-65; Kant 1946; Fromm 1973; 1992: 3-95, 107-131, 147-169, 203-212; Otto 1969; Siebert 2001; 2002; Kim 1996: 267-283).

Accommodation In the perspective of the Rabbis, the blessed doctrine of a jealous God was of vital importance for the Jew’s attitude towards the neo-paganism of the 20th and 21st centuries, as it has surfaced, and continues to do so in liberalism, communism and fascism (Deuteronomy 4: 20-28; Hertz 5716/1956: 760-763/28; Horkheimer 1988d, chap. 2, 11, 17; Adorno 1997: 47-72, 181-195, 254-289, 337-346, 555-573, 573-595, 608-617, 674-691, 702-741; Habermas 1986: 53-55; 1990: 9-18; Cohen 1972). According to Schechter, Judaism’s mission was just as much to teach the world that there were false gods and false ideals, as it was to bring it nearer to the true God and the true ideals. As Schechter stated, according to the legend, Abraham–the friend of God–began his career with breaking idols (Genesis 12-22; Hertz 5716/1956: 760-763/28; Horkheimer 1988d, chap. 211, 17; Fromm 1966; Lundgren 1998). It was Abraham’s particular glory to have been in opposition to the whole pagan world. This Jewish opposition continues into modernity. According to the Orthodox and Conservative Rabbis, following Maimonides, the prohibition against abrogating God’s laws permanently was of more than theoretical interest in modern Judaism (Deuteronomy 13: 2-6; Hertz 5716/1956: 805). In the perspective of the Rabbis, the various attempts made by revolutionary religious leaders to accommodate or assimilate Judaism to present-day modern conditions in secular civil society have all suffered spiritual shipwreck, because they acted in defiance of either “We shall not add unto the word, which I command you,” or of “Neither shall ye diminish from it.” On the one hand, some attempted to diminish Judaism by such vital things as the Sabbath,

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the Hebrew language, and the Love for Zion. On the other hand, there were those who also were prepared to add to the Jewish heritage things that constitute a serious weakening of the Unity of God, and a radical departure from other fundamental principles of the Jewish faith. This resistance of the strictest Jewish monotheism and its laws against accommodation and assimilation to modernity increased the Shoah, the age old suffering of the Jewish people, as expressed by the American poet Robert Browning, in his poem “Holy-Cross Day,” stanzas #19, By the torture prolonged from age to age, By the infamy, Israel’s heritage, By the Ghetto’s plague, by the garb’s disgrace, by the badge of shame, by the felon’s place, By the braiding-tool, by the bloody whip, And the summons to Christian fellowship (Deuteronomy 13: 1-6; Hertz 5716-1956: 806/6; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Adorno 1997: 7-142, 143-508; Horkheimer 1971: 40-41, 54-90; Cohen 172, parts Two and Three; Siebert 2001; 2002).

This age old suffering found its climax in the Holocaust: in Auschwitz and Birkenau (Adorno 1997: 31-67; Horkheimer 1967: 302-317, 317-321, Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 168-209). The Jewish critical theorists of society, who appeared in the transition from the assimilation Paradigm of Judaism to the Post-Modern Constellation, characterized by the Holocaust and the foundation of the State of Israel, neither diminished nor added to the biophilous heritage of Israel, but rather through criticizing this heritage attempted to preserve it, and to radicalize it, and thus to elevate and to fulfill it (Fromm 12966; Küng 1991: 223-274, 275-376).

Test The Rabbi Hoffman has called attention to the fact that Christian theologians have often explained Deuteronomy 13: 1-6 in relation to the founder of their religion; Rabbi Jesus from Nazareth (Deuteronomy 13: 1-6; Hertz 5716/1956: 806/6). The Rabbi had to admit that the rise of Christianity was indeed a test for Israel. So also were the expansion of Christianity and its triumphant world dominion throughout the Old Church Hellenistic Paradigm, the Medieval Roman Catholic Constellation, and the Reformation Protestant Paradigm a long trial of Israel’s loyalty to God and His Torah (Deuteronomy 13: 1-6; Hertz 5716/1956: 806/6; Küng 1994: 145-741). According to Rabbi Hoffmann, Israel nobly stood that test and trial. It remained un-dazzled and undaunted by the power of the dominant Christian

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and Islamic faith. While the humanistic critical theory of society, as Judaism in inheritance, had no doubt about this, it questioned, nevertheless, if Judaism’s–as well as Christianity’s and Islam’s–test and trial theodicy could still stand and be maintained after Auschwitz (Deuteronomy 13: 1-6; Hertz 5716/1956: 806/6Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Adorno 1997: 7-142, 143-508; Horkheimer 1971: 40-41, 54-90; 1985g, chaps. 2526, 27, 28, 2937, 40; Siebert 2001; 2002; Cohen 1972, Parts Two and Three; Siebert 2001; 2002; Kim 1996: 267-283; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549). The critical theorists of society bravely continued, nevertheless, to identify the false gods and false ideals in Judaism itself, as well as in Christianity and in Islam and in the other world religions, and in polytheistic modern civil society and its philosophies of liberalism, Marxism, fascism, neo-conservativism, postmodernism, and so on, in the name of the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue. The new dialectical theory of religion continues this rescuing critique and breaking of idols: this struggle for the truth understood negatively, as the negation of idolatry and ideology–the untruth.

Photography of the Earthly Life In their biophilous, negative, inverse, cipher theology as theodicy, which was intrinsic to their critical theory of society and religion and which was deeply rooted in the work of Franz Kafka, and without which truth could not possibly be formulated, the critical theorists preserved the deeply Jewish connected ideas of the unity of God and of the unity of humankind, even if they did not express their religious longing for the wholly Other in religious form, but were, nevertheless, still very much aware that this yearning was what kept them all together over almost a whole century in spite of all their great diversity as expressed by Löwenthal (Isaiah 54-55; Lieber 2001: 64-68; Benjamin 1955: Vol. 2, 196-229; Schweppenhäuser 1981: Horkheimer 1985l: 483-493; Adorno 1970: 103-110; 1980: 333-334; Löwenthal 1980; 1989). In this inverse theology, the thoughts of Adorno and Benjamin at least converged, merged, came to an agreement, and disappeared (Genesis 1, 2, 3, 11, 18: 7; Isaiah11: 27-28; 41: 4; 42: 5-25; 54-55: 5; Hertz 5716/1956: 20-23/1, 25, 41-42/110, 60/27-28, 61/463/7, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200; Hegel 1986p: 88; 1986q: 273-306, 501-535; 1986l: 28, 540; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455, 501-535; Feuerbach 1996; Niebuhr: 1964; Marx 1955; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Bouvier 2005: 65-68; Adorno 1969a: 20; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b: 103-110; 1980: 333-334; 1997b; 1897d; 1997f; 1997u: 413-523; 1998c: 188-200; Adorno/Benjamin 1994: 323-326, 329; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 7, 10, 11; Horkeimer 1967: 248-286,

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302-316; 1985g, chaps: 23, 27, 28, 29; 1985l: 483-492; Habermas 2001: 2728; Türke 1989; Brändle 1984: B; Derrida; Vatimo 2001: 33; Haverkamp 1994: 331-445). Like Kafka’s novels, the inverse theology was intended to be a photography of the often necrophilous earthly life in its totality, from the perspective of redeemed life, which had not yet happened in terms of the three Abrahamic religions, or any other religion, dead or alive, which at best had kept alive among the different nations the longing and the hope for salvation and redemption (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Adorno 1970b: 103; 1980: 333-334; Benjamin 1966chaps. 18, 19; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/ Bechert 1984; Küng 1982; 1991a; 1991b; 1992; 1994a; 1994b; 2002; 2003; 2004). Otherwise the present horrible wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Abu Ghraibs and the Guantanamo Bays could not possibly have happened, and the trends in antagonistic civil society toward alternative Future I–the Kafkaesque, totally bureaucratized, computerized, and robotized society, and toward Future alternative II–the entirely militarized society preparing World War III could not possibly continue (Flechtheim 1962a; 1962b; 1966; 1971; Scahill 2007; App. G). In Kafka’s novels and in the critical theorists’ inverse theology as photography of often necrophilous earthly life, nothing appeared any longer of the redeemed life, or the redeeming Absolute, or Unconditional, or Transcendence, or wholly Other except the black edge or negative of the picture, while the horribly shifted optics of the photographic image was no other than that of the slantingly posited camera itself (Isaiah 54-55; Lieber 2001: 64-68; Adorno 1970: 103; Benjamin 1955c: Vol. 2, 196-229; Scholem 1982; 1989, chap. 57; Habermas 1988: 277-279). The inverse theology was opposed to naturalistic as well as to–super–naturalistic interpretations (Adorno 1970: 103104: Habermas 2001; 2005). Concerning redemption, the inverse theology held on to the relationship between Kierkegaard and Kafka (Adorno 1962; 1980: 103-125; 1997j/2: 181-195, 238-254, 254-289, 608-617; Schweppenhäuser 1981). Yet, this relationship between Kierkegaard and Kafka was very different in the inverse theology from the one in Karl Barth’s dialectical theology (Horkheimer 1974: 218-219; Adorno 1970b: 103-104; 1962; 1997j/2: 181-195, 238-254, 254-289, 310-321, 608-617; Schweppenhäuser 1981). The difference lay in the cipher character of the inverse theology: not in the relic of the notion of the script, but rather socially in its prolegomenon (Adorno 1970: 103-105). For Adorno, this inverse theology was no other than that out of which Benjamin’s thoughts had been fed in his Passage Work (Benjamin 1977, chaps. 7, 10, 11; 1983a & b). It is a political theology as semblance of Otherness (Adorno 1973: 300-408). There was no semblance of Otherness in the second neo-conservative Bush Ad-

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ministration, in spite of all of its religious rhetoric, but only sameness and identity: antagonistic civil society, national security state, colonialism and imperialism (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Adorno 1973: 300-408; Scahill 2007).

Final Philosophical Success The powerful breakthrough of the cipher theology in Benjamin’s Passage Work, was for Adorno since 1929 the most beautiful guarantee of its final philosophical success (Adorno 1970: 104-106). According to the cipher theology, the platitudes of the naturalistic, psychoanalytical Kafka interpretations blocked the truth as the negation of ideology as the untruth less than the null, void and futile official bourgeois, super-naturalistic, dialectical-theological interpretations: naturalism less than a still too mythological theology (Horkheimer 1974: 218-219; Adorno 1970b: 103-125; 1997: j/2: 238-288, 608-617; Habermas 1990: 9-19; 1991: 91-156; 2001; 2005). As for Freud, so for the inverse theology: the neutrum and the father image belonged together (Freud 1939; 1946; 1962; 1964; 1977; 1992; Adorno 1970: 103-105). The inverse theology remained incomplete, a torso, like Benjamin’s whole Passage Work (Benjamin 1983: Vol. One and Two). In the cipher theology as semblance of Otherness the significant is related to the fragmentary. However, that did not mean that the incompleteness could not be located in Benjamin’s Passage Work and beyond. The incompleteness consisted in the fact that the relationship of the primordial history of modernity had not yet been elevated to the level of the dialectical notion (Hegel 1986e: 243-300; Adorno 1969; 1970: 104-106). The success of this elevation did not depend on a naturalistic or dialectical-theological, but rather on an inverse and cipher theological interpretation.

Age and World Age For the cipher theology, the antithesis in Kafka’s work between age and world age could become fruitful not as mere contrast, but only dialectically (Adorno 1970b: 105-106). For the inverse theologians the notion historical age did not exist. They also did not know decadence or progress in the open sense. Benjamin deconstructed the bourgeois notion of progress (Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b: 105). The inverse theologians knew only the notion of world age and that as extrapolation of the petrified present. In Kafka’s work, the notion of world age had remained abstract in the Hegelian sense. As for Hegel so for the inverse theologians

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only the concrete was true. The cipher theology remained close to Hegel, as exemplified in the inverse theology by the notions of nothing and something derived from the first two chapter of the Hegelian logic (Hegel 1986e: 63-173; Adorno 1970: 105-106). It received motives like the turnover of mythical right into guilt not only from the Jewish tradition, but also from the Hegelian philosophy of law (Hegel 1986g: 203-222; Adorno 1969; 1970b: 105-106; Küng 1991). The inverse theology did not interpret the anamnesis or the forgetting of the primordial history in Kafka’s work in the archaic sense but dialectically. The cipher theology articulated the notion of the mythos not only as logical construction, but concretely. The inverse theology had to overcome all symptoms of archaic bias and incompleteness of the mythical dialectic (Adorno 1962; 1970b: 105-106). For the inverse theology, Kafka’s picture of the child had to be equivalent to a neutralization of the world age in the flash light of the camera, which produced the photograph of the unredeemed often necrophilous earthly life. That meant all kinds of inconsistencies in the concrete: symptoms of the archaic bias, not yet carried out mythical dialectic even still here in the inverse theology.

Cipher of Hope For the inverse theologians, the most important mythical logic was that of the Odradek in Kafka’s The Castle (Kafka 1993, Adorno 1970b: 106-107). It would be most archaic to let Odradek originate out of the primitive world and out of guilt. Odradek had rather to be read as that prolegomenon which appeared in the face of the problem of the script. According to the inverse theology, Odradek had his place with the father of the house. Odradek was the care and the danger of the father of the house. In Odradek was prefigured the supersession of the creaturely guilt connection. For the inverse theologians the care was the cipher, even the most certain promise of hope, precisely in the liquidation of the house. The cipher theology put not only Hegel, but also Martin Heidegger on his feet (Adorno 1963; 1970: 106-107; 1997f: 423-523). The cipher theologians had to admit that Odradek was as the backside of the world of things the sign of the disfigurement and distortion. Yet, precisely as such cipher of distortion Odradek was also a motive of transcending: namely, the removal of the boundary and the reconciliation of the organic and the nonorganic or of the supersession of death (Adorno 1970b: 106-107; 1997j/2: 238-288, 608-616; Habermas 1990: 9-18). Odradek survived! According to the inverse theology, only to the thing-like transformed, or thingified,

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or reified life was promised the escape from the nature connection. Here was the reason for the inverse theologians’ resistance against the immediate relationship of use value in other connections (Marx 1961a: 39-41, 47, 52, 89, 196, 202, 214, 637-638, 846-848, 849; Adorno 1970b: 106-107). For the inverse theologians, here was more than the cloud. Here was dialectic. The form of the cloud was not to be cleared up or enlightened, but it rather had to be radically and completely dialecticized through: in a certain sense the parable of Odradek had to be made to rain. For the inverse theologians that remained the innermost concern of a Kafka interpretation. It was the same as the theoretical through-articulation of the dialectical image. For the inverse theologians, the Odradek was so dialectical that of him could be said: as good as nothing made everything good.

The Golden Age According to the inverse theology, the archaic-mythical category of the Golden Age had socially fatal and disastrous consequences particularly for the commodity category (Marx 1961a: 39, 44-45, 46, 67, 76-79, 81-82, 99, 109-111. 111, 117-118, 119, 131, 166, 177, 607, 847; Adorno 1970b: 115-117). If concerning the Golden Age the decisive ambiguity–a notion that was very much needed by the critical theory of society and which could not merely remain standing aside, namely, the ambiguity in relation to the hell–was suppressed, then the commodity became instead as the substance of the age simply the necrophilous hell. Then the commodity was negated in a manner and way that indeed let the immediacy of the primordial condition appear as the truth. Thus, the disenchantment of the dialectical image led right away into unbroken mythical thinking, and as there Jung, so here Klages announced himself as the great danger. Here was the central place for the teaching on the collector, who liberated things from the curse to be useful in civil society as commodity society (Benjamin 1983a: 269-280; 1988, chap 22; Adorno 1970b: 115-166; Baum 2007, part II; Godazgar 2007: 389-418). For the inverse theologians, here belonged also Haussmann, whose class consciousness initiated precisely through the completion of the commodity character in a Hegelian selfconsciousness the blowing up and breaking up of the phantasmagory (Benjamin 1983a: 179-210; 1983b; Adorno 1970b: 115-117). According to the inverse theologians, to understand the commodity as dialectical image meant precisely also to comprehend it as motive of its decline and downfall and of its supersession instead of the mere regression toward an older age. On one hand, the commodity was what was alienated and at

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which the use value died (Marx 1961a: 39-41, 44-45, 47, 52, 67, 76-79, 89, 109-113, 196, 202, 214, 637-638, 846-849; Adorno 1970b: 116-117). On the other hand, however, the commodity was that which survived, which having become alienated nevertheless overcame and got through the immediacy. The inverse theologians had the promise of immortality for the commodities and not for human beings. For the 19th century, the fetish was a faithless, final image as only the skull (Benjamin 1974: 172173; Adorno 1970: 116-117). The critical theory of society is not a first, but a last philosophy (Adorno 1997: 7-30). The cipher theology intrinsic to the critical theory is more concerned with eschatology than with creation (Genesis 1, 2; Isaiah 11, 65, 66; Revelation 21, 22; Adorno 1970b: 103162). The Golden age did not lay mythically before the often necrophilous hell of nature, society and history, the damaged life, the administered world, the thingified, reified thinking, all the suffering of men and animals, but historically and open dialectically beyond it (Hegel 1986l: 30-55; Adorno 1970: 103-162; 1980; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11l; Horkheimer 1967: 248-269, 302-317; 1985l: 483-492; 1985g, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 29, 37, 40; 1996s: 62-67; Scahill 2007).

The Surviving Commodity For the cipher theologians, here lay the decisive epistemological character of Kafka’s work, particularly of Odradek in his novel The Castle, as the uselessly surviving commodity (Kafka 1993; Schweppenhäuser 1981; Adorno 1970: 116-117). In this fairytale of Odradek, surrealism may admittedly have found its end, as the tragedy in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Benjamin 1978; 1988, chap. 15; Adorno 1970: 116-117). Yet, in terms of the internality of modern civil society, that meant that the mere notion of use value was in no way sufficient to criticize the commodity character, but that it only lead back to the pre-division-of-labor-stage of world-history (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Marx 1961a: 39-41, 44-45, 47, 52, 67, 76-79, 89, 109-113, 196, 202, 214, 637-638, 846-849. Adorno 1970: 116-117). Here the cipher theology was suspicious and critical of Brecht’s epical or dialectical theater and his categories of the collective, the immediate, the concept of function, as themselves being regressive (Bentley 1961; Benjamin 1978; Adorno 1970: 116-117). The inverse theology’s resistance against Brecht was not an insular rescue attempt for autonomous art, or religion, or philosophy, but it was rather connected with its own most original and deepest motives: the connection between critical political theology and critical political economy (Marx 1961a, b, & c; Schmitt 1997; Baum 2007;

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Godazgar 2007: 389-418; Khosrokhavar 2007: 453-464). Brecht’s epical theater was as world theater only played to God (Bentley 1961; Benjamin 1978; Adorno 1970b: 108-108, 115-117). Brecht’s dialectical theater did not tolerate any standpoint outside, a transcendent instance above society, for which it would join itself together as stage. In Brecht’s dialectical theater, heaven could not be hung up on the wall in the picture frame. In Brecht’s epical theater there was also no stage frame for the scene itself, except precisely the heaven above the racecourse, or the circuit. Therefore, according to the cipher theology, to the conception of the world as the theater of redemption, in the speechless taking over and acceptance of the word, belonged constitutively, that Kafka’s form of art was the extreme antithesis to Brecht’s theatrical art form, and that as such it was the novelform (Benjamin 1978; Schweppenhäuser 1981; Adorno 1970: 108-108, 115-117; Fromm 1973). Under no circumstances did the cipher theology want to sacrifice itself to Brecht’s form of abstract dialectical materialism and atheism (Bentley 1961; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 7, 10, 11, 1978; 1988, chaps. 19, 21, 23, 48; Adorno 1970: 106-125; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19212223, 242526, 29, 37, 40). However, what nevertheless the critical theorists shared with the Marxist playwright Brecht and his epical or dialectical theater, was the emphatic focus on the central position of the commodity-production, -exchange, -circulation, and -fetishism in modern often necrophilous antagonistic civil society (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Marx 1961a: 39-41, 44-45, 47, 52, 67, 76-79, 78-80, 8889, 99, 109-113, 196, 202, 214, 637-638, 846-849; Bentley 1961; Schmitt 1997: 78-80, 87-88, 92, 95, 98, 117, 138-140, 166; Fromm 1973). Only the commodities of old civilizations, which slaves, serfs, or wage laborers had produced once as they turned into non-surviving commodities themselves, survive mostly uselessly, after they and their owners and masters have long gone: rests of houses and roads, walls, viaducts, containers of all sizes more or less decorated, tools, weapons, wheels, altars, images of the gods, etc. Such uselessly surviving old commodities can be found today in the Roman castles on the Limes along the Danube and the Main and Rhein River, and in Southern England: like e.g. the famous castle, which the Germans call today the Saalburg near Bad Homburg in the Taunus Mountains, where Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling composed the oldest system program of German idealism in 1800, and where over a century later also some of the critical theorists met for discourse, and near Frankfurt a.M., and its Johannes Wolfgang Goethe Universität, and the Institute for Social Research, the intellectual home of the critical theorists (Kafka 1993; Schweppenhäuser 1981; Adorno 1969; 1970: 116-117; Bloch 1975;

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Macintyre 1970; Witte 1985; Kramer 2003; Schweppenhäuser 1996; Markun 1977; Jamme/Schneider 1984; Wiggershaus 1987; Zvi Rosen 1995; Gumnior/Ringguth1973). While the humanities of the Frankfurt University have ironically enough moved into the Administration Building of the I.G. Farben Cartell, after the American army had left it, the natural sciences and technology migrated out into the Taunus Mountains near Bad Homburg.

Commodity Character and Alienation Adorno told Benjamin in his Hornberg Letter of August 1935, that the commodity character, which was specific for the 19th century, i.e. the industrial production of commodities, had to be worked out materially much more sharply in the framework of their critical theory of society (Adorno 1970b: 117). This was necessary, because since the beginning of capitalism, i.e. the age of manufacture, i.e. the age of the Baroque, there existed on one hand commodity character and alienation to the point of necrophilia up to the present unregulated finance-market–capitalist disaster of 2008, 2009, 2010 (Benjamin 1978a; Adorno 1970b: 117; Fromm 1950; 1957; 1959; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1974; 1975; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1995; 1997; 2001; Marcuse 1960; 19561; 1962; 1966; 1970a; 1973; 1980a; 1987; 1995; 2001; Reich 1971; 1976; Sarazin 2008: 18-20; Horn 2008: 21-24; Höpner 200826-27; Rüttgers 2008: 28-31; Lauterbach 2008: 32-36; Lucke 2008: 37-40; Altvater 2008: 41-44; Meyer 200845-46; Christe 200847-51; Dayderstädt 2008: 52-55; Klein 2007). On the other hand, the unity of Modernity lay precisely in the alienated commodity character throughout the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries up to the present economic catastrophe, in which millions of workers are losing from day to day their jobs, their houses, and their pensions in America, Europe, Asia and elsewhere, in consequence of the globally victorious neo-liberal counter-revolution and its strategies of deregulation and privatization since the Nixon–and Reagan–Administrations, For Adorno in 1935 only a precise determination of the industrial commodity character as a historical one contrasted sharply from the older traditional commodity forms, could deliver fully the primordial history and ontology of the 19th century, which was the very purpose of Benjamin’s Passage Work (Adorno 1970b: 117; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b). In Adorno’s view, all the relationships to the commodity form as such would confer and bestow on the primordial history of the 19th and possibly also of the 20th and 21st centuries a certain character of the metaphorical, which could

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not be tolerated in the present emergency situation of 1935. Adorno supposed and suspected, that if Benjamin would surrender here completely his mode of procedure to the blind material work, he would achieve the greatest interpretation results. Adorno was aware that his critique of Benjamin’s Passage Work moved in a certain sphere of theoretical abstraction. That was indeed a matter of emergency. Adorno was sure, that his teacher and friend Benjamin would not consider this matter of emergency as one of world view, and that he would not thereby reject and remove his critical reservations.

Necrophilous Hell But Adoro added to his abstract critique of Benjamin’s Passage Work a few concrete suggestions (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Adorno 1970b: 117-125; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b). Adorno proposed that Benjamin should strike the word capital in the title “Paris, the Capital of the 19th Century” in the case that not after all with the necrophilous hell of antagonistic civil society the passage title should be resurrected. Adorno wanted Benjamin to make completely transparent as mere ideology the conception of the state as self-purpose. For Adorno Benjamin’s use of the Freudian and Jungian notion of the collective unconscious was in its introduction and exposition not entirely transparent (Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; 1992; Jung 1933; 1958; 1990; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1966b; 1968; 1976; 1980b; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Adorno 1970b: 117-125; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b). Adorno pointed out that the overestimation of the machine technology and of the machine as such had always been characteristic for bourgeois retrospective theories. Thereby the necrophilous productive relations had been covered up through abstract recourse to the means of production. Adorno pointed to the very important Hegelian concept of the second nature, which had been taken up by the Left-Hegelian Hungarian scholar Georg Lukacs, who for some time was in connection with Horkheimer’s Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (Hegel 1986a: 11, 36, 80, 91, 101, 219, 242, 294, 304; 316, 338, 385, 420, 436, 613, 614, 616, 617; Lukacs 1970; 1971; 1974; 1979; Adorno 1963; 1970b: 117-125; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b). It seemed to Adorno, that the faithful acceptance of the primordial appearance of technology was connected with the overestimation of the archaic element as such. Adorno noted, that the mythos was not the classless longing of the alternative Future III–the true society, but rather the objective character of the alienated and necrophilous commodity itself. Under the undialectical mythical gaze, that of the Medusa, es-

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caped the subjective share of the dialectic. For Adorno, the Golden Age was maybe the true transition to the necrophilous hell. Adorno asked Benjamin to verify and prove better the notion of commodity fetishism (Marx 1961: Vol. I, 78-80, 88-89, 99; Adorno 1963; 1970b: 117-125; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b). For Adorno, Benjamin’s concept of the organic indicated a static anthropology and could as such not be held on to: or only in such a way, that it existed only before magic and the fetish as such, and that as such it was itself historical as e.g. the landscape (Hegel 1986p: 259301; Adorno 1970b: 117-125; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b). Adorno found the dialectical commodity motive in Kafka’s Odradek.

Fashion According to Benjamin, as Adorno read and understood him, the fashion prescribed the ritual, according to which the fetish commodity wants to be respected and worshipped (Hegel 1986i; 1986m: 218-219; 1986n: 408-409, 411; 1986r: 61-62, 227, 557; 1986t: 72, 5141986p: 259-301; Adorno 1970b: 117-125, 181-182; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b). According to Benjamin, Grandville extended the commodity’s claim to the objects of everyday use as well as to the cosmos. As Grandeville pursued the commodity in the extremes, he uncovered its nature. The commodity stood in contradiction to the organic. Not the living body, but the dead corpse was the perfect object of the commodity’s practices. In the living body the commodity claimed the rights of the corpse. The commodity procured the living body for the unorganic world, the hairs and the nails, which stood in the middle between the unorganic and the organic, had always been exposed most to the action of the commodity. The fetishism which was overcome and defeated by the sex-appeal of the unorganic, was the life-nerve of the fashion (Hegel 1986i; 1986m: 218-219; 1986n: 408-409, 411; 1986m: 218-219; 1986n: 408-409, 411; 1986r: 61-62, 227, 557; 1986t: 72, 514; 1986p: 259-301; 1986r: 61-62, 227, 557; 1986t: 72, 514; Adorno 1970b: 117-125, 181-182; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b). The cult of the commodity put this life–nerve into its service. On one hand, the fashion was sworn to the unorganic world. On the other hand, it was precisely the fashion, which overcame death. The fashion brought and integrated the departed, the dead, into the living present. The fashion was the contemporary of every past. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, fashion and commodity represented dialectically the necrophilous as well as biophilous tendencies in antagonistic civil society pointing to alternative Future I–the death-friendly totally administered, bureaucratized, and

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technocratic or fascist society, and to alternative Future II–the likewise death-friendly entirely militarized society, or to alternative Future III–the life-friendly reconciled society (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986p: 259-301; Adorno 1970b: 117-125; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1957; 1959; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1972b: 14-15, 74, 76, 80-81, 86; 1973; 1974; 1975; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1997; 2001; Bloch 1960. 1970a; 1970b; 1985b; 1993; Bloch/Reif 1978; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 1971; App. G).

World Trade, Colonialism and Imperialism For Adorno, Bernjamin seemed to introduce the labor movement again and again into his Passage Work as a deus ex machina (Hegel 1986g: 339397; 1986p: 259-301; Adorno 1970b: 117-125; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b). Adorno believed that the commodity category could be very much concretized through the specifically modern categories of world trade, colonialism and impersialism: e.g. the passage as bazaar; the antiquity stores as world trade markets for the temporal and finite; the meaning of the most distant, which has been brought into what is closest; the problem of the gaining of the intentionless social strata and the colonial and imperial conquests (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Adorno 1970b: 117-125; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1975; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1979a; 1079b; 1981c; 1981d; 1982; 1984a; 1985b; 1986: 53-4; 125-126; 171-172; 1987a; 1987b; 1988a; 1988b; 1990; 1991c; 1992b; 1995; 1997a; 1998; 1999; 2001a; 2001c; 2002; 2003b; 2004a; 2004d; 2005; 2006a; 2006c; 2007; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b: 13-32; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Honeth/Joas 2002). Benjamin motivated Adorno, to research the psychoanalytical literature about the awakening, which in 1935 he did not know yet (Freud 1955; 1977; 1992; 1993; 1995a; 1995b; Adorno 1970b: 117-125; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b). However, Adorno was sure, that the dream-interpreting, awakening psychoanalysis, which had distanced itself expressively and polemically from hypnosis, belonged itself to the Art Nouveau, with which it coincided in terms of time. For Adorno, here lay a question of first rank, which could maybe lead far. Here Adorno introduced correctively to his principal critique of Benjamin’s Passage Work, that if he rejected the use of the psychoanalytical concept of the collective consciousness or unconsciousness, then he did this of course not, in order to let stand the bourgeois individual as actual or real substratum. According to Adorno, the individual of civil society had to be made transparent toward the interieur as social

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function, and its private closedness had to be revealed as mere appearance. But the bourgeois individual had to be revealed as appearance not in opposition to a hypostatized collective consciousness or unconsciousness, but rather in opposition to a real social process itself. Here the individual was a dialectical instrument of passage, which was not to be mythologized away, but could only be concretely superseded (Horkheimer 1987e: 67-104; Adorno 1970b: 117-125; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b). Adorno accentuated most expressively once more the sentence in Benjamin’s Passage Work, which was concerned with the liberation of things from the enslavement to be useful as the ingenious turning point toward the dialectical rescue of the commodity. Adorno told Benjamin, that he would be very glad, if he would explicate as much as possible the theory about the collector and about the interieur. According to Adorno, the notion of the false consciousness, i.e. ideology, needed the most careful consideration and could in no way be used any longer without recourse to its Hegelian origin (Hegel 1986c: 39. 40-41; Horkheimer 1987e: 67-104; Adorno 1970b: 117-125; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b). The former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Greenspan, produced–in spite of being an assimilated Jew–an exculpating piece of ideology and even of mythology, when he told the Congress on October 22, 2008, that the present global capitalist catastrophe, in which he had an active part, was a completely unexpected, once in a hundred years credit tsunami, in spite of the fact that it was not at all a natural but rather a specifically human event, a happening in the second nature, which admittedly was in modern civil society as alienated from the human beings involved in it and responsible for it as it was necrophilous (Hegel 1986c: 39. 40-41; 1986g: 339-397, 398-514; 1986p: 5095; Horkheimer 1987e: 67-104; Adorno 1970b: 117-125; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b; Jay 1980: 137-149; Küng 1991b: 223-274). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, particularly in the present–February 2010–global crisis of the capitalist system, the inverse theology as theodicy and as radicalization of the dialectic into the depth of the theological glowing fire of the wholly Other, which meant at the same time an extreme sharpening of the social-dialectical and particularly the economic motive, is necessary as a negative one, not only in order to formulate the truth and to overcome the ideologies and mythologies of antagonistic civil society as so many forms of a false consciousness, but also and even much more so in order to conquer its hellish necrophilous tendencies, the culture of death, in the name of the biophilous forces pointing toward post-modern, global alternative Future III–a life-friendly society, in which personal autonomy and universal solidarity will be reconciled, a culture of love (Hegel 1986a;

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1986c: 39. 40-41; 1986g: 339-397; Jamme/Schneider 1984: 11-14; Bryant 1896; 1956; Horkheimer 1988a; 1985l: 483-492; 1987e: 67-104; Adorno 1970b: 117-125; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985b; 1993; Bloch/Reif 1978; Flechtheim 1959: 625634; 1926: 27-34; 1963: 148-150; 1966: 455-464; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1957; 1959; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1995; 1997; 2001; Reich 1971; 1976; Marcuse 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969b; 1970a; 1980a; 1987; 1995; 2001; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 17, 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1982; 1984a; 1987b; 1988a; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 1992a; 1992b; 1997a; 1999; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Susman 1948; Siebert 1966: 12-14; 1979a; 1979c; 1979d; 1980; 1985; 1986: 442-457; 1987a; 1987b; 1987d; 1989; 1993; 1994a; 1994b: 69-90; 1994c; 1994d; 1995; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b: 69-114; 2002c: 187-193; 2003: 194-208; 2004a: 63-97; 2004b: 37-68; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c: 135-160; 2005d: 57-114; 2005e: 215231; 2005f: 231-247; 2006a; 2006b: 91-137; 2006c: 1-32; 2006d: 61-114; 2007a: 99-113; 2007b: 419-457; 2007c: 1-50; 2007d; 2007e; 2007f: 1-68; 2007g: 11-19; 2008a: 180-210; 2008b: 215-245; Petuchowski 1956: 543549; Kim 1996: 267-283; App. A, B, C, D, E, F, G).

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From the Jus Talionis to the Golden Rule In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the evolution of the ethical dimension, of the religious and secular moral consciousness from the Jus Talionis to the Golden Rule and beyond is certainly of highest actuality in the present–February 2010–globalized, rather oppressive and troublesome world-historical crisis situation, caused by the neo-liberal deregulation of a disastrous casino-capitalism (Hegel 1986g; Shirk 1965; Klein 2007; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Apresian 2002: 46-64; Habermas 1971; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1983; 1984a; 1986; 1988b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/ Ratzinger 2005; Byrd 2008). The horrible abuse that religion has suffered through in its ideological functionalization in the Western civilization as well as in the Near Eastern cultures, and elsewhere, particularly since September 11, 2001, and during the recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon, and in the psychological preparation of a possible war against Iran, make the theme of secularity and religious vitality and the three post-modern global alternative futures of religion in the framework of the three secular post-modern global alternative Futures particularly relevant and necessary (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 25-26, 29-30, 32, 3437, 40; Flechtheim 1971; Küng 1984; 1990; 1991; Third Part; 1994: 742906; 2004: Parts D and E; App. G).

Time Line of Nature and Man In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, in order to appreciate fully the development of the ethical dimension, of religious and secular moral consciousness, it must be seen in the context of the time line of nature and man, of natural evolution and the evolution and history of man (Hegel 1986l: 11-142; 1986i: 32-33; 1986s: 414; Habermas 1971; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1983; 1984a; 1986; 1988b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005; Küng 1991b: 25-28; Rifkin/Howard 1980; Lischer 1979; Skinner 1965; 1968; 1974; Malinowski 1929; 1954). According to most naturalistic scholars, the world of known

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galaxies has existed at least since 13 billion years down to the big bang. Human beings have lived on the planet earth since maybe 7 million years. About 7 million years ago the early human beings separated themselves from the chimpanzees in Africa and evolved from the animal kingdom through mutation and selection. They began to walk upright. Man became homo erectus. Thus man was able to leave the forests and outside to look over the high grass and identify prey and enemies. Man’s hands became free for work and fighting. The uterus, vagina, and clitoris moved more to the front of the female anatomy, and thus the sexual position changed between male and female, and the birth process between mother and child. Ninety-nine percent of human history were primordial history without writing, without names of individuals or nations, without religion and morality, and without any political or religious leadership (Horkheimer 1969; Küng 1991b: 25-28). The so-called homo sapiens has existed on this earth only since 200,000 years: since the old stone age. He was differentiated from the animals by an ego-consciousness and -control, and in the stone age was able to invent tools and weapons, and to instrumentalize fire, and to conquer the caves, which had been occupied so far by wild predators (Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; 1992; Fromm 1959; Küng 1991b: 25-28). The homo sapiens buried his dead, and brought sacrifices, and produced magically and religiously motivated cave paintings, reliefs and full plastics (Hegel 1986p; Küng 1991b: 25-28). Since the young stone age, 10,000 years ago, there have existed besides hunters, fishermen and food gatherers also more and more seditary farmers and cattle breeders. They erected villages with land possession and private property. So-called just wars and mutual terrorization took place. The One, or the Few began to dominate and exploit the Many (Hegel 1986l; 11-142; Küng 1991b: 25-28). The nature landscape changed into the culture landscape. The villages turned into the towns and into the cities, and in the city states civil society developed between family and state organization: e.g. in Jericho in the Jordan Valley, the walls of which can be dated back to 6800 BC or BCE. Only since 5,000 years BC have existed the early-historical high cultures and high religions. The first high culture developed before 3500 BC at the Euphrates and Tigris. Here were invented the wheel, the wagon, the potter’s wheel, the oldest counting system, predecessor of the computer, for the temple economy and for the construction of an order of gods in the cosmic system, and writing. Here began the written history, and the genuine historical time of humankind. Now not only administrative and economic data were written down, but later on also myths and legends. After 3000 BC the second high culture developed in the Nile Valley. Here

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not only a new form of writing was invented, but also agriculture with irrigation was developed, as well as cooperation, planning and organization. There existed a centralized administration with civil servants and priests. Through all this the formation of a strong state was possible. Around 2500 BC a third high culture developed in the Indus Valley in India. Around 1500 BC a fourth high culture came into existence in the Valley of the Yellow River in China: the Hongkong culture. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, according to the natural and human time line, the Abrahamic religions assert, that about 13 billion years after the Big Bang, the God who initiated it, spoke to Abraham and to Moses and to Jesus of Nazareth and to Mohammed, and according to Christianity even became flesh in this single person of the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth (Genesis; Exodus; John 1; The Holy Qur’an: Sura 1and 2; Hegel 1986q; Küng 1970; 1972; 1978; 1980; 1982; 1990b; 1991b; 1992; 1993; a1993b; 1994a; 2002; 2004; App. E).

Revenge The natural evolution and human history are the necessary precondition for the late development of the ethical dimension, of the religious and secular moral consciousness (Hegel 1986l: 11-142; 1986g; Habermas 1971; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1983; 1984a; 1986; 1988b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005; Küng 1991b: 25-28). Shakespeare’s Hamlet was still full of revenge and retaliation and full of the Jus and Lex Talionis and full of the related personal and collective insanity, and without the praxis of the Golden Rule in the rotten State of Denmark: in spite of the fact that he was a noble soul, and in spite of his connection with Martin Luther’s Wittenberg and the ProtestantEvangelical Paradigm of the Reformation of the 16th century, and in spite of his being in opposition to the New Testament, and the Sermon on the Mount of the Jewish-Apocalyptic Paradigm of the Primordial Christianity of the first century (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; Shakespeare 1878: 1165-1211; Hegel 1986c: 251; 1986n: 207; Adorno 1973d; 1973c; 1981; 1991a; 1997g; 1997j/1: 114-115; 1997j/2; 1997k; 1997o; 1997u; 2001a; Löwenthal 1970; 1990a; 1990b; Lukacs 1970; 1971; 1974; 1979; Küng 1994a: 89-144, 602-741). Against the background of the time line of natural and human evolution and history Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism and the Abrahamic religions appear to be rather recent developments (Hegel 1986p; Küng 1970; 1978; 1980; 1981; 1982; 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1998; 2002; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencrom/Bechert 1984; Metz; App. E) Against the background of the natural time line of 13 billion years or

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the human time line of 7 million years not even the Jewish parousia delay of 3,600 years, or the Christian parousia delay of 2,000 years, or the Islamic parousia delay of 1,400 years appear to be extraordinarily long (Hegel 1986q; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004; App. E). Against the natural and human time line Christian theologians may argue that Christianity is not so old after all, and that is not coming to its end after all, but that it has not even really started yet (Küng 1965; 1970; 1972; 1976; 1978; 1980; 1981b; 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 1998; 2002; 2003; Küng/ Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008; Metz 1959; 1962; 1963; 1965; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1978; 1980; 1981; 1984; 1995; 1997; 1998; 2006; Metz/Habermas/ Sölle 1994; Metz/Piters 1991; Metz/Rendtorf 1971; Metz/Wiesel 1993). Even such a deeply spiritual man as Master Eckhart asked in his mystical theology his disciples to remember their naturalness, their animality (Blakney 1941: 95-132). Of course, it was only when in man the longing awoke to move beyond the positivistically grasped and technologically controlled world of appearance and its bad infinity of graves, cemeteries and deaths into an impossible eternal life, that he began to become genuinely human (Küng 1982). There is more truth in the religious illusions and delusions than in the protocol sentences of the positivistic sciences (Marcuse 1961; 1970a; 1987.1995; 2001; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985a; 1985b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e). Of course, man has to negate his animality–otherwise there is only Auschwitz and Treblinka, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay–but he must also preserve it and he must fulfill the promises, which are given in the beauty of nature beyond nature in art, religion and philosophy, in order to deserve the name homo sapiens (Hegel 1986j; Keller 1972; 1994; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985a; 1985b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Adorno 1951; 1960; 1961; 1963; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1970b; 1973a; 1980a; 1980b; 1991b; 1993a; 1993c; 1995; 1996; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002b; 2002c; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d).

Naturalistic View The naturalistic view of natural and human evolution, including the history of the ethical dimension, of the religious and secular moral consciousness from the Lex Talionis to the Golden Rule and beyond, does of course not know, like the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, or the Holy Qur’an, or still Fichte’s, Schelling’s, or Hegel’s dialectical philosophy of any hidden

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guiding hand of divine Providence behind all natural and human history, so that the Hebrew Joseph could say to his brothers in Egypt: I am your brother Joseph, he whom you sold into Egypt... Now, do not be distressed or reproach yourself because you sold me hither; it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you… God has sent me ahead of you to ensure your survival on earth, and to save your lives in an extraordinary deliverance. So, it was not you who sent me here, but God: and he has made me a father to Pharao, lord of all his household, and ruler over the whole land of Egypt. (Genesis 45: 4-8; Exodus 21: 13; Lieber 2001: 276-277/4-8; Hegel 1986l; Lischer 1979; Shirk 1965; Küng 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004).

Guided by Providence, Joseph practiced no longer the Lex Talionis–revenge and retaliation–but rather already the Golden Rule: he treated his brothers, how he would like to be treated (Genesis 45: 4-8; Matthew 5: 38-62; 6: 25-34; 7: 12; Lieber 2001: 276-277/4-8; Hegel 1986l). Like Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer, so did also the critical theorists of society practice a weak naturalism (Hegel 1985a: 11, 36, 80, 91,101, 219, 242, 294, 304, 316, 338, 385, 420, 420, 436, 613, 614, 616, 617; Horkheimer 1885g: chaps 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1985l: 244-245, 246-247, 260-261, 264-265, 266-267, 277-278, 282-286, 286-287, 293-294, 294-296, 298-299, 299-301, 306, 312-313-315, 318-319, 483-493; Habermas 1970; 1971; 1973; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1982; 1983; 1984a; 1986; 1988a; 1988b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 1999; 201a; 2001b; 2002; 2004a; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2007; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Habermas/ Henrich 1974; Habermas/Luhmann; 1975; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006).

Terror and Counter-Terror The present–February 2010–war situation in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the religious terror and the secular counter-terror of virtue, freedom and democracy in the Near East after the neo-conservative trend turn of the late 1960s, and after the victorious neo-liberal counter-revolution of the late 1980s, and particularly after September 11, 2001, have been initiated, and motivated, and dominated by Right-Hegelian conservative revolutionaries, or better still, very successful counter-revolutionaries, for example, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, the Bush family, Paul Wolfowitz, or Donald Rumsfeld, and their economic, political, military, and cultural agents ad agenda (Habermas 1981, chaps. 9-466; 1985; 2006c; Borradori 2003). The deconstructionists, or post-modernists, not to speak of the Left-Hegelian praxis philosophers in Europe and America had no active part in

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the so-called war on terror, but even denied that this was a war at all in the sense of international law. They certainly did not have an active role in the war against Afghanistan, or in the second Iraq war, or in the war against Lebanon, or in the war and civil war going on in Palestine. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, terror means great fear (Borradori 2003; Habermas 2001a; 2006c). Terrorism means the policy of using acts inspiring great fear. Terror is a method of ruling or of conducting political opposition. To terrorize people means to fill them with terror and to dominate them by inducing terror. There is state terrorism, revolutionary terrorism, and nihilistic terrorism. There has been religious as well as secular terror in Medieval and Modern history. Long before the Shiites or Sunnis used religious terror as means of Jihad, it had been practiced by the Crusaders and the Inquisitors. Long before the “Alliance of the Willing” used secular terror of virtue, freedom and democracy in the name of national security in Afghanistan and Iraq, it had been practiced by the great bourgeois revolution in France from the fall of the Gerondists on June 2, 1793 to the fall of Robespierre, on July 27, 1794 (Horkheimer 1985: 238-239; 1988, chap. 3; 1989, chaps. 1517, 25). It was dominated by the Committee of Public Safety in Paris. This secular terror consisted of mass executions through the newly invented guillotine in order to galvanize national resistance in the face of foreign counter-revolutionary invasions.

Functionalization of Religion Unfortunately, the present ideological functionalization of religion in antagonistic civil society does not respect, recognize, preserve, and realize the prophetic texts of the three Abrahamic religions, but rather distorts them beyond recognition, and motivates a political and military praxis that is in direct contradiction to their original meaning (Schmidt 1972; Küng 1991; 1994; 2004; App. E). Can Christianity, Judaism, or Islam possibly survive such horrendous Machiavellian and blasphemous, hubrislike abuse? Of course, we can trace religion, troubled empires, terror and torture from Artaxerxes and the Persian Empire, and the torture-death of the soldier Mithradaites after the victory over Cyrus, the King’s brother, through the historical linkage of religious and political Manichaeism, to the second Bush Administration, and the American Empire, and Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay (Hegel 1986p: 390-405; App. E). Mithradaites was most cruelly killed because he rightly accused the King of having lied about his killing his brother, and was thus made falsely a liar himself, who followed Arhiman, the God of the lie and thus of darkness and evil, the

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opponent of Ahura Mazda, the God of light, and goodness, and the truth. Religion has changed from Zoroastrianism through Judaism and Christianity to Islam (Hegel 1986p: 390-405; 1986q; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; App. E). Yet, it has survived in always new forms.

Dialectical Definition The critical theory of religion remembers the warning of Friedrich Nietzsche, not to define anything that has a history and is still moving (Horkheimer 1974: 157-158). Religion, certainly, has a long history and it is still developing. Some people may say that Christianity has not even really started. Also, what is called civilization–Jewish civilization, Christian civilization, Islamic Civilization, and so on, has a history of hundreds of years and is still in process. Even the second Bush Administration has found out that the Rightwing Hegelian Francis Fukuyama had been wrong when he stated that history had come to its end with the climax of the victorious neo-conservative counter-revolution of 1989: the fall of the Soviet Empire. Recently, Fukuyama was, nevertheless, intelligent enough to leave the neo-conservative camp, movement, and think tanks in time. As usual, the rats are leaving the sinking ship! Obviously, the Jihadists have helped to re-start history again. In any case, the second Bush Administration seems to continue modern colonial and imperial history for better or for worse toward what Harvard Professor and Pentagon advisor Samuel Huntington–the disciple of the Hitler jurist and political theologian, and one of the fathers of both deconstructionism and neo-conservativism, Carl Schmitt–had called the clash of civilizations, instigated by Christianity on one hand, and Islam on the other, on the basis of Schmitt’s politicaltheological mythology and anthropology: aiming at the redemption of the unredeemed world (Huntington 1996, 1998; Meier 1994; Groh 1998). The second Bush Administration has not been post-modern so far but rather still very modern, when it engaged in Machiavellian style globalization, a very old modern phenomenon, in the form of neo-imperialism to the point of imperial hubris, and in the form of neo-colonialism in the service of the American and British oil magnates, not to speak of nationalism and religious fundamentalism. It seems that critical religion and critical theology as well as genuine modernity and enlightenment are still–as communicative and critical praxis–unfinished projects. We may, nevertheless, be allowed in this present war and terror situation to have at least a working definition of our focus point–religion. We define religion with the critical theorists of society as the longing for the wholly Other than the horror and

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terror of nature and history (Horkheimer 1985, chaps. 28-30, 32, 34, 37, 40).

Contradictory Notion The critical theory of society understands religion as a dialectical notion: it is contradictory, polemical and revolutionary in itself in relation to traditional and modern civil societies, states and empires (Hegel 1986q: 278291, 341-344; Horkheimer 1974: 16, 18, 92-83, 131-132; Siebert 2007c; 2008; App. E). Yet, religion’s dialectical character can also be harmonized and it can thus be functionalized for counter-revolutionary purposes. Shortly, there is good and bad religion (Horkheimer 1974: 92-93, 96-97, 121-123, 127, 131-133, 141-142, 148; Ott 2001; Siebert 2007c; 2008). Good religion is the impulse, which is carried through and out against the reality of civil society, state, and history, and which is still not yet completely suffocated through them, that things should become otherwise, and that the ban, the curse, and the spell of evil should be broken, and that things should turn to what is right: toward alternative Future III–the reconciled society (Horkheimer 1985g, chap. 37; App. G). Where life stands in this cipher of the longing for the wholly Other down to every gesture, there is good and genuine religion (Horkheimer 1974: 92-93; 1985g, chaps. 17, 29). To the contrary, bad religion is the impulse, which is perverted into affirmation that gilds the reality of traditional and modern civil societies, states and empires. This impulse is the vain lie. According to this impulse, the bad, the suffering, the horror have a meaning, be it through the earthly or be it through the heavenly future. The bad religion is the impulse, to give a positive meaning to Auschwitz and Treblinka, to Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all the horror and terror of nature and history for which these names stand (Horkheimer 1974: 92-93, 96-97, 121-123, 127, 131-133, 141-142, 148; 1989m, chaps. 15-16, 25, 30; Siebert 2007c). Good religion is the impulse, that things must become otherwise in society and history, so that a Vietnam, or an Iraq, including Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, or an Afghanistan, or a Lebanon, or a Palestine cannot happen any more, The bad religion, the lie, is in no need of the cross. It lives already in the notion of Transcendence. Where the good religion, the impulse toward what is right is genuine, there is no need for apologetics. This good impulse is not able to justify itself. As for the theologian Paul Tillich and for the sociologist Talcott Parsons, the ultimate concern or the concern for the Ultimate Reality can be shared by religious and secular people, so Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s impulse or longing for entire Oth-

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erness can have a religious and a secular form (Hegel 1986a: 344-345, 417; 1986b: 287-433; 1986c: 169, 423, 424; 1986e: 267, 270; 1986l: 174; 1986m: 135; 1986r: 173; 1986p: 9-88; 1986t: 386, 399, 407, 418; Tillich 1955; 1957: II, 9, 14, 26, 30, 87, 116; 1963: III, 102, 125, 130, 154, 223, 283, 287, 289, 293, 349, 422; 1972; 1977; 1983; Parsons 1964, chaps. I, II; 1965, chaps. I, II; Horkheimer 1985, chaps. 23, 25-30, 32, 34, 37, 40; 1996s: 62-67). The religious impulse and longing for total Otherness carry in themselves the possibility of reconciliation between the sacred and the profane, revelation and enlightenment, faith and knowledge (Hegel 1986a: 344-345, 417; 1986b: 287-433; 1986c: 169, 423, 424; 1986e: 267, 270; 1986l: 174; 1986m: 135; 1986p: 9-88; 1986r: 173; 1986t: 386, 399, 407, 418; Horkheimer 1985, chaps. 23, 25-30, 32, 34, 37, 40; Habermas 2001; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005).

Stages The critical theory of religion encounters four stages in the motion of the genuine critical, polemical, revolutionary, good religion (Horkheimer 1974: 92-93, 96-97, 121-123, 127, 131-133, 141-142, 148; Siebert 2007c; 2008; App. E). 1) 2) 3) 4)

The corruption in the secular society, state, or empire. The polemics of the good religion against this corruption and this sinfulness. The reaction of the corrupt society, state or empire, often legitimated by bad religion, against the protest, the polemics of the critical revolutionary good religion: non licet esse vos! [“You are not allowed to exist!] The victory of the martyred good religion over the persecuting society, state, or empire.

However, there can also be a compromise between religion and state in order to stop the persecution. The religion accommodates itself to the problematic state. Things go on as usual. Religion adjusts itself to the identity principle of the Empire, be it the Roman or American Empire, and is rewarded for it. The good religion may even turn into a bad religion and legitimate the state or empire in spite of its evil aspects. It may even take revenge on the former persecutors. Genuine, good religion is always the inversion of what is the case in the real world. If this good religion becomes positivistic and pragmatic in order to survive in a corrupt society, state, or empire, it betrays itself and moves into a niche of history and becomes irrelevant. It may even go under. The good religion, which inverts what is the case in society, state or empire, can be called with Diet-

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rich Bonhoeffer religion-less Christianity, or with Dorothy Sölle atheistic Christianity, or with Thomas Mann secular Christianity (Enns 2007: 167180; Sölle 1977; 1993; 1994; Mann 2004; De Chardin 1965; App. E).

Eye for Eye According to Francois de Voltaire and Arthur Schopenhauer, the origin of all wars was the desire and the lust for stealing: Dans toutes les guerres il nes’agit que de voler (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989: Vol. I, 287, 527). In July 2007 the American Congress was working on the privatization of the Iraqi oilfields, so that they can be appropriated by the American oil magnates as a consequence of the first and second Iraq wars. While robbery is definitely one motivation for war, revenge and retaliation is certainly another one. Hitler’s war was driven by revenge as well as by the lust for robbery: by revenge against the West, and by stealing against the East. Whatever may have been the different economic or political motivations and goals of the attack against the World Trade Centers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and of the prevented attack against the Congress Building, the Capitol, or the White House, on September 11, 2001, and the resulting wars against and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq in the past eight years, it has become quite obvious, that the religious principle of the Jus or Lex Talionis has also played an important role (Siebert 2005; 2006). The Torah teaches: “But should she (the pregnant woman, who had been beaten by a man) die you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stroke for stroke” (Exodus 21: 24-25). The New Testament teaches: “You have heard how it was said: Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth. But I say this to you: offer the wicked man no resistance. On the contrary, if anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well” (Matthew 5: 3842). The Holy Qur’an teaches following the Torah: “freeman for freeman, and slave for slave” (Surah 2: 190, 193). To be sure, on a certain stage of the evolution of moral consciousness the Lex Talionis came to be a limiting law: one eye for one eye, and no more. Unfortunately, in the present wars the stronger party tends to remove this limiting character of the Jus Talionis and takes ten or even more eyes for one eye: for example, the lives of 1 million Iraqis for the lives of 3,000 Americans, in spite of the fact that Iraq had nothing at all to do with September 11, 2001.

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Retaliation: A Taste of Suffering Osama bin Laden as well as Mohammed Atta have left no doubt that they were motivated by the intent of retaliation: they wanted to give the Americans a taste of all the suffering they had caused other people in years past: at least from the terror saturation-bombings in Europe, through Hiroshima and Nagasaki to their involvement in Iraq, Somalia, Southern Sudan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Kashmir, and in the Israeli struggles in Palestine and Lebanon (Lawrence 2005). The Holy Qur’an teaches: “Fight for the sake of Allah those who fight you, but do not violate the limits, Allah does not love aggressors” (Surah 2: 190). “Fight them until there is no more chaos and oppression, until there is justice and faith in Allah. If they cease hostilities, let there be no hostility except for those who oppress” (Surah 2: 193). Osama bin Laden said in an interview in November and December 2001: We ourselves are the victims of murder and massacres. We are only defending ourselves against the United States. This is a defensive jihad to protect our land and people. That’s why I have said, that if we don’t have security, neither will the Americans. It’s a very simple equation that any American child could understand: live and let others live. The events of 22nd Jumada al-Thani, or Aylul, are merely a response to the continuous injustice inflicted upon our sons in Palestine, Iraq, Somalia, southern Sudan, and other places, like Kashmir. The matter concerns the entire Umma. People need to wake up from their sleep, and try to find a solution to this catastrophe, that is threatening all of humanity (Lawrence 141).

Revenge Wars Today–February 2010–the American revenge wars in Afghanistan and Iraq fiercely continue undiminished and have even escalated further. Over 3,500 American soldiers have been killed, while they were killing others in Iraq alone. Over 25,000 American soldiers were wounded and crippled for life in body or soul, or both, while they were wounding and crippling others in Iraq alone. Already in the first Iraq war, over 400 children were incinerated by a single rocket attack on one bunker in Baghdad alone. Between the first and the second Iraq war, 500,000 children were killed by the international embargo. Former U.S. Secretary of State, Madelyn Albright, took responsibility for the death of these children. She stated that the death of the children had been necessary and worthwhile as a means for changing President Saddam Hussein’s regime. In the meantime, Albright

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has many times regretted and apologized for her statement, but not for the fact that the children have been killed. So far over 1 million civilians have been killed in Iraq since the beginning of the second war. Over a thousand civilians, among them many children, have been killed during the recent Israeli invasion into Lebanon. A new war against Iran may be possible, probable, and even imminent, since the psychological warfare and the attack fleet of carriers have been in place since quite some time. Daily the most primitive, archaic, and necrophilous Jus Talionis has been practiced in recent years on both sides in Palestine, in Israel, in Lebanon, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in the Sudan, and elsewhere.

Redemption Toward the end of the 19th century, the great atheistic thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche, had hoped that humankind would be redeemed from the urge of revenge and retaliation some day (Nietzsche 1967a: 30-32, 42-47, 203409, 443-447, 450-454). Yet, the spell and the ban of the most mythological Jus Talionis–including terroristic rocket-bombardments, suicide attacks, aerial saturation bombings, imprisonments, tortures of all kinds, hangings, decapitations, shootings, renditions–continue unbroken and are even escalated into our present historical situation–February 2010. Crime is committed against crime, without the order of private right, personal and social morality, and of law being mythically or otherwise restored (Hegel 1986: 198-292). As crime is committed against crime, criminality is only multiplied and escalated into the future in terms of a bad infinity. Children and grandchildren shall have to pay the price for it, with their own property and lives. Deeper and deeper becomes the abyss between political, military, and historical facticity on one hand, and religious as well as secular-humanistic ethical, and moral, and legal validity, on the other (Habermas 1992; 2001; Borradori 1994). As the unholy trinity of stealing, killing, and lying continues from day to day, the guilt connection among individuals and nations intensifies and spreads and enslaves them more and more. Genuinely religious and humanistic people try in vain to break the bad, quantitative infinity of nature and history through their insatiable longing for the good qualitative Infinity–the wholly Other than the horror, and the terror, and the curse of natural and historical finitude (Hegel 1986c: 131-132, 33; 1986d: 16, 87-88, 185-187; 1986e: 145, 149166; 1986l: 30-55; Schopenhauer 1986; Horkheimer 1967, chaps. 252, 269; 1985g, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 28-30, 32, 34, 37, 40).

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Lawlessness and Immorality In the meantime, global protest–weak and powerless as it may be against the iron will of the globalizing corporate ruling class–has, nevertheless, arisen and continues against the application of the Lex Talionis, and the increasing lawlessness and immorality connected with it in particular, and the neo-conservative or neo-liberal agenda in general: concerning the war against Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon (Wettig 2006: 18-21). Thus, for example, in April 2003, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Israel, decided to ban President Bush junior and Prime Minister Blair from the birthplace of Jesus of Nazareth, who had broken the Lex Talionis in his socalled Sermon on the Mount, and replaced it by the love of the enemy and the Golden Rule: “So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the meaning of the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 5: 38-48; Horkheimer 1989m, chaps. 15, 20; Global Research 2006). The Church of the Nativity stands under the authority of the Greek Orthodox Church (Küng 1994: 145-335). The Church remembers not only the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, but also, in connection with it, the killing of all the two year old male children in Bethlehem and its surroundings by Herod, the King of Judea, Idumaea, and Samaria, who governed from 37-4 BC, and was known as a mass murderer (Matthew 2: 1-23). The Church of the Nativity decided to ban Bush and Blair access into the Nativity Shrine forever because they were war criminals and the murderers of children. Their entry into the Church would tarnish it as (Bush’s) hands were covered in the blood of the innocent. The spirit of Christmas consisted in spreading peace and justice. The spirit of Christmas was when war criminals were banned from the birthplace of Jesus, the Christ. The Church of the Nativity banned the American President Bush and the British Prime Minister Blair in Israel in spite of the fact that the USA and Britain are the closest allies of Israel (Grosbard 2001; Rebhuhn/Levy 2006: 391-414). The U.S. news media have so far–February 2010–not yet reported this story of the Church of the Nativity’s decision in Israel. This is what the Jeffersonian freedom of the press has come down to.

Regime Change The neo-conservative application of the Lex Talionis and the consequent national and international lawlessness and immorality, and the global protest against it, reached a new climax with the unilateral regime change in Baghdad, and with the trial and execution of President Saddam Hus-

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sein. As the transfer of President Hussein by the American authorities to the Iraqi authorities and his long planned execution through hanging approached in the last days of the so bloody year 2006, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in Lebanon and Palestine and elsewhere, the Vatican, the center of the Roman Catholic Church, which had condemned the first and second Iraq war as unjust and immoral, announced that this death penalty imposed by an Iraqi court under American occupation and influence meant only the retaliation for one crime by another one: Jus Talionis (Küng 1994: 336-601; Global Research 2006; Schwartz 2006: 1-4; Wadlow 2006: 3-5; Grosbard 2001; Rebhuhn/Levi 2006: 391-414). President Hussein was not tried and sentenced to death and executed for having attacked two neutral countries in peace time, two international war crimes which he shared with President Bush junior, who initiated the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, but because he retaliated for an assassination attempt against his own life by killing over 200 Shiites.

Death Penalty Already when the neo-liberal President Bush junior was still Governor of Texas, the Vatican had tried several times to intervene into and prevent one or the other of the over 150 executions that took place under his governance: more than in any other state of the Union. Not only the Roman Catholic Church but also members from the World Council of Churches started to resist neo-conservative economic, political, and military lawlessness and immorality. When a born again prisoner in the born again Governor Bush’s Texas prisons asked him for mercy and the commutation of her death penalty, he ridiculed her publicly on television and let her be executed next day: Lex Talionis by one so-called Christian on another! The Governor must have misunderstood the Rabbi Jesus’ teaching on being born gain even more so than Nicodemus from the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem in his nightly discourse with the Nazarene: Jesus–“I tell you most solemnly, unless a man is born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus–“How can a grown man be born? Can he go back into his mother’s womb?” (Matthew 19-28; Titus 3: 5; John 3: 4, 5; 1 Peter 1: 3; Titus 3: 5). Nicodemus was not too far removed in his literalist consciousness from the modern American religious and political fundamentalism– or from that of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

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Legal and Psychological Preparations In spite of the protest and resistance of the Catholic and Protestant Christian Churches and of Islamic organizations, particularly of the Sunni persuasion, the American and Iraqi legal and psychological preparations for President Saddam Hussein’s execution went ahead for months in a trial in Baghdad, which suffered from many procedural flaws, some of which were intended to hide the American complicity in his war against Iran (Horkheimer 1988n: 67; MacFarquhar 2006; Canetti 1960, chaps. 1, 4, 5; Opitz 2006: 41-44; Harprecht 2006: 11-14). The United States had supported President Hussein in his unjust war against Iran and had provided him with mustard gas, which had been invented by the Jewish-German General Fritz Haber in 1915, and which was a weapon of mass destruction outlawed by the Geneva Convention; just like later on the American Government supported Osama Bin Laden in his struggle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan (Lawrence 2005). One of the flaws of the trial against President Hussein was the Baghdad court’s lack of independence from the Iraqi and the American Governments. The Iraqi Government changed the judges at least three times, when they did not perform according to its and American intentions. Another flaw was that President Saddam Hussein could not confront and question the witnesses appearing against him. Beyond that, President Hussein and his co-defendants, and his defense team, including the former American Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, knew very well that the American corporate ruling class and the American Government and its Iraqi puppet-government had already preordained the death penalty through hanging for all the defendants before the trial even started. As the execution date approached, in the end of the year 2006, the American and global mass media showed in graphic detail–to psychologically prepare its viewers for the execution of President Hussein–what the hanging of a human being entailed, so that all citizens would know exactly how cruelly the American Empire practices the Jus Talionis and punishes high level government officials, democratically legitimated or not, in dependent states who do not obey the commands of the American corporate ruling class and its rackets and coolies (Hearit 2006). After President Hussein’s execution, Human Rights Watch released a report calling the speedy trial and subsequent hanging of Saddam proof of the new Iraqi Governments disregard for human rights, not to speak of the American Government (Abdul-Zhara 2007: 1-4). The director of the Human Rights Watch’s international justice program stated: “The tribunal repeatedly showed its disregard for the fundamental due process rights

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of all the defendants” (Abdul-Zhara 2007: 1-4; Habermas 1975; 1978c; 1981c; 1982; 1983; 1984a; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1988b; 1990; 1991b; 1992a). Of course, the Human Rights Watch did not make the slightest difference in American or Iraqi governmental behavior. Might had become Right! History is made and written by the victors, not by the victims (Benjamin 1977, chap. 10). As late as Easter 2007, Pope Benedict XVI condemned the war in Iraq once more by saying in his Message to the world that it was a butchery, and that nothing good could possible come from it. The Democratic Party in the American Congress agreed with the Pope: not so President Bush junior, who continued to escalate his crusade for freedom and democracy, i.e. not for the freedom of All, but rather of the Few; for the American and international bourgeois power elite in the form of the so-called Search.

Service to the Corporate Ruling Class The global corporate ruling class, engaged in globalization and faced by Middle East terrorism, is treating people very differently depending upon whether they serve it well or not (Sullivan 2006: 1-3; Reese 2006: 1-2). Some people are rewarded and others punished. As an example of this, President Gerald R. Ford and President Saddam Hussein both died in the last week of the bloodiest year of the Iraq war, the year 2006 (Woodward 2006: 1-4; Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4; Harprecht 2006: 11-14; Auken 2007: 1-4). Both men had served the same transnational, corporate ruling class, what President Eisenhower had called the Military-Industrial Complex, particularly the oil magnates and their many rackets: the bourgeois masters of the free market and the globalized economy, and its social, political, and military consequences (Meyer 2006: 344-47; Hearit 2006). Yet, President Ford humbly obeyed the many mediated commands of the corporate ruling class throughout his life and work as a lawyer, a politician, a President, and a commander in chief, and thus became wealthy, and peacefully reached the ripe, satisfied, and fulfilled old age of the patriarchs in the Hebrew Bible in the midst of his loving family, and had a funeral with all state honors in Washington D.C. which was attended by many friends, including many old conservatives and neo-conservatives, and then was flown with his family and friends in the stately Air force One for an honorable burial in a grave close to his museum in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan (Woodward 2006: 1-4; Canetti 1960: 66-92). Sic transit gloria mundi! [“Thus passes the glory of the world!”] In contrast, President Hussein somewhere in his career as

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a lawyer, a politician, a President, and a commander in chief, began to misunderstand or to rebel against the manifold mediated commands of the international corporate ruling class, consisting of bankers and industrialists, particularly oil magnates, and all their rackets (Torchia/AbdulZarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4; Canetti 1960: 66-92; Fisk 2006: 1-2). He made the mistake of nationalizing the large Iraqi oil resources, and to use part of the profits to have free schools and free hospitals for his people, and thus, had progressed further in terms of social justice than the United States. President Hussein made the mistake not only of committing international crimes, which served the interests of the globalizing corporate ruling class, such as his war against Iran, but also those against it, like his invasion into the wealthy Kuwait, in order to overcome the bankruptcy of the Iraqi state caused by the costly war against Iran. Thus, Saddam was first demonized by Western propaganda, and he then was hanged by his taunting political enemies, and had to die without his family, which partially had already been liquidated either by himself or by his American enemies, and was thrown–as one of his accusers said–on the “garbage dumb of history.” He had a small, poor, miserable burial without any family or close friends, and without all honors in his hometown of Al-Awja, outside Tikrit, Iraq. Sic transit gloria mundi! Nearby Saddam had surrendered to the invading American troops as a prisoner of war, stating that he was the President of Iraq and that he could be helpful in negotiations. He was not taken seriously any longer. Saddam was a dictator, first created and then destroyed by America, as so many others in the Near East, and in Latin and Central America, and elsewhere around the globe in the past 100 years of American invasions and regime changes in the interest of American big business (Hegel 1986l: 111-114; Mercieca 2006; Fisk 2006: 1-2; Sherriff 2006: 106; Harprecht 2006: 11-12). Thus, Saddam’s life was one of many political tragedies! That at least is what the historical equation appears to be. Yet, only for the positivists are appearance and essence identical. This is not so for the dialecticians (Hegel 1986f: 17-185; 1986l: 19-55, 215-274; Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4; Canetti 1960: 66-92; Fisk 2006: 1-2; Sherriff 2006: 1-6; Meyer 2006: 44-47).

Execution President Saddam Hussein was executed in a prison in Baghdad on Saturday, December 30, 2006, on Eid al-Adha, a Sunni-Islamic feast day, at 6:00 a.m. (Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Frayer/Mattar 2007: 1-4). The execution took place during the year 2006’s deadliest month for the U.S.

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troops, with the toll reaching 113 American servicemen and women. At this time, over 3,000 members of the US military had already died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003. This was more human beings than had been killed in the attacks on New York and Washington D.C. 2 years earlier, on September 11, 2001. In addition there were over 25,000 wounded American soldiers. The Iraqi civilian casualties–“collateral damage” in U.S. military jargon–count over 600,000 in July 2007, over half of them women and children (Davies 2006: 1-3). The limiting Lex Talionis no longer has any limits (Siebert 2005; 2006). Iraq’s death penalty had been suspended by the U.S. military after it toppled President Hussein in 2003. Yet, the new Iraqi Government re-instated the death penalty two years later, in 2005, with the consent of the American Government, when President Saddam Hussein’s trial started, saying that executions would deter criminals (Hegel 1986a: 440-442, 614, 620; Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3). Saddam’s request to be shot honorably like a soldier, instead of being hanged shamefully like a common criminal, had been denied by the American guided Iraqi courts, together with all other appeals. The American military authorities delivered President Hussein, a Sunni, to his Iraqi executioners, who were Shiites, and who were very much intent on revenge and retaliation for the crimes he had committed against them: Lex Talionis (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-48; Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4; Siebert 2005; 2006). In the pre-execution turmoil, the American authorities very much wanted the execution to be postponed by two weeks, in order to make it “more orderly.” The new President of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, was against the death penalty in general and therefore refused to sign the constitutionally required execution order. However, the new Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, wanted Saddam to die before the New Year 2007 began. Therefore, al-Maliki declared the President’s signature to be unnecessary and signed the execution order himself. As the American military authorities delivered Saddam to his revengeful Shiite executioners, they of course took sides in the Iraqi civil war–as they once did in the Vietnamese civil war on the side of the Diemfascists against the Giap-communists. Now, the U.S. military authorities sided with one of the Iraqi war parties, the Shiites, against the other, the Sunnis, and the residuals of the Baath Party, and Generals, and Al-Qaida, and the foreign fighters, which would have disastrous consequences for the rest of the overall Iraqi as well as Afghanistan tragedy. It is the Shiites who are the majority in Iraq, but who are the minority elsewhere, and who are despised throughout the Middle East and elsewhere.

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Allah Akbar The American authorities did not tell President Saddam Hussein, when he went to bed on Friday night, December 29, 2006, that early next morning he would be pulled out of bed and would be delivered to the Iraqi authorities in order to be hanged by a Shiite lynch mob in the most barbarous way (Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3). Maybe in the general turmoil and confusion not even the American guards of the President Hussein knew what would happen early next morning. When, shortly before his execution, President Saddam Hussein was delivered by the American military to his Shiite executioners, he carried The Holy Qur’an in his hand. He had nothing to say any longer to his American captors. However, he spoke to the Iraqi, mainly Shiite crowd, which was gathered for his execution. Before his black-hooded hangmen put the rope around his neck, Saddam shouted: “Allah Akbar! The nation will be victorious and Palestine is Arab!” Arabic nationalism, including Islamic and socialistic elements, prevailed with Saddam up to his end! Saddam appeared calm but scornful of his Shiite captors as he stood on the metal framework of the gallows (Hurst 2006: 1-4). He exchanged taunts with them. He engaged in give and take with the crowd gathered eagerly to watch him die (Canetti 1960; 1972: 66-92, 104-132; Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4). Saddam insisted that he was Iraq’s savior, not its tyrant or scourge. Saddam stated that he and his friends were going to Heaven, and that their enemies would rot in hell. Saddam also called for forgiveness and love among the Iraqis. Yet, he also demanded that the Iraqis should continue to fight the Americans and the Persians. One of the Shiite guards shouted at Saddam: “You have destroyed us. You have killed us. You have made us live in destitution.” Saddam responded: “I have saved you from destitution and misery. I have destroyed your enemies, the Persians and the Americans.” “God damn you.” the guard said. “God damn you,” Saddam responded. The dialectic of mass and power, of the one and the many, of the one on one side, and the crowd in the execution room and the masses watching the execution on Iraqi and global television on the other, worked itself out with all brutality and cruelty (Hegel 1986e: 174-208; Canetti 1972: 122124; 1960; Mosse1977). However, Saddam seemed to smile at those Shiites taunting him to the end from below the gallows. Some voices chanted “Mokthada, Mokthada”, the given name of the radical anti-American Shiite cleric Mokthada al Sadr, whose Mahdi army militia is believed to be connected with Iran, and to have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Sunnis in the past year 2006 (Ladurner 2006: 16-18). President

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Hussein looked statesman like in his long black coat. Saddam said to the Shiite crowd, that they were not showing “manhood.” Then Saddam began to recite the Shahada. It is a Muslim prayer, which says that there is no god but God, and that Muhammad is his messenger. Saddam made it midway through his second recitation of the verse, when his hangmen cut him off. His last word was Muhammad. Then, the floor dropped out of the gallows. “The tyrant has fallen,” some Shiites shouted in the crowd of immediate onlookers. Then came another Shiite voice from the Shiite hanging pack: “Let him swing for three minutes” (Canetti 1972; 1960). It appeared through the cell phone cameras as if Saddam had fallen victim to a Shiite lynch mob, which was tolerated by a Shiite Government and by the American occupation force. A post-execution picture showed a large bloody spot at the front of the neck of Saddam, and thus made obvious to the world the extreme cruelty and inhumanity of the whole lynch procedure, following quite logically the other crimes in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, initiated and inspired by the American neo-conservative agenda.

Public Reactions Soon afterwards, far away from the Baghdad prison where President Saddam Hussein had been hanged, Sheil Yahya al-Attani, a Sunni cleric at the Saddam Big Mosque, said: “The President, the leader Saddam Hussein, is a martyr, and God will put him along with other martyrs” (Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4). “Do not be sad or complain, because he has died the death of a holy warrior.” Also the Vatican condemned the execution as an act of revenge and as practice of the Lex Talionis. In the first days of 2007, the City of Rome lighted up the Coliseum, in which many Christian martyrs had been executed, in remembrance of President Saddam Hussein’s execution and in protest against it. Also, the U.S.A.’s closest ally in the war against Iraq, the British Government, which had abolished the death penalty after World War II, condemned the execution of President Saddam Hussein, whom it had helped to depose against international law and against the will of the UN Security Council. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that the execution of Saddam Hussein prevented the exposure of the secrets and the crimes of the former dictator committed during his brutal rule (Ladurner 2006: 16-18). He meant particularly the secrets and crimes connected with Saddam’s war against Iran, which had been supported by the United States. In December 1983, during Iraq’s war against Iran, the

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neo-conservative Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy of President Ronald Reagan and until his resignation on November 8, 2006 Secretary of Defense in President G. W. Bush’s two Administrations, led an American delegation to President Saddam Hussein to express support for Iraq in the war. The U.S.A. supplied to Iraq the mustard gas, which had been developed by the German-Jewish General, Fritz Haber, early in World War I, in support of the German attacks against Belgium and France (Siebert 2006). While the American partisanship in the Iraq civil war for the Shiite government would have serious consequences for the ongoing war and for the future fate of Iraq, the immediate consequence of President Saddam Hussein’s execution was large, but mostly peaceful. Sunni protest rallies were conducted all around Baghdad and Iraq. There was, however, also a rise in Sunni violence not only in Baghdad, but also all over the country in retaliation and revenge for the President Saddam Hussein’s most cruel and inhumane death. It was already clear in January 2007, that the Shiite Unity Government and the American and British Governments would be held responsible for the rest of Iraqi history, no matter how long it would last, not only for President Hussein’s in many ways flawed trial in Baghdad but also for his lynch execution; for the two wars against Iraq, and their military casualties on both sides, and for their large civilian casualties–the so-called collateral damages; for Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and for all the consequent misery, pain and suffering in the present and in the future. These governments would be held responsible no matter how much they would try to correct this impression and judgment of the people in Iraq, in the whole Near East, and even in Islamic communities and states around the globe, or attempt to whitewash or re-write history. Generations of particularly Americans and British would have to pay for all that horror and terror with their property and their lives for many years to come; eye for eye, if the iron chain and spell of the Jus Talionis would not be broken (Scheurer 2007: 1-2; Miller 2007: 1-2; Abdullah 2006; Siebert 2006). It is thus no wonder that the neo-conservative television evangelist and preacher, Pat Robertson, predicted on January 3, 2007 a deadly terror attack on the U.S. during the new year, which would cost the lives of millions of people (Torchia 2007: 1-3; AP 2006: 1-4; Siebert 2006). He claimed that God told him so. Lex Talionis all over again (Siebert 2006). Maybe it was Robertson’s own scrupulous, if also somewhat selective Protestant conscience, which told him so: selective in relation to socialist and Muslim enemies, which according to the Sermon on the Mount he was supposed to love (Matthew 5: 43-48). Robertson did not say that God intended to do something about the impending new horrible

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theodicy and prevent it, or that humanity would finally in the year 2007 be redeemed from the Jus Talionis, or would liberate itself from the ugly age-old, primitive and archaic urge to revenge itself, privately or collectively, through wars, terror attacks, flawed show-trials, or public executions (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; Hegel 1986a: 440-442, 613-614, 6-19-620; Siebert 2006). An American toy factory reached the peak of the general tastelessness of the culture industry and of enlightenment as mass deception when it produced a doll of Saddam Hussein with a robe around its neck (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 120-167). The Saddam doll was selling well to the children of America on the free market. The only excuse of the producer was that this was just the kind of things he was doing: making dolls for children out of contemporary public events and issues. Already the children are introduced into the mysterium iniquitatis of revenge and retaliation (Siebert 2005; 2006).

Investigation In response to the national and international upheaval about the barbarous execution of President Saddam Hussein, on January 2, 2007 the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, ordered an investigation into it, but not concerning the inhuman taunting that occurred during its procedure, but rather concerning its being made public through the use of several cell phone cameras (Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4; Scheurer 2007: 1-2; Miller 2007: 1-2; Abdullah 2006; Abdul-Zhara 2007: 1-4). The supervisor of the execution and two guards came under suspicion. The Prime Minister promised that the next executions of two codefendants of Saddam Hussein would be more “orderly” (Frayer/Mattar 2007: 1-4). When President Hussein’s younger half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim, was executed together with another co-defendant, Awad Harmed al-Bandar, like President Hussein in the Saddam-era military intelligence headquarters building in the Shiite north Baghdad neighborhood of Kazimiyah at 3.00 a.m. on January 16, 2007, they were merely wearing Guantanamostyle red orange jumpsuits, but they were not taunted. Like President Hussein before, they also prayed the Shahada, shortly before they were executed. However, when Saddam’s younger brother was hanged, his head was severed: the hanging turned into a decapitation. By day’s end, at least 3,000 angry Sunnis protested by firing their guns into the air, weeping, or they were cursing the Iraqi and American Governments at the burial of Ibrahim in Al-Awja. Another global outcry of protest followed.

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Human Rights The American mass media, particularly the powerful Rightwing, neoconservative, most Government-conformed Fox News television and radio-stations described the crimes of the two co-defendants of Saddam Hussein in detail in order to justify the new public crime of their gruesome hanging or decapitation. According to Fox News, one of the men protesting the hanging asked in grief and utter frustration: Where are those who cry out and demand human rights: Where are the UN and the world human rights organizations? Barzan had cancer. They treated him only to keep him alive long enough to kill him. We vow to take revenge even if it takes years.

Ibrahim’s son in law Azzam Saleh Abdullah said: We heard the news from the media. We were supposed to have the information a day earlier, but it seems that the Government does not know the rules. It reflects the hatred for the Sunnis felt by the Shiite-led Government. They still want more Iraqi bloodshed. To hell with democracy.

The new Iraqi Government has obviously not only inherited the Iraqi sectarian hate, but also the American neo-conservative disrespect for legal and moral rules from the Nixon through the Reagan to the two Bush Administrations. A spokes woman for the new UN Secretary-General, Ban Kimoon, said “he regrets that despite pleas from both himself and the High Commissioner for human rights to spare the lives of the two defendants, Ibrahim and al-Bandar, they were both executed.” On Monday, January 15, 2007, the Martin Luther King Day 2007, Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, said during a press conference with her Egyptian counterpart in Luxor, Egypt, that the executions in Baghdad had been “mishandled,” and that she hoped that those responsible for making the cell phone videos of Saddam’s execution would be punished. Of course, she did not include in that hope the Shiite lynch mob, who taunted, mocked, and executed him. Rice stated with the usual neo-conservative or neoliberal hypocrisy: “We are disappointed that there was not greater dignity given to the accused under these circumstances”.

Revenge against Revenge On Monday, January 15, 2007, the Iraqi Government reported that at least 55 people were killed or found dead in Baghdad. On the same Martin Luther King Day, the U.S. military announced the death of two more

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soldiers killed in Baghdad. The mutual application of the Lex Talionis, revenge against revenge, has continued every day up to this time–February 2010–without redemption in the Jewish, Christian or Islamic, or even the Buddhist sense (Küng 2004: 19-55; Siebert 2006; 2005). On Tuesday, January 16, 2007, in revenge for the execution of President Hussein and his two aids over 109 Iraqis were killed outside a Baghdad University and over 200 people were wounded as students were heading home for the day, and 4 American soldiers were killed in Northern Iraq (Gamel 2007: 1-4). A few days later, on January 20, 2007, 20 U.S. Service members were killed in Iraq (Mroue 2006: 1-4). A few days later, on January 22, 2007, the Al Qaeda Deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, mocked and challenged U.S. President George W. Bush’s plan to increase Iraq troop numbers by over 21,000 troops in a video message intercepted by the U.S. based terrorism think-tank Site, to send the entire army to Iraq (BBC News 2007: 1). He threatened that the Iraqi insurgents would bury 10 armies like those of Mr. Bush. His strategy in Iraq was going to fail. Al Zawahiri asked the President, why send 20,000 troops only–why not send 50,000 or 100,000? He asked President Bush: “Aren’t you aware that the dogs of Iraq are pining over your troops’ dead bodies?” That is the hateful archaic language of revenge. On January 16, 2007, the UN announced that the death toll in Iraq for 2006 topped 34,000 Iraqis. The Golden Rule, which all three Abrahamic religions, Buddhism, and the other world religions share, as well as the global ethos project, which is built on the Golden Rule as well as on the categorical imperative and the a priori of the universal communication community, remains mute and unrealized as Modernity continues un-negated in the neo-conservative and neo-liberal form of globalization. Only its Orwellian and Huxlean lies, hypocrisy, and lawlessness point to global post-Modern alternative Future I–the totally administered, loveless and meaningless world, and to global post-modern alternative Future II– the entirely militarized more and more murderous world: “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength” (Orwell 1961: 7, 17, 87-88, 152153; Huxley 1969; Adorno1997j/2: 9-10, 47-71, 97-122, 375-395, 573-594, 608-616, 674-690, 702-740, 785-802; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Küng 1990; 1991: 486-536, 537-762; 1994: 869-906; 2004: Parts D and E; Siebert 2006; 2005; Meyer 2006: 22-27; App. F, G).

Facticity and Validity In his press conference with the Christian-Democratic German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, on January 4, 2006, the neo-conservative President

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Bush junior supported the investigation into President Saddam Hussein’s execution by the Iraqi Prime Minister, but–like his Secretary of State–refused to condemn the Shiite henchmen, who taunted him before his hanging (Frayer/Mattar 2007: 1-4; Abdul-Zhara 2007: 1-4). It seems that like Machiavelli or Pareto, the teacher of Benito Mussolini, before, so President Bush junior and his cabinet often seem to be blind for the essential difference between facticity and validity: namely, that the mere fact that a President, whose government has been recognized internationally for over three decades, has factually and effectively been removed by a foreign government through overwhelming power, force, war, and execution, does not yet mean that this procedure was rightful, moral, ethical, or legal, and that thus it has validity in any religious or secular sense (Habermas 1992). Not even the United Nations has the right to perform a regime change in any of its member states, or in any other state outside itself. Only a nation itself has the right to remove its government, if it threatens its existence. Regime change in one nation through unilateral intervention, first strike, war, occupation, terror or executions by another state can never be ethically or legally universalized. The very fact that often before in American or European history, might has been right de facto does not mean that, therefore, this principle has validity, and can be an excuse for present or future overwhelming military interventions. This principle of might is right also does not gain validity through the very fact that the enemy practiced it as well nationally or internationally. If I imitate my enemy and thus become like him, what is the purpose in fighting him? Injustices have the tendency to generate further injustices, and even escalate them, rather than to restore the violated order of right and personal, social, political, or historical morality. That has been the curse of the Jus or Lex Talionis through centuries. That is under all circumstances to be broken, and not to be continually reproduced, so that the horrible theodicy problem is further increased (Genesis 34; Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-48; Hertz 5716/1956: 127-129/1-31; Leibniz 1996, vol. I and II; Hegel 1986l: 28, 540, 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Oelmüller 1990; Torchia/Abdul-Zarah 2006: 1-3; Hurst 2006: 1-4; Siebert 1993; 2006). Under the condition of always more sophisticated weapons of mass destruction, such increase of the theodicy problem may very well mean the end of the human species in the form of a Third World War among the religion-based civilizations carried out with ABC weapons, as foreseen by Samuel Huntington and his followers. Shortly, the reduction of validity to facticity, or of right to might, cannot possibly be universalized in terms of the Golden Rule, or of its secularization and rationalization in the form of

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the categorical imperative, or of the a priori of the unlimited communication community (Apel 1975, vol. II, 155-436; Habermas 1983; 1991; 1992; Küng 1990; Siebert 2006; Lee 2006). If these universalizing principles are continually violated, only the always-escalating Lex Talionis and the consequent horror of the deepening theodicy problem are left (Siebert 2005; 2006).

Abolishment of the Death Penalty The critical theorist of religion remembers that Christian social ethics evolved only very slowly to the point when finally in the 20th century it was ready to find the death penalty implausible and unacceptable, and agreed with the modern enlighteners’ attempts to abolish it (Hegel 1986a: 440-442, 613-614, 619-620; Canetti 1960; 1972; Opitz 2006: 41-44). The death penalty had been quite customary in Antiquity, Medieval and Modern Europe, under the slaveholders, and the feudal lords, as well as under the bourgeois ruling class (Hegel 1986a: 440-442, 613-614, 6-19-620). Unfortunately, also the moral and legal and practical track record of the different Christian paradigms as well as of the other world religions concerning death penalty, as well as torture, or slavery has rather been miserable. Before World War II, only Norway had been humanistic and social-minded enough to abolish the death penalty in its territory. Yet, from 1945 on, when the European nations wanted to extract themselves from the bestiality of two world wars, and wanted to rediscover their normative identity and base in their seedbed societies of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome–the Golden Rule and its secular modern inversion into the categorical imperative and the a priori of the unlimited communication community, as well as autonomy, humanism, scientific rationality, universalistic humanity, democracy, constitutional state, and social market economy–they as well as the U.S.A. were so repelled and disgusted by the all too frequent and criminal application of the death penalty by the fascist regimes, particularly by the most revengeful Adolf Hitler, that they were ready and willing to abolish the death penalty (Kant 1929: 472-474, 633-634; 1946; 1975: 40-54, 55-61, 77-93, 113-122, 129-131; Hegel 1986g: 398-514; 1986q: 5095, 96-154, 155-184, 185-346; Fromm 1973, chap. 13; Canetti 1972, chaps. 1, 4, 5, 7; 1960; Sohn-Rethel 1975, chaps. 10, 11; Apel 1976, vol. I and II; 1982; Habermas 1983; 1991; Küng 1990: 84-85; 1991; 1994; 2004; Küng/ Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Häring/Kuschel 1993; Nida-Rümelin 2006: 5-10; Harprecht 2006: 11-14). The death penalty remained abolished in the West for several years, and still remains so in the European Union up to

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the present–February 2010. However, during the social crisis and social destabilization in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, which was caused particularly by economic setbacks under the Keynesian system, and by the War in Vietnam, and by the student rebellion, and which led to the successful neo-conservative revolution, or bourgeois counter-revolution, and to the neo-liberal trend turn, the Supreme Court of the U.S.A. permitted the particular states of the Union to reintroduce the death penalty again. Over 20 states did do so. Recently, however, from 2005-2010, several of these states have felt serious doubts concerning different aspects of the death penalty: but not enough yet to abolish it again and suspend it altogether everywhere and forever. To do so would help greatly to reduce the general necrophilia in the late capitalist commodity-exchange societies, and it would be an important step on the way to global alternative Future III–a society characterized by a possible socialism as practiced humanism, and situated beyond both, the free market economy on one hand, and the centrally administered economy, on the other (Adorno 1979: 354372, 397-407, 408-433, 434-439. 578-587; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002, chaps. 1, 2, 4-10; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; App. E, G). According to Canetti and Adorno, even the most modern and enlightened societies are still built on a latent coercive violence behind all commands of the international corporate ruling class and its rackets. It becomes manifest and immediate in a most extreme way not only in wars, but also already in the praxis of the death penalty, and in the particular executions: such as that of President Saddam Hussein (Canetti 1960: 90-91). The critical theorist of society, Theodor W. Adorno, argued, following Hegel, that every execution was directed toward the others, meaning toward those who were not executed (Hegel 1986a: 440-442, 613-614, 619-620; Canetti 1960: 90-91; 1972). Already Adorno’s great teacher, Friedrich Nietzsche, the son of a Protestant pastor and the self-proclaimed anti-Christ–Dionysus versus the Crucified–spoke, nevertheless, the great sentence in conformity with the Sermon on the Mount, and quite in the spirit of Hegel: that humanity had to be redeemed from the mythological spell of the Jus or Lex Talionis, from revenge, from retaliation (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; Hegel 1986a: 440-442, 613-614, 619-620; Canetti 1960: 90-91; Kaufmann 1968, chap. 12; Canetti 1960: 91-92; Siebert 2006).

Categorical Norms The Center-Hegelian, liberal, Catholic theologian, Hans Küng, co-initiator and co-promoter of the Post-Modern-Oecumenical Paradigm of Christi-

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anity, had to admit that certainly the world religions have always been and still are in the temptation to lose themselves in an infinite undergrowth of commandments, rules, regulations, instructions, cannons and paragraphs (Küng 1965; 1970; 1972; 1976; 1978; 1980; 1981b; 1987; 1989; 1990b: 8485; 1991a; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a: 336-601, 869-999; 1994b; 2002; 2003; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008; App. E). We may remember in the Jewish Religion of Sublimity the 613 Mitsvoth of Moses Maimonides, based on the Torah, or the new, special 614th Mitsvoth of Emil. L, Fackenheim, grounded in the experience of Auschwitz: that every Jew must act in such a way, that he does not give Adolf Hitler a post-humous victory (Hegel 1986q: 50-91; Fackenheim 1967; Küng 1991b: 61, 203, 221, 224, 413, 493, 519-520, 523, 564, 569, 463, 706-707, 717, 795-706, 845, 849, 706-707, 873; Solomon 2000: 42-44, 70, 72, 81, 82-83, 102, 119, 136). However, the world religions can, if they want to, often give with greater authority than any philosophy good reasons that the application of their norms are not only valid from case to case, but categorically (Kant 1965: 128, 158, 472-474, 633-634; Küng 1990: 84-85). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the great world religions can give to human beings in the present socially torn apart, antagonistic civil society a highest norm of conscience: that immensely important categorical imperative, which obligates people in a much greater depth and more fundamentally than any philosophy possibly can do (Küng 1990: 84-85). This is because all great world religions have demanded something like a Golden Rule: a not only hypothetical, conditional, but rather a categorical, apodictic, unconditional norm. It has been a completely and definitely practicable doable norm in the face of highly complex situations, in which individuals and groups have often to act.

Different Forms of the Golden Rule The Golden Rule appears in the different world religions in slightly different forms. The Golden Rule states in its Chinese form: Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you (Confucius, Analects 15, 23).

The Golden Rule says in its Hindu Form: This is the sum of duty: do nothing to others, which would cause you pain, if done to you (Mahabharata XIII 114. 8).

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The Golden Rule teaches in its Buddhist form: A state that is not pleasant or delightful to me must be so for him also; and a state which is not pleasant or delightful for me, how could I inflict that on another? (Samyutta Nikaia V).

The Golden Rule of Jainism says: A person should treat all creatures as he himself would be treated (Sutrakritanga 1.11, 33 anga).

The Golden Rule says in its Jewish form: Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you (Rabbi Hillel, Shabbat 31a).

The Golden Rule teaches in its Christian form: In everything do to others as you would have them do to you (Mathew 7: 12; Luke 6: 31).

The Golden Rule states in its Islamic form: No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself (40 Hadith Sayings of Muhammad of an-Nawawi 13).

The Golden Rule says in its Wicca form: If you harm none, do what you will: what you give forth, will come back three fold.

Modern Inversion Informed by Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg and Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas has objected that the Golden rule in all its forms was not the Kantian categorical imperative, and rightly so. The Golden Rule is, of course, pre-modern, religious and material in all its forms, whereas the Kantian categorical imperative is modern, secular and formal (Kant 1965: 128, 158, 472-474, 633-634; Küng 1990: 84-85). However, the religious Golden Rule can also be inverted, translated, sublated, rationalized, formalized, and secularized in modern, post-modern, and post-metaphysical philosophical and social-scientific discourses into the principle of–what Immanuel Kant had called–the categorical imperative: Act in such a way, that the maxim of your will can at any time also be valid as principle of a universal legislation, or Act in such a way, that you use the humanity in your own person as well as in the person of every other human

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chapter thirteen being always also as purpose, never merely as means. (Kant 1965: 113, 114, 128, 143, 158, 160, 472-474, 633-634; Küng 1990: 84-85).

In their communicative or discourse ethics, Charles Pierce, Apel, and Habermas have translated, sublated, rationalized, formalized, and secularized further the religious Golden Rule and the secular Kantian categorical imperative into the principle of the a priori of the unlimited communication community: Your action is ethically valid, when it honors the five validity claims–truthfulness, honesty, rightfulness, tastefulness and understandability, and when it finds the consensus of the universal communication community, particularly of the possible victims (Apel 1976, vol. 2; 1982; Edelstein/Habermas 1984; Habermas 1983; 1991a).

Ethical Motivation Habermas has admitted that modern secular ethics has a problem with motivation (Habermas 1983; 1991a; 1991b, part III; Küng 1990: 84-85). Even after Apel’s and Habermas’s communicative or discourse ethics has verified the validity of an ethical norm, for example, that it is better to love than to hate, or that one should not kill if one finds that convenient for oneself or for one’s country, there still remains the question why a person should follow it? The secular categorical imperative or the likewise secular communicative ethics has no adequate answer to this question of motivation. Küng had to admit that certainly the world religions have always been and still are in temptation to command and give orders to human beings in a most authoritarian manner, and to demand from them blind obedience and to do violence to their consciences (Küng 1990: 85; App. E).

Transition A major issue facing religious and secular people in late capitalist society is the possible transition from the necrophilous Jus Talionis to the most biophilous Golden Rule not only in Christianity, but in all world religions, and also in a secular form in the modern humanisms: “So always treat others as you would like them to treat you: that is the meaning of the Law and the Prophets”–in personal and collective, national and international relations and behavior (Matthew 7: 12; Küng 1990: 84-85). Daily, the Jus Talionis has been practiced in the most cruel way by Jews, Christians, and

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Muslims on both sides of the front in the past 10 years: in Palestine, in Israel, in Lebanon, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in the Sudan, and elsewhere. Seven million years ago, humans separated from the chimpanzees, who also were used to practice furious retaliation from one tribe to the other. Much has changed and much progress has been made not only in terms of instrumental rationality but also in terms of communicative rationality since then on our long march from animality to alternative Future III– the realm of freedom beyond the realm of natural necessity. This has been true particularly since the establishment of the great civilizations at the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers, at the Nile River, at the Indus River, and at the Yellow River: shortly since what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age between 800 and 200 before Christ or before the Common Era (Jaspers 1955; 1980; 1990; 2004; Küng 1991b: Part A). We went to the moon and we shall go to Mars. We overcame tribalism and nationalism, at least to the extent that the European Union and the United Nations became possible. Why should it not be possible for us to abolish the Jus Talionis and to make the transition to the Golden Rule?

Causes In order to promote such transition, we must explore the possible biological, psychological, economic, sociological, anthropological, and theological causes, which so far have prevented people from moving to alternative Future III–the free and reconciled society, and which force us to move toward alternative Future I–the totally administered society, and toward alternative Future II–the entirely militarized society, producing always new wars and civil wars, and instigating the collision of religion-based civilizations, and preparing World War III to be fought with weapons of mass destruction (Flechtheim 1971; App. F, G). Not at least and not at last, we need to discover the causes that compel people to the always new application of the most primitive and archaic Jus Talionis without end. As mentioned above, there was already in the Torah the wonderful story of Joseph, whose ten brothers wanted to kill him and then had shamefully and pitilessly sold him into Egyptian slavery, and who had now as representative of the Pharaoh the opportunity and the power to revenge himself, but forgave them (Genesis 37-50; Mann 1999; Adorno/Mann 2003; App. E). According to the Rabbis, the Joseph narrative made an important theological statement (Genesis 45: 5; Lieber 2001: 276/5: Mann 1999; Adorno/Mann 2003). In the Rabbi’s theological view, Joseph’s brothers had indeed acted with evil intent. However, the hidden guiding hand of

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divine Providence had been behind the whole Joseph story, nevertheless, as it was behind the whole history of Israel. God could not prevent the brothers from choosing to do something cruel. God’s role was to sustain Joseph and guide him to bring something good and life affirming out of the unfairness inflicted on him. Rabbi Abravanel noted that, although God used the sale of Joseph to further the divine plan, the brothers were still accountable for what they did. The narrative seems to imply, that the move of Jacob and his family to Egypt was not intended to be permanent, but would last only for the duration of the famine. The Israelites, however, became comfortable amid the material pleasures of Egypt and stayed in Goshen and were finally enslaved by later Pharaos, until Moses liberated them. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the real greatness of Joseph lay in the fact that for all time he showed humanity a better way than retaliation–the Lex Talionis. He tested his brothers, holding his own natural feelings in check, until convinced of their filial piety to their father Jacob, or Israel, their love for Benjamin, and their sincere contrition for their crime towards him. Then, Joseph forgave them freely, fully, and lovingly. He practiced the Golden Rule instead of the Jus Talionis: love instead of hate (Petuchowski 1956: 543-549; Kim 1996: 267-283; Siebert 2010; De Chardin 1965).

Forgiveness Also Jesus of Nazareth tried to break the Lex Talionis through forgiveness in the fourth commandment of the so-called Sermon on the Mount (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-42). There are Suras in the Holy Qur’an with the same intent. The Torah, the New Testament, and the Holy Qur’an contain the Golden Rule as well as forgiveness (Küng 1970; 1972; 1978; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 2004). All three Abrahamic religions as well as other world religions and humanisms prefer the Golden Rule and forgiveness over the praxis of the Lex Talionis. That has recently been portrayed most masterfully, simply, powerfully and remarkably in the wonderful Russian movie Prisoner of the Mountains on the war in Chechnya.The Torah and the Rabbis’ theology of history has not only most deeply influenced the New Testament and the Holy Qur’an, but also the great modern intellectual movements of German Idealism and American Transcendentalism as well as of historical materialism (Hegel 1986g; 1986l; 1986q; Horkheimer 1967: 302-317; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004). Particularly Hegel concretely superseded the Torah and the Rabbi’s theology of history, including especially its ethical dimension, into his dialectical philosophy of law and

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history, and of course Marx learned much from him (Hegel 1986g; 1986l; 1986q; Horkheimer 1967: 302-317; Marx 1961: Vol. I, 17-18; Horkheimer 1967: 302-317; 1985l: 286-287, 349-397, 398-416, 436-492; Küng 1970; 1972; 1978; 1990b; 1991b; 1994a; 2004)

Praxis Why then have the Jewish, Christian, Islamic and other religious and humanistic attempts to abolish the Jus Talionis through the Golden Rule and forgiveness not worked in praxis universally so far through the centuries (Küng 1990; 1991; 1994; 2004)? Why did it not work for Christians, in spite even of the moral compromise of the Seven Point Just War Theory of St. Augustine, the initiator of the Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity? It was honestly practiced by Christian heads of states only twice in 1,600 years. Why, to the contrary, were the Hindu Mahatma Gandhi and his followers able to break the ban of the Jus Talionis, and instead practice the Golden Rule and forgiveness successfully, while so many members of the Abrahamic religions have such a hard time to realize it? Since the Reformation, the Sermon on the Mount, which contains the negation of the Jus Talionis as well as the Golden Rule, has become a mirror, in which individuals and nations can recognize their sinfulness, rather than a genuine orientation of action, which would lead out of the present crisis situation of the Western Civilization (Miranda 1982). Of course, if the Golden Rule, which includes the Law and the Prophets, and forgiveness, is not practiced, then the bloody praxis of the Jus Talionis is the unavoidable and necessary consequence, in private and collective life, and thus, merely a further deepening of the terrible crisis in which we find ourselves in the present transition period, in which since 1918 a post-Modern Paradigm has began to determinately negate the Modern Paradigm of the past 400 years: creative destruction (Habermas 2002; 2005, chaps. 5, 8, 9; Habermas/ Ratzinger 2005; Küng 1990; 1991: 486-536, 537-762; 1994: 869-906; 2004, D and E; Siebert 2006; 2005; Meyer 2006: 22-27).

Global Ethos The Golden Rule in its religious and secular forms is not merely a hypothetical, conditional, but rather a categorical, apodictic, unconditional norm (Habermas/Ratzinger 2005: 55-57; Küng 1990). It is also practicable and doable in modern and post-modern highly complex situations in

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globalized, very antagonistic civil society, in which individuals and groups have to act communicatively or instrumentally only too often. The Golden Rule could very well become the foundation of–what Hans Küng has called–a “global ethos,” which he has presented to the United Nations in New York, and for which there he has reached complete consensus (Küng 1990). Such global ethos could inform the actions of teachers, economists, businessmen, politicians, generals, as well as the masses of the people in such a way that the application of the Jus Talionis would become for them more and more implausible and unacceptable. It is the purpose of our discourse in dialectical religiology to contribute to such enlightenment and emancipation as reconciliation and atonement.

Public Use of Reason To be sure, the realization of the Golden Rule and the global ethics is not possible without religious faith and without–what John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas have called–“the public use of reason” (Rawls 1971; Habermas 1983; 1985; 1991; 1992; 2002; 2004). Certainly, the modern separation of synagogue, church or mosque on one hand, and the secular neutral state, on the other, deeply influences the role that religious faith, traditions, communities, and organizations are allowed to play in antagonistic civil society, and in the political public sphere, above all in the political opinion and will-formation of the citizens. One of the immediate purposes of public discourse is to explore where in the opinion of the neo-conservative revisionists the dividing line should be between religion and state. It needs to be found out whether the neo-conservative or fundamentalist Jewish, Christian, or Islamic opponents, who are currently engaged in a culture war against the liberal standard version of an ethics of citizenship, are actually only championing the pro-religious meaning of the secular state held to be neutral, versus a narrow secularist notion of a pluralistic society. It is also possible, that the neo-conservative and fundamentalist opponents are more or less inconspicuously trying to change the liberal agenda from the bottom up, and thus, are already arguing from the background of a completely different self-understanding of modernity. The answers to such questions can reveal what chance the Golden Rule or the global ethos may have to be actualized in the public forum of modern states and among them. In any case, there will be no peace among the nations without peace inside and among the world religions.

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Post-Secular Society For the further development of the critical theory of religion, the liberal premises of the modern constitutional state and the consequences that the liberal conception of the public use of reason has on the religious or secular ethics of citizenship will need to be discussed (Rawls 1971; Habermas 1983; 1985; 1991; 1992; 2002; 2005; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005). The most important objections to the rather restrictive liberal idea of the political role of religion will need to be addressed. Through a critical discussion of neo-conservative and fundamentalist revisionist proposals that touch on the very foundations of the liberal self-understanding, we shall have to try to develop a conception of our own that gives the Golden Rule, the categorical imperative, the a priori of the unlimited communication community and the global ethos a chance to assert and actualize themselves against the archaic and mythological power of the Jus Talionis. We shall have to be ready to admit that religious and secular citizens can only fulfill the normative expectations of the liberal role of citizens if they likewise fulfill certain cognitive conditions and ascribe to the respective opposite the corresponding epistemic attitudes. We shall have to explain what this means by discussing the change in the form of religious consciousness, which was a response to the challenges of modernity. In their response to the process of modernization, religious communities have often differentiated themselves in themselves between those believers who wanted to resist it, and those who were willing to accommodate and assimilate themselves to it. Thus, in Judaism we find orthodox, conservative and reformed Rabbis. In Christianity, we find conservative and liberal believers. By contrast, we shall discover that the secular awareness that one is living in a post-secular society takes the shape of post-metaphysical thought at the philosophical level. Of course, post-secular does not mean that religion is returning for good, but rather that it disappears much more slowly than some of the secular enlighteners had predicted and hoped. We shall see that the secular and neutral liberal state faces the problem that religious and secular citizens can only acquire those mutual epistemic attitudes through complementary learning processes, while it remains a mute point whether these are learning processes at all, and ones, which the state cannot influence by its own means of law and politics anyway. In any case, our discourse wants to promote epistemic attitudes in religious and secular-humanist citizens of modern liberal and even of still historical-intermediate states, which make the Jus Talionis obsolete and which promote the Golden Rule and the global ethos.

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chapter thirteen Cooperation

Already in the present transition period from modernity to post-modernity the open dialectic between the religious and the secular, revelation and autonomous reason, faith and knowledge can make possible the cooperation between religious and secular people, believers and enlighteners toward a project world ethos (Küng 1990; App. E). It could be centered in the Golden Rule, which the Chinese Religion, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam and other world religions have in common. The Golden Rule embraces not only the whole Hebrew Law and the Prophets, but also the New Testament and the Koran. Also many enlighteners and humanists have no problem to accept the Golden Rule as the foundation of a global ethos. One may even extend the Golden Rule to non-human living beings: humans would do to animals, as humans would have animals do to them: for example, pull the sheep out of the pit even on the Sabbath (Matthew 12: 1, 2, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12). If human beings would not like to be eaten by sharks or lions or bears, they should not eat them. Before Noah all people were vegetarians. If humanity would respect animal rights in terms of the Golden Rule could they still establish zoos or keep domestic animals, not to speak of having huge slaughterhouses?

The End of the Lex Talionis The Golden Rule in all its different forms can conquer the Jus or Lex Talionis (Küng 1990; 1991; 1994; 2004). On Sunday evening, April 9, 2006, the Israeli Government announced that it has a right to retaliate against the missiles coming from the Gaza Strip: eye for eye, tooth for tooth! A few minutes later the Palestinian Authority announced that it had the right to retaliate against the Israeli counterattacks: free man for free man, slave for slave! Not even the limiting character of the Jus Talionis is taken seriously. The practice of the Golden Rule would be the end of the Lex Talionis: treat the other as you want to be treated! The analysis should not stop with the so-called realistic assertion that the Golden Rule cannot be practiced and thus, the spell or the curse of the mutual application of the Lex Talionis cannot be broken. People like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Archbishop Romero practiced the Golden Rule even in its extreme form by following the fourth and fifth commandment of the Sermon on the Mount. It is rather so that the psychoanalytical and critical sociological and critical theological analysis must begin precisely with the question, why is it not possible for some people to practice the Golden

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Rule and why they must remain under the spell of the mythological Jus Talionis? Which powerful instincts in the basement of the human civilization prevent continually the application of the Golden Rule: self-preservation, death drive, the hunger of the predator, will to power? Should it not be possible to break forever Adolf Hitler’s aristocratic principle of nature, the right of the predator to enslave or to kill the prey, for the sake of the survival of the human species on this planet earth? When some people can liberate themselves from this ban of the Lex Talionis and do to others as they want to be treated, why cannot all do it, since they all share in the same human nature? In any case, who does not want to lose his eye, should not take it from an other. Who does not want to be stolen from should not steal or engage in usury, or nationalism, or colonialism, or imperialism. Who does not want to be killed by the sword, should not use it. Who does not want to be murdered, should not murder, or engage in war, or torture, or assassinations, or terror, in religious or secular form. Who does not want to be lied to should not lie and engage in false advertisement, or false propaganda, or ideology understood as false consciousness; the masking of national, or racial, or class interests, shortly, the untruth. Whoever does not want his personal autonomy or national sovereignty to be violated, should not attack that of other persons or nations: for example, for the sake of regime change. Whoever does not want his own country to be devastated by natural or historical agents, should not devastate other peoples’ countries: otherwise, New Orleans of August/September 2005 and the surrounding states, cities, towns and villages suddenly look with their thousands of wounded and dead, and refugees, and homeless, and hostages, and fires, and shootings and killings and rapes and disorganization and chaos like Baghdad and Basra and surrounding Iraq, and Kabul and surrounding Afghanistan from 2002 until now. Who does not want other life forms to intervene into their own, should also not intervene into other peoples’ life forms. Whoever does not want other nations to have or to use weapons of mass destruction, should also not have or use them. The Israelite, Hebrew, Jewish, Christian and Islamic prophets and the Hebrew psalmists, would have said: repent! The Lutheran Christian Hegel would have said: world-history is world judgment! The Black Muslim Malcolm X would have said: the chickens are coming home to roost!

Egalitarianism The Golden Rule implies a true egalitarianism among individuals and nations, without which there cannot be any true discourse, or personal or

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social morality (Küng 1990). Whenever the Golden Rule is not actualized, the Lex Talionis will take its place. If we do continually to others, as we would not have them do to us, then there will necessarily be endless mutual retaliation, until both opponents are exhausted, or one of them has been annihilated, or one of them has the courage to take the first step to break the curse. Wars of revenge cannot be won, except through the total annihilation of the other, the enemy. If the wars of retaliation are not directed against another state but rather against a worldwide religious movement, then–since they are no wars at all in the first place–those non-wars can be won even less. There remains only either the practice of the Golden Rule, and thus the inclusion of the other, or cold, universal despair, and finally alternative Future II: a third world war between the civilizations ala Samuel Huntington. The Christian theologian and ecumenist, Hans Küng, has presented such a world ethos project, centered in the Golden Rule, to the World-Parliament of Religions as well as to the United Nations, and found full and universal acceptance. While Huntington’s prophecy of the clash of civilizations has admittedly and unfortunately at this moment in world history the tendency to fulfill itself, the critical theorists of religion and society, nevertheless, side with Küng’s World Ethos Project, and the discourse among the religions and the civilizations in the hope that it will help to produce peace among the nations.

Fundamental Principle According to the critical theory of religion the fundamental principle of the Golden Rule and four ethical and socio-ethical directives derived from it can show the way to global alternative Future III–a free society, characterized by personal autonomy as well as by universal, i.e. anamnestic, present, and proleptic solidarity (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 37, 40; Habermas 1986; Küng 1990; App. G). The fundamental demand is the Golden Rule. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, this fundamental principle should be the irrevocable, unconditional norm for all areas of life, for families and communities, for races, nations and religions. It should be supported by the insurmountable longing for the totally Other than what is the case in nature and history with their often most cruel laws. This totally Other stands for what once was called in Judaism and other world religions Infinite Power, Perfect Justice, Unconditional Love, Heaven, Eternity, Beauty, and Absolute Truth.

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Ethical Directives On the basis of this fundamental principle of the Golden Rule, four ethical directives, found in all the great world religions of humanity, have to be remembered if global alternative Future III should be realized: 1) 2) 3) 4)

You shall not murder, torture, torment, wound. This directive means in positive terms: you should have reverence for life. You should be committed to a culture of life and love, rather than to a culture of death. You shall not lie, deceive, force, manipulate. This directive means in positive terms: You should speak and act truthfully. You should be committed to a culture of truthfulness and tolerance. You shall not steal, exploit, rob, bribe, and corrupt. That directive means in positive terms: You should deal honestly and fairly. You should be committed to a culture of fairness and a just economic order. You shall not abuse sexuality, cheat, humiliate, dishonor. This directive means in positive terms: You should respect and love one another. You should be committed to a culture of partnership and equal dignity of men and women. (Küng 1990; Rawls 1971).

While all four ethical directives can be found in the Mosaic Decalogue, which all three Abrahamic religions have in common, the first and fourth directive is also part of the specifically Christian Sermon on the Mount. However, its third, fourth and fifth commandment could also serve as ethical directive some day on a higher level of social and cultural evolution on the way to alternative Future III: no oath, cancellation of the Lex or Jus Talionis, and love of the enemy. Jews, Christians and Muslims, as well as committed believers of other world religions, are under the obligation to seek every opportunity to practice kindness and love or–in secular terms–solidarity, and to bring relief and blessing, wherever they go. They see providential happenings in history: that there is Divine control of human conditions and that many humanly unaccountable things happen in individual and collective life. Already now the above four directives constitute a global ethic, able to lead humankind toward alternative Future III (App. G).

Global Ethic In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, such global ethic should not be imposed by law but be brought to public awareness and be based on the consensus of the unlimited, universal communication community (Habermas 1983; 1985; 1991a; 1991b; 1992; 2002; 2004; 2005;

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Küng 1990). Such global ethic is simultaneously applicable to individual persons and to collectives and their institutions. Such global ethic does not only focus on the collective responsibility to the relief of any responsibility the individual may hold, and vice versa. Of course, often the social conditions, or history, or the system must be blamed for specific injustices, abuses, and crimes. However, individuals may also be responsible for them, at least to some extent. The global ethic focuses equally on the responsibility of each individual in his or her place in society, as well as on the collective. Individual and collective are mediated through each other. They reproduce each other. As the individual is a product of society, so society is a product of the individuals. They reproduce and thus change each other. In order for global alternative Future III to be reached, individual and society will have to go through mutual revolutionary changes.

The Support of Law In the view of the critical theory of religion, the free commitment to such a global ethic does not exclude the support of the law (Hagerman 1992; Küng 1990). It rather includes it. In some circumstances the global ethic can appeal to the law. Such circumstances include cases of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, international assassinations and aggression contrary to international law. Meanwhile, following its ratification by more than sixty nations, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been established. According to the global ethic, it is to this court that such violations can be brought. This is specifically the case, when a signatory state is unable or unwilling to inflict legal penalties on atrocities committed in its territory or under its control.

Peace Up to this point in history–February 2010–the illegal and immoral wars against Afghanistan and Iraq have not brought the promised peace to either country, nor have they diminished terror around the world, but have only sown the seeds of new revenge (Fromm 1992: 203-212; Küng 1990; 2004: 29-42; Lawrence 2005; Siebert 2006). As the two wars and civil wars continue, the decisive question arises more than ever before: what international commitments are to be made in order to achieve a peace which is more than an armistice? In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, not the alternatives of the since 1917 passing Modern Paradigm,

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but the alternatives of the future Post-Modern Constellation are most relevant. There is. the alternative whether the billions that are being spent on sinfully expensive new weapon systems, for example, the new German Air Force Tornados, in order to fight terrorism and in preparation of new wars among the civilizations, should not rather be applied to kindergartens and schools, health care, hospitals, cancer research and public services at home and abroad, and to fighting against poverty, hunger and misery in the world: in order to promote the prophetic concept of shalom (Fromm 1992: 203-211). Particular demands will have to be put on all world religions not to support uncritically the official politics and policies of their respective governments, which only too often conduct politics as identification and demonization of the enemies, a la Carl Schmitt and Samuel Huntington, be these enemies the communists or the Jihadists, but to fulfill their own critical role in policing antagonistic civil society, particularly the multinational corporations. Why have so many Christians of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries in Europe and America again and again allowed themselves to be hooked and adopted and abused by the fascist or neo-liberal Right through the hypocritical disguise of traditional values–Karl Rove–, rather than to join the humanist-socialist Left, and its radical translation of insights and norms from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament into a new modern and postmodern form aiming at global alternative Future III– a sane, free, and peaceful society? (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1975a; 1975b; 1985b; 1993; Fromm 1950; 1956, l959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973, 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; Flechtheim 1959; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1071; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Hebermas 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b Lischer 1979; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; Metz 1965; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1975b; Baum 1959; 1965; 1967; 1968; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1980a; 1980b; 1982; 1994; 1996; 1999; 2003; 2004; 2005; 2007; Miranda 1982; App. E, F, G).

Prophets of Deceit In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, not only had the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth been a poor man, whom the rich and powerful people had murdered, they also abused his teachings through–what the critical theorist Leo Löwenthal called–the prophets of deceit as ideology and mythology throughout the slaveholder, feudal and capitalist societies, in order to dominate the poor classes and to exploit them, and thus to

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crucify the Nazarene again and again up to the second Bush Administration (Matthew 26-28; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97; Reich 1971; 1976; Fromm 1966; chap. ix; 1992; Marcuse 1970a; Löwenthal 1965; 1966; 1970; 1980; 1989; 1990a; 1990b; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10 and 11). Why throughout the centuries were so many Christians unable to follow the teaching of the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, to whose name they continually appealed: Beware of false prophets (lying teachers of religion) who come to you disguised as sheep but underneath are ravenous wolves. You will be able to tell them by their fruits (Matthew 7: 15-16; Löwenthal 1965; 1970; 1980; 1989; 1990a; 1990b).

One does not have to be informed by Rev. Jeremiah Right or Senator or President Obama, in order to know that according to the prophetic tradition of all three Abrahamic religions all nations stand under God’s judgement, be it Germany, England, France, Israel or the USA, and that any nationalistic or militaristic right or wrong my country falls under idolatry (Horkheimer 1988d: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 11; Fromm 1966; 1976; Lundgren 1998). The dialectical religiology does not promote post-modern global alternative Future I–a totally bureaucratic society, or post-modern global alternative Future II–a war society, but rather post-modern global alternative Future III–a peace society, in which the main antagonisms of modern civil society will have been fought through and will have been reconciled (Appendixes E and F in Volume I; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1975a; 1975b; 1985b; 1993; Fromm 1950; 1956, l959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973, 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; Flechtheim 1959; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1071; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Habermas 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; App. F, G).

Peace among Nations and among World-Religions The dialectical religiology summarizes this vision of post-modern global alternative Future III with Hans Küng in five propositions: 1) 2) 3)

There will be no peace among nations without peace among the world religions. There will be no peace among the world religions without discourse among them. There will be no discourse among the world religions without comparative foundational research in them and among them.

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There will be no discourse among the world religions without global ethical standards: particularly the Golden Rule and its ethical directives. There will, therefore, be no survival of this globe without a global ethic (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 37, 40; Fromm 1992: 203-212; Habermas 1970; 1971; 1975; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981c; 1981d; 1982; 1983; 1984a; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1988a; 1988b; 1990; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 1992b; 1997a; 1999; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2004d; 2005; 2006a; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; App. E, F, G).

Such critical global ethic-driven by the longing for and the confidence in the imageless and nameless Eternal One beyond all higher criticism–must guide the discourse and cooperation among civilizations, if they want to avoid further collisions, and the alternative Futures I and II, and if they want to survive, and if they want to find their way to global alternative Future III–a shalom or irenae or pax or salam or mir or Friede society, characterized by the religious Golden Rule, or by the secular categorical imperative or a priori of the universal communication community, and thus by the freedom of all, beyond the realm of natural, economic, political, and historical necessities (Psalm 91; Hegel 1986l: 133-141; Marx 1961c: 873-874; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 29; 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Adorno 1973: 300-408; 1997j/2: 97-122; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Bloch 1970a; 1879b; 1971; Fromm1966; 1967; 1992: 203-212; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Habermas 1971; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1982; 1983; 1984a; ; 1986; 1987c; 1988a; 1988b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 1997a; 1999; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2004a; 2004d; 2005; ; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Gerth/Mills 1964, part IV; Eggebrecht 1979). Shalom!–It shall be well! (Fromm 1992: 203-212; App. E, G).

chapter fourteen

Religion and Revolution Marx, who had come from an assimilated Jewish and reformatory Protestant family background in Trier, Germany, had defined religion in a very precise threefold way in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: 1) Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature. 2) Religion is the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. 3) Religion is the opium of the people (Marx 1964: 43-44; Trotsky 2006; Miranda 1982; Küng 1991: 266, 288, 349, 492, 541, 548; 1994: 35-37, 78, 329, 587, 624, 661, 776, 839, 848, 852, 858859, 1010, 1033-1034; App. E).

Marx’s three definitions show a deep insight into the nature of religion as longing for the wholly Other than the horror and terror of nature and history; for perfect justice–that the murderer shall not triumph over his innocent victim, at least not ultimately; and for unconditional love (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 29, 37, 40; Ott 2001; 2007; Goldstein 2006: part II; Siebert 2005; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c). What light do Marx’s definitions throw on the Jesus revolution, the Judas kiss and betrayal in the service of the counter-revolution in the context of the ancient Jewish state, the Roman Empire and following Empires (Matthew 26-28; Siebert 2008)?

The Poor Man Marx once took his five children into a church during his exile in London because of the music, and they asked him what all this religion was about. He summed up all three of his definitions into a very simple, materialistic, Nestorian Christology from below: “There was once a poor man, and the rich people murdered him” (Fetscher/Machovec 1974; Miranda 1982; Resing 2007: 103-105; Ratzinger 2007). It is the purpose of this chapter to explore the personality and the motivations of Judas Iscariot, the man from Cariot, a suburb of Jerusalem, who through a kiss betrayed his friend, the young Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth to the Roman guards in

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the Garden of Gethsemane outside of Jerusalem, across the Cedron Valley (Matthew 10: 1; 26: 14, 47; 27: 3; Luke 22: 3, 48; John 6: 72; 13: 2, 26, 29; 18: 2, 3, 5; Acts 1: 16, 25; Hendricks 2006; Voorst 2000). The Rabbi had taken on the whole Roman Empire and would even conquer it, not with the sword, like the Zealots, Spartacus, or Mohammed, but rather through the spirit alone, like Socrates. Judas through his kiss of betrayal made it possible in the first place that Jesus, the man from the lower classes of farmers, fishermen, workers and artisans in Palestine and the Roman Empire, could be murdered by the authorities of the rich classes of landowners, lawyers, judges, Jewish kings, Roman governors, and Sadducee priests. Judas and his betrayal will be seen in the context of the class struggle of his time in Palestine and in the Roman Empire (Hegel 1986c: 145-154; 1986q: 278-299; Hendricks 2006; Voorst 2000). As Spartacus had been betrayed by the pirate fleet and either fell in battle against the Roman army or was crucified with the 10,000 other slaves from his revolutionary army along the Via Apia outside of Rome, so Jesus was betrayed by Judas Iscariot, and was tortured and crucified by the Roman army outside of Jerusalem on Golgotha, or the place of the Skull (Matthew 26-28). Was there a legitimacy in Judas’s shocking abandonment of his friend and teacher and his revolutionary, or better still pro-volutionary movement, and in his counter-revolutionary change of orientation, and in his treason? Is there some harmony in this dissonance? Is there a sacrament of treason? Is there treason even in what is sacred? In any case, we shall look for the presence of the traitor, as an image of good or bad humanity, and of the glorification of the Divine or of blasphemy, in the accounts of the canonical and non-canonical Gospels and related writings of the first centuries of Christianity, and beyond (Voorst 2000; Hendricks 2006; Ehrman 2006; Kasser/Meyer/Wurst 2006; Miranda 1982).

Dialectic of the Classes According to Hegel, betrayal has been an intrinsic tendency in all historical forms of the master and servant relationship, because of its asymmetrical dialectical structure of recognition and thus, its fundamental injustice and unfairness (Hegel 1976: 172-178; 1986c: 145-154; 1986j: 221-229; 1986l: 133-141). For Hegel the dialectic of the classes was rooted not only in the human potential of work and tool, but also and most of all in the evolutionary universal of the struggle for recognition (Hegel 1972; 1979). Because life was as requisite as liberty to the solution of the struggle of recognition between master and slave, the fight ended in the first instance as a one-sided

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negation with inequality. While the one combatant–the slave–preferred life, and thus retained his simple self-consciousness but surrendered his claim for recognition, the other–the master–held fast to his self-assertion and was thus recognized by the former as his superior. Thus arose the status of master and slave as one moment in the historical class struggle. In the battle for recognition and the subjugation under a master appeared the emergence of humanity’s social life and of the commencement of political union. Yet, force, which was the basis of this phenomenon, was not on that account also the basis of abstract right, personal and social morality, but only the necessary and legitimate factor in the passage from the state of self-consciousness sunk into natural appetites and selfish isolation, to the state of universal selfconsciousness: alternative Future III–the realm of the freedom of All. Power, then, was the external phenomenal, empirical commencement of states, not their underlying and essential principle. With the force and power of the upper classes was connected the cunning and the betrayal of the subjugated lower classes. The relationship of master and slave contained only a relative removal of the contradiction between the particularity of humanity, reflected into itself, of the distinct self-conscious subjects and their mutual identity. For in this relationship between the ruling class and the ruled class the immediacy of particular self-consciousness was, to begin with, removed only on the side of the slave, but on the master’s side it was preserved. As long as the natural state of life persisted on both sides, the self-will of the slave surrendered itself to that of the master, and received for its content the purposes of the master, who, on his part, did not receive into his selfconsciousness, the slave’s will, but only the care for the support of the slave’s physical life. This happened in such a manner that in this relationship the realized identity of the self-consciousness of the subjects in relation was achieved only one-sidedly. The dominated class internalized the ideology of the ruling class, but not vice versa. Betrayal happened not only on the side of the lower classes. In order to make the final revolution of the lower class possible, members of the upper class had to desert and betray the latter and join the forces of the former with their superior philosophical and scientific education, without which the former could be angry and destructive, but could not build a new freer and more just society: thus, members of the clergy and the nobility helped the bourgeoisie in its revolutionary struggles in the 18th and 19th centuries, and members of the bourgeoisie supported the working class in its revolutions beyond capitalism, even a so called capitalism with a human face in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries (Kogon 1967; Harpprecht 2008b: 14-16; Schenk 2008; Kesting 2008b: 73-76).

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The ancient Greeks and Romans had not yet risen to the notion of the absolute freedom of All, since they did not know that a person as such, as this universal Ego, as rational self-consciousness, was entitled to freedom (Hegel 1976: 172-178; 1986c: 145-154; 1986j: 221-229; 1986l: 133-141; 1986q: 185-146; Küng 1991; 1994; 2004). This idea of the absolute or the universal freedom of All, instead of only the freedom of the One or of the Few, entered world history only through Christianity, the Religion of Becoming and Freedom: through the Jesus revolution, which was most deeply rooted in the Torah and in the Hebrew prophets, and which insisted on the equality of and the reciprocity among all human beings, and which has influenced Islam, as well as later religious and secular movements and revolutions. On the contrary, with the ancient Greeks and Romans a person was considered to be free only if he was born free. With the Greeks and the Romans, therefore, slavery existed in their free states, and betrayal and bloody wars developed when the slaves tried to free themselves, to obtain recognition of their eternal human rights. The same happened later on under feudalism and capitalism in so far as the Christian idea of the freedom of All remained a mere utopia, if also a concrete one (Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007c). In June 2007 the second Bush Administration was still continuing the habit, practiced by the bourgeois class from the English and French Revolution to the last capitalistic revolution, the American civil war, and beyond that from one bourgeois counter-revolution to the next, to transform the Christian utopia of the freedom of All into an ideology, understood critically as false consciousness–the masking of class, race, and national interests; shortly, the untruth-legitimating the freedom of the Few, the globalizing corporate ruling class, its employer. At this moment in history– February 2010–, the current U.S. administration is not only being met in the streets of Baghdad with bloody resistance of the Iraqis, who do not accept its secular bourgeois freedom-ideology of the Few, but also with the massive betrayal of the occupied people, who refuse to surrender their precious oil wells and their cheap labor to their occupiers, and to the corporate ruling class behind them, particularly the oil magnates. In the perception of the dialectical religiology in the most advanced capitalist country, the U.S.A., a cleaning woman also should not feel like a worker ant in an anthill, who is expected simply to adjust to this situation while her surplus labor is appropriated by a non-worker. She also should have the right and the possibility to leave a legacy to her children and grandchildren, like a businessman, or a medical doctor, or a lawyer, or a professor, or a minister.

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Freedom of All According to Hegel, the result of the struggle of the classes for recognition was brought about by the human spirit, following the law of freedom, in opposition to nature following the law of gravity (Hegel 1976: 176-177). This result was to be the universal self-consciousness or what we may call the alternative Future III–the freedom of All, in comparison to alternative Future I–the totally mechanized, computerized, robotized, administered society in which the freedom of the One and/or the freedom of the Few, shortly, the master-slave relationship, would be maintained and frozen for a long time to come, and to alternative Future II–a society engaged in one conventional war or civil war after the other, and preparing for ABC wars and the consequent environmental destruction and catastrophes (Hegel 1976: 172-178; 1986l: 133-141; 1986c: 145-154; 1986j: 221-229; 1986l: 133-141; Huxley 1968; Orwell 1961; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-391, 569573, 578-587; 1997j/2: 97-122; Flechtheim 1971; App. G). The freedom of All formed and constituted the utopian third stage of history, after the first and second stage of the freedom of the One–tribal chiefs, kings, tyrants, dictators–and the freedom of the Few–slaveholders, feudal lords and capitalists. On the third historical stage existed that free self-consciousness for which the other self-consciousness, confronting it, was no longer, as in the first and second historical stage, un-free, but it was likewise independent and autonomous. In this third, still utopian stage, therefore, the mutually, reciprocally related self-conscious subjects, by setting aside their unequal particular individualities, have risen to the consciousness of their real universality, of the freedom belonging to All, and hence to the intuition of their specific human identity with each other. Only now the rational will be real, and the real will be rational (Hegel 1971: 176-177; 1986g: 24-27). The master–the slaveholder, the feudal lord or the capitalist–, confronted by his slave, serf or wage laborer, was not yet truly free, for he was still far from seeing himself in the former. As such, he was continuously in danger of being betrayed and being overthrown by bloody revolts and revolutions of the subjugated lower classes–the majority of the people–from whose surplus labor he was living, and through which he controlled them. Consequently, it was only when the slave, serf, or wage laborer became free, that the master, the slaveholder, feudal lord and capitalist also became completely and really free. The master no longer had to be afraid of betrayal and violent revolutions by the subjugated classes fighting for the re-appropriation of their surplus value and for the recognition of their human dignity, their human and civil rights, and their freedoms. In

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this utopian state of universal freedom, in being reflected into himself or herself, the subject was immediately reflected into the other person, and, conversely, in relating himself or herself to the other, he or she was also immediately self-related. All personal, social, economic, political, or religious alienation was overcome (Hegel 1971: 176-177; Marx 1964: 41-60; 2005; Trotsky 2006; Niebuhr 1967). According to Hegel, here therefore occurred the violent redemption of the human mind or spirit into different selves, which were both in and for themselves and for one another. They were independent, absolutely impenetrable, resistant, autonomous, and yet at the same time identical and solidary with one another, hence not independent, not impenetrable, but, as it were, fused with one another. In alternative Future III, personal autonomy and universal–the anamnestic, present and proleptic–solidarity would be reconciled (Habermas 1986; Siebert 1994; App. G). In Hegel’s view, the nature of this dialectical relationship between the one and the other was thoroughly rational in the sense of mimetic or communicative dialectical rationality. The rational or the true consisted in the unity of subjectivity and objectivity. This unity formed manifestly the substance of ethical life: namely, of the family, of sexual love, of constitutional patriotism, the willing of the general aims and interests of the constitutional state, of longing and love towards God, of bravery too, when there was a risking of one’s life in a universal cause, and lastly also of honor, provided that this has for its content not some indifferent, particular interest of the isolated, atomistic individual, but something substantial and truly universal (Hegel 1972: 176-177; Siebert 1987b; 1987c; 1993; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 2001; 2005).

Dialectic of Betrayal Since the ancient Romans and Greeks, treason–derived from Latin tradere, to deliver–has usually been defined as a crime of disloyalty to one’s nation. A person that betrayed his nation, reneged on an oath of loyalty to it. That person willfully cooperated with another nation, identified politically and maybe also religiously as enemy. However, a traitor may not only betray a nation, but also a single personality, or a family, or a social class, or a political party, or a military unit, or a religious community: thus Brutus and Cassius, Iva Toguri D’Aquino–the Tokyo Rose, the Rosenbergs, Robert Hanssen, Robert Catesby and Guy Fawkes, Vidkun Quisling, Benedict Arnold, and so on, have all been called traitors. There is the always repeated Dolchstosslegende: Hitler called the socialists and communists traitors because they concluded the armistice of 1918 and introduced the

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Weimar Republic. The American Right made the Washington politicians responsible for the loss of the Vietnam War, and thus, called them traitors. Of course, it is only too obvious from the list of traitors mentioned that the notion of betrayal or traitor is dialectical. Who is a traitor for one group may be a hero for the other and vice versa. General Washington was a traitor for the British bourgeoisie, but a hero for the American bourgeoisie. Marx was a traitor for the European bourgeoisie, but a hero for the European proletariat. In March 1945, I, as a young German infantry lieutenant who had been trained to fight against “atheistic bolshevism” at the Eastern front, fought instead on the Western front, which in the meantime had moved into Germany. I fought several weeks against General Patton’s tank army, which had crossed the Rhine River at Worms, particularly, near the Odenwald town of Alzenau, in the for both sides most costly battle on and around the mountain called Hahnenkamp on March 28-29, 1945 (Trevor-Roper 1979: 314, 318, 324-325). The battle became particularly costly for the German side, because 300 Hungarian officers deserted early in the morning unnoticed by the German side, and left open a huge flank of the German force, into which General Patton could penetrate with 80 tanks. While the Germans considered the Hungarians to be traitors, they thought of themselves as doing the most reasonable, human and ethical thing, because the war was lost for the Germans anyway. When on March 30, 1945, after the end of the bloody battle on and around the Hahnenkamp and the town of Alzenau, I had to surrender to General Patton and his and Canadian officers, my sergeant took out of his pocket an Austrian flag and told our captors that he was not a German at all, but rather an Austrian, and that he really belonged into the Austrian army. I felt somewhat betrayed and considered the sergeant under the circumstances as some kind of a Judas. However, our American and Canadian captors found the case to be hilarious and laughed at the sergeant. They did not consider him to be a traitor at all but rather as a joke, since there had not been an independent Austria, not to speak of an Austrian army, for a decade. Treason seems never merely to be an abstract negation, but rather a determinate one, which contains a positive element after all, depending on the perspective of the observer or the participant. A son betrayed his mother with a kiss on her cancer-death bed and abandoned her, and thus became her Judas. Yet, he and his concubine and his friends did not consider him to be a traitor at all, but encouraged him to live a happy life, and thus he forgot about the whole thing and finally was forgiven or forgotten by all. In this dialectical perspective many people can indeed become traitors be it in the bad or the good sense, in one historical

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situation or the other. From the Latin tradere was derived not only treason, but also tradition. We may dare to say that there would be no movement in tradition without betrayal. One religious tradition has determinately negated, meaning at least partially betrayed, the previous one: for example, Buddhism “betrayed” Hinduism, Christianity “betrayed” Judaism, the Lutheran and Calvinistic tradition “betrayed” the Roman Catholic one, Islam “betrayed” Judaism and Christianity (Hegel 1986p: 374-389; 1986q: 185-346; Küng 1994; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: Parts A and C; App. E).

Decline of Religion Toward the end of his life, in 1831, Hegel observed in the religious community in Berlin and elsewhere three different steps, stages, levels, or estates of consciousness: 1)

The level of the immediate, impartial, unprejudiced, uninhibited religion and faith, which later on was called the first naiveté. 2) The stage of the analytical understanding, of the so-called educated people, of reflection, the bourgeois enlightenment. 3) The step or estate of philosophy and of dialectical reason, which later on was called the second naiveté (Hegel 1986q: 342-344; App. E, F).

At this time for Hegel, the realization of the Christian community–after he had considered its origin and its existence, and its decline, lapse, dilapidation in its spiritual reality into this three-fold internal disunion–seemed to be at the same time its passing away. To Hegel, this sounded like a dissonance. Believers looked at the participants in the enlightenment as traitors. As late as 2001, an orthodox Bishop in my international course on Religion in Civil Society in Yalta, Crimea, Ukraine, expressed to me his firm opinion that the enlightened West had fallen into apostasy like the Emperor Julian Apostata, whom Hitler had admired so much (Trevor-Roper 1988: 87-89). Apostasy may not only be called a dissonance in the realm of religion, but also the worst form of treason in what is sacred. The Lutheran Christian Hegel hesitated to speak of the decline, or downfall, or death of religion, specifically Christianity. He believed that the kingdom of God had been founded from the beginning of creation for all eternity. The Holy Spirit would live as such eternally in the Christian community. The gates of hell would not be able to overpower the church. No betrayal would ever bring down the Christian community: from Judas to the alliance of the Church with secular leaders from Constantine to Benito Mussolini, Generalissimo Franco, and Adolf Hitler, or with neo-conservativism and neo-liberalism.

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For Hegel, to speak of the passing away and the death of religion, particularly Christianity, meant to end his Philosophy of Religion, the coronation of his whole dialectical philosophy, with a dissonance. He wanted so much to end it harmoniously. Hegel could end his great philosophy as little with a dissonance as his contemporaries Beethoven or Mozart could conclude their symphonies with a dissonance (Adorno 1993). They left that to the late bourgeois composers Arnold Schönberg, or Alban Berg, or Gustav Mahler, or also to Igor Stravinsky (Adorno 1962; 1973; 1995; Steinert 1993).

The Roman Empire Hegel, the philosopher of religion, could not help himself: the dissonance was at hand in the reality of the history of religion itself (Hegel 1986q: 342-343). Hegel remembered that in the late Roman Empire the universal unity of religion had disappeared. The Divine had been profaned. The general political life had been broken and at a loss, and helpless, and without deeds and confidence. Reason had taken refuge alone in the form of private right, including property, contracts, and punishment for their violation. The particular personal well being had been elevated into the universal purpose because what was in and for itself–meaning the family, civil society, state, religion, the Absolute–had been given up, surrendered, betrayed. Everybody betrayed everybody. In the context of the Roman Empire, the death of Jesus, facilitated by his friend Judas, was a polemical one and on the revolutionary side against the Jewish and Roman society (Hegel 1986q: 289-291). In this death, there was represented not only the giving up of the natural will of the people, but all peculiarity, interest, and purpose, toward which the natural will of the people could direct itself in Roman civil society and state. All greatness and all validity of the Roman world, particularly of its upper classes, had thereby been buried in the grave of the spirit. Jesus himself had made communism the presupposition of mimesis and entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven, and the early Christian community was communistic for a while, and the monastic orders are still communistic today (Matthew 19: 16-22; Acts 2: 42-47; 4: 32-35; Hegel 1986q: 278-291; Dirks 1968). This precisely was the revolutionary element in the death of Jesus, through which the Roman world was given a different form (Hegel 1986q: 289-290; Hendricks 2006; Miranda 1982; Voorst 2000).

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It was not for nothing that Adolf Hitler called early communistic Christianity the “bolshevism” that destroyed the Roman Empire, while he was fighting the modern atheistic communism on the Eastern front (Acts 2: 42-47; 4: 32-35; Hegel 1986q: 289-291; Trevor-Roper 1988: 253-257, 722; Cohen 1972; Miranda 1982). In Hitler’s Wolfsschanze headquarters in East Prussia on November 30, 1944, Martin Bormann, Head of the NSDAP Chancellery, stated that Jewish methods have never varied in their essentials (Trevor-Roper 1988: 721-722). Everywhere the Jews have stirred up the plebs against the ruling classes. Everywhere the Jews have fostered discontent against the established power. These Jewish methods were the seeds that produced the crop the Jews hoped to gather later. Everywhere the Jews fanned the flames of hatred between peoples of the same blood, particularly Aryan blood. The Jews invented class-warfare. The repudiation of this class-struggle theory had, therefore, always to be an anti-Jewish measure. In the same way, any doctrine that was anti-Communist, and any doctrine that was anti-Christian, had ipso facto also to be anti-Jewish as well. According to Bormann, the National Socialist doctrine was, therefore, anti-Jewish in excelsis, for it was both anti-communist and anti-Christian. For Hitler, Jesus had been a great man, and therefore could not have been a Jew. While for Hegel, Jesus, of course, had still been fully Jewish, for Hitler and Bormann, informed by the Talmud, Jesus had to be at least half Jewish (Trevor-Roper 1988: 76). Hitler had 150,000 halfJews in his army, who were declared to be “honorary Aryans.” Their ultimate fate would be decided at the end of the war. Many of them were killed as traitors already long before the war ended. For Hitler, Jesus was something like an honorary Aryan, who had fought bravely against the Jewish bankers in Jerusalem. In any case, according to Bormann, National Socialism was solid to the core, and the whole of its strength was concentrated against the Jews, even in matters that appeared to have a purely social aspect and were designed for the furtherance of the social amenities of the German people. Hitler agreed with Bormann that it was comforting to see how even in those days–November 1944–the fatal relationship between communism and Christianity was daily becoming clearer to the human intelligence. The Catholics Hitler and Bormann had not only removed themselves far from the Christian giving up of the natural will, but had reaffirmed it through their making the “aristocratic principle of nature” their highest form of National Socialist ethics and morality: the right of the predator to dominate, enslave, and annihilate the prey (Hitler 1943:

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64-65). In the weaker neo-conservative language of George H. W. Bush’s Administration that meant: there must be winners and losers!

Transfiguration However, in Hegel’s perspective, the Christian “giving up of the natural will” was at the same time transfiguring the finite human life (Hegel 1986q: 289-291). The being-other of finite human life had still a wider circumference, and a larger scale, and a further determination. To the existence of the human subject belonged essentially that he or she was also for others (Hegel 1986q: 289-291; Münch 1995). The subject was not only for himself or herself. Yet, the subject was also in the representation of the other persons. The subject was valid and objective in so far as he or she knew how to make him or herself valid for other persons, and thereby became really valid. The validity of the subject was the representation of the other person and rested on the comparison with what they recognized and respected, and what was valid for them as such and in itself. The reason why Hitler and Bormann and the whole fascist movement fought Judaism, Christianity and communism, was that what they had in common: the principle of equality (Cohen 1972). For fascist naturalism, inequality was as necessary in history as in nature: with the class system would also disappear the human species as such, and the globe would role around without human beings, as it was the case 7 million years ago, before humanity separated from the chimpanzees (Hitler 1943: 64-65). Fighting for inequality meant for Hitler to fight for humanity. Everybody who fought for equality was a traitor to the human species–the traitor kat’exochaen. In this struggle for inequality, Hitler himself betrayed the working class to the German Herren Club in Düsseldorf, and to the whole bourgeois ruling class (Sohn-Rethel 1973). In this struggle for inequality Hitler sacrificed over 6 million Jews, and over 27 million Russian communists, and many others, Christians included (Bonhoeffer 1993).

Dialectic of the Cross The death of Jesus, facilitated by his disciple Judas’s betrayal, was not only the natural death of a heart attack. It was also the death of a criminal, the dishonoring death on the cross, reserved in the Roman Empire for runaway slaves and other traitors. It contained in it not only the natural element but also the withdrawal of civil recognition and respect, the general

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contempt, the humiliation, the civil dishonor, and the worldly disgrace, shame and violence in a Roman civil society, state and Empire torn apart by adultery, stealing, killing and lying (Hegel 1986q: 290; Merton 1978, chap. 5; Honneth 1990; 1991; 1994; Hendricks 2006; Münch 1995; Miranda 1982; Voorst 2000). The cross was transfigured. The cross, which in the representation of the Romans had been the lowest, and what the Roman civil society and state had determined to be something dishonoring, was dialectically inverted into its opposite, into the highest. Death is natural, and every human being like every animal and plant must die. However, as the withdrawal of recognition and the dishonor of the cross was dialectically turned into the highest honor, all traditional bonds of human living together in the Roman Empire were attacked, damaged, shocked, shaken, shattered, and dissolved in their foundations. When the cross was elevated into the highest standard, the positive content of which was at the same time the Realm of God, the wholly Other, then, the innermost mentality of the people was in its deepest foundations withdrawn from Roman civil society and state, and the substantial basis of the social and political life was taken away. Now the whole edifice of the Roman civil society and state had no reality any longer. It was merely an empty appearance without essence, substance, and truth, which would only too soon crash down and fall into ruins. The fact that the Roman Empire was no longer real in itself had to manifest itself also in the historical existence.

Arbitrariness On its part, the power of the late Roman Empire dishonored everything that so far had had recognition, respect and dignity among the people living in the Roman Republic and Empire (Hegel 1986q: 290). The Jesus revolution or the Christians alone could not be made responsible for the Fall of Rome. The Roman Empire had already started with the betrayal and assassination of Caesar by his friends Brutus and Cassius (Hegel 1986l: 12-14, 13, 45-47, 115, 133, 365, 377, 379, 379-380, 385, 419, 54; 1986n: 328; 1986s: 434). Now the life of every individual stood in the arbitrariness of the Emperor, which was not limited internally or externally by anything. However, besides the life of the individuals, all virtue, dignity, age, position, class, profession, state, and gender was dishonored through and through. The slave of the Emperor was after him the highest power, or had even more power than he did. The Roman Senate violated itself as much as it was violated by the Emperor. Thus, the majesty of the Roman world power was pulled into the excrements together with the majesty

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of virtue, right, personal and social morality, the venerability of institutions, and of everything that had once had validity for the Roman world. Thus, the secular Regent of the Roman world made on his part the highest into the most contemptible, and dialectically turned upside down from its foundation the mentality of the people, so that nothing effective could be opposed any longer inside the Roman Empire to the Jesus movement and revolution. The whole new Christian Religion of Becoming and Freedom had on its part elevated the most contemptible thing, the cross, a most cruel instrument of torture and execution, into its highest flag and standard. Everything firm, abstract right, personal and social morality, everything valid in public opinion, and everything that had might and power was destroyed. For the extant Roman state, which directed itself against the Jesus revolution and the new Christian religion, there remained only the completely external cold force and violence and torture and terror, in short, death. However, the dishonored and degraded life, which felt itself internally to be eternal, did of course no longer fear or shy away from this death, and thus neutralized it, and made it non-functional. Thousands of the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, now called the Christ, allowed themselves to be charged by the Roman courts with atheism and high treason, and to be martyred. Likewise, today the American Empire seems to be powerless against the Muslim insurrectionist in the near East, who do not any longer care about life or death, and thus, for the time being–February 2010–continue to resist in spite of all the deadly weapons and the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay being directed against them (Küng 2004). However that may be, it is not the dialectic of the Crescent Moon, but rather the dialectic of the cross that throws a different light on Judas‘s betrayal, which lead Jesus to his execution: the dialectic of betrayal. The fundamental sentence and principle of the dialectical logic is: the negative is likewise the positive; or the negation of the negation is the affirmative (Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 49).

Dialectic of Death Hegel’s almost monophysitistic Christology from above contained the determination that God had died and that God was dead (Hegel 1986q: 291; Garaudi 1962; Bloch 1975c; Vahanian 1967; 1977; Schultz 1969; Küng 1970; 1994). For Hegel, this was the most awful and terrible thought: that everything Eternal, everything True was not; that the negative itself was in God. With this thought was connected the highest pain, the feeling of the complete lack of rescue and hope, and the giving up of every-

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thing higher. However, according to Hegel, the course of events did not remain standing here (Hegel 1986q: 291; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1985d; 1975b; 1975c; 1979; 1985a; 1985b; Bloch/Reif 1978; Küng 1970; 1994; Moltmann 1964). There happened a dialectical inversion of the death of God: God maintained himself in the process of his dying and death. God’s death was only the death of death, the negation of negation. God arose again from death to life. Death turned into its opposite: resurrection and ascension. According to the Rabbinically trained Erich Fromm’s Christology from below, Psalm 22 has played a decisive role in the story of the betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth, and of his crucifixion (Psalm 22; Matthew 27: 46; Hegel 1986q: 291; Fromm 1966: 231-236; Bloch 1960; 1970b; 1972; 1975b; 1975c; 1985a; 1985b; 1985d; Bloch/Reif 1978; Garaudy 1962; Küng 1970; 1994; Moltmann 1964). Matthew 27: 46 reported: “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice: Eli, Eli lama sabachthani? That was, My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” The Gospel quoted the Aramaic version of the Hebrew text, which read: Eli, Eli lamaha azavtani? For Fromm, it was an almost unbelievable idea that Jesus should have died with words of utter despair. This had, of course, been noted by many Christian interpreters of the canonical Gospels who explained the apparent absurdity by pointing to the fact that Jesus was God and man, and as man he died in despair. For the Jewish scholar Fromm, this explanation was not very satisfactory. However, the dissonance remains: the dying Jesus seemed to be in utter despair and to feel abandoned and betrayed not only by humanity, for example, by Judas, or by Peter, and finally by all his friends, but ultimately even by God, by his very much loved Ab in heaven. Yet, Fromm has shown rightly that in Psalm 22 there is a dialectical inversion from negation to affirmation, from despair to hope, from human and divine abandonment and betrayal to Messianic remembrance, help, and rescue. The Psalm ends hopefully: The whole earth from end to end, will remember and come back to Yahweh; All the families of the nations will bow before him. For Yahweh reigns, the ruler of nations! Before him all the prosperous of the earth will bow down, Before him will bow all who go down to the dust, And my soul will live for him, my children will serve him; Men will proclaim the Lord to generations still to come. His righteousness to a people yet unborn. All this he has done (Psalm 22; Hegel 1986q: 273-306; Fromm 1966: 231-236; Adorno 1980: 333334; Bloch 1960; 1970b; 1972; 1975b; 1985d: Moltmann 1964; Küng 1970; 1994).

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Jesus certainly had no less faith in and love for his Ab in heaven, than the Rabbi Akiba, who, according to the Talmud, while being tortured by the Romans, smiled, and when asked by the torturing Roman general, why he smiled, answered quoting the Shema Israel: All my life I have prayed: You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul (meaning life), and with all your power. I never could love him with all my life until now. That is why I am happy (Fromm 1966: 231-236).

Certainly, Jesus did not die in despair as an expression of his being human.

The Church Fathers For Max Horkheimer, informed by the Torah and the New Testament as well as by Kant, Hegel, Marx and Freud, Jesus of Nazareth died for all human beings (Psalm 22; Psalm 91; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97; Fromm 1992: 3-94; 1966: 231-236; Siebert 2005; Ott 2001; 2007). He could not keep himself avariciously for himself. He belonged to all beings that suffered. Horkheimer criticized the Greek and Roman Church Fathers for making out of Jesus’ revolutionary life and deeds a religion: they made a teaching out of it, which was a consolation also for the evil person. Thus in May 1945, Cardinal Bertram from Breslau, still in Germany at the time, the head of the German Bishops Conference, ordered that a Mass was to be said for Adolf Hitler, who had been responsible for the deaths of millions of people, and who had just married outside the Church, and who had a day later committed suicide together with his new wife Eva Braun in the Berlin Führer Bunker. According to Horkheimer, since the Church Fathers’ conservative transformation of Jesus’ revolutionary life and deeds into a consoling teaching had been so successful, the thought of Jesus had nothing any longer to do with the actions of people, not to speak of their suffering. Whoever read the Evangelium, so Horkheimer argued, and did not see that Jesus had died against his contemporary 1959 representatives, could not read at all. This conservative traditional theology from the Church fathers on to the present-day Christian representatives was the most furious, fierce and severe scorn and sheer mockery, if not blasphemy that had ever happened to any great thought (Dershowitz 2007; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97). Horkheimer remembered that the early Church finally accepted soldiers into its membership, after many internal struggles. It did not yet bless the murderous tools of two hostile armies: like the Catho-

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lic priest who blessed the two atomic bombs, which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. According to Horkheimer, the spiritual energies toward the wholly Other, opposed to the horror and terror of history, which Jesus awakened through his unheard of revolutionary deed, and which broke through the icy coldness of the ancient Roman world, was by the religion that referred and appealed to him, turned away, deflected and distracted from mimesis or imitation to cult, from action to worship and adoration. Horkheimer had to admit that if that deflection had not happened, Jesus would probably have been forgotten, at least as much as Spartacus or Socrates. His followers would have wasted themselves. They would have gone under in darkness. Instead of a successful organization like the Church, which was also not poor in educational results, nothing would have remained. The good and bad deeds and institutions of Christianity would not have been written down in any history book. Jesus would have been right: his realm would not have been of this world (John 18: 28-40; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97). It would have been the wholly Other than this world of appearance with all its horrible injustices. Horkheimer did not dare to say, what was the better thing.

The Jesus Kiss In the tradition of the Church Fathers, Dostoevsky’s Great Inquisitor in the Brothers Karamazov thought that he did a good deed when he took away the freedom from the believers that Jesus had given to them, and when he thus, betrayed his revolution and replaced it with his own ecclesiastical counter-revolution (Berdyaev 1966). However, Jesus embraced the Great Inquisitor and in great sadness and sorrow, he kissed him and left. The Jesus kiss versus the Judas kiss! The present Pope, Benedict XVI, who as professor had been very much engaged in Patristics, had been a very harsh inquisitor, particularly in relation to the Central and Latin American Liberation theologians and Basic Christian Communities, before he became Pope. Yet, maybe the traditional counter-revolution, which harmonizes and thus neutralizes the Jesus revolution in conformity to the functional requirements of the Empires, may not be the last word in world history. After all, the creation of the hierarchy and the sacramentalization of the Church was the result of the rather lengthy parousia delay, the non-appearance of the Messiah and the promised completion of the Jesus revolution. Indeed through the mediating remembrance of the Church, the Jesus revolution has arisen sporadically again and again in religious or in secular forms: through the martyrs and saints, through the monas-

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tic orders, and more recently through a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or a Paul Tillich, or a Walter Dirks, or a Eugen Kogon or a Martin Luther King, or a Mother Theresa, or an Archbishop Romero, or the Berrigan Brothers, or the Cardinal Brothers, or a Che Guevara, or a Fidel Castro, or a Hugo Chavez, or even the critical theorists of society (Bonhoeffer 1993; Dirks 1968; 1983a; 1983b; 1985; Tillich 1972). Not all of Christianity turned into cult and liturgy. There was also always mimesis. Both are not necessarily mutually exclusive. At least toward the end of his life, Horkheimer felt that his critical theory had been misunderstood like the Jesus movement and revolution. If the Church Fathers and their followers up to Benedict XVI had not harmonized the polemical and revolutionary elements in the Jesus’ message, then the Emperor Diocletian would not have rescinded the non licet esse vos against the Christians. The following European Empires would have renewed it again, like the Third German Empire did against critical Christians in the Confessing and other Churches, or as the American Empire has done against the Basic Christian Communities and the liberation theologians in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, and so on. Such renewal of the non licet esse vos produced the martyrdom of Martin Luther King and Archbishop Romero and of his priests and nuns, and lay people. The Church asserted, on its own authority against the teaching of Jesus and of Augustine that the path to life was narrow and small and that the road to damnation was broad, the universal will of God to save all people, and thus generated many more converts (Matthew 7: 13, 14). But who spoke the truth? While often the truth is polemical and revolutionary and non-conformist, the untruth is often harmonious and consoling. Secular revolutionaries may not be able to heal physical and mental illnesses, as Jesus did as an essential part of his revolution. However, they can introduce a national health insurance. Secular revolutionaries may not be able to forgive sins, as Jesus did as an essential element of his revolution, but they can establish programs of reconciliation after the revolution has been won.

Rescue For Horkheimer, without doubt the Greek and Roman Church fathers had betrayed Jesus and his revolutionary life and deeds (Horkheimer 1974: 96-97). However, in Horkheimer’s view, betrayal was a dialectical notion. Through their betrayal the Church fathers also rescued Jesus’ memory, if also in a distorted form. Of course, if the Church corrupted and betrayed the revolutionary nature of Jesus’ Halacha and Haggada, then the true be-

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lievers had to betray the Church in order to rediscover it again. Indeed, the true followers of Jesus’ revolutionary message have often done so. Then, some were called heretics, and were not treated very well even before the Holy Inquisition. For every great saintly founder of a monastic order in the Church, there was an analogical great heretical leader outside the hierarchical Church, who loved God and the neighbor as much as the former (Dirks 1968). Maybe there is a sacrament of betrayal after all. Of course, the Church did not always betray the Jesus revolution and movement outright, but sometimes even facilitated a new break through, if also with hierarchical hesitation, resistance, and sometimes condemnation: for example, Thomas Müntzer’s farmer war of 1525, or more recently, the Basic Christian Community movement in Central and Latin America and its liberation theology (Miranda 1982; Siebert 2007b). Certainly, the liberation theologians are closer to the Jesus revolution than the Church supported Opus Dei, which tries to resist, oppress, and suppress them, like the fascist Arena Party in El Salvador, and the CIA, and the “School of the Americas” in Fort Benning, Georgia. This suppression has often led to the martyrdom of priests, nuns, and laypeople committed to the Jesus revolution in the form of the Basic Christian communities and the liberation theology in the modern American Empire, be it in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, similar to that which took place in the ancient Roman Empire. While the Jesus revolution found expression in religious form even still in modernity, when this form became a conservative, or even reactionary hindrance and obstacle, its content was inverted into the secular form of the modern bourgeois and socialistic enlightenment movements and revolutions, often mediated through Jewish, Christian and Islamic mysticism (Scholem 1967; 1970a; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1976; 1977a; 1977b; 1977c; 1980; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1980: 333-334; Habermas 1978: 11-95, 127-143; 1987, chaps. 1, 6, 7, 14, 15, 18, 19; Siebert 2007b).

Dialectic of Revolution According to Hegel, in its beginning the new Christian religion was itself still concentrated in itself (Hegel 1986q: 280-289). It was not yet broadly particularized into a large movement, a big community, not to speak of a hierarchical and sacramental World-Church. It was present only in this initial energy of longing for the totally Other than the Jewish or the Roman world, or the world of appearance in general. This energy of longing constituted the only valid interest of humanity. Humanity had to fight

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and to struggle, in order to maintain this energy of longing because it was not yet in agreement with the state and condition of the Jewish and Roman world. It was not yet in connection with the universal Roman world consciousness. Thus, the first appearance of the new Christian religion contained a strong polemical and revolutionary element (Hegel 1986q: 280-289; Siebert 2007b). It embraced the polemical demand to distance oneself from finite things. It contained the revolutionary demand to elevate oneself to an infinite energy of longing, in which the Universal, the totally Other, had to be held onto for itself, and for which all other familial, economic, political or cultural bonds had to become indifferent. All what otherwise was right, and personally and socially moral, had to be set aside. Thus, Jesus said, Who is my mother, and who are my brothers? … Let the dead bury their dead… Who puts his hand on the plow and looks back, is not skillful and clever enough for the kingdom of God… I have come to bring the sword… I have come to bring the fire and I want it to burn… (Matthew 10: 34; 12: 48; 8: 22; Luke 9: 60, 62).

Jesus expressed a polemical and revolutionary attitude against the sociomoral conditions in Palestine and in the Roman Empire: “Do not care for the other day… Give your goods to the poor classes…” (Matthew 6: 34; 19: 21). While earlier even Jesus was tempted to use the sword and asked his disciples to buy some weapons, at latest in the Garden of Gethsemane he had changed his mind and asked Peter to put his sword back into the sheath and not to fight against the heavily armed Jewish or Roman guards, and certainly Judas, the traitor, was never violently attacked by the other disciples, but rather later on did violence to himself by committing suicide, at least according to the canonical Gospels (Matthew 10: 4, 34; 26: 14, 47, 51, 52, 55; 27: 3; Luke 22: 34-36; John 6: 72; 13: 2, 26, 29; 18: 2, 3, 5; Acts 1: 16, 25). Thus, the Jesus revolution became a non-violent one. For Jesus, all the conditions in Jewish and Roman civil society that related them to property disappeared. Jesus engaged in the great refusal of the Jewish and Roman world. Yet, here a dialectic of revolution seemed to assert itself. For Hegel, the polemical and revolutionary statements of Jesus had a tendency to supersede themselves: when the rich classes give everything to the poor classes, then there are no poor classes any longer. However, the bourgeois thinker, Hegel, may have overlooked that the abolishment of poverty may precisely have been one goal of the Jesus revolution and its communist tendencies: No rich person could enter the kingdom of God; one could not serve two masters, God and capital (Matthew 13: 22; Luke 16: 9, 11, 3; Acts 2: 42-47; 4: 32-35; 5: 1-11).

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According to Hegel, all these were negative, polemical, revolutionary teachings and determinations, which belonged to the first appearance of the new Christian religion, when it constituted the only interest of the people who believed in it, and when these believers were afraid that there was still danger, that they could loose it again (Hegel 1986q: 280-289). Jesus’ teaching was directed at people of the poor classes, with whom the Jewish and Roman worlds were finished, as they too were finished with them. They were the prey. They were the losers. Thus, one side of the Jesus movement and revolution was this radical renunciation: this great refusal of the status quo (Hegel 1986q: 280-289; Horkheimer 1972: chap. 4; 1974c: 96-97; Fromm 1966b; 1974; 1992; Reich 1971; 1976; Marcuse 1960; 1962; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1973; 2001) This giving up, this putting back and aside of all essential worldly interests and even of all rational socialmoral bonds was in the concentrated appearance of the truth an essential determination, which in the following decades and centuries, when the truth had a more secure existence in the Greco-Roman world, would lose its importance. The Jesus revolution was followed by the restoration and normalization. According to Hegel, it could happen that when the early Christian community behaved toward the outside, Jewish and Roman world only in a submissive, suffering, yielding, surrendering, neck-presenting mode, that its internal energy may in time, when it had become stronger, direct itself with the same fierce violence toward the outside with which it had been encountered. Indeed after the Synagogue had excommunicated and persecuted the Ecclesia, the Ecclesia persecuted the Synagogue, and the heretics, and the pagans for many centuries. The Jesus revolution turned over dialectically into the ecclesiastical counter-revolution. Insofar as Jesus had been as polemical and revolutionary as his teacher John the Baptist before him, and his disciple Paul of Tarsus after him, then Judas’s betrayal of Jesus to the Jewish and Roman establishment, to the Sanhedrin and the Roman Governor, was counter-revolutionary, no matter what his personal intentions may have been. As a matter of fact, the Pharisee Saul of Tarsus had been a counter-revolutionary in the name of the Sanhedrin, and had persecuted the revolutionary Jesus movement, and had presided over the stoning of Stephen and of others, and thus, had become a mass murderer before he was converted into a follower of Jesus in Damascus, and thus into a revolutionary, who expressed his radicality by predicting that those who are nothing will make into nothing those who are something (Acts 7: 55-60; 8: 1-3; 9: 1-30). In contrast, Judas be-

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came through his betrayal of Jesus and his revolutionary cause the patron saint of all future counter-revolutionaries. Judas was the first man of the restoration, and many others would follow him. Of course, the counterrevolution or restoration may always rescue some elements of the original revolution through its negation, if also in distorted form. Jesus promised the Kingdom of God, but all what came was the Church.

Love of God and Neighbor Furthermore, according to Hegel to the beginning of the new Christian religion belonged affirmatively the announcement of the Kingdom of God: the realm of the love to God (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6; Hegel 1986q: 280-289). Into this realm of love, humanity has to transfer itself, by throwing itself immediately into this Truth. Jesus expressed this at the beginning of his so-called Sermon on the Mount with the purest and the most enormous parrhesie, which means frankness, honesty, confidence, and courage, as well as with a revolutionary, eschatological-apocalyptic radicality: How happy are the poor in spirit: theirs is the kingdom of heaven… Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right: they shall be satisfied… Happy the pure in heart: they shall see God. Happy the peacemaker: they shall be sons of God… (Matthew 5: 1-12).

For Hegel, such words were the greatest of what had ever been said in any world religion or philosophy. Such words were the ultimate center of the Jesus revolution, which negated all superstition and all un-freedom of humanity. The Sermon on the Mount was presented in the language of enthusiasm in such penetrating tones that makes the soul tremble and shake and, like Hermes, the psychagogue, pulls it out of the body, and leads it out of the temporal dimension to the eternal home: Set your hearts on his kingdom first, and on his righteousness, and all these other things (food, clothing, etc.) will be given you as well (Matthew 6: 33). Hegel had inverted this sentence materialistically already in his Phenomenology of Mind of 1807: Set your hearts first on food and clothing, then the kingdom of God will fall to you by itself (Matthew 6: 33; Benjamin 1977: 252-253). In this elevation and complete abstraction from all that is considered to be great in the Jewish and Greco-Roman world, which Jesus commanded in the Sermon on the Mount, there was contained a certain melancholy and sadness about the fact that his own nation and the Roman Empire and all men in general had sunk so deep morally. Jesus appeared when the Jewish people had immersed themselves even more stubbornly into their

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divine service because of what they had already suffered and the danger of that suffering continuing. At the same time, the Jewish people were in despair concerning the historical reality that surrounded them, since they had come into contact with the universality of humankind in the form of the Roman Empire, which they could not deny, but a universality that was still completely spiritless. Shortly, Jesus appeared in the midst of the helplessness of the common people of the lower classes in Palestine and in the Roman Empire as a whole: I bless you Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children (Matthew 11: 25). It was not accidental that the canonical Gospels were written in koinae-Greek: in proletarian Greek. That was one reason why none of the philosophers of the University of Athens converted to Christianity until it was closed by a Christian Emperor in 529 AD. According to Hegel, the love of the neighbor, of the stranger, and even of the enemy, which Jesus commanded in the Sermon on the Mount, had as such no objective political purpose yet (Matthew 5: 43-48). To the contrary, it was directed in a polemical and revolutionary way against the status quo of the Roman Empire, particularly and most closely against the status quo of the occupied Jewish state. Jesus declared all the actions that were commanded by the Jewish law–later on collected by Maimonides in the 613 Mitzvoth–which people otherwise considered to be valid, but which were without love, to be merely dead behavior. Jesus was healing humans even on the Sabbath and was thus, breaking the fourth commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue out of love for the neighbor (Matthew 12: 1, 2, 5, 10, 11; 24: 20; 28: 1; Siebert 2007b). According to Jesus, even the animal world was included in the all-embracing love: when a sheep fell into the pit, it could be rescued even on the Sabbath.

Pure Subjectivity According to Hegel’s interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, the subjectivity, which had grasped its infinite value, had thereby given up in a radically revolutionary way all differences of power, rule, force, estate, class, stand, profession, and even of gender and race, be it in the Roman or in the American Empire: before God all human beings were equal (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6; Hegel 1986q: 303-304). For Hegel, only in the negation of the infinite “pain of love” lay first of all the root and the possibility of the truly universal human and civil rights, and thus of alternative Future III–a society, in which the freedom of All would be realized beyond the necessity of nature (Hegel 1986l: 133-141; Marx 1961c: 873-874; Miranda

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1982; App. G). The Roman law, like the American law today, had started from the positive standpoint, and from analytical understanding, and it had no higher theological, ethical, or moral principle in itself, through which the legal standpoint could be proven and justified. Thus, the Roman law was, like the American law today, entirely secular and profane. This purity of subjectivity, which appeared in the Sermon on the Mount, and which mediated itself in the love out of infinite pain, existed only through this mediation. This mediation had its objective form and representation in the suffering, dying and elevation of Jesus, the Christ (Matt 26-28; Hegel 1986q: 291, 303). Judas inverted the cipher of love, the kiss, into the sign of his betrayal of Jesus to the Jewish and Roman authorities and upper classes, and through it not only facilitated his execution, but also the counter-revolution against his revolution of love. Who was thus Judas Iscariot?

Revolutionary Mission Judas was first mentioned and portrayed early in Mark’s Gospel, when Jesus chose his twelve disciples and called them apostles: those sent on a revolutionary mission (Mark 3: 13-19; Brox 1982). For the Rabbis simply to preach and to practice the Mosaic Decalogue was already a revolutionary mission. The same was true of the Sermon on the Mount, which was deeply rooted in the Torah and in the Hebrew prophets. The final apostle chosen by Jesus was Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him or who handed him over to the Jewish and Roman establishment. Jesus predicted the betrayal of Judas during his Last Supper in the valley of Cedron: “Woe to that one through whom the Son of man is turned over. It would have been better for that one not to have been born” (Mark 14: 20). At this point, Judas had already agreed to do the evil deed and to betray Jesus’ non-violent revolution of love to the Jewish and Roman ruling class, and to the counter-revolution of hate. Immediately, before his account of the Last Supper, Mark reported the story of an unnamed woman, who anointed Jesus’ head with costly perfume. Jesus took this as a kindly act. The woman at least had understood that Jesus had to die. The Jewish establishment had for a long time planned the assassination of the young revolutionary Rabbi from Nazareth and Jesus had talked often about this treacherous plan in public. Only the disciples were still in denial. Some of those who were there when the woman put perfume on Jesus’ head were outraged that she had wasted such expensive ointment when it could have been sold for nearly a year’s wage and could have been given to the poor. They pretended hypocritically

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to share the love of Jesus for the poor classes while in reality they only opposed and rejected the woman’s act of recognition and love, in the face of the danger of his assassination by the ruling class, whom he had criticized sharply throughout the years of his public life, and in anticipation of the imminent victory of the counter-revolution in the streets of Jerusalem.

The Poor Classes Jesus rebuked the failure of the critics of the woman to understand the dangerous situation, as she did: Leave her alone; why do you trouble her? She has done a good deed for me. For you will always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could: she has anointed my body ahead of time for burial. Truly, I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be spoken of, in memory of her (Mark 14: 89).

This “always,” which Jesus spoke about concerning the poor classes, has to be read and understood in terms of the eschatological-apocalyptic reservation in his theology of revolution (Siebert 2007b). There will be poor classes until the vertical breaking in of the kingdom of God and the Messianic redemption into the horrible continuum of the horizontal historical process, which would happen soon, in one or two generations, in any case: suddenly, apocalyptically (Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1980b: 333-334). There then followed the next fateful verse in Mark, the second of his entire gospel in which Judas was explicitly named: And Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve, went out to the chief priests, in order that he might betray him to them. Those who learned of it rejoiced and promised to give him money. So he was looking for an opportunity to betray him (Mark 14: 10-11).

Because Jesus was winning popularity among the crowds in Jerusalem by his revolutionary preaching, the chief priests and scribes as representatives of the ruling class were seeking a way to arrest him by stealth, and to kill him. However, they did not want to do it during the Passover feast, lest that would lead to a riot among the people (Mark 14: 1). Judas was willing to give them information that they needed to make the arrest without anyone noticing. After all, the ruling class is always somewhat afraid of the anger of the majority of the people, whom they rule.

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Betrayal Scene The final reference to Judas in Mark’s Gospel came in the betrayal scene itself (Mark 14: 32-42). After the Last Supper, Jesus had gone out with his disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane in order to pray to his Ab in heaven. Mark does not tell if Judas came along or if he sneaked off by himself later. Here again those closest to Jesus, all men from the lower classes, proved faithless. Jesus asked Peter, James and John to stay alert and watch for him while he prayed in private. Yet, three times Jesus came back to find them asleep. The third time Jesus told them that the hour had come: “See, the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of the sinners. Arise let us go. See, the one who betrays me is near” (Mark 14: 41-42). Judas Iscariot arrived immediately with an armed crowd of Jews or Romans from the chief priests, scribes and elders. Judas had indicated how he would identify Jesus to them: with a kiss. Judas came to Jesus, called him Rabbi, and then kissed him. The armed, Roman or Jewish crowd laid hands on Jesus and arrested him with only a brief skirmish, before the disciples all fled. Judas told the armed crowd to take Jesus away securely (Mark 14: 44). Mark never mentioned Judas again after he had betrayed Jesus with a kiss. However, the reader of Mark can scarcely hope for Judas’s repentance and his return to Jesus’ good graces, as Peter did after he had been faithless several times, because Jesus had already indicated that it would have been better for Judas not to have bee born (Mark 14: 20). The other canonical Gospels leave no doubt concerning the horrible fate of Judas, who had been seduced by Satan to betray Jesus and his revolution of love: suicide without repentance, forgiveness, and redemption (Matthew 10: 4; 26: 14, 47; 27: 3; Luke 22: 3, 48; John 6: 72; 13: 2, 26, 29; 18: 2, 3, 5; Acts 1: 1625). Peter was restored and became a leader in the revolutionary Jesus movement together with the converted, repentant, and forgiven Paul. However, Judas, who had served the counter-revolutionary cause of the Jewish and Roman establishment, was lost forever. That was all that Mark had to say about the Judas betrayal. He was not interested in the counter-revolution, since the Jesus-revolution was still going on, and had not yet developed into an always more conservative, more hierarchical, more sacramental Church, which finally allowed itself to be co-opted and functionalized by the same Roman state and Empire that had tortured and executed Jesus and many of his followers for 300 years, and by following Empires. The Church provided the Empires with good hospitals and with good schools, and unfortunately also with good army chaplains. In Germany’s Third Empire, even Hitler’s SS had chaplains with cross and swastika on their uniforms,

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for example, in its military prisons in Paris, where they assisted with the executions. In the American Empire, army chaplains have recently been present in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay at the climax of the most criminal abuses, without being able to stop them.

Rehabilitation The only recently discovered non-canonical Gnostic Gospel of Judas Iscariot tried to rehabilitate Judas in terms of the fundamental Gnostic principle: the dichotomy between the evil material world on one hand, and the good spiritual world on the other (Hegel 1986q: 237, 247; 1986r: 139; 1986s: 425-430, 439-440, 461, 506, 527; Ehrman 2006; Kasser/Meyer/ Wurst 2006). According to the Gnostic Gospel, Judas had been the only one among the disciples who had understood the “mysterious” teachings of Jesus. Therefore, for the Gnostic Gospel, the betrayal of Judas took on a completely different character. Now, Judas’s betrayal was no longer merely a malicious act, as it had been portrayed in the earlier Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and in the Acts. Judas had not acted out of greed for money. He had not been seduced and driven by Satan from his revolutionary to his counter-revolutionary mission. He had not been a wicked man acting out the evil machinations of his heart. Judas had rather done Jesus the greatest favor of all in the Gnostic perspective: he had enabled Jesus to escape this wicked world rather than to change it, and to return to his heavenly home. The Judas Gospel tells the story of the betrayal in straightforward, nearly stark terms: there are similarities to the accounts of the New Testament Gospels, but some differences as well. Here in the Judas Gospel as in the canonical texts of the New Testament, the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem had Jesus arrested, and Judas handed him over to them. However, it happened not in the Garden of Gethsemane, but rather in a guest room in a house probably in the Valley of Calcedon below the walls of Jerusalem, and the leaders seem to be alone, not accompanied by a mob of low class scum, whom Jesus had tried to liberate and to redeem, and who had turned against him and had joined the counter-revolution. According to the Gospel of Judas, the Jewish high priests were murmuring because Jesus had gone into the guest room to pray. It does not tell why this was upsetting to the high priests. Some of the scribes were keeping watch. They wanted to arrest Jesus while he was still praying by himself, not when other people were around, for they were afraid of the people, since he was regarded by all as a prophet (Judas 58: 17-19). These were the people who had joined the Jesus revolution, and

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who were believed by the authorities to be able to turn violent, but never did. The masses were split between the Jesus revolution and the counterrevolution of the Jewish and Roman establishment.

Salvation According to the Judas Gospel, the Jewish leaders found Judas in the house with the guest room and were a bit taken aback and asked him: “What are you doing here: You are Jesus’ disciple” (Judas 58: 17-19; Ehrman 2006; Kasser/Meyer/Wurst 2006). Evidently, Judas was alone in the house. All the other disciples had fled. Judas was the only one who had remained faithful to his Master until the end. The other disciples had run for their lives, not being good Gnostics–having gnosis or higher knowledge–like Judas, and thus not understanding that life in the material world was not the “real life:” that salvation came precisely at death, when the soul could escape the entrapment of this material prison of the body and return to its heavenly home. That was what Jesus himself was about to do, thanks to the act of Judas, instead of making a kingdom of heaven revolution on this evil earth. Thus, Judas gave the Jewish leaders the reply that they wished to hear. The Judas gospel does not tell what that reply was. Presumably, Judas told the Jewish leaders where to find Jesus in the house. Judas then received some money from the authorities, and handed him over to them (Judas 58: 25-26; Ehrman 2006; Kasser/Meyer/Wurst 2006). That is where the Gospel of Judas ends. There is no account of Jesus’ torture, execution and death here: that was almost an afterthought. Judas and the Gnostics, who wanted to rehabilitate him, were not Pro-metheus but rather Epi-metheus people. Also, in Gnosticism Athens conquered Jerusalem. There is certainly no account of Jesus’ resurrection. That would violate the entire Gnostic point of the Judas Gospel: that Jesus was to be saved–like all people–not in the flesh but from the flesh, not materialistically, but idealistically. The common way that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are designated in the surviving manuscripts is as Gospels according to these people. In these books, it is not the Gospel about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but the Gospel as told by these people. That is not how the Gospel of Judas is entitled. Here it is not the Gospel according to Judas: his version of the Gospel story. It is rather the Gospel of Judas: the good news about Judas himself. Here appears the narcissism of the counter-revolutionary, who knows of no other. Judas even more than Jesus is the real hero of the account of the Judas Gospel. To be sure, according to the Judas Gospel, Jesus remained the divine revealer, who alone knew the mys-

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terious truths that could lead to salvation. The Gnostics made Jesus into a Gnostic. Yet, the Gospel was really about Judas: how he received these revelations from Jesus. It was about Judas’s Gnostic superiority over all the other disciples, who continued to worship the false god or gods, who had created this evil material world. The Gospel was about Judas, how he would ultimately transcend this material world, as at the end of his life he would enter into that luminous cloud, in which dwelled the ultimate and true God himself, in a kind of rapture. Once Jesus had prophesied to Judas: “Lift up your eyes, and look at the cloud, and the light within it, and the stars surrounding it: The star that leads the way is your star” (Ehrman 2006; Kasser/Meyer/Wurst 2006).

Gnosticism According to Hegel, Gnosticism came from the Orient (Hegel 1986q: 247, 237; 1986r: 139; 1986s: 425-430, 439-440, 461, 506, 527, Ehrman 2006; Kasser/Meyer/Wurst 2006; Scholem 1967, 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; Habermas 1978; 1987). Particularly in the first, very significant centuries of Christianity, the great oriental world views–Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the Kabbalah–penetrated Italy, the Occident, the land of limitation and measure, where the spirit of subjectivity was dominant, and began through the Gnostic philosophy to pursue the measureless in the occidental spirit, until it came again in the Church to gain preponderance, and to determine the Divine firmly, and consequentially to repress Gnosticism in all its forms as heretical, including the Judas Gospel, 1,600 years ago. For Gnosticism, the material, natural world was not absolute, but relative. It was merely appearance without substance. It was unessential appearance not only for the human beings, but also in itself. It was its quality, to go over and to take itself back into the ultimate Idea. It was the determination of the independence of the being-other of the natural, material world, in which the manifold metaphysical determinations about the hylae–the matter–had their foundation among the ancient Greeks and Romans, also among the philosophizing Christians, mainly the Gnostics, to whom the author of the Judas Gospel belonged. Gnosticism had it roots in Oriental religion and philosophy, particularly in the Kabbalah. Whenever the West moves into a major crisis, and a revolutionary cultural macro-paradigm change has become necessary, be it from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, or from the Middle Ages to Modernity, or from Modernity to Post-Modernity, Western intellectuals have the tendency to escape

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into Oriental religion and philosophy, be it in the Roman or the American Empire (Gert/Mills 1964; Küng 1994).

Three Principles Particularly around the time of the birth of Jesus and in the following centuries, a philosophical representation of the relationship of the trinity originated influenced by Oriental religion and philosophy, particularly Hinduism and the Kabbalah (Hegel 1986q: 247, 237; 1986r: 139; 1986s: 425-430, 439-440, 461, 506, 527; Ehrman 2006; Kasser/Meyer/Wurst 2006). The Gnostics were deeply involved in the struggle around this notion of the trinity, and over this fight split into many different sects. According to the outstanding Gnostic Basilides, the first principle was the Theos arraetos, the indescribable God, the Ensof of the Kabbalah. Philon spoke of the To On, the Ho On, the Anonomastos, and the nameless, immediate One. The Gnostic Marcus called the first principle the Anennoaetos, the Unthinkable, and even the Anousios, the Non-Being or the Nothingness, which did not progress to any determinations, the Monotaes. The Gnostics also spoke about the first principle as the Sigae, the pure Quietness, or Stillness. The Gnostic Valentine called the first principle Eon, or the Unfathomable, the Primordial Ground, or the Bythos, the absolute Abyss, in which everything was superseded. Valentine also named the first principle Proarchae, that which was before the first principle, or Propator, that which was before the beginning or before the Father in heaven. According to Basilides, the second principle was the Nous, Reason, the First Born, the Logos, the Sophia, the Wisdom, the Dynamis, the Activating Principle, or more concretely the Dikaiosynae, the Justice, or the Iraenae, the Peace. Other Gnostics spoke of the second principle as the Ideas, the Angels, or the Eons. They were the roots, or the seeds of the particular fulfillment: the Logoi, the Rizai, the Spermata, the Plaeromata, or the Karpoi. Basilides called the third principle the Archontaes, the heads of the realms of the Spirits. Other Gnostics spoke of the third principle as the Diathesis, the Explication of the Abyss, as the making itself comprehensible of the Incomprehensible. The Gnostics expressed this in the form of Eons and Angels. There are different lower principles at work in the explication of the Abyss, such as the male and the female principle, out of the Synthesis and Syzygia of which arose the Plaeroma., the fulfillment. This fulfillment was the world of Eons in general. The Gnostics, however, called the Abyss, in which the differentiated gender elements were still locked up, and had not yet stepped out of, the Hermaphrodit, as the Pythagoreans

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had already done before. Here, the main thing was the return, the process of purification of the soul, the Oikonomia katharseon. The soul had to return from the hylae, matter, or nature, to the Sophia and to the Iraenae. The primordial being carried locked up in itself all perfection, but only as Potentia, as Possibility. The Nous, the Spirit, the First Born, was only the first revelation of the hidden One. Also, all created beings could only through the connection with God gain entrance to and participation in the true Justice, and in the Peace deriving from it. According to the Gnostic Judas Gospel, Judas wanted to help Jesus through his betrayal to be purified through death, and thus to return from matter and nature to his beloved Ab.

Concreteness The general need and interest of the Gnostics was to determine and to grasp what was in and for itself, the Absolute, as the concrete, from the Latin concrescere–growing together, but unfortunately they failed (Hegel 1986q: 247, 237; 1986r: 139; 1986s: 425-430, 439-440, 461, 506, 527, Ehrman 2006; Kasser/Meyer/Wurst 2006). The Neo-Platonist Plotinus criticized the Gnostics because they did not at all talk concretely about virtue and goodness. They did not teach how virtue was concretely acquired. They did not say how the soul was concretely to be formed and purified. Nothing was done, advanced, or achieved by just saying: Look at God! The Gnostics also had to show how such looking was to be caused and to be brought about concretely; how humanity could be led concretely to this seeing of God. According to Plotinus, the virtue that was directed toward an ultimate goal and lived in the soul with wisdom showed God. Plotinus honored the Greek and Roman gods as he attributed to them a deeper meaning and effectiveness. In Plotinus’ view, whoever loved something, also loved everything that had affinity with it: like the children of the father whom he loved. The souls in the world have affinity with the Higher, the Intelligible, the Absolute. Therefore, they could not possibly be cut off from it. For Plotinus, the Agogae of the soul to concrete virtue was the main issue. Plotinus criticized the Gnostics because they made the spiritual, the intellectual into the only true reality. As they presuppose the Christian books, they transform everything into something spiritual. The Gnostics evaporated the concrete form of existence, of reality, which in Christ had been an essential moment, into an abstract thought. Against the Gnostics, Plotinus considered firmly as essential the connection between the Intelligible and the concrete empirical reality, the harmony between

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thoughts and the real world. The real world must not be cut off from the intelligible world. Divine Providence must reach into this concrete world of nature and history. God lived in this world, and the world had part in him. If God was distant from the world, then he was also distant from the individual Gnostics or Neo-Platonists or Christian, and nothing could be said about him or his product. This world had part in God, and thus was not forsaken and abandoned by him, nor will it ever be. The whole of the world was even more than its parts sharing in the divine Providence. That was proven by the being and the rationality of this world.

Immediate Existence of the Individual On one hand, the Church Fathers opposed the Gnostics, as did Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists (Hegel 1986q: 247, 237; 1986r: 139; 1986s: 425430, 439-440, 461, 506, 527, Ehrman 2006; Kasser/Meyer/Wurst 2006). The Church Fathers were critical of the Gnostics because with them the determination of the concrete individual as this one, disappeared, and his or her immediate existence was evaporated and faded away into a mere abstract form of the spiritual realm. On the other hand, the Church and the Church Fathers opposed the Arians, who recognized the appeared concrete historical individual, but who did not posit him into the connection with the particularization in and the breaking open of the divine Idea. The Arians have taken Christ for a human being and have spread and expanded him into a higher nature–the first creation. They have not posited him into a moment in the history of God, of the Spirit itself. Today, the Jehovah’s Witnesses are still Arians. The Church Fathers asserted against Gnostics and Arians the unity of the divine and human nature, which had come to consciousness in the individual members of the Church. The Church rejected, squashed, and condemned Gnosticism in all its forms because it partially remained standing in the abstract Universal, or because it partially grasped the Christological representation in the form of imagination, and this representation was opposed to the real self-consciousness, the Christos en sarki, the Christ in the flesh. Thus, the Docetists said, for example, that Christ had only an apparent body, or an apparent life. The concrete thought was merely background. In contrast to Gnosticism, the Church held firmly on to the determinate historical form of the personality of Jesus of Nazareth. As the Church did this, it remained closer than the Gnostics to the Jesus movement and revolution. As Gnostics dissolved the concrete historical reality into spiritual abstractness, there was no room any longer for the Jesus or any other revolution, and

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for the liberation and redemption of the real people out of flesh and blood from any ruling class or any Empire, be it Roman, British, French, Russian, German, or American. Plotinus criticized the Gnostics because they did not at all talk concretely about virtue. In fascist Germany, the Gestapo found out in interrogations who among the prisoners was a socialist or a communist by counting how many times he mentioned the word concrete... Alternative Future III–the free, just and peaceful society, would be concrete (App. G). Civil society, based on analytical understanding is still abstract. In civil society, everybody is an analyst, analyzing something particular in his domain.

Dialectic of Love According to Hegel, as in the late Roman Empire before, in modern civil society at the beginning of the 19th century and beyond, the individual moral view, private opinion and conviction without objective truth made itself into what alone had validity (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986q: 289291, 342-344). The mania and addiction of private right and enjoyment was the order of the day. Shortly, universal betrayal had penetrated and permeated the dimension of religion as well as of civil society. In Hegel’s view, when the time was fulfilled that the justification through the Notion–the self-particularization, self-negation and self-alienation of the Universal, as well as its self-singularization, and self-affirmation, and selfreconciliation–had become a need in civil society, then in the immediate consciousness of the people, in the social and historical reality, the unity of the internal and the external life of the people was no longer present, and nothing was any longer justified in religious faith (Hegel 1986f: 243300; 1986q: 342-344). The harshness of an objective command or order, and external insistence, the power of the state or of the Church could here no longer get things into a straight line again. For this the decline and dilapidation had penetrated too deeply into family, civil society, and authoritarian or constitutional state (Hegel 1986g, part III; 1986q: 342-344; Horkheimer 1987e: 293-319, 377-395; 1988c, chaps 6, 16, 18). In Hegel’s view, when the Evangelium is no longer preached to the poor classes in civil society, and when–in the words of the Sermon on the Mount–“the salt has become tasteless and can only be thrown out to be trampled under foot by men,” and when all the religious and moral foundations have been taken away and have been replaced through positive science and technology by a secular enlightenment, then the people of the lower classes, for whose reason, which had remained repressed and undifferen-

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tiated, the truth could only be in the form of representations or picture thinking, could not help any longer their urge and longing for the totally Other than the unjust world of society and history (Matthew 5: 13-16; Hegel 1986q: 342-344). Finally, the people fell for the prejudice that God could not be known. According to Hegel, to be sure the people in the lower classes were still closest to the infinite “pain of love” as represented by the betrayed, tortured and crucified Jesus of Nazareth. However, since the bourgeois enlighteners had dialectically inverted the religious love into the secular love and enjoyment without any pain, the people of the lower classes saw themselves abandoned and betrayed by their teachers. The conformist intellectuals in civil society had admittedly helped themselves: through reflection. They had found their satisfaction in the finitude, in the subjectivity, and in its virtuosity, and thereby in vanity. However, they had lost the longing for the qualitative Infinitude beyond the finite world of appearance, and thus they had lost the people. The substantial core of the people could not find its satisfaction in reflection, finitude, subjectivity, virtuosity, and vanity. As Judas had betrayed the Jesus movement and revolution to the Roman bourgeoisie, nobility and Empire, so the modern conformist intellectuals have betrayed the proletariat to the modern bourgeoisie and its Empires.

Solution? For Hegel, his dialectical philosophy had resolved this dissonance, this betrayal, in the realm of religion by 1831 (Hegel 1986p: 9-53; 1986q: 342344). It had been the very purpose of Hegel’s whole Philosophy of Religion, to reconcile reason with religion, through recognizing it in its manifold formations as being logical and necessary, and to find again in the revealed religion the Truth and the Idea. However, Hegel had to admit that this reconciliation of reason and religion was only a partial one. It was without external, sociological universality. Concerning this relationship between religion and autonomous reason, philosophy was a “separate sanctuary” in modern civil society and state, and its servants formed and constituted an isolated priesthood, which was not allowed to go together with the bourgeois world, and which had to guard the possession of the Truth in the midst of untruth. It was excluded from the universal betrayal, but it could not overcome it completely in the reality of antagonistic civil society. In resignation, Hegel had to leave it to the temporal, empirical, present bourgeois society how it would find its way out of its disunion, its betrayal, and how it would form and constitute itself in a new way (Hegel 1986g:

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339-397; 1986l: 520-542; 1986q: 342-344; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-617). This was not the immediate, practical task, affair, and matter of philosophy.

Task It will, however, be the task of post-Hegelian, non-conformist intellectuals and of the dialectical theory of society and religion to help civil society to find a way out of the as such necessary antagonism between religious faith and secular knowledge, and out of the dichotomy between the bourgeoisie and the workers, and to overcome the as such necessary betrayal of faith by reason, and vice versa, as well as the as such necessary betrayal of the lower classes by the upper classes and their conformist intellectuals, and vice versa (Demirovic 1999; Siebert 1994; 2001; 2005; App. E, F, G). While at present–February 2010–some things in civil society may still be justified by analytical understanding, nothing is justified any longer by religion or philosophy, by faith or the dialectical notion and reason, and the consequent legitimation deficiency is compensated by ideology as necessary appearance and false consciousness. All great narratives, all concern with synthesis and reconciliation, have been banned in civil society as mystical or speculative thinking, not only by deconstructionists, but by neo-conservatives as well (Habermas 1985). Of course, the reconciliation of the antagonisms in civil society presupposes their alienation. In the present transition period from Modernity to Post-Modernity, the possible solution of this double problem lies in a continual public discourse in antagonistic civil society, which keeps open the dialectic between the religious and the secular, as well as between the classes, and does not allow them to be closed up fundamentalistically on one hand, or positivistically, scientistically, and naturalistically, on the other (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 37, 40; Ott 2001; 2007; Habermas 1998; 2001a; 2001b; 2005; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005; Goldstein 2006, part II; Siebert 2001; 2004b; 2005, 2007a; 2007b; 2007c). For some discourse partners, the remembrance of the Jesus movement and revolution may still provide a most powerful motivation, in spite of all betrayals, to mitigate at least alternative Future I–the totally bureaucratized, computerized and robotized signal society; and to resist most definitely alternative Future II–the entirely militarized society, engaging itself deeper and deeper into the collision of religiously based or secular civilizations aiming at World War III; and to promote most passionately alternative Future III–a society, in which personal autonomy and universal solidarity will be reconciled, and which is egalitarian, and in which All will be free, and in which an attentive and friendly

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living together of human beings, and even with animals and plants will be possible (Flechtheim 1971; Habermas 1986; App. E, F, G).

Ability and Need In October 2008, during the U.S. Presidential Campaign, the neo-liberal Republican McCain-Camp told the American people, that the opponent, the Roosevelt socially modified liberal Democratic Obama-Camp, promoted the redistribution of wealth, and that Obama himself was really a socialist or even a Marxist, because like Marx he wanted to apply the revolutionary principle: From each according to his ability, and to each according to his need (Marx 1871; 1906; 1953; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1963; 1964; 1974; 1977; Marx/Engels 1960; 2005; Benjamin 1977: 252-253; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Fraser/ Honneth 2003). Neither of the two political Camps were aware, that this principle was a religious-revolutionary one and that Marx, who after all was a baptized Lutheran, had taken it from the New Testament, from the Acts, where the communism of the early Christian community in Jerusalem was described (Acts 2: 42-47; 4: 32-35; Hegel 1986c: 545-574; 1986q: 241-298; O’Regan 1994; Kogon 1967; Küng 1994a: 89-144; 1994b: chap. I). Marx had inverted this Christian revolutionary principle into his secular revolutionary dialectical philosophy, as he had translated the Jewish, Christian and Islamic eschatology into the concrete utopia of alternative Future III–the realm of freedom (Acts 2: 42-47; 4: 32-35; Revelation 2122; Marx 1871; 1906; 1953; 1956; 1961c: 873-874; 1963; 1964; 1974; 1977; Marx/Engels 1960; 2005; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985b; 1985c; 1985d; 1986e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; App. G). While the McCain Camp used with the help of the Christian Right and of the chosen Republican Vice-President Sarah Palin, a fundamentalist Christian from the Pentecostalist Church of the Protestant-Evangelical Paradigm of the Reformation, traditional religious values, particularly family values, the Obama Camp inverted the Christian principle–From everbody according to his ability to everybody according to his needs–into a secular social democratic principle–redistribution of wealth and universal mutual recognition–in the context of a social-liberal philosophy, and the consequent policies and their practical execution (Acts 2: 42-47; 4: 3235; Revelation 21-22; Marx 1871; 1906; 1953; 1956; 1961c 873-874; 1963; 1964; 1974; 1977; Marx/Engels 1960; 2005; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/ Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b;

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1975c; 1985b; 1985c; 1985d; 1986e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Fraser/Honneth 2003; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004). If the American secular and religious Right was really serious about traditional family values, their official political defenders would not continually violate them on a personal level, and they would long have legislated family wages and child support, as they have been instituted in all civilized nations for a long time. (Horkheimer chaps. 16, 17, 18) In reality, the neo-liberal Right uses the traditional Christian values only as bait to catch votes for neo-liberal political candidates. Against all ideological appearances, the Left, which inverts Christian into secular values–e.g. neighbourly love into universal solidarity–may be more religious, than the Right, which simply abuses them ideologically. The neo-conservative secular and religious Right makes a virtue out of selfishness against all what Judaism, Christianity and Islam stand for: a la Ayn Randt (Horkheimer 1978e: 320-350; 1988d: chaps. 6, 7, 11; 1988c: 1, 5, 8, 15, 16, 17, 18; Küng 1991b, 1994a, 1994b; 2003). The religious bourgeois is even more egoistic than the secular bourgeois since he projects his selfishness into Eternity. The bourgeois uses a little bit of tax-deductable charity, in order to cover up or justify his immense selfishness and go to heaven nevertheless, where he can enjoy his egoism and individualism and liberal atomism and narcisism forever. While the former fascist Carl Gustav Jung looked more religious than his teacher Sigmund Freud, the latter’s enlightenment principle–where Id is, Ego must be–may nevertheless be more religious than the former’s romantic principle–where Ego is, Id must be (Fromm 1950; 1959; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Fromm ed. 1966c).

Marx’s Capital In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the Marxian inversions of revolutionary Biblical semantic and semiotic materials and potentials gained new actuality with the new popularity of Marx’s Capital at the occasion of the catastrophic crisis of capitalism in 2008, as at the same time the neo-liberal prophets of deceit lost at least some of their power over the people (Horkheimer 1985h: 306-317; Löwenthal 1965; 1966; 1980; 1989; 1990b; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Niebuhr 1964). Thus, with the enormous global capitalist crisis of September and October 2008, the question arose again in Europe and America and elsewhere, if Karl Marx had not been right after all with his Capital? (Marx 1906; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; Fromm 1967; Bloch 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Habermas

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1970; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1984a; 1992a; 1998; 2006c; Borradori 2004). European and American publishers, e.g. the German publisher Karl Dietz, have argued, that Marx had come back into fashion again, and attributed his new popularity to the economic crisis of 2008. Dietz sold 1,500 copies of Das Kapital in 2008: up from the 200 he has usually sold annually. Written in 1867, sales of Marx’s Capital rarely hit double digitals, but have been on the rise since 2005. Marxist dialectical economic philosophy and particularly its Russian Leninist version had fallen out of favour with the victorious neo-conservative counter-revolution of 1989, and the consequent collapse of the Soviet Union (Marcuse 1961; Habermas 1976). According to the publisher Dietz’s director Joern Schuetrumpf, Marx’s Capital was definitely in vogue in 2008: and the global financial crisis of 2008 brought the publishing company in Berlin a huge bump. Schuetrumpf doubted if people would actually read the Capital all the way to the end, because it was really arduous. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, of course, all good books are arduous. Schuetrumpf suggested, that it was younger Germans who were buying the Capital being unhappy with the neo-conservative direction their elders had led Germany and Europe and America in the 20th and 21st centuries (Meyer 2008c: 45-46; 2008d: 12-13; Güngör 2008: 50-53; Harpprecht 2008: 14-16; Tress 2008: 17-20; Pfeiffer 2008: 54-58Walther 200858-59; Ullrich 2008: 70-72; Kesting 2008b 73-76; Schenk 2008; Mosdorf 2008: 78-79). There was a younger generation of academics in Europe and America and elsewhere tackling hard economic, political and religious questions and looking to Marx for answers. Other German publishers have also printed Das Kapital, and German mass media have reported that bookstores nationwide have seen 300% increases in sales of the book in the last months of 2008. Suddenly too, some of the all-but-forgotten Marxist philosophers were having their say again, such as the historian Eric Hobsbawm. The Marxist historian told BBC Radio 4’s Today Program that globalization, which was implicit in capitalism, has not only destroyed the Western cultural heritage and tradition, but it was also incredibly unstable (Hegel 1986g: 339-387; 1986l: 520-542; 1986q: 342-344; Adorno 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997h; 1997i/1; 1997i/2; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 2000a; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d). It operated through a dialectical movement and series of crises (Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53). Hobsbawm said on BBC Radio 4’s Today Program on October 25, 2008, that this present capitalist crisis with its global nationalization of mayor banks and industries had been recognized to be the end of this particular, bourgeois era : a macro-paradigmatic change, in which the modern model was concretely superseded by the post-modern paradigm

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(Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986c: 48-53; 1986l: 520-542; 1986q: 342-344; Adorno 1951; 1952: 585-595; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1980a; 1980b; 1991a; 1993b; 1993c; 1994; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2002; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008).

Utopias According to Adorno, the fabula docet of Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, like Orwell’s negative utopias, an anticipatory portrayal of post-modern alternative Future I–the totally administered society– was more nihilistic than it could be right for the humanity, which he proclaimed so passionately (Huxley 1968; Orwell 1945; 1961; Adorno 1997j/2: 97-123; Tiedemann 1997; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 17, 29, 30, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1996s: 28-31, 54-57, 62-66; App. G). In Adorno’s view, thereby happened an injustice precisely to the factual, to what was the case, in modern antagonistic civil society, on which lay his positivistic emphasize (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Adorno 1963; 1980a; 1997j/2: 97-123; Huxley 1968; Tiedemann 1997; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 17, 29, 30, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1996s: 28-31, 54-57, 62-66; App. C, D). Huxley’s negative utopia shared with all accomplished modern utopias the aspect of vanity. According to Adorno, things happened differently than Huxley had expected and they shall continue to do so. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, often the dialectical movement of history has taken another way than expected by poets, or philosophers, or social scientists, or politicians, or even futurologists (Hegel 1986g; 1986l; Flechtheim 1971; Toffler 1972; 1980; Adorno 1997c; 1997f; 1997u). Thus, in September/ October 2008 the neo-liberal Bush Administration began to nationalize and socialize mayor banks and industries against its free-market philosophy and all its predictions for eight years, how world-history would and should move after the victorious global neo-conservative counter-revolution of 1989, and against its own expressive will. In Adorno’s view, not the exact imagination has failed, when things happen differently in history, but the gaze into the distant future as such, the guessing of the facticity of what was not yet the case, the non-being, was beaten with the powerlessness of presumptiousness (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1993; Adorno 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1973b; 1973b; 1980a; 1980b; 1982; 1993b; 1993c; 1997a; 1997c; 1997f; 1997j/2: 97-123; Huxley 1968; Flechtheim 1971; Toffler 1972; 1980). The antithetical moment of dialectic, so Adorno argued, could not be replaced

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consequent-logically, e.g. through the generic term of enlightenment (Bloch 1975c; Adorno 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1973b; 1973b; 1980a; 1980b; 1982; 1993b; 1993c; 1997a; 1997c; 1997f; 1997j/2: 97-123; Huxley 1968). For Adorno, whoever tried such replacement, excluded that what did not belong to the subject, and what was not itself spiritual, and what was not transparent for itself, and which delivered the very motivating force of the dialectical movement, The completely painted out utopia, no matter how much it contained materialistic-technological elements and how ever much it was correct in a natural science sense, was in principle a regression into the identity philosophy, into the idealism of Kant. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel: the Absolute, the wholly Other, as the Identity of the Identity and the Non-Identity (Hegel 1986b: 10, 10, 11, 22, 37, 38, 38, 39, 48, 50-51, 58, 60-61, 67-68, 71, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 111, 112, 114, 252, 255, 307, 309, 310, 311, 312, 322, 329, 371-372, 414, 457; 1986c: 568; Hegel 1986f: 243-300; Horkheimer 1967: 252, 259-260; 311312; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Küng 1970; 1978: Part B; 1994b: 904905). The critical theorists stressed and concentrated continually on the sphere of particularization, alienation and difference in the absolute notion, on the dimension of non-identity, pain and suffering (Hegel 1986c: 545-574, 575-592; 1986f: 280-287; 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 33-55; 1986q: 241-298, 487-536; O’Regan 1994; Horkheimer 1967: 252, 259-261; 311313). According to Adorno, the painted out utopia did not succeed concerning the ironical correctness, which Huxley’s extensions in time tried to accomplish. As certainly, so Adorno argued, as the unconscious–of-itself notion of total enlightenment moved toward the turn-over from rationality into irrationality, from integration into desintegration, so little could be deduced from it, if it would actually occur and if it would be left at that for ever (Horkheimer/Adorno 1951; 1969; 1972; 1984; 2002; Horkheimer 1932; 1936; 1966; 1967b; 1969; 1970a; 1970b; 1971a; 1972; 1973; 1974a; 1974b; 1974c; 1978; 1981a; 1981b; 1981c; 1987c; 1991f; 1996a; 2006).

Technological Civilization For Adorno, the dawning economic and political catastrophies could not leave untouched the dialectical movement of the late capitalistic, industrial, technological civilization (Adorno 1997j/1: 129-122; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 122-146; 177-195, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 434-439, 569-573, 578-587; Metz 1980; 1981; 1995). Huxley’s Ape and Essence was the somewhat hasty attempt, to correct a mistake, which did not come from his lack of knowledge in quantum physics, but rather from his linear concep-

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tion of history, and which therefore could not be overcome through corrections: the processing and assimilation of additional materials. While for Adorno the plausibility of the prognoses of Huxley’s Brave New World was all to simple, the prognoses of his second book about the future, his second negative utopia, e.g. the Religion of Satan carried the stigma of the improbability. Of course, in the perspective of the dialectical religiology, it is always possible, that religions can be abused by the ruling classes–slaveholders, feudal lords, or capitalists for the control and exploitation of their slaves, serfs, or wage laborers to such an extend, that they become not only ideological, pathological and criminological, but even–in their own language–Satanological (Nilus 1905; Caughlin 1932; Deschner 1998; Kertzer 2001; Meier 1994; Brinkley 1982; Goldhagen 2002). According to Adorno, this stigma of improbability could not possibly be defended in the midst of the realistic novel technology through the hint, instruction, reference or relevant information concerning the philosophical allegoric. However, for Adorno, in Huxley’s thought–mistake revenged itself the ideological bias of the whole negative utopian conception. Huxley’s attitude remained unintentionally related to and was kindred spirits with that high bourgeois attitude, which assured with sovereignty, that it did in no way support out of its own interest or speak in favor of the capitalistic profit economy, but rather for the sake of and in the interest of all human beings. According to the high bourgeoisie the human beings were not yet ripe for socialism. If the human beings had nothing to work for, then they would not know, what to do with their time any longer. The bourgeois ruling class engages in such statements even now in the global capitalistic catastrophe of 2008, 2009, 2010, while it nationalizes and socializes one bank and one industry after the other, and thus itself introduces “socialism”, and at the same time considers the workers mature enough as tax payers to bail it with trillions of dollars out of its financial disaster, for which it alone is responsible, because of its bankrupt neo-liberal philosophy and the consequent policies of de-regulation and privatization: according to Chinese wisdom, in its head the fish stinks first.

Cold Reification According to Adorno, that kind of bourgeois ruling class wisdom was not only compromised through its praxis, but it was also without cognitive content, because it as much reified the human beings as simply given, as it lifted into heaven the observer as freely floating instance (Adorno 1997j/1: 121-122). For Adorno, such cold reification was present also in the in-

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nermost interior of Huxley’s conceptual structure. According to Adorno, full of fictitious care concerning the misfortune, which the realized utopia could do to humanity, Huxley pushed away from himself the much more urgent and real mischief, which prevented the utopia from being realized in antagonistic civil society. For Adorno, it was idle to complain, lament, or wail about what would become of the human beings after hunger and worry would have disappeared from the world in alternative Future I or III (Adorno 1997j/1: 121-122; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 49; App. G). This was so, because this utopia was the prey of this world through the power of the very logic precisely of that civilization, about which Huxley’s novels could say nothing worse than the boredom of the in principle not to be reached land of milk and honey–the first Hebrew utopia (Exodus 3: 8; Adorno 1997j/1: 121-122; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 49). Here it was fundamental for Huxley to develop in spite of all indignation about the nuisance, and mischief in bourgeois society, a construction of history, which still had time and thus was in no hurry. On time was transferred what would be the people’s task to accomplish. However, the relationship to the time was parasitic. Huxley’s novels transferred the guilt of the present civil society to the unborn generations. In this was reflected the unfortunate and ill-fated counter-revolutionary position: things should not become different. It was the exact opposite of the critical theorists’ longing for the wholly Other than what is positivistically the case in nature and history, which is also the driving force in all world religions, and in all genuine revolutions, religious or secular, and which is the basis of their struggle against all forms of social injustice in all class societies (Bloch 1960; 1970; a; 1979b; 1971; 1972; 1975b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 38, 39, 40; 1996s: 62-66; Küng 1994a: 904-805).

Counter-Revolutionary Attitude For Adorno, the counter-revolutionary statement and attitude, that things should not become otherwise, was the final product of the primordial Protestant connection between internal peace and repression (Adorno 1997j/1: 121-122; Küng 1994a: 602-741). Because according to the Protestant-Evangelical Paradigm of the Reformation, man carried the radicalized original and inherited sin and thus was not able to do better on earth, the improvement of the world itself was bent into the sin (Horkheimer 1985g: chap 37; Adorno 1997j/1: 121-122; Küng 1994a: 602-741). However, the blood of the unborn generations had no effect on Huxley’s novels on the future. The novels failed out of the weakness of an often with very mag-

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nificent inventions decorated empty scheme. Because the revolutionary transformation of the human beings could not be calculated, and because it withdrew from the anticipating dialectical imagination, it was replaced through the caricature of the people of today according to the ancient and used up procedure of the satire. The fiction of the future bowed down before the omnipotence of the present: what had not yet been became comical through the lesser effect, that it was merely like that what was anyway: like the gods in Jacques Offenbach’s operettas (Adorno 1997j/1: 121-122, 238-253, 254-288; 1973c: 1976; 1997l; 1997m; Habermas 1981d; 1991c; 2001b; 2001c; 2003b; 2003c). For the image of the most distant the view was substituted which the inverted opera glasses offered of the closest. The form-trick to report of the future as of the past, gave to the content a repelling agreement (Adorno 1997j/1: 121-122, 238-253, 254-288; 1973c: 1976; 1997l; 1997m; Habermas 1981d; 1991c; 2001b; 2001c; 2003b; 2003c). The grotesque, which caught up with the present through confrontation with its own extension into the future, had the last laugh like natural representations with enlarged heads. The pathetical notion of the eternal man contented itself with the humane concept of the normal from yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Not the contemplative moment as such, which Huxley’s novels shared with all philosophy and representation, it was to be reproached with, but rather with fact that it did not itself take into the reflection the moment of a praxis, which could explode in revolutionary terms the despicable and disreputable continuum of world history (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 38, 39; Adorno 1997j/1: 121-122, 238-253, 254-288; 1973c: 1976; 1997l; 1997m; Habermas 1981d; 1991c; 2001b; 2001c; 2003b; 2003c).

The Choice For Adorno, humanity did not have the choice between totalitarian world state on one hand and individualism and atomistic liberalism on the other (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 38, 39; Adorno 1997j/1: 121-122, 238-253, 254-288; 1973c: 1976; 1997l; 1997m; Habermas 1981d; 1991c; 2001b; 2001c; 2003b; 2003c). If the great historical perspective was at all more than the Fata Morgana of the disposing gaze, then it pointed to the question, if the human society would finally determine itself toward alternative Future III the reconciled society and the wholly Other, or if it would bring about the world-historical catastrophe via alternative Future I–the totally administered signal society and alternative Future II–the militaristic society (Flechtheim 1959: 625-

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634; 1962: 27-34; 1963: 148-150; 1966: 455-466; 1971; Bloch 1960,1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975b; 1985a; 1985b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Bloch/ Reif 1978; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40; Adorno 1970b; 1997j/1: 121-122, 238-253, 254-288; 1973c: 1976; 1997l; 1997m; Habermas 1981d; 1991c; 2001b; 2001c; 2003b; 2003c; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b; App. G). The historical-materialist cipher theologian recognized in the remembered monadic structure of history the sign of a Messianic standstill of the happening: of a revolutionary chance in the struggle for the repressed past–in the class struggle (Benjamin 1977: 260). For the critical theory of religion, informed by Hegel, contingent history and its organization, the phenomenology, both together, the comprehended history, constitute the remembrance and the Gogatha of the absolute Spirit, the reality, truth and certitude of his throne, without which he would be the lifeless lonely One, and not the concrete, good Infinite (Hegel 1986c: 590-501; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; 347-536; Küng 1970; 1978; 1980; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984) For the dialectical religiologist informed by Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno and engaged in emancipatory remembrance of the suffering of the innocent victims of history, the future is–as it was for the old Jews–not a homogenous and empty time, because in it every second could become the small gate, through which the Messiah could enter: the arrival of the wholly Other than the continual horror and terror of nature and history (Isaiah 61-66; Revelation 21-22; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; Benjamin 1977: 261263; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 38, 39, 40; Flechtheim 1959: 625-634; 1962: 27-34; 1963: 148-150; 1966: 455-466; 1971; Bloch 1960,1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975b; 1985a; 1985b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b; 1997j/1: 121-122, 238-253, 254-288; 1973c: 1976; 1997l; 1997m; Habermas 1981d; 1991c; 2001b; 2001c; 2003b; 2003c; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b; Metz 1959; 1967; 1870; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1981; 1995; 1997; 1998; 2006Metz/Wiee 1992; Metz/Habermas/ Sölle 1994; Metz/Rendtdorf 1971; Metz/Peters 1991).

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Concrete Utopia In the Presidential election of November 4, 2008 the charismatic AfricanAmerican Senator Barack Obama was able to awaken the longing for difference, otherness and change, and the primordial American trust and confidence, that again and again the chance of a new beginning is given, which is the very secret of democracy, and thus became the 43rd President of the United States, and with him won the Roosevelt philosophy of a socially modified liberalism over the older not socially modified liberalism of the second Bush Administration, which through its deregulation and privatization made selfishness of the corrupt corporate ruling class into a virtue a la Ayn Randt, and thus produced the present global capitalistic catastrophe, which forced it against its own theory and will to nationalize and socialize the mayor banks and industries (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Klein 2007; Perkins 2007; Kinzer 2006; Scahill 2007; Perkins 2004; Hedges 2006; Harprecht 2008: 16-17). As the President Obama plans to initiate a new New Deal and to distribute the wealth through progressive taxation and to encourage mutual ,reciprocal recognition among all people, he is on his way of initiating a public discourse about and creating the institutions, which could lead to the concrete utopia of global, post-modern alternative Future III–a post-liberal society based on a humanistic, democratic socialism beyond state capitalism and free market economy (Hegel 1986a: 57,161-162, 532, 580; 1986c: 65; 1986d: 63, 249, 472, 473, 482, 485, 574; 1986g: 436, 437, 447, 477; 1986k: 99; 1986l: 181-183, 360-382, 534, 535; 1986q: 166; 1986r: 71, 508; Fromm 1957, 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972; 1974; 1975; 1976; 1980a; 1981; 1990; 1995; 2001; Fromm ed. 1966; Adorno j/1: 47-71, 97-123; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1973; 1980a; 1987; 1995; 2001; Fetscher/Schmidt 202; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1978c; 1981c; 1981d; 1983; 1984a; 1985b; 1986; 1990; 1992a; App. G).

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While the critical theorists were able to invert quite easily the cognitive, the ethical, and moral aspects of religion into the secular discourse of the modern expert cultures and through them into communicative action in life world and system on the basis of their inverse theology, they did have a problem with the translation of its expressive elements: the celebration specifically of the Sabbath, or of Sunday, and generally of cult, liturgy, and rituals: in spite of the fact that Marx had liked to listen to the music in London churches, reminding him of the poor man, whom the rich people had murdered (Bloch 1960: 227-229; 1970b; 1972; 1975b; 1975c; 1979; 1985b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Benjamin 1955a; 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1974; Marcuse 1970a; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 14-17, 25-29, 32, 34, 37, 40, 42; Adorno 1970b: 111-161; 1997j/2: 608-617; Habermas 1976; 1983; 1991a; 1991b; 2001; 2004; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005). However, the critical theorists tried, nevertheless, to invert through their dialectical theology of the glowing nucleus of the wholly Other also the fourth dogma of Judaism– the Sabbath, or the Sunday as symbol of immortality, including cult, liturgy, and rituals–not like Kant into a mere postulate, but rather into the energy of a yearning and a hope for that immortality or future life, which was entirely a Sabbath (Kant 1929: 30-31, 331, 333-334, 364, 369-377, 379-380, 639, 649, 650; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 28, 37, 40; Bloch 1960: 227-229; 1985, vol. III, chaps. 54, 55; Benedict XVI: 2007).

Music Thus, Adorno found the secular transformation of religious, sabbatical cultic and liturgical elements in music as a form, in which God could be found and experienced, for example, in the works of Beethoven (Bloch 1960: 220-225, 227-229; Adorno 1951; 1960; 1973a; 1976; 1991b; 1993a ; 1995; 1996; 1997g; 1997l; 1997m; 1997n; 1997p; 1997q ; 1997r; 1997s; 2002b; 2002c; Adorno/Tobisch 2003; Steinert 1993). It was through music that Albert Einstein, who played the violin quite well, rediscovered again the God of Judaism, after a long estrangement from his Jewish origin spent in the study of quantum physics, for which there was only a God who could not gamble; who existed against the quantum physicist Heisenberg’s God, who did indeed gamble, and thus allowed even the atoms a certain amount of freedom (Küng 1991: 245, 288, 719, 802, 810). According to Bloch, the Princess Sabbath was no less superior to all gods who left

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people on this earth, than ever the weeping, furiously breaking-in miracle struck by the palliatives (Genesis 1; Exodus 20: 9-11; Hertz 5716/1956: 2-5; Lieber 2001: 2-11; Bloch 1960: 227-229; 1985, vol. III, chaps. 54, 55; Siebert 2007a; 2007b). For Bloch, the spirit of unblocked and undisguised concrete–what Thomas Müntzer’s contemporary, the Erasmian Thomas More had called for the first time–utopia (ouk topos–no place yet), once more could shine high above the ruins of World War I and II, and the Cold War, and Vietnam, and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the so-called war on terror, and the broken cultural spheres of this globalizing late capitalist world (Horkheimer 1987b: 237-252; 1988d, chap. 1; Bloch 1960: 227229; 1975; 1985, vol. III, chaps. 54, 55; Luxemburg 1977; Lanham 1982: 327-343). This concrete utopia was certain of its pole only in the innermost Ophir, Atlantis, and Orplid: in the house of absolute, solidary “weappearance.” In this way Bloch, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse and their disciples unite themselves in the spirit of Thomas Müntzer, as well as the secular reconstructed historical materialism, and the Jewish and Christian and Islamic dream of the Unconditional and the totally Other in the same walk, march, and campaign plan (Isaiah 11, 65, 66; Matthew 24, 25, 28; Revelation 21, 22; Qur’an: Sura 1-3; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Bloch 1960: 227-229; 1985e: chaps. 54, 55). They unite themselves as energy of the journey and as the end of all environments, in which man has been as a non-recognized, oppressed, contemptible, exploited, humiliated, tortured, crucified, lost, and missing being. They unite themselves as reconstruction and alteration of the star or planet earth. They unite themselves as vocation, creation, and as enforcement of the Messianic realm: “Now I am making the whole of creation new!” (Revelation 21: 5; Bloch/ Reif 1978: 88; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1985e: chaps. 54, 55). For Bloch, Thomas Müntzer remained with all Chiliasts a caller on this stormy pilgrimage. In Thomas’s spirit not only new life should start in the old world, but every exuberance becomes open as the world and eternity lies open: the new world of warmth and of breakthrough, of the light that roars broadly out of the innermost being of humanity. According to Bloch, in Thomas’s spirit, now the Messianic time and light must become real. Toward this Messianic time has been directed the radiation of man’s never renouncing and never disappointed spirit. In Bloch’s eschatological view, we all have certainly had enough world-history. We have had too much form, polis, and work. We have been hoodwinked enough. There has been enough blocking, closing off, and barricading through culture and clashes of civilizations. For Bloch, in the spirit of Thomas, another irresistible life stirs and is moving. The all too narrow background of the stage of history,

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the stage of the polis, the stage of culture escaped and disappeared. In Thomas’s spirit, soul, depth, and extended dream-heaven, with stars from the bottom to the top shine into the world. The true firmaments developed themselves. The Road of Counsel stretched and moved irresistibly up to that secret Messianic Sabbatical Symbol, toward which had moved the dark, searching, difficult earth since the beginning of times (Bloch 1960: 227-229; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1985e: chaps. 54, 55).

Proclamation of the Highest Truths While for the Rabbis God, the Creator and Lord of the Universe, which was the work of His goodness and wisdom, and humanity, made in his image, who was to hallow his week-day labors by the blessedness of Sabbathrest, and an overall theological and anthropological optimism were the fundamental Jewish dogmas contained already in the first chapter of the Genesis, they emphasized, nevertheless, at the same time, that the very purpose of this first chapter of the Torah was to reveal these teachings to the children of men (Genesis 1; Hertz 5716/1956: 2-5; Lieber 2001: 2-11; Qur’an: Sura 1-3). Its purpose was not to serve as a textbook of astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, psychology or sociology. Its object was not to teach scientific facts and data. Its purpose was to proclaim the highest truths respecting God, humanity, and the universe. The Rabbis considered the conflict between the fundamental realties of the Religion of Sublimity and the established facts of science to be unreal as soon as religion and science each recognized the true borders and boundaries of its domain and dominion. The critical theorists of society could no longer share this Rabbinical optimism concerning the harmony between the sacred and the profane, nor that of the German idealists: from Kant and Jacobi, through Fichte and Schelling to Hegel (Exodus 28: 41; Lieber 2001: 510/41; Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986p: 9-88; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; 347-536; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 3, 4, 9, 13-22, 25-26, 29-30, 32, 34, 37, 40; Habermas 1978, chap. 5; 1986; 53-55; 1990: 9-19; 2001; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005). The name of the continuing conflict between the religious and the secular was not only science, but also and much more so the theodicy problem (Leibniz 1996, vols. I and II; Hegel 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Oelmüller 1990; Metz 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993). According to the Rabbis, it was already Abraham’s faith in God’s justice that apparently, between Hebron and Sodom, gave rise to his serious questions about God’s morality in governing his world (Genesis 18: 25; Lieber 2001: 103/25). In modernity these theodicy or contingency questions were secularized

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(Horkheimer 1971; 1972: chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7). Charles Darwin had not been alienated from the Anglican Church and Christianity because of his scientific discoveries in the Caribbean, but rather because of the premature death of his beloved little daughter (Darwin 1980). Admittedly of course, the natural and historical sciences revealed more and more of the contingency-or theodicy problems, as for it space and time opened it self up more and more: that most organisms, including the human organism, on this planet at least were programmed to consume each other for their own survival sake (Hegel 1986l: 19-55; 1986q: 501-536; Darwin 1980). The critical theorists saw only too clearly that the dialectic between the sacred and the profane, and in the religious and in the secular, continued to progress and to deepen throughout the 20th century (Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969; Adorno 1966: 300-408). They wanted to prevent any fundamentalist or positivistic repression of this dialectic between the religious and the secular (Horkheimer 1986g: 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-617; Habermas 1990: 9-18; 2001; 2002; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005; Mendieta 2005). They tried to promote an open dialectic between the sacred and the profane. So does the dialectical theory of religion (Siebert. 2001; 2002; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2006a; 2006c; 2006d; 2007b; 2007c).

The Seriousness of Sin For the Rabbis, the fifth and the sixth religious dogmas or truth of the Religion of Sublimity were reflected in the third chapter of Genesis: the parable of the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3; Hertz 5716/1956: 10-13; Lieber 2001: 17-23; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer 1985g, chap. 37; Fromm 1966, chap. 5; Küng 1991). One of these dogmas was that on the seriousness of sin and repentance. For Judaism, there was an everlasting distinction between right and wrong, between good and evil. In the perspective of the Rabbis, there have always been serpent voices deriding all moral do’s and don’ts, proclaiming instinct and inclination to be the truest guides to human happiness, and bluntly denying that any evil consequences follow the defiance of God’s commands. According to the Rabbis, chapter 3 of Genesis for all times warned humanity against these insidious and fateful serpent voices. In the words of Isaiah 5: 20-21, chapter 3 of Genesis seemed to say: “Woe unto them, that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Woe unto them, that are wise in their own eyes.” The critical theorists took sin so seriously that they radicalized even the fifth Jewish dogma under the influence of Christianity, particularly Saint Paul

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and Saint Augustine and the Protestant-Evangelical Paradigm of the Reformation, as well as the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and the horrible experiences of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, and in the anticipation of alternative Future I–the totally administered society as described by Dostoevsky, Kafka, Huxley and Orwell, in which untruth is truth, and war is peace, as well as in anticipation of alternative Future II–the totally militarized society, into the original sin or the fall of man (Schopenhauer 1989: Vol. 1, 550, 552, 553; Vol. 2,747, 774, 795, 800-805, 819; Vol. 3, 597; Vol. 4, 81; Vol. 5, 450, 449, 548-549; Huxley 1968; Orwell 1961; Kafka 1993; Wiesel 1982; 1992; Horkheimer 1985g: 391-392; Fromm 1966, chap. 5; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-31; Adorno 1970b: 103-125; 1980; 1997j/1: 47-71, 97-121, 238-253,254-288; 1997j/2: 608616; Habermas 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2004d; Habermas/Derrida 2003; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Küng 1994a: 89-144, 602-741; 1994b; Benedict XVI 2007: 21-22; App. G).

The Free Will For the Rabbis, the other, the sixth vital dogma contained in chapter 3 of Genesis was that free will had been given to humanity (Genesis 3; Hertz 5716/1956: 10-13; Lieber 2001: 17-23; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer 1985g, chap. 37; Fromm 1966, chaps. 3-5; Küng 1991b). Thus, in the view of the Rabbis, it was in humanity’s power either to work with God or against Him. It was not the knowledge of evil, but the succumbing to it, that was deadly for humanity. Humanity may see the forbidden fruit, but need not eat of it. Humanity could make or mar its destiny. According to the Rabbis, in all ages and conditions humanity had shown the power to resist the suggestions of sin, and had proved itself superior to the power of evil. If a human being stumbled and fell on the pathway of life, Judaism bid him to rise again and to seek the face of the Heavenly Father in humility, contrition and repentance. The Rabbis asked: “If a man sins, what is his punishment?” The Prophet answered: “The soul that sins it shall die– the wages of sin is death.” The Sage answered: “Evil pursues the evil doer– the wages of the sin is sin.” According to the Rabbis, the answer of the El Shaddai, the Almighty is: “Let a man repent, and his sin will be forgiven him–the wages of sin is repentance.” In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, that has also been the answer of the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth (Matthew 6: 14; 9: 2, 5, 6, 12: 31; 26: 28). While the critical theorists took most seriously the differentiation between good and evil, they in no way denied but rather stressed most emphatically in principle humanity’s free

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will, its ability and power to resist the bad conditions in antagonistic civil society, and to transform them through revolution or reform toward the concrete utopian alternative Future III–the good and right society (Luxemburg 1977; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 1-6, 9-13, 17, 21, 29-30, 32, 34, 37-43; Fromm 1950, 1964; 1966a, chap. 3-5; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1981; 1990; 2001; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-31; Adorno 1970b : 103-125; 1980b; 1997j/1: 97-122; Habermas 2004; Habermas/Derrida 2003; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Küng 1990; App. G). The critical theorist’s notion of the free will comes closer to the more optimistic interpretation in the Medieval Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity than to the more pessimistic interpretation in the ProtestantEvangelical Constellation of the Reformation (Horkheimer 1985g, chap. 37; Küng 1994: 336-601, 602-741). It was not by accident that most of the assistants of Horkheimer and Adorno were Catholics, such as Karl-Heinz Haag, to whom Adorno even dedicated his Hegel book (Adorno 1969; Horkheimer 1988n: 535-536; Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005).

Pessimism and Optimism According to the Rabbis, instead of the anthropologically and theologically pessimistic Christian notion of the Fall of Man in the sense of humanity as a whole, particularly in the radical interpretation of the Protestant Evangelical Paradigm of Chritianity, Judaism announced and emphasized more optimistically the Rise of Man (Genesis 3; Hertz 5716/1956: 10-13; Lieber 2001: 17-23; Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Horkheimer 1985g: 37; Fromm 1966a; 1966b, chaps. 3, 4. 5; 1967; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; Baum 1959; 1971; 1975b; 1980a; 1980b; 1982; 1994; 1996; 2001; 2003; 2004; 2005; 2007). According to Adorno, in the integral, administered world of modern capitalist society, which did not tolerate sorrow, the rather pessimistic commandment of Saint Paul in his Letter to the Romans “weep with the weeping” was even more valid than ever before (Huxley 1968; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Adorno 1997j/1: 114). Adorno also remembered, that Huxley’s savage reported the rather pessimistic story, that once when he was in one of his more ascetic moods, he stood with stretched out arms in glowing heat at a rock, in order to feel how a crucified man would feel (Huxley 1968; Adorno 1997j/1: 115116). When the savage was asked for an explanation, he gave the curious answer: “Because I felt I ought to. If Jesus could stand it. And then, if one has done something wrong… Besides, I was unhappy. That was another reason.” In Adorno’s view, when the savage could already himself not find

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another reason for his religious adventure, the choice of suffering, than that he had suffered, then he could hardly contradict his interviewer, who was of the opinion, that it would have been after all much more rational to take the euphoric panacea drug soma, in order to heal himself from his depression. For Adorno, the world of ideas, which was irrationally hypostatized, and which was itself, so to speak, made into mere existence, demanded always again and again justification through mere existences: it was prescribed for the sake of that empirical happiness, which was to be negated through the former. Once Adorno’s friend, the Christian Walter Dirks, argued vehemently against his friend, the Christian Eugen Kogon’s rather pessimistic opinion, that nobody had a right to happiness, who had not suffered in Buchenwald, as he had done (Adorno/Dirks 1974; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Siebert 2005b). Walter resisted Kogon’s wish to write a whole issue of their Franfurter Hefte on the theodicy problem. There was for the more optimistically inclined and happiness-seeking Walter simply too much sadness and pessimism as well as intimidation and domination connected with that unresolved problem not only in Buddhism but also in Christianity, particularly in the last years of his long life, when he had to struggle with severe attacks of depression (Hegel 1986l: 1955; Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989: Vol. 2: 438439, 547; Vol. 4: 25, 51, 324-327; Vol. 5, 183, 251, 365, 405-412, 419-426, 444, 572; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps, 4, 9, 19, 21, 29, 37, 40; Dirks 1968; 1983a; 1083b; 1985; Siebert 1986: 442-457; 1987d; 1993; 2000; 2004a; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2007a; 2007b: 419-457).

Pessimistic Predictions and New Hope In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, unfortunately too many pessimistic military, economical, political, cultural and religious predictions by modern philosophers of history and social scientists, like Oswald Spengler, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Karl Mannheim, Thorstein Veblen, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno, have indeed been realized and proven right by the social and historical process and dynamic not only through European fascism, but also since the Second World War through the Cold War, particularly the Vietnam War, to the First Iraq War and the Afghanistran and Lebanese Wars, and the Second Iraq War, from the Nixon to the two Bush Administrations (Huxley 1968; Orwell 1945; 1961; Spengler 1922; Veblen 1945; Mannheim 1935; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Adorno 1997j/1: 47-71, 97-122; 1997j/2: 499-506, 507-517, 518-532, 533-554, 555-572, 573-594, 608-616, 617-638, 674-690,

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702-740, 794-802; Franken 2003; Gosling 2000; Buchanan 2006; Esposito/Mogahed 2007; Clinton 2004; Zinn 2003: chaps. 14-25; Dallaire 2003; Kinzer 2006; Perkins 2006; 2007; Scahill 2007; Bin Laden 2005; Klein Hedges 2007; Fest/Eichinger 2002; Gilbert 1995). However, against all this massive pessimism, Senator Barak Obama, rooted in the immense suffering of a whole enslaved race and in the liberation theology of Martin Luther King, has through his Presidential Campaign of 2008 stirred up once more in America and Europe and elsewhere a new optimism and hope, and has awakened anew the longing not for an abstract and thus false utopianism, but rather for the wholly Other than the dark years of the neo-conservative second Bush Adinistration, and the neo-liberal ideology and status quo, and the two most cruel wars in Iraq and Afghanistan spilling over into Pakistan and Syria, and a world-wide economic catastrophe caused by the lack of policing of the unlimited, usurous need, hunger and greed for surplus value and profit of the American and other corporate ruling classes (Marx 1961: Vol. I, 12-13, 74, 93, 141, 158, 166, 168-169, 194, 224, 226, 282, 296, 317-319, 321, 330-331, 346, 425, 534, 542, 543, 548-549, 592-593, 616, 689, 818, 827-828, 830, 834-836, 844; Vol. II, 4, 10, 25, 29-31, 35, 36, 40, 51, 60-66, 76, 112, 120, 122, 131, 188, 193, 208, 212, 216, 222, 292-307, 325, 330, 338, 360, 362, 388; Horkheimer 1985f: chaps. 17, 29, 34, 35, 37, 40; 1996s: 32-74; Adorno 1997j/14771, 72-86; 97-122; 1997j/2: 499-506, 507-517, 518-532, 533-554, 555-572, 573-594, 608-616, 617-638, 674-690, 702-740, 794-802; Franken 2003; Gosling 2000; Buchanan 2006; Esposito/Mogahed 2007; Clinton 2004; Zinn 2003: chaps. 14-25; Dallaire 2003; Kinzer 2006; Perkins 2006; 2007; Scahill 2007; Bin Laden 2005; Klein Hedges 2007; Fest/Eichinger 2002; Gilbert 1995).

Original Virtue In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, all that Christian talk about weeping and suffering, which the first generation of the critical theorists concretely superseded into their dialectical theory of society, does not sound like blue-eyed optimism (Huxley 1968; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Adorno 1997j/1: 114-116). To the contrary, instead of the anthropological Christian notion of the original sin, the more optimistic Judaism stressed the original virtue: the beneficent hereditary influence of righteous ancestors upon their descendants (Genesis. 3; Hertz 5716/1956: 10-13; Lieber 2001: 17-23; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985g: 37; Fromm 1966, chaps. 3, 4, 5).

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The Jewish interpretation of the fall of humanity was certainly more optimistic than the Christian one. The Midrash said that there was no generation without its Abraham, Moses or Samuel. For the Rabbis, that meant that each age was capable of realizing the highest potentialities of the moral and spiritual life. Judaism was clinging to the idea of human progress. In the perspective of the Rabbis, following here Isaiah 2 and 11, the Golden Age of Humanity was not in the past but in the future, and all the children of humanity were destined to help in the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth (Genesis 3; Hertz 5716/1956: 10-13; Lieber 2001: 17-23; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985g: 37; Fromm 1964; 1966a; 1966b: chaps. 3-5; Adorno 1970b: 75-90, 103161). The critical theorist’s radicalization of the seriousness of sin, as it appeared in the third chapter of Genesis, into the original sin, or the fall of humanity, or the curse on humanity, prevented them as little as Catholic Christianity to cling with Judaism to the idea of progress: to long most energetically and passionately for the rise of humanity to light, friendship and love, and to alternative Future III–the reconciled and free society, and to the imageless and nameless totally Other and to the rescue of the innocent victims of history, who had been slaughtered without ever having had their day in court (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40, 42; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b: 75-90, 103-161; 1980b: 333-334; Habermas 1986: 53-55; 1990: 9-19; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-248; Peukert 1976: 278-280; 293-294; Benedict 2007: 7-8; App. G). Of course, also Judaism has its pessimistic moments and elements (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991b). Thus Jacob answered Pharao’s question “How many are the years of your life?” rather pessimistically “The years of my sojourn on earth are one hundred and thirty. Few and hard have been the years of my life, nor do they come up to the life spans of my fathers during their sojourns” (Genesis 47: 7-10). The Rabbis did not expect Jacob to sound so bitter and pessimistic about his life (Genesis 47: 7-10; Lieber 2001: 285-286). Jacob had just been united with his beloved son Joseph in Goshen, Egypt, whom he had thought dead, and he had been promised a life of ease in Egypt by Joseph and the Pharao. The Rabbis have described Jacob’s life as a “story with a happy ending that withholds any simple feeling of happiness at the end.” Although Jacob got everything he wanted, it was not in the way he would have wanted it. Everything had been a struggle.

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Last Judgment The Rabbis found the seriousness of sin expressed in the story of the flood, which they considered to be an event in historic times, approximately about the year 3800 before the Common Era, which today may find some support in the astronomical, geological, and biological catastrophe theories (Genesis 6: 9-11, 32; Hertz 5716/1956: 26-40; Lieber 2001: 33-62). For the Rabbis, the story of that flood as it was recounted in the families of the Hebrew Patriarchs was of great ethical and religious value. The Deluge was a Divine judgment upon an age, in which might was right, and depravity degraded and enslaved the children of humanity (Hertz 5716/1956: 26-40; Lieber 2001: 33-62; Benedict XVI 2007: 20-23). We may speak of the Divine judgment as the eighth dogma of Judaism as the Religion of Sublimity. According to the Rabbis, before the Flood there were giants on earth in those days: the men of renown. To these super-men, life meant unscrupulous selfishness and the deification of power and pleasure. Among these men of violence one man alone walked upright and blameless: Noah. He believed in justice and practiced mercy. According to the rabbinical legend, Noah was during the years of his ship’s construction a preacher of repentance. “Turn from your evil ways and live,” was Noah’s admonition to his fellow men. Noah predicted to the men and women of his generation and warned them that a Tsunami, a Deluge, was coming, so that they might desist from iniquity and turn to righteousness. In vain! Noah saw that entire generation swept away. Yet, Noah also loved to see the Rainbow of Promise as symbol of a covenant between God and humanity. Unlike its Babylonian counterpart, the Hebrew deluge story was a proclamation of the eternal truth that the basis of human society was justice, and that any society that was devoid of justice deserved to perish, and would inevitably go under. Noah saw the beginnings of a better, more just world. In the Rabbi’s view, that better world was eventually to gain in strength, and to find lasting expression in Abraham and his covenant and his descendants. Still for Hegel, world-history was world-judgment (Isaiah 7, 11, 42, 54, 65, 66; Revelation 20, 21, 22; Hertz 5716/1956: 41-44; Lieber 2001: 3536; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986l: 559). According to Benedict XVI, in the modern era the idea of the Last Judgment had faded into the background (Benedict XVI: 20). Christian faith had been individualized and privatized and primarily oriented towards the salvation of the believer’s own soul, while reflection on world history was largely dominated by the idea of progress (Hegel 1986l; Benedict XVI: 20). The fundamental content of judgement, however, has not disappeared. It has simply taken on a totally

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different form. The atheism of the 19th and 20th centuries was in its origins and aims a type of moralism. It was a protest against the injustices of the world and of world-history. While the critical theorists had problems with Yahweh’s destructive wrath and the whole talion-theodicy, as it was expressed, for example, in the story of the flood, they, nevertheless, continued to take sin seriously to the point of its radicalization into the original sin, and the catastrophic fall of humanity, and as a spell and a curse over the whole human species. Their longing for the wholly Other continued to include the yearning for perfect justice: that the murderer would not triumph over the innocent victim, at least not ultimately, and that both would have their day in court (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 29, 37, 49, 42; Adorno 1980b: 333-334; Thomson/Held 1982: 245-247; Peukert 1976: 278-280, 293-294).

One Humanity: Universal Language As the critical theorists concretely superseded the dogmas of Judaism into their dialectical theory of society, they also preserved the Jewish teaching about the unity ot humanity, particularly after the linguistic trend turn initiated by Habermas on the basis of the human potentials of language and memory and of the struggle for recognition: namely, as the linguistically mediated onenes of humankind (Genesis 11: 1-9; Hertz 5716/1956: 3839; Lieber 2001: 58-60; Hegel 1972, 1976, 1979; 1986b; Habermas 1981a; 1981b; 1984a; 1984b; 1987d; Benedict XVI: 8). For the Rabbis, one reading and explanation of Genesis 11 was that it continued the theme of the preceding section and indicated that the Divine ideal was one humanity united by one universal language. We may speak of such unifying universal language as the ninth dogma or truth of the Jewish religion. In view of the division of humanity by diversity of language, which had ever been a source of misunderstanding, hostility and war, this chapter 11 of Genesis answered the question, of how the original Divinely-ordained unity of language, that indispensable link for the unity of humanity, had been lost. In the view of Rabbi Steinthal, only a great transgression–an enterprise colossal in its insolent impiety and evidencing an open revolt against God– could have accounted for such a moral catastrophe to humanity (Genesis 11: 1-9; Hertz 5716/1956: 38-39; Lieber 2001: 58-60). According to the Rabbis, the symbols of such heathen impiety to the Hebrew mind were the ziggurats, the Mesopotamian temple-towers rising to an immense height as if they intended to scale Heaven: the first skyscrapers in the long history of traditional and modern civil society. Mohammed Ata and his 18

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Jihadists may have imagined that they struck the Tower of Babel–the story is also in the Holy Qur’an–when they transformed civil airliners into rockets and flew them into the two skyscrapers of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001 (Habermas 2001). The Rabbis remembered that the building of the greatest of these towers had been associated with Babylon, the center of ancient luxury and power, not far from Baghdad, Iraq, which at this time–February 2010–is still heavily occupied by American troops in misguided retaliation for September 11, 2001 (Genesis 11: 1-9; Hertz 5716/1956: 38-39; Lieber 2001: 58-60; Habermas 2001). The Rabbis asserted that the builders of this Tower of Babel wished to storm the heavens in order to wage war against the Deity. According to Ryle, as the highest stage in an Assyrian or Babylonian ziggurat was surmounted by a shrine of the Deity, there was perhaps less fancifulness in these words of the Rabbis than was often suspected. The Rabbis remembered that Jewish legend told of the god-lessness and inhumanity of these tower builders. If, in the course of the construction of the tower, a person fell down and met his death, none paid heed to it. Yet, if a brick fell down and broke into fragments, the tower-builders were grieved and even shed tears. For the Rabbis, that was a graphic summing up of heathen civilization, ancient or modern. Also the workers, who fell down to the ground during building modern skyscrapers, were often not very well remembered. In the view of the Rabbis, such an enterprise as building the Tower of Babel provoked Divine punishment. Thus, that insolence and power were broken by lasting division occasioned by diversity of language. Quite a different reading and interpretation was given of Genesis 11 by Ibn Ezra (Genesis 11: 1-9; Hertz 5716/1956: 38-39; Lieber 2001: 58-60; Habermas 2001). According to him, the purpose of the builders of the Tower of Babel had simply been to prevent their becoming separated, and to secure their dwelling together. However, as this purpose was contrary to the design of Providence that the whole earth should be inhabited, it was frustrated. According to the Rabbis, the expression whose top may reach unto heaven had accordingly to be interpreted as saying that that tower was to be of very great height so that it would be visible at a considerable distance and thus could become a rallying point to all people. While the critical theorists of society would reject the talion-theodicy implicit in the parable of the Tower of Babel, they would nevertheless accept the tendency toward an always greater universality, stressed by Ibn Ezra’s reading and interpretation: the direction toward post-modern, global alternative Future III–the unlimited communication community (Genesis 11: 1-9; Hertz 5716/1956: 38-39; Lieber 2001: 58-60; Hegel 1972, 1976, 1979; 1986b; Apel 1976a; 1976b; 1982;

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1990; Habermas 1981a; 1981b; 1984; Honneth 1990; 1994; 2000; Fraser/ Honneth 2003; Honneth/Joas 1986; Edelstein/Habermas 1984; App. F, G).

Mystical Theology and Historical Materialism Adorno and Benjamin determinately negated into their negative, inverse, cipher theology as center of their critical theory of society not only the Jewish dogma of the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue, but also all other nine truths of Judaism (Horkheimer 1985l: 483493; Adorno 1970b: 103-125; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 23-24). Adorno and Benjamin dared in their non-conformist, other, inverse theology to summarize in one draw of the dialectical bow, thus, bringing its opposite ends together: the Jewish mystical theology on one hand, and the critical political economy or reconstructed historical materialism, on the other (Hegel 1986g, part III; Marx 1961a, b & c; Adorno 1970b: 316-317; Benjamin 1977: 251; Habermas 1976). The inverse theology as critical political theology engaged itself and acted through a reconstructed historical materialism in the world-history as class struggle (Hegel 1986a: 555; 1986c: 152, 153, 154, 285; 1986f: 384, 389-390; 1986k: 94; 1986l: 346348; Marx 1961a: 12-13, 141, 282, 296, 689; Benjamin 1977: 251; Adorno 1970b : 116-117; Habermas 1976). According to Hegel, if the bad course of world-history would be defeated or overcome, or if virtue would be victorious, that had to decide itself out of the nature of the living weapons that the fighters used: the patricians and the plebeians, the slaveholders and the slaves, the feudal lords and the serfs, the owners of capital and the wage laborers, the creditors and the debtors, the producers and the consumers (Hegel 1986a: 555; 1986c: 152, 153, 154, 285; 1986f: 384, 389-390; 1986g: 33-55; 1986k: 94; 1986l: 346-348). For Hegel, this was so because the weapons were nothing else than the essence of the fighters themselves. According to Marx, the class struggle could remain latent for some time, or it could reveal itself only in singular appearances, until it would break fully into the open in the form of a revolution (Marx 1961a: 12-13, 141, 282, 296, 689). For Marx, in Antiquity the class struggle moved mainly in the form of a fight between creditors and debtors. It ended in Rome with the downfall of the plebeian debtors, who were replaced by the slaves. In the Middle ages, the class struggle ended with the downfall of the feudal debtors, who lost and forfeited their political power together with its economic basis.

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Radicalization of Dialectic According to Benjamin’s (1977: 251) last essay On the Notion of History Marxian dialectical, historical materialism engaged in the class struggle with the help of mystical political theology, or possibly also vice versa. Adorno’s and Benjamin’s cipher theology understood itself as a restitution of theology as theodicy as such (Adorno 1970b: 116-117; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Scholem 1967; 1970; 1973; 1977; 1974; Habermas 1976; 1978a: 11-32, 33-47, 48-95, 127-143; 1978b, chap. 5; 1987b, chaps. 6, 7, 14, 15, 18, 19; 1987c). The inverse cipher theology comprehended itself as the radicalization of the dialectic–the determinate negation–of history into the theological glowing core of the wholly Other than the finite world of appearances with all its horrible injustices (Hegel 1986c: 73-77; 1973; 1986e: 48-53; Marx 1961a: 17-18; Schmitt 1997; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 37, 40, 42; 1985l: 286-287, 436-492. 526-541, 593-605; Adorno 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b: 116-117; 1973; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-54). This theological radicalization would at the same time mean an extreme sharpening of the social and economic dialectical motives. Theology interpreted historical materialism, and dialectical materialism interpreted theology (Horkheimer 1974c: 4, 8, 16, 18, 28-29, 49, 62, 63-65, 68-69, 71, 75-76, 92-93, 96-97, 116, 121-123, 127, 131-132, 138-139, 141-142; 1985g, chaps. 14-22, 25-26, 29-30, 32, 37, 40; Adorno 1970b: 117-118; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11). As the extremes were mediated through each other dialectically, they also reproduced each other dialectically. According to Adorno, the cipher theology had to work out materialistically much more sharply the commodity character, which was specific for the civil society of the 19th century as well as of the following 20th and 21st centuries: the industrial commodity production and its fetishism (Marx 1961a: 39, 44-46, 67, 76-78, 78-80, 81-82, 88-89, 99, 109-113, 119, 177, 607, 847; Adorno 1970b: 117-118). This was because on one hand, the commodity character and alienation had existed since the beginning of capitalism, i.e., since the age of manufacturing and more precisely the Baroque age, and on the other hand, since then the unity of modernity lay particularly in the commodity character (Marx 1961a: 39, 44-46, 67, 76-78, 81-82, 109-113, 119, 177, 607, 847; Adorno 1970b: 117-118; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 6-8, 10-12, 21; 1978a; 1983a; 1983b; 1988, chaps. 6, 15, 17, 19, 21-23, 25, 29, 30, 47, 48; 1993). However, according to the cipher theology only a precise determination of the industrial form of commodity, as one historically abstracted sharply from the older forms of commodity, could deliver completely the primordial history and ontology

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of the antagonistic civil society of the 19th as well as of the 20th and 21st centuries (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Marx 1961a: 39, 44-46, 67, 76-78, 81-82, 109-113, 119, 177, 607, 847; Adorno 1979: 9-20, 42-86, 122-147, 147-177, 177-196, 217-238, 280-354, 354-373, 373-392, 392-397, 397-408, 408434, 440-457, 457-478, 500-532, 538-547, 569-574, 578-587; 1993a; 1995; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 6-8, 10-12, 21; 1978; 1983a; 1983b ; 1988, chaps. 6, 15, 17, 19, 21-23, 25, 29, 30, 47, 48; App. C, D). According to Adorno, all relationships to the commodity form as such, would confer and bestow upon this primordial history of modern civil society a certain metaphorical character, which the inverse or cipher theology could not tolerate in this present serious emergency situation at the beginning of the transition from Modernity to Post-Modernity. Adorno supposed that if Benjamin would in his Passage Work “surrender himself completely to his mode of procedure, to the blind work with the material of history,” then he would achieve the greatest interpretation results (Adorno 1970b : 117; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b). Adorno had to admit that his critique moved in relationship to Benjamin’s work on the historical material in a certain theoretical sphere of abstraction, and that this was a necessity and an emergency situation. Yet, Adorno was sure that Benjamin would not consider this necessity as one of world view and would thus remove his reservations as invalid. The inverse theology strove, like Hegel’s dialectical philosophy and like the whole critical theory of society, to which the cipher theology belonged, toward concreteness in the context of a modern civil society, the production and consumption process of which were likewise extremely abstract (Hegel 1986d: 413, 441; 1986f: 279-295, 298, 382, 387, 565-566; 1986g: 339-397; Marx 1961a: 39, 44-46, 67, 76-78, 81-82, 109-113, 119, 177, 607, 847; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1979: 9-20, 42-86, 122-147, 147177, 177-196, 217-238, 280-354, 354-373, 373-392, 392-397, 397-408, 408434, 440-457, 457-478, 500-532, 538-547, 569-574, 578-587; 1993; 1995; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 6-8, 10-12, 21; 1978; 1983a; 1983b; 1988, chaps. 6, 15, 17, 19, 21-23, 25, 29, 30, 47, 48).

Interest- or Credit-Slavery In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, and the inverse theology intrinsic to it, all class societies are unjust: the One or the Few live from the work and the surplus value of the Many: the patricians from the plebeians, the slaveholders from the slaves, the feudal lords from the serfs, the owners of capital from the wage laborers, the creditors from the debtors, the producers from the consumers (Hegel 1986a: 555; 1986c: 152, 153,

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154, 285; 1986f: 384, 389-390; 1986g: 33-55; 1986k: 94; 1986l: 346-348). Slaves, serfs, or wage laborers perform the pre-industrial or industrial, mechanized and computerized commodity-production, exchange and circulation (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 133-141; Marx 1961a: 8, 39, 44-46, 67, 76-78, 81-82, 99, 109-113, 117-119, 166, 177, 607, 847; Adorno 1970a; 1970b; 1979: 9-19, 42-85, 122-146, 177-195, 217-228, 280-353, 373-391, 440-456, 569-573, 578-587; Wallace 2007: 769-800). Even the conservative-, or better, counter-revolutionary Adolf Hitler learned willingly from the economist Gottfried Feder about the injustice, evil, and horror of interest or credit slavery, and only in this way came to understand the teachings of Karl Marx, in order then, of course, only to oppose him, the Jew. Thus already in 1932, Hitler moved to dissolve The Economic Division of the Empire Directorium of the NSDAP, an economic body with elaborate plans for socialization, of which Feder was the head, in order to please the industrialists, and in 1934 fired Feder as Under-Secretary of State for Labor over the project of the production of synthetic petrol, on which Feder was not very keen (Marx 1961a: 145-147, 660-661, 794-796; 1961b: 111, 143, 177, 183, 189, 249, 251; 1961c: 317-318, 319-320, 347, 378, 436-452, 476483, 498-499, 502, 506, 523-529, 543, 562, 565-567, 648, 655; Hitler 1943: 209, 210, 213, 215, 217, 219, 221; Trevor-Roper 1988: 127; Sohn Rethel 1975). Feder disappeared from public life into privacy as professor of economics at the Technical University in Charlottenburg. Since Marx, Feder, and Hitler, interest or credit slavery has continually increased in antagonistic civil society, in spite of all crises, collapses, like the crash that is happening right now–2008, 2009, 2010–in the housing market and industry of the U.S.A. and at Wall Street.

Liberation and Redemption According to Adorno and Benjamin, the radicalization of dialectical materialism leads to theology as theodicy: the antagonism between the totally Other as Infinite Power, Perfect Justice, and Unconditional Love, on one hand, and what is positivistically the case, the cursed finite, unjust, and loveless often necrophilous one-dimensional world of having with all its hellish aggression, destructiveness, cruelty, horror, and terror of revolution and counter-revolution, on the other (Hegel 1986g, part III; 1986l: 19-55; Hitler 1943: 206-216; Horkheimer 1967b: 248-268, 302-317; 1985g, chaps. 27, 28, 29, 30, 37, 40; 1989m, chaps. 7, 8, 11, 14-18, 20-21, 25, 2831, 37; Adorno 1980a.; 1980b Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Marcuse

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1960; 1961, 1962; 1966; 1969a). The radicalization of theology as theodicy leads to historical materialism: the struggle of the slaves, the serfs and the wage laborers for justice, liberation and redemption (Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1966; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Eggebrecht 1980; Habermas 1976). Without such radicalization, theology and dialectical materialism would remain foreign and even antagonistic bodies for each other and would resist their mutual penetration (Benjamin 1977: 251). The adjective inverse in the name inverse theology stemmed not only from the world of music, with which Adorno was most familiar, but also from history, namely from situations in the Middle Ages, when Jews were crucified inversely by Christians, and thus saw the world upside down (Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1980: 233-234). This was the price the Jewish martyrs had to pay in hours of infinite pain and suffering for seeing in the light of redemption the world with all its deep antagonisms and discrepancies, as it would lay prostrate on Judgment Day. In Modernity, the SS crucified at least one Catholic priest and one Protestant minister, as if they were Jews, in the torture chambers of the concentration camp of Buchenwald near Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Weimar (Kogon 1995). Such inverse theology would allow semantic and semiotic materials and potentials, like the notion of God, freedom, original sin, Decalogue, Golden Rule, resurrection of the dead, resurrection of the flesh, redemption, salvation, Messiah, Judgment Day, heaven, beauty, eternity, and so on to migrate, to be sublated, to be translated from the depth of the mythos into the modern or post-modern secular discourse among the expert cultures, and through it into the communicative praxis of the life world of civil society, and even into the instrumental and functional activities of its economic and political subsystems in support of its struggle against always new waves of re-barbarization climaxing in alternative Future I–the technologically, or fascistically totally administered society, or in alternative Future II–a third world war between the religiously based civilizations possibly fought with hydrogen bombs (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 37, 40; Adorno 1997j/2: 608616, 674-690; Habermas 1990: 9-18; Marsden 2006; Martin 2006; Wager 2006: 1-4; Sarche 2006: 1-3; Thayer 2006: 2-4; Jumi 2006: 1-3; App. G). Once the Kingdom of God was the name for the wholly Other as the radical and total inversion of what is the case in this often necrophilous world (Matthew 6: 33; 12: 28; 21: 43; Luke 6: 20; 7: 28; 9: 2, 60, 62; 13: 28, 29; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1976: 201-202; 1992: 203-212). The inverse theology was driven and moved by the insatiable yearning for the good Infinity as the radical inversion of what is the

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case in this world: as the radical determinate negation of what in society and history is called injustice, abandonment and alienation (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 29, 37, 40, 42).

Multiple Horrors In January 2008, the barbarism of multiple horrors, injustices, abandonment, alienation and human suffering had reached new heights, or rather new depth, not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Burma, and particularly in Chad, and in Africa’s largest nation, the Sudan, especially Darfur, and most recently in Kenya (Sampson 2007: 1-4; 2008: 2-3). Ever since Chadian rebels launched an assault on their country’s capital, N’Djamena, that killed hundreds of people, the problems in and around Chad have threatened to go from bad to worse. That included the situation in Darfur, the region in neighboring Sudan, where as many as 400,000 people have died since 2003. With all the violence, some 200,000 refugees from Darfur have fled into Chad. Now Chad’s dictatorial president, Idriss Déby, said Sudan’s government was behind the effort to overthrow him, and has threatened to kick the Darfur refugees out. The Sudanese, in turn, said Déby supported rebels in Darfur, seeking to overthrow them. With Chad’s government dangling, and the disaster in Darfur threatening to spread, it was time to take a closer look at Chad. What was found was not encouraging. Landlocked in Africa and half consumed by the Sahara, the world’s largest desert, Chad was one of the world’s poorest nations. Its neighbors include Libya, to the north, and Sudan to the east, and lately, its history was full of conquest, colonialism, and conflict. In the late 19th century, a Sudanese conqueror named Rabih al-Zubayr subdued several small kingdoms in what was–in 2007/2008–Chad. Yet, al-Zubayr’s empire proved short lived. French forces arrived and defeated his army in 1900 and soon made Chad a colony within French Equatorial Africa. They ruled the region for more than 50 years, though their control over northern Chad, the Saharan part, remained nominal. In 1960, Chad and other French colonies in Africa gained independence. The nation’s first post-colonial government was dominated by French-educated, Christian southerners and supported by French aid. Before long, it was opposed by northern Muslims, who said they were not represented. By the late 1960s, Libyan-backed Muslim guerrillas were on the attack. There has been intermittent civil war ever since. The 1970s saw two coups and Libya’s annexation of part of northern Chad. The 1980s saw another coup and the recouping of the land Libya had taken. Then, in 1990, the Patriotic Salvation Movement, an

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insurgent group based in Sudan and backed by Libya, staged its own coup. The group’s leader, Idriss Déby, took over as President and has held the job ever since. In 1996, President Déby won Chad’s first real Presidential election, though there were many complaints of fraud. In 1998, he faced a violent rebellion of his own, led by his former defense minister. Despite a series of peace deals, and Déby’s re-election in 2001, clouded again by allegations of fraud, violence has continued. In 2004, some 200,000 refugees from the Darfur region of western Sudan poured into Chad. Violence followed them, too, as militias crossed the border and clashed with Chadian troops. A glimmer of hope came in 2003, when a pipeline connecting Chad’s oil fields to the Atlantic Ocean opened. It delivers nearly 250,000 barrels a day, a trickle relative to world oil supply, but a torrent relative to the revenue Chad generated without it. However, there’s a catch. To build the pipeline, Chad got a loan from the World Bank, which made the government promise to spend its petrodollars on development. President Déby now wanted to spend the money on his military and has threatened to shut down production, if he could not. In January 2008, hundreds of people were killed in Kenya, in protests and ethnic violence stemming from the East African nation’s recent presidential election. According to official counts, President Mwai Kibaki, an ethnic Kikuyu, won re-election by a narrow margin. However, the opposition said the vote was rigged, and both U.S. and European observers have criticized the results. Opposition protesters took to the streets to insist that their candidate, Raila Amolo Odinga, an ethnic Luo, was Kenya’s rightful president. Meanwhile long simmering ethnic tensions between the Kikuyu, the Luo, and other Kenyan ethnic groups-and there are dozens of them-have boiled over. The violence caught the Western World off-guard. Despite problems with poverty, crime, and tribe-based political cronyism, Kenya had been a beacon of stability in one of the world’s least stable regions. That is no longer the case. In spite of all the horror and terror in nature and history, and in spite of all the immense sufferings and injustices on this planet earth, the critical theorists of society and religion nevertheless–and even precisely because of it–continue to long that there may be a God, who may be Perfect Justice and Unconditional Love (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40, 42). Like the great Antigone in the Greek Religion of Fate and Beauty, the dialectical theorist of society feels driven by an invisible energy, by an insatiable longing, which pulls and tears him beyond himself, and maybe also even beyond the duties imposed on him by the particular society and state, to which he belongs (Hegel 1986c: 322, 348; 1986g: 221, 297, 319;

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1986k: 76; 1986l: 56; 1986m: 287; 1986q: 96-124; 1986n: 60; 1986o: 550; 1986q: 96-124, 133; 1986r: 509; Horkheimer 1985g: 17, 29, 37, 40, 42).

The Ontological Argument Adorno remembered in his Negative Dialectics that Hegel, in spite of absorbing the Kantian critique of all the philosophical proofs for the existence of God, had, nevertheless, resurrected again in his dialectical logic and philosophy of religion the ontological argument of Saint Anselm of Canterbury as well as the reflections on it by Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Wolff, which were once more considered after Hegel by J. A. Dorner, Lotze, Robert Flint, etc. (Anselm 1962; Kant 1929: 500-531; Hegel 1986h: 167, 348-349; 1986p: 29, 1986q: 209-210, 210-212, 347-535; 1986s: 554-560, 591; 1986t: 138, 360; Adorno 1997f: 394-397; Horkheimer 1987b: 295-312). Hegel resurrected Anselm’s ontological proof for the existence of God by overcoming its deficiency through developing in his dialectical logic the unity of notion and being, which the great Medieval theologian had simply presupposed, as had done in faith the authors of the Torah, the New Testament, and the Holy Qur’an (Anselm 1962; Kant 1929: 500531; Hegel 1986e: 82-173; 1986f: 243-573; 1986h: 167, 348-349; 1986p: 29, 1986q: 209-210, 210-212, 347-535; 1986s: 554-560, 591; 1986t: 138, 360). Adorno declared that Hegel’s attempt to resurrect Anselm’s ontological argument was in vain (Anselm 1962; Kant 1929: 500531; Hegel 1986q: 501-536; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1997f: 394397). It did not succeed. According to Adorno, by Hegel’s consistent resolution of non-identity into pure identity, the theological notion came to be the guarantor of the non-conceptual: the Absolute, the wholly Other (Horkheimer 1985g, chap. 17, 29, 37, 40, 42; Adorno 1962; 1963; 1969a; 1969b; 1997f: 394-397). Transcendence, so Adorno explained, captured by the immanence of the human spirit was at the same time turned into the totality of the human spirit and thus abolished altogether (Horkheimer 1985g, chap. 17, 29, 37, 40, 42; 1988n: 535-536; Adorno 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1970b; 1980a; 1980b; 1997j/2: 608-616; 1997f: 394-397; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 23-24; Habermas1990: 14-15; Haag 1983; 2005). In Adorno’s view, after Hegel the more Transcendence crumbled under the onslaught of the bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment movements, both in the Western world and in the human mind, the more arcane it would be, as though concentrating in an outermost point above all dialectical mediations. For Adorno, in this sense the antihistorical theology of downright Otherness–the Barthian dialectical the-

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ology–had its historical index in the present positivistic transition period between Modernity and Post-Modernity (Barth 1950; 1959; Horkheimer 1974; 218-219; 1985g, chap. 17, 29, 37, 40, 42; 1988n: 535-536; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1970b: 103-161; 1962; 1980a; 1980b; 1980c; 1997j/2: 608616; 1997f: 394-397; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 23-24; Habermas 1990: 14-15; 1991c; 1995; 1998; 2001a; 2001c; 2003b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007; Haag 1983; 2005; Küng 1994, chap. VII). According to Adorno, the question of metaphysics was sharpened into the question whether this utter tenuousness, abstractness, indefiniteness was the last, already lost defensive position of metaphysics, or whether in a post-metaphysical age metaphysics survived only in the meanest and shabbiest things as ciphers: whether a state of consummate insignificance will let metaphysics restore reason to the autocratic reason, that performs its office without resistance or reflection (Horkheimer 1985l: 483-493; Adorno 1997f: 394397; Habermas 1985; 1988: 59-60, 277-278).

Positivism According to Adorno’s negative dialectics, the thesis of positivism was that even a metaphysics that had escaped from the religious into the profane dimension was still void (Horkheimer 1970; 1971; 1972; 1973; 1974a; 1974b; 1974c: 101-104; 116-117; 1985l: 436-493; 1989m, chap. 31; 1987b: 295-312; Adorno 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1980c; 1981; 1990; 1991a; 1997f: 394-397; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 200a; 2000b; 2002a; 2002d). Even the idea of truth, on the account of which positivism had been initiated in the first place since August Comte, was sacrificed. Adorno gave credit to Wittgenstein for having pointed this out, however well this commandment of silence about the truth did otherwise go with a dogmatic, falsely resurrected metaphysics, that could no longer be distinguished from the wordless rapture of believers in Martin Heidegger’s Being (Heidegger 1968; 2001; Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; 1974c: 101-104; 116-117; 1978; 1985l: 436-493; Adorno 1973: 403; 1980; 1997f: 413-523; Habermas 1987a; 1987b, chaps. 2, 3, 10, 16; 1987c; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2004d: part III; 2005; 2006a). In Adorno’s view, what demythologization would not affect without making it apologetically available was not an argument, since the sphere of arguments was antinomical pure and simple, but the experience that if thought was not decapitated at all, it would flow into Transcendence: down to the idea of a world, that would not only abolish extant suffering but even revoke the suffering that was irrevocably past (Adorno 1973: 403; 1980: 333-334; Benjamin 1977,

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chaps. 10, 11; Thompson/David 1982: 245-247; Habermas 1986: 53-54; Peukert 278-280. 289-302; Sampson 2007: 1-4; 2008: 2-3).

Messianic Realm This Adorno statement became very important for Benedict XVI, and other theologians and religious people, because it showed the fundamental weakness and deficiency of a dialectical or historical materialism, which was not connected with theology, and of any other purely secular humanism: the slaves, the serfs, the wage laborers, who had fought and died for alternative Future III–the realm of freedom, in which all social sources of human suffering would have been abolished, the victims of Auschwitz and Treblinka, of Dresden and Hamburg, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, of Sudan and Kenya, etc., who had never had their day in court–would remain hopelessly excluded from it and would never be rescued (Marx 1961c: 873-874; Marcuse 1960, 1961; Adorno 1997f: 394-397; Habermas 1976; 1986: 53-55; Thomson/David 1982: 245247; Peukert 1976: 279-280, 289-302; Benedict XVI 2007: 20-21; Sampson 2007: 1-4; 2008: 2-3). The murderers would triumph ultimately over their innocent victims, if–as Benjamin put it in the spirit of the Abrahamic religions–not the Messiah himself would complete all historical happenings: if he would not redeem, complete, and create the relationship of the historical happenings to the Messianic realm (Isaiah 11, 65, 66; Revelation 21, 22; Benjamin 1977: 262-263; Horkheimer 1985g: 17, 29, 37, 40, 42). Therefore, nothing historical could possibly relate itself out of itself to the Messianic realm. Therefore, the kingdom of God could not be posited as telos of the historical dynamic (Exodus 19: 6; Isaiah 9: 7; Daniel 2: 44; 6: 26; 7: 14, 18, 27; Matthew 4: 23; 6: 10, 33; 12: 28; 21: 43; Mark 1: 14, 15; 4: 11, 26, 30; 8: 39; 9: 46: 10: 15, 23; Benjamin 1977: 262). Historically seen, the Kingdom of God was not the telos, but the end of history. Therefore, the order of the secular or the profane could not be built on the thought of the Kingdom of God. Therefore, the theocracy has no political, but only a religious meaning. It had been the greatest merit of the critical theorist Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia to have denied the political meaning of theocracy with all intensity: for example, today–in February 2010–in the Islamic Republic of Iran, or in the nascent Islamic Republic of Iraq, or in Vatican City, insofar as these theocratic entities are not only religious, but also political (Bloch 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1979, 1985a; 1985b; 1985c; 1998; Benjamin 1977: 262-263). The order of the secular had to orientate itself toward alternative Future III–the realm of earthly

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happiness (App. G). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, alterative Future III is not the Kingdom of God. Even if alternative Future III–the free society–would be able to abolish the extant suffering, it could not revoke the suffering that was irrevocably past. That can happen only in the Messianic realm, in the Kingdom of God. The longing for the wholly Other, which continually reproduces itself out of the awareness of the negativity of nature, society, and history, if it is not suffocated by it, includes in itself the yearning toward alternative Future III–the realm of earthly happiness, but it also transcends it infinitely (Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1979, 1985a; 1985b; 1985c; 1998; Benjamin 1977: 262-263; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 29, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42; Adorno 1997f: 394-397; App. G).

The Notion of Something For Adorno’s negative dialectics, to have all thoughts converge upon the notion of Something that would differ from the unspeakable world, from that which is indeed the case with all its multiple horrors and terrors, that was not the same as the infinitesimal principle through which Leibniz and Kant meant to make the idea of Transcendence commensurable with a science, the fallibility–namely, the confusion of control of nature with being-in-itself–was needed to motivate the correcting experience of convergence (Kant 1929: 299, 307, 318, 380, 393, 418, 483, 496, 531, 532, 662, Hegel 1985e: 115-173; Adorno 1970b : 103-125; 1973: 403; 1997f: 394397; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1987b: 295-312). According to Adorno, the world was worse than hell, and it was better than hell (Hegel 1986l: 29-55; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1997f: 394-397; Sampson 2007: 1-4; 2008: 2-3). It was worse than hell because even nihility could not be that absolute as it finally appeared conciliatory in Schopenhauer’s Buddhism-informed Nirvana (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989: Vol. 1: 445, 518-520, 554-558; Vol. 4: 733-754; Hegel 1096p: 374-389; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 23-24; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 4, 9, 19, 21, 37). There was no way out of the closed context of immanence. It denied the world even the measure of sense accorded to it by the Hindu philosopher, who viewed it as the dream of an evil demon (Hegel 1986p: 331-373; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 23-24; Adorno 1973a; 1973b: 403). The demon could after all stop dreaming. In Adorno’s view, the mistake in Schopenhauer’s thinking was that the law which kept immanence under its own spell was directly said to be that essence that immanence blocked: the essence that would not be conceivable as other than transcendent. Yet, for Adorno, the

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world was better than hell, because the absolute conclusiveness that Schopenhauer had attributed to the world’s course was borrowed in turn from the idealistic system. It was a pure identity principle, and as deceptive as any identity principle (Hegel 1986b: 10, 11, 22, 37, 38, 39, 48, 5-52, 58, 60-61, 67-68, 71, 94, 85, 97, 98, 255307, 371-372, 457; 1986c: 568; 1986d: 18, 67, 129, 172; 1986e: 29; 1986f: 36, 38-47, 75, 180-186, 466, 467, 482, 485, 494; 1986h: 217, 243; 1986i: 138; 1986j: 366, 390; 1986p: 100; 1986q: 59, 61, 62, 139, 189, 193, 230, 273, 334, 528; 1986r: 299, 349, 538; 1986s: 407; 1986t: 435; Adorno 1969a: 23-24; 1969b; 1969c; 1997f: 394-397). Hegel had comprehended the “Identity of the Identity and the Non-Identity” as the first and purest, the most abstract definition of the Absolute (Hegel 1986e: 74, 9; Küng 1978: Part B). According to the critical theorists, all religious or philosophical identity systems are to be exploded through radical, but nevertheless still determinate negation: through a non-conclusive, open dialectic reaching out for absolute Non-Identity: the imageless and nameless totally Other than the finite world of appearances with all its hellish horror and terror (Horkheimer 1965g, chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40, 42; 1985l: 483-492; 1989m, chaps. 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 26, 30, 31, 37; Adorno 1980a; 1980b: 333-334; 1980c; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 23-24; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11).

Despair Long before Kafka and Adorno, Hegel knew, in spite of his theological optimism, that world history was not precisely the ground for human happiness (Hegel 1986l: 33-55, 74-105; Kafka 1993; 2001; Horkheimer 1967: 259-261; 1987b: 295-312; Benjamin 1974; 1978; Schweppenhäuser 1981; Adorno 1962; 1979: 103-125; 1980a, 1980b; 1980c; 1997f: 394-397; Wiesel 1982). According to Adorno, in Kafka’s writings, the very basis of his and Benjamin’s other, dialectical, inverse, cipher theology–the disturbed and damaged course of world-history was incommensurable also with the sense of its sheer senselessness and blindness. Adorno could not stringently construe the course of history according to the principle of Kafka’s writings. The course of the world resisted all attempts of a desperate consciousness to posit despair as an absolute. The world’s course was not absolutely conclusive, nor was absolute despair. Despair was rather its conclusiveness, However void every trace of Otherness in the course of history, and however much all happiness was marred by revocability: in the breaks that belied identity, entity was still pervaded by the ever broken

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pledges of that Otherness. All happiness was but a fragment of the entire happiness humanity was denied, and was denied by itself.

Otherness of History According to Adorno, the convergence–meaning, the humanly promised Otherness of history–pointed unswervingly to what ontology illegitimately located before history, or exempted from history altogether: Reason or Providence (Hegel 1986e: 43-44; 1986l: 19-29; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b: 103-161; 1973b: 300-360, 404; 1997f: 394-397; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d; Horkheimer 1987b: 295-312). In Adorno’s view, the theological notion was not real as the ontological argument from Anselm of Canterbury to Hegel would have it, but there would also be no conceiving it, if we were not urged to conceive it by something in the matter itself (Anselm 1962; Hegel 1986q: 347-535; Adorno 1997f: 394-397). Adorno remembered that Karl Kraus, who had not been engaged in a romantically liberal metamorphosis, and who had been armored against every tangible, imaginatively unimaginative assertion of Transcendence, preferred to read Transcendence longingly rather than to strike it out (Adorno 1997f: 394-397; Benjamin 1977, chap. 23). Kraus’s writings were one other source, besides the Torah and the works of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Otto, and Barth for Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s concept of the longing for Transcendence, or the wholly Other (Horkheimer 1985g, chap. 29, 37; Benjamin 1977, chap. 23; Adorno 1997f: 394-397). According to Adorno, metaphysics could not rise or be resurrected again in a postmetaphysical age (Adorno 1997f: 394-397, 415-523; 1998; 2000; Habermas 1988; Haag 1983; 2005). The concept of resurrection belonged to creatures, not to something created. In the structures of the human mind it was an indication of untruth. Yet, maybe metaphysics would originate only with the realization of what has been thought in its sign.

Semblance: Promise of Non-Semblance For Adorno, art anticipated some of this fate of metaphysics (Adorno 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; 1980b; 1981; 1991b; 1993a; 1993c; 1995; 1996; 1997b; 1997c; 1997f: 396-397; 1997k; 1997l; 1997m; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2001b; 2002a; 2002b; 2002c; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d; Adorno/Bejamin 1994; Adorno/Mann 2003; Adorno/Tobisch 2003; Benjamin 1996; Horkheimer 1987b: 295-312). According to Adorno, the work

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of Nietzsche, from which he learned maybe even more than from Hegel, was brimful of anti-metaphysical invectives, but no formula described metaphysics as faithfully as Zarathustra’s “Pure fool, pure poet” (Nietzsche 1967a; Horkheimer 1989, chap. 13; Adorno 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; 1997f: 396-397; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2003b; 2003d). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, Nietzsche’s writings were full of anti-religious and anti-theological invectives, but no formula described religion and theology as faithfully as “The Madman” in The Gay Sciences (Nietzsche 1968: 95-96). In Adorno’s view the thinking artist Nietzsche understood the un-thought art (Adorno 1997f: 396-397). A thought that did not capitulate to the wretchedly ontical–that which is posivistically the case in the world–will founder upon its criteria. Truth will turn into untruth (Adorno 1979: 354-372, 578-587; 1997f: 396-397; Horkheimer1989m, chap. 31; Habermas 2004a; 2004b; 2004d; 2005; 2006a; 2006d; 2007). Philosophy will turn into folly. However, so Adorno argued, philosophy could not abdicate, if stupidity was not to triumph in the realized unreason of the late capitalist class society (Adorno 1979: 9-19, 122-146, 280-353, 354-372, 373-391, 397-407, 408433, 440-456, 457-477, 569-573, 578-587; 1980a; 1980b; 1980c; 1993b; 1993c; 1997a; 1997f: 396-397; Horkheimer 1974: 101-104, 116-117; 1989m, chap. 31). For Adorno, folly was truth in the form of which humanity, in the midst of being confronted by untruth = ideology, will not let truth go. According to Adorno, art was semblance even at its highest peaks (Adorno 1951; 1960; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969c; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; 1976; 1980b; 1980c; 1981; 1991b; 1993a; 1993c; 1995; 1996; 1997f: 396-397; Benjamin 1968; 1974; 1978a; 1978c; 1980; 1983a; 1983b; 1987; 1988; 1993; 1995a; 1995c; 1996a). Yet, art’s semblance, the irresistible part of it, was given to it by what is Not-Semblance, the totally Other than the world of appearance and injustice (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1997f: 396-397; Benjamin 1996). What art– notably the art decried as nihilistic, for example, the early works of Brecht or those of Beckett later on–said in refraining from judgments was that everything was just not nothing (Adorno 1973a; 1973b; 1997f: 396-397; Benjamin 1977; 1978c; 1978a; 1983a; 1983b; 1988; 1995a; 1995c; 1996a). If it were, whatever was would be pale, colorless and indifferent. No longer fell on men and things the light of Transcendence or of the wholly Other (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17,29,37,40; Adorno 1980b: 333-334; 1997f: 396-397; Habermas 1990: 9-18; 1991a: part III). For Adorno, the resistance of the eye that did not want the colors of the world to fade was indelible from the resistance to the fungible world of commodity-barter in

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globalized late capitalist society (Adorno 1979: 354-372, 578-587; 1997f: 396-397; 1997j/2: 608-616; Jamme/Schneider 1984; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; 1978a; 1996a). Semblance–particularly the artistic ciphers–was a promise of non-semblance: the Non-Identical, the Infinite, the wholly Other (Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1970b: 103-125; 1997f: 396-397). For the critical theorist of religion, not only the artistic, but also the religious ciphers can be a promise of the totally Other than the horror and terror of nature and history.

Solidarity The need in thinking, so Adorno concluded in his Negative Dialectics, was what made humanity think (Adorno 1997f: 399-400; Horkheimer 1987b: 295-312). The need in thinking asked to be negated by thinking. The need in thinking had to disappear in thought, if it was to be really satisfied. In this its negation the need in thinking survived. For Adorno, represented in the innermost cell of thought was that which was unlike thought: the entirely Other than thought (Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1997f: 399-400; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). The smallest intermundane traits–even outside the circle of artistic and religious ciphers–would be of relevance to the Absolute. In Adorno’s perspective, this was because the micrological view cracked open the shells of what, measured by the subsuming cover concept, was helplessly isolated, and exploded its identity: namely, the delusion that it was only a specimen (Hegel 1986g: 26-27, 42-43; 1986p: 272-273; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1997f: 399-400). For Adorno, there was solidarity between such thinking and metaphysics at the time of its fall, and the beginning of a post-metaphysical age (Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1997f: 399-40; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1988a: 59-60, 277-279; Rorty 1970; 1983; 1992; 1982; Waldenfels 1985; Wellmer 1985; Honneth 1985; Teunissen 1982; 1988b; 1991a: Part III; Friedeburg/Habermas 1983: 41-65). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, there was also a solidarity between such critical thinking and religion in its fall, and the beginning of a not only post-secular but also a post-religious age: the solidarity which will be necessary to rescue through a dialectical, inverse theology elements–for example, the Golden Rule rather than the Lex Talionis–of good religion into post-modern alternative Future III–the City of Being–a free, and life-friendly, and reconciled society (Fromm 1976, chaps. III, VII, VIII, IX; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616;

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1997f: 399-400; Benjamin 1955c: Vol. I: 494; 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Habermas 1990: 14-15; 2001; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Siebert 2007c; App. G).

The Spirit of the World Religions The critical theory of religion, including the dialectical inverse theology as theodicy intrinsic to it, tries to hold up in times of hollow and dull conformism in antagonistic civil society, and opposes to the spirit of globalized capitalism and its religion of money, the spirit of the great world religions and humanisms, in so far as they are driven and express in their insufficient images and names the semblance of the Non-Semblance, the imageless and nameless wholly Other than the finite world of appearances and its continual un-repented and un-atoned for horrible injustices (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1966: 402-405; 1970b: 103-162; 1997j: 608616; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1976; Raines/Dean 1970; Dirks 1983; 1985; Habermas 2002; Metz 1978; Peukert 1976; Arens 1982; 1989; Gutierrez 1971; Mendieta 2005; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert1984; Küng 1978; 1991; 1994; 2004; 1994; Siebert 1993; 2005; 2006). The dialectical theory of religion remembers the Frankfurters from Horkheimer through Benjamin and Adorno, Fromm and Marcuse, Dirks, Kogon, and Rudolphi, to Friedeburg, Habermas and Honneth and mediates their religious and humanistic heritage to students and readers (Siebert 1986; 1993; 2001; 2002a; Ott 2001; 2007: 1-70, 167-186, 273-306, 419-457). It continually directs attention to the achievements and limitations of the at this time greatest representative of the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas, who in the meantime has unfortunately as philosopher of the “post-secular society” advanced in some theological circles to the position of a “church father,” and he who remains faithful to the spirit of the enlightenment has thereby been clerically colonized (Habermas 1991a: Part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; Arens 1989; Baum 2007: 107-121). No doubt, the critical theory of religion tries to make itself strong for a possible dialectical political theology as theodicy in the spirit of the inverse theology of Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and Fromm as well as of the fundamental theology of Metz, Peukert and Arens, and in sharp contrast and opposition to the conservative political theology of Carl Schmitt, which is rising again in the neo-conservative and neo-liberal atmosphere of globalized late capitalist society (Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b: 193-161; 1979: 9-20, 122-147, 280-353, 354-372, 373-391, 392, 396,

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397-407, 569-573, 578-587; 1997j/2: 608-616; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1976; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 2930, 32, 34, 37, 40, 42; Metz 1978; Peukert 1978; Arens 1982; 1989; 1995; Groh 1998; Meier 1994; Spanknebel 2010: 98-100; Mehring 2009). The critical theorist of religion tries to bring together men and women across continents, ethnical, religious, and philosophical boundaries, fences, walls, and barriers, and to initiate scientific, and theological, and political discourses among them, be it in Croatia or in the Ukraine or in the U.S.A. or in Canada. In all this, the critical theorist of religion tries to be as communicative, philanthropically and generously, as he or she is driven by the energy of the insatiable longing for the life-friendly, liberating, solidary, merciful, compassionate, rescuing, justice and goodness creating Eternal One or imageless and nameless wholly Other. During the global economic catastrophe under the second neo-liberal Bush Administration and its counter-measure of a nationalization program, the dialectical religiologist remembered together with the Rabbis the Israelite Joseph, who about 1600 BCE during a severe famine in the Middle East, in which the people became wholly dependent on the Egyptian state for their survival, averted economic disaster through a series of drastic measures that, in effect, nationalized the land and livestock and turned the populace into tenant farmers of the state, so that they and their children may have enough bread to eat and may not starve to death (Genesis 47: 11-14; Lieber 2001: 286/13 and 14). The critical theorist of religion is longing for the totally Other than this extant world of abandonment, hunger, illness, loneliness, alienation, meaninglessness, injustice, including the yearning for the concrete utopia of alternative Future III–a reconciled society, in which the social causes for human and animal suffering would be abolished, which longing for a non-reified Transcendence, for the totally Non-Identical, would be shared likewise by religious believers as well as by humanistic enlighteners (Exodus 20: 1-11; Matthew 5-7; Luke 6; John 18: 26-38; Fox 1980: 57-64, 65-74; Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985c; 1984d; 1985e; Horkheimer 1985g, chaps. 17, 29, 37, 38, 39, 40, 31, 42; 1996: 54-57, 62-67; Benjamin 1977, chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b: 103-162; 1997j: 608-616; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1976; Raines/Dean 1970; Dirks 1983; 1985; Habermas 1986: 53-54; 2002; Metz 1978; Peukert 1976; Arens 1982; 1989; Gutierrez 1971; Mendieta 2005; Küng/Ess/ Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng 1978; 1980; 1981b; 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2002; 2004; Arato/Gebhardt 1982; Ott 2001, Siebert 1993; 2005; 2006; App. G).

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Rationality and Reality Over a hundred years before the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, Hegel had not only anticipated the negative utopian alternative Future I–a mechanized and automated society as consequence of tendencies in modern antagonistic civil society, and the likewise negative utopian alternative Future II–a totally militarized society as consequence of tendencies in the modern state, but also the concrete, i.e. reachable and doable positive utopia of alternative Future III–a society in which the religious and the secular, reality and rationality, individual and community, personal autonomy and universal solidarity would be reconciled in the true social totality, as consequence of tendencies in modern culture, i.e. art, religion and philosophy (Hegel 1986c 24; 1986g: 24-27; 1986j: 366-398; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; Wiggershaus 1987; 1987; App. C, D, E, F, G). Hegel’s concrete positive utopia reached its climax in his eschatological notion of the Absolute or the wholly Other: the comprehended world-history as the remembrance and the scullhill of the absolute Spirit, the reality, truth and certainty of His throne, and of the realm of individuals and nations, out of which arose His good, communicative Infinity (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1997j/1: 47-71, 72-96, 97122; 1997j/2: 608-616). Already in the three generations before the critical theorists of society, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Marx found it necessary to protect and rescue the individual from Hegel’s holistic, subjective, objective and absolute idealism, in spite of the fact that his whole dialectical philosophy had been the attempt to reconcile not only the modern antagonisms between the sacred and the profane, and between the rational and the real, but also the modern contradiction between the individual and the collective (Hegel 1896; 1964; 1965; 1969; 1972; 1976; 1979; 1986a; 1986b; 1986c; 1986e; 1986f; 1986j; 1986l; 1986p; 1986q; Bryant 1896; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1997j/1: 47-71, 72-96, 97122; 1997j/2: 608-616; Wiggershaus 1987; 1987; App. F). In spite of all their criticism against German idealism and identity philosophy, the historical materialists on the Hegelian Left, Adorno and Horkheimer and the other critical theorists, remained, neverless, particularly in their thinking about concrete utopia or eschatology, much closer to Hegel than they ever came to Huxley, Veblen, Spengler or anybody else on the positivistic Hegelian Right, like Auguste Compte, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber or Talcott Parsons not to speak of Martin Heidegger or Carl G. Jung (Hegel 1896; 1964; 1965; 1969; 1972; 1976; 1979; 1986a; 1986b; 1986c; 1986e; 1986f; 1986j; 1986l; 1986p; 1986q; Bryant 1896; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b;

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1997f: 413-523; 1997j/1: 47-71, 72-96, 97-122; 1997j/2: 608-616; Horkheimer 1987b: 295-311; 1988c: chaps. 5, 6, 8, 10, 11; 1988d: chaps. 2, 5, 6, 7, 11; Fromm 1950; Heidegger 2001; Mehring 1992; Froh 1998; Meier 1994; Parsons 1964; 1965; 971; Jung 1958). In Adorno’s view, Hegel’s teaching about the rationality of the real and the reality of the rational degenerated in Oswald Spengler’s very pessimistic book The Decline of the West into a mere caricature (1986g: 24-27; Adorno 1997j/1: 58-59,62). In Spengler’s book Hegel’s pathos of the meaningful reality and his mockery and ridicule against the world-improvement-people was held on to, while at the same time the nacked domination-thinking robbed the reality of the claim of meaning and reason, in which alone the Hegelian pathos had been grounded. For Spengler and his disciples reason and unreason of history were the same, i.e. pure power, and the fact was precisely that, in which this rule manifested itself. For Adorno, in the form of Spengler’s pessimistic prognosis was present already the disposition over the human beings as suspension of themselves. According to Adorno, to the contrary the critical theory of society, which expected everything from the people and their actions, which did not any longer count on political relationships of forces, but which rather wanted to put an end to the play of forces, did not prophesy at all. Spengler stated that what was at stake was to count in world-history to the largest extent with the unknown. However, for Adorno the unknown of humanity was precisely that, with which one could not count. The history was no equation. It was no analytical judgement. In Adorno’s view, the conception, that history was such equation or analytical judgement excluded a priori the possibility of the unknown, i.e. the totally demythologized, imageless, nameless, notionless wholly Other which was the very center of the dialectical theory of society (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps, 17, 29, 37, 40; 1996s: 62-66; Adorno 1997j/1: 64). Spengler’s prediction of history reminded Adorno and warned him of the myths of Tantalus and Sisyphus and of the sayings of the Oracles, which always announced evil events for the future. For Adorno, Spengler was more fortune-teller than prophet (Adorno 1997j/1: 64; Benjamin 1977: chap 10). In Adorno’s view, in Spengler’s gigantic and destructive fortunetelling triumphed the low middle class: the left-over of the Middle Ages, which in Modernity became threatened from below by the labor unions and from above by the corporate chains and malls, and which became the social basis for fascism in the 20th and 21st centuries (Adorno 1997j/1l: 64; Brinkley 1982; Kubizek 1954; Paassen/Wise 1934; Mosse 1964; Bessel 2001; 1975; Hedges 2006; Stoddard 1940; Rosenbaum 1999; Krueger 1941; Sayer/Botting 2004; Gellately 2001; Siebert 1966; 1993; 1994b;

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Weitensteiner 2002).Before, during and after the U.S. Presidential Campaign of 2008 Democratic and Republican politicians and the mass media continually mixed up and confused the low middle class, Joe the plummer, and the working class. In the 1930ies, John Steinbeck–when he was still a socialist and had not yet in the 1940ies converted to American nationalism–worked for an alliance of working class and low middle class against the middle and high bourgeoisie (Steinbeck 1957; 2002a; 2002b).

Physical and Psychic Transcendence Adorno and Marcuse argued against Huxley’s Brave New World that the progressing domination of nature and likewise progressing social control removed all physical as well as psychic Transcendence, the X-experience, the longing for the wholly Other (Adorno, 1997j/1: 115-116; Marcuse 1960; 1962; 1966; 1969b; 1970a; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1995; 2001; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1992; 1995; 2001; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1982; 1986; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2007; Siebert 1966; 1979a; 1979c; 1979d; 1980: 2753; 1985; 1986; 1987a; 1987b; 1987d; 1989; 1993; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 1994d; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2004a; 2005b; 2005c; 2006a; 2006b; 2007a; 2007b; 2007f: 1-68; 2007g; 2008a: 180-210; 2008b: 215-245). Culture as the summarizing title for one side of the antagonism, the other side of which was barbarism, lived from the unfulfilled, the longing, the faith, the pain, the hope: shortly from that, what was not yet, but which however announced itself already in the reality, nevertheless (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1972; 1976a; 1975b; 1985a; 1985b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Kogon 1967; Adorno, 1997j/1: 115-116) According to Adorno, if the true, as Hegel wanted it, was the whole, then it was the true only, when the energy of the whole entered completely into the knowledge of the particular, the individual and his or her suffering (Hegel 1986c: 24; Adorno 1997j/2: 58-59). Adorno argued against Huxley that in his pessimistic book, Brave New World, the category of the individual appeared in unquestioned dignity (Adorno 1997j/1: 119-120). For Adorno, unreflected individualism asserted itself in Huxley’s work as if the horror, at which it stared, was not itself the monstrous product of the modern individualistic, so called civil society (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Adorno 1997j/1: 119-120). Huxley eliminated from the historical process the individual human spontaneity. But instead Huxley split off the notion of the individual from world-history and made it on its part into a piece of the philosophia perennis. For Adorno Individuation, which was an essentially social process, became once more

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unchangeable nature. Into the place of the insight into the entanglement of the individuation into the universal guilt-connection, which the great bourgeois philosophy was able to have on its height, from Kant through Fichte and Schelling to Hegel, stepped the empirical nivellation of the individual through the modern psychologism. In consequence of the great bourgeois idealistic tradition, the superior force of which challenged rather to resistance than to respect, the individual was on one hand as idea elevated into the measureless, while however on the other hand every singular individual human being was as a straggler of the desillusionment– romanticism delivered to moral bankruptcy. The knowledge of the nullity, invalidity, and futility of the individual, which was socially true enough in antagonistic bourgeois society, was imposed and loaded upon the privately overburdened individual. Huxley’s work attributed the fact, that the individual was functional and functionizable in civil society, and that in truth it was not itself, but rather merely the character mask of civil society, to the absolutized individual as its guilt, unauthenticity, untruthfulness, limited egoism, like all that on which the subtly describing ego-psychology could insist. According to Huxley, in the authentic bourgeois spirit the individual was at the same time everything. That was so, because the individual had once been the principle of the bourgeois order of property. The individual was also nothing and absolutely replaceable as mere carrier of property. For Adorno, that was the price, which the bourgeois ideology had to pay for its own untruth. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, informed by German idealism and historical materialism, in the concrete utopia of alternative Future III–the reconciled society, the individual’s personal autonomy was to be mediated through universal solidarity, and vice versa, in direction of the longing for the wholly Other than the unjust and loveless world of appearance (Horkheimr 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37; 40; Fromm 1950; 1957; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1976; 1995; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975; 1985q; 1985b; 1985c; 1985d.1985e; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981d; 1982; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Siebert 1979a; 1979c; 1979d; 1985; 1986; 1987a; 1987c; 19891993; 1994c; 2004a; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2007a: 99-113; 2007b; 2007g: 11-19; 2008b: 215-245; App. G).

chapter sixteen

Religion in Socialist Society In the past 40 years, we have spread and applied–not only theoretically, but also practically–the critical theory of society as well as the dialectical religiology in the antagonistic civil societies of the U.S.A., of Canada, as well as of Western Europe, Japan, Israel, and finally also in the–in consequence of the victorious neo-conservative counter-revolution of 1989– post-communist societies of Hungary, Poland, Croatia, Serbia, Russia and the Ukraine (Marcuse 1960; 1961; Habermas 1976; Niclauss 2007: 7880; Honneth 2007; Siebert 200; 2001; 2002; 2004: 135-160; 2005: 57-115; 2006: 61-114; 2007a: 1-71, 419-458; 2007b 99-114). Since October 2000, we have introduced the critical theory of society and the dialectical religiology also into the cultural discourse of Russia and the Ukraine, where they had been repressed together with the new political- and liberationtheology as revisionism and Western Marxism during the Soviet period of so-called realized socialism, which in its Stalinistic form looked to the critical theorists of society more like red fascism, in spite of the fact that there had been a successful cooperation between the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research–Felix Weil, Carl Grünberg, etc.–on one hand and the Moscow Marx-Engels-Institute–David Borisovic, Rjazanov, Ernst Czobel, etc.–on the other between 1924 and 1929 (Vollgraf/Sperl/Hecker 2000; Schmidt 1970: 4-63; Marcuse 1960; 1961; Löwenthal 1989; Jay 1981; Habermas 1976).

The Talent Story In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, often stories can portray and reflect different types of societies–slaveholder-feudal, liberal, socialist, fascist societies–and their dominant personality form and their meaning and ethos or lack of them much more adequately than the anthropological, sociological or economical analysis: thus the Biblical Parable of the Talents showed and criticized with great irony and satire the aggressive and exploitative having-character of a capitalist on a very low level of commodity exchange and the human suffering he produced with such

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clarity and brutality , that even Karl Marx could not have done it better (Matthew 25: 14-30; Marx 1961: Vol. I, 58, 160-161; 192, 240, 281-282, 295, 300, 323, 789, 843; Marx/Engels 1960; 2005; Fromm 1932a; 1932b; 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980a; 1980b; 1992; 1997; 2001; Fromm (ed) 1966c; Fromm/Xirau 1979; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1973; Jeremias 1972; Tillich 1955; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; 1963; Niebuhr 1932; 1964; Miranda 1971; Arens/John/ Rottländer 1991; Arens 1982; 1989a; 1989b; 1992; 1994a; 1994b; 1995; 1997; 2007; Gutierez 1973; 1988; Norris 1974; Zerfass 1988). The Biblical talent story was certainly not an apologia of the capitalist system as it has often been abused ideologically in neo-liberal society. The capitalist in the Biblical talent story, was a hard man, who was reaping where he had not sown and who was gathering where he had not scattered, According to the talent story, the capitalist was not an image of God, but rather its very opposite. In the perspective of the Biblical story God did not legitimate the capitalist system on any level of evolution, but was rather the foundation for its critique (Acts 2: 42-47; 4: 32-35; Hegel 1986a: 13; 1986f: 62; 1986g: 168, 353; 1986k: 21; 1986l: 370).

Practical Application Here follows our story about the Russian and Ukrainian socialist society in transition to a liberal society, and possibly back again: more precisely the theoretical and practical application of the critical theory of society and the dialectical religiology in story form to a trip from the USA to Russia and the Ukraine, to Saint Petersburg University and the Yalta Conference on Religion and Civil Society: Identity Crisis and New Challenges of PostSecular Society of November 2007 (Siebert 2008b: 55-61; 2008c: 61-65). The story about our journey from Detroit to Yalta and back and the experiences involved is itself a practical application of the dialectical religiology. For the critical theorist, theory and praxis are, of course, always dialectically connected with each other (Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1975; 1976; 1978a; 1978c). The story began 18 years after the victorious neo-liberal counter-revolution against the Soviet Union and Empire and 1 year before the collapse of the neo-conservative West which had overcome the socialist block and which now found itself in a crisis of its own, which went to its capitalistic roots and core: the industrial commodity production. As this story is written down in November 2008, the New York Stockmarket is loosing billions of dollars a week, ten thousands of workers are loosing their jobs and their homes and pensions. At this moment it is doubtful, if a

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new Roosevelt New Deal on the basis of a socially modified liberalism will be able to undo the enormous damage which neo-liberal deregulation and privatization has done in the past eight years and if private capitalism can be rescued once more like in the Great Depression of 1929. Now the generation, which was born in poverty in the first Great Depression of 1929 is after some periods of prosperity approaching once more in poverty the end of its life span during the second much Greater Depression of 2008 (Pfeiffer 2008: 54-57; Siebert 1966; 1993; 1994b; 2007a; 2007g: 11-19; Geier 2008: 10-17). At this moment in history–February 2010–the American Federal Government still nationalizes under the euphemism of bail-out one mayor bank, insurance company, and industry after the other. As the Barack Obama Administration constitutes itself, the only choice seems to be nationalization in direction of a humanistic socialist society, or in direction of corporatism, i.e. a fascist society, i.e. barbarism (Horkheimer/ Adorno 2002; Brändle 1984; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1971; Fromm 1966c/19667). The historical context of our Russian and Ukrainian story, world-history seems indeed to be worldjudgement: winners turn into loosers and loosers into winners. Sic transit Gloria mundi! Every step in our story seems to verify that.

From Kalamazoo and Detroit through Frankfurt to Saint Petersburg My graduate student in our WMU Sociology Department and Russian interpreter, Katya Vasetsky-Chamberlin, and I started our journey from Detroit late on November 3, 2007. Her husband Steve Chamberlin took us from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to the Detroit airport in my car. On the way, we had a small explosion in the car’s air conditioner. It could have ruined the whole trip, but we fixed it ourselves on the cold and rainy road. Katya and I flew in a Lufthansa airbus from Detroit to Frankfurt a.M. The Lufthansa had from its very beginning the best weather service, which was even the envy of the German Air Force. Thus, our flight to Frankfurt was rather smooth, without too much turbulence or disturbances. Unfortunately, there was not enough time to make the usual visit to the family of my late Brother Karl in Frankfurt a.M., Germany. We did that in April 2008, on the way to Dubrovnik, Croatia, where our international course on The Future of Religion: The Wholly Other, Liberation, Happiness, and the Rescue of the Hopeless would take place in the Inter-University Centre (IUC), April 28-May 3, 2008, another application of the dialectical religiology. Thus, Katya and I flew immediately from Frankfurt to Saint Petersburg also in a Lufthansa airbus. The Lufthansa was everywhere!

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Where was Boeing? We flew up the Baltic Sea to the highest peak of the Gulf of Finland across Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to Russia and Saint Petersburg.

Novgorod We left Novgorod to the east, where the Crusaders, many of them being knights, priests and monks from England, Germany, France, had once attacked all at the same time (Lortz 1962: 323-330, 336, 376, 380, 389, 401, 403, 405, 425, 435, 437-439, 899, 946; App. E). The Crusaders marched to Novgorod after they had searched for the empty grave of the Redeemer in Jerusalem, at which they fell down on their faces with their swords and uniforms dripping of the blood of the murdered Arabs and Jews of the Holy City, and where they had established a Christian kingdom against Islam, and where finally they had been beaten in the devastated Holy Land, through being cut off from the Sea of Galilee and dehydrated in the dessert by Saladin (Hegel 1986a: 1986l: 285, 413, 441, 467-477; 1986n: 213-214; 1986s: 536-537, 590; Lortz 1984: 323, 327, 328-330, 331, 332, 333, 336, 352, 376, 380, 389, 401, 403, 405, 423, 435, 437-439, 475, 899, 946; Nathanson 2007: 18-22). Now, after the Palestinian disaster, the Crusaders–what was left of them–had turned from Palestine to Russia, where they carried with likewise brute force the cross, fire and sword against Novgorod. Here, they were finally drowned in the nearby icy lakes by the great Czar Alexander, after they had plundered, murdered, and burned through all the villages and towns along the road, as the modern crusaders would do later on: Napoleon in 1812; the German armies in 1915/1916/1917; the 12 counter-revolutionary Western armies, who joined the Whites against the Reds–the atheistic Bolshevics, the Communists, Lenin and the Third International in 1919/1920; and Hitler’s anti-atheist-bolshevist invasion in 1941 with 3 million men from all over Western and Central Europe. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, it definitely would have been better for the Crusaders, if they would have stayed at home peacefully after the Palestine catastrophe, and had spent their lives in repentance and atonement. Maybe thus they could have avoided the later heresy trials by the Holy Inquisition, because of a suspected relapse on their part into Zoroastrianism, the Religion of Light and Darkness, or of Good and Evil, or more specifically one of its derivations, Mithraism, and their consequent decimation (Hegel 1986p: 390-405; App. E). Yet, even after World War II there were two or three knights still left in the Deutsch-Herren-Orden Monastery in Frankfurt a.M. I had so far made it only to Rostock in the former German Democratic Republic, where I had

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taught in the Protestant Theological Faculty of the Wilhelm Pieck University for several summer semesters before and after the victorious neo-conservative counter-revolution of 1989, as well as to Denmark, and Sweden.

The Great Patriotic War As we flew toward Saint Petersburg, there was already snow on the ground everywhere in the Baltic States. Our plane had to be deiced before it started from Frankfurt Airport, and then again on the way in the airports of Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Simferopol. I remembered, that Hitler flew the same rout from the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia along the Baltic States in reach of the Russian Air Force in 1944, in order to visit the Finnish General Mannerheim near Helsinki, to get him into what the Russians still call the Great Patriotic War on his own side against the Soviet Union (Mayer 1978: Sakowskiej 1988). He failed. However, there is a tape left about the whole episode that has just surfaced. Here, Hitler’s voice is most charming and persuasive. He even paid Stalin a compliment by saying, that a Government that was able to put thousands of tanks into the field in such a short time since his invasion, had certainly to be recognized and respected. When we approached Saint Petersburg, the former Leningrad, where the lights were on already, I remembered that the German Northern Army had beleaguered the city for several years, and that thousands of citizens had been killed by the new Crusaders against Bolshevist atheism through artillery shelling and Stuka attacks, and mostly through a terrible starvation, until a road opened up across the frozen Lake Ladoga, and food could be brought in at night. All the German army reports came back to me about the surrounding battles of Tallinn, Narva, Tartu, Pecov, Velikie Luki, and, of course, Novgorod. The brave city of Leningrad never fell, just as Novgorod never fell. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, one cannot comprehend what is the case in the present and its intrinsic potential for what will be the case in the future, without remembering what had been the case in the past.

Restoration of Civil Society On November 4, 2007, Katya’s uncle and aunt picked us up from the Saint Petersburg airport and drove us to my Hotel Aster. It was amazing for me to hear that the name of the city and the airport did not remember a Czar, but rather the Apostle from the New Testament: the Apostle Pe-

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ter had replaced the revolutionary Lenin again. Russia is definitely still in the process of transition from a socialist back into a civil society. To be sure, the present Russian civil society is already now further developed than the one had been that had existed before World War I, and that had been transformed by Lenin and Stalin into a premature socialist society between the two World Wars and afterwards. Definitely, the new Russian civil society is becoming prosperous under President Vladimir Putin, as he curbs in the all too wild capitalism by governmental measures, and thus saves some socialist elements. The small Hotel Asther, consisting of a combination of reconstructed old apartments, was one of the many low bourgeois enterprises that were initiated and carried out by young entrepreneurs supported by the Government and as such was a sign and symbol of the new prosperity. The real wealth of the newly restored Russian civil society came, of course, from the very large, partially privately and partially state owned national and international oil and gas business. Katya’s uncle and aunt were retired after a good life with much hard work and suffering, and could live decently with their pension. They were tremendously happy to see Katya, and me too, of course. Russians are most friendly and warm-hearted people, and when they love somebody, they really mean it–as long as they are not alienated and attacked. Uncle and aunt were too young to have remembered the Great Patriotic War and the German attack against Leningrad from their own personal experience. Next morning, on November 5, 2008, Katya’s good uncle gave us a ride in his car through the great city of Saint Petersburg. We took many pictures. Saint Petersburg is a mixture of Amsterdam and Paris. It is a wonderful city. Unfortunately, we drove into a one-way street, and were caught by the very active police, and had to pay for a ticket. I also lost my camera with all the wonderful pictures I had taken in Saint Petersburg somewhere on the way. Katya thought the camera may have disappeared during the very intense airport searches against terrorism, as it often happens, and not only in Russia. In Dubrovnik, during the old Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, my camera had been safe throughout 20 years of international courses on the Future of Religion, and disappeared only during the civil war in Hotel Argentina during a press conference that was protected by the most attentive new Croatian secret police. We shall never know what happened to the camera in Saint Petersburg. We are however, absolutely sure that it did not disappear in Hotel Aster, where a most honest cleaning lady, who was much too old in order still to do the heavy work, took care of the rooms. Whoever has the camera now may at least enjoy the wonderful pictures of Saint Petersburg.

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Winter Palace On our sightseeing tour through Saint Petersburg, we saw of course the Winter Palace, where Lenin started his revolution in the night from October 24-25, 1917, after Alexander Kerenskij’s February revolution had failed (Scherrer 2007: 22-28). Lenin’s huge statues are still standing everywhere waiting for the next revolution, after the third counter-revolution of 1989 and the restoration of civil society may have exhausted themselves. There are still many names of places, streets, and metro stations that remember the October Revolution: the Place of the Revolution, the Place of Iljitsch, Lenin-Allee, Proletarskaja, Komsomolskaja, Marxistskaja, etc. At the Winter Palace, Lenin declared all the feudal and bourgeois buildings to be the property of the people, who had built them after all. Then, of course, came the horrible peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk that the Germans dictated, and was then revenged by the so-called Versailles Dictate, which had much to do not only with World War I, but also, and much more so, with World War II. Hitler’s war was a war of retaliation against the West, Jus Talionis, and a war of colonial thievery and robbery toward the East (Mayer 1978: Sakowskiej 1988). The V in the V-I and the V-II rockets–which devastated London, and which were produced by Porsche, with the help of the SS Colonel Werner von Braun, and with 700 Hungarian-Jewish slave workers from the Concentration Camp of Auschwitz, by the same Porsche who was the friend of Hitler, the automobile fan, and of Henry Ford, and who was the inventor of the Volkswagen, and of many types of race cars, and of always new models of tanks for the Eastern Front up to the impossible Mouse, and who was a technical genius without any sense whatsoever for the difference between good and evil–stood for the English word “vengeance:” L’ automobile c’est la guerre! (Benjamin 1996b: 186-199). How triumphantly Hitler had danced around the railroad car in the forest of Compiegne: according to Wagner’s Rienzi, the Medieval people’s tribune, whom he had seen 50 times in the opera houses of Vienna and elsewhere, and whom he tried to imitate in the context of the modern political and historical reality. It could not go well! Then came still all the victories in the Balkans and in Russia. However, then also came the final catastrophes of Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin. As if affirming the history-theological and philosophical saying world history is world judgment–Hitler said to his secretaries in his last hours in the Berlin Führer Bunker: Fate wanted it that way! (Hegel 1986a: 305-306; 342344, 345, 346-347, 349, 351, 353, 517; 1986c: 237, 273, 342-354, 355, 495, 496, 535, 548; Benjamin 1977: chap. 3; Fromm 1973: chap. 13; 1992: 107130,147-168; Fest/Eichinger 2004).

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chapter sixteen The Frankfurters

However, in spite of the fact that the City of Frankfurt had named one of its streets after its own son, the critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno, the Frankfurters seemed not to have changed much. When we had come through the Frankfurt Airport in the morning of November 4, 2007, the native Frankfurters, who assisted us very friendly and nicely and effectively, spoke still lovingly of their Adolf, and still remembered in detail the Flak 10.5 artillery and the Me109, which had tried to defend the city in vain against the British and American so-called saturation- or terrorbombers, who destroyed 80 percent of it. Yet, the Frankfurt natives, who still spoke the dialect, and could still remember Adolf, became fewer and fewer, and the so-called foreigners became more and more. Most of the taxis outside the Frankfurt Airport were driven by Pakistanis, and Iranians, and most of all by Turks, who had done this work for 30 or more years already, and who spoke German well, and their children even better. They were all Muslims and did not believe that September 11, 2001 was the work of Muslims, but rather an inside job of the CIA. The Turks were longing for a Turkish Chancellor in Berlin. Once, the so-called foreigners had come to the rich German Federal Republic from the Near East and from Eastern Europe, having been attracted by powerful German capital, and had been welcomed. Now, however, in 2007, with massive outsourcing of jobs to Africa, India, or China, and a consequently shrinking of the labor market, they had become a burden and a social and political liability and problem for the Frankfurters and the Germans and Western Europeans in general. Even many still religious Frankfurters had forgotten the Abrahamic community and solidarity, and the Sermon on the Mount, and had moved to the Religious and Political Right, and thus did not want to treat the Islamic foreigners according to the Golden Rule, but rather wanted them to go home, wherever that may be (Matthew 7: 12; Dubiel/ Frieburg/Schumm 1994; Matheson 1981; Siebert 2007c). In general the Christian inhabitants of the rich capitalistic city of Frankfurt had long forgotten the communist roots of their Judeo-Christian faith, e.g. that among Israelites, priests and Levites owned no land (Genesis 47: 22; Numbers 18: 23-24; Lieber 2001: 288/22; Acts 2: 42-47; 4: 32-35; Hegel 1986a: 13; 1986f: 62; 1986g: 168, 353; 1986k: 21; 1986l: 370). They depended on the tithes and gifts of the worshippers, which led them to identify with the poor classes among the people. In old Egypt, by contrast, the priests were a priviledged class, likely to be sympathetic to other priviledged elements in Egyptian society. Also the members of the Primordial Christian

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Apocalyptic Paradigm, who followed the poor Rabbi from Nazareth, who was driven by his unsatiable longing for his friends and for his and their God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Shepherd, the Guide, the Provider, the Protector, his and their invisible heavenly Father, the wholly Other, and who was murdered by the rich and powerful Jewish and Roman classes, sold their property and gave it to the community: from everybody according to his ability, and to everybody according to his need (Genesis 48: 15; Matthew 5: 16, 45, 48; 6: 1, 4, 6,9, 14, 26; 7: 11, 21; 10: 20, 29, 32; 11: 25, 27; 12: 50; 13: 43; 15: 13; 16: 17, 27; 18: 10, 14, 19, 35; 20: 23; 23: 9; 24: 36; 25: 34; 26: 29, 39, 53; 28: 19; Luke 22: 15; 22: 24; Acts 2: 42-47; 432-35; Lieber 2001: 296/15; Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Otto 1969; 1991; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Reich 1976; Fromm 1992; Küng 1994a: 89-1244a; App. E). Not the bourgeoisie in Western Europe, but rather the socialists in Eastern Europe had come closer to this communist Christian principle. The Eastern Marxists had inversed Judaism and Christianity into their form of secular dialectical materialism. After the Roman Emperor Julian, the Apostate, nobody had seen clearer than Hitler with the hateful sharp eyes of the enemy the connection between Judaism and Christianity on one hand and communism or Bolshevism on the other: egalitarianism (Hitler 1943: 64-65; Trevor-Roper 2000: 76; Lortz 1964: 68, 104, 113-114, 129, 140, 153). For Hitler the Christians were the communists or Bolshevists of the late Roman Empire, and the modern secular Bolshevists, whom he fought in Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev, and 27 million of whom he killed, were the illegitimate children and heirs of Christianity (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Trevor-Roper 2000: 7, 17, 75, 76, 88, 89). Once the Christians had destroyed the Roman Empire (Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Trevor-Roper 2000: 7, 17, 75, 76, 88, 89). If the modern Bolshevists were allowed to survive, they would poison and annihilate through their egalitarianism the whole human species on this earth (Hitler 1943: 64-65; Trevor-Roper 2000: 7, 17, 75, 76, 88, 89) Therefore, Moscow had to disappear as the center of Bolshevism. At least some of the Frankfurt natives were still convinced of the inequality among individuals, nations and races, and they were observing regretfully and sadly that everything in Germany had gone the opposite way from where their beloved Adolf had once led them, democracy or not, and they were longing romantically for the good old times, when there was law and order, and when there was Volksgemeinschaft, meaning exclusive “people’s solidarity,” and when the German soul was purified from nudist beaches, porno movies, homosexuals and lesbians, and drugs and prostitution, and political corruption, and when the youth had discipline, and most of all, when there were no

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foreigners yet, except in the concentration camps or forced labor camps around the city, and of course, outside the beloved fatherland, particularly in the occupied Eastern Europe.

University In the afternoon of November 5, 2007, Professor Leo Semashko, a former Eastern-Marxist intellectual and now the converted author of the liberal Tetrasociology, and the leader of the global Peace and Harmony Movement, took us from Hotel Aster to the University of Saint Petersburg (Semashko 2003; 2006; 2008). I gave two lectures at the University. One lecture was on The Critical Theory of Religion: New Models. The other paper was on the Critical Theory of Religion: The Golden Rule. Katya did an excellent job in translating my papers. Professors and students were very interested (Apresian 2002; Siebert 2006a; 2007c; 2007d). The students were well dressed and happy. However, the third generation remembered little of the pain and suffering of their grandparents. There were good questions by students and faculty alike. Older professors still had a tendency toward scientific atheism, falling back behind Immanuel Kant, which Marx never did. Atheists were people who had lived through such horrible circumstances that they could no longer trust in the God of their fathers, and therefore denied his existence. They could not solve the theodicy problem, theoretically or practically. Their atheism was a practical, not a scientific matter. In Auschwitz, Rabbis and other Jewish scholars had put God on trial and after three days of theological moral and legal argumentation found him guilty of having violated the Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenant (Ezekiel 37-15-28; Lieber 2001: 290; Wiesel 1982). One Rabbi even suspected that God dissolved his covenants with the Jewish people and instead concluded a new one with Hitler and his people, pointing to the belt which all German soldiers wore with the inscription: God with us. God used Hitler as an instrument to punish or to test the Jewish people. After the trial some of the Rabbis and scholars never went back to pray again, and 80% of the population of Israel has ceased praying. But some of the Rabbis and scholars did go back and prayed again. Today, the political theologian Metz still feels justified to pray, in spite of the continuing massive unresolved theodicy problem, precisely because some and maybe many of the victims in Auschwitz and other death camps did indeed pray their Shema Israel up to the last moments in the gas chambers (Adorno 1979: 397-433; 1997j/1: 47-71; 97-122; 1997j/2: 608-617, 674-690; 784802; 1997u; Horkheimer 1987e: 197-238; Metz 1995; Kogon 1965; 1995;

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Metz/Wiesel 1993; Oelmüller 1990). Some of the older professors in the University of Saint Petersburg had become agnostics already in the Soviet period: their sociological or other scientific methodologies could not transcend the boundaries of the senses and the world of appearances. Neither atheists nor agnostics wanted after the so-called fall of communism to risk a Kierkegaardian “leap of faith,” or what Kierkegaard had called the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” and return to the Abrahamic religions, particularly to the Ecumenical-Hellenistic Paradigm of Christianity, to which their grandparents had still belonged: to Christianity, not to what Kierkegaard had called Christendom, to good religion, and not too bad religion, which was to be forgotten (Genesis 22; Lieber 2001: 117; Adorno 1962; Küng 1994a: 145-335; 1994b; Martin 2007: 17-24; Rohden 2007: 2533; Kosch 2007; Mooney 2007). They were not ready to follow Abraham and plant a tamarisk tree, which did not only facilitate his practice of hospitality, but also symbolized a new start for the world, and the atonement for the failures of the past–not only of Adam eating the fruit, or of Noah drinking, or of Lot’s incestuous relations–, but also for the more recent crimes of brown and red fascism (Genesis 21: 33; Lieber 2001: 117/33). We discussed the possibility that Marx and Lenin may have had something to do with Baruch Spinoza’s modern pantheism rather than with atheism (Dirks 1983a: 119-181; 1983b: 136-203; Küng 1978: 157-172). While I was well familiar with the Roman Catholic Authoritarianism, the Protestant Fundamentalism, and the Protestant Liberalism in the West, now in Saint Petersburg in the face of the wonderful Orthodox Churches surrounding the University, I became deeply impressed by the power of Orthodox Traditionalism and its long history. To be sure, its long connection with the House of Romanow was a problem for me. Of course, Leo and I were very much aware, that not only human reason, but also religious faith could become pathological and criminal (Hegel 1986b; 287-532; 1986j: 38-302; Honneth 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2004; 2005; 2007) Leo and I remembered that almost 30years earlier, in 1978, the egalitarian Christiansocialist utopian Temple-community of 1,000 white and black Jonestown People were–after having done much good charitable work among the poor of Los Angeles and San Francisco–driven through their longing for Paradise, the Promised Land, the New, the Non-Identical, the wholly Other to escape the Californian slums and to move to Guyana in South America and finally even to communist Russia, which however they never reached. But Reverend Jones’s and his peoples’ American identity and sameness caught up with them in the jungles of Guyana in the form of the Californian Congressman Ryan and several journalists,

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who wanted to explore if all members of Jonestown were there voluntarily and began to split up the movement. The faith of Reverend Jones and of some of his followers became pathological and criminal, and they killed the Congressman and two journalists. Afterwards 900 Jonestown people killed themselves in an attack of insanity and criminality, including hundreds of children, in the form of a long-prepared, so-called revolutionary suicidal euthanasia in protest against the antagonistic liberal society of Los Angeles and San Francisco through cyancaly-poisoned lemonade, because the earth had supposedly given to them all it could and now death and Paradise seemed to them to be by far preferable over the next 10 months of life under the American law and order Administration of Justice (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 107-114; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Jenemann 2007).

Encirclement When I asked our Russian friends at the University of Saint Petersburg whether they were afraid of a new political or military encirclement by the West–America, European Union, NATO–they answered very quietly and self-confidently that Russia was a very large country, and that thus it was hard to encircle: there was much more behind the Ural! On February 1, 2008 the Polish Foreign Minister gave contractually permission to the United States to construct rocket bases in Poland for defense against Iran: a project that the Russian Federation had opposed from its very start and for which it would retaliate soon by setting up missiles of its own in Latvia. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the political and military mechanism of retaliation and revenge reached far back into primitive and archaic history (Hegel 1986g; Shirk 1965; Klein 2007; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Apresian 2002: 46-64; Habermas 1971; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1983; 1984a; 1986; 1988b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005; Byrd 2008). Thus the Rabbi Rashbam criticized Joseph in the Genesis as ruthless, comparing his dispossessing the Egyptian people of their lands to the actions of the infamous Assyrian king Sennacherib (Genesis 47: 23-25; 2 Kings 18, esp. vv. 31-32; Lieber 20012: 288/23-25). A generation later, the Egyptians would take their revenge on Joseph for having reduced them to slavery, by enslaving his people, the Hebrews in Goshen, until 400 years later Moses again retaliated against the Egyptians through doing great harm to them while liberating their Hebrew slaves and leading them to Canaan, the utopia of the Holy Land, where milk and honey were flowing

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(Genesis 47: 23-25; 2Kings 18,esp.vv.31-32; Exodus 1-18; Lieber 20012: 288/23-25; Hegel 1986q: 1850-95; Küng 1991: 64-97; ). It seems that the transition from the Lex Talionis to the Golden Rule is very hard particularly in international relations, and that the violation of the latter, leads necessarily back to the former (Hegel 1986g; Shirk 1965; Klein 2007; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Apresian 2002: 46-64; Habermas 1971; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1983; 1984a; 1986; 1988b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005; Byrd 2008). As in recent years new tensions have been rising between the USA and the Russian Federation, the critical theorist of religion has been driven by the desperate hope, that nations would learn and evolve to the point, where they would treat each other not as they were actually treated, but rather as they would like to be treated, and thus would prepare the way to post-modern alternative Future III–a more peaceful world–society, and ultimately to the Shalom promised by the Hebrew prophets (Isaiah 61-66; Revelation 21-22; Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1972b; 1973. 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 19901992: 203-212; 1995; 1997; 2001; Fromm (ed), 1966; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; Flechtheim 1959: 625-634; 1962: 27-34; 1963: 148-150; 1966: 455-464; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Eggebrecht 1980; Küng 1990b; 1991b; 1994a; 2002; 2004).

Tetrasociology In the evening of November 5, 2007, we celebrated our great success at the Saint Petersburg University with Professor Leo Semashko and his dear wife Lucy in a nice restaurant near Hotel Aster. Leo told us all about his tetrasociology, which he traced back to Marx, and which he had developed and taught already in the Soviet time, but which he had developed further in a liberal direction since the breakdown of the Soviet Union and Empire in 1989 (Semashko 2003; 2006; 2008). It aimed at peace through harmony on four different social levels. Leo concretely superseded into his tetrasociology what the dialectical religiology had discovered about the evolution of the moral consciousness from the religious Lex Talionis to the religious Golden Rule and the latter’s inversion into the secular categorical imperative and secular apriory of the unlimited communication community (Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Semashko 2003; 2006; 2008; Apresian 2002: 46-64; Siebert 1993; 1994c; 2002a; 2005b; 2006a; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007g; 2008a). Leo, who had received a completely atheistic and secular education in the Soviet Union was amazed to find

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out that the Golden Rule was present in almost all living world religions and that it could be inverted into secular discourse on ethics and morality (Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Semashko 2003; 2006; 2008; Apresian 2002: 46-64; Habermas 1971; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1982; 1983; 1984a; 1986; 1988b; 1990; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 1992b; 2001a; 2002; 2004b 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; Siebert 1993; 1994c; 2002a; 2005b; 2006a; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007g; 2008a). I had to remind and warn Leo, that in the continuing national and international actual class struggle notions like harmony and peace could easily be perverted into ideology and as such could promote and legitimate oppression and exploitation of the working class by the bourgeosie (Marx/Engels 1960; 2005; Honneth 2004; 2005; 2007). However, Leo was firmly convinced that Lenin’s interpretation of Hegel and Marx and his Great Socialist October Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd, and what followed under Stalin, had been a great mistake and a tragedy, and that now history took its normal course again (Marcuse 1961; Habermas 1976). I received from Leo’s wife Lucy a wonderful book about Saint Petersburg. While the older scholars at the University of Saint Petersburg, whom we met during our visit could still remember, that there had been once a time in Russian history, that was inspired by the vision of the City of God, and still believed in and were motivated by the Earthly City of Progress, be it in its socialist form or more recently again in its liberal bourgeoisie form, they could not yet conceive of alternative Future III–the City of Being, in which the City of God and the City of Progress would be concretely superseded (Fox 1980: 83-90; Fromm 1976: 201-202; Küng 1994a: 145-335; 1994b). Fromm learned the notion of being from the Rabbis. According to the Rabbis Jacob dissociated himself from the two tribes Simeon and Levi because of their disregard for human values (Genesis 49: 6; Lieber 2001: 3000/6). The word translated here from the Hebrew as being meant presence, as in the Presence of the Lord. A derivative meaning was honor. For the Rabbis honor was the God-endowed quality that distinguished human beings from other forms of life. According to Hegel and the Hegelian Left honor was the actualization of the human potential or evolutionary universal of the struggle for reciprocal recognition among individuals, classes and nations (Hegel 1972; 1976; 1979; 1986b; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b: 13-32; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007).

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The Earthly City of Progress Already 30 years ago Erich Fromm noticed that the vision of the modern Earthly City of Progress was deteriorating to that of the Tower of Babel, which was beginning to collapse, and predicted on the basis of his critical analytical social psychology that it would ultimately bury everybody in its ruins (Fromm 1932a; 1932b; 1950; 1959; 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976: 200; 1980a; 1960b; 1981; 1990; 1995; 1997; 2001; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1973; 1975; 1980a; 1984; 2001Geier 2008: 10-17). While in 2008 the New York Stock market lost daily 3-5 and more percent, and the unemployment- and foreclosure- and bankruptcy-rate was continually rising in spite of the Federal Government’s nationalization of banks and industries, and while the casualty numbers of the American troops from the still ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone up unnoticed by the public engaged in Presidential elections to 5,000 men and women and 1 million Iraqi civilians as collateral damage, and while the disappointment and anger of the working and low middle classes about their losses became continually greater and more desperate, President Bush junior told the representatives of the G 20 in the Economic Summit Meeting in Washington D.C. on Saturday, November 15, 2008, that the present economic crisis was not at all the fault of the globalized free market system–e.g. the lack of policing of civil society as system of needs, production, and exchange in recent decades–and that it had not to be reinvented, but that it had to be and could be rescued (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Fromm 1976: 200; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1973; 1975; 1980a; 1984; 2001; Klein 2007; Scahill 2007). The bourgeois ruling class and its political agents, pandids, experts, propagandists and ideologues fell so low in their desperation, that they blamed instead of their own atomistic neoliberal philosophy–in his head the fish stinks first–and the consequent deregulation and privatization rather the labor unions for the capitalistic catastrophe: as usually in late capitalist society the victims were guilty, The bourgeois ruling class and its agents suffered from–in Biblical terms–the hardness of the heart, i.e. the inability to learn and to evolve, and therefore remained blind and dogmatic, as their professional languages became more and more confused, while the Tower of Babel–of disaster capitalism–was collapsing under their feet. The owners and CEOs of banks and industries were considered by the Government to be best suited to fix the economic problems, in spite of the fact that they had just produced them. The free market system which had just caused the whole economic

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disaster and connected human tragedy was supposed to correct itself like a deus ex machina, or Adam Smith’s invisible hand, a miserable left-over of what once in Scottish-Protestant theology and philosophy had been called Providence (Hegel 1986g: 347; 1986t: 285-286). In any case, the capitalist ruling class did not take any responsibility for the horrible market situation, which it itself had produced–and not only Wall Street alone. Not even the religious communities in American civil society spoke about the guilt-connection, in which not only the bourgeois ruling class, but also they themselves were entangled, and were silent about the need for repentance and atonement. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, concerning the continuing bloody wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the connected special forces attacks into Syria and Pakistan and many other so-called Alcaida-places, and the terrible economic disaster, in which the Shihadists will certainly see Allah’s Judgement, Fromm’s prediction concerning the demise of Earthly City of Progress may have been right after all (The Holy Qur’an Sura 1 and 2; Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Fromm 1976: 200; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1973; 1975; 1980a; 1984; 2001; Klein 2007; Scahill 2007; Lawrence 2005; Esposito/Mogahed 2007).

Pardon In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, it was of course not only the second Bush Administration, which was responsible for the disaster capitalism of the past 8 years, but also the neo-liberal free, but not social market philosophy of the Friedmann and Chicago School, which was globalized even to Saint Petersburg, and Moscov and Kiev (Klein 2007; Geier 2008: 10-17). In November 2008 it was also very doubtful if President Bush’s possible and probable pardon in the last two months of his Administration for all the officials in his Government, who had been involved in the criminal praxis of torture and other war crimes in the past 8 years will really be liberating or redeeming, if he does not cunningly leave the whole war crime issue to the next Democratic Administration, trusting that it shall not have the courage to take it seriously but shall merely set up another commission to look into it? The President hoped that he himself and his Administration and the truth of his domestic and international policies will against his present low popularity and service evaluation be justified by history (Hegel 1986g: 339-515; Habermas 1992a; 1998; 2004c; 2006c). However, a post-bourgeois critical religion with a political theology as theodicy could engage against the Nixon, Reagan,

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and the first and second Bush Administrations and their neo-conservative economic and war policies in a likewise mystical and political Imitatio Dei and in the emancipatory and redemptive remembrance of the suffering of Jesus of Nazareth, the poor man who was murdered by the rich and powerful people, and who was later on given the title of Jahweh’s Son and Messiah, and of the suffering of all other innocent victims of history, and in the critique of the general trend toward post-modern alternative Future I–a totally administered teleological-technological society, and of the tendency toward post-modern alternative Furture II–a more and more militarized society, and could promote the post-modern alternative Future III–a free, just, and reconciled society, out of the provocative memory of the suffering of slaves, serfs and wage laborers in the ultimate horizon of the passionate longing for the advent of the wholly Other than the horror and terror of nature and history: Messianic hope (Psalm 83: 3; Isaiah 26: 9; Jeremiah 17: 16; Ezekiel 37: 15-28; Matthew 5: 43-48; Luke 2: 15; 23: 24; Romans 1: 11; 15: 23; 2 Corinthias 5: 2; 7: 7; 7: 11; Philippians 1: 23; 2: 26; 1 Timothy 2: 17; 3: 6; Lieber 2001: 290; Blakney 1941: 95-139; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985a; 1985b; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Horkheimr 1985g: chaps, 17, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40; Benjamin 1955a; 1974; 1977: chaps. 10 and 11; 1978; 1978c; 1978d; 1980; 1983a; 1983b; 1995b; Flechtheim 1959; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Metz 1959; 1962; 1963; 1965; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1977; 1978; 1980; 1981; 1984; 1995; 1998; 2006; Metz/Habermas/ Sölle 1994; Metz/Rendtorf 1971; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Peukert 1976; Arens 1982; 1989a; 1989b; 1992; 1994a; 1994b; 1995; 1997; 2007; Arens/Rotlander 1991; Miranda 1971; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b; Küng 1970; 1990b; 1994a; 1994b; 2002; App. G). Adorno, one last genius of the 20th century, had not only criticized modern commodity exchange society with all its crises, but he had also developed perspectives of its transformation toward alternative Future III–an egalitarian society characterized by emancipation as reconciliation (Claussen 1981; 1993; 2008; Jenemann 2007; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Fetscher/Machovec 1974; App. G). Up to his departure from power on January 20, 2009, President Bush held up tenaciously the ideological appearance of religiosity and moral righteousness and refused to take any responsibility whatsoever and confess any guilt or show any remorse, repentance or wish for atonement concerning his Administration’s untrue and failed neo-liberal philosophy, neglect of the Golden Rule, criminal praxis of non-equivalent and unjust retribution and retaliation, the violation of the American Constitution and international law, particularly the Geneva conventions, unilateral be-

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haviour toward the United Nations, the unconstitutional initiation of two unjust wars with high civilian casualties, the new unnecessary estrangement from and tensions with the Russian Federation, etc.: as all witnessed by the 25 Impeachment Articles presented to the House of the American Congress in 2008. In the present international crisis in the midst of the transition period between Modernity and Post-Modernity the dialectical religiology holds on firmly to its notion of religion as longing for perfect justice and as the yearning that the murderers shall not triumph over their innocent victims, at least not ultimately, and to the Golden Rule, the categorical imperative and the a priori of the universal communication community rooted in that longing (Matthew 7: 12; Kant 1965: 472474, 633-634; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978a; 1981d; 1982; 1983; 1984a; 1986; 1988a; 1988b; 1991b; 1992a; 1997a; 1999; 2001a; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Honneth/Joas 2002; Küng 1980; 1981b; 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 2002; 2004; Küng/ Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008).

The Storyteller On Wednesday, November 7, 2007 Katya and I flew with the Ukrainian Airline to Kiev and then to Simferopol, Ukraine. The taxi driver, who drove me from Hotel Aster to the apartment of Katya’s relatives, and then both of us the long way to the Saint Petersburg Airport, and then a few days later back again in the middle of cold winter nights, was a wonderful story teller: a profession, which unfortunately has slowly disappeared since the beginning of the dialectical transition from Modernity to Post-Modernity after World War I (Benjamin 1977: chap. 24; 1980; Opitz 1996; Habermas 1981c; 1985b; 1986; 1987a 1990; 1991c; 1995; 1998; 2001c; 2003b; 2004a; 2006c; Borradori 2003). Our taxi driver seemed to want to imitate and even to compete with the happier and shorter short stories of the great Russian writer Anton Chekhov of the late 19th century, when Russia had not become a socialist country yet (Chekhov 1993; 2000; Troyat 1984; Kesting 2010: 85-87). He told us most hilarious and humorous taxi-life-stories, one after the other, and thereby, made particularly Katya very happy. We expressed our hope to the very poetical Saint Petersburg taxi driver that he would publish his wonderful stories some day for the enjoyment of a larger public. If we had asked our taxi driver, what 1917 meant for him today, he would probably have answered as others of his

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profession did that the revolution was still present as in the past so now in the fate of every family: the dead of the Gulag were much worse off, than the dead of the Second World War because the latter defended their homeland, and knew what they were dying for (Scherrer 2007: 22-28). The restoration of Russian civil society did not change anything concerning those socialist memories. Nevertheless, it is possible, that–if the third counterrevolution of 1989 continues through its present massive crisis of 2008– the intelligent Lenin may have to make room for the last, most incapable, and incompetent Czar Nikolai II, and that Lenin’s body may be taken out of the Mausoleum in Moscow some day and may be re-buried in one of the city’s cemeteries, in remembrance of the day of his death, after the Czar’s body had already been re-buried in the tomb of the Romanovs in the Saint Petersburg Peter and Paul Fortress, and after the Orthodox Church had canonized him as a martyr in 2000. The Orthodox Church completely forgot the atrocities the Czar had committed when he was beating down and repressing successfully for the time being the Revolution of 1905, after the defeat by the Japanese in the year before, of course only, in order to be swallowed up by the next revolutionary wave, 12 years later, in 1917. Sic transit Gloria mundi! Revolutions cannot be stopped for good by counter-revolutions, be it through atrocities or through money, at least not in the long run. Also the very successful President Putin was merely a transition figure, who in 2007 planned to resign, in order to join his friend, the SocialDemocratic Ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of the German Federal Republic in a private gas-business, but later on changed his mind. Our story teller and other taxi drivers in Saint Petersburg were convinced that as Lenin’s revolution of 1917 had been paid for by German money, the present orange counter-revolutions in Georgia of 2003, in the Ukraine of 2004, and in Kyrgyzstan of 2005 were analogically financed by American money. The question arose continually for us in Russia as well as in the Ukraine, what the proletariat, or what in Western Europe is now called the precariat, from its precarious life style–the workers, taxi drivers, farmers–will do after the magic of the victorious counter-revolution of 1989 will lose its power and its money, and after the splendor of the capitalistic commodity production, exchange and fetishism has worn thinner and disappears in a global economic crisis. Will the workers, farmers, and taxi drivers be happy nationally and internationally through consoling themselves by misunderstanding themselves as middle class in antagonistic civil society under neo-conservative or neo-liberal control, as in America, or will they continue to remember Marx and Lenin and his October Revolution, if also in a demythologized form, and the great Patriotic War, and the

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socialist victory over Middle and Western European fascism, and will fight and work their way into Post-Modern alternative Future III–a new humanist-socialist, sane, communitarian society? (Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Marcuse 1960; 1961; Fromm 1967; 1968; 1981; 1990; 1995; 2001; Fromm (ed) 1966; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; Honneth 1993; Honneth/Joas 2002; Fraser/ Honneth 2003; Münch 1995; Edelstein/Habermas 1984). Much depends for future world history on whatever the working classes will think, and decide, and do (Hegel 1986l: 428-434, 520-540; Marcuse 1960; 1987; App. G).

From Saint Petersburg to Yalta Not only was our flight with the Ukrainian Airline on November 7, 2007 and later on back with the Russian Aeroflot very safe, but we also found most friendly assistance at every airport, as in the U.S.A. and in Germany, so also in Russia and in the Ukraine. In the Ukraine, a doctor even assisted us, which was more than we expected and needed. That assistance was a wonderful sign of humanity in the midst of all the always evolving high technology of the continually growing airports! When we flew across the huge territory of the Russian Federation and the Ukraine, I could not help but remember the 3 million so-called fascist soldiers from all parts of Central, Western, Northern and Southern Europe, who not even seventy years ago invaded and devastated the land and the villages and the towns and the cities below, and killed 27 million so-called communists and 6 million Jews. I thought of the Muslim Tartars, who were allied with Hitler, and therefore later on were punished by Stalin through transfer or resettlement: like the Jews had been transferred out of Germany to Palestine in 1933, and the Arabs out of Palestine, and the Germans out of Silesia and East Prussia and like all the other forms of ethnic cleansing later on (Black 2001; Küng 1991: 627-702, 703-734; 2004: 568-582; Scherrer 2007: 22-28). I thought of the Christians, for example, the Mennonites and others, who following the Sermon on the Mount bravely resisted to bear and use arms against other human beings, and who therefore were driven out by red fascism into exile, or were sent into labor camps, in order to build cities behind the Ural. Others were simply murdered. When seven years earlier, I had flown into Kiev, it was the Sunday on which the city remembered the arrival of the SS 50 years earlier. On this Sunday, 180 Jews were shot in the city, simply because of their race. Later on 36,000 Jews were killed in a quarry near Kiev. This was before the insecticide Zyklon-B, which had been invented by the Jewish chemist Fritz Haber, the father of the gaswar, and which had been produced a mass by I.G. Farben, was used in the

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German work- and death-camps (Benjamin 1996b: 186-199; 1996c; 1997; Adorno 1997u; Siebert 1993; 2000; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2007a; 2007g; Weitensteiner 2002). Already in the 1920s, long before the fascist armies arrived, a pogrom killed many Jews in the Ukraine simply because of their faith. When the German troops came to Kiev in October 1941 and fought their way against heavy Russian resistance across the Dnepr on their way to the Volga, and finally to Stalingrad and into their disaster, the river seemed to consist of human blood rather than of water.

Army Chaplains On our flight from Saint Petersburg through Kiev to Simferopol, I remembered all the army chaplains, who were part of the Operation Barbarossa over half a century earlier in the territory below. Army chaplains have been since the Constantinian turn and the association between Church and state one of the most problematic institutions of Christianity (Küng 1994a). The army chaplains, who by profession were committed to the unconditional promises and covenants of peace of Judaism and Christianity, had nevertheless continually in their respective armies to witness and even to be engaged in the violation of the Golden Rule, including the Mosaic Decalogue as well as the Sermon on the Mount, and the consequent praxis of the often even unlimited Lex talionis (Exodus 20; 21: 24; Ezekiel 37: 15-28; Matthew 5-7; Lieber 2001: 290; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; 185-346; Küng 1991b; 1994a; Siebert 1993; 1994b; 1995; 2000; 2002b; 2002c; 2004b; 2005a; 2005c; 2005d; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007d; 2007f; 2007g; 2008a; 2008b). Bertolt Brecht had described in his very ironical play Schweyk in the Second World War, a German Army Chaplain, who was with his altar-wagon on his way to Stalingrad in the cold winter of 1943, and who, already being drunk, ordered the Bohemian soldier Schweyk to deprive the poor farmers in the next village of even more vodka, and who got stuck in the snow, and who, therefore, cursed his employers, the Nazis, into hell because they had not given him a sufficient amount of gasoline: they would be punished for this neglect on Judgment Day (Brecht 1961; 1967; 1973; 1980; 1981; 1993a; 1993b; 1994; 2003; 2007; Willet 1964). Unfortunately, Brecht was right: there was much, very bad religion involved in the fascist attack against atheistic bolshevism, which of course had no army chaplains any longer. In contrast, Adolf Hitler, once my supreme commander, had thousands of Christian army chaplains for millions of Catholic and Protestant soldiers in his many armies, in spite of the fact that for him Christianity had been the bolshevism in the Roman

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Empire and had destroyed it, and in spite of the fact that the bolshevism that he fought at the Eastern front with his three million men from all over Europe was for him nothing else than a secularized Christianity, and as such would destroy humanity like it had destroyed the Roman Empire and its civilization, and in spite of the fact that therefore he had to annihilate it together with the Judaism from which it came, in order to rescue the human species (Hitler 1943: 64-65; Trevor-Roper 1988: 7, 34, 51, 59, 75, 88, 145, 189, 253, 722).The existence of Christian army chaplains, was only one of the many inconsistencies, inconsequences and abnormalities of the Third Reich.

Equality What for Hitler Christianity and bolshevism had in common, was the most malignant and destructive virus of human “equality” (Hitler 1943: 64-65). There had to be, according to Hitler’s “aristocratic principle of nature” human predators and prey, or the human species would go under and the earth would move around the sun without it, as it had been the case thousands or a million years ago. The army chaplains were not seen by Hitler as Christians, in spite of the fact that they carried not only the swastika, but also the cross on their officer-uniforms, but rather as mere moral-officers, who had to motivate those troops who still needed them for their heroic life and death struggle against atheistic bolshevism. After the victorious end of the war, the army chaplains would be treated–like the 150,000 half-Jews, who were considered to be honorary Arians, and who served in the German army sometimes even in very high positions also at the Eastern front–according to their meritorious behavior toward the Reich (Rigg 2002). On our flight to Simferopol, I remembered some non-fictional, real army chaplains, whom I had encountered during my service in the German air force and army, One such Lutheran army chaplain shared with me his last drop of water, when as prisoner of war I was hit in an animal railroad car by a stone which had been thrown by Alsace Lorain civilians outside, who wanted to prove that they had become again good Frenchmen, and which left me unconscious.

Cross and Swastika Another former Catholic army chaplain, Father Joseph Maria Reuss, assisted in July 1956 the church wedding of Margaret Noyes from Washigton

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D.C. and myself in Dieburg, Germany. During the Operation Barbarossa Father Reuss had as army chaplain been so fanatic in his struggle against atheistic Bolshevism, that in a tank battle at the Southern Russian front, he did not even notice that his feet were freezing off. He had to be operated without anesthesia. He also, bound by the Empire Concordat between Hitler and the Vatican of 1934, had once stood by quietly when thousands of Russian children were machine-gunned down, and he could only say the Rosary (Goldhagen 2002). Later on, because after his operation he could not walk very well any longer, he finally was sent to Paris where he served as army chaplain in an infamous SS prison, where he daily obediently accompanied mostly innocent people going to their execution. Even the SS still had chaplains. Instead of resigning from the priesthood at the end of the war in May 1945, as the former army chaplain, Father Reuss had rightly intended to do, he allowed himself to be promoted to Regens of the Mainz Priest Seminary, and as such to educate young theologians and candidates for the priesthood, many of whom had also fought at the Eastern Front against atheistic Bolshevism. Finally Father Reuss became a Suffragan or Auxiliary Bishop of Sidon–a port city in Phoenicia about 25 miles north of Tyre, once a Christian town lost by the Crusaders to the Muslims and still remembered in the 20th century in Bishop-titles–in the Diocese of Mainz in the German Federal Republic, and preached and wrote much about love for many years, without having changed his hostile attitude toward socialists, not to speak of communists, in the spirit of Pious X’s Syllabus and Vatican I (Genesis 49: 13; 2 Samuel 25: 6; Lieber 2001: 202/13). Father Reuss was buried in the Cathedral of Mainz, while the shallow mass graves of the murdered Russian children, whose death he had witnessed, remained anonymous and forgotten. Many years after the death of Bishop Reuss I found little booklets about him in the chapel of the Frankfurt Airport, which contained his life story and his picture as a young German officer with the symbols of the cross and the swastika on his uniform. The union of these symbols reflected the Empire Concordat which is still valid up to today–2010–in the German Federal Republic. Since the annexation of the German Democratic Republic by the German Federal Republic the symbol of the hammer and the sickle is repressed in Germany and few people think of uniting this socialist symbol with the Christian symbol of the cross, or Marx and Teilhard de Chardin, as indicating two corresponding ways to alternative Future III–a new humanity (Lischer 1979; De Chardin 1965; App. G).

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Of course, there is an alternative to the army chaplains. There was the colleague of Bischop Reuss in Mainz, Father Landvogt, who throughout his life followed the Sermon on the Mount, and who served the poor classes in the city, and who during World War II, being ill himself, stayed in the bombed out city in a wet basement in solidarity with his parishoners to the bitter end, and who distributed food to the starving people, and who after one bombardment in which a British airmine exploded in front of his church found his 25 nun’s suffocated but still kneeling before the monstrance in the basement chaple, and who visited the many victims of the saturation bombings or burried them on the cemeteries. Father Landvogt was considered a saint by the Catholics and the Protestants and was respected even by the socialists and communists. Father Landvogt’s grave is still visited today in 2010, 50 years after his death, in the catacomb of his church by many believers in the hope that through his intercession they could find their prayers heard and fulfilled, and could be healed physically and mentally, and sometimes they are.

Atrocities On December 2, 2007, the born-again and government-conform Fox News told us, in its usual “fair, balanced and unafraid” way, after Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, after Lebanon, and Palestine, after Chechnya, and after Rwanda, Sudan, and Darfur, and after Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, that atrocities are simply committed by some unstable characters, or that they are merely a part of war, and come along with the territory. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, there never was, is, or will be a psychological, moral, ethical, legal, or religious excuse, justification, or legitimating for atrocities. While good religion, which resists such atrocities in the name of the Golden Rule, should be promoted, bad religion, which tolerates or even excuses or legitimates them, sometimes in the name of the Jus Talionis, must be criticized and forgotten as fast as possible (Exodus 20; 21: 24; Ezekiel 37: 15-28; Matthew 5-7; Lieber 2001: 290; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; 185-346; Horkheimer 1972: 129-131; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1985l: 294-295; Küng 1991b; 1994a; Siebert 1993; 1994b; 1995; 2000; 2002b; 2002c; 2004b; 2005a; 2005c; 2005d; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007d; 2007f; 2007g; 2008a; 2008b).

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Deportation Our friend and driver Igor picked us up with his taxi at the airport of Simferopol, Ukraine, in order to drive us to Yalta. Also, Zhenia Leontyeva’s mother was there. Zhenia had been our former translator in Yalta, and was now my graduate student, who lived in my House of Shalom in Kalamazoo, with free room and board like so many other students from the U.S.A. and from many other countries had done before, and was doing her Ph.D. in sociology at Western Michigan University. Zhenia’s grandfather, who was Jewish, and his sister had been deported from the Soviet Union during the Operation Barbarossa to a German concentration camp in Poland when they were only 15 and 16 years of age (Siebert 1003; 2007g: 11-19). There, medical experiments were performed on them by fascist doctors. When the boy came home again two years later, he had gray hairs. He had escaped the concentration camp with the help of Catholic Polish farmers. After the boy had been cleared from all suspicion of collaboration with the Germans by Russian intelligence, he was right away drafted into the Soviet Army, in order to fight against the German invaders. The sister’s escape failed; she was brought back into the concentration camp and was brutally punished and tortured in isolation. She never came home again. She died in the concentration camp. The brother was able to report the whole deportation story to the family at home, including his granddaughter Zhenia. Our driver Igor had been a prominent soldier in the former Soviet-Russian army. He still regretted, that he had not had the opportunity to fight for Russia in Afghanistan. Now Igor was doing rather well in the travel business around the growing airport of Simferopol. He had just bought himself a better used car, which we enjoyed very much. Yet, Igor could not and did not want to give up his socialist-humanist longings, and still hoped for better, i.e. socialist times. Igor drove us to Yalta, where we arrived after a two-hour mountain trip and stayed again in our old and very good Hotel Orianda. A year later, on November 21, 2008. Igor, while in Moscov, was consoled by a speech of President Putin, in which he promised that the Russian Federation would be a social state supporting a social market. In contrast President Bush junior kept up to the end of his Administration on January 20, 2009, and the beginning of the Obama Admninistration the ideological appearance that he and his Government and his free-market-philosophy had absolutely nothing to do with the continuing humanly and economically most costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and finally with the disaster of globalized capitalism in September/October/November/December 2008, and that they were in

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no way responsible for these tragic historical events (Klein 2007; Scahill 2007; Byrd 2008a; 2008b).

Human Hopelessness and Transforming Grace As much as our friends in Saint Petersburg and in Yalta had despised the antagonistic Bush Government from 2000-2008, so great were their expectations and hopes for the new Obama Administration in November 2008: an almost Biblical, concretely-utopian, prophetic, eschatological hope for reconciliation, which in order to be able to overcome the prevailing global human helplessness and hopelessness seemed to be in need of transforming divine grace (Ezekiel 37: 15-28; Lieber 2001: 290; Mann 1999; Byrd 2008b: 1-33). According to the Rabbis, what the Torah had portrayed as a family event in the Joseph story, the prophet Ezekiel had projected as a national and international hope: the reconciliation and reunification of all the people Israel (Ezekiel 37: 15-28; Lieber 2001: 290; Mann 1999). Judah had assumed a leadership role among his brothers and had negotiated with Joseph for the redemption of his brethren (Genesis 44: 18-34; Lieber 2001: 29). This had lead to the restoration of family unity and the collective ingathering of Jacob’s offspring in Egypt during the time of drought. The Rabbis remembered, that a thousand years later, during the Babylonian Exile, God had prophesied the unification of the northern and the southern tribes, symbolized respectively by Judah and Joseph, along with their national ingathering to the ancestral homeland,. In the Torah the initiation of the reconciliation had started on the human plane and had required bilateral human understanding for its fulfillment, With the prophet Ezekiel the initiation of redemption had belonged to God alone, as had done its consummation: a divine grace transforming human hopelessness (Ezekiel 37: 15-28; Lieber 2001: 29). For the Rabbis, joined together, the Torah episode of reconciled brothers had been a portent of the redeemed and reunited nation prophesied by Ezekiel. Put in the manner of the classical Rabbinic epigram “the acts of the fathers were a sign for the children.” In the perspective of the dialectical religiology and of the inverse cipher theology intrinsic to it, the notion of divine grace transforming human despair, which was present in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Holy Qu’ran seemed to have been lost in the secular philosophies on the Hegelian Right and Left, as well as in post-metaphysical positivism, de-constructionism, and praxis philosophy (Habermas 1986; 1987b; 1987c; 1988a; 1988b; 1991a; 1992b; .1999; 2001a; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2004d; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006;

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Küng 1970; 1972; 1978; 1981a; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2002; 2004). But in moments of universal despair, as in the present–March 2010, a time of broken governments–the title of Martin Heidegger’s posthumous article Only a God can help us in the German journal The Spiegel seems to gain new actuality (Heidegger 1968; 2001). We would have the opportunity to discuss the theological motive of grace transforming historical hopelessness in our next international course on religion and civil society in Yalta in October 2010 in the midst of the global capitalistic catastrophe anticipated in the quasi-apocalyptic Jihadist attack against the World Trade Center as symbol of the global financial system on September 11, 2001 (Lawrence 2005; Esposito/Mogahed 2007; Habermas 2001a; 2001c; 2002; 2003b; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; Borradori 2003; Geier 2008: 10-17; Küng 2004).

Post-Secular Society The seventh international course in Yalta on Religion and Civil Society: Identity Crisis and New Challenges of Post-Secular Society from November 8-11, 2007 was once more a great success (Byrd 2008b; Siebert 2008a; 2008b). Professors and students were present not only from the Ukraine, and from the Russian Federation, but also from behind the Ural, and from Central Asia as well as from the United States and Norway. A representative of the Ukrainian Cultural Ministry was present, who wanted to receive information from us specialists in Comparative Religion, Psychology, Sociology, Political Science, Philosophy and Theology for policy purposes. There were many tensions in the religious sphere of Ukrainian society that the state would like to mitigate through wise policies, while at the same time staying neutral. Also, the Orthodox Church was represented through a priest and theologian, Father Nicolay. He belonged to the Patriarchy of Moscow: the Third Rome! (Küng 1994a: 145-335; 1994b). There were tensions between the Patriarch of Moscow and the Archbishop of Kiev. Maybe the Archbishop wanted to become independent and a Patriarch of the Ukraine in his own right? There were also tensions among all religious groups concerning church or mosque property that had once been confiscated by the Soviet state, but which had been freed from state control after the victorious third neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1989. Tensions existed between the Crimean Tartar Muslims, who in World War II had followed and cooperated with Hitler’s army, and the Kiev Muslims, who had stayed with Stalin. Thus, in our discourse we spoke much about the neutral liberal or socialist state, the separation of religious faith and

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secular rationality, and of church and state, the consequent privatization of religion, the difference between good and bad religion, the theodicy problem, and so on. Members of all three Abrahamic religions were present. Fears were expressed about a possible partition of the Ukraine between the coal-rich, highly industrialized East, which was Orthodox and inclined toward the Russian Federation, and the West, which was Orthodox as well as United and Roman Catholic, and tended toward the European Union. An inclusion of the Ukraine, or a large part of it, into the European Union and the NATO, would indeed equal a quasi-encirclement of the Russian Federation, and thus, could elicit and provoke fears of encirclement in Moscow, similar to those, which the Germans had in the 19th and 20th centuries, and which found their full realization in the 20th century in two two-front wars. There had been, after all, not only the battle of Stalingrad, now Wolgograd, but also the tank battle of Kursk, which–if they had been successful for the Germans–would have reached east of and thus behind Moscow, and thus would have meant its encirclement. Besides directing the international course together with a Russian Professor, who had once been my student, Tatiana Tsenyushkina, I gave two papers: one on The Critical Theory of Religion: The Lex Talionis, and the other on The Dialectical Religiology: The Jesus Revolution, the Judas Kiss, and the Empires (Siebert 2008a: 180-210; 2008b: 55-61; 2008c; 2008d). I preferred the name critical theory of religion or dialectical religiology over theo-logy, because I thought–following Hegel, Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer– that it would be good to have a moratorium for several decades concerning the name of Theos, because of its blasphemous abuse by the bad religion of the Crusaders not only of Jerusalem and Novgorod in the Middle Ages, but particularly also of Saint Petersburg and Moscow and Stalingrad in the 20th century, and of Iraq and Afghanistan in the 21st century. Economic, political, military and historical deeds and events were justified e.g. through Christianity in spite of the fact that they contradicted directly its truth (Hegel 1986q: 342-344; Habermas 1999; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006). Once more Katya did an excellent translation job for two languages–Russian and Ukrainian. Katya also gave her own excellent sociology paper. I wished, of course, that I could have taken more students like Katya from Western Michigan University on my trip. However, my finances were not sufficient for other students. We hope for an improvement of this financial situation with the help of the Western Michigan University and the Universities of Simferopol and Sevastopol in the future.

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Discourses We had good and passionate discourses following our papers in our seventh international course in Yalta in November 2007 among members from different Eastern and Western civilizations with the intent to help to avoid their collision predicted by Samuel Huntington (Küng 1978; 1981b; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2002; 2004; Huntingon 1996, 1998; App. G). We understood discourse as a privileged form of communicative action among subjects, who produced texts, with a certain structure, in a particular context, and with a specific goal, motivation, and intention (Habermas 1969; 1981a; 1981b; 1983; 1984a; 1984b; 1986; 1987c; 1991a; 1991b; 1997a; 1999; 2001a; 2004a; 2004c; 2004d; Arens 1982; 1989a; 1989b; 1992; 1994a; 1994b; 1995; 1997; 2007; Arens/Rottländer: 199). Our discourse ethics included the validity claims of truthfulness in relation to the world of nature; of honesty in relation to humanity’s inner world; of rightfulness in relation to the social world; of tastefulness in relation to the cultural world; and of understandability in relation to the world of language (App. C, D). Our discourse ethics also included the law of universalization, as it was contained in the Mosaic Decalogue, as well as in the Kantian Categorical Imperative, and in Apel’s and Habermas’s principle of the a priori of the unlimited communication community (Apel 1976b; 1990; Habermas 1991a; 1991b). We defined discourse as future oriented remembrance of human suffering, with the practical intent to diminish it.

Fideism and Rationalism I had a particularly intense discourses with the Orthodox priest, Father Nickolay, and with Dr. Gabrielyan, an Armenian and an excellent pedagogue, political scientist and Chair of the Political Science Department of the University of Simferopol, where I and my graduate student Dustin Byrd had spoken three years earlier to the faculty and the students about the dialectic between the religious and the secular as well as in the sacred and in the profane. While Father Nickolai leaned toward fideism, Dr. Gabrielyan, who remembered the slaughter of one million Armenian Christians by the Turks in 1914, was inclined toward rationalism (Küng 1970; 1978; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a). While Father Nicolay presented the great Orthodox patristic tradition and Dr. Gabrielyon the great modern enlightenment movements, I engaged in the critique of the possible ambiguity of both, faith as well as reason, in terms of the Golden Rule as the totality of religious values and norms and its secular equivalents (Hegel

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1986b: 287-392, 434-532; Küng 1978; 1990a; 1991a; 1990b; 1991b; 1994a: 145-335; 1994b; 2004). We, nevertheless, agreed that good religion was conformed to its normative original interpretation of reality and orientation of action, and that bad religion betrayed both in conformity to the secular society, state, or empire. It was bad religion when Augustine told the slaves in the Roman Empire to love their masters and produce their surplus value without rancor; when Thomas Aquinas told the serfs of the Middle Ages, that they were mere instruments of labor and could be beaten by their masters, or that women were deficient human beings; when the Jesuit journal Abside in fascist Spain stated that the Christian God was one of the owners and not one of the workers; or when a Catholic priest blessed the atomic bomb, the for the time being the most advanced and terrible murder weapon, which was dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945 (Kogon 1967; Garaudy 1968). It was good religion when Thomas Münzer sided with the oppressed and exploited farmers in feudal Germany in the name of the Sermon on the Mount, and fought with them for perfect justice; when priests and ministers struggled together with socialists against European fascism; when the liberation theologians and the basic Christian communities of Central and Latin America fought together with socialists for the rights of the exploited workers and farmers (Bloch 1970a; 1979b; 1971; 1975b; 1972; 1985e; Raines/Dean 1970: 3-11; Gutierrez 1973). It was bad religion when the Russian Orthodox Church legitimated the House Romanov and its serf system deep into the 19th century; when it excommunicated Tolstoy, who had freed his serfs; and when it canonized the last Czar. Good religion was alive in Russia through centuries in innumerable poor and simple believers–workers, farmers, serfs, people’s priests, monks, staretzes–as well as in Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s works. Particularly Dostoevsky’s Idiot (1969) and the Brothers Karamasov (1950) and Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1968) revealed genuine good religion as well as genuine atheism. It is important to differentiate between good and bad religion, if the future socialist-humanist revolution should not once more throw the baby out with the bathwater, and repress and abolish with the bad, salt-less religion, which for the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth had been “good for nothing, and can only be thrown out to be trampled underfoot by men,” the good religion also, which should be preserved, elevated, and fulfilled (Matthew 5: 13). While Dr. Gabrielyan, emphasized the fear-factor in all social and political life. I stressed the enlightenment as the attempt to free people from their fears, and to make them into masters of their fate. We all agreed on the desirability of both, the continuation of good religion–the longing for the totally Other, including the

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yearning that the present national and international injustices were to be overcome and abolished–as well as of the enlightenment project, no matter, whether we were religiously committed or not. We were most realistic about the modern dialectic between the sacred and the profane, between revelation and reason, as well as about the dialectic of the enlightenment– rationality could turn over into irrationality, integration into disintegration–and of religion–the religion of truth could turn into ideology, i.e, false consciousness and the masking of national, race, and class interests, and the religion of love could turn into the most cruel crusades, witch hunting and inquisition (Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; 1974c : 8, 16, 18, 2829, 54, 56, 61, 91, 96-97, 121-125, 127, 131-132, 213, 268, 286-287, 288289, 316-320, 92; 1978; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969). We concluded that both religion and enlightenment were still unfinished projects. My papers were taken very well by professors and students. The professors wanted the papers to be published in Russian and Ukrainian as fast as possible. Our discourse came to its most friendly, harmonious, and peaceful conclusion with a delicious Ukrainian meal and wonderful religious as well as secular musical presentations by a young, very gifted and very ecumenical Orthodox choir.

Peace Our international courses in Yalta as well as our sister-courses in Dubrovnik have rested on the presupposition that there will be no peace among nations without peace among the world religions; and that there will be no peace among the religions without discourse among them; and that there can be no discourse among them without their knowledge about each others’ interpretation of reality and orientation of action (Küng 1980; 1981b; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Ott 2001; 2004; 2007; Reimer 1989; 1992; Reimer 2007). Discourse may be a weak medium. Yet, where there was no discourse, there was war, be it in the family, or among nations, or among religions. Anyone who wants to have peace will not avoid discourse. Whoever wants war, must only avoid discourse. The purpose of our international courses in Yalta and Dubrovnik was always to increase this mutual knowledge, and thus to contribute to discourse and peace among the religions, the nations, and the civilizations. Also, the results of this seventh course in Yalta has already appeared in a book for a broader public (Siebert 2008a; 2008b; 2008c). The University of Simferopol expressed interest in a contract with Western Michigan University. I promised to discuss the issue with Western Michigan University.

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We have such a contract already with the University of Sevastopol. This city had been destroyed to a large extent by German artillery, like another city on the Crimea, Odessa. The purpose of such contracts is the support of our international course on Religion and Civil Society in Yalta as well as the exchange of professors and students, and other forms of cooperation. The professors of the University of Simferopol and Kiev invited me to stay for vacations in Yalta–a wonderful city–for a whole summer talking with just one beloved person. What a wonderful idea! However, my new friends did not know that I have done only working vacations for 43 years, and would not like to have it otherwise.

Day of Liberation On Friday night–November 9, 2007–Igor drove us back from Yalta to Simferopol again. On the way we stayed in the mountains in a wonderful hunting lodge and had an excellent Russian meal. Germans are coming to these lodges in large numbers during summer on their peaceful pilgrimages through the Ukraine. Sometimes they may visit Hitler’s former headquarter near Kiev, during the Operation Barbarossa, South. When we arrived in our Hotel in Simferopol, Zhenia’s Mother received us again, and we spent some time together talking about Kalamazoo and Zhenia’s life there and her very successful work in W.M.U.’s Sociology Department. Zhenia’s Grandfather, who had suffered so much under German occupation, was too ill to meet with us in Simferopol. Early Saturday morning, we left Simferopol in a Russian Aeroflot plane and flew to Moscow. We landed on the airfield east of Moscow, which the German Center Army had reached late in November 1941, precisely 66 years earlier, when suddenly a horrible winter weather set in. Hundreds of German tanks and airplanes were destroyed by ice and snow. Hitler arrived in Moscow six weeks late, because of the Balkan war, which he had to fight for his model and friend, Benito Mussolini, who had got stuck there on his way to Greece. At this time before the gates of Moscow, Hitler could have reached an armistice with Stalin, who was ready to leave his capital city. But Communism, the secularization of Judaism and Christianity, was the archenemy of National Socialism, and thus, Hitler felt compelled to destroy it completely, and beyond that to conquer the whole Soviet territory up to the Volga, and maybe up to the Ural for colonization. Our plane had once more to be de-iced in Moscow because of the harsh winter conditions and snowfall. That gave us time to reflect on the successful and prosperous Presidency of Vladimir Putin. We remembered that since 2005 Putin had replaced

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November 7, the day on which traditionally the great socialistic October Revolution had been celebrated, with November 4, as the day, on which from now on the Russian Federation would remember Moscow’s liberation from the Catholic Poles, who in 1612 kept the Kremlin occupied: the Day of Liberation (Scherrer 2007: 22-28). President Putin was fully aware that through the liberation from Polish occupation the decades of dynastic, social, and national crisis and confusion–smuta–had come to an end, and the rebirth of a strong Russian central state could begin. The analogy to President Putin’s own situation and efforts were only too obvious, to ground newly the Russian state authority after the social chaos of the last years of President Yeltsin. Putin’s rearrangement of the national places of remembrance did not move or excite the Russian public too much. In any case, President Putin’s attempt to give back to his country the self-consciousness of a great nation after the chaos of the 1990s, orientated itself in terms of World War II, in the consequence of which not only the U.S.A. but also Russia became a global super-power. The new textbook that President Putin demanded for the history courses in all Russian schools was supposed to mediate and communicate a new pride in the national history and in the national solidarity. This fed upon the consciousness that the Russian Federation found itself in the possession of important raw materials, which were highly valued and traded on the world market, and that it correspondingly engaged in a dynamic foreign policy. Putin’s history textbook was also intended to teach the Russian students that the entrance into the club of democratic nations meant that part of the national sovereignty had to be given up in favor of the U.S.A.

Return From Putin’s rather blooming Moscow, we flew on to Saint Petersburg. Katya’s uncle picked us up again from the airport and took us through an unbelievable traffic to the Hotel Aster. In the middle of the night, we started our flight back with Lufthansa to Frankfurt and to Detroit. In Frankfurt, we had to land through a horrible dark and cold rainstorm. My hometown had done this to me already many times before. The clouds were hanging so low to the ground that I could see the Main River only a few minutes before we landed. After we had left Yalta a terrible storm sank seven ships in the Black Sea. A horrible storm raged in the North Sea against Bremen, and Hamburg, and Southern England. We somehow sneaked safely through all the storms with the help of Lufthansa meteorology. The crossing of the Atlantic was very smooth. Steve picked us

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up in Detroit, and on the way home we celebrated our return with good American hamburgers. We had not slept several nights, and we had to start teaching the next morning again. However, we were tough people. Katya came from Russia. I was trained to go into Russia as a young German officer. So we both were well trained, and all went well! We returned from our trip through Russia and the Ukraine on November 11, 2007. At the first opportunity, we expressed our heartfelt gratitude as well as the thankfulness of all the resource people and participants of the seventh international course on Religion and Civil Society: Identity Crisis and New Challenges of Post-Secular Society in Yalta to the Administration of Western Michigan University for its generous financial contribution, without which it could not have taken place, and without which its results could not be published for a broader circle of scholars around the globe (Siebert 2008a; 2008b; 2008c).

A New Religion: The Pledge of Eternal Salvation We could not have found any better place for our seventh international course on religion and civil society as for all the previous and later ones than Yalta on the Crimea, since here great religious and social writers like Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky had visited and worked in their search for a new religion, a new Christianity: in remembrance not only of the crucified Nazarene, but of all poor people who have been exploited, tortured, and murdered by the rich classes, the slaveholders, the feudal lords and the modern capitalists up to the present global economic crisis of 2010 (Marx.1871; 1953; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1963; 1964; 1974; 1977; Marx/Engels 1960; Benjamin 1988, chaps. 12, 13, 14; Marcuse 1960; 1961; Chekhov 1993; 2000; Troyat 1984; Tolstoy 1960; 1961; 1968; Dodson 1962; Dostoevsky 1950; 1957; 1969; Kesting 2010: 85-87). All three great religious and social writers had come from families who were rooted in the Ecumenical-Hellenistic Paradigm of the Christian Antiquity, or more specifically in the Orthodox Traditionalism, under the House of the Romanovs up to the Revolution of 1905 and the Kerensky Social Democratic Revolution and the Lenin Communist Revolution in Saint Petersburg and Moscow at the end of World War I, and to the atheistic communist period, which the Orthodox Church survived up to the successful Neoliberal Counter-Revolution of 1989, after which it was put back into many of its old rights again, particularly its property rights (Troyat 1984: chaps. 1 and 2; Chekhov 2000: 223-252, 361-376, 377-382, 421-436; 1993: 568585, 586-591,592-609; Marcuse 1961; Benjamin 1968; 1977: chaps 4, 6,

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15, 24; 1980; 1988: chaps. 12, 13, 14; Küng 1994a: 145-335). We allowed particularly Anton Chekhov to introduce us to Yalta, We visited the Oreanda and the small Orthodox church, near which Chekhov had written his short story about The Lady with the Little Dog in 1899 (Chekhov 2000: 361-377; Troyat 1984: chap. XII; Kesting 2010: 85-87). Father Nickolai, who was in process of restoring and renovating the church, which had been neglected during the atheistic-communistic period, told us not only all about its long history, but also all about Chekhov and his life in Yalta and his writings. The Orthodox priest showed us the old bench under the trees near his church, the only sacred place in a profane social environment, be it feudal, bourgeois or socialist, where the often ill Chekhov had sat a century ago and had meditated and had looked over the Black Sea toward the distant Yalta, barely visible through the morning mist, stretched out along the coast line under the white clouds, which stood motionless on the mountain tops behind (Chekhov 2000: 366-367). Here for Chekhov the leaves of the trees did not stir, and the cicadas called, and the monotonous, dull noise of the sea, coming from deep below, spoke to him of the peace, of the eternal sleep that awaited him and all humans. Checkhov remembered and reflected, that so it had sounded below, when neither Yalta nor Oreanda were there, so it sounded now in 1899, and would go on sounding with the same dull indifference when he and all humans would no longer be here. For Chekhov in this constancy, in this utter indifference to the life and death of each human being, there perhaps lay hidden the pledge of all humans’ eternal salvation, the unceasing movement of life on earth, of unceasing perfection (Chekhov 2000: 366-367; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d; Küng 1982). Here at Chekhov’s bench high above the Black Sea it became obvious to us that a civilization could not exist without any sense of the Sacred (Chekhov 2000: 366-367; Küng 1982) Ratzinger/Marcello 2006). My colleagues and I also visited the memorial place on the embankment and boardwalk along the Black Sea shoreline of Yalta, where a sculpture portrayed the two lovers–Anna Sergeevna von Dideritz from Saint Petersburg and Dmitri Dmitrich Guriov from Moscow and the dog from Chekhov’s short story about The Lady and the Little Dog (Chekhov 2000: 361-377; Troyat 1984: chap. XII). The luxury district Oreanda, which included Lividia, the summer residence of the Romanovs and many summer homes of the nobility from Saint Petersburg and Moscow, became after the Lenin Communist Revolution a vacation place for the victorious working class, and was taken over by the Western and the new Russian

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bourgeoisie after the triumphant Neo-Liberal Counter-Revolution of 1989, which built new luxury hotels and homes in the area until the global credit freeze during the catastrophic crisis of late 2008 stopped all construction (Geier 2008: 10-17). Near the small Orthodox church of Oreanda my colleagues and I met a famous old monk who looked and spoke very much like the black monk in Chekhov’s short story of the same title (Chekhov 2000: 223-252). The old monk became famous when as a young man he defended single-handedly and heroically for several days a house on a hill in Stalingrad against continual German attacks and thus became a hero of the nation in the Great Patriotic War. The old monk had never been persecuted by the atheistic-communistic Government in Moscow or Kiev.

Humanist-Socialist Remembrance In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the great Russian 19th century writers’ Christian memory of the poor classes and their suffering could be inverted into a secular humanist-socialist remembrance (Marx 1871; 1906; 1953; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1963; 1964; 1974; 1977; Marx/Engels 1960; Marcuse 1960; 1961; Chekhov 1993; 2000; Troyat 1984; Tolstoy 1960; 1961; 1968; Dodson 1962; Dostoevsky 1950; 1957; 1969). When Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met in Yalta, in order to plan the unconditional surrender and occupation of Germany, a socialist Europe was still possible (Zinn 1999: chaps. 13, 14, 15, 16, 17). When the victorious Allied Leaders met again in Potsdam only the Cold War could be expected, because the Western Allies were no longer willing to include the Russians in a common administration of Germany, since they were afraid that the Soviets would impose nationalization and socialization on the German industry. For Hitler and his low bourgeois national-socialist folkish philosophy and party and armies the Cold War had come too late (Gellately 2001; Fest/Eichinger 2002; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 11, 17) Hegel had predicted that the new American and the Slavic World would supersede the old European World (Hegel 1986a: 218; l: 107-115; 413, 418, 490-481; 513; 1986g: 465; 1986l: 422, 500; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62). According to Hitler’s own all too late insight and word to his secretaries in the Führer Bunker in April 1945: Fate wanted it that way! (Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 11, 17; Gellately 2001; Fest/ Eichinger 2002). In the historical class struggle, Hitler’s low bourgeois armies had been crushed between the high-capitalist armies from the American World and the socialist armies from the Slavic World (Hegel 1986a: 218; l: 57,107-115, 413, 418, 490-481; 513; 1986d: 63, 473, 485, 574; 1986k: 99;

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1986g: 465; 1986l: 422, 500; 1986o: 352; 1986r: 71; 1986t: 62; Gellately 2001; Fest/Eichinger 2002).

Class struggle, Golden Rule, and Lex Talionis In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, while in the previous world-historical class struggle the rich classes, differentiated through the inequality of wealth, training, and education, had not treated the poor classes according to the Golden Rule, otherwise the class-antagonism would not have come about in the first place and would not have continually deepened, in the future class struggle the poor classes would have to treat the rich classes according to the Golden Rule and not according to the unending Lex Talionis (Hegel 1986a: 218; l: 57, 107-115, 413, 418, 490-481; 513; 1986c: 274, 386; 1986g: 464; 1986g: 465; 1986k: 553; 1986l: 422, 500; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; Gellately 2001; Fest/Eichinger 2002). In the class struggle–between master and servant–the human self-consciousness appeared as absolute foreign being (Hegel 1986a: 218; l: 57,107-115, 413, 418, 490-481; 513; 1986c: 145-154, 274, 386; 1986g: 464; 1986g: 465; 1986k: 553; 1986l: 422, 500; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62). The mediating factor would have to be that, in which both sides, the consciousnesses of the opposing classes, would be one. The consciousness would recognize the one moment in the other. The consciousness would recognize its own purpose and action in the fate and its fate in its purpose and action. The consciousness would recognize its own being in this necessity. The torn-apart consciousness of the class struggle was the consciousness of what was wrong in antagonistic civil society (Hegel 1986a: 13, 218; l: 57, 107-115, 413, 418, 490-481; 513; 1986c: 274, 386; 1986f: 62; 1986g: 168; 353; 464; 1986g: 465; 1986k: 21, 553; 1986l: 370; 422, 500; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; Gellately 2001; Fest/Eichinger 2002; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 205; 2007; Negt 1964; 2006: 62-64; 2007: 4-8; 2008: 37-41; Frazer/Honneth 2003). This torn-apart consciousness about the injustices in antagonistic bourgeois society was the source of religious as well as secular terrorism and counter-terrorism (Hegel 1986a: 218; l: 57,107-115, 413, 418, 490-481; 513; 1986c: 145-154, 274, 386; 1986g: 464; 1986g: 465; 1986k: 553; 1986l: 422, 500; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; Habermas 2006c; Borradori 2003; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 205; 2007; Negt 1964; 2006: 62-64; 2007: 4-8; 2008: 37-41; Frazer/ Honneth 2003)

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Thus, one year after our seventh international course in Yalta, on November 26, 2008, a group of Islamic militants, called Dekan Muhashedin, with religious-socialist tendencies, initiated a well coordinated terror attack with speedboats in waves of violence against Bombay, or today Mumbai, population 18 million, the commercial and financial capital of India, population over a billion, the greatest liberal democracy in the East with an enormous level of poverty, and targeted 10 specific places for several days, mainly luxury hotels, but also the Jewish Community Center, prestigious restaurants and coffee shops, and searched for the passports of American and British citizens, representatives of the richest capitalistic countries, and took hostages and killed 171 people, including 11 policemen, whose main task it had been to protect the property and the lives particularly of the rich classes, and wounded over 327 people (Habermas 2006c; Borradori 2003). Poor Americans or British are not traveling abroad and certainly do not live in luxury hotels. A young orthodox Rabbi and his wife, both from New York, were taken hostage by the Jihadists in the Jewish Community Center and were then murdered together with another Rabbi and two other persons, when Indian commandoes tried to rescue them. A most gifted girl of 13 years of age and her father from Virginia, who were members of the Synchronism-Meditation-Movement in New York, were killed with other Westerners in a famous Mumbai coffeeshop. Ironically enough Jews and Muslims have the Lex Talionis in common with each other and the Golden Rule with each other and with the Christians, Hindus, Jainists, and Buddhists (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 538-42; 7: 12; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 2004). To be sure, the militant Islamic group practiced the Lex Talionis against what they believed to be members of the rich classes of Western nations and of Israel, i.e. retaliation for their–what the Al Quaeda leadership in a video-message on Thanksgiving 2008 called forbidden wealth resulting from usury and unlimited greed, and for crimes against the poor of the world, and they did not act according to the Golden Rule which condemns terrorism but according to the Lex Talionis, which permits it (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; 7: 12; . Esposito/Mogahed 2007; Lawrence 2006; Habermas 2006c; Borradori 2003; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Siebert 2006a; 2007c: 1-50; 2007d; 2008a: 180-210). The Indian Government suspected Pakistan to be involved in the terror attack against Mumbai. There is the danger that India may practice the Jus Talionis against Pakistan. Retaliation produces new revenge. Both countries are atomic powers. The West-

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ern bourgeois mass media have no clue and are completely blind concerning the real motivation of the terror attack against Mumbai or against any other Western target: forbidden wealth (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; 7: 12; Esposito/Mogahed 2007; Lawrence 2006; Habermas 2006c; Borradori 2003; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Siebert 2006a; 2007c: 1-50; 2007d; 2008a: 180-210). In December 2008 the Al Quaeda leadership seemed to be convinced and to claim not without much selfdeception, that it had single-handedly brought down the infidels, the secular superpower Soviet Union and the socialist enlightenment movement through its war in Afghanistan, and that it has then overcome the leftover likewise secular superpower America and the bourgeois enlightenment movement through several terror attacks against American interests worldwide and through the second war in Iraq and through the war in Afghanistan, and finally through the catastrophic economic crisis of 2008 (Lawrence 2005; Esposito/Mogahed 2007).

Conversion to Islam On Thanksgiving 2008, the Al Quaeda leadership sent the public video message to the capitalist West, that it could best solve its present enormous economic crisis, if it would convert to Islam and reject forbidden wealth: i.e. wealth reaped from usury (Lawrence 2005; Esposito/Mogahed 2007; Ratzinger/Pera 2006). In the view of the critical theory of religion, the capitalist West could of course also convert to Judaism or Christianity in order to resolve its economic crisis, because all three Abrahamic religions apply the Golden Rule to economic and business-behaviour and -systems and thus reject usury, unlimited greed and forbidden wealth (Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Ratzinger/Pera 2006). Of course, Jewish or Christian religious-socio-ethical theory would have to be turned into secular praxis in the private, economic and political spheres of modern antagonistic civil society toward alternative Future III– a society determinated by universal citizen service; universal college access; universal retirement savings; universal children’s health care; fiscal responsibility and an end to corporate welfare; tax reform to help those who aren’t wealthy to build wealth; and a new strategy to win the war on terror (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Habermas 1978a; 1976; 1978c; Emanuel/ Reed 2006). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology the ban of the Jus Talionis, i.e. retaliation, has to be broken through the praxis of the Golden Rule, including all religious ethical and moral values and norms, and of its inversion into its secular equivalents, the categorical imperative

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and the a priori of the unlimited communication community, including profane values and norms and their translation into enforceable positive laws, if humanity should ever move toward alternative Future III–a peace society (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; 7: 12; . More 1901; 1965; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985a; 1985c; Flechtheim 1959: 625-634; 1962: 27-34; 1963: 148-150; 1966: 455-464; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Habermas 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1982; 1983; 1984a; 1997a; 1999; 2001a; 2002; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; : 1-25; 2006c; 2007; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Siebert 2006a; 2007c; 2007d; 2008a; 2008b; App. G).

Ideologization In Yalta in November 2007 we were certain, that of course even the Golden Rule, including all religious ethical and moral values and norms, could be distorted into ideology understood as false consciousness, and the masking of racial, national and class interests, shortly as untruth (Matthew 5-7; Siebert 2005b; 2006a; 2007c; 2007d; 2008a; 2008c; 2008e; 2008f). Thus during the Presidential Campaign in the USA of 2008, some Roman Catholic bishops and priests, who had been informed by the reactionary Fox News close to the Bush Administration, told the Roman Catholics against the will of the Bishop of Rome with whom they are in union, that they would surely go to hell if they would vote for the Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama because the pro-choice position was part of his material political platform, ignoring completely his stand for the redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation in the name of justice, and against the war in Iraq in the name of peace, which so far had cost the lives of 5,000 American soldiers and of 1 million Iraqi civilians: a Satanic dialectic! Also the religious faith itself, in which the Golden Rule is rooted, could be blasphemously ideologized. Thus Hitler ideologized religious faith when he demanded it from the German people for his person, his national socialism, his policies, his ultimate victory and that the more so as they moved toward their destruction. When President Bush junior used faith-based religious services, then while he instrumentalized Christian communities to perform social services, which the state found too costly to perform, he did not yet pervert the religious faith into ideology. However that happened, when President Bush explained in the middle of the capitalist catastrophe in November 2008, that the free enterprise system was faith-based and meant, that the free market was based on the faith of the consumers. It was ideologization and blaspheming to base

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a usurous economic system on a religion which was opposed to usury: be it Judaism, Christianity, or Islam (Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004). According to the Abrahamic religions only God can be the object of religious faith and not an absolutized political or economic system, e.g. the capitalist system (Hegel 1986a: 13; 1986f: 62; 1987g: 168, 353; 1986k: 21; 1986g: 370). It is idolatry or fetishism to make anything finite into the good, qualitative Infinite and long for it (Exodus 20; Psalm 83: 3; Isaiah 26: 9; Jeremiah 17: 16; Ezekiel 37: 15-28; Matthew 5: 43-48; Luke 2: 15; 23: 24; Romans 1: 11; 15: 23; 2 Corinthians 5: 2; 7: 7; 7: 11; Philippians 1: 23; 2: 26; 1 Timothy 2: 17; 3: 6; Lieber 2001: 290; Blakney 1941: 95139; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985a; 1985b; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Horkheimr 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40; Benjamin 1955a; 1974; 1977: chaps. 10 and 11; 1978; 1978c; 1978d; 1980; 1983a; 1983b; 1995b; Flechtheim 1959; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Metz 1959; 1962; 1963; 1965; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1977; 1978; 1980; 1981; 1984; 1995; 1998; 2006; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Metz/Rendtorf 1971; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Peukert 1976; Arens 1982; 1989a; 1989b; 1992; 1994a; 1994b; 1995; 1997; 2007; Arens/Rotlander 1991; Miranda 1971; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b; Küng 1970; 1990b; 1994a; 1994b; 2002).

False Return of Religion In Yalta as well as in our sister course in Dubrovnik we were aware that during the so-called return of religion after the communist period in Eastern Europe ideologization of religion took place very often in the form of nationalization and ethnotization: the Ukranian or Russian became automatically Orthodox again and the Croat became automatically Roman Catholic again, no matter if he took seriously believes like the Trinity or the incarnation or if he was really driven by the faith in Transcendence or by the longing for the wholly Other than the ongoing horror and terror of history (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 30). The newly born orthodox Russian or Ukrainian or Croat could very well remain the atheist or the agnostic he had been before during the communist period under the cover of the newly gained religiosity, the authenticity of which could be easily measured by his praxis of the Golden Rule, rooted in the longing for the totally Other, in the private as well as in the economic and political dimension of the newly established Eastern European nation-states (Horkheimer 1985g chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38,

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39, 40; Küng 1994a: 904-906; Siebert 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2002c; 2003; 2004a; 2004b; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007e; 2007f; 2007g; 2008a; 2008c; 2008e; 2008f).

Everlasting Covenant of Friendship In the historical context of the present transition period between Modernity and Post-Modernity, characterized by so much revengeful terror and counter-terror, we remembered in Yalta already in 2007, Ezekiel’s eschatological statement: I will make a covenant of friendship with them–it shall be an everlasting covenant with them–I will establish them and multiply them, and I will place My Sanctuary among them forever. My Presence shall rest over them; I will be their God and they shall be My people. And when My Sanctuary abides among them forever, the nations shall know that I the Lord do sanctify Israel (Ezekiel 37: 26-28; Habermas 1981d; 1985b; 1987a; 1987c; 1988a; 1988b; 1990; 1991c; 1992b; 1998; 2001a; 2001c).

According to the Rabbis, the prophet Ezekiel had used the notion My Presence in terms of the old vocabulary of the wilderness Tabernacle to indicate the renewal of the divine Presence among the people (Exodus 25: 8-9; Ezekiel 37: 27; Lieber 2001: 292/27; Tillich 1963a: 34, 35,36, 51, 84, 86, 99, 107, 113, 117, 126, 127, 136, 210, 246, 249, 328, 337, 400). Ancient Jewish tradition had interpreted My Tabernacle as My indwelling Presence or Shekinah, what was in Greek theophany and in terms of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s inverse theology the ciphers of the wholly Other (Exodus 25: 8-9; Ezekiel 37: 27; Psalm 83: 3; Isaiah 26: 9; Jeremiah 17: 16; Ezekiel 37: 15-28; Matthew 5: 43-48; Luke 2: 15; 23: 24; Romans 1: 11; 15: 23; 2 Corinthians 5: 2; 7: 7; 7: 11; Philippians 1: 23; 2: 26; 1 Timothy 2: 17; 3: 6; Lieber 2001: 290; 2001: 292/27; Blakney 1941: 95-139; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985a; 1985b; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Horkheimr 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40; Benjamin 1955a; 1974; 1977: chaps. 10 and 11; 1978; 1978c; 1978d; 1980; 1983a; 1983b; 1995b; Flechtheim 1959; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Metz 1959; 1962; 1963; 1965; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1977; 1978; 1980; 1981; 1984; 1995; 1998; 2006; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Metz/ Rendtorf 1971; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Peukert 1976; Arens 1982; 1989a; 1989b; 1992; 1994a; 1994b; 1995; 1997; 2007; Arens/Rotlander 1991; Miranda 1971; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b; Küng

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1970; 1990b; 1994a; 1994b; 2002; Tillich 1963a: 34, 35, 36, 51, 84, 86, 99, 107, 113, 117, 126, 127, 136, 210, 246, 249, 328, 337, 400; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). Eliezer of Beaugency had emphasized the protective aspect of this theological symbolism. In the view of the Rabbis, the statement “I will be their God and they shall be My people” had been a formulaic expression of the covenantal bond and its reciprocity (Ezekiel 37: 23; Lieber 2001: 291-292/23; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; 185-346; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004). The formulary was common with alternate formulations in many Hebrew prophetic writings, and in the Torah and in the New Testament (Ezekiel 11: 20; 14: 11; 36: 28; 37: 27; Hosea 2: 25; Leviticus 28: 12; Deuteronomy 29: 12; Revelation 21: 3-6). The Book of Revelation stated concerning the New Jerusalem after the old Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans in the year 70: You see this city: Here God lives among men. He will make his home among them; they shall be his people, and he will be their God; his name is Godwith-them. He will wipe away all tears from their eyes; there will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness. The world of the past has gone (Revelation 21: 3-6).

These Arch-Christian eschatological words were guiding our discourse in Yalta in 2007 (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969c; 1970b; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b). Here in Yalta as well as in Dubrovnik eschatology was more important for us, than mythology or ontology.

Violation and Affirmation of the Golden Rule In Yalta as well as in Dubrovnik we remembered the Jewish and Christian covenants between God and man embracing the Providential promises and the Golden Rule as the sum-total of the law and the prophets (Matthew 5-7). We discussed the well-known trial of God in Auschwitz, in which the Rabbis charged him with having broken the covenant and thus having produced the unsolvable theodicy problem (Wiesel 1982; 1992). God himself had violated his own Golden Rule and had not treated his people as he wanted to be treated (Matthew 7: 12; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b). The Rabbis considered even the possibility, that God may have broken the covenant with the Jews and may have concluded a new covenant with the Germans, who carried on their belts the inscription–God

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with us–and may have used Hitler as an instrument to punish or test the Jewish people. In Yalta as well as in Dubrovnik, we also discussed the possibility that man had broken the covenants through not having followed the Golden Rule toward God and men, and thus having elicited the Lex Talionis, practiced by God and man: the talion theodicy (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; Hegel 1986l: 28; 540, 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Oelmüller 1990; Wiesel 1982; 1992). One of our Russian friends in Yalta pointed out that the breaking of the covenant through the violation of the Golden Rule and sinning initiated world history (Genesis 1-3; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37). Sinning was necessary for man’s separation from nature and animality and for his making human history. Americans had made history when they broke the Golden Rule through putting rockets into Poland and the Check Republic directed toward Iran, while not wanting Russian rockets in Canada or Mexico, and thus forced the Russians to practice the Lex Talionis and to retaliate through putting rockets into Latvia directed toward Central and Western Europe, But we argued with our Russian friend that original and inherited sin must not be used as legitimation for the horror and terror of a history full of retaliation and counter-revenge (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37). The Hebrew Bible and the New Testaments and the Holy Qu’ran contain many prophetic eschatological calls for repentance, for metanoia, for overcoming temptations and ceasing to sin and affirming the Golden Rule in the name of life toward the New Jerusalem, in which “I will be their God and they shall be My people” and in which there will be ultimate liberation and redemption and Shalom: toward the wholly Other than the dark unredeemed world of the present (Genesis 28: 19; 49: 3; Lieber 2001: 294/3; chap. 35; Matthew 3: 1-17; 4: 1-17; Bloch 1960; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1981; 1992; 1995; 2001; 2003-212; Fromm 1966c; Adorno 1951: 333-334; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). In the very same world-history, which was initiated through sin, through the violation of the Golden Rule, sin is also to be overcome, through the affirmation of the Golden Rule, through repentance, conversion, forgiveness and redemption in all dimensions of human life (Matthew 3: 1-17; 4: 1-17; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1957; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Fromm 1966c; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Fromm/Xirau 1979; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b).

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Will to Life Like other great writers of the 19th century in their novels, so had our Chekhov reflected this drama of sinning, repentance, conversion, forgiveness and longing for redemption in his short story The Lady with the Little Dog and in his other stories and plays (Chekhov 1993; 2000; Troyat 1984; Kesting 2010: 85-87). In the perspective of the Schopenhaurian secular inversion of the religious notion of sin, in the history which was initiated through the will to life of the one instrumentalizing selfishly the will to life in the other, redemption was achieved through the one suffering with the suffering of the other, or as Paul put it to weep with the weeping, and the one rejoicing with the joy of the other (Schopenhauer 1941; 1989, Vol. 1: 550, 552, 553; Vol. 2, 747, 774-775, 795, 800, 805, 819; Vol. 3: 597; Vol. 4: 81; Vol. 5: 440, 450, 458-459; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 17, 21, 29, 37, 40). That pledge of redemption through the solidary determinate negation of the will to life with its aggressive as well as libidinous aspects in the religious as well as in the aesthetical and philosophical dimension, without sublimation of which the Golden Rule could not be practiced privately or collectively, and would invert into its opposite, the Jus Talionis, was the final conclusion of our seventh international course on Religion and Civil Society in Yalta in November 2007 (Matthew 5-7; 26: 52; Schopenhauer 1941; 1989, Vol. 1: 550, 552, 553; Vol. 2: 747, 774-775, 795, 800, 805, 819; Vol. 3: 597; Vol. 4: 81; Vol. 5: 440, 450, 458-459; Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; 1992; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 4, 9, 17, 21, 29, 37, 40; Fromm 1956; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Adorno 1932; 1951; 1960; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1973d; 1973c; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1991a; 1991b; 1993a; Siebert 2008a; 2008b; 2008e; 2008f).

Negation of the Sword According to the Rabbis, the Hebrew words translated in Genesis 49: 5–“Simeon and Levi are a pair; their weapons are tools of lawlessness”– as their weapons appeared only here, and any translation was guess-work (Lieber 2001: 300/5). The Midrash read “their weapons are stolen’” (Genesis 49: 5; Lieber 2001: 300/5). It was Esau who had been ordained to live by the sword. Jacob and his descendents were to flourish through their piety. When Simeon and Levi resorted to violence, they appropriated Esau’s method of conflict resolution. The Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth stood finally in

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the Hebrew tradition, when he told one of his followers–probably Peter, the leader of his disciples and later on of the early communist Christian community in Jerusalem–who had struck off the ear of the high priest’s servant on Mount Olive, Put your sword back, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 5: 38-48; 7: 12; 10: 34; 26: 47, 51, 52, 55; Luke 2: 35; 21: 24; 22: 36, 38, 49; Acts 1: 12-14; 15-26; 2: 42-474: 32-35; Küng 1994a: 89-144).

Killing for killing was precisely what the Lex talionis demanded and what was actualized and realized in world-history, most recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, etc. (Exodus 21: 24). To put the sword back was the demand of the Golden Rule. Jesus told one of his followers to put his just used sword back after he had once told his friends that he had not come to bring peace but the sword, and after once he had asked them that they should buy swords (Matthew 5: 38-48; 7: 12; 10: 34; 26: 47, 51, 52, 55; Luke 2: 35; 21: 24; 22: 36, 38, 49; Acts 1: 12-14; 15-26; 2: 42-47; 4: 32-35; Küng 1994a: 89-144). Shortly before he had not held up the other cheek himself after the servant of the high priest Caiaphas had given him a slap in the face before the Sanhedrin but asked for a justification–why do you strike me–and shortly before his own violent death through torture and execution in April of the year 33, Jesus finally negated not only theoretically but also practically the sword and the Lex Talionis through the Golden Rule (Matthew 5: 38-42; 7: 12;-7; John 18: 12-24). The dialectical religiology, which we practiced and developed further most fruitfully in our seventh international course on Religion and Civil Society in Yalta in 2007, follows the Jacob- and the Jesus-traditions in their determinate negation of the sword and of the Jus Talionis into the Golden Rule, rooted in revelation as well as in reason, i.e. in the human potential of language and memory and in the evolutionary universal of the struggle for recognition, or into its secularization, the categorical imperative or the a priori of the unlimited communication community: as the negation of the negativity of the sword and of the Lex Talionis toward alternative Future III–a more peaceful society in the horizon of the wholly Other than all resemblance (Genesis 49: 5; Lieber 2001: 300/5; Matthew 5-7; Hegel 1896; 1965; 1969; 1972; 1976; 1979; 1986a: 62,81,82-83, 85, 106, 107, 108, 113-114, 115-116, 119, 125, 138, 182, 207, 223-224, 227-229, 297, 301, 309, 311-312, 315, 317, 319, 319-323, 324-325, 327, 387-389; 1986b; 1986q: 283; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1969c; 1970b; 1997j/2: 608-616; Flechteim 1959; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97; Fromm 1973; 1992: 3-94; Reich 1971; 1976; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Habermas

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1971; 1976; 1978a: chap. 5; 1982; 1983; 1984a; 1986; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 1991b; 1992a; 1992b; 1997a; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Hullot-Kentor 2006; App. G). In all 8 international courses so far in Yalta on Religion and Civil Society and in all 33 international courses so far in Dubrovnik on the Future of Religion, we were fully aware that in the present transition period from Modernity to Post-Modernity, the sword had long been replaced by an infinitely more murderous weapon, the atomic and hydrogen bombs, and that in such a weapon-technological situation the Lex Talionis must be superseded by the Golden Rule, or by its secular equivalents like the categorical imperative or the apriori of the universal communication community, if the human species is to survive this 21st century on this earth (Matthew 5-7; 26: 52; Flechtheim 19959; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1971; Flechtheim/ Lohmann 2003; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Fromm 1973; Reich 1971; 1976; Reich 2008; Habermas 1970; 1971; 1975; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981c; 1981d; 1983; 1984a; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1987c; 1988b; 1990; 1991a; 1991b; 1991c; 1992a; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Küng 1980; 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; Apostolidis 2000; AOL News 2003a; 2003b; 2003c; 2003d; 2006a; 2006b ; 2006e; 2006f; 2006g; 2007a; 2007b; Dubiel 1988; 1992; 1993: 5-11; 1994: 5-13; 1995; 1996: 33-40; 1998: 25-35; Dubiel/Friedeburg 1996: 5-12; 1994; App. E, F, G).

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From Magic to the Dialectical Notion According to Horkheimer’s critical theory of society, which concretely superseded in itself Judaism and Christianity as well as German idealism, historical materialism, and psychoanalysis, with the progressing enlightenment always new developments of the world were subjected to the firm dialectical notion of the truth in terms of expansion and extension as well as intensity (Hegel 1986f: 243-300; Horkheimer 1967b; 1969; 1985l: 299301, 323-325; 1989m: 649-651). In this process, the test was always the increase not only of personal, but rather also of generally available power over nature: the external as well as the internal human nature (Horkheimer 1989m: 650-651; Lohmann 1994; Mitscherlich 1994).

The Notion as Tool In Horkheimer’s view, the notion was a tool (Hegel 1986f: 243-300; Horkheimer 1967; 1985l: 323-325; 1989: 650-651). It was rooted in the human potential of work and tool, and thus, in instrumental or functional rationality and action (Hegel 1972; 1979; 1986b). It becomes the tool of scientific and technological geniuses like Porsche and SS Colonel Werner von Braun, who were extremely competent concerning the human potential of work and tool and instrumental rationality and action, but who at the same time had no competence what so ever concerning the evolutionary universals of language and memory, and of mutual recognition and thus, of mimetic and communicative rationality and action, and who therefore were also not religiously musical, and thus had also no sense whatsoever for the difference between good and evil (Genesis 1, 2, 3; Lieber 2001: 2-23; Gehlen 1964; Apel 1976b; Habermas 1975; 1976; 1983; 1991a; 1991b; 1997a). According to Horkheimer, the conditions of the production and application of the notion as mere tool corresponded to those of other social means of production (Horkheimer 1989: 650). In a certain sense, the notion was the tool that had come to itself: the tool katexochen. The illusionary tendency, which was connected with the notion, to consider the data and facts, which were held together through it,

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to be the reality itself, appeared to Horkheimer today–in 1949, four years after the end of World War II–as a residual of magic and fetishism, the first and most primitive and archaic form of religious consciousness, before precisely that enlightenment, for which once every appearance served as motor of thinking (Hegel 1986p: 249-301; Wach 1958; 1961; 1967; Berher 1990; Leeuw 1963; Lenski 1963; O’Dea 1966; Gehlen 1964; Horkheimer 1989m: 649; App. E). For Horkheimer, the error of the primitive tribes, who were devoted to magic and fetishism, and who identified the enemy with his weapon, lock, curlew, or foot print that the tribal magician used for his conjuration, returned in the naïve world-view of the bourgeois, who believed that the conceptual formula with which nature was conquered, defeated, and overcome was its essence itself (Döbert 1973; Yinger 1964; Gehlen 1964; Horkheimer 1989: 650-65). In Horkheimer’s view, here the quid pro quo was obvious. However crazy, mad, lunatic and insane, so Horkheimer argued, may appear or seem the primitive or modern fetishization of the means–the immediate identification of purpose and instrument–their radical separation would have to annihilate the hope that humanity would ever come to the truth in any sense (Horkheimer 1967b; 1989m: 650-65). If the means did not embody and contain the truth, it would remain eternally removed. Thus for the positivistic, cognitive theory of religion, even religious notions are an instrument or a tool (Adorno 1970a; Horkiheimer 1985l: 483-492; Marcuse 1962: 65-66; Wuthnow 2007: 341-360; Ströbele-Gregor 2007: 37-40).

Identity of Notion and Being According to Horkheimer, still the least primitive, archaic, or naïve Hegelian philosophy had stamped the identity of notion and being only so far as mythical appearance, as it was not mediated, i.e. not acquired, not appropriated: as it was notionless (Hegel 1986b: 515, 551; 1986d: 22, 29, 33, 103, 127-131, 143, 192-203; 1986e: 24, 29, 27; 1986f: 284; 1986r: 16, 31, 205-231, 225-226, 229-230, 393, 395, 397, Horkheimer 1989: 650-651; 1967l b: 259-260; Adorno 1963; 1973b: 300-360). Even Hegel’s philosophy had still considered it as self-evident that the means–in principle the truth, the civilization–did catch up with the rational society only in so far as it contained the truth in itself (Hegel 1986l: 33-55; Horkheimer 1989: 650-651; Adorno 1973b: 300-360). Otherwise the private and general history would remain meaningless and senseless. Hegel had considered his work as the proof that sticking with and keeping to the Kantian teaching about the chorismos or the abyss between notion and absolute being

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would have to make Kant’s own philosophy as well as any other–e.g. the critical theory of society–into a farce: i.e. a dramatic representation intended only to amuse; a comedy with a futile or absurd outcome (Kant 1929: 19, 21, 22-24, 45, 104, 113, 121, 503, 510, 529, 577-579, 581, 583, 586-587, 314; Hegel 1986a: 74, 188, 234; 1986b: 251, 260, 269, 270, 287433; Horkheimer 1989: 650-651; Williams 2006/2007: 9-34). Nietzsche agreed with Hegel that Kant indeed made a joke when he wanted to prove in a way that would dumbfound the common man that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul (Kaufmann 1967: 96; Lohmann 2007: 67-69; Karlauf 2007; Lütkehaus 2007: 67-69). Kant wrote against the scholars in favor of the popular prejudice that the things-in-themselves and the Thing-in-itself, God, the Ens Realissimum, could not be known– but for scholars and not popularly (Kant 1929: 24, 27, 71-74, 85-87, 89, 149, 172-173, 230, 265-267, 440, 449, 490; Kaufmann 1967: 96; Lohmann 2007: 67-69; Karlauf 2007; Lütkehaus 2007: 67-69). While Horkheimer, Adorno, and the other critical theorists continued to agree with Gaunilon’s and Kant’s non-identity of notion and being rather than with Anselm of Canterbury’s and Hegel’s identity of notion and being, they, nevertheless, negated the latter not abstractly, but rather concretely, and thus preserved at least the memory of the ontological proof–a Being existed against which a greater could not be conceived. The critical theorists kept this alive in the form of their longing for the wholly Other, who could not be imagined or named but who was nevertheless, and who was closer to the individual than his or her own personal or national identity. The critical theorists thus rejected post-theistically both traditional theism as well as traditional atheism (Exodus 20; Saint Anselm 1962: xv-xx, 22, 153-157; Hegel 1986c: 68-76; 1986e: 48-53; 1986r: 347-534; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 29, 30, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Adorno 1973b: 390-393, 402-405; Tillich 1972: 186-190; Fromm 1966; 1976: chaps. III, VII, IX). The Kantian position was, of course, quite in contrast to the shekinah or theophany experiences reported in the Torah: in which–philosophically speaking–Notion and being were identical (Genesis 16: 14; 22; Lieber 2001: 120/14; Petuchowski 1956: 543-594). The Rabbis paraphrased the name that Abraham gave to the site where he was supposed to sacrifice Isaac in the form of a holocaust, as the high point where I saw God. This was an intriguing contrast to the slave Hagar, who named the well that saved her and her son Ishmael’s life the low point where I saw God. The Parashah, which began with Abraham encountering God in the form of three strangers and which contained so many references to seeing and not seeing, concluded with Abraham finding God in

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this seeing experience of the almost holocaust of Isaac. According to the Rabbis, believers came to see God not only in the daily experiences of the beauty and order of nature, the companionship of others, and their abilities to grow, to learn, and to share. The believers came to see God as well in their peak experiences of love, marriage, parenthood, personal success, their being delivered from danger, and in their ability to survive and transcend misfortune. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, even in horrible theodicy experiences the identity of notion and being did not break for the believers (Psalm 22; Psalm 46; Psalm 73; Berrigan 1978: 35-37, 53-56; Leibniz 1996; Hegel 1986l: 28; 540; 1986p: 88; 1986d: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Fromm 1966: 231-236; Oelmüller 1990; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Siebert 2002: chaps. 2 and 5).

Positive Construction According to Adorno in his Negative Dialectic, Kant confronted the construction of his barrier erected against the Absolute, the radical non-identity between notion and being, with the positive construction of metaphysics in his Critique of Practical Reason (Kant 1974; 1982; Horkheimer 1987b: 15-148, 295-312; Adorno 1997f: 382-386; 1998). In Adorno’s view, Kant did not pass in silence over this construction’s moment of despair. Kant stated that even if a transcendental faculty of freedom may serve as a supplement, perhaps to initiate changes in the world, this faculty would have to be solely outside the world of appearances. This was Kant’s position, although it always remained an audacious presumption to assume outside of the totality of all possible views, an object that could not be given to any possible perception: namely, the Absolute, the Thing-in-itself, the Ens Realissimum, the imageless and nameless wholly Other (Kant 1929: 490; Adorno 1997f: 382-386). Kant’s parenthesis about the audacious presumption showed to Adorno how skeptical he was of his own mundus intelligibilis. For Adorno, this Kantian formulation from the footnote to the Antithesis of the Third Antinomy came close to atheism. What Kant postulated so zealously later on, was here in the Critique of Practical Reason called theoretically presumptuous. According to Adorno, Kant’s desperate reluctance to imagine the postulate as an existential judgment was strenuously avoided. According to Kant’s passage, it would have to be possible to conceive as an object of possible visuality, at least, what must at the same time be conceived as removed from all visuality: namely the Absolute, the entirely Other. Human Reason would have to capitulate to the contradiction, unless the hubris, the arrogance of prescribing its own

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bounds had first irrationally narrowed reason’s domain without tying it to those bounds objectively as reason. Yet, so Adorno argued, if visuality too was included in infinite reason, as it was by the idealists and also by the Neo-Kantians, then Transcendence, the Absolute, the entirely Other would be virtually cashiered by the immanence of the human mind.

God, Freedom and Immortality According to Adorno, what Kant alluded to with respect to freedom would apply also to the other elements of the Thing-itself: God and immortality or future life, only more so (Kant 1965: 28-29, 30-31, 89-90, 333-335, 369-377, 379-380, 392, 484-486, 490, 600, 602-604, 639, 644, 648-650; Adorno 1997f: 382-386). For Adorno, this was so because these elements of the Thing-itself–God and immortality–did not refer to any pure possibility of conduct. Their own concepts made them rather postulates of things in being, no matter what kind. These entities needed a matter. In Kant’s case, they would depend entirely upon that visuality whose possibility he excluded from the transcendent ideas. For Adorno, the pathos of the Kantian intelligibility complemented the difficulty of ascertaining it in any way, and if it were only in the medium of the self-sufficient thought designated by the word intelligible. According to Adorno, the word must not refer to anything real.

A Positive Mundus Intelligibilis According to Adorno, the movement of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason proceeded to a positive mundus intelligibilis that could not be envisioned in his intention (Kant 1968; Adorno 1997f: 382-386). For Adorno, as soon as what ought to be in civil society, which was emphatically distinguished from what was the case, was established as a realm of its own–a realm of validity–and was equipped with absolute authority, the procedure would, albeit involuntarily, make it assume the character of a second existence. A thought in which people did not think something was not a thought (Hegel 1986e: 115-173; Adorno 1997f: 382-386). The ideas, the substance of metaphysics, were not visual, but neither could they be airy nothings of thought, lest they be stripped of all objectivity (Hegel 1986e: 82-114; Adorno 1997f: 382-386; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c). The intelligible world, so Adorno concluded, would be devoured by the very subject that the other, intelligible dimension was to transcend: transcendence by immanence

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(Adorno 1997f: 382-386; Cortan/Doran 2007: 565-572; Massignon 573582; Kamrane 2007: 603-6120). A century after Kant, so Adorno observed, such flattening of the intelligible sphere into the imaginary dimension of what was the case, came to be the cardinal sin of the neo-romanticists of the fin de siècle, and of the phenomenological philosophy tailor-made to their measure (Adorno 1997a: 7-78; 1997e: 7-246; 1997f: 382-386).

A Nature-Controlling Principle According to Adorno, in the human mind, mere entity became aware of its deficiency (Adorno 1997f: 382-386). The departure from an existence obdurate in itself–particularly in late capitalist society–was the source of what separated the human mind from its nature-controlling principle. (Adorno 1997h: 354-372, 578-567; 1997f: 382-386). For Adorno, the point of this turn was that the human mind was not to become existent in its own eyes either, as it happens today–February 2008–in cognitivism, even in the cognitive theory of religion, when it talks about the mind-brain to avoid an endless repetition of the ever same, the identical particularly in globalizing late civil society (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Adorno1997f: 382-386; 1997h: 9-19, 217-237, 354-391, 397-433, 569-573, 578-587; Light/Wilson 2004; Wutnow 2007: 341-360). In Adorno’s view, the side of the human mind that was hostile to life would be sheer depravity if it did not climax in its self-reflection. According to Adorno, the religious or secular asceticism, which the human mind demanded of others was wrong, but its own religious or secular asceticism was good: in its self-negation, the human mind transcended itself. For Adorno this was a step that was not so foreign and alien to Kant’s subsequent Metaphysics of Morals as people may expect (Kant 1968; Adorno1997f: 382-386). According to Adorno, to be a human mind at all, it had to know that what it was touching upon did not exhaust it: that the finiteness did not exhaust it. The human mind thought what was beyond it: shortly, what once in art, religion and philosophy was called Heaven, Eternity, Beauty, Absolute, Unconditional, Freedom, Immortality, Future Life mundus intelligibilis, Thing-in-itself, absolute Spirit and which the critical theorists now named the wholly Other than the world of appearances in its totality (Hegel 1986c: 575-591; 1986j: 366-398; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40, 42; Adorno 1997f: 382-386).

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The Fragile Truth In Adorno’s perspective, Kant’s concept of the intelligible realm would be the concept of something that was not, and yet it was not a pure nonbeing (Kant 1929: 28-29, 30-31, 89-90, 333-335, 369-377, 379-380, 392, 484-486, 490, 600, 602-604, 639, 644, 648-650; Hegel 1986t: 267-313, 314, 315, 318, 322, 322, 323, 327, 329, 386-388, 390, 400, 401, 403, 405, 407, 407, 408, 413, 414, 428, 429, 432, 444, 451, 453; Adorno 1997f: 382-386). For Adorno, under the positivistic rules of the nature-controlling human mind, the ruled of the sphere, whose negation was the intelligible sphere, the intelligible realm would have to be rejected without resistance as imaginary (Horkheimer 1970b: 101-104, 116-117; Adorno 1980a; 1997f: 382-386). For Adorno, nowhere else was truth so fragile. Here the truth may even deteriorate into the hypostasis of something thought up for no reason: something in which thought meant to possess what it had really lost. Then again the effort to comprehend that something was easy to confuse with things, which were the case. If people in their thinking, so Adorno argued, mistook thoughts for realities–in the paralogism of Anselm of Canterbury’s and Hegel’s ontological argument for the existence of God, which Gaunilon and Kant had supposedly demolished–, then their thinking was void (Saint Anselm 1962; Adorno 1997f: 382-386). However, in Adorno’s view, the fallacy was the direct elevation of negativity, the critique of what merely was the case, into positivity as the insufficiency of what was at hand might guarantee that what is the case will be rid of that insufficiency. Adorno argued in his Negative Dialectic against the whole tradition of positive dialectic, that the negation of the negation was the affirmation, that even in extremis a negated negative was not necessarily a positive (Hegel 1986c: 68-76; 1986e: 48-53; Adorno; 1997f: 382-386; Marcuse 1969a; 1969b).

A Logic of Semblance or of Truth Adorno remembered that Kant had called the transcendental dialectics a logic of semblance: the doctrine of the contradictions in which any treatment of transcendent things in the Mundus intelligibilis, in the Thing-initself as positively knowable, were bound to become entangled in contradictions (Kant 1965: 99, 100, 176, 297-570; Adorno: 1997f: 382-386; Hullot-Kenten 2006). Adorno was convinced that Kant’s verdict had not been made obsolete by Hegel’s effort to vindicate the logic of semblance as a logic of truth (Kant 1965: 99, 100, 176, 297-570; Hegel 1986e; 1986f;

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1986q: 347-535; Adorno: 1997f: 382-386). However, according to Adorno, reflection had not been cut short by Kant’s verdict on semblance. Once made conscious, so Adorno argued, the semblance was no longer the same. For Adorno, what finite human beings said about Transcendence was the semblance of Transcendence: but as Kant well knew, it was a necessary semblance. Hence, so Adorno concluded, there was the incomparable metaphysical relevance of the rescue of the necessary semblance: it was the object of aesthetics (Adorno 1973a; 1981; 1997f: 382-386; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2001a; 2002b; 2002c). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, it may also be the object of religion and theology precisely because it is driven by the longing for the things beyond resemblance, the wholly Other, and the Golden Rule or the categorical imperative or the a priori of the unlimited communication community rooted in it (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1970b: 103-188; Hullot-Kenten 2006).

Rescue of the Necessary Semblance For the critical theorist of religion, as a matter of fact the metaphysical relevance of the rescue of the necessary semblance was not only an object of aesthetics, but also of religion as well in terms of the negative, inverse cipher or semblance theology (Horkheimer 1985l: 483-492; Adorno 1970: 103-125; 1962; 1997j: 608-616; Habermas 1986: 53-55; 1990: 14-15; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2002, 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005; Hullot-Kenten 2006). Adorno wrote to Benjamin from Merton College in England on November 6, 1934, that in his Passage Work he should proceed without qualms to realize every part of the content of their negative, inverse, semblance or cipher theology and all the literalness of its most extreme claims: everything that was originally harbored in it (Benjamin 1983a; 1983b; Adorno 1970: 103-161; Adorno/Benjamin 1994: 72-81). Adorno told Benjamin that for the sake of their own negative, inverse, cipher- or semblance-theological approach he should strongly refrain from associating his thought with the critical theory of society in a merely external manner. It really seemed to Adorno that here, where the most absolutely decisive and fundamental issues were concerned, one had to speak out loudly and clearly, and thereby one had to reveal the undiminished categorical depth, without neglecting the negative, inverse, cipher or semblance theology. At this decisive level, Adorno believed that by dialectically incorporating their negative, inverse, cipher or semblance theological approach, the Marxist theory of historical materialism could

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be more easily further developed. Here, the aesthetical could intervene incomparably much deeper in a revolutionary way into reality than the class theory as deus ex machina (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; 1983a; 1983b; Adorno 1970: 103-125; 1962; Adorno/Benjamin 1994: 72-81). For the critical theorist of religion, the aesthetical–particularly literature and music– is accompanied by the religious–especially the mystical–as it intervenes in a revolutionary way into the reality of antagonistic civil society, as it was the case with the work of Kierkegaard and Benjamin (Jamme/Schneider 1984: 11-14; Hegel 1986g; 1986m; 1986n; 1986o; 1986p; 1986q; Scholem 1967; 1970; 1973; 1974; 1977; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; 1988; Adorno 1970: 103-161; 1973; 1962; 2002a; 2002b; 2002c; 2002d; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c: 48-95, 127-143; Metz 1998). The dialectical theory of religion concretely supersedes in itself the works of Kierkegaard and Marx, including the latter’s class theory (Marx/Engels 2005).

Dichotomy of Purpose and Means In 1949, for Horkheimer the reason or analytical understanding, which was engaged in the control of external and internal nature, and which was blocked off and separated from the dimension of the Absolute, the Mundus intelligibilis, the wholly Other, and without which no higher, mimetic or communicative dialectical rationality aiming at the truth was possible, was itself instrumentalized, and the notions that it produced were mere tools (Horkheimer 1967; 1985f: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40, 42; 1985l: 590-592, 593-605; 1989: 650-651; Adorno 1970: 103-125; 1962; 1997j: 608-616; Habermas 1986: 53-55; 1990: 14-15; 1991a part III; 2001a; 2002; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Habermas/Henrich 1974; Habermas/Luhmann 1975; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005). For Horkheimer, tool meant plan, as long as the plan was not one of and for the whole of humanity. As Horkheimer argued, there existed a dichotomy between purpose and means. Horkheimer remembered that the entrepreneur of the Victorian age and style was a planner. The entrepreneur was alienated from the powers of civil society–the movements of the commodity prices, the change of the upward and downward economic trends and fluctuations, wars and revolutions–because other plans worked and operated against his plan (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Horkheimer 1989: 650-651). For Horkheimer, the market could appear as the regulating agency in civil society only because none of the planners who met there had the strength, power, and force enough to really assert itself. Among classes and nations, the so-called regulating market was even more ephemeral, short-

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lived, and only of passing interest and value. As Horkheimer argued, the more densely the subject of the plan or planning was organized in it the more powerful was the plan. Only, so Horkheimer predicted, with the organization of humanity down to the last detail in the global alternative Future I–the entirely administered society–in terms of a common plan would the alienation stop. (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1989: 650-651; App. G). According to Horkheimer, this was so because nothing human would any longer oppose the organization as something foreign in alternative Future I. The process came to its completion in alternative Future I when the universal plan was no longer forced upon the individual, be it also only ideologically masked as the individual’s own plan. In alternative Future I, the plan would not be allowed to be the administration of some people by others, so that the difference of one group from the other as presupposition of the social totality would withdraw itself and hide from the notion as tool. In Horkheimer’s view, that precisely was the Marxist reason for alternative Future III: the free union of human beings, free from the social totality’s unplanned effect of social power (Marx 1961c: 873-874; Horkheimer 1989: 650-651; App. G). Only when every individual became in his or her action the means of the social whole, would he and she become the purpose for the social totality and for himself or herself. Only when once the means had been completely recognized as purpose, would human beings be liberated from the domination of the means. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, with the Marxist alternative Future III, there was at least a light at the end of the tunnel, while in alternative Future I and II humanity would remain mere means for each other and for the social totality forever. Obviously the present global situation in February 2010 is still removed from the fascist alternative Future I or the Marxist alternative Future III, when the G 8 are not able even in the face of a world wide economic crisis to come to a common plan and to unite and to follow the American neo-liberal example and to pump over 150 billion dollars of tax money back into the hands of the consumers, in order thereby to stimulate or jump start the capitalist economy and the world market. The critical theory of religion strives with the Kantian critical theorists for an alternative Future III–a society, in which the antagonisms of present civil society would be reconciled, and in which human beings would never be merely a means for others or for the social whole, but always a self-purpose (App. E, F, G).

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Bourgeois and Proletarian Idealism According to the historical materialist Horkheimer, as problematic as classical, bourgeois, or proletarian idealism may admittedly have been, intrinsic to it and laid out in it from the start in the first thought was the notion, which while trying to master existing beings, also meant to touch the truth: even in the first presentiment, idea, or suspicion that the extension of human power stood in relation to alternative Future III–the right life in the right society (Marx 1961c: 873-874; Horkheimer 1989m: 650-651; Adorno 1970a; App. G). Horkheimer’s main question was, if knowledge was so unfortunately and fatefully chained with the instrumental and functional conceptualization of the ruling class as it appeared to the itself so chained consequential, non-dialectical, positivistic logic (Horkheimer 1989m: 651; Adorno 1970a; Habermas 1973; 1975). For Horkheimer in 1949, the attempts to break out of such consequential, instrumental, nondialectical positivistic logic were not very tempting: pure meditation, which was after all spoon-fed and treated like a child; non-resistance, to which the doubtful magic-praxis was written into its face; the humbug of salvation-knowledge. Horkheimer was sure that for thought, which was tired of being instrumentalized through the triumph of the means there was only one way for its rescue: to enlarge, increase, and magnify the triumph of the means until it turns over dialectically into its opposite: the triumph of purposes (Horkheimer 1967b). Horkheimer was convinced that the enlightenment had not come to its end with the Second World War (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969). The modern movement from magic and fetishism to enlightenment and alternative Future III–the reconciled society continued (Horkheimer 1095g: chaps. 37, 40; App. G). Horkheimer and the critical theorists tried to move beyond bourgeois and proletarian idealism in terms of a new reconstructed historical materialism, in which both would be concretely superseded (Horkheimer 1988d: chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17; Habermas 1976). The critical theory of religion promotes in the spirit of such critical historical materialism the dialectical turnover from positivistic instrumental and functional dominationthinking of means to a dialectical communicative and mimetic thinking of purposes (Habermas 1976; 1978: 48-95, 127-143; 1978: chap. 5; 1986: 53-54, 75, 98-99, 125-126; 1990: 9-18; 1991: part III; 2002; Habermas/ Ratzinger 2005; Siebert 2001; 2002).

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chapter seventeen The Dialectical Law

In New York in 1945, Horkheimer stated that the turn over of the bourgeois call for freedom, which had been revolutionary against the feudal system, into the reactionary slogan in favor of the entrepreneur-initiative and of monopoly capitalism was an example of the dialectical law that in the bourgeois class society all institutions for the lower class finally turn over into means of control and domination. Horkheimer mentioned as examples of this: The Law for the Protection of the Republic, which was established in Germany in 1922 after the nationalistically and Anti-Semitically motivated assassination of Walther Rathenau; the Mann Act or the White Slave Traffic Act established in the USA of 1910, which threatened punishment for traffic in girls and against pimps; the Employment Contract at the immigration into the United States of 1917, according to which a work contract that had been concluded before the immigration was a cogent reason–with few exceptions–for the denial of a visa, because the labor unions were afraid that through the hiring of masses of cheap foreign workers pressure could be put on the wage level; and even the jury trial (Horkheimer1985l: 298). Today–in February 2010–we could add to this list the repression of the labor unions under the neo-conservative U.S. Administrations or, since September 11, 2001, the Patriot Act.

The Dialectical Origin of the Truth In Horkheimer’s perspective, with the creative dialectical destruction of each form of historical life–slaveholder society, feudal society, capitalist society–the truth was set free (Horkheimer 1985l: 298). The truth took first of all the form of aesthetical appearance, of remembrance and of utopia (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985l: 298). The reality of the past life form which had been false, superstitious, unjust and cruel, rose after its death as image against the reality, through which it had been destroyed and annihilated. Horkheimer recalled as examples the image of the individual freedom after the fall of liberalism; the magician, the illusionist, the conjurer, the circus against the wizard and the alchemist, who already himself had been an ambiguous reflection of the bloody magician. For Horkheimer and Adorno as for Hegel before, the truth had a time core (Hegel 1986a: 193. 288, 374-375; 1986b: 31, 39, 153, 460-461, 511, 540, 545; 1986c: 15, 41-43, 46, 47, 64, 76-77, 137-177; 1968p: 64-88; 1986l: 133-141; Horkheimer 1985l: 298). Each new life form was the truth of the previous one. According to Horkheimer, the truth was so to speak

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a product of the decomposition of a past obsolete life form. The truth presupposed the dying and the death of a past life form. The origin of the truth was death. In Horkheimer’s view, that precisely was the justified true core of the Christian teaching about the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ, or the death of God and its reversion. The truth was the negative of the negative, the death of death, the overcoming of the grave, the triumph over the negative, the resurrection, the transfiguration, the ascension (Psalm 16: 10; Schiller 1980: 59-60; Goethe 1980; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986q: 186-299, especially 273-274; Horkheimer 1985l: 298). However, for Horkheimer, unfortunately the supposed worship of the cross in the Christian community tried to smudge, to cover over, and to blur the insight that the origin of the truth was death. In Horkheimer’s view, more exactly than in the Christian teaching, the relationship between death and truth was formulated in the fact that the most sublime perfumes were really identical–in terms of the substance–with the moschus. For Horkheimer, the difference was so to speak a nuance of the conception, the nothingness, which was after all everything.

From Non-Dialectical to Dialectical Thinking In his New York notes of 1945, Horkheimer recorded the difference between non-dialectical and dialectical thinking. He explained that with non-dialectical thinking the concepts are formed from definitions fixed in such a way that when new knowledge was introduced into the mix, its real extent, range, area, or circumference increased but the definition remained unchanged. In dialectical thinking, however, the meaning of the definition itself is attacked through new knowledge (Horkheimer 1985l: 299-300). Therefore, the dialectician did not yet have to throw it away as being obsolete and invalid and useless. Horkheimer had to admit that this difference between dialectical and non-dialectical, positivistic thinking was understandable only if one made clear to oneself that with dialectical thinking every notion stood actually and really for the truth. As the dialectic progress came about, through the negation of the absolute truth claim of notions and judgments, so the notions and judgments, which did not pose such truth claim, were logically merely contradictory or senseless. For Horkheimer, in principle also, non-dialectical thinking had the same truth-intention. It had only given up this truth intention and forgotten it as a consequence of its resignation. As non-dialectical thinking no longer reflected upon the progressive movement, which really constituted thinking, by attributing it to psychology as being contradictory

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and nonsensical, the development, which connected thoughts, i.e. the spirit, was driven out. They turned from thoughts into mere containers: into things. They were not even any longer signs or ciphers, because signs were signs only in the power of the thoughtful truth-intentions, which were awakened through the ciphers. In Horkheimer’s view, Susan Langer had not seen the decisive element in her critique of utilitarian language theory in which she differentiated between symptomatic signs and representative symbols (Langer 1942; Horkheimer 1985l: 299). The critical theory of religion is dialectical in that it takes thoughts seriously and not as tools or things or containers and that it takes seriously the ability of ciphers to awaken thoughtful truth-intentions. According to the dialectical theory of religion, the religious and ethical truth develops and evolves from one world-religion to the other and from one paradigm to the other in each world-religion as it becomes more and more concrete from one developmental stage to the other: the truth is the whole (Hegel 1986c: 24-25; 1986p; 1986q; Küng 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984). The whole, however, is only the essence or the truth through its self-development and self-completion (Hegel 1986c; Horkheimer 1985l: 299-300, 483-493; Horkheimer/Adorno 1951: 284-281; 1969; 1972; 1984; 2002; Horkheimer 1985l: 299; Horkheimer/Fromm/Marcuse 1936).

Abolishment of Development According to Horkheimer, in the social reality of Western civil society of 1945, what could be seen always more clearly had been included in the non-dialectical bourgeois thinking from the very start: the liquidation of development (Horkheimer 1985l: 299-300). As late as the 1960s, the father of American structural functionalism, Talcott Parsons, was forced by the student movement to add to his social static, his system of human condition and human action system, a social dynamics, his theory of evolution, which as of 2008 has not yet been further developed by neo-functionalism in North America or in Germany and Europe (Parsons 1964; 1965; O’Dea 1966; Habermas 1973: 164-183; Habermas/Luhmann 1975). Horkheimer only had to consider the notion of truth in order to prove this (Hegel 1986a: 193288, 374-375; 1986b: 31, 39, 153; 1986c: 15, 40, 41-43, 46, 47, 64, 76-77, 137-177). After the notion of truth had been well defined, e.g. as adaequatio intellectus et rei, then in principle there could not be anything further experienced about this highest idea, at which all intellectual and spiritual interest aimed. The only task that remained for the non-di-

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alectical bourgeois thinking in relation to the notion or the idea of truth was the mechanical examination, test, or assessment whether a sentence corresponded to it or not. The conditions for this procedure of examination were constructed in the so-called logic, a non-dialectical logic to be sure. For Horkheimer, in opposition to this non-dialectical bourgeois thinking stood the assumption of dialectical thinking, that one could not already know what the truth was because knowledge was not yet completed nor finished. For Kant and Hegel, the highest formal expression of the truth and of knowledge was the antinomy and its resolution (Hegel 1986b: 39, 153, 460-461, 511, 540, 545; 1986c 40; Horkheimer 1985m: 299-300). For Hegel, the truth was not merely a prominent and distinct coin, which was given in a finished form, and which as such could be exchanged in the market place. According to Hegel, the appearance was the rising and falling, which itself did not rise and fall, but which was in itself, and which constituted the reality and the movement of the life of the truth. The truth was its own movement in itself. In Horkheimer’s dialectical view, the intellectual and spiritual process not only consisted in the multiplication, increase, or correction of the individual truths, by which, however, the notion of the truth as a mere formal one remained itself completely untouched and unaffected. In Horkheimer’s dialectical perspective, the material progress touched and affected rather the formal category: i.e. the difference between the formal and the material was continually concretely superseded.

Beyond the World of Appearance and Disappearance As for Kant, Hegel, and Horkheimer, so also for the dialectical theorist of religion is the truth an open-ended progressive movement in itself (2 Kings 7: 28; Psalm 24: 10; 42: 3; 118: 30, 43; Matthew 22: 16; John 1: 14, 17; 3: 21; 18: 37, 38; Hegel 1986a: 193, 288, 374-375; 1986b: 31, 39, 153, 460-461, 511, 540. 545; 1986c: 15, 40, 41-43, 46, 47, 64, 76-77, 137-177; Horkheimer 1985l: 299-300). The logic of the world of appearance and its continual rising and falling, coming and going, being born and dying, which as such does not change, is not yet the logic of the world of truth (Genesis 23; Hegel 1986l: 30-55; Horkheimer 1967: 259-261). The logic of the world of appearance and disappearance has been most adequately described by the great Greek tragedians, who did not know yet of any Jewish, Christian, or Islamic eschatology:

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chapter seventeen By Pindar in his Pythian Odes 8, 95-86: Creatures of a day, what is anyone? what is he not? Man is but a dream of a shadow. (Bultmann 1958: 23-24; 1961). By Sophocles, Ajax 125-126, 127-133: Alas! we living mortals, what are we But phantoms all or unsubstantial shades? … Warned by these sights, Odysseus, see that thou Utter no boastful word against the gods, Nor swell with pride if haply might of arm Exalt thee over thy fellows, or vast wealth, A day can prostrate and a day upraise, All that is mortal; but the gods approve Sobriety and forwardness abhor. (Bultmann 1958: 23-24; 1961). By Aeshylos, Persians 820-828: Mortal man needs must not vaunt him overmuch. Zeus, of a truth, is a chastiser of overweening pride And corrects with heavy hand. (Bultmann 1958: 23-24; 1961). By the modern tragedian William Shakespeare, Tempest IV, 1, who did know about the eschatology of the three Abrahamic religions: The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all, which inherit, shall dissolve. And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep … (Bultmann 1958: 23-24; 1961).

The Disappearance of the World of Appearance According to the critical theory of religion, if the upraising and the prostration of all days, the rising and falling, the being born and dying in the world of appearance would itself begin to rise and fall and to change, then the logic of appearance would come to its end (Bultmann 1958: 2324; 1961; Metz 1959; 1962; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1981; 1995; 1997; 1998; 2006; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b; Kogon 1967). The world of appearance would disappear with all its com-

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ing and going. It would be concretely superseded by the logic of truth. The world of appearance and disappearance and its logic would go apocalyptically, eschatologically beyond itself toward a totally other new heaven and new earth (Revelation 21-22). Until then, people will try to resist and retard their disappearance through eros against thanatos, libido against death drive, biophilous against necrophilous forces, counter-revolution against revolution, through conservatives and reactionaries, through medicine, hospitals, monuments, skyscrapers, books, libraries, museums, archeology, mass media, like radio, television, movies, and so on (Marcuse 1960; 1962; Howard 2008: 45-50). Yet, sooner than later, all these instruments of survival and remembrance will disappear together with the people who produced them, as the crashing down of the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001 has globally shown symbolically in such a horrible, almost apocalyptic way: intended by the Jihadists as praxis of Lex Talionis–retaliation–for the international violation of the Golden Rule (Habermas 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2003b; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Lawrence 2005; Esposito/Mogahed 2007; Boradori 2003). Natural and social catastrophes, like wars and terror, only hasten the process and speed of disappearance. So does capitalism, particularly in its totalitarian monopolistic and oligopolistic forms, not only through instigating wars of thievery, or through the more or less creative destruction of old cultural forms, but simply through the commodification of everything, of people as well as of things, and thus, through making them into mere objects of very transitory, fetishized exchange processes. If there is not the wholly Other than the world of appearance and disappearance, history–which is supposed to remember and judge particularly the so called great men and their policies–will forget them and everybody else, no matter if they were good or bad people, saints or torturers and mass murderers, and will finally disappear itself together with the little cosmic ball earth, on which it once happened without any meaning and purpose (Hegel 1986l: 33-55; Hitler 1943: 64-65; Horkheimer 1967: 259-261; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40, 42; 1988d: chaps. 1, 3, 8, 9, 11; Harprecht 2008: 31-33; Gujer 2008: 4-8; Thies 2008: 34-37; Riese 2008: 41-45; Meyer 2008: 53-56; Zierock 2008: 59-63; Walther 103-105; Dornbusch 2008: 79-82; Betz 2008: 108-110; Müller/ Sontowski 2008: 75-79; Baron: 2008: 92-95; Howard 2008: 45-50). Habermas agreed with the Kabbalists and the Chassidim that God could not double himself up and create another Infinite (Scholem 1957; 1970; 1973; 1974; 1977; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Habermas 1978: chap. 5; 1986: 53-55; 1982: 48-95, 127-143). Therefore, God had to create a finite world

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characterized by the continual coming and going, being born and dying of not only individuals but even whole species of plants and animals, persons, families, societies, states, empires, civilizations, and whole cultural life forms. Along with this comes also all of the human perils and the pain and suffering that happens with creative destruction, which is the substance of the theodicy problem

The Logic of Truth For Hegel, the logic of appearance and the logic of truth were different but also identical, which produced the impression of pantheism: that the world was all there was, that metaphysics had swallowed up eschatology, that there was no rescue, redemption or justice for the hopeless victims, not even ultimately (Hegel 1986k: 190, 390-466; Küng 1978: 155-197; 498500, 555-556; Bultmann 1958; 1961; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247; Metz 1973a; 1973b; 1973c: chaps. III, VI; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1995; 2006; Peukert 1976: 278-281). Of course, Hegel had always denied the charge of pantheism. He wanted to live and to die as a Christian. For the critical theorists of society, the logic of appearance and the logic of truth were radically different. The logic of truth pointed to the imageless and nameless totally Other than the world of appearance and disappearance (John 18: 36-40; Horkheimer 1987e: 45-52; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). The totally Other–once the Kingdom of God–was the end of the world of appearances and disappearance and its massive injustices (John 18: 36-40; Revelation 21-22; Bultmann 1958; 1961; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). The religions themselves were situated in the world of appearances and obeyed as such the necessary logic of these appearances, and as such participated in the coming and going of this world of appearances. If, according to Genesis 1 and 2, God created humanity in his image, then, of course, God was not imageless. If, according to John 1, the Logos was with God, and if the Logos was God, and if all creatures were created in the Logos, and the Logos became human in the Christ, then God has given himself an image in Jesus of Nazareth (Hegel 1986q: 241-298; Küng 1970; Pope Benedict XVI 2007b: 20-21; 2009). Then, of course, God was again not imageless. If, according to the understanding of Exodus 20: 4-6, no image was to be made of the Absolute, then, Genesis 1 and 2 and John 1 were to be demythologized in the spirit of Exodus 20: 4-6. That is exactly what the critical theorists of society have done (Bultmann 1958; 1961; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97). In the religious perspective, God makes images of himself (Benedict XVI 2007). In the view of the secular en-

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lighteners, humanity makes the images of the Absolute. However, in spite of the fact that the religions are situated in the world of with necessity continually coming and going, appearing and disappearing phenomena, some of its appearances or apparitions–the Shekinah or the Theophanies– may very well become ciphers pointing beyond the logic of appearances to the logic of truth: to the wholly Other than the world of appearances and its continual necessary coming and going, being born and dying, and the badly infinite meaningless and senseless suffering connected with these processes (Genesis 6; 12; 15; 18; 22; Exodus 3; 19; Matthew 3; 4; 14; 17; Luke 1; 3; 4; Adorno 1969c; 1970b: 103-125; 1980b: 333-334; Hegel 1986l: 19-55; Horkheimer 1967: 259-260; 1989: chaps. 14-18, 21, 25, 30; Wiesel 1982; Metz/Wiesel 1993). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, those ciphers do not resolve theoretically the theodicy problems, but they may make them more bearable practically by pointing to a goal–the eschata or the eschaton, shortly, The Kingdom of God–and by thus giving hope and consolation (Isaiah 65-66; Daniel 12; Adorno 1970b: 103-125; 1980b: 333-334; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 30; Wiesel 1982; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Bultmann 1958; 1961; Küng 1991b: 726730; Schmidt-Biggemann 1988).

Identity with the Truth According to Horkheimer what was valid for the developmental notion of the truth was also valid for the other fundamental notions, such as freedom, happiness, justice, or love (Horkheimer 1985l: 300-301; 1989: chap. 36). The notion of truth and the other notions were most closely connected. Even leaving out of consideration the notions’ essential identity with the truth to be fulfilled in each case through the thinking mediation, the relationship of each notion to the object comprehended by it was regulated through the notion of truth. However, so Horkheimer argued, if this notion of truth was not conclusively fixed through a definition like the adaequatio intellectus et rei, the relationship of every singular notion to that something or thing that it comprehended, could no longer be fixed through conclusive, formal-logical sentences. According to Horkheimer, if this was the case, on one hand the structure of logic was pulled and torn into the course of the material knowledge, and on the other hand every step of material knowledge was now burdened with the problematic of the highest conceptual relationships–the relationships of the truth–to which its scope was to extend. Unlike the positivistic theories of religion, for example, the structural-functionalist or the cognitive theories of religion,

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the critical theory of religion tries to discover the dialectical form in the material knowledge itself, as it explores in each concept its identity with the notion of truth (Luhmann1977; Schmidt 1972; Light/Wilson 2003; O’Dea 1966; Habermas 2002; Siebert 2000; 2001).

Empirical Research For Horkheimer, that double consequence of the structure of the non-dialectical logic strengthened not only the weight of the so-called empirical research, on which now the ultimate questions depended (Horkheimer 1985l: 300-301). It also reigned in the empirical research because these questions, with all the claims and the doubts and scruples that follow from them, were furthermore implicated in every act of empirical knowledge (Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 18; 1985l: 300-301). According to Horkheimer, in the dialectical logic, empirical research was not let loose. When–in 1945–what was called empirical research represented nothing else than the dried up product of abstraction, which tended particularly in the social sciences toward empty mechanical operations, i.e. the bad separation of formal logic and empirical research, then concrete thinking came to its right in the liquidation of this opposition (Hegel 1986e: 4853; Horkheimer1985l: 300-301). In Horkheimer’s view, while in empirical research the social something was seen supposedly without prejudice, but in reality through the schemes that were produced through the economical division of labor, the dialectic experienced in every moment the thing’s sub specie of the philosophical interest of the truth, and precisely therefore, in relative freedom from the distorting industrial conceptualization (Hegel 1986e: 115-173; Horkheimer 1985l: 300-301). For the dialectic appearance was always the perception of the nature, which was cut off from the adequate expression. Dialectic would like to help nature find its adequate expression. For Horkheimer, the attempt to understand what was after all not able to express itself–nature, lead to speculation as a process in which the traditional dualisms, e.g. between formal and material knowledge, or between the structure of logic and empirical research, or between subject and object, were not blurred or covered over but rather were continually changed in their relationships. In this sense, the critical theory of religion also is empirical as well as speculative, aiming at the concrete thinking through of religious phenomena (Hegel 1986e: 115173; Horkheimer1985l: 300-301; Habermas 2002; Siebert 2000; 2001).

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Naiveté According to Horkheimer, the dialectical spirit has another relationship to the naiveté, the naïve consciousness, than the prevailing undialectical spirit in civil society (Horkheimer 1985l: 301-302; 398-416, 436-492, 526541, 593-605). The undialectical, positivistic spirit is the simple opposite to the naiveté: its abstract negation (Adorno 1980a; 1980b; Horkheimer 1974c: 101-104, 116-117, 148-151, 200-212, 213, 218-219; 1985l: 301302). The undialectical, positivistic consciousness always strove and endeavored to determine the conditions, causes, components, the relationship of a feeling or a thing. Already before the undialectical spirit knew all these things, it experienced them with the anticipating certainty that they were merely the effects of something else. For the positivistic consciousness, everything immediate and particular was always merely a sign for the mediated and universal. The undialectical spirit had devoted itself to the reification, as in contrast to the positivistic consciousness in which the simple-minded person was helplessly abandoned to the moment. The critical theory of religion resists both, reification as well as simple-mindedness. It negates the naiveté, but concretely rather than abstractly. During my last visit to the great Christian dialectician Walter Dirks, the friend of Adorno, shortly before his death in his home in the Black Forest, he asked me, if he had been child-like enough in his life and his work in the spirit of the New Testament: At this time the disciples came to Jesus and said’ Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ So he called a little child to him and set the child in front of them. Then he said’ I tell you solemnly, unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. And so. the one who makes himself as little as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18: 1-4).

I could comfirm to Walter that he had indeed not only negated his first naivete, but that he had also preserved, elevated and fulfilled it: as so many other great men and women had done before him (Matthew 18: 1-4; Dirks 1969; 1983a; 1983b 1985; Adorno/Dirks 1974).

Transformation of the Naiveté In Horkheimer’s view, the dialectic differentiated and transformed the naiveté without destroying it (Horkheimer 1985l: 301-302; 398-416, 436492, 526-541, 593-605). Also the dialectic gets with the positive sciences

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behind the things. Yet, the dialectic preserved, even rescued the magic that came from the things themselves. For the dialectic, the knowledge about the relationships–the transitoriness, the mere appearance-character–did not turn into a motive of apathy as it did for the Stoa (Hegel 1986g: 259; 1986j: 301; 1986k: 469; 1986l: 96; 1986r: 523, 544, 551, 554; 1986s: 255-296; Horkheimer 1985l: 301-302, 398-416, 436-492, 526-541, 593605). According to Horkheimer, this was precisely the consequence of the Hegelian principle: that in every new mediation the previous stage, i.e. the immediate one, was supposed to be concretely superseded (Hegel 1986c: 68-77; 1986e: 48-53; Horkheimer 1985l: 301-302; 398-416, 436-492, 526541, 593-605). For Horkheimer, in Hegel’s instruction more was intrinsic than the mere logical in the old traditional sense. Hegel’s instruction said that in the true enlightenment, the one that was identical with philosophy, mythology was not overpowered. The power of mythology was rather mitigated, soothed and calmed down (Hegel 1986a: 22-33; 1986b: 183, 292, 294; 1986c: 327, 362, 398-431; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 23-24; Horkheimer 1967: 259-260, 311-312; 1985l: 301-302, 398-416, 436-492, 526-541, 593-605). In Horkheimer’s view, like reflected behavior in general, the dialectic resisted the worship of what was dead. But to dialectic also the foolishness was not alien, to encounter the anorganic and organic things with great tenderness, in spite of the fact that they themselves could not feel anything. In the refusal of the blind domination of nature, the dialectical spirit withdrew from the domination through nature, without cutting off the possibility to let itself be enchanted and charmed by things. It was the preservation of the naiveté in thinking, which Kant had called the intellectual perception and which he wanted to reserve only for the Divinity. The successors of Kant–Fichte, Schelling, Hegel–tried to rescue this intellectual mode of representation, of intuition, of imagination, of synthesis through creating the dialectical method (Kant 1929: 28, 35n, 88, 90, 146, 164, 169, 247, 268, 270-272, 378n; Hegel 1986c: 68-77; 1986e: 48-53; Horkheimer 1985l: 286-287, 301-302, 398-416, 436-492, 526-541, 593-605; 1987b: 15-74, 75-148). The critical theorists of society speak of the dialectical imagination (Horkheimer/Adorno 1987e: 13-238; Jay 1981; Dubiel 1992). According to Horkheimer, if the therapeutic psychoanalysis would be what it ought to be, then it would concentrate itself on the effort to discover the moments in the individual and historical life through which the power in the form of the father or the political ruler makes humanity unable to devote themselves to the things, in order to deliver humanity more surely to these things (Horkheimer 1985l: 301-302, 398-416,

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436-492, 526-541, 593-605; Landauer 1991). In this function, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy would again become an instrument of philosophy.

Class Division At the end of World War II, Horkheimer, still being in American exile, observed that in the American non-dialectical, positivistic sociology there certainly corresponded a reality to the divisions of American civil society into working class, lower middle class, middle class, and upper class (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 107-114; Horkheimer 1985l: 302-303; 1996q: 617693; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354, 372-373, 391; 569-573, 578-587; Tumin 1965; App. F). However, Horkheimer had to ask the question of which satisfying function the sociological divisions of classes fulfilled in the psychological household of the American sociologists themselves? When in 1945 Horkheimer came into the company of such a sociological specialist in an exorbitantly priced restaurant in New York, where the men were dressed in tailcoats and the women’s diamonds were flashing, where a faultless and irreproachable orchestra was playing, and where he felt himself to be a real big shot and also to be for once in the higher circles, he immediately heard that all this was merely middle class with only an occasional touch or hint of the upper middle class, and that there could not be any talk of the high class. The highest situated people in the social stratification were like the gods sitting in the clouds. There no mortal gaze could penetrate. What great light, so Horkheimer remarked ironically, must this sociologist be that he could also assign to the elegant people around him their right place on the social ladder, and that he could take care that one did not overestimate them. All respect had to be given to the all embracing sociological view that seemed to disseminate out of those castles in the clouds, and could like the inhabitants of these castles subsume under itself even these average millionaires. However, Horkheimer knew only too well that from below the whole things presented itself in a different way. The picture was determined through the two poles of the social development in civil society. Here, humanity seemed to be split into the stratum of the beneficiaries of the bourgeois system: the generals, colonels and captains of the exploitation on one hand, and the existence of the large army of proletarians, of those who were in misery or who had no other prospects. The first social stratum was infinitely small. The differences in this very small social stratum were difficult to recognize. The critical theorist of religion is fully aware of the fact that the social stratification in civil society as described by Horkheimer or by American sociologists has most impor-

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tant implications also for religious organizations (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 107-114; Horkheimer 1985l: 302-303; 1996q: 617-693; Tumin 1965; O’Dea 1966: 57-60, 74-79; Luhann 1977: 38, 229, 243, 278). They are situated on different levels of the social ladder. Some are connected with the upper bourgeoisie and are likewise very rich, while others are in solidarity with the proletariat and share its misery (Scherrer 2008: 63-67; Meng 2008: 67-69).

Crises and Wars According to Horkheimer, the critical theory of society, which was directed toward the change of this condition of class antagonism in late capitalist society, took extremely seriously the differences in the size of the capitals (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 107-114; Marx 1961a: 12-13, 15-17, 141, 161-162, 175, 282, 296, 322-324, 345-247, 507, 592-594, 689, 806; Horkheimer 1985l: 302-303; 1996q: 617-693; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 569-573, 578-587; Tumin 1965; App. F). On the proportions of the differences of the capitals depended the economic crises in antagonistic civil society and the wars between states based on it (Hegel 1986g: 339-397, 398-514. Horkheimer 1985l: 302-303; 1996q: 617-693; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 372-391, 569-573, 578-587; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007). In Horkheimer’s view, in civil society’s sphere of production every contrast could become socially significant. However, in bourgeois society’s sphere of consumption showed itself immediately the one contrast of pleasure and privation, hunger and saturation, which the non-dialectical, positivistic American sociologists’ subtle category-formation concerning the American class system tried to smudge, to cover up, or to blur in spite of its objective justification. Horkheimer argued that the simple, brutal facts of the class antagonism in American bourgeois society would not turn into fraudulent ideology only if this differentiation maintained itself in all the complexity of the notions. However, Horkheimer knew only too well that simplicity and brutality contradicted the scientific refinement of the freely floating intelligence of the positivistic American sociologists (Adorno 1980a; 1980b; Horkheimer 1985l: 302-303; 1996q: 617-693). For Horkheimer, the dialectical insight–that in the so ample and rich series of social strata in civil society, from far above to far below, where the mode of existence turned over from abundance into poverty, and finally into misery–was too coarse and gross for scientific fineness and refinement of the freely floating intelligence of the non-dialectical sociologists, and it thus remained stuck with

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the nuances and shades of social stratification. According to Horkheimer, these gentlemen–the positivistic sociologists–considered themselves to be big shots when they could differentiate between lower, upper and upper middle class. Yet, they could in reality not compose themselves in their extreme respect for wealth and the richest classes in civil society. Today, in February 2010, 65 years after Horkheimer’s critique of the class analysis in American sociology, the positivistic non-dialectical, American sociologists have the tendency to take the subjective false consciousness of millions of American workers, that they are middle class, for the basis of their argument that there exists objectively no proletariat any longer in American civil society (Adorno 1979: 9-19, 196-216, 217-237, 238-244, 280-353, 354-372, 373-391, 478-493, 500-531, 532-537, 538-546, 569-573, 578-587). They behave like a cardiologist who bases his diagnosis on the subjective feelings of his heart patients, rather than on the objective results of the cardiogram.

Confusion Adorno reflected on and analyzed as intensely as Horkheimer modern American as well as European civil society as late capitalist or industrial society: its class system, its psychoanalytical basis, its education, its culture, its social conflicts, its static and dynamic, its need system, its antiSemitic and fascist and liberal propaganda, its neurotic politics, its tension between individual and organization, its ideology, its public sphere of opinion, the logic of its positivistic social sciences, its many only half educated people, its religion, its music, its literature, its philosophy, its theology, and its old and new superstitions (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Adorno 1932; 1951; 1952; 1960; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1970b; 1973a; 1974b; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; 1976; 1979; Geier 2008: 10-17; App. F, G). Adorno strove to overcome the confusion concerning all these categories in American and European antagonistic civil society.

Social Class In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, it was however particularly the confusion about social class, which reached its climax in the U.S. Presidential Election Campaign of 2008 in the context of the ongoing global capitalist catastrophe and which gave Adorno’s enlightenment a special actuality (Geier 2008: 10-17). The Democratic candidate, Senator Obama,

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and the Republican candidate, Senator McCain, as well as the mass media on the neo-liberal Right as well as on the Roosevelt socially modified liberal Left used continually the notion middle class. They talked about the war going on against the middle class without ever mentioning the class which fought against and wanted to do harm to the so-called middle class. They never identified the corporate ruling class which paid both contenders for the Presidential power: not even then when the workers were asked by the federal Government as tax payers to bail out this very ruling class– the failed bankers and monopolists and oligopolists and cartels. Sometimes the Presidential candidates and pandids spoke about the hard working middle class. Seldom did they mention the working class, which they really meant. They could not really use the word working class, if they wanted to reach the workers and not lose them, because of their false consciousness: they did not want to be workers but rather middle class and they wanted to vote according to their aspirations and not according to their real class status and thus according to their real interests. Of course, there exists no viable labor party in the United States and the workers are represented by two bourgeois partiers which both are interested in the massive votes of the low middle class and the working class. However, the politicians and the pandids did not even dare to use the word low middle class in spite of the fact that this was exactly what they meant besides the working class. Both candidates used Joe the plummer as representative of the low middle class. According to Senator Obama the highest income level of the low middle class would be 250,000 Dollars for a family and 200,000 dollars for an individual. For Senator McCain the limit was 1 million. The real Joe the plummer did not even have a plummer’s license and only wanted to buy a plummer business, which was supposed to earn more than 250,000 dollars a year, but he did not have the money to do so.

Redistribution of Wealth In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, since the class category was confused during the U.S. Presidential Campaign of 2008, people could not understand Obama’s notion of redistribution of wealth and of progressive taxation: that beyond 250,000 dollars people would be taxed more and more, and below this level less and less. The Roosevelt-liberal Senator Obama was called a Marxist and a socialist and a communist. His opponent Senator McCain told the masses, that if one would not tax the upper classes, then they would create jobs. He did not say where? He frightened the working class and the lower middle class that an Obama

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Administration would tax them out of their well-deserved profits, which they never had, while a progressive taxation was really in their favor. The Rightwing propaganda was strongly faith-based. It sharged the Left with secular humanism and with being committed to abortion and gay marriage and stem cell research. Religion became a political and ideological play ball.

State and Civil Society While in September, October, November and December of 2008 the so far neo-liberal second Bush Administration was already in the process of nationalizing and federalizing large parts of civil society–banks, insurance industries and automakers–through bailing them out, and putting up federal Tsars for them, the Right was still preaching the neo-liberal message of the state as mere night watchman and the autonomy of the free market. Neither the Right nor the Left could imagine that the nationalization of failed banks and industries by the federal state was really their appropriation by the people as association of free citizens: the transformation of the private appropriation of collective labor into collective appropriation. The estrangement between not only the bourgeois, but even the citizens and their state was almost total. Still distant was the insight that after the economic catastrophe of 2008 the fulfillment of the most vital needs of the nation could no longer be left in the hands of the bourgeois, who was merely concerned with his private interest and goods, but had to be given into the hands of the citizen whose main concern was the common good. It is immensely hard for the narcistic and egoistic bougeois to transform himself into a solidary family member or into a citizen devoted to a constitutional patriotism (Hegel 1986g; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 14,15; 16, 17, 20, 21, 23, 33; 1988c: 16, 17, 18; 1987e: 241-242, 242-244, 257-259, 268-269, 269-271, 274-276, 287-288, 288-292, 294-319, 320-350, 354-359, 364-372, 377-395, 415-422; 1987b: 271-294, 319-320, 320-321, 324-326, 338-339, 350-351, 355-357, 379-381, 397, 397-398, 398-400, 405-408, 434-436, 436-437, 437-438, 445-446, 448-449; Habermas 1992a). If the bourgeois does not transform himself he destroys the family–divorce– as well as the state–corruption–and the natural environment–ecological catastrophes–and thus even civil society itself.

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In 2008, capitalism experienced its worst crisis since the 1930s and the classbased turbulence and confusion in the economic and political arena of American civil society and in the mass media were enormous and catastrophic (Geier 2008: 10-17). After the Obama victory in November 2008 as result of the disaster of the faith-based neo-liberal policies of the second Bush Administration, it remains one of the main tasks of the dialectical religiology, informed by Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critical theory of society, to clarify particularly the notion of class especially in the American consciousness, where it is weakest, and in this enlightenment process to stress the position of religion in the class struggle raging manifestly or latently in antagonistic modern civil society, and not to allow that the notion of class is further confused and repressed in connection with race or religion. In any case, in the perspective of the dialectical religiology the American ruling class and its functionaries had to learn in 2008, that if it is in the nature of things–i.e. in the logic of the antagonistic movement of capital–that there will occur an economic crisis or a depression, then it will happen again, no matter how they would like to construct reality psychologically or ethically or economically or politically or religiously in terms of neo-liberalism or any other ideology (Hegel 1986g; App. F).

The Rational as the Irrational According to Horkheimer, in the modern capitalist class society, the theoretical, abstract moment predominated in the truth over the practical concrete element, precisely because it had no power over civil society (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Horkheimer 1985l: 306; Habermas 1978; 1999). For Horkheimer, the preponderance of theory over praxis was, not only in 1945 but always, an expression of impotence and powerlessness. In the theory itself, spiritual and intellectual, i.e. uncontrollable irrational elements, had necessarily too great a weight as long as the empirical social reality was bad. In Horkheimer’s view, the negation of the bad reality of late capitalist society expressed itself in the presence of a merely fantasy-like, romantic element in the theory: the rational was the irrational (Horkheimer 1985l: 306; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 93-121, 122-146, 177-195, 354-372, 397-407, 408-433, 434-439, 440-456, 457-477, 532-537, 538-546, 569-573, 574-577, 578-587). Herder had been one of the first great thinkers, who had spoken and propagated the Gods’ language of the illustrative and imaginative reason on the basis of German mysticism and pietism, Vico’s

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mythology critique, Spinozism, and Platonism to the horror of Immanuel Kant (Safranski 2007; Zimmermann 2007: 66-70).

Divine Language and Reason Soon the Romantics–Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tiek, but also Friedrich Schiller–payed attention to the divine language and reason (Safranski 2007; Zimmermann 2007: 66-70). It was admittedly a reason sensitized for the dark and for feeling, for the fantastic and the imaginary. Some of the late Romantics converted to Catholicism which at the time became the handyman and the dogs body of the counter-revolutionary Holy Alliance and the servant of Metternich’s restauration. Hegel was one of the first thinkers who denied his own romantic origins, and who transformed them into the iron dialectical law of the movement of the world spirit, as well as of family, civil society and constitutional state (Jamme/ Schneider 1984; Riedel 1975; Hegel 1986g; Safranski 2007; Zimmermann 2007: 66-70). Hegel could only reproach and sharply criticize the Romantics (Hegel 1986c: 15-17; 1986d: 450; 1986g: 279; 1986m: 209-210; 1986r: 377; Safranski 2007; Zimmermann 2007: 66-70). He spoke of the Romantic as being nebulous, vain and empty. He criticized te arbitrary mysticism of the arrogant romantic subjects. The generation of the Young Hegeians also wanted to leave behind the castles of the romantic dream. They pushed foreward toward the realization of the political utopia and a reality renovated on the basis of human rights. Now the Christian world of myth was to be completely disenchanted. Marx declared religion to be opium of the people and promissed, not without some romantic remembrance, a Golden Age, which was to be fought for by a globally victorious proletariat (Marx 1964: 43-59; Marx/Engels 2005; Adorno 1970: 103-161; Safranski 2007; Zimmermann 2007: 66-70). Not only in German fascism, particularly in the works of Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger, but even in the works of the Western Marxists, like Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Bloch romantic elements can be discovered. Even the great, most truthful and honest journalist and political theologian, Walter Dirks, was tempted by the romantic elements of fascism before he decided against it, and went into internal exile (Dirks 1983a: 2056; Siebert 1986). The same was true of Dirk’s Catholic pastor in Frankfurt, the prophetic political theologian, Georg W. Rudolphi (Siebert 1993). The critical theory of religion can determinately negate the residuals of the fantasy-like, romantic element in itself to the extent to which it can engage in a praxis that concretely supersedes–even in the smallest steps of

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gaining power–modern, bourgeois society toward postmodern alternative Future III–the free and reconciled society on the basis of natural necessity, in which the natural becomes humanized, and the human becomes naturalized, and in which the rational will become real, and the real will become rational, and the irrational will become the rational, while at the same time resisting alternative Future I–the totally administered society, and alternative Future II–the totally militarized society (Hegel 1986g: 2627; Marx 1961c: 873-874; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34-42; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1993, chaps. 54, 55; Fromm 1966; 1967; Eggebrecht 1980; Luxemburg 1977; Dirks 1983a: 119-207; 1983b: 136-203; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 19711975b; Flechtheim 1959; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Habermas 1976; 1978a; Jung 1980; App. G).

Caveat Of course, the dialectical religiology remains always aware of the Jewish caveat against thinking about the future (Benjamin 1977: 261). According to the Rabbis, Jacob as he was dying summoned his children, promising to tell them what will happen to them in the future (Genesis 49: 1; Lieber 2001: 298/1). Instead , he spoke to each of his sons about that son’s character and special gifts. The Midrash suggested, that this was because the spirit of prophecy had departed from Jacob. In the Rabbis’ view perhaps humans were not able to know the future lest it lead them to despair or complacency. According to the Rabbi Natali of Ropshitz, perhaps when Jacob looked into the future, he saw the quarreling and bloodshed that would befall his descendants, and the spirit of prophecy could not abide where there was grief and sadness. The modern reader may understand the Biblical passage about the future to mean that a person’s future depends on his or her character. There was no preordained script that humans were fated to follow. In the Appendix B to his last essay on the Notion of History of 1940, Benjamin was sure that the fortunetellers who questioned the time concerning what it was hiding in its lap experienced it neither as homogeneous or as empty. For Benjamin it was well known that fortune telling had been forbidden to the Jews (Benjamin 1977: 261). According to Benjamin, whoever held that before his eyes, could maybe receive a notion, how the past time had been experienced in remembrance: namely in the same way, neither homogeneous nor empty. For Benjamin it was well known that it had been forbidden to the Jews to investigate the future. To the contrary, the Torah and the prayer instructed the Jews in

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remembrance. This remembrance disenchanted for the Jews the future to which those people were addicted and under the spell of which those people had come who got their information from the fortunetellers. But for the Jews therefore the future became however nevertheless not homogeneous or empty time. This was so because in the future every second was the small gate, through which the Messiah could enter. That remained true even–if also in an inverse-theological form–for those modern assimilated Jews who were engaged in the critical theory of society as dialectical futurology, e.g. Bloch, Flechtheim, Benjamin, Marcuse, Habermas, Adorno, Fromm and Benjamin (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; Benjamin 1977: chaps 10,11; Petuchowski 1956: 543-594).

The Orthodox Monk Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s and the other critical theorists’ way from magic and fetishism or idolatry to the dialectical notion of truth had been anticipated in aesthetical, artistic, literary form by the one generation older great Russian writer and philosopher Anton Chekhov, who was also a medical doctor, in the discourse between Andrei Vassilyich Kovrin and an Orthodox monk in his short story The Black Monk and its ultimate concern with eternal truth (Hegel 1986f: 243-300, 548-573; 1986p: 249-301; Chekhov 2000: 223-252; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Horkheimer 1967b; 1969; 1985l: 299-301, 323-325; 1989m: 649-651; 1989m: 650-651; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; Lohmann 1994; Mitscherlich 1994; Dirks 1968; Lundgren 1998; Kesting 2010: 85-87; Küng 1994a: 145335; App. E). In their dialogue Kovrin told the Orthodox black monk that he was a mirage or a vision. Kovrin asked the monk, why he was here and sitting in one place? It did not agree with the old legend about the black monk, which had been told in Russia for centuries. The monk answered Kovrin after a moment in a low voice, turning his face to him, that this did not make any difference, since the legend, the mirage, the vision, and he the monk himself, were all a product of Kovrin’s excited imagination. The monk confessed to be himself a phantom or a vision. Thus Kovrin asked if the monk really existed? Also that did not really matter to the faintly smiling monk. As far as the monk was concerned, he existed in Kovrin’s imagination, and his imagination was part of nature, which meant that he, the monk, also existed in nature. Kovrin told the monk, that he had a very old, intelligent, and highly expressive face, as if he had really lived more than a thousand years. Kovrin did not know that his imagination was capable of creating such phenomena, such vision. In the

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perspective of the dialectical religiology, Chekhov’s black monk was a symbol of the archetype Animus in the collective unconscious of the psyche as discovered by his younger contemporary Carl Gustav Jung’s individuation psychology (Jung 1933; 1958; 1990; Adorno 1969c; 1970b: 103-125; 1980b; 1994; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997e; Fromm 1932b; 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1990; 1995; 1997; 2001; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Fromm/Xirau 1979; Fromm-Reichmann 1960; Kesting 2010: 85-87). Of course the archetype Animus must not be ontologized into a psychological constant (Jung 1933; 1958; 1990; Adorno 1969c; 1970b: 103-125; 1980b; 1994; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997e; Fromm 1932b; 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1990; 1995; 1997; 2001; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Fromm/Xirau 1979; Fromm-Reichmann 1960; Bergen/Doerksen/Koop 2007: 99-114, 115134). It is rather a psychological variable produced through the evolution and history not only of the individual, but also of the human species.

Eternal Truth and Eternal Life In Chekhov’s short story The Black Monk, the old Orthodox monk looked at Kovrin with great rapture (Chekhov 2000: 237-238; Kesting 2010: 8587). Kovrin asked the monk if he liked him? The monk answered in the affirmative. For the monk Kovrin was one of the few who were justly called the chosen of God in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament (2 Kings 21: 6; 1 Chronicle 16: 13: Psalm 8888: 4, 20; 104: 43; 105: 5; Matthew 24: 22; 24, 31; Luke 19: 7; 23: 35; Chekhov 2000: 237-238). According to the old monk, Kovrin served the eternal truth. Kovrin’s thoughts and intentions, his astonishing science and his whole life bore a divine, heavenly imprint, because they were devoted to the Reasonable and the Beautiful, i.e. to what was eternal. Kovrin asked the monk if people could possibly attain to eternal truth, and did they really need it, if there was no eternal life? The monk assured Kovrin that there was eternal life. (2 Kings 21: 6; 1 Chronicle 16: 13: Psalm 8888: 4, 20; 104: 43; 105: 5; Matthew 24: 22; 24, 31; Luke 19: 7; 23: 35; Chekhov 2000: 237-238; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1980b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2003d; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Küng 1982; 1990a; 1991a; 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 1998; 2004; Küng/ Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008; Kuschel 1990). The monk believed in peoples’ immortality. According to the Orthodox monk, a great magnificent future awaited Kovrin’s people. The more people like Kovrin, who were devoted to the eternal truth of the Reasonable

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and the Beautiful there were on earth, the sooner that future would be realized. Without Kovrin and the other servants of the higher principle of the Reasonable and the Beautiful, who live consciously and freely, mankind would be insignificant: developing in natural order, it would wait a long time for the end of its earthly history. However, so the clack monk predicted, Kovrin would lead mankind into the kingdom of eternal truth several thousand years earlier: and in that lay his high worth. Kovrin incarnated in himself the blessing of God that rested upon people. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, here in Chekhov’s story, enlightenment happened already in religion: the Christian monk inverted the Jewish and Christian eschatology of the kingdom of God into the enlightenment utopia of the realm of the Reasonable and the Beautiful (Chekhov 2000: 223-252, 321-332, 361-376, 421-436; Kesting 2010: 85-87).

Enjoyment In Chekhov’s story, Kovrin wanted to know from the Orthodox monk what was the goal of eternal life? (2 Kings 21: 6; 1 Chronicle 16: 13: Psalm 8888: 4,20; 104: 43; 105: 5; Matthew 24: 22; 24, 31; Luke 19: 7; 23: 35; Chekhov 2000: 237-238; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1980b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2003d; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Küng 1982; 1990a; 1991a; 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 1998; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/ Bechert 1984; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008; Kuschel 1990; Kesting 2010: 8587). According to the black monk, the goal of eternal life was the same as the goal of any life: enjoyment. For the monk, true enjoyment was in knowledge. Eternal life would provide countless and inexhaustible sources of knowledge and in that sense it was said in the New Testament In my Father’s house are many mansions. (John 14: 2; Chekhov 2000: 237238).

Kovrin, robbing his hands with pleasure, told the Orthodox monk how very nice it had been to listen to him, and the latter was very glad about that. However, Kovrin knew only too well, that when the monk would leave he would be troubled by the question of his essence. The black monk was a phantom, a hallucination, a vision. That meant of course, that Kovrin was mentally ill, abnormal. But the monk merely answered: suppose you are! What was so troubling about that after all? The monk told Kovrin, that he was ill because he had worked beyond his strength for 15 years and thus got tired and that meant, that he sacrificed his health to

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an idea–the Reasonable and the Beautiful–the eternal truth, and the time was near when he would also give his life to it. What could be better? That was generally what all noble natures, prophets as well as enlighteners, endowed from on high, longed and strove for. But, so Kovrin argued, if he was mentally ill, then could he really believe himself? However, the black monk put the counter-question: how did he, Kovrin know, that people of genius, whom the whole world believed, did not also see phantoms and visions? According to the monk learned men now say that genius was akin to madness. The monk explained to his friend Kovrin, that only the ordinary aristocratic, bourgeois, or proletarian herd people were healthy and normal. In the monk’s view, reflections on this modern nervous age, fatigue, degeneracy, and so on, could seriously worry only those who saw the goal of life in the present: that is, herd people.

The Origin as Goal Chekhov’s contemporary, the enlightener Friedrich Nietzsche had just proven the monk’s thesis even against his own philosophy of health: he spent the last years of his life in insanity in the house of his sister, one of the contributors to German fascism, in Berlin up to his death in 1900, 6 years after the completion of the story of the Black Monk (Kaufmann 1967; 1968; 1986; Kesting 2010: 85-87). Certainly for Adorno, who had learned much from Nietzsche as well as from Karl Krauss, the goal of life was not the present: the origin rather was the goal, the Genesis was the Revelation, the mythos, the ontology was the eschatology (Horkheimer 1989m: chap. 2; Benjamin 1977: 257-258, 258-259, 353-384; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1980: 333-334; Hullot-Kentor 2006: 1-21). Adorno himself was one last genius of the 29th century (Claussen 2008; Jenemann 2007). Already for Christianity the origin was the goal: the liberating remembrance of Jesus the Christ, future redemption and emancipation out of the remembrance of the past suffering of the innocent victims of world-history–particularly after Auschwitz (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986l; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1997u; Metz 1959; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1975b; 1977; 1978; 1980; 1981; 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993; 1997; 2006; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b). Thus according to Adorno’s teacher and friend Benjamin, for Robespierre the Rome of Antiquity was past loaded with now-time, a mystical notion from Master Eckhart, which he exploded out of the continuum of history (Blakney 1941: 153; Benjamin 1977: 258-259). The great French revolution understood itself as a returned Rome. The revolution

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quoted the old Rome precisely as the fashion summoned a past costume. The fashion has the scent for what was full of actuality, wherever it moved in the thicket of the past history. The fashion was the tiger leap into the past history. Only it took place in an arena in which the capitalist ruling class gave the orders. The same leap under the free sky of history was the dialectical one as which Marx comprehended the proletarian revolution (Marx 1871; 1906; 1953; 1956; 1963; 1964; 1974; 1977; Marx/Engels 1960; 2005; Benjamin 1977: 258-259). According to the Catholic theologian of history Theodor Haecker, in general dialectical materialists did not belong to the herd people, but rather carried in their character a certain aristocratic trait (Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2). The dialectical materialists have determinately superseded in their historical materialism the non-dialectical materialism initiated and developed by the French medical doctors of the second half of the 19th century. Certainly, neither Adorno nor any other critical theorists of the Frankfurt School belonged to what Chekhov had called the herd people: they stood firmly in the tradition of Judaism and Christianity, and in the bourgeois, Schopenhaurian, Nietzschean, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment movements (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 40; 1987i: 346-400; 1987k: 171-188, 189-195, 221-232; Kesting 2010: 85-87).

Physical and Mental Health In Chekhov’s story, Kovrin objected to the Orthodox monk through reminding him of the ideal of the Romans: mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body) (Chekhov 2000: 238; Kesting 2010: 8587). However the black monk reminded Kovrin that not everything that the Romans or the Greeks had said about physical or mental health or about anything else was necessarily true. An exalted Dionysian state, excitement, ecstasy–shortly all that what distinguished the Hebrew prophets, the Russian poets, the martyrs for an idea like the Reasonable and the Beautiful, and the eternal truth, and the eternal life, from ordinary people, run counter to the animal side of man, i.e. to his physical health. The monk repeated, that if Kovrin wanted to be healthy and normal, he should join the herd, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. Kovrin found it strange that the monk repeated what often had gone through his own head. It was as if the monk had spied and eavesdropped on Kovrin’s innermost thoughts. But Kovrin did not want to talk any longer about himself. He rather asked the monk once more, what he meant by eternal truth? However the monk did not reply any longer. Kovrin looked at the monk and could not make

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out any longer his face. The monk’s features were dim and blurred. Then the monk’s head and hands began to disappear. The monk’s body mingled with the bench and the evening twilight. Finally, the monk vanished completely. Kovrin observed that his hallucination or vision was over. Kovrin laughed: too bad! Kovrin went back to the house cheerful and happy. The little that the Orthodox monk had said to him had flattered not his vanity, but rather his whole soul, his whole being. For Kovrin it was a lofty and happy fate, to be a chosen one, to serve the eternal truth, to stand in the ranks of those who would make mankind worth of the Kingdom of God several thousand years earlier, i.e. deliver people from several thousand extra years of struggle, sin, and suffering, to give everything to that idea of eternal truth–youth, strength, health–to be ready to die for the common good. Kovrin’s past, pure, chaste, filled with toil raced through his memory. Kovrin remembered all that he had studied and what he had taught others at the university for the past 15 years. Kovrin decided that there was indeed no exaggeration in what the black monk had said to him, or that, as Adorno put it later on, the truth was in the exaggeration.

Orthodoxy, Mysticism, Enlightenment In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, in his short story about the Black Monk and in his other stories and themes, Chekhov moved from the religious to the secular, from magic and fetishism to the dialectical notion of truth, from Orthodox religion through mysticism to the secular enlightenment, all sharing the longing for the things beyond resemblance, for Transcendence, and for the imageless and nameless wholly Other (Hegel1986p: 9-53; Chekhov 1993; 2000; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1997j/2: 608-616; Benjamin 1977: chaps 10, 11; Hullot-Kentor 2006; Fromm 1932b; 1950; 1959; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1980b; Lundgren 1998; Habermas 1990: 9-18; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c: 127-143; 1982; 1991a: Part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Kesting 2010: 85-87). His medical profession allowed Checkhov to accomplish a materialistic inversion of religious semantic and semiotic materials and potentials into the discourse of the enlightenment, and thus to reconcile both of them (Horkheimer 1989m: chap. 32). The monk, the religious man, and Kovrin, the professor and enlightener, participated both in the longing of the orthodox believers, the mystics, and the enlighteners to make–against the parousia delay–the Kingdom of God or the realm of what is Reasonable and Beautiful, to come faster and earlier, to shorten human suffering. The enlightener Nietzsche

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would have agreed with the monk concerning the untruth of the Roman principle mens sana in copore sano: it was his madman who discovered ingeniously the death of God in and for antagonistic civil society, and who had killed him (Hegel 1986j: 38-302; Horkheimer 1989m: chap.13; Kaufmann 1986: 95-96). Also the enlightener Freud would have agreed with the monk concerning the untruth of the Roman ideal of physical and mental health: he refused to treat psychoanalytically the composer Gustav Mahler, because he was afraid that the healing of his neurosis would also deprive him of his musical talent and genius (Hegel 1986j: 38-302; Freud 1939; 1946; 1993; 1995a; 1995b; Horkheimer 1989m: chap. 28; Adorno 1960; 1969c).

Fame and Remembrance After according to Chekhov’s story Kovrin had got married to Tanya and had started a healthy and normal life, his vision of the black monk nevertheless returned again (Chekhov 2000: 243-245; Kesting 2010: 85-87). In the vision, the monk asked Kovrin what he was thinking about now? Kovrin was thinking about fame. In the French novel, which Kovrin was just reading, there appeared a young scholar who did foolish things and pained away from a longing for fame. For Kovrin such longing for fame was incomprehensible. The black monk explained to Kovrin, that this longing for fame was incompressible to him because he was intelligent. Therefore Kovrin looked at fame with indifference, as upon a plaything, that did not really interest him. Kovrin affirmed the Orthodox monk’s analysis. According to the monk’s analysis, celebrity had no charm for Kovrin. Was it really flattering, or amusing or instructive, so the monk asked, to have your name carved on a tombstone and then have time erase the inscription along with the gilding? Fortunately, though, the monk argued ironically, there are too many of you for weak human memory to be able to preserve your names. Kovrin agreed: why should one remember them?

Happiness But Kovrin wanted to talk about something else with the black monk, namely about happiness (Chekhov 2000: 243-244; Kesting 2010: 85-87). What was happiness? According to Kovrin, in ancient times one happy man, Polycrates, finally became frightened of his happiness because it was so great. In order to appease the gods the frightened happy man sacrificed his favorite ring to them. Kovrin too, like Polycrates, was beginning to

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worry a little about his happiness. It seemed strange to Kovrin that he experienced nothing but joy from morning till evening. It filled the whole of him and stifled all his other feelings. Kovrin did not know what sadness, sorrow, or boredom was? Kovrin was not asleep now and had insomnia, but he was not bored. Kovrin said it seriously: he was beginning to be puzzled. The black monk was amazed and asked why? Was joy a supernatural feeling: should it not be the normal state of man? The higher man was, so the monk explained, in his mental and moral development, the freer he was and the greater the pleasure that life afforded him. According to the monk, Socrates, Diogenes, and Marcus Aurelius experienced happiness and joy, not sorrow. The monk remembered, that the Apostle Paul said once: Rejoice ever more! Thus the monk admonished Kovrin to rejoice and to be happy. Kovrin asked back jokingly and laughingly what would happen if the gods suddenly got angry and if they would take from him his comfort and make him suffer cold and hunger? It would hardly be to his liking. In the reading of the critical theory of religion, Kovrin did not know if he could face the theodicy problem? (Leibniz 1996; Hegel 1986g: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Horkheimer 1989m: chap. 34, 36, 37; Metz 1972a; 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Kesting 2010: 85-87).

The Last Vision Precisely that theodicy experience happened to Kovrin in Chekhov’s story: the gods became angry (Chekhov 2000: 251-252; Kesting 2010: 85-87). In the middle of his illness and the decline of his marriage and of his professional life as a professor, Kovrin told his family how lucky and happy Buddha and Mohammed and Shakespeare had been that their kind relations and doctors did not treat them for ecstasy and inspiration and visions. According to Kovrin, if Mohammed had taken potassium bromide for his nerves, worked only two hours a day, and drunk milk, as had been prescribed for him by his doctors and family, there would have been as little left after this remarkable man as after his dog. Kovrin predicted, that doctors and kind relations would finally make it so that mankind would grow dull. Mediocrity would be considered genius and civilization would die out. Kovrin told his kind relations with vexation and irony: if you only knew how grateful I am to you! Kovrin’s misery went on for two years. Shortly before his death from consumption, Kovrin had a last vision in a hotel in Sebastopol on the Crimea, on his way to Yalta. According to Kovrin’s vision, a black, tall pillar, resembling a whirlwind or a tornado, appeared on the far shore of the bay of Sebastopol against the horizon of

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the Black Sea. With terrific speed it moved across the bay of Sebastopol in direction of the hotel in which he stayed, growing ever smaller and darker. Kovrin barely had time to step aside and let it pass: a monk with a bare, grey head and black eyebrows, barefoot, his arms crossed on his chest, raced by and stopped in the middle of his room. The monk asked Kovrin reproachfully why he did not believe him when he told him that he was a genius. Kovrin would not have spent these last two years so sadly and meagerly. Now Kovrin believed that he was chosen of God and a genius. Kovrin vividly recalled all his old conversations with the black monk, and wanted to speak. But blood flowed from his throat straight on to his chest, and he, not knowing what to do, moved his hands over his chest, and his cuffs became wet with blood. The black monk was whispering to him that he was a genius and was dying only because his weak human body had lost its equilibrium and could no longer serve as a container of genius.

Longing for the Lost Life Chekhov completed the story of the Black Monk in Moscov in January 1894 (Chekhov 2000: 252). Twenty years later, in spring 1914, Max Horkheimer initiated together with his friends Friedrich Pollock and Suzanne or Suze Neumeier a religious-humanistic group driven by the insatiable longing for the wholly Other, the New, the Unconditional and passionately devoted to the utopian vision L’ile heureuse in the midst of antagonistic Eurpean civil society shortly before its most uncivil World War I (Horkheimer 1987l: 289-328, 329-332, 333-345; 1985g: chap. 24; 1995o: 9-15; 1996q: 678-679, 687-691, 714-717, 722-731, 908-909, 910, 966-969, 1000-1005, 1010-1018). All three friends felt chosen from the ordinary bougeois herd to serve the noble idea of the Island of Happiness. However, Suzanne, a distant relative and Parisian friend of the young Horkheimer, soon betrayed the utopian vision of L’ile heureuse and returned again to the ordinary life in the bourgeois herd and later on married Captain Pierre Lucien (Horkheimer 1996q: 979-981). At the time, while Horkheimer, as Pollock believed, may have lost his faith in religion, he never lost his faith in God–the wholly Other (Horkheimer 1995o: 88; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Ott 2001; 2007). Suzanne Neumeier was soon replaced in the group of friends by Rosa Riekher, Horkheimer’s later most beloved wife Maidon (Horkheimer 1995: 11-13, 15-22, 25-29, 81-82, 85, 88). After the end of World War II, in 1948, Horkheimer visited Suzanne Lucien and her daughter shortly in Paris, where she told him about her regret concerning her betrayal of the vision of the Island of Happiness and

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her return from the chosen life on the ile heureuse to the miserable and tortured ordinary life in Paris and her rather unhappy marriage and all her suffering (Horkheimer 1996q: 979-981; 1987l: 289-328, 329-332, 333345; 1985g: chap. 24; 1995: 9-15; 1996q: 678-679, 687-691, 714-717, 722731, 908-909, 910, 967-969). Horkheimer reflected on his, Pollock’s and Neumeier’s community life in his novel L’ile heureuse (Horkheimer 1987l: 289-328). Horkheimer began his critical theory of society, which had its root in the group of friends devoted to the concrete utopia of the ile heureuse, in the poetical form of this and other novels and diary pages and letters (Horkheimer 1987l: 289-328, 329-332, 333-345; 1988a; 1995o: 9-15). Later on–before and during World War II–when the critical theorists had been forced into exile from national-socialist Germany to America–there were many extraordinary chosen people, who separated themselves from the fascist herd and resisted it in the name of alternative Future III–a free, just and peaceful society, out of the longing for the wholly Other than the horror and terror of history under the spell of the social-Darwinistic aristocratic principle of nature, and who sometimes ended in martyrdom: Friedrich Bonhoeffer and his seminarians and friends; Father Delp and the Kreisauer Kreis; Karl Barth and the Confessing Church; Sophie Scholl and her brother and friend and the student movement The White Rose (Hitler 1943; 1986; Barth 1950; 1959; Bonhoeffer 1985; 1993; 2000; 2003; Scholl 2005; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993).

End and Beginning Horkheimer’s novels and poetical diary pages and letters and thus his critcal theory of society seem to begin in 1914, where Chekhov’s short stories ended in the last decade of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century (Chekhov 1993; 2000; Horkheimer 1987l: 289-328, 329332, 333-345; 1988a; 1995o: 9-15; Kesting 2010: 85-87). They were an expression of the infinite longing for the lost life, which Horkheimer and his friends shared with Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling, Fichte and Novalis: the yearning for light, friendship, love, redemption, peace, freedom, enjoyment, happiness, absolute truth, eternal life, the Kingdom of God, the Reasonable and the Beautiful, the wholly Other than sin, suffering, boredom, mediocrity, illness, death, sorrow, sadness, the bourgeois and the proletarian herd, and the renunciation of all fame (Hegel 1986a: 344-345, 417; 1986c: 169, 423, 424; 1986e: 267-270; 1986l: 174; 1986m: 135; 1986r: 173; 1986t: 386, 399, 407, 428; Jamme/Schneider 1984; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). The friends’ longing was justified by faith

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as well as by the dialectical notion of truth, in which all magic, fetishism, idolatry, mythology, and religion had been concretely negated, and which would guide the critical theorists throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century (Hegel 1986a: 344-345, 417, 1986c: 169, 423, 424; 1986e: 267, 270, 1986l: 174; 1986m: 135; 1986q: 342-344; 1986r: 173; 1986t: 386, 399, 407, 418; Horkheimer 1988a; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). Unfortunately, particularly since the first great depression of 1929 Governments in America as well as in Europe have aimed at the ordinary rather than the extraordinary also in the dimension of education: at the ordinary people with common sense as the summary of all present prejudices rather than at the extraordinary, chosen people who are devoted to the service of the idea of the Reasonable and the Beautiful. My late friend Ivan Supek, Heisenberg student, quantum physicist, novelist, former President of the University of Zagreb, who refused to produce the atomic bomb for Tito’s Jugoslavia, spoke always of the inverse selection in social evolution, particularly in the political and economic and educational dimension (Geier 2008: 10-17). In Summer 2008, the mediator of the U.S. Federal Internal Revenue Office told me many times in several tele-conferences, that while admittedly I was an extraordinary educator, as witnessed by Western Michigan University and two U.S. Senators from Michigan, before the law only the ordinary was valid. However, after several months of hard discourses about education the federal mediator and the Federal Internal Revenue Office recognized also the extraordinary pedagogial activities and services. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, even governments can learn and evolve. As a matter of fact, individuals or nations who do not aim and reach beyond the ordinary shall fall below it. It is one of the tasks of the critical theory of religion to help to reverse this inversion which brings the less than ordinary to the top of the social evolution, and presses the extraordinary down to its bottom, or levels it off, or neutralizes it through a false order of recognition and awards, in the spirit of the evolving communitarian critical theory of society and to give a chance to the chosen ones, who are in an extraordinary way devoted to the realm of the True, the Beautiful and the Good, for the sake of the survival of the human civilization beyond the present horror and terror of world-history and the political powerlessness of the scientifically victorious positivism to overcome the barbarism, if it does not even support it (Hegel 19861: 111; 336-337, 459; 1986b: 520, 526, 527-528; 1986c: 123, 427; 1986e: 49, 86, 122; 1986f: 56-58, 60-64, 64-66, 70-73, 80, 161, 311-317; Horkheimer 1974: 101-104, 116-117; 1985g: chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 39,

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40, 41, 42; 1988n: 139, 162-163, 307, 331-332, 348, 351-352, 425, 520-521; 1989m: 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 38; 1996s: 32-74; Adorno 1952; 1970a; 1973b; 1976; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b: 13-32; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Honneth/Joas 2002; Fraser/Honneth 2003; Dubiel 1988; 192; 1993: 5-11; 1995: 14-25; 1996: 33-40; 1998: 2535; Dubiel/Friedeburg 1996: 5-12; Dubiel/Friedeburg/Schumm 1994; Negt 1964; 2006: 62-64; 2007: 4-8; 2008: 37-41; Kellner 1989; 1991; 2001; MacIntyre 1970; McCarthy 1990; 1994; Küng 1990a; 1998; 1990b; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 1998; 2004; Jens/Küng 1993; Metz 1962; 1967; 1970; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; Kesting 2010: 85-87).

chapter eighteen

Truth as Meaning of Language and work According to Horkheimer, truth was the meaning of language (Horkheimer 1985l: 305-307; 1988n: 47, 48, 65-66, 74-75, 82, 84-85, 85-86, 135, 198-199, 394, 487-488, 535; 1989m: chaps. 12, 16; Habermas 1999). However, Horkheimer had to admit that this could almost not be shown any longer in the American civil society of 1945.

Language as Action Such showing would have presupposed that the speakers would agree already concerning this point: that the truth was the meaning of language (Horkheimer 1985l: 305-307). However, already in 1945, this was nowhere the case any longer. For Horkheimer, language was taken as action: as communication and information (Horkheimer 1985l: 305-307; 1988n: 47, 48, 65-66, 74-75, 82, 84-85, 85-86, 135, 198-199, 394, 487-488, 535; Habermas 1971; 1973; 1978c; 1981a; 1981b; 1984a; 1999). It was taken like an instrument. It was as if one gave or communicated an axe to a worker so that he could cut down a tree, so one gave him a formula that he would stamp out and exterminate the whole forest. According to Horkheimer, the criterion of the deed turned into the criterion of thought: truth was suitability, or effect. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the human potential of language and memory was fused with the evolutionary universal of work and tool, practical discourse turned into strategic discourse, mimetic and communicative rationality turned into instrumental and functional rationality, and truth into suitability and effectiveness (Hegel 1972; 1979; Horkheimer 1985l: 305-307; 1988n: 47, 48, 6566, 74-75, 82, 84-85, 85-86, 135, 198-199, 394, 487-488, 535; Habermas 1981a; 1981b; 1984a 1999). Performance was more important than truth content

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chapter eighteen The Oath

In Horkheimer’s view, in order to penetrate from this modern notion of truth as suitability and effectiveness, which liquidated it, to its hidden intention, it was good to analyze a mediating stage, the oath (Hegel 1972; 1979; Horkheimer 1985l: 305-307; 1988n: 47, 48, 65-66, 74-75, 82, 84-85, 85-86, 135, 198-199, 394, 487-488, 535; Habermas 1981a; 1981b; 1984a; 1999). According to Horkheimer, in legal proceedings the oath had been an instrument for many centuries. On one hand, the statement of the oath of the accused or the witness served the purpose of finding the murderer. However on the other hand, the statement of the accused or witness was good only when the word was the truth not only in relation to the external effect, but so to speak also immanently, in itself. Toward this second moment, attention was directed in the oath. This second moment was vouched for through the calling on God. God’s presence alone gave to the word the proving power. In the custom of the oath became revealed the condition of the language: language presupposed the Unconditional as being true. Only in relation to God was the language true. Horkheimer was aware of the presence of the oath already in the Torah. In the book Genesis, Abraham said to the senior servant of his household, who had charge of all that he owned, “Put your hand under my thigh and I will make you swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and the God of the earth, that you will not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites among whom I dwell, but will go to the land of my birth and get a wife for my son Isaac” (Genesis 24; 2; Lieber 2001: 131/2). According to the Rabbis, the gestures that accompanied oath taking had been universal in the ancient world long before Abraham. The thigh, which Abraham spoke of, referred to the genital organ, in which the power of procreation resided (Genesis 24: 2-12; 47; 29; Lieber 2001: 131-133). According to the Hebrew Sages, the genital organ acquired sanctity because it was marked by the covenant of circumcision. There was similar involvement in other cultures, such as the Roman culture, as the words testify and testimony derived from testes–indicate. Abraham, referring to the genital organ, was thereby invoking the presence and the power of God as the guarantor of the oath. In light of the fact that the mission of the servant Eliezer involved travel to a distant land of Aram-naharim, the city of Nahor between the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers, Abraham invoked God’s universal sovereignty, using a title–the Lord, the God of heaven and the God of the earth–that was unique in biblical literature. It was a monotheistic version of an Ancient Near Eastern oath formula, in which the gods

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of heaven and earth were invoked as witnesses. The Midrash suggested that before the time of Abraham God ruled in heaven but was unknown on earth. Abraham brought God’s sovereignty down to earth. Thus when Eliezer came with his ten camels to the entrance of the city of Nahor, he prayed: O Lord, God of my master Abraham., grant me good fortune this day, and deal graciously with my master Abraham. Here I stand by the spring as the daughters of the townsmen come out to draw water; let the maiden to whom I say ‘Please, lower your jar so I may drink,’ and who replies, ‘Drink, and I will also water your camels’–let her be the one whom You have decreed for your servant Isaac. Thereby shall I know that you have dealt graciously with my master (Genesis 24: 2-12; 47; 29; Lieber 2001: 131-133).

According to the Rabbis, Rebecca was the one God chose for Isaac because she possessed nobility of character, was hospitable to strangers and was kind to animals. A single camel–and there were ten–required at least 25 gallons of water to regain the weight it had lost in the course of a long journey. It took each camel about 10 minutes to drink this amount of water. Eliezer was the first person that the scriptures record as praying for personal guidance at a critical moment. In the Biblical perspective, often what appeared to be the result of chance, might in reality be a deliberate determination of God. Nothing was more characteristic of the biblical outlook than the conviction about the role of divine Providence in everyday human affairs. There was attached to the oath also an adjuration, a curse, as penalty in the case of noncompliance: Eliezer was free from such adjuration or curse connected to his oath that he gave to Abraham, only in the case that his kindred in Aram-naharim, the city of Nahor, would refuse to give him Rebecca as wife for his son Isaac (Genesis 24: 41; Lieber 2001: 135/41). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, unlike the God of Voltaire and Rousseau and of bourgeois agnostic deism, who has left the world to itself after he created it, the God of Israel as well as of Christianity and Islam is not only transcendent–the wholly Other–but also immanent in the detail of personal biographies and national histories and world-history (Genesis 24: 2-12; 47; 29; Lieber 2001: 131-133; Hegel 1986k: 278; 1986l; 1986n: 115; 1986p: 259; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346, 347536; Otto 1969; 1991; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 40; Küng 1978; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Haecker 1918; 1933; 1935).

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chapter eighteen The Presence of God

Horkheimer was also fully aware that the presence of God had been criticized in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 1929: 29, 89-90, 117, 325n, 484-486, 493, 495-524, 531, 553, 559-561, 565-567, 595, 625, 631-632, 638-640, 644, 648-650; Horkheimer 1985l: 305-307; 1987b: 15-74, 75-148). There was a tension between the critical theorists’ inheritance from Judaism on one hand, and from German idealism, at least Kant, on the other. According to Horkheimer’s Kant-interpretation, the Unconditional could never be given. Horkheimer remembered that only in the Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity the Unconditional found places in space: for example, in the monstrance or in the tabernacle of the Eucharist after–in scholastic terms–the transubstantiation (Horkheimer 1985l: 305-307; Küng 1994a: 336-601). According to Horkheimer, swearing had been forbidden to Jews anyhow, and the following history of the oath, which was related to the Jewish taboo on swearing, the force and compulsion to the caricatured ritual, revealed that the Christians were no longer sure of their own cause. Horkheimer remembered that Johann Georg Hamann remarked that the critique of reason was the critique of language (Hegel 1986d: 460; 1986i: 19; 1986k: 275-352; Horkheimer 1985l: 305-307; Habermas 1981a; 1981b; 1984a; 1999). Hamann conceived of the problems of reason in the form of language. According to Horkheimer, Hamann did not know how right he had been. With the ontological significance, so Horkheimer explained, of the natural sciences the Kantian transcendental dialectic had put an end to the claim of the word as such and in general. In Horkheimer’s view, also when Hegel integrated the natural sciences in a relativized form into his dialectical system, this happened on the basis of the identity principle. According to Kant, this identity principle had been the dogmatic presupposition, which certainly did not give way or yield to the ancient and antiquated institution of the oath concerning superstition. However, Hegel had proven that this ancient institution of the oath had, nevertheless, been the basis and foundation of the Kantian system in a hidden way, in so far as it wanted to be true (Kant 1929; 1946; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Hegel 1986r: 157, 186, 237, 317, 318, 318, 431, 433, 440, 444, 445; 1986s: 172, 172, 177, 179, 199, 284, 293, 375, 390, 555557, 559, 559; 1986t: 27, 70, 131, 145, 206, 267-313, 314, 315, 318, 322, 322, 323, 327, 329-386; Horkheimer 1987b: 15-148). For Horkheimer, in the humiliation and degradation of the Jews, who were ridiculed as they despised the Christian oath, honor was done to the truth in a negative way (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-320; 1985l:

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304-305). Horkheimer overlooked on one hand, that the institution of the oath was indeed present already in the Torah, and that on the other hand, it was forbidden in the New Testament. Thus, Jesus of Nazareth taught in his so-called Sermon on the Mount: Again, you have learned how it was said to our ancestors: ‘You must not break your oath, but must fulfill your oath to the Lord.’ But I say this to you: do not swear at all, either by heaven, since that is God’s throne; or by the earth since that is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, since that is the city of the great king. Do not swear by your own head either, since you cannot turn a single hair white or black. All you need say is ‘Yes’ if you mean yes, ’No’ if you mean no; anything more than this comes from the evil one (Exodus 20: 7; Matthew 5: 33-37).

Unfortunately Christianity, or better still what Kierkegaard had called Christendom, very often in the process of its assimilation to the state, be it in Antiquity, Middle Ages or Modernity, did not obey Jesus’ teaching against oath taking, The critical theorists of society radicalized the third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue as Jesus had done, when he forbid oath taking, as they did later (Exodus 20: 7; Matthew 5: 33-37; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; Adorno 1976; Küng 1994a; Pope Benedict XVI 2007: 20-21). Often the critical theorists have been more Jesuanic than many Christians had been (Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97, 218-219, 247-248, 293-294, 316-320; 1988a: 100, 157-158, 169, 267-263, 298-322, 345-354; Fromm 1966a: chaps. 2, 3, 7, 9; 1966b: chap. ix; 1976: chap. 3; 1992: 3-94, 203-212; Reich 1976; Lundgren 1998: 20-23, 42-45, 67, 73, 89, 125, 132, 133, 141, 151-154, 159, 162, 187).

The Kol Nidre For Horkheimer, it was also questionable if the Jews swore on the Torah without being compelled and forced (Horkheimer 1967b: 302-320; 1985l: 304-305). According to Horkheimer, it was highly indicated to study the relevant documents because here the question was decided concerning Jewish idolatry. Of course, the Rabbi Jesus’ prohibition against oath taking as a Satanic act, in his so-called Sermon on the Mount, presupposed the institution of oath taking in the Hebrew, Israelite, and Jewish community since Abraham, as well as in the surrounding Near Eastern city states, and empires, and beyond (Genesis 24: 2; 47; 29; Lieber 2001: 131-132; Exodus 20: 7; Matthew 5: 33-37; Lieber 2001: 131-132; Horkheimer 1967b: 302320; 1985l: 304-305). According to Horkheimer, the oath was a residual

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of the more immediate nature religion of magic and fetishism (Genesis 24: 2; 47; 29; Lieber 2001: 131-132; Exodus 20: 7; Matthew 5: 33-37; Lieber 2001: 131-132; Hegel 1986p: 259-301; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-320; 1985l: 304-305; App. E). The oath was a conjuration in the most primitive and archaic sense. Since the decline, disintegration and decay of the religion of magic and fetishism every oath had really been a curse word, a smutty joke or remark or cursing, a devil’s worship, or it came as Jesus put it from the evil one, from Satan (Genesis 24: 2; 47; 29; Exodus 20: 7; Matthew 5: 37; Lieber 2001: 131-132; Hegel 1986p: 259-301; Horkheimer 1967a; 1967b: 302-320; 1985l: 304-305). At the time of the Rabbi Jesus, other Rabbis as well discouraged oath taking in connection with the third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue (Exodus 20: 7; Matthew 5: 37). If the Jews, so Horkheimer argued, should have recognized the institution of the oath against the Kol Nidre Song, then this would prove their conformity with the power, the ruler, the master, the ruling classes, under which they had to suffer. The Kol Nidre, meaning All Vows, was the introductory prayer of the evening of Yom Kippur, the Atonement Day. It contained the declaration of nullity and invalidity of all vows performed and sworn in the past, and later on also in the coming year, in so far as they concerned one’s own person. However, the Kol Nidre did not relate to the oath as obligation toward other people. The rite of oath had constituted in the history of Anti-Semitism often the cause and occasion for unfounded attacks against Judaism and the oath performance (Horkheimer 1967a; 1967b: 302-320; 1985l: 304-305; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Adorno 1973b: 361-364; 1979: 397-407, 408-433). The reservations in relation to oath taking, which developed out of the demand of the unconditional avoidance of perjury, and which found expression also in the third commandment of the Sermon on the Mount, did not assert themselves in Judaism or Islam in a unified way (Genesis 24: 2; 47; 29; Exodus 20: 7; Matthew 5: 37; Lieber 2001: 131-132; Hegel 1986p: 259-301; 1986q 50-95; Horkheimer 1967a; 1967b: 302-320; 1985l: 304-305; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2003). The same is even much more emphatically true for Christianity (Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Küng 1994a). According to Horkheimer, a quantity of such conformity of the Jews to the ruling classes, under which they had to suffer so much, was probably also intrinsic in other forms of the Jewish ceremonial: even in the stubbornness with which they held on to it.

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Jewish Rite In the more recent centuries, Horkheimer by the Jewish rite was reminded of terrorized people, who were able to survive through the automatic repetition of the manners and mannerisms of the oppressor (Genesis 24: 2; 47; 29; Exodus 20: 7; Matthew 5: 37; Lieber 2001: 131-132; Hegel 1986p: 259-301; 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-320; 1985l: 304-305; Küng 1991b). The Jewish rite intervened most visibly into the Christian operation through the Schächten, the specifically Jewish form of slaughtering animals. According to Horkheimer, with such stubborn holding on to the Jewish ceremonial, the Jews paid for their continuation and survival. In Horkheimer’s view, the ugliness of the Jews was a portrayal, an image, a likeness of the Anti-Semitic hate of the Christians and–so the dialectical religiology may add–a likeness of the Anti-Judaism of the Muslims (Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-320; 1985l: 304-305; Adorno 1979: 397-433; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004). The Jewish monotonous singing was a resonance of the Christian hymns of victory. For Horkheimer, in the Jewish existence, Christians became aware of their own idolatry. As the Christians beat and knocked down the Jews, they tried desperately to defend themselves against the always renewed temptation of relapsing into Judaism or even into pagan barbarism. Horkheimer was convinced that through their survival, the Jews did too much honor to the Christians. For Horkheimer, even the recognizing judgment of Goethe, the friend of Hegel, about the alien toughness and tenacity with which the Jews had maintained themselves and survived through thousands of years, had a glimmer of justified negativity: the Jews’ own conjuring gestures, with which they implored the devil and begged for favors, mercy, and clemency expressed not only the fear of the condemned people, but also their adjustment and assimilation to hell. As his friend Hegel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ambiguously stated about the Jewish people: The Israelite nation has never been of much use as its leaders, judges, heads, prophets have thousand times reproached it for; it possesses few virtues and the most faults of other nations. But concerning independence, strength, courage, and when all that is no longer valid, concerning tenacity, it has no equal. It is the most steadfast nation on earth, it is, it was, it will be, in order to glorify the name Yahweh through all times (Goethe 1930: 59-160; 1965; 2005; Hegel 1986a: 45, 48, 105, 133, 174, 184, 208-209, 226-228, 285, 292, 297, 355, 372-373, 381, 436, 436; 1986g: 421; 1986l: 146, 230, 241, 241, 243, 244, 274, 388-390, 391, 429, 470, 510; 1986m: 141, 480, 1986n: 77, 65; 1986p: 345; 1986q: 48-49, 50-95, 265, 285, 336; 1986r: 12, 116, 132; 1986s: 409-410,

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chapter eighteen 419, 426493, 523-524; 1986t: 157; Horkheimer 1985l: 305; 1988n: 202-202, 207-298, 332, 400, 533; Benjamin 1977: chap. 5; App. E).

Still in 1945, Horkheimer had to admit that if the Jews would be liberated, they would do the same as the Christians had done (Horkheimer 1985l: 305). In the almost sincere and honest assurance of the assimilated modern Jews in New York and elsewhere, that they, as individuals and as a nation, were after all like the Christians, the religious customs of the diaspora revealed themselves as a world-historical means to get there ultimately. With such insight, Horkheimer had a hard time to find the courage to speak at all. The critical theorist of religion remembers of course, that before the Ecclesia attacked the Synagogue for centuries–thus unintentionally preparing the pagan, fascist, pseudo-scientifically justified and legitimated Shoa of the 20th century–the Synagogue had excommunicated and persecuted the Ecclesia, while members of both communities, Jews and Christians alike, were accused of atheism and high treason before the Roman courts, and were consequentially tortured, executed, and martyred by the Roman army (Acts 4-28; Fromm 1966b: chap. ix; 1972b; 1973; 1992; Reich 1971; 1976; Küng 1991b; 1994a: 89-144; Bach 2007; Legendre/Olivier/Schnitzler 2007; 1974; 1992; Betz 2008: 108-109). It is indeed hard to speak about the relationship of the Synagogue and the Ecclesia, but it must be done, nevertheless, for the sake of mutual reconciliation and atonement (Metz 1995; 1997: chaps. 3, 7; Metz, Habermas, Sölle et al. 1994: chaps. 1, 3, 5; Oelmüller 1990: 103-118; Metz/Peters 1991: 68-72, 73-77; Metz/Wiese 1993; Peters 1998: chap. 12). For such reconciling discourse, committed unconditionally to the truth and nothing than the truth, the Jewish and the non-Jewish critical theorists of society have indeed laid the best foundations (Habermas 1969; 1971; 1973; 1976; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1981a; 1981b; 1982; 1983; 1984a; 1986; 1988b; 1990: 9-18; 1991a: Part III; 1991b; 1997a; 1999; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2004; 2005; 2007; Siebert 1966; 1979; 1979c; 1979d; 1985; 1986; 1993; 1994b; 2000; 2002c; 2003; 2004a; 2004b; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007f; 2007g).

Intellectual Climate Change After the victorious neo-conservative/neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1989, guided economically by Friedmann and his Chicago School, the non-conformist, intellectual Frankfurt School met with unfavorable times

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(Honneth 2007; Niclauss 2007: 78-79; Sim/Loon 2001; Demirovic 1999; Goldstein 2005; Ott 2007; Arato/Gebhardt 1982). Now, the intellectual climate tended essentially toward an acceptance of the given neo-conservative conditions in America as well as in Europe. The non-dialectical, positivistic social sciences, neo-conservativism as well as deconstructionism, as well as the mass media considered high range theories, as historical idealism and historical materialism had delivered them, as well as utopian designs as stale, flat and obsolete. According to the neo-conservatives, everybody had to accommodate himself or herself to and arrange himself or herself with the extant and dominant neo-liberal economic order. The rebellion against antagonistic civil society was supposed to be exhausted. The former new social movements, which had opposed the colonization of the life world–characterized by communicative action and rationality and the medium of ethical values and norms–of late capitalist society by its economic and political subsystems–determined by instrumental action and rationality and the media of money and power–had supposedly been absorbed by the political-social mainstream. However, in recent years there have nevertheless appeared indications of an intellectual climate change. Even the non-dialectical American social sciences and mass media mention the word capitalism more and more and often even in a critical sense, which had very seldom happened before. The themes of social critique return in Europe as well as in America: environmental destruction, authoritarian control-state, growing social and economic inequality, accelerated economization of the life world, concentration of capital, nationalism, rightwing extremism, neo-fascism, Anti-Semitism, labor unions, religious fundamentalism, and so on. Not only on the Left but also on the Right, the impression has been spreading that–as Hamlet put it once–there was something rotten in the state of Denmark, or that there is something not entirely right or even principally wrong in present antagonistic civil society, particularly as of September 2008, globalization has turned into a global economic crisis.

Theory and Praxis The present Director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Axel Honneth, concentrated in his recent book, Pathologies of Reason, on the possible scientific, if also not hefty political actuality of the critical theory of society in the present global crisis situation, particularly in relation to the dialectical relationship between theory and praxis (Habermas 1969; 1971; 1973; 1976; 1978a; 1978b; b; 1979a; 1979b; 1981a; 1981b; 1981c;

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2004a; 1984a; Honneth 1985; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2001; 2002b; 2005; 2007; Honneth/Joas 2002; Niclauss 2007: 78-79; Borradori 2003). Honneth’s approach is historical, since particularly the most recent research has emphasized the plurality in the Frankfurt School. The critical theory of religion itself is part of this plurality. Here the main question arises as to whether the critical theory of society still constitutes a unified paradigm as intended by its founder, Horkheimer, or if there exists rather merely something like a family-similarity, in which the family members pretend externally to get along with each other while at the same time they engage in intense controversies in the living room. The critical theory of religion continues to emphasize the original intent of a unified and uniform, but at the same time highly differentiated paradigm of the critical theory of society, of which it considers itself to be an integral part (Horkheimer 1981a; 1981b; 1988d; Honneth 2007; 2009).

Theory and History In 2007, Honneth tried to identify the very core of the critical theory of society in the present philosophical, scientific and political context (Honneth 1994: 11-106; 2007; Niclauss 2007: 78-79). Honneth emphasized the Left-Hegelian premises of the Frankfurt School (O’Regan 1994; Honneth 1994: 11-106; 2007; Niclauss 2007: 78-79). He did this by marking it off to some extent from the work of his teacher Habermas, whose successor he has become to the chair for philosophy in the University of Frankfurt. Honneth presented particularly the idea of an objective social potential of reason. According to Honneth, the critical theory in a unique way has kept and continues to stick to a mediation of theory and history in a notion of the socially effective reason. The critical theory understood the historical past with practical intent as an educational process. The pathological deformation of this historical learning process through capitalism could be overcome alone through an enlightenment process among the participants. This model of thought was a crossing or folding of theory and history. This model of thought was the foundation of the unity of the critical theory of society in the multiplicity of its many voices.

Capitalist Deformations As of February 2008, Rabbis, who remember that Eastern European communism constituted a secularization of Jewish Messianism, explain its

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break down through the weakness of human nature, which consists not only of an angelical but also of an animal part, which sometimes makes humanity act worse than animals (Fromm 1950; 1957; 1959; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973: chap. 13). While communism appeals to the weaker angelical side of human nature, capitalism appeals to the stronger animal side: to egoism and Narcisism. Selfishness is good! (Horkheimer 1932; 1936; 1974c: 202-203; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2; 1989m: chaps. 6, 9, 11, 14, 15, 17, 18, 25; Perkins 2006; Klein 2007; Hedges 2006; Gosling 2000; Franken 2003; Scahill 2007). Thus, instead of a radical social paradigm change in 1918 and 1945, capitalism returned again, in spite of the fact that it had produced two world wars via colonialism and imperialism, and cost the lives of over 70 million human beings. Communism simply seems to be too difficult for humanity to achieve. While the early church consisted of communistic communities, later on private property was introduced again in comformity to Roman civil society and Christians engaged in traditional capitalism and finally also again in military activities, as the Church went into bed with the Roman civil society and state, which had executed Jesus of Nazareth and many of his follwers for 300 years. The monasteries opposed this conformist mainstream Christianity by forming communistic brotherhood and sisterhood communities, which admittedly were in need of continual reform, whenever they became collectively rich (Acts 2: 42-47; 4: 32-37; 5: 1-11; Hegel 1986l: 370; 1986q: 289-292, Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; Dirks 1968; Metz 1978; Metz/Peters 1991). The monasteries tried to correct the deformations of the historical learning process through private property and capitalism in themselves as well as in mainstream Christianity as well as in traditional and modern civil societies, states and empires. Some Jewish, Christian and Islamic communities tried to cling to some form of their old anti-usury law, in order to curb the capitalist deformations of the historical learning process (Hegel 1986b: 565; 1986g: 168353; 1896k: 21; Honneth 1994: 11-106; 2007; Niclauss 2007: 78-79). Modern forms of communism, be it in Israel, Cuba, Venezuela, Chile, North Vietnam, China, are like the communist Christian, Buddhist, Hindu monasteries of the past: engaged in the struggle between humanity’s animality and our more angelical tendencies. While the critical theory of religion is fully and most realistically aware of the animality of humanity that finds its most sophisticated expression in different forms of modern private capitalism and the consequent neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism, which points to alternative Future I–the totally beauracratized, computerized, robotized, signal society, and to alternative Future II–the totally militarized society con-

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tinually engaged in conventional wars and civil wars and preparing ABC wars, it would, nevertheless, give a chance in the spirit of the great world religions and philosphies to the angelical aspect of human nature as well, which tends toward and longs and hopes for alternative Future III–a sane, friendly, solidary, brotherly and sisterly society, which through discourse frees itself from its fears and masters its self-produced fate (Hegel 1986a: 13; 1986f: 62; 1986g: 168, 339-397, 398-514; 1986k: 21; 1986l: 370; 1986q: 342-343; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1979; 1985a; 1985b; 1985e: chaps. 54, 55; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Flechtheim 1971; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1957; 1959; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1975; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1995; 1997; 2001; Dirks 1983a; 1983b; Bloch/Reif 1978; App. E, G).

Genealogical Direction Besides the Hegelian heritage of the as such post-metaphysical critical theory of society Honneth also stressed the genealogical direction of the Frankurt School in the connection with and extension of the work of Nietzsche and Foucault (Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1970a; 1987; Habermas 1969; 1976; 1978a: chap. 5; 1985a; 1987b; 1987c; 1988a; 1991a; 1992a; 2004a; 2004c; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Habermas/Hewnrich 1974; Gadamer/ Habermas 1979; Honneth 1985; 2007; Niclauss 2007: 78-79; Borradori 2003; O’Regan 1994). Already Adorno had maybe learned more from Nietzsche than from Hegel. For Honneth, it belonged to the most valued and appreciatiated specific characteristics of the critical theory of society that it had preserved in itself the consciousness of a detective for the deformations, to which praxis-guiding values, norms, and principles had been exposed in the historical process. Out of this detective consciousness, Honneth developped in relation to the present status of social critique informative and performative considerations and insights concerning the role of the intellectual. Honneth insisted most emphatically that the critical theory was not allowed to be satisfied with the position and role of the normalized, interjecting and interrupting caller, who had been integrated into the rules of the game of the media democracy. The critical theory of religion traces the deformations of particularly religious values and norms in the historical process, and restores them through enlightenment according to their original intent, such as the Sermon on the Mount, or rescues them through their inversion into the secular discourse among the expert cultures (Adorno 1970b: 103-125; 1997j/2: 310-320, 573-594,

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608-616; Mendieta 2005; Habermas 1997a; 1999; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Siebert 2000; 2001).

Task According to Honneth, it was the task of the critical theory of society to uncover, discover, and show publicly the blind spots of the social discourse (Habermas 1978a: chap 5; 1982; 1983; 1984a; 1985a; 1986; 1987c; 1988a; 1988b; 1990; 1991a: part III; 1992b; 1999; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2004a; 2003c; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007; Habermas/ Luhmann 1975; Honneth 1985, 2007; Niclauss 2007: 78-79; Borradori 2003). It was the task of the critical theory of society to thematize particularly those pathologies of the life world and the social system, which usually fall through the grid, the screen, the raster, or the frame work of the public discourse as it continually took place in the mass media and in the mass culture of civil and socialist societies. Honneth refered to the example of the politically broad effectiveness of what Horkheimer and Adorno had called the culture industry. Here, Honneth opted for the long breath of the praxis-directed theory rather than for the talk-show professor’s critical counter-force against ideology as false consciousness and masking of national and class interests and as appearance necessary for the integration and stabilization of antagonistic civil society (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 120-167; Honneth 1985, 2007; Niclauss 2007: 78-79). Also the critical theory of religion remains essentially mythology- and ideology-critique: particularly critique of religious mythologies and ideologies (Siebert 2000; 2001).

Mythology Critique As the antagonism between the religious and the secular continues in bourgeois society, all science can do is to demythologize the relgious stories, e.g. the Sumerian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Christian or Islamic stories of the Flood (Genesis 6-10; App. E, F). Science practices mythology critique, by reducing e.g. in the stories of the flood the measurement of the ship and the numbers of the species gathered in it; by limiting the size of the flood to the Euphrates and Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf; by shortening the time of the flood; by removing the landing on Mount Ararat, etc. However, science does all this without necessarily removing the impossible childike form of the story and also destroying its religious-ethical

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core: that the gods or God punishes people for violating the Golden Rule or any of its norms, laws or values, into which it is particularized; or that the Lex Talionis, retaliation, follows with necessity such violation of the Golden Rule (Matthew 5-7; Siebert 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2006a; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007g; 2008a; 2008f). The dialectical religiology as mythology critique may even go so far as to say, that the meaning of such mythical story or language is, that not the gods or God punish the people for such violation of the Golden Rule, but that they themselves punish themselves by simply acting against it, since it itself transforms itself in the process of its violation into the Jus Talionis (Matthew 5-7; Apresian 2002: 46-64; . Matthew 5-7; Küng 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Siebert 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2006a; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007g; 2008a; 2008f). While the critical theory of religion stands for enlightenment and demythologization, it at the same time remains interested in rescuing the religious-ethical truth of the mythos (Benjamin 1955a; 1974; 1977; 1978a; : chaps 10, 11; Habermas 1982; 1984a; 1986; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006).

Positioning Honneth was not only concerned with the question of the unity of the critical theory of society, but also with the question concerning its reactualization through its new positioning in the contemporary supply and demand of the fast fluctuating theory-market of civil society (Honneth 1985, 2007; Niclauss 2007: 78-79). Finally, even theories have been comodified. Honneth did not deny that the critical theory suffered some losses in this theory market after the victorious neo-conservative counterrevolution in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Too bad for the market! Of course, the critical theorists had even a much smaller share in the theory market under fascism than they have today under neo-conservativism (Löwenthal 1980; 1989: chap. 16; 1990b; Sohn/Rethel 1973; 1975; 1978; 1985). As a matter of fact, the critical theorists never planned or expected such fame, as indeed they achieved in the second part of the 20th century, always being aware, what damage it could do to the critical spirit. To be sure, the working classes can today liberate themselves as little from the neo-conservative ruling powers as they could once free themselves from the fascist ruling powers. That has indeed remained a problem also for the critical theory of society. Thus, after the new retreat of the Marxist tradition after the neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1989, and the pushing

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to the front of neo-conservative and post-structural theories as well as of the liberal political philosophy of Rawls and Walzer, the discourse space has admittedly somewhat become narrower for authors of the Frankfurt School. However, the critical theorist of religion remembers and emphasizes not only that like his teacher Hegel, Marx has been often called a dead dog in the dialectic of civil society in good times and returned again in bad times, but also that historical materialism is only one tradition that the critical theory of society has concretely superseded into itself, besides Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, historical idealism, metaphysical pessimism, and Freudian psychoanalysis; the critical potential of which is far from being exhausted in late capitalist society (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; 185346; Marx 1961a: 17-19; Taylor 1983; Adorno 1970a; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1991a; 1993b; Friedeburg/Habermas 1983; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 23-24; Habermas 1976; 1990; 1991a: part III; 1997a 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Siebert 2000; 2001). There is no reason for intellectual defaitism no matter how divided the West may be in the face of the global economic crisis and the bloody terrorism and counter-terrorism (Habermas 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b: 1-25; 2006c; 2007; Borradori 2003). To those intellectuals, who call others again and again prematurely dead dogs the critical theorist of religion would like to say with the Biblical story about the Fraud of Aananias and Sapphira, and with Hegel, and with Marx: They have just been to bury your husband; they will carry you out, too (Acts 5: 1-11; Marx 1961a: 17-18). Great religions and great philosophies are dead without return and renaissances only after they have been radically but still determinately negated by a new religion or a new philosophy (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; 1986r; 1986s; 1985t; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616). So far, neither the critical theory of society itself, nor the religions and philosophies it is rooted in–the Abrahamic religions, German idealism, historical materialism, metaphysical pessimism, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy–have been concretely superseded: not only criticized, but also preserved, and elevated, and fulfilled by a truer religion or by a truer philosophy (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; 1986r; 1986s; 1985t; Horkheimer 1987b: 15-148, 149-178, 179-270, 295-311; 1985h: chaps. 1, 5, 6, 9, 16, 23, 28, 32; 1987i; 1990j; 1989m: chaps. 2, 13, 27, 28, 29; Adorno 1997j/20: 608-616; Löwenthal 1989; Habermas 1990: 9-18; 1991a; 2001a; 2002; 2004a; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Wiggershaus 1987; Haag 1983; Mendieta 2005; Dubiel 1992; Ott 2007; Reimer 1992). At this moment in the transition from Modernity to Post-Modernity, there is in Hegel’s words no land in sight: no new Heracleitos, Plato, Aristotle, Paul, Origines, Augustin, Anselm

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of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, Master Eckhart, Luther, Münzer, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Schleiermacher, Freud, Barth, Tillich, Bultmann, Mann, Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, or any new great artistic, religious, or philosophical paradigm pointing into the future (Hegel 1986e: 84, 185, 226; 1986h: 57, 193; 1986: 146, 336, 522; 1986q: 499; 1986r: 14, 194, 215, 238, 301, 319434; Horkheimer 1990j; 1989m: chaps. 2, 13, 27, 28, 29; Bloch 1971; 1972; Fromm 1967; Küng 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a,1994b; 1998; 2004).

Fundamental Assumptions The critical theorist agrees with Honneth that the project of a continuation of the critical theory under the Hegelian premisses in the presently still neo-conservative or liberal political, military, economic and cultural context, is indeed demanding and challenging (Honneth 1985; 2007; Niclauss 2007: 78-79; O’Regan 1994). Yet, the critical theorists of religion would like to rescue nevertheless some of the concrete history-philosophical and sociological fundamental assumptions of the Frankfurt School into the present and even into the future, not so much for the commodity market of theories, but rather for the sake of the truth, and in order not to weaken the critical theory’s original, largely religious presuppositions, motives, motivations and power (Horkheimer 1988a; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10-11; 1996: 616-618, 665-676; Scholem 1989; Adorno 1970b; 1973b: 300-406; 1997j:/2608-617; Löwenthal 1965; 1966; 1970; 1980: 80-81; 155-157, 175-176; 1989: chaps. 7, 8, 13, 14, 16; 1990a; 1990b; Habermas 1991a: part III; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Mendieta 2002; 2005). While Martin Heidegger left behind the posthumous warning Only a God can help us, in the German journal The Spiegel, Horkheimer left behind the more definite posthumous prayer In You Eternal One alone I trust on his grave stone in the Jewish Cemetery of Bern, Switzerland (Heidegger 2001; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 38, 38, 40; Adorno 1997f: 413-526). Reason without such definite faith and hope falls victim to positivism, deconstructionism, neo-conservativism, or intellectual and political defaitism in the present crisis situation in the transition from Modernity to Post-Modernity (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 434-532; Horkheimer 1974c: 101-104, 116-117; Adorno 1962; 1963; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1980a; Habermas 1978c; 1981a; 1981b; 1982; 1986; 1988a; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006c; 2007; Borradori 2003; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006). The critical religiologist answers the question

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positively as to whether the core of the critical theory of society, identified by Horheimer and Adorno, could or must be defended against the traditional theory (Horkheimer 1988a; 1988c: chaps. 1, 3-6, 8-11, 13-18; 1988d; Adorno 1970a; 1970b; 1979; 1980b; 1993b; 1993c; 1997; a1997b; 1998c; 2000a; 2000b; 2001a; 2001b; 2002a; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969; 1972; Benjamin 1977l: chaps. 10, 11; 1996; Adorno/Bennjamin 1994; Fromm 1932a; 1932b; 1950; 1957; 1959; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1975; 1976; 1980a; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Jäger 2004).

Polarity The critical theorist of religion agrees with Honneth when he identifies the polarity in the present situation of the formerly Jewish Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, as on one hand he contrasts and arranges the Frankfurt School’s internal voices lucidly and stringently, and on the other hand as he moves in the direction of the connection and extension ability (Guardini 1925; 1952; Honneth 1985; 2007; Niclauss 2007: 78-79). Such polarity has existed more or less strongly in the Frankfurt School from the very beginning and has reached a climax in the work of Habermas, and should and must be continued. Where actual Franfurt School external positions would have to flow into the intention of an actualization of the critical theory of society depends on one hand on its normative core idea and on the other on the challenges from the historical context and situation. If suddenly Carl Schmitt’s fascist political philosophy and theology gains actuality, as it is the case now in February 2010, then of coure a discourse is demanded, motivated by the intent to rescue the enlightenment once more: to free people from their fears and to make them into masters of their fate (Groh 1998; Meier 1994). The same motivation must guide the ongoing discourse with different forms of positivism and naturalism, such as structural-functionalism, cognitivism, rational choice theory, as well as with different forms of neo-conservativism and deconstructionism (Horkheimer 1988d: chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16; 1988c: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1970b; 1973; 1984; 1987; 2001; Habermas 1969; 1971; 1973; 1976; 1978a; 1984a; 1984b; 1985a; 1986; 1987b; 1987c; 1988b; 1991a; 1992a; 1992b; 1999; 2001b; 2002; 2004a; 2005; 2006a; 2006d; Habermas/Luhmann 1957; Goldstein 2006; Light/ Wilson 2004; Luhmann 1977a; 1997b; 1997; 1999; 2000). At the same time, the Frankfurt School’s internal discourse among different groups

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must not be neglected (Schmidt 1972). For sure, a substantial critical or dialectical theory of religion will yield neither to a claimless pragmatism nor to a social romanticism.

Paradigm Change In spite of the intellectual climate change in Europe and America in consequence of the crisis of the neo-liberal globalization process, which reached its climax in the capitalist breakdowm of September 2008 and the following depression, due to 25 years of unpoliced, deregulated, privatized overproduction, there is still today–in February 2010–an intellectual vacuum in the non-dialectical, positivistic social sciences in general and in sociology in particular in the context of the divided West and a time of religious terrorism and secular counter-terrorism: a vacuum of the Left (Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; Habermas 1969; 1971; 1973; 1976; 1978a; 1978; 1981a; 1981b; 1984a; 1985a; 1986; 1987b; 1987c; 1988a; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006c; Honneth 2007; Niclauss 2007: 78-79; Borradori 2003; Goldstein 2001; 2005; 2006; Geier 2008: 10-17). That is also true for the sociology of religion. At a time when under the second Bush Administration the Religious Right has taken center stage in both, domestic and international politics, particularly in America, few sociologists of religion have taken on a non-positivistic, critical, dialectical perspective (Franken 2003; Hedges 2006; Meyer 2008: 53-55; Goldstein 2001; 2005; 2006). One goal of this Manifesto is to suggest a discourse between the Right and the Left, between positivists and dialecticians in the social sciences, in sociology and in the sociology of religion, and to make a case for a paradigm change and the possibility of a critical theory of religion which is orientated toward a dynamic notion of truth, in which all magic or fetishistic instrumentalization of reason and concepts is concretely superseded (Hegel 1986a: 193, 288, 374-375; 1986b: 31, 39, 153, 460-461, 511, 540, 545; 1986c: 15, 40, 4142, 42-43, 46-47, 64, 76-77, 137-177; 1986p: 259-301; Horkheimer 1988c: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 14, 1988d: chaps: 6, 7; 1986l: 1-68; 1988n: 47, 48, 65-66, 74-75, 82, 84-85, 85-86, 135, 198-199, 394, 487-488, 535; Habermas 1999; Goldstein 2006; Ott 2007; Siebert 1985: 108-114; 1989; 1993; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 1994d; 1995; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2002c; 2003; 2004a; 2004b; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007e; 2007f: 1-68; 2008f; 2008a; 2008b; 2008e). The critical theory of religion contains the promise of providing an alternative to mainstream positivistic, non-dialectical approaches in the sociology of religion (Berger 1990; Yinger 1969; Wach 1961; Leeuw 1963;

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O’Dea 1966; Luhmann 1977a; 1977b; 1997; 1999; 2000; Habermas 1999; 2001a; 2002; 2004a; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Luhmann 1975; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Schmidt 1972; Cox 1966; Mendieta 2005; Goldstein 2006; Ott 2007; Siebert 1985: 108-114; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2002c; 2003; 2004a; 2004b; 2005b). In the 20th and 21st centuries, the sociology of religion has had several frameworks guiding its analysis including functionalism, phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, rational choice theory, and cognitivism (Wuthnow 2007: 341-360; Gold/Engel 1998; Lawson/ McCauley 1990; Goldstein 2001; 2005; 2006). Absent from this list is a conflict or critical approach, which exists in many other sub-areas of sociology. Marxism has tended to ignore religion, assuming that it would eventually disappear even though Marxism itself retained theological elements and was as such itself a critique of the liberal and fascist philosophy of oppression, and of the unjust social conditions in civil society, which it reflected and justified and legitimated (Hegel 1986g: 339-398; Marx 1964: 4-5, 26-27, 40, 41-60, 68-69, 107, 108; Niebuhr 1932; 1964; Miranda 1971; Lischer 1979; Gutierrez 1971: 29-30, 31, 40/26/29/30, 187, 216, 219-220, 222, 244/59, 249, 284/51). Up to now the critical theory of religion has remained mostly exegesis of existing research of the Frankfurt School. The critical theory of religion has the potential of providing a new direction for the sociology of religion only if it is used as a theoretical framework to guide empirical research and political praxis. The methodology of the critical theory of religion is the use of critique as a form of self-correction and rescue (Marx 1977: 102103; Bloch 1972: 1363; Ott 2001: chaps. 4-6; Goldstein 2001: 268). Critical Theory seeks not to bury religion (Kee 2007: 512). It does not only critique religion, but it also preserves, rescues, elevates and fulfills it. In doing so, it engages in a critique of itself, either by becoming self-consciously aware of the theological elements within itself, or purging itself of them, thereby moving more in a social scientific direction, without, however, losing them completely (Horkheimer 1885g: chaps. 14-17, 21, 25-26, 29-30, 32, 37-40, 42; Adorno 1970a; 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1990: 9-18). The theological idea needs and deserves newly to be made conscious, and to be saved through radical critique, and the critical theory of religion may very well participate in and contribute to this critical rescue process (Benjamin 1968; Habermas 1988a; 1988b; 1991a: part III).

Discourse-Connections Even if the original Frankfurt School would have been blind to religious notions–which certainly was not the case–that would not mean that the

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new critical theory of religion, which is derived from it and which here is developed further, would, or could, or should not be concerned with, or appreciate all these theological semantic and semiotic contents and potentials, and the still very appellative and motivating religious language (Horkheimer 1974c: 8, 15, 18, 28-29, 33, 71, 82-93, 97-97, 106-107, 121123, 127, 131-132, 141-142; 1988a; 1988c: chaps. 6, 15, 16; 1988d: chap. 2; 1985g: chaps. 14-18, 20-22, 25-26, 29-30, 32, 34, 37, 40; 1989m: chap. 12; Adorno 1970b; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1992: 3-84; Habermas 1985a; 1988a: 59-60, 277-279; 1992a; 1992b; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006b; 2007; Eco 1980; 2000a; 2000b; 2002; Eco/Martini 1997; Lundgren 1998). Taking Habermas’s theory of communicative action as its model, and particularly after his linguistic turn–prepared already by Benjamin and Adorno, the critical theory of society and religion was highly competent in making dialectical discourse connections with other theoretical perspectives not only in philosophy and theology, but also, and particularly so, in the social sciences and sociology, and was able to selectively incorporate and integrate elements of these competing theories within itself, and even to learn from non-dialectical, positivistic theories, such as Talcott Parsons structural functionalism (Benjamin 1968: 185-544; 1977: 335-412; 1995: 17-74; Adorno 1970a; 1970b; 1973b; 1980a; 1980b; 1981; 1997b 1997c: 251-410; 1997d; Habermas 1971; 1973; 1975; 1976; 1981a ; 1981b; 1982; 1984a ; 1985a; 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 1990: 9-18; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004a; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Luhmann 1971; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Dallmayr 1974; Mendieta 2005; MacCarthy 1994; Ott 2007; Demirovic 1999; Luckmann 1991). In the name of the dialectical inclusion of the other, Habermas, who had learned from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind that one could not be beyond any philosophy or theory if one had not first of all been in it before, was indeed a great master of discourse connections with all kinds of theorists, even those most opposed to the critical theory of society, as is his student Honneth (Hegel 1986c; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1976; 1982; 1983; 1987b; 1987c; 1991a: part III; 1997a; 1997b; 2005; Borradori 2003; Honneth 1985). Yet, the more recent critical theory of society and religion went beyond Habermas by more seriously considering three other theories that he had dismissed or ignored, but which were important in the non-dialectical, positivistic sociology, and particularly sociology of religion: postmodernism, rational choice theory, and cognitivism (Habermas 1973; 1978a: part III; 1984a; 1985a; 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; Goldstein 2006; Gold/Engel 1998; Light/Wilson 2004; Luckmann 1991). Habermas associated post-modernism with neo-conservativism, which

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has entered into an alliance with anti-modernism in opposition to the praxis philosophy (Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1973; 1975; 1976; 1978a; 1978b; 1978c; 1979a; 1979b; 1981a; 1981b; ; 1985a; 1981d; 1984a 1986; 1987b; 1987c; 1988a ; 1988b; 1990; 1991a; 1991b; 1991c; 1992b; 1997a; 1999; 2001b; 2001c; 2002).

Dialectical Inclusion of the Other In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, further discourse connections could be made and other theories could be dialectically included into it more than this has already happened: post-modernism, neo-conservativism, and rational choice theory, which has become a major current in the American sociology of religion, as well as cognitivism, which has become strong in Europe (Habermas 1997a; 1981a & b; 1984a; 1984b; 1988a; 1988b; 1997a; 1997b; 2001a; 2002; 2004a; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Borradori 2003; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Honneth 1985; Gold/Engel 1998; Light/Wilson 2004; Goldstein 2005; 2006; Luckmann 1991). The dialectcal theory of religion sees post-modernism as a result of the political failure of the 1968 movements. Whereas post-modernism has replaced contradictions with paradoxes, the critical theory of religion sees a dialectic between movement and countermovement. The dialectical theory of religion engages in a critique of rational choice theory with its emphasis on the religious market (Goldstein 2005; 2006). However, the dialectical religiology recogizes the commodity fetishism, the idolatry, of all markets characterized by the to have versus the to be attitude, and thus does not idealize them but rather places them critically into the context of the present aggressive transition period from Modernity to Post-Modernity so full of divisions and of revolutionary and counter-revlutionary tendencies (Genesis 24: 29; Lieber 2001: 134/29; Hegel 1986l: 520-542; 1986q: 342-344; Marx 1961a: 8, 78-80, 99, 784-786, 881; Freud 1962; 1964; Fromm 1950; 1957: 9-11; 1959; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1975; 1976; 1980a; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1995; 1997; 2001; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1978b; 1979a; 1979b; 1981c; 1985a; 1985b; 1988a; 1990; 1991c; 1995; 1998; 2001b; 2001c; 2003b; 2006cLundgren 1998). The dialectical thory of religion recognizes that religious markets do not always exist, and that instead of competition between competing firms there is often conflict between different religious ethnic groups with different and even contradictory interpretatiions of reality and orientations of action.

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The critical theory of religion sees exchange relationships not always to be equivalent but often conflictual (Blau 1986). While interpretive, the dialectical theory of religion is not value free. It sides with the forces of the bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment and of Modernity and Post-Modernity against the rear guard of nationalism, traditionalism and fundamentalism and against those who seek to legitimize them: neo-conservativism, neo-liberalism, functionalism, cognitivism, and the rational choice theory. At the heart of the critical theory of religion is a dialectical theory of secularization (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986p: 9-88; Benjamin 1977: chaps 10, 11; Haecker 1918; 1933; 1935; Habermas 2001a; 2002; 2003a; 2003c; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007; Habermas/ Ratzinger 2006; Sölle/Habermas/1975; Sölle/Metz 1990; Goldstein 2005; 2006). Rather than seeing secularization occurring in a linear manner, the critical theory of religion sees secularization and, more specifically, religious rationalization, as occurring in a dialectical manner. It views the ongoing conflict between fundamentalism and modernity, the tensions of which climaxed and exploded in the catastrophe of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington D.C., as part of this historical dialectic (Habermas 2001a; App. E, F).

Dialectic of Secularization Max Weber’s Ancient Judaism combined with his sociology of domination provides the critical theorist of religion with a theory of religious rationalization moving between the opposition of the charisma of the prophets and the tradition of the priests. (Weber 1952: chaps. II, IV; Goldstein 2005; 2006; Ott 2007). While charisma and tradition stand in opposition to each other, the dynamic between them, from tradition to charisma and through routinization back to the everyday life world, has a development in the direction of rationalization. The prophet brings about a new set of values, while the priest institutionalizes them. This opposition is continued in the conflict between Talmudic Judaism and early Christianity, and in Occidental Christianity between the Catholic Church and monasticism. It also describes the dynamic between the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Church (Schluchter 1985). Weber did not have a dialectic in the idealistic Hegelian or materialistic Marxist sense of determinate negation, since there is no reconciliation between the opposites posited (Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53; 1986q: 288-292, 342-344; Jamme/Schneider 1984: 11-14; Marx 1961a: 17-18; Horkheimer 1985l: 286-287; Adorno 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 23-24). Never-

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theless, for Weber the Occident did have a telos of rationalization toward which it was developing through opposites (Goldstein 2005; 2006; Ott 2007). Thus, Weber’s work can be dialectically included into the critical theory of religion as ongoing discourse. Ernst Bloch’s genuine dialectical theory of religion, rooted like Tillich’s and Habermas’s work in the thinking of Schelling, moved from Moses through the prophets to Jesus, and from Feuerbach to Marx, and viewed the process of secularization as being driven by the contradiction between faith in God and faith in man (Bloch 1993: vol. 1-3; 1970a; 1970b; Goldstein 2005). The dialectical theorist of religion can continue to learn from Bloch. His student Walter Benjamin had several so-called dialectical theories of secularization (Benjamin 1996; Goldstein 2005). They were contained in his philosophy of language, theory of experience, theory of dreams, and aesthetic theory. His so-called dialectical theories of secularization contained a two-way movement: from sacred to profane, and from profane to sacred. Benjamin’s dialectical theory of secularization moved in a secular direction, but doubled back on itself in the direction of the sacred (Benjamin 1996; Goldstein 2001; 2005). It, therefore, was dialectical in the closed idealistic, not in the open materialistic sense. Here Benjamin followed Hegel, Goethe and Beethoven and his friend Gerhard Scholem rather than his friend Bertolt Brecht (Hegel 1986p: 9-88; Scholem 1989; Brecht 1973: 14, 17, 33, 212). Benjamin’s student and friend Adorno’s dialectic of secularization was indeed genuinely dialectical in the sense of a radical, but nevertheless still determinate negation of theological contents in terms of the inverse theology from the depth of the mythos into the profane discourse of the expert cultures, without an idealistic or romantic return (Adorno 1970b; 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1990: 9-18). In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno have a dialectic between myth and enlightenment, faith and reason, which, unlike the bourgeois enlightenment, did not regress again into mythology, exemplified in President Reagan’s and President Bush junior’s political Manichaeism of the good and evil empire, of Armageddon, of the axis of evil, of the rogue nations, of a holy crusade against communists or Muslims, instead of moving on and rescuing in itself some important theological contents (Horkheimer/ Adorno 1951; 1969; 1972; 1984; 2002; Adorno 1997c; Goldstein 2001; 2005). The dialectical theory of religion can continue to integrate dialectically the truth content of the Dialectic of Enlightenment into itself as ongoing practical discourse aiming not at winning a competition among theories but rather at the truth, without in any way becoming aggressive or destructive against the great world religions, in so far as they remain

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faithful toward their own normative beginnings, active and alive, and are good rather than bad religions.

Content and Function In Horkheimer’s critical theory of society, there was at work a dialectic between religion’s emancipatory content and its reactionary pattern maintenance and integrative function for the survival of antagonistic civil society (Horkheimer 1974c: 8, 16, 17-18, 92-93, 96-97, 121-123, 127, 131132, 208, 210-211, 212-213, 218-219, 246-247, 268, 286-287, 516-520; 1987b: 337-338, 350-351, 354-355, 359-360, 381-382, 411-415, 450-452; 1988c: chaps. 6, 16). Horkheimer’s critical theory of society inverted religion’s negative, emancipatory content into a secular, revolutionary form (Ott 2001: 63-63, 66). That Horkheimer had Psalm 91: 2–In you, Eternal One, alone I trust!–written on his gravestone in the Jewish cemetery of Bern, Switzerland, after his death on July 7, 1973, shows how serious he was concerning the critical content of religion, particularly Judaism, up to his death (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 2006; Ott 2001; Siebert 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c: 1-32). In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, the great mistake of the Hegelian Right has been that it has made religion into an integrative factor that helps to fulfill the functional survival requirement of antagonistic bourgeois society, and turned its critical content into ideology, understood as false consciousness and as the masking of particular national, race, and class interests for the sake of its assigned function (Weber 1952; 1963: chaps. VI, VII, VIII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI; 1969; 1978; 1992; 2002: 203-221; Wach 1961; Berger 1990; Yinger 1969; Luhmann 1977a; 1977b; 1997; 1999; 2000; Parsons 1964: chaps. 1 and 2; 1965: chaps. 1 and 2; O’Dea 1966; Goldstein 2006; Ott 2007). In the view of the dialectical theory of religion, the great mistake of the Hegelian Left has been to interpret religion homogenously rather than contradictorily and dialectically, and thus, not to differentiate sharply enough between good religion, which demands the change of the evil social conditions, and bad religion which gilds, beautifies, and idealizes them, and justifies them mythologically and ideologically, and mystifies them as fate (Marx 1961a: 84-86, 389, 653, 759; 1964: 4-5, 26-27, 40, 6869, 107, 108; 1964b: 41-60; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; Niebuhr 1932; 1964; 1987; Schmidt 1972; Eco/Cardinal Martini 1997; Siebert 2001: 327, 484). According to the dialectical theory of religion, the critical theological content of good religion can only be rescued by being rediscovered in the depth of secularization itself. In his Negative Dialectics, Adorno at-

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tempted to radically, but nevertheless determinately negate the theological elements in the traditional dialectic: to critique, but also to preserve, elevate, and fulfill them (Adorno 1973b). Jürgen Habermas, as the current flag bearer of critical theory, has in recent years intensified his interest towards religion. As a die hard modernist and enlightener, he argues that religion is no longer capable of providing a coherent worldview, but it still has–in an external sociological perspective–a function in modern civil and socialist society for normalizing the explosive experiential contents of extra-everyday events (Habermas 1981a & b; 1984b; 1988a: 5960; 1992: 51; 2006a: 46-47). Religion still holds its own in an increasingly secular environment and coexists with philosophy, which has ceased to be transcendent, but has now become post-metaphysical in a post-secular society. Of course, Habermas has not turned into a church father as some theologians in Europe think. Habermas continues to engage in a methodological atheism. For Habermas, the religious world views have–in an internal philosophical perspective–become incoherent and obsolete because they can no longer really fulfill their proper task, namely, to explain and to resolve theoretically and practically the theodicy problem in the face of the horror and terror of the 20th and 21st centuries: Auschwitz and Treblinka, Hamburg and Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, etc. (Leibnitz 1996: vol. 1 and 2; Hegel 1986l: 28-40; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 20, 248, 455; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37, 40; Habermas 1982: 245-247; 1986: 53-55; Oelmüller 1990; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Peukert 1976: 278-280; Küng 1991a; 1991b: 726-730). In Habermas’s view, postsecular does not mean that the secularization process in civil or socialist society has come to its end, but rather that the religions disappear at a slower pace than some of the enlighteners–such as Marx or Freud–had hoped for and predicted (Marx 1953: chaps. III, VIII; Freud 1962; 1964; Küng 1978; 1990a). In Habermas’s perspective, philosophy is not yet able to replace or to repress religion because its language cannot yet compete with the still most appelative, most inspiring, semantic, theological contents and the power of expression, not only of the artistic, but also of the religious language (Adorno 1970b; 1997j/2: 618-616; Benjamin 1996: 1774, 595-678; Habermas 1988a: 59-60, 278-279; 1991a: part III; 2002; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Theunissen 1982; 1983). Despite all these contributions to the academic study of religion by the Frankfurt School, for the most part it has been ignored in the traditional sociology of religion. This deficiency should be corrected through a productive discourse, in which the real meaning of language is the truth and nothing

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than the truth, between the traditional, non-dialectical, positivistic sociology of religion and the critical theory of religion (Light/Wilson 2004; Goldstein 2006; Ott 2007).

Patterns of Secularization The traditional, non-dialectical, positivistic sociology of religion in Europe and America, which has been accused of having a linear theory of secularization, has been receptive to more dialectical approaches even though it has ignored the critical theory of society and religion, and excluded it from its discourse (Warner 1993: 1052). There was broad agreement among members of the traditional sociology of religion that secularization was not merely a linear process (Parsons 1964: chap. I, esp. 114; 1965: chap. I; Luckmann 1967: 36; Martin 1969: 6; Fenn 1978: 39; Siebert 1980). Aside from the linear, one can find three other patterns in the traditional sociology of religion: the cyclical/spiral, the dialectical, and the paradoxical. Bellah, Berger, and Luckmann made use of a pre-Hegelian, pre-Marxian, pre-Adornoian dialectics, but did not explicitly apply it to the theories of secularization (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986c: 74-77; 1986e: 48-53; 1986p: 9-88; Marx 1961a: 17-18; Horkheimer 1985l: 286-287; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1970b; 1973b; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1987; 1995; 2001; O’Regan 1994; Taylor 1975; Weiss 1974; Bellah 1975; Berger 1967; Luckmann 1967). Wilson, Martin, and Fenn had explicit dialectical theories of secularization, but also understood dialectics in the pre-Hegelian sense (Hegel 1986c: 74-77; 1986e: 48-53; Marx 1961a: 17-18; Horkheimer 1985l: 286-287; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1973b; 1979b; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1987; Wilson 1966; Martin 1969; Fenn 1978). Parsons and Luhmann did not only avoid using the term dialectics, but also the Hegelian or Marxian dialectical method itself (Hegel 1986c: 74-77; 1986e: 48-53; Marx 1961a: 17-18; Horkheimer 1985l: 286-287; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1970b; 1973b; Parsons 1971; Luhmann 2000). It is obviously very hard to build a bridge between the Hegelian Left, which thinks dialectically and in revolutionary terms and represents the interests of the working classes, on one hand, and the Hegelian Right, which thinks positivistically and in counter-revolutionary terms, and represents the interests of the bourgeois classes, on the other (Hegel 1986c: 74-77; 1986e: 48-53; Marx 1961a: 17-18; Horkheimer 1985l: 286-287; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1973b; Marcuse 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1970b; a; 1987; Löwith 1967; Bellah 1975; Berger 1967; Luckmann 1967; App. E, F).

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Not even Parsons’ evolutionary theory, which the third youth movement forced him to add to his structural-functional system theory in the late 1960s after 30 years of mere system thinking, is dialectical in the traditional, not to speak of the Hegelian-Marxian form (Hegel 1986c: 74-77; 1986e: 48-53; Marx 1961a: 17-18; Horkheimer 1985l: 286-287; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; Marcuse 1960; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1970b; 1987; 1995; 2001; Parsons 1964; 1965).

Neo-Secularization Theory Recently several sociologists of religion, who can be grouped together in a neo-secularization approach have articulated a so-called dialectical theory of secularization as a way out of the impasse over the secularization debate (Yamane 1997; Dobbelaere 1999: 244; Gorski 2000: 159-162; Demerath 2001: 215; Martin 2005: 3, 8). However, the arguments by the neo-secularization theorists in favor of a dialectical theory of secularization have been only brief and none of the dialectical models that they propose is historical idealist or historical materialist: and how could it be otherwise on the Hegelian Right or even in the Hegelian Center which are opposed to qualitative development in family, society, state, international relations or culture, particularly religion (Hegel 1986c: 74-77; 1986e: 48-53; Marx 1961a: 17-18; Horkheimer 1985l: 286-287; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1970b; 1973b Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1970b; 1973; 1987; Parsons 1964; 1965; Yamane 1997; Dobbelaere 1999: 244; Gorski 2000: 159-162; Demerath 2001: 215; Martin 2005: 3, 8). Mark Chaves’s and Christian Smith’s fusion of secularization theory and social-movement theory holds the most potential for the theory of secularization (Chaves 1993, 1994; Smith 2003). Where Smith and Chaves of course stop short is the application of the Hegelian-Marxian-Adornoian dialectical logic to religious and social movements promoting or resisting religious rationalization and secularization (Hegel 1986c: 74-77; 1986e: 48-53; Marx 1961a: 17-18; Horkheimer 1985l: 286-287; Adorno 1932; 1951; 1952; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1970b; 1973b; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1987; 1995; 2001). This is precisely the direction in which the critical theory of religion is moving. A dialectical theory of secularization, which is based on a historical sociology of religious and social movements, can provide a way out of the impasse in the secularization debate between the traditional, positivistic sociology of religion and the new dialectical theory of religion.

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In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, one of the major problems with the debate over secularization is that many who have sought to disprove that the process is occurring have done so along quantitative rather than qualitative lines (Hegel 1986p: 9-88; Marx 1961a: 17-18; Adorno 1951; 1952; 1970a; 1970b; 1973b: 300-408; 1976; 1997j/2: 608-616; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000a; 2000b; Habermas 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007). The dialectical theory of religion, while being aware of the occasional usefulness of positivistic methodologies, is also acutely aware of their limitations (Hegel 1986p: 9-88; Marx 1961: Vol. I, 17-18; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1970b; 1987; 1995; 2001; Adorno 1951; 1952; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1970b; 1973b: 300-408; 1976; 1997j/2: 608-616; 2000a; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d; Habermas 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007). Those attempting to refute the theory of secularization assume that it was taking place in a merely linear manner (Warner 1993: 1052; Stark and Finke 2006). Thus far, quantitative data analysis has only been capable of establishing quantitative, linear relationships. If secularization is a dialectical process in the sense of a concrete supersession of the sacred into the profane, then in order to prove or disprove it, it would need to be operationalized. However, not all relationships are capable of operationalization. If secularization occurs on an individual, familial, societal, political, historical and cultural level, then at least in a positivistic perspective secularization as qualitative differentiation is not capable of operationalization and thus cannot be proven or disproven (Dobbelaere 2002; Smith 2003: 7). The non-dialectical, positivistic sociologists of religion find themselves in an aporetical situation.

Denominational Differences The in itself secular critical theory of religion looks at denominatonal differences through a dialectical conflict approach (Hegel 1986p: 9-88; Marx 1961a: 17-18; Niebuhr 1987; Marcuse 1966; 1969; 1987; Adorno 1951; 1952; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1970b; 1973b 300-408; 1976; 1997j/2: 608-616; 2000a; Habermas 2001a; 2002; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; Coser 1956; Dahrendorf 1959; Collins 1975; Menke 1996; App. E). Whereas Stark and Bainbridge have taken church-sect theory and interpreted secularization as a self-limiting process, the critical theory of religion, here following Bryan Wilson, sees a dialec-

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tic at work between church and sect (Stark and Bainbridge 1985; Wilson 1966). The dialectical theorist of religion finds the distant basis for this in the work of Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, and Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr (Weber 1952; 1962; 1963; 1969; 1978; 1992; 2002: 203-220; Troeltsch 1912; 1992; Niebuhr 1932; 1964; Niebuhr 1987). First, as always, the dilectical religiologist reads the texts of Weber, Troeltsch, and the Niebuhrs, in their economic, social, and historical contexts. Weber, Troeltsch and the Niebuhrs were most intensely engaged in discourse with historical materialism: to be sure, in order to overcome it in a secular or a religious way (Weber 1952; 1962; 1963; 1969; 1978; 1992; 2002: 203-220; Troeltsch 1912; 1992; Niebuhr 1932; 1964; Niebuhr 1987; Marcuse 1960; 1961; Habermas 1976). They were arguing against economic determinism and for the influence of religious ideas and values and norms on social action. They wanted to turn upside down once more idealstically Marx’s basesuper-structure theory, which definitely is in need of critical modification and reconstruction (Bloch 1971; Fromm 1967; Habermas 1976). Troeltsch in particular was arguing against Karl Kautsky, that Christianity was not merely the result of a class struggle (Troeltsch 1912; 1992: 39). However, Troeltsch did see Christianity as driven by its own inner dialectic and its otherworldliness, as a response to the loss of hope among the lower classes under Roman occupation of Palestine and in the Roman Empire in general (Hegel 1986q: 286-306; Troeltsch 1912; 1992: 48; Menke 1996). Indeed, Jesus was not Spartacus, or even Barrabas, or Bar Kochbar! Troeltsch’s church-sect theory explained the differences between church and sect in social class terms: the church both stabilizes and determines the social order; in so doing, however, she becomes dependent upon the upper classes, and upon their development. The sects, on the other hand, are connected with the lower classes, or at least with those elements in society which are opposed to the state and to society; they work upward from below, and not downwards from above (Troeltsch 1912; 1992: 331; App. E).

Likewise, Weber’s Ancient Judaism like Kautsky’s Foundations of Christianity engaged in a class analysis of the Hebrew Bible and Judaism, and the New Testament and Christianity (Weber 1952; 1993: chaps. III, VI, VII, VIII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI; Kautsky 1925; App. E). Niebuhr, who like his friend Paul Tillich was a Religious or Christian Socialist–something Adorno considered to be impossible–looked at denominational differences on the basis of class, region, race, and ethnicity. Niebuhr saw sects as religious movements, which were class based (Niebuhr 1929/1987: 29-30; 1964). What is remarkable is how this has all become so whitewashed and sanitized

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by the neo-conservative rational choice approach (Goldstein 2006). Stark and Bainbridge have de-dialecticized the church-sect theory by turning it into a pendulum (Stark/Bainbridge 1985). While Stark, Finke and Bainbridge did see churches as moving from higher to lower tension due to the secularizing influences of wealth, they did not make sense of the paradox that the more affluent classes belonged to this-worldly lower tension denominations and that the less affluent and less educated classes were more otherworldly. Stark, Finke and Bainbridge also did not explain the so-called dialectical relationship between church and sect in terms of class structure. More recently, Stark and Finke with their idealized market approach of rational choice, rather than trying to make sense of the role that class relations play in religion, have downplayed it (Goldstein 2006; Stark/ Finke 2000: 32). Of course, such pendulum dialectics has nothing to do with the dialectics of Hegel, Marx, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno or Baloch (Hegel 1986c: 73-77; 1986e: 48-53; 1986p: 9-88; Marx 1961a: 17-18; Horkheimer 1985l: 286-287, 483-492; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1970b; 1987; Adorno 1951; 1952; 1962; 1963; 1966: 300-408; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1970b; 1973b; 1973e; 1966: 300-408; 1976; 1997j/2: 608-616; 2000; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1979; Horkheimer 1985l: 286-287483-492; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Marcuse 1966).

Culture Wars According to the dialectical theory of religion, the culture wars that exist in the United States today–February 2010–between liberals on the Left and neo-conservatives on the Right, are still based on denominational differences, which continue to correlate with social class, education, race, region, and ethnicity, although the boundaries are presently rather fluid (Roof/McKinney 1987; Wuthnow 1988; Hunter 1991). In Europe, the American liberal Left would still be on the Right. What today is called liberalism was an atomistic, individualistic social and political philosophy, which President Roosevelt socially modified in 1934 on the basis of the principle of subsidiary, which was taken from the Papal Social Encyclical Letter Quadragesimo Anno of 1931. What today is called neo-conservativism or neo-liberalism is a regression to liberalism before it was socially modified in 1934, and is therefore again without the principle of subsidiary, as well as of the principles of solidarity and social justice. That has become painfully obvious, for example, when the neo-conservative second Bush Administration was faced with the hurricane and flood catastrophe of

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New Orleans. Both forms of liberalism, the Roosevelt liberalism and the older neo-conservativism or neo-liberalism were originally rooted in the Protestant-Evangelical Paradigm of Christianity (Küng 1994a: 602, 741; 1994b). In the meantime, both forms of liberalism have become secularized. However, in spite of the fact that the economic and social policies of the Right and of the Left, of the neo-conservative Republicans and of the liberal Democrats, are usually entirely secular, they still try sometimes to appear religious and as standing up for religious values and norms: on the Right even more so than on the Left. Not only neo-conservative Republicans, but also liberal Democrats want to appeal to that part of the electorate that still holds on to praxis-relevant religious beliefs, values and norms, particularly before local, state and federal elections, in order to get as many votes as possible. Nobody wants to appear as totally secular, no matter how profane everybody may have become already in reality for all practical purposes of economics and politics. The bourgeoisie had an ambiguous relationship to religion from its very start in Homer’s Odyssey (Homer 1922; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 50-87). For the bourgeoisie, religion has always been a matter of pragmatics, long before American pragmatism arose. For all practical purposes, there are only two bourgeois parties in the United States. There is no viable labor party as in other Western countries. The interests of 180 million American workers are politically represented by two bourgeois parties. The antagonism between the Right and the Left, neo-conservativism and liberalism, Republicans and Democrats in present day America is the political source for the culture wars today particularly before and after the Presidential elections of 2008 (App. E, F).

Denominational Differences Contrary to Stark’s pendulum focus on the unchurched becoming churched, Roof and McKinney found the movement was rather from neoconservative to liberal to outright secular (Roof/McKinney 1987: 170; App. F). Denominational differences expressed themselves politically. The division between Red States and Blue States was based on denominational divisions (Pew Forum 2005). In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, paradoxically enough, what needs to be made more sense of are the more conservative tendencies of less affluent whites and the more liberal and secular tendencies of more affluent whites. This can be explained through issues of education, mass media, and consciousness (Wuthnow 1988; Horkheimer and Adorno 1976; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; Adorno 1997b;

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1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997h; 1997i; 1997j/1; 1997j/2; 1997t/1; 1997t/2; 1997u; Adorno/Frankel-Brunswick/Levison/Sandford1950; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Lukács 1971; 1979). Marx’s opium quotation has been taken out of context and misunderstood (Marx 1964: 41-60; Bloch 1972: 62; McKinnon 2006). This is particularly true of Stark and Finke (Stark/Fink 2000: 32). Marx argued that religion was not only opium of the people but also the sigh of the oppressed creature, and the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions (Marx 1964: 43-44). For Marx, religious suffering was at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering (Marx 1964: 43-44; 1964: 43-441974: 244). Marx argued that before one could engage in a critique of the material conditions, one must first engage in a critique of religion, because this stood in the way of objectively seeing material reality. According to Marx, the premise of all criticism was the criticism of religion” (Marx 1964: 41-60; 1977: 53). It is such a framework that can help the critical theorist of religion make sense of the paradoxical alliance between the “Mods” and the “Cons;” between the economically affluent moderate Republicans and the economically depressed blue collar workers, who have turned to evangelicalism and fundamentalism to help themselves cope with their problems. They have been manipulated with the use of religious issues–abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research–into supporting economic, political and military issues, such as the wars against Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq–that are against their religion as well as against their own economic and political interests (Frank 2005). The working classes suffer from a false consciousness, which is the product not only of the continual, immediate stream of bourgeois advertisements and propaganda, to which they are exposed via the mass media and mass culture, and culture industry, which has turned enlightenment into mass fraud, but also, and much more so, of the whole deformation of history as learning process through contemporary global monopoly and oligopoly capitalism, by which and for which they have been completely blinded (Lukacs 1971; 1979; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 17; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 128-177; Honneth 1990; 1994; 2007; Niclauss 2007: 78-80). The Christian Right has entered into an alliance with the ultra conservative corporate ruling class (Adorno 1997i/1: 7-142; 1997j/2: 608-616; Goldstein 2005: 57-114; 2006: 61-114; Meyer 2008; 5356; Domhoff 2006).

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The Spectre of Liberation The critical theory of religion focuses on the social psychological aspects of religion (Freud 1939: 101; 1962; 1964; Horkheimer 1985l: 172-183; 294296; Fromm 1932a; 1932b; 1950; 1959; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1980a; 1980b; 1992; Adorno/Frankel/Brunswick/Levinson/Sanford 1950: Part IV; Petuchowski 1956: 543-594). Freud saw religion as a response to traumatic experiences (Freud 1939: 101; 1962; 1964). Religion, according to Feuerbach, was based on alienation (Feuerbach 1957; 1996). For Feuerbach, God was a projection of the alienated self (Feuerbach 1957; 1996; Bloch 1972: 59). However, in the perspecive of the dialectical theory of religion, in providing communicative interaction and community, religion was also an attempt to overcome that alienation (Arens 2007). The repression–understood in the technical Freudian sense–of the Christian freedom message played only a minor role in the institutionalization of Christianity (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6; John 18: 28-40; Freud 1939; 1961; 1964; Bloch 1972; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97, 316-320; 1988c: chaps. 4, 5, 16; 1988d: chaps. 2, 5, 6, 7, 11; Marcuse 1962: 65-66; 1970: 3-10; Breines 1970; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2008a; 2008b; 2008c; 2008f). The transformation of the original, liberating theological thought, idea, or content of the Gospels, summed up in the so-called Sermon on the Mount, the deflection from the original liberating theological objective, the kingdom of God, took place in the broad daylight of history. Equally open was the armed struggle of institutionalized Christianity against the heretics, who tried, or allegedly tried, to rescue the unsublimated liberating theological thought, idea or content, and the unsublimated liberating theological objective of the Gospels. There were supposedly good rational motives behind the bloody wars against the Christian revolutions, which filled the Christian era of world history. However, the cruel and organized slaughter of the Anabaptists, Enthusiasts, particularly Thomas Münzer, of slaves, peasants and paupers, who revolted under the sign of the cross, the burning of witches and of their defenders–this sadistic extermination of the weak people suggested that unconscious instinctual forces broke through all the rationality and rationalizations again (Engels 1967; Bloch 1972; Marcuse 1962: 64-65). The executioners and their bands of lynch mobs fought the specter of a liberation, which they desired and longed for, but which they were compelled to reject. The crime against the Son had to be forgotten in the killing of those, whose practice recalled the original crime: the murder of the poor Christ by the rich and powerful people (John 18-20; Hegel 1986q: 241-298; Fromm 1992; Reich 1976; Siebert

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2007a; 2007b; 2997c; 2007d; 2008a; 2008b; 2008c; 2008d; 2008e). It took centuries of progress and domestication before the return of the repressed was mastered by the power of the modern industrial civilization (Fromm 1976: 202; Marcuse 1962: 64-65). Yet at its late stage, its rationality seemed to explode in another return of the repressed: in the form of international fascism and neo-fascism (Adorno 1979: 397-433; 1997; Fromm 1973: chap. 13; 1976: 202; Marcuse 1962: 64-65; 1966: 389-420). The image of liberation, which had become increasingly realistic in the socialist revolutions, was persecuted the world over by brown and red fascism. Concentration and labor and death camps, the trial and tribulations of non-conformists, released a hatred and fury that indicated the total mobilization against the return of the repressed. As the early Frankfurt School was concerned with the rise of fascism, today the critical theory of religion is equally as concerned with the rise of fundamentalism, whether it be Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or Hindu, and the related neo-conservativism and neoliberalism and the over all dominant positivism (Marcuse 1962: 64-65; Adorno 1980a; 1980b; 1980c; 1982; Habermas 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2004a; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; Borradori 2003; Satrakian 2008; Küng 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2008a; 2008b; 2000c; 2008d; 2008e). It takes the Frankfurt analysis of the authoritarian personality and applies it to the clerico-fascism of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Islamic Fundamentalism (Adorno/Frenkel-Brunswick/Levinson/Sanford 1950; Langman 2006; Küng 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/ Bechert 1984; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2997c; 2007d; 2008a; 2008b; 2000c; 2008d; 2008e; App. E). While not arguing that all forms of religiosity are associated with the authoritarian personality, the critical theory of religion sees, nevertheless, that religious fundamentalism as an idealized, romantic conception of the past that seeks a return to traditional gender relations (Stark 2000: 12-13, 18). It sees fundamentalism as a reaction to modernity. Religious believers, threatened by modern enlightenment, fear to lose their center and hold in life, and instead of breaking through higher criticism forward to a second naivite, they try to return to the religion of their forebears, interpreting their sacred texts literally, which they may seldom have done. Like nationalism, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. The critical theory of religion is particularly concerned with more militant, terroristic forms of Islamicism, but nevertheless sees them as a resistance to Westernization (Habermas 2001a; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006c; 2007; Borradori 2003; Ammerman 1987, Tibi 2002, Lewis 2003; Setrakian 2008: 1-3).

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Truthful Discourse The critical theory of religion, at this moment in history–February 2010– sees no reconciliation between the Hegelian Right–including neo-conservativism, Weberian time diagnoses, liberalism, neo-liberalism, pessimistic anthropology, compensation theory, as well as the philosophy of departure, deconstructionism, reaching from Hegel through Nietzsche to Bataille, Derrida, and Foucault, and the different forms of nationalism and religious fundamentalism–on one hand, and the Hegelian Left–including Western Marxism, American pragmatism, French existentialism, praxis philosophy, occidental rationalism, and Freudianism–on the other (Habermas 1985a; 1985b; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; App. F). However, there can, and must, and should take place an open-dialectical truthful discourse between the Hegelian Right and Left in America and Europe, which is committed to the truth understood as the determinate negation of mythology and ideology, and to the interest of the working classes, who produce the wealth of the nations, which is the basis for the arrival of global alternative Future III–the friendly, free, just and reconciled society, and which must not any longer be wasted for the achievement of global alternative Future I–the totally administered, beaurocratic signal society, or for global alternative Future II–the totally militarized society continually engaged in conventional wars and civil wars, and preparing for a collission and a nuclear war between religion-based civilizations (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34-40, 42; Adorno 1951; 1952; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1997u; 1998b; 200a; 2000b; 2001a; 2001b; 2002a; Benjamin 1996; Flechtheim 1959: 625-634; 1962: 27-34; 1963: 148-150; 1966: 455-464; 1971; Flchtheim/Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1985a; 1985b; 1985e: chaps, 54, 55; Fromm 1980a; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1995; 1997; 2001; Habermas 1983; 1991a; 1991b; 1991c; 1992a; 1992b; 1998; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2003b; 2004a Light/Wilson 2004; Setrakian 2008: 1-3; App. G). In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, where there is no discourse directed toward the truth as the meaning of language, there is war. Who wants to have war, must only avoid discourse. Who wants to have peace, will never cease to seek truthful discourse.

Truth as Meaning of Work and Tool In view of the critical theory of religion, truth is not only the meaning of the human potentials of language and memory but also of the evolution-

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ary universal of work and tool (Hegel 1972; 1976; 1979; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Habermas 1969, 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981a; 1981b; 1984a; 1984b; 1986; 1991b; 1992a). The linguistic turn inside and outside the critical theory of society in the sciences and in the public sphere of the state had been necessary as counterweight against the dominance of the human potential of work and tool in the sphere of civil society as well as in the sciences. However through this linguistic turn the evolutionary universal of work and tool has in no way lost its importance and relevance. That has become particularly obvious again in the present–March 2010–global capitalist crisis with bank crashes, financial market break down, and economic depression, the cause of which is once more–as Marx predicted 150 years ago–massive overproduction, e.g. in the housing market, car market, computer market, etc. due to a lack of planning, policing, regulation by the state, and too much privatization, and due to the functionalization of the state by civil society, the state as an instrument of the capitalist ruling class to the very borderline of corporatism, and due to the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Georgia, etc., and which have been far from being sporty, but rather more like hell and also showed traces of fascist behavior particularly in Abu Ghraib and Gutanamo Bay (Marx 1961: Vol. I, 618, 668-669; Meng 2008: 9-11; Asmussen 2008: 12-15; Hillebrand 2008: 16-17; Thies 2008: 18-20; Negt 2008: 62-65; Creveld 2008; Gewen 2008; Nobecaurt 2008; Geier 2008: 10-17; App. C, D, E, F, G).

Return of Marxism Since the beginning of the capitalist disaster in September 2008, many people in Germany and elsewhere take Karl Marx from the shelves of the libraries again (Hegel 1986g; Kamenka 1983; Marx 1871; 1906; 1953; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1963; 1964; 1974; 1977; Marx/Engels 1960; 205). They find out that Marx, whose theory, historical materialism, was rooted in the human potential of work and tool, had signified money as commodity fetish and had warned that the activities of the international finance jugglers would inescapably bring about a financial crisis. Even the German Finance Minister, Peter Steinbrück, stated, that Marx may not have been entirely wrong with his crisis theory. The Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Reinhard Marx, has published a book with the title Das Kapital, in which he writes about Karl Marx and the connection between money, greed, and sin. The Archbishop was asked in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung: who should detain and check and hold or keep back

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the actual destructive forces of the capitalist economic system? The politicians? The Church? The Archbishop answered: The reason of the human beings! The Archbishop confessed, that here he was formed by the enlightenment which after all had Christian roots. The Archbishop saw the whole history of Christianity and he started from a realistic image of man, from his ability to differentiate between good and evil, right and wrong. For the Archbishop, this his understanding of enlightenment meant, that the human beings could learn from crises. It meant, that in the present economic crisis, people could begin to build a social market economy, which follows one goal: man must stand in the center! Of course, not all theologians agree with such Left Wing position. Thus already in 1979, Johannes Baptist Metz, a student of Karl Rahmer, the father of the new political theology and of the liberation theology, who has also learned much from the Frankfurt School, was prevented by the then Archbishop of Munich, Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, a bitter opponent of the liberation theology, from becoming professor at the theological faculty of the University of Munich (Metz 1959; 1962; 1963; 1965; 1967; 1969; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975a; 1977; 1980; 1995; 1997; 1998; 2006; Ratzinger 1994; 2004; 2007; Ratzinger/Peras 2006; Habermas/ Ratzinger 2006). An open dissension happened between the former two German Council theologians: Metz on the Left and Ratzinger on the Right. However the former Cardinal Ratzinger did not only try to marginalize the new political theologian Metz on the Hegelian Left, but also even the liberal theologian Hans Küng in the Hegelian Center, likewise a former Council theologian from Switzerland, through taking away from him the right to teach as a Catholic theologian in December 1978 (Küng 1965; 1970; 1972; 1976; 1980; 1981b; 1987; 1989; 1990b; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 2003; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008; Metz 1959; 1962; 1963; 1965; 1967; 1969; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975a; 1977; 1980; 1995; 1997; 1998; 2006; .Ratzinger 1994; 2004; 2007; Ratzinger/Peras 2006; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; App. E, F).

Stateism In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the capitalist disaster of 2008 is particularly dramatic and deep and hard to handle in America, since many Americans oppose European stateism, and have learned to rank the bourgeois higher than the citoyen, or mix them both up, and civil society higher than the state, which in its evolution has stayed behind bourgeois society, and to respect the businessman more than the demo-

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cratically elected political representatives and the government (Marx 1961: Vol. I, 618, 668-669; Meng 2008: 9-11; Asmussen 2008: 12-15; Hillebrand 2008: 16-17; Thies 2008: 18-20; Negt 2008: 62-65; Creveld 2008; Gewen 2008; Nobecaurt 2008; Geier 2008: 10-17; Merseburger 2008: 68-79; Harpprecht 2008; App. C, D, E). Even if the bourgeois turns into a citizen and takes a state office, the citizen has a hard time to control the bourgeois in himself: like the former–December 2008–Governor Blagojevich of Illinois who was arrested and indicted for having tried to sell to the highest bidder the U.S. Senate seat of his state, which had been vacated by the President elect Barack Obama: the private interest and good triumphed over the common interest and good, The importance of the human universal of work and tool as foundation of civil society has become newly manifest through the very fact that since September 2008 U.S. Senators and television pundids, both in the service of the American capitalist ruling class, continually blame the labor unions and the 180 million American workers instead of themselves for the present American and global catastrophe of capitalism: once more the victims are guilty. As important and necessary as the linguistic turn has been for the evolution of the critical theory of society, and for the sciences and for the discourse in the public sphere of the state, it must nevertheless not be forgotten that truth is not only the meaning of the human potentials of language and memory, and of the struggle for recognition, but also of the evolutionary universal of work and tool, and that the main objective of historical materialism has been to overcome the class-antagonism in modern civil society not only through public discourse but also through revolutionary class conflict between labor and capital, which is first of all a fight for food, clothing and housing, but then of course also a language-mediated struggle for recognition and for alternative Future III–the emancipation of the working class as well as the genuine liberation of the dominant bourgeoisie and the capitalist ruling class–the freedom of All (Hegel 1986a: 209; 1986c: 19, 152, 431, 433, 439, 440-441; 198d: 486; 1986g: 50, 339-398; 1986j: 227; 1986s: 113; 1986t: 331, 503; Marx 1964: 4-5, 26-27, 40, 41-60, 68-69, 107, 108; Niebuhr 1932; 1964; Miranda 1971; Lischer 1979; Gutierrez 1971: 29-30, 31, 40/26/29/30, 187, 216, 219-220, 222, 244/59, 249, 284/51; App. A, C, D, E, F, G). Once more in the present economic depression it is the working class, which as the real producer of wealth, has to carry the main burden of suffering: the loss of millions of jobs, pensions, health insurance, homes, lack of education, etc. (Geier 2008: 10-17).

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Labor and Capital In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, since 1998 the USA has lost its competitive position on the world market (Geier 2008: 16-17; App. C, D, F). Now in March 2010 it will have to begin to restructure, which will involve attempting to raise the rate of exploitation: increasing productivity while lowering the wages and benefits even further. The wage and benefit reduction for workers has happened already in the American autoindustry. Here wages have already been cut in half in many cases. The United States will become a cheap labor country compared to its competitors. The auto wages in the USA are probably about a third of what they are in Germany. The minimum wage in the USA is half of what it is in Britain, France, Germany and Ireland. In the past 25 years the contradictions of neo-liberalism have increased the immiseration and the poverty of the American working class. In order to get out of the present capitalist crisis, the American ruling class is going to attack worker’s living standards even further. On December 12, 2008 neoliberal U.S. Senators asked the auto workers’ unions for further sacrifices, and when the unions were unwilling to make them, the U.S. Senate voted down the 40 billion dollars, which the three automakers in Detroit needed to survive. The Senate did this after it had together with the House given–against the old advice of Henry Ford–hundreds of billions of dollars to speculative capital–Wall Street–rather than to productive capital–the auto industry in Detroit. The auto workers either let themselves be exploited even more, or they shall have no work and no income and no pension and no health insurance at all. It is obvious that such a situation cannot be maintained and sustained for long. The collective violation of the Golden Rule in the class struggle will intensify, and so will the practice of the Lex Talionis (Genesis 50: 15-21; Lieber 2001: 308-310; Apresian 2003: 46-64; Geier 2008: 16-17; Siebert 2005a; 2005b; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007e; 2007g; 2008a; 2008c; 2008e; App. F). The Golden Rule and its secular equivalents, the categorical imperative and the a priori of the unlimited communication community demand that civil society develops in itself an economic democracy (Matthew 5-7; Apel 1976b; Negt 2008: 62-65; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981d; 1983; 1984a; 1986; 1988b; 1990; 1991b; 1992a; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 2004).

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In the view of the critical theory of religion, the economic instability of the present historical period is leading to political, philosophical and theological instability (Geier 2008: 6-17; Negt 2008: 62-65; App. F). The working class consciousness may shift in response. Until December 2007 people thought of this depression mainly in terms of the decline of the housing market, and then in the last year in terms of the rise of the food and gasoline prices. Now–in March 2010–peoples’ pensions are being destroyed, i.e. the savings of the American working class are being wiped out by the decline of housing prices, pension funds, etc. Peoples’ incomes are declining, and lay-offs are mounting. All people know that we are in a deep crisis. Nobody has confidence in the corrupt banking system or the broken government. Some people believe in the President Obama, just for the hope of any change at all after the disaster of the second Bush Administration, because there is no faith in existing institutions or in the politicians. It was not so that ordinary people were gung how about the free market. They accepted it. But they did not embrace it. Now people are seeing the total failure of the free market, and that government intervention is necessary. The state must intervene! That is what the banks all say. That is what the capitalist ruling class and its political functionaries and pundits say, aside from increasingly marginal conservatives in the U.S. Senate and in the Fox News media. There has been an enormous shift in terms of what was the prevailing free market ideology that the media and the universities all upheld. They promoted the idea that government intervention is bad, free markets are good, and that unrestrained globalization was the answer to all problems. Now–in March 2010–all of that is collapsing in front of everybody’s eyes: the Jewish billionair George Soros asks for the nationalization of the banks.

Traditional Liberalism What is going to replace the neo-liberalism? (Geier 2008: 6-17; Negt 2008: 62-65). The immediate replacement will be the traditional socially modified Roosevelt liberalism and a new New Deal. The Democrats are coming up with a new economic plan. According to President Obama there will be programs for stimulating the economy through more unemployment benefits and more infrastructure spending. They are to give work to 2,5 million workers. Overall there will be a call for more shared sacrifice. The capitalist ruling class and the billionaires cannot make that call. One

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Jewish billionair, Eric Madoff, has robbed 50 billion dollars from Wall Street and particularly from Jewish charities in California and elsewhere through unpoliced stock market manipulations and was attacked by angry workers when he appeared before a courthouse in New York on December 17, 2008. The liberals and the Democrats are needed to make that appeal for more shared sacrifices. Until now–March 2010–it has been the second Bush Administration that was held responsible for the wars and for the economic disaster: the enemy has been the neo-conservative and neoliberal Right Wing. Now the traditional Roosevelt liberalism will be in power, and what ever it does not accomplish in terms of easing lay-offs, extending unemployment benefits, and stopping foreclosures, will be blamed on the Obama Administration.

Right and Left The present economic crisis does not mean that there are openings only for the Left: the Right will also grow (Marx 1961: Vol. I, 618, 668-669; Meng 2008: 9-11; Asmussen 2008: 12-15; Hillebrand 2008: 16-17; Thies 2008: 18-20; Negt 2008: 62-65; Creveld 2008; Gewen 2008; Nobecaurt 2008; Geier 2008: 6-17; Negt 2008: 62-65; Inkeles 1994b; Dubiel/Friedeburg/ Schumm 1994). In Austria, the far Right emerged with 30 percent of the vote. In Italy, neo-fascists are in the coalition government introducing racist laws against Roma people or gypsies. In South Africa, there was a pogrom against refugees from other African countries. There may be a lot of nasty political moves by the Right. It may not be the traditional Right, but new Right formations that will organize around anti-immigrant racism, protectionism, and other forms of Right-wing populism. On the other hand there is an enormous opening for the Left that has been marginalized since the 1960s and 1970s (Kellner 1989; 1991; 2001; McCarthy 1990; 1994; Benhabib/Bons/McCole 1993; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Apostolidis 2000; Hulot-Kentor 2006; Brändle 1984; Meng 2008: 9-11; Asmussen 2008: 12-15; Hillebrand 2008: 16-17; Thies 2008: 18-20; Negt 2008: 6265; Creveld 2008; Gewen 2008; Nobecaurt 2008; Geier 2008: 6-17; Dubiel 1988; 1992; 1993; 1994; 1995; 1996; 1998). The disaster of the free market makes it easier for the Left to argue about the failure of capitalism and the need for an alternative based on human needs. The free market which supposedly triumphed in the neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1989 and brought the end of history, has led to nothing than misery and the ruin of millions of people, who are mired in poverty, hunger, unemployment, and ill health, but thanks to the free market mania of the past decades, face a

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shredded safety net that does not even begin to address these problems. The immense opening for the Left brings also new possibilities for the critical theory of society and for the dialectical religiology (Marx 1961: Vol. I, 618, 668-669; Horkheimer/Adorno 2002; Benhabib/Bons/McCole 1993; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Apostolidis 2000; Hulot-Kentor 2006; Brändle 1984; Meng 2008: 9-11; Asmussen 2008: 12-15; Hillebrand 2008: 16-17; Thies 2008: 18-20; Negt 2008: 62-65; Creveld 2008; Gewen 2008; Nobecaurt 2008; Geier 2008: 6-17; Kellner 1989; 1991; 2001; McCarthy 1990; 1994; Dubiel 1988; 1992; 1993; 1994; 1995; 1996; 1998).

The Interests of the Owners In the near future people in civil society will also be forced to ask: what does government intervention mean when it is a government not of the workers, nor of the masses of the people, but a government that represents the interests of the bourgeois owners, the bankers, and the industrialists? (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Kamenka 1983; Marx 1871; 1906; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1936; 1964; 1974; Marx/Engels 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970; 1971; 1972; 1975b; 1975c; Fromm 1959; 1966; 1967, 1968; Flechtheim 1959; 1962; 1963; 1971; Flchtheim/Lohmann 2003; Habermas 1976; Apostolidis 2000; Hulot-Kentor 2006; Brändle 1984; Meng 2008: 9-11; Asmussen 2008: 1215; Hillebrand 2008: 16-17; Thies 2008: 18-20; Negt 2008: 62-65; Creveld 2008; Gewen 2008; Nobecaurt 2008; Geier 2008: 6-17; App. C, D, F). The state is being used–sometimes even with religious legitimation–for state capitalistic purposes, in order to reorganize capital, even to curb some of its excesses (Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Habermas 1975; Geier 2008: 6-17; Negt 2008: 62-65). But the state’s aim is to keep capitalism and its productive relations going: relations in which labor is dominated and exploited for the profits of a Few. Part of the restructuring will involve an even harsher attack on working-class living standards. At the same time nationalization or socialization or federalization opens up space for the Left, including the critical theorists of society and the dialectical religiologists to argue against wholesale privatization, which would only lead back to an even deeper crisis, for the defense of public schools against privatization, and even to argue for nationalized, universal health care. But the Left has to be clear that state capitalist nationalization–i.e. the intervention of the state in order to prop up the bankers and the industrialists at the workers expense and without any democratic control over the process–is no great improvement over what went before under neo-liberalism. The traditional Roosevelt liberals or new New Dealers will probably accept that kind of

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state intervention. The Left–including the critical theorists–must demand the kind of state intervention that will come only with mass pressure and control from below, from the working class: intervention to improve health care, education, unemployment benefits, to prevent foreclosure, etc.

Defensive and Offensive In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the Left–including the critical theorists and dialectical religiologists–has to operate on two levels (Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Geier 2008: 16-17; Negt 200862-65; Meng 20078: 9-11; Asmussen 2008: 12-15; Hillebrand 2008: 16-17; Kellner 1989; 1991; 2001; McCarthy 1990; 1994; Dubiel 1988; 1992; 1993; 1994; 1995; 1996; 1998). First a Left has to be rebuilt that is prepared to fight on every front in defense of the working class interests, whether it is against layoffs, against foreclosures, or against cuts in health care, social services and pensions. Second, the Left, including the critical theorists and religiologists, must be prepared to take part in any struggles to defend the interests of the working class, as well as creating a political and philosophical and theological alternative to the free market and its defenders, neo-liberals or liberals. The Left, including the critical theorists and the dialectical religiologists, must utilize the present crisis to conduct a theoretical and practical offensive against capitalism as the private appropriation of collective labor and to argue for a humanist-socialist alternative (Hegel 1986g: 339397; Marx 1871; 1906; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1936; 1964; 1974; Marx/ Engels 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970; 1971; 1972; 1975b; 1975c; Fromm 1959; 1966; 1967, 1968; Flechtheim 1959; 1962; 1963; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Habermas 1976; Apostolidis 2000; HulotKentor 2006; Brändle 1984; Meng 2008: 9-11; Asmussen 2008: 12-15; Hillebrand 2008: 16-17; Thies 2008: 18-20; Negt 2008: 62-65; Creveld 2008; Gewen 2008; Nobecaurt 2008; Geier 2008: 6-17; Kellner 1989; 1991; 2001; McCarthy 1990; 1994; Dubiel 1988; 1992; 1993; 1994; 1995; 1996; 1998). The truth can be found as meaning through the actualization of the human potentials of language and memory and of the struggle for recognition as well as through the evolutionary universal of work and tool (Hegel 1972; 1976; 1979; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1973; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981a; 1981b; 1982; 1983; 1984a; 1986; 1988b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 1999; 2001; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Kellner 1989; 1991; 2001; McCarthy 1990; 1994; Dubiel 1988; 1992; 1993; 1994; 1995; 1996; 1998).

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chapter eighteen Religious Inspirations

In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the truth however not only of the human potentials of language, work, and recognition, but also of the evolutionary universals of sexuality and eroticism, and of nationhood is the global alternative Future III–the rational society, in which all people would be free and would as citizens decide in discourse and in solidarity their common fate–, and ultimately the wholly Other than the most painful imperfections and deficiencies of finite nature, society and history (Isaiah 60-66; Matthew 5-7; Revelation 21-22; Moore 1895; 1901; 1963; Hegel 1969; 1972; 1976; 1979; 1986c: 590-591; 1986l: 133-141; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1996s: 32-74; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985e; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/ Lohmann 2003; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1966b; 1967; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1995; 1997; 2001; Benjamin 1977L chaps 10, 11; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; Honneth 1993; Honneth/Joas 2002; Fraser/Honneth 2003; Kellner 1989; 1991; 2001; McCarthy 1990; 1994; Dubiel 1988; 1992; 1993; 1994; 1995; 1996; 1998; Levi-Strauss 2008; Baron 2008: 66-68; App. G). Like the critical theorists of society and Claude Levi-Strauss and unlike the representatives of the critical rationalism around the Mannheim sociologist and philosopher Hans Albert the dialectical religiologists do not consider religious inspirations for the secular civil society in general with distrust and suspicion (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970a; Levi-Strauss 2008; Baron 2006: 66-68). In any case, the religious inspirations continue. In 2008, in equatorial Africa a tribe discovered a lioness who was peacefully walking and lying down with a young antelope calf for weeks without eating it. The tribe saw a divine miracle in the event and built a religious legend around it: God had suspended the laws of nature and had stopped the continual destruction of the prey by the predator for the sake of the latter’s self-preservation. Jews, Christians, and Muslims may be reminded by the new African legend of their own old Messianiceschatological prophecies: The wolf lives with the lamb, The panther lies down with the kid, Calf and lion cub feed together With a little boy to lead them. The cow and the bear make friends, Their young lie down together. The lion eats straw like the ox. The infant plays over the cobra’s hole; Into the viper’s lair

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The young child puts his hand. They do not hurt, no harm, on all my holy mountain, For the country is filled with the knowledge of Yahweh As the waters swell the sea. (Isaiah 11: 6-9).

Of course, the modern natural sciences have their own theory and explanation: the lioness had been separated from its group and had lost its own cub and thus had substituted the antelope calf for it. That explanation, however, does not necessarily prevent the dialectical religiology to see the extraordinary African event as Messianic cipher pointing toward the wholly Other than nature and history as a mutual eating society without end and all the pain, suffering and death involved (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970a; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Levi-Strauss 2008; Baron 2008: 66-68). Such religious inspiration must not necessarily be distrusted and suspected as being detrimental for modern civil society. It may even be helpful for a desperate modern liberal society in crisis and for its instrumental as well as communicative rationality which has become pathological and defaitistic, because its liberal world view is no longer sufficient and effective for the resolution of new collective problems due to its one-sided, abstract and therefore untrue atomistic orientation, and the individual autonomy, which is in need of being mediated with and balanced by universal, i.e. anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity: otherwise, the end of all reason! (Hegel 1986g; 1986l; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Honneth/Joas 2002; Fraser/Honneth 2003; Lütkehaus 2008b: 70-72; Edmonds/Eidinow 2008). According to an old Chinese proverb, in its head the fish stinks first!

Memoria Passionis For the critical theorist of religion as for the new political theologian Metz in his newest book Memoria Passionis, the God-tiredness has always been a problem as much as the trivial atheism, which can speak of God without to mean him seriously as Nietzsche still did, and which is not the least suspicious that what is for it may not be so in itself (Kaufmann 1986: 95-96; Metz 2006). Also the dialectical religiology is engaged in the memoria passionis against a self-privatization of religious or secular communities, and feels obligated not to forget the innocent victims of nature, society and history and to put itself under the authority of suffering (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Levi-Strauss 2008; Baron 2008: 66-68; Metz

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1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1995; 1997; 1998; 2006; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Metz/Tiemo/Peters 1991; Metz/ Wiesel 1993). In the present transition period from Modernity to PostModernity, religious inspirations may help in the search for a new social and political philosophy to replace liberalism, the philosophy of the late bourgeoisie, which has been bankrupt and obsolete already since the 19th century, and which has because of its abstract atomism unmediated by universal solidarity and consequent untruth lead in the 20th century to socialism as well as to fascism, and for a short time overcame them both, but which can nevertheless bring about in the 21st century either further economic, social, political and religious bankruptcy and in consequence new forms of barbarous corporatism or fascism, based on the aristocratic principle of nature, or new forms of a humanistic socialism, grounded in the Golden Rule or in its secular equivalents (Hegel 1986l: 534, 535; Hitler 1943; Kogon 1995; Horkheimer 1988n: 47, 48, 49-50, 54-55, 59, 59-60, 67, 67-68, 68-69, 69-70, 72, 72-74, 76-77, 78, 79, 89, 90-91, 92, 94, 9899, 100-102, 102-103, 106-108, 112-114, 115-116, 117, 123-124, 126-128, 128-131, 131-133, 137-139, 141, 143-144, 144-145, 151-152, 153-154, 155, 164-165, 166-172, 204, 208-210, 215, 228, 240, 247-248, 273-274, 276-277, 284, 302-303, 310-311, 313-314, 318, 327-328, 330, 332, 338, 348-349, 350-361, 365-366, 378-379, 380, 384-385, 404-405, 406-408, 413, 419-420, 427-428, 428-429, 431-432, 433-436, 436-440, 445-447, 447-448, 449-451, 452-453, 456-457, 458-459, 471-474, 475-477, 481, 483-484, 486-487, 493-495, 497, 509-513, 513-518, 520, 521-522, 523-524, 535-536, 536-537, 540; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1957; 1960b; 1966c; 1967, 1968; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1981; 1990; 1995; 2001; Fromm/Xirau 1979; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1975; 1976; 1978c; 1981d; 1984a; 1985a; 1985b; 1987; 1988a; 1988b; 1990; 1991c; 1992a; 1992b; 1995; 1998; 2001a; 2001b; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert/1984; Küng/ Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008). However, liberalism is a necessary stage of human history and cannot be leaped over, jumped over, or skipped on the way to global alternative Future III– the realm of freedom mediated through solidarity, and toward the wholly Other than the horror and terror of nature and history: the liberal epoch of history must rather be worked through and fought through to the end, and while its lack of solidarity must be criticized, its emanicipation of the individual must be rescued, preserved, elevated and fulfilled through being reconciled with universal solidarity: no man is an island! (Hegel 1986g; 1986q; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975b; 1985b; 1985e; Marx 1961c: 873-874; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988n:

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236; 1989m: chaps. 6, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 24, 25, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37; 1996s: 32-75; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Habermas 1976; 1986; 1992a; App. E, G).

chapter nineteen

Religion in Liberal Society In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, life and religion in the European and American abstractly, i.e. atomistically liberal society of the 19th and 20th centuries and even still the 21st century up to the global economic depression of 2008, 2009, 2010, when the whole neo-liberal free market idolatry crashed–like the ancient gods made by man out of wood, stone or clay who had eyes but could not see and who had ears but could not hear and who had legs but could not walk, had once been dissolvedand up to the connected environmental or ecological problems, can be most concretely portrayed in terms of anamnestic solidarity and as theodicy through the practical experiences of working class immigrant families driven by the insatiable longing for the wholly Other, including the utopian dream and deep yearning to leave the Old World and to enter the New World (Hegel 1986l: 107-115, 491-540; Kamenka 1983: 115-125; Marx 1971; 1906; 1953; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1963; 1964; 1974; 1977; Marx/Engels 1960; 2005; Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; 1974c: 167-168; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Habermas 1986: 53-54; 2006c; Fromm 1950; 1957; 1959; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; Lundgren 1998; App. C, D, E, G). Here, in the spirit of the critical theory of religion as discourse, understood as future-oriented remembrance of human suffering with the practical intent to diminish it and of anamnestic solidarity, I would like to remember and to introduce specifically the tragic stories of the two working-class emigrant families of Johannes Kraus and Margaret Kraus, née Splindler, and of Ludwig Peter Krauss and Charlotte Krauss, née Frei, the great-grandparents of my late wife Margaret Charlotte Siebert, née Noyes, who died from cancer in London, Ontario, Canada, on October 20, 1978, and the great-great-great-grandparents of our eight children, and the great-great-great-great-grandparents of our fourteen grandchildren (Krauss 1880; Kraus 1990; Horkheimer 1972; 1974c: 167-168; Held 1984; Siebert 2001: chap. 3; 2002a: 29-32, chaps. 2, 6).

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chapter nineteen Two Immigrant Families

The Johannes Kraus and the Ludwig Krauss families emigrated from the working class in the German, less liberal capitalist society, from Neuenstadt and Heilbronn, and from villages in Bavaria, to the working class in the American extremely liberal bourgeois society, known to be full of unlimited possibilities at the time of their emigration around the middle of the 19th century: to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cumberland, and Martinsburg (Hegel 1986l: 107-115; Krauss 1880; Kraus 1880; Horkheimer 197c: 167-168; Held 1984; Siebert, 2001: chap. III; 2002a: 29-32, chaps. 2, 6; App. C, D, G). The European and the American civil societies were globalizing already in the 19th century and they have continued to globalize ever since throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century and possibly into global alternative Future III–a world democracy: prepared by the domestication of the self-destructive finance market capitalism, which can not balance greed with fear, and which Brecht had once called Rockefeller capitalism and Las Vegas culture, and by the overcoming of the mass poverty in the developing countries and of the social antagonisms in the developed, rich countries, and by the replacement of fossil and atomic resources through renewable energy sources (Hegel 1986g: 339-514; 1986l: 491-540; Maresch 2008: 68-70; Kittsteiner 2007; Kamenka 1983: 505-557; Zinn 1999; Klein 2007; Perkins 2004; 2007; Kinzler 2006; Clinton 2004; Blackwater 2007; Buchanan 2006; Scherer 2008: 75-78; Hofmann 2008: 78-79; Zöpel 2008; Schumann/Grife 2008; App. E, G). While both working class families where driven by their longing for America as the land of the future and its promises of liberty and happiness, they also shared the yearning for the invisible Eternal One, symbolized for them through the image and notion of the kingdom of God as presented in the forms of the Roman Catholic and the Protestant Evangelical Paradigms of Christianity: the not yet demythologized, wholly Other than the world as valley of tears (Psalm 91; Luke 14: 16; John 18: 33-40; Eckhart 1963: 241-245; Hegel 1986a: 417, 344-345; 1986c: 169; 1986e: 267, 270; 1986l: 114, 174; 1986m: 135; 1986p: 185-346; 1986r: 173; 1986t: 186, 399, 418407; Benjamin 1977: chap.11; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps.17, 29, 37, 40; Mann 113-116; Küng 1994a: 336741; Siebert, 2001: chap. III; 2002a: 29-32, chaps. 2, 6; App. E, G).

The Bible and the Western Culture For both working-class immigrant families, Krauss and Kraus, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament were still very much present–at least

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through church services and through poems and stories–in the otherwise secularizing German and European as well as American liberal societies, states, and cultures: the powerful Biblical images of the Fall, of the Flood, of the Tower of Babel, of Sodom and Gomorrah, of God’s appearance on Mount Sinai, of the tortured and crucified Messiah from Nazareth, and the great Biblical prophetic, eschatological, and apocalyptic visions of the wholly Other than the old world created by God through the Logos, including nature and history up to the late American and Slavic Empires, of the radically New, of the New Heavenly Jerusalem, of the New Heaven and the New Earth, of Shalom (Genesis 1, 2, 3, 6-9, 11, 19; Exodus 19, 20; Isaiah 61-66, John 1, 18-20; Revelation 20-22; Hegel 1986a: 218; 1986g: 465; 1986l: 107-115, 413, 418, 422, 490, 491, 500, 513; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; Benjamin 1977: chap.10, 11; 1996c; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969c; 1997u; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484498; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975b; 1975c; 1985e; Bloch/ Reif 1978; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1992; 1995; 2001; Horkheimer 1974c: 167-168; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Kraus 1880; Krauss 1880; Kesting 2008c: 64-68; Maresh 2008: 68-70; Kittsteiner 2007; Osten 2008: 71-72; Sloterdijk 2007; Rutschky 2008: 7476; Grebing 2008: 77-78; Valero 2008; Collopy 2000; Miles 2008; App. E). According to the Bible, that old world, e.g. the old Jerusalem, the old Israel, which on December 27-31, 2008 once again flew air strikes against the besieged Gaza Strip and killed over 800 people and injured or wounded over 1,500 people–in terms of a Davidian and Salomonian Realpolitik with other means from the Empire Paradigm of the Monarchical Time of Judaism– in retaliation against the Hamas rockets, which killed 4 persons in the southern part of Israel, and which gave in terms of Fackenheim’s 314th Mitzvoth Hitler one more posthumous victory, and which may provoke a third Intifada–that world of the past and the present would be gone and there would be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness (1 Kings 2: 1-12; Revelation 21: 4; Lieber 2001: 312-313; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer 1974a: chaps. 6, 7, 8, 9; 1974c: 148-151, 164-165, 169, 208, 213, Küng 1991: 98-131; Miles 2008; Callopy 2000; App. E, G). While for Bach and Kant, Schelling, Herder and Hegel, von Baader, Kierkegaard, Emerson, Felix Mendelsohn and Dostojewski, Scholem, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm and Tillich, Karl Rahner and Karl Barth, Dirks and Kogon, Küng and Kuschel, Metz, Peukert and Arens, the Bible has still been the word of God, for the methodological atheism of Marx and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, Brecht, and Andre Gide, Bloch, Pollock, Marcuse, Löwenthal, Sohn-Rethel and Elias Canetti, Habermas, Honneth,

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and Dubiel, it became great and deep human literature, or literary mythology, or depth grammar of Western culture, or a wonderful reading experience, and sometimes also problematic ideology, propaganda, violence and prejudice (Hegel 1986q; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Opitz 1996; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 41; 1985l: 294-296, 483-493; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 29, 34; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997u; Kogon 1967; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Habermas 1971; 1976; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1982; 1985a; 1986; 1987b; 1988a; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Küng 1970; 1978; 1981a; 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 2003; 2004; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008; Metz 1959; 1963; 1973; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1984; 1995; 1997; 1998; 2006; Metx/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Arens 1989b; 1994b; Kesting 2008c: 6468).While the Protestant Ludwig Krauss family from Swabia, now in New York, was more secularized than the Catholic Johannes Kraus family from Bavaria, now in Philadelphia or Baltimore, they both nevertheless could still recognize themselves, in the Biblical stories, because in the 19th century they were still alive in the collective memory of the Western culture, and the disappearing Bible knowledge beyond all positive faithfulness, had not yet become a sign of cultural self-forgetfulness: as it often appears today–in 2010–in the West: e.g. among my Jewish, Christian and Islamic students in America and Europe (Krauss 1880; Kraus 1880; Kesting 2008c: 64-68). However, particularly in the Protestant Krauss family in New York the secularizing tendency is noticeable already from the Bible as word of God to the Bible as great world-literature. In December 1878, Ludwig Krauss received as a Christmas gift for life from his good Jewish-German friend, Robert Eisermann, with friendly greeting and best wishes instead of the Bible, the newest, most wonderful edition of the secular complete works of William Shakespeare, which admittedly critically preserved in themselves much Greek, Roman and Catholic- and Protestant-Christian texts, however not as divine revelation, but rather as human literature, to which his son Louis, the later goldsmith with Tiffany in New York and architectural draftsman with the Federal Government in Washington D.C. added on the free backpages playful drawings of classical pillars and of a rabbit and of a rat (Krauss 1880; Shakespeare 1878). In the meantime, the natural sciences have, of course, developed eschatological-apocalyptic images of their own, which are more powerful but less meaningful than those of the Bible: global warming, super-volcanoes, super-tsunamis, asteroid and gamma-ray impacts, black holes in warped space, which can

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swallow up total sun systems, including our own, and the possible occurrence of all these events only being a matter of warped time.

Dwarf and Puppet The critical theorists followed the dialectic of revelation and autonomous reason as portrayed in von Baader’s and Benjamin’s chess automaton in the first thesis of the latter’s last essay, The Notion of History, in which the religious and the secular, the dwarf and the puppet, theology and historical materialism opposed, but also supported each other in making revolutionary history (Benjamin 1977: 251; Kogon 1967; Maresh 2008: 68-70; Grebing 2008: 77-78; Valero 2008; App. F, G). The dwarf theology and the puppet historical materialism were together to revolutionize modern antagonistic civil society. On the poverty-stricken Island of Ibiza Benjamin had met in 1932 and 1933 the person, whom Scholem called later on the most influential mystery man in Benjamin’s life: Felix Noeggerath (Benjamin 1977: 251; Scholem 1967; 1970a; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1977a; 1977b; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Adorno 1970b; 1997u; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Kogon 1967; Maresh 2008: 68-70; Grebing 2008: 77-78; Valero 2008). From his friend Noeggerath, Benjamin could learn about socialist revolution and about fascist counter-revolution, as well as about art and religion connected with them (Marcuse 1960; 1961; Benjamin 1977: 251; Scholem 1967; 1970a; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1977a; 1977b; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Adorno 1970b; 1997u; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Kogon 1967; Maresh 2008: 68-70; Grebing 2008: 77-78; Valero 2008). In 1918/1919 Noeggerath was counted among the revolutionaries in Munich and among the followers of the assassinated communist leader Kurt Eisner. Since 1937, Noeggerath was able to survive the fascist period and World War II in the German ArmyIntelligence, being sufficiently camouflaged as translator and writer of reports about the international politics. Since 1950, Noeggerath lived again in Munich up to his death in 1960. Here in Munich, Noeggerath took up a friendship again with the significant art-historian Wilhelm Worringer, which had originated in the same city half a century earlier, in 1900, in the external context of Karl Wolfskehl and Stephan George (Hamann 2010: 9092; Raulff 2009). Benjamin had heard lectures on George at the University of Heidelberg together with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s later Propaganda Minister. Also masked and camouflaged National Socialists had come to the Island of Ibiza in 1932 and 1933. One of the Nazis was Benjamin’s secretary for some time. Like a detective, Scholem searched for Noeggerath in Munich after Benjamin’s death in Port Bou in 1940 up to his own death

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in Jerusalem in 1980, because he believed that Noeggerath held the key to the solution of the riddle why his friend Benjamin did not become a Zionist, and did not go to Jewish Palestine, and did not become the Jewish Herder at the University of Jerusalem, but instead stayed in Germany deep into the National Socialist period, and finally wanted with his support to join the critical theorists in the International Institute for Social Research at Columbia University in New York (Benjamin 1977: 251; Scholem 1967; 1970a; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1977a; 1977b; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Adorno 1970b; 1997u; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Kogon 1967; Maresh 2008: 68-70; Grebing 2008: 77-78; Valero 2008; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1987b; 1988b). Scholem never found Noeggerath. The families Kraus and Krauss were in spite or because of their commitment to the Catholic or Protestant Paradigm of Christianity much more inclined to revolution than to counterrevolution (Kraus 1880; Krauss 1880; Benjamin 1977: 251; Scholem 1967; 1970a; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1977a; 1977b; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Adorno 1970b; 1997u; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Kogon 1967; Maresh 2008: 68-70; Grebing 2008: 77-78; Valero 2008; Heinann 2008: 78-79; Sandfoss 2007; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1987b; 1988b). Thus Johannes Kraus participated in Philadelphia in the American Civil War, the last bourgeois revolution, and Ludwig Krauss took part in labor unions and in the funeral of the first communists murdered in New York (Kraus 1889; Krauss 1880; Benjamin 1977: 251; Scholem 1967; 1970a; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1977a; 1977b; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Adorno 1970b; 1997u; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Kogon 1967; Maresh 2008: 68-70; Grebing 2008: 77-78; Valero 2008; Marcuse 1960; 1961; Habermas 1976; 1978c; 1982; 1987b; 1988b; Heinann 2008: 78-79; Sandfoss 2007; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1987b; 1988b).

World-Market as World Judgment Likewise for the two working-class immigrant families Krauss and Kraus world-history–and particularly the world market and its depressive cycles from which they suffered much–was what Schiller and Hegel had called world judgment, and–unlike in the present 21st century capitalist catastrophe–in the economic crises of the 19th and 20th centuries at least God was still believed to be able to help the victims and the poor classes as–what Hegel had still called theologically–Divine Providence as cunning of Reason, or as not yet entirely secularized–what Adam Smith and maybe even Says and Ricardo had named–invisible hand, when the providential liberal state failed them in Europe or America through not being providential enough (Krauss 1880; Kraus 1880; Hegel 1986g: 347; 1986l; 1986t:

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285-286; Maresh 2008: 68-71; Osten 2008: 71-72; Kittsteiner 2007). Marx reacted to the economic crises and social rejections, which the two working class families suffered together with millions of people in Europe and America, with the suggestion of the socialilization of private property, and John Maynard Keynes with state-organized programs and policies aimed at preventing economic fluctuations, which were in use up to the neoliberal trend turn of the 1970s when they were replaced by the Friedmann plans from the Chicago School and produced the capitalist disaster of September 2008 (Maresch 2008: 68-70; Kittsteiner 2007). Marx miscalculated the conversion of values into prices. Keynes spoke for a total state, which the National Socialists and fascists tuned into historical reality. The two immigrant families became familiar with–what Oswald Spengler called–the will to prey in the form of the Anglo-American capitalism. Since the 19th and 20th centuries this capitalist will to prey has triumphed over what Nietzsche had named the will to power. What since then has been at stake was not a little bit more or less social market economy, but only the best possible capitalism. Since then all critics of capitalism had to make themselves familiar with the notion of profit. Now the times are over, in which Europe and America could appropriate the wealth of the world and could redistribute it among themselves. That pains particularly the Social Democracies and the labor unions, whose success recipe had been for many decades the redistribution of wealth. It is not amazing, that the global capitalism hits those countries most painfully, which had a successful workers movement. Precisely because of this tradition these countries and these movements experience the deepest crisis now in the depression of 2008, 2009, 2010. Thus at present the auto industry in Detroit, in which the unions had been most successful, finds itself in the worst crisis: on December 29, 2008, Chrysler and General Motors needed and received 4 billion dollars each from the U.S. Federal Government in order to be able to survive the coming three months. The new Democratic Obama Administration has nevertheless the redistribution of wealth still on its program (Maresch 2008: 68-70; Kittsteiner 2007; Thränert 2008: 11-15; Weisskirchen 2008: 15-18; Rudolph 2008b: 20-23). Even the welleducated Hegelian dialectical religiologist will not restrain himself from assigning or allocating guilt to the capitalist ruling classes in the West: their subjective and objective greed, which has governed the capitalist and finance markets, and which seems to have replaced completely in history what the Greeks once called Reason and the Hebrew Prophets Providence (Hegel 1986l; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 2006c; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2004; 2005; 2007). Egoism is good! Greed is good!

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This greed is system-immanent. The liberation theologians speak of structural sins or guilt (Gutierrez 1973; 1988; Maresch 2008: 68-70; Kittsteiner 2007; Thränert 2008: 11-15; Weisskirchen 2008: 15-18; Rudolph 2008b: 20-23). This greed determines the behavior of all players on the capitalist market, sometimes even the churches. Economics, not politics or religion, seem to have become the fate of the West (Hegel 1986g; 1986l; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 2006c; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2004; 2005; 2007). President Clinton, “It’s the economy, stupid!”, and Marx agreed (Marx 1871; 1906; 1953; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1963; 1964; 1977; Marx/Engels 1860; 2005; Clinton 2004; Maresch 2009: 68-70; Kittsteiner 2007). However, even in America the actual financial crisis of September 2008 has brought the state into civil society and the marketplace as seldom before in American history. Thus it may still be possible, that–as Walther Rathenau thought–the economy would not after all be the fate of the West, but rather the politics and through it even theology and religion (Hegel 1986g; 1986l; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1969c; 1970b; 1997j/2: 608-617; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Brändle 1984; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 2006c; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2001; 2004; 2005; 2007; Honneth/Joas 2002; Fraser/ Honneth 2003). Precisely because the Kraus and the Krauss families suffered so much from the structural greed in American civil society, most of them spent most of their life time in the service not of corporations, but rather of the US Federal Government in the 19th as well as in the 20th centuries (Kraus 1880; Krauss 1880; Maresch 2009: 68-70; Kittsteiner 2007; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6).

Liberalization as Civilization Peter Sloterdijk, a passionate opponent of the Frankfurt School, saw in– what Horkheimer called–the liberalization of religion in European and American civil society a civilization process for the Jewish, Christian and Islamic ethical monotheisms throughout the 19th and 20th centuries (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 29, 37, 40; Osten 2008: 71-72; Sloterdijk 2007). For Sloterdijk, this process of civilization was concluded as soon as human beings feel ashamed for certain expressions of their God, which unfortunately had been fixed in writing and for all entrances and scenes of an in general very nice, however sometimes very angry and wrathful grandfather, whom one could not let go into public without escort for quite some time. Recently, the Roman Catholic Church has eliminated from its hourly prayers all disputed and controversial re-

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vengeful Psalms. Already for the two immigrant working class families Kraus and Krauss the wholly Other was benevolent Providence rather than wrathful: Mysterium fascinosum rather than Mysteriun tremendun (Otto 1969; 1991; Osten 2008: 71-72; Sloterdijk 2007). According to Sloterdijk, following Lessing’s parable of the three rings, the judgment over the world took place since the bourgeois enlightenment as everyday plebiscite in the form of sympathy fluctuations. In Sloterdijk’s view, there existed between the three monotheisms–Judaism, Christianity and Islam–and the lack of peace in the world a significant correlation (Hegel 1986q; Fromm 1966b; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Osten 2008: 71-72; Sloterdijk 2007). Precisely therefore the softer, more meditative pantheistic religions of the East, particularly Buddhism, were gaining more and more sympathy in the West and around the world (Hegel 1986p; Fromm 1950; 1974; 1976; 1997; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Osten 2008: 71-72; Sloterdijk 2007; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984). Sloterdijk pleaded that the monotheisms had to become parties of a civil society through giving up their zeal collective of the for us or the against us. Sloterdijk knew of course, that the ideal of peaceful coexistence was for the Abrahamic religions only with great difficulties compatible with the different immanent Messianic and activist tendencies of these religions and their thematic energies and their affects of anger, wrath, rage, pride, shame down to the militarypolitical models of holy wars or crusades. Sloterdijk saw the civilization task of the three monotheisms in the uncoupling of the affect of the enthusiasm from the religious code–e.g. the Golden Rule–the real wealth of the Western and other cultures. Sloterdijk thought particulary of the successes of Islam from the 7th to the 15th centuries and its insult and offence history ever since up to the catastrophe of September 11, 2001 and the December 30, 2008 conflict between the Islamic Palestinians and the mainly Jewish state of Israel in Gaza (Osten 2008: 71-72; Sloterdijk 2007; Habermas 2001a; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 2004). For Sloterdijk, the Islamic world was one with a veil of anger spread over it. Sloterdijk saw in the elimination of the revenge Psalms from the hourly prayers of the Roman Catholic Church an invitation to the Muslims to reconsider on their part irritating elements in the Holy Qu’ran and no longer to religiously instrumentalize their history of insults and offences into a campaign of anger and wrath against the West. For Sloterdijk, the real instruments of the present historical situation were rather the demographic enlightenment and the actualized politics of development (Sloterdijk 2007; Pope Benedict XVI 2009). In Sloterdijks opinion, unfortunately the Abrahamic religions had no idea of and did not understand these two instruments.

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They were rather on both fronts suspect of counter-productivity. It seems to the dialectical religiologist, that the Christianity of the Kraus and Krauss families in Germany and America was rather civilized and thus without any angry, military-political models or tendencies, and that it connected the idea of a benevolent and life-friendly Providence with a behavior determined by the Golden Rule: even if they had to participate in wars, as indeed they did, not in Europe but in the U.S.A. These did not become for them holy wars or crusades, but rather remained entirely secular (Krauss 1880; Kraus 1880; Hegel 1986q; Fromm 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1966b; 1968; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; Küng 1990b; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Osten 2008: 71-72; Sloterdijk 2007). Of course, not only religion, but also abstract liberal capitalist society is in need of further civilization processes.

Religion and Mental Health In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the religion and mental health or wellness campaign in Europe and America appears very often as unbearable and intolerable leveling of the Abrahamic religions (Jung 1933; 1958; 1880; Fromm 1950; Berrgen, Doerksen, Koop 2007: 115-134; Rutschky 2008: 74-76). The promoters of religion as medium of mental health seem to give up the Jewish, Christian and Islamic ethical monotheism with its central idea of a personal God in favor of a swarming this-worldly polytheism, which has an inclination to palpable neo-pagan regressions behind that self-understanding of personal autonomy and universal solidarity, which entered world history with the teachings of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic prophets, and even deeper into animism, magic and fetishism, and into mythologies, which undercut the egoidentity, that had been achieved by means of the major world-religions and terminated the majority of the subject, and could not claim any longer similarity with the mythology of reason, which Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin conjured up and promoted in their system program of German idealism in Frankfurt in 1800 (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Jamme/Schneider 1984; Adorno 1994; 1997j/2: 608-617; 1998a 1998b; Habermas 1986: 53-54; 1990: 9-19; Rutschky 2008: 74-76). Of course, people like Sloterdijk may argue that the transformation of religion into Mental Health constitutes a great progress in civilization. It changes the faith powers, which have inspired throughout the history of religions indescribable cruelties, sin and guilt into culture consumption, travels and good food. There remains of course enough sin and guilt that are practically effective: genocide,

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euthanasia, hunger, wars, unjust distribution of wealth, etc. All this constitutes for the culturally and politically engaged bourgeoisie a universal guilt connection. No chain of action can be recognized, into which people had just to enter in order to do good and to diminish the bad. There it was consoling, that in the figures of the Pope or of the Dalai Lama religious authorities announced pure teachings, how the good could be promoted and how the bad could be diminished, and thus helped to overcome the discontent in the Western civilization (Freud 1962; 1964; Hegel 1986p; Adorno 1994; 1997j/2: 608-617; Habermas 1990: 9-19; Rutschky 2008: 7476; App. E). The Pope and the Dalai Lama were like the trees, from which in earlier periods of the history of religions people tried to gain healing power by magical means. For the dialectical religiology the main question is, how can, if not the substance, then at least the humanizing and thus also consoling and healing power of religious traditions that protect people against the neo-pagan regression in late capitalist society, how can the legacy of the world religions be rescued and salvaged through the present transition period between Modernity and Post-Modernity into the secular global alternative Future III–the realm of freedom (Marx 1961: 873874; Adorno 1979: 354-373, 578-587; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohann 2003; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981d; 1982; 1984a; 1985b; 1987a; 1988a; 1988b; 1990; 1991c; 1992a; 2001b; App. G). For the moment, the critical theorist of religion can only answer: through an inverse cipher theology (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b; 1994; 1997j/2: 608617; Brändle 1984; Habermas 1986; 1990: 9-19; Rutschky 2008: 74-76). Certainly the two immigrant families Kraus and Krauss were not protected by their religion from mental illness. Charlotte Krauss, the wife of Ludwig Krauss spent 19 years in the lunatic asylum on Blackwell Island in New York (Krauss 1880). One of the sons of Johannes Krauss, Charley, became a victim of life-long alcoholism (Kraus 1880). However, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries the Transcendence, which became manifest in their forms of Christianity, gave identity and sovereignty to the egos of the members of the Kraus and Krauss families throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and into the 21st century, and protected most of them against ego weakness, and strengthened them against overwhelming negative stimuli from the external capitalist environment and from the internal id and super-ego, and enabled them to engage in universal solidarity in the family, as well as in the ethnic neighborhoods, and labor unions, and political parties and churches (Hegel 1986q; Adorno 1994; 1997j/2: 608617; Habermas 1990: 9-19; Rutschky 2008: 74-76). Whatever personal

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and familial wellness there was in the two working class families in Europe and America, was very much connected with their religions: their Catholicism or their Protestantism (Krauss 1880; Kraus 1980; Rutschky 2008: 74-77). But also Benjamin’s and Adorno’s post-theistic inverse cipher theology was already anticipated not only in the rise of Marxism in Europe and America, particularly in New York, but also in some working class families, e.g. in the Krauss families in New York and in Philadelphia (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b; 1994; 1997j/2: 608-617; Habermas 1990: 9-19; Rutschky 2008: 74-76). It was part of the socialist resistance against atomistic liberalism in the second half of the 19th century and against European and American fascism–the real assault on civilization–in the first half of the 20th century (Krauss 1880; Kraus 1880; Paassen/Wise 1934; Jeffreys 2008; Rosenbaum 1999; Hedges 2001; Baldwin 2001; Grebing 2008: 77-78; Heimann 2008: 78-80; Sandvoss 2007).

Theodicy Solution The two immigrant families Kraus and Krauss, who went through many theodicy experiences in Europe as well as in America, still believed in the theodicy solution of the Biblical story of Joseph, who told his brothers: Have no fear! Am I a substitute for God? Besides, although you intended me harm, God intended for good, so as to bring about the present result– the survival of many people. And so fear not. I will sustain you and your children Thus he reassured them speaking kindly to them. (Genesis 50: 19; Lieber 2001: 309/18; Kraus 1880; Krauss 1880).

According to the interpretation of the Rabbis the brothers’ anxiety was eased at once (Lieber 2001: 309/18). Joseph had no interest in seeking revenge; the very idea offended him. Human beings dare not usurp the prerogative of God who alone has the right of punitive retaliation, and who alone could invert the human intention to do harm into his divine intention for good, and thus to negate the negative and to bring about out of the negative a good result, and thus to resolve the theodicy problems (Genesis 50: 19; Leviticus 19: 18; Lieber 2001: 309: 18; Hegel 1986l: 34-36; Kraus 1880; Kraus 1880; Küng 1994a: 336-741; Siebert, 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: 29-32, chaps. 2, 6). According to the psychological theology of Adorno’s friend, Thomas Mann, inspired by the Torah, the German mystics Meister Eckart and Angelus Silesius, and by Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, and by Karl Marx and by Sigmund Freud, the soul is the giver of all given: thus also of God (Blackney 1941: 247/41-248/42,

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288/19; Kamenka 1983: 115-124; Freud 1955: 194-222; Mann 2002: 101168; Adorno/Mann 2003; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976: chaps. 3, 7, 9; 1980b; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001). Thus, Meister Eckhart said: The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one eye, and one vision or seeing, and one knowing, and one loving. Man should love God a-spiritually. His soul should be a-spiritual, devoid of ghost-likeness. For as long as the soul is ghostlike it is a mental image and being image-like, it will lack both, unity and the power to unite, thus it could not love God rightly, for true love is union. Man’s soul ought to be de-ghosted, void of ghosts, and be kept so. For if man loves God as a god, a ghost, a person, or as if he were something with a form, man must get rid of all this. Man must love God as he is, a not-god, a not-ghost, a-personal, formless. Man must love God as he is, the One, pure, sheer and limpid, in whom there is no duality: for man is to sink eternally from negation to negation in the One, who is spaceless and timeless. Angelus Selesius said: I know, that without me God can not live even for a moment; if I become nothing, he must give up his spirit out of emergency and necessity. Thus in the perspective of the critical religiology the soul, which is as imageless as God and which has the loving power to unite subject and object, is the giver also of the longing for the totally Other, and the longed for wholly Other can not be without the longing subject, and both are not only different and distant, but most closely connected as well.

God’s Work The Johannes Kraus and Ludwig Kraus families wanted to do God’s work first in German and then in American abstractly liberal civil society (Kraus 1880; Krauss 1880). From the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament they had learned that God’s work is carried out by the least powerful members of society, e.g. women and younger sons (Genesis 27; Lieber 2001: 154-155/1). They belonged to the least powerful and poorest members of German and American bourgeois society. While the Johannes Kraus family was Catholic and the Ludwig Krauss family was Protestant, neither of the two families were sufficiently prepared for and were therefore surprised by the despair they would encounter in the American liberal society, this socially torn apart world, this continual wild struggle for recognition, this other of justice, namely the capitalistic deformation and pathologies of the life world, this complete lack of any re-distribution of wealth, this economic system, based on the private appropriation of collective labor and surplus value, and divided in winners and losers,

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particularly during the turmoil and chaos of the Civil War and its aftermath, and during the economic depressions which followed each other in the business cycle with more or less speed, and the many hopeless people they would see disappear in New York to Blackwell Island and to Hart Island, and to Ryker’s Island, and who all were in utter need for rescue (Kraus 1880; Krauss 1880; Hegel 1986g: 339514; 1986l: 107-115; 491-540; Frazer/Honneth 2003; Honneth 1990; 1994; 2000; Siebert 2001: chap. 3; 2002a: chaps 2, 6). The two families did not only experience hopelessness and the need for rescue outside of themselves in American atomistic liberal capitalist society, but also very often among their own members. There has been a family continuity from the Johannes Kraus family and the Ludwig Krauss family, who lived in the German and American abstract liberal society, to the 14 grandchildren of the Siebert family, who today–March 2010–live in the even more atomistic and narcissistic and socially autistic neo-liberal American society (Kraus 1880; Krauss 1880; Siebert 2001; 2002a). The Rabbis speak of the notion of the merit of the fathers (Genesis 26: 24; Lieber 2001: 152/24). According to the Rabbis, the righteousness of the ancestors creates a pool of spiritual credit that may sustain their descendents. The Johannes Kraus family and the Ludwig Krauss family were indeed much suffering, but nevertheless righteous people in the context of the Roman Catholic and Protestant Evangelical Paradigm of Christianity (Kraus 1880; Krauss 1880; Siebert 2001; 2002a; Küng 1994a: 336-741; 1994b).

Remembrance, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation The critical theory of religion is a discourse understood as a privileged form of communicative action among subjects, who produce texts, which takes place in a particular situation, with a double structure, and which are motivated by specific goals, and which concentrate on the notions like reason or justice in spite of all opposition from de-constructing post-modernism and neo-conservativism and neo-liberalism: it is future-oriented remembrance of human suffering with the practical intent not only to diminish it, but also to achieve forgiveness and reconciliation in and beyond late post-fascist and post-communist, abstract neo-liberal, capitalist society, which suffers more and more from social atomism and autism and psychological depression, but also from amnesia (Genesis 25: 9; Lieber 2001: 140/9; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 382-396, 440-456, 569-573, 578-587; 1951; 1952: 585-595; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; Habermas 1981d; 1982; 1983; 1984;

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1985a; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 1988a; 1988b; 1990; 1991a; 1991b; 1991c; 1992a; 1992b; 1995; 1997a; 1998; 1999; 2001a; 2001c; 2002a: 302-314, 410/317; 2002d; Habermas-Luhmann 1976: 101-290; Peukert 1976; Arens 1982; 1989a; 1989b; 1992; 1995; 2007; Arens/John/Rottländer 1991; Held 1984; Stephens 1994; Siebert, 2001; 2002a). According to the Rabbis, Isaac and Ishmael were reunited at their father Abraham’s funeral (Genesis 25: 9; Lieber 2001: 140/9). For the Rabbis, this was a sign that Ishmael changed his ways as he matured. Although Ishmael could not have forgotten how his father Abraham had treated him, and how his brother supplanted him, he seemed to have forgiven Abraham for having been a less-than-perfect father. Isaac too seemed to have come to terms with his father’s nearly killing him on Mount Moriah. In the Rabbis view, these reconciliations occurred in Abraham’s lifetime and were the reason for the Torah’s describing him as contented in his old age. The Rabbis like to see this as a model for family reconciliation: forgiving old hurts. The Rabbis also take this as a model for the descendants of Ishmael and Isaac, the contemporary Arabs and Israeli Jews, to find grounds for forgiveness and reconciliation.

Future-Oriented Remembrance I had practiced discourse as future-oriented remembrance of human suffering with the practical intent to diminish it long before I became familiar with the Frankfurt School in the German fascist society, as well as in the American abstract liberal society long before I began to become familiar with the Frankfurt School through my friendship with Walter Dirks and Eugen Kogon and through their journal, the Frankfurter Hefte and at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität in Frankfurt, in 1947. I had lived in the German fascist society, in Frankfurt a.M, before and during the war, and when Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald happened. I had lived in the American liberal society, in the prisoner of war camp, Camp Allen, in Norfolk, Virginia, when on August 8, 1945 the shocking news came over the radio that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima by an American plane. After World War II, and after becoming familiar with the Frankfurt School, and during the cold war between the capitalist and socialist block, and after the victorious neo-conservative counter-revolution, and during the so-called war against terror, I practiced the discourse as future-orientated remembrance in German and American liberal society as well as in socialist societies in Eastern Europe guided by Horkheimer’s, Adorno’s, Benjamin’s, Fromm’s and Marcuse’s

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critical theory of society. It included the Jewish as well as Kantian inverse cipher theology, or better still theodicy, which climaxed in the neither theistic nor atheistic longing for the imageless and nameless wholly Other, the most radically demythologized God of Israel, for freedom, and for personal immortality, and in the Messianic anamnestic solidarity with the innocent victims of the slaughter bench of society, and history, over whom their murderers would not triumph, at least not ultimately (Psalm 4; 30; 70; 91; Matthew 26-28; Mark 14-16; Luke 22-24; John 12-21; Quint 1979: 140-164; Mann 2002; 101-168; Adorno 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b: 103-161; 1997d; 1997u; 2002a : 302-314, 410/317; 2002d: Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 5, 7, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1966a; 1966b: chaps ii, iii, iv, vii, ix; 1967; Habermas 1997a: chaps. 4, 6, 7; 1997b; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; Arens/ John/Rottländer 1991; Lohmann 1994; Mitscherlich 1994; Siebert, 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: 29-32, chaps. 2, 6). After I had found accidentally diaries and letters of the Ludwig Krauss and the Johannes Kraus families in the basement of the house of Margaret Noyes, my mother in law, in Washington D.C, after her cancer death in November 1962, I was able to concretize my discourse as future-orientated remembrance on these two families and their theodicy experiences (Leibniz 1996: Vol. I and II; Hegel 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Krauss 1880; Kraus 1880; Held 1984; Schmitt-Biggemann 1988; Oelmüller 1880; Siebert, 2001: xi-xvi; chap. III; 2002a: 29-32, chaps. 2, 6).

Remembrance as Theodicy My wife Margie and her family and I understood theodicy in the tradition of Leibniz and Hegel and the critical theorists of society as justification of the all-benevolent and all-powerful God in the face of the horror and terror of nature and particularly of family, civil society, state, and history (Leibniz 1995: Vol. I and II; Hegel 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248-455; Horkheimer 1971). For Margie and me, the theodicy problem had always been a central issue throughout the 22years of our married life together up to her most cruel cancer death in October 1978 (Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). Precisely through such remembrance of tragic things past, we tried–following not only Benjamin and Adorno, but also the last verse of the Te Deum, laudamus te, as it is rooted in the Hebrew Psalms and present in the Roman Catholic Para-

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digm of Christianity as well as in the Protestant-Evangelical Paradigm, and in the music from Orlando di Lasso through Bach, Mozart, Berlioz, Bruckner and Verdi to Zoltan Kodali–to brave death by breaking the power of oblivion engulfing every individual life: In te Domine speravi non confundar in aeternum (In you I hope, O Lord, I may not be disgraced, shamed, and violated in eternity). (Psalm 16: 10; Psalm 30; Psalm 70; Psalm 91; Psalm 4; Hegel 1986c: 591; 1986q: 273-274, 286-299; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1997g: 199-211; 1997f: 119; 1997k: 214-215; 1997p: 319-320; 2002a: 302-314, 410/317; 2002d; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 5, 7, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Proust 1982: 5-224; Joyce 1975: 144-152; Kracauer 1995: 189-212; Küng 1982; 1994a: 336-741; 1994b).

Margie had played this music beautifully from the 1940’s on, privately and in public, on the piano and on the organ, in concert halls and churches, in Washington D.C., Baltimore, Kalamazoo, and Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, up to her last days in 1978. According to Adorno, enlightenment, the process of radical demythologization, should through inversion lead nature, which bears itself in mind, beyond its own natural and guilt connections, toward the remembrance of eternal life (Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1997g: 199-211; 1997f: 119; 1997k: 214-215; 1997p: 319-320; 2002a: 302314, 410/317; 2002d). To be sure, remembrance is a very weak category, originally deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition (Küng 1991b). However, it is a category of greatest importance not only for Judaism, but also for Christianity and Islam and beyond them for the whole history of religions from Daoism and Chinese ancestor worship on as well as for modern humanism (Hegel 1986p: 302-330; 1986q: 50-95; 1986l: 115, 140, 428-430; Bloch 1969; 1790a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1985a; 1985b; 1985e: chaps. 52, 53, 54, 55; 1970a; Küng 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; App. E). The following remembrance of the emigrant families Johannes and Margaret Kraus, and of Ludwig and Charlotte Krauss, is remembrance as theodicy: as the attempt to brave death by breaking the power of oblivion engulfing them as every other individual life (Krauss 1880; Kraus 1980; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1997g: 199-211; 1997f: 119; 1997k: 214-215; 1997p: 319-320; 2002a: 302-314, 410/317; Siebert, 2001: xi-xvii, chap. III; 2002a: 29-32, chaps. 2,6).

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chapter nineteen Protection of Ideologies

Between 1926 and 1931, Horkheimer wrote down occasional notes in the spirit of his critical theory of society, and always in the conviction, that today access to the truth was by way of the profane: about notions like righteousness, forgiveness, reconciliation, metaphysics, character, morality, personality, religion, Judaism, Christianity, ideology, and humanity, or the value of man, as they had validity in the atomistic, liberal capitalist society in Europe and America (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Horkheimer 1987b: 312; Kracauer 1995: 1-31, 189-202). National Socialism had not yet been victorious in the German liberal society, and Horkheimer and the other critical theorists had not yet moved into exile in the American liberal capitalist society. According to Horkheimer, at the time–in 1926–the intellectual atmosphere in German liberal civil society was characterized through the social democratic culture, politics, and policies; through bourgeois literature, sympathizing with a possible socialist revolution; through the academic restructuring of Marxism and Freudianism, and through a politicized and ideologized Christianity (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Horkheimer 1987b: 312-454). Horkheimer’s observations and notes from 1926-1931, two years before Adolf Hitler and National Socialism came into power in Berlin, throw light on the liberal capitalist society not only in Germany and Europe, but also in America, not only in the 20th century, but also in the 19th century, and even still in the 21st century, with small variations. In Horkheimer’s view, the more problematic the ideologies had become as necessary appearance in liberal bourgeois society in Europe and America, the more cruel became the means with which one had to protect them. The degree of enthusiasm, as well as fright, and terror, with which staggering and wavering idols were defended, showed to Horkheimer how far the dusk had already progressed in late liberal capitalist society (Horkheimer 1987b: 313; 1988d: chap. 2; Fromm 1966b chaps. ii and iv; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 373-396, 440-456, 457-477, 569-573, 578-587; Landgren 1998). According to Horkheimer, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the understanding of the masses had with the large industry in European and American liberal civil society increased to such an extent that the holiest goods had supposedly to be protected from it. Who defended well these holiest goods, had already made his career. Everyone would regret it, who would say the truth with simple words. Besides the general systematically promoted stupidification, along with the threat of economic ruin, social outlawing and banning, torture and even death prevented the understanding of the masses from laying hands on or from

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misappropriating the highest conceptual means of domination: including the religious means. The imperialism of the great European and American states of the 19th and the 20th and even the 21st centuries did not have to envy the Middle Ages for their stakes. The symbols of the modern imperialism were protected through finer apparatuses and more terribly armed guards than the inmates of the Medieval Church. The opponents of the Holy Inquisition have made the dusk of the Medieval world into the dawn of the new Modern day. For Horkheimer, Fromm, and the other critical theorists, the dusk of the liberal capitalist society had not necessarily introduced the night of humanity, which unfortunately seemed to threaten it in 1926, and we may add maybe also at this time–March 2010–in spite of the psycho-pathological resentment-born Islamic terrorism and the revenge-born, likewise psycho-pathological bourgeois counter-terrorism of virtue, democracy and freedom (Fromm 1973; Horkheimer 1987b: 312-454; Borradori 2003; Frings 2004: 219). In any case, the Rightwing Hegelian Francis Fukuyama was wrong when he thought in 1992, that the victorious neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1986 had meant the end of history, and that the bourgeois would be the last man, as the appearance of Islamic extremism and socialist revivals in Central and Latin America and elsewhere show only too clearly (Fukuyama 1992; Zinn 1999: chaps. 18-25).

Humanity In 1926, Horkheimer remembered a very respected scholar in German liberal society, who sympathized with socialism, and who had heard during a scientific table talk an impartial participant speak about humanity (Hegel 1986a: 372-373; 1986c: 85, 91-92, 235, 376, 378, 384, 478-479, 490, 510511, 518, 518, 521, 529, 529, 531; Horkheimer 1987b: 315). Right away the scholar glowed in noble anger and reprimanded and rebuffed the unsuspecting speaker. The scholar told the speaker that the notion of humanity had been dishonored and had become contentless through the worst capitalistic praxis, which had used it as disguise and mask through centuries. Therefore decent human beings could no longer seriously use this notion of humanity. They therefore, had ceased to take this word of humanity into their mouth. Horkheimer thought: this was indeed a radical scholar! Only, so asked Horkheimer himself, which expressions or terms were now allowed to be used in order to signify what was good. Were not all notions in liberal capitalist society equally dishonored through a use, which concealed a bad praxis? A few weeks later, Horkheimer found a book,

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which this widely recognized scholar had published about the reality of Christianity. First Horkheimer was surprised. Then, Horkheimer found out that the scholar had not rejected the word humanity at all, but rather the thing itself. Today–March 2010–not only critical theorists, but also the deconstructionists make precisely this ideology-critical point (Habermas 1985a: chaps. 5-11, Honneth 1985: part II; Borradori 2003). The critical religiologist is aware of many religious terms that have been abused in liberal bourgeois society as ideology. In order to defend bad economic, political, or military deeds, neo-conservative ideologues abuse even the word God up to this very moment in March 2010, in order to defend the American crusade against Iraq and Afghanistan. Therefore, the critical theorist of religion may suggest that such words–like God–should maybe not be used any longer, at least for some time. However, this rejection of those words should happen precisely, in order ultimately to make conscious and to rescue the something signified by them: particularly the nameless and imageless wholly Other than the finite world of appearance with all its horrible injustices (Meister Eckhart 1979: 228-232; Hegel 1986d: 52, 53, 213, 319; 1986e: 20, 114, 126; 1986f: 295, 431; 1986g: 352; 1986p: 308-312; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 1, 2, 4, 10, 11, 12, 21, 23, 24; 1988: chaps. 9-102, 185544; 1996: 17-74; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 29-34; Adorno 1997j/2: 181-288, 507-594, 608-616, 674-69: 1997f: 31-66, 133-250, 251-432; Habermas 1976: 48-85; 127-143; 1988a: 59-60, 278-279; 1988b; 1990: 9-18; 1991a: part III; 2005: chaps. 5, 8, 9; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Friedeburg/Habermas 1983: 14-34, 41-65, 95132, 138-176, Borradori 2003).

The Age of Unlimited Possibilities For Horkheimer, the 19th century, and even more so the 20th century was the age of the unlimited possibilities in European as well as in American liberal society (Horkheimer 1987b: 315-336). The achievements of technology increased daily in liberal capitalistic society. Also the human productive forces surpassed themselves. Since 1826 the skillfulness of the worker had grown beyond all expectations. The average expenditure of energy, punctuality, stamina, and perseverance of the individual had multiplied. That happened not only in the industry but in all areas of life in European and American bourgeois society. Thus, virtuoso achievements in art, e.g. on the cello, which in earlier periods of liberal society only the greatest artists could accomplish, and which came close to the wonderful, the marvelous, the miraculous, belonged in the 1920s to the firm ability

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of every student, who had left the conservatory. Not only the accomplishments in the different forms of sport, but also the art of writing poetical verses surpassed the most flowering period of the past. In the 1920s the composers played ironically with melodies, which in earlier periods of liberal society could have constituted the brilliant achievement of an old symphony. Henry Ford, who shared with his friend Adolf Hitler the emphasice on productive rather than speculative capital as well as his AntiSemitism and the identification of Wall Street with Jewish high finance, and who gave him a Mercedes, when he came out of his Munich prison, and who later on received a high German decoration from him, produced nine thousand automobiles in one day (Baldwin 1001). Children steered Ford’s T-model through the heavy traffic of New York. According to Horkheimer, in late liberal capitalistic society through the mass media and the culture industry the most enormous and monstrous events have become everyday affairs (Horkheimer 1987b: 315-336; Adorno 1991a; 1993b). Centuries had spoken with horror of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, in which some of my Huguenot ancestors were butchered, who could not escape into the Protestant Hessen, north of Frankfurt, to Münzenberg, Trais Münzenberg, and Lich, in order to rescue themselves and their families. Before modern liberal society, the martyrdom of one single person constituted the object of a whole religion. In the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, the Bartholomew Days of nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism, all products of liberal capitalistic society being continually in search for always cheaper human and natural resources, as well as the heroism of those non-conformists who resist them, have become everyday issues, of which the mass media report under the title miscellaneous (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 107-112, 491-540; Horkheimer 1987b: 315336, Fromm 1981). For Horkheimer, in late liberal bourgeois society there were so many Socrateses, Thomas Münzers and Giordano Brunos, that their names go under in the local newspapers (Bloch 1972; Horkheimer 1987b: 315-336; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007d; 2007e; 2008a).

The Mass Media and Culture Industry According to Horkheimer, because of one single Jesus of Nazareth, the capitalist mass media and the culture industry would hardly muster a particular anger any longer in the abstract liberal society of 1926 (Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; 1974c: 96-97; 1987b: 315-336; Adorno 1979; 1991a; 1993b; 1994; Fromm 1950; 1966a; 1966b: 231-236; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1992: 3-94; Reich 1976; Fuhr 2008: 64-65). Like Marx and Freud before,

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Horkheimer thought very highly of the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth. While Marx saw in Jesus a good poor man, who was murdered by the rich and powerful people, and while for Freud he was one of the moving and affecting great personalities of world history, i.e. human beings with overpowering energy of spirit, who stood up for the highest cultural values, and were the conscience of whole nations and civilizations, and who were often enough during their life time ridiculed, scoffed at, ill-treated, and even annihilated in the most cruel way, and who later on ascended to divinity, for Horkheimer he was the man who could not keep himself back avariciously for himself and who suffered and died compassionately for all who suffered, and whose great deed of unconditional love for humanity broke through the icy coldness of the Roman Empire (Freud 1955: 185186; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; Fromm 1966b: 231-236; 1992: 3-94; Reich 1976; Siebert 2007c). For Thomas Mann as for the critical theorists, Jesus’ word on the cross around the ninth hour Eli, Eli, lama sabbachthani?–My God, my God, why have you deserted me?–was, against all appearance, not an outbreak or outburst of despair and disappointment, but, to the contrary, one of highest Messianic self-feeling and self-consciousness (Psalm 22; Matthew 27: 45-47; Freud 1955: 216-217; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; 1987b: 315-336; Fromm 1966b: 231-236; 1992: 3-94; Reich 1976; Adorno/ Mann 2003). This word was not original. It was not a spontaneous scream. It rather constituted the beginning of Psalm 22, which from the beginning to the end was a proclamation and announcement of the Messiah. Jesus quoted Psalm 22, and the quotation meant: Yes, I am the one! However, according to Horkheimer, in modern liberal bourgeois society, the mass media would merely report: Jerusalem, Date. The leader of the insurrection, about whom we have recently reported, has today been sentenced to death, and has right away been executed (Psalm 22; Matthew 27: 45-47; Freud 1955: 216-217; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; 1987b: 315-336; Fromm 1966b 231-236; 1992: 3-94; Reich 1976). Horkheimer had to admit that there were after all in liberal society people, who in the movie theaters shed tears about Sunny Boy. Yet, so Horkheimer observed, they did that at the same time, when in the service of their own property interests real human beings were slowly tormented and tortured to death, only because they were under suspicion of fighting for the liberation of humanity, or of a part of it. On March 10, 2008, in neo-liberal American society, President Bush junior vetoed a bill that would have prevented the torture, e.g. water boarding, of so-called terrorists in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, or in any other location of the globe.

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The Dialectic of Distance and Nearness For Horkheimer, already in the liberal society of 1926, photography, telegraphy and radio had turned the distance into nearness, proximity, and vicinity (Horkheimer 1987b: 315-336; Habermas 1986: 125-126). How much more so today–March 2010–through television! According to Horkheimer, the misery of the whole earth took place before the inhabitants of the big cities of liberal-capitalist society. Horkheimer was of the opinion, that the misery should now challenge the urban inhabitants to abolish it. However, so Horkheimer observed, in European and American liberal bourgeois society, the closeness and nearness had also dialectically turned over into distance. That was because now in capitalistic society the terror and fright in the urban inhabitants’ own cities went under in the universal suffering, as at the same time the urban inhabitants entertained themselves with the marriage dealings and scandals of the movie stars or of the politicians. In March 2008 the mass media of the American and all other liberal societies, entertained the masses with the adulterous involvement in a prostitution ring of the Governor Spitzer of the state of New York. The Jewish, Democratic Governor had tried for years quite successfully to bring Wall Street criminals and others to justice with a strong sense of righteousness, only then to be caught himself in criminal activities to the great enjoyment of his Wall Street-and other enemies, his Republican opponents, and the Rightwing mass media, e.g. Fox News, and to be forced into resignation. The Governor finally had only one friend left besides the members of his family, namely the famous Jewish lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz. He argued against the mania of liberal bourgeois society of inverting the private into the public, and the public into the private: that private affairs should be kept private, and the public affairs should be kept public. While in March 2008, the urban inhabitants in all liberal societies in America and Europe, were entertained through the mass media for weeks with the formerly righteous New York politician’s sex scandals over the past decade, the daily casualty lists from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan remained almost ignored by them (Perkins 2007: part 3). According to Horkheimer, the past of liberal capitalist society was surpassed by its present–1926–in every respect. The dialectical religiologist may add his own daily observation, that what for Horkheimer had been the present of liberal capitalist society in 1926, has by far been surpassed by the present neo-liberal bourgeois society of 2010 in America as well as in Europe (Buchanan 2006; Perkins 2006; 2007; Ehrenreich 2001; Scahill 2007; Hedges 2006; Gosling 2000; Franken 2003; Klein 2007; Clinton 2004).

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chapter nineteen Magic Utopias

In his recent Encyclical Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI has explained human sufferings inside and outside of modern abstract liberal society out of the imperfections of man (Pope Benedict XVI 2007: No. 41-44). He has rejected the bourgeois utopia of freedom, equality, and brotherhood and the socialist utopia of the realm of freedom on the basis of the realm of natural necessity, which he recognized as secularized Jewish or Christian eschatology, nevertheless as mere magic, preposterous, and false (Marx 1961c: 873-874; Horkheimer 1974c: 167-168; 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40; 1985l: 286-287, 593-605; Benedict XVI 2007: No. 41-44). Benedict XVI held on to the Christian eschatology–he (Christ) shall come again and judge the living and the dead. He rejected the inversion of this eschatological content from its religious into a secular form, in spite of the continually extended parousia delay so full of human suffering (Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Adorno 1970b: 103-125; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Benedict XVI 2007: No. 41-44). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the Pope’s explanation of human suffering from man’s imperfections is rather euphemistic in the face of all the wars and civil wars of the 19th and 20th and 21st centuries, of Auschwitz and Treblinka, Hamburg and Dresden, Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, etc. All these horrible events are more than mere human imperfections! The Pope’s anthropological pessimism concerning modern utopias and the consequent revolutions suggests that people should passively, humbly, lovingly, and peacefully endure the oppression by the corporate ruling classes, and obediently produce their surplus labor and value to be appropriated by them, until the Messiah finally arrives. In the meantime, they are to throw themselves on the mercy of their masters instead of demanding justice now. Such suggestions are fundamentally conservative, if not reactionary. Such suggestions contradict the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, which were continually polemical toward the establishment of the rich and the powerful people in Jerusalem, and because of which he was finally murdered by them, since they did not want to give up their wealth and their power, and repent, and atone, and follow him toward the Kingdom of God (Matthew 26-28; Mark 1416; Luke 22-24; John 18-18-21; Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; 1974c: 96-97; 1987b: 315-336; Fromm 1966a; 1966b: 231-236; 1992: 3-94; Reich 1976). This teaching finds support in the new well meant commandments recently released and issued by the Vatican, one of which asks Christians not to deepen the class-antagonism in liberal capitalist society, instead of

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working and fighting it through, and thus to overcome it toward alternative Future III–a reconciled society (Hegel 1986g: 339-514; Marx 1953: chaps. VI-X; 1961a: 17-18; Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; 1974c: 167-168; 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40; 1985l: 286-287, 593-605; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 569-573, 578-587; Marcuse 1960: 389-420; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; App. E, F, G).

Counter-Revolution Such former Papal suggestions have as such, maybe unintended, counterrevolutionary implications, and support ultra-conservative and reactionary forces inside and outside of the Church, promoting devolution rather than integration, or reform, or revolution: a la Carl Schmitt and his many new students and followers (Meier 1995; Esposito/Mogahed 2007; Lawrence 2005; Benedict XVI 2007: No. 41-44; Nida-Rümelin 2006: 9-14; Maresh 2008: 73-75; Blumenberg 2007). It was thus not accidental that Pope John Paul II played an important role in the neo-liberal counterrevolution of 1989, after his predecessor Pious XII had blessed the counter-revolutionary fascist crusade against the Soviet Union, which had cost the lives of 27 million Russians. On March 19, 2008 Pope Benedict XVI joined the Dalai Llama in his support of the counter-revolutionary Buddhist forces in Tibet against the Chinese communist revolution informed by a Western secular utopia–alternative Future III–the realm of freedom on the basis of the realm of natural necessity, in which everybody would receive according to his needs and give according to his abilities (Acts 2: 42-47; 4: 32-35; Marx 1961c: 873-874; App. G). Of course, the Pope also shares in the old Christian hope, that the Christian brotherhood-sisterhood message would slowly and peacefully undermine any unjust systems of domination, oppression, and exploitation (Acts 2: 42-47; 4: 32-35; Benedict XVI 2007; 2009). Certainly some slaves were freed by Christian masters, or were at least treated better. Yet over all, in contrast to Hitler’s thesis that Christianity had been the bolshevism in the Roman Empire and that it had destroyed it through its principle of brotherhood and equality, and that bolshevism, which he was fighting at the Eastern Front, was secularized Christianity, and would destroy humanity with its principle of equality if it was not annihilated by him, religion in general and Christianity in particular more often than not served as a factor of integration, equilibration and stabilization in slaveholder-feudal-and capitalist-systems of domination and exploitation (Trevor-Roper 1988: 7, 51, 58, 75, 253, 325, 412, 521, 552, 722; Parsons 1964; 1965; Luhmann1977; O’Dea 1966; Wach 1961;

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Weber 1964; Light/Wilson 2003). Why else would the Roman Emperor Constantine have elevated the Bishops into senatorial rank, and why else would even Hitler have concluded an Empire Concordat with the Vatican, and why else would he have tried to establish an Empire Church under the leadership of the Lutheran Bishop Müller? Christianity did not produce too many Thomas Münzers, or Martin Luther Kings, not to speak of Spartacuses, who would try to overthrow violently or non-violently exploitative ruling classes in the name of the Hebrew Bible, especially the Mosaic Decalogue, and of the New Testament, particularly the Sermon on the Mount, through creative destruction (Exodus 20; Mathew 5-7; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972). Cardinal Ratzinger did his best as Great Inquisitor to repress the Latin American liberation theologians and the Basic Christian Communities. However, still today–March 2010–as the Pasha celebration in the Synagogue remembers the liberation of the Jewish slaves from their Egyptian masters, so its inversion, the Last Supper in the Church remembers that the murderers, the rich and the powerful, did at least ultimately not triumph over the innocent victim Jesus of Nazareth and all the other victims of history, and that the cross, the most cruel instrument of domination of the Roman masters over their slaves, turned for the Christians into a sign of redemption and liberation (Mark 14-16; Matthew 26-28; Hegel 1986q: 288-292; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37,40; Küng 1970; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b).

Judaism and Christianity The members of both emigrant families, the Johannes Kraus and the Ludwig Krauss family, were baptized Christians and practiced their faith more or less throughout their lives (Kraus 1880; Krauss 1880; Kracauer 1995: 189-212; App. E). They certainly had ample opportunity to meet with Jewish people in New York and along the East Coast. However, there is no indication that they were infected with any kind of religious or secular anti-Semitism, be it in the German or in the American liberal-capitalist society. It is, of course, very likely that they had learned already in Germany that their Christianity was superior to all other world religions and that it had succeeded where all the other religions failed, including Judaism, of which they knew very little. In spite of the fact that Horkheimer, Adorno, and Fromm thought very highly of the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth and of the spiritual energies that were awakened through his unheard of deed, which broke through the icy coldness of Antiquity, they nevertheless separated him radically from the Christianity, or what Kierkegaard

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called the Christendom, which continually referred and appealed to him, and at the same time contradicted him and most of what he had taught and had stood for (Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; 1974c: 96-97; Adorno 1970b; Fromm 1966a; 1966b: 231-236; 1992; Reich 1971; 1976; App. E). Horkheimer and Adorno stated in their Dialectic of Enlightenment of 1944 that civilization was the victory of society over nature, which changed everything into pure nature (Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 186). The critical theorists had to admit that the Jews themselves had taken part in this process of civilization for 4 thousand years: with enlightenment as with cynicism. Judaism had the oldest surviving patriarchate. It was even older than the matriarchate, which Bachofen had discovered and talked and written about (Bachofen 1992; Fromm 1994; Eller 1992). Judaism was the incarnation of ethical monotheism. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the Jews transformed taboos into civilizing maxims, when other people in the Near Eastern, Egyptian or African, Indian or Chinese civilizations still clung to magic and fetishism (Hegel 1986p: 259-301; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1972: 186; App. E). To the critical theorists of society, the Jews seemed to have succeeded where not the Jew Jesus but rather Christendom had failed (Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; 1974c: 96-97; Adorno 1969c; 1970b; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 186; Fromm 1992; Reich). The Jews diffused magic and fetishism through their own power and turned them against themselves as ritual service to the one God Yahweh (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 186; Fromm 1966b: chaps. ii, v, ix; Küng 1991b). The Jews did not eliminate adaptation to nature, but converted it into a series of duties in the form of a ritual, as shown in the 613 Mitzvoth (Solomon 1996: 42-44, 70, 72, 81, 82-83, 102, 119, 136; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1972: 186). The Jews have retained the aspect of expiation, i.e. the atonement for and so the wiping out of the guilt, the sin, the wrong doing of the past, but have avoided the reversion to mythology, which symbolism implies, or even to magic and fetishism (Hegel 1986p: 259-301; 1986q: 5095; Horkheimer/Adorno1969: 23-24, 186; Küng 1991b; App. E). Thus, the Jews were thought to have fallen behind advanced civilization, and yet to be too far ahead of it as well. The Jews were both clever and stupid, similar and dissimilar. They were declared guilty of something, which they as the first burghers, were the first to overcome: the lure of base instincts, reversion to animality, and to the ground, the service of images. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, because the Jews invented the concept of the kosher meat, they were persecuted as swine. The fascist Anti-Semites made themselves the executors of the Hebrew Bible: they wanted the Jews, who had eaten of the tree of knowledge, to return unto dust, e.g. in Ausch-

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witz or Treblinka (Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 186; Adorno 1951; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1997u; Kogon .1965). To be sure, the Christian emigrant families Ludwig Krauss and Johannes Kraus did as little as Pope Benedict XIII today–in 2010–radicalize the second or third commandment as the critical theorists did 50 years later, but rather continued to hold on to the image of a loving, providential God, no matter how tragic their lives in American liberal civil society became (Benedict XVI 2007: No. 41-44; Siebert 2000: Introduction, chap. III; 2001: chaps. 2, 6). They held on to the God, who in the words of Benedict XVI had given himself an image in Christ, who was man, and who was crucified, and who thus took the denial of false images of God to the extreme. God had now revealed his true face in the figure of the sufferer, who shared man’s God-forsaken condition by taking it upon himself.

The Last Bourgeois Revolution Johannes and Margaret Kraus arrived as German Catholic immigrants in New York in 1857 (Krauss 1880; Kraus 1880; Hegel 1986l: 107-114; Horkheimer 1987b: 315-316; Held 1984; Siebert, 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: 29-32, chaps. 2, 6; Küng 1994a: 336, 601, 602, 602-741; 1994b; 1998; 2003). Johannes came to New York four years before the Civil War started. Johannes and Margaret immigrated nine years before Ludwig Kraus. Johannes had to participate as a Union soldier in the Civil War, partially because he came earlier to America than Ludwig Krauss, and partially because he moved south to Philadelphia and Baltimore, while Ludwig stayed North, in New York, for the rest of his life. Like millions of other Europeans, Johannes and Margaret Kraus had come from the Old World to the American liberal capitalistic society driven by their longing for the New World, the land of unlimited possibilities and opportunities, the Land of the Future (Kraus 1880; Hegel 1986l: 107-115). They came from the Roman Catholic Bavaria, and were and remained Catholics and would educate their seven children most strictly in the Catholic faith in the context of the overwhelmingly Protestant American liberal society (Krauss 1880; Kraus 1880; Kracauer 1995: 203-212; Held 1984; Siebert, 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: 29-32, chaps. 2, 6; Küng 1994a: 336601, 602, 602-741; 1994b; 2003). One of Johannes’s brothers even became a Catholic priest, and as such also migrated to the American bourgeois society. American liberalism had inherited from Protestantism, more specifically Calvinism and Presbyterianism, its abstract atomistic and individualistic attitude, which accounts for Christianity’s differentiation in America

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into 1,200 churches, denominations, sects, and cults in spite of the Biblical demand of Christian unity (Küng 1994a: 602-741; 1994b). Johannes and Margaret Kraus came to the American liberal society about a decade after Karl Marx had written his essays about different problematic aspects of capitalist society entitled the National Economy and Philosophy of 1844, and the Holy Family of 1844, and the German Ideology of 1845, and The Misery of Philosophy of 1847, and the Manifest of the Communist Party of 1848 (Marx 1953: chaps. VI-X; Marx/Engels 2005; Kamenka 1983; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1967; Bloch 1971). In his essays, Marx had addressed issues relevant for bourgeois society like: the antagonism of self-consciousness, spirit, religion, absolute knowledge, proletariat and wealth, idea and interest, history and speculation, state and civil society, the critical battle against the French materialism, nature and history, the opposition between materialism and idealism, ideology, division of labor, state and the right of property, indignation, the association, organization of labor, work, wage, commodity, class antagonism, production anarchy, the metaphysics of the political economy, coalitions, bourgeois and proletarian, proletarian and communist, socialist and communist literature, reactionary socialism, feudal socialism, petite bourgeois socialism, the German and the true socialism, conservative or bourgeois socialism, the critical-utopian socialism and communism, the position of communism in relation to the different oppositional political parties. All these themes were of greatest significance not only for the British and European liberal societies, but also for the American capitalist society. Johannes and Margaret Kraus lived through the Civil War as the last bourgeois revolution, in which the Northern capitalist ruling class liquidated the Southern ruling class of slaveholders (Krauss 1880; Kraus 1880; Held 1984; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: 29-32, chaps. 2, 6; Zinn 1999: chap. 9). The Civil War as a class war cost the lives of 600,000 Americans, of whom many had just immigrated in order to avoid the continual European wars. As result of the liquidation of the white Southern slaveholder class by the white Northern capitalist class, the African-American slaves were freed from slavery and were transformed into capitalist wage laborers. That was historical progress without doubt (Krauss 1880; Kraus 1880; Held 1984; Siebert, 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: 29-32, chaps. 2, 6; Zinn 1999; Perkins 2006; 2007)! The Kraus family was pulled into the bloody chaos of the last bourgeois revolution, which was then followed merely by bourgeois counter-revolutions up to the victorious neo-conservative counter-revolution of 1989. Liberal counterrevolutionary measures were directed against national and international socialistic and quasi-socialistic movements

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inside and outside bourgeois societies: e.g. against the labor movement, the three youth movements, the civil rights movement. April 4, 2010 will be the 42nd anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King at the occasion of a sanitation worker strike in Memphis in preparation of a national anti-poverty march to Washington D.C., which had not only racial, but definitely also non-violent socialist-revolutionary elements, if also in a wonderful Christian-eschatological language. Liberal counterrevolutionary actions were taken against socialist countries like Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Chile, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, etc. (Scahill 2007; Hedges 2006; Perkins 2006; Clinton 2004; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; Zinn 2003: chaps. 13-25). European fascist counter-revolutions were directed against internal socialist movements e.g. in Germany, Spain, and Italy, as well as against the Soviet Union (Hitler 1942; Taylor 1962; Trevor-Roper 1988; Kershaw 2000). At present–March 2010– liberal counter-revolutionary measures are directed against Islamicsocialist movements, like Hamas in Palestine, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, or the Bath Party in Syria and Iraq, the Taliban and Al Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or socialism in Venezuela and Cuba, etc. (Bin Laden 2005; Esposito/Mogahed 2007; Held 1984; Zinn 2003; Perkins 2006; 2007; Scahill 2007; Hedges 2006; Clinton 2004; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007). Often the liberal and fascist counter-revolutions had the same enemy in the long run: socialism and communism.

Farmer, Inn keepers, Peddler, Brewery worker, Soldier After Johannes and Margaret Kraus had arrived in New York from Bavaria, where they had been farmers and inn keepers, he bought himself a horse and a wagon, and traveled south with his 23 years old wife as a peddler from town to town: from New York through Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cumberland and finally down to Martinsburg (Krauss 1880; Kraus 1880; Held 1984; Siebert, 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: 29-32, chaps. 2, 6; Zinn 1999; Perkins 2006; 2007). Johannes stayed in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the American Constitution and the City of Brotherly Love, for about four years, where he worked in a German beer brewery for some time. Then, while his family stayed in Philadelphia, Johannes joined the Union Army. America’s civil war began April 12, 1861 (Kraus 1880; Sampson 2008; Zinn 1999: chaps. 9, 10). Immediately, one of President Lincoln’s most pressing concerns was how to protect Washington D.C., the capital, located perilously between Maryland and Virginia. Both states were thinking hard about secession. On April 18, 1961, secessionists in

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Baltimore tried to prevent federal troops from passing through. A riot ensued. Bridges were burned. Shots were fired. The following week, on April 27, 1861, Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus, authorizing his commanding general to arrest and detain, without resort to the ordinary processes and forms of law, such individuals as he might deem dangerous to the public safety. For the rest of the Civil War, military officers could arrest U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely without presenting evidence against them. On July 4th 1886, Lincoln asked during a special session of Congress: Is there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness? Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence? Lincoln pointed out that in times of crisis, the President might need to defend the nation before the Congress could even assemble. In fact, the Congress had been out of session when the crisis of the Civil War began. Lincoln answered to the charge that, one who is sworn to take care that laws be faithfully executed, should not himself violate them, with the question that still echoes in debates about civil liberties and national security today–March 2010–concerning the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and in general the so-called war on terror: Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself to go to pieces, lest that one be violated? In 1863, Congress passed the Habeas Corpus Act, effectively endorsing Lincoln’s earlier suspension of the Great Writ. People have debated whether Lincoln’s decision was necessary and appropriate ever since. Since Lincoln, all liberal states have had emergency laws, which governments can appeal to in the time of crisis. Hitler became legally a dictator, when he appealed to the emergency laws of the Weimar Republic, and was granted them with the help of the Catholic Center Party (Gelately 2001: chaps. 1, 2). President Roosevelt did not appeal to the emergency laws and did not become a dictator, but rather introduced the New Deal, and modified atomistic liberalism socially through the principle of subsidiarity from Catholic social ethics.

Miner After joining the Union Army in 1861, Johannes Kraus, the former German farmer, peddler, and brewery worker fought as Northern Union soldier in several battles, and was wounded in one of them (Kraus 1880; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: chap. 2; Zinn 1999: chaps. 8, 10). Yet, Johannes survived the war. According to the family legend, Johannes was even healed from rheumatism through sleeping in wet forests. After the civil war, Johannes merely left the Union Army, before he was really dis-

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charged. On July 7, 1865, Johannes left Philadelphia with his wife Margaret and his growing family, and went further south to Baltimore. Since his arrival in New York, Johannes had constantly remained in close touch– through frequent letters–with his mother and family, farmers and inn keepers all of them, in a village in Bavaria. Thus upon arrival in Baltimore, Johannes received a letter from his family in Germany on August 4th, 1865, which he answered promptly next day. Most German and American members of the very Catholic Kraus family remained like the German and American members of the Lutheran Ludwig Krauss family–in rather close contact with each other from the 1850s to the 1890s. Also in Baltimore, Johannes worked in a German brewery. On Thursday, November 5, 1867, Johannes left Baltimore with his family and went to Cumberland. On November 12, 1867, Johannes started his work in the German brewery of Georg Hering and Georg Long, in Cumberland, 221 N. Gay Street. Johannes’s diary contained recipes for making good German beer. It was obviously in search for new, better paid work that Johannes and his family moved from one town or city to the other. Thus sometime later Johannes returned once more to the Post-Civil-War Philadelphia with good recommendations from his employers in Baltimore and Cumberland, in search for a new brewery. Johannes stayed in Philadelphia for another two years. But on February 8, 1869, Johannes left Philadelphia with his wife Margaret and his children and finally arrived in the railroad town of Martinsburg, where he settled for good at 208 South High Street up to his death in 1882: for 13 years. He became a miner in a West Virginia Mining Company. The speechless capital and the always volatile and unstable market characterized by business-and war-cycles, forced the German emigrants Johannes and Margaret to move their growing family from one town and city to the other, sometimes back and forth, in American liberal civil society along the East Coast, as it impelled Ludwig Krauss to move his family from on tenement house to the other in New York City. The consequent suffering was immense for both working class families. All that happened–and continues to happen 150 years later–to millions of American working class families, who’s whole life is determined and deformed by capital’s always faster movement of expansion, accumulation, and concentration, and its consequent always greater hunger for always cheaper natural and human resources.

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Children When Johannes and Margaret Kraus finally arrived and settled for good in Martinsburg, they had seven children altogether (Kraus 1880; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). Katharina Kraus had been born in Philadelphia on April 6, 1859. She died unmarried as Catherine Kraus in Martinsburg, on January 21, 1882, only 23 years of age. Georg Kraus had been born in Philadelphia on January 21, 1861, and died on March 26, 1939, at the age of 78. Maria Kraus had been born in Philadelphia on March 1, 1863 and died as Mary A. Dorn on July 9th, 1930, at the age of 67. Johann Adam Kraus had been born in Baltimore, on September 17, 1865, and died on September 4th, 1934 at the age of 69. Elisabeth Kraus, nicknamed Liessy, was born in Martinsburg on February 1873, and died on January 9, 1956, at the age of 82, after having carried to their graves father and mother, all her brothers and sisters, and her husband Louis Krauss. Wilhelm Kraus was born in Martinsburg on January 10, 1875, and died there on March 2nd, 1875 at the age of 3 months. Karl Paulus Kraus was born in Martinsburg on November 15, 1876. In baptism he received the first name of his uncle Paulus Kraus, a Catholic priest in the parish of Schnellville, Indiana. Karl Paulus died on March 26, 1936, at the age of 59. There were times in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cumberland, and Martinsburg, when Johannes Kraus was unemployed, and when the good Catholic became rather despondent, because he could no longer feed his wife and his growing family. There was of course no help from the liberal State or Federal Government. There was only self-help and the help from divine Providence: God helps those who help themselves! (Kraus 1880; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6)

Valley of Tears Johannes’s brother, Father Paulus Kraus–Pastor of the Catholic church in Schnellville, Indiana, and the godfather of his seventh child–tried to help Johannes and Margaret Kraus and their seven children in their distress as much as he possibly could, during the 1870s, after his family in Germany and in America had lost touch with him for some time, while he was studying for the priesthood (Kraus 1866; 1880; Siebert 2002a: chap. 2). Father Paulus Kraus’s theology was rather traditional and simple. On the basis of his life experience, particularly in the American South during the Civil War, and of his theology, Paulus considered the world to be an utter valley of tears. He celebrated the mass daily as an anticipation of the totally Other

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than this miserable earth–Heaven, where the believers were to move as fast as possible. However, his traditional theology did not prevent the priest Paulus Kraus from helping out financially not only his brother Johannes Kraus and his family, but also his old mother in a village in Southern Germany, and some of his poor parishioners in Schnellville, and even the Bishop of his diocese in Southern Indiana. Father Paulus even invited his brother Johannes and his whole family to come to Schnellville, and to rent a farm for $500, or better still, to buy one for $5,000. Farm life would be hard and poor in Schnellville, so Father Paulus argued. But at least the Kraus children would be saved from the moral corruption of the bad city life with all its murders and prostitution. The children could come to his parish school in Schnellville, and get a good education, and thus could and would grow up as decent people. As Father Paulus had been lost to his family in the 1850s and 1860s, so he disappeared again somewhere in the Wild West in the 1880s, and this time for good. There is no trace of Father Paulus in the Register of the North American Priests. His church in Schnellville burned down in 1900. The only thing left of Father Paulus in Schnellville are a few baptismal certificates, which he had signed, and which were rescued from the fire. Only Father Paulus’s Bishop of the Indiana Diocese is mentioned in the Register of the North American Priests: who once had borrowed $ 250 from Father Paulus, when he was still pastor of Schnellville’s Catholic church, and which he had never paid back.

Model for Life The Johannes Kraus Family never forgot Father Paulus, who had been a generous man and Christian (Kraus 1880; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). As such he and his theology became a model for the life of the Johannes Kraus family for four generations to come. Even at a time of desperate tiredness, hunger and exertion the first, second, third and fourth generation of the very Catholic Kraus family in Germany and America had a sustaining Abrahamic faith to give meaning to their lives even on the bleakest days, and to sustain their longing for the wholly Other than the valley of tears in which they found themselves continually (Genesis 25; Psalm 91; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37; Kraus 1880; Siebert 2002a: chap. 2; Lieber 2001: 148/29-148/32). Even when the Kraus family was very exhausted, and hungry, and driven to the brink of existence in the liberal American society, its members did not lack the capacity to be concerned with religious covenants and obligations. The members of the Johannes Kraus family were very much aware of their finitude

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and mortality. According to the Rabbis, some people contemplating their mortality were moved to live their lives thoughtfully, to invest their energies in things that truly matter. Others, like e.g. Esau, say: Why need I worry about morality and religion since I will die soon anyway (Genesis 25; Lieber 2001: 148/29-148/32).The members of the Kraus family belonged to the first group of thoughtful people, very much concerned with religion and morality.

The West Virginia Mining Operation Johannes Krauss never took his family to Schnellville. There was simply not enough money for such resettlement from Philadelphia or from Martinsburg to Schnellville, and for renting, not to speak of buying a farm (Kraus 1880; Siebert 2002a: chap. 2). Thus, Johannes worked as a miner in a West Virginia Mining Operation, until he died there in a horrible mine accident, as they have happened ever since in West Virginia and elsewhere up to the present–2010, often because of a lack of security measures. Johannes was crushed by a coupler latch, which rolled down and speared him in the gut. It happened in the morning at 11.45 a.m. on the 18th of October 1882. Precisely at this time, his wife Margaret was shelling beans in the kitchen, and the mirror cracked in the hallway. Margaret was said by the family to have considered it an omen, and thus knew something was horribly wrong. Johannes’s body was brought up from the mineshaft at the end of the shift. Johannes Kraus left behind his widow Margaret Kraus, and their surviving five children, for whom, of course, no provision had been made by the employer, the West Virginia Mining Corporation, for whose surplus value he had worked and died, or by the liberal society or state. His son, Wilhelm Kraus, had preceded his father Johannes in death by seven years. His oldest daughter, Catherine Kraus, died with her father in the same year, only ten months earlier. The good father Paulus Kraus did not reappear a second time, in order to help out his dead brother Johannes’s poor widow Margaret and family. He remained lost somewhere in the West. Margaret died twelve years after her husband Johannes, on June 22, 1894, at the age of 60. Margaret had to raise her surviving five children without any workers compensation, pension, or social security in the liberal American society, the liberalism of which had not yet been socially modified via the principle of subsidiarity by the Roosevelt Administration (Krauss 1880; Kraus 1880; Zinn 1999; Perkins 2006; 2007; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chap. 2). For the critical religiologist, informed by the Rabbis, Abraham and David had represented two distinct models of

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aging (1 Kings 1: 1-31; Lieber 2001: 142-143; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). The Abrahamic type entered old age with all the religious and moral integrity of life in tact. The Davidic type entered old age in the atmosphere of catastrophe. If the members of the Johannes Kraus family and the Ludwig Krauss family entered old age at all in the American liberal civil society–and most of them did not–then it followed the Davidic type rather than the Abrahamic type.

Socialist Labor Union Leaders Often between the 1830s and the 1930s small towns in West Virginia, e.g. Matewan, or Martinsburg, as elsewhere in American atomistic liberal, civil society with little solidarity, exploded when socialist unionist miners clashed with the capitalist owners of a tyrannical coal company (Krauss 1880; Kraus 1880; Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Sayles 1987; Zinn 1999; Perkins 2006; 2007; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chap. 2). Usually the workers had to buy their food, and clothing, and other commodities in the company store. The payments were deducted from their wages. Also the companies mostly owned the miserable houses, in which the workers lived. Also the sheriff was usually on the take and mostly took his orders and directives from the company, and the judge lived and reigned in a far away city. In the growing company towns of West Virginia, the dependence of the workers on the owners was almost absolute, and the protection by the liberal state, and the law, and the courts, was as good as zero. Thus, serious and devoted socialist labor leaders arrived from far away places in the North, e.g. Pittsburgh, in the small towns of West Virginia, in order through unionization to better the lives of the men, and the women, and the children, most of whom did not even speak English very well. Sometimes these socialist labor leaders in their efforts to organize the workers of the coal companies, e.g. the Stone Mountain Coal Company in Matewan, ignited not only the powder keg of class hate and class struggle, but also of racial, national, and ethnic hostilities, and betrayal among the workers, and further corruption in the management. They sometimes touched off most violent pre-revolutionary incidents in the history of the so-called coal wars, in which the liberal State Governments, as well as the liberal Federal Government, and thus the police and the army were mostly on the side of the owners, and not on the side of the workers, no matter how exploited the latter were, or how unjust their situation was.

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Family, Society, State, Religion The dialectical religiologist remembers that in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages civil society had developed in the city states out of the family, between the family and the state, and thus presupposed them both (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: Parts I, II, III, IV; Zinn 1999; Perkins 2006; 2007; App. C, D). In America, vice versa, the state organization grew very slowly out of the family, and out of civil society, and presupposed them both, and continues to do so still today–March 2010 (Hegel 1986l: 107-114; Zinn 1999; Perkins 2006; 2007). Therefore even today, the internal sovereignty of the state toward liberal bourgeois society and the corporations remains weak. In the present–March 2010–economic depression, with rising unemployment rates, the American federal state is not powerful enough to intervene effectively into civil society, in order to rescue banks from bankruptcy and millions of house owners from foreclosure, and millions of workers from unemployment. This happens in spite of the fact that even neo-conservative politicians, who are usually against such intervention in the spirit of neo-liberalism and a night watchman-theory of the state, and the free market ideology, ask for precisely such intervention, since particularly the financial markets do not function adequately. Since Odysseus, the very prototype of the bourgeois character, who populates liberal civil society, and who is more concerned with autonomy than with solidarity, with his private good than with the common good, has been unfit for family membership and has thus again and again destroyed the family through an increasing divorce rate, and has been unfit for citizenship, and has thus again and again undermined the state through escalating political corruption (Homer 1922; Hegel 1986g: 292-514; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 43-80; 81-119; Siebert 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). Finally, the bourgeois character also destroys religion, which so far had legitimated and stabilized the family and the state as well as the natural environment. Odysseus was driven all through the Mediterranean Sea by Poseidon, because he and his workers had in disrespect slaughtered and eaten the god’s cows. While the god annihilated Odysseus’ workers completely, he kept their employer alive in order to make him suffer much as punishment.

Lack of Universal Solidarity This same atomistic liberal civil society, which destroyed most city states of Antiquity and Middle Ages from within, became the very foundation of the modern secular state in North America (Hegel 1986g: 292-514; 1986l:

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107-114; App. C, D). It is the lack of universal solidarity in American individualistic liberal civil society–except during catastrophes like e.g. the devastating fire storm in Southern California of October 21, 2007–which can explain, why the introduction of social security was postponed up to 1933, when President Roosevelt modified liberalism socially by accepting the principle of subsidiarity from the Papal Encyclical Letter Quadragesimo Anno (Hegel 1986l: 107-114; Zinn 1999; Perkins 2006; 2007; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). It is the lack of solidarity in American atomistic liberal civil society, which explains why the introduction of universal health insurance has still not yet happened today by 2010, which the less liberal Germany has had since 1870. The regression of neo-liberalism and neo-conservativism behind President Roosevelt’s social modification of liberalism and the consequent further privatization explains the progressive cancellation of the New Deal achievements, since the counter-revolutionary Nixon–and Reagan–Administrations. On October 18, 2007, the neo-liberal President Bush junior vetoed the health insurance for 4 million American children because it was too expensive. That did not prevent the compassionately conservative President a week later to ask Congress for 190 billion dollars for the continuation of his unjust wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. The billions of dollars the President spends in these wars in one week would have easily paid for the children’s insurance program. In the meantime, 40 million Americans remain completely without health insurance. That precisely is compassionate, often religiously legitimated, neo-conservativism. In October 2007, in the economically depressed State of Michigan everybody fought for himself and for his own particularistic interests right up into the chambers of the Government in Lansing, and the common good, or the always more perfect union, and what is connected with it, e.g. education or health care, fell by the way side. Everything looked like Henry Ford country again, or simply like the former Wild West, where everybody was riding around freely and the sheriff, and the judge, and the court were far removed.

Totalitarization In the perspective of the critical religiology, in the hundred years between Hegel and Parsons, atomistic liberal bourgeoisie society in America and Europe became totalitarian in the sense that it integrated into itself not only the family, but also the state and religion (Hegel 1986g: 292-514; 1986l: 107-114; 1986p: 236-245; Parsons 1964; 1965; Zinn 1999; Perkins 2006; 2007; App. C, D). For Hegel, family and civil society had been part of the

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state, which was legitimated by religion. Still for scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries, like Carl Schmitt, the Epimetheus thinker of the Religious Right, and Jürgen Habermas, the Prometheus thinker on the Secular Left the state presupposed a religious and theological dimension, and it needed religious and theological legitimation particularly in moments of political and historical crisis (Habermas/Ratzinger 2005; Mehring 1992; Meier 1994; Groh 1998; Blumenberg 2007; Nida-Rümelin 2008: 9-14; Maresh 2008: 73-75). For Parsons, a century after Hegel, family, economy, polity and religion became integrated into liberal civil society, and had to function for its survival: the family fulfills the pattern maintenance function for the survival of liberal bourgeois society; the economy the adaptive function; the state the goal attainment function; and the religion the integrative function. Since all four subsystems have become integral parts of liberal civil society, they have become unable to criticize, not to speak of changing it. The totalitarization of liberal bourgeois society leaves no instance outside it, even just to control it adequately. To be sure, the totalitarization of liberal civil society did not only happen in the heads of Hegel and Parsons and of their students, but also and particularly so in the historical reality itself.

Boilermakers In spite of all the problems of civil society of the 19th and 20th centuries, the five surviving children of Johannes and Margaret Kraus did not only survive the deaths of their parents, but also were able to live productive lives (Kraus 1880; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). Their son George Kraus became a boilermaker in the U.S. Naval Yard in Washington D.C., 16th and A Street SE. Their son Charley became the drunk of the family. He lived in Annacostia. He held various jobs. But he finally also worked like his brother George as a boilermaker in the U.S. Naval Yard in Washington D.C. Their son John remained a bachelor. He was a railroad worker, but finally also retired as a boilermaker from the Naval Yard in Washington D.C., as did his brothers George and Charley. John was a very devoted Catholic. He was the only Catholic in the Erector Shop, which made and mounted battleship turrets (Kraus 1880; Küng 1976; 1987; 1989; 1992; 1994a 336-601; 1994b; 2003). As a devoted Catholic, John became a victim of prejudice in the Mason controlled shop. When John retired from the Navy Yard on August 1, 1930 he received a pension of $750 a month. John died from stomach cancer and edema of the lungs on September 6, 1934, at 10.30 p.m. He bequeathed all his property–many

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volumes of books, jewelry and personal effects–to his widowed niece Margaret C. Noyes and to her two children: Karl and Margaret Noyes. Johannes’s and Margaret’s daughter Mary married Buzz Byron. Buss was a commander in the American Navy. Mary and Buzz lived in Bethesda, Maryland. They had no children. Almost the whole Kraus family was employed by the American Federal Government at least in the 20th century.

Architectural Draftsman Johannes and Margaret Kraus’s daughter Elisabeth married Louis Krauss, the son of Ludwig Krauss from New York in Washington D.C. on July 5, 1899: in the same year in which his mother Charlotte Krauss, née Frei, died in the mental hospital on Blackwell Island in New York (Krauss 1880; Kraus 1880; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). Louis, the only surviving child of the carpenter Ludwig Krauss, had been raised a Lutheran Protestant. Elizabeth had been raised a Roman Catholic. Louis converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism, when he married the devoutly practicing Catholic Elizabeth Kraus, at the time being a secretary in Baltimore: maybe because of her, or maybe because the Krauss family in New York had not practiced Lutheranism very much (Kraus 1880; Krauss 1880; Küng 1994a: 336-601, 602-741; 1994b). Louis became a silversmith in New York. He was trained at Tiffanies. Later on Louis became an architectural draftsman in Washington D.C. Already in 1924, Louis had been an architectural draftsman in the U.S. Treasury Department for 22 years, 12 of which had been spent in the Supervising Architect’s Office, and the remainder in the Chief Clerk’s Office. During the year 1902, Louis was appointed as Architectural Draftsman in the Supervising Architect’s Office, and remained there about a year and one-half, and was then transferred as draftsman to the furniture division of the Chief Clerk’s Office. Here Louis was in full charge of the drafting in this office. During the period Louis was in charge, some of the largest buildings, which were designed in this office, were equipped with specially built furniture of all kinds. Some of the buildings referred to were the U.S. Custom House in New York, the Post-Office and Custom House in Chicago, Ill, the Post-Office and Custom House in San Francisco, California, and many others. Later on, Louis became Assistant Inspector of Furniture. In 1911, his office, among others, was transferred from the Chief Clerk’s Office to the Office of the Supervising Architect. Here it was Louis’s duty to design, make working drawings, write specifications, make factory inspections when the work was in the course of construction, and the final inspections at the build-

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ings. During the year 1913, Louis was detailed from the office to equip the new buildings of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where he made the complete furniture equipment for the entire building: designing, making, working drawings, and writing specifications, and inspecting a great many special articles of furniture. In 1914, Louis was transferred to the Drafting Division. Since 1914, Louis was working on architectural drawings. In all his years of service in the Department, Louis made an effort to be loyal, faithful, and efficient in the performance of his duties. Many times when in the Chief Clerk’s Office Louis gave up his annual leave voluntarily and his family vacations at Ocean City, in order to keep abreast of his work, when the office was unable to give him any assistance. Previous to his coming to this office, Louis had been in charge of the office of Mr. Glenn Brown of the City of Washington D.C., a prominent member of the American Institute of Architects. On July 11, 1924, Louis felt justified with the experience he had had before he entered the Chief Clerk’s Office, coupled with the experience while in the Office and with the service he had rendered, in making a plea to have his salary reallocated, as it did not seem fair and reasonable to him that he should be allocated as he was, and new draftsmen coming into the Office at the present time were allocated to a salary of $2,400 per annum. Louis felt that he should in justice receive at least as much as a new employee. In summer 1941, Louis had a stroke while on family vacations in Ocean City. After returning home, Louis had another massive stroke, from which he died. He left behind a small pension for his widow Elisabeth, his daughter Margaret, his son Frank and his Grandson Karl, who soon would be drafted to serve with the Marines in the Pacific, and his Granddaughter Margie. He also left behind many drawings of Greek and Roman architecture, many well-bound books on national-geographic discoveries and world literature, including a huge volume of Shakespeare’s works, a gift from a New York friend of 1899. All these works are still part of my library today–March 2010.

Providence and the Death of the Other In 1895, thirteen years after the tragic death of her father Johannes Kraus, and 16 months after the death of her mother Margaret Kraus, and four years before her marriage to Louis Krauss, Elisabeth read Baron Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s romantic novel The Sorrows of Werther (Goethe 1822; Kraus 1880; Siebert 2002a: chap. 2). On October 4, 1895, Elisabeth put a marker on page 49 of the book, where young Werther discussed at supper in the presence of his beloved Charlotte and other friends, the

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causes of human happiness and misery. Here, Werther availed himself of the opportunity to censure the passion of ill humor through arguing, that if we could partake in the bounty, which Providence so liberally bestowed on all of us, with a suitable meekness and gratitude, the reflection would smoothen our rough passage through life, and lighten the load of those evils, which we all more or less must bear. Throughout her long life, Elisabeth was a strong believer in the Providence of God, and was thus able to carry the rather heavy burdens and sufferings, particularly the death of the other, i.e. father, mother, brother, sister, son in law, husband–in meekness and gratitude up to her own death from leukemia in 1956. Already early in her life Elisabeth had become familiar with the death of the other (Kraus 1880; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). She found her experience of the death of the other not only expressed in the Sorrows of Werther, but also in a poem about the death of a husband, which she typed on a sheet of paper on December 27, 1897, fifteen years after the death of her father Johannes, and three years after the death of her mother Margaret, and two years before her marriage to Louis Krauss (Kraus 1880; Siebert 2002a: chap. 2). The poem ends with the sad prediction: One of us two shall find all light, all beauty, All joy on earth, a tale forever done; Shall know henceforth, that life means only duty– O God! O God! Have pity on that one.

Elisabeth tried to master the experience of the death of the other–particularly through her own long years of widowhood from 1943-1956–through her childlike, but nevertheless very strong and powerful faith in God’s Providence, which she found most adequately expressed in a short story, which she typed on the same day as the poem on the death of the other on the back page, preserving both in her diary for the rest of her life. The short story about a merchant, who was rescued from the bullet of a robber through a nasty rain and thunderstorm, which made the powder wet and useless, ended with the insight: The rain, at which I murmured, saved my property and life. In the future, I will not forget, what the proverb says: What God sends, is always well, though why, it is often hard to tell.

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Office Clerk and Housewife After their marriage and his conversion, Elisabeth and Louis Krauss, shared this strong faith, that Providence governs the world, in spite of all contingencies throughout their life together, through many hardships, perils, poverty, illness and death, with each other, and with their children, and grandchildren (Kraus 1880; Hegel 1986l: 19-55; Habermas 1986: 5354). Their longing and love for the not yet demythologized totally Other, the Eternal One, God’s Providence, consoled Elisabeth and Louis, and their family about the misfortune and the death of the others, family members, friends, and neighbors, as well as about the arrival of their own death (Psalm 46; Psalm 73; Psalm 91; Kraus 1880; Hegel 1986l: 1955; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1986: 53-54; Berrigan 1972; 1978: 35-37, 53-56; 1989). Their faith in Providence enabled them to reconcile most practically, communicatively, and competently the sacred and the profane, redemption and happiness, as well as personal autonomy and universal, i.e. anamnestic, present, and proleptic solidarity (Kraus 1880; Hegel 1986l: 19-55; 1986p: 9-53; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Habermas 1986). Only the form separates the content of the people’s religion from the content of great art and great philosophy. From 1900 to 1943, Elisabeth and Louis lived in their own house at 61-R-NE, Washington D.C., not too far away from the Main Railroad Station, the Capitol, and the White House: the very center of the growing American Empire. Elisabeth and Louis had two children: Margaret Charlotte Kraus, born on January 29, 1900, and named after her grandmother Charlotte Krauss and her grandmother Margaret Kraus, and Frank Charles Kraus, born on June 7, 1906, and named after Louis’s older brother Frank Krauss, who had died at the age of 18, and his younger brother Karl Krauss, who had died at the age of 1. The names of the dead survived in the names of the living, and hopefully beyond. After having raised their own children, Elisabeth and Louis took care of their grandchildren, Karl and Margaret Noyes, after the death of their father Karl Henry Neuss in 1929. In their particular familial providence, Elisabeth and Louis imitated in faith and solidarity the universal divine Providence, without, however, losing their own personal autonomy and sovereignty. Throughout her life, Elisabeth was a good and most effective housewife for her husband Louis, her unmarried brother John, and her children and grandchildren. In the last decade of the 19th century, Elisabeth had still lived in Martinsburg and Baltimore and had worked as an office clerk, characterized by her employers as being of excellent character, thoroughly honest, and willing, well educated,

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thoroughly competent, intelligent and quick. Before Elisabeth got married to Louis Krauss, she liked to collect sermons on the Power of gentleness, etc., paintings, pictures of outstanding men in the community and in political life. She gathered articles and poems of religious and moral content, often concerned with the transitoriness of life, Providence, and the theodicy problem from the Philadelphia Inquirer, The World, The Indian Helper, and other newspapers (Kraus 1980; Siebert 2000: Introduction; 2001: chap. 2). Elisabeth was interested in the social corruption among the politicians in Washington of 1898. She read about startling episodes in Washington life, which showed that men in highest rank violated the moral laws. Again and again the bourgeois broke through in the citizen. She studied intensely an article on nerves: Nerves. Alarming increase among women. Exciting causes. Overstrain and higher education. She read melancholical poems about The goal we never reach, or Sweethearts always, or Broken marriages, or Advice is cheap, or The other woman speaks, or Harkening for his steps, or The rain, or To a jealous fair one, or If life’s a stage, or As we see it, and stories about Friendship, or Witchcraft Trial in the Modern Town of Salem. Sometimes Elisabeth would even write poetry herself in letters to her siblings and friends. While her parents Johannes and Margaret Kraus had moved from North to South, from New York to Martinsburg, Elisabeth’s journey went from South to North, from Martinsburg to Washington D.C.

Student Later on, Louis and Elisabeth Krauss’s son Frank built a successful taxi company, which transported passengers to and from the Dulles Airport in Washington D.C. (Kraus 1880; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). He could afford a wonderful cottage at the Chesapeake Bay, where Margie and her brother Karl spent some of their vacations from the hot summers in Washington D.C. When his second, much younger wife left him in 1962, Frank committed suicide in his garage. His sister Margaret married Karl Henry Neuss at St. Martin’s Church in Washington D.C. on the 19th of April 1922. Father Eugene A. Hannan assisted the marriage ceremony. Karl had been born–as one of five children, three sons and two daughters–to the family of Bartholomew Neuss and Katherina Neuss, née Moegerle in New Haven, Connecticut, on June 25, 1899 (Neuss 1917). The Neuss family had immigrated to the United States from the City of Neuss in Germany, toward the end of the 19th century, a generation later than the Ludwig Krauss family and the Johannes Kraus family. Karl grew

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up at 101 Gregory Street, New Haven. He went to the Roman Catholic St. Boniface School for his elementary education. He graduated from the New Haven High School in 1917. During his high school period Karl was a member of the Glee Club and the senior Chorus. He identified as his future profession: Electrical Engineer. At graduation from high school Karl chose a motto from literature: My songs yet forth so clear. Karl was an excellent student. Karl’s mind was equally gifted technically and musically. Karl struck and cultivated in himself a good balance between instrumental and functional rationality and action on one hand, and mimetic, and communicative, rationality and praxis, on the other. Well prepared in New Haven’s St. Boniface Elementary School and High School, in 1917, Karl did not go to the closer Harvard University or Yale University, but rather to the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C., in order to study in the Electrical Engineering Department, and also to join the army. Here in Washington D.C., Karl Henry met Margaret Charlotte Krauss and her family.

Marine and Sodality Member Margaret Charlotte Krauss had joined the Marine Corps in Washington D.C, in 1918 (Kraus 1880; Siebert 2002a: chap. 2). Later on, she re-enlisted again and served 4 years of active duty. Margaret was also a member of the Sodality of Mary at St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church in Washington D.C. (Kraus 1880; Küng 1994a: 336-601; 1994b). She also belonged to the Third Order of St. Francis at the Franciscan Monastery in Washington D.C., which also Margie and I visited very often later on, when we studied together in the nearby Catholic University of America in 1953/1954. Margaret had no difficulties what so ever to harmonize her military service as a Marine with her membership in the Sodality of Mary and the Third Order of St. Francis: neither had her many friends in Washington D.C., who were good practicing Catholics and at the same time served in the Armed Forces mostly in officer’s ranks. Also Margaret’s daughter, Margie, earned her money as a student at Dunbarton College and at the Catholic University of America not only through playing the organ and directing the choir at St. Gabriel’s Church, but also at the military chapel at Fort Belvoir, and several army chaplains were her friends: one of them fell in the Korean War, while heroically helping wounded comrades in battle. With the money made at Fort Belvoir, Margie was able to take her Mother Margaret and her Grandmother Elisabeth for vacations to Canada and to the Caribbean Islands, and her Mother to Germany, France, Egypt, and Is-

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rael as a sign of her gratitude for all they had done for her throughout her life, raising her for twenty five years under rather difficult and often tragic conditions, and to contribute to our first Volkswagen in Germany after we got married in Dieburg in 1956.

Electrical Engineer and Soldier Margaret’s husband Karl Henry Neuss was a very life-happy and most musical person (Kraus 1880; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). Already early in his marriage, Karl bought a wonderful piano, on which he played skillfully and to which he sang mostly German songs, and on which his daughter Margie would learn to play, and which was still in my home: 630 Piccadilly Road, Kalamazoo Michigan, up to 2009. Karl had been honorably discharged from the U.S. Army on November 26, 1918, when he was still a student in the Engineering Department of the Catholic University of America, Washington D.C. During the horrible flu epidemic of 1918, which cost the lives of ten thousands of people all over the United States and beyond, Karl Henry served as student and soldier in the hospitals of Washington D.C. At the time Karl Henry was drafted to the Army, he was 19 years of age, and had brown eyes, brown hair, and a fair complexion, and was 5 feet and 7 inches in height. The continual overwork and stress caused him to have a heart attack in the basement of the Engineering Department of Catholic University of America. His mother Katharina came from New Haven, Connecticut, to Washington for over six weeks in order to nurse him back to health. While Karl Henry received from the United States Army the Testimony of Honest and Faithful Service, he never was compensated for his illness, because it was an injury not received on the battlefield. W.B. Ladue, Colonel, Corps of Engineers, and Engineer Commissioner of the District of Colombia and head of the Municipal Architects Office, in which Louis Krauss worked as an architectural draftsman, and his son in law Karl Henry Neuss as an electric engineer, remembered Karl after his death in 1929 as a valuable citizen, a man of unusual good judgment, tact, and professional ability, and as a leader of capable, honorable and dependable people, who build the great, the good, and the lasting things of this world. Karl and Margaret became the parents of my late wife Margie and her 6 years older brother Karl. Elisabeth raised her grandchildren Margie and Karl while their mother Margaret served as a Marine and worked for little money for the Navy Department after the early death of her husband Karl Henry Neuss, a mechanical engineer, who had worked in the D.C. Municipal

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Architect’s Office and had become the head of the District Governments Engineering Department and director of the heating system of the District Government. Karl Henry died at the early age of 30, on June 15, 1929, from aortic regurgitation and cerebral embolism. After the death of their son Karl Henry, Bartholomew Neuss and Katherina Neuss came to Washington D.C. in order to adopt their grandchildren Karl and Margie, because they thought their mother Margaret would not be able to raise them adequately. They may have suspected that Margaret had traces of the illness of her grandmother Charlotte, who had died in the mental institution on Blackwell Island in 1899. However, on the 20th of February 1931 the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia granted the guardianship of the minors Karl Henry Noyes and Margaret Charlotte Noyes, to their mother. At the occasion, Margaret was so upset about the interference of her in-laws Bartholomew and Katherina Neuss, that she changed her and the children’s name from Neuss to Noyes. From 1931 on, the family Noyes in Washington D.C. and the family Neuss in New Haven were estranged from each other. Grandfather Louis and Grandmother Elisabeth helped greatly their daughter Margaret, to give Karl Henry and Margaret Charlotte the best education possible. In spite of the fact, that four doctors testified that the early death of Karl Henry Neuss was connected with his heart attack of 1918, his widow Margaret’s decades long attempts to receive compensation from the U.S. Army through Congress failed again and again. Karl Henry’s son Karl would, nevertheless, serve again most meritoriously with the U.S. Marines in the Second World War against Japan. Karl Henry was buried in the German-Italian Catholic St. Mary’s Cemetery, five months before his daughter Margie was born on November 12, 1929. On Karl’s memorial card was quoted Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted, from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5: 5). Then there followed a prayer, which expressed the mainly Christocentric, Catholic piety of the family Krauss and of their St. Martin’s and St. Gabriel’s Parishes in 1929: Gentlest Heart of Jesus, ever present in the Blessed Sacrament, ever consumed with burning love for the poor captive souls in Purgatory, have mercy on the soul of Thy departed servant. Be not severe in Thy judgment, but let some drop of Thy Precious Blood fall upon the devouring flames, and do Thou, O merciful Savior, send Thy angels to conduct Thy departed servant to a place of refreshment, light and peace. May the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

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chapter nineteen Eternal rest grant onto him, O Lord! And let perpetual light shine upon him. Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him. Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for him. St. Joseph, friend of the Sacred Heart, pray for him.

In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, while such Catholic piety was not free from mythology and maybe not even entirely from magic motivation, it expressed, nevertheless, a longing for the wholly Other than the world of continually disappearing appearances, with all its horrible injustices, misery, unhappiness, loneliness, meaninglessness, guilt, abandonment, illnesses, aging, dying and death, and the countless innocent victims, who never have had their day in any earthly court (Kracauer 1995: 203-212; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-248; Küng 1994a: 336-601; 1994b: Benedict XVI 2007: No. 42, 43).

Historical Events At the time of Karl Henry Neuss’s death and of the birth of his daughter Margie in 1929, Herbert C. Hoover was President of the United States and Charles Curtis was the Vice President. Under President Hoover the Great Depression broke out in 1929. On the same day when Margie was born, on November 12, 1929, the Kelley-Roosevelt Expedition went to Eastern Asia and was successful in obtaining a complete specimen of the rare giant panda near the Tibetan boarder. The Neanderthal man group of approximately 60,000 years ago was installed in the museum. The U.S. physicist Robert Van de Graft experimented with a silk ribbon and a motor, in order to generate electrostatic lighting between two tin cans, and two years later built a 10 million volt generator. Richard E. Byrd flew to the South Pole. His big tri-motored airplane started the 1,600 mile flight to the South Pole and back from Little America. At the time of Margie’s birth a new Ford auto cost 625 dollars, a new house 4,000 dollars, a loaf of bread 9 cents, a gallon of milk 56 cents, and a dozen eggs 45 cents. In Detroit, the 20 million dollar Ambassador Bridge over the Detroit River between the U.S. and Canada was dedicated. In the 1960s and the 1970s Margie and I and our seven children would cross with great excitement this 1,850 feet long bridge in our golden station wagon on our way to the Universities of Waterloo and London many times, and remembered its dedication on the day of her birth.

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Social Workers I still met Margie’s grandmother Elizabeth Krauss in Washington D.C. in October 1953, when I began to study with her granddaughter Margie Noyes at the Catholic University of America, in the Department of Social Work, and to play piano and sing with friends at her home at 4603 Illinois Avenue NW, where her family had lived most of the time since November 1925, when Karl Henry Neuss had bought it for 8,000 dollars (Kraus 1880; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). Elizabeth had always counseled Margie, not to marry a German. However, for once Margie disobeyed the authority of her grandmother Elizabeth, and–according to her own confession on her deathbed in London, Ontario, Canada, in October 1978–, had had no regrets, and neither do I. It was at 4603 Illinois Avenue, where Margie Charlotte Noyes had grown up from her 13th year on. It was here at her home, where 11 years later, we celebrated Margie’s 24th birthday on November 12, 1953, together with her mother Margaret Charlotte Noyes and her grandmother Elisabeth Krauss, who at the time was already bent deeply by old age, and by much human loss and suffering and by over 80 years of hard life. Margie and I had met in the Social Work Department of the Catholic University of America in October 1953. Margie studied social casework and I studied social group work. We both were to become social workers of different kinds–Margie in the USA and I in Germany. Social group work was to help me in Germany to promote further liberal democracy through schools and education, and through the Christian Democratic Party of the German Federal Republic and political action.

Soldier, Prisoner of War and Agent of Liberal Democracy I had grown up in fascist Germany, in Frankfurt a.M. (Siebert 1966; 1993; 1994b; 2001; 2002; Weitensteiner 2002). After having been educated in the Catholic Youth movement and in an elite humanistic high school, the Lessing Gymnasium, I was drafted into the air force and then into the army, after most of the German planes were gone. In April/May 1945, while fighting against General Patton’s tank army in Alzenau in the Spessart Mountains, and after the furious battle on the Hahnenkamp, I was taken prisoner and was transported through France and across the Atlantic to Camp Allen in Norfolk, Virginia. In Camp Allen I was selected by Jewish secret service officers as anti-Nazi because I had been engaged as leader in the Catholic Youth Movement in anti-fascist activities in Frankfurt a.M.

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Now I was educated by professors of economics, political science and sociology from surrounding universities, according to a liberal-democratic program worked out by the critical theorists Marcuse, Horkheimer and Adorno in the International Institute for Social Research at Columbia University, New York, in order to be sent back to Germany, and there to help to re-introduce liberal democracy into the German society, which for 12 years had been dominated by fascist democracy. In February 1946, I returned to Germany, and while continuing my studies at the Lessing Gymnasium and in the Universities of Frankfurt, Mainz, and Münster, engaged at the same time in the liberal democratization work together with my friends Walter Dirks and Eugen Kogon through the new Christian Democratic Party, which had replaced the former entirely Catholic Center Party. In 1953, I was once more selected by the U.S. State Department to return to the United States for a refresher course in liberal democratic leadership. I was sent to the Social Work Department of the Catholic University of America in October 1953.

Dating, Engagement, Marriage, and Family Soon after I had met Margie in the first week of my arrival at the Catholic University of America, we saw each other daily in the classrooms and hallways of the Social Work Department (Kraus 1880; Siebert 1966; 1993; 1994b; 2001; 2002; Weitensteiner 2002). I began to invite Margie out to our first dates in winter and spring 1953/1954: to dances, plays, church services, my public lectures at Dunbarton College, where she had done her undergraduate work, to parties, and to trips through the countryside of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Often we participated in services not only at the nearby Franciscan Monastery, but also at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on the Campus of the Catholic University of America, which at the time consisted only of its basement. We visited the Engineering Building on Campus, where Margie’s father had studied and had had his heart attack. We visited the Roman Catholic GermanItalian Cemetery nearby, where Karl Henry Noyes had been buried as well as Louis Krauss. We frequented the Campus library, where Margie’s mother Margaret was still working. It was at the entrance of her home at 4603 Illinois Avenue, where on a warm Washington May evening after a very nice picnic at the beautiful Sugarloaf Mountain, Maryland, Margie and I exchanged our first kiss. In this our first kiss were virtually present already our engagement, our marriage, our 8 children, our whole family life in Germany, in the USA, and in Canada, for the next 24 years, up to

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the tragic October 1978, the year of her most cruel cancer suffering and death, and even our 14 grandchildren, whom she wanted to see so much, but who were born only after she had passed away. Margie and I got engaged in the Cathedral of St. Gallen in Switzerland on July 26, 1955, and we were married by our friend, the Bishop of Mainz, Dr. Joseph Maria Reuss, in Dieburg, Germany, on July 26, 1956. While I was teaching in Dieburg and Meschede, Germany, Margie and I worked together through the Left Wing of the Christian Democratic Party of the Federal Republic of Germany toward a democratic, socially very modified liberal German society, from 1956 to 1962. In January/October1962, we followed the Johannes Kraus family and the Ludwig Krauss family a century earlier, and migrated once more through New York, to Baltimore, and finally to Kalamazoo in Michigan, where today–March 2010–I am still teaching in the Department of Comparative Religion of Western Michigan University promoting the humanistic critical theory of society and religion.

Providence and Reason As in Germany before, so Margie and I pursued also after our return to the United States in 1962 a socially modified liberalism in the Roosevelt tradition through our educational work, first at Loyola College and St. Agnes College in Baltimore, and then at Western Michigan University, Western Ontario University in London, Ontario, and Waterloo University in Waterloo, Ontario, as well as through our political work on the Left Wing of the Democratic Party (Siebert 1966; 1993; 1994b; 2001; 2002a; Weitensteiner 2002). Twice I was in the third congressional district the campaign manager for the Presidential candidate, Senator George McGovern, who had fought with the American Air force in Germany, while I defended the German cities in the German Air force: we became good friends. From the very start of our relationship in 1953, Margie and I considered our meeting each other in the Social Work Department of the Catholic University of America, where her father Karl Henry Neuss, her mother Margaret Charlotte Noyes, and her brother Karl Noyes had studied and worked already, as being Providential, in the spirit of the Kraus family: we trusted that Providence and Reason governed the world, in spite of all its horror and terror, and let us be guided by them in our marriage and family life and decisions (Hegel 1986l: 19-55; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37; 1986p: 87-88; Baum 2007: chap. 5). We expressed this trust through our life and our academic and political work, and finally also through the symbol of the Rose in the Cross of the Present, which we received from

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the writings of Dante, Luther, and Hegel, and put on our gravestone on the Mountain Home Cemetery in Kalamazoo: the Rose of Providence and Reason in the Cross of the present historical situation (Hegel 1986g: 2627, 42,43; 1986p: 88, 272-273). Throughout our life together in Europe and America from 1953 to 1978 and beyond, Margie and I believed firmly that we received our daily tasks from God’s Providence, Reason, and Wisdom from one kairos to the other–no matter how puzzling and painful the riddles of life were–and made our decisions to accomplish those familial, educational, political and religious duties in terms of the Gospels, particularly the Sermon on the Mount, and in terms of our inner conscience, voice, light, or grace as our sources of truth: as the Johannes Kraus family and the Ludwig Krauss family had done in New York, the capital of the 19th, and 20th centuries more or less socially modified liberalism, as well as in Philadelphia, Cumberland, Baltimore, Martinsburg, and Washington D.C. (Matthew 5-7; Hegel 1986l: 19-55; 1986g: 26-27, 42, 43; 1986p: 88, 272-273; Kraus 1880; Krauss 1880; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Baum 2007: chap. 5).

Humanism against Authoritarianism From the very beginning of and throughout our marriage and work together as teachers, Margie and I opted for humanism and against all forms of authoritarianism in the family, in civil society, in the state, in history, in culture, and particularly in Post-Vatican II religion (Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1967: 261-263; 1976: 201-202; Küng 1972; 1976; 1978; 1980; 1987; 1989; 1990b; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1991a; Siebert 1966; 1993; 1994b; 2001; 2002a; Weitensteiner 2002). We remembered the great humanists of the past: Gautama, the Buddha, the Hebrew Prophets, Jesus the Christ, Socrates, the philosophers of the Renaissance, and those of the enlightenment down to Goethe, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Thomas Mann and the critical theorists (Fromm 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967: 261-263; 1976: 201-202; Küng 1965; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; Goethe 1965; Mann 1991; Siebert 2001; 2002a). We became aware of the unbroken tradition of humanism, which reached back some 2,500 years to what Jaspers called the axis time, and which was now in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s growing in the most divergent fields of thought, mostly in those of Christianity and Marxism, but also among thinkers, who belonged to neither camp, such as Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Camus, and Einstein. Margie and I were fascinated by humanist thought within Christian thinking on the one hand, and that within Marxist-socialist thinking on the other. We discovered the new

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importance of humanism within the Roman Catholic Church, represented e.g. by Pope John XXIII, Teilhard de Chardin, Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, and Johannes B. Metz. We knew Rahner, Küng, and Metz personally. We were also familiar with humanism in the Protestant Church, as represented by Paul Tillich, Jürgen Moltmann and Albert Schweitzer. We knew Moltmann personally. At the other end of the philosophical spectrum there was evidence of a new humanism among Marxist thinkers.

Inter-University Center Margie and I met humanistic Marxist philosophers from Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia as well as from Western Europe and America through our international course on the Future of Religion in the InterUniversity Center for Post-Graduate Studies in Dubrovnik, which Margie and I had founded in 1975, and which often turned into a ChristianMarxist dialogue (Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1967: 261-263; 1976: 201-202; Küng 1993a; 1993b; 1994a 1994b; Siebert 1966; 1993; 1994b; 2001; 2002a; Weitensteiner 2002a; Ott 2001; 2004; 2007). Here we became familiar with the names of humanistic Marxists like Georg Lukacs, Adam Schaff, Veljko Korac, Ernst Bloch, Petrovich, Vrcan, Bosniak, Supec, and of course of the members of the Frankfurt School, who had visited the Summer School of Cordula, e.g. Habermas, who also participated in our course on the Future of Religion, as did Metz and Küng. The Summer School of Cordula ended because of the inhospitability of the surrounding population, before we started our course in Dubrovnik, inheriting its progressive intellectual tradition. Here we also met with Ossip K. Flechtheim, the founder of the critical humanistic futurology, and learned much from him. Later on in 1983, 5 years after Margie’s death, I even established a Center for Humanistic Future Studies at Western Michigan University, which Flechtheim had tried to do 40 years earlier at American universities during his exile in the United States (Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003). Here in the Inter-University Center, we also continued to develop our humanistic dialectical theory of religion out of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory of society in continual discourse with our colleagues from Eastern and Western Europe, the Near East, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. For Margie and me humanism was a system of thought and feeling centered upon man, his growth, happiness, integrity, dignity, and freedom: upon man as an end in himself, as self-purpose, and not as a means toward anything; upon his capacity to be active and productive and creative not only as an individual, but also as a participant in society and history; and upon the

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fact that every man carries within himself all of humanity. Margie and I, as well as our colleagues who came to Dubrovnik, saw the renaissance of humanism in the 1960s and 1970s as a reaction to the ever increasing threat to man: and the need for the rescue of the hopeless victims. We were very sensitive for the threat to humanity’s spiritual existence resulting from a late capitalist society, in which man became increasingly alienated from himself as producer and consumer, reified, commodified and subordinated to the interests of economic production and profit taking, and to the corresponding state organization: particularly what President Eisenhower had called the military industrial complex, which threatened democracy (Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 457-477, 569-573, 478-587; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Fromm 1950; 1957; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967: 261-263; 1976: 201-202; Küng 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; Siebert 1966; 1993; 1994b; 2001; 2002a; Weitensteiner 2002a; Ott 2001; 2004; 2007). We were also fully aware of the threat to man’s physical existence through the ever-increasing nuclear arms race between the hostile capitalist and socialist blocks, and through the global ecological destruction. Margie and I joined religious and secular humanists, who had a deep and passionate desire, to fight these two threats and dangers by putting the concern for man in the center of their thoughts and actions, and tried to prevent the arrival of alternative Future I–the totally administered society, and of alternative Future II–the entirely militarized society, and to promote alternative Future III–the reconciled society (Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985a; 1985b; 1985e; App. G). Always our humanistic longing for alternative Future III was an integral part of our insatiable yearning for the wholly Other and the ultimate rescue of the victims of society and history: the murderer must not triumph over the innocent victim, at least not ultimately (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40).

Beyond Abstract Liberalism According to Horkheimer’s Notes of 1961, a century earlier Marx had spoken of the capitalist society, which through the actions of the proletariat had to turn into alternative Future III–the egalitarian, classless communist society (Hegel 1986g: 339-514; Marx 1953: chaps. VI-X; Horkheimer 1974c: 167-168; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 569-573, 578587; App. G). Yet, what was at stake for Horkheimer, was not the society, but particular states and blocks of states. Insofar as the state like religion

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belonged to the superstructure for Marx, Horkheimer emphasized its highly real interaction with its basis: abstract liberal civil society (Hegel: 1986g: 339-514; 1986p: 236-246; Marx 1953: chaps. VI-X; 1983: 115-125; Horkheimer 1974c: 167-168; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 569573, 578-587; App. C, D). The interest in the falling of the class barriers turned in the period of late liberalism or neo-liberalism into the interest in the rising of the living standard. However, this living standard was connected with the power and reputation of the nation. The living standard revealed itself even more and more as the real meaning of the nation. Out of precisely those human energies, which most of the time appeared to generate the proletarian solidarity, out of the suffering from the social class difference, the will and longing for alternative Future III–the society characterized by a better, more just life, by liberté, égalité, and fraternité, resulted through the economic and political context and situation in late liberal capitalist society as well as through the conscious influence of those who were in power, the corporate ruling class and its rackets, not in alternative Future III–the biophilous and thus right and peaceful society, but rather in alternative Future I–the brown or red fascist Volksgemeinschaft, or alternative Future II–the aggressive, necrophilous militaristic or war society (Hegel 1986g: 339-514; Marx 1953: chaps. VI-X; Horkheimer 1974c: 167-168; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 397-407, 408-433, 569573, 578-587; Fromm 1961; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; Marcuse 1960: 389-420; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Miles 2008; Collopy 2000; App. G). Precisely because the national states were there, so Horkheimer argued, the enthusiasm was elicited not through the Marxian watchword Proletarians of all countries unite, but rather through the call Á les enfants de la patrie and through the slogan of the last German Emperor Wilhelm of August 1914–I do not know any classes any longer. I know only Germans. The nationalists marched arm in arm. For Horkheimer, the national socialism of the Führer Adolf Hitler and the socialism in the free land of Marshall Joseph Stalin signified the bad identity, which had already been anticipated in the dance around the guillotine during the French bourgeois revolution (Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 397-433, 569-573, 578-587). According to Horkheimer, what happened was the fulfillment through regression, instead of as rescue of what had already once become good even in still abstract, atomistic liberal society: as consequence of abstract rather than of concrete, determinate negation (Hegel 1986c: 68-77; 1986e: 48-53; Marx 1953: chaps. VI-X; 1961a: 17-18; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 23-24; Horkheimer 1974c: 167-168; 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40; 1985l: 1, 286-287,

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593-605; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 569-573, 578-587; Marcuse 1960: 389-420). The critique of Marx had been meant as critique of abstract, atomistic, narcissistic, selfish, socially autistic liberalism. It was however itself liberal critique in terms of a concrete liberalism, in which justice and freedom would be mediated. However, it lapsed, nevertheless, into the authoritarian force of history, which pointed to alternative Future I–the totally administered society without meaning and love, instead of to alternative Future III–the society characterized by freedom, equality and brotherhood (Hegel 1986g: 339-514; Marx 1953: chaps. VI-X; 1961a: 17-18; Horkheimer 1974c: 167-168; 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40; 1985l: 286-287, 593-605; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 569573, 578-587; Marcuse 1960: 389-420; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/ Lohmann 2003; Nida-Rümelin 2006: 9-14; App. G). The dialectical religiology understands historical materialism as liberal self-criticism, and aims itself beyond abstract liberalism and even more atomistic neo-liberalism toward alternative Future III–a society, in which the great liberal accomplishments in terms of personal autonomy and sovereignty would be concretely mediated with universal solidarity (Fromm 1964; 1966a; 1966b 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1974; 1975; 1976; Eggebrecht 1980; Habermas 1976; 1986; Siebert 2001; 2002a; App. G). The betrayal of freedom, equality and brotherhood by the bourgeoisie in the 19th century lead in the 20th century toward alternative Future I–in the form of authoritarian fascism and socialism, or red fascism. The neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1989 meant the transitory return from fascism and socialism to abstract liberalism: their very origin. Alternative Future III would be a concrete liberal society, in which personal sovereignty and anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity would be reconciled (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975b; Flechtheim1959: 625-634; 1962: 27-34; 1963: 148-150; 1966: 455-464; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1984a; 1985a; 1986; Siebert 2001; 2002a; App. G).

Longing and Solidarity Horkheimer wrote in 1971, two years before his death, in the liberal German Federal Republic, that the great bourgeois philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, the father of metaphysical pessimism, was not so unconditionally pessimistic, as it would correspond to the present dark historical situation and context (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Horkheimer 1985g: 231-232, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 37, 40). Schopenhauer had taught in Berlin and Frankfurt a.M., that the return of those people, who have freed

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themselves from bourgeois self-love, into the universal will, constituted a kind of redemption, In this way, so Horkheimer argued, Schopenhauer had been connected through this and several other parts of his work not only with Buddhism, as the Religion of Inwardness, but also with Christianity as the Religion of Freedom (Schopenhauer 1989: Vol. I, 486, 518520, 558; Vol. II, 218-219, 557, 651, 717, 729, 782; Vol. IV, 149; Vol. V, 387, 406-414, 420-423, 427-445, 450-455, 459-466, 473; Hegel 1986p: 374389; 1986q: 185-346; Küng 1970; 1994a; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: C; App. E). Schopenhauer knew of a consolation. Today–in 1971– Horkheimer could say, that the reasons for such consolation became always weaker in European and American liberal society. The only thing which remained for Horkheimer was the longing for the wholly Other, which was endangered through the progress itself in abstract liberal civil society, but which was nevertheless common to the people, who knew of the misery of the past, the injustice of the present, and the prospect of post-modern alternative Future I–a totally bureaucratized society, which was lacking in spiritual meaning and love (Horkheimer 1985g: 231-232, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; App. G). According to Horkheimer, if such people could find and come together, they could found a solidarity, which would preserve and contain in itself, in an undogmatic way, theological elements (Horkheimer 1987k: 289-332; 1988a; 1985g: 231-232, chaps. 4,9, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976). With those solidary peoples’ ultimately negative attitude toward the extant world connected itself, nevertheless, what at the time–in 1971–in Frankfurt was known as the critical theory of society (Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1985g: 231-232, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970c; 1971; 1972; 1973; 1974; 1976). Those people, who would be bound together through their longing for the wholly Other would not be able to say something about the Absolute, about the Unconditional, about God and redemption. They could not proclaim or pronounce the knowledge, any knowledge at all, as absolute truth. In that sense they would be agnostics like Kant (Kant 1929; 1946; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Horkheimer 1987k: 13-79). But they could spread the anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity. They could signify, what in the face of the dearly to be paid for, but nevertheless necessary progress of liberal society, had to be changed and to be preserved for the purpose of the diminishment of human suffering. With the theoretical pessimism could be connected a not un-optimistic praxis, which–remembering the universal

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evil–could nevertheless improve upon the possible common good, in spite of everything (Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1985g: 231-232, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970c; 1971; 1972; 1973; 1974; 1976; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978a). For the people, who were active in this solidarity, their own judgment about good and evil would not count and would not be valid as absolute truth. They would always be aware of the relativity of their own judgment, insofar as it did not limit itself to the establishment of facts and data in protocol sentences (Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1985g: 231-232, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970c; 1971; 1972; 1973; 1974; 1976; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978a; Siebert 1979d; 2005b; Ott 2001). For Horkheimer, Schopenhauer as well as Hegel, whom the former identified as enemy, and even the whole great philosophy of liberal civil society in its so vain and futile attempts at the theory and praxis of the truth have first of all made possible such reflections of the critical theory of society (Horkheimer 1987b: 1574, 75-148, 149-178; 179-270, 271-311; 1988c: chaps. 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16; 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 19, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40; 1988d: chaps. 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16; 1990j: 11-168, 169-333, 334-422; Siebert 1979d; 2005b; Ott 2001). In Horkheimer’s view, pessimism united the historical-philosophical experience in liberal, socialist, and fascist society with the heritage of the great Buddhist and Christian theology (Schopenhauer 1989: Vol. I, 486, 518-520, 558; Vol. II, 218-219, 557, 651, 717, 729, 782; Vol. IV, 149, Vol. V, 387, 406-414, 420-423, 427-445, 450-455, 459-466, 473; Hegel 1986p: 374389; 1986q: 185-346; Küng 1970; 1994a; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: C). The spreading of such pessimism could do more good than the more and more exclusively professional education in abstract liberal society: i.e. an atomistic society without solidarity and without the longing for the wholly Other than the finite world and its most painful imperfections and deficiencies (Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1985g: 231232, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; Marcuse 2005; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970c; 1971; 1972; 1973; 1974; 1976; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978a; Vattimo 2008; Badiou 2003).

chapter twenty

New York: The Capital of Liberalism Like the Johannes Kraus family, so was also the Ludwig Krauss family driven by a deep longing for liberal America, the New World, the Land of the Future, particularly the City of New York as the Capital of Liberalism of the 19th century, and still of the 20th and 21st centuries, with all its earthly, secular promises of freedom and happiness, as well as by their yearning for the wholly Other in a Protestant-Evangelical form (Hegel 1986l: 107-114; Benjamin 1977: chap.11; Küng 1994a: 602-741). Before they came to New York, the families thought little of the human costs and the human price to be paid for the progress of liberalism: the hopeless people, who were crying out for rescue in the slums of the city and on Blackwell Island, and on Hart Island, and on Riker’s Island.

Man and his Economic Fate When in 1933, two generations after the working class immigrant families Krauss and Kraus, Horkheimer and his non conformist intellectual friends came as refugees from fascist Germany to New York as the Capital of liberalism and while he lived and worked there in exile at his International Institute for Social Research at Columbia University, he observed that there was no difference in this city, or in the whole liberal American society, between the economic fate and the human beings themselves (Horkheimer 1987e; 241; 1995n: 99-811; 1995p; 1996q). No one was anything else than his income, his property, his position, and his economic chances. According to Horkheimer, the economic character mask and that what was hidden beneath it, were identical for the consciousness of the people, including those, who were affected, down to the smallest fold, crease, or wrinkle. Everybody was worth as much as he or she earned. Everybody earned as much as he was worth. What a man was, he experienced through the changing situations of his economic existence. Man did not recognize himself as something else. Horkheimer remembered that the historical materialistic critique of liberal-capitalist society had in the 19th century opposed German idealism and its brother, American

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transcendentalism, by saying that it was not the consciousness that determined being, but that the being determined consciousness: that the truth about liberal bourgeois society could not be found in its idealistic representations and images, but rather in its economy (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Marx 1953; Marx/Engels 2005; Niebuhr 1964; Tucker 1978; Bottomore 1956; Niebuhr 1964; Horkheimer 1987e: 241). Horkheimer observed that in the meantime, in the 20th century, the bourgeois consciousness had completely thrown overboard such idealism altogether: i.e. negated it abstractly. Now people in liberal bourgeois society judged their own self according to its market value, its exchange value, and learned what they were from how they were faring or how they were getting on well or badly in the liberal capitalist economy of New York or any other American city, town or village. The economic fate of the people, and even if it was the saddest one, was not external to them. They recognized it. Horkheimer heard a New Yorker say: I am a failure–and that is that! Unfortunately, the Ludwig Kraus family belonged to the losers and victims in the liberal City of New York, at least the first generation and most members of the second generation.

The Oldest and the Youngest History Horkheimer, the head of what later on would be called the Frankfurt School embracing a group of non-conformist Jewish, and then more and more non-Jewish intellectuals, traced the transformation of the religious and philosophical idea into economic and political power, rule and domination and exploitation (Horkheimer 1987e; 241; 1995n: 99-811; 1995p; 1996q; Adorno 1951; 1952; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969c; 1970a; 1970b: 103-161; 1979; 1980b; 1982; 1990). Horkheimer discovered that sometimes from the oldest, most primitive, most archaic, and exotic history originated tendencies of the youngest, most familiar, most modern history of liberal bourgeois society, which had reached its climax in the City of New York of the 19th and 20th centuries, and became particularly clear through the historical distance. In order to prove this point, Horkheimer followed Paul Deussen’s explanation of the Isa-Upanishad, where he had pointed out that the step that the Indian thinking took in it beyond earlier steps, was similar to that step, which according to the Gospel of Matthew Jesus of Nazareth took beyond John the Baptist, his teacher, and the Stoics beyond the Cynics (Matthew 3; Hegel 1986g: 259; 1986j: 301; 1986s: 255296; Deussen 1905: 524; Horkheimer 1987e: 241; App. E). For Horkheimer, Deussen’s remark was admittedly historically somewhat one-sided, be-

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cause the uncompromising ideas of John the Baptist and of the Cynics no less than the opinions, against which those first verses of the Isa-Upanishad were supposedly to constitute progress, looked much more like Left-wing streams of secession, which had been split off from powerful cliques and parties, than like main lines of historical movement, out of which then branched off the European philosophy, Christianity and the very lively and positive Vedic religion (Deussen 1905: chap. 2, verse 17-19; 1906; Horkheimer 1987e: 241; Küng 1994a; 1994b; Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: B, C; App. E).Thus, in the Indian collections the Isa-Upanishad stood usually as the first, ergo long before those, the supersession of which it was supposed to be. For Horkheimer, there was, nevertheless, connected with this first piece of the Isa-Upanishad factually something of the betrayal of youthful radicalism, of revolutionary opposition against the dominant reality then, in primitive and archaic history, and at present in modern history: in New York, the peek of liberalism in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries (Deussen 1905: chap. 2: Verse 17-19; 1906; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 38, 39, 40; 1987e: 241).

Vedantism, Stoicism, Christianity In Horkheimer’s perspective, the step to Vedantism, Stoicism and Christianity, which were able to organize, consisted in the participation in the social reality and in the extension, expansion, and explication of a unified theoretical system (Hegel 1986p: 331-389; 1986q: 185-346; 1986s: 255296; Horkheimer 1987e: 242-243; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: B, C; Küng 1994a; 1994b; App. E). That system was mediated through the teaching that the active role in life was not damaging for the salvation of the soul, if only one had the right spiritual disposition. Christianity admittedly reached this step only in the Pauline stage of its Jewish-Apocalyptic Paradigm (Hegel 1986p: 331-389; 1986q: 185-346; 1986s: 255-296; Horkheimer 1987e: 242-243; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: B, C; Küng 1994a: 89-144; 1994b). The original idea, which distanced itself from the status quo of the social reality, turned over into religion (Hegel 1986p: 331-389; 1986q: 185-346; 1986s: 255-296; Horkheimer 1974c: 9697; 1987e: 242-243; Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: B, C; Küng 1994a: 89144; 1994b; App. E). Now those who were unwilling and refused to make any compromise were scolded. They turned away from the longing for children, from the yearning for possessions, from the desire for the world and wandered around as beggars, mendicants, begging monks, voluntary losers. They did this, because the longing for children was the yearning for

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possessions, and longing for possessions was yearning for the world: and one as the other was vain longing, sheer vanity. For Horkheimer, those who speak that way, the men and women unwilling to compromise, may very well according to the civilizers speak the truth, but they were not in step with the course of the social life. Therefore they were considered to be crazy, mad, or lunatic. They were indeed similar to John the Baptist, who had been announced by the Prophet Isaiah, and who preached in the wilderness of Judaea: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is close at hand (Matthew 3). John wore a garment of camel skin, and he lived on locusts and wild honey (Mark 1). According to Hegel, the Cynics had little philosophical education and they never made it to a philosophical system, a science. Only later did the Stoics make Cynicism into a philosophical discipline (Hegel 1986s: 255-296). Hegel called the successors of the Cynics pig like, disgusting, impudent beggars.

Anarchy Horkheimer had to admit that the people unwilling to compromise, about whom history reported at all, did not lack every kind of organized following, otherwise not even their names would have made it into modern civil society (Matthew 3; Mark 1; Hegel 1986p: 331-389; 1986q: 185-346; 1986s: 255-296; Horkheimer 1987e: 242-243; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/ Bechert 1984: B, C; Küng 1994a; 1994b). These uncompromising people posited at least a piece of systematic teaching or of rules of behavior. Even those verses by the first more radical Upanishads were verses and sacrifice-sayings or maxims of priest-guilds (Deussen 1905: 373; Horkheimer 1987e: 242-243). John the Baptist did not make it to the status of a founder of a religion, but he, nevertheless, founded a religious order (Matthew 3; Mark 1; Meyer 1921: Vol. 1, 90; Horkheimer 1987e: 242-243). The Cynics formed a school of philosophers. Antistenes, the founder of this school of philosophers developed even the outline of a theory of the state (Hegel 1986r: 321, 520, 553-555; Horkheimer 1987e: 242-243). However, according to Horkheimer, the theoretical and practical systems of such outsiders and non-conformists of history were not very tight, strict, concise, and centralized. They differentiated themselves from the successful thinkers through a dose of anarchy. For the so-called anarchists, the idea and the individual person were of greater validity than the administration and the collective. Thus, they provoked the rage and fury of the administrators of the collective. Horkheimer remembered that Plato, the man of power, rule, administration, and organization meant the Cynics, when he argued

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zealously and enthusiastically in his Politeia and Politicos against equating the office of the king with that of a common herdsman or shepherd, and against the loosely organized humanity without national boundaries, as a pig state (Hegel 1986s: 11-249; Zeller 1922: 2. Part, 1. Abteilung, 325326, Anmerkung; Horkheimer 1987e: 243-245). The so-called anarchists, unwilling to make a compromise, may have been ready for union, association and cooperation, they were, however, awkward and clumsy in relation to a solid social edifice of a hierarchy closed up downward. In Horkheimer’s view, neither in their theory, which lacked the uniformity and consequence, nor in their praxis, which lacked the thrust-energetic summary, the uncompromising anarchists’ own being reflected the world, as it really was the case.

The Third Youth Movement Forty-two years ago, in 1968, the third youth movement provoked through its anarchistic tendencies the rage and fury of the corporate ruling class and its political functionaries not only in the liberal City of New York, but throughout the whole liberal-capitalist world, from Japan through the United States to Germany and Italy (Horkheimer 1987e: 243-245; Meyer 2008: 21-27, 33-37; Hofmann 2008; 27-31; Negt 2008: 37-41; Rutschky 2008: 4245; Gaschke 2008: 45-48; Fuch 2008: 49-51; Wiedemann 2008: 52-55). The third youth movement admittedly followed often more the anarchist Michael Bakunin than Karl Marx. However, it was most of all–against all distortions by the neo-conservative Right, and against all later mythologization–an emancipation and modernization movement with democratic intent. It wanted to determine newly the relationship between spirit and politics. It wanted to establish democracy as life form. It ended tragically with the shooting of students by the National Guard at Kent State University, for which President Nixon never apologized, and in Mexico City, and elsewhere. The youth were pushed back into–what Max Weber had called–the iron cage of capitalism, through the neo-conservative Nixon-Reagan-Bush counter-revolution, which continued to 2008. In Germany, the Anti-68-Movement practiced revenge against the Red-Green coalition, which preserved some of the tendencies of the third youth movement of 1968.

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So far Horkheimer has described the formal difference between the radical and the conformist movements in the history of religion and philosophy (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 38, 39, 40; 1987e: 243-245; App. E). According to Horkheimer, the difference did not lay in an isolated content. In no way were the radical and conformist movements of history differentiated through the idea of asceticism. The sect of the ascetic Gautama, the Buddha has conquered the Asiatic world (Hegel 1986p: 374-389; Horkheimer 1987e: 243-245; Küng/Ess/Stiefencron/Bechert 1984B). The Gautama showed already in his lifetime a great talent for organization. Admittedly the Gautama did not yet exclude, as the reformer Cankara, the lower classes from the communication of the teaching (Deussen 1906: 63-65; Horkheimer 1987e: 243-245). Yet the Gautama, nevertheless, recognized expressively the property of human beings. The Gautama, being of noble background himself, was proud and boasted of the sons of the upper casts, who entered his order, in which there seemed to exist pariahs, if at all, only as very rare exceptions (Hegel 1986p: 374-389; Horkheimer 1987e: 243-245; Küng/Ess/Stiefencron/Bechert 1984B). In contrast to Buddhism, only very few upper class people were present in the early communist Christian community and most members were slaves and poor people (Acts 2: 42-47; 4: 32-35; Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Küng/Ess/Stiefencron/ Bechert 1984: B; Küng 89-144) From the very start the Gautama’s disciples were organized according to the Brahmin prototype. The Gautama did not accept into his order cripples, handicapped and sick people, criminals, and many other types of peoples. At the time of acceptance into the order the candidate was asked: Do you have leprosy, consumption, epilepsy: Are you a human being? Are you a Man? Are you your own master? Do you have no debts? Do you not stand in the king’s service? Completely in agreement and conformity with the brutal patriarchalism of India, women were only unwillingly and reluctantly allowed to enter the primordial order. They had to subject, subjugate, and submit themselves to the men. They remained indeed underage. The whole Buddhist order enjoyed the favor of the rulers. The order integrated itself excellently into the Indian life. It did not attempt to overthrow the inhuman Indian caste system.

Historical Materialism For Horkheimer, asceticism and materialism, the opposites, are in the same mode ambiguous (Hegel 1986p: 374-389; Marx 1953: chaps. 6-10;

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Horkheimer 1987e: 243-245; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Dirks 1968; Küng/Ess/Stiefencron/Bechert 1984: B; App. E). For Horkheimer, asceticism as denial of cooperation in the bad status quo of liberal civil society fell in the face of oppression and exploitation together with the material demands of the masses, as vice versa asceticism as means of discipline imposed by cliques, aimed at the adaptation to the unjust social conditions. The materialistic integration into the status quo of liberal capitalist society–sex, car, and career–the particular egoism, had always been connected with renunciation, while the grace of the non-bourgeois enthusiasts wandered and roamed beyond the status quo materialistically toward the land of milk and honey. According to Horkheimer, in the true, not bourgeois but rather historical materialism, asceticism was determinately negated, and in the true asceticism the historical materialism was concretely superseded (Horkheimer 1987e: 243-245; Löwenthal 1990a; 1990b; 1989; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Dirks 1968; App. E). In Horkheimer’s perspective, the history of those old religions and philosophical schools, like the history of the modern bourgeois and socialist parties and revolutions could teach that the price for survival was the practical cooperation with the status quo: the transformation of the religious and the philosophical idea into economic and political power and rule. The Christian and the liberal idea had long been transformed into economic and political power and rule in the liberal world, and particularly in its capital, the City of New York, when the Johannes Kraus family, and the Ludwig Krauss family arrived at the American shores in the middle of the 19th century.

The Carpenter While the lives of the Johannes Kraus family were finally concentrated in Washington D.C., the Ludwig Krauss Family settled for good in New York as the very center of the continually globalizing liberal civil society (Kraus 1880; Krauss 1880; Sombart, 1976; Gans 1972: 275-289; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). Precisely as the most secular capital of the liberal world of the 19th, 20th centuries, and even still the 21st century, New York would become the primary target of the religious, Islamic attack of September 11, 2001. However, that was still one and a half centuries off in the future, when Ludwig Peter Krauss left Germany for the United States. Ludwig was born in Neuenstadt, An der Grossen Linde, near Heilbronn, in the Kingdom of Würtemberg, on January 23, 1844. In terms of religion, Ludwig was baptized a Lutheran Christian, and remained a Lutheran to the end of his life in New York, after he had buried three of his four children and

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his wife Charlotte on the New York Lutheran Cemetery (Krauss 1980; Küng 1994a: 602-741; 1994b; App. E). Ludwig had celebrated his Confirmation in April 1858. However, no religious images appear in his diary, which he wrote in German in beautiful letters between 1880-1890: not even the image of the Crucified and Resurrected Christ on Easter, in which for Christians the denial of false images of God was taken to the extreme, e.g. the image of Ishtar and the dying and after three days resurrected god Adonis in the Syrian Religion of Pain, or the image of Isis and the dying and after three days rising god Osiris in the Egyptian Religion of Riddle (Hegel 1986p: 406-442; 1986q: 241-298; Krauss 1880; Benedict XVI: No 43; App. E). Ludwig was the first son of Johann Christian Kraus, a carpenter, and of Lavotine Krauss, née Rüngart. Ludwig spent most of his early years with his grandparents. After his Confirmation Ludwig learned carpentry from his father for three years. On the 27th of May, Ludwig left home as a carpenter apprentice for Stuttgart, and Göppingen. On September 8, 1862 Ludwig left Germany for Switzerland, where he had the most wonderful experiences. He worked in Interlaken and Bern. He even traveled to Paris. Early in 1864 Ludwig’s dear mother died. On the 24th of February 1864, Ludwig traveled back home from Paris through Strassburg and Karlsruhe, in order to meet his new mother. On March 1, 1864 Ludwig was to be drafted by the Würtembergian Army, but he was not accepted because he had a slight deformation of the breastbone, which he passed on to later generations of the Krauss family. Thus, Ludwig did not migrate from Germany to the United States of America because he wanted to avoid military service. One personal motive for his emigration, besides his longing for the New World, the liberal land of unlimited opportunity, and the Land of the Future, which he shared with millions of other Germans and Europeans, who migrated to the American or the Slavic World, may rather have been that his mother had died early, and that his father married again soon after, and that he did not get along with his new stepmother, and that he thus no longer felt at home in Neuenstadt (Hegel 1986a: 218; 1986l: 107-115, 413, 418, 422, 490-491, 500; 513; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; 1986g: 465; Krauss 1880; Hegel 1986l: 107114). In any case, in May 1864, Ludwig left Neuenstadt once more in order to improve his carpentry. He wandered through Bavaria and Saxonia up to Dresden, where he found good work with the Jewish masters Türpa and Rosenkranz. On the 29th of May 1866, Ludwig traveled to Hamburg. Ludwig left Hamburg for America on the SS Borussia on June 2, 1866, after the end of the American Civil War: slavery without submission, emancipation without freedom (Kraus 1990; Krauss 1880; Zinn 1999; 10, 171,189-195, 235238; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002b: chaps. 2-6). It would be followed by

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the domination of the robber barons and by another civil war between the rich and the poor classes, and by the rise of American imperialism and colonialism, and by the socialist challenge (Zinn 1999: chaps. 9, 10, 11, 12, 13).

Arrival Ludwig Krauss arrived in Hoboken, New York, on June 16,1866 at the age of 22, almost ten years after the arrival of Johannes Kraus: four years before the Prussian-French War of 1870, and one year after the end of the American Civil War, in which Johannes Kraus had actively participated on the Union side, and which had cost the lives of 600,000 Americans from a population of only 30 million (Krauss 1980; Hegel 1986l: 107-114; Zinn 1999: chaps. 1-13; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). Ludwig had already an aunt living in New York, who picked him up in the harbor of Hoboken. Ludwig worked as a carpenter in New York for over 30 years. He never left the City, in order to find a job elsewhere. Unlike Johannes Kraus, Ludwig Krauss obviously preferred the victorious liberal capitalist North over the defeated South, once ruled by the slaveholder class in the last bourgeois revolutionary class war. In Fall 1867, one year after his arrival in Hoboken, Ludwig invited his brother, Wilhelm Krauss, also to leave the small town of Neuenstadt, and to join him in the good life of the huge, always growing, extremely liberal metropolis of New York. Wilhelm was full of hope for a new and better life in America. However, only five years after his arrival–in May 1872–Wilhelm left New York again and the United States and his brother Ludwig, in order to return to and join the Krauss family in Neuenstadt. Wilhelm’s return happened shortly after the end of the Prussian-French War, which brought great prosperity to the German cities. His brother Ludwig continued to live in New York for the rest of his life. Ludwig however remained in contact with his brother Wilhelm as well as with his father Johann and his stepmother through letters up to their death in Neuenstadt. Ludwig never had the means for a visit to Germany. Ludwig’s father and teacher Johann died in far away Neuenstadt on New Years Eve of 1874.

The Carpenter Union Ludwig Krauss was a member of a carpenter union in New York (Krauss 1880; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). He suffered through several business cycles and the consequent waves of unemploy-

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ment. He went on several strikes. In December 1871, Ludwig walked in a funeral procession in honor of murdered and fallen communist comrades: the only crime of whom had been that they did not recognize the right of the owners to keep the surplus value, for which they had not worked, while the workers, who had worked for it, did not receive it (Krauss 1880; Sombart 1976: chaps. 3-26; Sections One to Three). It is possible that not only the Carpenter Union but also Ludwig Kraus had socialist tendencies. In 1882, Ludwig witnessed, nevertheless, with great admiration the completion of what he called the miraculous Brooklyn Bridge. On Thursday, September 28, 1886–15 days after the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Peace of Paris, by which the independence of the United States had been recognized–Ludwig participated in the celebration of the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe’s Island at the entrance of New York Harbor situated closely to Hoboken, where he had arrived from Germany twenty years earlier. The carpenter Ludwig named the great symbol of American liberalism of Greek origin, and a gift from the liberal Republic of France, somewhat ironically the Goddess of Freedom. According to Max Weber, liberal civil society had always been somewhat polytheistic (Weber 1963; App. E).

Lady Liberty The Lady Liberty herself, the erection of which Ludwig Krauss observed on September 28, 1886, had a pretty hard welcome in New York and America (Krauss 1880; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. 3; 2002a: 29-32, chaps. 2, 6; Himick/ Samson 2008: 1-4). The story of the Statue of Liberty was one of a colossal sculpture that nearly did not happen in liberal France or in liberal America. It was a story of surrogate patriotism and love of liberty. After the story had originated in liberal France, it found its place in the liberal American dream. It was a story that many 19th-century Americans–like Ludwig Krauss–did not find compelling at all. Already in 1865, 89 years after the American Revolution and 76 years after the French Revolution, two French men, statesman Edouard de Laboulaye and sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, conceived the idea of creating a magnificent statue, to present to the people of the United States as a celebration of the American Declaration of Independence and as a reminder, that there were still many people in France, who cherished liberty and liberalism. France had long since lapsed from a liberal republic to the authoritarian, autocratic rule of Napoleon III, and into counter-revolutionary restauration. But its liberal republican patriots remained determined. The magnificent statue was to be a symbol for the

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prevailing philosophy of liberalism. For Bartholdi, the project’s mission was clear and personal: to glorify the Republic and liberty over there in America, in the hope, that some day it could be found again here in France. When Bartholdi traveled to the United States in 1871, his artistic vision was instantly committed to paper as his ship sailed into New York Harbor. His plan was a colossal Lady Liberty standing at the entrance of New York Harbor. Bartholdi called it Liberty Enlightening the World. The name summed up the whole liberal program. At the time most Americans, like the carpenter Ludwig Krauss, called it pointless. Upon his return to France, Bartholdi refined his vision using small clay models. He chose to work with lightweight copper, rather than bronze, or stone, because it was better suited for disassembly and transport. Eventually, Bartholdi teamed with AlexandreGustave Eiffel, a French engineer, known for innovative work in metal construction. Later on he designed the famous Eiffel Tower in Paris, which earned him the nickname the magician of iron. Eiffel created an elaborate skeleton of iron supports, upon which Bartholdi’s artisan-hammered copper skin would rest. The entire sculpture was fully erected in Paris by 1884. Here the 151-foot Lady of Liberty towered over buildings along grand boulevards. The Lady’s seven-spiked crown symbolized the rays of liberty lighting the seven seas and seven continents of the world. Her tablet was inscribed: July 4, 1776. While the liberal message and mission was in crisis in France and in the old European world under the pressure of the counter-revolutionary restauration, it was to prosper in and to be globalized from the new American world. The French people loved the Lady of Liberty. However, the American Committee on the Statue of Liberty was nearly dormant, with little money or support. The American architect, Richard Morris Hunt, had been creating a pedestal since 1883. But the work at a quarry, to supply granite, ceased in 1884, due to lack of funds. When Hunt sought money from his wealthy clientele, they refused. The bourgeois winners had little sense for the symbol of liberalism. In 1885, Bartholdi had the statue disassembled, and shipped to the United States, where it sat, unpacked, in boxes. Finally, a disgusted Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World and an immigrant from Hungary, used his paper to enlist help from the working class. In five month’s time, Pulitzer managed to raise $100,000 in contributions: a dollar, a dime, a penny at a time. Ironically enough, it was the contribution of Ludwig Krauss’s working class that finally made the erection of the Statue of Liberty possible. Thus, work resumed on a 154-foot pedestal. On October 28, 1886, President Grover Cleveland dedicated Liberty Enlightening the World–The Statue of Liberty–amid great, if belated fanfare. While Ludwig Krauss had sailed into New York Harbor 20 years earlier, when there was no

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Statue of Liberty greeting the immigrants yet, he was, nevertheless, already hungry for freedom, like all the other millions of people, who had arrived before him, and would arrive after him.

Marriage and Family In 1872, after a smaller love affair in New York, Ludwig Krauss fell in love most deeply with Charlotte Frei, called Lotti by her husband and friends (Krauss 1880; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. 3; 2002a: 29-32, chaps. 2, 6). It was a very happy time for Charlotte and Ludwig. Charlotte had come to New York from Heilbronn, Germany, a larger city very close to Ludwig’s smaller hometown of Neuenstadt. Ludwig and Charlotte got married on November 21, 1872. At the time Ludwig was 28 years old. He got married 6 years after his arrival in Hoboken. Ludwig and Charlotte had four children together: Frank, born in 411 Second Street on Tuesday, July 22, 1873, in the morning at 6.00 o’clock; Louis, born in 431 E. 16 Street on Thursday, August 5, 1875 in the evening at 10.00 o’clock; Emma, Charlotte, born in 610 Second Street on Wednesday, November 14, 1877, in the morning at 2: 00 o’clock and Karl or Charlie, born in E. 44th Street on September 13, 1879 with the help of the Jewish Dr. Otterbaum. In spring 1875, Lotti’s sister had died in far away Heilbronn. In 1876 an economic depression hit and the carpenter business went very bad. In 1878, Lotti’s joint rheumatism started. For eight years the Krauss family moved on Manhattan from one poor and dark tenement house to the other, probably often forced to do so, because economic depressions and consequent unemployment made it hard for Ludwig to pay the rent on time. Ludwig, who as carpenter could have been a member of the low bourgeoisie in Germany like his father, if he had stayed at home, was gliding down into the proletariat of New York because of bad economic conditions and one family tragedy after the other (Krauss 1880; Sombart 1976: chaps. 3-26; Sections One to Three; Gans 1972).

Tenement Houses The tragedy of the Ludwig and Charlotte Kauss family unfolded in the context of several tenement houses on Manhattan (Krauss 1880). A tenement house on Manhattan consisted of six stories. Along each of the six floors there were 4 small apartments. In each of the 4 rooms of each apartment lived one family or about 4-6 or more persons. There was merely one toilet

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and small sink for all the families of one floor. There was one bathtub in the middle of each kitchen of each apartment. It was covered up during the day and was used as a table. While the front windows of the tenement house looked out on the busy street, all the side windows opened up to the dark walls of the very close next tenement houses on both sides, which kept particularly the apartments on the lower floors dark all day long and without ventilation, and there was no public garbage collection. The workers, mostly recent immigrants from Europe, were crammed and packed into the unhealthy tenement houses worse than the animals in the stables, hutches, stys, and henhouses on the farms in the villages surrounding New York, as they were used by the capitalists as mere means of production for the purpose of producing the primitive capital accumulation for the lowest price possible according to the rules of economic liberalism. It was against the background of such proletarian tenement houses in Germany, France, Belgium, and England, and throughout the British Empire, that Marx and Engels announced in London The Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848, and that Marx published the first volume of The Capital. Critique of the Political Economy in 1867, and that Engels composed his monograph on The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in 1884, and that both thinkers developed the historical materialism as the radical selfcritique of liberalism (Marx 1871; 1906; 1951; 1953; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1963; 1964; 1974; 1977; Marx/Engels 1953a; 1953b; 1953c; 1955; 1960; 2005; Krauss 1880; Kraus 1880). It was against the background of such tenement houses, that Horkheimer, Marcuse and Fromm wrote their Studies on Authority and Family in the Institute for Social Research at Columbia University, New York, in 1936 (Horkheimer 1987e: 377-395; 1988c: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 16, 17, 18; 1995o: 442-810; Horkheimer/ Fromm/Marcuse 1936). Over the last 70 years, since the arrival of President Roosevelt’s–on the basis of the principle of subsidiarity from the Papal Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of 1931–socially modified liberalism, many of the tenement houses on Manhattan have been replaced by high rise luxury apartment buildings and office towers. Now, in 2010, the tenants of many of the former tenement houses, the poor classes, live in clusters of high rise public housing projects protected by rent control on and surrounding Manhattan (Pope Benedict XVI 2009).

Protector of the People The death of Senator Edward or Teddy Kennedy on August 27, 2009, who came from an upper-middleclass family in Boston, and who had survived

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the assassinations of his two older brothers, Jack and Bobby, more than 40 years ago, and who for almost half a century claimed to be the protector of the people, something like a peoples’ tribune, and particularly the champion of working people and organized labor, and who acted accordingly as a prolific legislator in Washington D.C., and who had a rather precarious relationship to the Roman Catholic Church, to which he belonged and by which he was buried in sacred ground on Arlington Cemetery in Washington D.C., may very well symbolize the climax as well as the limits and the end of the New Deal theory and policies as a moderate rather than a radical self-criticism of liberalism (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 520-542; Clinton 2004; Zinn 1999: chaps. 13-25; Küng 1994a). The Senator was called an idealist-realist-pragmatist. The Senator’s strained relationship to his Church was connected with issues like the pro-choice option in the abortion controversy, which he defended throughout his political life. When the Senator was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in 2008, he wrote a letter to Benedict XVI, which was delivered by President Obama in Rome, and in which he asked for forgiveness, which was granted by the Pope together with a recognition and praise of Kennedy’s work for the poor classes in the spirit of the Church’s social doctrine, which emphasized the priority of labor over capital, subsidiarity, solidarity and social justice (Pope Benedict XVI 2009; Baum 1975b; 1980a; 1980b; 1982; 2007). In spite of his shaky relationship to his Church as a liberal Democratic politician, the Senator always wanted to be a good Catholic. Thus he asked his Church for an annulment of his first marriage, which was granted. Finally, the Senator received a Catholic funeral mass at the Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica, situated in a slum area of Boston, and a burial service, in which two Cardinals participated. When the Senator run a Presidential campaign against the incumbant Democratic President Carter, a Baptist, who had bitterly disappointed the Democratic Party through his cautious centrism, Kennedy placed himself in the Left’s vanguard, declaring in a famous speech that sometimes a party must sail against the wind. During this Presidential campaign the Senator came to New York and stood on a street corner in a tenement house slum neighbourhood in the Bronx and promised a better deal for urban Blacks and Hispanics in the midst of the urban wasteland. Disdaining the Left-ward option by Senator George McGovern, whose campaign manager I was in the Fourth Congressional District when he ran for the Presidency in 1972, Senator Kennedy and the whole Democratic Party threw in their lot decisively with Wall Street, and the big players across the American corporate landscape. The labor unions and the other foot soldier constituencies of the

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Democratic Party would be flung rhetorical bouquets with decreasing fervor every four years. Though the obiturists at the occasion of the Senator’s funeral have glowingly evoked Kennedy’s 46 year stint in the US Senate and, as the last liberal, his mastery of the legislative process, they missed the all-important fact that it was out of his Senate office that came two momentous slabs of legislation that signaled the onset of the neo-liberal era, which has ended in the present–2008, 2009, 2010–economic catastrophe: deregulation of trucking and aviation. From the very start they were a disaster for organized labor and the working conditions and pay of people in those industries. Trucking deregulation was certainly the most ferocious anti-labor move of the 1970s, with Kennedy as the driving force. Some of the Senators aids promptly reaped the fruits of their legislative work, leaving the Hill to make money hand over fist trying to break unions on behalf of the Texas Air Corporation and its properties, Continental Airlines and its subsidiary Eastern. In spite of his deadly attacks on the working class and on organized labor, the Senator was like his whole family adept at persuading the underdogs that he was on their side. If it had not been for Kennedy a lot more of the 40 million uninsured people in America would have health coverage, In 1971 President Nixon, heading into the reelection bid, put up the legislative ancestor of all recent Democratic proposals, but Kennedy shot it down, preferring to have this as his campaign plank sometime in the political future. Now, in 2010, the Republicans scream socialism at exactly the same universal health plan, which the neo-conservative President Nixon had once proposed and Senator Kennedy had killed off 38 years earlier. To this day–March 2010–good, but deluded people argue, that the Senator was the mighty champion of the working class, even though he helped deliver them into the inferno of neo-liberalism (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 520-542; Clinton 2004; Zinn 1999: chaps. 13-25; Lendman 2009). Certainly, the always compromise-ready Senator, did not represent and practice a radical self-criticism of liberalism, which would go to the very roots of the present–2008, 2009, 2010–global capitalist crisis, as does e.g. the intentionally democratic and humanistic socialism of the present Chinese Prime-minister, who in August 2009 recommended the connection of wealth and personal and social morality (Fromm 1967; 1968; Fromm (ed), 1966c).

Wealth and Morality On August 24, 2009 the Prime-minister of socialist China reminded the West in an interview with the American news organization CNN, that

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Adam Smith, Scottish moral philosopher and father of economic liberalism, had not only written one book on the accumulation of the wealth of nations but also another one on morality (Hegel 1986g: 347; 1986t: 285-286; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002). According to the Chinese Prime-minister, the accumulation of enormous wealth in a few greedy private hands could not possibly be sustained and had to lead into catastrophic economic crises like the one of 2008/2009, which started from the United States and Great Britain. Presently China tries to connect the invisible hand of the market with the visible hand of a socialist government, which does not tolerate the immoral accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few greedy businessmen and thereby the formation of a corporate ruling class, which, being situated in civil society, is not only above the state, but even controls it for its own private good instead of for the common good, through its aggressive authoritarian personality type, its private ownership of the means of production as basis for its money and power, its massive financial contributions to the cause of conformist politicians and intellectuals, its advertisement and propaganda, its liberal and particularly neo-liberal and neoconservative ideologies, its commonsense as tight network of obsolete liberal prejudices and projections, its uncritical, undialectical conservative, and sometimes even reactionary traditional religion, and its whole culture industry, as it has been the case continually in modern Europe, throughout the British Empire, as well as in the United States, particularly since the American civil war as the last victorious bourgeois revolution, and since the rise of the robber barons, and as by now–2010–it has been globalized (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 107-114, 520-540; Horkheimer 1987e: 293-319, 320-350, 377-395, 396-405, 406-411, 412-414, 415-422, 423-452; Horkheimer/Adorno 1951: 284-291; Lukacs 1970; 1971; 1974; 1979; Löwenthal 1970; 1980; 1989; 1990a; 1990b; Adorno 1951; 1969c; 1970a; 1991a; 1993b; 1995b; 1997i-1: 7-142, 143-507; 1997u; Adorno/ Frenkel-Brunswick/Levinson/Sanford 1950; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392402; 1958b: 484-498; Kogon 1967; Zinn 1999: chaps. 11-25; Siebert 1993; 2004a; 2004c; 2005b; 2006d; App. C, D, E, F), The Prime-minister of China, which recently gave a loan of one trillion dollars to the United States, hoped that the American Government would control the present economic crisis, which was obviously very different from the Great Depression of 1929-1939,through federalizaton of banks, industries and insurance companies: through opposing personal and social morality to greed. Of course, as the New Deal did not rescue capitalism in the 1930s, but rather World War II did it, so the new New Deal of 2009/2010 will also not rescue it into the 21st century. In case the American Government would after

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a short period of stabilization return again from the visible hand to the invisible hand, from morality to greed, and would allow again the deregulation of the market and the so called self-policing of the capitalists, an even deeper economic crisis would occur and now without the availability of further foreign loans for further nationalization. The options are either socialism a la Chavez opposed to proletarian tenement houses symbolizing the dark side of economic liberalism, or its prevention of socialism through fascism a la Peron, or corporatism. The critical theorists of society and of religion opt with Adorno for the transformation of the liberal commodity exchange society into a total social subject as source of cooperative planning for the common good beyond the market economy on one hand, and the central-administrative economy on the other toward global alternative Future III–a democratic, humanist socialism, or a socialist humanism, characterized by human rights, which would make the hell of tenement houses for the working class impossible anywhere in the world for the future (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 107-114, 520-540; Horkheimer 1987k: 171-188; 1988c: chap. 12; Marcuse 1961; Neumann 1942; Fromm 1957; 1961; 1967; 1968; 1970: B699-B705; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1975; 1976; 1980a; 1981; 1990a; 1990b; 1995; 1999: 34-36; 2001; Fromm (ed) 1966c; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1975b; 1975c; 1985b; 1985e; Fetscher/ Schmidt 2002; Flechtheim 1959: 625-634; 1962: 27-34; 1963: 148-150; 1966: 455-464; 1971; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1975; 1976; 1977; 1978a; 1978c; 1978d; 1992a; 1997a; 1998; 1999; 2001c; 2004c; 2006c; 2009; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Habermas/Luhmann 1975; Habermas/ Ratzinger 2006; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; 2009; Honneth/Joas 2002; Fraser/Honneth 2003; Benedict XVI: 2009; Küng 1990b; 1991a; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1993b Zinn 1999: chaps. 11-25; App. C, D, E, F, G).

Misfortune of the Mother In Spring 1880, there suddenly began after 8 years of marriage, and four children, and much hard work, and much poverty, and much moving from one tenement house and street of Manhattan to the other, what Ludwig Krauss called the misfortune of the mother (Krauss 1880; Siebert 2001: vi-xvi, chap. 3; 2002a: 29-32, chaps. 2, 6). The misfortune started on Friday, April 30, 1880, with Charlotte’s first psychotic episode, and with it began a family tragedy, which would span the next two decades and would reach even into the 20th century. Charlotte had already long suffered from rheumatism. Now she was brought to the insane pavilion of

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New York’s Bellevue Hospital and was diagnosed from certain symptoms, which today would maybe subsumed under the notion of schizophrenia. Charlotte was in her middle 30s. On May 7, 1880, Charlotte suffered a second severe attack of mental illness. She was first committed to Bellevue Hospital, and was then transported by car and boat to the lunatic asylum for the poor classes on Blackwell’s Island in the East River, which later on was called, as part of Long Island, Welfare Island, and which, after President Roosevelt had socially modified American liberalism, was renamed and is known as Roosevelt Island up to today–March 2010. Charlotte was brought into the New York City Lunatic Asylum for the Insane through the famous Octagon Tower (Krauss 1880; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888). Here Charlotte stayed for 18 most cruel years. My wife Margie Charlotte spoke often of Charlotte Frei, the mother of her grandfather Louis Krauss and her own great-grandmother, but Margie never mentioned Charlotte’s misfortune, her mental illness. It was a dark family secret. In the family tradition, Charlotte Krauss was falsely said to have come from France, from Alsace Loraine, and thus to be French, and she was always called by her maiden name–Frei–as if she did not really belong to the Krauss family. However, the first name of the poor woman was nevertheless carried as middle name through three generations: by her child, Emma Charlotte, her grandchild, Margaret Charlotte, and finally by her great-grandchild, Margaret Charlotte, i.e. Margie.

Visits For 18 long years, Ludwig visited his wife Charlotte in the Octagon Tower on Blackwell Island almost every Sunday: coming up by boat on the East River from lower Manhattan (Krauss 1880; Siebert 2001: vi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). From visit to visit, only the halls and rooms of the New York City Asylum for the indigent and poor insane people changed, in which Charlotte was stationed from year to year. In spite of some ups and downs, Charlotte’s mental illness remained fundamentally always the same. Almost every Sunday Ludwig brought Lotti gifts: cakes, slippers, other clothing, etc. He could not pay more than at least a symbolical fee for her room and board, and sometimes cruel and always useless treatment, or none at all. The rest was charity. Often Charlotte had severe psychotic attacks and was put into a straightjacket. Ludwig witnessed one of those attacks, and how Charlotte was straight jacketed. Sometimes Charlotte could no longer remember her wedding date, or the family birthdays. Charlotte was depressed most of the time. Often Charlotte reproached

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her husband, and blamed him for her and the family’s misfortune. Sometimes Charlotte threw cakes into her husband’s face, or pleaded with him to take her home beyond the East River into some miserable tenement house on Manhattan. The only book Charlotte had brought from Germany, and owned, and kept throughout her life, even on Blackwell’s Island was Friedrich Schiller’s romantic tragedy Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Virgin of Orleans). Jeanne d’ Arc had also suffered from a mental illness: a pathological separation between the psychic dimension on one hand, and the intellectual consciousness on the other; a splitting of life between the mediated consciousness on one hand, and the more and more monopolizing psychic knowledge on the other: schizophrenia, caused by religious and political, i.e. nationalistic and patriotic exaltations (Hegel 1986j: 132-182, esp.139-140). Throughout Charlotte’s 18 years of mental illness on Blackwell Island, Ludwig stayed in contact through letters with her father, and her brothers and sisters in Heilbronn, and reported on her condition. Ludwig never divorced his wife Charlotte, and he never married again. Even still toward the end of his diary, December 31, 1890, Ludwig reported that he visited not only the grave of his daughter Emma on the Lutheran Cemetery on Easter Sunday, May 11, 1890, and his sons Frank and Louis, who had just found a job at Tiffany’s, but also Lotti. Ludwig visited his wife on Blackwell Island in 1990, ten years after she fell ill, on January 16, 18, 30; February 15; March 12; May 1, 12, 16, etc. up to September 29, October 28, November 10, December 27, and continued to bring her gifts, like underwear and warm shoes, while at the same time having consultations with her doctors, moving his household to new locations and buying new carpets, looking for work, joining the Lodge, participating in the Labor Lyceum and in protest marches with the Union against the unjust working conditions in the liberal City of New York, and struggling with his own illnesses often connected with high fever. On December 31, 1890, Ludwig bought himself a new musical instrument: a cither. Even the New Years Evenings, not to speak of the others, Ludwig spent alone. He usually went to bed early after playing on his cither, and singing old German songs, which he had once learned in distant Neuenstadt. Charlotte died in the mental hospital on Blackwell Island on July 28, 1898, in her early 50s. Ludwig buried his beloved wife Lotti on the Lutheran Cemetery of New York on the same lot, where he had buried his daughter Emma, and his son Frank.

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For years Ludwig visited weekly his four small children in orphanages and foster homes, first on Randall’s Island, and then on Staten Island (Krauss 1880; Siebert 2001: vi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). Ludwig could not go to work all day long and care for the small children at home at the same time. Ludwig bought the children shoes, slippers, straw hats, jackets, and other clothing, and paid at least symbolically for their care. Sometimes Ludwig found one or the other of his children homesick and weeping. He then arranged it, so that two of them could at least live together in the same foster home or in the same orphanage. That improved the situation. Ludwig cared for the children most lovingly, until one after the other of them became ill and died. Three of Ludwig’s and Charlotte’s children had died before their mother Charlotte: Charlie on July 11, 1880 at the age of 10 months; Emma on April 17, 1888, at the age of 11; Frank on March 29, 1891 at the age of 18. Louis alone survived and became the grandfather of my wife Margaret and the great grandfather of our 8 children and the great-great-grandfather of our 14 grandchildren. Ludwig buried his three children on the Lutheran Cemetery of New York long before their mother Charlotte. No mineral knobs were allowed on any lot in the Lutheran Cemetery for ornament or otherwise. No wooden rail, monument or structure could be erected on any grave. By the statute it was made a misdemeanor to cut, break, or injure any tree, shrub or plant on the cemetery, or to destroy any tomb, grave stone, building or other structure. The penalty for such misdemeanor was a fine not exceeding $250, and oneyear imprisonment, or both, at the discretion of the court.

Theodicy There was no way home to Heilbronn from the New York City Asylum for the Insane on Blackwell Island, down the East River, and beyond the harbor of New York and the Statue of Liberty back across the Atlantic Ocean to Germany (Krauss 1880; Habermas 1986: 53-54; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). In his diary, which he began at the age of 36, Ludwig, the Lutheran, tried to break the power of oblivion through remembering his own life, and Charlotte and their children, and their tragedy on the Golgotha of Blackwell’s Island, and thus to give immortality to them, while he himself suffered intensely from loneliness, and from painful cramps in his face, and from sporadic epileptic attacks. Not once did the Lutheran Ludwig Kraus speak in his diary of God or immortality. His loving Sunday

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visits to his wife and children were his divine service. He missed these visits only when he himself was hindered by his own excruciating headaches, jawbone cramps, and epileptic attacks. Ludwig’s theodicy experience was too overwhelming. God seemed to be indifferent to his tragedy, and thus inspired neither fear nor hope. Ludwig’s diary is a document of despair. It is the story of the most intense physical and psychic suffering. It is a most simple and at the same time most cruel witness and confession of the absence of God in humanity’s tragedy: of man’s abandonment and his loneliness. The diary is a negative theodicy of great human courage. There remained for Ludwig only anamnestic solidarity as possible rescue of the hopeless victims: Charlotte, and the children, and he himself. Ludwig’s diary was a letter in the bottle, which he threw into the ocean of history, as he was sinking, so that somebody may find it some day in a distant future and may continue to remember, and thus to contribute to his and his families immortality. Ludwig lived long enough to bury not only his daughter Emma Kraus in 1888, and his son Frank Krauss in 1891, but also his wife, Charlotte Krauss on July 30, 1898, on the same public lot 1, Map 3/a, Row 23, Grave 78, in the Lutheran Cemetery of Middle Village, New York, four miles from the Williams Burgh Ferries: one horrible theodicy experience after the other. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, in the slums of New York Ludwig Kraus, a carpenter and a crucified man, came close to being, what the prophetic political theologian may call today an anonymous saint (Krauss 1880; Siebert 1993; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). I found Ludwig Krauss’ diary by accident among the trash in the basement of his grand-daughter Margaret Charlotte Noyes, née Krauss in November 1962, shortly after her cancer death, in Washington D.C., Illinois Avenue 4006. After Ludwig’s son, Louis Krauss, the father of Margaret Charlotte Noyes, had died in 1941, nobody in the Kraus/Noyes family had been able any longer to read the German writing of the diary. When I found the diary accidentally, it was in the process of being thrown into the city garbage dump, and to be burned.

Octagon Tower My children, grandchildren and I noticed the Roosevelt Island and the Octagon Tower accidentally through the windows of our rooms in the Millennium Hotel, near the UN Building, at the occasion of the wedding of my 8th child and youngest daughter Jeanne and her husband Christopher Irving, in May 2003, and then again at the occasion of the baptism of their first child and my 11th grandchild Christopher-Matthew in

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June 2004 (Hegel 1986j: 132-182, esp.139-140; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Krauss 1880; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). In May 2003 and June 2004, we visited by car the crumbling gray ruin of the Octagon Tower on the former Blackwell Island, now Roosevelt Island in the East River, opposite Manhattan. The ruin belies its past. The erstwhile corridors had born the footprints of Charles Dickens and of Nellie Bly. Its grand rotunda once held the blue ribbon in interior beauty. The Octagon Tower’s beauty was once a mask for an institution of despair, the New York City Asylum for the indigent insane. The by now lonely Octagon Tower once had the company of the Asylum’s two projecting wings. The Octagon Tower was the Asylums administrative center and main entrance hall. Here Ludwig Kraus had to enter whenever he wanted to visit his wife Lotti. When the facility opened in 1839–41 years before Charlotte Krauss arrived–it was a much-needed relief to the overcrowded wards of Bellevue Hospital on Manhattan. The Octagon Tower had been designed by the noted architect Alexander Jackson Davis, credited in New York with the Wall Street Federal Hall. The New York City mental health facility, the Octagon Building on Blackwell’s Island, in which Charlotte Krauss would spent 18 years of her life, had been built under the architect Davis in 1835. It was completed in 1842. When Charlotte was transferred into the building in May 1880, it was already 45 years old. At the time of its completion the Octagon Building was already considered to be one of New York’s great structures, and was visited by notables such as Charles Dickens. The final structure only sparingly followed Davis’ blueprint. One of Davis’ designs, which fortunately were followed, was the cast iron spiral staircase with wood Ionic columns inside the Octagon Tower. Many times Charlotte Krauss had to walk up and down this spiral staircase on the way to her rooms in the one or the other wing. According to the architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, this rotunda was the Grandest interior in the city, dating from before the Grand Central Concourse.

Liberal Establishment According to the liberal establishment of New York, the Lunatic Asylum’s objective was originally not confinement, but treatment (Hegel 1986j: 132-182, esp.139-140; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888). Here liberalism, which originated from the Protestant Paradigm of Christianity, and which was understood in the original French, British, and general European and American sense, as a radically revolutionary, atomistic and individualistic philosophy, climaxing in the notion of

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liberality: Freedom, equality, brotherhood, human and civil rights (Hegel 1986d: 351,471; 1986l: 534, 535; Küng 1994: 602-741; 1994b). In this sense, liberalism embraced not only, what today–March 2010–in America is called liberalism, namely President Roosevelt’s socially modified New Deal liberalism, but also neo-conservativism, or neo-liberalism. Paradoxically enough, the abstract neo-liberalism is older than the more concrete Roosevelt liberalism of 1933. While the more concrete socially modified liberalism reaches back to the Roosevelt era, neo-liberalism reclaims and continues the restoration period, which took place after the great French bourgeois revolution. As such it has regressed back to the first half of the 19th century. Both forms of liberalism are in spite of their differences, nevertheless, equally based on the principle of the human atoms and of the individual will, and are thus equally blind for a holistic view of the social totality of individual, family, civil society, constitutional state, and culture, particularly religion, and its differentiations, tensions, contradictions, antagonisms, and their possible resolutions (App. C, D, E, F). My liberal friend Ivan Supek, President of the University of Zagreb, Croatia, shared with his teacher Werner Heisenberg not only the theology that God gambles, but also the quantum physics, that already the atoms contained an element of freedom, and turned this theological and physical insight critically against the collectivistic self-management system of the former Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. Hegel had considered atomistic liberalism to be bankrupt already 30 years before Ludwig Krauss landed in Hoboken, New York, which, of course, did not prevent it from continuing in Europe and America in one form or the other up to the April 2008 Presidential election campaign in the United States, in which liberals on the Left struggled with neo-liberals on the Right, without being challenged by any viable labor party: liberal and neo-liberal bourgeois candidates represented the interests of 180 million American workers. The Neoliberalism of Friedmann’s Chicago School has globally fallen into utter disrepute with the capitalist catastrophe of 2008, 2009, 2010, which it itself has caused and produced.

Psychotherapy According to the New York liberal establishment of the early decades of the 19th century, in the Blackwell Island Asylum for the Insane, psychotherapy was originally to consist of entertainment, activity, and physical labor (Hegel 1986j: 132-182, esp.139-140; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly, 1888). Men were to work on the seawall and in the

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vegetable gardens, while women were to serve as housekeepers and seamstresses. However, as so often, here also the best intentions, promises, and policies of the liberal New York establishment were broken. Liberal theory and praxis did not fit! Thus, the Asylum did go through infamous phases of development. Until 1850, most of its staff were inmates from the Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary. Male inmates were supervisors. Female inmates were nurses. Many sane immigrants were committed simply for speaking unfamiliar languages. Charles Dickens and Nellie Bly, who’s real name was Elisabeth Cochrane, described the New York City Asylum for the Insane as a place close not only to Dante’s Purgatorio, but also, and even much more so, to his Inferno (Jeremiah 3, 4; Hertz 5716-1956: 729; Alighieri 1961: 31-338; Hegel 1986j: 132-182, esp.139-140; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888). According to Cochrane, on the entrance of the Octagon Tower should have been written, what was inscribed on the door to Dante’s Inferno: “You who enter here, let all hope go!”

Infamous Phases By the time the infamous phases of the New York City Asylum for the Insane occurred i.e. between the 1840s and the 1890s, the once great, progressive revolutionary philosophy of liberalism had already been perverted into a conservative, and even reactionary and counter-revolutionary bourgeois ideology (Hegel 1986j: 132-182, esp.139-140; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888). This liberal ideology promoted freedom without genuine equality, and without a brotherhood and sisterhood, which was more than mere secular or religious public relations, in order to mask the universal individual egoism and selfishness, This liberal ideology was particularly without subsidiarity and solidarity, in opposition to the fundamental ethical and socio-ethical codes of the ethical monotheism of the three Abrahamic Religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and all the other living world religions: e.g. the Golden Rule, which they all have in common in one form or the other: In everything do to others as you would have them do to you (Deuteronomy 1-34; Hertz5716-1956: 735; Matthew 5-7; Luke 6, 17-45; Hegel 1986l: 534-535; 1986p: 249-389; 1986q: 50-95, 185346; Sombart 1976: chaps. 3-26, Sections One to Three; Gans 1972: 275289; Horkheimer 1987i: chap. 16; 1987b: 271-294; 1988c: chap. 16; Küng 1984; 1990b; 1991a; Siebert 2007c: 1-50; 2007d; App. E). The atomistic liberal ideology emphasized an egoistic self-preservation at home as well as abroad from the 19th into the 20th and 21st centuries: greed is good! (Hegel 1986l: 534-535; Horkheimer 1988c: chaps. 21, 22, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32,

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33). In international affairs the liberal ideology has stressed the sovereignty of the particular nation state even without international cooperation, if the national interest required it: the Afghanistan and second Gulf War have only been the most recent and dramatic examples for this liberal or neo-liberal attitude (Nessman 2004: 1-3; Hulse 2004: 1-3; Graham 2004: 1; Krane 2004: 1-2; Fischer 2004: 1-3). The liberal ideology exploits the fact that there is still no universally recognized, effective Praetorat working in world history (Hegel 1986g: 490-514; 1986l: 30-55, 74-105, 107-114, 534535; Deutsch 2004: 1-3). Even the small State of Israel can simply ignore the ruling of the World Court in the Hague, that its West Bank security wall or barrier violates international law and has to be taken down. The liberal ideology, even if it has called itself compassionate sometimes, has usually produced hell for the losers at home and abroad. This liberal ideology elicited its own opponents in the forms of communism and fascism and was at least one important economic, political and cultural root cause for the two world wars and the cold war in the 20th century, and the following period of Arabic and Islamic terrorism arising from formerly colonized third world countries and reaching into the 21st century. The Jewish sages generally regarded Esau as a vain and the archetypical anti-Semite, the spiritual ancestor of Imperial Rome and all the other European persecutors of Jews. In Genesis 27: 34 however the sages sympathize with Esau’s tears and his pain of being cheated and were uncomfortable with Jacob’s having gained the blessing from his father Isaac by fraudulent means. A Rabbi predicted that years later, the Jewish people would have to shed tears for what the descendents of Esau–the Edomites, who helped destroy the First Temple and the Romans, who destroyed the Second Temple–did to them, as retribution for the day Jacob made Esau cry: the Lex Talionis replaced the Golden Rule (Lieber 2001: 158/34; Siebert 2007c). The very fact that the atomistic and individualistic liberalism has been theoretically and practical bankrupt since the restoration period of the early 19th century, has never stopped politicians since, from applying it happily in its ideological form right into the 21st century. Atomistic liberalism quickly comes to its limits wherever massive collective problems arise: social security, health insurance, removal of slums, etc. Certainly the liberalization of religions leads to their decline and their end (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 40). To be sure, so far the alliance of religion with liberalism has no less distorted the former than its alliance with fascism. There is a better chance that religion will survive in an alliance with the critical theory of society, as the example of the new political theology in Europe or the liberation theology in Central and Latin America shows very clearly (Metz

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1959; 1965; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1981; 1984; 1995; 1997; 1998; 2006; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/ Wiesel 1993; Gutierrez 1971; Bloch/Reif 1978: 70-89).

American Notes Charles Dickens practiced inverse or determinately negative theology including the essential idea of personal immortality through remembering solidarity with the innocent victims of the holocaust altar of liberal civil society and history, when in the already very secularized European and American liberal capitalist society of the first half of the 19th century, he remembered the Octagon Tower and its wings, the New York Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, in his American Notes (Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b: 103-161; 1981; 1993b; 1997u). After his 1842 visit to the Octagon Tower, Dickens wrote in his American Notes about the “lounging, listless, madhouse air” that prevailed there, and which was very painful for him. Diseases such as scurvy, typhus, and cholera all took their turns. Overcrowding and financial difficulties were practically givens. One day during his stay in New York between January and June 1842, Dickens paid a visit to the different institutions on Blackwell’s Island off Long Island. Dickens was taken to Blackwell’s Island across the East River in a boat belonging to the Blackwell’s Island‘s Penitentiary. It was rowed by a crew of prisoners, who were dressed in striped uniforms of black and buff, in which they looked like faded tigers. The prisoners took Dickens, by the same conveyance to the jail itself. Here on Blackwell’s Island, Dickens saw not only the New York City Penitentiary, and the Bellevue Almshouse, and the Orphanage, but also the first state hospital for insane paupers, the Octagon Building, or what he called the Lunatic Asylum. The artist Dickens found the Blackwell Island’s Lunatic Asylum to be architecturally handsome. He admired the Octagon Building’s magnificent rotunda and its remarkable spacious and elegant staircase. At the time of Dickens’s visit, the whole structure of the Octagon Tower was not yet completely finished, but it was already one of considerable size and extent, and it was capable of accommodating a very large number of patients. Dickens’s visit happened 38 years before Charlotte Krauss arrived in the Octagon Building of the Blackwell Island Lunatic Asylum. Not much had changed in it for the better, since 1842 (Krauss 1880).

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Social Critic In spite of the architectural beauty of the Octagon Building, the social critic Dickens could not say that he derived much comfort from the inspection of this charity: the Blackwell’s Island’s Lunatic Asylum (Tandon, 2000: 1618; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Adorno 1979: 103-161). Dickens commented on the distressing conditions in this New York City mental health facility. According to Dickens, the different wards of the Lunatic Asylum were not clean, and were not very well ordered. Dickens saw nothing of that salutary system of middle and upper-class mental hospitals, which had impressed him so favorably elsewhere in America. He noticed the moping idiot, cowering down with long disheveled hair. Dickens saw the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger. He observed the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and the lips, and the munching of the nails. There, so Dickens reported, were all the patients, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror. Dickens found the dining room in the New York Lunatic Asylum to be a bare, dull, dreary place, with nothing for the eye to rest on but the empty walls. Dickens saw a woman locked up alone. Dickens was told that the woman was bent on committing suicide. If anything, so Dickens remarked ironically, could have strengthened the woman in her resolution to commit suicide, it would certainly have been the insupportable monotony of such an existence in the Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum. Charlotte Kraus became one of these suffering women (Krauss 1880).

Shock Dickens was so shocked by the terrible crowd with which these halls and galleries of the Blackwell’s Island’s insane asylum were filled that he abridged his stay within the shortest limits, and declined to see that portion of the Asylum, in which the refractory and violent patients were under even closer restraint (Krauss 1880; Tandon, 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888). Dickens had no doubt that the gentleman, who presided over this establishment of the Lunatic Asylum at the time–i.e. in 1842, was competent to manage it, and that he had done all in his power to promote its usefulness. However, Dickens believed that the miserable strife of the liberal political party in the City of New York was carried even into this sad refuge of afflicted and degraded humanity: the Octagon Tower and the whole Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island. Dickens believed that the eyes, which were to watch over and control the wanderings of the patients’ minds, on which

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the most dreadful visitation to which human nature was exposed had fallen, wore the glasses of some wretched liberal political parties in the City and the State of New York. Dickens believed that the Governor of the Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum was appointed, and deposed, and changed perpetually, as liberal parties fluctuated and varied, and as their despicable weathercocks were blowing this way or that without any stability. According to Dickens, a hundred times in every week some new most paltry exhibition of that narrow-minded and injurious liberal party spirit, which was the Simoom– i.e. hot, dry desert wind–of America, sickening and blighting everything of wholesome life within its reach, was forced upon the Governor’s notice. Yet, Dickens had never turned his back upon this liberal party spirit with feelings of such deep disgust and measureless contempt, as when he crossed the threshold of the Octagon Tower and the connected wings on Blackwell’s Island. Up to the present–March 2010–institutions in liberal capitalist society remain characterized by that continually vacillating and fundamentally destructive liberal weathercock attitude: even universities. Charlotte Kraus and her family became one of the many victims of this almost anomic, arbitrary and contradictory, weak, and mostly ineffective regulating liberalism, before and after she entered the Octagon Building of the Asylum on Blackwell Island. Even the newest liberal measures continually proved themselves only too soon as the oldest. In liberal civil society, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Through quantitative changes, qualitative changes are avoided and prevented. There was really nothing new under the sun above Blackwell Island for a whole century. According to Jefferson and Einstein, the insanity of liberal capitalist society consisted in the expectation that from the same liberal measures could derive different results (Fromm 1990). However, nowhere in Europe or America did the liberal neglect of the mentally ill people turn into their fascist, state-sponsored euthanasia: their annihilation. That happened only one generation after Charlotte Krauss’s death on Blackwell Island in the Germany from which she had migrated to the USA: in Adolf Hitler’s SS-State (Kogon 1995). Only too easily the liberal axiom–there must be winners and losers–can turn over into the fascist aristocratic principle of nature–there must be predators and prey (Hitler 1943: 63-65)! As I wrote this chapter in my library at 630 Piccadilly Road, Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Sunday, April 13, 2006, at 3.30 p.m., a big robin had been for hours flying from an old Chinese Elm tree against its reflection in my large window: a precise image of the lonely, narcissistic bourgeois individual in–what Riesmann has called–the lonely crowd of liberal capitalist society, who is continually tempted to escape from his psychologically problematic and ambiguous, merely negative freedom into global

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alternative Future I: into a fascist society, characterized by authoritarianism, automatic conformity, and destructiveness, instead of moving into the postliberal global alternative Future III–a truly, material democratic society, in which the bourgeois illusion of individuality is overcome through true personal autonomy, sovereignty, spontaneity, and creativity, mediated through universal solidarity and subsidiarity (Fromm 1970; Flechteim 1971; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; App. G).

The Cupola In June 2004, when my family and I visited the ruins of the Octagon Tower, I could still imagine from the residuals and relics the former cupola or dome high beyond the abandoned interior, once grandiose spiraling staircase, which Dickens and other great artists had admired so much (Krauss 1880; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 38, 39, 40; Adorno 1979; Siebert 2001: vi-xvi, chap. III; 2002a). The cupola must once have appeared like the closure piece of a church or a theater, on the sacrificial altar or stage of which passed innumerable tragedies like that of Charlotte and Ludwig Krauss and their children. The sadness of the many images was torn upward to the dome of the Octagon Tower through the many lamenting words of the patients and their families, if they had any. At its height, however, the cupola may have transformed itself into consolation. The captive sound of the many poor and desperate creatures, who entered the Octagon Tower, may have ascended to its dome, and the echo may have returned again and may have sounded of the hope that the hopeless victims were not entirely lost. Thus, in the dome of the Octagon Tower, which demonstrated the unholy and terrible immanence of the closed liberal bourgeois world, may have contained, nevertheless, the promise that whatever happened here may not be forgotten, but rather concretely superseded: Non confundar! That was the resonance that the cupola may once have granted to the sad, melancholical, fallible, impure, insane voices and cries from below. Some day, so it may have appeared, the roundness of the dome of the Octagon Tower may draw the whole church or theater into itself. Then the church or the theater was like a sphere, which would no longer know any above or below, or the direction of historical time, which the longing of religion and art and philosophy has sought to overcome for centuries. In that lay the justification of the religious and the artistic illusion of the cupola, which in its intrinsic longing for the totally Other, and for the rescue of the hopeless victims may have contained more truth than that present

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in the positive natural or social sciences, which the 8 medical doctors practiced in the New York City Asylum for the Insane. In the sphere form of the Octagon Building the most desperate and transitory life may have presented itself under the cupola or the dome as suddenly and ultimately saved, rescued, and redeemed. The surrealistic scenes of the church-like or theater-like Octagon Tower, and its staircase, and its cupola were a combination of the forests and fields of Blackwell Island, and of the sound of the East River flowing by on one side, and the slowly rising skyscrapers and deepening subways of Manhattan, on the other side, from where the endless stream of hopeless patients, like Charlotte Krauss, came in search for healing, and rescue, and liberation (Krauss 1880; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 38, 39, 40).

The Madhouse Half a century after Dickens’s visit to the Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum, the 24 years old American journalist Elisabeth Cochran practiced inverse or determinately negative theology, including the idea of personal immortality through anamnetic solidarity with the innocent victims of the slaughter bench of society and history, when she remembered in the already very much secularized liberal New York civil society of the 1880s the at times 1600 mentally ill women and the miserable conditions under which they had to live in the Octagon Tower and its wings, in her book Ten Days in a Madhouse (Hegel 1986l: 29-55; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1959c; 1970a; 1970b: 103-161; 1973b; 1979; 1993b; 1993c; 1994; 1997b; 1997c; 1997f; 1997h; 1997u). According to Cochran, even with added buildings, conditions were not at all better and improved in–what she called–the madhouse or the human rat trap on Blackwell Island, 45 years after Dickens’s visit. In a famous undercover operation for the New York World of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made the erection of the Statue of Liberty possible with money collected from the working class, Nelly Bly or Elizabeth Cochrane feigned insanity in Bellevue Hospital in New York, and was promptly sent to the Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island. In 1887, after a New York World attorney obtained her release with some difficulties, she gained national recognition, writing a series of front-page articles, detailing also other harrowing experiences in liberal New York. In her articles and book, Cochran criticized the insufficient medical care in the Blackwell Island Asylum by eight not very efficient doctors, and by sometimes most brutal nurses: little and bad food; cold rooms and halls; no winter clothing;

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poor and uncomfortable furniture; bad lighting; one bath a week and that always with cold water even in winter; robbery gangs; no books or articles; little entertainment; few visitors; much loneliness, abandonment and boredom; doctors distracted by love affairs with nurses; severe punishment like holding the heads of patients under water in the bathtub Since the 1980s such water boarding has been internationally outlawed by the Geneva Conventions on American initiative as a form of torture, but has nevertheless been practiced by the neo-liberal second Bush-Administration during the investigation of so called illegal combatants or Islamic terrorists in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, and which as such has been as immoral as it has been technically unproductive not only for healing mostly German, more or less mentally ill women, but also for finding true intelligence information in order to be able to prevent new terror attacks.

Liberal Party Spirit In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, what Dickens’s had called the most destructive American Simoom of the divisive and continually vacillating liberal party spirit had not stopped to blow at Cochran’s time, and continued to blow to the end of the 19th century and beyond (Hegel 1986l: 29-55; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1959c; 1970a; 1970b: 103-161; 1973b; 1979; 1993b; 1993c; 1994; 1997b; 1997c; 1997f; 1997h; 1997u). Cochran explored the situation of the victims of the liberal simoom in New York also outside Blackwell Island: the servant girls’ white slavery; shop girls making pepperboxes; etc. They all received miserable minimal wages, as they produced large profits for their bourgeois masters. Some of that white slavery continues today in New York and other places of American liberal civil society, in which 2 percent of the population exploit 98 percent. As a matter of fact, the whole abstract liberal party spirit continues in New York and in Washington D.C. today, in March 2010, while the insurrection and the civil war in Afghanistan and Iraq rage under American occupation initiated and directed by the neo-conservative or neo-liberal second BushAdministration (Adorno 1997h: 177-195; Pennington 2004: 1-2; Reid 2004: 1-3; Abrams 2004: 1-2; Sidoti 2004: 1-3; Walsh 2004: 1; Summers 2003: 1; Green 2003, 1; Buchanan 2004; 1; Johnson 2004: 1-3; Wilmington 2004: 9; Caro 2004: 8; Shenon 2004; Bohan, 2004: 1-2; Shanker/Schmitt 2004: 1-3; Sanger 2004: 1-3; Bennis 2004: 1-5; Conachy 2004: 1-4; Krane 2004: Nessman, 2004: 1-3; Hulse 2004: 1-3; Graham 2004: 1; Krane 2004: 1-2; Fischer 2004: 1-3).

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In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, this abstract neoliberal spirit has found its most recent and most cruel expression, when the neo-liberal second Bush Administration opposed–motivated by a deep hate against the so called terrorist-organization Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran–in December 2008 and January 2009 through the UN Security Council and other international measures an immediate cease fire between Israel and the Hamas Government in Gaza (Hegel 1986l: 29-55; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1959c; 1970a; 1970b: 103-161; 1973b; 1979; 1993b; 1993c; 1994; 1997b; 1997c; 1997f; 1997h; 1997u; Horkheimer 1967: 302-316, 317-320; 1974: 28-29, 148-151, 164-165, 169; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 177-217; Fromm 1966b). It thus encouraged the Israeli Government to continue for over a week its most horrible attack from the air, on the land, and from the sea, which up to January 8, 2009 had cost the lives of over 800 civilians and injured over 3,000 non-combatants, while the hospitals in Gaza City have run out of doctors and medicine, and overall the supply of food, water and electricity had broken down for a population of about one and a half million mostly Islamic Palestinians, settled in a territory 4 miles broad and thirty miles long, or about a fifth of the population of the State of Israel. UN schools in Gaza City, full of refugees, have been hit by Israeli bombs. UN and Red Cross transport trucks, full of food and medicine, etc., have been shot at by Israeli soldiers in spite of the fact, that they had received permission by the Israeli army and the green light had been given to them to proceed and to deliver the humanitarian aid so desperately needed by the Palestinian civilian population, and some of their drivers had been wounded or even killed, and their rescue work had to be stopped, While all that happened in the Gaza Strip, Hamas rockets have killed 3 Israelis in the southern part of Israel and 1 Israeli soldier was shot in Gaza. As the tragic conflict between Israel and the Arabic states and the Islamic world continued, once more Israel, supported by the United States and its abstract neo-liberal party spirit, used disproportionate force and practiced the unlimited application of the Jus Talioni which could hardly bring about the desired lasting peace– Shalom (Fromm 1992: 203-212; Küng 1991b: 275-376, 640-665, 666-702, 703-734, 736-752; 2004: 568-582, 763-784; Hacker 1972; Solomon 1996). As in the perspective of inner criticism Israel–inspired by America’s neoliberal party spirit, and imitating it, and carrying out proxy-wars for it– it did not only disobey UN resolutions and violate Geneva Conventions,

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and the international law, but–most importantly–it also broke its own Noah-, Abraham- and Moses-Covenants, in which its whole national and spiritual existence is rooted: He who sheds man’s blood, shall have his blood shed by man, for in the image of God man was made (Genesis 9, 15; Exodus 24-31, 32-34; Lieber 2001: 50-54, 82-85, 476-529, 529-546).

In the view of the inner-critical, dialectical religiology, nothing is more important for the preservation of the spiritual and national existence of Israel than to overcome the apostasy, and to renew the Covenants, which by the way remain valid for Christians and Muslims as well, and to act accordingly nationally as well as internationally (Genesis 9, 15; Exodus 2431, 32-34; Lieber 2001: 50-54, 82-85, 476-529, 529-546; The Holy Qu’ran S.II, 27, 40, 63; Horkheimer 1967: 302-316, 317-320; 1974: 28-29, 148151, 164-165, 169; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Fromm 1966b). There are Jewish political theologians in Israel, who would agree with this position.

The Human Rat Trap In the midst of the liberal party spirit of the late 19th century America, the journalist Cochran attempted in New York her tricky but, nevertheless, successful medical commitment to Blackwell’s Island’s insane asylum in order to gather information for a story on how bad the treatment and management of the patients was in this specific mental health facility, this Octagon Building, and in order then to publicize it in the New York World, and to bring it before a Grand Jury in New York, and thus to produce institutional changes for the better (Hegel 1986l: 29-55; Krauss 1880; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Adorno 1970b 103-161; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1979; 1980b; 1993b). She was a liberal critic of liberalism. It all started out as a dare for Cochran. The New York World managing editor, John Cockerill, suggested, that an outlandish stunt be designed to attract more readers. Cockerill would have the tall and rather pretty Cochran act as an insane woman and allow her to be committed to Blackwell’s Island-New York City’s notorious insane asylum. What resulted was a searing expose that got the attention of reformers and readers alike. Cochran marked a time in history that was remembered forever. The mis-

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treatment of patients was shown in the front pages of the New York World. Through remembering, Cochran tried to break the iron ban and spell of forgetfulness, which lay over the insane women of the Blackwell’s Island Octagon Building, and thus to grant immortality to the innocent victims. Cochran found it very easy to get into the Octagon Building, the human rattrap, but very hard to get out. Cochran showed enormous amounts of bravery to be put into the Octagon Building and write a story about it. Cochran was magnificent with the other patients, maybe also with Charlotte Krauss. To be put in a place like Blackwell’s Island was like today’s commitment to the still ongoing insane pavilion of Bellevue Hospital in New York. Cochran’s description of the Octagon Building insane asylum being like a human rattrap was the best metaphor anyone could use. A rattrap prevents the rat from escaping and being free, unless it is let go. Cochran’s metaphor described the Octagon Asylum particularly, when it came down to the fact of being stuck. Once one was in Blackwell Island’s Octagon Building, there was no way one was able to get out, unless one was let out. Charlotte was not let out for 18 years–until her death.

God’s Most Helpless Creatures Finally, Cochrane was happy to be able to state in her book on the madhouse of Blackwell’s Island as a result of her visit to the asylum and the exposures consequent thereon, that the liberal City of New York had appropriated one million dollars more per annum than ever before for the care of the insane people (Hegel 1986l: 29-55; Krauss 1880; Tandon 2000: 1-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b: 103-161; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1979; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 128-176, 177-217). Thus, Cochran had at least the satisfaction of knowing that the poor unfortunates, God’s most helpless creatures, would be a little bit better cared for because of her brave work. Even liberals can sometimes show some compassion with the masses of losers, and victims and easy prey in liberal civil society, if driven and forced by public exposure through observant journalists, newspapers, grand juries, public opinion, etc, at least for a short time, and always insufficiently: compassionate liberalism, or even neo-liberalism and neo-conservativism! With the reforms that followed Cochrane’s reports on the Lunatic Asylum, its facility was deemed insufficient. Thus, in 1894, four years before Charlotte Krauss’s death, patients were transferred to a new Wards Island facility. Thereafter, the Octagon Tower and its wings were occupied by the Metropolitan Hospital. It joined Blackwell Island’s City Hospital as two of

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the world’s largest medical institutions. Accommodating nearly 1,400 patients, Metropolitan Hospital held general medical facilities, but specialized in tuberculosis. From 1902 to 1921, it also housed a leprosy ward. In 1955, the Metropolitan Hospital abandoned the Octagon Tower buildings for new quarters in First Avenue and 97th Street. Now only the Octagon Tower was still standing. In 1975 it was designated a city landmark and was partially restored. As a ruin, however, this structure of the Octagon Tower has suffered the pangs of vandalism. In 1982, vandals torched the roof of the Octagon Tower. For the next ten years, the interior of the Octagon Tower was battered by the elements. Over Labor Day weekend 1999, a fire obliterated much of the Octagon Towers upper portion and caused extensive damage to the interiors. Horkheimer and the critical theorists, who worked with him at the International Institute for Social Research at Columbia University could still see the Octagon Tower from 1933-1950 (Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 51-90). I could still see the Octagon Tower when I came through New York, first as prisoner of war in 1947, and then again as exchange student in 1953 and 1954. In the 1990s, my family and I visited several times the fenced-in pitiful ruins of the Octagon Building insane asylum. Under the ruins was buried immeasurable human suffering: including that of Charlotte Krauss. My family and I finally practiced inverse theology, when we remembered Charlotte during her great-great granddaughter’s and my youngest daughter Jeanne’s wedding not too far away from Roosevelt Island and the ruins of the Octagon Building insane asylum in May 2003, and thus tried to give personal immortality to her, and to all the other most mortal innocent victims of the asylum as well as of our family, and to liberate them from the rat-trap of finitude, through Messianic anamnestic solidarity (Benjamin 1977; chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b; Habermas 1986: 53-54). We made a last visit to the overgrown ruins of the Octagon Building on the last day of May, 2004, shortly before its most amazing neo-liberal restauration as the center of an immensely expensive luxury apartment complex.

The Good Shepherd In the center of Blackwell’s Island, on Main Street, stood the Chapel of the Good Shepherd (Krauss 1880; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1997h: 177-195; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 128-176, 177-217). The Chapel, which in 2004 was called the Good Shepherd Community Center, had been built in 1888, when Charlotte Krauss had been in the Octagon Building Asylum for 8 years.

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Frederick Clarke Withers had been the architect. The banker George M. Bliss had given the Chapel as a gift to the Episcopal City Mission Society, to serve the patients in the Octagon insane asylum as well as the inmates of the Blackwell Island’s penitentiary. Often for liberals and neo-liberals, religion is the answer to the social problems, which they cannot, or which they do not want to solve. The bell of the Chapel of the Good Shepherd, which now, in 2010, stands in the village square, used to wake up the laborers of the nearby Almshouse. Charlotte could hear the bell from the Chapel of the Good Shepherd for ten years, from 1888 to 1898, every morning like all the other patients of the Octagon insane asylum, and the prisoners of the Blackwell’s Island penitentiary, and the poor workers from the Almshouse, and the children from the orphanage. The care of the soul of the Lutheran Charlotte Krauss was not only in the hands of the secular 8 psychiatrists in the Octagon Tower, but also in the hands of the Episcopalian priests, who administered the Chapel of the Good Shepherd. However, other religious groups were represented as well: e.g. the heroic Jesuits, some of whom volunteered and died in the smallpox hospital, which was also on Blackwell Island. Nothing can symbolize Charlotte’s and her family’s horrible theodicy problem, as well as that of the other patients and the prisoners, and the poor workers, and the orphans on the Blackwell Island than the presence of the Chapel of the Good Shepherd: the antagonism between the all-loving and all-powerful Divine Providence on one hand, and the insane, the prisoners, the orphans and the poor on the slaughter bench of nature, society and history, on the other (Leibniz 1996: vol. 1 and 2; Hegel 1986l: 29-55; 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; App. E, F). Divine Providence, the Good Shepherd, was sadly absent from the life of Charlotte Krauss on Blackwell Island at least from 1880 to 1898, with the exception that the moon came up regularly disturbing the mentally ill, and that the sun was rising every morning in the East, from the Atlantic Ocean, and from the unreachable Europe, Germany and Heilbronn, and that the East River was flowing by peacefully and refreshingly in the unbearably hot summers on both sides of the Island.

A Humane Refuge On January 23, 2005, the liberal Christopher Gray of the New York Times, called the New York City Lunatic Asylum euphemistically a humane refuge (Krauss 1880; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1997h: 177-195; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 128176, 177-217). For Gray, 30 years ago, i.e. in 1975, the Octagon Tower on

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Roosevelt Island seemed like a multi-sided peg in a round-hole world: a weird, purposeless, left over fragment of the New York Lunatic Asylum, built in 1839 on what was then Blackwell Island. Now in 2005, after its wings had been demolished and it had deteriorated to a point just short of collapse, this once grand building was brought back from the brink of ruin, and was given a new life. In the 1830s, 175 years ago, the liberal New York City Board of Alderman had decided to build, what it called euphemistically a humane refuge for the insane on Blackwell Island. Although near the growing city of New York, the island was nimble-proof. It was not near any one’s backyard. The surrounding waters were useful as a moat for isolating paupers, criminals, and smallpox patients, all of whom were soon housed on the island and outside liberal civil society. The asylum’s architect, Alexander Jackson Davis, famous now in 2005 for the picturesque villas and cottages he designed for the middle and high bourgeoisie of New York, developed a plan for an expansive structure in the shape of a squarish C. Its end reached the East River and formed an enclosed court. In the perspective of the 21st century journalist Gray, except for the bars on the windows, it could have been a spectacular seaside hotel, or a complex of quarters for military officers. Only the northern half of the C was actually built, with two 250-foot arms at right angles joined by a large four-story-high Octagon, 80 feet wide, with central offices, storerooms and the residence of the physician in charge. The three story wings were low and severe, double-loaded corridors with 6 by 10-foot rooms running down each side. They and the octagonal section were built of blue-gray schist. The moody, variable stone was quarried on the Blackwell Island itself. The quarry can still be seen today in 2010, not too far away from the former asylum. While the Octagonal section had a square cupola, the side wings had loggias with Tuscan-style columns. The entire assembly was austere and grand, venturing even on the bleak. But compared with previous examples, the new building, so Gray assured us euphemistically, was a utopian effort in the use of architecture to improve the human condition in the 1830s, when the bourgeois revolutions turned into periods of restoration, and had lost much of their once utopian spirit. It was now to be inherited from the bourgeoisie by a socialistically inclined working class. In any case, originally the liberal City Government of New York did not intend to create an Island of Despair, but rather an Island of Hope and Happiness.

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According to the liberal New York Times journalist Gray, in 1849–two generations before the start of the Freudian psychoanalytical and psychotherapeutic enlightenment movement, Dr. M. H., the superintendent of the New York City Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island, counted 487 patients in his annual report (Krauss 1880; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Freud 1955; Reich 1971; 1976; Jung 1933; 1990; Mitscherlich 1994; Fromm 1932a; 1932b; 1950; 1959; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1990,1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Landauer 1991; Lohmann 1994; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; 1979: 408-433; 1997h: 177-195; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 128-176, 177-217). Ninety-one patients had died of cholera in one sudden outbreak between June 10 and July 26 of 1849, most of them within a few hours after its onset. Yet, Dr. Ranney was, nevertheless, upbeat and optimistic about the environment of his institution, the Lunatic Asylum, away from the excitement of the City of New York, and with a pure invigorating atmosphere, and in addition with the most beautiful scenery on every side of Blackwell Island. In Dr. Ranney’s view, all of these environmental traits tended to remove the patience despondency, and to establish the health, and to restore reason. Dr. Ranney was proud of the availability of religious services, and of the Asylums library. He especially praised the works of Sir Walter Scott. However, Dr. Ranney did not mention anything in his report of 1849, which could after Freud’s early work on brainanatomy,-physiology and-pathology and particularly after his establishment of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy be called treatment of mental illness. Dr. Ranney’s therapy relied mostly on rest and relaxation, presupposing that the competitive restlessness and tension of the dynamic liberal City of New York had made the patients ill in the first place. In 1866–a generation before the start of the Freudian psychoanalytical and psychotherapeutic enlightenment movement–Harper’s New Monthly Magazine published the rather utopian account that patients of the New York Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell Island caught lobsters and fish in the East River, played quoits, built furniture, and grew their own vegetable, including 200 bushels of tomatoes a year, and thus calmed down the possibly bad conscience of the bourgeoisie living on Manhattan. By 1866 more recent improvement of the human condition on Blackwell Island had been the adoption of navy blue clothes for males and calico gowns for women. Previously, patients of the Octagon Tower Asylum had worn striped clothing like that of the near penitentiary inmates. One mentally ill woman

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thought herself to be a china teapot, sitting for hours each day with her right arm as a spout and her left arm as the handle, but always in fear she would be knocked over. Also she received rest therapy, and no medical doctor tried to analyze the meaning of the woman’s bizarre behavior, and her self-understanding and her fear. Charlotte Kraus rested and relaxed in the New York City Lunatic Asylum without any improvement of her condition for 19 years. While there were religious services for the patients of the Octagon Lunatic Asylum for Episcopalian, and Roman Catholic, and other religiously committed patients who may have been told the oldest theodicy, that suffering was the consequence of sin, or how to suffer in the Imitatio Christi, and who may have waited for a miracle, that never occurred, or who may even have experienced a miraculous healing, which the doctors at the Octagon Tower could not account for, there was no sound, scientifically grounded psychotherapy yet for the mentally ill women on Blackwell Island: e.g. Charlotte Kraus.

Visionary Housing Settlement According to Gray’s research of 2005, in 1878, two years before Charlotte Krauss entered the New York City Lunatic Asylum, the city put a new ornamental stone stairway and a slate-covered dome on top of the octagonal building, thus mitigating the chaste severity of the design, and after the Asylum relocated to Wards Island in the 1890s and was succeeded by the Metropolitan Hospital, which in turn left around 1950, and after the asylum building had only been in marginal use, in the 1960s New York State took over much of what had become Roosevelt Island for its neoliberal visionary housing settlement (Krauss 1880; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Adorno 1970b; 103-161; 1997h: 177195; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 128-176, 177-217). A memorandum in the files of the Landmarks Preservation Commission noted an agreement permitting the State of New York to demolish the Alexander Jackson Davis wings of the Octagon Tower, but salvaging enough stone to reface the scars left on what was by then known as the Octagon, with the idea that it would be rebuilt as a sort of folly some day. The wings were indeed taken down, but nothing ever came of a plan to preserve the Octagon. Indeed, it fell into ruin through multiple fires and collapses. It became just the very shell, which my family and I encountered, when we visited Roosevelt Island in 2003 and 2004. However, in 2004, after long negotiations the architect-developer Bruce Redman Becker started construction on a new 13 story apartment complex with 500 rental units, connected to the Octagon,

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which would be used for the main entry area, offices and common rooms. In a perfect world, so the journalist Gray argued, the original wings of the New York City Lunatic Asylum would have survived New York State’s planning for Roosevelt Island. Of course, liberal civil society is far from being a perfect world. Thus, the New York State’s planning had little tolerance for the nuances of older buildings. The silly stairway and dome applied to the Octagon Tower in the 1870s–which the architect Davis had bitterly protested against at the time, and which indeed trivialized his chaste design–would be removed instead of completely recreated for the present project. According to Gray, in that utopian perfect world, which modern liberal civil society, always suffering from amnesia, was not, the entire complex of the former new York City Lunatic Asylum–aged, worn, battered by the slings and arrows of time–would be chastely refitted on the inside. Its sweeping lines would reach out to the swirling eddies of the East River. It would yield a sense of the antiquity of New York City. Most of all, it would present the utopian vision of those in the liberal New York City Government, who wanted to elevate humanistically the treatment of the insane people, the victims of society, which of course goes far beyond the potential and possibilities of present liberal and neo-liberal capitalist society and could be reached only in post-capitalist, post-liberal global alternative Future III–the sane society (Freud 1955; 1962; 1964; Jung 1933; 1990; Frankl 1990; Landauer 1991; Mitscherlich 1994; Reich 1971; 1976; Fromm 1932b; 1950; 1956; 1957; 1959; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1975; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1990; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985b; 1985e; Fromm/ Suzuki/Martino 1960; Adorno 1980; Lohmann 1994; Funk/Johach/Meyer 2000; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; App. G).

The Tower of Babel Blackwell Island or Wards Island were not the only places where the City of New York, the capital of liberalism, let disappear from view the losers with their lives damaged in the fierce competitive struggle for survival, wealth, and power, while the winners built higher and higher their Babylonian skyscrapers on Manhattan and elsewhere, expressions of the Titanic achievements of the modern bourgeoisie as well as of its hubris, and prospered and became richer and richer, and always more powerful, and lived in their luxury apartments and in their castles along the Hudson River (Kraus 1880; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Buckley 2008: A 22; Siebert 2002a: chap. 2; Zinn 1999: chaps. 11-25;

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Adorno 1980a; 1980b). In case the most sensitive Walter Benjamin had not been driven into suicide by German, French and Spanish fascism in September 1940, and would have come to the United States via Lisbon, Portugal, as planned, he would have had an even harder time to adjust to and to survive in the City of New York, the Capital of liberalism, than he had to adapt to Berlin, his birthplace, or to Paris, his exile, or to Moscow, in spite of the most caring preparations, which had been made for him in New York by Scholem, Horkheimer, Adorno, and most of all by Gretel Adorno: big cities, the triumph of bourgeois capitalism and liberalism, were a horror to him (Benjamin 1955; 1980; 1985: Vol. 1, 45-78; 1987; Scholem 1989: 267-268; Blau 1992). Fromm,–who after he had worked in Horkheimer’s International Institute for Social Research in New York for several years, practiced psychoanalysis in the same city for over two decades–spoke of the Late Medieval vision of the City of God and of the following liberal vision of the growth of the Earthly City of Progress, which in the 20th century deteriorated to that of the Tower of Babel, and which was now–in 1976–beginning to collapse, and would ultimately bury everybody, bourgeois and proletarian, winners and losers, predators and prey, alike in its chaos and ruins (Genesis 11: 1-9; Fromm 1966b; 1976; Siebert 2001; 2002a; 2005b). According to Fromm, that would happen if there was not a new synthesis between the spiritual core of the Late Medieval City of God and the development of rational thought and science since the Renaissance in the liberal City of Progress: the alternative Future III– the post-liberal and post-modern City of Being, in which the antagonisms of liberal civil society, e.g. personal autonomy and universal solidarity, would be reconciled (Fromm 1966b; 1976; App. E, G).

Hart Island There was reserved for the losers and victims of the liberal City of New York besides Blackwell Island and Wards Island also Hart Island, a part of the Bronx in Long Island Sound, which was opened up in 1869, shortly after Johannes and Margaret Kraus and Ludwig and Charlotte Krauss arrived in the City from Germany, and which is still open today, in March 2010 (Buckley 2008: A 22). Hart Island is home to New York City’s Potter’s Field, the place where hundreds of thousands of the city’s anonymous, indigent, and forgotten victims have been laid to rest, tightly packed in pine coffins in common graves. The name Potter’s Field had been taken from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (Zechariah 11: 12-13; Matthew 27: 3-10. Buckley 2008: A 22; Siebert 2008b: 55-61). When he

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found out that Jesus had been condemned, Judas his betrayer was filled with remorse and took the thirty silver pieces back to the chief priests and elders in Jerusalem. They discussed the matter and bought with the money the Potter’s Field as graveyard for foreigners, and this was why later on the field was called the Field of Blood. The Christians thought that thereby the word of the prophet Jeremiah, or correctly Zachariah, was fulfilled: “And they took the thirty silver pieces, the sum of which the precious One was priced by the children of Israel, and they gave them for the Potter’s Field…” Hart Island is managed and maintained by the New York City’s Department of Correction, and inmates dig and fill the graves–three bodies deep for adults, five deep for babies–and mark each trench with numbered concrete blocks. The Island is off limits to the public, though family members, who can prove their relatives are buried there, are able to arrange visits. Many people, who came as immigrants from Europe to New York–like e.g. Johannes and Margaret Kraus and Ludwig and Charlotte Krauss–seemingly vanished off to Hart Island, or children who died at birth or soon afterwards were buried there in haste because their families could afford little else. Little Karl Krauss, who was not buried on the Lutheran Cemetery of New York, may have disappeared on Hart Island. In a way, Blackwell Island, Wards Island, and Hart Island are what New York, the capital of liberalism, is all about: there is tremendous wealth and power and privilege, but there is also at the same time immeasurable misery and suffering, and a lot of people become invisible, too.

Throne and Altar In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the critical theorists’ longing for the wholly Other than the deficient world of appearance, was continually elicited and ignited not through the obvious positivity of liberal civil society–its rich and powerful classes–but rather by its negativity, its massive poverty and humiliation of large parts of its population, which does not change, no matter how rich liberal capitalist society becomes (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Marx 1953: chaps 6-10; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40). Their longing for the totally Other brings the critical theorists of society closer to the dominated and exploited classes of liberal civil society than many Christians, e.g. Pope Benedict XVI (Habermas/Ratzinger 2006). Today, Tuesday 15, 2008, the Pope started his visit to the United States–to Washington D.C. and New York–under the motto Christ Our Hope. Already on the plane across the Atlantic, Benedict XVI confessed to journalists how ashamed he was about the massive clerical child abuse

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scandals in the United States, and he promised that the offenders could have no place in the priesthood, and that the Church would do everything in order to contribute to healing and to prevent further abuses. Soon after his arrival in the United States, the Pope met with some of the victims, and spoke to them, and prayed with them. Throughout his visit, Benedict XVI did not consider it wise, to mention the 500,000 children who–according to the confession of the former U. S. Secretary of State Albright– had been killed in Iraq through the Western embargo between the first and second Iraq War, both of which the Vatican had condemned as being unjust according to the Augustinian Seven Point Just War Theory, or the over one million Iraqis killed in the second Iraq War, among whom there were many children. The Pope was received with great dignity on Dulles Airport, by President Bush junior personally and by his wife. The President otherwise never receives foreign dignitaries at the airport. The conservative Pope shares with the neo-liberal President the opposition to the liberation theologians of Central and Latin America, informed by the Gospels, the Sermon on the Mount, as well as by the critical theory of society, and to their followers, the Basic Christian Communities, desiring justice now, and to all other forms of religious or secular humanistic socialism (Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1966c; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; Metz 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; Gutierrez 1973; Berrigan 1978). After his arrival in the White House, the Pope, who represents a Church, which throughout its long history up to the present has been much more authoritarian than democratic, told President Bush, that democracy could only work if the political leaders were completely committed to the truth. The imperial President, who for 8 years has been involved in the most Orwellian and Kafkaesque lies, agreed with the Pope completely, and told him that America stands for harmony of faith and reason, and that, therefore, it is the hope of the world, and that many people in this country are open and willing to hear Benedict’s message of hope. Once more throne and altar are in agreement (Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Franken 2003; Clinton 2004; Kinzler 2006; Perkins 2004; Scahill 2007; Hedges 2006; Zinn 2003: chaps. 18-25; Cornwell 1999; Goldhagen 2002; Kertzer 2001; Dalin 2005; Klein 2007). The neo-conservative politicians hope that this agreement will solve the legitimation crisis and deficiency of the very unpopular, neo-conservative President Bush, and of his at the time possible, likewise neo-liberal Republican successor, Senator McCain.

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On his way to the Flössenburg Concentration Camp in Bavaria, where he would be hanged naked, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was kept prisoner for a short time in the ruins of a Catholic church, which had been bombed out by the Allies (Mayer/Zimmerling 1993). There, Bonhoeffer predicted before two co-prisoners, a liberal British soldier and a socialistic Russian soldier, a future religionless Christianity, which would cut the ancient bond between throne and altar, empire and church, and which would suffer with the suffering and the pain of the people, as well as of God (Mayer/Zimmerling 1993; Kolodiejchuk 2007; Siebert 1993: 177-179). The Jesuit priest Alfred Delp, member of the Kreisauer Kreis, who was also murdered by the German fascist government, suggested in his letters from prison something very similar to Bonhoeffer, and asked the Vatican [as Fromm would do later on] to free itself from its diplomatic-bureaucratic apparatus and activities and to convert back to the simplicity of the Gospels (Fromm 1976: 201-202). There has, indeed, been much suffering and pain not only under fascism and socialism, but also under liberalism: on Blackwell Island, Wade Island, Hart Island, and Rikers Island, etc. Liberalism and neo-liberalism continue to cause much suffering and pain nationally and internationally. When under the gallow of the Flössenburg Concentration Camp, the Gestapo official told Bonhoeffer–That is the end–the brave pastor, pacifist, Nazi resister, and agent of grace, answered defiantly– no. To the end, Bonhoeffer, one of the initiators of the Post-modern Ecumenical Paradigm of Christianity, longed and hoped for the wholly Other, the totally demythologized invisible and holy God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, a longing and hope that remains after theism has disappeared in anxiety, doubt, guilt, meaninglessness, and despair: the God above God, the totally Other than the horror and terror of society and history, which Bonhoeffer had experienced so intensely under German fascism after he had refused out of a feeling of responsibility and solidarity to stay in the safe liberal America (Hegel 1986l: 115, 140, 428-430; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Mayer/Zimmerling 1993; Tillich 1952; Kolodiejchuk 2007; Küng 1991b; 1994a: D, 50, 904-905, 918; 2004; 1994b; Siebert 1993: 177-179).

The Unclaimed Victims Over the years Hart Island has housed–like Blackwell Island–a lunatic asylum, a tuberculosis hospital, a boys’ reformatory, and a prison (Buck-

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ley 2008: A, 22). However, Hart Island’s most enduring use has been as a cemetery for the unclaimed victims of New York City. The New York Department of Correction estimates that roughly 800,000 people have been buried on the Hart Island since 1869, with 1,500 more arriving yearly, about half of them stillbirth and infants. Particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, when the AIDS and crack epidemics were ravaging New York City’s poor communities, and when infant mortality rates were soaring, the babies of the City’s impoverished and addicted were ending up at Hart Island. It obviously represented something wrong in the American liberal culture that there were mass graves for babies on Hart Island, and no affordable way to raise the children, because of the high costs involved in giving birth and education without any State or Federal support: living wages, family wages, family allowances, etc. How the other half of liberal civil society dies, is indicative of how the other half lives. The inequalities of life in liberal, capitalist society extend into how the dead are handled. There are no individual markings on the cemetery on Hart Island, but each gravesite corresponds to an entry in a ledger. Otherwise, Hart Island is not a dumpy, shabby place. It is rather peaceful and calm with the somber changing of bells reverberating from the buoys in the Sound. While it would be a good thing to allow public visits at least once a year on Hart Island as a hidden part of liberal American culture, the New York Department of Correction is concerned with security on the island because inmates are working there continually. Hart Island is an impressive symbolical anticipation of the Kafkaesque and Orwellian post-modern alternative Future I–the totally administered society without meaning and love, as has been Blackwell Island as Charlotte Krauss lived it, and her husband Ludwig and their children Frank, Louis and Emma experienced it when they visited it (Kraus 1880; Krauss 1880; Buckley 2008: A 22; Siebert 2002a: chap. 2; Zinn 1999: chaps. 11-25; Kafka 1993; Huxley 1968; 1969; 1994; Brecht 1964; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36; Flechtheim 1971; Adorno 1997j/2: 9-30, 97-122; App. G).

Rikers Island There was reserved for the losers and victims of the liberal City of New York besides Blackwell Island, Wards Island, and Hart Island, also Rikers Island (Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 51-62; Senay 2007; Barth 2007; MuskeDukes 2007; Zielbauer 2007). In 1932, a year before Horkheimer emigrated with some of his collaborators from fascist Germany to the United States, to the City of New York, a jail for men opened up on the Rikers

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Island in the middle of the Great Depression, so as to replace the dilapidated jail on Blackwell’s Island, or by now Roosevelt Island. It was another island, where New York, the Capital of atomistic and individualistic liberalism, let its losers and victims disappear. The Island has housed up to the present–March 2010–the world’s largest–what Kafka would have called– penal colony (Kafka 1964; 1993a; 1993b; 2001; Schweppenhäuse 1992r; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 51-62; Senay 2007; Barth 2007; Muske-Dukes 2007; Zielbauer 2007). Up to the present, the United States has proportionally more prisoners in its prisons, and even on death row, than any other country in the world. Reasons for this large number of prisoners may be that the American liberal civil society is characterized by an enormous dynamic and speed, by an extremely unjust, asymmetrical distribution of property, and by a fierce struggle not only for money and property, but also for recognition, and power, and that it is thus torn apart socially to the point of pathology, and that it is the least state-regulated and- controlled of all civil societies, and that it thus leaves to its atoms or its individuals often more freedom, unmediated by solidarity, subsidiarity, social justice and sufficient education, than they can possibly use responsibly in the present transition period from Modernity to Post-Modernity (Hegel 1986g: 338-514; Kafka 1964; 1993a; 1993b; 2001; Schweppenhäuser 1992; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 51-62; Habermas 1969, 1970; 1975; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981c; 1981d; 1982; 1983; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1988b; 1990; 1991a; 1991b; 1991c; 1992a; 1995; 1997a; 1998; 1999; 2001a; Honneth 1990; 1994; 2000; Frazer/Honneth 2003; Münich 1995; Senay 2007; Barth 2007; Muske-Dukes 2007; Zielbauer 2007). Rikers Island houses the largest of New York City’s jail facilities. The Island comprises 413.17 acres or 1.672 km. The Island is situated in the East River between Queens and the mainland Bronx, adjacent to the runways of La Guardia Airport. The Island itself is part of the borough of the Bronx, though it is included as part of Queens Community Board 1 and has a Queens ZIP code. The jail complex, operated by the New York City Department of Correction, has a budget of $860 million a year, a staff of 10,000 officers and 1,500 civilians to control a yearly inmate population of up to 130,000 people. The official permanent population of the Island, as reported by the United States Census Bureau, was 12,780 as of the 2000 census. The Island is named after Abraham Rycken, a Dutch settler, who moved to Long Island in 1638, and whose descendants owned Rikers Island until 1884, when it was sold to the city for $180,000 and it has been used as a jail ever since. Abraham Rycken and his heirs had belonged to the winners of American liberal civil society. An inmate at Rikers Island is informally called a Riker.

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City of Jails The facility of the penal colony on Rikers Island generally holds about 15,000 inmates at a time (Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 51-62; Senay 2007; Barth 2007; Muske-Dukes 2007; Zielbauer 2007; Senay 2007). The daytime population, including the staff, can be 20,000 or more. The facility, which consists of ten jails, holds local offenders, who are awaiting trial and are too poor to afford or cannot legally obtain bail, those serving sentences of one year or less, and those temporarily placed there pending transfer to another facility, which for the time being is overcrowded and thus, does not have space enough. The only access to the prison facility on Rikers Island is from Queens, over the unmarked 4,200-foot or 1.28 km three-lane Francis Buono Bridge, dedicated on November 22, 1966 by Mayor John Lindsay. Before the bridge was constructed, the only access to the Island was by ferry, as in the case of Blackwell Island. Transportation is also provided by the Q101R Limited stop bus service, also serving the Rikers Island Parking Lot, the 21st Street-Queens bridge F subway station, and the Queensboro Plaza 7.7 NW subway station at Queensboro Plaza, providing around-the-clock service. There are also privately operated shuttles that connect the parking lot at the south end to the Island. Bus service within the Island for visitors visiting inmates is provided by the New York City Department of Correction. The North Infirmary Command, which used to be called the Rikers Island Infirmary, is used to house inmates requiring extreme protective custody, as well as some regular inmates. The rest of the facilities, all built in the last 67 years, make up this City of Jails–the counterpart to the City of Freedom. On Manhattan Island, two of these jails are floating jails. Originally Staten Island ferries, the two floating detention centers are docked off the northern tip of Rikers Island. Each of them has an inmate capacity of 162 prisoners and serves as an annex to one of the other jails on the Island. There is also the Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center, a floating barge. The New York City’s jail system has become something of a small town. There are schools, medical clinics, ball fields, chapels, gyms, drug rehabilitation programs, grocery stores, barbershops, a bakery, a Laundromat, a power plant, a track, a tailor shop, a print shop, a bus depot, a car wash, and, of course, also the chapels cannot be missing as harmonious conclusion in the world’s largest penal colony.

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Rikers Island was once used as a military training ground for both European-American and African-American regiments during the Civil War (Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 51-62; Senay 2007; Barth 2007; MuskeDukes 2007; Zielbauer 2007; Senay 2007). The first regiment to use the Island was the Ninth New York Infantry, also known as Hawkin’s Zouaves, which arrived there on May 15, 1861. Hawkins’ Zouaves was followed by the 36th New York State Volunteers on June 23, which was followed by the Anderson Zouaves on July 15, 1861. The Anderson Zouaves were commanded by John Lafayette Riker who was related to the owners of the island. The camp of the Anderson Zouaves was named Camp Astor in compliment to millionaire John Jacob Astor Jr. who provided funding for the Union Army, and who appears to have made a significant contribution to the raising of the Anderson Zouaves in particular, with the Astor ladies being credited with the manufacture of the Zouave uniforms worn by the recruits of this regiment. The Civil War was after all the last bourgeois revolution! Despite the fact that Rikers Island was subsequently used by numerous Civil War regiments, the name Camp Astor was specific to the Anderson Zouaves, and did not become a general name for the military encampment on the Island. After the Island had been bought by New York City from the Riker family in 1884 and had been used as a jail farm, in 1954 landfill was added to the Island. It enlarged the area of the island to 415 acres, enabling the jail facilities to expand. The original penitentiary building, completed in 1935, is now a maximum-security facility called James A. Thomas Center. During the Republican Rudolph Giuliani’s term as Mayor of New York, the jail filled to overflowing, and an 800-bed barge was installed on the East River, to accommodate the extra inmates. The barge is called the Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center, or V.C.B.C./VCBC, and was formerly known as MTF3 for Maritime Facility #3. VCBC is located at 1 Halleck St, Bronx, NY 10474, at the end of Hunts Point, near the recently relocated Fulton Fish Market. A drawing by artist Salvador Dalí, done as an apology because he was unable to attend a talk about art for the prisoners at Rikers Island, hung in the inmate dining room from 1965 to 1981, when it was moved to the prison lobby for safekeeping. The drawing was stolen in March 2003 and replaced with a fake. Three Correction Officers, and an Assistant Deputy Warden were arrested and charged with the theft, and, though three later pleaded guilty and one was acquitted, the famous Dali drawing has not been recovered up to the present–March 2010.

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The Culture Industry More than Blackwell Island, or Wade Island, or Hart Island, Rikers Island has been reflected by the liberal and neo-liberal mass culture industry, and has thus been made a matter of public knowledge, and no New Yorker, and even no American, can pretend not to know anything about the largest penal colony, and what is happening there (Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 51-62; Senay 2007; Barth 2007; Muske-Dukes 2007; Zielbauer 2007; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 129-167; Senay 2007). In the movie Carlito’s Way, Sean Penn’s character is involved in a plot to assist in the escape of the New York Italian Mob boss from Rikers Island, via boat. A fictional prison in the Marvel Comics Universe, Rikers Island is a stronghold for containing both human and super-human detainees. It is based on the real life location. In the first story Arc of the New Avengers, the heroes– Spider-Woman, Iron Man, Captain America, Spider-Man, Daredevil, and Luke Cage–battle to stop a mass breakout at Riker’s Island, orchestrated by Electro. The Daredevil in the Marvel Comics Universe story, The Devil in Cell Block D, involves Daredevil’s imprisonment in Rikers. In the video game Driver: Parallel Lines, TK’s goal in one mission is to bust Candy out of Rikers. In the Marvel video game The Punisher, Jigsaw is imprisoned at Rikers Island. The main character, Frank Castle, later infiltrates the prison, which leads to a large shoot-out and riot, in which Jigsaw is eventually battled. In Futurama’s 5th season episode Three Hundred Big Boys, Kif is sent to Commander Rikers Island, an obvious play on Rikers Island. The name is a reference to the character Commander William Riker, from the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, played by Jonathan Frakes. In the Law and Order television franchise, convicts are often sent to Rikers Island for sex crimes and homicides. In many episodes, the detectives visit Rikers to question inmates, although the actual scenes are taped on a set as well as in the now-closed Queen’s House jail. Particularly the lower classes in civil society must continually be reminded by masses of detective movies how essential and how effective the work of the police is (Hegel 1986g: 382-392; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 51-62; Senay 2007; Barth 2007; Muske-Dukes 2007; Zielbauer 2007; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 129-167; Senay 2007). In Stephen Adly Guirgis’ play Jesus Hopped the “A” Train, the character Lucius Jenkins is detained at Rikers Island. Religion is often presented in liberal and neo-liberal entertainment in one way or the other! In a Season 1episode of Chappelle Show, during the sketch Pop Copy, a store clerk, played by Michael Rapaport, references that he doesn’t care about his reputation, and that he’ll go to Rikers for three or

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four years just to prove my point. In the 2006 theatrical film, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, the character of Antonio, based on a real person, is sent to Rikers Island after he murders a street hood. His friends are told to visit him there, which, of course, they never do. In 1972, The Family Dogg recorded a song Riker’s Island, sometimes credited as Ryker’s Island, about a man sent to the jail, in their second album The View From Rowland’s Head. It was also the B-side of their single Sweet America. The 1980 Jim Carroll Band song People Who Died mentions Rikers in the verse: Brian got busted on a narco rap/He beat the rap by rattin’ on some biker/ He said, ‘Hey, I know it’s dangerous, but it sure beats Rikers’/But the next day he got offed by the very same bikers. The 1990 Kool G Rap song Rikers Island tells of the facility and its notoriety within New York. The Sega Saturn video game Three Dirty Dwarves uses Rikers Island as a level, where the dwarves fight off escaping prisoners and prison guards. In the book Monster, Steve Harmon is sent to Rikers Island, while he is awaiting trial for a murder charge. In the book On the Road, the character Elmer Hassel is mentioned as being on Rikers Island. The Island is often mentioned, and has been visited twice by the CBS crime drama CSI: NY. The video for the Public Enemy song Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, which is about a prison riot, was filmed at Rikers Island. Tupac Shakur mentions Rikers Island in his song called Old School. He says A young nigga tryin to stay away from Rikers Isle. Criminals in Gargoyles TV series were commonly taken to an island prison known as Rikers Lockup. The WWE tag team Cryme Tyme was put into Rikers as an explanation for their absence after their real-life firing and rehiring. It has obviously been much easier for the liberal and neo-liberal bourgeoisie of the 19th and 20th centuries to entertain itself through the mass culture industry with the misery in liberal capitalist society, than to change it (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Gumnior/ Ringguth 1973: 51-62; Senay 2007; Barth 2007; Muske-Dukes 2007; Zielbauer 2007; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 129-167; Senay 2007). The Law and Order movies, which appear almost every night on American television, show again and again not only how efficiently and effectively the New York police and detectives catch all kinds of criminals and deliver them to Riker’s Island and to the courts and back again, but also the many types of culture wars, in which the American liberal society is continually involved, and which it seeks to resolve: often through the courts and through Rikers Island–and often in vain. The Law and Order movies demonstrate, that the police concludes and integrates antagonistic liberal civil society, as the child synthesizes the family, and history brings to its fulfillment the state, and the God Schiva, or Mahadewa, or Rudra harmonizes

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the Trimurti in the Hindu Religion of Imagination (Hegel 1986g: 339-397, 398-514; 1986p: 331-373; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: B; App. C, D, E, F).Whoever would like to study religion, morality and legality of liberal civil society in the nutshell must only look at the Law and Order movies on American television. They agree with Shakespeare’s Hamlet: good and evil–they are only in the thoughts of men! (Shakespeare 1878; Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Kaufmann 1986: 95-96, 443-446, 450-454).

The New Colossus In 1889, 57 years after Dickens had visited Blackwell Island Lunatic Asylum and only one year after Cochran had been there and had written her articles and book about it, Emma Lazarus practiced inverse theology, including the idea of personal immortality, through anamnestic solidarity with the tired, poor, huddled masses, the wretched refuse, the homeless, the tempest-tossed, shortly, the innocent victims of the slaughter bench of liberal society and history, when she remembered them all in her famous poem The New Colossus (Krauss 1880; Lazarus 1889: Vol. I, 202-203; Bergh 1908: 85-87; Adorno 1970b; Siebert, 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). Lazarus did this, 9 years after Charlotte Krauss had been committed to the Blackwell Island Insane Asylum for women from the lowest classes in New York. Lazarus did this, three years after Ludwig Krauss had observed the erection of the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe’s Island, not too far away from Blackwell Island, and participated in the inauguration and celebration of what the American Congress called in Washington D.C. on May 11, 1886 the Colossal Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World. In her poem–dedicated to the great gift of the citizens of the Republic of France to the grateful citizens of the American Republic under President Grover Cleveland–Lazarus remembered the Colossus of Rhodes, i.e. the high statue of Helios, which from 280-224 B.C. stood at the entrance to the Harbor of Rhodes in Greece, and which was one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and opposed and contrasted to it the new Statue of Liberty at the entrance of the New York Harbor: Idou Rodos, idou kai to paedaema Hic Rodus, hic saltus Here is the Rose of Reason, here dance (Hegel 1986g: 25-27; Krauss 1880; Lazarus 1889: Vol. I, 202-203; Bergh 1908: 85-87; Adorno 1970b; Siebert, 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6).

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There is no indication that the carpenter Ludwig Krauss knew about the mythological background of the Statue of Liberty: about one of the Seven Wonders of the World–the Colossus of Rhodes (Krauss 1880; Lazarus 1889: Vol. I, 202-203; Bergh 1908: 85-87; Adorno 1970b; Siebert, 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). The other six wonders were: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Pyramids of Giza. Today–March 2010–the Pyramids alone are left of the Seven Wonders of the World. Greek workers had made a wonder out of war, when they built the Colossus on the Island of Rhodes in the Mediterranean Sea. An army had besieged the Island’s Capital, but Rhodes resisted for a year, and the enemy army left. So the Rhodians transformed the enemy army’s abandoned bronze-and iron-weapons and sold its siege equipment in order to make the Colossus: a 110-foot, or 34 meters statue of the Sun God Helios. By 280 BCE, the Colossus stood tall on a marble pedestal near the harbor of Rhodes–until an earthquake toppled it just 56 years later.

Marxism and Zionism Emma Lazarus had been born on July 22, 1849, into a very wealthy Jewish family in New York (Krauss 1880; Lazarus 1889: Vol. I, 202-203; Bergh 1908: 85-87; Adorno 1970b: chap. III; Siebert 2001; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). The Lazarus family’s wealth came from the surplus labor and surplus value of workers working in its New York sugar refinery. However, Emma Lazarus devoted her life to Marxist and Zionist causes, after having learned about the anti-Semitic pogroms of the 1880s in Tsarist Russia. Marx and Engels had published their Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848 and in 1888 (Marx 1953; Marx/Engels 2005; Tucker 1978; Bottomore 1964). Emma was one of the early Marxists in New York, like those communists who had been murdered in the City and to whose funeral Ludwig Krauss went with his Carpenter Union. The first Zionist movement and organization advocating the right of the Jews to return to their homeland in Jewish Palestine was Hibbat Zion, the Love of Zion, which was founded in 1870 (Spiro 2008; Kronzek 2008). One of its most prominent members was Judah Leob Pinsker. He had been a member of a Russian assimilation group called Maskilim. In his book Auto-Emancipation Pinsker wrote: We must reconcile ourselves to the idea that other nations, by reason of their inherent natural antagonism, will forever reject us. This was a sentiment commonly felt by Jews, who had been forced into the Diaspora. In 1882, the

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Beit Yaacov Lechnu Venelech Zionist movement was formed. From then until 1941, 30,000 Russian Jews made aliyah, or immigration, to Israel while establishing 28 new settlements. Emma was one of the early Zionists in New York. Lazarus’s poem The New Colossus in honor of the Statue of Liberty reads in its totality: Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flames Are the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows worldwide welcome; her mild eyes command The air bridged harbor that twin cities name. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips.” Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless. tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Unfortunately, Emma Lazarus lived only 38 years. In 1903, 5 years after Charlotte Krauss’s death in Blackwell Island’s Lunatic Asylum a plaque with Lazarus’s poem was placed on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal’s interior wall, without much fanfare, according to many historians. Today, unfortunately, some misguided American neo-fascists see Lazarus’s beautiful poem as a secret call to the rest of the Jews in the world to come and to take over America. Anti-Semitism has survived Hitler’s death, and prevails in new forms not only in Europe, but also in liberal America.

The Reincarnation of the Octagon On December 4, 2005, Nadine Prozan wrote an article in the New York Times entitled The Changing Landscape of Roosevelt Island (Krauss 1880; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Senay 2007; Barth 2007; Muske-Dukes 2007; Zielbauer 2007; Lazarus 1889: Vol. I, 202-203; Bergh 1908: 85-87; Adorno 1970b; Siebert, 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 3). Here Prozan reported that at the North end of the former Blackwell Island, now Roosevelt Island, opposite East 84th Street, the Octagon was being reincarnated as a 500-unit luxury rental tower. After the journalist had introduced the Octagon as the remnant of a landmark constructed in 1839 and had gone through the history of the New York Lunatic Asylum

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up to the time, when it was shut down in 1955, and when only the eight exterior walls of the old Octagon had survived the ravages of fire and time, he told his readers that reproductions of the Octagonal dome and of the sweeping interior circular staircase would be the architectural centerpieces of the new building that would extend over two wings around a courtyard. The liberal and neo-liberal path has led from the Lunatic Asylum to a luxury rental tower! According to Prozan, the reincarnated Octagon was developed and designed by Becker and Becker Associates of Fairfield, Connecticut. The restored Octagon has ignited a debate like everything else on Blackwell or Roosevelt Island: in this case about the way it is positioned on open space. The renewed luxury Octagon will have a childcare center, a swimming pool, tennis courts, a library, a lobby designed by David Rockwell, a fitness center, a billiards room, a clubhouse, a business center, and underground parking. With a target completion date of June 2006, the restored Octagon would have 400 units of market-rate housing with monthly rents ranging from about $ 1,950 for a studio to $3,800 for a unit with three bedrooms, though a fee will be listed for as much as $6,000. In December 2005, leases were processed for 40 applicants, and there were 700 names on a list of people who requested information, including one who has asked for a 62-year lease–a proposal not yet rejected or accepted. The social minded Bruce Redman Becker, president of the firm, said there would also be 100 units of middle-income housing, reserved for tenants earning no more than $ 94,000, which is 150 percent of the area median income for a family of four. They would pay slightly lower rents and go through the same application procedure as other potential tenants. Of course, there is no room in the reincarnated Octagon for members of the working class, not to speak of the working poor class, to which Ludwig and Charlotte Krauss and their four children had belonged to 130 years earlier.

The Freedom of the Poor When on New Year’s Eve 2003, my family and I took a boat trip by the Statue of Liberty and up the East River toward Roosevelt Island, our guide pointed to a huge complex of tenement houses on Manhattan of the kind Ludwig and Charlotte Krauss had lived in with their four children for 8 years, and explained to us that this was where the huddled masses of the poor lived in the midst of the super-wealthy liberal City of New York (Hegel 1986l: 27-55, 111-114, 534-535; 1986g: 382-392; Krauss 1880; Tandon 1999: 16-18: Bly 1888; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Siebert 2001; 2002). How-

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ever, so the guide consoled us, the poor were at least free in the liberal City of New York. In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, the poor classes in the liberal City of New York were certainly free from work, health insurance, adequate food, education and housing. Liberal and neo-liberal New York and America did not develop according to Lazarus’s Marxist vision of alternative Future III–a classless and thus egalitarian and universally free and solidary society, but rather according to the liberal vision of a bourgeois class society, in which the hell of Blackwell Island, which Dickens and Cochran had observed, and that of Wade Island, and Hart Island, and Rikers Island and many similar places for the paupers, could be tolerated with good, often religiously based conscience for decades to come–up to the present–March 2010 (App. G).

From Liberal Atomism to Fascist Collectivism Of course, already 130 years ago, the old New York City Lunatic Asylum was far from being a humane refuge for members of the working class (Hegel 1986g: 24-27, 339-514; 1986l: 33-55, 107-114, 133-141, 491-540; Krauss 1880; Tandon, 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Senay 2007; Barth 2007; Muske-Dukes 2007; Zielbauer 2007; Lazarus 1889: Vol. I, 202203; Bergh 1908: 85-87; Adorno 1970b: Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). While then on Blackwell Island, Wade Island, Hart Island, Rikers Island, etc, divine Reason and Providence seemed obviously to be missing, the human reason and providence of the liberal City and State of New York remained likewise pitifully ineffective: even after President Roosevelt’s New Deal had socially modified and mitigated liberalism in terms of the principle of subsidiarity from the Papal Social Encyclical Letter Quadragesimo Anno of 1931, and certainly after this modification and mitigation has been cancelled again by the Neo-Conservatives and Neo-Liberals since the Nixon and Reagan, and Bush Administrations (Hegel 1986g: 24-27, 339-514; 1986l: 33-55, 107-114, 133-141, 491-540; Krauss 1880; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Senay 2007; Barth 2007; Muske-Dukes 2007; Zielbauer 2007; Lazarus 1889: Vol. I, 202-203; Bergh 1908: 85-87; Adorno 1970b). That cancellation, of course, could not be expected to be otherwise particularly since the neo-conservative trend turn of the 1970s, when the old Pre-Roosevelt atomistic and individualistic liberal philosophy of the American bourgeoisie came fully into its own again in the form of Friedmann’s and the Chicago School’s free market theory and policies. As throughout the 19th and 20th centuries the once revolutionary bourgeoisie became more and more powerful and established, and thus also more and

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more conservative and counter-revolutionary, its philosophy–liberalism– transformed the original concrete utopia of the Freedom of All, which originated from Jerusalem and Athens into an ideology that justified and legitimated the actual Freedom of the Few–the corporate ruling class (Hegel 1986g: 24-27, 339-514; 1986l: 33-55, 107-114, 133-141, 491-540; 1986g: 2427, 339-514; 1986l: 33-55, 107-114, 133-141, 491-540; Marcuse 1960; Klein 2007). Thus, according to the neo-liberal President Bush senior, there had to be winners and losers, in spite of the grand Statue of Liberty inviting the tired, poor and huddled masses of the world longing for universal freedom (Hegel 1986g: 24-27, 339-514; 1986l: 33-55, 107-114, 133-141, 491-540; Hegel 1986g: 24-27, 339-514; 1986l: 33-55, 107-114, 133-141, 491-540; Krauss 1880; Lazarus 1889: Vol. I, 202-203; Bergh 1908: 85-87; Adorno 1970b; Siebert, 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). Only half a century after the erection of the Statue of Liberty in the liberal City of New York, on the European continent Adolf Hitler and his national-socialist movement and government radicalized the liberal principle, that there must be winners and losers, with or without what the neo-liberal President Bush junior called compassionate conservativism–into the Aristocratic Principle of Nature, according to which there had to be predators and prey, and then consequentially behaved like predators and began to kill the insane in their asylums and the Jewish and other prisoners in their concentration camps, and communists at home and abroad (Hitler 1943: 64-65). As much as liberalism is separated from fascism through the move from individualism to collectivism, both nevertheless emphasize inequality, and therefore have the same enemy, socialism, which stresses equality. It took, therefore, only a few months in 1933, to transform the liberal Weimar Republic into a fascist state, the SS State, mainly through the emergency laws, and it also took only a few months in 1945, to transform the fascist state into the liberal German Federal Republic (App. C, D). Of course, liberalism cannot only be the stepping stone for alternative Future I–a fascist society and the consequent barbarism, but also for alternative Future III–a humanistic-socialistic, society, in which the individual and the collective, personal autonomy and universal solidarity are reconciled (Fromm 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1974; 1976; 1981; 1990; Marcuse 1961; 1966; Habermas 1976; 1986; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; App. G).

The Riddles of Providence: The Dialectic of Enlightenment For a long time, New York has been the most adequate expression of the modern dialectic of enlightenment: extreme rationality turned over into

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extreme irrationality; extreme integration turned over into extreme disintegration (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969). Horkheimer and Adorno wrote their famous Dialectic on Enlightenment in the liberal City of New York and near the liberal City of Los Angeles, and the book reflects very much the life in the contemporary liberal American society toward the end of World War II, but retains nevertheless its validity and actuality up to the present– March 2010. The human suffering and pain on Blackwell’s Island between 1880 and 1898 was the necessary counterpoint to the grandiose bridges to and the growing skyscrapers on Manhattan, the symbols of the enormous struggle for recognition, success, power and money, and pride, but also of its social disorganization, injustices, bourgeois arrogance, extreme subjectivism, and other secular as well as religious social pathologies, and precisely as such threw light on the very essence of American antagonistic civil society as inequitable, asymmetrical exchange process up to the present–March 2010 (Adorno 1979; Honneth 1990; 1994; 2000; Frazer/ Honneth 2003; Habermas 2000a ; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2003a; 2003b; 2003c; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; Habermas/ Bovenschen 1981; Habermas/Luhmann 1975; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Klein 2007; Scahill 2007; Hedges 2006; Clinton 2004; Kinzer 2006; Zinn 1999: chaps. 10-25). Long before it became obvious, that no Good Shepherd rescued the hopeless, the insane, the prisoners, the orphans and the poor on Blackwell Island between 1880 and 1898 and that neither Anaxagoras’s Reason tested by Socrates in the streets of Athens, nor the Hebrew Prophets’ Providence tested by Jesus in the streets of Jerusalem, governed the Island of despair and unhappiness.. Hegel had spoken already of the Riddles of Providence, the irrationality of Reason, the theodicy problem philosophically inverted into the secular problem of the dialectic of enlightenment (Matthew 6: 25-34; Leibniz 1996: Vol. 1 and 2; Hegel 1986g; 1986l: 28, 3636, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1970b; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969; Oelmüller 1990). For Hegel’s Philosophy of History and its theological, humanistic and scientific structure, those riddles of Providence and of Reason, those pathological contingencies and irrationalities, and forms of disintegration, and disorganization in personal life, family, civil society, state, and history, which continually produce such immeasurable human suffering and pain, were produced either through nature or by man. However, in contrast to the extremely pessimistic philosophy of his archenemy Schopenhauer, Hegel’s optimistic positive theology, rooted in the prophets and mystics of the Jewish Religion of Sublimity and of the Christian Religion of Freedom, as well as in the philosophies of Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Plato and

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Aristotle asserted that all evil of nature and of history has been, or is, or shall ultimately be conquered: good will prevail over evil, which is merely the means or the instrument for the good–namely, alterative Future III: the realm of the freedom of All (Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185346; 1986r: 319-342, 369-403; 1986s: 11-248; 1986l: 19-55; 1986o: 352; Schopenhauer 1977: Vol. 2; chaps. 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 17, 19, 21; Fromm 1981: chaps. 3, 6, 7; App. G). In the face of the increased horror and terror of the slaughter bench of the 20th century, prepared in the antagonistic civil society of the 19th century, and continuing into the 21st century, and guided by Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy, the critical theorists could no longer share Hegel’s optimistic theology (Schopenhauer 1977: Vol. 2, chaps. 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49: Hegel 1986l: 19-55l; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 19, 21). They could only long for what Hegel had still been absolutely certain of in faith and reason: the Absolute, the Unconditional, the invisible and wholly One, and the freedom of all, and that perfect justice would be achieved, and that the murderer would not triumph over the innocent victim, at least not ultimately, and that thus Shalom, Peace, and Friendship would be achieved (Hegel 1986c: 575-591; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23-40; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; Fromm 1992: 201-212). In this yearning, Horkheimer and his friends promoted the very opposite of Blackwell Island, the island of unhappiness, which Charlotte Krauss had experienced, and which Dickens and Cochran had described: namely, the concrete utopia of the L’ile heureuse, or the Island of happiness, devoted to light, adventure, energy, redemption, peace, will to knowledge, immortal love, work, political action, and friendship, as well as to Heaven, Eternity, and Beauty, i.e. the wholly Other than the finite world of appearance and of injustice (Horkheimer 1995o: 9-11/2/3; Horkheimer 1987k: 289-328; 1988; 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 19, 21; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 180-181; Adorno 2000a: 61-66, 67-73; Mann 1990: 236-250, 262-265; 2002; Krauss 1880; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Senay 2007; Barth 2007; Muske-Dukes 2007; Zielbauer 2007; Lazarus 1889: Vol. I, 202-203; Bergh 1908: 85-87; Adorno 1970b; Lazarus, 1889: Vol. I, 202-203; Bergh 1908: 85-87; Siebert 2001; 2002a). They promoted all these themes poetically, before they moved–like Goethe before–from poetry to philosophy and science, and transformed them into topics of their philosophical and scientific critical theory of society (Horkheimer 1968; 1981a; 1981b; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40.). The critical theorists of society superseded concretely into their longing for the wholly Other also Freud’s longing for the Father, and other

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definitions of religion: like the longing for the realization of full Being, or sensation of Eternity, or oceanic feeling of something limitless and unbounded, which is the source of the religious energy, which is seized upon by different religious systems, and which is directed by them into particular channels, and which is doubtlessly never exhausted by them (Blakney 1941: 170-173; Meister Eckhart 1979: 13-71; Marx 1961c: 873-874, 867944; 1963: 41-60; Kaufmann 1986: 95-96; Freud 1946: 164-200, esp. 191; 1962: 11-12; 1964; Fromm 1966b; 1976: chaps. III, VII; 1992: 3-94; Quint 1979: 13-71). The critical theorists rescued the truth of the image, or of the definition through its determinate negation (Freud 1946: 164-200, esp. 191; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 23-24).

From Pauper Lunatic Asylum to the Green Building During my trip to New York in May 2008, I visited once more the Octagon Building which, according to its new plaque, had originally been designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, and which had been opened in 1841 as part of the Pauper Lunatic Asylum. The Octagon Building had originally been the very center piece of the Asylum in the form a five story octagonal rotunda of stately blue-gray stone, quarried on Blackwell Island itself (Krauss 1880; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Senay 2007; Barth 2007; Muske-Dukes 2007; Zielbauer 2007; Lazarus 1889: Vol. I, 202-203; Bergh 1908: 85-87; Adorno 1970b; Siebert, 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 3). On Tuesday, May 27th, 2008, the beautifully restored Octagon Building was newly dedicated as the center of mostly luxury apartments in a festive act by the State and City of New York. The Octagon’s LEED Silver Certification was recognized by Russ Unger, the Executive Director of the New York Chapter of the United States Green Building Council. The New York City Council Landmarks Committee Chair, Jessica Lappin, dedicated the Landmark Designation Plaque, which shortly describes the history of the Octagon, and which was fixed to its impressive entrance. The President of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society, Judy Berdy, dedicated the Sundial from the Alumnae Association of the Metropolitan Hospital School of Nursing. While the Octagon is a city, state and national landmark and joined the National Register of Historic Places, in 1972 its survival remained in doubt for decades, because of its deteriorating condition. After a nine year effort by developer/architect Becker and Becker, the Octagon was restored and transformed into a green mixed-use community with 500 apartments; a child care center; a public ecological park; a playground; a swimming pool; a fitness center;

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public tennis courts; an art gallery; office space; underground parking; and most importantly the rehabilitation of a cultural and historical landmark. In addition to saving an endangered historic building, Becker and Becker implemented green building practices into the restoration and development plan, setting a precedent for Roosevelt Island and Manhattan residential buildings. The project is a pioneer in combining historic preservation, new construction, and green building. As such it exceeds New York State Green Building Tax Credit and LEED Silver requirements and is 35% more efficient than New York State energy code standards. The Octagon has the largest array of rooftop solar panels on any residential building in New York State. It received a Green Apple award from the US Environmental Protection Agency and the MYS Department of Environmental Protection for leadership in applying sustainable design principles to residential development. Green building is the most advanced idea of the Roosevelt socially modified liberalism, in so far as it was able to assert itself against pressures of the neo-conservative and neo-liberal period from the Nixon to the second Bush Administration (Baron 2008: 92-95).

From the Past to the Future During my visit to the Octagon Building in May 2008, I also learned that its whole liberal restauration and transformation and festive dedication was done in order to preserve the past and to sustain the future (Krauss 1880; Tandon 2000: 16-18; Dickens 2000: 103-105; Bly 1888; Senay 2007; Barth 2007; Muske-Dukes 2007; Zielbauer 2007; Lazarus 1889: Vol. I, 202-203; Bergh 1908: 85-87; Adorno 1970b; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 3). Yet, can the preservation of liberalism, which the whole project symbolizes, really sustain the future? What future? Blackwell Island, on which the Octagon had originally been erected, was renamed Roosevelt Island after President Roosevelt had socially modified the long theoretically and practically bankrupt abstract, atomistic liberalism through the principle of subsidiarity in the form of the New Deal, and had thereby revived it, and rescued it, as well as his own bourgeois class, and the capitalist system, from the disaster of the Great Depression: and that, to be sure, not without the help of World War II, which guaranteed full employment (Zinn 2003: chaps. 12-25; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; Perkins 2007). However, liberalism cannot be rescued for ever through its New Deal social modification, particularly since this has been cancelled to a large extent through the neo-conservativism and neo-liberalism of the Nixon, Reagan, and two Bush Administrations via deregulation and

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privatization throughout all dimensions of social and cultural life from business through education to the military and religion: also not through a new environmentalism or green building, as necessary as it is. This neoconservative cancellation of the New Deal social modification of liberalism has lead into the present economic, political and international catastrophe of September 2008, 2009, 2010: economic depression, inflation, high oil prices, the loss of millions of homes because of the sub-prime credit crisis, the New Orleans disaster, the failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the continual Palestine crisis up to the present–March 2010–Israeli attack against the Gaza Strip, which up to January 13, 2009, has caused the death of over 800 Palestinians and has injured over 3,000 Palestinian civilians, while 10 Israeli civilians and soldiers have died (Gujer 2006: 4-8; Harprecht 2008: 31-33; Riese 2008: 41-45; Thies 2008: 41-45; Meyer 2008: 52-556; Zierock 2008: 59-63; Walther 2008: 103-105). The Roosevelt liberals were not able to stop the neo-liberals from moving into their catastrophe no matter how hard they tried. What is most important in the perspective of the dialectical religiology is that the Octagon Building helps to preserve the memory of the suffering of all the innocent victims on Blackwell Island throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, so that it may sustain the future through contributing in the present transition period from Modernity to Post-Modernity to the theory and praxis of the liberation and redemption of the people beyond liberal bourgeois society not toward alternative Future I–a society characterized by a teleological-technological orientation, but rather toward alternative Future III–a, concrete humanistic, just, communitarian liberal society, in which individual and community would be mediated with each other and mutual recognition would prevail, and the pathology of reason would be overcome (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1971; 1972; 1975a; Flechtheim 1959: 625-634; 1962: 27-34; 1963: 148-150; 1966: 455464; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Habermas 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981d; 1986; 1990; 1991c; 1992a; 1998; 1999; 2001a; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Fraser/Honneth 2003; Metz 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1975b; 1975c; 1985e; App. G).

Option for the Poor In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, when the new political theology, initiated by Baptist Metz, announced the Option for the Poor it aimed at alternative Future III–the just society, as well as at the New Heaven and the New Earth (Exodus 2: 16-22; Lieber 2002: 325/16-17; Matthew

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5-7; Revelation 21-22; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10-11; Bloch 1960; 19970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975b; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Metz 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 19841995; 1997; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b; Siebert 1989; 1993; 2002a; 2006a; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b: 419-457; 2007c: 1-50; 2007d; 2008b: 55-61; App. G). Unfortunately, Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, considered it necessary to say a strong word against the new political or liberation theology, because it supposedly threatened ultimately the Christian faith with a politization, which would have destroyed the religious element, if he had not officially and powerfully repressed it in the interest and service of the neo-liberal corporate ruling class of the American civil society: thereby aiming more at alternative Future I than alternative Future III (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10,11; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/ Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975b; 1975c; 1985b; 1985e; Habermas/Ratzing 2006; Ratzinger 2004; Metz 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1975b; 1975c; 1985e; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; Djerassi 2008; App. G). However, the political and liberation theologians do not only use theology in order to justify aspects of historical materialism, but they rather and much more so use historical materialism in order to practice theology in the pluralistic liberal civil society and history and beyond against all old and new forms of capitalist exploitation, colonialism and imperialism (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Habermas/Ratzing 2006; Ratzinger 2004; Metz 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1975b; 1975c; 1985e; 1998; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b). The political and liberation theologians’ passionate longing for the wholly Other and Shalom is in spite of all God-forsakenness in pluralistic liberal civil society nevertheless rooted in and continually nourished by the provoking remembrance of the suffering of the innocent victims, the poor, the slaves, the serfs, the wage laborers, the martyrs of the truth (Exodus 2: 11-15; Psalm 22; Matthew 26, 27, 28; Lieber 2001: 323-324/11-15; Fromm 1966: chap. ix; 1992: 3-94, 203-212; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10,11; Opitz 1996; Reich 1976; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1985h: 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33; Adorno 1970b: 103-125; Tiedemann 2003; Habermas/ Ratzinger 2006; Ratzinger 2004; Metz 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1981; 1984; 1995; 1997; 1998; 2008; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; Peukert 1976: 273-282; Zerfass 1988; Ackermann 2005; Arens 2007; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b). Of course not only Thanatos but also Eros contributes to the insatiable yearning for light, friendship, love, alternative Future III–the free and just society, Heaven, Eternity and

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Beauty or the wholly Other than the finite world of appearance, which according to the Jewish mystics God created with all its deficiencies, because he could not double himself up and produce another Infinite (Exodus 2: 16-22; Lieber 2001: 325/16-17; Scholem 1967; 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; Marcuse 1962; 1969b; 1970a; 1980a; 1987; 1995; 2001; Fromm 1932b; 1950; 1956; 1959; 1974; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1972b; 1973; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Horkheimer 1988a; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1996s: 32-74; Djerassi 2008; App. G). There would never have come into existence a new Christian political or liberation theology, announcing the option for the poor, without the help of the originally Jewish critical theory of society: without particularly Bloch, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Adorno, Fromm, or Marcuse (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1951; 1952: 585-595; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1997u; 2003d; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484498; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Fromm 1950; 1966b; 1966c; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1981; 1990; 2001; Marcuse 1962; 1969b; 1970a; 1973; 1980a; 1987; 2001; Kogon 1967; Habermas 1969; 1976; 1978c; 1982; 1987b; 1988b; 1991a: Part III; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Djerassi 2008; Siebert).

Beyond Liberalism? In the view of the critical theory of religion, in the present transition period from Modernity to Post Modernity the social and historical process seems since quite some time to point beyond both forms of atomistic liberalism: Roosevelt-liberalism as well as neo-liberalism (Habermas 1969; 1970; 1875; 1976; 1978a; 1978b; 1978c; 1979a; 1979b; 1981c; 1981d; 1982; 1984a; 1985b; 1986; 1988b; 1990; 1991c; 1998; 2001a; Gosling 2000; Buchanan 2006; Clinton 2004; Frankern 2003; Hedges 2007; Scahill 2007; Zinn 2003: chaps. 12-25; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; Perkins 2007). However, the social and historical process cannot simply leap undialectically and abstractly over the two forms of individualistic liberalism into postmodern alternative Future III–a biophilous reconciled society, no matter, how defective and ineffective concerning collective problems they may be (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Fromm 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; App. B, C, D, F, G). A reconstructed historical materialism or socialist humanism, which would try to leap undialectically over the two forms of atomistic liberalism, may turn once more into revolutionary red fascism, and may so elicit once more a counter-revo-

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lutionary brown fascism, and may finally end up in post-modern global alternative Future I–the totally mechanized, computerized, automated, wired, bureaucratized society, or in post-modern global alternative Future II–the extremely aggressive and necrophilous, totally militarized society (Benjamin 1977: chap. 10, esp. the Theses XI, XII, XIII; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Marcuse 1961; 1966; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1975; 1976; 1981; 1990; Flechtheim 1971; Reich 1971; 1976; Sohn-Rethel 1973; 1975; 1978; 1985; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; Habermas 1976; Honneth 1990; 1994; Fraser/Honneth 2003; Brosio, 2004; Glotz, 2004: 5; Seitz 2004: 15-18; Miller 2004: 71-77; Faulenbach 2004: 78-82; Ullrich 2004: 105-107; Bröning 2004: 108-109; Reifenrath,2004: 109-110; Zimmermann 2004: 88-91; Ulrich 2004: 92-94; Meyer, 2004: 95-98: Schneider 2004: 99-101; Armas 2004: 1-2; App. F, G). In a socially further modified form, liberalism may still allow for a little while an intellectual and spiritual life driven by the longing for light, love and friendship and for the meaning of life, and most of all for the totally Other than the slaughter bench of society and history. After all, the critical theorists of society fled from fascist Germany not to the Soviet Union, but rather to liberal Switzerland, France, England, and the United States, and here found support and protection for their critical work. Certainly, on the basis of the principles of subsidiarity, solidarity and justice, such socially further modified liberalism would be closer to what the Roosevelt Administration, or later on the Kennedy Administration, or the Carter Administration, or more recently the Clinton and Obama Administrations tried to pursue for the immediate future, than to what the neo-conservative or neo-liberal Nixon Administration, Reagan Administration, not to speak of the two Bush Administrations tried to achieve (Zinn 2003: chaps. 18-25; Clinton 2004). Paradoxically enough, the so-called neo-liberalism is much older than the Roosevelt liberalism, and the former had already been superseded by the latter as bankrupt in 1933: recent decades of neo-liberal history have been characterized not only by political and economic restauration, but also by strong politically and militarily counterrevolutionary and socially regressive tendencies (Gosling 2000; Buchanan 2006; Clinton 2004; Frankern 2003; Hedges 2007; Scahill 2007; Zinn 2003: chaps. 12-25; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; Perkins 2007). While the Roosevelt liberalism started in the 1930s, neo-liberalism is historically rooted in the likewise individualistic Protestant-Evangelical Paradigm of Christianity, and reached its peak as a secular philosophy and movement of the rising bourgeoisie in the 18th and 19th centuries (Küng 1994a: 602-741; 1994b; Zinn 2003: chaps. 18-25; Clinton 2004). From March 2004 to June 2008

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not a few liberal Americans have been afraid that the very neo-conservative second Bush Administration has been leading the way–through national security measures and legislation in reaction to September 11, 2001– from a neo-liberal state to the post-modern, global alternative Future I–a fascist state, most adequate to a monopoly-and oligopoly-capitalistic economy and civil society (App. G).

Liberal Socialism In the meantime, while no viable labor party exists at all in the United States, in Europe the traditional Social Democracy has been modified and transformed into the liberal socialism of a Blair or a Schröder and their followers (Philips 2004: 1-3; Villelabbeitia/Loney 2004; Brosio 2004). Such hyphenated socialism indicates a reconciliation of personal autonomy and universal solidarity, which has never been achieved, and which could be established only in the framework of a postmodern age: in alternative Future III–a truly free and equal society (Benjamin 1977: chap. 10, esp. the Theses XI, XII, XIII; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Marcuse 1961; 1966; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; Flechtheim 1971; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; Habermas 1976; 1995; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Honneth 1990; 1994; Fraser/Honneth 2003; Brosio, 2004; Glotz 2004: 5; Seitz 2004: 15-18; Miller 2004: 71-77; Faulenbach 2004: 78-82; Ullrich 2004: 105-107; Bröning 2004: 108-109; Reifenrath 2004: 109-110; Zimmermann 2004: 88-91; Ulrich 2004: 92-94; Meyer 2004: 95-98; Schneider 2004: 99-101; Armas 2004: 1-2; App. G). Socialist Russia had solidarity but no autonomy. Liberal America has autonomy but no solidarity. It was the European labor movement, which translated the Biblical love of the neighbor into the secular notion of solidarity (Matthew 5-7; Abendroth 1969). If America had neighborly love or solidarity it would not have more and more people, who have no health insurance–40 million people in August 2004, 45.7 million in 2007; and it would not have more and more people living in poverty, 35.8 million people in 2003, and 37.3 in 2007. In the Germany of the 1980s this liberal socialism allied itself with the Leftwing Catholicism of Walter Dirks and Eugen Kogon and their Frankfurter Hefte. The Leftwing Catholic Frankfurter Hefte was symbolically enough united with the liberal-socialist New Society into the New Society/Frankfurter Hefte. In this alliance, the free socialists gained a sense of religious legitimation, and the Catholics a sense of secular enlightenment. The new journal is very much influenced by the Frankfurt School. There is, however, always the danger that one element of such hyphenated

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socialism overwhelms the other e.g. liberalism socialism: in the former German National Socialism, nationalism triumphed over socialism (Betz 2008: 108-110; Dornbusch 2008: 79-82). It seems that in the liberal socialism of Blair and Schröder liberalism did indeed sometimes overcome socialism. At least, their liberal socialism seemed to have begun to do the job of neo-liberalism, e.g. the reduction of the welfare state and its social programs, or direct or indirect support of neo-colonial and neo-imperialist wars in the Near East, and elsewhere (Habermas 1995; Negt 2007: 4-8; Schan 2007: 8-11; Kress 2007: 48-50; Ludwig 2007: 10-15; Nathanson 2007: 18-22; Ströbele-Gredor 2007: 37-40; Meyer 2007: 46-49; Gujer 2008: 4-8; Harprecht 2008: 31-33; Riese 2008: 41-48; Thies 2008: 34-37; Meyer 2008: 52-56; Zierock 2008: 59-63; Scherer 2008: 63-67; Walther 2008: 103108).

Coup d’État in Haiti The Roosevelt-liberal Clinton Administration rescued the Government of the first democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, the poorest country in the hemisphere (Clinton 2004: 168, 463, 467, 610, 616, 617, 624, 537, 645, 649; Berryman 1987; Philips, 2004: 1-3; Villelabbeitia/Loney 2004; Brosio 2004: 1-50). Aristide had been a Roman Catholic priest, who had been active in the slums of Haiti, Aristide also stood in the tradition of the new political theology, which had been strongly influenced by the Frankfurt School. President Clinton restored Aristide’s Government on Haiti in 1994, after it had been ousted by a coup d’etate by the Haitian military in 1991. The neo-liberal second Bush-Administration undermined Aristide’s Government again through the CIA instigating a rebellion, and through the withdrawing of funds since 2001, and thus initiated a counter-revolutionary restauration (Kinzer 2006; Scahill 2007; Klein 2007; Perkins 2007; Zinn 2003: chaps. 24-25). There is, indeed, some difference not only between the domestic, but also the foreign policies of a liberal and a neo-liberal American Administration. In February 2004, the neo-liberal Bush Administration did not only not intervene in and stop the rebellion under the leadership of the criminal Haitian police chief and army officer, Guy Philippe, against the disliked, but nevertheless legitimate government of President Aristide. Aristide was even driven out of his capital and out of his palace by U.S. Marines, who had landed in Port-au-Prince. At gunpoint, Aristide was transported into exile in the Central African Republic in order to make room for a government more favorable to the interests of American corporations. Aristide lost the favor

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of the neo-liberal second Bush Administration because he tried to force an American owner of 18 factories on Haiti to pay his workers just wages, and along with other capitalists to pay their taxes. Aristide also tried to abolish the servitude of maids, who were working in the households of rich families for mere food and shelter alone, without any further remuneration. As a priest, a liberation theologian, and a politician Aristide stood for grassroots democracy, alleviation of poverty, and God’s love for all human beings (Groh, 1998; Philips, 2004: 1-3; Brosio, 2004: 1-50). He challenged the neo-conservative or neo-liberal globalization efforts of the Haitian bourgeois upper class and their capitalist U.S. partners. For this, the neo-liberal Bush Administration had long targeted Aristide. Liberal American mainstream media had every reason to question the U.S. State Department’s version of the coup d’état in Haiti, but choose instead to report a highly doubtful cover story. The neo-liberal media were merely the stenographers for the neo-conservative American Government. Shortly, for the neo-liberal Government and mass media and anchormen and -women, Aristide was simply too much a Christian and a socialist! Thus, he had to be removed by force against all international law and rules of democracy in the interest of American and indigenous Haitian capital. What Hitler’s jurist, Carl Schmitt, had called decisionism, took the place of normativism in American foreign policy toward Haiti (Groh 1998; Philips 2004: 1-3; Brosio 2004: 1-50). Hegel had seen correctly that the future of the Americas would depend on how the North would treat the South (Hegel 1985a: 218; 1985l: 107-115, 413, 418, 490-491, 513; 1985m: 352; 1985t: 62; Brosio 2004: 1-50). Neo-liberal or even fascist decisionism is the wrong treatment: the undemocratic, violent removal of democratically elected governments and their supporters because of their Christian or Islamic socialism–be it Salvador Allende in Chile, or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, or Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, or Oscar Romero and the liberation theologians in El Salvador, or Aristide in Haiti, or the Bat-Government in Iraq, or the Hamas Government in the Gaza Strip, or the Hezbollah Government in Lebanon, etc.–can ultimately only lead to alternative Future I–an Orwellian or Huxlian totally administered society (Hegel 1985a: 218; 1985l: 107-115, 413, 418, 490-491, 513; 1985m: 352: 1985t: 62; Adorno 1973b: 300-408; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 40; 1989m: 458-459, 464466, 466-467; Groh 1998; Philips 2004: 1-3; Brosio, 2004: 1-50; App. G). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, democratic normativism would be the right measure for the preparation and achievement of postmodern, global, alternative Future III–the City of Being, in which the Medieval City of God and the Modern City of Progress would be concretely

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superseded; and in which the emphasis would be more on creative being than on having; and in which humanity could release and express freely all of its good energies that have been repressed so far in systems of class domination; and in which the particular and the universal, the personal autonomy and the universal solidarity would be reconciled; and in which there would be no paupers any more, because the wealth would be redistributed and there would be mutual, reciprocal recognition among all people, and no more humiliation of some; and in which a friendly living together of all would be possible (Blakney 1941: 170-173; Hegel 1985a: 218; 1985l: 107-115, 413, 418, 490-491, 513; 1985m: 352; 1985t: 62; Kraus 1880; Fromm 1976; 1990; 1992; Schaar 1961; Habermas 1976; 1992a; 1997a; Philips 2004: 1-3; Brosio, 2004: 1-50; Honneth 1990; 1994; 2000; Fraser/Honneth 2003; Honneth/Joas 1986; Münch 1995; Edelstein/Habermas 1984; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; App. G).

Counter-Revolutionary Restoration On March 5, 2004–6 years before the earthquake of 2010, which killed 200,000 mostly poor people–, thousands of furious supporters of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide poured out of Haiti’s slums and into the streets, marching on the U.S. Embassy in order to denounce the occupation of their homeland, and to demand Aristides return, and to resist the American initiated counter-revolutionary restauration of the capitalist status quo (Philips 2004: 1-3; Villelabbeitia/Loney 2004). The Aristide supporters wanted the exiled President to finish his five-year term in office. A crowd, estimated at more than 10,000 people materialized suddenly, seething at Aristide’s flight to Africa, hurling slurs at U.S. Marines, and calling President George W. Bush a terrorist. Hundreds held up their hands, with fingers extended, shouting Aristide five years, the rallying cry of those who wanted him to finish his term. Heavily armed U.S. troops watched from the embassy rooftop as the crowed marched past and chanted–Bush terrorist! Bush Terrorist!–and waved Haitian flags and wore T-shirts bearing photos of Aristide. The supporters of Aristide, whose fiery oratory from the pulpit had helped galvanize a popular revolt that had dislodged the Duvalier family dictatorship in the 1980s, had been relatively quiet for a week, stunned by his departure. Now they blamed Haiti’s wealthy elite, the neo-liberal American President Bush, and French President Jacques Chirac, for what they called the foreign occupation. According to the supporters the Haitian bourgeoisie joined with the international community to occupy Haiti and get rid of President Aristide: the French or American

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bourgeoisie never had done anything for the masses! Now they took away their President! In the view of the supporters, if Aristide did not come back, life would be hell in Haiti. In March 2004, the liberal Black Caucus in the American Congress tried together with its many friends–as it did before at the occasion of the likewise CIA inspired coup d’état of 1991–to enlighten the American people about the illegal and undemocratic behavior of the neo-conservative Bush Administration toward Haiti, and to promote once more the restoration of the legitimate Government of Aristide. Arriving in the Central African Republic, President Aristide stated that those who overthrew him had cut down the tree of peace, but it would grow again. R. Robinson, the former President of the Trans Africa Monitoring Group, stated that President Aristide told him in a phone call that he had been abducted from Haiti by U.S. troops, who accompanied him on a flight in an American military plane to the likewise very unstable Central African Republic. Aristide asked Robinson to tell the world that what had happened to him was indeed a coup d’état: that he was abducted by American soldiers, and put aboard a plane, and was told to make no phone calls to anyone, and that he was put aboard a plane with his sister’s husband and his wife. Haiti’s first democratically elected President was pressured to leave Haiti by the United States and the rebels. After the Central African Republic, Aristide would probably go to South Africa. An American based security firm guarding Aristide was told by the United States Government that the President could not count on Washington’s protection in the event of rebel hostilities at the palace in Haiti. Before Aristide took his wife and his sister’s husband with him into exile in the Central African Republic, he sent his two daughters to New York. In the past decade, Aristide had obviously not been able to create a good socialistic or even only a socially modified liberal society as precondition for a meaningful life for all Haitians, and thus to make out of Haiti, an Island of Misery, like Blackwell Island in the East River, an Island of Happiness as envisioned by the critical theorists of society, in which the longing for light, love, friendship and a meaningful life could be concretized (Horkheimer 1988a). Aristide hoped for peace in the future. In November 2004, the American citizens had the choice to vote for a neo-liberal or a liberal administration. In the 2004 Federal election, a majority of citizens, including millions of Roman Catholics and Evangelicals, voted for the neo-liberal President Bush, in spite of the fact that they knew that his war against Iraq had been unjust from the very start not only according to their Sermon on the Mount, but also according to their Augustinian Seven Point Just War Theory, and that it had cost by the time close to a million human lives, not to speak about

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the war against Afghanistan. In the Presidential Election of November 2008, the American citizens have decided for the Democratic Rooseveltliberal Senator Barack Obama against the Republican neo-liberal Senator John McCain. Now it remains to be seen, how far on the Left the Obama Administration will really stand, and if it will continue–as promised–to socially modify further the abstract, atomistic, individualistic liberal American civil society in direction, not of post-modern global alternative Futures I–a more administered society, or of Future II–a more militarized society, but rather of Future III–a more hopeful, and more just, and more reconciled, and more concrete liberal society (Flechtheim 1971; Ott 2007; Goldstein 2006; Thräänert 2008: 11-15; Weisskirchen 2008: 15-18; Rudolph 2008: 20-23; Siebert 2001; 2002a; App. G).

Liberalization of Religion as Preservation For Horkheimer as well as for Benjamin, Adorno, Scholem, Arnold Schönberg or Habermas, the liberalization of religion in liberal society meant the preservation of religion (Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1985g: 231-232, 237-239, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970c; 1971; 1972; 1973; 1974; 1976; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978a; Djerassi 2008). According to Horkheimer, Kant had in a way which excluded any doubt brought to the modern consciousness that what people called reality or the world, which could be scientifically researched and explored, was a product of subjective intellectual factors (Kant 1929; 1968; 1970; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1985g: 231232, 237-239, chaps. 3, 4, 9, 13, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; 1987: b: 15-178, 295-311; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970c; 1971; 1972; 1973; 1974; 1976; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978a). According to Schopenhauer’s further development of the Kantian teaching, the work of the human brain had always consisted in the ordering of the–as Rene Descartes expressed it–facts of consciousness, that they fit together in a for the human life skillful and clever way (Kant 1929; 1968; 1970; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Hegel 1986b: 184, 263; 1986c: 427; 1986d: 431, 396,341-342, 345; 1986f: 402; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1985g: 231-232, 237-239, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970c; 1971; 1972; 1973; 1974; 1976; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978). Man’s subjective organization was responsible that his world opposed him as objective reality. The objective world was no pure in

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itself, but rather a function of man’s subjective organization. If that, however, was indeed that way, so Horkheimer concluded, then the knowledge of the connections among the appearances of this world were not the last and ultimate information about the reality: no Absolutum. The ultimate truth could not be translated into the human language, because all human notions originated from man’s subjective organization. That explains to some extend the Kantian Habermas’s confessed methodological atheism and religious un-musicality particularly after he introduced the linguistic turn into the critical theory of society (Habermas 1981a; 1981b; 1983; 1984a; 1984b; 1987d; 1988b; 1991a: Part III; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Siebert 2001; 2002a). Horkheimer argued that since the ultimate truth, which was to be expressed in religion, did not enter into the human language and into the world of notions, he could speak of religion only negatively through establishing, that the reality known to man was not the ultimate reality (Kant 1929; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Hegel 1986b: 184, 263; 1986c: 427; 1986d: 431, 396, 341-342, 345; 1986f: 402; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1985g: 231-232, 237-239, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970c; 1971; 1972; 1973; 1974; 1976; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978). Thus human beings could not signify and determine, what the Absolute was and out of what it consisted. For Horkheimer also the dogmatic atheists violated this insight, when they–as e.g. Schopenhauer–passed off the nothing as the ultimate reality, which supposedly redeemed man from the misery of the world. This positive metaphysics was as little tenable as any other, because the notion nothing was in no way less subjective than the notion God or ethos (Kant 1929; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Hegel 1986b: 184, 263; 1986c: 427; 1986d: 431, 396, 341-342, 345; 1986f: 402; Adorno 1998a; 1998c; 2000b; 2002a; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1985g: 231-232, 237-239, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970c; 1971; 1972; 1973; 1974; 1976; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978).Adorno 1998a; 1998c; 2000b; 2002a; Küng 1978; 1990b). All human notions were subjective. Only a negative metaphysics was still possible (Adorno 1998a; 1998c; 2000b; 2002a; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1985g: 231-232, 237239, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970c; 1971; 1972; 1973; 1974; 1976; Adorno 1998a; 1998c; 2000b; 2002a Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978; Haag 1983; 2005; Küng 1978; 1990b). In spite of, or because of the fact that a positive metaphysics is no longer possible, Horkheimer could

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insist, that the world around man was not the ultimate reality. For Horkheimer a genuine liberalization of religion in liberal civil society had to concentrate itself on this negative metaphysical insight.

Old and New Understanding of God According to Horkheimer, in the light of this negative metaphysical insight, questions about the change of liturgy, ceremonies or uses and customs, as e.g. Vatican II had produced them in the Roman Catholic Church and beyond, were less important (Adorno 1998a; 1998c; 2000b; 2002a; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1985g: 231-232, 237-239, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; 1988n: 527-528, 535-537; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970c1971; 1972; 1973; 1974; 1976; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978; Haag 1983; 2005; Küng 1978; 1990b; App. E). To Horkheimer, the main concern seemed to be the new conception of the human understanding of God in terms of the God of Moses and of the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue, and the God of Immanuel Kant and of his prohibition against penetrating into the realm of the Thing-in-itself or the Ens Realissimum (Exodus 20; Kant 1929: 29, 89-90, 117, 325n, 484-486, 490, 493, 495, 553, 524, 531, 559-560, 565-567, 595, 625, 631-632, 538, 649, 648650; Hegel 1986q: 347-536; Horkheimr/Adorno 1969: 9-31; Habermas 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Arens 2007; Küng 1978; 1993a; 1993b). For Horkheimer, God as positive dogma was effective only in separating people and in turning them against each other (Adorno 1998a; 1998c; 2000b; 2002a; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1985g: 231-232, 237-239, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; 1988n: 527528, 535-537, Fromm 1950; 1956; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970c; 1971; 1972; 1973; 1974; 1976; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978; Haag 1983; 2005; Küng 1978; 1990b). Horkheimer concretely superseded in his new negative metaphysical conception of the understanding of God the old Hebrew notion of God as it appeared already in the Torah, more specifically in the Book Exodus (Exodus 1, 2, 3; Lieber 2001: 315316; Kant 1929: 29, 89-90, 117, 325n, 484-486, 490, 493, 495, 553, 524, 531, 559-560, 565-567, 595, 625, 631-632, 538, 649, 648-650; Hegel 1986q: 347-536; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 9-31; Habermas 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Arens 2007; Küng 1978; 1993a; 1993b). According to the Rabbis the various episodes of the Exodus of the Hebrew people from the slavery in Egypt had projected the Israelite concepts of God and His relations to the world. The different aspects of the divine personality, as

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told in the Book Exodus, expressed a conception of a single God, who demanded exclusive service and fidelity. In Exodus, God was presented as the Creator of all existence, wholly independent of His creations, and totally beyond the constraints of the world of nature, Hence any attempt to depict or represent God in material or pictorial form was inevitably a falsification and was strictly prohibited in the Mosaic Decalogue as well as later on in the Kantian critical philosophy as well as finally in the critical theory of society. The Book of Exodus also affirmed that God, being absolutely transcendent and other, was, nevertheless, also–in contrast to bourgeois deism–deeply involved in human affairs, and human history was the deliberate, purposeful plan of divine Intelligence. Furthermore, God chose to enter into an eternally valid covenantal relationship with Israel, a legal reality that entailed immutable and inescapable obligations on Israel’s part, as spelled out in the various Biblical laws. Finally, in the Book Exodus the religious calendar of Israel became transformed through the Exodus experience. Formerly an expression of the rhythms of the seasons in nature, the sacred times became reinterpreted in terms of that great historical event of the exodus from Egyptian bondage. They became commemorations of God’s benefactions upon Israel in Egypt and afterwards in the wilderness, and were emancipated from the phenomena of nature. A process of demythologization and enlightenment took place in the Jewish Religion of Sublimity itself (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991b; App. E).

The Jewish Notion of God In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the other two Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Islam, determinately negated, i.e. criticized and preserved the Israelite conception of the understanding of God, in the New Testament and in the Holy Qu’ran, and in their later teachings (Hegel 1986l: 114, 140, 428-430; 1986q: 50-95; 185-346; Küng 1970; 1972; 1976; 1978; 1980; 1987; 1991b; 1992; 1994a; 1994b; 2003; 2004; Kuschel/ Schlensog 2008; App. E). For the Israelites since Moses, God was the EhychAscher-Ehych, (Exodus 3: 14; Petuchowski 1956: 543-594). According to the Rabbis this name of God meant: I am that I am; I am who I am; and I will be what I will be; I am whatever I choose to be; I am pure being; I am more than you can comprehend (Lieber 330/14; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991b). This phrase evoked YHVW, the specific proper name of Israel’s God also known as the Tetragrammaton, i.e. the four consonants. The phrase also indicates that the earliest in the Torah recorded understanding of the divine name was as verb derived from a stem meaning to be. In the

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Rabbis view, because it is the sound of wind and breath, the way in which we sense the invisible it could express the quality of absolute Being, the eternal, unchanging, dynamic Presence. It could also mean: He causes to be. YH was the third person masculine singular. Ehyeh was the corresponding first-person singular. The latter was used here because name giving in the ancient world implied the wielding of power over the one named (Exodus 3: 14; Lieber 330/14; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991b; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30). Hence the divine name could proceed only from God. Thus God revealed to Moses a name symbolizing the help needed for his task to liberate the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, without offering a real name. After the Babylonian exile and during the Second Temple period the Tetragrammaton came to be regarded as charged with sanctity and magical potency. Therefore its pronunciation ceased. It was replaced in speech by Adonai: Lord. Often the vowels of Adonai would accompany the letters of YHVH in written texts which gave rise to the mistaken form Jehovah. The mistake can be found in Christian translations of the Torah and still occurs in the Name of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in modern civil society. The original Hebrew pronunciation of YHVH was lost. Modern attempts at recovery, such as Yahweh are conjectural and have no support from Jewish tradition. It appears to the Rabbis, that the name YHVH came into prominence only as the characteristic personal name of the God of Israel in the time of Moses. It is questionable for the Rabbis whether this name was known before the time of Moses. It is of interest for the Rabbis though, that the various divine names found in Genesis were not used any longer in later biblical books, except occasionally in poetic texts, like e.g. in Psalm 91 (Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 17). A new stage in the history of Israelite ethical monotheism began with the revelation of the divine name YHVH to Moses.

Radicalization The critical theorists may have introduced a new stage in the history of Judaism when they radicalized the third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue and forbid, supported by Kant, to name God at all (Exodus 3: 14; Lieber 330/14; Kant 1929: 27, 74, 97, 149, 490; Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 347-536; Fromm 1976: chaps. III, VII, IX; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Küng 1991b). According to the critical theorist Erich Fromm the Ehych-Asher-Ehych meant: I, God, am in the process of becoming: neither I nor human understanding of Me is yet complete. And you human beings, fashioned in the image of God, are also in the process of becoming (Fromm 1966: chaps. ii, iii; Lieber 2001: 330/14; Baum 1971; Petuchowski 1956:

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543-594). According to the Rabbis, the Jewish divine name was gender free: it was neither specifically masculine nor specifically feminine, as befits a God who embraces polarities of male and female, young and old, transcendent and near at hand, sameness and otherness, identity and nonidentity (Lieber 2001: 330/14; Fromm 1966; 1997; 2001). Informed by the Torah and by the New Testament, the Catholic theologian Nicolaus von Cues spoke of God as the Coincidentia Oppositorum (Lortz 1962: 462, 465-466, 532, 701, 744, 941; Küng 1994a: 427, 522, 547; App. E). The name of God may be connected with the phrase in Genesis 3: 12: I will be with you. In that case, God’s name, God’s essence, would imply for the Rabbis: I am not a far off God, a remote, uncaring philosophical conclusion. I am God who will be with you. You cannot understand My nature, but you will know Me by My presence, and you will walk with Me when you follow my commands. This Jewish notion of God stands in utter contrast to the bourgeois deistic God of Francois de Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau, who left the world after he created it, and who is the God of modern, liberal, civil society, and who is also the God of the American Declaration of Independence (Lieber 2001: 330/14; Hegel 1986a: 56, 74, 85, 438; 1986g: 80; 239; 304; 400,452; 1986b: 420; 1986h: 312-313; 1986i: 96, 346; 1986j: 68; 1986k: 2178; 378; 1986l: 61, 419; 1986m: 305, 345-346, 354; 1096o: 210, 352, 370, 414, 503; 1986p: 211; 1986r: 358; 1986s: 129; 1986t: 248,275, 290, 294, 300, 306-308, 311, 331, 365, 413; App. E). Fromm’s colleague at the Frankfurt Jewish School of learning, Martin Buber understood the Ehych-Asher-Ehyeh to mean: I cannot be summoned or manipulated, as the magicians of Egypt invoked and manipulated their gods. In accordance with My character, again and again I stand by those whom I befriend. According to the Rabbis it was significant that the Hebrew name of God was not a noun but a verb. The essence of Jewish theology was not the nature of God, what God is, but rather the actions of God, what God does, the difference that God made in peoples’ lives. For the Rabbis, God was always the God of the fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the God of the Hebrews (Exodus 3-16-18; Lieber 2001: 331/16-18). According to the Rabbis, this last name of God–the God of the Hebrews–appeared only in Exodus, invariably when Pharaoh was addressed by Moses and always with a demand for permission to worship in the wilderness, Although Pharaoh did not know YHVH, he never claimed to be ignorant of the God of the Hebrews. Perhaps this name, like the God of the father, belonged to the pre-Mosaic history of Israelite religion and was widely used among the pastoral nomads of the region. That might be the reason, why Moses carefully identified it with YHVH each time he used it. What then did God’s

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name mean for the Rabbis? It may mean any or all of the following: God exists. God is more than we can comprehend. God, or our understanding of God, is constantly growing. God is present in peoples’ lives. God is with people in their efforts to do what is right but difficult. The dialectical religiology can accept all these meanings of the name of God (Siebert 2001; 2002a; 2005b; App. E).

The Dialectical Notion of God Hegel, rooted in Jerusalem as well as in Athens, in the Hebrew Bible as well as in the New Testament, in Catholic as well as in Protestant mysticism, described in his not yet secularized dialectical Logos-logic the Trinitariantheological notion as a process moving from the universal, through the particular into the singular (Blakney 1941: 170-177; Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 43-44, 48-53; 1986f: 272-300; O’Reagan 1994). The universal objectivated itself in the particular and returned to itself through this objectification. As the particular negated the universal, so the singular negated the particular. The double negation lead to affirmation. For Hegel, the notion was the self-particularizing, self-unfolding, self-alienating as well as self-singularizing, self-folding, self-contracting, and self-reconciling universal. The singular was the identity of the identity of the universal and of the non-identity of the particular. The singular was the affirmative result of the negation of the universal and of the particular. In the singular the universal and the particular were not only negated, but also preserved, elevated and fulfilled. Rest, consolation and peace were to be found in the singular as the affirmative result of the negation of the negation of the universal and of the particular (Blakney 1941: 170-177; Hegel 1986e: 4344; 1986f: 272-300; Fromm 2001; App. E).

The Notion of God in the Abrahamic Religions Since 1978, the Center-Hegelian Catholic theologian Hans Küng has defined the modern dialectical notion of the traditional understanding of God in the Abrahamic religions in such a way: The world is as creation of God to think in that way, that the Creator does not remain external to his work, that the creation can rather be comprehended as the unfolding of God in the world, without the world losing itself in God or God losing himself in the world, without the world giving up its independence to God or God dissolving himself into the world. Ergo, crea-

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tion in unfolding or unfolding through creation: no being is made into God, but also no being remains outside of God and added to God. And God is to be understood as all-present, unspeakable mystery of this world, the origin of its being, its becoming, its order, its goal, and that in such a way, that man and world neither exist independently from God nor only as appearance and illusion, but rather as relative reality, Neither identity without differentiation nor remaining difference of God and individual self, but difference dialectically superseded in identity. (Blakney 1941: 170191; Hegel 1986b: 411, 508, 537, 552; 1986c: 26-27. 62,494, 551, 552, 554555; 1986d: 67, 273, 277, 280-282; 1986p: 162, 377, 419, 439; 1986q: 12, 123, 187, 190, 204, 234, 299, 305, 442, 480; 1986s: 94, 198, 508, 525, 543; Fromm 1976: chaps. III, IX; Küng 1978: 157-190; 1984: 304; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 63-65; Badiou 2003; Vattimo/Girard/Zizek 2008; App. E).

In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, this most advanced CenterHegelian identity-philosophical definition of the dialectical notion of God as the identity of the identity of God and of the non-identity of the world was certainly ecumenical as it tried to do justice to the Abrahamic religions and maybe even to some of the far Eastern world religions (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Küng 1970; 1984; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1993a; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stitencron/Bechert 1984; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; App. E). However, it did admittedly give as little a theoretical solution to the theodicy problem as the previous Rabbinical definition based on the Book Exodus: the contradiction between the unfolding Creator God of order, and the horrible disorder in his world, as nature and as history (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Küng 1974: 157-190; 1984: 304; 1991b: 726-728; Kuschel.Schlensog 2008: 6365). Precisely this lack of a theoretical theodicy answer was the main reason, why the critical theorists of society opted for the Mosaic and Kantian agnosticism and for a methodological atheism (Exodus 3: 14; 20; Kant 1929: 24, 27, 71-74, 85-87, 89, 149, 172-173, 230, 265-267, 278-280, 282284, 346-348, 351-353, 381-383, 440, 449. 457, 460, 466-468, 482-484, 490; 1975: 24-31, 40-55, 62-77, 77-93; Küng 1978: C, D; 1991b: 726-728: Metz 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993).

Root and Solution of the Theodicy Problem In the view of the critical theory of religion, bourgeois identity-philosophies or-theologies do not radicalize, but rather arrest and harmonize the dialectic of history down into its theological glowing fire (Adorno 1970b: 116-117). Already in the Torah fire, being nonmaterial, formless, mysterious, and luminous, had often been used to describe the external

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manifestation of God (Exodus 3: 2; Lieber 2001: 327/2). The self-sustaining fire of the Mosaic non-consumed burning bush at Horeb, requiring no other substance for its existence, was for the Rabbis a clear representation of the divine Presence. Contrary to the identity-philosophies andtheologies, the critical theory of society is non-identity philosophy, and as such it sharpens and radicalizes in the form of its inverse cipher theology the historical, including the economic and social dialectic, down into the theological dialectic between God and his world (Adorno 1970b: 116-117; 1980b; 1993c; 1997c; 1997f; Brändle 1984: 95-160; Küng 1974: 157-190; 1984: 304; 1991b: 726-728; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 63-65). The theodicy problem is rooted in the non-identity between God and the world: between God’s justice and the injustice in his world, because he could not double himself up into another perfect Infinite, but only into an imperfect, deficient finite world (Leibniz 1996; Hegel 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Scholem 1967; 1973b; 1977a: 1-50; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Adorno 1970b: 116-117; Küng 1974: 157-190; 1984: 304; 1991b: 726-728; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 63-65; Oelmüller 1990; Metz 1995). The critical theory of religion, following the Hebrew Prophets and the critical theory of society, emphasizes the Non-Identical, the wholly Other, the radically New (Isaiah 60-66; Revelation 21-33; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985e; Horkheimer 1986g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Benjamin 1970; Brändle 1984). The critical theorist of religion finds liberation, redemption, and Messianic atonement in the solidary remembrance of the suffering of the innocent victims of history, remembrance as critique, memoria as source of the future: the remembrance of the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, of the Rabbi Akiba, of all the tortured and crucified people, of all the exploited slaves, serfs and wage laborers, of the patients of the Octagon Tower Lunatic Asylum, of the Kraus-and the Krauss families, etc. (Exodus 1: 13-14; Lieber 2001: 319-320/13-14; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1966b: ix; 1967; 1973; 1974; 1980a; 1981; 1990; 1992; Reich 1971; 1976; Habermas 1986: 53-55; Metz 1959; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b).

Practical Solution In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, both definitions of the notion of God may, nevertheless, allow for a practical, decisionist solution of the theodicy problem: which does not let people understand theoretically senseless suffering, but rather to bear it practically in confidence and faith, which is not only a putting off of the justice for the lower classes into a

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distant Beyond, but rather a basis for protest and resistance against the miserable economic and social conditions here and now in antagonistic abstract liberal society: carried and strengthened in the present transition period from Modernity to Post-Modernity by an insatiable yearning and longing for the whole Other than the horror and terror of nature and history (Horkheimer 1996s: 32-74; Fromm 1968; 1974; 1976; 1978a; 1995; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981d; 1986; 1987a; 1990; 1991c; 1995; 1998; 2001a; 2001c; 2003b; Küng 1991b: 726-730; 1994a: 876-877, 904-905). Liberalized religious believers may decide decisionistically to hold on to the love of God in spite, or also because of all unhappiness and misery in the world, which are generated by the antagonistic structure of liberal civil society as well as by the fundamental perils of human existence in general like guilt, meaninglessness, loneliness, abandonment, the fear as well as the reality of sickness, old age, dying, and death, and thus through such decisionism may receive consolation (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b; 1969c; Habermas 1986: 53-54). They may decide to hold on to the God, to whom is directed the sigh of the oppressed creature, and who is the heart of a heartless liberal capitalist world, and who is the spirit of spiritless social conditions, and who is remembered in the liturgical music, which even Marx liked in the churches of London: like Jacob, Job, Jesus, or Faust (Kamenka 1983: 115; Marcuse 2005; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; App. E).

Learning-Theodicy Reminded by critical theorists of society like Erich Fromm, the Rabbis became very much aware, that modern readers may be bothered by the aspects of God’s plan that delayed the redemption while slaves continued to suffer and die–and that manipulated Pharaoh’s response, hardening his heart, so that the Egyptian people were afflicted with 10 plagues: shortly by the theodicy problem involved (Exodus 3: 20; Lieber 332/20; Fromm 1966b; App. E). For the Rabbis part of the answer to this theodicy problem lay in the Torah’s view, that God wanted Israel to go through the experience of slavery and redemption, in order to teach them compassion for the oppressed and gratitude for their freedom. The purpose of the Exodus was not only to free the Israelites but to demonstrate the greatness of God over the idols and human rulers in Egypt. Had God, so the Rabbis argued, moved Pharaoh to deal generously with Israel from the outset, that lesson would not have been learned. The dialectical religiologists may speak of a learning-theodicy. The critical theorist of religion has nevertheless great

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difficulties to apply such learning-theodicy to Auschwitz and to all the horrible events of the 20th and 21st centuries covered by that name, and to find it acceptable and plausible (Exodus 3: 20; Lieber 332/20; Fromm 1966b; Adorno 1997u; Kogon 1967; 2002; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1968b: 848-498; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 25, 29, 30). What kind of a God would that be in the Religion of Sublimity, who in order to teach Israel and the world a lesson about compassion for the oppressed and about gratitude for liberation and about his greatness over idols and human despotism through his letting happen or even willing the killing of 6 million Jews under the Covenant, or 27 million Russian communists, or more recently 1 million Iraqis, or 1,300 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, or 13 Israelis in Southern Israel and Gaza? (Hegel 1986q: 50-96; Küng 1991b). He would be a monstrosity, who would deserve human worship as little as Arhiman, the God of lies, in the Persian Religion of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil (Hegel 1986p: 390-406; 1986q: 50-96; Küng 1991b; App. E).

Evolution Moreover, according to the scientifically enlightened Rabbis, just as paleontologists have discovered fossils of creatures that lived long ago and used them to study the process of physical evolution, it may be that here in the Book Exodus and in a few other places in the Bible, there were remnants of an earlier religious and moral outlook, that may be used to trace the evolution of Jewish religious and moral thought in the Bible and in post-biblical commentaries (Exodus 3: 20; Lieber 332/20; Fromm 1966b; Adorno 1997u; Kogon 1967; 2002; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1968b: 848-498; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 25, 29, 30; App. E). These remnants included the acceptance of slavery, the vulnerable position of women, capital punishment for Shabbat violators and disrespectful children. In the Bible itself and among the Rabbis of the Talmud and the Midrash, there were early on signs, that people who lived more than 2,000 years ago were often as troubled by these passages–and by the theodicy problem in general–as modern people are today–in 2010– and strove to understand or reinterpret them in ways that sustained the more evolved religious and moral views of a later age without in any way diminishing their reverence for the Torah. The dialectical religiology finds such evolutionary view of religion and morality plausible and acceptable and has no difficulties to apply it not only to Judaism, but to other world religions as well: from one paradigm to the other in each religion, as well

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as from one religion to the other, and from religion to humanism as Religion in Inheritance (Exodus 3: 20; Lieber 332/20; Hegel 1986p; 186q; Fromm 1966b; Adorno 1997u; Kogon 1967; 2002; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1968b: 848-498; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 25, 29, 30; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Küng 1970; 1978; 1980; 1984; 1989; 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 1998; 2004; Kogon 1967; 2003a; 2003b; 59-63; Badiou 2003; Vattimo/Girard/Zizek 2008; App. E). The Left-Hegelian dialectical religiology is a paradigmatic-evolutionary theory of religion (Siebert 1965; 1966; 2001; 2002).

The Ultimate Reality According to Horkheimer, here once more following Kant and Schopenhauer more than Hegel, the longing that the reality of the world with all its horror and terror may not be the ultimate one, could unite and bind together all human beings in solidarity, who did not want to and could not come to terms with the injustices of this world: as it had once been the case in his own concrete-utopian Exodus community of friends on the L’ile heureuse (Exodus 2: 11-22; Lieber 2001: 315-326; More 1895; 1901; 1963; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1987k: 289-332; 1988a). Such solidarity could and must include nature–plants and animals–as well, if the modern environmental problems are to be resolved. The present massive ecological problems are the result of the irrational economic metabolism and reproduction of antagonistic civil society, which has no solidarity among men or between men and nature. Whoever wants to prevent even greater and more catastrophic ecological damages, must transform the liberal and neo-liberal mode of economic metabolism and reproduction of the modern commodity exchange society (Fetscher/Schmidt 2002). At this moment in history–March 2010–the horror and the terror of the world is most manifest in the ongoing wars between Israel and the Gaza Strip, and between the USA and Iraq and Afghanistan. While Jews, Christians and Muslim had the Golden Rule in common, the nations, nevertheless, in which they were the majority have treated each other as they did not possibly want to be treated themselves, and thus have continually elicited the praxis of the Lex Talionis: retaliation and revenge (Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004). Unfortunately, the wholly Other as the absolutely New has not yet happened, and all what is happening in history is always the old, the same, the identical: with the exception, of course, of

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always new and more murderous murder weapons–Trinity, Big Boy, Fat Man; atomic-, plutonium- and hydrogen-bombs; always more improved unmanned killer drones; always more perfect attack helicopters, gun ships and tanks; etc. (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1996s: 32-74).

Object of Longing In Horkheimer’s view, nevertheless, for all human beings who did not want to and could not come to terms with the injustice of this world, God became as Ultimate Reality the object of human longing and honoring. (Horkheimer 1985g: 38-239). For them, God ceased to be an object of human knowledge and possession. According to Horkheimer, a faith understood in this way belonged unconditionally to that, what the critical theorists of society called human culture (Adorno 1998a; 1998c; 2000b; 2002a; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1974: 218-219; 1985g: 231-232, 237-239, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; 1988n: 527528, 535-537; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970c; 1971; 1972; 1973; 1974; 1976; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978; Haag 1983; 2005; Küng 1978; 1990b; App. E). The critical theorists of society had to strive that all those human beings would unite with each other, who did not want to consider as ultimate the horror and terror of the past and the present: that they would come together in the same conscious longing, that there was an Ultimate Reality, an Absolute, an wholly Other, which was opposed to the merely appearing world and its horrible injustices (Adorno 1998a; 1998c; 2000b; 2002a; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1985g: 231-232, 237-239, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; 1988n: 527-528, 535-537; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970c1971; 1972; 1973; 1974; 1976; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978; Haag 1983; 2005; Küng 1978; 1990b).

Religious Liturgies In Horkheimer’s view, the religious liturgies, ceremonies, sacraments, sacramentals and uses could continue in liberal civil society (Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1985g: 231-232, 237-239, chaps. 4, 9,21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; 1988n: 527-528, 535-537). For Horkheimer, it was entirely understandable, that human beings, who have the same longing, the same innermost conviction, that there is something wrong

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with the status quo of the world have common customs, in order to keep their longing awake and alive. For Horkheimer, the world religions shared this conviction, that there was something wrong with this world, also with Marx. and Marxian historical materialism and socialist humanism (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Fromm 1950; 1957; 1959; 1966c1967; 1968; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1985g: 231-232, 237-239, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; 1988n: 527-528, 535537; Marcuse 2005; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; App. E). According to Horkheimer, to keep this longing for the wholly Other awake was the task of all those human beings inside and outside of liberal society, who would like to preserve the good of the past as much as possible. These people do not oppose abstractly the technical progress being made in liberal civil society. They defend themselves, however, against the abstract negation of the individual in alternative Future I–a perfectly administered world, and fight for the full development of the individual person in alternative Future III–a society, in which solidarity and justice are mediated with freedom (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Adorno 1998a; 1998c; 2000b; 2002a; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1969; 1985g: 231-232, 237239, chaps. 4, 9, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 38, 39, 40, 42; 1988n: 527-528, 535-537, Fromm 1950; 1956; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970c; 1971; 1972; 1973; 1974; 1976; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978; Haag 1983; 2005; Küng 1978; 1990b; App. G).

Jewish Rites, Laws, and Festivals Horkheimer remembered that the Jews had held together in persecutions for thousands of years for the sake of justice (Horkheimer 1967: 302-316, 317-320; 1974: 8, 29-30, 52-53, 81-82, 97, 101-104, 116-117, 148-151, 164165, 169, 213, 218-219; 215, 247-248; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Dodson 1962: 18-35). The Jewish religious rites, the marriage and circumcision, the dietary laws and the feast days and celebrations and the funeral ceremonies, the Mosaic Decalogue were moments of holding together, of continuity in a world, which the Messiah had not yet made into the kingdom of God (Exodus 2: 2; Lieber 2001: 322; Fromm 1966b; 1992: 203-212; Hacker 1972; Solomon 1996; Küng 1991b: 275-376, 640-665, 666-702, 703734, 736-752; 2004: 568-582, 763-784; Hacker 1972; Solomon 1996: chaps. 4, 5, 6, 9; App. E). To the contrary, according to Nietzsche, modern civil society had killed God (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Kaufmann 1968; 1986: 95-96; Küng 1978: C, D). Already in the earliest stages of modern bourgeois society, Master Eckhart had anticipated such God-killing in his mystical theology:

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chapter twenty It is God’s nature to give and his existence depends on his giving, when we are subject to him. If we are not and thus receive nothing from him, we do him violence and even kill him, or if not him, we do violence to ourselves and as much as is possible to us. (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Blakney 1941: 186187; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 1-127; Küng 1978: C, D; 1993a; Metz 1998; 2006; App. E).

The killing of God did not start in socialist or fascist society, but happened already before in more and more antagonistic liberal civil society. Horkheimer and most of the Jewish members of the Institute for Social Research in German and American liberal society, in Frankfurt a.M. and in New York, had been brought into the Jewish Covenant through the rite of circumcision (Lieber 2001: 322; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: chap. 1; App. E). At the occasion, their parents had possibly set aside a chair for Elijah, the forerunner of the Messiah, as if to say: perhaps this will be the one to make the world into the kingdom of God. Adorno, having been born half Jewish, was nevertheless baptized a Catholic in the tradition of his mother, before he was educated a Protestant, and then became a Marxist (Scheible 1989: chap. 1; App. E). Horkheimer and Adorno and the other Jewish members of the Frankfurt School still remembered the Mosaic Decalogue, not only the laws against idolatry but also the commandment against adultery, even if some of them violated it sometimes (Exodus 20; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Djerassi 2008: chap. 2). While Horkheimer and his wife Maidon, who had been baptized a Christian, but then converted to Judaism late in life, were still like his parents buried in the Jewish cemetery of Bern, Switzerland, with Jewish rituals and ceremonies as Scholem had been in Jerusalem, and had Hebrew-Biblical texts inscribed on their gravestone, Adorno was buried in the Adorno-family grave on the secular Main Cemetery of Frankfurt a.M. without any Jewish or Christian ceremonies (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Djerassi 2008: chap. 3; Scheible 1989: 131-146; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 91-132; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 28, 29, 37, 40). Habermas was still missing with some embarrassment the religious ceremonies as possible closure– like at the occasion of Scholem’s burial in Jerusalem–during the funerals of secular intellectuals engaged in secular enlightenment in Switzerland and in Germany, and asked for new translators of religion, and maybe also for new forms of not only religious cognition and ethos, but also of religious expression in new rites and ceremonies (Habermas 1982; 1988b; 1991a; 1997b; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005, 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/ Ratzinger 2006; Metz 1998; 2006; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/Rendtorf 1971; Küng 1993a; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; App. E).

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Judaism as Hope for Justice Horkheimer remembered that up to 1949, when there was no liberal Jewish power-state yet, Judaism meant the hope for justice at the end of the world (Horkheimer 1967: 302-320, 317-320; 1974: 8, 29-30, 52-53, 81-82, 97, 101-104, 116-117, 148-151, 164-165, 169, 213, 218-219; 215; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 29-30; App. E). The Jews were both a nation, and the opposite at the same time: namely, the reproach of all nations. In 1961, 12 years after the new liberal State of Israel had been founded–this very state claimed to speak for Judaism, and to be Judaism. The Jewish nation, in which the wrong of all nations had turned into accusation, and the Jewish individuals in whose words and gestures the negative of the status quo of the world had reflected itself, had themselves become positive. The Jews had become a nation among nations, soldiers, leaders and money-raisers for themselves. As once before the Christianity in the Roman Catholic Paradigm, only less promising, Judaism was supposed to see in the State of Israel first of all and to start with the goal, rather than in the eschatological New, Heavenly Jerusalem or Kingdom of God (Isaiah 62-66; Revelation 21-22; Horkheimer 1974: 8, 14, 15, 16, 28, 29, 38, 39, 40, 77, 92-93, 121-123, 127, 131-132, 141-142, 148-151, 164-165, 167-168, 196197, 213, 218-219, 246-247, 247-248, 260, 268, 286-287, 289-290, 293-294, 316-320, 352-353; 1988d: chaps. 2, 6, 7, 11, Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Küng 1991b: 223-274; 1994a: 336-601; App. E). Horkheimer noticed with sadness, that in the triumph of its temporal success the liberal State of Israel had fundamentally resigned itself to the world as it is the case and had become liberal and positivistic (Horkheimer 1974: 33, 38, 39, 101-104, 115-116, 116-117, 121-123, 127, 131-132, 141-142, 167-168, 169, 194-195, 208, 210-211, 213, 215-216, 219-224, 246-247, 247-248, 268, 316, 320). Judaism paid for its continuation and survival with its tribute to the law of this world, as it is the case. While admittedly Judaism has Hebrew for its language, but now in the State of Israel it is the language of success, not the language of the Hebrew prophets. Since the French Revolution, Judaism has assimilated itself to the condition of the liberal world in the form of the Assimilation Paradigm of Modernity (Horkheimer 1974: 169; Küng 223-274; App. E). However–so Horkheimer quotes the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth–whoever knows himself free of guilt, may throw the first stone (John 8, 1-11; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97, 169). Who after all does not assimilate to the liberal world? However, for Horkheimer it was, nevertheless, a pity and a shame, that through such assimilation and renunciation precisely that got lost to the world, what through Judaism should main-

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tain itself, as it had happened before in the assimilation and victory of Christendom: the longing for the wholly Other than the feudal or liberalbourgeois power world (Horkheimer 1974: 169, 192, 316-320; Honneth 1985; Küng 1991b: 223-274; 1994a: 336-601; App. E). For Horkheimer the good was good not through being victorious, but rather through resisting victory. Horkheimer wished passionately that Israel’s national subordination under the law of the status quo of the liberal world may not come to such a drastic end as the personal subordination of the individuals in the Europe of Hitler, Franco and Stalin, and their overdue successors (App. G).

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Religion in Fascist Society In Horkheimer’s perspective, the non-conformist Jewish intellectuals, who had escaped martyrdom under Hitler through emigration into the American liberal society, had only one single task (Horkheimer 1974: 215; Adorno 1997u; Neumann 1942; Djerassi 2008). They had to contribute so that the dreadful and appalling fascist events–summed up under the name Auschwitz–would always be remembered and would never be forgotten, so that they would never be repeated again in the future (SohnRethel 1975: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1979: 397-433; 1997u; Fromm 1973: chap. 13; Horkheimer 1974: 215; Djerassi 2008).

Remembrance According to the Rabbis, in the Book Exodus the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob broke his silence and directly intervened through Moses in Israel’s history (Exodus 2: 23-25; 3: 6; Lieber 2001: 325-328/6; Hegel 1986: 59-95; Küng 1991b; App. E). It was established practice in Egypt for a new King to celebrate his accession to the throne by granting amnesty to those guilty of crimes, by releasing prisoners, and by freeing slaves. The Israelites had good reason to expect that the change in regime would bring with it some easing of their own slave conditions. However, this was not to be; hence, the emphasis in the Book Exodus on the intensity of the misery of the Hebrew slaves. Moses, however, after years earlier having killed an Egyptian, who was beating unjustly a Hebrew slave, and thus, fled into another country did benefit from the Pharaoh’s amnesty and could return from his exile in Midian to Egypt (Exodus 2: 11-15, 23-25; 4: 19; Lieber 2001: 323-326). Four terms gave expression to Israel’s suffering in Egyptian slavery: groaning, cried out, cry for help, moaning; and four verbs expressed God’s response: heard, remembered, looked upon and took notice. The Hebrew word for remembrance noted much more than the English word, which merely emphasizes the remembrance of things past. The Hebrew word rather meant to be mindful, to pay heed, and it signified a sharp focusing of attention on someone or

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something. It embraced concern and involvement, and always led to action. To some Rabbis, a closer reading of the text would seem to indicate that the Israelites were not crying out to God. They were rather groaning in their misery with no certainty that anyone would hear them. The Hebrew for cry for help was used in the Book Job, which presented a testtheodicy and was imitated by Goethe in his Faust, in reference to the last groan of a dying person (Exodus 2: 23-25; 3; Job 24: 12; Lieber 2001: 325326/23-25; Goethe 1965; Berrigan 1978: 35-37; 53-56). God responded to the Israelites not because they sought divine help, but because God saw their suffering. Rabbi Heschel defined Jewish religion as the awareness of God’s interest in man. An ancient Rabbi taught that what God saw was that despite their misery, the Israelites tried to help each other. For example, instead of each man looking out for himself, as the bourgeois would do in modern liberal society, when one Israelite would finish making his quota of bricks in Egyptian slavery, he would help out a weaker neighbor (Exodus 2: 23-25; 3-Job 24: 12; Lieber 2001: 325-326/23-25; Goethe 1965; Hegel 1986g: 339-397; App. E). Similar testimony from the German fascist death camps tells of how some prisoners would share their meager rations of food and clothing with the sick and needy.

The Sigh of the Oppressed Creature Karl Marx spoke out of the same Jewish tradition, when he defined religion in his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as the expression of real suffering and as protest against real suffering; as the sigh of the oppressed creature; as the sentiment of a heartless world, and as the soul of soulless conditions (Exodus 2: 23-25; 3; Job 24: 12; Lieber 2001: 325-326/2325; Goethe 1965; Hegel 1986g; Tucker 1978: 53-65). Also Horkheimer, informed by Marx, stood like him in the Jewish tradition when he spoke very emphatically of the task of the non-conformist Jewish intellectuals to remember the innocent victims of German fascism: i.e. to be mindful, to pay heed, to focus sharply their attention on these victims and to be concerned and involved and act, so that history will not repeat itself (Neumann 1942; Sohn-Rethel 1975: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1979: 397-433; 1997u; Fromm 1973: chap. 13; Horkheimer 1974: 215; Thomson/Held 1982: 246-247; Peukert 1976: 273-282; Djerassi 2008; App. E). Benjamin was fully aware that it was more arduous to honor the memory of the nameless people than that of the renowned people (Benjamin 1977: chap. 10; Djerassi 2008: 15-16). This insight would have been an ideal grave marker during the horrible days of September 1940, when Benjamin was driven

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into suicide by Spanish, French and German fascists in Port Bou, and did not even receive his own pauper’s grave, not to speak of a grave stone.

Anamnestic Solidarity According to Horkheimer, indeed the surviving non-conformist Jewish intellectuals had only that one task, to stand in unity or in anamnestic solidarity with those innocent victims of fascist society, who had died under unspeakable pain, agony, anguish and misery (Horkheimer 1974: 215; Adorno 1997u; Habermas 1976; 1978c; 1986; Djerassi 2008). The thinking of these Jewish intellectuals and their work belonged to those innocent victims, and the accident that they had escaped should make the unity with them not problematic, but rather more certain. Whatever these Jewish intellectuals experienced had to stand under the aspect of the horror, which had been aimed at them as well as at the victims. The death of the victims was the truth of the life of these Jewish intellectuals. These Jewish intellectuals continued to exist only in order to express the victims’ despair and their longing for the wholly Other than the horror and terror of the finite world of history, which stood under the aristocratic principle of nature (Hitler 1943: 64-65; Jeffrey 2008; Rosenbaum 1998; Paasen/ Wise 1934). The same is true for the dialectical religiologist, no matter if he is Jewish or not. The following story expresses this anamnestic solidarity with the innocent victims of German fascist society and is devoted to their remembrance with the practical intent to help prevent under all circumstances alternative Future I–a neo-fascist society–from arising out of the present transition period between Modernity and Post-Modernity, particularly in the present global neo-liberal and neo-conservative economic crisis of 2008, 2009, 2010 (Flechtheim 1971; Klein 2007; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1975; 1976; 1978c; 1985b; 1990; 1991c; 1995; 1998; 2001a; 2001c; 2003b; 2004a; App. G).

From Philosophy to Ideology and Back During the revolutionary 18th century in Europe and America, the great atomistic philosophy of liberalism was still grounded religiously: namely, in the Protestant-Evangelical Paradigm of Christianity (Hegel 1986l: 534, 535; Zinn 2003; Scahill 2007; Klein 2007; Küng 1994a: 602-741; App. E). However, it turned into an ideology, the more the bourgeois class gained power in civil society, in the constitutional state, in international relations,

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and in history, and became conservative, neo-conservative, counterrevolutionary, and became finally philosophically, economically and politically bankrupt and obsolete in the 19th century, particularly in sofar as it was not socially modified. This however did not prevent the liberal, neo-liberal, and neo-conservative politicians from continuing their idealistic slogans of personal freedom, democracy, and the free world: up to the American Presidential campaign of April 2008; and up to the present–2010–economic depression, which makes once more the deficiencies of liberalism only all too obvious, as it deprives many workers of their pensions, of their jobs, of their houses; and up to the present inflation of prices for food and gasoline, which contributes to the overcrowding of the food banks; and up to the bloody and most expensive Iraq and Afghan wars, which deprive the workers of their sons and daughters; and up to the Israeli war against the Hamas-governed Gaza strip in December 2008 and January 2009, which was supported by the American neo-conservative and neo-liberal Bush-Administration and by the American taxpayer; and which found more critique and opposition in Israel itself than in Western countries motivated by Anti-Arabic and Anti-Islamic bigotry (Nader 20091-2; Mitchell 2009: 1-2; Kuhn 2009: 1-2; Baum 2003: 205-221; 2004; 2007; App. E). In three weeks of war against the Gaza Strip, which is only double the size of the District of Columbia, the neo-conservative and neo-liberal Israeli Government has through the application of state terror produced 1,300 Palestinian and 13 Israeli fatalities, many thousands of injuries, the destruction of homes, schools, mosques, hospitals, pharmacies, granaries, farmer’s fields, many critical public facilities, the smashing of clearly marked UN headquarters and UN schools along with stored medicines and food supplies. The Israeli and American response was: Hamas terrorists! Many years ago the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, stated: There has been Anti-Semitism: the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz. But was that the Palestinian’s fault? They only see one thing. We have come here and stolen their country. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, we must ask, if to the breaking of the Covenant, which God was charged with by the Rabbinical court in Auschwitz, corresponds the breaking of the Covenant by the State of Israel in the Gaza Strip of 2008/2009? In any case, the remembrance of David Ben-Gurion’s statement could break the spell of neo-liberal ideology, and lead back to a truthful political philosophy and theology.

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Human Progress On January 20th 2009, Barack Obama became President of the United States and gave millions of people at home and abroad the hope of real human progress: the end of neo-liberal ideology; the beginning of a true, i.e. concrete liberal philosophy generating the right policies and actions; mediation of personal autonomy with universal solidarity; the end of the unjust wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, unjust by the standards of the Augustinian Seven Point Just War Theory; reestablishment of the Habeas Corpus Act; closing of Guantanamo Bay; abolishment of torture; redistribution of wealth; the transformation of the sick neo-liberal commodity exchange society or monopoly and oligopoly capitalism; the creation or rescue of 5 million new jobs; the rescue of homes and pensions; the protection of the environment; discourse with other nations; establishment of an embassy in Iran; filling of the ambassador post in Syria; justice and peace for the Palestinian and the Israeli people in two separate states (Adorno 1997j/2: 617-638; Neumann 1942; Nader 20091-2; Mitchell 2009: 1-2; Kuhn 2009: 1-2; Thränert 2008: 34-37; Weisskirchen 2008: 1518; Rudolph 2008: 20-23; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002). Like the Kennedys’, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X before, Obama has been able in recent years to awaken in masses of people, particularly the younger generation, at home and abroad the longing for difference, otherness, and the wholly Other: peace versus war; jobs versus hunger; national health insurance versus illness. The dialectical religiologist can only hope that Obama must not become a martyr of freedom on the way to alternative Future III–an egalitarian and emancipated society, like the Kennedys’, Martin Luther King and Malcom X and many other less known people before: martyrized by neo-liberal or fascist groups in society and state aiming at alternative Future I–a corporatist or fascist class society, and at alternative Future II–a militaristic, imperialistic society (Horkheimer 1985h: chaps. 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34; 1996s: 21-27, 32-74; Sohn-Rethel 1973, 1975, 1978, 1985; Neumann 1942; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; App. G)

The Huddled Masses While in America more than in Europe, the ideological liberalism or neoliberalism prevailed into the 21st century and did not change either into socialism or into fascism as in Europe in spite of tendencies in both directions, by the time of the neo-conservative counter-revolution of 1989, it

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had repressed both of them effectively, at least for the time being (Hegel 1986: 534, 535; Neumann 1942; Zinn 2003; Scahill 2007; Klein 2007; Greffrath 2008: 66-69). It is the case that sometimes more fascist than socialist tendencies survive. On April 20, 2008–in remembrance of Adolf Hitler’s birthday–the so-called National Socialist Party of America received permission to meet at the Washington Monument in Washington D.C., not too far from the White House and the Congress Building. It was not the Neo-Nazis, but rather some of the protesters against them that were arrested by the police. Both, collectivistic fascism and collectivistic socialism are the historically necessary reaction against the insufficiently socially modified and mitigated modern, atomistic liberal capitalistic society. For Marx, capital–not necessarily the capitalist who could be personally a rather good man–was the power which had to strive to create for itself a world according to its own image (Hegel 1986g: 339-397, 398-514; Marx 1961a, b, c; Marx/Engels 2006; Greffrath 2008: 66-69). Hegel as well as Marx had predicted the self-globalization of liberal capitalist society. As for Hegel, the state was the god of this earth, so for Marx capital was the god of modernity (Hegel 1986g: 339-397, 398-514; Marx 1961a, b, c; Marx/Engels 2005; Horkheimer 1967: 250; Greffrath 2008: 66-69). The Biblical tone in Marx’s prediction in his book The Capital was no accident. Here Marx’s unmasked capital as the god of modernity, if indeed god was in Aristotelian terms the energy that could move everything, and the spirit which could permeate everything, and the substance which could transform itself into everything. According to Marx, under the rule of this god men turned into flexible resources, families into rearing places of human capital, universities into places of production of profitable qualifications, nations into economic locations, landscapes into experience parks for tourists, cultural, including religious traditions into the content of the infoentertainment industry. Shortly, in the capitalist perspective, the world counted only insofar as it was profitable. Thus, the notions with which people understand the world today, in March 2010, come always closer to the pure image of capitalism, as it had been outlined in Marx’s theory only three generations ago. The revolutionary Marx wrote into the family book of the miserable proletariat of the 19th century: if you do not unite yourself and fight for global alternative Future III–a substantial democracy, then you shall end up as a huddled, undifferentiated mass of poor devils, which no redemption can help any longer. There was again Marx’s prophetic tone. Like the critical theorists later on, Marx combined the Jewish prophets with the enlightener Kant. Marx sharpened critically Kant’s categorical imperative into the demand to overthrow all conditions, under

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which man is a humiliated, an enslaved, and abandoned, a contemptuous being. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, certainly the “dead dog” Marx still bites in the present transition period from Modernity to PostModernity (Hegel 1986g: 339-397, 398-514; 1986l; Marx 1961a, b, c; Marx/ Engels 2005; Horkheimer 1967: 250; Greffrath 2008: 66-69; Habermas 1991c; 1992a; 1998; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c). Thus, it is understandable that during the catastrophe of globalizing capitalism of 2008, 2009, 2010 people particularly in Europe run into their libraries, in order to find Marx’s works again, particularly his crisis theory, and that also the critical theory of society, which has concretely superseded Marx in itself together with Voltaire and Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Freud, is gaining new actuality. While Marx and the Marxists aimed at the determinate negation of the self-globalizing liberal capitalist society into alternative Future III–the realm of freedom, the fascists of all forms have tried to preserve capitalism into global alternative Future I–the totally administered society, and into global alternative Future II–the totally militarized society (Hegel 1986g: 339-397, 398-514; 1986l: 534, 535; Marx 1961a, b, c; Marx/Engels 2005; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40; Marcuse 1966; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Zinn 2003; Scahil l2007; Klein 2007; Greffrath 2008: 66-69; App. G).

From Liberalism to Fascism and Socialism, and Back Again In Germany in 1933, my family and I had experienced how fast a liberal state– the Weimar Republic–could be transformed into a fascist state–Hitler’s Third Reich, and in 1946, how fast a fascist state could be transformed again into a liberal one–the German Federal Republic (Neumann 1942; Thies 2006: 37-39; 2007: 15-17; 2008a: 34-37; 2008b: 55-57; 2008c; Thierse 2008: 62-63; Lucke 2008: 64-65; Greffrath 2008: 66-69; Siebert 2001; 2002a; Djerassi 2008: chaps. 1-3; App. B, C, D). It was, of course, Germany that became–in the Biblical language of the Rabbis–one of the evil incarnations of Edom, the successors of Esau, the brother of Jacob–the Father of Israel, like e.g. the Roman Empire of the Emperor Hadrian before, who slaughtered the Jews after the revolt at Bethar, 132-135 BCE (Malachi 1: 1-2: 7; Lieber 2001: 163-165). The German Democratic Republic proved how fast a fascist state could be transformed into a socialistic one. Yet, I was taught by my experience in Eastern Europe from 1989 on, as well as by George Soros, how difficult it is to transform–if at all–socialist states back into liberal, or neo-liberal ones. According to Soros, the latter transformation failed in Eastern Europe after 1989, because neo-liberalism, capitalism and

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civil society were introduced without social thought, i.e. without social modification, without sufficient government control over the penetrating multinational corporations, monopolies and oligopolies, and over the newly starting antagonistic civil society, in order to protect the workers, the consumers, the weaker businesses, as well as the poor and needy people from the predatory behavior of the richest and most powerful capitalists, who took six times their investments out of the former Soviet Union and its influence sphere. In April 2008 the Putin Government of the Russian Federation tried its best to control the oligarchs, the Russian and non-Russian capitalists. Today, in liberal American society and state, neo-liberal and post-liberal traits point to the arrival of alternative Future I–the totally administered society, and to alternative Future II–the entirely militarized society determined and dominated by what President Eisenhower had called at the end of his Administration with great anxiety the militaryindustrial complex. As Blackwell Island was a dialectical image of a hellish Island of Unhappiness, in which shoot together many traits of the liberal and neo-liberal America of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, so in Horkheimer’s dialectical image of the Island of Happiness are crystallized traits that point beyond liberalism toward alternative Future III–a truly free and reconciled society, of which the inhabitants of Blackwell Island in the East River could only dream (Krauss 1880; Horkheimer 1988a; 1987b: 237-251, 295-311; 1987k: 13-79, 100-118, 171-188, 202-208, 221-232, 289-328, 329-332; App. G).

French Revolution In 1931, two years before Adolf Hitler came into power in Berlin in January 1933, Horkheimer traced fascism back to the French Revolution (Horkheimer 1974a: 343-344; 1987b: 100-118, 441-442; 1987c: 354-359; 1991f: 214-215, 364, 404, 405, 409, 417; 1985h: 77-83; 1988n: 88-89, 103104, 153-154, 343, 380-381, 388, 404-405, 406-408; 1995o: 99-811; 1996q: 9-636; Brickner 1943; Neumann 1942). Horkheimer was a sympathizing observer of the great French Revolution of 1789. He was not put to shame by the fact that the French Revolution had gone too far, measured by what in that historical moment could be realized, and that the realization of its program became the content of a long period after heavy setbacks. However, Horkheimer was put to shame by the running wild of the precisely not revolutionary, but philistine, pedantic, and sadistic instincts of the authoritarian personality in the petite or low bourgeoisie, which in the 20th century became the basis of the fascist counter-revolution not only

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in France, but also in Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, the United States, etc. (Horkheimer 1974a: 343-344; 1987b: 100-118, 441-442; Fromm 1969; 1980a Adorno 1950; Valentine 1936; Machtan 2001; Kogon 1995; Coughlin 1932; 1933; Hedges 2006; Paasen/Wise 1934; Rosenbaum 1999). For Horkheimer, the subaltern or submissive malice and spite of the petite bourgeois strata and authoritarian personalities, on which the French Revolution had to lean and to base itself in praxis, transformed the solidarity of the people, to which it appealed in theory, from the very start into an ideology: understood as socially necessary appearance, which as the untruth was to be seen through and to be changed, but which was for the immediate life of people in its compressed and deepened form the ens realissimum (Horkheimer 1974a: 343-344; 1987b: 100-118, 441-442; Adorno 1997h: 17-19). Horkheimer had to admit that also in the French Revolution were inserted drives and energies, which pointed not only beyond the feudal system, but also beyond the class society as such toward alternative Future III–an egalitarian, classless society. Yet, according to Horkheimer, such drives pointing to alternative Future III could be found more in the writings of the enlighteners than in the sadistic petite bourgeoisie, which came into power for some time. In the face of this petite bourgeois rule, so Horkheimer argued, it may indeed have appeared as a redemption when the representatives of the developed productive forces, the high bourgeoisie, which was mature enough to take over the power, began to lead after the fall of Robespierre. For Horkheimer, through an immediate interpretation of the French Revolution on the basis of the enlightenment philosophy the reality was almost as much distorted as through the impudence and insolence of a certain romantic, which found the work of the guillotine to be abominable only, because it did not function in the service of the Bourbons (Horkheimer 1974a: 343-344; 1987b: 100118, 441-442; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969).

Petite Bourgeoisie and Revolution In the perspective of Horkheimer, in the Germany of 1931 the two elements of the French Revolution, pedantic and sadistic petite bourgeoisie and revolution appeared as two separate forces (Horkheimer 1974a: 343-344; 1987b: 100-118, 409, 441-442; 1987b: 100-118, 441-442; 1987c: 354-359; 1991f: 214-215; 364, 404, 405, 409, 417; 1985h: 77-83; 1988n: 88-89, 103104, 153-154, 343, 380-381, 388, 404-405, 406-408; 1995o: 99-811; 1996q: 9-636; Brickner 1943; Fromm 1973: chap. 13; 1980a). Now the petite bourgeois and the farmers were allowed particularly in the form of the

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SA and other fascist organizations to revolt in the service of the leading high bourgeoisie and to scream and shout for the hangman. Adolf Hitler was after all an employee of the Herren Club in Düsseldorf and of Krupp and Tüssen and Henry Ford (Horkheimer 1974a 343-344; 1987b: 100-118, 441-442; Adorno 1997h: 124-125; Fromm 1973: chap. 13; 1980a; Canetti 1972: 7-39; Sohn Rethel 1975: Part 2; Baldwin 2001). However, so Horkheimer argued, the energies, which were in 1931directed toward the creation of alternative Future III–a more humane world, were now incarnated in the theory and praxis of small groups of the proletariat. They were not concerned with the guillotine, but really with alternative Future III–the realm of freedom (Marx 1961c: 873-874; Horkheimer 1974a: 343-344; 1987b: 100-118, 441-442; Adorno 1997h: 124-125; Fromm 1972: chap. 13; 1980a; Canetti 1972: 7-39; Sohn Rethel 1975: Part 2; Baldwin 2001; App. G). Unfortunately, only two years later, these small socialist groups were overwhelmed by fascism, and found themselves in concentration camps or ended up in the cemeteries: the revolutionary socialist character was repressed by the authoritarian, fascist character; the liberal civil society and constitutional state were replaced by the fascist state (Fromm 1980a; Marx 1961c: 873-874; Horkheimer 1974a: 343-344; 1987b: 100-118, 441442; Adorno 1950; 1997h: 124-125; Canetti 1972: 7-39; Sohn Rethel 1975: Part 2; Baldwin 2001; Neumann 1942).

French Nationalism In 1967, Horkheimer stated that the nationalism in the French Revolution and the nationalism in the Germany of the 19th and 20th centuries had a completely different character (Hegel 1986a: 197, 548-558; 1986d: 246, 327, 468, 489, 588; 1986g: 338, 494, 502; 1986j: 50, 64-65, 66-68, 350; Horkheimer 1974a: 343-344; 1988n: 407-409; 1987b: 100-118, 441-442; 1987c: 354-359; 1991f: 214-215; 364, 404, 405, 409, 417; 1985h: 77-83; 1988n: 88-89, 103-104, 153-154, 343, 380-381, 388, 404-405, 406-408; 1995o: 99-811; 1996q: 9-636; Brickner 1943). According to Horkheimer, in the French Revolution nationalism was carried by the spirit of the enlightenment. The French nationalism was the combative watchword or slogan against the feudalism, and the absolutism, and against the Catholic Church in the name of the sovereignty of the rising bourgeoisie, which established itself as nation. However, the French nationalism was not aggressive against other nations. The French nationalism referred to and appealed to its cultural achievements and not to its military or moral superiority.

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German Nationalism According to Horkheimer, in contrast to the French enlightened nationalism, in Germany the nationalism appeared already from its very start in alliance with Anti-Semitism (Horkheimer 1967b: 302-316; 1988n: 406408; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Neumann 1942). This happened at a time when the conservative, counter-revolutionary Austrian statesman, Metternich, could still say with some right that Germany was merely a geographical notion. However, so Horkheimer argued in 1967, during the whole 19th century, and particularly intensively after the foundation of the second German Empire through the conservative Chancellor Bismarck, German nationalism decorated itself with the splendor and the fame of the Roman Empire of the German Nation, which it transfigured romantically. German nationalism appeared not only with the legitimate claim of the bourgeoisie after the misery of the innumerable feudal and absolutistic principalities and the creation of a large economic territory, which was no longer torn apart through innumerable customs and duty boundaries, but particularly with the assertion of the superiority of its own nation over all the other nations. It was not for nothing, so Horkheimer observed, that the other nations were afraid of the national anthem Germany above everything, because they recognized that what was at stake here was not the usual love for the fatherland alone, which was valid for the citizens of all other countries as well, but rather an aggressive nationalism. According to the German national hymn, the German claim to power reached as far as the German tongue sounds and God in heaven sings songs. This was even spelled out and formulated precisely in the German national anthem: From the Mass to the Memel, from the Etsch to the Belt. This comprised Belgian, Dutch, Scandinavian, Polish and Italian territory. All these territories were indeed and actually occupied by German troops in World War II. However, already in the deepest whisper, people spoke in Germany about the racially degenerated Frenchman, the treacherous Albion, and the lazy Italian. As completion and supplement to these prejudices and clichés, Horkheimer drew upon images in which the different nations symbolized themselves: the armored Germania on the Niederwald Monument, and the la douce France, which posited the at least not aggressive claim, to be the cultural leader of humanity.

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According to Horkheimer in 1967, America, whose nationalism seemed to be still closer to that of France than to that of Germany, had been rescued out of whatever motives from the complete fascist enslavement (Horkheimer 1967b: 302-316; 1988n: 408-409; 1996r: 652-653; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217). Horkheimer observed that in 1967, only 12 years after the end of World War II, the answer to this rescue from fascism was everywhere and not only in Germany, a widely spread and deep-seated hostility against America. Critical theorists and other intellectuals have reflected deeply about the causes of this anti-Americanism, which reaches into the very present–March 2010. I heard it during my recent trips to Germany, Croatia, Ukraine: We hate America! Go to hell with your democracy! Horkheimer mentioned as possible causes of this hostility against America not only in the Near East but also in Europe: resentment, and envy, but also mistakes that were being made by the American Government and the American citizens. Of course, in 1967 the Vietnam War was going on. It was surprising for Horkheimer that wherever Anti-Americanism could be found, also Ant-Semitism spread. The universal malaise, so Horkheimer explained, which was conditioned through the decline of culture, was seeking for the guilty one, for a scapegoat. The universal malaise found out of the above indicated reasons its scapegoats in the Americans, and in America itself again the Jews, who supposedly rule, govern and control America. For Horkheimer, the demagogues from the fascist Right, but to some degree also from the socialistic Left, had long recognized that here a fertile field offered itself, and they used and abused the situation to an always greater extent.

Unity of Theory and Praxis According to Horkheimer, also the youth, particularly the SDS, had been seized by the universal malaise (Horkheimer 1967b: 302-316; 1988n: 408-409; 1996r: 652-653; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Habermas 1970; 1978a). The youth had nothing that it could hold on to, except the nationalism. This nationalism could easily be manipulated into the direction of the Anti-Americanism and of the Anti-Semitism. In addition, the successes of de Gaulles, who at the top of a third or fourth ranking country kicks the great Powers, without having to pay the bill so far, give an example that asked for imitation. Horkheimer found grotesque the confusion among the students on the socialistic Left. The unity of theory

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and praxis, which the students had demanded earlier, turned into a crude Anti-American praxis, without being backed up by a genuine theory: certainly not by the critical theory of society, which could not have survived fascism if it had not been rescued in America, in New York, at Columbia University (Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 51-90; Horkheimer 1967a; 1967b: 302-316; 1988n: 408-409; 1996r: 652-653; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217). In his letter to Horkheimer of May 31, 1967, Adorno revealed his intent to make Herbert Marcuse understand without the possibility of a misunderstanding what in the meantime also Ludwig von Friedeburg had confirmed: that Horkheimer’s supposed assertion that the Americans were fighting in Vietnam for democracy and for freedom was a forgery. According to Adorno, it belonged to the uncomfortable sides of the strategy of the supposedly New Left that it continually engaged in such stylizations. Adorno was of the opinion that it would have been the least that he and Horkheimer could have expected from Herbert Marcuse that before he wrote pathetically about the issue to Horkheimer, he would have explored with him what was true concerning it. Adorno expected that Marcuse would have trusted him and Horkheimer more than those students, mainly from SDS, who understood a certain conception in such a way that they promoted the unity of the praxis with a non-existing theory: shortly, the pure notion-less practicism. In the meantime, a splinter group of the SDS in Berlin had declared itself in solidarity with the people, who had put a warehouse on fire in Bruxelles, Belgium. The SDS was of the opinion that one had to create Vietnamese conditions in Europe in order to direct the attention of the Europeans to the Vietnam War. Thereby for Adorno and Horkheimer, the limit had now really been overstepped of what the critical theorists could tolerate, as in the sense of the indulgence and leniency of Wotan, the Germanic god of war, for Siegfried, the Germanic hero who shattered, smashed and crushed the latter’s spear in the third act of Richard Wagner’s opera Siegfried.

The Decoding of the Fascist Period In Frankfurt a.M. in December 1960, Horkheimer reflected on the Israeli secret police, the Masad’s seizure of Adolf Eichmann, who became for him a key to decode not only anti-Semitism, but beyond that the whole fascist period in Germany and Europe from 1933 to 1945, as well as the following restoration period of the liberal capitalist society and formal– democratic constitutional state (Horkheimer 1987a; 1967b: 302-320; 1974c: 148-151, 164, 343-344; 1987b: 100-118, 441-442; 1987c: 354-359;

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1991f: 214-215; 364, 404, 405, 409, 417; 1985h: 77-83; 1988n: 88-89, 103104, 153-154, 343, 380-381, 388, 404-405, 406-408; 1995o: 99-811; 1996q: 9-636; Arendt 1965; Smith 1993: 209-229; Jay 1980: 137-149; Byrd 2008; Brickner 1943; Arendt 1966; Habermas 1992). SS Colonel Eichmann had run the Jewish Section of the SD (Kershaw 2000: 42, 131, 134, 136, 318, 322, 324, 492, 493, 837; Kogon 1995; Cornwell 1999; Paassen/Wise 1934; Rosenbaum 1996; Hedges 2006). He had learned Hebrew from a Rabbi. SS Colonel Eichmann had forced the emigration of the Viennese Jews. Like Hitler, so also Eichmann had favored a Jewish state in Palestine, however against the will and policies of the German Foreign Office in Berlin. Eichmann had visited Palestine and had developed the Jewish state idea through his secret dealing with his Zionist contacts. Eichmann had suggested pogroms against the Jews all over Europe. Together with SS General Heydrich, Eichmann presided over the Wannsee Conference, which initiated the final solution of the Jewish question through gassing. SS Colonel Eichmann had organized the transport of several thousands of Jews from Vienna, Kattowitz and Moravia to the Nisko district, south of Lublin. Gypsies from Vienna were also included in this deportation. Eichmann had suggested Madagascar as being the most suitable place for the Jews, the Madagascar Solution, at a time when American fascists and anti-Semites spoke of the Alaska solution. SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann the manager of the Final Solution, was finally dramatically abducted from Argentine by Israeli agents, tried in Jerusalem, and hanged there in 1962, and his ashes were spread over the Mediterranean Sea.

The Extermination of the Jews In December 1960, for Horkheimer Adolf Eichmann was an accomplice of National Socialism (Horkheimer 1967b; 302-320; 1974c: 148-151, 164, 343-344; 1987b: 100-118, 441-442; 1987c: 354-359; 1991f: 214-215; 364, 404, 405, 409, 417; 1985h: 77-83; 1988n: 88-89, 103-104, 153-154, 343, 380-381, 388, 404-405, 406-408; 1995o: 99-811; 1996q: 9-636; Arendt 1965; Brickner 1943). He was entrusted particularly with the extermination of the Jews in Germany and in the countries occupied by German troops. According to Horkheimer, Eichmann was seized by Israeli citizens in Argentine, and he was brought to Israel. Here, he was to be taken to court and was to be condemned. In Horkheimer’s view, the number of Jews, who had been murdered on Eichmann’s command had been estimated on different levels: from three quarters of a million to four or five million. In Horkheimer’s view, Eichmann was proud of the role that he

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had played in the Final Solution of the Jewish Question and did regret it or repent it as little as Hitler or Himmler or Bormann had done (Marx 1953: 171-206; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-320; 1974c: 148-151). According to Horkheimer, in terms of the prevailing law in fascist Germany between 1933-1945, particularly the Nürnberg Laws, Eichmann was right and had a right to be proud of what he had done, and had no reason to repent (Horkheimer 1967b: 302-320; 1974c: 148-151; Gilbert 1995; Persico 1994; Kogon 2002). If the court in Israel wanted to speak the truth, so Horkheimer suggested, it had to declare itself to be incompetent concerning the Eichmann case.

Formal Reasons It was obvious to Horkheimer in 1960, that the formal reasons for the court procedure against Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem were untenable (Horkheimer 1967b: 302-320; 1974c: 148-151; Arendt 1965; Gilbert 1995; Persico 1994; Kogon 2002). Eichmann had not murdered in Israel. Also, Israel could not wish and will that the seizure of political criminals in the asylum, which they had found rightly or wrongly, would become–in Kantian terms–the universal rule. For Horkheimer, punishment was a means through which a particular state enforced and obtained by force the respect for its laws. The purpose of punishment was deterrence. All other theories of punishment were bad theology and metaphysics (Hegel 1986a: 306, 338-339, 341, 344, 353, 443; 1986b: 480; 1986c: 128-129; 1986d: 245; 1986f: 107; 1986g: 177-178; 1986p: 227; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-320; 1974c: 148-151; Gilbert 1995; Persico 1994; Kogon 2002). For Horkheimer, it was utter insanity to assume that punishment in Israel was able to deter the possible successors of Eichmann in the world. Whatever would happen to Eichmann in the State of Israel, so Horkheimer argued, would prove the powerlessness, not the power of the Jews, who were aware of themselves and of their right: the presumption, and not the habit or custom of the authority of the state in Israel. According to Horkheimer, everybody knew in December 1960 that the politicians of the world had overlooked and allowed once more the Israelis their totalitarian odd behavior, for the time being, in view of New York and the United Nations. The totalitarian odd behavior of the Israelis reminded Horkheimer of Benito Mussolini in former Fascist Italy, and of the red fascists in the at the time still existing Soviet Union and Empire.

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According to Horkheimer, the material reasons that had been brought forth for the judicial act against Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1960, were no less inadequate than the formal reasons (Horkheimer 1967b: 302-320; 1974c: 148-151; Gilbert 1995; Persico 1994; Kogon 2002). Thus, Horkheimer did not only reject the formal reasons for a future trial of Eichmann, but also the material reasons. The trial against Adolf Eichmann, so the Israelis said, should enlighten the youth in Israel, and the nations outside the country about the Third Reich. If however, so Horkheimer argued, such enlightenment or knowledge could not be mediated through the reliable and honest literature, which was already at had in scientific as well as in generally accessible works of the culture languages, e.g. the many editions of Eugen Kogon’s SS State, but if the actuality, which came to it in the consciousness of the present and the future generations, should be won only in the form of the newest trial reports and of international sensations, then it was really in bad shape. The consciousness that was impressed by the death of the Jews under Adolf Hitler only through new headlines in the mass media, had little depth, and the remembrance of the innocent victims would be badly preserved in it. In Horkheimer’s perspective, the real consequences of the trial reputation of the extermination, and the political and social-psychological effects upon the nations in the present could not be predicted. As with the youth in Israel, so also with the friendly masses in other nations, whom the Israelis hoped to win over to their side, the unconscious idea, suspicion, presentiment, must constitute an inhibition that the dead victims became a political means, a tactic, a propaganda, be it even for a most legitimate national purpose. For Horkheimer, in consequence the resistance of the good forces against the destructive ones was paralyzed, if it should use spiritual and intellectual weapons, which with the opponent were self-evident (Fromm 1973; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-320; 1974c: 148-151; Gilbert 1995; Persico 1994; Kogon 1967; 2002; Kogon 2003a: 2003b: 59-63). According to Horkheimer, criminal procedures out of political calculations belonged to the weaponry of anti-Semitism and fascism, and not of Judaism. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, if Horkheimer or Adorno, Benjamin or Scholem, Fromm or Marcuse, Schönberg, or Brecht would still have been alive during the recent Israeli wars against Lebanon in 2006 and against the Gaza Strip in 2008/2009, they would certainly have understood Israel’s claim to self-defense, but they would, nevertheless, also been very saddened by the means it used in order to reach its justified purpose, and

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they would not have considered such critique or reproach to be anti-Semitic: according to the morality and ethos of all three Abrahamic faith communities the good purpose does not sanctify or justify the evil means, e.g. the killing of hundreds of non-combatants, including many women and children, and the destruction of their food supply, their houses, their hospitals, and their schools (Fromm 1966b; 1968; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-320; 1974c: 148-151; Gilbert 1995; Persico 1994; Kogon 1967; 2002; Kogon 2003a: 2003b: 59-63; Arendt 1965; 1968; 1996; 1997; Djerassi 2008; Habermas 1987b; 1988b; 1991a: Part III; 1992a; 1997a; 1999; 2001a; 2006c; 2007; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2004; 2005; 2007; Küng 1984; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; App. E).

Calculations In December 1960, Horkheimer was convinced that the calculations of the Israeli authorities concerning the Eichmann trial were false and wrong (Horkheimer 1967a: 302-320; 1974c: 148-151; Gilbert 1995; Persico 1994; Kogon 2002). Horkheimer had to admit that persecutions and mass murder, terror and cruelty, and their official administration were unfortunately fundamental themes of world-history (Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 21, 25, 30, 37; 1967b: 302-320; 1974c: 148-151; Gilbert 1995; Persico 1994; Kogon 1967; 2002; 2003a; 2003b: 59-63). For Horkheimer’s Schopenhauerand Hegel-inspired pessimistic philosophy of history, political systems that had come into power through the help of persecutions and mass murder, and were able to maintain themselves, were after their defeat through the internal or external enemy, repulsive and abominable for other nations for a short time, until they came up again in similar form (Hegel 1986l: 29-55; Schopenhauer 1946; 1989: Vol. 1: 342-346; Vol. 2: 563-573; Vol. 5: 658-659; Horkheimer 1967b: 259-261). Horkheimer remembered that for decades nobody was allowed in France or Europe to declare his or her support for the former Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, not to speak of the great Revolution. However, at the time of the great economic miracle in France under Louis Philipp the coffin of Napoleon Bonaparte came in triumph to Paris, and was posited into the Cathedral of Notre Dame. According to Horkheimer, finally Napoleon, the Infamous, ascended to the renovated Emperor’s Throne in France. There had been innumerable victims. However, at the end of the 19th century, France was considered and recognized as the guardian of freedom, who donated to the United States the Statue of Liberty, at the erection of which Ludwig Krauss was present with thousands of other New Yorkers, and which he

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admired (Horkheimer 1967b: 259-261; Krauss 1880). For Horkheimer, the power of forgetfulness was all-embracing in world-history. The power of forgetfulness had grown with the spreading of the modern capitalist mode of production and circulation. Horkheimer predicted that the Eichmann Trial would be powerless against the power of forgetfulness in the globalizing liberal capitalist society, which by definition suffers from amnesia, as it stands under the rule of its god capital, and as it as exchange and commodity society continually builds and destroys again with always greater speed (Marx 1961a, b, c; Marx/Engels 2005; Horkheimer 1967b: 259-261; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 42-85, 122-146, 177-195, 217-237, 354-372, 373-391, 397-407, 569-573, 578-587; 1993b; 1993c; 1997j/2: 11-30, 4771, 72-86, 87-122, 238-253, 254-288, 674-690). According to Horkheimer, one new value repressed the other out of the light of the mass media, while the disastrous effect added and mounted up in darkness. In December 1960, as the German economic miracle took hold, Horkheimer may have been afraid of a future Hitler renaissance, in spite of the fact, that Stalin had made sure that there would be no coffin to be brought back to Berlin, and no new fascist mythology would surround and transfigure the former Führer and his regime (Horkheimer 1967b: 259-261; Arendt 1968; 1965; Fest/Eichinger 2004; Gun 1969: chaps.18-21; Gellately 2001: chap. 10; Kershaw 2000: chaps. 15-17; App. G).

Atonement In 1960, Horkheimer heard atonement or expiation named as the last or first reason for the Eichmann Trial: so to speak, as the self-evident human necessity (Horkheimer 1967b: 259-261; Fest/Eichinger 2004; Gun 1969: chaps.18-21; Gellately 2001: chaps. 10; Kershaw 2000: chaps. 15-17; Arendt 1968). Horkheimer had–informed by Freud–a deep distrust and suspicion against the deeply Jewish and Christian word atonement, or at-one-ment, in general. It seemed to cover up emotions, feelings, or impulses very much averse to light (Horkheimer 1967b: 259-261; Landauer 1999; Mitscherlich 1994; Reich 1971). It originated from a foreign world. It reminded Horkheimer of the Germanic, pre-historic times and of the Holy Inquisition in the Catholic Middle Ages, and even still in Modernity. For Horkheimer, however, the very idea that Eichmann could atone or expiate for his criminal deeds, according to human judgment and a human judge’s decision, was a horrible and grotesque scorn and a sheer mockery in relation to the victims. It would have been easier for Horkheimer to understand the confessed will to take revenge, as poor as it would have

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to remain in the face of Eichmann’s horrible deeds: to practice the Jus or Lex Talionis (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; Horkheimer 1967b: 259-261). According to Horkheimer, if a Jew, who had lost father and mother through Hitler’s rule, had had tracked down the rogue Eichmann in Argentine, and had killed him on the open road, he would not have been a tactician, but rather a human being, whom everybody would have to understand (Horkheimer 1967b: 259-261; Djerassi 2008: 96-97). The Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, however, so Horkheimer argued, no matter how craftily and cunningly the Israelis may prepare it, was simple-minded and outrageous at the same time.

Suffering as Fundamental Motive In Horkheimer’s view, the intent of the Israelis to render harmless the SS Colonel Eichmann, in so far as he participated in the plans of international agencies of fascism, would be entirely legitimate (Horkheimer 1974c: 150-151; Kershaw 2000: 42, 131, 134, 136, 318, 322, 324, 492, 493, 837). However, for Horkheimer, the Israeli intent to do something bad to Eichmann betrayed not only the lack of political understanding, but also coarseness of feeling. According to Horkheimer, no nation had suffered more in the last four thousand years of world history than the Jewish people (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer 1974c: 150-151; Kershaw 2000: 42, 131, 134, 136, 318, 322, 324, 492, 493, 837; Küng 1991b). Suffering was the fundamental motive in the fate of the Jewish nation. The Jewish people have made out of suffering a moment of duration, permanence and unity. In the Jewish nation, instead of generating most of all malice, spite, and meanness, the suffering had transformed itself into a kind of collective insight and experience. In the Jewish people, suffering and hope became inseparable. In Horkheimer’s perspective, at one moment of the Jewish people’s history, the European nations suspected and had a presentiment of this Jewish insight and experience, and had integrated the pain, agony, anguish, and misery, which the Jews suffered for the sake of the Messianic eternal future, which they did not want to give up, into world history through their confession to the tortured redeemer, Jesus of Nazareth (Isaiah 11, 24, 25, 65, 66; Matthew 26, 27, 28; Revelation 22; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; 185-346; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1966b: chaps. ii, iii, iv, ix; 1976: chaps. III, VII, IX; 1992: 203-212; Adorno 1980b: 333-334; Küng 1991b; 1994a; Metz 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1984; 1998; 2006; Metz/ Habermas/Sölle 1994; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Benedict

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XVI 2007; App. E). However, so Horkheimer argued, Jews were not ascetical. They have not–supposedly like the Christians–worshipped suffering, but they have experienced it. For Horkheimer, more than with other nations, among the Jewish people suffering was connected with the remembrance of their own dead victims. Their suffering did not make the dead victims into saints. The suffering only bestowed on the thought of them the infinite tenderness, which supposedly could do without the consolation of eternal life (Isaiah 11, 24, 25, 65, 66; Matthew 26, 27, 28; Revelation 22; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; 185-346; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1966b: chaps. ii, iii, iv, ix; 1976: chaps. III, VII, IX; 1992: 203-212; Adorno 1980b: 333-334; Küng 1982; 1991b; 1994a; Metz 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1984; 1998; 2006; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Benedict XVI 2007; App. E). In the perspective of the comparative dialectical religiology, even through the resurrection of the flesh, also in Judaism the consolation of personal immortality was not entirely unknown (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1982; 1991b; 1994a; Benedict XVI 2007).

Punishment and Suffering According to Horkheimer, the Jew, to whom came the natural thought in the face of the capture of Eichmann to see him punished and suffer, has not yet reflected upon himself or herself, and his or her Jewishness (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer 1974c: 150-151; Kershaw 2000: 42, 131, 134, 136, 318, 322, 324, 492, 493, 837). With such a Jew, the wish for Eichmann’s punishment and suffering offended not only against Judaism as the Religion of Sublimity, but also against everything that he or she had received or inherited from Jewish and world history. The enterprise to punish Eichmann without need and necessity, and thus to make him suffer, aimed at doing something to him through which the dead victims of the Jewish nation could receive nobility. Horkheimer criticized the politicians in Israel not only because of their lack of spirit, but also of heart. These Israeli politicians did not know and feel what they were doing. Thus, Horkheimer pleaded for the incompetence of the court in Jerusalem in the case Eichmann, and for his return to the country, i.e. Argentine, from which he had been purloined or stolen. In the perspective of the critical religiology, such procedure would probably have saved Eichmann’s life, since Argentine was at the time full of old fascists, Nazis’, Ustasha members, etc, some of whom were even situated in high political, mainly security places. Horkheimer predicted that nothing good would

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come from the Eichmann trial, neither for the security and position of the Jews in the world, nor even for their self-consciousness and self-esteem. For Horkheimer, the Eichmann trial was a repetition: Eichmann would do damage a second time!

Authoritarian Personalties On July 18, 1961, Horkheimer stated that there were many reasons why the Eichmann trial could only cause further evil, misfortune, and mischief (Horkheimer 1967bc: 302-316, 317-32; 1974c: 150-151, 164; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 177-217; Kershaw 2000: 42, 131, 134, 136, 318, 322, 324, 492, 493, 837). Slowly these reasons had gotten around in the Jewish community, and had been spread in the world. According to Horkheimer, one reason, which was not so obvious but nevertheless much more realistic than others, had become manifest during the interrogation and examination of the Eichmann trial. In Horkheimer’s historical-philosophical perspective, in the period of the decline and downfall of the more and more plutocratized formal democracy, that meant in the 1960s and in the immediate future, the states needed to an always higher degree people, authoritarian personalities, who could practice an iron obedience, and who were driven by a good measure of un-sublimated sadism (Horkheimer 1974c: 150-151, 164; Adorno 1951: Part IV; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 88-127, 177-217; Fromm 1973; 1980a; Habermas 1992a; Napier/Jost 2007). Horkheimer remembered that in the classical-bourgeois, Victorian period sadism activated itself in a changed form, in the competitive struggle of antagonistic, liberal capitalistic society: the obedience in the adaptation to the market. Horkheimer predicted, however, that the more the capitalist society transformed itself toward post-modern alternative Future I–total administration, and particularly toward post-modern alternative Future II–a military fortress, the more significant became the authoritarian type of the small-lipped, youthful, lower-rank, underleader. Enviable, so Horkheimer stated ironically, were the nations and states in which there existed many Eichmann’s. Horkheimer felt that the Eichmann’s of this world embodied and personified the authoritarian type of alternative Future I and II. Horkheimer could not imagine that the poor public prosecutor in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem could possibly pull the world spirit to his side as once Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, or Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Revolution had done (Hegel 1986b: 289, 522; 1986c: 33, 551, 585; 1986d: 64; 1986g: 88, 503, 506, 508-510; 1986l: 22, 33-55, 73, 133, 377, 413, 559; 1986r: 38, 100,

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117, 123, 512; Horkheimer 1974c: 150-151, 164; Adorno 1951: Part IV; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 88-127, 177-217; Fromm 1973; 1980a; Habermas 1992a). After the world spirit has marched on almost another half century, it is quite obvious to the critical theorist of religion that it did not follow the intent of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem to eliminate the Eichmann’s of the world once and for all, but rather moved further in direction of alternative Future I and II: the further increase of anti-Semitism in the Near East and in Europe, the continually rising American military budget, as well as Abu-Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and the legalization of torture by the Bush Administration, and the weakening of human and civil rights through the Patriot Act after September 11, 2001, and in general the American nationalism and the consequent unilaterialism give witness to this (Hedges 2006; Franken 2003; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; Scahill 2007; Zinn 1999: chaps. 18-25; Byrd 2008; App. G).

Cooperation In 1969, Horkheimer declared that he and the other Jewish intellectuals, who had escaped the torture death under Hitler, Heydrich, or Eichmann in one of the many concentration camps–Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Belzek, Bergen-Belsen, Berlin-Columbia Haus, Berlin-General Pape Strasse, Flossenbürg, Gross Rosen, Krakau, Lemberg, Maidanek, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Treblinka, Warsaw, etc.–had only one single task: namely, to cooperate so that the dreadful and horrible fascist times and events would not return, and that they would not be forgotten through unity and solidarity with those innocent victims, who had died in the camps under unspeakable pain, agony, anguish and misery (Horkheimer 1974c: 213; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 25, 30; Adorno 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997u; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 168-208; Kogon 1995; Thompson/Held 1982: 246-247; Peukert 1976: 278-282, 293-302). The thinking and the work of the Jewish intellectuals belonged to these victims. The chance, the coincidence, the accident, that the still living Jewish intellectuals escaped the horrible fate should not make the unity and solidarity with the victims questionable or doubtful, but rather more certain. Whatever the Jewish intellectuals would experience had to stand under the aspect of the horror, cruelty and terror, which had been aimed at them, as well as at the slaughtered victims. The death of the victims was the truth of the life of the Jewish intellectuals. The Jewish intellectuals existed in order to express the victims’ despair, as well as their longing for the wholly Other than the horror and terror of society and history, includ-

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ing their longing for freedom and immortality (Horkheimer 1974c: 213; 1985g: chaps. 16, 17, 29, 37, 40). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, not only the Jewish intellectuals, but also all other non-conformist intellectuals should share in solidarity in the accomplishment of this task: particularly, the critical theorists of religion themselves.

Counter-Revolutionary Fascism The critical theory of religion has its roots in the experience of the 20th century as the century of religious, moral, political and military catastrophes, and in the reflection upon it: the experience of fascism, growing out of and against liberal capitalist society, and its radicalization of antiSemitism, and anti-socialism, and anti-communism, the consequent World War II, and the following liberal restoration period, in which the same antagonistic modern civil society was restored again, which had not only produced liberalism, but which also had provoked revolutionary socialism and the counter-revolutionary fascism directed against both in the first place (Hegel 1986a: 45, 48, 133, 174, 184, 208-209, 226-228, 274-297, 355, 372-373, 381, 436, 436; 1986g: 421; 1986l: 146, 230, 241, 243, 244, 274, 388-390, 391, 429, 470-510; 1986m: 141, 480; 1986n: 17, 65; 1986p: 345; 1986q: 48-4953, 67, 69-71, 73, 82-84, 87, 265, 283, 336: 1986r: 12, 116, 132; 1986s: 409-410,419, 426, 493, 523-524: 1986t: 157; Rauschning, 1940: 5-7; chaps.1-17: Adorno 1973b: 432-437; 2003d; Kiss 1931: 5-6; chaps.1-5; 259-299; Mann 1990: 360-367; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Siebert 2001; 2002a: chap. 3; 2007e; Zimmermann 2003: 63-67; Renton 2001: 132-145; Rosenthal/Gelb 1967: chaps. 1-18; Philipps 1965: 1; Section 1; Galen 1941). Early on, Hitler had called himself the most conservative revolutionary, i.e. counter-revolutionary, and started his political career with counter-revolutionary activities in the service of the defeated German army (Hitler 1943: chaps. 8-12). The dialectical theory of religion is a response to the challenge of this experience with counter-revolutionary forces (Siebert 2004b). The following story of the old Jewish woman with the Star of David on her black coat, the young SS officer, and the Christian and humanist Otto Schuhmann leads concretely into the very center of this experience of the continuing slaughter bench of nature and history, with which the new critical religiology continues to be confronted and to struggle: as narrative dialectical image of anti-Semitism, which was rooted not only in authoritarian personalities but also in the authoritarian family, society, and state, and which the critical theorists continually fought theoretically and practically, and which at times penetrated even

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the original innermost circle of the critical theorists itself, and which continues today–March 2010 (Askenasy: 2003, Anhang; Hegel 1986g: 511512; Marx 1953: 171-207; 1964: 1-40; Mann 1990: 284-285, 360-364; Horkheimer 1988d: 308-331; 1967b: 302-316; Benjamin 1978d: 671-683; Adorno 2003d: 314-318, 325-326, 330-332, 331-335, 346-347, 349-350, 352-354, 360-361, 362-363, 365-367, 370, 372, 377-379, 380-382, 387-389, 395-397, 441-445; Brenner 2002: Parts I-V; Solomon 2000: 6-15; Schoeps 2003: 55; Hurnaus 2003: 1-156; Krieger 2003: Parts I and II; Cooper 2008). The story is told in terms of what Benjamin and Adorno called the lost view, which saw the world out of the perspective of the dead victims, as if it was laying before it in solar eclipse: so as it may appear to the view of the redeemed; so as it is the case with all its antagonisms (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b: 10; 1980b: 333-334; App. F). This sad view may give all tenderness, warmth and hope to the life, which has been damaged, and which has gone cold in fascist society.

IG Farben Administration Building It happened in Frankfurt a.M. in April 1942, when even Benjamin and Adorno–not to speak of the other critical theorists of society, or the other Jewish intellectuals–had long left the city and Germany, into French or American exile: my encounter with the old Jewish lady on her way to the concentration camp (Askenasy 2003; Jeffreys 2008; Schweppenhäuser 1996; Kramer 203; Wiggershaus 1987a; 1987b; Jay 1980: 137-149; 1981; Löwenthal 1989; Smith 1993: 209-229; Byrd 2009; Djerassi 2008: chap. 2; Siebert 2007g). I had been late on my way from the Hügelstrasse in Frankfurt a.M. Ginnheim, where at that time I lived with my mother Elli Siebert and my three years younger brother Karl, to the Lessing Gymnasium, a humanistic elite high school. The reason for my being late had been that near the huge Administration Building of I.G. Farben, the chain had fallen off my bicycle and I had not been able to repair the damage on the way (Askenasy 2003; Jeffreys 2008; Siebert 2007g). At the time, this I.G. Farben Administration Building was the headquarter of Germany’s largest chemical corporation, which in April 1942 had begun already to produce Zyklon B for the concentration camps (Askenasy 2003; Jeffreys 2008; Siebert 2007g). They had turned from camps providing cheap labor for German corporations into death camps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, and after the German declaration of war against the United States in the same month, in consequence of obligations intrinsic to the treaty among the axis powers Berlin, Rome, and

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Tokyo, and of many months of continual American provocations across the Atlantic, under the shield of neutrality, and in favor of England, and hidden even from the American Congress and the people, before and after the war had started, and after thus the European war had turned and expanded into a new world war. After having doubled the world foodsupply through getting ammoniac out of the air before World War I, and after having invented and weaponized and applied the first poison gas at the Western front at Ypers, Belgium, in August 1915, the Jewish chemist, Friedrich Haber, had developed and produced insecticides, called Cyclons, one of which, Zyklon B, was taken over by the IG Farben Industry in 1942 (Askenasy 2003; Jeffreys 2008; Siebert 2007g; 2006a: Part I; 2007e). After my lecture before representatives of I.G. Farben in the 1980s, they told me that Zyklon B had been produced by a subsidiary of I.G. Farben (Askenasy 2003; Jeffreys 2008; Siebert 2007g; 2006a: Part I; 2007e). I never received the promised name of the subsidiary. The I.G. Farben Administration Building was surrounded by a large housing development, which was almost completely occupied by I.G. Farben employees, most of whom were devout National Socialists. A few years earlier, the Catholics among them had tried to oust their pastor, Georg W. Rudophi, from the St. Albert Church, because he had not been patriotic and nationalistic enough, in spite of the fact that he had been wounded four times in World War I (Siebert 1993; Weitensteiner 2002). During World War II, the I.G. Farben building was never bombed out by the American or British Air Force, because it was to become the center of the post-war American Military Government for the American Zone of occupation. Thereby, the apartment building of my parents Bruno and Elli Siebert which was a part of the nearby settlement for World War I veterans, named Peace, was also spared from being bombed out by the American or British air force. Today– March 2010–the former grandiose I.G. Farben Administration Building is part of the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität, and houses the Humanities. Indeed, the critical theorists of society could not possibly– as Horkheimer, son of a Jewish-German capitalist and once CEO in his father’s factories, put it often–talk about fascism, concentration camps, war, colonialism, imperialism, damage to–what Freud had called–the hidden nature of man, destruction of the manifest external, natural environment, without speaking about capitalism and the capitalists: I.G. Farben, Ford Motor Company, IBM, etc. (Marx 1871; 1906; 1953; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1951c; 1963; 1964; 1974; 1977; Freud 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; 1992; Neumann 1942; Sohn-Rethel 1973; 1975; 1978; 1985; Marcuse 1960; 1962; 1966; 1995; Fromm 1950; 1957; 1959; 1961; 1964; 1967; 1972a; 1972b;

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1973; 1974; 1975; 1980a; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 2001; Flechtheim 1966: 455464; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Adorno 1951; 1952; 1966; 1973d; 1973e; 1976; 1979: 397-407, 408-433, 434-439; 1980b; 1991a; 1994; 1997u; 2003c; 2003d; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: chaps 1,2; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3440; Jeffreys 2008; Black 2001; Baldwin 2001; Djerassi 2008: chap 3; Scahill 2007; Zinn 1999; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; App. C, D).

The Old Jewish Woman Since my bicycle did not function any longer, I had to walk down from the I.G. Farben Administration Building to the Lessing Gymnasium (Siebert 2007e). Thus, as I began to push my bicycle down to my school, I saw ahead of me an old woman in a black coat. She must have been in her seventies. She carried two suitcases, which she had always again and again to put down on the street because they were obviously too heavy for her. When I tried to pass by the old woman with my bicycle, I discovered on the left side of her black coat the large yellow Star of David, which at this time the Jews were forced by the Nuremberg Laws to wear again as identity disc and as a mark of anti-Semitic prejudice, exclusion, non-recognition, humiliation, discrimination, dishonor and shame in the Third German Reich of modernity, as once before in the First German Reich of the Middle Ages (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Baum 1959: parts I and II; Siebert 2007e). In 1935, the national socialists had held a Party Day of Freedom in Nuremberg (Adorno, 2001b: 241-242, 437/263; Black 2001; Baldwin 2001). The Empire Party Day of the NSDAP had taken place from September 10-16, 1935. During this event the Nuremberg Laws had been unanimously decided on by the German Diet, which precisely for this purpose had come from Berlin to Nuremberg. Through these Nuremberg Laws the Jewish citizens of Germany had been factually deprived of all human and civil rights. To be sure, the Party Day of Freedom had been a sheer mockery against what normally was understood under freedom in a liberal, civil society and democratic constitutional state, e.g. in the former Weimar Republic: namely the freedom of the individual. The old lady with the yellow Star was one of the many Jewish citizens in Frankfurt and Germany, who for all practical purposes had been deprived of all their human and civil rights in the new German SS State (Kogon 1995; Rosenbaum 1998; Kershaw 2001; Cornwell 1999; Persico 1994; Dalin 2001; Machtan 2001; Kertzer 2001; Goldhagen 2002; App. C, D).

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Catholic Youth Movement I stopped my bicycle beside the old Jewish woman and asked her if I could maybe help her with her heavy suitcases (Askenasy 2003; Siebert 2007g). The old woman was first very shy and reserved. As it is well known, at least since the Nuremberg Laws under the national-socialist domination, Jews and Aryans were not even supposed to talk to each other. In recent years, I had, however, learned in the Catholic Youth Movement in Frankfurt a.M., particularly, in the parish of Sta Familia in Ginnheim, to which my family and I belonged, that anti-Semitism, or more precisely anti-Judaism in religious or biological/anthropological form was a very bad thing, and that what was happening to the Jewish citizens in Frankfurt a.M.–originally a very liberal and also a very Jewish city, where the Rothschild family had had its business-origin and where one of their financial headquarters had been situated–and in Germany and Europe in general through fascism in all its forms, was a great injustice (Walker 1970; Matheson 1981; Erickson 1985; Reimer 1989; Hitler 1943: 60, 64, 63, 65, 111, 125, 148, 150, 155, 194, 203, 297, 231, 232, 243, 287, 300-308, 309-311, 312, 313, 314, 319321, 324, 326, 382, 447, 453, 457, 472, 447, 600, 622, 623, 624, 639; Taylor 1986: xvii, xix, xxii, 23, 26, 29, 37, 58, 76, 92, 100, 105, 111, 132, 133, 134, 135, 138, 139, 159, 175,178, 186, 188, 192, 208, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 407-412; Siebert 1993; 2007g; 2009a; 2009c; Weitensteiner 2002; Oelmüller 1990; Schuster/Boschert-Kimmig 1993). Nothing was left of the traditional Christian Anti-Semitism in the Catholic Youth Movement in Frankfurt a.M. (Baum 1959; Djerassi 2008). Hitler meant particularly the Rothchild banking business, when up to the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and the German war declaration against America, and the Wannsee Conference, and the beginning of the systematic final solution of the Jewish question, he threatened again and again that if the Jewish high finance would once more produce war among the European nations, this would mean not the end of Europe, but rather the end of the Jewish race. The notion of a Jew-free Germany or Europe did not belong to the vocabulary of the Catholic Youth Movement (Dalin 2001) The Catholic Youth in Frankfurt and elsewhere fought against such anti-Semitic language and actions, and that often with bitter and painful consequences to the point of persecutions, bodily violence, torture, and assassinations of individual, particularly leading members of the movement (Goldhagen 2002; Kertzer 2001; Dalin 2001; Cornwell 1999; Siebert 1993; Weitensteiner 2002). It was obvious from her clothing and behavior that the old Jewish woman belonged to the Frankfurt bourgeoisie, like the

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Adorno and Fromm family (Wiggershaus 1987; Lundgren 1998: chap. 3; Funk/Joach/Meyer 2000). However, I never found out if the old Jewish woman belonged to the orthodox, conservative, or most assimilated reformed community of Jewish people in Frankfurt, or if she had prayed the Schma Israel, when she left her house near the I.G. Farben Building with her heavy suitcases a last time. There had also been no anti-Semitism in my family at Falkstrasse 86, in Frankfurt Bockenheim and after 1933, in the Hügelstrasse 194 in the Friede Block. To the contrary, I witnessed my mother throughout the fascist period visiting a Jewish woman, who was married to her Aryan supervisor in the former Jewish shoe factory ICA Schneider. The woman, whose name was Scheel, was never deported to a concentration camp, but she expected it whenever the telephone, or the doorbell rang. My mother was a great consolation to her. As soon as the American Army liberated Frankfurt in March 1945, Mrs. Scheel collapsed from years of horrible stress, and died, leaving behind her husband, and her daughter, and her son. While she lived in a nice comfortable bourgeois house, and the police never called her, and Psalm 91 was realized for her in Frankfurt, as for the Horkheimer family in Stuttgart, her life had been, nevertheless, one hell of fear, doubt, and despair (Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 17).

The Communist It was about the same time in Spring of 1942, when I met the old Jewish woman on the way to the Lessing Gymnasium, that I also encountered a communist: the worker and comrade Müller (Siebert 1993; 2007e). For the fascists the Jews and the communists were most closely connected: they both stood for equality, and thus rejected and violated the Aristocratic Principle of Nature, the very core of fascist ethics and social ethics, and were therefore both enemies not only of Germany, but also of the whole human species (Hitler 1943: 64-65; Siebert 2009a; 2009c). Marxism was secularized, Messianic Judaism and Christianity! Comrade Müller had been the only communist in the housing development called Peace, not far north from the I.G. Farben Building, which had been reserved for veterans from World War I, and which was full of devoted National Socialists. My parents had moved into the Peace Block in January 1933, because my father Bruno had been a veteran. However, my father had not been a National Socialist, but rather a member of the Catholic Center Party. Also, the communist Müller had been a soldier in World War I. It had precisely been his war experience, which had made Müller into a Marxist.

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In 1934, the communist Müller had been deported to the Concentration Camp Dachau because he had fought against National Socialism from the start. That Müller had also fought in World War I, like Hitler, for his German Fatherland did not save him from the concentration camp. However, in 1942 the communist Müller had, nevertheless, been released from Dachau, and had been sent home to his wife and his son Horst, a friend of mine, under the condition that he would promise to the SS administration that he would not tell anybody about his experiences in the camp. He also remained under continual Gestapo surveillance. I met the communist Müller one evening near my mother’s house, at the corner of the Hügelstrasse and Felix Dahnstrasse, while the city of Mainz, 30 miles away, was attacked by the British air force. While the communist Müller and I stood together at the street corner and looked at the distant horrible fire works of the air attack and the flak artillery and listened to the terrible distant thunder of exploding bombs and grenades, he told me that Frankfurt would be bombed sooner than later as well, which I could hardly believe or imagine. Suddenly Müller asked me–so to speak out of the blue sky–if I knew the great philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel, the teacher of Karl Marx? The communist Müller thought I should know about the great Christian idealist and humanist, because I belonged to the Catholic Youth Movement and because I went to the elite Protestant-humanistic Lessing Gymnasium. For the historical materialist Müller, religion and linguistic humanism were both forms of bourgeois idealism, of which he was, of course, suspicious no matter in which form it appeared. While there had been no anti-Semitism present in Sta Familia or in the Lessing Gymnasium, both shared, nevertheless, first in the liberal and then in the fascist anti-communism. It was precisely their religious or secular anti-communism, which made church and school go along with fascism, if also otherwise they despised it. However, the communist Müller had met not only other Marxists in Dachau, but also good Jews, Christians, and humanists. Thus, the historical materialist Müller had become more tolerant toward idealists in all forms and shapes. He thought that I was an idealist too. Of course, at the time, Jews and communists were identified by National Socialist propaganda as one and the same, and in any case as enemies of the Reich. After all, Marx, the father of modern communism, had also been a Jew. That he was also a baptized Protestant did not matter. Thus, Jews and communists were supposedly sent to the concentration camps in order to learn to work hard because they were lazy by nature: the communists, because they did not want to produce surplus value for their capitalist masters, and the Jews, because they were always in circula-

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tion. That there may be some truth in the communist opposition to the private appropriation of collective labor, and that for 1,000 years the Jews had been pushed out of production into circulation by the Christians, had been entirely forgotten. The Marxist Müller also knew that Catholics were persecuted in Frankfurt together with Jews and communists. Thus, Müller trusted me. Unfortunately, at the time I had never heard of Hegel, neither in Sta Familia, nor in the Lessing Gymnasium. The communist Müller was very disappointed about that. He had discovered a decisive gap in my education. Thus, the dialectical materialist Müller started right away to introduce me into the life and work of the dialectical idealist Hegel, while the city of Mainz was burning and laid into ruins. For this, to be sure, very short introduction into Hegel, I have been infinitely grateful to the very decent and brave communist Müller throughout my later life. For me, somehow, the image of the communist Müller always remained connected with my Hegel and Marx studies. In the face of the Vatican’s Lateran Treaty with Benito Mussolini, and of the Vatican’s Empire Concordat with Adolf Hitler, and of the Empire Bishop Müller in Berlin and his German Christendom, not to speak of the silence of the Church and even of God concerning the concentration camps and particularly the Jewish question, it was very easy for the communist Müller also to be a convinced atheist (Krieg 2004; Hedges 2007; Goldhagen 2002; Dalin 2005; Mathesobn 1981; Stone/Weaver 1998; Kertzer 2001). The communist Müller showed me the way to Hegel’s dialectical historical idealism, and through him and his work the way to Marx’s dialectical historical materialism (Hegel 1986l; Marx 1953; Habermas 1976).

The Police After I had caught up with the old Jewish woman, and had offered my help on my way from the housing development Peace, along the I.G. Farben Administration Building, to the Lessing Gymnasium, I asked her where she wanted to go (Askenasy 2003; Siebert 1966; 2007e). As she slowly began to trust me and to have confidence in me, the old Jewish woman started to speak and to remember. She told me that the police had visited her the night before in her house near the I.G. Farben housing development, and not too far away from the Dornbusch area, where Anna Frank had experienced her earliest childhood, before her family emigrated to Holland. The policeman ordered the old Jewish woman to come next morning to the air shelter of the Lessing Gymnasium. From there she would be transported by bus and train together with many other Jews to a beautiful vil-

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lage in Eastern Europe, where she could enjoy with friends the evening of her life in peace and quiet: far away from the noisy hustle and bustle of the big city of Frankfurt, where she had been born. The policeman’s story sounded like paradise or like the first Jewish utopia: the land flowing with milk and honey (Exodus 3: 8; Lieber 2001: 328/8). The police told the old woman to pack as much stuff into her suitcases, as she could possibly carry. The old woman had followed obediently the command of the policeman, and thus was now on her way to the huge air shelter of the Lessing Gymnasium. That was all the old woman knew about her future. That was all that I knew about her future. Of course, we both knew, like everybody else in Germany, that there existed Dachau and other concentration camps, in which–so the nationalist propaganda went–lazy people like Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, traitors of all kinds, etc. were sent, in order to learn to work: Work makes free (Schuster/Boschert-Kimmig 1993; Mijatovich1985; Sakowskieje 1988; Kogon 1995)! Yet, we did not ask ourselves what a woman in her 70s, who could not even carry her suitcases, was supposed to do in a labor camp? Precisely the lack of this question made the paradisiacal story of the policeman about the beautiful utopian village in the East of the night before plausible first to the old Jewish woman and then to me. Then of course neither the old Jewish woman nor I knew about Fritz Haber, or Zyklon B, or what was happening in the I.G. Farben Administration Building or in the I.G. Farben Industry in Frankfurt, Höchst, from 1942 on, which I would defend a year later–since August 1943–as a member of the German Air Force. Thus, I could believe in my Catholic conscience that I did a good deed through carrying the old Jewish woman’s suitcases, while in reality I helped her to travel to some concentration camp in the East, which had already started to transform itself from a profitable cheap labor camp into a death camp, applying Zyklon B. Thinking and being did not idealistically agree, but were materialistically antagonistic. As later on Habermas often told me in Frankfurt, Dubrovnik, and at Villa Nova University: Things don’t fit! (Habermas 1976). Not only the communist Müller, but also the fate of the old Jewish lady showed me the way from dialectical, historical idealism to–not a positivistic bourgeois materialism–but rather a dialectical historical materialism, and finally to the critical theory of society and the dialectical religiology (Hegel 1986l; Marx 1953; Habermas 1976; Siebert 1966; 1979a; 1979c; 1979d; 1985; 1986; 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 1987d; 1989; 1993; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 1994d; 1995; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b: 69-114; 2002c: 187-193; 2003: 194-208; 2004a: 63-97; 2004b: 3768; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c: 135-160; 2005d: 57-114; 2005e: 215-231; 2005f:

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231-247; 2006a; 2006b: 91-137; 2006c: 1-32; 2006d: 61-114; 2007a: 99113; Ott 2001; 2007b). However, already in April 1942, I asked myself in relation to the communist Müller, who had just come out of a concentration camp and all its suffering, and to the old Jewish lady, who was just on her way to the concentration camp and all its suffering and death, and discussed with the priests in the Catholic Youth Movement, what Horkheimer asked himself later on in 1962: Why did God, who supposedly had created the world and governed it so wisely, let all these terrible and awful things happen, all these injustices and cruelties (Skriver 1962; Horkheimer 1988n: 333)? Of course, this question gained its meaning only and first of all out of the Judeo-Christian teaching on God’s Providence and its riddles, which said something about how things ought to be, and ought not to be, and with which I became familiar in the Catholic Youth Movement (Hegel 1986l: 19-55; Horkheimer 1967: 250, 252, 260; Baum 1980a; 2007; Siebert 1966; 1993; Weitensteiner 2002).

Righteous Gentiles According to the Rabbis, the phrase translated from the Torah as the fear of God was the closest it came to having a word or definition for religion (Exodus 1: 17; Lieber 2001: 320/17). The case of the Egyptian midwives, who were ordered to kill all male children born by Hebrew women and did not follow the order because of their fear of God, suggested that the essence of religion was not belief in the existence of God or any other theological precept, but belief that certain things were wrong, because God had built standards of moral behavior into the universe. Abraham had been afraid that the Philistines would murder him and abduct his wife Sarah, because there is no fear of God in this place (Genesis 20: 11). The Egyptian midwives not only believed in God but also understood that God demanded a high level of moral behavior. They were willing to risk punishment at the hands of Pharaoh rather than betray their allegiance to God. This is the first reported case of civil disobedience in the Torah, challenging the government in the name of a higher authority (Fromm 1966b; 1981). According to the Rabbis, it found an echo in the thousands of righteous gentiles who risked their own lives to protect Jews from the Nazis. The Egyptian midwives began a pattern that is continued in the story of Moses, whose life was repeatedly threatened by men and saved by women: his mother, Pharaoh’s daughter, his sister, Miriam, and his wife, Zipporah. It was through righteous women that Israel was redeemed (Exodus 1: 12; Lieber 2001: 320/17). Max Horkheimer would never forget

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the Catholic driver who drove his parents from Stuttgart into their Swiss exile and thus helped to rescue them (Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37). I shall always remember Father Rudolphi, the parish priest of Santa Familia in Ginnheim near Frankfurt a.M., who did not only preach continually the Hebrew prophets while Gestapo agents watched him in his church and wrote down discriminating notes, and who did not only daily remember the suffering of the innocent victims of history, the saints, during mass, but who also continually helped with great personal risks Jewish women and children in his parish (Rudolphi 1949; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993). I shall never forget my mother’s weekly visits throughout the war to a Jewish woman, Mrs Scheel, and her two small children up the Hügel Strasse, who lived in daily fear of being picked up by the police and of being sent to a concentration camp in Eastern Europe: like the old Jewish lady I encountered on the way to the air shelter of the Lessing Gymnasium. Mrs Scheel probably only survived because her Aryan husband was a CEO in the formerly Jewish shoe factory ICA Schneider, which had been confiscated and expropriated by the fascist state after the Jewish owners had left for London before January 1933, when Hitler came into power. My mother and my father had worked in this factory for many years. There were indeed not only fanatic Anti-Semites or Anti-Judaists, but also brave righteous gentiles living in fascist Germany between 1933 and 1945 (Bonhoeffer 1993; 2000; 2003; Djerassi 2008; Siebert 1966; 1993; Weitensteiner 2002)

The Good Samaritan Father Rudolphi was not only–informed by his teacher Theodor Haecker– a great political theologian in theory, but he also tried to practice his theory through practically following the example of the good Samaritan (Luke 10: 25-37; Rudolphi 1949; Dirks 1985; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; Siebert 1966; 1993; Weitensteiner 2002; App. E). Like the good Samaritan, who broke through the in-group and out-group separation between Jews and Samaritans, Rudolphi not only cut through the in-group and out-group barrier between Aryans and Jews, but also between Germans and Americans, and that in the middle of Naci Germany and of World War II. During an American bombing attack on Frankfurt a.M. in February 1945, which Father Rudolphi considered to be an act of terror forbidden by the Geneva Conventions, an American 4-engine plane, produced by Henry Ford in Detroit, was hit and damaged by the German flak artillery fire. The burning plane descended very fast and low over Father Rudolphi’s church

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Sta. Familia in Ginnheim, a Frankfurt suburb. Six crew members were able to leave their smoking plane in the last moment before it crashed into a small forest: the Ginnheimer Wäldchen. Parts of the plane’s fuselage and its wheels were spread all over the forest. One of the pilots landed with his parachute in the same little forest about 20 minutes walk away from Father Rudolphi’s church. The pilot was severely wounded and called for a doctor. No doctor came. Instead the Nazi party leader of Ginnheim, which had been heavily damaged by the bombardment and many people had been killed and wounded, arrived and took out his revolver and shot the defenseless, wounded pilot, saying: Here you have your doctor! He thereby committed a most horrible war crime of his own. The Nazi leader practiced the Lex Talionis: the life of the American pilot for the life of the German victims of the bombardment, in which he had just participated (Exodus 21: 24). When Father Rudolphi heard of the wounded and dying American pilot, he took his bicycle and drove to him as fast as possible, in order to help him and give him, if necessary, the Sacrament of the Sick or the Last Rites. There were no boundaries for Father Rudolphi between friend and enemy in the face of human peril, suffering, and need. However, Father Rudolphi came too late. The pilot had already been murdered. Father Rudolphi gave him a last blessing.

The Witness When a month later, in March 1945, General Patton’s army arrived in Frankfurt and occupied the city, including Ginnheim, after some resistance, American officers looked for the Nazi party leader, who had murdered the pilot (Luke 10: 25-37; Rudolphi 1949; Dirks 1985; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; Siebert 1966; 1993; Weitensteiner 2002). When they found and caught him and wanted to put him on trial before a military tribunal, they needed a witness. They did not trust any of the old Nazis and they did not have confidence in the communists, who had replaced the National Socialists in some local offices. Thus, the American officers came to Father Rudolphi, who alone they trusted, and asked him to be their witness. The officers knew that the Nazi party leader had harassed Father Rudolphi and his community for 12 years, but that he had finally visited the Pastor in order to apologize for all the bad things he had done to the priest and to his parish. However, Father Rudolphi refused to witness by saying that the Nazi leader had come to him for confession and that he was not allowed to break his confessional oath of secrecy. The officers objected that the Nazi leader was after all a Protestant. Yet, Father Rudolphi

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considered the Protestant a baptized Christian, who had as such the right to go to confession and to confessional secrecy. The officers had to turn after all to a communist witness: the worker and comrade Müller, the former concentration camp prisoner. Thus, the Nazi leader was tried by the American military tribunal, and was found guilty, and was sentenced to death, and was hanged, and was buried by Father Rudolphi’s Chaplain, Father Wehenkel, on the nearby Bockenheim Cemetery. The American military court practiced the Jus Talionis: the life of the Nazi leader for the life of the pilot (Exodus 21: 24). Father Rudolphi refused to participate in the praxis of the Lex Talionis be it against the American pilot, who had just terror-bombed the city he loved and had caused many civilian casualties, or against the Nazi leader, who had made his life a hell with the help of the Gestapo and the Hitler Youth for over a decade. He rather chose to witness to and to act according to the Golden Rule, as the good Samaritan had done (Matthew 5: 38-42; 7: 12; Luke 10: 25-37; Rudolphi 1949; Dirks 1985; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; Siebert 1966; 1993; Weitensteiner 2002). Father Rudolphi had believed in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Hebrews, the God of Jesus of Nazareth, who had given the Golden Rule to humankind, and he had preached most powerfully the Hebrew prophets, who continually affirmed it, in the midst of the anti-Semitic fascist Germany (Exodus 3: 16-18; Lieber 2001: 331: /16-18). Father Rudolphi did what he preached. He never made the Church the final object of his faith and work, but rather the kingdom of God. He loved not only the neighbor, but also the enemy and the stranger (Matthew 5: 43-48). In the icy cold winter of 1945/1946, he gave his only coat to a Russian worker, who had just been released from a forced labor camp near Frankfurt. It was obviously not easy for Father Rudolphi or for anybody else to follow the good Samaritan and to practice the Golden Rule and to cross the sharp lines between in-groups and out-groups in the fascist society, or afterwards in the newly developing liberal society. Father Rudolphi, who had fought already in World War I, did know from the Torah and from the New Testament, that there were not only earthly courts, but that there would be finally the Last Judgement for all participants in the horrible event, which he experienced at the end of World War II: the murderer would not triumph over the innocent victim, at least not ultimately (Matthew 5: 38-42; 7: 12; 25: 31-46; Luke 10: 25-37; Rudolphi 1949; Dirks 1985; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 37, 40; 1988d: chap. 2; Siebert 1966; 1993; Weitensteiner 2002). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, it can be said in the dynamic spirit of Father Rudolphi, that maybe Christianity has not even started yet (Rudolphi 1949; Kogon 1967; Küng 1994a;

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Badiou 2003; Vattimo/Girard/Zizek 2008; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1966; 1993, 2001; 2002a; 2008b: 55-61; App. E).

chapter twenty-two

The Owl of Minerva After early in the morning on one day in April 1942 in Frankfurt a.M. I had loaded the two heavy suitcases of the old Jewish lady with the Star of David on her black winter coat on my bicycle, I pushed it slowly down toward the Lessing Gymnasium and to its air shelter (Ashkenasy 2003; Siebert 2007e; Schweppenhäuser 1996; Kramer 203; Wiggershaus 1987a; 1987b; Jay 1980: 137-149; 1981; Löwenthal 1989; Smith 1993: 209-229; Byrd 2009). As the old Jewish woman and I walked together side by side, we passed by the soccer field of the Lessing Gymnasium, the Palaestra, on which I had played soccer every week since the Sexta, the first class of the humanistic gymnasium.

Symbol of Great Philosophy We also walked by the stately home of the Director of the Lessing Gymnasium, Dr. Silomon (Ashkenasy 2003; Siebert 2007e). As the old Jewish woman and I approached the gate of the Lessing Gymnasium, and thus also the entrance of the air shelter right besides it, we heard from down below the confused noise of many voices of a large mass of Jewish people from all over Frankfurt. As so many times before, I saw at the gate of the Lessing Gymnasium the relief of the Owl of Minerva, the symbol of great philosophy, which even survived the later American and British bombardments of Frankfurt, and the consequent destruction of the school building and is still there today–in March 2010–and a replica of which I have built in above my fire place in my private library at 630 Piccadilly Road, Kalamazoo, Michigan. Germany’s great philosopher of law and history, Georg W. F. Hegel, who had taught over a century earlier in a humanistic gymnasium in Nuremberg, had stated that the Owl of Minerva began its flight only with the beginning dusk: philosophy could do its work only after a life form had come to its end (Hegel 1986g: 28; App. B, C, D, E, G). Hegel could develop his own dialectical philosophy at the beginning of the 19th century only because at the time Western civilization had begun to decline, and was to be concretely superseded through the American and

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Slavic worlds (Hegel 1986a: 218; 1986l: 107-115, 413, 418, 490-491, 513; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; App. C, D, G). Since Hegel, the decline of Western Civilization had progressed particularly through two world wars and fascism. The relief of the Owl of the Pallas Athena was in a certain sense the symbol and emblem of the very essence and spirit of the humanistic Lessing Gymnasium. Thus, it had specifically been dedicated to the great German liberal dramatist, and critic, and enlightener, Gotthold Ephrahim Lessing, who was deeply rooted in the humanist tradition since Erasmus, and who was the author of the famous Three Ring Story, and who through this story, tried at the time to promote tolerance among the three Abrahamic religions, taking his friend, the Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn for an example, on the basis of the great bourgeois enlightenment and of the human and civil rights it had announced (More 1895; 1901; 1963; Göring 1950: Vol. 17: 16-17, 106; Vol. 9: 221; Hegel 1986a: 21, 29, 611-614; 1986h: 22; 1986k: 279; 1986m: 499, 503; 1986o: 289-280, 491, 503; 1986t: 309, 309, 311, 316; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 22; Solomon 2000: 51-53; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Ashkenasy 2003; Siebert 1965; 1966; 2007e; App. E). Where now had gone this enlightenment, these rights, and this tolerance? As so many times before, I read the inscription above the archway, which connected the school with the house of the Director Dr. Silomon: Non Scholae sed Vitae Discimus. On this morning in April 1942, I was, indeed, to learn much more for life rather than for the school about the slaughter bench of society and history: admittedly, in a very different way from the one intended by the Latin verse of the humanists (Hegel 1986l: 33-55).

The SS Officer When I pushed the luggage of the old Jewish woman on my bicycle to the entrance of the air shelter of the Lessing Gymnasium, and when there I started to unload it, from below a young, good looking, dashing, plucky, very clean SS Officer came running up the shelter staircases (Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Askenasy 2003; Siebert 2007e). He was one of Colonel Eichmann’s men. He carried in his right hand a large folder with names. He was obviously in charge of the collection project, which was going on in the air shelter. The young SS man looked as if he also had once enjoyed a good humanistic education; and as if he had also participated in the German enlightenment; and as if he could maybe also comprehend and interpret the relief of the Owl of the patriarchal virgin-goddess Athena, who had originated from the Head of Zeus, the father of all the god’s on

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Olympus; and as if he could also translate the motto on the arch over the entrance to the Lessing Gymnasium; and as if he maybe could even play with his tender hands, unused to work, Mozart and Beethoven, or Chopin and Mahler; and as if also he may have been once a nice young Protestant or Catholic, and may even have served as an altar boy in a Catholic church, besides being a member of the Hitler Youth (Walker 1970; Siebert 2007e; App. E). Now, in any case, the young SS officer served SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann’s project of a Jew-free Germany and Europe. The young SS officer looked at me and at the old Jewish woman with the yellow Star of David on her black coat, and at my bicycle and the luggage half unloaded. He stood there looking as if he had been hit by lightening. He seemed to be under a spell. He was stunned. He did not trust his eyes. He hesitated. He did not seem to understand and to comprehend what he saw. However, then it dawned on him what was happening, and he asked me with a very loud voice, what I was doing there? Finally, the SS officer began to shout and scream, so that one could hear his voice across the whole schoolyard and through the open windows of the classrooms. In greatest excitement and agitation, the SS officer asked me how a German, Aryan boy like me could possibly carry the suitcases of a Jewish pig: Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Don’t you have any feeling of honor left in your belly? I was somewhat surprised, but I answered the young SS officer, nevertheless, rather quietly, that the old lady did not look like a pig but rather like my perfectly German and Aryan late grandmother, who once had lived in Bockenheim, on Frankfurt’s Westside near the former Rothschild estate. That some Jewish element had entered my family on my mother’s side in the early 18th century, I did not know yet at the time. People only thought sometimes that my mother Elli and her brother Adolf looked Jewish, but nobody could ever prove any Jewish background. It would also not have mattered to the SS man, because according to his racial theory all genetic Jewish influence was supposed to have disappeared in an Aryan family by the seventh generation (Rigg 2002; Siebert 2007e). In any case, my answer did not please the SS officer. He suspected somehow that my grandmother had also been a Jewish pig. Thus, he became even more irritated, and waved the folder with all the Jewish names in the air, and shouted even louder. The SS Officer also found on his list the name of the old Jewish woman, whom I had helped by carrying her suitcases.

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For the young SS officer and his fascist anthropology, the Jews really did belong to another species, in spite of the fact that members of different species cannot procreate with each other, and that the Nürnberg Laws, which forbid intermarriage between Jews and Germans, had precisely thereby proven inversely that they definitely belonged to the same species (Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Askenasy 2003; Djerassi 2008; Siebert 2007e). Long before Hitler, Pharaoh had chosen to believe the improbable excuse of the Egyptian midwives, that they could not kill the Hebrew boys as ordered by him because the Hebrew women were not like the Egyptian women: they were vigorous. Before the midwife could come to them, they had given birth already (Exodus 1: 19-22; Lieber 2001: 320-321/19, 22). According to the Rabbis, the Hebrew word here translated with vigorous meant literally like animals. Already Pharaoh was ready to believe that the Israelites were virtually a different species, less human and less deserving of life than the Egyptians, so that he could proceed with his program of persecution and slaughter. Finally, the Pharaoh involved all the people of Egypt in the slaughter of Hebrew male babies rather than to leave it to the authorities or the army. The Rabbis explained rightly, that persecution could not be successful without the complicity of the community. The young SS man believed to have a whole air shelter full of Jewish animals, whom he was ready to send in box cars to labor and death camps in Eastern Europe, while the whole Frankfurt or German community was completely quiet and did not in any way resist in the name of life (Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1981; 1974). As a matter of fact, I helped the old Jewish woman on her way to the concentration camp and I even thought that I did a good deed: a Samaritan service (Dirks 1985).

The Angel of History As the old Jewish lady was transported with millions of other victims– Jews, Gypsies, communists, Mennonites, Jehovah Witnesses, homosexuals etc.–by young SS men on order of Eichmann, Heidrich, Himmler and Hitler, not to the Jewish utopia of the land flowing with milk and honey, but rather to the dystopia of work and death camps in Eastern Europe, no miracle happened to rescue and redeem them (Exodus 3: 8; Lieber 2001: 328/8; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Askenasy 2003; Djerassi 2008; Siebert 2007e). Paul Klee’s angel on his picture Presentation of the Miracle, which was rooted in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament, and

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which Dora Benjamin gave as a gift to her husband Walter on his twentyseventh birthday, did not appear. There appeared only the Angelus Novus, the Angel of History, who was rooted in the Hebrew Bible; and whom Klee painted in Hitler’s Munich after World War I; and whom Benjamin bought for a 1,000 Marks a year after his creation; and who was commented on by him as well as by Scholem, besides Kafka’s Trial, and much later by Djerassi in his struggle for his Jewish identity in America, which cannot only be a racial or a national one, but must also always be a religious one; and who was willed by Benjamin to Scholem in his testament before his first suicide attempt; and who was remembered by composers throughout the second half of the 20th century into the 21st century (Benjamin 1977: 255; Scholem 1989: 79-81, 123-125, 267; Djerassi 2008: chaps. 2,3,4). Between the two world wars, Klee painted over 50 angels. After Hegel and the bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian enlighteners had long denied the existence of angels, there obviously arose again a great need and longing for angels–formerly messengers from God–in secular antagonistic liberal civil society not only between the two world wars, but even also still afterwards during World War II, and into the 21st century. Klee was not a Jew but a Christian, who painted Jewish pictures of angels who were often connected with Stars of David and Menorahs and at the same time looked as if they came from the Book of Revelation: as if they were eschatological or apocalyptic angels (Revelation 1: 2; 14: 6-13; 18: 1-3; 21; 22; Djerassi 2008: chaps. 3, 4). The book of Revelation itself was a Christian, but at the same time a very Jewish book. For the National Socialists, Klee’s pictures were Jewish and therefore degenerate (Djerassi 2008: chaps. 3, 4). According to Benjamin, who had already committed suicide in Port Bou on September 26,1940, this Angel of History wanted to stay and to awaken the dead, and to put together again what had been shattered, and smashed, and crushed (Benjamin 1977: 255). However, a cold storm blew from Paradise, which got caught in the angel’s wings. This storm was so strong that the angel could no longer close his wings. This storm drove the angel incessantly into the future, to which he turned his back, while the heap of rubble and ruins grew to heaven before him. What civil society called progress was precisely that storm from Paradise into the future, which was not homogeneous and empty time, because in it, every second was the small gate through which the Messiah could enter (Benjamin 1977: 255, 261; Fromm 1976: 202; Adorno 1997j/2: 617-638; App. E). Only two years after I had accompanied the old Jewish woman, who for ever remained nameless for me, to the air shelter of the Lessing Gymnasium, symbol of bourgeois enlightenment, it was bombed out just like Horkheimer’s Institute for

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Social Research at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität by the American Air Force and lay in ruins like 80 percent of the city of Frankfurt a.M. World history seemed indeed to be world judgment from the beginning to the end: the Messianic redemption and rescue! (Exodus 3: 8; Isaiah 62-66; Revelation 21, 22; Lieber 2001: 328/8; Hegel 1986l; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b: 103-146; 1980: 333-334; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985e; Brändle 1984; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Askenasy 2003; Siebert 1965; 1966; 2007a; 2007e; App. G).

Indo-Germanic Tribesmen At the tense moment of the old Jewish woman’s and my encounter with the young SS officer in front of the air shelter of the Lessing Gymnasium in April 1942, Director Dr. Silomon came out of the Director’s house besides the entrance to the Lessing Gymnasium and opposite to the staircase, which led down to the air shelter (Askenasy 2003; Siebert 2007e). Dr. Silomon had written much about the Indo-Germanic tribesmen, and their languages, and their cultures, and their religions and their migrations. From this superior Aryan race of Indo-Germanic tribesmen, Dr. Silomon himself, the SS officer, and I were supposed to have been descended, while the old Jewish woman, whom I had helped by carrying her suitcases, was supposed to be derived from the inferior, parasitic Semitic race. Dr. Silomon with his pressed-together small lips, and his ascetic and aristocratic face, was a kind of intellectual or noble National Socialist, with a great deal of idealism, being always at the verge of ideology as false consciousness masking national and class interests. Now, the SS officer began to scream also at Dr. Silomon in the most disrespectful manner. He wanted to have my name from the Director, and got it. Then the SS officer asked Director Dr. Silomon what kind of German boys he was educating in his school: boys that carried the suitcases of Jews! The SS Officer demanded of director Silomon that I under all circumstances had to be severely punished for my evil deed. Something like me, so the SS officer shouted, did not belong into a German gymnasium and into higher education. The SS man could also have said as once my National-Socialist English teacher had told me in his Swabian dialect and threatened me with: you should become a stone beater and do roadwork, which in his liberal eyes was about the lowest thing a man could possibly do in life. I was after all only a little token proletarian in an otherwise middle or high bourgeois humanistic high school, with the particular function of giving a good conscience to

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the liberal Frankfurt bourgeoisie. Like this English-teacher and most of the students, so also did the SS Officer–contrary to his plebeian comrades in the SA–come from good bourgeois circles, to whom a little proletarian, who spoke the Frankfurt dialect better than high German was not exactly and especially likeable, even if he, or particular because he wanted in addition to learn Latin, and Greek and Hebrew, and maybe also one of the modern, less appreciated living languages, like English.

Aporia of the Race Struggle Under the attack of the SS officer, Dr. Silomon remained silent (Siebert 2007e). He was obviously deeply shaken. His aristocratic face became rather pale. Dr. Silomon looked at the SS officer and then at me somewhat reproachful as if he wanted to say: how could you do such a thing, Siebert? I met Dr. Silomon a last time two years later, in April 1944, in an anti-aircraft position in Mannheim-Käfernthal. He had come to the position in order to teach Indo-Germanic history to us students–who in the meantime had turned into anti-aircraft gunners to defend the German cities against American and British saturation bombing while the German army was fighting atheistic Bolshevism on the Eastern front. When Dr. Silomon arrived in the anti-aircraft battery, American bombers approached Mannheim-Käfernthal. Their pathfinders posited a smoke signal right above our anti-aircraft position and its heavy four 10.5 and 12.5 guns, to knock us out before the real bombardment of the city began. Soon the main squadron of bombers was above us and let its bombs rain on us. Dr. Silomon and I had taken cover and lay together in a small, narrow, and flat earth-bunker, while heavy bombs landed and exploded all around us. Dr. Silomon was even whiter yet in his face than he had been before the SS officer, two years earlier. He was terrified and trembled over his whole body. It is harder to die for older men than for younger ones, because the latter have not yet experienced much. Dr. Silomon looked very old and broken: non-Romanized Indo-Germanic tribesmen were bombing nonRomanized Indo-Germanic tribesmen, as so often before. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and after the European war had turned into a world war, and after the final solution of the Jewish question had begun, Aryan Germany was allied with Asian Japan, and declared war on the Aryan United States. Already in the First World War, Aryan England had been allied with Asian Japan against Aryan Germany. Aryans fought with Asians against Aryans. Nothing fit! The aporia of the global race-struggle had become complete. Dr. Silomon’s racial worldview and geopolitics,

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including the failed heartland theory, were collapsing in a measureless catastrophe. While the bombs were falling I asked the shaken old man: Where is Henry Ford now? His airplanes from Detroit were bombing us. How could the fascists and anti-Semites, Henry Ford and his friend, the radio-priest Father Charles Caughlin from Detroit, or IBM, or the old Bush family, or other American corporations, or Pius XII and the Catholic Church, let this happen? (Ford 1920: Vol. I-IV; Segel 1995: 49-118; Baldwin 2001; Black 2001; Kertzer 2001; Goldhagen 2002; Siebert 2007e). We both, Dr. Silomon and I, survived the American bombardment in our field bunker in Mannheim-Käfernthal, in spite of the fact that our antiaircraft position had been devastated through craters. After this bombardment, Dr. Silomon no longer came to teach us about the indo-Germanic tribesmen. His visits had become too meaningless, and also technically impossible, since the trains from Frankfurt to Mannheim had either been interrupted by bombardments or were continually endangered by deep flying enemy airplanes. We anti-aircraft gunner students continued our hopeless defense of the already destroyed Mannheim and then moved to Kindsbach near Kaiserlautern, in order to interrupt the masses of American and British bombers, which were accustomed to concentrate here before they flew to their targets in the Reich. Sometimes, admittedly, we students took vacations in nearby Heidelberg, which the American Air Force generals continued to spare, because they had studied at its famous University and they remembered their former German and Aryan girlfriends, and the dreams of their youth, and because of certain future administrative plans, as in the case of the I.G. Farben Administration Building in Frankfurt, the later headquarter of the Military Government of the American Occupation Zone of Germany. I lost sight of Dr. Silomon until after the end of the war and my return from the Prisoner of War Camp Allen in Norfolk Virginia, when he asked for support in his de-Nazification process, which I gave him, since he never punished me for having helped the old Jewish woman to carry her suitcase, as the SS officer had demanded.

Christian and Humanist However, the decision whether and how I was to be punished for my socalled crime, of having carried the suitcases of an old Jewish woman to the assembly area in the air shelter of the Lessing Gymnasium in April 1942, did not only lay with the Director Dr. Silomon, who had formally been drafted to the army, but with the acting Deputy Director, Professor Dr. Otto Schuhmann (Askenasy 2003: chaps. 3-9; Siebert 2007e). He was

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a member of the Confessing Church, which stood in opposition against the fascist regime in Germany. He was also a true humanist, rooted in the poetry of Ovid and Horace and in the modern European humanism since Erasmus and Thomas More and Lessing (More 1965; Askenasy 2003: chaps. 3-9; Siebert 1965; 1966; 2007e). He had not been drafted to the army because he was extremely nearsighted. I am allowed to say in honor particularly of Otto Schuhman and the whole faculty of the Lessing Gymnasium, that I was never punished for my so-called evil deed. It seemed to me even, that from this time on I was treated better, in spite of my so-called proletarian origin. I even became the class spokesperson. Otto Schumann simply let the uncomfortable affair with the SS Officer fall under the table. He ignored it. Of course, already not to do anything in such a case, needed great courage at the time in the context of the total fascist regression into utter barbarism, almost unmitigated by right, personal morality, family, civil society, state constitution, not to speak of religion or humanism (Hegel 1986g; Kogon 1995; Siebert 1965; 1966; 1993; 2001; 2002a; Weitensteiner 2002). For years, the SS had advanced to the most powerful position in the Reich: the German state had become in its totality an SS-State. The SS was omni-present and ubiquitous. The young SS officer could reappear again any day, since the transports of Jews from the air shelter of the Lessing Gymnasium to the concentration camps in Eastern Europe continued sporadically. Frankfurt had once been very friendly to the Jewish people. Some of the Jewish families had lived in Frankfurt for centuries and for many generations. Not only the Rothschild’s, but also the Fromm’s and the Adorno’s had felt quite at home in the liberal city before they had to escape into exile.

The Governor Such a punishment, as the young SS officer had planned and demanded for me, would have done great damage to me, if indeed it had been executed, and if particularly the Deputy Director Otto Schuhmann had not sabotaged it, and suspended and cancelled it (Askenasy 2003; Siebert 2007e). I had already a record with the National Socialist Party in Frankfurt and Hessen from an incident that had happened in 1941. The Gauleiter, the fascist Governor of Hessen, had already closed my free position for needy pupils–little token proletarians–at the high bourgeois Lessing Gymnasium because I seemed not to be worthy to receive it. The reason for that was that I had counseled my three years younger brother Karl, who was also a pupil at the Lessing Gymnasium, not to participate in the

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Hitler Youth service in the Ginnheim Red Block on Wednesday afternoon at 3: 00 pm, but rather to study his Latin and do his homework. The Hitler Youth movement, so I explained to my brother, would not last very long after all. He should think of his future. Somebody must have told what I had said to my brother to the Hitler Youth leaders in Ginnheim. In any case, my school support money from the state of Hessen was cancelled. I obviously had an attitude problem, which could not be tolerated by the Hitler Youth or the NSDAP. Thus from now on, my mother had to earn my school money in the shoe factory ICA Schneider in Frankfurt, where she worked as a secretary and typist. The former Jewish owners had fled to London, after their property had been confiscated by the fascist state. Now a state appointed manager administered the factory. After the end of World War II, the shoe factory was restored to the rightful Jewish owners, and my brother worked in it as an electrician, until it was closed down for good in the late 1950s. For the time being, I was indeed very lucky that Dr. Schuhmann did not carry out the order of the SS officer, and practiced brave and dangerous disobedience in a Christian and humanistic spirit (Fromm 1981; Askenasy 2003; Siebert 1965; 1966. 1993; 2001; 2002a; 2007e; Weitensteiner 2002).

The Battle on the Hahnenkamp During and after World War II, I had three more encounters with the SS (Siebert 1993; 2001; 2002a; 2007e). One happened three years later, in March 1945. In the meantime, I had left the German Air Force and had gone through the German Labor Service in Northern Germany, and I had finally joined the Officers School of the Armored Infantry Division in Büdingen, Hessen. Here my 14 year old brother Karl visited me regularly and most lovingly from Frankfurt in the Büdingen infantry barracks–as he had done before at all the airports where I had been stationed with the Air Force–in spite of the continual American air-bombardments of the railroad between Frankfurt and Büdingen and of its military installations themselves, and brought me wonderful cakes baked by my mother. In Büdingen, I went through five months of training for the Eastern Front, where at the time the average life expectancy of a young German infantry lieutenant was about four weeks. During December and January 1944, I was ordered from the barracks in Büdingen to Hitler’s headquarter in a castle in the Taunus Mountains north of Frankfurt, from where he directed the desperate last Ardennes Offensive, which cost the lives of about 150,000 American soldiers. I had to watch Hitler’s railroad car hidden in

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the forest while American planes filled the sky searching for him. Here I saw Hitler for the last time: a very aged man after the 43rd assassination attempt against him by Colonel von Stauffenberg a few months earlier. I also saw high-level officers, coming from the Eastern front in order to give Hitler situation reports, without really doing so under the ban of his magic blue eyes and his absolute authority. Here in the Taunus Mountains, after the defeat of the Ardennes Offensive by General Patton in January 1945, Hitler refused to surrender and even threatened suicide. Afterwards, Hitler traveled back in his railroad car through the bombed out city of Frankfurt to the likewise bombed out city of Berlin and to his bunker, and to the final four months of his regime. In February 1945, a good friend of my family, Dr. Aloys Bilz, a journalist, contacted my General, who belonged with him to the same Catholic Student Organization, and asked him to take good care of me. The General did indeed call me into his office and we exchanged some friendly words. While the General was not really able to do anything for me immediately, he did, nevertheless, rescue the city of Büdingen in March by moving his troops east passing by Hanau to Alzenau, where he became helpful to me in a very precarious situation. Toward the end of March 1945, I marched with my battalion from Büdingen against General Patton and his tank army, which on March 28, 1945 had crossed the Main River at Krotzenburg near Alzenau and at Horstein (Trevor-Roper 1979: 314-315, 324-325; Siebert 1993; 2001; 2002a; 2007e). After a long night march from Büdingen, our battalion got involved with Patton’s army near Alzenau. By means of a counterattack, the battalion was able to drive back Patton’s forces, who had been moving south of Hanau out of the Kahlwies-Alzenau bridgehead, and to take back Alzenau. Patton left behind his hospital, in which wounded American soldiers and German prisoners had been treated equally in terms of medicine and doctors according to the Geneva conventions, and were now treated equally after the German take over, except that now the American soldiers were the prisoners and the German soldiers were free, both nevertheless still all being wounded. In the following fierce battle on the Hahnenkamp Mountain, in which eighty of Patton’s tanks plus infantry and fighter planes were participating, most of my company was annihilated. On the evening after the battle, I found myself with two comrades in the forest on top of the Hahnenkamp Mountain, where tanks could not penetrate and reach us. My two comrades had been severely wounded and asked for a priest, in order to receive the last Sacrament. However, no army chaplains were present and available any longer. Indeed, usually not only the German army, but even the SS had chaplains up to the very end of the war. Since

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the American army usually stopped fighting at five o’clock in the evening, I thought it safe to look for a priest in the next village down at the back of the Hahnenkamp Mountain. I left my rifle behind with the wounded men and had only a revolver and two hand grenades with me. I indeed found a Catholic pastor in the small church of the next village at the foot of the Hahnenkamp and lead him back to the dying men. He gave them the last rites. They died during the night. They were later on buried together with many other comrades on the cemetery of Alzenau, where they lay for over fifty years. I visited their graves almost every year, throughout the next half century.

Court Martial on Wheels In the meantime, it had become dark on the Hahnenkamp Mountain (Siebert 1993; 2001; 2002a; 2007e). Thus, I wanted to bring the old and rather fragile and very shortsighted Pastor back to his parish house through the forest. I was afraid that–left alone–he could fall over the roots, or rocks of the forest. When we crossed the country road at the foot of the Hahnenkamp, there approached us in the moonlight a motor cycle with a hanger, on which were seated three SS men: a kind of court martial on wheels, which drove behind the rather shaky front, in order to catch deserters, and thus to stabilize it. If the soldiers would move forward against the enemy, they had a chance that not every bullet would hit its target, and thus to survive. If they would move backwards in order to escape, the SS would make sure that they would be dead for certain. As a matter of fact, I saw a few corpses of very young and very old men hanging from some trees already along the country road in the moonlight. The SS men, all three being officers, stopped and asked me, where my rifle was? When they did not see it, they thought I was a deserter, and they began the paper work for the court martial procedure against desertion, which could only end with the death penalty. The priest had quietly disappeared into the forest on the other side of the road. I was in a rather desperate situation. However, at this moment, providentially enough, my General from Büdingen stepped out of the dark forest with his entourage. Now he had his opportunity to keep his promise, which he had made a month earlier to my uncle Aloys Bilz, the journalist, to take good care of me, and so he did. He saw the danger of the situation. By the time–March 1945–the SS had long become more powerful than the army. It took great courage for an army officer to resist SS men even lower in rank. Thus, the General came over and pulled my big steal helmet down into my rather thin and small face,

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and then laughed, and shouted humorously in his southern dialect that I was not worth a rope or a bullet, and that we did not have enough bullets left anyway, and that he had lost enough men already during the day, as a matter of fact almost my whole company. It was the General’s presence of mind and brave humor, which rescued me from the SS on March 28, 1945, which could have been my last day. The SS stopped the court martial procedure and drove on along the country road to look for their next victim. I returned to whatever was left of the battalion. I never broke my oath or deserted, because I never knew if and when the German Government or any other government had become so criminal that it lost its national and international recognition and legitimation and I thus was free from all my obligations. Hitler had not only become German Chancellor legitimately, but the emergency laws, which had been given to him by the Catholic Center Party, had made him even a legitimate dictator. I had given my last speech on Hitler in the barracks of Büdingen in January 1945, at the occasion of my officer’s exam.

The Ambush In the late afternoon of the day after the battle on the Hahnenkamp, a Colonel of the Büdingen battalion gathered the rest of his young officers in an inn in the Lohr Valley, in order to celebrate the innkeeper’s daughter’s 18th birthday (Siebert 1993; 2001; 2002a; 2007e). As the Colonel offered a toast of champagne to the young lady, a detachment of Patton’s army, consisting of tanks and infantry, came up the road through the Lohr area and began shooting through the windows of the inn. Very quietly the Colonel put down his glass and told the officers that he wanted to show the Americans German strategy a last time. He ordered his young officers to take the rest of the battalion, about 200 men, around the mountain up the road to the next village, and to put them on top of the hill along the road, and wait for the American detachment, and ambush it. The colonel left behind a few men in bunkers close to the inn in order to cover the back of the battalion. The American detachment passed by the inn, destroyed the bunkers behind it with the men in them with flame throwers, and moved up the road toward the next village, unaware of the German battalion waiting for them. When Patton’s detachment came close to the village, with screaming children and women and animals, the Colonel ordered to open fire on the tanks and the accompanying infantry, mostly African-American soldiers. It was a short barrage of about three minutes. The Colonel knew–and that was his last tricky German strategy–that the

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tanks could not lift their barrels high enough to reach his men on top of the hill and behind it. There were no German casualties. But the rest of the battalion dissolved afterwards into the forests. I never saw the Colonel or most of the men again. Not only the SS but also the army was involved in most cruel and most meaningless operations. The SS spirit had penetrated not only the military, but also civil society, the state, the family, the whole nation, the culture, including art, religion, and philosophy, and science: SS Colonel Werner von Braun had produced with slave labor from concentration camps the vengeance rockets, which destroyed parts of London almost to the end of the war, and would decades later direct the American program, which would take the first men to the moon, and maybe would have promoted the Mars program further than it is now, if in Washington he had been allowed to do so.

Meaninglessness Over a decade after the fierce battle on the Hahnenkamp Mountain and the ambush, I visited Alzenau with my American wife Margie, and we also came to the inn in the Lohr valley, where the Colonel from Büdingen had made his last strategic decision (Siebert 1993; 2001; 2002a; 2007e). The old innkeeper did not recognize me anymore, being out of uniform. Yet, I asked the old innkeeper if he could still remember what had happened in late March 1945, on the 18th birthday of his daughter. He did. He told us that in the night before his daughter’s birthday young German officers had been stationed in his inn, and that they had been so drunk, that they shot all his black cows grazing in the meadows behind the house in the moonshine because they thought they were enemy tanks. The innkeeper also remembered that in the late afternoon of his daughter’s birthday, an hour after the Colonel and his men had left his inn, there occurred a horrible noise of rifle and machine gun fire up the Lohr Valley road, near the next village. It lasted maybe three minutes. After the short battle, body bags were brought down the Lohr Valley to the yard of his inn. He counted about 90 body bags. Ninety young American soldiers had lost their lives on this day in the Lohr area. The battle had had no strategic or even only tactical value whatsoever. Patton’s army had already moved on toward Würzburg, and had already taken the city after a last horrible air bombardment. Patton’s infantry detachment, whose task it had been to clear the unimportant Lohr Valley of German soldiers, had been destroyed just in order to show off once more German strategy and tactics. In any case, the human sacrifice was out of proportion to the purpose to be achieved.

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Events like this convinced me forever of the meaninglessness of the slaughterhouse of history in general, and of war in particular (Matthew 5-17; Luke 6; Hegel 1986l: 19-55; Horkheimer 1967b: 259-260; Hörisch 2003). Experiences of this kind have been the most powerful sources of Western skepticism, doubt, despair, materialism, naturalism, atheism and nihilism, as well as of the transition from authoritarian theism to a humanistic post-theism in terms of the City of Being, after the City of God of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and after the City of Progress of Modernity in the younger generations after World War I and II (Fromm 1973; 1976; Tillich 1957: 5-10, 13, 16, 25, 29, 30, 51; 1963: 19, 199, 258; 1972; Küng 1991b: Part Three; 1994a: C; 1994b; 2004: D, E).

The Catholic Herald On the same day, March 28, 1945, when I was rescued from the SS court martial on wheels by my General after the battle on the Hahnenkamp, Dr. Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s baptized Catholic Propaganda Minister in Berlin still had hope for Germany and National Socialism, in spite of the fact that he knew very well that there was–what he called for the first time–the Iron Curtain of Bolshevism going down in Europe (Trevor-Roper 1979: 314315, 324-325, 318; Adorno 2003b; 2003d: 213; Siebert 2007e). What gave Goebbels hope at this late moment one month before the end of the war and Hitler’s and his own suicide, was that he had heard that the Catholic Press in Britain, mainly the Catholic Herald, was now using fairly strong language against Bolshevism: as Father Charles Coughlin, friend of Henry Ford and Joseph Goebbels, in Detroit had done for many years, and other clerico-fascist preachers in other parts of the United States as well (Ward 1933; Baldwin 2001: chap. 19; Prinkley 1982; Holdstein 2006: 61-150; Trevor-Roper 1979: 314-315, 324-325, 318; Adorno 2003b; 2003d: 213; Siebert 2007e). After all, Catholicism, fascism, and liberalism had–in spite of all their differences and contradictions–in common an intense hostility against socialism, communism, and Bolshevism! According to Goebbels, the Catholic Herald had in general supported the National Socialist theories. The paper said, as late as March 28, 1945, that National Socialism was better and more tolerable than Bolshevism, and, had it not been for the war, would have gotten over its teething troubles. In any case, National Socialism had to be regarded as the lesser of two evils. Goebbels, who had done his Ph.D. with the financial support of the Catholic Church, and who had paid his student loans back, when he was already Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, saw in these statements the guiding hand of the Vatican:

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of Pius XII (Goldhagen 2002; Kertzer 2001; Siebert 1993; Weitensteiner 2002). Later on, Winston Churchill would repeat Goebbels’s word of the Iron Curtain of Bolshevism in a famous speech in the United States. He also murmured once that he had slaughtered the wrong pig: Hitler instead of Stalin. Now the always precarious alliance between Bolshevism and Capitalism was broken, but too late for the low bourgeois Hitler and Goebbels, and their National Socialism, which were squashed between the extremes of upper bourgeois capitalism and working class bolshevism. For me, the war ended two days later, on March 30, 1945, when I–after having lost almost all of my comrades in the recent struggles, and particularly in the Battle on and around the Hahnenkamp Mountain–surrendered to officers of General Patton’s army and of a Canadian detachment at the foot of the mountain, and was sent via Worms, Marseille and Oran to a prisoner of war camp in Norfolk, Virginia: Camp Allen. Here I was treated very well for almost a year, in strictest conformity to the Geneva Convention of 1929.

Concentration Camp for SS Men My third encounter with the SS took place almost one year later (Siebert 1993; 2007e; Weitensteiner 2002). After my arrival in Camp Allen in May 1945, I had been categorized by Jewish secret service men, who knew Frankfurt and German better than I did, as anti-Nazi, because of my leading activities in the Catholic Youth Movement, and had received an education in democracy by Harvard professors in political science, sociology, and economics. The professors followed a re-education plan for German prisoners of war and for Germany in general, which had been worked out in Washington D.C. by members of Horkheimer’s International Institute for Social Research, in New York, the later Frankfurt School, and of the New School, which is today the New School University, in cooperation with Mrs. Roosevelt. At the end of the educational process, in February 1946, I was supposed to be sent back to Germany, in order to help democratize it. However, my liberty ship, full of anti-Nazis, was misdirected by the U.S. State Department to Le Havre, France, while ships full of old Nazis and even war criminals went home to Hamburg, Germany. When to our great surprise we landed in Le Havre, we were transported by trucks to Bolbek: to what can be fairly called an American concentration camp for SS men. When we entered the camp, an American Colonel, who played with his wonderful German shepherd dog, received us. When we told the Colonel, that we were all anti-Nazis and were supposed to go home to Germany,

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and were obviously in the wrong place, he told us that all Germans now pretended to be anti-Nazis. He distributed our sea bags, which were full of cigarettes and chocolate to be used on the black market in Frankfurt– one must eat, before one can teach or have democracy–to the assistants, who helped him to run the camp. When I moved into my tent, I noticed that I was surrounded by starving young SS men. At that early time the American army did not yet differentiate between the SS as an elite troop, like the later Green Berets or Seals, and the SS as administrators of concentration camps (Kogon 1995). The SS men, whom I saw around me, were neither an elite troop nor concentration camp managers or guards. They were very young SS men, who had been drafted in the last months of the war. They looked miserable with their starved faces and their protruding stomachs. When I went into my tent, it was full of water. Two dead SS men lay there. Their comrades had not told the Colonel of the dead men yet, because they wanted to get their small rations for a few days longer. Next day, French doctors came into the Bolbek camp and rejoiced finding us so well fed. They registered us for work either in coal mines in France, or for cleaning up minefields in the Normandy, for which the maps had gotten lost. Both activities were against the Geneva Convention. So was the whole camp. After three weeks, the State Department recognized its error, and we anti-Nazis were liberated from the SS Camp, and were sent with our sea bags, empty now except for some underwear, to an American prisoner of war camp in Heilbronn, from where we were released to go home to Frankfurt or elsewhere, in order to start the democratization process. Heilbronn had been the hometown of my children’s great, great grandparents, Ludwig and Charlotte Krauss, who in the 1860s had left for Hamburg and Hobogen, in order to find like Johannes and Margaret Kraus, and the five brothers of my grandfather Joseph Siebert, peace, freedom, and prosperity in America (Kraus 1880; Krauss 1880; Siebert 1993; 2001; 2002a). Now liberal America had come back to Germany and Europe, in order to liberate them from counter-revolutionary fascism and later on also from revolutionary communism against which Catholicism, liberalism and fascism had fought from the start and in the first place!

From Decisionism to Normativism The day after my release from the Heilbronn American prisoner of war camp, I went right away into the I.G. Farben Building, now the headquarter of the American military government for the American occupation zone of Germany, and complained bitterly about the violation of the Geneva

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Convention in the prisoner of war camp in Bolbek: normativism, i.e. the rule of law, and not decisionism, even for SS men, particularly for SS men, was the point of my complaint (Adorno 2003d: 210-213; 327/216; Schmitt 1963; Groh 1998; Mehring 1992; Meier 1994; Horkheimer 1974a: chaps. 6, 7, 9; 1974b). Decisionism, not so much a la Jean Paul Sartre and existentialism, but rather a la Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s jurist and political theologian, father of neo-conservativism as well as of deconstructionism, was based on the abstractness of the category of decision (Adorno 2003: 210-213; 327/216; Schmitt 1963; Groh 1998; Mehring 1992; Meier 1994; Horkheimer 1974a: chaps.6, 7, 9; Habermas 1985a). However, so Adorno stated rightly, into every decision moments of objectivity enter. It is impossible to base the whole philosophy on decision as a minimum. Decisionism, that of Sartre or of Schmitt, is the function of a particular social-political situation. Decisionism results from economical, or political, or military emergency situations, which seem to permit, or even make necessary the partial abolishment of normativism: of the constitution, of national and international law, of the Geneva Convention, of the U.N. Charter, etc. The fascist decisionism reached its climax in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, where SS men like Dr, Mengele daily changed the rules arbitrarily in response to real or imagined emergencies, contingencies, or exigencies until it was stopped by the arrival of the liberating Russian troops (Kogon 1995; Adorno 2003b: 213; 327/216). Such decisionism always unleashes violent needs, interests, and passions, and thus always leads to disaster (Hegel 1986l: 33-55, 55-74; Kogon 1995; Adorno 2003b; 2003d: 213; 327/216). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, only normativism, religious or secular or both, will ultimately conquer the SS men of this world and their capacity to violate the Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and all other religious and humanistic ethical codes through daily stealing, murdering, and lying (Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1967c; 1968; 1972; 1972a; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; Johach/Meyer 2000; Habermas 1976; 1983; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 1992b; Siebert 2004b; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007d; 2007e; 2008a: 180-210; 2008b: 55-61; 2008c: 61-65). Fascist decisionism cannot be overcome by liberal decisionism, but it can only be newly provoked and produced by it. In order to be successful, such religious or humanistic normativism must, of course, harness the natural needs, passions and interests of the masses of the people, without which nothing happens in this world (Hegel 1986l: 33-55). Normativism is the shibboleth by which the true lovers of nations and humanity can be differentiated from their enemies and destroyers (Hegel 1986g:

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360-381, 465-489, 490-514; 1986l: 33-55, 55-74). There is no democracy without normativism. In February 1946 in Frankfurt, I was convinced that democracy presupposed the transition from fascist as well as liberal decisionism to normativism: a constitutional patriotism (Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1967: 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1976; Johach/Meyer 2000; Habermas 1976; 1983; 1991a; 1991b; 1991c; 1992a; 1992b; 1995; Siebert 2001; 2002; 2004b; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007d; 2007e; 2008a). In the light of normativism every liberal, or fascist, or socialist nationalism reveals its untruth: and thus its potential for catastrophe. I do not know if my complaint at the military government in the I.G. Farben Building was effective, and if it changed the situation in the Bolbek camp from decisionism to normativism in 1946. There was no follow up. Yet, one thing is sure, that today–March 2010–Carl Schmitt’s influence is greater than ever before and his form of decisionism prevails stronger in academic theory as well as in domestic and international political praxis in America as well as in Europe after the victorious neoliberal counter-revolution of 1989, and in the context of the emergency of international terrorism, and religious and humanistic normativism suffers one defeat after the other to the detriment of democracy. In the view of dialectical religiology, this fateful trend is to be turned around if the global alternative Future I–the totally administered human anthill society–and global alternative Future II–the completely militarized society continually engaged in intra-specific slaughter to the possible extreme of the self-liquidation of the human species through ABC weapons and/ or environmental destruction, are to be avoided, and global alternative Future III–a truly human shalom-society is at least to be approached (Psalm 22; 91; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1981; 1992: 203-212; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Flechtheim 1971; App. G). On May 26, 2008, Memorial Day in America, a Jihadist on a motorcycle blew up himself at a checkpoint in Baghdad and killed 6 people in order to prove, as so many other terrorists have in recent weeks, that the surge of the American troops does not work. Memorial Day gives Americans pause to reflect in anamnestic solidarity with all the victims of recent wars on the three global alternative Futures, and on the fact that the lex talionis, terror and counter-terror, is no solution to the problem of international terrorism, but leads only to a dialectical escalation in waves, which can last for decades and even centuries in so far as whole civilizations are involved, and finally to global alternative Futures I and II, and excludes any possibility of the realization of global alternative Future III. Memorial Day could and should also motivate the anamnestic solidarity

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with all the more recent genocide victims: e.g. the ten thousands of Tutsis, who have been slaughtered in Rwanda, for which not only the immediate murderers were responsible and guilty, but also the Canadian Lieutenant General, Romeo Dallaire, the force commander of the UN Assistance Mission to Rwanda from 1993-1994, who shook hands with the Devil, and thus contributed to the failure of humanity in Rwanda, but also, and even more so, the former Belgium colonial power, and in connection with it the Catholic Church, a well as the UN Security Council (Dallair 2005).

Anti-Communism The last time I met SS men, was in Baltimore, Maryland, long after the war, in 1963 (Siebert 1966; 1994b; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chap. 6; 2005a; 2007a: 99-113). At the time, I taught economics and theology at St. Agnes College and Loyola College. Shortly after the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Texas, two men came to my house near St. Agnes College. They introduced themselves to me, at the time still a German citizen, as former members of the SS, who had come via Argentina, a hotbed of international fascism, to the United States and were now working in the building trade in Baltimore. They remembered the good old times, when the SS was in charge in Germany. They denied the Holocaust. I had not told my American-born wife Margaret, that the visitors once had been SS men. Yet Margie, a most hospitable woman, who had gone through a complete Catholic education in Washington D.C. from the first grade to the university, and was a wonderful piano and organ player, felt very uncomfortable with the two men. There was an atmosphere of predator-animality around them, as the two men complained bitterly that they had to work with their hands building houses in Baltimore, and that their talents were not appreciated in America, and that as former SS men they could find more adequate employment in the French Foreign Legion, or in the secret service organizations or militias of fascist governments in Central and Latin America, side by side with the graduates of the School of the Americas, and that in this capacity they could do what they had always been best at: killing communists! Of course, killing communists had started already in New York in the 1880s, and communist hunting had never stopped since. It had just reached another climax in the recent past, in the McCarthyism of the 1950s. Hitler had incarcerated, tortured, and killed more communists in Germany, and Western and Eastern Europe than anybody else. The communists’ main crime was to have challenged the right of the owner to keep the surplus value he appropriated from collective labor. The

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communists violated one of the closure values of American culture: the private appropriation and accumulation of collective surplus value profit from other peoples’ work. Catholics, fascists and liberals shared this anticommunism. Because of this anti-communism, the two SS men had come to liberal America in the first place. Now they were disappointed. There was in those former SS men, as in the whole fascist movement, much animal-vitality and little spirituality. Whatever spirituality there was, it was completely in the service of this predator-vitality: blood and soil, racism and nationalism. Margie and I and our six children at the time were very happy, when the two former SS men were out of our peaceful and democratic Baltimore home once and for all. Indeed, they never returned.

Name While in April 1942, the young SS officer screamed, bellowed, and roared around about the Jewish pig and the bad humanistic education at the entrance to the air shelter of the Lessing Gymnasium in Frankfurt, the old Jewish lady in the black coat with the yellow Star of David on its left side had with my help taken off her suitcases completely from my bicycle, and slowly and quietly had stepped down with her heavy luggage the same staircase, on which he had come up (Ashkenasy 1993; Siebert 2007e). My encounter with the old woman had been short. I would never see her again. We had never really introduced ourselves to each other. I never found out her name. While the old Jewish lady remained forever nameless for me, also she never knew my name. We remained nameless for each other. Only the SS officer knew our names. Her name may have been one of the many Jewish names in Frankfurt: Sarah Rosenblut, or Eva Rothschild, or Rebekka Goldstein, or Ruth Kohlenbach, or Judith Rosenzweig, or Esther Rosenstock, or Erna Kirchheimer, or Rachel Fromm, or Dora Baum, etc. (Djerassi 2008: chaps. 2, 4). Of course, the SS officer knew the name of the old Jewish woman, since he had her name with hundreds of others on his list in his folder in his right hand. Hopefully, Yahweh knew our names and remembered us! Hopefully, the Jewish people would never forget her name and would remember her. The Rabbis had taught that Divine Providence gave to the Jewish people those phenomenal great men like Moses and David, in whom the whole nation and its history reached its climax once and for all (II Samuel 7: 12-17; Hertz 5716-1956: 458/16; Hegel 1986l: 33-55, 55-74; 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991b). David had been the most luminous figure and the most gifted personage in Israelite history. He was surpassed in ethical greatness and general historical importance

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only by Moses, the man of God. Yet, so I asked myself already then and up to now, March 2010, where were all the Christians and all the humanists, and most of all where was God’s all-loving and all-powerful Providence in April 1942, and where were the great men Moses and David here in the distress of the old Jewish woman with the Star of David on her black coat, in her loneliness and abandonment, and of all the other Jewish people down in the dark basement of the Lessing Gymnasium, in this whole landscape of silent screams: the horrible drama of the theodicy question? (Leibniz 1996: Vol. I, II; Hegel 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 455; Metz 1995; Oelmüller 1990; Gutierrez 1988)? Humanity and God would be on trial!

Golgotha Whatever her name may have been, together with many other human beings down in the air shelter of the Lessing Gymnasium, the old Jewish lady was transported on the Deutsche Reichsbahn to one of the concentration camps somewhere in Eastern Europe, which by the time–April 1942–slowly transformed themselves from work camps, which delivered cheap labor for German agriculture and industry, into death camps: first for those who could not yet work and produce surplus value, e.g. the children and their mothers, and then for those who could no longer work and produce surplus labor, the old people (Kogon 1995; Ashkenasy 1993; Siebert 2007e). The concentration camps shared with the capitalist society, to which they belonged, its highest value: the surplus value. In the concentration camps the metaphysics of capitalism reached its most inhuman and anti-human and most deadly extreme (Hinkelammert 1985; Kogon 1995; Ashkenasy 1993; Siebert 2007e). The value of a person was measured by the surplus labor, which he or she could produce. One cannot speak about fascism, without speaking about capitalism. When I met the old Jewish woman, who could certainly not work any longer, she had already been administratively sentenced to death for no crime of her own whatsoever. She was obviously not particularly rich. She had certainly not belonged to the Jewish high finance, e.g. to the Frankfurt Rothschild family, whom Hitler had blamed for World War I. Like Simon of Cyrene gave support by carrying the cross of the innocent Jew Jesus of Nazareth on his way to Golgotha, or–as the Romans, who would torture, crucify, and kill him, called it, to Calvary or to the place of the skull–so I helped now, only more voluntarily than he had done, and against the will of the fascist authorities, whose name and symbol came from the Roman symbol of

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justice: the fasces, the bundle of sticks with an ax in the middle, the innocent old Jewish woman to carry her heavy suitcases on her way to the concentration camp, and very probably also to her execution through Zyklon B from the I.G. Farben Chemical Industry, the administration building of which stood only five minutes away from the air shelter of the Lessing Gymnasium from which she was in the process of being shipped to one of the camps (Matthew 27, 32-33; Hegel 1986l: 19-55, esp. 33; 1986q: 268299). On the slaughter bench and sacrificial altar of world history, even the best intentions and deeds can connect themselves with the most terrible and horrible consequences.

Ultimate Purpose? As soon as the whole scope of the Jewish tragedy came into the open with the end of World War II in May 1945, there stuck in my throat the question, which I could express and formulate only much later: for which ultimate purpose were this old Jewish lady, and all these people in the air shelter of the Lessing Gymnasium, and millions more like them sacrificed on the broad and bloody altar of world history (Leibniz 1996: Vol. I, II; Hegel 1986l: 28, 33-74, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 455; Horkheimer 1974a: chap. 6; Adorno 2003d: 529-531, 535-539; Kogon 1995; Metz 1995; Oelmüller 1990; Gutierrez 1988; Ashkenasy 1993; Siebert 2007e)? Was there a Providence, a Divine World Government, a Plan, an Ultimate Purpose, a Law, a Supreme Judge, a Judgment Day, as the Torah taught, and the New Testament, and the Holy Qu’ran, or not (Hegel 1986q: 5096, 185-346, 347-536)? Would world history be world judgment? Would the murderers always triumph over their innocent victims? Was there any meaning in all this? Would the fascist nihilism of the young SS officer and of all his comrades prevail forever in one form or the other? Would they have the last word in history? It dawned on me, what later on I learned to call: the theodicy problem. Could God be justified before the old Jewish woman with her suitcases, and with her Star of David, and before the suffering and death, which was ahead of her and of all those gathered in the air shelter of the Lessing Gymnasium? There has been no adequate theoretical answer then, in April 1942, and there is none now, 68 years later in any of the great world religions, or world philosophies since Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, or Schopenhauer not to speak of the natural or social sciences: there is no theoretical consolation (Horkheimer 1974a: chap. 6; Adorno 2003b; 2003d: 529-531, 535-539; Habermas 1973; 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 1988a: 60, 278-279; 1988b; Habermas/Luhmann 1971; Borradori

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2003; Kogon 1995; Metz 1995; Oelmüller 1990; Gutierrez 1988; Küng 1991b: 726-730; Ashkenasy 1993; Siebert 2007e). There have been six traditional Jewish theodicy answers: 1) the talion-theodicy, 2) the instrument-theodicy, 3) the freedom-theodicy of the Torah, 4) the test-theodicy of the book Job, 5) the learning theodicy, and 6) the apocalyptic-eschatological theodicy of the Jewish prophets (Exodus 3: 20; Isaiah 11: 60-66; Lieber 2001: 332: 20; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991b).

All six Jewish theodicies have been taken over by Christians and Muslims (Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004). Following the Torah, the New Testament, and the Holy Qur’an, Hegel’s theodicy combined for a last time the six Jewish, Christian and Islamic theodicies as it instrumentalized the evil and suffering in the direction of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic eschatology: the ultimate mystical reunion of God and his world (Hosea 2: 1-22; Hertz, 5716-1956: 580-581; Revelation 20-22; Blakney 1941; Hegel 1986c: 68-77, 545-574, 575-592; 1986e: 48-53, 91-92; 1986g: 493-494; 1986l: 33; 1986q: 273-274: Horkheimer 1972: chap. 3; 1987k: 289328; 1985l: 329-341; 1988a: 19-364; 1995o: 9-79; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d; Recer 2003: 1-2; Habermas 1971: 172-227; 1981c: chap. 15; 1982: 127-143; Metz 1995; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Kuschel, 1990; Oelmüller 1990; Schmidt-Biggemann 1988; Peters/Urban 1999; Peters 1998; Fackenheim 1967; Scholem 1967; 1970; 1973; Bentley 1961; Moltmann 1996; App. G). The world would no longer be Godless and God would no longer be world-less, and all evil and suffering–the slaughter bench of nature and history–would be conquered ultimately. The world would no longer be abandoned and God would no longer be lonely. Absolute knowledge, as the self-knowledge of the Absolute in the subjective knowledge of the individuals and in the objective knowledge of the nations would be established: God would know himself in his world, and the world would know itself in God. God would be at home with himself in his world and the world would be at home with itself in God. The realm of Divine and human freedom would be realized. In the face of the increased horror of the historical slaughter bench of the 20th and 21st centuries, the critical theorists of society could not do otherwise than to determinately negate Hegel’s theodicy, and the Jewish, Christian and Islamic theodicies concretely superseded in it (Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 7, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 30,

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31, 32; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 35, 36, 37, 40). However in the critical theorists’ longing, which breaks through the Mosaic and Kantian prohibitions into the dimension of the wholly Other than the cruelty and terror of nature and history, is contained the possibility of a practical and maybe even a theoretical theodicy solution and the beginning of consolation. The critical theorist of religion tries to express and practice this theistic or post-theistic yearning for the totally Other through possible indications and ciphers like light, adventure, energy, temptation, redemption, peace, immortality, love, indignation, shock, freedom, work, birth, mae on, principle of hope, X-experience, heaven, eternity, beauty, etc., particularly with the help of Bloch, Benjamin and Adorno, Horkheimer and Fromm (Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985a; 1985b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; 1996; Adorno 1997u; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988a; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1966a; 1966b; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1976; 1992; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1970; Funk 1995; Funk/Joach/Meyer 2000).

God’s Silence According to the Jewish philosopher of religion, Hans Jonas, God was silent in Auschwitz (Jonas 1984). Jonas asked whether God held back only his power, which he possessed in an unappreciated form, but which he used only in an abbreviated form, for the sake of the creation’s own right. Jonas asked why God did not interfere in Auschwitz? For Jonas, in the case of the truly and completely one-sided, horrible deeds, that among his likenesses and images in the creation the ones do to the innocent others, one may expect, that the good God would suspend and break his own rule of even the most extreme holding back of his power, and would interfere with a rescuing miracle. However, Jonas knew only too well that no rescuing miracle happened in Auschwitz. The miracles that happened came from human beings alone: the deeds of those individual, often unknown just people among the nations, who themselves did not shy away from the ultimate sacrifice, even when there was no other solution in Auschwitz, shared the fate of Israel. However, not only the Pope, but God also was silent (Jonas 1984; Kertzer 2001; Krieg 2004; Kogon 1995; Goldhagen 2002). The critical theorist of religion practices throughout the anamnestic solidarity with those unknown just people among the nations, who themselves did not shy away from the ultimate sacrifice, and who gave their life, and had to give it, and thus shared the fate of Israel: like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or Father Delp, or Sophie Scholl and her brother and her friend, etc. (Jonas 1984; Baudis 1979; Stone/Weaver 1998). The dialec-

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tical religiologist is, of course, aware that outstanding thinkers as well as common people felt the silence and even the death of God long before the Shoa in the atomistic liberal capitalistic society of the 19th century, and particularly therefore opposed the injustice post-theistically not only with the voice of anamnestic solidarity with the hopeless victims of society, and history, and nature, but also, and particularly so with the longing for the totally demythologized God of the Abrahamic religions, or for the God above the God of theism, or for the wholly Other than the moral catastrophes of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries (Hegel 1986q: 287-292, 333-344; Kaufmann 1968: 95-96; Jonas 1984; Kraus 1980; Krauss 1980; Tillich 1972: 186-190; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Vahanian 1967; Küng 1990a; 1990b; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Siebert 2001; 2002a). Most recently, at the beginning of May 2008, a cyclone killed 100,000 people in Myanmar. Afterwards the military Junta of the country prevented international emergency aid to reach one and a half million starving people. Around the same time an earthquake killed 50,000 people in China and later 200,000 people in Haiti and 400 people in Chile. At the same time there is no end to the killing in Afghanistan and Iraq. Each of those theodicy events elicits and intensifies always anew the yearning for what is wholly Other.

The Dark Night of the Soul The contemporary Jewish commentator Zornberg was prompted to consider the 20 years of Jacob’s service at Laban’s house, in terms of the Christian mystic John of the Cross, as a dark night of the soul: Jacob’s years spent in struggling with the dark forces represented by Laban’s treachery and in confronting his own attraction to deceit (Genesis 28: 10-22; Lieber 2001: 166-168; App. E). When the Jewish Sages attributed to Jacob the institution of the evening prayer, they may be crediting him as the first person able to find God in the midst of darkness. The Rabbis interpret mystically Jacob’s dream of the stairway to the sky, on which angels of God were going up and down, as saying that people ascend toward God one step at a time, making one small change in their lives, and stabilizing it, before they take another step. Sometimes people slip and miss a step, falling back, but they recover and keep climbing. Most people do not practice the Kierkegaardian leap toward God in one great burst of enthusiasm. Mordecai Kaplan learned from the angels of God going up and down on the stairway, that one set of angels was leaving Jacob, and a different set would accompany him outside the land of Canaan on his way to Haran. In Kaplan’s view, Jews have different concerns and priorities outside their land than

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they do when living in it. People need different angels to guide them. For Jacob the staircase to heaven was the gateway to heaven. It was the place, where the angels ascended to and descended from. The notion that such gateways existed was widely spread at the time. One of the titles of the high priest of Thebes in Egypt was the Opener of the Gates of Heavens. The name of the city of Babylon was interpreted by the Semites as derived from bab-ilim: gate of the god. According to the Rabbis, as Jacob was not aware of the presence of God at Luz or Bethel, so many times people found themselves in the presence of God, not only in synagogue sanctuaries, but also in crucial moments of their lives, or in the midst of natural beauty, and remain unaware of it. In the Rabbis view, people tend to speak casually of coming into God’s presence. Jacob’s response of being shaken in the presence of God at Luz or Bethel reminded the Rabbis that for people to truly encounter God in their lives was a soul-shattering experience. People were shaken to the core of their souls. They were never the same persons afterward. Jacob’s encounter at Luz or Bethel changed him from a frightened young man to a man prepared to take responsibility for his life. Although, according to the Rabbis, Jewish prayer was predominantly about thanking and praising God for what the believers had, Judaism was not so other-worldly or idealistic as to be embarrassed by prayers for material sustenance like food, clothing, or housing. The same is true of Christianity and Islam. Several Jewish commentators were troubled by Jacob’s saying if God protects me, when God had just promised to do so in his dream at Luz or Bethel. Also the commentators asked, how could Jacob possibly say the Lord shall be my God only if God helps him prosper? The first comment may reflect Jacob’s doubts about the validity of his dream: was it real or mere wishful thinking in the Marxian and Freudian sense (Marx 1953; 1974; Kamenka 1983115-116; Freud 1939; 1946; 1962; 1964; 1977; 1992; 1993; 1995a; 1995b; Bloch 1971; 1972; Fromm 1959; 1980b; Marcuse 1962; Horkheimer 1996s: 69-70; Küng 1990a)? Could Jacob, like his grandfather Abraham, trust God to fulfill the divine promise? The Midrash resolved the second question by taking the words the Lord shall be my God as part of Jacob’s prayer, not as a promise. Along with food, clothing, housing and safety, Jacob was praying for a sense of God’s presence. The critical theorist of religion thinks of Jacob’s stairway dream in terms of steps of energetic longing for light, friendship, love, knowledge, adventure, freedom, work, peace, redemption, and finally for the wholly Other than the deep night of the soul, and of the world (Genesis 28: 1022; Lieber 2001: 166-168; Mann 1999: 101-168; Horkheimer 1988a; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; App. E).

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chapter twenty-two Refusal to Forget

At the beginning of his novel, entitled Forgotten, Elie Wiesel (1982; 1992: 9-10; App. E) has Elhanan, the aging father, who is losing his memory due to a disease, say a prayer: God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, forget not your son who calls upon you now. You well know, You, source of all memory, that to forget is to abandon, to forget is to repudiate. Do not abandon me, God of my fathers, for I have never repudiated You. God of Israel, do not cast out a son of Israel who yearns with all his heart and all his soul to be linked to the history of Israel. God and King of the universe, exile me not from that universe. As a child I learned to revere You, to love You, to obey You; keep me from forgetting the child that I was. As an adolescent I chanted the litanies of the martyrs of Mainz and York; erase them not from my memory, You who erase nothing from Your own. As a man I learned to respect the will of our dead; keep me from forgetting what I learned. God of my ancestors, let the bond between them and me remain whole, unbroken. You who have chosen to dwell in Jerusalem, let me not forget Jerusalem. You who wander with Your people in exile, let me remember them. God of Auschwitz, know that I must remember Auschwitz. And that I must remind You of it. God of Treblinka, let the sound of that name make me, and You, tremble now and always. God of Belzec, let me, and You, weep for the victims of Belzec. You who share our suffering, You who share our wait, let me never be far from those who have invited You into their hearts. You who foresees the future of man, let me not cut myself off from my past. God of justice, be just to me. God of charity, be kind to me. God of mercy, plunge me not into the kaf-ha-kallah, the chasm where all life, hope and light are extinguished by oblivion. God of truth, remember that without memory truth becomes only the mask of truth. Remember that only memory leads man back to the source of his longing for You. Remember, God of history, that You created man to remember. You put me into the world, You spared me in time of danger and death, that I might testify. What sort of witness would I be without my memory? Know, God, that I do not wish to forget You. I do not wish to forget anything. Not the living and not the dead. Not the voices and not the silences. I do not wish to forget the moments of abundance that enriched my life, nor the hours of anguish that drove me to despair. Even if You forget me, O Lord, I refuse to forget You.

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The deeply Jewish, even Hassidic prayer gives a still positive-theological expression for Bloch’s, Horkheimer’s, Benjamin’s, Adorno’s, and Fromm’s negative, inverse, cipher or sign theology, which is the translation of the former into the secular discourse of the modern expert cultures, be they psychology, social psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, or philosophy (Exodus 4: 2-10; Lieber 2001: 332-334/2-10; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1986; Horkheimer 1988a; 1988c: chap. 16; 1988d: chaps. 2, 5, 6, 7, 11; 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 33, 37, 49; 1996s: 32-74; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1932a; 1932b; 1950; 1959; 1966a; 1966b, 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1992: 3-94, 203212; 2001; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1973; 1976; 1978a; 1986: 53-55; 1990: 9-18; 2002; Habermas/Ratzinger 2005; Thomson/Held 1982: 246247). It is also an illustration of the critical theory of religion’s anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity as well as for its longing for the wholly Other than the dark night of the soul, and even more so the dark night of a world ruled by the idolatrous metaphysics of capitalism, which daily demands most painful human sacrifices in metropolitan and rural slums, as well as in colonial and imperial wars and civil wars (Hinkelammert 1985; Gutierrez 1988; Perkins 2007; Zinn 2003: chaps. 18-25; Klein 2007; Scahill 2007; Hedges 2006; Franken 2003; Kinzer 2006; Clinton 2004).

The Idea of the Soul after Auschwitz Horkheimer wrote in 1967, 22 years after the end of World War II and of German and European fascism, that the idea of the soul, as Modernity inherited it from India, Israel and Greece, stood for an other than the world of appearance with all its horrible injustices (Kant 1929: 328-383, 557-558, 594-595; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 16, 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1980b; 1993c; 1997a; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997e; 1997f; 1997u, 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 200b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d; App. C, D, E). Unlike the reified instrumental reason, the worry and trouble concerning the idea of the soul particularly after Auschwitz, Treblinka, etc. did not seek mere orientation in connection with career and success in liberal civil society. According to Horkheimer in 1967, where there was still serious talk of the soul of man, particularly its immortality, what was at stake was that truth, which theology could no longer offer, and which the positivistic sciences, monopolizing what is correct, ordered and categorized into other branches of culture: art, religion, or philosophy. What was at stake was that which

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underlay the world, which Kant had in his work proven to be mere appearance. What was at stake was that which transcended as the Absolute the reality, which was conditioned by the human intellect. While for Kant man was forbidden to move into this sphere of the Thing in itself–God, Freedom and Immortality, for Horkheimer, man–if he did indeed obey this prohibition that Kant himself had overstepped–would renounce and give up the longing for the wholly Other, without which he ultimately would lose his autonomy, and thus also his solidarity with others (Kant 1929: 24, 27, 71-72, 74, 85-87, 89, 149, 172-173, 230, 265-267, 276-280, 328-383, 440, 449, 490, 557-558, 594-595; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 16, 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; 1997u; Habermas 1986; 1990: 14-15; Siebert 2001; 2002a). This longing was the driving force not only in great progressive literature and music and philosophy, but also and even first of all in great religion and theology (1951; 1960; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1991b; 1993a; 1993c; 1995; 1996; 1997a; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997g; 1997k; 1997l; 1997m; 1997n; 1997o; 1997p; 1997q; 1997r; 1997s; 1997u; 1998c; 2002a; 2002b; 2002c; 2002d; 2003d; Benjamin 1955a; 1972; 1974; 1977; 1978a; 1978c; 1983a; 1983b; 1988; 1995a; 1995c; 1996a; 1996c). Bloch, Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm, Marcuse, and the other critical theorists of society did not want to renounce this longing for the entirely Other, and thereby humanity itself in its emphatic sense, and sacrifice them to abstract doubt, and neither do the critical theorists of religion (Hegel 1986c: 72; 1986r: 467; 1986s: 362, 371; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 5, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40; Löwenthal 1980: 8-81; 1989; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1997: j/2: 97-122, 608-617; Fromm 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1976; Fromm/ Xirau 1969; Raines/Dean 1970: 3-10; Küng 1978; 1982; 1984; 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 1998; Siebert 2001; 2002a; 2004a; 2004b; 2005b; 2005c: 135-160; 2005d: 57-114; 2005e; 215-231; 2005f: 231-247; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c: 1-32; 2006d: 61-114; 2007a: 99-113; 2007b: 419-457; 2007d; 2007f: 1-68; 2007g: 11-19; 2008a: 180-210; 2008b: 55-61; 2008e; 2008f).

Morality and the Wholly Other According to Horkheimer, the two aspects–morality in the broadest sense and the thought of the wholly Other than the world of appearance–which the human intellect understood to order and to classify, characterized the specific meaning that transcended modern psychology, and which in

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1967 had been added to the notion of the human soul (Kant 1929: 328383, 557-558, 594-595; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 16, 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1997b; 1997d; 1997u). The third youth movement of the 1960s was not only skeptical toward the notion of the soul and its immortality, and the two aspects of morality and the wholly Other, but even aggressive against them, and considered them to be utterly romantic. However, so Horkheimer argued, through its enthusiastic and passionate opposition against those notions, the third youth movement betrayed and manifested, nevertheless, that precisely this interest expressed in these notions was also its own. Horkheimer knew no better proof for his supposition or suspicion, than the quotation from a Nietzschean obituary for God, the Lord, which came from a student journal, and which was undersigned by three humanistic high school students, and which had been reprinted in the socialdemocratic Frankfurter Rundschau on February 14, 1967, while the war raged on in Vietnam: As we see, always more people are tortured, murdered, raped in the Kingdom of God and one lets them starve, suffocate, and burn. We are of the opinion, that a conclusion forces itself on everybody, who thinks honestly: the God who once ‘governed everything so marvelously, splendidly and magnificently, whom my soul praised, who lead me on a green meadow,’ is absent, sick, gone on a journey, dead. A God, who orders and arranges best everything in Auschwitz, and in the Warsaw Ghetto, in Vietnam and in the New York negro quarters, does not exist any longer. He has not taken care of and dealt with his work. His post, his job is open. The future is open.

According to Horkheimer, the young authors had negated the word God and soul, as they criticized the famous traditional Church song: Te Deum Laudamus Te (Kant 1929: 328-383, 557-558, 594-595; Kaufmann 1968: 95-96; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 16, 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1997u). The revolt of the young authors was characteristic for them. Yet, it appeared to Horkheimer that the negation expressed by the young authors contained more faithfulness to the meaning of the word of God and soul, more longing for the passing away meaning, significance, and importance of these words, than many of the positive confessions to the so-called traditional and conventional good of thoughts. According to Horkheimer, whoever was seeking to preserve the idea of the soul or of God, must keep and save at the same time, together with the knowledge about theological and philosophical traditions, also the doubt, which belonged consciously to the serious thinking of the present (Hegel 1986c: 72; 1986r: 467; 1986s: 362, 371; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 5, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40; Siebert 2001; 2002a). As, according to Hegel’s

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Phenomenology of the Mind, the truth was the continual result of doubt and despair, so for the critical theorists of society the longing for God, Freedom and Immortality–not only the vicarious immortality conferred by children to their parents–shortly the neither theistic, nor atheistic, but rather post-theistic yearning for the wholly Other, which broke through the Mosaic prohibition against making images or naming the Absolute, and through the Kantian prohibition, to penetrate the Thing in itself, was continually generated dialectically by modern skepticism and pessimism, directed against religious revelation and faith, in the face of the horror and terror of nature and history: e.g. the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, or the continuing bloody civil wars in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq in March 2010, which both cost the lives of thousands of people, often children (Genesis 30: 1; Lieber 2001: 174/1; Hegel 1986c; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 29, 37, 40; 1988n: 215; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Raymont 2004; App. E).

Expression of the Other For Horkheimer, in the post-fascist Germany and Europe of 1953, people worshipped the WC instead of God (Horkheimer 1988n: 215). According to Horkheimer, the saddest thing in the present German and European situation was that human beings were neither able nor willing to imagine that the wholly Other than the horror and terror of nature and history did indeed really exist. Precisely, therefore, so Horkheimer argued, all that responsible men or women thought and did, had to be guided by the purpose of giving expression to this totally Other. What is this wholly Other? In Horkheimer’s view, it was the task of the philosophy to express this totally Other (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988n: 215, 216-217, 228-232, 321-322, 329-330, 333, 405-406; 436-438, 518-519, 527-528, 530531, 536, 544; 1996s: 62-67). This wholly Other could not be expressed in a few sentences because–as Hegel had put it–the Truth is the whole (Hegel 1986c: 24-25; Horkheimer 1985l: 483-493; 1988n: 215, 216-217, 228). Indications or ciphers of the totally Other were a few words like the Absolute, Redemption, Atonement, Reconciliation. That was what, according to Horkheimer, Schopenhauer meant when he stated that the great world religions had the right question, but they had allowed the answer to be bought from them through the declaration that redemption could be achieved through the religious rites and rituals, and that it was really already here, no matter how unredeemed nature, and human beings, and their societies and history really and actually looked (Schopenhauer

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1946; 1977; 1989: Vol. I: 226, 371, 379, 447, 550, 453, 542-544; Vol. II: 773, 779, 806, 816; Vol. III: 597; Vol. IV: 81; Vol. V: 171; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; 1988n: 215). Certainly and unfortunately, the many rites and rituals, which were celebrated in Germany and Europe in the first half of the 20th century, not to mention the Holy Mass which was ordered to be said for Hitler in May 1945, and the blessings which were given in the old Constantinian spirit by a Catholic priest to the most advanced murder weapon, the atomic bombs, which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, did not redeem the world from fascism. There were, of course, a few individual Christians and Christian families in Germany and all over Europe, who followed the Evangelium, particularly the Sermon on the Mount, and engaged in mimesis, in the Imitatio Christi, rather than in rites, rituals, cult, or liturgy, in action rather than in worship, or at least in both, and rescued some of their Jewish brothers and sisters: as e.g. the Catholic driver, who drove the parents of Horkheimer from Stuttgart into Swiss exile; or the Dutch people who were able to protect Anna Frank and her family for some time; or Oskar Schindler, who could prevent 1,200 Jews from being murdered in Auschwitz; or Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Sophie Scholl and her brother, who did take the side of the Jews and resisted fascism, and were martyred themselves. Unfortunately, even such heroic rescuing actions by sometimes already religionless Christians, i.e. those who stressed mimesis rather than cult, were not able to redeem Germany and Europe from international fascism, and to prevent the war and the final solution to the Jewish question, or at least to stop it, when it was already in progress, after the Second World War had really started with Pearl Harbor.

From Dusk to Dawn Shortly before her cruel cancer death on October 20, 1978, my late wife Margie framed beautifully for me and our family not only the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount, and the passage on Love from St, Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, but also the passage on The Owl of Minerva from Hegel’s (1986g: 27-28) Philosophy of Right: One word more about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only, when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed. The teaching of the notion, which is also history’s inescapable lesson, is that it is only when actuality is mature, that the ideal first appears over against the real, and

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chapter twenty-two that the ideal apprehends this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy’s painting grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only understood. The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. (Call 2008: 1-4; Siebert 1979b; 1979c; 1987b; 1987c; 2001; 2002a).

In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the dusk is followed by the dawn, and remembrance by anticipation, and the Owl of Minerva by the Gallic Cock, or also maybe by an American or a Russian Cock (Hegel 1986a: 218; 1986l: 107-115, 413, 418, 422, 490-491, 500, 513; 1986g: 465; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; Horkheimer 1974c: 224-354). While the critical theory of society remembered and painted the dusk of the passing life form of European Modernity, which ended in the barbarism of international fascism, and in the catastrophes of World War I and II, the Cold War, and the world wide religious and secular terrorism, it also–like Hegel’s dialectical philosophy before–anticipated, and aimed at, and prepared at the same time the dawn of a post-European, post-bourgeois, postcapitalistic, post-liberal, post-modern, post-theistic paradigm: global alternative Future III–a society, which would be driven by the longing for the wholly Other, and motivated by its new expressions, and in which personal autonomy and universal solidarity would be reconciled (Hegel 1986a: 218; 1986l: 107-115, 413, 418, 422, 490-491, 500, 513; 1986g: 465; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; Horkheimer 1974c: 224-354; 1988n: 245-247; 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 38, 39, 40; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Habermas 1986; Siebert 2001; 2002a; App. G).

The God of Our Time The old Jewish woman, who I encountered on my way to the Lessing Gymnasium in Frankfurt a.M. in April 1942, did not come from the East-side of Frankfurt, where the poor Jews lived, and she did also not come from the West-side of Frankfurt, where the rich Jews lived: she did definitely not belong to the high bourgeois Rothschild Family, but rather to the low middle class of Frankfurt and Germany (Adorno 2003d: 482-483, 494497, 505-506; Ferguson 2002; Betz 2004: 107-109; Scheible 1989: chaps. 1, 2). The great Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, considered the Rothschild’s, who had originated from Frankfurt, to be Agents of the Reaction, and entered a cultural-critically understood word-game about them: Money is the god of our time, and Rothschild is his prophet. In the 18th century, the founding father of the Rothschild’s, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, had

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started from the Jew-Street in Frankfurt as a coin-merchant, and had worked his way up to the banker of the Prince of Hessen, and had created a multinational financial enterprise and empire, which continues today into the 8th generation as a family business centered in Paris and New York City. In 1938, Adolf Eichmann had moved into the Vienna Rothschild Palais, and there had established the Center for the Jewish Emigration, aiming at a Jew-free Europe. When after Hitler had threatened again and again up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, that if the Jewish high finance–that included most of all the Rothschild family, enterprise, and empire–would push the European nations once more into a world war against each other, then this would not mean the end of Europe, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race, and when. the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor brought about declaration of war of Germany and Italy against the U.S.A., and when the European war had thus turned into a world war, and when thereby the final solution of the Jewish question began, the Rothschild and the other Middle and High Jewish bourgeoisie had long left Germany and continental Europe for London and New York. The old Jewish woman, whose suitcases I carried into the basement of the air shelter of the Lessing Gymnasium and into the arms of the SS, was walking together with millions of innocent working class and low middle class, non-Rothschild Jews into the concentration camps, and into the horrible final solution, who had absolutely nothing to do with any instigation of any war whatsoever.

Resurrection after Death During a Gala Diner in Rothschild’s’ Paris Palais, Heine spoke with his table lady about the advantages and disadvantages of the different world religions (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Adorno 2003d: 482-483, 494-497, 505506; Ferguson 2002; Betz, 2004: 107-109; Scheible 1989: chaps. 1, 2; Küng 1991a; 1994a; 1994b; 1990b; 1991a; 1998; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/ Bechert 1984; App. E). At this occasion, Heine summed up his opinion on Christianity loud enough, so that Rothschild, who sat on the opposite side of the table, could definitely hear it: See, Madam, Christianity gives us a bill of exchange–on the resurrection after death. However, this bill of exchange: has Rothschild signed it? In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, we can only hope that the Jewish as well as the Christian bill of exchange on the resurrection after death has validity, with or without the Rothschilds, and that the murderers shall not triumph over their innocent victims–at least not ultimately (Hegel, 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Küng 1994ab:

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B and C; 1991b: A, B, C; 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 37, 40; Ferguson 2002; Betz 2004: 107-109; Scheible 1989: chaps. 1, 2). Like Heine a century earlier, so were Horkheimer and his friends and their critical theory of society from the very start driven by what Hegel had called the energy of longing toward perfect justice beyond antagonistic civil society and its idolatry of capital, without which modern nationalism, fascism, racism, particularly anti-Semitism, the British and German concentration camps, and the two world wars could not be explained and understood, and in which even they, the critics themselves, and their families were entangled to some extent (Exodus 20: 1-21; Hegel 1986a: 344-345; 1986c: 169; 1986e: 267; 1986l: 174; 1986k: 235; 1986s: 173; 1986t: 386, 399, 418; Horkheimer 1988a: 100-157; 1988n: 405-406, 410-411, 413, 431-432, 445-447, 474, 481-482, 491, 499-501, 503-504, 507-510, 517, 527528, 530-531, 533, 535536, 540, 541-542, 546-549; 1985g: chaps. 37, 40; Adorno 2003d; Gumnior/ Ringguth 1973: chaps. 1. 2; Scheible 1989: chaps. 1, 2; Witte 1985: chaps. 1, 2; Kramer 2003). Also the new critical theory of religion is motivated by this energy of longing beyond the slaughter bench of society and history, which climaxed uniquely in Auschwitz and the horror and terror this name stands for, and toward alternative Future III–the right society, in which the idolatry of capital would be broken, and light, love, happiness and a meaningful life, and the hope for the totally Other as the concrete negation of injustice, loneliness, abandonment, and alienation would be possible for all people (Exodus 20: 1-21; Hegel 1986a: 344-345; 1986c: 169; 1986e: 267; 1986l: 174; 1986k: 235; 1986s: 173; 1986t: 386, 399, 418; Horkheimer 1988a: 100-157; 1988n: 405-406, 410-411, 413, 431-432, 445447, 474, 481-482, 491, 499-501, 503-504, 507-510, 517, 527, 528, 530531, 533, 535-536, 540, 541-542, 546-549; 1985g: chaps. 37, 40; Gumnior/ Ringguth, 1973: chaps. 1, 2; Scheible, 1989: chaps. 1, 2; Witte 1985: chaps. 1, 2; Kramer 2003; Siebert 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 2001; 2002a; App. G).

The Possibility of Life, Poetry and Prayer Adorno asked after the end of World War II: If after Auschwitz one could still live (Tiedemann 1997). Of course, in a trivial sense, people have continued to live after Auschwitz through the cold war, and into the neo-liberal globalization, and into the war against terror, as they have lived for a long time in the face of the Golgotha of natural history. However, can such damaged life really and truly be called life in the emphatic sense (Hegel 1986l: 19-55; Adorno 1980b; Tiedemann 1997: Parts II)? In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, one can live humanly after Auschwitz as the cli-

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max of the skull hill of history only if one is driven beyond it by the longing for the totally Other, which is rooted in the Messianic anamnestic solidarity with the innocent victims, not as the goal of a theocratic world politics, but as the end of nature and of the natural human history (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Opitz 1996; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23, 27, 28, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Fromm 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1976; Tiedemann 1997). Such longing for the totally Other than the world of appearance with all its horror and terror, which contains the yearning for freedom and the resurrection of the flesh as well, also includes the, to be sure, finite and transitory post-modern global alternative Future III–the City of Being, of a non-damaged, creative and happy life, in which all negativity would be continually successfully negated through the full and free release of the best and most constructive energies in man (Fromm 1976; Petuchowski 1956: 543-594; App. G). In such an alternative Future III, living labor would be liberated from the domination of dead capital, and its idolatry would be overcome, and money would no longer be the god of society, and all commodity fetishism would be cancelled, and all murderous prejudices would be dissolved, and the Lex Talionis would be superseded by the Golden Rule, and life could live, and genuine poetry could be written, and honest prayers could be said, and fascism and Auschwitz would no longer be possible, and the old Jewish woman and all her sisters and brothers would be safe (Blakney 1941; Quint 1963; Marx 1953; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; Marx/Engels 2005; Tucker 1978; Niebuhr 1967; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; Horkheimer 1936; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Fromm 1976; Tiedemann 197; Benedict XVI 2007; Siebert 2001; 2002a; 2005; 2006; Ott 2007; Goldstein 2006).

The Preservation of the Folkish Community Throughout the 1950s and the 1960s, Horkheimer felt always compelled to formulate and reformulate that the German’s confession of guilt after the defeat of National Socialism in May 1945 was a clever procedure to rescue the folkish community feeling into the post-war period (Horkheimer 1974: 200-201). The main task for the German fascists after World War II was to preserve their We National Socialist community. But the National Socialists did not even declare that they should have become indignant or should have been shocked during the Third Reich, or that they should have at least connected themselves with those who did not join in or take part in the fascist activities (Löwenthal 1980; 1989; 1990a; 1990b). The Germans after the war simply declared that they were understandably afraid in the Third Reich for their jobs, their property, their families and

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their lives, if they had tried to behave as non-conformists. For the post-war Germans, the others were not the Nazis, but rather always the Americans and the people of the German resistance: the Staufenbergs, the Bonhoeffers, the Delps, the Scholls, etc. Horkheimer felt the coolness and the strangeness which characterized the wretched and miserable 20th of July celebrations. The German confession of guilt meant rather that we and the National Socialists of the past belonged together. The war was lost. We, the Germans, must make our apologies, because otherwise we shall not get up again in the world fast enough. Only when the victors wanted to draw the consequences out of the atrocities of the fascist regime, then the post war Germans reached for the most impudent lies and asserted the opposite of guilt: we have not known anything of all these crimes, instead of we don’t want to know of them. Even still the I stood for the we: I was no Nazi, in principle we all were no Nazis. The “we” was the bridge, the bad, which made possible German fascism. The difference between the individual and the collective was leveled off. Who ever preserved this difference stood outside and did not belong to us and was probably a communist: as if in the communist block it was not at least the same way. Whoever in politics and in many other domains of social and cultural life spoke of himself and signified the compatriots as they, appeared to the listening people, also if they did not realize it, as traitor, and only accidentally as decent human being. When on January 10, 2009 I got stuck with my car in the midst of the Michigan winter during a powerful snowstorm in a huge snow bank and struggled for a long time in vain to get out, finally two young Muslim Arabs stopped and pulled me out: a small anticipation of global alternative Future III–a society, in which I and we, personal autonomy and universal solidarity will be genuinely reconciled. The civilization which has the greater solidarity without loss of autonomy will have the greater chance to survive and to preserve itself humanely.

The Stiffening of the Heart In the perspective of the dialectical religiology the fascist and still postfascist period in Germany was characterized by what the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and the Holy Qu’ran have called the stiffening or the hardness of the heart (Exodus 4: 21; Matthew 19: 1-8; Lieber 2001: 335/21; Kim 1996: 267-283; App. E). According to the Rabbis, the motif of the stiffening, or hardening, of Pharaoh’s heart appeared exactly 20 times in Exodus. Half of the references were descriptions of Pharaoh’s destructive authoritarian character: i.e. he hardened his own heart (Exodus 4: 21;

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Lieber 2001: 335/21; Fromm 1932b; 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980a; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Benjamin 1968; 1977; 1978d). In the Rabbi’s view, half of the references were attributed to divine causality, a form of measure for measure. In the biblical conception, psychological faculties were considered to be concentrated in the heart (Exodus 4: 21; Lieber 2001: 335/21; Fromm 1932b; 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980a; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001). Human behavior was determined in the heart, which was regarded as the seat of the intellectual, moral and spiritual life of the individual. Thus, hardening of the heart expressed a state of arrogant moral degeneracy, unresponsive to reason and incapable of compassion (Exodus 4: 21; Lieber 2001: 335/21; Mitscherlich 1993; 1994; Fromm 1932b; 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980a; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001). Pharaoh’s personal guilt was beyond question. Pharaoh’s character was now his destiny! (Exodus 4: 21; Lieber 2001: 335/21; Mitscherlich 1993; 1994; Fromm 1932b; 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980a; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Benjamin 1968; 1977; 1978d). As the Pharaoh was deprived of any chance of relenting, he was irresistibly drawn to a doom of his own making. Repentance was not even considered a possibility in Exodus. It was a religious notion that evidently evolved only after the Exodus story. However, even after the notion of repentance had evolved in man’s moral consciousness, it was often not practiced, particularly not for collective political or military crimes. The Nazi leadership in Germany never repented the killing of the 27 million communists in Russia or of the 6 million Jews in the concentration camps all over Central and Eastern Europe. Also, the post-fascist German population had a hard time not only to mourn, but also to repent the horrible crimes that had happened in the fascist period in Germany and Europe (Mitscherlich 1993; 1994; Fromm 1932b; 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980a; 1980b; 1981; 1990; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Benjamin 1968; 1977; 1978d). Also today–in March 2010– Americans have a hard time to repent the crimes committed during the 8 years of the second Bush Administration: the torture of prisoners, the breaking of the Habeas Corpus Act, the initiation of two wars, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, over a million casualties in Iraq, unilateralism versus the United Nations and the European Union, the violation of the American Constitution, of international law, particularly the Geneva Conventions, etc. In the midst of the capitalist tsunami, the American corporate ruling

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class, the bankers and industrialists, did not repent their un-policed and un-regulated greed, which has lead the American global economy into the catastrophe. To the contrary, the highest executives of Wall Street gave themselves irresponsibly and shamelessly a 20 billion dollar bonus from the federal bail-out money in January 2009, while millions of American workers lost their jobs, houses and pensions: “after me the deluge!” Neither the new Obama Administration nor even the churches have so far called for repentance. The stiffening or the hardening of the heart prevails and continues in the midst of the capitalist disaster.

Higher Education In 1956, Horkheimer and Adorno wrote a Preface for a research report of their Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt entitled University and Society (Horkheimer 1996s: 13-16; Horkheimer/Adorno 1956; Buck-Morss 1977; 2002). According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the fact of the university crisis in Germany–the loss of Minerva or Pallas Athena, of the great philosophy of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, or of Lessing’s enlightenment–and the thought of a university reform, which had been urgent already before World War I, without having been realized even after World War II up to the present–2010–, included a challenge to the empirical social research: namely, to complement observations and theoretical considerations about the whole complex of questions through binding statements about how the problem of the university in the present liberal society and constitutional state presented itself to those, whom it concerned most immediately: namely the students, the academic teachers, and the circles of the economy and of the administration, who would employ the students after they had completed their studies, economically spoken–the consumers of the university products. (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 13, 21, 22; 1996s: 13-16; Adorno 1969b; Horkheimer/Adorno 1956; Buck-Morss 1977; 2002). Up to the present–March 2010–the dialectical religiology must ask, why the universities did not resist fascism, as did e.g. the individual students Sophie Scholl and her brother and their friend at the University of Munich, and the whole student movement of the White Rose, and the Confessing Church out of the Protestant-Evangelical Paradigm of the Reformation, (Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Scholl 2005; Küng 1994a: 692-741). Often priests and ministers were more ready for protest and even martyrdom against fascism than the professors, as e.g. Father Delp, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or Paul Tillich (Bonhoeffer 1985; 1993; 2000; 2003; Stone/ Weaver 1989). The universities and higher education had definitely failed

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civil society and the constitutional state in that they did not help avoiding the catastrophes of World War I and II, of fascism, and of the cold war, and of the following war against terror. Why did the universities themselves become fascist already early on, like e.g. the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität in Frankfurt a.M? Why did even some university chaplains walk around in the SA uniform on campus early on, even before January 1933, as e.g. the church-historian Joseph Lortz (Ericksen 1985)? As a matter of fact, the universities were often more a part of the fascist problem than of its solution. At least one half of the 15 officials–SS commanders and government officials–who met in a formerly Jewish villa at the Wannsee on the outskirts of Berlin in Winter 1942 in a conference under direction of the ruthless and efficient Chief of Security, SS-General Reinhard Heydrich, and the at the time still SS Major Adolf Eichmann, in order to decide the final solution of the Jewish question through the application of Zyklon B developed by Fritz Haber and produced by I.G. Farben, had a doctorate in some academic discipline from a German university (Ashkenasy 2003; Siebert 2007e; Schweppenhäuser 1996; Kramer 203; Wiggershaus 1987a; 1987b; Jay 1980: 137-149; 1981; Löwenthal 1989; Smith 1993: 209-229; Byrd 2009; Arendt 1965; 1968; Horkheimer 1967: 302-316, 317-320, 335-354; 1974: 8, 101-104, 116-117, 145-146148-151, 152-154, 164-165; Djerassi 2008: 170-174; Branach/Tucci 2001). So did Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Dr. Joseph Goebbels. Thus the question posed itself to Horkheimer and Adorno and the Institute for Social Research, how the university could possibly be reformed in such a way, that in the future at least it may be more helpful to liberal society and constitutional state in solving its problems through higher education (Horkheimer 1996s: 13-16; Horkheimer/Adorno 1956; Buck-Morss 1977; 2002; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1973; 1976; 1978a; 1978a; 1978b; 1978c; 1979a; 1979b; 1981c; 1981d; 1982; 1984a; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 1988a; 1988b; 1990; 1991a; 1991b; 1991c; 1992a; 1995; 1997a; 1998; 1999; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2003b; 2004a; 2004c; 2005; 2006c; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Habermas/Henrich 1974; Habermas/Luhmann 1975; Habermas/ Ratzinger 2006; Shanley 2009: 1-2).

Opinions and Truth For Horkheimer and Adorno, the Institute research report of 1956 about the university crisis and reform concerned the relationship of professional training to the educational idea and to education proper and thus the proposals for the studium general or general studies; the personal and professional

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relationship between teachers and students; and in connection with that the lack of young teachers and the economic situation of teachers and students; and finally the form of the community life of the students: and most of all the relationship between opinion and truth, the concern with which reaches into the present–2010–sociological, philosophical and theological discourse in liberal and neo-liberal society (Horkheimer 1996s: 13-16; Horkheimer/Adorno 1956; Buck-Morss 1977; 2002; Habermas 1975; 1981c; 1991a: Part III; 2001a; 2005; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Reder/ Schmidt 2008; Metz 1995; 2006; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Sölle/ Habermas 1975; Peukert 1976; Arens 1989b; 2007; 2009: 79-93; Funken 2008). Horkheimer and Adorno conceived of the research report perspectivistically: from the perspectives of the teachers, of the students, and of the consumers of the graduated students in the economy and in the state administration. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the subjective boundary of the mere opinions of the three groups was in no way automatically superseded through comparison of the opinions of the divergent groups with each other and through counting together something like the arithmetical means among them. In spite of all their critique of the traditional university and higher education under the symbol of Minerva and Pallas Athena, great philosophy and enlightenment, which had become extremely problematic in the post-fascist liberal society and which had sunk down into mere ideology, understood as false consciousness, Horkheimer and Adorno remained, nevertheless, Platonists and Hegelians in the sense that they differentiated sharply between subjective opinion and objective truth, and that they did not share the positivistic illusion, that the average of the subjective opinions was the truth itself. Also, in the perspective of the dialectical religiology, that 180 million American workers were subjectively of the opinion that they were middle class did not mean that they were objectively and truly middle class; that millions of people in American civil society were subjectively of the opinion that they were God-believers did not mean that they were objectively and truly God-believers. This differentiation between opinion and truth, between subjective and objective middle class people or Godbelievers was particularly relevant, when the number of American middle class atheists was continually growing, who sang in their weekly television shows, that they were not afraid of Yahweh, or of Jesus, or of Allah, but that they were only afraid of the evil things, which the believers were doing in the name of their God. Yet how, so the critical theorist of religion must ask, can believers, who do evil things in the name of their good God, be really, objectively, and truly believers? At least the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth had passionately warned of the

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false prophets, who come to you disguised as sheep but underneath are ravenous wolves. You will be able to tell them by their fruits. Can people pick grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, a sound tree produces good fruit, but a rotten tree bad fruit. A sound tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a rotten tree bear good fruit. Any tree that does not produce good fruit is cut down and thrown on the fire. I repeat, you will be able to tell them by their fruits (Matthew 7: 15-20).

These are some of the very few functionalistic sentences in the New Testament.

Opinion Research According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the positivistic misunderstanding that the average of subjective opinions was the truth itself, gave to the opinion research its fatal sound and bad name (Horkheimer 1996s: 13-16; Horkheimer/Adorno 1956; 1979: 9-20, 42-86, 93-122, 354-373, 440-456, 457-477, 476-493, 494-499, 500-531, 532-537, 538-548, 569-573, 574-577, 578-587). In Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s view, the opinion research could escape this fatal sound and bad name only if it did not confuse the empirical reliability of its generalizations, i.e. the binding obligation of what it found out about the subjective contents of consciousness, with the objective binding obligation of what the people, who were asked–students, teachers, businessmen and state administrators–were thinking. As necessary as it was for Horkheimer and Adorno, to get a clear picture of how students, professors, and economic and political specialists and experts saw the university in 1956, or later on, as little were their views and opinions concerning good and evil an immediate expression of what the universities were really all about: namely Minerva, Pallas Athena, great philosophy, enlightenment (Horkheimer 1996s: 13-16; Horkheimer/Adorno 1951: 284-291; 1956; 1972; Buck-Morss 1977; 2002). The consciousness of all these groups of themselves as well as their understanding of the extremely complex situation in the antagonistic civil society, in which the university found itself, the context of its texts, through the contradiction among the traditional idea of education–Pallas Athena, great philosophy, and enlightenment, the practical demands of the present occupational and professional life, and a representation of free and conscious people, which was only in the process of formation, was very limited, without the groups or individual representatives of them carrying the responsibility and guilt for this situation. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the veil that was hiding from many students that their preparation for their profession was

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also a battering and bashing up of their humanity; or from many professors, that the educational idea of Hegel’s contemporary and colleague at the University of Berlin, Wilhelm von Humboldt, which they still presupposed as self-evident, had become incompatible with the real conditions of the present–1956–life in late capitalist society; or which seduced some experts in economy and state to turn the idea of general education in such a way as if it were nothing else than the ability of practical people to discuss as agents of economic interests with their contracting business partners also other things besides the planned conclusions of contracts: e.g. religious, or theological, or philosophical, or ethical, or aesthetical, or political issues (Hegel 1986j: 272; 1986k: 131-204; Adorno 1979: 9-20, 42-86, 93-122, 354-373, 440-456, 457-477, 476, 493, 494-499, 500-531, 532-537, 538-548, 569-573, 574-577, 578-587; Horkheimer 1996s: 13-16; Horkheimer/Adorno 1951: 284-291; 1956; 1972; Buck-Morss 1977; 2002). Up to the present–March 2010–the dialectical religiologist has again and again the opportunity to meet pilots of civil airliners or medical doctors in hospitals, etc. who obviously received an excellent professional training, but no education at all: e.g. concerning the world religions and their interpretations of reality and orientations of action, as well as the arts or philosophy. They confess quite honestly that they know nothing: i.e. beyond the boundaries of their professional training. It is only too obvious that this absence of education in the case of masses of well trained specialists and experts without education must have catastrophic consequences for any society which claims or tries to be democratic: any democracy needs a large number of well educated and not only well professionally or occupationally trained people, in order to come about or to survive. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, such antagonism between training and education was predestined by the liberal society, and not by the mere psychology of those who entertained that kind of idealistic or humanistic representations inherited from Humbold or Hegel: Minerva, Pallas Athena, Erasmus’s or Thomas More’s humanism, or Lessing’s enlightenment (More 1965; Hegel 1986j: 272; 1986k: 131-204; Adorno 1979: 9-20, 42-86, 93122, 354-373, 440-456, 457-477, 476, 493, 494-499, 500-531, 532-537, 538548, 569-573, 574-577, 578-587; Horkheimer 1996s: 13-16; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1951: 284-291; 1956; 1972; Buck-Morss 1977; 2002; App. F). While the problematic, questionable, dubious character of the subjective opinion as mere subjective opinion often glimmered through the Institute research report on university and society of 1956, it was not its real theme, but the opinions were rather presented as that as which they gave themselves, in spite of the fact, that they were occasionally commented on, and were

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throughout interpretatively processed, assimilated, and digested. The more that was the case, the more urgent was for Horkheimer and Adorno the reservation and proviso, that the opinions were not made into the canon of good and evil, and of what had to be done, and of what had to be avoided in the future. Only in connection with other analyses of the universities, fundamentally directed toward objective facts, could the findings of the Institute research into university and society of 1956 gain their right status. Vice versa, all statements about university crisis and reform needed, if they did not want to measure themselves by merely abstract norms, the confrontation with the modes of reaction of those, who according to their interests found themselves closest to the university problems, and who felt most intensely the symptoms of the university crisis in civil society: the students, the professors, and the agents of the economy and of the constitutional state, who depend on the graduated students. Only in this way could reforms come about that would enable the universities to help to prevent post-modern alternative Future I–a neo-corporatist or neo-fascist society, as well as post-modern alternative Future II–an aggressive, necrophilous, militaristic society, and to promote post-modern alternative Future III–a biophilous, concretely liberal society, in which the religious and the secular, freedom and justice, individual autonomy and universal solidarity would be reconciled (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; Flechtheim 1959: 625-634; 1962: 27-34; 1963: 148-150; 1966: 355-464; 1971; Flechtheim/ Lohmann 2003; Fromm 1966c; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1981; 2001; Marcuse 1960; 1962; 1966; 1969b; 1970a; 1995; 2001; 2005; Adorno 1979: 9-20, 42-86, 93-122, 354-373, 440-456, 457-477, 476, 493, 494-499, 500-531, 532-537, 538-548, 569-573, 574-577, 578-587; Horkheimer 1996s: 13-16; Horkheimer/Adorno 1951: 284-291; 1956; 1972; Buck-Morss 1977; 2002; App. G). Truely educated people would not have done Auschwitz or Treblinka (Shanley 2009: 1-2). They would not have sent the old Jewish lady with the Star of David from Frankfurt to Eastern European concentration camps, where Jews who had not been sufficiently gassed with Cyclon B would be–still being alive–thrown into the fire, where they became conscious again and screamed (Adorno 1997f: 429, 430; Kogon 2002; Shanley 2009: 1-2). Truely educated people would not have done Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, waterboarding, or rendition (Shanley 2009: 1-2). Ends do not justify the means! (Kim 1996: 267-283)

chapter twenty-three

Critical Religion: Against Aggression, Force, Violence, and Terror From its very start the dialectical religiology was not only concerned with feudal or bourgeois, conformist, affirmative, traditional religion, but also, and most of all, with a post-bourgeois, non-conformist, negative, anamnestic and proleptic, theodicy-aware, modern or post-modern critical religion, effectively politically engaged in the public sphere against necrophilous aggression, force, violence and terror: with a new translation of religion as answer to what was missing spiritually in the present transition period from Modernity to Post-Modernity (Bloch 1960; 1970b; 1972; 1975b; 1985c: 1985d; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Adorno 1962; 1963; 1969a; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 494-498; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Marcuse 1970a; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1979a; 1979b; 1981d; 1982; 1986; 1988a; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 1991c; 2001a; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Henrich 1974; Haberms/Ratzinger 2006; Kogon 1967; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b; Metz 1965; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1981; 1984; 1995; 1997; 1998; 2006; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/ Wiesel 1993; Peukert 1976; Arens 1982; 1989a; 1989b; 1992; 1994a; 1994b; 2007; 2009: 79-83; Arens/John/Rottländer 1991; Siebert 1978: 8194; 1979e: 35-46; 2009d). Such critical religion is understood as the basis for protest and resistance against human suffering under the unjust conditions of oppressive, exploitative, cold, heartless and spiritless class societies, whose foundation would be carried and strengthened on its part by the insatiable longing for the wholly Other than the sameness of brutal aggression, violence, force and terror in finite nature and history, or even in God himself: the untamed necrophilous killer–or destroyer–or retaliation–God, the Mysterium Tremendum (Genesis 32: 23-32; Exodus 4: 24-26; Matthew 6: 13; Lieber 2001: 336-337/24-26; Blakney 1941: 197202; More 1965; Kamenka 1983: 115-116; Kautsky 1959; Otto 1969; 1991; Fromm 1966b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1996s: 13-16; Osten 2008: 71-72; Arens 2009: 79-83; Küng 1994a: 904-906; Horkheimer/

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Adorno 1956; Buck-Morss 1977; 2002; Habermas 1975; 1981c; 1991a: Part III; 2001a; 2005; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Reder/Schmidt 2008; Metz 1995; 2006; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Sölle/Habermas 1975; Peukert 1976; Arens 1989b; 2007; 2009: 79-93; Funken 2008; Wolin 2006; Siebert 2009d).

Gnosis Gnoseos In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s notion of the imageless and nameless wholly Other concretely superseded in itself, what in the affirmative, idealistic metaphysics of Aristotle and Hegel had been called Gnosis Gnoseos, Self-Thinking and Self-Knowing Reason, Divinity, the Absolute-Universal, the eternally in and for itself being Idea, or the Absolute Spirit (Aristotlees 1986: XII: 7; Hegel 1986j: 393-395; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Küng 1970; 1978; 1982; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 63-65; Westphal 2007/2008: 95-134; Maker 2007/2008: 159-164). According to Aristotle, the thinking in itself aimed at that what was the Best in itself. The highest thinking was directed at the Highest in itself. Reason thought itself in the comprehension of that, what was thinkable. This was so, because Reason itself became thinkable as it touched and thought the object, so that thinking and what was thought were the same. This was so, because Reason was the receiving ability for what could be thought and the Essence. Reason was in real action as it had, what was thought. Therefore, that what was thought, was in a fuller sense Divine than that what Reason seemed to contain as Divine, and the speculation was the most pleasant and the best. If now the Divinity felt always so well, comfortable and happy, as human beings did sometimes, then it was admirable, and when the Divinity was even happier then it was even more admirable. Thus, however, stood things with the Divinity, Life lived in the Divinity. This was so because Reason’s real activity was life. The Divinity, however, was the activity. The Divinity’s activity in itself was its best and eternal life. The Divinity, so Aristotle stated, was the eternal and the best living Essence. Thus, life and constant, continual, continuous, eternal continuance lived in the Divinity, because it was life and eternity.

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The Idea According to the Aristotelian Hegel, the Idea of philosophy had the selfknowing Reason, the Absolute-Universal, for its center (Aristotle 1986: XII: 7; Blakney 1941: 212-217; Hegel 1986j: 393-395; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Küng 1970; 1978; 1982; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 63-65Westphal 2007/2008: 95-134; Maker 2007/2008: 159-164) The center of the Idea differentiated itself into nature and human spirit. The center of the Idea made the human spirit into the presupposition as the process of its subjective activity, and nature into the general extreme as the process of the in itself objectively being Idea. The self-differentiation or self-judgment of the Idea into the two appearances, nature and human spirit, determined them as its manifestations: i.e. the manifestations of the self-knowing Reason. It was this appearing, which grounded first of all the further development. The first appearance constituted the conclusion, which had the Theo-Logical as its ground and starting point and nature as middle, which joined together the human spirit with the Theo-Logical (Aristotle 1986: XII: 7; Hegel 1986e: 43-44; 1986f: 548-573; 1986q: 347-536; 1986j: 393-395; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Küng 1970; 1978; 1982; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; Kuschel/ Schlensog 2008: 63-65; Westphal 2007/2008: 95-134; Maker 2007/2008: 159-164). The Theo-Logical turned into nature and the nature turned into the human spirit. The nature, which stood between the human spirit and its essence, the Theo-Logical, did admittedly not separate them into extremes of finite abstraction, nor itself from them into something independent, which as other would only join together others. This was so, because the conclusion was in the Idea and the nature was essentially determined only as passage or transit point and as negative moment, and it was in itself the Idea. However, the mediation of the dialectical, theological notion had the external form of transition and the science had the external form of the course of necessity, so that only in the one extreme was posited the freedom of the dialectical theological notion as its joining itself together with itself. It united itself in the Idea, that it was the nature, the thing, the notion, which moved on and developed itself, and that this movement was as much the activity of the knowledge: that the eternally in and for itself being Idea affirmed, generated and enjoyed itself eternally as absolute Spirit (Aristotle 1986: XII: 7; Hegel 1986c: 590591; 1986j: 393-395; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Küng 1970; 1978; 1982; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 63-65). While for the historical idealist the religious or metaphysical movement

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proceeded from the Divinity through nature and man to his reunion with the re-membering, communitarian, infinite, absolute Spirit in the realm of reality, truth, and certainty, for the historical materialist the post-religious and post-metaphysical movement proceeded from nature through man to the Ultimum, which as utopian stood in an irregular relationship to the present unjust status quo of history; which was the house of absolute we-appearance and experience; which was the end of all environments, in which man was an oppressed, contemptuous, contemptible, lost and missing being; which was the reconstruction of the star earth; which was the vocation, calling, appointment, appeal, creation, and forcing of the realm of freedom; which was an other, new, irresistible life in a new, open world of warmth, and of breakthrough, and of eternity; which was light roaring out of the interior of man; which was soul, depth, dreamheaven stretched out over all things and full of stars from the ground to the top; which was the secret symbol, toward which the dark, seeking and searching, difficult earth had moved since the beginning of times; which was Marxism united with the Schellingian or Hegelian dream of the Unconditional; which was humanism as heir of religion and metaphysics; and which was the Deity of Being as synthesis of the City of God and the City of Progress (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; Schelling 1860; 1946; 1977a; 1977b; Feuerbach 1904; 1957; 1996; Bloch 1960: 224-229: 99-113; 419457; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; Fromm 1966b; 1974; 1976: 201-202; 1990; 1995; 2001; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; App. C, D, E, G). The transition from historical idealism to historical materialism, as well as to existentialism and psychoanalysis, was caused through the idealialists’ rigorous logical subsumption of the particular under the universal, and in consequence through the neglect of and the insensitivity for the specific suffering of the singular individual person, shortly through their inability to solve adequately the theodicy problem (Hegel 1986f: 273-300; 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Kamenka 1983: 115-124; Adorno 1962; 1997u: 75-78; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2003b; Horkheimer 1967: 252, 259-261; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Metz 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Oelmüller 1990; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). With the idealists, the individuals appear on the slaughter bench of world-history often merely as the little flowers on which the powerful great men step, or as foul existences (Hegel 1986l: 33-55; Metz 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Oelmüller 1990; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). Adorno and Horkheimer and the other critical theorists did not only determinately negate the Aristotelian and Hegelian idealism, but also the Marxian historical materialism, which derived from both of

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them, and thus was Aristotelian as well as Hegelian (Aristotle 1986: XII: 7; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986j: 393-395; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Küng 1970; 1978; 1982; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; Kuschel/ Schlensog 2008: 63-65; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1970a; 1987; 2005; Fromm 1967; Bloch 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Habermas 1976). According to the dialectical religiology, informed by historical idealism and materialism, man becomes man only in so far as he transcends through ethics and morality, art, religion and philosophy, nature and himself toward the non-reified, demythologized, un-humanized, wholly Other than the darkness and evil, force, violence, and terror present in nature as well as in society and history (Blakney 1941: 207-217; Hegel 1986j; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; 2001; Marcuse 1962; 1970a: chap. 1; Habermas 1976; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1982; 1983; 1986; 1987b; 1988a; 1988b; 1991a: Part III; 1991b; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; Habermas/ Ratzinger 2006; Siebert 2007a; 2007g: 11-19; 2001; 2002a; App. B, C, D).

Religion in Dialectical Idealism In the view of the critical theory of religion, for both, the great dialectical idealist Hegel, on one hand, and his confessed disciple, the great dialectical materialist Marx, on the other, and their many disciples up to the present, humanity’s social nature and world were connected with religion, and vice versa: individual subjects and their interaction, family, civil society, constitutional state, history, and culture on one hand, and the world-religions on the other (Hegel 1986a: 234-238; 1986j: 394-395; 1986p: 11-16; 1986q; 1986g; Jamme/Schneider 1984; Singer 1983; Fackenheim 1970; Weiss 1974; O’Regan 1994; Taylor 1993: Parts 4, 5, 6; Marx 1964: i-vi, 4359, 195-219; 1961a: 17-18; Bloch, 1971; 1970a; 1970b; App. C, D, E). Not only all great philosophies, but also all great world religions contain idealistic as well as materialistic elements (Benjamin 1977: 252). It is one purpose of the critical theory of religion, which concretely supersedes into itself historical idealism as well as historical materialism, to explore the relationship between religion on one hand, and the slaughter bench of liberal, socialist, and fascist society and history, characterized by the continual application of aggression, force, terror, and the jus talionis, as witnessed once more by the 25 Articles of Impeachment against President Bush, which had been collected by the Congressman Kucinich from Ohio, and were read for 5 hours in the House of the American Congress on June 10, 2008, on the other, and to discover if and to what extent religion could

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possibly contribute to the critique of these negativities, and possibly to their negation, or at least to their mitigation, and finally even to their abolishment, and thus to the cause of shalom–peace (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; Hegel 1986l: 19-55; 1986p: 11-16; 1986g; Marx 1964: i-vi, 43-59, 195-219; 1961a: 17-18; Horkheimer 1967b: 248-268, 252, 259260, 311-312; Adorno 1969a: chaps. 1, 2,3; 1969b; 1969c; Fromm 1967: 1-86, 87-196, 220-221, 258-260; 1992: 95-106, 147-168, 203-212; Marcuse 1962; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; Habermas1976; Borradori 2003; Kellner 1989; Giles 1997; Kucinich 2008; Siebert 1987; 2001; 2002a; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d: 135-160; 2005d: 57-115; 2005e; 215-231; 2005f: 231-247; 2006a; 2006b: 91-137; 2006c: 1-32; 2006d: 61-114; App. G). According to Hegel, a Lutheran Christian, religion was the elevation of the finite to the Infinite: of the finite life to the infinite Life (Hegel 1986a: 9-103, 104-229, 234238, 274-427; Jamme/Schneider: 1984; Hegel 1986p: 11-16). In Hegel’s view, religion was that region for our consciousness in which all riddles of the world were resolved, in which all contradictions of the deeper reflecting spirit were revealed, and in which all pain of feeling had become silent. For Hegel, religion was the region of the eternal truth, of eternal rest, quiet, calm, silence, tranquility, and of eternal peace. From man as spirit started the many forms of sciences and arts, and of the interests of the political life: conditions that were related to his will and to the realization of his freedom in society and history. However, in Hegel’s perspective, all these manifold cultural and social formations, and the further interrelationship of human conditions, actions, enjoyments, and all that has value and deserved respect for man, and in which he was seeking his happiness, his fame, and his pride, all this found its ultimate center in religion: in the thought, the consciousness, the feeling of God. In Hegel’s view, God was, therefore, the beginning of everything and the goal of everything (Jamme/Schneider 1984; Hegel 1986a: 9-103, 104-229, 234-238, 274-427; 1986p: 11-16; Küng 1970; 1978: B). Everything came out of this theological center point, and everything returned back into it. Likewise, God was the center, who put life and spirit into everything, and who maintained all these social and cultural formations, and animated them. According to Hegel, in religion, man put himself into a relationship to this center, in which all his other conditions came together. Thereby, man elevated himself to the highest level of consciousness and into the region that was free from relationship to other things: the absolutely Self-Sufficient, the Unconditional, the Free and the ultimate Purpose for itself: in the words of the critical theorists, into the dimension of the wholly Other (Jamme/Schneider: 1984; Hegel 1986a: 9-103, 104-229, 234-238, 274-427; 1986p: 11-16;

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Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Küng, 1970; 1978: B; App. C, D, E, G). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, Hegel’s concern with the ultimate human-divine realm of freedom retains its actuality into the 21st century, precisely because of its increase in force, terror and Lex Talionis.

Religion in Dialectical Materialism Marx–for whom Hegel never became the dead dog which he has always been for the positivists of all shapes and forms–concretely superseded in his critique of his Philosophy of Law his notion of religion from historical idealism into historical materialism as a form of radical, revolutionary, socialist humanism (Hegel 1986g; Marx 1964: 43-59; 1961a: 17-18; Raines/ Dean 1970: 3-10; Flechthei/Lohmann 2003; Unseld 1965: 383-394; Küng 1970; 1978: B, C). For Marx, to be radical is to grasp things by the root, but for man the root is man himself. Marx negated Hegel’s notion of religion radically, but nevertheless not abstractly, but rather determinately and concretely in the sense that he did not only criticize it, but that he also preserved it, and tried to elevate, and to fulfill it (Hegel 1986c: 72-75; 1986e: 48-53; 1986g; Marx 1964: 43-59; Fromm 1967: 220-221). Marx did this being a Jew by birth and a Protestant by education and culture (Marx 1953: v-vi, ix-lx, chaps. I, III, V, VI, VIII, X). Doing this, he used the dialectic as well as some of the notions of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind (Hegel 1986c: 72-75; Marx 1964: 43-59; Fromm 1967: 220-221). Marx’s radical but nevertheless concrete supersession of Hegel’s notion of religion was, furthermore, mediated through the Hegel-student Ludwig Feuerbach and his conception of projection (Feuerbach 1904: 23-52; 1957: vii-xiv, Part I; 1996; Marx 1953: v-vi, ix-lx, chaps. I, III, V, VI, VIII, X). In the perspective of Marx, religion was indeed man’s self-consciousness and self-awareness as individual and as social being (Marx 1964: 43-59; Fromm 1967: 220-221). Yet in Marx’s view, that was the case only so long as man had not found himself yet, or had already lost himself again. In Marx’s view, man was not an abstract being squatting outside the world. Man was the human world: the family, the society, the state, and the history (Hegel 1986g; 1986l: 19-141; Marx 1964: i-vi, 43-59, 195-219; App. C, D). Man was a social being who produces religion through his family, his state, his society, his history (Hegel 1986a: 9-229, 239-254, 274-418; 1986p: 9-99, First and Second Parts; 1986q: Second and Third Part; 1986g: Parts One, Two, Three; 1986l: 19-141, Parts One to Four; Marx 1964: i-vi, 43-59, 195-219; App. C, D, E). Marx saw religion as an inverted world consciousness, because family, society, state and history were de facto an inverted world. According

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to Marx, religion was the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general basis of consolation and justification. For Max, religion was the fantastic realization of the human being in as much as the human being posed no true reality yet. In Marx’s view, the struggle against religion was, therefore, indirectly a struggle against the world, the spiritual aroma that was religion. In Marx’s perspective, religious suffering was at the same time an expression of real suffering, and a protest against real suffering. Religion was the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. Religion was the opium not for, but of the people: their own product, produced out of their own miserable situation. While Hegel had applied the opium image only to Hinduism, Marx generalized it to all the world religions and to religion as such (Hegel 1986c: 495-574; 1986a: 239-250; 1986p: 331-373; Marx 1964: i-vi, 43-59, 195-219; Küng/Ess/ Stietencron/Bechert 1984: B; Küng, 1978: B, C; App. E). Such generalization may not be permissible in terms of a dialectical religiology, not even in terms of the different religious traditions constituting Hinduism itself.

Realm of Freedom For Marx, the determinate or concrete abolition of religion as the illusionary happiness of men was a demand for their real happiness in alternative Future III–the realm of freedom, in which men and women could express and realize fully all the good energies of their being, on the basis of the realm of natural and economic necessity (Hegel 1986c: 72-75; 1986e: 48-53; Marx 1961c: 873-874; 1964: i-vi, 16, 43-59, 195-219; Fromm 1967; 1976; App. G). The call to abandon their religious illusions about their condition was a call to abandon a condition that required illusions. In Marx’s view, the concrete criticism of religion was, therefore, the embryonic criticism of this vale of tears, of which religion was the halo. While for Hegel, man had to take upon himself the cross of the contradictory present in family, society, state and history, in order to pluck the Rose of Reason, for Marx criticism had plucked the imaginary flower from the chain, not in order that man shall bear the chain without caprice or consolation, but so that he shall cast off the chain and pluck the living flower (Hegel 1986g: 26-27, 42-43; 1986p: 272; Marx 1871: 7-9, 18, 19-20, 24-26, 29-31, 32-33, 36, 37, 39, 42-45, 46-48, 64-67, 129-131, 135, 136-140; 1964: i-vi; 43-59, 195-219; App. C, D, E, F, G). While Hegel and Marx certainly disagreed concerning the notion of religion, they nevertheless, did consent on the inverse

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character of the social and historical world full of force, terror, jus talionis, riddles, contradictions, pain, untruth, restlessness, continual warfare, class struggle, insufficiency, temporality, finitude, conditionality, contingency, enslavement, purposelessness, meaninglessness, retaliation, alienation, loss of self, abstraction, suffering, oppression, heartlessness, soullessness, tears, unhappiness, chains, on one hand, and on the inverse character of religion with its claims to truth, rest, peace, spirituality, unconditionality, freedom, ultimate purpose, eternal happiness and protest against all suffering and death in the world, on the other: as the religious inversion of this inversion of the world, as the negation of this negation, may it arrive at an affirmation and be real, or be ideological or illusionary (Jamme/ Schneider 1984; Hegel 1986a: 234-238; 1986l: 1-55, 236-247; Marx 1964: i-vi, 43-59, 195-219; 1961a: 17-18; Bloch 1971: 1-9; 1970a: 1-82; App. C, D, E). While Hegel’s historical idealism was a theodicy in the sense of the self-justification of God through his instrumentalization of the injustice and evil, force, terror and retaliation on the slaughter bench of nature, society and history in direction of alternative Future III–the realm of human and divine freedom, Marx’s historical materialism was a theodicy in the Weberian sense of the explanation of the suffering on this same holocaust altar, with the practical intent to overcome it through revolution in direction of alternative Future III–the realm of freedom as full realization of man’s being, on the basis of the remaining necessary metabolism with nature (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986l: 19-55, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986q: 501534; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Horkheimer 1967b: 259-260, 311-313; 1971: 37-38,40-41; Küng 1991b: 726-733; Oelmüller 1990; App. G). Neither the Soviet Empire, which failed in terms of the development of red fascism and the arrest of the historical dialectic, nor the therefore successful neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1989 has made in anyway obsolete the Hegelian or the Marxian dialectical notion of the realm of freedom as the full realization of human nature (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986l: 19-55, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986q: 501-534; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Marx 1961c: 873-874; Horkheimer 1967b: 259-260, 311-313; 1971: 37-38, 40-41; Küng 1991b: 726-733; Oelmüller 1990; Fromm: 1966a; 1966b; 1990; 1992: 3-94, 203-212; Fromm/Xirau 1969; Habermas 1976; 1986; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; Edelstein/Habermas 1984; Fraser/Honneth 1993; Benedict XVI 2007; App. G). Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Marx retained actuality through Western and Eastern Marxism, on the Hegelian Left, in the praxis philosophy, and in the Frankfurt School. In the view of the dialectical religiology, the longing for the Marxian realm of freedom remains alive even after the victorious counter-revolution of 1989, and after the start of

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the liberal war against the Islamic force and terror, partially in conformity to the jus talionis, into the 21st century.

Metaphysical Need, Capacity, Disposition, and Talent Schopenhauer blamed religion for the lack of progress in metaphysics (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989: Vol. V, 21, 266, 382-466, 477; App. E). Schopenhauer did not get tired of reproaching metaphysics because of its so very small progress in the face of the so great advances in the physical or natural sciences in Modernity. Voltaire had already cried out: O metaphysique! Nous sommes aussi avances que du temps des premiers Druides. For Voltaire and Schopenhauer, while the natural sciences progressed, metaphysics regressed to the times of the first Druids. According to Schopenhauer, religion had always been ex officio the antagonist and continual inhibition for metaphysics, particularly in the Middle Ages, when it was completely under the control of theology. According to Schopenhauer, metaphysics would never be able to show its true energies, and would never be able to do its gigantic steps, as long as it was expected under threats to adapt itself to the religious dogmas, which were calculated for the so very small metaphysical capacity of the large crowd of people in liberal society, First, so Schopenhauer criticized, the religious authorities bound the arms of the metaphysicians, and then they mocked and sneered at them, that they could not achieve anything. In Schopenhauer’s view, the religions have seized and taken possession of the metaphysical need, capacity, disposition, and talent of man, as they partially paralyze it through early religious education, training, impression, memorization, socialization, and most of all through the authoritarian internalization of their dogmas and moral orientation of action, and partially forbid and frowned upon all its free, impartial, unprejudiced, uninhibited expressions. In consequence, man is partially directly forbidden to research freely the most important and most interesting issues, even his existence itself, and such research is partially indirectly hindered, hampered and prevented, and it is partially made impossible through that paralysis. Thus, man’s most sublime metaphysical capacity and talent have been kept in chains. Schopenhauer opposed Philalethes, the friend of the truth, to Demopheles, the friend of the people, and identified with the former. With Plato, Demophles defended religion as the metaphysics of the people, which gave the highest meaning to the uneducated working masses, and consolation in their suffering and even in death. Philalethes promoted a higher metaphysics than such people’s metaphysics as is religion. Philalethes stood

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for the metaphysical truth on the basis of reason against the untruth of religion. Schopenhauer-Philalethes replaced atheistically the Gods of the world religions and their mythical allegories, and mysteries, and tragedies, and absurd dogmas, and popular temple ceremonies and liturgies and cults, and their authorities, revelations and miracles, with the world as universal will to life and its representations. Religion belonged to the childhood of mankind. Judaism as well as Christianity and Islam, having been undermined by science for a long time, were in the process of going under, like the Greek or Roman religions before. According to Schopenhauer, the metaphysics of the world as universal will to life and its representations would survive the world religions, and would satisfy the metaphysical need, capacity, disposition, and talent of the educated people. After Schopenhauer had been a dead dog in the 19th century, he gained new philosophical, aesthetical, and even political actuality in the 20th century, particularly through the massive experience of force, terror and Lex talionis involved in World War I and II, and in liberalism, socialism, and fascism: e.g. for Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.

The Death of God According to Nietzsche, God–the entire Horizon, the Sun of the earth, the Direction and the Light of man–was dead (Kaufmann 1986: 95-96). God had died in the Syrian Religion of Pain, but had risen again (Hegel 1986p: 406-409). God had died in the Egyptian Religion of Riddle, but had risen again (Hegel 1986p: 409-442; App. E). God had died in Christianity for Luther and Hegel, but there had been an inversion, and God maintained himself in this process of his death, and it was merely the death of death (Matthew 27, 28; Hegel 1986q: 291; Küng 1970; 1978; 1990a; 1994a; 1994b; Benedict XVI 2007; App. E). God arose again to life. Death turned into its opposite through resurrection and ascension. Yet for Nietzsche, God remained dead (Kaufmann 1986: 95-96). According to Nietzsche, the people of modern, so-called civil society had killed God with their science and their politics in the forms of materialism, atheism and nihilism, long before it turned into a socialist or a fascist society (Kaufmann 1986: 95-96; Küng 1978: C and D; 1970; 1993a; 1994a; 1994b; Benedict XVI 2007). For Nietzsche, there was no consolation any more in liberal society. What were the Holiest and the most Powerful of all that the world had yet owned was bled to death under the knives of the bourgeoisie. Nobody could wipe the blood of this slaughter of God off the people living in

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bourgeois society. There was no water there for them to clean themselves. There were no festivals of atonement, or sacred games. According to Nietzsche, the greatness of this deed, the killing of God–the prototype of all force, terror, and jus talionis, of which also Freud and Reich spoke later on–was too great for the bourgeoisie to bear (Kaufmann 1986: 95-96; Freud 1939; 1946; 1962; 1964; Reich 1966; 1971; Küng 1979; 1978: C and D). For Nietzsche, the people in civil society themselves had to become gods, simply to be worthy of their own murder of God. The old Gods had to be replaced by the new super-man. There had never been a greater deed. Whoever would be born after the modern civil society, for the sake of this deed he would be part of a higher history than all history hitherto. In Nietzsche’s time, this tremendous event was still on its way. It was still wandering. It had not yet reached the ears of men. Lightening and thunder required time. The light of the stars required time. Deeds required time, even long after they had been done, before they could be seen and heard. In Nietzsche’s time, this deed–the murder of God–was still more distant from the people of liberal society than the most distant stars: and yet they hade done it themselves. Nietzsche considered the churches of liberal society to be the tombs and sepulchers of God. Nietzsche gained greatest actuality in the 20th and 21st centuries through German fascism, deconstructionism, and even through the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno (Habermas 1985a; 1987b; 1987c; Arens 2009: 79-83). Today–2010–even all the modern bourgeois religiologists at the positivistic state universities of civil society study religion, but exclude–in contrast to Hegel–the God or Truth question completely, as if there was nothing to be asked for any longer, and separate themselves sharply from theology, as if it had indeed– as Benjamin and Adorno had said–become small and ugly and could no longer let itself be seen in public (Hegel 1986p: 11-27; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-617; Benjamin 1955a; 1955c: Vol. I, 494; 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Marcuse 1962: 65-66; Horkheimer 1988c: chaps. 5, 16; 1988d: chap. 5; App. E).

The Oceanic Feeling In 1927, Freud sent his friend Romain Rolland his little book The Future of an Illusion, which had treated religion as an illusion (Freud 1962: 11-12; 1964). Rolland answered Freud that he entirely agreed with his judgment upon religion, but that he was sorry that Freud had not appreciated the true source of religious sentiments. For Rolland, this source consisted in a peculiar feeling, which he himself was never without, and which he found confirmed by many others, and which he may suppose was present in mil-

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lions of people. It was a feeling that Rolland wanted to call a sensation of Eternity: a feeling as of Something Limitless, Unbounded, Infinite–as it were, oceanic. This feeling, so Rolland added, was a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith. This feeling brought with it no assurance of personal immortality. Yet, this feeling was, nevertheless, the source of religious energy. This source was seized upon by the various Churches and religious systems, and was directed by them into particular channels, and was also doubtless exhausted by them. One may, so Rolland thought, rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejected every religious belief and illusion.

The Infinite The view of Rolland, who himself had in 1919 praised the magic of illusion in his poem Liluli, caused Freud no small difficulty (Freud 1962: 11-12; 1964). Freud, who had defined religion as the longing for the father, and who had attributed to it the psychological and cultural function, to mitigate at least man’s strong instinct for aggression, force, and terror, and his inclination for the practice of the Lex talionis, could not discover in himself this oceanic feeling of the Infinite (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; Freud 1939; 1946; 1962: 11-12; 1964; Marcuse 1962; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1967; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1980b; Siebert 2006a; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007g; 2008a; App. E). It was not easy for Freud, to deal scientifically–psychoanalytically–with feelings (Freud 1939; 1946; 1962: 11-12; 1964; Marcuse 1962; Fromm 1980; Landauer 1991). Freud could attempt to describe the physiological signs of feelings. Where this was not possible, so Freud argued, nothing remained but to fall back on the ideational content, which was most readily associated with the feeling. Freud was afraid that Rolland’s oceanic feeling of the Infinite, too, would defy this kind of characterization. Freud understood Rolland to mean the same thing by the oceanic feeling as the consolation offered by an original and somewhat eccentric dramatist–Christian Dietrich Grabbe–in his Hannibal, to his hero, who was facing a self-inflicted death: Indeed, we shall not fall out of this world. We are in it once and for all! For Freud, that was to say, it was a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole. To Freud, this seemed rather to be something in the nature of an intellectual perception. Freud had to admit that this intellectual perception was not without an accompanying feeling-tone, but only such as would be present with any other act of thought of equal range. From his own experience, Freud could not convince himself of the primary nature

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of such an oceanic feeling of the Infinite. Yet, Freud admitted that this did not give him the right to deny that such oceanic feeling did in fact occur in other people. For Freud, the only question was whether it was being correctly interpreted, and whether it ought to be regarded as the fons et origo [source and origin] of the whole need for religion. In Freud’s view, the Ego seemed to maintain clear and sharp lines in relation to the Id and to the Super-Ego and toward the external natural, social, and historical reality (Freud 1939; 1946; 1962: 11-12; 1964; App. B, C, D, E). For Freud, there was only one state, admittedly an unusual one, but not one that could be stigmatized as pathological, in which the Ego did not maintain its boundary. At the height of being in love, the boundary between Ego and object threatened to melt away (Hegel 1986a: 239-254; 1986g: 307338; Horkheimer 1988a: 191-200, 345-348; 1987k: 289-328; Freud 1939; 1946; 1962: 11-12; 1964). Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who was in love declared, that I and you were one and identical, and was prepared to behave as if it was indeed the case, and were a fact.

The Religion of the Working Class Unlike the great philosophers of German Idealism, Freud was much less concerned with the deepest sources of the religious feeling–the sensation of Eternity, the Infinite, the Absolute, the Unconditional–than with what the common man understood by his religion: i.e. the working class in civil society (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 491-540; 1986q: 341-344; Freud 1962: 21-24; 1964). Freud was concerned with the religious system of doctrines and promises, which on the one hand explained to the common man the riddles of this world–the evil, the suffering, the force, the violence, the terror–with enviable completeness, and on the other, assured him that a caring divine Providence would watch over his life and would compensate him in a future existence for any frustration he suffered here on earth (Exodus 33: 13; Hosea 14: 10; Lieber 2001: 193/10; Hegel 1986l: 19-55; Freud 1964; 1962: 21-24; Horkheimer 1967: 259-261, 311-312; Baum 2007: chap. 5). According to Freud’s experience, the working class could not imagine this divine Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father. Here Freud overlooked that the Hebrews had called Yahweh Father only after the exile to Babylon (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Freud 1962: 21-24; 1964; Küng 1978; 1979; 199a; 1991b). For Freud, nevertheless, only such a divine, protective, fatherly Being could understand the needs of the children of men, and be softened by their prayers, and placated by the signs of their remorse. In Freud’s view,

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the whole thing was so patently infantile, so foreign to the natural, social, and historical reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity, it was painful to think that the great majority of mortals would never be able to rise above this naïve view of life. It was still more humiliating for Freud to discover how large a number of people living in civil society today, who could not but see that this religion of the common man was not acceptable and tenable, nevertheless tried to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions and struggles. Freud, the Jew, wanted to mix among the ranks of the believers, in order to meet these philosophers who thought they could rescue the God of religion by replacing him by an impersonal, shadowy and abstract metaphysical principle, and to address them with the warning words of the third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue: You shall not utter the name of Yahweh your God to misuse it, for Yahweh will not leave unpunished the man who utters his name to misuse it (Exodus 20: 7; Freud 1962: 21-24; 1964; Mann 2002: 101-168). If, so Freud argued, some of the great men of the past acted in the same way, no appeal could be made to their example. He knew, why they were obliged to do so: the control of the Church over society and state–the Holy Inquisition (Freud 1962: 21-24; 1964; Bentley 1961: 331-404; App. C, D, E).

Palliative Measures For Freud, the religion of the common man in the working class of civil society was the only one that ought to bear that name (Hegel 1986g: 339397; 1986l: 491-540; 1986q: 341-344; Freud 1962: 21-24; 1964). Like Marx, Freud did not really want to deprive the working class, which had neither art or philosophy or science, of its religion because like Marx he understood that there was a need for some kind of palliative, because life was simply too hard to bear, particularly for the lower classes, in antagonistic bourgeois society, as long as there was no revolutionary transformation toward alternative Future III–the realm of freedom on the basis of the realm of natural and economic necessity (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 491-540; 1986q: 341-344; Marx 1961c: 873-874; App. B, C, D, E, F, G). Life brought too many pains, disappointments, and impossible tasks. Life was deeply damaged, and did not really live in modern capitalist society already long before Auschwitz and Treblinka (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 491-540; 1986q: 341-344; Freud 1962: 21-24; 1964; Adorno 1980a; 1980b; 1980c; Tiedemann 1997). In order to bear their hard life, people could not dispense with palliative measures:

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Freud himself took cocaine for some time, and became addicted to it, and prescribed it even to his patients in Vienna and France. Freud considered some of these three palliative measures to be indispensable. For Freud, the great bourgeois enlightener Voltaire had deflections in mind when he ended his Candid, in which he had ridiculed Leibniz’s all too optimistic metaphysical theodicy, with the advice to cultivate one’s garden (Leibniz 1996; Hegel 1986l: 28; 1986t: 248, 455; Freud 1962: 21-24; 1964). Freud knew that scientific activity was a deflection of this kind too. For Freud, the substitutive satisfactions, as offered by art, were illusions in contrast with the natural, social, economic, political, and historical reality, but they were, nevertheless, psychically effective, thanks to the role that fantasy had had assumed in mental life in the process of its evolution. According to Freud, the intoxicating substances influenced the human body and altered its chemistry. Freud admitted that it was no simple matter, to see where religion had its place in this series. However, finally Freud had no doubt that the palliative power of religion lay in the fact that it alone could answer the question of the purpose of life, and this purpose was not only the finite, but even the infinite happiness of man, the full realization of what psychoanalysis had called the pleasure principle in contrast to the reality principle (Freud 1962: 21-24; 1964; 1992). For Freud, the idea of life having a purpose, namely, happiness, stood and fell with the religious system: the solution of the theodicy problem (Hegel 1986l: 28, 640; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Freud 1962: 21-24; 1964; 1992). It seems to the critical religiologists that for Freud elements of all three palleative measures were contained in the religion of the working class in antagonistic bourgeois society (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 491-540; 1986q: 341-344; Niebuhr 1932; 1964: 41-58; Freud 1962: 21-24; 1964; App. C, D, E, F, G). There is no indication, that for Freud religion was more than its palliative function for the masses in capitalist society. His biological determinism prevented Freud from seeing the possibility of religion as a radical, critical, revolutionary, productive force in and beyond antagonistic civil society, driving and pushing toward alternative Future III–a free, just, reconciled, and thus, sane society (Hegel 1986l: 19-33; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1976; 1990; Marcuse 1966; Niebuhr 1932; 1964; 1987; Raines/Dean 1970; Kogon 1967; Siebert 2005c; 2006a; 2006b; 2007a; 2007b; 2007e; 2008a: 180-210; 2008b: 55-61; 2008c: 61-65). However, for

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Freud’s philosophy the main function of religion in the popular sense was to preach love and thus, to mitigate the aggressive components of the Id, the death drive, man’s destructiveness, force, violence, torture, and terror, which unfortunately it only seldom fulfilled actually and factually: with the exception of the few saints, who were able to follow the Golden Rule and its concretization in the 5 commandments of the Sermon on the Mount against murder, adultery, lying, the Lex talionis, and the exclusion of the stranger and the enemy (Matthew 5-7; Freud 1939; 1946; 1962; 1964; 1992; Reich 1976; 1971; Fromm 1973; App. E). In the perspective of the critical religiology, the further task of psychoanalysis would be to explore why individuals and most of all nations are so often completely unable to practice the Golden Rule, and the life commandments intrinsic to it, and to stop, or diminish at least force, violence, torture, terror and war, instead of escalating it, and to help to remove the obstacles after they have been found in the personal or collective consciousness or unconsciousness, or in the surrounding social, economic, or political structures of modern civil society (Matthew 5-7; Hegel 1986g; Marx 1961a: chap. 1; Freud 1939; 1946; 1962; 1964; 1992; Reich 1976; 1971; Fromm 1973; App. C, D, E).

Dialectic of Enlightenment and Liberating Truth In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, Freud reduced and dissolved the oceanic feeling of the Infinite into a more or less sublimated form of finite sexual or erotic love (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Freud 1939; 1946; 1962: 11-12; 1964; Marcuse 1962; Fromm 1959; 1980b; 1997; 2001; Siebert 2005a; 2005b; 2005c: 135-160; 2005d: 57-114: 2005e: 215-231; 2005f: 231-247; 2006a; 2006b: 91-137; 231-247; 2006c: 1-32; 2006d: 61-114). Certainly, while the sexual and erotic yearning can be a part of the longing for the wholly Other, as the writings of the mystics show only too clearly, the latter can nevertheless not be reduced to the former without doing violence to both (Blakney 1941; Quint 1979; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Freud 1939; 1946; 1962: 11-12; 1964; Marcuse 1962; Fromm 1959; 1980b; Siebert 2005a; 2005b; 2005c: 135-160; 2005d: 57-114: 2005e: 215-231; 2005f: 231-247: 2006a; 2006b: 91-137; 231-247; 2006c: 1-32; 2006d: 61-114; App. E). Freud was certainly close to the great tradition of the Enlightenment, reaching from Voltaire and Rousseau through Kant and Hegel to Marx, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but he also succumbed to the dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969; Marcuse 1962: 65-66). In this dialectic of Enlightenment rationality turned over into irrationality, and integration into disintegration, and

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the liberation from fear into more fear, and the mastering of fate into the enslavement by it. Such dialectic facilitated, mainly as the result of a too abstract negation of religion, the decline of the Enlightenment, and its return after all demythologization to mythology in the form of often an aggressive and even terroristic religious and political fundamentalism (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969; Marcuse 1962: 65-66; Habermas 2001a; 2002; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Borradori 2003; App. F). Thus, President Ronald Reagan, who had started out as an enlightened Roosevelt liberal and labor union leader, became a neo-liberal, conservative-revolutionary icon, and as such returned to and preached weekly on every Saturday the old Persian mythology of the good and evil empire struggling against each other and the Hebrew mythology of the final battle of Armageddon, and allowed such mythologies to determine his foreign and domestic policies. However, according to Fromm, in order to appreciate fully the extraordinary significance not only of the Enlightenment movement in general, but also of Freud’s psychoanalysis and its discoveries, one had to start out with understanding the principle, on which they had been based. (Fromm 1959; 1980b: vii-viii; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969; Marcuse 1962: 65-66; Habermas 2001a; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; Borradori 2003; Küng 1979; Siebert 2005a; 2005b; 2005c: 135-160; 2005d: 57-114: 2005e: 215-231; 2005f: 231-247; 2006a; 2006b: 91-137; 231-247; 2006c: 1-32; 2006d: 61-114; Petuchowski 1956: 543-594). In Fromm’s view, one could not express this Freudian principle more adequately than through the words of Jesus of Nazareth to the Jews, who believed in him: If you make my word your home you will indeed be my disciples, you will learn the truth and the truth shall make you free (John 8: 31-32; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; Fromm 1959; 1966b: chap. ix; 1980b: vi; Reich 1976; Küng 1970).

For Fromm, indeed, the idea that the truth saved and healed, was an old insight, which the Great Masters of Living and Being had proclaimed: nobody perhaps with such radicalism and clarity as the Gautama, the Buddha, yet, it was a thought common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: to Socrates, Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx (Fromm 1966a: chap. ix; 1966b; 1967; 1976; 1980b: vi; 1992: 3-94; Funk/Johach/Meyer 2000; Fromm/Suzuki/ Martino 1960; Fromm/Xirau 1969; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; Marcuse 1970a; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng 1970; 1990a; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Jens/Küng 1993; Benedict XVI 2007; App. E). Ultimately, the dialectic of enlightenment is not to be continued forever, or suddenly broken off, but rather resolved through the liberating power of the truth: against the untruth prevailing in contemporary liberal, so-

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cialist, and fascist societies, and against the consequent force, violence, and terror (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969; Marcuse 1962: 65-66; Habermas 1971; 2001a; 2002; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; Borradori 2003; Arens 2009: 79-83; Küng 1978; 1990a; Siebert 2005a; 2005b; 2005c: 135-160; 2005d: 57-114: 2005e: 215-231; 2005f: 231-247: 2006a; 2006b: 91-137; 231-247; 2006c: 1-32; 2006d: 61-114).

Fascism and the Masses According to Adorno and Horkheimer, since its foundation in the time before 1933, the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt a.M included the psychoanalysis into its work, and that in its strictest Freudian form: including a psychoanalysis of religion, particularly of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhaism a la Freud, Reik, Reich, Samuel, Fromm, etc. (Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Kamenka 1983: 115-116; Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; Reich 1976; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 3, 4, 6, 7; 1985l: 294-295; 1989m: 260-263; 1996s: 17-20; Küng 1991; 1994a; 1994b; 1967; 1992; 1997). From the start a psychoanalytical department was connected with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt a.M. This department was lead by Karl Landauer, a student of Freud and for a short time Horkheimer’s own psychoanalyst (Landauer 1999; Horkheimer 1995o: 190-193, 247-248, 285-288, 309-311, 324-326, 333, 334-336, 338-339, 364-365, 366-367, 416-417, 453-454, 465-466, 477-479, 516-517, 620-623, 632-634, 644-648, 703-704, 705-706, 808-811). Karl Landauer starved to death in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Landauer’s colleague, Erich Fromm, had written already in the first number of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung two programmatic essays about the structure, method, and tasks of an analytical social psychology (Horkheimer 1970: 28-54, 253-277; Horkheimer 1989m: 260263; 1996s: 17-20; 1995o: 150-151, 152-153, 157-159, 160-163, 163-171, 171-173, 174-176, 177-188, 209-210, 213-215, 215-217, 371-374, 399-400, 444-446, 446-448; Fromm 1932a; 1932b; Schmid-Noerr 2000: 7-40; Mühlleitner 2000: 41-56; Bonss 2000: 57-82; Wolf 2000: 83-100). In 1932, in the shadow of the threatening Hitler dictatorship of 1933, stood before the eyes of Horkheimer and Adorno and their colleagues in the Frankfurt Institute–the Cafe Marx, including the Freud department–the contradiction between the palpable interests of the masses on one hand, and the fascist politics, on the other. The masses let themselves be enthusiastically engaged by national socialist politics. Horkheimer and Adorno saw that the economic pressure, under which the masses stood, continued itself in

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social, psychological, unconscious processes, which brought the people to the point, where they made precisely this pressure, under which they stood, into their own affair and business and put up with the loss of freedom. Scholars in the Institute for Social Research tried in many theoretical studies to trace further the interaction between society and psychology as Freudian psychoanalysis. Horkheimer and Adorno and the other critical theorists, including Fromm and Landauer always considered the socioeconomic pressure–what Freud had called the Lebensnot, i.e. life need, life want, life trouble, life emergency.

Authority According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the theme of the interaction of familial, social, economic, political or religious authority on one hand and the psychic repression on the other played for many years a great role also in the empirical work of the Institute for Social Research and has not lost its actuality up to the present–2009 (Horkheimer 1996s: 17-20; SchmidNoerr 2000: 7-40; Mühlleitner 2000: 41-56; Bonss 2000: 57-82; Wolf 2000: 83-100; App. C, D). In 1935 Horkheimer’s, Fromm’s, and Marcuse’s volume on Authority and Family appeared in Paris (Horkheimer 1932: 125-144; 1996s: 17-20; Horkheimer/Fromm/Marcuse 1936; Horkheimer 1996s: 17-20; Schmid-Noerr 2000: 7-40; Mühlleitner 2000: 41-56; Bonss 2000: 57-82; Wolf 2000: 83-100). This volume started with theoretical outlines, designs, and drafts, questionnaires, and with particular monographic depictions the analytical description as well as the explanation of the authority-bound character as well as the knowledge of socially decisive social-psychological categories, e.g. the internalization of the authority in the form of the Protestant work ethics into the super-ego in the bourgeois age (Hegel 1986g; Weber 1952; 1969; 1978; 1992: 302-322; 2002: 203-221; Horkheimer 1932: 125-144; 1996s: 17-20; Horkheimer/Fromm/Marcuse 1936; Horkheimer 1996s: 17-20; Schmid-Noerr 2000: 7-40; Mühlleitner 2000: 41-56; Bonss 2000: 57-82; Wolf 2000: 83-100; App. C, D, E). During the emigration in the USA, Adorno carried out research about the authoritarian character together with the Berkeley Public Opinion Study Group (Adorno/Frankel-Brunwick/Levinson/Sandford 1950; Horkheimer 1932: 125-144; 1996s: 17-20; Horkheimer/Fromm/Marcuse 1936; Horkheimer 1996s: 17-20; Schmid-Noerr 2000: 7-40; Mühlleitner 2000: 41-56; Bonss 2000: 57-82; Wolf 2000: 83-100). In this study perspectives and categories of the older volume on Family and Authority were related to a broader empirical material and were particularly applied to the illumination of the

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darkest mass phenomena of the first half of the 20th century: the persecution mania directed against minorities, particularly the causes and elements of anti-Semitism (Horkheimer 1985l: 294-295; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Adorno/Frankel-Brunwick/Levinson/Sandford 1950; Horkheimer 1932: 125-144; 1996s: 17-20; Horkheimer/Fromm/Marcuse 1936; Horkheimer 1996s: 17-20; Schmid-Noerr 2000: 7-40; Mühlleitner 2000: 41-56; Bonss 2000: 57-82; Wolf 2000: 83-100; App. E). For the critical theorists these studies were unthinkable without the impulse of the Freudian psychology and thus they very often used Freudian categories (Adorno 1979; 1995a; Horkheimer 1985l: 294-295; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Adorno/Frankel-Brunwick/Levinson/Sandford 1950; Horkheimer 1932: 125-144; 1996s: 17-20; Horkheimer/Fromm/Marcuse 1936; Schmid-Noerr 2000: 7-40; Mühlleitner 2000: 41-56; Bonss 2000: 5782; Wolf 2000: 83-100). Informed by Freud, the critical theorists struggled against authoritarianism as a presupposition of fascism not only in the family, in civil society, and in the state, but also in religion, and in the spirit of the Torah for the limitation of human authority in all dimensions of social life (Exodus 5: 1-2; Lieber 2001: 338/1-2; Horkheimer 1932: 125144; 1988c: chaps. 15, 16, 17, 18; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2, 6, 7, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16; 1987e: 293-319, 320-350, 351-353, 354-359, 364-472, 373-376, 377-395; 396-405, 406-412, 415-422, 423-452, 453-457; 1985l: 294-295; 1996s: 17-20; Adorno 1979; 1995a; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Adorno/FrankelBrunwick/Levinson/Sandford 1950; Horkheimer 1932: 125-144; 1996s: 17-20; Horkheimer/Fromm/Marcuse 1936; Schmid-Noerr 2000: 7-40; Mühlleitner 2000: 41-56; Bonss 2000: 57-82; Wolf 2000: 83-100; App. E). According to the Rabbis, Pharaoh refused to free the Hebrew slaves in Goshen, not only because it was in his economic interest to keep them, but also because he does not know God, i.e. he does not recognize, that certain kinds of behavior, such as abusing other people, were wrong (Exodus 5: 1-2; Lieber 2001: 338/1-2). Divine Sovereignty was precisely what Pharaoh mocked at the outset of his power struggle with Moses and his brother Aaron. It was not a matter of oversize egos in battle, but rather of the limits of human authority. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, for the critical theorists the divine Sovereignty, the wholly Other, was not the basis for the legitimation of human authority in family civil society state and religion, but rather for its critique (Exodus 5: 1-2; Lieber 2001: 338/1-2; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1932: 125-144; 1988c: chaps. 15, 16, 17, 18; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2, 6, 7, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16; 1987e: 293-319, 320-350, 351-353, 354-359, 364-472, 373-376, 377-395; 396-405, 406-412, 415-422, 423-452, 453-457; 1985l: 294-295; 1996s: 17-20).

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Horkheimer and Adorno criticized Freud when he claimed that sociology was in its totality nothing else than applied psychology (Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; Adorno 1979; 1995a; Horkheimer 1932: 125-144; 1996s: 17-20; 1985l: 294-295; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Adorno/ Frankel-Brunwick/Levinson/Sandford 1950; 1996s: 17-20; Horkheimer/ Fromm/Marcuse 1936; Schmid-Noerr 2000: 7-40; Mühlleitner 2000: 4156; Bonss 2000: 57-82; Wolf 2000: 83-100). According to the critical theorists, Freud did not see that the external laws of society were not such of the pure inwardness of the human beings. At this point the critical theorists connected Marx and his knowledge of the external laws of society and history and Freud and his knowledge of the psyche and its internal laws (Marx 1871; 1906; 1953; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1963; 1964; 1977; Kamenka 1983; Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; Bloch 1971; Fromm 1932a; 1932b; 1959; 1967; 1980a; 1980b; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1970a; 1980a; 1995; 2001; Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; Adorno 1979; 1995a; Horkheimer 1985l: 294-295; Flechtheim/ Lohman 2003; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Adorno/FrankelBrunwick/Levinson/Sandford 1950; Horkheimer 1932: 125-144; 1996s: 17-20; Horkheimer/Fromm/Marcuse 1936; Horkheimer 1996s: 17-20; Schmid-Noerr 2000: 7-40; Mühlleitner 2000: 41-56; Bonss 2000: 57-82; Wolf 2000: 83-100). In the perspective of Adorno and Horkheimer, the laws of society have made themselves independent. These social laws stepped opposite to men and the individual psyche and contradicted them in a decisive manner. The more this objectification of the social laws happened and proved itself the more changed the function of that what was covered by the expression social psycholopgy. If, in 1932, social psychology wanted to trace how the social compulsion reached into the most refined and keenest psychic differentiation of the individual, who thinks to be for himself or herself and to belong to himself or herself, then in 1957 the reflection on social psychological mechanisms were often used to distract from that force of society. Difficulties and conflicts of the present situation in late capitalist society were made harmless as soon as they were immediately reduced to man’s psyche, to his internal processes. Precisely therefore, to the critical theorist it appeared to be less the demand of the time to produce a synthesis of sociology and psychology than the insistent but separate work in both dimensions. Thereby also certain teachings of Freud did not remain untouched. In his late period, Freud had the inclination to absolitize the psychic essence of man in opposition to the condi-

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tions of his existence. The reality principle, which Freud represented, could lead people astray to sanction the adaptation to the blind social pressure of antagonistic civil society and finally to justify the continuation of the reality principle. Of course the critical theorists had to admit that this intention constituted only one side of the Freudian thinking. This intention could not be separated from Freud’s other deadly serious experience of the burden under which humanity dragged itself along. Precisely this experience gave the Freudian teaching its irreconcilable depth and substantiality, which the critical theorists connected with the irreconcilable depth of the Marxian teaching (Marx 1871; 1906; 1953; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1963; 1964; 1977; Kamenka 1983; Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; Bloch 1971; Fromm 1932a; 1932b; 1959; 1967; 1980a; 1980b; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1970a; 1980a; 1995; 2001; Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; Adorno 1979; 1995a; Horkheimer 1985l: 294-295; Flechtheim/ Lohman 2003; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Adorno/FrankelBrunwick/Levinson/Sandford 1950; Horkheimer 1932: 125-144; 1996s: 17-20; Horkheimer/Fromm/Marcuse 1936; Horkheimer 1996s: 17-20; Schmid-Noerr 2000: 7-40; Mühlleitner 2000: 41-56; Bonss 2000: 57-82; Wolf 2000: 83-100). The critical theorists engaged neither in a psychologization of the critical theory of society nor in a socialization of psychology. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the psychoanalytical revisionism of the different schools which advocated against the supposedly Freudian exaggerations a stronger consideration of the so-called social factors, has not only often neglected or even forgotten the brilliant discoveries of Freud–the role of the early childhood, the repression, even the central notion of the unconscious, but it has beyond that associated itself with the trivial commonsense, with the social conformism, and has lost the critical hardness. In addition, the revisionists presented the regression of the Freudian theory into a commonplace psychology as real progress. After the resistance against the psychoanalysis seemed to have been overcome, Freud was repressed a second time through conformist preparation. The mythologizing obscurantism and the positivism, which was satisfied with the surface phenomena of the ego-psychology had no problem to come to an understanding with such revisionism. Against such revisionism the critical theorists wanted to restore again the living consciousness of Freud together with that of Marx in Germany and in America: without sociologizing Freud or psychologizing Marx (Marx 1871; 1906; 1953; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1963; 1964; 1977; Kamenka 1983; Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; Bloch 1971; Fromm 1932a; 1932b; 1959; 1967; 1980a; 1980b; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1970a; 1980a; 1995; 2001; Freud

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1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; Adorno 1979; 1995a; Horkheimer 1985l: 294-295; Flechthei/Lohman 2003; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177217; Adorno/Frankel-Brunwick/Levinson/Sandford 1950; Horkheimer 1932: 125-144; 1996s: 17-20; Horkheimer/Fromm/Marcuse 1936; Horkheimer 1996s: 17-20; Schmid-Noerr 2000: 7-40; Mühlleitner 2000: 41-56; Bonss 2000: 57-82; Wolf 2000: 83-100; App. C, D).

Self-reflection According to Horkheimer, what Freud demanded most emphatically from scholars and human beings in general was self-reflection (Horkheimer 1989m: 259-263). It seemed to Horkheimer that precisely such selfreflection had become very difficult for individuals and nations at this time of Freud’s 100th birthday on May 6, 1956. This was particularly the case, when the Freudian self-reflection touched unavoidably the individuals’ and nations’ own wounds and weaknesses. Horkheimer thought particularly of the personal and collective self-conceit, the pride of class as well as of nationhood that had become so widespread in all countries. For Horkheimer, self-deceit and pride could only with great difficulties be separated from the inclination of the black and white painting of other people. People idealized themselves and their own group. People themselves were always right and the others were always wrong. Horkheimer remembered that Freud had developed a theory, the cue of which was narcissism: the being in love with oneself (Horkheimer 1989m: 259-263; Fromm 1956). Narcissism meant that people, when they in early stages of their development, found themselves hindered or rejected in the choice of their love object, instead turned their love again as in the earliest childhood back to themselves. Like every distracted or repressed drive, so also could this libidinous instinct easily take on diseased, morbid, traits: an overestimation, an over-sensitivity, which was not in agreement with the reality. When, so Horkheimer argued with Freud, people found themselves as individuals too weak and powerless, then they very easily transferred their, so to speak, pathological self-love to groups to which they belonged. The reason, which led to the original denial, is projected on other groups, particularly the so-called enemies. That happened especially in so far as the reason lay with the people themselves, e.g. the insatiability of their own wishes; the indifference toward the environment, the lack of empathy and courage. For Horkheimer, the psychological mechanism, which was the basis for the private and collective selfishness, proved itself in Freud’s perspective as something not at all natural, or healthy, but rather as a symp-

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tom, which could be healed only when people recognized the causes that lay in themselves (Horkheimer 1987e: 320-350; 1988c: 4, chaps. 4, 6, 8, 16, 17, 18; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2, 6, 7; 1989m: 259-263). However, that was of course extremely uncomfortable. For a long time, people have liked only too much to project the darkness in themselves on other individuals or groups, and for that matter to posit themselves as being absolute. According to Horkheimer, Freud could help people against such projections. Freud has taught people to search for the darkness first of all in themselves, and only then in the others. The dialectical religiologist remembers that already the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth had taught against such projection: Do not judge, and you will not be judged; because the judgments you give are the judgments you will get; and the amount you measure to is the amount you will be given. How do you observe the splinter in your brother’s eye and never notice the blank in your own? How are you say to your brother, Let me take the splinter out of your eye, when all the time there is a blank in your own: Hypocrite! Take the blank out of your own eye first, and then you will see clearly enough to take the splinter out of your brother’s eye (Matthew 7: 1-5; 261; Horkheimer 1989m; App. E).

In Horkheimer’s view, in so far as Freud rejected such projection as well, he was a man of that enlightenment, which Christians and romantics have called shallow, because they had not gone through it seriously. Yet, here indeed genuine faith and enlightenment meet. According to Horkheimer, if people would be healed from their narcissistic self-love, which was nothing primary but rather a kind of maiming and mutilation then this would contribute to a large measure to their own individual and collective health.

Guilt Horkheimer found a liberating element in Freud’s otherwise very serious and even Schopenhaurian dark and gloomy thinking (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Freud 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; 1992; Horkheimer 1989m: 261). Freud did not want people to dwell on their guilt. As Freud explained the psychic mechanisms in the people themselves, which made them aggressive and willing to destroy and be sadistic, he also at the same time tried to grasp and comprehend the origin of the tormenting and agonizing feelings of guilt, which only stood in the way of the work for alternative Future III–a better, more guiltless reality (Freud 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; 1992; Horkheimer 1989m: 261; Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1974; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985b; 1985e; Bloch/Reif

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1978; Flechtheim 1971; Flechthei/Lohmann 2003; App. G). According to Horkheimer, Freud saw in the deceased, morbid, pathological guilt complex, which only inhibited the rational activity, nothing else than the late reflex of the old application of power, force and violence, to which people had once to bow down, and which they had internalized in the super-ego (Freud 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; 1992; Horkheimer 1989m: 261). The specific aspect of the self-reflection that Freud demanded was that it did also not stop short of people’s own guilt feelings. Thus, it was not a self-reflection of an irrational kind. It was no appeal to any unresolvable authorities in the people themselves, outside of them or beyond them. It was rather self-reflection in the spirit of the sciences.

The Cult of the Irrational According to Horkheimer, Freud believed in the healing and helping energies of the human consciousness (Freud 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; 1992; Horkheimer 1989m: 261; Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1974). Precisely thereby, Freud was a man of the 19th century. Freud prepared the critical theorists of society as well as people in civil society in general against the temptation of breaking off their thinking and throwing themselves into the arms of the irrational or anti-rational, be it also in the name of spiritual depth. The manias and addictions and the character deficiencies, which the great literature of the 19th and 20th centuries knew how to portray and to critique and to scourge–malice, and spite, and greed for power, and the inability to love and also to resist–Freud wanted to comprehend scientifically, and finally to subjugate under the power of the analytical understanding (Freud 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; 1992; Adorno 1951; 1952; 1962; 1970a; 1973a; 1973d; 1973e; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1981; 1891a; 1993b; 1994; 1997h; 1997i; 1997j/1; 1997j/2; 1997k; Benjamin 1950; 1955a; 1955c; 1968; 1972; 1974; 1977; 1978a; 1978c; 1983a; 1983b; 1988; 1995c; 1996a; 1996c; Löwenthal 1965; 1966; 1970; 1980; 1989; 1990a; 1990b; Lukacs 1970; 1971; 1974; 1979; Horkheimer 1989m: 261; Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1974). If this was the 19th century, then Horkheimer was not able to see anything obsolete or contemptuous or contemptible in it. To the contrary, he saw an element of that humanity that today, in the 20th century–and the critical religiologist may add in the 21st century–was threatened everywhere and particularly in Germany and Europe and even in America not at last through the cult of the irrational and the unconscious, which could not be stamped out and terminated. Freud did certainly not take carelessly the irrational and the unconscious dimension in man. To the contrary, it was

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Freud’s opinion that human reason transcended only to a very small extent the unconscious forces in people’s psyche. In his psychological science, Freud has emphasized precisely the unconscious more than anybody else before him. However, Freud has never bowed down before this power of darkness, but he rather wanted to enable and strengthen people that they could with the small energy of their consciousness control the chaos in and around themselves. Freud wanted man, who had long become master of the external nature, to be able to master himself: his often hidden internal nature. As an old man in London, Freud summed up his psychoanalytical teaching in the enlightenment principle: What id–i.e. the mere drive or instinct, or mere unconscious urge–is, should become ego–i.e. conscious and controllable. This enlightenment principle has been concretely superseded into the critical theory of society as well as into the dialectical religiology (Siebert 2001; 2002a).

Prejudice For Horkheimer even in 1956, Freud had still the greatest actuality, and the prejudices against him spread around particularly by the positivists and ego-psychologists in German and American society, were for him null and void (Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; Adorno 1979; 1995a; Horkheimer 1932: 125-144; 1985l: 294-295; 1989m: 262-263; 1996s: 1720; 1985l: 294-295; Horkheimer/Adorno 1951; 1969: 177-217; Adorno/ Frankel-Brunwick/Levinson/Sandford 1950; 1996s: 17-20; Horkheimer/ Fromm/Marcuse 1936; Schmid-Noerr 2000: 7-40; Mühlleitner 2000: 4156; Bonss 2000: 57-82; Wolf 2000: 83-100). The most widely spread prejudice against Freud was that he overestimated human sexuality. When the National Socialists burned Freud’s books on the stake–like the Protestants had done first with the Catholic books in Wittenberg–they had abused and reviled him particularly through hinting at the significance of the sexuality in his work. In the perspective of the critical reliogiology, it is rather ironical that people in the present-day oversexed American civil society, in which the porno business is almost as profitable as the drug and armament business, criticize Freud for talking too much about sex. It is likewise ironical that in American bourgeois society, which is possessed by work, consumption, money and profit, Marx is blamed and rejected for being too much concerned with economics and supposedly even being an economical determinist. American society rejects precisely those enlighteners, which it is most in need of for its survival, particularly in the present capitalist catastrophe of 2008, 2009, 2010. However, for Horkheimer, what

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has happened to Freud has happened very often. People confused the significance that a thing had in the thinking of a man with the position and attitude which he himself had taken concerning this matter. According to Horkheimer, Freud was in reality a Puritan. When Freud emphasized sexuality more than others, it was not because he wanted to promote unfettered satisfaction of the human drives or instincts. The exact opposite was the case. Freud was a member of civil society, a bourgeois, in the significant and best sense of this word. As such, Freud was deeply permeated and convinced through the principle that one had to keep order in the internal psychic as well as in the external real household of family, society and state. Everything had to proceed economically. For Freud, the power and the force of the drives and the instincts of the id in man’s psyche threatened always again and again any kind of human culture. However, Freud was of the opinion that people had to look firmly into the eye of their drives and instincts, in order to be able to control them, instead of hunting and repressing them into the darkness, where they then could produce in masked and changed form evil, misfortune, and mischief. In Horkheimer’s view, Freud had been a man of humanity in the sense that he taught neither the repression of the drives nor the blind submission and obedience to the instincts, but rather rational self-reflection. The dialectical religiologist opts for a concrete, determinate negation of nature and the drives and instincts: their negation as well as their preservation, and elevation, and sublimation, and thus, their emphatically human and humane fulfillment (Hegel 1986e; Siebert 2001; 2002a).

Peace, Love and Justice Like Fromm, Marcuse and Reich before, Horkheimer concretely superseded Freud’s psychoanalysis as well as Marx’s historical materialism in his comparative social psychology of religion (Feuerbach 1904; 1957; 1996; Kamenka 1983: 115-124; Marx 1953; 1963; Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; Adorno 1979; 1995a; Horkheimer 1932: 125-144; 1985l: 294295; 1985l: 294-295; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b 1989m: 262-263; 1996s: 17-20; 1985l: 294-295; Horkheimer/Adorno 1951; 1969: 177-217; Adorno/Frankel-Brunwick/Levinson/Sandford 1950; 1996s: 17-20; Horkheimer/Fromm/Marcuse 1936; Fromm 1959; 1967; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; Schmid-Noerr 2000: 7-40; Mühlleitner 2000: 41-56; Bonss 2000: 57-82; Wolf 2000: 83-100). Horkheimer concentrated his psychology of religion mostly on Judaism, the Religion of Sublimity, and on Christianity, the Religion of Freedom (Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185-346, 347-536; Horkheimer

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1985l: 294-295; Horkheimer/Adorno 2002; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; App. E). According to Horkheimer, out of the mouth of their Messianic Hebrew prophets the Jews had taken over the teaching on peace, love and justice (Isaiah 11: 63-66; Horkheimer 1985l: 294-295; Fromm 1992: 203-212; 1966: VII, IX). Horkheimer had to admit that the Jews often grumbled and groused against this Messianic prophetic teaching and also acted against it. However, the Jews have, nevertheless, honored the Messianic prophetic speech as a human one (Adorno 1951; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985l: 294-295; Fromm 1992: 203-212; 1966: VII, IX; App. E). In Horkheimer’s view, in contrast the proclaimer or pronouncer of peace, love and justice in Christianity, the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, was elevated and made God: he was primitively deified. (Horkheimer 1985l: 294-295; 1974: 55-56, 96-97; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; App. E). Horkheimer could imagine, which measure of estrangement and alienation, hate and nausea, and disgust those principles of peace, love and justice had to stimulate, excite, arouse, infuriate, provoke and work up among the barbarous European nations, if they had to move their teacher so far beyond themselves into the realm of the Absolute, the Unconditional, the Transcendence, the wholly Other, in order not to push his teaching aside contemptuously. It was no lesser measure than that of the grim and dogged lust, which the metaphysical immortalization of evil in the Christian theology as theodicy betrayed. For Horkheimer, the charm and attraction of the Divina Comedia of Christianity was not exerted and performed through heaven, but rather through hell: as far as the misdeeds and the punishments were concerned (Alighieri 1955; Horkheimer1985l: 294-295; 1974: 55-56, 96-97; Adorno 1970b; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/ Schlensog 2008). Through the primitive deification of Jesus of Nazareth, Horkheimer still felt the aversion to, the distaste for, and the reluctance that his teaching about peace, love and justice encountered in all people in the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages and in the early Modernity, who were not slaves, serfs, or wage laborers (Kamenka 1983: 115-124; Marx 1953; 1963; Trevor-Roper 1953: 76; Horkheimer 1985l: 294-295; 1974: 55-56, 96-97; Adorno 1970b). In his novel Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky let a young student, Romanovich, write an article with the same title, in which he divided humanity into the masses of the ordinary, average, inferior people, who must follow the ethical laws, on one hand, and the few extraordinary superior people, the supermen, who could suspend the moral laws and kill inferior people like insects, on the other (Dostoevsky 1950; 1969; 1972). Romanovich named Mohammed and Napoleon among

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the superior people. He wanted to be like Napoleon. The student murdered with an ax, what he considered to be two useless, mean, greedy, avaricious old sisters, whom he had encountered as pawnbrokers, and whom he considered to be inferior, while he counted himself among the supermen. In his novel Crime and Punishment, the Orthodox Dostoevsky anticipated prophetically through the murderous student’s published article of the same title and through his brutal, aggressive, violent, terrorist, murderous deed the fascists of the 20th century, who considered themselves to belong to the superior Aryan race and believed as such to have the right to annihilate the so-called inferior people–the mentally ill, the Jews, the communists, the gypsies, the homosexuals, etc. and finally to march with three million men into the Soviet Union and murder 27 million so-called Slavic, communistic Untermenschen according to the aristocratic principle of nature (Hitler 1943: 64-65; Trevior-Roper 1988; Rosenbaum 1999). The Christ-like Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot, and the saintly Abbot in his novel The Brothers Karamasov constituted the very opposite of the super-man Romanovich in his novel Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky 1950; 1969; 1972). According to Horkheimer, people could endure Jesus’ teaching only through inventing the devil. Satan was, so to speak, the compensation for the Immaculate Conception (Horkheimer 1985l: 294-295; 1974: 55-56, 96-97; Adorno 1970b; Küng 1994a; 1994b). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, Horkheimer did not really mean the sin-less birth of Mary, but rather Jesus’ virgin birth, free from the original sin, or both. In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the Immaculate Conception of Mary was celebrated, but it was not yet a dogma. Since, so Horkheimer argued, people could not make–no matter out of which economical and social reasons–Jesus himself officially into Satan, they let the role, which he was supposed to play, at least to be carried out by a double, on whom they could now project and unload the hate, which Jesus continually kindled. According to Horkheimer, for the Jews, however, who brought Christianity to the Germans and to other wild nations, people did not trouble themselves with such double. The Jews were identified immediately with the devil. Without any beating about the bush and straight out the Jews were seen as the God-be-with-us–the devil. The Jews experienced all the foaming aggression, rage and fury, which the hammering in of the civilization caused among those Europeans who came to feel it first through the mediation of Christianity (Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; Horkheimer 1985l: 294-295; 1974: 55-56, 96-97; Adorno 1970b; Küng 1994a; 1994b). Because the Christian civilization spread from the Mediterranean Sea, the Anti-Semitism increased the further the

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Europeans moved toward the East (Horkheimer 1985l: 294-295; 1974: 55-56, 96-97; Adorno 1970b; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Küng 1994a; 1994b). In Germany, the devil carried Jewish traits and the Jews the disgrace and the ignominy, which was meant for the principles of peace, love, justice, logos and truth (Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 12, 26, 30, 35; 1985l: 294-295; 1974: 55-56, 96-97; Adorno 1970b; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Küng 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Pope Benedict XVI 2009). Unfortunately, Horkheimer’s psychoanalysis of Christian Anti-Semitism retains its actuality up to the present. In January 2009, after the very conservative German Pope Benedict XVI had lifted the excommunication of four reactionary, Right-wing Bishops, who had opposed the reforms of Vatican II, including its corrections of liturgical texts, which blamed the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, one of them, Bishop Richard Williamson from Great Britain, denied in public the Holocaust or the Shoa (Küng 2009; Drobinski 2009: 4; Loheide 2009; Ulrich 2009: 8; Meyer 2009). While the Bishop apologized for the trouble he had produced for the Vatican, he did not rescind his Anti-Semitic remarks. Jews protested around the world against this renewal of Catholic Anti-Semitism. Some Catholics joined their Jewish brothers and sisters and protested not only against the Anti-Semitic Bishop but also against the Pope for having lifted the excommunications autocratically and without consultation. Some Catholics in Germany and Austria, where holocaust-denial is considered to be a crime, even left the Church. Hans Küng, whose permission to teach Catholic theology has still not yet been restored by the Vatican, compared the conservative Pope Benedict XVI with the former neo-conservative American President George W. Bush, with whom he celebrated his 80th birthday in the White House in 2008, and wished for a Pope, who would be more like the present American President Barack Obama: But can we do that really? Yes we can! (Küng 2009; App. E)

The Character of Christianity Horkheimer was fully aware that everything about Anti-Semitism had been seen already by Freud, Reik, Reich, Samuel, Fromm, Marcuse, Bloch, Adorno, and other psychologists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers (Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; Adorno 1979; 1995a; Horkheimer 1932: 125-144; 1985l: 294-295; 1985l: 294-295; 1989m: 262263; 1996s: 17-20; 1985l: 294-295; Reich 1971; 1976; Horkheimer/Adorno 1951; 1969: 177-217; Adorno/Frankel-Brunwick/Levinson/Sandford 1950; 1996s: 17-20; Horkheimer/Fromm/Marcuse 1936; Fromm 1959; 1967;

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Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; Schmid-Noerr 2000: 7-40; Mühlleitner 2000: 41-56; Bonss 2000: 57-82; Wolf 2000: 83-100; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 12, 26, 30, 35; 1985l: 294-295; 1974: 55-56, 96-97; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b). For Horkheimer, where all these psychologists, psychoanalysts and philosophers staggered, reeled, fluctuated, hesitated, wavered, swayed and varied was due to the very character of Christianity itself (Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 12, 26, 30, 35; 1985l: 294-295; 1974: 55-56, 96-97; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; App. E). Horkheimer did not really search for the religious reason for Anti-Semitism in the converted masses, but rather in Christianity itself (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 12, 26, 30, 35; 1985l: 294-295; 1974: 5556, 96-97; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; App. E). According to Horkheimer, Christianity deified the virtues of civilization. This deification was merely the other side of the estrangement, alienation, demonization, and condemnation. As true, so Horkheimer argued, as the teachings of the Evangelium may be in themselves, they inverted and perverted themselves when they were transformed into a religion by the Greek and Roman Church fathers (Hegel 1986q: 185-346, 347-536; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97; 1989m: chaps. 12, 26, 30, 35; 1985l: 294-295; 1974: 55-56, 96-97; Adorno 1962; 1969c; 1970b; 1980b; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484498; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b). For Horkheimer, the devil had probably many psychological and sociological sources. The lie, however, so Horkheimer insisted, from which Satan gained his eternal life energy was the idolizing and idolatry of the son of man: the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth (Matthew 8: 20; 9: 6; 10: 23; 11: 19; 12: 8, 32, 40; 13: 37, 41; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97; 1989m: chaps. 12, 26, 30, 35; 1985l: 294-295; 1974: 55-56, 96-97). The deification of Jesus of Nazareth happened in the process of the direct and indirect slaveholder, feudal lord and bourgeois domination, power and rule (Kamenka 1983: 115-124; Marx 1953; 1963; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97; 1989m: chaps. 12, 26, 30, 35; 1985l: 294-295; 1974: 55-56, 96-97). In Horkheimer’s view, besides the sword of Charlemagne, the cash register of the Jewish traders and dealers had a part in this process (Horkheimer 1974: 302-317, 1974: 96-97; 1989m: chaps. 12, 26, 30, 35; 1985l: 294-295; 1974: 55-56, 96-97). For the Jewish traders, of course, the business turned out to be a bad one through the centuries. In Horkheimer’s view, the horror of civilization came from the fact that people had to pay for it with the lie. The Anti-Semitism was ultimately not so much the disguise of the hate against Christianity, but rather the consequence of the circumstance that already Christianity itself constituted the disguise. The hate against the God was secondary. The genuine hate lay in the primitive dei-

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fication of the son of man, Jesus of Nazareth (Matthew 8: 20; 9: 6; 10: 23; 11: 19; 12: 8, 32, 40; 13: 37, 41; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97; 1989m: chaps. 12, 26, 30, 35; 1985l: 294-295; 1974: 55-56, 96-97). Unlike Hegel, but like Goethe, Horkheimer was highly critical of the cross, which had first been the torture and execution instrument of the Roman slave holders to keep their slaves in their place, and which was finally inverted and transfigured by the Christians into a sign of victory, the positive content of which was the kingdom of God, the Judeo-Christian cipher for the Truth, for the wholly Other than the states and empires and their military force and the cruelty and horror and terror of history up to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay in the first decade of the 21st century (Matthew 26-28; John 18: 33-40; Blakney 1941: 208-210; Hegel 1986q: 289-291; chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 30, 31, 33, Horkheimer 1974: 55-56, 96-97; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 30, 31, 34; 1985l: 294-295; Adorno 1970b: 103-125). For Horkheimer, the cross, which the Christians worshipped rather than detested and abhorred, was already the infamous vow of the torture-machine, which European and American history has faithfully kept and redeemed: up to–so the critical religiologist may add– the water boarding of the second Bush Administration from 2001-2008. Since the cross became holy, so Horkheimer argued, every wood appeared by nature to be determined and destined to become the material for gallows and stakes. In the view of the critical religiology, while Horkheimer rejected any Christology from above, he retained, nevertheless, a Christology from below. He admired the historical Jesus of Nazareth for having died for all human beings; and for not being able to hold himself back egoistically, narcistically, and avariously; and for his belonging to all, who suffered in society, history and nature; and for his unheard of deed, which through the energies, which it awakened, broke through the icy coldness of the Roman civil society and state (Hegel 1986q; Horkheimer 1974: 96). Horkheimer’s psychoanalysis of the image of the cross can help any genuine theology of the cross to free itself from the pathological and criminal abuses of this symbol as they have occurred through the centuries up to the modern crusades: e.g., Hitler’s’ crusade against the atheistic bolshevism in Eastern Europe, or the second Bush Administration’s crusade against Islamic Iraq and Afghanistan.

From Monotheism, through Atheism, to Humanistic Post-Theism Horkheimer and the other members of the first, mainly Jewish generation of critical theorists of society, moved from the Jewish ethical monotheism

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of their parents and their childhood, through the atheism of Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, to a post-theism and post-atheism, which was characterized by the longing for the imageless and nameless wholly Other than the imperfect finite world of appearance, or by an X-experience without dogmas, rituals, and institutions, and in which theistic-ethical as well as concrete atheistic truth elements, religious faith and enlightenment, were critically preserved and combined into a new form of critical, non-authoritarian, humanistic religion, or religiosity, or spirituality, which could co-exist peacefully side by side with the still living world religions, particularly Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, in so far as they were genuine and faithful to their own original intent (Hegel 1986p: 409-442; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1950; 1966b; 1976; Fromm/ Suzuki/Martino 1960; Scholem 1977; Habermas 1978a: 127-143; 1978b: chap.5; 1976; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 7-27; Witte 1985: 7-29; Küng 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: A, B). Nowhere did the critical theorists count themselves among those philosophers who, according to Freud–the non-philosopher, thought they could rescue the God of religion by replacing him by an impersonal, shadowy, and abstract principle, and of whom he warned about the consequences of their violation of the third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue (Freud 1962: 21-24; 1964). To the contrary, Horkheimer and Adorno radicalized not only the third, but also the second Mosaic law and the imageless and nameless wholly Other they were longing for was as little an abstract principle as the invisible God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 2324; Freud 1962: 21-24; 1964). Like the Hebrew prophets demanded, the critical theorists transcended the human realm and had an exclusively transcendent focus (Hosea 11: 7-12: 12; Lieber 2001: 194; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 7, 29, 37, 40). According to Jewish philosophy the prophets spoke of God figuratively: in ways that did not depict His indescribable essence (Hosea 12: 11; Liber 2001: 197/11). However, it had precisely been the insufficiently answered theodicy, the original form of all theology–the problem of the antagonism between the all-powerful and all-loving God on one hand, and the evil, suffering, force, violence and terror in the not so civil civil-society–which had motivated and driven the critical theorists beyond the Abrahamic religions, and their ethical monotheism, and even German idealism, through atheism, into a post-monotheistic, critical, humanistic, religiosity, since every positive theodicy answer, in so far as it crossed the boundary between the finite world of appearance and the

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dimension of the wholly Other-the totally demythologized invisible God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the Father of Jesus of Nazareth, and the Allah of Mohammed, entangled itself hopelessly into horrible antinomies: the talion and the test theodicy (Tiedemann 1997: 20, 21, 72, 77-78; Horkheimer 1971: 37, 40-41; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). While Hegel still saw the agent of the world spirit, Napoleon Bonaparte, the former artillery commander, riding victoriously through Leibzig, after the battle of Jena and Auerstett, Adorno perceived the world spirit not riding on a horse, but rather flying on wings and without a head: Hitler’s and SS. Colonel Werner von Braun’s V-I (vengeance) and V-II (Hegel 1986l; Wiedemann 1997: 77). For Adorno, that precisely refuted not only the philosophy of history of Hegel, including its instrumental theodicy, but also the theology of history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, including its talion and test theodicies (Hegel 1986l; Wiedemann 1997: 77). Thus, it was certainly not critical religion, but rather non-genuine, most contradictory, ideological, and even blasphemous religion, when President Bush on June 15, 2008 asked the surviving victims of natural–and maybe even historical– catastrophes, to find consolation in the love of a higher Being, after–in theistic terms–this loving higher Being had allowed these catastrophes to happen in the first place, or even to make them possible, and cause them. In theistic perspective, for God to let a thing happen was very much identical with willing and causing it.

Struggle for More Rational Forms of Life Already in 1935 in American Exile, Horkheimer stated that the productive form of the critique of the status quo of late capitalist society, which in earlier periods of history had expressed itself as faith and hope in a heavenly Judge, was presently the struggle for alternative Future III–more rational forms of social life (Horkheimer 1971: 36-37; 1986g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; App. G). Yet, as human reason after Kant could not defend itself in spite of its better knowledge against the return of certain obsolete and overcome illusions, there remained in existence also, since the transition of the religious longing into the conscious social praxis with Marx, an appearance that admittedly could be refuted, but which could not be completely repressed. It was the image of perfect justice. According to Horkheimer, such perfect justice could never be completely realized in the historical process with all its force, cruelty, violence, torture and terror (Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 24, 30, 37). For Horkheimer, this was so because even when alternative Future III–a better

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society, would have taken the place of the present bourgeois society with its disorder and chaos, and would have unfolded itself, the past misery and the need, want and the suffering in the surrounding nature–that of animals and plants–would not yet be made good. Therefore in Horkheimer’s view, what was at stake here was also an illusion, an inflation of representations, which had probably come into existence in primitive, not yet differentiated exchange societies. For Horkheimer, the conviction that everybody should get his own, the idea of justice, and that everybody originally brought along an equal right to happiness was the universalization of economically conditioned rules, their escalation into the realm of the boundaryless good Infinity. However, in Horkheimer’s perspective, the driving force toward this transcending in thought beyond the possible, to this powerless rebellion against the natural, social, economic, political and historical reality, belonged to man as he had developed historically. For Horkheimer, not the rejection or refusal of this image of perfect justice differentiated the progressive type of human being from the regressive one, but the limits of the possibility of fulfillment. For Horkheimer and Adorno, humanity in the emphatic sense began only with the longing for the wholly Other, including the theoretical and practical yearning that things in society and history would become otherwise, better, more just (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1951; 1952: 585-595; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1970b; 1973b: 366; 1973d; 1973e; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1993b; Pope Benedict XIII 2005; 2006; 2007a; 2007b, 2009).

Explanation of Suffering In 1935, it became clear that Horkheimer’s philosophy, his critical theory of society, had contained in itself from its very start in 1914, like Hegel’s and all great philosophy before and afterwards, a theological idea, and was like the Hegelian as well as the Schopenhauerian, Nietzschean, Marxian, and Freudian philosophies, a theodicy (Horkheimer 1971: 37, 40-41; 1986a; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 13, 28). Horkheimer understood theodicy not only like Hegel as the justification of God in the face of the injustices and evil in his world, but also like Schopenhauer, Marx, Nieztsche, Freud and Weber as any theoretical effort to explain the suffering in this world (Weber 1952; 1963: chap. IX; 1992: 302-322; 2002: 203-221; Horkheimer 1971: 37, 40-41; 1986a; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Gutierre 1988; Miranda 1974; Oelmüller 1992). In the perspective of Horkheimer’s critical theory of society, in which historical idealism and historical materialism were likewise determinately negated, without the

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thought of the truth and thereby of that which guarantied it, the imageless and nameless totally Other than the Golgotha of society and history, there was also no knowledge of its opposite, the untruth, the abandonment, loneliness, suffering, death of human beings, because of which the true philosophy must be critical and pessimistic; not even the sorrow, without which there is no happiness (Horkheimer 1971: 40-41, 54-90; 1985g: chaps. 23, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40). Horkheimer and his close friend and cooperator, Adorno, called the Absolute not simply atheistically an illusion or delusion, like Marx or Freud, but rather post-theistically and post-atheistically the totally Other, which had once been named in the great world religions or systems of metaphysics theistically: Heaven, Eternity, Beauty, or Goodness, or Gnosis Gnoseos, or Unconditional, or absolute Spirit (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986j: 394-395; Horkheimer, 1972: chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; 1985g: chaps. 29, 37; Küng, 1994a: 904-905; 1994b; Valery 1989: 134-143). The dialectical religiologist may speak of a mystical atheism, which–like the great mystics–separated all religious and metaphysical images and notions from that Something which once was called God (Blakney 1941: 9). For the critical theorists of society in their longing for the wholly Other were flowing together Buddhist, Greek, Jewish and Christian negative theology and Kantian philosophical agnosticism (Hegel 1986j: 372-377; 1986p: 374-389; 1986q: 50-95, 96-154, 185-346; Horkheimer 1971: 40-41, 46-47; Horkheimer 1985g: 29, 37; Küng 1991b: 275-763; 1994a: 849-906). The critical theory of society did not negate abstractly the imageless and nameless totally Other than the slaughter bench of society and history, the absolute Truth, but the latter was itself the determinate negation of that, which on earth was named injustice, human abandonment, loneliness, and alienation, as it became visible in extremis in the continual application of force, terror and particularly of the jus or Lex talionis, of revenge and retaliation, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries: e.g. today–in March 2010–in Palestine and in Iraq and in a secret, preparatory way in Iran (Kusinic 2008). For Horkheimer, without the thought of an unthinkable infinite happiness, there was not even the consciousness of Freudian earthly, transitory happiness, which in respect of its unabolishable transitoriness can never be without sorrow (Horkheimer 1971: 40-41, 54-90; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11). Certainly, like nations so do also the world religions contain elements of alienation and projection, but that did not mean that nations or religions are nothing else than alienation and projection. Certainly, not only nations but also religions have their criminology and their pathology, but that does not mean that nations or religions are nothing else than criminal and insane, in spite of the fact that sometimes

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it looks like it (Fromm 1990; Hinkelammert 1985; Lernoux 1980). What, nevertheless, in the perspective of the critical theory of religion is to be abolished are not necessarily the nations or the religions, but rather their alienation and projections, their criminality and their insanity.

The Tradition of the Occidental Philosophy Like Kant, Schelling and Hegel, and unlike Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, Horkheimer was fully aware and convinced of the necessity to continue at least to some extent the tradition of the occidental philosophy (Horkheimer 1967: 227; 1971: 41-42; 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 13, 21; 1989m: chaps. 13, 28). For Horkheimer, this tradition was characterized by the fact that it had the task of supporting the Judeo-Christian teaching, at least its postulates, through rational methods, which had a certain affinity to science. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, some part of Judeo-Christian theism had to be rescued into the post-theistic critical theory of society, and the critical humanistic religiosity grounded in it (Horkheimer 1971: 41-42; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1990: 9-18). This was because the emphatic, all human errors surviving Truth could not be separated from Judeo-Christian theism. Otherwise positivism would have validity (Horkheimer 1971: 41-42; 1974c: 101-104, 116-117; 1989m: chap. 31; Adorno 1970b; 1976; 1980a). Unfortunately, the newest theology was already connected with such positivism, in spite of all contradictions between them. According to positivism, truth meant merely the functioning of calculations. For the positivists, thoughts were organs, or tools, or merely functions of the brain-mind. Consciousness became superfluous, insofar as the purpose-rational modes of behavior, which had once been mediated through it, had become habitual and ritualistic in the collective. For Horkheimer, to rescue an unconditional meaning without God was sheer vanity (Horkheimer 1971: 41-42; Habermas 1978: chaps. 1132, 33-47, 48-95, 127-143; 1991a: Part III). Without appeal to Something Divine, the good deed and the rescue of the unjustly persecuted and prosecuted person, the innocent victim, the hopeless, lost all glory, except it would correspond to the interest of a collective on this side or the other side of a country’s boundary, and the struggle against force, violence, torture and terror in society and history would ultimately be lost (Horkheimer 1971: 41-42; Thompson/Held 1982: 246-247; Borradori 2003). The individual murderers, the serial killers and the mass murderers at the desks of high political offices, of which the mass media report hourly, would have the last word in history.

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Radicalization of Dialectic Like Kant, Schelling and Hegel and unlike Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, Adorno and his friend, Walter Benjamin, initiated together their new Left-Hegelian, negative, inverse theology, which intended to supersede in itself not only Jewish and Christian theology, Kant, Schelling and Hegel, but also Nietzsche and Marx, as well as Freud, Kierkegaard, and Kafka (Exodus 20; Deuteronomy 11; Hertz 5716/1956: 294-301,790-793; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Benjamin 1983a: Vol. I, 45-78; 1983b: Vol. II, 991-1059; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 13, 21; 1989m: chaps. 13, 28; Adorno 1970b: 103-110, 111-125; Valery 1973: 138-139, 140-143; Küng 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; Metz 1959; 1962; 1963; 1967; 1973c; Metz/Habermas/ Sölle 1994). From the very start, their inverse, cipher theology was driven intrinsically by the energy of the longing for the invisible, imageless, nameless and notionless reality of the wholly Other (Adorno 1970b: 103110; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40). In this longing the friends wanted to see their thoughts disappear. Their negative, inverse theology was opposed to naturalism as well as to supernaturalism, but at the same time critically preserved both in the form of a weak naturalism, and a strong, however completely demythologized super-naturalism: that nature and man’s natural history with all its force, violence, torture, and terror may not be the last word (Hosea 11: 10; Lieber 2001: 195/10; Adorno 1970b: 103-110; Horkheimer 1974c: 8, 218-219; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1985l: 483-493; Habermas 2001a; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Borradori 2003; Arens 2009). Theology must not be sacrificed to historical materialism, but must be seen in connection with the contradictory social movement toward alternative Future III–the classless society (Marx 1961c: 873-874; Adorno 1970b: 111-125; Opitz 1996: Parts 4, 7; Habermas 1976; App. G). The restitution of theology as inverse, cipher theology had to be seen as a radicalization of the power of dialectic, which had originally been a theological one, into the theological glowing core, the wholly Other, and at the same time as an extreme sharpening of the social and economic dialectical motive: the motive of the resolution of the global class antagonism and struggle between the corporate ruling classes and the working classes toward alternative Future III–the reconciled society (Marx 1961c: 873-874; Marx/Engels 2005; Adorno 1970b: 111-125; Opitz 1996: Parts 4, 7; Habermas 1976; App. G). Historical materialism had to be in the service of the inverse theology, if the metaphysical problems of the former were to be resolved, and if it was to be effective on the chessboard of world history, and in the global class

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struggle (Benjamin 1977: 251; Opitz 1996: Part 7; Habermas 1976). This critical theology had not only to deal with the wholly Other, but also with the specific commodity character since the 19th century, i.e. with the industrial commodity production, since the beginning of modern capitalism, since the age of manufacture, since the Baroque period; with commodity fetishism; with the alienation of human beings in antagonistic civil society; with the unity of modernity rooted in the commodity character; with the overestimation of the machine-technology, and with the machine as such; with the productive forces and means; with the productive relations, and with the connected notion of the false consciousness, as derived from the Hegelian philosophy; with the sharp and clear historical differentiation between the industrial form of commodity and the traditional one, which alone could deliver fully the primordial history and ontology of the 19th, and even of the 20th and 21st centuries; with the collective consciousness and unconsciousness; with the interior as social function; with mythology and ideology critique; with the Golden Age and hell; with mythos and history; with the dialectical self-disintegration of the mythos; with the notion of the second nature; with static and dynamic anthropology; with the method of immanent critique; with magic aura; with bourgeois German idealism; with the sign of freedom; with tabuization and fetishization; with play and appearance; with the wounds of capitalism; with bourgeois sadism; with the communist society; with mimesis; with the damaged bourgeoisie character; with the separation of the symbol of theology from the work of art, and from the magic taboo; with world trade, colonialism and imperialism; with psychoanalysis; with proletarian solidarity; with revolution and counter-revolution; with the disintegration of the proletariat as mass through the revolution; with the non-magic God, who lives in the detail; with the decoding of the social function of jazz; with the riddles of history; with the inanity of civil society; with the phantasmagoria as history-philosophical category; with history and magic; with dialectical materialism; with economic base-structure and cultural super-structure; with the materialistic determinism of cultural characters mediated through the total process of civil society; with anthropological materialism; with the connection between the theoretical and the empirical; with the theological motive to call things by their names and the representation of mere facticity; with the cross-road of magic and positivism; with good speculative theory; with the one truth; with use value and exchange value; with utopian longing; with capitalist exploitation; with the dialectical notion: the particularization and singularization of the universal; with the particular in the universal; with forgetting, chock, remembrance and advertise-

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ment; with reification as forgetfulness (Hegel 1986g: 339-514; Marx 1961a: chap. 1; Benjamin 1978a; 1978c; 1978d; 1983a: Vol. I, 45-78; 1983b: Vol. II, 991-1059; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; Opitz 1996: Part 7; Habermas 1976). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, one can not speak about force, violence, torture, terror, and war, in the 20th and 21st centuries without speaking about global monopoly and oligopoly capitalism (Lernoux 1980; Hinkelammert 1985). One can not stop the modern horror and terror of history, without transforming capitalism in terms of alternative Future III–a socialist humanism or humanist socialism, on the basis of a global ethos, grounded in the Golden Rule, the categorical imperative, and in the a priori of the unlimited communication community: otherwise there will only be alternative Future I–barbarism, or alternative Future II–a possible speciesannihilation (Matthew 7: 12; Hegel 1986g: 339-514; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1976; Lernoux 1980; Hinkelammert 1985; Apel 1976; Küng 1990b; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; Semashko 2008; Ott 2007; Goldstein 2006; Franken 2003; Hedges 2006; Dallaire 2003; Scahill 2007; Perkins 2007; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; Kusinic 2008; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007e; 2008a; App. G).

Exodus In the perspective of the critical religiology, Adorno’s and Benjamin’s negative and inverse, cipher theology remained deeply rooted in the very core of the Jewish Religion of Sublimity: the remembrance of the liberation of the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt by Yahweh Elohim through Moses and Aaron, and the revelation of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, particularly the second and the third commandment, the prohibition against making images of and naming the Absolute, as reported in the Book Exodus (Exodus 1-15, 20; Lieber 2001: 316-414, 441-450; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Benjamin 1983a: Vol. I, 45-78; 1983b: Vol. II, 991-1059; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 13, 21; 1989m: chaps. 13, 28; Adorno, 1969c; 1970b: 103-161; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 23-24; Valery 1973: 138-139, 140-143; Küng 1991a; 1991b; Siebert 2009d; App. G). In the critical theorists’ longing for the totally Other than the slaughter bench of nature and history is not only criticized but also preserved the God of Israel, who did not stand on the side of the Pharaoh and the Egyptian ruling class, but rather on the side of their Hebrew slaves, and his second and third commandments against all forms of idolatry. Following the Hegelian universalization of Jewish monotheism, the inverse theology has stood in

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the dialectic of history, as movement in contradictions, always on the side of the slaves and not of the slave holders, on the side of the serfs and not of the feudal lords, on the side of the wage laborers and not of the capitalists, on the side of the socialist workers and not of their functionaries, and bureaucrats, and sometimes even red fascists. Adorno’s and Benjamin’s shared theological longing for the wholly Other included the yearning and the will that things become otherwise in bourgeois society and modern history (Adorno 1973a: 366). Adorno and Benjamin knew as well as Brecht that in civil society the rich have it better than the poor; that things go on unjustly in the capitalist world; that oppression exists together with formal equality; that private goodness is turned into its opposite by objective malice and spite; and that goodness needs the mask of evil–an indeed dubious wisdom (Adorno 1973a: 366; Bentley 1961).

Ideology Critique For Hans Küng, the great Center-Hegelian, liberal, humanistic Catholic theologian, and his cooperators and friends in Tübingen, the years between 1968 and 1974, the time of the most violent and terror-filled, liberal as well as fascist, anti-communist Vietnam War, was spiritually-intellectually dominated in the West by the Left-Hegelian, Neo-Marxist as well as by the Right-Hegelian, neo-rationalistic world interpretations (Adorno 1970b; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 44-77; Küng 1978: 533-538, 540-542). While Küng was situated in the Hegelian Center, he could be flexible and make excursions into the Hegelian Left, including the praxis philosophy, and into the Hegelian Right, including deconstructionism and neo-conservativism, in response to what ever the spirit of the modern, post-metaphysical times required: be it the economic, political, historical, cultural, ecclesiastical, or theological situation (Küng 1965; 1970; 1972; 1976; 1978; 1980; 1981a; 1981b; 1984; 1987; 1989; Habermas 1985a; 1985b; 1988a; 1988b). He wrote about Freud, but never about Marx (Kamenka 1983: 115-117; Küng 1990a). Philosophy, in the spirit of Max Horkheimer’s Frankfurt School and of Karl Popper’s critical rationalism, dominated the cultural scene, and religion was put under ideology suspicion: Passe et depasse! Today–in 2010–Hans and his friends in Germany cannot stress enough the intellectual challenges with which theology was confronted in the 1960s and the 1970s, and for which it was in no way prepared. Whoever at the time still wanted to be a Christian had to justify his position as never before. Christians were pushed into a cultural and intellectual defensive position, which had been unknown so far. Thus, Hans had to ask

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in one of his public presentations of 1970: What is the Christian message? Such question could, of course, only be asked when it was no longer evident what the Christian message should really be. No matter what the past 2,000 years of Christianity had produced, the question had to be posed in a completely new form. The old traditional answers were no longer sufficient. In the meantime, Hans has given the new Christian answer in 66 books. Such gigantic theological and philosophical work could paint its gray in gray with the strongest strokes of course only, because the oriental and occidental shapes of life of the past 6,000 years, had grown old (Hegel 1986g; 1986l; 1986p; 1986q; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008). By theology’s and philosophy’s grey in grey, these oriental and occidental life forms could not be rejuvenated but only be understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. Theology and philosophy have always come too late on the historical scene in order to give instruction as to what the world ought to be. As the thought of the world, theology and philosophy appeared only when actuality was already there cut and dried after its process of formation had been completed. The teaching of the dialectical notion, which was also history’s inescapable lesson, was that it was only when actuality was mature that the ideal first appeared over against the real, and that the ideal apprehended this same real world in its substance, and built it up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm: e.g. in the form of 66 wonderful books.

The New Creation However, for Hans Küng and his friends in Tübingen, a new legitimation of Christianity out of its origins was the call of the hour: beginning with the figure of the historical Jesus (Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 44-77; Küng 1978: 533-538, 540i-542; 1994a; 1994b). Küng’s Institute for Oecumenical Research in Tübingen turned theology into a laboratory of the spirit, characterized by complementary and historical narrative thinking. As Marx had seen in Jesus of Nazareth a poor man, whom the rich people murdered, so the Schellingian-Marxian philosopher, Ernst Bloch, in Tübingen, saw in Jesus a man whose life started in the stable and ended on the gallows (Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 44-77; Reich 1976; Fromm 1992; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; 1974c: 96-97; Fromm 1964; 1966a; 1966b: chap. ix). Bloch missed in Küng’s liberal theological work the arch-Christian word: Now I am making the whole of creation new (Revelation 21: 5; Bloch/Reif 1978: 88). Bloch did not find in Küng’s work the really believed momentary, instantaneous expectation of the last

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things. For Bloch, there was an enormous difference between the moment in which the heavenly Jerusalem breaks vertically into the horrible historical continuum, characterized by force, violence, torture, terror and wars, on one hand, and reformistic, paradigmatic interim payments, which came to terms with the present situation, admittedly in a reformatory way, on the other (Revelation 21; Bloch/Reif 1978: 88; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Metz 1977; 1998; Peter/Urbam 1999; 1969). The status quo of antagonistic civil society was very grateful for such reformatory attitude, since it would postpone the revolution, and therefore rewarded it greatly. The present historical situation as such, no matter how treacherously ironed out in a reformatory way, was in any case the very opposite of the apocalyptically conscientious Praesence, the Nunc Stans (Revelation 21; Bloch/ Reif 1978: 88; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1985e: chaps. 53, 54, 55; Metz 1973; 1978; 1997; Peters/Urban 1999; Gutierrez 1971; Moltmann 1996). There seemed to be no room in Küng’s work for the still outstanding identity of humanity with the whole, so dark world-subject. There seemed to be no place in Küng’s future projections for the hope and the expectation of the old Jews, that every second could become the small gate through which the Messiah could enter and interrupt the historical continuum so full of force, terror, violence, torture and war, not only for individuals, but also for nations, and for the whole human species (Revelation 21; Bloch/Reif 1978: 88; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1985e: chaps. 53, 54, 55; Benjamin 1974: 261; Moltmann 1996; Peter/Urban 1999). This was also the eschatologicalapocalyptic consciousness of Jesus of Nazareth. Hans and his friends speak of the next hundred years of micro and macro paradigmatic historical changes in the world, as if they were sure that not every second during this time could become the small gate through which the Messiah could enter in order to disrupt and interrupt its continuity: not only for the individual in his or her personal death, but for the species as a whole. The eschatological reservation is valid not only for the individual biography, but also for world history. Hans and his friends have been convinced that his great book of 1974–Being a Christian–about the mimesis or imitatio Christi in the 20th or 21st centuries–did not have to be afraid of the question of social relevance: the ideology suspicion (Küng 1970; 1972; 1976; 1978; 1980; 1984; 1987; 1989; 1990b; 1991a; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 2003; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/ Schlensog 2008). Hans and his students and friends summed up the content of being a Christian in the short formula:

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In the imitation of Jesus the Christ man can live a truly human life in the world of today, as well as act, suffer and die: in happiness and unhappiness, in life and death, held up by God and helpful to men (Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 55-56; 1970; 1984; 1990b; 1994a).

In the confidence of this theological principle, Hans’s friends wanted to give back the ideology suspicion to a secularized, flattened out, superficial consumer and fun society.

New Actuality Unfortunately in recent decades, the ideology suspicion and ideology critique has also in relation to the world religions even gained new actuality (Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 44-77). Since Hans has written his great trilogy about the three Abrahamic religions from 1991 to 2004, and up to the present, March 2010, Jews, Christians and Muslims have forced, violated, tortured, and terrorized each other without interruption in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere, without being stopped by the Golden Rule, the Hebrew Covenants, the Mosaic Decalogue, the Sermon on the Mount, the Five Pillars, the categorical imperative, the a priori of the unlimited communication community, the Quartet–including the USA, Russia, the European Union and the UN–or the new global ethos: and all this often in the name of an ideological Judaism, Christianity or Islam (Küng 1990b; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004). There is, of course, a great difference between reconstructing the ideal substance of the mature actuality of the past oriental and occidental life forms into an intellectual, scientific realm, on one hand, and the ethical instruction of the modern life form in its transition toward a postmodern world, on the other (Hegel 1986g; 1986l; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 44-77, 145-146). Hans knows, of course, of all the bad struggles in the world, but he would rather like to avoid them. He knows of the hard and merciless struggles in the economy, society, and in high-level national and international politics, as well as in private life. According to Hans, such bad struggles are motivated by uninhibited greed, avarice, and will to power. Yet, in his sermons on Sunday, April 27, 2008 in St. Johannes, Tübingen, and on Sunday, June 8, 2008 in his home town parish in Sursee, Switzerland, at the occasion of his eightieth birthday celebration, Hans wanted rather to be silent about the bad struggles of the selfrighteous Good People against the axis of evil or of the bad people, as they are carried out under the pretense of a war against terror understood as a holy crusade (Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 44-77, 144-152). In Afghanistan,

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Iraq and Palestine this war against terror has led to the terror of war with the result of over one million casualties in Iraq alone. Hans Küng and his former colleague, Joseph Ratzinger, later Cardinal and now Pope Benedict XVI, both followed the way of their conscience, and both ended up in antagonistic liberal and conservative theological positions, which reflect their closeness or distance from the secular modern world, and which in the past 32 years could not be reconciled by complementarity, or by discourse, or by brotherly love (Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 44-77, 144-152, 162).

Four-Step Dialectic Indeed, the critical theory of society, the Frankfurt School, must continue to be mythology and ideology critique in anamnestic solidarity with the innocent victims (Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 44-77; 100, 114-115; Habermas 1986: 53-55; Thomson/Held 1982: 245-247; Peukert 1976: 278-280; Schneider 1995; Mayer/Zimmerling 1993; Bvaudis/Gollwitzer 1979). Theology can find help in the critical theory of society as mythology and ideology critique: in its four-step dialectic (Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 44-77; Hegel 1986c; 1986e; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960). The critical theory of society has determinately negated in itself the classical Greek two-step dialectic, which made clear to human beings that in reality it is not so, but otherwise. It has concretely superseded in itself the Hegelian three-step dialectic, which taught people that it was in reality so, but also otherwise, and therefore so and otherwise. It concretely negated in itself also the Buddhist four-step dialectic, which negated all four possibilities: that it was so in reality; that it was otherwise; that it was so and otherwise; and that it was neither so nor otherwise. On this dialectical way, the critical theorists reached the dimension of the imageless, nameless, notionless wholly Other, which logical thinking was not allowed to enter under the threat of the punishment of entangling itself into unresovable antinomies (Horkheimer/Adorno 1972; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). For Adorno, Amorbach was–as Hans believed– as little as for him Sursee, a location of metaphysical experience, which was supposed to replace the God experience (Adorno 1997j: 1: 302-310; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 44-77, 100, 114, 125). Adorno was no nature mystic or lyricist. For Adorno’s inverse theology, Amorbach was merely one of many small and irrelevant ciphers of the otherwise imageless and nameless wholly Other, the unsatiable longing for which Küng has–in spite of his Catholic love for images and stories–shared with him as powerful support for his faith in Christ not as a palliative toward a Beyond,

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but rather as a basis for protest and resistance against unjust conditions in antagonistic civil society here and today, be it in 1994 or in 2010 (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Küng 1994a: 904-905; 1994b). The critical theorists’ sharp analysis of the dialectic of modernity can still help theology on its way into the post-modernity paradigm, in case the parousia delay continues that long, dependent on God’s sovereignty alone: Maranatha! (Revelation 21, 22; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 44-77, 100, 114; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969). Faced with the many antagonisms in late capitalist society, natural and social scientists have become more pessimistic about the future of human kind than the liberal theologians in a neo-liberal culture, which has become more and more anti-utopian as well as anti-eschatological since the neo-conservative counter-revolution of 1989 (Adorno 1979: 9-20, 20-42, 42-86, 122-147, 147-177, 177-196, 217-238, 280-354, 354-373, 373-392, 392-397, 397-408, 408-434, 434-440, 440-457, 457478, 569-574, 578-587; 1997u; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; App. C, D, E, F, G). The dialectical religiology shares, nevertheless, Hans Küng’s Center Hegelian program world ethos; if also in a critical way: the good struggle for freedom and peace through truth (Küng 1970; 1972; 1978; 1980; 1981b; 1984; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Pope Benedict XVI 2009; App. G).

Authoritarian and Humanistic Religion In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, Paul Johannes Tillich, theologian of nature, culture, and politics, friend of Horkheimer and Fromm, and teacher of Adorno, who habilitated himself with him in 1931 with a dissertation on Kierkegaard, had differentiated between the traditional, conformist, authoritarian slaveholder-, feudal-and bourgeois-religion on one hand, and the critical post-bourgeois, humanistic religion engaged in the struggle against aggression, force, violence and terror, long before many other theologians of the 20th century, e.g. Theodor Haecker, the Niebuhr Brothers, the Brothers Cardinal, the Berrigan Brothers, Johannes B. Metz, Jürgen Moltmann, Leonardo Boff, Gustavo Gutierrez, etc., on the other (Tillich 1951; 1955; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1980a; Haecker 1918; 1933; 1935; R. Niebuhr 1932; 1964; H. Niehbuhr 1987; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1995; 1997; 2001; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1972; 1985e; Adorno 1962; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 25, 26; 1987k: 345-408; 1988d: chap. 2; 1989m: 29; Bloch/Reif 1978; Metz 1952; 1963; 1965; 1967; 1973c; 1975; 1977; 1980, 1981; 1995; Moltmann 1969; 1995; 2002a; 2002b; Goodstein

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2009: A 15; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Wolin 2006; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; Siebert 1978: 81-94; 1979e: 35-46; 1993; 2005b), The Lutheran existential theologian Tillich came closer to the secular critical theorists of society of the Frankfurt School than any other Jewish, Christian, or Islamic theologian: even closer than Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, Karl Barth, Walter Dirks, Eugen Kogon, Johannes B. Metz, or Jürgen Moltmann (Kogon 1967; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Siebert 2009d). In 1929, Tillich had been called from the Chair for Religious Philosophy in Dresden to the Chair for Philosophy at the University in Frankfurt a.M. (Horkheimer 1989m: chap. 14, 15, 29). The first incumbent of the Chair for Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, which had been founded in 1914, was Hans Cornelius, who became the teacher of Horkheimer and Adorno. Cornelius confessed to belong to the empirio-criticism, a kind of positivism (Horkheimer 1989m: 265; Adorno 1978). The passionate anti-postivists Horkheimer and Adorno had originally a positivistic teacher. When Cornelius retired, the Jewish phenomenologist Max Scheler was called from Cologne to the Chair of Philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität in Frankfurt (Scheler 1913-1916; 1923; 1927/1928; Horkheimer 1989m: 265; Adorno 1997e: 7-246). Scheler’s work had originally stood close–like that of the phenomenologist Romano Guardini–to the Roman Catholic Paradigm (Guardini 1925; 1948; 1952; Küng 1994a; 1994b). Scheler separated himself from Catholicism after its notion of God as love and power and its talion- and test-theodicy broke down for him in his personal experience as German soldier of the Battle of Verdun on the slaughter bench of World War I, in which battle 1 million German and French soldiers butchered each other in one square mile and in a war in which 10 million people were murdered. As Scheler distanced himself from the Catholic teaching of the dualism of God and world, he turned toward a mystical representation of the becoming God. Scheler tried to resolve theoretically the theodicy problem through developing a dynamic pantheism, in which God was love, who only slowly gained energy and power from below, and thus would some day be love and power, and as such would be able to interfere in and stop such horrible events as Verdun and World War I. Thus, Scheler became inclined–like the Frankfurt gestaltpsychologists, who came from Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind–to the optimistic belief, that the reality was immediately meaningful in itself. Scheler died after a few months of teaching at the University of Frankfurt from a heart attack in a brothel in Cologne, where in Schopenhaurian and Freudian terms his immensely intellectual, and spiritual, and loving Ego tried to gain energy

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and power from below: from the libidinous aspects of the Id–the will to life (Schopenhauer1946; 1977; 1989; Freud 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; 1992; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 21; 1989m: chaps. 28, 29). Tillich became Scheler’s successor and took over his Frankfurt Chair of Philosophy, and as such became the advocate for a crititical, humanistic religion and theology versus a traditional authoriotarian religion and theology, connected since the Constantinian turn with the state, and thus continually being deeply involved in wars, aggression, force, violence and terror (Fromm 1972b; 1973; Lortz 1962: 32, 54, 65, 104, 107-108, 127-128, 184, 244, 349, 907, 958; Küng 1994a: 62, 218-219, 222-223, 225, 228, 240-241, 243, 246-248, 385-386, 462).

Towering Influence In the view of the critical religiology, at least since 1929, Tillich became a towering influence for the Frankfurt critical theorists of society: particularly for Horkheimer, Adorno, and Pollock (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 25, 26; 1987k: 345-408; 1989m: chap. 29; Adorno 1962; 1997b: 239-263; 1997f: 413-523; Wolin 2006; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004). Tillich came up in the biographies not only of the critical theorists of society, but also of Arendt and Gadamer as well (Horkheimer 1989m: chap. 13, 29; 1985g: chaps. 25, 26; 1987k: 345-408; Adorno 1962; 1997b: 239-263; 1997f: 413523). Not only Jewish theologians and philosophers, but also Tillich and other Protestant and Catholic theologians and philosophers had a great influence on Horkheimer’s, Adorno’s, Pollock’s, Benjamin’s and Fromm’s thought. Along with Tillich one must also think of Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Rudolf Otto, ErnstTroeltsch, and others (Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004). The overall influence of Tillich was one that is still to be articulated even today, in 2010. Not only Tillich and Horkheimer, but also Tillich and Adorno kept up contact with each other for many years. When in 1940, Tillich was at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, he invited Adorno to give a lecture on Kierkegaard (Adorno 1962). This lecture was certainly together with another essay of Adorno also on Kierkegaard, written in Germany after World War II in remembrance of Tillich, a possible source for the theological motifs in the critical theory of society: the inverse cipher theology of the wholly Other (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 28, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1970b; 1997b: 239-263). It is, of course, worth remembering that Adorno did in spite of his admiration for his teacher Tillich, not spare him his criticism of his liberal theology in his Jargon of Authenticity, and of his religious socialism (Tillich 1951; 1955; 1957;

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1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1980a; Adorno 1997f: 413-523).

Shaking Foundations Later on, the American theologian Tillich incorporated into the Christian doctrine and into his own theology–like Horkheimer and Adorno, Fromm and Marcuse into their critical theory of society–not only Marx and historical materialism, but also Freud and psychoanalysis (Tillich 1951; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1967; 1972b; 1973; 1980a; 1980b; 1992; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1970a; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004). As after World War I and II the foundations of the Western civilization and of Christianity were shaking, Tillich postulated that faith was ultimate concern, or concern with the ultimate Reality, or the totally Other (Tillich 1926; 1948; 1951; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983). He postulated that God was the Ground of being or Being itself. (Blakney 1941: 218-223; Tillich 1951; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1980a; 2001). Tillich asked and demanded that man should strive for new being rather than salvation (1948; 1955a). Parsons, but not Luhmann, introduced Tillich’s theological notion of the ultimate Reality into the structural-functional sociology, more precisely into the system of human action (Tillich 1926; 1948; 1951; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Parsons 1964: chaps. 1 and 2; 1965: chaps. 1 and 2; Luhmann 1977a). The more the American theologian Tillich approached Heidegger’s phenomenological philosophy of the immediate, authentic being–there as movement in time toward death, characterized by anxiety and care, and defined God as the ground of that being–here, the more he distanced himself from his student Adorno, who condemned the Heideggerian phenomenological jargon of authenticity, and from the other critical theorists of society, with the exception maybe of Fromm, who let the City of Being supersed in itself the City of God and the City of Progress, and of Marcuse, who came close to a Heideggerian Marxism (Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1997f: 413-523; Fromm 1976; 2001; Marcuse 2005). For Adorno, Heidegger, the former Catholic theologian and later phenomenologist, who had a Catholic and a Protestant marriage ceremony, and who converted to Protestantism, but who then had a Catholic funeral, and who remained a fascist even posthumously, had taken the sting out of theology, without which redemption could not be thought (Adorno 1997f: 423-424; Adorno 1951; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11). In the perspective of the national-socialist intellectuals,

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Adolf Hitler was the greatest phenomenologist particularly because he connected with phenomenology also the notion of the Kairos–right moment– to act politically and historically (Hitler 1943; 1986; Trevor-Roper 1979; 1985; 1988; Rosenbaum 1998; Fest/Eichinger 2002).

The Notion of the Truth In Adorno’s view, according to the notion of theology, nothing natural went through death unchanged: no Buberian or Heideggerian phenomenological from man to man was now and here the eternity, and certainly no phenomenological from man to God, in which man as it were tapped God on his shoulder: a God who was not the wholly Other, but rather part of the sameness and the identity of this world and thus an idol (Adorno 1997f: 423-424; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Lundgren 1998). Also for a critical religion informed by Adorno and Horkheimer, the notion of the truth could not be formulated without a determinate notion of the negative, inverse cipher theology of the imageless and nameless wholly Other than the horror and terror and cruelty of society and history: e.g. the Vietnam war, or the Yugoslav war, or the Iraq war, or the Afghanistan/ Pakistan war, or the Lebanon war, or the Gaza war, etc (Exodus 20; Horkheimer 1985l: 483-492; 1989m: chaps. 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 30; Adorno 1970b; Adorno 1997f: 423-424; Adorno 1951; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11). In the perspective of the critical religiology, also for the critical religion the truth would be the function of the positive negation, or of the determinate negativity, or of the open dialectic (Horkheimer 1985l: 483-492; 1989m: chaps. 12, 16, 19, 26, 30; Adorno 1997u; Habermas 1999). The critical peace-generating, humanistic religion would not only critique the untruths in the traditional, authoritarian, and dogmatic religion or metaphysics, but also make conscious, rescue, translate, inverse, elevate and possibly fulfill the truths for the private and public sphere, which once had been thematized, formulated, and articulated in it: measure from the Chinese religion; imagination from Hinduism; inwardness from Buddhism; light and goodness from the Persian religion; pain from the Syrian religion; riddle from the Egyptina religion; sublimity from the Jewish religion; beauty and fate from the Greek religion; utility from the Roman religion; freedom from Christianity, law from Islam, etc. (Hegel 1964; 1965; 1969; 1986e; 1986f; 1986j; 1986p; 1986q; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985b; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Kogon

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1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Kogon 1967; Habermas 1976; 1978a: 1982: chap. 5; 1978c; 1987b; 1988a; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 1992b; 1999; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Jung 1958; Küng 1970; 1978; 1982; 1984; 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992; 1994a; 1994b; 1998; 2004; 2009; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Küng/ Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; Sölle 1977; 1992; 1994; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Sölle/Habermas 1975; Sölle/ Metz 1990; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Metz/Peters 1991; App. E).

Marxism and Phenomenology While Horkheimer had heard phenomenological lectures from Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in Freiburg, the critical theorists on their part were like Marx before and Brecht later on deeply rooted in Hegel’s dialectical Phenomenology of Mind, and differentiated their critical theory of society sharply from the non-dialectical phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger and their followers already before they went into the American exile, and rather followed Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Marx, and Freud (Horkheimer 1966; 1967a; 1970a; 1970b; 1970c; 1971; 1972: chaps. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; 1981a: chaps. 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13; 1981b: chaps.1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 13, 14; 1981c: chaps. 1, 2, 3; 1987k: 13-118; 133-157, 221-232, 268269, 275-277, 284-288, 289-328; 1987b: 15-74, 75-148; 1988c: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 15, 16; Adorno 1997a: 7-78, 79-324; 1997b; 1997e: 7-246, 247-382; Gumnior/Ring/Guth 1973: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8). The dialectical religiology understands Marxism as the self-criticism of liberalism, through which the latter’s narcissistic, autistic, and–in the Greek sense of ho idiotaes–idiotic atomism is overcome, and personal autonomy is reconciled with universal solidarity, and it takes phenomenology as the method of observation and description of phenomena, and of arriving at absolute essences through the analysis of living experience in disregard of scientific knowledge (Adorno 1997a: 7-78, 79-324; 1997b; 1997e; 7-246, 247-382; Habermas 1976; 1986). After their emigration to New York and Columbia University, the critical theorists differentiated themselves sharply from the phenomenologically orientated New School of Social Research, now the New School University. Horkheimer’s International Institute for Social Research in New York and the New School became philosophical and political competitors. That did not prevent Horkheimer from giving lectures at the New School. Great phenomenological religiologists like Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann had been students and faculty at the New

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School for Social Research and were as phenomenologists opposed to Marxism as well as to the critical theory of society (Luckmann 1967; 1991). Luckmann was the son of an Ustasha-general, who was executed by Tito’s partisans on the Dalmatian coast near Dubrovnik after returning from a visit to Benito Mussolioni in Rome. The critical religiology must, nevertheless, admit that the structural-functionalist Talcott Parsons criticized the Berger of the 1960s for coming too close to Neo-Marxism. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, there has really never been any danger of that happening neither then nor even less later on. Berger and Luckmann have never been progressive but have always been conservative thinkers.

Life World and System Berger and Luckmann were both–like Parsons–deeply influenced by the phenomenologist Alfred Schütz, a German-Jewish émigré to the United States (Woodhead/Heelas/Martin 2001; Schütz/Parsons 1977). For most of his life, Schütz worked in his family’s bank. He only taught at the New School full time later in his life. In his Phenomenology of the Social World, Schütz applied Husserl’s phenomenology to Max Weber’s interpretative sociology. He posed the problem of how it was really possible from a phenomenological point of view to put oneself in the place of the other–in terms of Herbert Mead (Mead 1967). After Schütz died, Luckmann finished his second book Structures of the Life World. Berger and Luckmann continued this project in their Social Construction of Reality. The real accomplishment of Schütz, Berger, and Luckmann was the integration of phenomenology into sociology. Parsons accepted the phenomenological concept of the life world: the whole human action system as part of the system of human condition was life world (Parsons 1964; 1965; 1971; Parsons/ Shils 1951; Waldenfelse/Brockmann/Pazanin 1977). Also Habermas accepted from Schütz and Parsons the notion of the life world into his theory of communicative action (Habermas 1984a; 1984b; 1987d). However, Habermas opposed the life world to the system, i.e. the economic and political subsystem of civil society. The system had a tendency to colonize the life world. Social movements opposed the colonization of the life world. Berger did not only identify with the Neo-Orthodoxy, but also with neo-conservativism (Woodhead/Heelas/Martin 2001: 27-29). Berger and Luckmann did, nevertheless, integrate Marx’s dialectic of externalization, objectification and internalization into their Social Construction of Reality (Troeltsch 1992; Woodhead/Heelas/Martin 2001: 27-29).

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However, Berger’s identification with neo-conservativism shows that he and Luckmann did not really move from the Right to the Left at any time. Berger’s Sacred Canopy was concerned with the relationship between religious pluralism and secularization (Berger 1990). His argument has been inverted by the more recent rational choice theory of religion. The main theme in Berger’s Sacred Canopy was the dialectic of religion and society, or of externalization, objectification, and internatilzation. However, Berger’s dialectic was not materialistic. As a phenomenologist, Berger began with consciousness, and therefore tended from the start into a more idealistic direction. Yet, Berger went so far as to say that not to recognize this dialectic between religion and society was to have a false consciousness. For many years, Ludwig Landgrebe and his colleagues Bernard Waldenfels, Jan M. Brockmann, and Ante Pazanin tried to reconcile Marxism and Husserl’s, and Heidegger’s, and Gadamer’s and their followers’ non-dialectical phenomenology (Waldenfelse/Brockmann/Pazanin 1977). I participated in Landgrebe’s course on Marxism and Phenomenology in the InterUniversity Centre of Post-Graduate Studies in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, now Croatia. I also invited not only the closest Heidegger disciple and teacher of Habermas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, but also Luckmann to my international course on the Future of Religion in the IUC, which still continues today in 2010, and both gave excellent phenomenological lectures on religion (Reimer 1989; 1992; Ott 2001; 2004; 2007). The Dubrovnik attempts to reconcile Marxism and phenomenology ended with the most horrible Yugoslav civil war, and the consequent disintegration of the Yugoslav Republic, and the defeat of the socialist self-management system, and also of the Praxis Group in Zagreb, which was close to the critical theory of society and always wanted to democratize further Tito’s Yugoslavia up to the civil war and the restauration of the pre-socialist Croatian state by Franjo Tudjman, who was first the youngest general of Marshall Tito and then Croatian nationalist, and who was called–according to his followers’ traditional, conservative political theology–by Divine Providence to overthrow communism and build a post-commuist Catholic Croatian nation-state (Tudjman 1996).

The Task of Protestantism Horkheimer, Pollock and Adorno had met Tillich already before 1931 in a smaller circle arranged by him at the University of Frankfurt a.M. They encountered each other again in the public Discussion about the Task of Protestantism in the Secular Civilization, which had been organized by

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the theologians Heinrich Frick and Tillich for Protestant theologians, i.e. dialectical theologians, and theologians from religious socialism, on one hand, and for secular philosophers and sociologists, on the other, in Frankfurt a.M in 1931, two years after he had arrived in Frankfurt from Dresden, and two years before Hitler came into power in Berlin in January 1933 (Gellately 2001; Rosenbaum 1998; Horkheimer 1987k: 345-405; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Küng 1994a: 602-741; 1994b; App. E). Theologians present were: Emil Brunner, Martin Dibelius, Heinrich Frick, Hans Freiherr von Soden, Paul Tillich. Philosophers and social scientists present were: Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock, Emil Blum, Kurt Riezler, Hermann Schafft, Karl Mannheim, Carl Mennicke. For Tillich and the other theologians, the starting point in the 1931 discourse was the self-understanding of the Christian mission in the face of the cultural crisis, which supposedly had been determined through World War I, the growing labor movement, and the hollowing out and undermining of Christianity. For Tillich and the other Protestant theologians the question was not only whether the Protestant-Evangelical Paradigm of Christianity could still present an action-guiding, ultimate, crucial, or central point, key or issue, and in what did possibly consist its contribution to the solution of the cultural crisis, but rather also already the estimation and assessment of the crisis itself (Tillich 1926; 1951; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1980a; Horkheimer 1987k: 345-405; Reimer 1989; 1992; Küng 1994a: 602-741; 1994b; App. E).

Material Suffering In his discourse with Tillich of 1931, which would continue for decades, Horkheimer argued against the determination of the present cultural crisis as the problematic of the secular culture, of the hypostatization of technology, or of man in general, in order to put in contrast to it the material suffering of the people into the foreground of the discussion (Horkheimer 1987k: 345-405; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Küng 1994a: 602-741; 1994b). Doing so, Horkheimer was very much aware of the barbarous element in his turning down or rejecting the mere culture critique of the theologians. Horkheimer was aware that his materialistic gesture had to remind Tillich and the other discourse partners of the dialectic between philosophical critique on one hand, and the barbarous border-transgression toward economics and politics, on the other, in his essay on Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism, i.e. positivism (Horkheimer 1987k: 171-188; 347-405). For Horkheimer, a related parallel of the argumentation consisted in his

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critique of the phenomenological analysis, which appealed to Edmund Husserl’s intuition of the essence of the phenomena (Adorno 1997e: 7-146; Horkheimer 1987k: 345-405). As Horkheimer saw the weakness of the phenomenology in the fact that it itself did not take seriously enough the return to the factual, which it had propagated and promised, so he saw the weakness of the traditional, authoritarian, and conformist religions in the fact, that they did not have enough love for the transitory human beings (Horkheimer 1987k: 99, 348, 366; Adorno 1997e: 7-146).

Love of the Transitory Human Beings In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, Horkheimer’ double criticism remains valid today in 2010 (Siebert 1978: 81-94; 1979e; 2001; 2002a; 2009d). A critical religion, which would break out of the sameness and identity of the traditional, authoritarian, bourgeois religion, would have to be materialistic, non-authoritarian, non-dogmatic, humanistic, existential, economical and political. A critical religion would stress the love for the mortal human beings in theory and in praxis, who are continually threatened by aggression, violence, force and terror (Tillich 1951; 1955; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Haecker 1918; 1933; 1935; R. Niebuhr 1932; 1964; H. Niehbuhr 1987; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1995; 1997; 2001; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1972; 1985e; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 25, 26; 1987k: 345-408; 1988d: chap. 2; 1989m: 29; Siebert 1978: 81-94; 1979e: 35-46; 1993; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; 2005b). A critical religion would exclude from itself the double life, which has been so typical for the traditional, authoritarian religion for centuries: the Manichaean split between the manifest, open, public, good, idealistic life style, and the hidden, repressed, bad materialistic life style (Goodstein 2009: A 15). B. F. Skinner defined traditional authoritarian religion adequately in his behaviorist psychology, when he wrote: Religion is to help to conform to a society; and Talcott Parsons in his structural-functional sociology, when he identified religion as integrative subsystem of society; or Luhmann when he called religion in his structural-functionalism the contingency–experience–management–subsystem of civil society (Skinner 1965; 1968; 1974; Parsons 1964: chaps. 1 and 2; 1965: chaps. 1 and 2; 1971; Luhmann 1977a; App. E). Unlike the traditional, authoritarian religion, a critical religion would not resign itself to the facts of the status quo in antagonistic civil society, and afterwards give it even a shine of glory (Horkheimer 1987k: 353-354). It would be a postbourgeois, working-class religion, which would follow the poor man Jesus

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of Nazareth, who was murdered by the rich people (Matthew 5-7; 26-28; Kamenka 1983: 115-116; Rudolphi 1949; Dirks 1968; 1983a; 1983b; 1985; Siebert 1986; 1993). It would produce proletarian saints (Rudolphi 1949; Siebert 1986; 1993). Its suffering would be at once the expression of real suffering and the protest against real suffering: driven by the longing for the wholly Other than a world of oppressed and exploited slaves, serfs, or wage laborers (Hokheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). It would not only be the sigh of the oppressed creatures and the heart of a heartless world, and the spirit of spiritless conditions, but also and most of all the emancipation, and liberation, and redemption from conditions in which billions of human beings must live a life in poverty and without recognition of their humanity: a damaged life; a life that does not live (Kamenka 1983: 115-116; Adorno 1951).

The Working Classes When Tillich received his invitation from Henrich Frick to participate in the Discussion about the Task of Protestantism in the Secular Civilization of 1931, it had been very valuable for him that the decisive, most dynamic circles of the Anglo-American Protestantism, the missionary circles, had through their own internal development encountered the same problem of the antagonism between Christianity and the secular civilization, with which he and the other invited German, Protestant theologians had met for decades in a different context (Horkheimer 1987k: 354-356; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; App. E, F). Tillich had encountered this problem particularly through his own theological development, and through the fact that he relatively early in World War I as a German army chaplain and after the war experienced as a professor the situation of Protestantism in relationship to the proletariat, the working classes in Germany and Europe, who had to carry the heaviest burdens in war and peace (Fromm 1967; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1980a; Horkheimer 1987k: 354-356). This double encounter with the proletariat on one hand and the secular autonomous culture on the other, determined Tillich and posited him into a situation, which corresponded precisely to what appeared in those Anglo-American missionary circles, which otherwise were so foreign to him. On the basis of this fact, Tillich and Frick decided to call together the Frankfurt circle in 1931. It was also directly or indirectly directed–not at last and not at least–against the rising fascist movement in Germany, which was on its way to absolute political power, and against Protestant and Catholic theologians, who were in sympathy with or actively supported, or did not

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sufficiently resist German fascism: like Emanuel Hirsch, Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althauser, Joseph Lortz, Karl Eschweiler, Karl Adam, Romano Guardini, Engelbert Krebs, Carl Schmitt, etc. (Horkheimer 1987k: 354-356; Meier 1005; Stone/Weaver 1998; Krieg 2004; Mosse 1975; Ericksen 1985; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004: chaps. 1, 3, 4, 7; App. E).

Structure of the Frankfurt Circle According to Tillich, the Frankfurt Discourse of 1931 came about because those theologians were called, whom Frick had mentioned to him, and of whom they both believed that they stood in the same situation, in the problematic of the present collision between Protestantism and the modern autonomous culture (Horkheimer 1987k: 355; Wolin 2006; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; App. E, F). The other participants of the Frankfurt Discourse, the secular philosophers and social scientist, came from Tillich’s Frankfurt Talks, which he had most of all conducted according to three sides: 1) 2)

3)

The first side was the inner-philosophical one, which was particularly connected with Athens, with the Greek thinking. It wanted from Athens to influence the present and all the cultural forms. The second side consisted of the group, which started from and stood in the middle of the discussion concerning the common experience of the proletarian situation and of socialism. This group made this fact also into the very center of its total theoretical work. The third side consisted of the group, which first of all reservedly analyzed sociogically the situation. This group wanted to bring all members of the three groups into connection with their real situation. For Tillich, the critique of this third sociological group of that what happened in the other two groups, beame of decisive significance (Horkheimer 1967a: 29; 1987k: 355).

Possibility of Existence According to Tillich, the theologians in the Frankfurt Discourse of 1931, who belonged consciously to but moved at the very borderline of the Protestant Church, wanted to hear from the secular philosophers and sociologists, particularly the critical theorists of society, who did not immediately stand in Protestantism, but only in the passionate question concerning the possibility of the existence in which they all lived, in absolute radicality and without any inhibitions, what they had in their hearts in relation to

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Protestantism (Horkheimer 1967a: 29; 1987k: 355; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; App. E). The theologians wanted to know how they, the Protestant Church, including those who existed at its borderline, were standing in the social, intellectual, and spiritual consciosuness of the present, secular, civil society. Then, Tillich hoped that the theologians could give a small counter-gift to the secular philosophers, and social scientists, and particularly to the critical theorists of society: Horkheimer, Adorno and Pollock. Tillich hoped that the theologians could show the secular philosophers and social scientists why they were still standing at least at the boundary line of the Protestant Church, and why they had not yet left this Protestantism, but why they still held on to it out of the deep consciousness conscerning the profane situation in antagonistic civil society. Tilich expected much from the radical and open answers from both sides, the theologians and the secular philosophers and social scientists. The dialectical reliogiology still shares Tillich’s great expectations concerning a discourse between not only Protestant, but also Catholic as well as Jewish, and Islamic theologians, on one hand, and secular philosophers and social scientists, particularly critical theorists of society, on the other, today in 2010, 79 years later, as the only way to keep the tensions of the modern antagonism between the religious and the secular, as well as between the poor and the rich classes, from rising and from producing another explosion like September 11, 2001–or worse (Borradori 2003; Habermas 2001b; 2006c; Siebert 2001; 2002a).

Capitalism Horkheimer answered Tillich and the theologians in a few theses (Horkheimer 1987: 365-368). First of all, Horkheimer did not believe, cum grano salis, that 13 years after the end of World War I he and the theologians and the secular philosophers and social sciemtists had before themselves capitalism as a scene of devastation (Horkheimer 1967a: 29; 1987k: 355; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; App. C, D). In his own categories Horkheimer wanted to say that capitalism was not in ruins. To the contrary, capitalism was starting to arrange the world according to methods that were not entirely and radically new, into a new post-modern phase of development: toward alternative Future I–the totally administered society, characterized by the expropriation of the Ego and the cancellation of the dialectical notion, and without individuality, freedom, spirit, meaning, love, and religious illusions (Hegel 1986q: 289-292, 341-344; Horkheimer 1987: 365-368; 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1984m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 25, 30, 31, 36, 37; Flechheim 1971; App. G). Horkheimer

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predicted that certain constant traits of capitalism would probably survive the present transition period into the new phase of evolution (Horkheimer 1981a; 1981b; 1987: 365-368; 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1984m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 25, 30, 31, 36, 37; Habermas 1976; 1978a; 1981d; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1987c; 1988a; 1988b; 1990; 1991c; 1992a; 1995; 1998; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2003b; 2004a; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtei/ Lohmann 2003). From this prediction, Horkheimer concluded the question: what was really the need, want, trouble, necessity, emergency, problem, from which all the people present in the Frankfurt Discourse of 1931 suffered? Was it really the problem of the profane culture, which tormented human beings? Horkheimer was convinced that people were tormented through much more real and brutal things than the secular culture. Also, this torment was not new. Yet, this material, materialistic suffering of the people was what tormented Horkheimer. He had seen this materialistic suffering of the workers when he was the CEO in the factories of his father, Moses or Moritz Horkheimer (Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: chaps. 1, 2, 3; Horkheimer 1987: 365-368). It was important for Horkheimer that one stood with this suffering. From this perspective, Horkheimer could not do otherwise, than to take sides in this class struggle, and to believe that what really counted was to struggle in such a way that the meaningless pain, agony, anguish, misery, in so far as it was indeed meaningless, was negated, insofar as it could indeed be superseded. When Horkheimer spoke of meaninglessness, he meant something else than the theologians did, who were present. When Horkheimer spoke of meaninglessness, he meant the pain and agony in so far as it was not necessary in the face of the intellectual and material productive forces and energies, which at this time–1931–were standing in man’s disposition. Horkheimer had the representation and he could not free himself from the theory of the world– his critical theory of society, which he had already developed in 1931–that the social form of organization, which was dominant at this time, conditioned essentially this human suffering, and anguish, and misery; as, in the perspective of the dialectical religiology, it does once more today, in March 2010, when millions of American workers are losing their jobs, their homes, and their pensions and return to the collective soup kitchens in a new massive economic depression (Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: chaps. 1, 2, 3; Horkheimer 1981a; 1981b; 1981c; 1987: 365-368; Habermas 1986: 53-55; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2004; 2005; 2007; Honneth/Joas 2002; Dubiel 1988; 1992; 1993: 5-11; 1994: 5-13; 1995: 14-25; 1996: 33-40; 1998: 25-35). When after World War I, Horkheimer went to the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in

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Frankfurt, he was told by his teachers: men had always to suffer; simply because the natural resources were always scarce. For Horkheimer, these statements had in the meantime–to put it nicely–proven themseves to be false and wrong. It was in no way so, that all scholars have always said that the cause of human suffering lay in the form of the social organization of humanity. To what extent this was hanging together with intellectual or spiritual things was a huge and enormous problem. According to Horkheimer, when he put himself into this class struggle, then it was most important for him to ask, whether it was then so significant, seen from his critical-theoretical perspective, if this fight was hanging together with primordial religious motives or not? Horkheimer said with Spinoza: I have so little time to pose the problem to myself (Hegel 1986a: 74; 1986b: 10, 37, 106, 229-230, 263, 327, 339-352; Horkheimer 1967a: 29; 1987k: 355). Was there a philosophy or a religious view that legitimated Horkheimer’s attitude in this class struggle as the adequate one? For Horkheimer, the religious person or the metaphysician was not sufficiently seized by, moved, or taken up through the actual sufferings, and thus they both had not enough love for the finite, transitory human beings. Horkheimer did not know if what the theologians had to say was so important: if the secular civilization, the technology, the world view which carried the technology, the view of man of himself, could really be described in the way the theologians did. The theologians could see these things as they did only because they emphasized their contradiction to the religious dimension. However, Horkheimer questioned whether the antagonism between the religious and the secular was really so decisive in the present economic, social and historical situation? Maybe the antinomy between the rich and the poor classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, or between Right and Left, was much more important and more decisive than the antagonism between the sacred and the profane. Horkheimer was convinced that this ideologization of the machine was a very ephemeral appearance. It was certainly very different in Russia than in America. As economist, Horkheimer wanted to say that to bring together Russia and America in this way was a superficial remark. A whole series of data, which the theologians mentioned, seemed to stem from the fact that the theology cared too little for this reality and that they saw here only the antagonism of religion and the world. Horkheimer did not know whether this antagonism was the right word in this time–in 1931.

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chapter twenty-three Dedemonization or Demythologization

Adorno answered Tillich and the theologians in the Frankfurt Discourse of 1931 by acknowledging first of all, that Horkheimer had anticipated already much of what he wanted to say (Horkheimer 1987k: 366-368; Wolin 2006; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004). Adorno tried to formulate the theme of profanity or secularity through using the terminology of his teacher Tillich (Tillich 1951; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1980a; Horkheimer 1987k: 366-368; Adorno 1997u; Wolin 2006; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004). Tillich had described and characterized the position of profanity toward Protestantism as dialectical. That meant for Adorno, that this position was of the kind that, on one hand, all that existed as theological had–in order to prove itself at all as genuine–to move in an unlimited and complete way into the secularity. That precisely was the core of Adorno’s and Benjamin’s negative, inverse, cypher theology (Adorno 1970b: 103-125; 1969c; 1997j/2: 608-616; Adorno/ Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1987k: 367-368; Habermas 1990: 9-20; Siebert 2009d). On the other hand, the theologians had raised the demand in relation to secularity, that because it had an anarchical, chaotic character, and because it was a scene of devastation, it needed the religious. Adorno believed that as long as the theologians remained standing with this conception, they did not take so radically seriously the demand of profanity, as it was necessary, when one had once–as the critical theorists had done–conceived of the thought of the secular as the scene of truth. According to Adorno, the religious motif, which in any case in Tillich’s conception would underlie as the only fundamental element, was that of dedemonization, or what he would call with Hans Jonas and Rudolf Bultmann demythologization (Bultmann 1958; Jonas 1930: 68; Horkheimer 1987k: 366-368). For Adorno, it was decicive that this was, however, a motif, which was not to be derived from some given motives of the positively present theology, but which completely entered into the profanity. Adorno could imagine that the function of Protestantism had indeed at the same time fulfilled and exhausted itself historically in this decisive moment. Adorno thought that this transfer or inversion of what was theologically meant had really succeeded: that the demand of demythologization had gone over completely into the profanity. If this was indeed the case, so Adorno argued, then it could be possible that the theological categories themselves, to the extent to which they still remained, were nothing else than empty husks or shells of past historical stages or phases of this demythologization process,

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which were brought up again with intentions, which he could not describe as being good (Horkheimer 1987k: 367-368; Adorno 1970b: 103-125; 1969c; 1997j/2: 608-616; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Habermas 1990: 9-20; Siebert 2009d). In the perspectve of the dialectical religiology, to be sure, the critical religion would be dedemonized or demythologized (Horkheimer 1987k: 367-368; Adorno 1970b: 103-125; 1969c; 1997j/2: 608-616; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Habermas 1990: 9-20; Siebert 2001; 2002a; 2009d).

The Mythical Adorno knew precisely that in Tillich’s theory the process of demythologization was not a clean, polished, and blatant one, but rather a dialectical one (Tillich 1951; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Horkheimer 1987k: 367-368; Adorno 1970b: 103-125; 1969c; 1997j/2: 608-616; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Habermas 1990: 9-20; Siebert 2009d). The mythical could not simply be erased in terms of an abstract negation. The mythical was rather encountered again and again. The real productive forces of history followed precisey out of such stocks, which were described as mythical. Adorno had no problem to admit that. However, Adorno stated, that this moment of recourse itself, that taking along of the mythical, was in no way any longer located in the sphere of the explicit religion. This recourse to the mythical had its decisive place rather in secularity. For Adorno, in the primordial phenomenon of hunger seemed precisely that demonic power to be present, which had to be stopped, so that the demonic would be broken. Therefore, Adorno preferred to speak of demythologization rather than of dedemonization. Demythologization was indeed dialectical. Contrary to this, there existed a piece of nature, with which some day humanity could reconcile itself. To Adorno, the possibility of such reconciliation seemed to lay in the sphere of profanity. Contrary to this, the moment of the necessary mythification seemed to fall away, because it itself lay as well in the secularity. In opposition to this, Adorno believed that he had to demand radically that people move out of the general positive forms of the ecclesiastical, if they accepted such a notion of Protestantism as did Tillich and the other theologians present in the Frankfurt Discourse of 1931.

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chapter twenty-three Primordial Religious Motives

Concerning the primordial religious motives mentioned by Tillich and the theologians, Adorno saw a very problematic equivocation (Tillich 1951; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1980a; Horkheimer 1987k: 366-368; Adorno 1997u; Wolin 2006; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; App. E). If nothing else was understood under this term than that e.g. in socialism was present something religious as mythical, which always again and again emerged, and to which one took recourse, then Adorno would say that these religous primordial motives were nothing else than questionable demonizations, which one had to fight against, as e.g. the Lenin cult in Moscow and Leningrad (Tillich 1951; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1980a; Horkheimer 1987k: 366-368; Adorno 1997u; Wolin 2006; Siebert 2008c; 2009d). For Adorno, those motives, as so called religious primordial motives, had to be switched off and eliminated. As soon as one wanted to reduce socialism to such religious or mythical moments, one connected oneself precisely with what in socialism was to be radically criticized. For Adorno, this was likewise valid for the fetishization or the cult of the machine in modern cibvilization, which was absolutely incompatible with the fundamental representation and ontological development of socialism. If, so Adorno argued, there should be any talk of such religious primordial motives, then they could not stand, where in the profane sphere religious good found itself in a broken up form, but only there where it was most profane. For Adorno, any attempt to take these primordial religious motives away from the most secular sphere as religious ideas shining through, appeared to be an aberration and a going, or leading astray. Adorno was highly suspicious of an expression or a formulation like the religious man, who could be active in socialism. In truth, the religious man was probably the unreligious man, if one understood religion in refernce to demythologization.

Effectiveness Friedrich Pollock, the life-long friend of Horkheimer at least from 1913 on, a member of the originally religious L’ile heureuse, the co-founder of the critical theory of society, answered Tillich and the theologians in the Frankfurt Discourse of 1931, by pointing out that in the Protestant church there were certainly still present devoted, and committed, and most active believers, but that they, nevertheless, agreed that the church was not

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effective in the modern civilization (Pollock 1970; Horkheimer 1987k: 289328, 380-382; 1988a; 1995p: 9-11, 13-15, 22-25, 32-45, 45-47; Tillich 1951; 1955; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1980a; Adorno 1997u; Wolin 2006; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; App. E). According to Pollock, there had been much talk in the Frankfurt Discourse about religious primordial motives. However, in Pollock’s view, the form in which that happened made him think that this was a question, which concerned maybe 6 or 7 percent of the people capable of gainful employment, the income of whom was over 3,000 marks, and who belonged to the middle or upper-classes of civil society. The 63 percent of employees, whose income lay under 1,200 marks, and who belonged to the working classes, were not at all concerned with such issues like religious primordial motives. Shortly, the concern was a class issue (Pollock 1970; Fromm 1980a; Horkheimer 1987k: 289-328, 380-382; 1988a; 1995p: 9-11, 13-15, 22-25, 32-45, 45-47; Tillich 1951; 1955; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1980a; Adorno 1997u; Wolin 2006; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; App. F). Pollock was afraid that here in the lower or working classes, the theologians would speak to deaf ears. Theologians may point to communist workers, who had shown a need for prayers or for a meaningful life. Pollock had to admit that in such desperate circles there were certainly very strong religious impulses present. However, Pollock left open what those impulses really were. Yet, Pollock had some doubts whether those impulses could really be satisfied through the teachings of Protestantism (Horkheimer 1987k: 289-328, 380-382; 1988a; 1995p: 9-11, 13-15, 22-25, 32-45, 45-47; Tillich 1951; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1980a; Adorno 1997u; Wolin 2006; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Küng 1994a: 602-741; 1994b; Metz 1969; App. E). For Pollock, it seemed to be probable that this helplessness came out of the situation of human beings, who could hope at best in the second year of the Great Depression to be employed again for 8 hours, or to do somethig for themselves meaningless, and that was the highest of which they could think. For Pollock, the problematic of the modern profane culture, of which the theologians had spoken, seemed not to lay in the deification of the machine or of the sport, but rather in the fact that an enormously great and splendid machine had been built up that was useless for most people, who had to live in the Orwellian, aggressive, insane, one-dimensional capitalist machine, which stepped opposite the human beings not as God, but rather as devil: no matter if it functioned as in times of prosperity, or malfunctioned as in times of the deepest depression as in 1929 or in 2008, 2009, 2010 (Pollock 1970; Adorno 1970b: 103-146; 1997u;

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Horkheimer 1987k: 289-328, 380-382; 1988a; 1995p: 9-11, 13-15, 22-25, 32-45, 45-47; Tillich 1951; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Fromm 1957; 1961; 1964; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1980a; 1990; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1966; 1979; Wolin 2006; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Küng 1994a: 602-741; 1994b; Metz 1969; App. G). According to Pollock, the religious socialists had taken an in-between position toward what the theologians had to say during the Frankfurt Discourse of 1931. The religious socialists asked: what could the religious consciousness do at all concerning the proletarian consciousness–situation in the modern capitalist mega-machine? Who could somehow be helped with the Christian faith? What could one do so that the religion was not a mere museum affair? What did the religion do for workers concretely? (App. E)

Help According to Pollock, everything the religious socialists and the theologians had been saying were things that went to the heart of those human beings, who belonged to the middle and upper classes in civil society, and whose stomachs were somewhat filled (Pollock 1970; Horkheimer 1987k: 289-328, 380-382; 1988a; 1995p: 9-11, 13-15, 22-25, 32-45, 45-47; Tillich 1951; 1955; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1980a; Adorno 1997u; Wolin 2006; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004). The theologians always talked about the task of the church, as if it was self-evident that it could help all people at the same time, be it in Europe or America: the low middle class, which was going under; the famers, who were in the process of being proletarianized in Germany and elsewhere; the craftsman, and the artisans, and the workers, who were still standing in the production; and the people who were condemned to technological or structural unemployment in the depressions of 1929 or 2008, 2009, 2010, or in-between (Steinbeck 1929; 1950; 1999; 2002a; 2002b; Horkheimer 1987k: 289-328, 380-382; 1988a; 1995p: 9-11, 13-15, 22-25, 32-45, 45-47; Tillich 1951; 1955; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1980a; Adorno 1997u; Wolin 2006; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; App. E). Pollock did not understand completely what was meant when a theologian stated that what mattered now most was to fight against the secularization and against the de-deification of the world, without indicating at all, where this Godlessness came from, and how such a fight could possibly be fought? Pollock had the suspicion that here things were at stake, to which theologians had no entrance at all, and for whom excursions into the sociology or the critical theory of society were necessary. Finally, the

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theologians pointed out in the Frankfurt Discourse of 1931, that inspite of everything the prayer activity and the Christian charity could and had to help here somehow. However, here Pollock had to ask as sociologist and critical theorist, which social function did the reduction of the critical situation of 1931 to those things like prayer and charity really have? For Pollock, such reduction had maybe among other things the unintended function, to smudge, or to cover over, or to blur the real situation of the working classes. In Pollock’s view, thereby the real primordial religious motives were discredited, no matter how decent and Christian they were.

Messianic Anamnestic Solidarity In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, informed by Horkheimer, Adorno, Pollock and the other critical theorists, the theistic, traditional, authoritarian and dogmatic religion may very well be concretely superseded into a post-theistic, critical, humanistic, a-dogmatic and non-authoritarian religion, which may be able to survive into post-modern alternative Future III–a secular society, in which not only personal autonomy and universal solidarity, but also the sacred and the profane will be reconciled (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1987k: 289-328, 345-498; Fromm 1950; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985b; 1985e; Marcuse 1960; 1962; 1969b; 1970a; Tillich 1926; 1951; 1955; 1957, 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Siebert 2007a: 99-113; 2007b: 419-457; 2007g: 11-19; App. E, F, G). The critical religion must evolve beyond the traditional religion through continuing the process of de-demonization and demythologization (Pollock 1970; Horkheimer 1987k: 289-328, 380-382; 1988a; 1995p: 9-11, 13-15, 22-25, 32-45, 45-47; Tillich 1951; 1955; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1980a; Adorno 1997u; Wolin 2006; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004). It must rescue the primordial religious motives from their ideologization. It must not only be concerned with the modern antagonism between the religious and the secular in civil society, but also and even more and primarily so with the modern dichotomies of the rich and the poor classes and of the Right and the Left: shortly, with the material suffering of the working classes. It must also move from the Lex Talionis–eye for eye–to the Golden Rule–always treat others as you would like them to treat you (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; 7: 12). On February 19, 2009, an Iranian court, following the traditional, authoritarian and dogmatic Islamic Religion of Law, the Jus Talionis in the Holy Qu’ran, and the Sharia, sentenced a young man, who had blinded with acid his

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fiancé, because she did not want to marry him any longer, to be blinded himself with acid as well, with the exception of the use of anesthesia. (Hegel 1086j: 61-62; 1986l: 115, 122, 140, 285, 428-434; 1986m: 141, 416, 473-478; 1986n: 175; 1986o: 288, 367, 535; 1986p: 216, 318; 1986q: 30, 73, 86, 278; 1986r: 92; 1986s: 514; 1986t: 293-294; Küng 2004; App. E). The only way that the court could possibly commute the cruel punishment would be that the original victim would move from the Lex Talionis to the Golden Rule, which is written in the Holy Qu’ran as well, and would forgive her former fiancé his treacherous deed. The critical theory of society can help the critical religion in diminishing individual and collective aggression, force, violence and terror, and in general material human suffering, in so far as it is caused by the unjust social organization of humanity under capitalism (Pollock 1970; Horkheimer 1987k: 289-328, 380-382; 1988a; 1995p: 9-11, 13-15, 22-25, 32-45, 45-47; Tillich 1951; 1955; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1972; 1977; 1983; Fromm 1972b; 1973; 1980a; Adorno 1997u; Wolin 2006; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Habermas 1970; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1986; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). It can help the critical religion to generate more love for the finite, transitory, mortal human beings. It can help the critical religion to contribute to the conquest of unhappiness and misery, which are generated by the unjust structure of social life, through making it aware of and sensitive for the fundamental perils of the fragile human existence on this earth: such as alienation, meaninglessness, guilt, abandonment, loneliness, fear and reality of old age, sickness, dying and death (Habermas 1986: 53-55). It can help the critical religion keep alive the passionate and insatiable longing for the power of the God above the God of theism: the God who appears when the God of theism has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt, the imageless and nameless wholly Other than all forms of modern idolatry–aggressive oligopoly capitalism, nationalism, militarism, neo-colonialism, neo-imperialism, etc (Tillich 1972: 186-190; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1987k: 268-269, 280-293, 284-288, 289-328, 329-332, 345-408, 409417; App. E). The critical theory of society can remind the post-theistic critical religion of Meister Eckhart’s profound statement, deeply rooted in the revolution of the saints: If anyone imagines that he knows God and his knowledge takes form, then he may know something, but it is not God (Blakney 1941: 219, 221; More 1965; Walzer 1968; Pope John XXIII 1963; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1992; 1995; 2001; Habermas 1970; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1986; Siebert 2001; 2002a; App. E). Negative inverse, cipher theology: docta

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ignorantia! (Nicholas de Cusa 1962; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; App. E). Informed by Horkheimer, Adorno, Pollock, Benjamin, Habermas and other critical theorist and by Tillich as well, such critical relgion may still carry in itself the hope for redemption, and thus the power to console (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1992; 1995; 2001; Habermas 1970; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1986; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Siebert 2001; 2002a). Such critical religion may produce a response to the horror, that there may not be possible a universal solidarity with victims of the merciless historical progress and the misery of past generations, which appear to be irreversible to the secular gaze, through the idea of a Messianic anamnestic solidarity, which could bring about an ultimate atonement (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Habermas 1986: 53-55; App. E, G). The critical theorists of modern society practiced critical religion, when out of anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity with the victims and out of their longing for Heaven, Eternity, and Beauty or for the wholly Other than nature and history, determined by aggression, force, violence and terror, they tried to transcend magic, fetishism, and all kinds of idolatry, and even theism and atheism (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-207; 1969b: 177217; 2002: 137-172; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988a; 1988d: chaps. 2, 6, 7, 11, 1989m: chaps. 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 30, 31; 1996s: 62-66; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b; Fromm 1966b; 1968; 1972b; 1973; Lundgren 1998; App. E, F, G).

Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion

Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor

David Fasenfest

Wayne State University Editorial Board

Chris Chase-Dunn, University of California-Riverside G. William Domhoff, University of California-Santa Cruz Colette Fagan, Manchester University Martha Gimenez, University of Colorado, Boulder Heidi Gottfried, Wayne State University Karin Gottschall, University of Bremen Bob Jessop, Lancaster University Rhonda Levine, Colgate University Jacqueline O’Reilly, University of Brighton Mary Romero, Arizona State University Chizuko Ueno, University of Tokyo

VOLUME 20

Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion The Wholly Other, Liberation, Happiness and the Rescue of the Hopeless Volume 3

By

Rudolf Siebert

Leiden • Boston 2010

On the cover: “The Machine” (1988) by Diane Thomas Lincoln, Wichita, Kansas, USA. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Siebert, Rudolf J., 1927Manifesto of the critical theory of society and religion : the wholly other, liberation, happiness, and the rescue of the hopeless / By Rudolf Siebert. p. cm. -- (Studies in critical social sciences ; v. 20) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18436-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Religion--Philosophy. 2. Frankfurt school of sociology. I. Title. II. Series. BL51.S52555 2010 261--dc22

ISSN: ISBN: ISBN: ISBN: ISBN:

2010001670

1573-4234 978-90-04-18436-7 (set) 978-90-04-18440-4 (vol. 1) 978-90-04-18442-8 (vol. 2) 978-90-04-18443-5 (vol. 3)

Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. Typeset by chs:p [Leiden, Netherlands]

printed in the netherlands

contents Volume One Acknowledgements ......................................................................................... xi Introduction ................................................................................................... xiii Chapter One.  The Critical Theory of Society ............................................... 1 Chapter Two.  The Neo-Conservative Trend Turn .................................... 57 Chapter Three.  The Three-fold Critical Theory of Religion .................... 97 Chapter Four.  From Quantitative to Qualitative Infinity ...................... 153 Chapter Five.  Theory Formation . ................................................................ 189 Chapter Six.  From Traditional to Critical Theory .................................. 229 Chapter Seven.  Universal Pragmatic ........................................................ 257 Chapter Eight. Truth and Justification . ...................................................... 287 Chapter Nine. Toward a New Model . ......................................................... 331 Appendices A. Mottoes, Impulses and Motives . ...................................................... 375 B. Special Considerations and Inspirations ......................................... 390 C. The Five-World Macro Model .......................................................... 414 D. The Fundamental Potentials, Categories, and Spheres of Action . 416 E. Heuristic Model of the History of Religions . ................................. 418 F. Antagonisms of Modern Civil Society and their Resolutions ...... 420 G. Possible Alternative Futures . ............................................................ 423

Volume Two Chapter Ten. External and Internal Perspective ..................................... Chapter Eleven. Conscious-making and Rescuing Critique . ............... Chapter Twelve. Necrophilous and Biophilous Elements . .................... Chapter Thirteen.  From the Jus Talionis to the Golden Rule . .............. Chapter Fourteen.  Religion and Revolution . .......................................... Chapter Fifteen. Concrete Utopia ............................................................. Chapter Sixteen.  Religion in Socialist Society . .......................................

425 473 509 555 599 643 677

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contents

Chapter Seventeen.  From Magic to the Dialectical Notion . ................. 725 Chapter Eighteen. Truth as Meaning of Language and Work . ............. 767 Chapter Nineteen.  Religion in Liberal Society . ...................................... 815 Chapter Twenty. New York: The Capital of Liberalism .......................... 873 Chapter Twenty-One.  Religion in Fascist Society .................................. 959 Chapter Twenty-Two.  The Owl of Minerva . ............................................. 995 Chapter Twenty-Three. Critical Religion: Against Aggression, Force, Violence, and Terror . ................................................................ 1041

Volume Three Chapter Twenty-Four.  The Jewish-German Tragedy ........................... Chapter Twenty-Five.  From the Westphalian Peace to the Bourgeois and Socialist Revolutions ............................................ Chapter Twenty-Six.  The Expansion and Contraction of God ........... Chapter Twenty-Seven.  The Desperate Hope and the Rescue of the Hopeless . ..................................................................................... Chapter Twenty-Eight. Trust in the Eternal One . ................................

1111 1183 1243 1319 1385

Epilogue: God, Freedom, and Immortality . ........................................... 1445 References . .................................................................................................. 1577 Name Index ................................................................................................. 1693 Subject Index . ............................................................................................. 1715

chapter twenty-four

The Jewish-German Tragedy In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, insofar as Marxists or positivists have superseded religion abstractly, they fell victim to the dialectic of enlightenment: rationality turned into irrationality; integration turned into disintegration (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: ix-xi, chaps. 1-6; Adorno 1979: 280-354; Fromm 1990b; Marcuse 1967; 2001; Habermas 1976; Haselberg, 1962: 5-7, Parts I-III). As victims of the dialectic of enlightenment, Marxists sometimes regressed like positivists into mythology and personality cult, particularly in the context of Soviet red fascism, and thus, missed Marx’s concrete critique of religion, and produced counter-productively religious martyrs, and thus, strengthened the nationalist counter-revolutions of the 1920s, the 1940s and the 1980s, and thus, helped the continuation of the torn apart, divided inverse society and the inverse religion, characterized by authoritarian rather than revolutionary or democratic personalities, by having rather than being, and by the pathology of reason to the extreme of racism, particularly anti-Semitism, or more precisely Anti-Judaism (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-218; Adorno 1997h: 397-407, 408-433; Fromm 1957; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1975; 1976; 1980a; 1981; 1990a; Fromm 1990b; 1992; Reich 1971; 1976; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; Habermas 1970; 1976; 1981c; 1981d; 1987a; 1990; 1991c; 1992a; 1995; 1999; 2001a; 2001c; 2003b; 2006c; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Borradori 2003; Lauder 2009: 1-4; App. E).

Kingdom of God In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the religious idea of the Kingdom of God, situated in the Abrahamic faith communities, and characterized by the presence of God among his people, and by the absence of tears, death, mourning, sadness, as well as of idolatry, adultery, stealing, murder, and lying, remains the radical inversion of what is the case in present antagonistic civil society (Revelation 21: 1-8; Hegel 1086j: 61-62; 1986l: 115, 122, 140, 285, 428-434; 1986m: 141, 416, 473-478; 1986n: 175;

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1986o: 288, 367, 535; 1986p: 216, 318; 1986q: 30, 73, 86, 278; 1986r: 92; 1986s: 514; 1986t: 293-294; 1986g: 339-397; 1986q: 50-85; 185-346; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; 1988: chaps. 3, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 30, 34, 47, 48; Bloch 1993: chaps. 53-55; 1972; 1986; 1970a; 1970b; Fromm 1990b; Jung 1958: 248-225; Küng 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Baum 2008; App. E). However, there is not the slightest indication of a Messianic interruption of the horrible historical continuum of force and counter-force, terror and counter-terror, retaliation and counter-retaliation, crime and punishment. This parousia delay, this non-appearance of the Messiah, has been the most painful open flank of at least all three Abrahamic religions, i.e. Judaism, Christianity and Islam, into which any form of atheism can drive easily and devastatingly (Küng 1978: C; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; App. E). This, however, has so far not prevented at least some believers from Judaism, Christianity and Islam to continue to practice non-bourgeois, radical, critical religion in terms of a revolutionary humanism, and thus, to continue to hope–as once was done by the old Jews–that every second could be the little gate through which the Messiah could enter in order to end the inverse world and bring about a new heaven and a new earth (Benjamin 1977: chap. 10; Metz 1980; 1998: chaps. 1-10; Peters/Urban 1999; Dirks 1985; Sölle, 1977; 1992; 1994; Sölle/Metz/Kuschel 1990; App. E, G). Of course, Bloch and Benjamin have made it sufficiently clear that the time of political theocracy is over, once and for all (Bloch 1975b; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11). The Kingdom of God is a religious, not a political idea. The Kingdom of God is not the goal of history, but rather human happiness is. However, with such happiness can arrive silently also the Kingdom of God. Iran and other Mid-Eastern states show clearly how much unhappiness can come upon a people when once more the attempt is made anachronistically, to make the Kingdom of God the political goal of history, and to establish a political theocracy under modern conditions.

Change of History In 1845/1846, Marx stated in his 11th Thesis on Feuerbach: The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; now what counts is to change it (Marx 1953: 341; App. G). Much has changed in the capitalist world since Marx and the transition from liberal capitalism to neo-liberal monopoly and oligopoly capitalism. To the extent to which the critical theorist of religion does not consider perfect justice to be realizable in this world, he negates also the possibility of inner worldly paradises

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(Marx 1961c: 873-874; Horkheimer 1971; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1996s: 21-28, 28-32, 34-40, 40-44, 44-49, 48-49, 52-54, 54-57, 62-67, 7172, 72-75; Adorno 1970b; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1990b; App. G). According to Horkheimer, these earthly utopias, which have no relationship to something Transcendent or to a totally Other, have the tendency to stiffen and solidify into social systems of force, violence, torture, terror and retaliation. Since the years after World War II, the idea of increasing poverty and misery of the workers, out of which, according to Marx, was to arise the indignation, the revolution, the transition toward alternative Future III–the realm of freedom on the basis of the realm of necessity, has over long periods become abstract and illusory, at least in the capitalists core countries: it has become at least as aged and obsolete as the bourgeois ideologies, which the youth movement of the 1960s held so much in contempt (Marx 1961c: 873-874; Flechtheim 1971; App. G). The conditions of existence for blue and white color workers, which at the time of the Communist Manifesto of 1848 were the result of crass oppression, constitute at present the motives for union organization, for argumentation between leading groups in the economic and political subsystems of civil society (Marx/Engels 2005; Fromm 1990b). For a long time the proletarian revolutionary will has gone over into society-immanent, reality-adjusted activity (Marx 1953: chap. X; Horkheimer 1971: 48-49; 1985g: chap. 37; Fromm 1990b). In the perspective of the critical theorist of religion, at least according to the subjective consciousness, the proletariat has been integrated in the G8–the capitalist core countries. Most of the 180 million workers in the United States think they are middle class, and many of them may out of this false consciousness vote against their own best and real interest, as they did for the neo-liberal second Bush Administration in the US Federal Elections of November 2004 and could have possibly done again for the neo-conservative McCain/Palin ticket of November 2008. In the process of neo-liberal/neoconservative globalization, such ideologically inspired voting would continue to alienate U.S. workers even further from the other workers of the world, and from their solidarity, and from their common humanity. While the situation of the workers has improved in the capitalist core countries since 1848, it remains very much the same, or has even been worsened for the majority of the workers outside the G8, which met on July 8, 2008, in Japan, discussing the issue of global poverty. In a certain sense the minority of the workers in the capitalist core countries have become co-exploiters of the majority of the workers of the world. The higher wages of the workers in the West depend on the lower wages of the workers in the rest of the world. Thus, the

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change of history, which Marx demanded in 1845-1848, has objectively lost nothing of its actuality for the majority of the workers of the world, no matter how false their subjective consciousness may be in the present neo-conservative globalization process: the change from man’s natural, spiritual-animal pre-history to his fully human history–alternative Future III–a free society, in which man’s natural being would be humanized, and his humanity would be naturalized (Hegel 1986g: 1986l; Marx 1953: chap. III-X; Marx/Engels 2005). This change of history would be open toward Transcendence, the wholly Other (Marx 1961c: 873-874; Horkheimer 1971; 1985g: chap. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1996s: 21-28, 28-32, 34-40, 40-44, 4449, 48-49, 52-54, 54-57, 62-67, 71-72, 72-75; Adorno 1970; Fromm 1990b; App. G). The progressive dialectical religiology opposes and rejects any form of a romantic relapse behind the industrial society, or behind the empirical social sciences, or behind the liberal state (Pfahl-Traughber 2008: 76-79; Rudolph 2008: 14; Scherrer 2008a: 15-18; Scherrer 2008b: 19-24; Schneider-Deters 2008: 36-40).

Dynamic of Society and History To be sure, for the Frankfurt School the teachings not only of Hegel, but also of Marx and Friedrich Engels remain indispensable for the understanding of the dynamic of the late capitalist society and history: particularly of liberalism, socialism, and fascism (Horkheimer 1971: 48-49; 1985g: chap. 37; Neumann 1942; Adorno, 1979: I, 354-373, 578-567; Bloch 1971; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1868; 1992; Bloch 1971; 1975c; Marcuse 1961; 1980; 1987; Sohn-Rethel 1973; Canetti 1972; Habermas 1976). However, this Hegelian and Marxian teaching may no longer be sufficient in order to explain the internal development as well as the external relationships of present nation-states, characterized by the massive application of power, force, violence, torture, and terror and counter-terror, and retaliation and counter-retaliation. Unfortunately, during the Cold War period the seemingly oppositional claim of relating aggressive notions like class domination, colonialism, and imperialism to capitalist states alone and not likewise to alleged communistic states stood no less in opposition to the humanistic impulses, which determine the critical theory of society and religion, than the corresponding prejudices of the bourgeoisie. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, in the dialectical materialist countries long before their demise in 1989, socialism–understood as the idea of not only formally but materially and content wise realized democracy– had been perverted into the instrument of manipulation, as much as the

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Christian message had in the bloody centuries of Christianity. The dialectical religiologist must ask seriously: can one today, in 2010, wish honestly and ethically for a new revolution, if one knows very well that it will very probably be accompanied by revolutionary and particularly counterrevolutionary terrorism and retaliation? In this situation, after the change of history has not gone very well so far, it may be time to reflect once more on great theory–i.e. concretely Kant, Fichte, Schelling and most of all Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud–and interpret it again toward a new praxis. It may be helpful for the philosophers and social scientists to return again to great theory, and to begin anew to interpret the world more adequately, in order to initiate a new praxis, which will really be able to change the identity of late capitalist society, and to at least avoid alternative Future I–the totally organized and administered society, and alternative Future II–the entirely militarized society, and to aim at alternative Future III–a more reconciled and therefore freer and more just society (Flechtheim 1971; Adorno 1979: I, 354-373, 578-567; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 38, 39, 40; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Habermas 1990, Part V, esp. 179-204; App. G). Thus, the critical theorist of religion moves back particularly to Hegel, in order to learn from him once more how to interpret the world differently, and how to appreciate the power of determinate negation or creative destruction, which produces new life forms, including their economic, political, and religious dimensions, and to understand the praxis philosopher Marx less positivistically, and more dialectically and humanistically, and thus to contribute to the arrival of global alternative Future III: a transnational, post-bureaucratic realm of the freedom of All on the basis of natural and economic necessity, in which the human and social rights of all citizens are guarantied (Hegel 1986e: I, 4853; 1986c: 72-77; Marx 1953; 1961c: 873-874; Adorno 1969b; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37, 38, 39, 40; Habermas 1990: Part V, esp. 179-204; Faist 2009: 7-36; Johnson/WoodBrewster/Brookes 2009: 37-62; App. G). What did Hegel have to say about force, violence, torture, terror and the jus talionis or lex talionis, which may still be of relevance for our praxis in the present world historical situation characterized by massive poverty, most forceful and violent nationalism and globalism, war against terror and terror of war, retaliation and counter-retaliation, fascism and anti-socialism, anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, or anti-Islamism (Genesis 32: 7; Hosea 11: 10; Lieber 2001: 195/10, 198-199/7; Kusinic 2008; Dubiel/Friedeburg/Schumm 1994; Hedges 2006; Scahill 2007; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; Perkins 2007; Schwadel 2008; Alumkal 2008; Wuthnow/Offut 2008)?

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chapter twenty-four Insanity

Already the young Hegel knew of the possibility of religious alienation– the projection of man’s own humanity and its riches into the sky–and most importantly he connected it with the social alienation in modern civil society (Hegel 1986a: 181, 245, 276, 321, 330, 352, 394, 426, 435, 580581; Kamenka 115-124; Marx, 1953: 187, 361; Fromm 1990a: 121, 127, 132, 210, 233, 236, 238, 247, 251, 253-262, 270-271, 278, 327, 263-269; 1990b; Benjamin 1988: chaps. 3, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 29, 30, 35, 38, 40, 46, 47, 48). According to the young Hegel, when the social nature of man had once been disturbed and forced to throw itself into particularities and peculiarities, then such deep perversion got into it that it now used its energy for its disunion from others, and that it proceeded in the assertion of its own separation and alienation to the point of insanity (Hegel 1986a: 181, 245, 276, 321, 330, 352, 394, 426, 435, 580-581; 1986c: 149, 154, 157-158, 174-175, 274, 277, 282, 358-359, 427, 552, 575; 1986d: 82; 1986f: II, 409; 1986g: 352; 1986j: III, 322; 1986m: I, 135; 1986o: III, 343; 1986r: I, 22; 1986t: III, 52; Marx 1961b: 25; 1953: 187, 361; Kamenka 115-124; Fromm 1955: 121, 236; 1990b; Baum 1959; 1971; 1975b; 2001; 2003; 2004). According to Hegel, madness was nothing else than the completed separation or alienation of the individual from his or her species or genus: from humanity (Hegel 1986j: III, 43-198, esp. 50, 57-70, 87-89, 117-118, 132-160, 160-182; 1986c: 149, 154, 157-158, 174-175, 274, 277, 282358-359, 427, 552, 575; esp. 590-591; Fromm 1950; 1957: 9-11; 1959; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976: 121, 236; 127, 132, 210, 233, 236, 238, 247, 251, 253-262, 270-271, 278, 327, 263269; 1990; 1995; 1997; 2001). The Left-Hegelian critical theorist Fromm, Marxist and Freudian at the same time, remembered that the older traditional meaning of alienation, which was still used in the 18th century, was to denote an insane person (Fromm 1990a; 1990b). Alien in French and alienado in Spanish were older words for the psychotic, the thoroughly and absolutely alienated person. In English, alienist is still used for the doctor, who cares for the insane people. In the 19th century, for Hegel and Marx, the word alienation was no longer referring to a state of insanity. They used the word alienation, but in the less drastic form of selfestrangement, which permitted the person to act reasonably in practical matters, yet which constituted, nevertheless, one of the most severe socially patterned defects. Hegel spoke of alienation between man and nature, between man and civil society and its laws and power (Hegel 1986a: 181, 245, 276, 321, 330, 352, 394, 426, 435, 580-581; 1986c: 149, 154, 157-

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158, 174-175, 274, 277, 282, 358-359, 427, 552, 575; 1986d: 82; 1986f: II, 409; 1986g: 352; 1986j: III, 322; 1986m: I, 135; 1986o: III, 343; 1986r: I, 22; 1986t: III, 52; Kamenka 1983: 115-124; Marx, 1961b: 25; 1953: 187, 361; Fromm 1990a: 121, 236; 1990b; Baum 1959; 1971; 1975b; 2001; 2003; 2004). Alienation meant the singularization and entanglement of life. Alienation meant the feeling of unhappiness and the pitifulness of one’s actions. The self-consciousness could externalize itself and alienate itself from itself as an absolute foreign being. Alienation meant work according to a foreign will. Ego could feel itself as mere form and the surrounding objectivity as a being completely separated from itself. The real social order could be perceived as a completely alienated, hostile, and turned upside down superior force. Alienation was rooted in the division of labor in civil society, the abstraction of production, the reduction to one type of skillfulness and dependence on civil society. Hegel believed in the realization of God’s realm in history as well as beyond without any form of alienation, thus, translating Christian theology into this-worldly philosophy (Hegel 1986a: 181, 245, 276, 321, 330, 352, 394, 426, 435, 580-581; 1986c: 149, 154, 157-158, 174-175, 274, 277, 282, 358-359, 427, 552, 575). Hegel anticipated already the critical theorists’ other, or inverse theology: the longing for the totally Other (Hegel 1986a: 344-345, 417; 1986c: 169, 423, 424; 1986e: 267, 270; 1986t: III, 386, 399, 407, 418; Adorno 1970b: 103110, 111-125; Fromm 1990b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; 1967: 311-312; Benjamin 1977: 252; App. G). Hegel’s dialectical, philosophical theology was already not only affirmative, but also negative and inverse. Ultimately, it was no less a negative theology than the Talmud.

Prehistory In Marx’s philosophy, alienation was called that condition of man where his own act becomes an alien power, standing over and against him, instead of being ruled by him (Marx 1961b: 236; 1953: 187, 361; Fromm 1973; 1990a: 121, 127, 132, 210, 233, 236, 238, 247, 251, 253-262, 270-271, 278, 327, 263-269; 1990b). Marx’s thought was also a Messianic one, inverted into the secular language of historical materialism (Horkheimer 1972: 129-132; Fromm 1990b). It was Messianic materialism (Marx 1953; Tucker 1978: 53-66; Fromm 1990b; Niebuhr 1964; Gutierrez 1973: 9-10, 25, 2930, 31, 40/26, 40/29, 40/30, 187/98, 104, 106-107, 123/20, 137, 141/2, 216, 219-220, 222, 224, 244/59, 249/121; Sölle 1994). It was an anticipation of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s inverse theology (Adorno 1970: 103-125). For Marx, all past human history was only prehistory. It was the history

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of self-alienation. Only with humanistic socialism or socialist humanism would the realm of unalienated, truly human history, of human freedom, be ushered in: the realm of freedom on the basis of the realm of natural and economic necessity (Marx 1961c: 873-874; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1966c; 1967; 1990a; 1990b; Eggebrecht 1980; App. G). The classless society of justice, brotherliness and sisterliness, and reason would be the beginning of a new world, toward the formation of which all previous human history had been moving. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the perversion of Soviet Marxism into Stalinism and red fascism, and the victorious neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1989, and the following age of Islamic and bourgeois terrorism and counter-terrorism with all their mutual force, violence, and torture were great setbacks on humanity’s long way from pre-history to genuine history, animality to alternative Future III–the realm of freedom (Hegel 1986g: 339-398; 1986l: 491-540; 1986p: 236-246; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Flechtheim 1971; Fromm 1990b; Pfahl-Traughber 2008: 76-79; Rudolph 2008: 14; Scherrer 2008a: 15-18; Scherrer 2008b: 19-24; Schneider-Deters 2008: 36-40; Kusinic 2008; Dubiel/Friedeburg/Schumm 1994; Hedges 2006; Scahill 2007; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; Perkins 2007; Schwadel 2008; Alumkal 2008; Wuthnow/Offut 2008; App. G). Unfortunately, the human freedom history has been full of such regressions (Hegel 1986l). Today, such regressions point to post-modern, global alternative Future I–the totally administered society in technocratic, fascist or Stalinist form, and to postmodern global alternative Future II–the entirely militarized society full of force, violence, torture, conventional wars and civil wars, aiming at World War III, even under the pretense to preserve world peace (Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1966; Fromm 1968; 1973; Fromm 1990b; Kusinic 2008; Dubiel/ Friedeburg/Schumm 1994; Hedges 2006; Scahill 2007; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; Perkins 2007; Schwadel 2008; Alumkal 2008; Wuthnow/Offut 2008; App. G).

Religious Roots While the use of the word alienation in this general Hegelian or Marxian sense has been a more recent one, the concept is a much older one (Hegel 1986a: 181, 245, 276, 321, 330, 352, 394, 426, 435, 580-581; Marx 1961b: 236; 1953: 187, 361; Fromm 1990a: 121, 127, 132, 210, 233, 236, 238, 247, 251, 253-262, 270-271, 278, 327, 263-269; Fromm 1990b; Benjamin 1988: chaps. 3, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 29, 30, 35, 38, 40, 46, 47, 48). It is rooted in religion. Alienation is the same human behavior

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to which the prophets of the Hebrew Bible referred as idolatry (Exodus 20: 4-7; Deuteronomy 1-6; Fromm 1966b: 121, 127, 132, 210, 233, 236, 238, 247, 251, 253-262, 270-271, 278, 327, 263-269; Landgren 1998; App. E). It is the violation of the second and the third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue: the prohibition against making images of or naming the Absolute (Exodus 20: 4-7; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 23-24; App. E). It is this alienated prehistory, or animal-history of human kind, or history of idolatry, in which takes place continually the application of force, violence, torture, e.g. the Bush Administration’s water boarding in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, and terror, and of the lex talionis (Kucinic 2008). According to Marx, there would be either socialism or barbarism (Marx 1953: 333, 548-550; Marx 1961c: 103, 143, 213, 293-294, 479, 481-482, 711-712, 826, 873, 907, 932-933, 873-874; Fromm 1955: 109, 121, 127, 132, 210, 233, 236, 238, 246-269, 270-272, 277, 278, 283, 286, 326-327, 328; 1966b: chaps. ii, iv, v, vi, ix; 1990b). So far there has been little socialism and much nationalistic barbarism connected with much ideological religion, as well as force, torture, violence, and counterforce and much jus gladii, lex talionis: i.e. retaliation and counter-retaliation (Kant 1981: 3-12, 15-52, 52-76; Hegel 1986a: 580-581; Schneider 1954: 99-101; Ullrich 2004: 92-94; Zimmermann 2007: 88-91; Meyer 1954: 95-98; Bonnefoy 2004: 4; Baker/ Glaser 2004: 3; Bezymenski 2004; Kapos 2004: Section 2, C; Johnson 2004; Schmitt 2004: A 6; Eckel 2004: 1-3; Simpson 2004: 1-2; Federman 2004: 1-3; Housego 2004a: 1-3; Housego 2004b: 1-3; Mroue 2004: 1-3; Shah 2004: 1-3; K’al-Fadli, 2004: 1; Al-Obeidi 2004: 1-3; Finucane 2004: 1; Dodds 2004: 1-2; Schorr 2004; Dodds 2004: 1-2; Gallardo 2004: 1-2; Hunt 2004: 1-2; Laumont 2003: 403). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, Marx inverted the religious struggle of the Hebrew, Christian and Islamic prophets against idolatry into his own secular fight not against the capitalists, but rather against capital as a most massive idol of antagonistic civil society, which the workers of the world produce and reproduce continually with their life energies, but which has become an alien power, standing over and against them like a god, like their fate, instead of being ruled by them (Marx 1953: 235-237; 1953: 187, 361; Fromm 1990a: 121, 127, 132, 210, 233, 236, 238, 247, 251, 253-262, 270-271, 278, 327, 263-269, 236; 1973; Fromm 1990b; Hinkelammert 1985; Kusinic 2008; Dubiel/Friedeburg/ Schumm 1994; Hedges 2006; Scahill 2007; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; Perkins 2007; Schwadel 2008; Alumkal 2008; Wuthnow/Offut 2008). According to the dialectical religiology, the end of idolatry would not necessarily mean the end of religion, but–to the contrary–the beginning of a true, and genuine, non-authoritarian, humanistic and unalienated, critical religion

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without any projections, which could survive into the post-modern alternative Future III: the reconciled society (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 1, 27, 29, 37, 40; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; App. E, G). Such critical religion could join the enlighteners in their struggle to free people form their fears, and to make them into masters of their fate– particularly the awesome, most powerful national and international idolatry of capitalism (Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1976; Metz 1978; Küng 1990b; 1991a; Hinkelammert 1985; Kusinic 2008; Dubiel/Friedeburg/Schumm 1994; Hedges 2006; Scahill 2007; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; Perkins 2007; Schwadel 2008; Alumkal 2008; Wuthnow/Offut 2008). Insofar as modern civil society is capitalistic, it cannot possibly be religious in a substantial sense. Of course, the external forms of a positive religion can still stand around a long time after its substantial truth has moved on: until also its temples fall into ruins completely. Already when I began to study theology at the University of Mainz in 1947, only two years after the end of the horrible World War II, which had cost the lives of 60 million people, I had the impression and said so, that the great medieval cathedrals in Mainz and Worms and along the whole Rhine and Danube River had turned into museums for quite some time.

Ethno-nationalism According to Hegel, not only individuals but also nations suffered from alienation from each other and from the human species in its totality, as once represented more or less by the Holy Alliance, or by the League of Nations, and today–in 2010–by the UN: namely, in all forms of nationalism (Hegel 1986j: III, 43-198, esp. 50, 57-70, 87-89, 117-118, 132-160, 160-182; Pfahl-Traughber 2008: 76-79; Rudolph 2008: 14; Scherrer 2008a: 15-18; Scherrer 2008b: 19-24; Schneider-Deters 2008: 36-40; Kusinic 2008; Dubiel/ Friedeburg/Schumm 1994; Hedges 2006; Scahill 2007; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; Perkins 2007; Schwadel 2008; Alumkal 2008; Wuthnow/Offut 2008). In modern nationalism, alienation–among individuals and nations, and from international organizations, and from humanity, and finally from God, but necessarily from religion–returns again to its original meaning of insanity. Nationalisms are even the more the forms of alienation as insanity, the more religiously they are based and legitimated, and the more fanatical and hysterical they become. In the age of international bourgeois and communist block confrontation, too quickly did the social sciences and the mass media declare the category of national differentiation of the world society to be obsolete (Weitkamp 2008; Rudolph 2008: 14; Scherrer

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2008a: 15-19; Scherrer 2008b: 15-129; Schneider Deters 2008: 36-40). Then the breakdown of the real socialism happened as a consequence of the victorious neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1989 in Eastern Europe along the national-ethnical breaking points of the Soviet Empire (Timmermann 2008: 27-30; Lindner 2008: 34-36; Libal 2008: 40-44; Weitkamp 2008; Rudolph 2008: 14; Scherrer 2008a: 15-19; Scherrer 2008b: 15-129; Schneider Deters 2008: 36-40). This nationalistic fission happened always in connection with a particular positive religion: Russian nationalism and the Orthodox Church; Chechnian nationalism and Islam; Polish nationalism and Roman Catholicism; Serbian nationalism and the Orthodox Church; Croatian nationalism and the Roman Catholic Church, Bosnian nationalism and Islam, Israeli nationalism and Judaism, Palestinian nationalism and Islam, etc. The question of whether these nationalists have a real substantial faith in God, Yahweh, the Father of Jesus the Christ, or Allah, or merely a firm belief in the spirit of their nation, may remain open for the time being. I met quite a few Polish-Catholics, or Russian Orthodox, or Israeli Jews, or Bosnian Muslims, etc. who in reality were atheists for all practical or theoretical purposes. This may be a matter of indifference for a positivistic sociologist, for whom appearance and essence are identical, but not for a dialectical theorist, who practices inner criticism. Nationalist constellations of the 19th century returned again in surprisingly unmediated forms. With these nationalisms, returned also new forms of alienation, and of the application of force, violence, torture and terror, and of the lex talionis, i.e. the eye for eye, tooth for tooth from the Torah, or the free man for free man, slave for slave from the Holy Qu’ran, or simply secular revenge and retribution, often under the ideological cover of the pretense of social or historical justice (Exodus 21, 24; Matthew 5: 38-42, 49; Küng 1991b; 2004). The Chechnian terror attacks against Russia in September/ October 2004 were only one example among many others taking place all around the globe at this time (Eckel 2004: 1-3; Bellaby 2004: 1-2). This often religiously based, ethno-national, social change dynamic can be grasped and comprehended only insufficiently in traditional, positivistictheoretical categories (Luhmann 1977). The very notion of the ethnical or ethnicity is an example for the tremendous speed with which today–in 2010–an expression cannot only play a central role in the self-understanding of nation states, which establish themselves newly, but also how fast it can become general property in the social sciences and in the everyday language (Weitkamp 2008; Rudolph 2008: 14; Scherrer 2008a: 15-19; 2008b: 15-129; Schneider-Deters 2008: 36-40). In my whole long life, I personally have never seen a healthy racial or ethno-nationalist: be it in Germany,

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in the United States, in Canada, in Poland, in Russia, in the Ukraine, in Croatia, in Serbia, in Israel, or elsewhere (Hegel 1986a: 580-581; Schneider 1954: 99-101; Ullrich 2004: 92-94; Zimmermann 2004: 88-91; Meyer 2004: 95-98). Here, I would like to attempt to make some sense of present forms of often religiously grounded nationalisms and their use of force, violence, terror, and praxis of the lex talionis in terms of the critical theory of society of the Frankfurt School and of the dialectical theory of religion (Exodus 21, 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; Hegel 1986l: 19-55; Horkheimer 1972; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Siebert 2001; 2002a).

Fundamentalism and Nationalism In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, religious fundamentalism is as modern a phenomenon as nationalism, and occurs in reaction to the modern antagonism between the religious and the secular (Hegel 1986p: I, 11-88, 214; 1986q: II, 53, 72, 73, 82, 174; 1986a: 197, 548-558; 1986d: 246, 327, 468, 489, 588; 1986g: 338, 494, 502; 1986j: III, 50, 64-65, 66-68, 350; 1986k: 180, 532; 1986l: 421, 479; 1986m: I, 353-354; 1986o: III, 344, 346; 1986r: I, 11; Appleby/Strong 2003; App. E, F). At present, only too often the two modern phenomena, fundamentalism and nationalism, move and work hand in hand in the same nations, e.g. in Africa, Asia, Near East, Europe and the Americas. They may share the same degree of alienation or insanity. A fundamentalist is a religious person, who has been touched and even shocked by the waves of modern enlightenment, and is now afraid that he may lose his center and all his hold in life, and therefore tries to escape backward into the religion of the fathers, and take the sacred writings literally, instead of going through the demythologizing enlightenment and arrive on its other side in a second naiveté. Today–in 2010–Israel identifies itself to some extent with a fundamentalism rooted in the Rabbinical-Synagogical Paradigm of the Middle Ages (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991b: 169-274; Second and Third Main Part; App. E). The Russian, Serbian, and the Ukrainian nations identify themselves to some extent with a fundamentalism rooted in the Ecumenical-Hellenistic Constellation of the Christian Antiquity (Hegel 1986q: 183-346; Scherrer 2008a: 15-18; Scherrer b: 19-24; Schneider-Deters 2008: 36-40; Libal 2008: 40-43; Küng 1994a: 145-335; 1994b; App. B,E). The Croatian, Hungarian, and Polish nations identify themselves to some extent with a fundamentalism rooted in the Roman-Catholic Paradigm of the Middle Ages (Küng 1994a: 336-602; App. E). The Bosnian and the Palestinian nations identify

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themselves to some extent with a fundamentalism rooted in the Medieval Ulama-Sufi Paradigm of Islam (Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: A; App. E). The further a fundamentalism goes back in the paradigmatic history of the religion, in which it is rooted, the more dangerous it becomes for the present historical process and human kind. Thus, a Jewish fundamentalism, which relates itself to the Empire Paradigm of the Monarchical Time of Judaism, may want to establish under modern political and military conditions a State of Israel, reaching from the Nile to the Euphrates and Tigris (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991b; App. E). A Jewish fundamentalism rooted in the Theocratic Paradigm of the Post-Exile Judaism, may want to replace the Mosque in Jerusalem by the third temple, because without this event the Messiah can and will not come. A Christian fundamentalism rooted in the Medieval Roman Catholic Paradigm may want to re-Christianize all of Europe from Madrid even to Moscow and the Ural (Hegel 1986q: 218-346; Küng 1994a; 1994b; App. E). An Islamic fundamentalism rooted in the Arabic Empire Paradigm or in the Classical Islamic World Religion Model, may plan to establish a new Kalifat in Teheran or in Damascus, which would reach from the Middle East through North Africa to Spain, and into the Balkan and the Crimea (Küng 2004; App. E). When those and other nations have problems with moving from the traditional to the modern, or from the modern to the post-modern paradigm, they may become fundamentalistic as well as nationalistic in a particular religious and national crisis (Küng, 1991b: 169-274; Second and Third Main Part; 1994a: 145-335, 336-602, 742-906; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: 742-906, A; App. E, F). Thus, they may also try to help themselves through the application of force, violence, torture, terror, and wars and civil wars, and of the jus or lex talionis, which is often fundamentalistically motivated and legitimated. When this happens, religion becomes part of the problem rather than its solution. To be sure, there is no peace among the nations, without peace among the world religions (Küng, 2003: 3-28, esp. 18-19; 1990b; 1991a; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; App. E, F). There is no peace among the world religions without discourse among them. There is no discourse among the world religions without mutual knowledge of their interpretation of reality and orientation of action, i.e. their dogmas and their personal and social morality (Habermas 1981a; 1981b; 1984a; Küng 1991b: 169-274, Second and Third Main Part; 1994a: 145-335, 336602, 742-906; 1994b; 1990b; 2003: 3-28, esp. 18-19; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/ Bechert 1984: 742-906, A; App. E, F). Where there is no discourse, there is war in personal as well as in national and international affairs! In dis-

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course, the world religions could help each other to avoid or at least mitigate force, violence, torture, terror and war and the application of the lex talionis through sharing their historical experiences. Islam is today situated in the same phase of the evolution of religious and moral consciousness, in which Roman Catholicism found itself at the beginning of the modernization and secularization process, and of the formation of the modern nation states, 400 years ago. Should Islam not be able to learn from Catholicism, and vice versa? With the global phenomenon of an often religiously based ethnocitization or nationalization of the economic, social, political, and historical reality are connected new forms of force and terror which seem to obey the age old lex talionis as it can be found not only in the Hebrew Bible and in the Holy Qu’ran, but in the sacred scriptures of other world religions as well, even in the New Testament in the form of a talion theodicy: in spite of the negation of the lex talionis in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7).

The German and the Jewish Nation In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the young Hegel had certainly been too optimistic when he argued that the German nation was not able to escalate its stiff-necked and stubborn idolatrous behavior and character concerning its own ethnic-national particularity to the alienation and insanity of the Jewish nation (Deuteronomy 9: 6, 13, 27; 10: 16; Hertz 5716/1956: 785/6, 786/13, 787/27, 789/16; Hegel 1986a: 580-581; 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-316, 317-321; Küng 1991b; Susman 1948; App. E, F). Hegel considered the Jewish nation to be unable to associate and to unite itself with other nations in sociability and community in the framework of the Roman Empire. Hegel had indeed been too optimistic when he believed that the German nation could not come to the Jewish nation’s despicable and disreputable separation and alienation and insanity, and to murder and to let itself be murdered, until its state was destroyed by the Roman army between 66 and 70 ACE, and ultimately, between 132 and 135 ACE after a new insurrection led by Simeon ben Kosiba, who had been greeted by the Rabbi Akiba, the greatest Jewish teacher of his time, as the Messiah, but turned out to be what the Rabbis later on called a false alarm (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Susman 1948: chaps. 1-9; Küng, 1991b: 164-168; Fromm 1966b: chap. ix; App. E, F). Rabbi Akiba longed for the sublime moment when his daily profession of the love of God might be put to the test and confirmed by action (Deuteronomy 6:

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4-25; Hertz 5716/1956: 769-774, esp. 770/5; Matthew 5-7, esp. 5: 38-48; Luke 6: 17-49; Fromm 1966b: chap. ix; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-316, 317321; App. E). That moment came, when, after Akiba’s noble part in the last Jewish War of Independence against Imperial Rome, the Roman executioner was tearing his flesh with combs of iron. Akiba, while being tortured, smiled, and when asked by the Roman General why he smiled, told him and his weeping disciples: All my life I have prayed: You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul (meaning life) and with all your power. I never could love him ‘with all my life’ until now. That is why I am happy (Jerusalem Talmud, Berakhot IX, 7, 14b; Babylonian Talmud, Berakhoth 61b; Fromm 1966b: 231-232; App. E).

According to the Rabbis, it was such understanding of the words of the Shema Israel: Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One

that gave the Jewish martyrs throughout the ages the comfort and courage to face overwhelming force, terror, and torture, and to lay down their lives for their faith (Hertz 5716/1956: 769-774; Fromm 1966b: 231-232; App. E). The Shema Israel includes the love of God, i.e. to do his will and obey his commandments not only against idolatry, but also against adultery, stealing, murdering and lying, and thus, contains also the love of the neighbor and of one self–what the modern labor movement has inverted and translated into the secular notion of solidarity–and in Christianity even the love of the enemy and the exclusion of the lex talionis and of the corresponding destructive aggression, force, violence, terror, torture and wars, and the triumph of the Golden Rule (Matthew 5, 6, 7; Fromm 1966b: chap. ix; 1973; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-316, 317-321; App. E, F).

Notion and History Contrary to Hegel’s optimism concerning the Germans, the German nation engaged precisely in such stubborn national particularism between 1933 and 1945: Germany escalated its stiff-neckness concerning its own ethnic-national particularity to the extreme alienation and insanity of the Jewish nation in 70 ACE, and once more in 135 ACE (Hegel 1986a: 580581; 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-316, 317-321; Küng 1991b; Susman 1948; Trevor-Roper 2000; Kershaw 1987; Rosenbaum 1998; Speer 1970; Persico 1994; App. E, F). The German nation was unable to associate

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and to unite itself with other nations in sociability and community in the framework of Europe, or the League of Nations. The German nation came to a despicable and disreputable separation and alienation, to murder and to let itself be murdered, until the Allies destroyed its whole state. Germans and Jews were even much more similar than Hegel had thought. However, Hegel noticed, nevertheless, quite clearly that for the German nation its ethno-national particularity and the corresponding privilege and preference was something so intimately personal, that the power of the dialectical notion, which originally was a theological one, and which constituted the very core of his philosophical system–the self-particularization and the self-singularization of the universal, or the self-alienation and self-reconciliation of the universal and the corresponding insight into its necessity, was, nevertheless, much too weak in order to determine the real historical actions not only of the Jews, but also of the Germans (Hegel 1986a: 580581; Hegel 1986f: 272-300; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-316, 317-321; Adorno 1970b: 103-110, 111-125; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c). The historical actions and events exploded the dialectical notion. The particularization disallowed the singularization: alienation prevented the reconciliation. The dialectical notion and the insight into the necessity connected with it, brought along with it such distrust and suspicion against itself that it had to be justified through force, and even through terror and retaliation. People subordinated themselves to the dialectical notion–the union of the universal and the particular–and the corresponding insight of necessity only, when it was justified by force, terror and revenge. That has been true not only for the German and the Jewish nation, but more or less for all nations and nation states insofar as they chose the way into modern nationalism. Force justified the dialectical notion and insight of necessity, and vice versa. If Hegel’s critique of the nationalism of the Jewish nation on the basis of the dialectical notion, was anti-Semitic, then, of course, also his critique of the German nation was anti-Germanic: which is very unlikely, in spite of the fact, that he was posthumously charged in Berlin with high treason. The very fact that his Jewish friends still today–2010–put little pebbles on Hegel’s gravestone, a replica of the holocaust altar in the first and second temple in Jerusalem, in the Dorothean Cemetery in Berlin 180 years after his death, may indicate that his critique of Jewish nationalism and force and terror should not be interpreted as religious anti-Judaism, not to speak of secular anti-Semitism (Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1967b: 302-316, 317-321; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1973a; 1973b: 300-360; Marcuse 1960: Part I; 1987: chaps. 1-26; Siebert 2005a; 2005b; 2005c: 135-160; 2005d: 57-116; 2005e: 215-231; 2005f: 231-247; 2006a).

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The historical materialist Adorno’s negative dialectics was the result of his and the other critical theorists’ 20th century experience and insight, which had already not been foreign to the historical idealist Hegel: that often history like nature does not conform to the dialectical notion and sometimes teaches something different (Hegel 1986h; 1986i; 1986j; 1986l; Adorno 1973a; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e). Often things don’t fit! There are overwhelming riddles and contingencies in history as well as in nature.

Jewish-German Nationalism Professor Dr. Fritz Haber had been born a Jew in Breslau, now Polish Warsaw, in December 1868 (Charles 2005; Smil: 2004; Stolzenberg 2004; Harman 2004: 31-39; Siebert 2006a: Part I). He was named by his very patriotic Jewish-German father Siegfried after the legendary Old Fritz, a founder of the royal house of Hohenzollern. Fritz Haber became an assimilated and dissenting Jew. In November 1892, at the age of 24, Haber was baptized a Protestant in the Michaelis Church in Jena, Germany. Haber’s conversion was purely pragmatic. In order to be accepted by the liberal German bourgeoisie, Haber had–in the words of Hannah Arendt–to be a Jew, who was unlike the Jews. While studying chemistry in Berlin, Haber was also a student of Wilhelm Dilthey, who at that time formalized the distinction between the human sciences and the natural sciences. Haber was even a better philosopher than a chemist. As a chemist, nevertheless, Haber along with Carl Bosch transformed the world food production by synthesizing ammonia from its elements in the presence of a catalyst at elevated temperature and atmospheric pressure. Haber had figured out how to fix nitrogen for food and explosives from its inexhaustible supply in the air. The commercial and national implications of his invention were staggering. The so-called Haber process was a method for synthesizing ammonia by the catalyzed combination of nitrogen and hydrogen at high temperature and pressure. It satisfied the desperate need of civil society for nitrogenous and hydrogenous ammonia, and reproduced the latter a mass in Oppau and Leuna, Germany. Haber became a Noble Laureate in 1920. Haber chose not to become a Zionist, but rather a most devoted German nationalist, ready to apply force and terror and the lex talionis in defense of his beloved German Fatherland. Haber had been weaned on teachings of duty to the German state produced by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, besides whom Hegel wished to be buried and was buried (Hegel 1986t: 70, 130, 132, 153, 313, 314, 314, 369, 386, 387-420, 421, 423, 426-427, 429,

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438, 458, 518; Harman 2004: 31-39; Siebert 1979b; 1979c; 1987b; 1987c; 2006a: Part I). In Fichte’s patriotic spirit, Haber would do all he could for his Germany. This was to be his Jewish-German fate and tragedy. Great scientists have the tendency to be cosmopolitans and pacifists in peacetime, but when their nations enter war, they are also grasped by the nationalism, and alienation, and insanity of their country like all the other patriots, and turn into warriors, and make substantial contributions to the war effort. That happened not only to the German Jew Haber in the First World War, but also to the American Jews Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Teller in the Second World War. Nationalism and its intrinsic alienation and insanity, is an overwhelming emotional power for every individual that gets entangled in it.

The Two Walls of Pride The former German Jew Einstein has expressed his loss of religious faith in his German letter to the American believing Jew Eric Gutkind of 1954, which he shared with other assimilated, scientifically educated German Jews, like Marx and Freud, or Haber and Baum: The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtle interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them. In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the privilege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all precision, possibly as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolization. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary. Now that I have quite openly stated our difference in intellectual convictions, it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essen-

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tial things, i.e. in our evaluations of human behavior. What separates us are only intellectual ‘props’ and ‘rationalisation’ in Freud’s language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well, if we talked about concrete things With friendly thanks and best wishes Yours, A. Einstein (Einstein 1954; Fromm 1990b).

Later on, Einstein, for whom–in contrast to the quantum physicist Heisenberg– God did not gamble–came closer again to the Jewish experience of God, when he, a violin player, listened to the music of the great Jewish violinist Jascha Heifitz: Einstein came at least as close to Judaism again as the heretical Spinoza, the Jewish pantheist, who had been deeply influenced by Anselm of Canterbury, and by Meister Eckhart, and to whom Einstein also owed his liberalism (Hartshorne 1962: xi-xiii; Blakney 1941: xiii; Spinoza 1848; Hegel 1986a: 74; 1986b: 1037, 106, 229-230, 263, 327, 339-352, 338-341, 345, 351, 401, 409-410; Feuer 1966; App. E). Also Adorno found Truth and God in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and other great composers (Adorno/ Kogon 1958b: 496-498).

Source of Truth In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, music may be a deeper source of truth than quantum physics or relativity theory (Adorno 1973a; 1973c; 1976; 1991b; 1993a; 1995a; 1996; 1997g; 1997l; 1997m; 1997n; 1997o; 1997p; 1997q; 1997r; 1997s; 2002b; 2002c; Siebert 2006b). That may also be the case not only for art, but also for religion. The critical theorist of religion recognizes not only in the paradigmatic evolution of science, but also in that of the world religions, a progressive tendency to overcome human weaknesses, primitive and childish legends and superstitions, disrespect for causality, immorality, props and rationalizations, and that in reality and not only through suspiciously subtle and sublimated interpretations, and even to supersede animism, pantheism and monotheism toward an enlightened, post-theistic, humanistic religiosity or spirituality, characterized by the longing for the completely demythologized wholly Other than the horror and terror of nature and history, prepared by Anselm of Canterbury, Meister Eckhart, Spinoza, Marx, Freud, and also by Einstein and the critical theorists of society (Genesis 32; Lieber 2001: 198-203; Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Tillich 1972; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1976; 1990a; 1990b; 2001; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1991b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert

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1984; App. E, F). There are deeply religious people, who have overcome childish superstitions and legends: e.g. a primitive, naïve, even fetishistic and idolatrous deification of the Gautama or of Jesus of Nazareth (Tillich 1972; Fromm 1976; Küng 1970; 1972; 1976; 1978; 1984; 1991a; 1994a; 1994b; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; App. E). Some believers are childlike, but not necessarily childish, as for example, Saint Francis of Assisi (Dirks 1968: 160-187). Even the genius of Einstein, like that of other great people, e.g. Goethe or Adorno, retained an element of childlikeness up to late in life (Benjamin 1977: chap. 5; Siebert 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2006a; 2007a; 2007g; 2008b). The great and highly intellectual German and European journalist and theologian, Walter Dirks, friend of Kogon and Adorno, asked me shortly before his death: Was I childlike enough? I could answer affirmatively, without irony and in all seriousness: the Kingdom, the wholly Other, belongs to the childlike, rather than to the childish people (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 50; Dirks 1983a; 1983b; 1984; Siebert 2005b; App. E). The more religion evolves paradigmatically and progressively, the more it can become a genuine source of truth, together with art, philosophy, and science. In the view of the dialectical religiology, one cannot possibly–without the help of the traditional world religions, or of a new post-theistic, humanistic religiosity or spirituality–deal with such monstrous sins as committed e.g. by Haber, when he initiated the gas war in 1915; or e.g. by Einstein, when he recommended, as former pacifist, the most advanced murder weapon, the atomic bomb, to the Roosevelt Administration in 1939, which would cost the lives of ten thousands of human beings, innocent civilians, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to repent it, as indeed he did; or e.g. by the present–2010–terrorists and counter-terrorists in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, and maybe soon in Pakistan and Iran (Blakney 1941: 17-19; Fromm 1966b: chaps. vi, vii, ix; Fromm 1976; Borradori 2003). Only a positivist would assert that science alone is the only source of truth (Horkheimer 1974a; 1974b; 1974c: 101-104, 116, 117; Adorno 1970a; 1970b; Habermas 1971; 1973; 1976; 1984a; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 1992b; 1999; 2002; 2004a; 2005; 2006a; 2006c; 2006d; 2007; Greffrath 2009: 64-67).

German Militarism During World War I, Fritz Haber became an officer and finally a General in the German army, and received the Iron Crosses I and II (Charles 2005; Smil 2004; Stolzenberg 2004; Siebert 2006a: Part I; Harman 2004: 31-39). While Haber was deeply committed to German militarism, he was, never-

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theless, also a friend of the Jewish pacifist Albert Einstein, whose quantum physics contributed later on greatly to the development of the most advanced murder weapon of the 20th century, the atomic bomb, and even to the German Jew Teller’s hydrogen bomb, overshadowing the whole cold war between the capitalist and the socialist block, up to the victorious neoliberal counter-revolution of 1989. In 1915, as a German nationalist and patriot, Haber had the idea that Germany should develop chemical weapons against its enemies. Haber produced the different, always stronger forms of poison gas, to be used by the German army at the Western and Eastern front. In his discourse with Otto Hahn and Albert Einstein, Haber used in World War I the same argument for the military application of poison gas, which President Truman engaged in World War II, when he ordered the first atomic bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: namely, to bring through this application of enormous force and terror and revenge a fast end to the butchery of the war, and thus to save lives. The high socialmoral purpose was supposed to sanctify the criminal means.

Gas Attack in Ypres On April 22, 1915 at 6.00 p.m., just as the wind turned to the West-NorthWest, the first gas attack in the military history of the modern nation states started at Ypres, in Belgium (Charles 2005; Harman 2004: 31-39). German troops released 168 tons of chlorine from more than 5,000 steel canisters that Haber had skillfully designed. By the end of the battle, there were 15,000 French soldiers wounded, and 5,000 dead. Haber was promoted captain and received the Iron Crosses I and II. During the celebration of the success of the poison gas in Berlin, two weeks after the attack at Ypres, Haber’s wife Clara, the mother of his child, and also a chemist, committed suicide in their house through shooting herself in her heart with his revolver. However, the tragic death of his wife Clara did in no way prevent Dr. Haber from developing new and more potent forms of poison gas, including mustard gas. In his nationalistic passion, obsession, and fanaticism, the positivistically inclined chemist Haber overlooked–unlike his more dialectically thinking wife Clara–the dialectic of history, and particularly of weaponry and armaments: namely, that only too soon also the Allies–following the sheer will to survive or the lex talionis–would not only have gasmasks to neutralize his work to some extent, but also similar and even better means of force and terror, and of mass destruction: more effective poison gasses. By the end of World War I, the casualties of chemical warfare had amounted to 1.3 million people. Ten thousands

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of soldiers on both sides of the front died from poison gas. Also, Hitler was among those German soldiers gassed and blinded for some time through gas used by the British and the French at the Western front (Hitler 1943: chap. V). While Hitler was lying wounded in an army hospital in East Prussia, suffering from blindness, three young Jewish revolutionaries brought the message of the defeat of the German troops, the armistice, and the end of the second German Empire, and the start of the German Republic. Hitler fell into the deepest despair and depression. The experience did not contribute little to his later fanatic, totally alienated, insane nationalism, and his corresponding longing for the praxis of the lex talionis, of revenge, and the corresponding application of always greater force and terror to an extreme, which had never been reached before in modern history. While Hitler’s war against the East was sheer thievery– the colonization of Russia, his war against the West was sheer revenge for the Dictate of Versailles. Hitler continually justified and legitimated his aggressive and expansive nationalism through fundamentalist notions like Herr, Herr Gott, Allmächtiger, or Unerforschliche Vorsehung, or Schicksal from the Abrahamic religions (Hitler 1943: 64-65; Fromm 1973: chap. 13; Baum 2007: chap. 5). The father of the great Canadian theologian, Gregory Baum, Jewish by origin and Protestant by culture, helped as a German officer and assistant to Dr. Haber to produce and weaponize and apply the poison gas, by which Baum’s wife Shirley’s father, an Allied soldier, was killed (Baum 1991; 1996; 2001; 2002; 2003; 2004: 20-23; 2007; Siebert 2004c). These are the fruits of nationalism, and of the alienation, insanity, force, violence, terror, and the jus gladii, the lex talionis produced by it. While during the Second World War, Fritz Haber’s gas was effectively outlawed by the Geneva Convention, the American Government gave nevertheless his mustard gas to President Saddam Hussein during his war against Iran, who used it not only against the Iranians, but also against the rebellious Curds in his own country. That was the reason why the second Bush Administration could say that President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. However, Iraq’s mustard gas had already been used up or made ineffective at the time of the first Gulf War in 1990-1991. Hitler’s and his conscious and unconscious followers’ longing then and today– in 2010–has never been directed toward alternative Future III–a universalistic and humanistic utopia, but rather toward alternative Future I–a particularistic, nationalistic, and racist dystopia (App. G). That became never clearer symbolically and ironically than through the fact that one of Hitler’s Me-109 pilots, Horst Rippert, 90 years old in 2010, shot down Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French answer to the American Charles

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Lindbergh, and the author of many books including the Little Prince, a wonderful fable anticipating alternative Future III–a society of innocence and hope, as he was flying an American reconnaissance plane over the Mediterranean Sea, coming from French Algeria. Rippert, who had been inspired to fly by Saint-Exupéry’s books, confesses today ruefully: If I had known that it was him, I’d never have fired. Rippert would rather have broken his oath to the Führer. However, Rippert did not. He rather fired. That is the Kafkaesque anticipation of alternative Future I, which the critical theory of society and the dialectical religiology tries to resist (Schweppenhauser 1983; Schmidt 1979; App. G).

War Criminal Shortly after Germany’s defeat in 1918, the Allies placed Dr. Haber high on their list of war criminals (Charles 2005; Smil, 2004; Stolzenberg 2004; Harman 2004: 31-39; Siebert 2006a: Part I). The Allies demanded Haber’s extradition. However, Haber grew a beard and escaped to Switzerland in 1919. Yet, Haber was back again in public life in time to receive the Noble Price in Sweden, in 1920. There was, of course, a great outcry in France, Britain, and the United States against the Swedish Academy’s choice of Dr. Haber for the Noble Price. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 had forbidden the use of chemical gasses in war. For the Allies, Haber was nothing other than the inventor of the gas war and thus was nothing else than a war criminal. However, Haber was not perturbed by the outcry in France, Britain and the United States against him. Haber defended his actions before a Parliamentary Committee of the Reichstag back home in Berlin, arguing that if chemical weapons could be decisive in ending the war, they should be used. Obviously, the good purpose of peace sanctified the criminal means. According to Haber, chemical weapons were not more gruesome than any other weapon of death. Haber was indeed a positivist and not a dialectician: he could not see through the eyes of the other, his opponent.

Nation State and Humanity Haber strongly believed that in times of peace scientists belonged to the world, but in times of war they belonged to their country (Charles 2005; Harman 2004: 31-39; Siebert 2006a: Part I). War produced a dichotomy between the particular and the universal, between the nation state and

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the human species (App. G). However, in Haber’s mind, duty to humanity and duty to one’s country were not as much at odds as might seem. As positivist, Haber was completely committed to the identity-principle. Thus, Haber agreed with the nationalist worldview, quite popular under Kaiser Wilhelm II, that insofar as men had hitherto looked beyond their own particular country, they had mostly taken the coincidence of these two duties for granted. To suspect that the goals of one’s own particular national community were at variance with the good of mankind, was productive of so much indignation to the average individual, and of so much agony to the sensitive person, to make it infinitely tempting, to assume that the two objectives coincided, and that, in serving the nation to one’s best ability, one was also serving humanity. Also, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels were convinced that what was good for Germany was also good for the human species: e.g. the annihilation of 6 million Jews in Auschwitz and Treblinka and elsewhere, and of 27 million communists in Russia and elsewhere through an unbelievable escalation of force, violence, terror, torture, and revenge (Trevor-Roper 1988; Taylor 1983). For Haber, faith in nationalism and faith in humanity were two sides of the same coin. This was not only the affirmation of the identity principle, but also of the German nationalist creed. Consequentially, the Parliamentary Committee in Berlin accepted Haber’s case, and offered him complete exoneration for his actions on behalf of Germany during World War I. If after World War I there had been a Nuremberg Trial, Dr. Haber would have been tried as a war criminal and he would probably have been executed, and Gregory Baum’s father and other assistants would have been punished as well. In Germany, Haber was still a war hero at the time. He was a leading science administrator. His institute was successfully developing gasses such as the Cyclones for massive campaigns of pest control. From Haber’s Institute also came Cyclon B, which was developed a mass by I. G. Farben, and which was finally–after the European war had turned into a world war with Pearl Harbor, and after the concentration camps had been transformed from cheap labor camps for German industry into death camps–used to annihilate millions of Jews. In this connection Haber’s Jewish-German tragedy reached its absolute climactic alienation, and insanity, and absurdity.

Zionism The Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, who was also a distinguished chemist, invited Dr. Haber to come to Palestine and to work in the new Sieff Institute at Rehovot, today the Weizmann Institute (Charles 2005;

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Smil 2004; Stolzenberg 2004; Harman 2004: 31-39; Siebert 2006a: Part I). In 1933, after Hitler had come into power, Haber wrote to Weizmann that he had been more than a great army commander in Germany, and more than a captain of industry. He had been the founder of industries. His work had been essentially for the economic and military expansion of Germany. All doors had been open to him in Germany. However, so Haber told Weizmann, the position he had had occupied then in Germany, glamorous as it may have seemed, was nothing compared with that of Weizmann. For Haber, Weizmann was not creating out of plenty. Weizmann was creating out of nothing, in a land–Jewish Palestine–that lacked everything. Weizmann was trying to restore the derelict Jewish people to a sense of dignity. At the end of his life, so Haber confessed to Weizmann, he found himself a bankrupt human being. Haber predicted to Weizmann that when he himself would long be gone and forgotten, his work would still stand, a shining monument, in the long history of the Jewish people. Haber did not go to Palestine, but he became a Zionist in his heart and spirit. He converted from German to Jewish nationalism. Haber explained to Einstein that he had never been in his life as Jewish as now in 1933. In a further letter to Weizmann, Haber, the Protestant convert and German nationalist and patriot, confessed and sealed his complete turn to Zionism, when he stated that he had known the wartime battlefields, on which French and English Jews shot German Jews, just as French and English socialists shot German social democrats, and that this had left behind a stain in him that was painful to bear. However, it was too late for Haber to activate fully his newly found Jewishness and Zionism. Haber had been weakened by the military and political events. His chronically nervous constitution was broken. Haber fell ill in Basel, where Herzl had convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897. Haber died in Basel in exile from fascist Germany on January 29, 1934, one year after National Socialism came into power. He was broken hearted and he was longing for Zion. Haber had become the personification of that Jewish-German tragedy in the context of which Horkheimer and Adorno and their Jewish and German collaborators and friends initiated and developed their critical theory of society from World War I, through fascism and World War II, into the restoration of German and European civil society (Smil: 2004; Stolzenberg 2004; Harman 2004: 31-39; Siebert 2006a: Part I; Horkheimer 1988d: chaps 2, 6, 7, 11, 15; Gumnior/Ringguth 1988; Scheible 1989; Schweppenhäuser 1999; Wiggershaus 1987). The German Jew Albert Einstein wrote in a letter about the German Jew Fritz Haber:

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chapter twenty-four At the end, he was forced to experience all the bitterness of being abandoned by the people of his circle, a circle that mattered very much to him, even though he recognized its dubious acts of violence… It was the tragedy of the German Jew: the tragedy of unrequited love (Charles 2005: ix).

In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, that was indeed the very core of the Jewish-German tragedy: unrequited love. This is what the German people must really remember in order to be able to mourn, and to repent, and to atone for the Shoa and for all the horrible pogroms through the ages, which climaxed in it (Mitscherlich 1993; 1994; Siebert 1966; 2004c; 2005b; 2007g).

Nationalistic Subjectivism In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, in its collective neurosis, or even psychosis of nationalism, a nation escalates idolatrously its own national consciousness and sub-consciousness to the point where it concentrates on its particularity to such an extent that it loses contact and rapport with the general historical reality, and considers itself to be above other nations and even above humanity, and becomes unilateral, and turns against them in terms of an extreme nationalistic subjectivism: right or wrong my country; love it or leave it (Hegel 1986a: 181, 245, 276, 321, 330, 352, 394, 426, 435, 580-581; 1986c: 149, 154, 157-158, 174-175, 274, 277, 282, 358-359, 427, 552, 575; 1986d: 82; 1986f: II, 409; 1986g: 352; 1986j: III, 322; 1986m: I, 135; 1986o: III, 343; 1986r: I, 22; 1986t: III, 52; Marx 1906; 1951; 1953: 187, 361; 1961: II, 25; Marx/Engels 1953a; 1953b; 1953c; 1955; 2005; Trotsky 2006; Bottomore 1975; Berkin 1939; Schmitt 1997; Tucker 1978; Fromm 1961; 1964; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1975; 1976; 1990a; 1990b; Baum 1975a; 1975b). What on one side of the national border is cursed as a terrorist is glorified as a martyr, or a hero, or a saint on the other side, and vice versa. Who on one side of the national boundary is punished as a war criminal, is rewarded as a patriot on the other side, and vice versa. Such national subjectivism produces a worldwide Babylonian confusion of language. Such national subjectivism is one of the main diseases of modernity. It came to its climax in Hitler’s aristocratic principle of nature: that there must be predators and prey, and that one must always make sure for oneself and for one’s country that one is always on the side of the predators and never on the side of the prey (Hitler 1943: chaps. II, III, V, esp. 64-65). During World War I, Hitler admired and praised the propaganda of the British as an expression of their extreme nationalistic subjectivism, and cursed the German objectivism as

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self-defeating. In his famous letter to Einstein of 1916, Freud lamented the British as well as the German nationalist subjectivism, because it ruined the objectivity of the positive sciences: the British anthropologists called the Germans Huns, and the German psychoanalysts named the British neurotics and psychotics (Freud 1962; 1964). Today, in March 2010, what the Israelis call terrorists, the Palestinians call saints, and vice versa, as they are both under the spell of the jus gladii and the lex talionis (Federman 2004: 1-2; Lavie 2004: 1-2; Brisson 2004: 1-2; Tillich 1972: chaps. 2, 3, 6; Baum 2004: 1-5). After World War I, such nationalist subjectivism had produced in the nationalists, and later on in the national socialists and fascists different types of anxiety: the anxiety of fate and death; the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness to the point of nihilism; and the anxiety of guilt and condemnation. These types of anxiety had produced psychosomatic symptoms in the nationalists and fascists of all shapes, and had continually to be repressed and neutralized by them so that they may not fall into depression, and that life may be possible at all. In the spirit of this nationalist subjectivism, Dr. Haber and his assistants, e.g. Gregory Baum’s father, fell into such depressions after they had become German war criminals, at least for the Allies.

Genealogical Pass In his letter of September 4, 2004 to me, Gregory Baum, who in his youth had been deported with other Jewish boys and girls from fascist Berlin to England and Canada shortly before World War II, remembered now at the age of 80, that in Nazi Germany to get an Ahnen Pass (Genealogical Pass) in order to prove that one was a genuine Aryan and German and not a Jew, one had to submit the baptismal certificates of parents and grandparents–that was all. For Gregory, the great irony was that there existed no scientific, anthropological test to distinguish Aryans from non-Aryans. Thus, the German Government had to turn to the religious criteria of three generations. According to my German experience, the Ahnen Pass rested on genealogical research into seven generations, as well as on a nationalsocialist anthropology of race, which contained criteria by which German Aryans could be differentiated from Africans, Asians, Mid-eastern Semites, including Jews, and other Europeans and Native Americans. This was taught in schools, and underlay the horrible decisions of the Nürnberg Laws and the Wannsee Conference, concerning the final solution of the Jewish question after Pearl Harbor. Of course, this anthropology of race was not scientific, but rather ideological, understood as false consciousness,

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masking of racial, national and class interests: shortly, it was the untruth. It was not objective, but rather the most adequate expression of national and racial subjectivism.

The State of Israel In his letter of September 4, 2004, Gregory Baum considered my usual denunciation of anti-Semitism, and my emphasis on the complicity of the Church and of the wider society to be wonderful. However, what, according to Gregory, I usually did not say–and he thought, deserved to be said– was, that after World War II, the guilt of the West influenced the decision of the State of Israel: putting a heavy burden on the shoulders of the Palestinians, who had nothing to do with the terrible Western drama–the Shoa. For Gregory, what was happening now in Palestine–the daily application of force, terror, and lex talionis–was still related to Adolf Hitler. In Gregory’s view, this was due to two reasons: 1)

2)

Before the Second World war, Zionism was a minority movement among the Jews: it was rejected a. by the Orthodox Jews, who believed the Jews were a religious community, not a people in the political sense; b. by the Reform Jews, and by the non-religious Jewish bourgeoisie, who favored integration into the country, to which they belonged, and c. by the socialist Jews, especially the Bund in Eastern Europe, who wanted the Jews to wrestle for the creation of a socialist society. It was only after the Holocaust, or better the Shoa, that the majority of Jews supported Zionism. Without Hitler, the Jewish community in Palestine would have remained quite small. The guilt of the West, including especially the Churches, prevented government and public opinion from offering a rational critique of the Jewish state, according to principles of universal justice. We closed our eyes! We preferred to remain silent. Today the Government of Israel and the Jewish bourgeois elite in North America play on the antiSemitism of the past, and thus hope to gain ethical indulgence for the oppression of the Palestinian people. Without Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust or the Shoa, so Gregory concluded his letter, nothing of all this would have happened.

The Ambiguity of Nationalism Since Gregory Baum has moved from Toronto to McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1986, and became familiar with the Quebec

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nationalism, he discovered the ambiguity of nationalism as such: there was not only a bad nationalism, but also a good one (Baum 1980b; 1982; 1991; 1996; 2001; 2002; 2003; Siebert 2004c). During recent trips to Germany, particularly Berlin, Gregory discovered that even the German nationalism of the First and Second World War, e.g. that of his father, was no longer entirely bad. The Germans had suffered also. Gregory learned to see nations in opposition to empires: e.g. Quebec nationalism in opposition to the American imperialism. Since Gregory did not find sufficient support for his new insights into nationalism in his own Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity–in spite of the political theology of Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s jurist and theologian, and in the Concordats between the Vatican and most fascist states–Gregory grounded his new insight in the first Jewish Christian Constellation of Christianity, in the Bible (Küng 1994a; 1994b; App. E). Gregory saw nationalism in connection with the movements of decolonization, and with the imperial domination of neo-liberal capitalism in the process of globalization, undermining regional economies and cultures, and with the present effort at UNESCO to produce a charter protecting cultural diversity. In terms of the dialectical religiology, Gregory overlooks, that often empire formation has its roots in the exaggerated nationalism of one powerful nation. That was certainly the case with Hitler’s Germany and the Third Reich, which fortunately lasted only 12 years, but, nevertheless, produced a catastrophe for Europe and the world. The attempt to drive out the devil of imperialism through the Satan of nationalism can only lead to another world war. On the basis of my life long experience with nationalists and nationalism it is very hard for me to see its ambiguity, or its good sides. It looks sometimes, as if Gregory would blame the present catastrophic conditions in the Near East entirely on the bad racial nationalism of Hitler, and not also on the good ethno-nationalism of Israelis and Palestinians. Only an emphasis on the universalistic tendencies in the three Abrahamic religions, as emphasized by Horkheimer for Judaism, by Hegel and the Horkheimer friend Paul Tillich for Christianity, and today by Tariq Ramadan for Islam, could possibly supersede all forms of nationalism in the West and in the Near East. In any case, my disagreement with Gregory on the ambiguity, or the good sides, of nationalism has, nevertheless, never diminished our friendship, or my gratitude for his scholarly life work as a liberal theologian (Baum 1980b; 1982; 1991; 1996; 2001; 2002; 2003; 2004; 2007; Siebert 2004c; App. E, F, G).

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chapter twenty-four From Liberal to Inverse Theology

As Gregory Baum in his liberal theology speaks about Hitler’s even posthumous guilt, he approaches the critical theorists’ inverse theology, insofar as it stands always on the side of the oppressed, and never on the side of the oppressors; always on the side of the prey, and never on the side of the predator (Adorno 1962; 1963; 1969c; 1970b; 1997j/2: 608-616; Baum 1980b; 1982; 1991; 1996; 2001; 2002; 2003; 2004; 2007; Siebert 2004c). Sometimes in tears, Hitler regretted in the last days of his life in the Führer Bunker in Berlin his compromises, errors, and mistakes–in relation to England, to France, to Spain, to Austria, to Germany, to the German conservatives, to the European bourgeoisie, to Italy, to Russia, to Europe, to the Arabic states, to Egypt, to Iraq, the whole Near East, to the whole Islamic world (Hegel 1986l: 19-29; Benjamin 1988: chaps. 2, 3, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 21, 23, 26, 35, 28, 40, 41, 43, 47; 1977: chaps. 3, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 20; Rauschning 1940; Fest/Eichinger 2004: chap. IV, esp. 97-100; Gun 1969; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; Küng 1991b: 231, 277, 279-284, 290, 292, 294-299, 301, 304-307, 309, 312-313, 315-317, 319, 323-324, 330, 337, 348, 352, 360, 366, 486, 546, 704-709, 712, 741, 806810, 812-816, 818-819, 822-823, 873; 1994a: 25, 649, 756, 894; 1994b). Hitler believed that life did not forgive any weaknesses. Hitler regretted post factum that he had only too often not been hard enough: that he had been too good. There was only one exception for Hitler: he had fought the Jews with an open visor. He had cleaned the German living space from the Jewish poison. Here, he regretted nothing. Hitler, a baptized Roman Catholic, could not see that precisely his relationship toward the Jewish people was his greatest guilt and mistake, which embraced all the others. He had attacked the very essence of Judaism: the remembrance of the liberation of the Hebrew slaves from their Egyptian masters through Moses in the name of Yahweh, and the revelation of the ten commandments on Mount Sinai, particularly the second and the third commandment against idolatry (Exodus 20; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991b; App. E). Hitler fell for the idolatry of race, nation, and leadership (Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2). In the name of such idolatry, his SS troops bragged that they could violate all Ten Commandments in 12 hours, be it in Russia or elsewhere. The American Green Berets, or the Delta Forces, or the Seals prided themselves in Vietnam, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, to be able to do the same, all out of nationalism and patriotism: right or wrong my country! Hitler was not Moses, but Pharaoh. He identified Jews and communists, and tried to annihilate them both, because they stood for equality, which, according to him and his aristocratic principle of nature,

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would, if it was victorious, mean the end of the human species on this earth (Hitler 1943: 64-65). He killed egalitarian Jews and communists in order to rescue humanity from equality. In contrast to the Strasser brothers or Röhm, Hitler was not a revolutionary, but a conservative revolutionary, or better still a counter-revolutionary. He was an employee of the Herrren Club in Düsseldorf, of IG Farben, of IBM, of Krupp and Tyssen, and of Henry Ford, and other oligarchs and supermen in the economic dimension, who paid him, the superman in the political domain (Jeffreys 2008; Black 2001; 1999; Baldwin 2001). He did not liberate the workers from their capitalist masters, but rather lead them back into loyalty to them. When toward the end of 1933, Hitler stopped the persecution of capitalists, he defended his action, by saying that history would not judge him by how many capitalists he had eliminated, but rather by how many workers he had employed (Neumann 1942; Sohn-Rethel 1973: chap. 11; Canetti 1972: chap. 1; Fromm 1973: chap. 13). Hitler was a man of inequality. While liberalism and fascism reaffirm the inequality of the bourgeois class system of civil society, they are both willing to give some support to their domestic proletariat, in order thereby to integrate it. The costs of such integration have to be carried by the exploitation of foreign colonial human and natural resources. The result is that the domestic proletariat feels closer to its capitalist masters than to the proletariat in the colonial territories. Thus, the proletariat of the world cannot unite itself and fight the globalized bourgeoisie, the owners of the multinational corporations. Divide et impera! Wars happen when competing capitalist nations run out of always cheaper labor and natural resources, and therefore have to penetrate other nations’ territories in order to find them. This is how World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and the War on Terror have come about. Hitler wanted to find cheap labor and cheap natural resources for German and European capital in the Soviet territory, as English capital had found it in India and Africa, and French capital in Africa, and Italian capital in Abyssinia, and Japanese capital in China, and American capital in Central and Latin America and in the Philippines (Neumann 1942; Sohn-Rethel 1973: chap. 11; Canetti 1972: chap. 1; Fromm 1973: chap. 13; Klein 2007; Hedges 2007; Perkins 2007; Kinzer 2006). The dialectical religiologist cannot speak about liberalism, or fascism, or socialism, or colonialism, or imperialism or war without speaking about capitalism, no matter if it is legitimated by religious or secular ideologies. The only part that German fascists took from Hegel’s dialectical philosophy was his Heracleitian theory of the necessity of war, legitimated not only by political, but also by divine Providence (Hegel 1986g: 339-397, 490-524).

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chapter twenty-four Fate

Shortly before his death, Hitler knew that millions of people would curse him, not because he had been evil, but rather because he had lost the war (Rauschning 1940; Fest/Eichinger 2004: chap. IV, esp. 97-100; Gun 1969; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993; Haecker, 1935; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2). Up to the end, Hitler was convinced that Fate had not wanted it otherwise. Again and again, Hitler had believed that Fate, or Providence, or the Almighty, or the Lord God had protected him from the 47 assassination attempts against him, and that thereby had affirmed his divine mission, for which he had lived celibate–a Catholic idea–until he married his long time friend Eva Braun on the day before their double suicide in the Berlin Bunker, and thereby had legitimated his plans and actions, no matter how evil they may have appeared by the standards of the Mosaic Decalogue, the Sermon the Mount, the League of Nations, the Geneva Convention, or the other international laws and treaties. Now at the very end of his life, Hitler resigned himself to this same Providence. Hitler’s Almighty or Lord God was–in spite of all appearance, which mislead and seduced many German Christians to join him and his movement–not the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses: the liberator of the slaves, serfs, or wage laborers (Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Küng 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; App. E). He was not the Father of Jesus of Nazareth, whom he admired as a great theoretician, in spite of the fact that even by fascist racial standards and accounting he was at least half Jewish. He was not even the Allah of Islam, which he preferred over Christianity, because it allowed for the lex talionis. Hitler’s Providence was not the revolutionary God of Hegel, being at work in the dialectic of history toward the realm of the Freedom of All, using great men as instruments (Hegel 1986l; App. F, G). Hitler was not one of Hegel’s great men, since he did not use his genius in order to liberate the enslaved individuals, races, nations, and classes of Europe, but rather in order to enslave them even further in terms of his aristocratic principle of nature, which gave the right to the predator to catch, oppress, exploit and even destroy and annihilate his prey (Hitler 1943: 64-65). Hitler’s Fate was not identical with Ahura Mazda of the Aryan Persian Religion of Light and Darkness, or of Good and Evil, but rather with Arhiman, the evil Principle (Hegel 1986p: 395-405; App. E). Hitler’s Fate was not identical with the Persian or Roman Mithras, one of the seven spirits surrounding the throne of Ahura Mazda, but rather with the bull, which he is in process of killing on so many altar pictures in Roman castles along the Main River, or the Rhine River, or the Danube, or in Southern England. Certainly, Hitler indulged in religious and

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political Manichaeism: Mani from Persepolis in Persia identifying Arhiman with the God of the Hebrew Bible, and Ahura Mazda with the God of the New Testament (App. E). Likewise today, the conservative revolutionaries engage in religious and political Manichaeism, when they divide the world into the good and the evil empire, or in the good Alliance of the Willing, which stands for freedom and democracy, on one hand, and the Axis of Evil or the rogue nations, which stand for enslavement and dictatorship, on the other. Hitler’s Fate was not identical with Yahweh of the Religion of Sublimity, who liberated his people and gave them his commandments on the way to the utopia of the land of milk and honey, but rather with Satan, the successor of Arhiman and of the bull of Mithras. On the peak of his victories in the West and in the East, Hitler appeared like a Moses to his nation, but in reality he was an anti-Moses, who fell for the Golden Calf and for the whole idolatry of blood and soil, and of race and nation, and of charismatic leadership, and of science and technology and war, and lead the slaves back to their masters and finally into their destruction (Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; App. E). Hitler’s God came closest to the blind Fate of the Greek Religion of Beauty, which was compatible with polytheism, but was as such entirely indifferent to the gods, as well as to the tears and the cries of the victims of the slaveholder society and history (Hegel 1986q: 96-154). Certainly, Hitler’s Fate, Providence, Almighty, Lord-God was not identical with the totally Other than the slaughter bench, holocaust altar, Golgotha, skull hill of nature and history, for whom the critical theorists of society, whom he called the negativists, and whom he drove out of Germany, were longing (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps.17, 29, 37, 40; 1974: 49, 200-202). Hitler’s God was rather a Darwinian God, and as such identical with that slaughter bench of nature and history and its force, terror, torture, and lex talionis, and aristocratic law of nature (Hitler 1943: 64-65). Hitler as well as Goebbels were positivists, and their folkish philosophy was an identity philosophy (Horkheimer 1974c: 101-104, 116-117; Adorno 1970a; 1970b). Hitler explained that he had not invented what was the case, this slaughter bench of nature and history, but that he wanted to make sure that he himself and his Aryan race and his German nation would not be among its prey, but rather among its predators. In the end, Hitler accepted the decision of Fate, when he himself became the prey of history together with his wife, his friends, his followers, his National Socialist Party, his comrades, his armies, his government and even his state and nation: because the Germanic race and nations had been too weak to stand up against the Slavic armies, as once the 300 Spartans at the Thermopylae had done against the overwhelming Persian army. Hitler’s God was not a God of the weak, but a God of the strong: he rewarded the

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strong and punished the weak. Hitler’s God was an inversion of the God of Christianity, into which he had been born. Up to the end of her life Leni Riefenstahl, who remained a fascist even after Hitler’s death, was faithful to the God of the strong, when she filmed sharks in the depth of the sea, these archaic predators and killing machines, and neglected their prey, and when she filmed the young and powerful warriors and their beautiful wives in African tribes, neglecting completely the poor, the old, the sick, the weak, the ugly. That precisely is the most tempting Darwinian spirit of fascism as– in Benito Mussolini terms–state corporatism, which fits so well the global movement of capital (Neumann 1942; Sohn-Rethel 1973: chap. 11; Canetti 1972: chap. 1; Fromm 1973: chap. 13; Klein 2007; Hedges 2007; Perkins 2007; Kinzer 2006). Hitler’s God did not suffer with his suffering creatures. He was merciless. He was the projection of merciless social Darwinists. More than liberalism, fascism glorifies the fittest and has sheer contempt for the less fit: the slaves, the serfs, the wage laborers, the poor, the physically and mentally handicapped and sick, and the old, and for their resentment. Often this glorification of the fittest and the contempt for the less fit and unfit is covered up by compassionate liberal-or fascist-ideological public rhetoric. On July 9, 2008, a neo-liberal Congressman told the American people that they were winners, and that there was no actual economic depression going on, but only a mental depression. The American workers were not really losing their jobs, their houses, their pensions, their health benefits, etc. in the present economic depression. It was all merely in their heads. Liberal ideologues had even tried to psychologize the Great Depression from 19291939. So far, it has probably been the splitting of liberalism in America into a pre-Roosevelt liberalism, now called paradoxically enough neo-liberalism or neo-conservativism, on one hand, and a post-Roosevelt socially modified liberalism, now called liberalism, which made it possible in American history to neutralize socialism through the socially modified liberalism, and to neutralize fascism through the neo-liberalism or neo-conservativism, and thus avoid both: a socialist or a fascist America (Paassen/Wise 1934; Brinkley 1983; Hedges 2006; Baldwin 2001).

Idolatrist rather than Nihilist? Hitler was not a nihilist as some of his opponents, particularly liberal theologians, have argued, except if idolatry is considered to be nihilistic, as indeed the Hebrew prophets have done sometimes, for whom the idols had eyes, but did not see, and ears, but did not hear, and legs, but did not walk, etc. (Rauschning, 1940; Fest/Eichinger, 2004: chap. IV, esp. 97-100;

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Gun 1969; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert, 1993; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; Küng 1978: D, E; 1994a: 25, 649, 756, 894; 1994b). Certainly, the Vatican did not consider Hitler to be a nihilist, when it concluded with him the Empire Concordat, which legitimated him internationally, and which remains valid up to the present–2010–in the German Federal Republic and in Rome. Neither Hitler’s universal Fate, nor his particular gods or idols, were simply nothing (Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2). Even if Fate would be reduced to the revolutionary or authoritarian character of a man, it would not simply be nothing, but a rather impressive psychological force (Benjamin 1977: chap. 3; 1988: 3; Fromm 1992: chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5; 1973: chap. 13). There is not only the henotheism of Abraham, who recognized the reality of the one universal God, without denying entirely that of other gods in Babylonia, or Egypt, or Canaan (Genesis 12-25; Fromm 1966b: chaps. ii, iii, v; Lundgren 1998). The polytheistic images do indeed represent real forces in nature, society, and history: Pluto and Mammon represent wealth; Mars–war; Aphrodite and Venus–sexuality; Athena–wisdom, etc. (Hegel 1986q: 96-184; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2). These particular gods are as little just nothing as the universal Fate, which was above them and worked through them. They represent real powers and values. Hitler’s gods–nature, race, nation, family, leadership, state, capital, history, etc.– were rather powerful entities (Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2). What is wrong with idolatry is that finite natural, social, economic, political, and historical forces are hypostatized and reified into something Infinite, to be sure not a good qualitative Infinity, but rather into a bad quantitative, repetitive, infinity, which keeps people under its spell for some time, and enslaves them to the first and second nature via the formation and interpretation of myths and mythologies: e.g. Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the 20th Century (Trevor-Roper 1988: 422). Human history has to a large extent been a history of idolatry. Hitler was the idolatrous product of what Max Weber had called the polytheistic modern, uncivil civil society and civilization (Weber 1964). Bourgeois society has remained polytheistic and thus idolatrous beyond Hitler’s death and his peculiar form of idolatry, rather than nihilism. Hitler’s rise and fall is rooted in his fatalism and in his idolatry, not in nihilism. Nothing makes the life of orthodox Jewish, Christian or Islamic monotheists more difficult in modern capitalist society, than its polytheistic character and the latter’s moral consequences: before, during, and after Hitler (Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185-346, 347-536; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004).

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chapter twenty-four Catholic Nationalism

Between 1933 and 1945, I participated in the local struggles between the National Socialists and the Churches at the parish level (Siebert 1993; Weitensteiner 2002; App. E). It happened in a Catholic dual-parish in the Frankfurt suburbs of Ginnheim and Dornbush: in Sta Familia and in St. Albert. The priest, Fr. Rudolphi, served there for more than twenty years during the whole Nazi period, and beyond, and most fortunately compiled a Parish Chronicle of some thousand pages, in which he recorded all the main parish events, and added his own commentaries on the wider political scene, as well as some of his contemporary sermons, and his personal reflections. Hans Weitensteiner and I have tried in two books to provide a portrait of this Catholic milieu. After the early death of my father from cancer in June 1938, Fr. Rudophi became a substitute father to me, and thus I also appear in his Parish Chronicle. I became witness of much of his suffering between 1933 and 1945, and later on. According to Weitensteiner and his reviewer, the Canadian historian John Conway, Fr. Rudolphi was born just after the end of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, when German Catholics were fervently eager to demonstrate that they could be as loyal to the new state as their Protestant counterparts. His military service in the First World War only reinforced this ardent nationalism. Like so many others, he returned disillusioned by defeat, outraged at the iniquitous Versailles Treaty, alarmed by the dangers of Bolshevism, and eager to see Germany’s national and international reputation restored. It was not surprising that his initial reaction to the rise of Nazism was favorable. The Catholics’ hopes, that the Empire Concordat of 1933 would enhance their position in society were dashed on the rock of Nazi radicalism and intransigence. Yet, for Fr. Rudolphi and so many of his flock, the Nazis’ true ambitions were obscured by their wishful thinking that they could simultaneously pledge support to their Church and to the new political regime. Only very reluctantly and very late did they realize the incompatibility of these divergent loyalties. Fr. Rudolphi was an assiduous pastor. He had two new churches built, looked after his parishioners, especially after 1939, remained in contact with serving soldiers and evacuated families, and deplored the disasters brought on by the war’s events. His sympathies for the Frankfurt citizens bombed out in the devastating air raids were certainly genuine, and led to the frustrated question asked in the title of Weitensteiner’s book: Why we, always we…? Was this city of Frankfurt guiltier than London? However, according to Weitensteiner and Conway Fr. Rudolphi remained a staunch German nationalist. The sufferings of

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others, such as the Jews, Gypsies, Poles, or Russians were hardly mentioned by Fr. Rudolphi. Yet, the comments he jotted down of his own and his parishioners’ reactions in those traumatic years are interesting as a contemporary record. It is noteworthy that despite his strong nationalist feelings, Fr. Rudolphi did not succumb to the Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda, or allow this poison to be repeated in his parish. Yet, there is no record of any more active measures to support the Nazis’ victims. Even after the war, he was reluctant to believe the evidence of the concentration camps, or the extent of Nazi crimes. In this, he was not alone. The Catholics’ sense of duty to support established authority prevented them from encouraging any idea of resistance to the Nazi state, even after their own firsthand evidence of the Gestapo’s ruthless high-handedness. In Weitensteiner and Conway’s view, it was just this blending of Catholic mythology and Germanic nationalist ideology, which made German Catholics so susceptible to the Nazi allurements. Fr. Rudolphi, the conscientious priest and devoted nationalist, may be seen as typical. Hence, so Conway concluded, the great value of Weitensteiner’s memoir of Rudolphi’s parish and his political positions.

From Nationalism to Prophetic Political Theology I have tried to bring out from my own personal experience what is missing in Weitensteiner’s and Conway’s merely historical view of Fr. Rudolphi’s life and work as the title of my book indicated: Right, Power and Love: Georg W. Rudolphi’s Prophetic Political Theology (Siebert 1993). Here, I stressed that Fr. Rudolphi was like many other German priests of the time a disciple of the Catholic philosopher Theodor Haecker, who in his book The Christian and History and elsewhere had developed a Christianhumanistic philosophy and theology of history (Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; Siebert 1993; Weitensteiner 2002; App. E). Haecker was part of the German resistance against fascism. Under Nazism, he was forbidden to teach and write, and he was imprisoned, and he died in great pain shortly before German fascism was defeated. With Haecker, Fr. Rudophi rejected radically and publicly Alfred Rosenberg’s myth of the 20th century from the very start. In his sermons and in his teaching, Fr. Rudolphi followed Haecker’s philosophy and theology of history all the way, and continually, and consistently, and because of that, he had to suffer like his teacher. There were continually Gestapo spies in his church, sometimes even expriests in its service, who wrote down regime critical remarks Fr. Rudolphi made in his sermons. He was incarcerated and beaten by the Gestapo in

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Frankfurt. He was in continual fear of members of the Nazi Party or the Gestapo entering his miserable parish house in Ginnheim, in order to take him away. He took the risk of helping Jewish families in his parish. He criticized heroically year after year the idolatry, insanity and alienation of the Hitler regime. To us parishioners, Fr. Rudolphi was in the darkest times of Nazism like another Moses, ready to liberate the slaves, and to hold up the commandments, and to destroy the Golden Calf, and all idolatry of nature, race, nation and leader. Fr. Rudolphi anticipated in his prophetic sermons the new saint–the worker saint–and the redemption and the liberation of the working class, from which he himself had come. I was an immediate witness of his immense suffering. I would never have become the anti-fascist, as whom I was categorized in the Prisoner of War Camp Allen in Norfolk/Newport news, Virginia, in May 1945, by Jewish secret service officers, who knew German and Frankfurt better than I did, and I would never have remained the anti-nationalist I am today–in 2010–without the prophetic political theology of Fr. Rudolphi and his existential example. A purely positivistic, historical perspective misses the fact that between 1933 and 1945, Fr. Rudolphi concretely superseded his nationalism into his anti-fascist prophetic political theology inspired by Haecker’s great Christian humanistic philosophy and theology of history, in which he tried to connect power and force on one hand and justice and love on the other. Fr. Rudolphi was a co-fighter of Walter Dirks and Eugen Kogon, the author of the SS State, both friends of Horkheimer and Adorno, both the founders and editors of the Left-Catholic journal The Frankfurter Hefte, in which also Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas have written. He was a predecessor of the father of the new political theology, Johannes B. Metz, and of the father of the liberation theology, Gustavo Gutierrez (Kogon 1974; Dirks 1985; 1983a; 1983b; Metz 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1978; Gutierrez 1973; App. E).

German Nationalism and Zionism If Gregory Baum’s analysis, of Hitler and his even posthumous guilt concerning the State of Israel is correct in his letter to me of September 4, 2004, then there existed a dialectical relationship between German nationalism and Zionism: they reproduced each other (Black 1999; 2001). There was not only Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, but there were also about 150,000 men of Jewish descent fighting in the German army in World War II (Brenner 2002; Rigg 2002; Black 1999; 2001). As in the first half of the 20th century Germany alienated itself from other nations,

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and from the League of Nations, and from humanity, so in the second half of the 20th Century and in the beginning of the 21st century, the State of Israel has alienated itself from other nations, and the UN, and humanity. In both cases, the particular nation state’s sovereignty has triumphed over the international solidarity of the human species (Hegel 1986a: 602; Lortz 1964: 573, 701, 703). Much of what the Germans did to the Jews, now the Israelis do to the Palestinians. (Küng 1994a: 336-601, 602-741; 1994b). More recently, a cabinet member of the Government in Jerusalem saw in an Israeli newspaper the picture of an old Palestinian woman, who was crawling on her knees on the floor of her bulldozed down house, searching for her pills. The picture reminded the cabinet member of his grandmother, who had died in Auschwitz. Since the beginning of the second Intifada, Israelis and Palestinians have practiced rigorously against each other the jus gladii or the lex talionis almost daily. Such practice had cost already by 2004, the lives of over 3,000 Palestinians and of over 800 Israelis, not to speak of the enormous property damage, particularly on the Palestinian side. On September 2004, orthodox Rabbis in Israel, representing the main stream of opinion, wrote an open letter to the Defense Ministry in Jerusalem, demanding that the military should attack the Palestinian militants, even if that meant high casualties among the civilian population surrounding them: what the American military call “collateral damage.” The Rabbis made clear that they will not be persuaded by Christian preachers, who tell the Israelis to hold up the other cheek according to the fourth commandment of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5: 38-42; App. E). While Martin Luther King practiced the fourth commandment of the Sermon on the Mount, Malcolm X converted to Islam because of the same commandment, since he thought that the black man in America could not be emancipated through holding up the other cheek to the white man with his police dogs. Both men were assassinated. The Orthodox Rabbis in Israel have forgotten that their opponents, the Islamic Palestinians, may also radicalize the lex talionis to the point, where they may also not care about killing civilians surrounding Israeli soldiers. Thus, a whole terroristic talion culture is created, in which individuals and nations unleash their inner negativity, their destructive aggression, from generation to generation, and which involves both genders, and which spreads from one region to the other (Fromm 1973; Horkheimer 1967b: 302-320). The orthodox Rabbis forgot the dialectic of history and particularly of the battles among nations. Unfortunately, any criticism, Christian or even Jewish, or otherwise, of policies of the State of Israel, particularly those in violation of UN resolutions, or decisions by the World Court, are often rejected by

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Jewish orthodox or Zionist apologists as being anti-Semitic (Horkheimer 1967b: 302-316, 317-320; 1974c: 8, 96-97, 148, 164-165, 200-202, 208, 213, 218-219; 1985g: chap. 37; 1971: 46-48). This anti-Semitism charge turns into a weapon against any form of criticism of the State of Israel.

The Balance of Particular and Universal In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, in the absence of genuine discourse among Palestinians and Israelis, in Hegelian terms at least only force could realize the dialectical notion, i.e. the balance between the particular nations and the universal, common good and interest of humankind. However, as Germany or the United States could not have been forced by the League of Nations into universal solidarity, so today Israel or the United States can not be forced by the United Nations if they decide for a unilateral course of economic, political, or military action (Exodus 21, 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; Morris 2004; Federmann 2004: 1-2; Brisson 2004: 1-2, 25; Küng 1994a: 89-144; 1994b). The only law which is valid and effective internationally is the survival of the fittest: the law of the jungle. As German nationalism lead to World War II, so Zionism may help to bring about alternative Future II: the ultimate paroxysm, alienation, insanity, and madness of what Samuel Huntington has called the clash of civilizations; finally a Third World War, fought with weapons of mass destruction, an NBC war, among different civilizations, the very core of which may very well be one or more of the Abrahamic world religions (Flechtheim 1971; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; App. E, F). According to the dialectical religiology, not only the particular nation states but also the international organizations, e.g. the League of Nations, or the UN, have their own inner negativity, which again and again leads to the exclusion of so-called rogue nations, which then again serves their own selfintegration. Even these international organizations would fall apart, if they could not always find new enemies. Maybe only an extra-terrestrial enemy could unite the human species on this earth. Yet, there is hope: the German-Jewish tragedy seems to have been resolved for the time being. However, it took the Shoa to do so. New forms of anti-Semitism in Germany, and Europe, and elsewhere have to be watched carefully and dealt with immediately through education and political action.

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Anti-Semitism Horkheimer and Adorno as well as the other critical theorists did not think systematically, but rather concentrated and focused their thought on particular psychological, sociological, philosophical, or theological problems: e.g. anti-Semitism in Germany, Europe or America (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-207; 1969b: 177-217; 2002: 137-172; Adorno 1997h: 397-407, 408-433; 1997i/1: 7-142, 143-508; 1997i/2: 121-326; Wiesenthal 1998; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Lauder 2009: 1-4; App. E). The critical theorists of society saw anti-Semitism as part of the dialectic of enlightenment: as the very limit of the bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment not only in Germany, but also in the rest of Europe and in America; not only in Los Angeles in 1944 but also in Frankfurt a.M. in 1969, and–in the perspective of the dialectical religiology–it was still the case in 2010 all over the West and particularly in the Near East (Horkheimer/Adorno 2002: 137-172; Adorno 1997h: 397-407, 408-4331997i/1: 7-142, 121-326; 1997i/2: 7-142, 121-326). According to Adorno and Horkheimer, modern anti-Semitism was considered by some people in Germany, Europe, and America to be a fate-question of humanity, and by others as a mere pretense (Horkheimer/Adorno 2002: 177-217; Lauder 2009: 1-4). In the critical theorists’ view, particularly for the German fascists the Jews were not a minority like any other, but rather the anti-race, the negative principle as such, the evil One, the Arhiman, the father of lies (Hegel 1986p: 390-405; 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer/ Adorno 2002: 177-217; Küng 1991b; Lauder 2009: 1-4). On the extermination of the Jews depended not only the happiness, but also the survival of the whole human species (Hitler 1943: 54-65; Horkheimer/Adorno 2002: 177-217; Küng 1991b; Rosenbaum 1998). On the basis of this fascist thesis happened the Wannsee Conference of 1942, which planned a Jew-free Germany and Europe through the gassing with Cyclon B of the whole Jewish race. Thus happened the Shoa against the promises of Moses and the Prophets, who had dramatized the continuity of divine guidance throughout the generations, and who had repeated a pattern of divine address, and assurance and human resistance (Jeremiah 1: 1-3; Lieber 2001: 347; Hitler 1943: 54-65; Rosenbaum 1998; Horkheimer/Adorno 2002: 137-172; Adorno 1997h: 397-407, 408-433; 1997i/1: 7-142, 121-326; 1997i/2: 7-142, 121-326). Moses and the prophets had functioned as intermediaries between the divine Spirit and the Jewish people. Through Moses and the prophets, it had been taught that Israel’s life was determined not by earthly political powers, but by divine care and judgment.

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Moses and the prophets thus challenged the Jewish peoples’perception of the everyday life world: the Israelites’ weariness of spirit in the time of Moses, or Israel’s political vision in the days of Jeremiah. The prophets, who sensed the enormity of their task and their personal inadequacy, were strengthened nevertheless by divine reassurance as they set out to confront the resistance of others. The Jews had brought Moses and the prophets to the German people and the Europeans in general (Horkheimer 1967: 302-316, 317-320; 1974: chaps. 2, 3, 6, 7, 8). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, precisely because the Shoa, initiated and carried out by the German and other fascists, happened against all the promises of Moses and of the prophets, and of all the Covenants concerning God’s providence and protection for the Jewish people, the Rabbis put God on trial in Auschwitz and charged him with having broken the covenants and found him to be guilty (Jeremiah 1: 1-3; Lieber 2001: 347; Hegel 1986: 1933; Hitler 1943: 54-65; Rosenbaum 1998; Horkheimer/Adorno 2002: 137172; Adorno 1997h: 397-407, 408-433; 1997i/1: 7-142, 121-326; 1997i/2: 7-142, 121-326; Wiesel 1982; 1992; Metz/Wiesel 1993). For the critical theorists diametrically opposed to the fascist thesis of the Jews as counterrace was the liberal thesis, that the Jews, free of national or racial features, formed a group through religious believes and traditions and ethical norms, and nothing else (Horkheimer/Adorno 2002: 137-172; App. E). Jewish traits related to Eastern Jews, and in any case only to those who had not yet been assimilated to German, or European, or American culture. For Horkheimer and Adorno, both theses or doctrines were true and false at the same time.

The Fascist Thesis For Horkheimer and Adorno, the fascist thesis or doctrine of the Jews as counter-race was true in the sense, that German fascism had made it true through the Shoa in Germany and Europe (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177; 2002: 137-172; Adorno 1997h: 397-407, 408-433; 1997i/1: 7-142, 143-508; 1997i/2: 121-326; Wiesenthal 1998; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; App. E). In the 20th century–and the dialectical religiologist may add the 21st century–the Jews were the group, who drew upon itself the annihilation–will, which the false capitalist social organization continually produces out of itself. The Jews were branded and stigmatized by the absolute evil as the absolute evil (Hitler 1943; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 177; Rosenbaum 1998; Baldwin 2001). In this ironical sense, which the German fascists introduced, the Jews were indeed the chosen

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people. While civil society was no longer economically in need of bourgeois class domination, the Jews were determined as its absolute object, which should merely be processed. Out of good reasons, the bourgeoisie did not tell the workers to their face, who finally were after all the object of bourgeois class domination. In the present–2010–economic catastrophe in America, it is not the billionaires but the liberal Democrats who have to tell the workers that they have to make more sacrifices. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the black population was to be kept in its place. This is still the case today in spite of the Obama Presidency. In February 2009, its new Attorney General, a black man, called the Americans cowards because they did not want to face the race question. The dialectical religiologist may add that the American people do not yet have the courage to face the class question, which is hidden behind the race question as its mask. According to the critical theorists, while the black people were to be kept in their place, the earth was to be cleaned and purified from the Jews. The January 2009 scandal in the Vatican caused by the Anti-Semitic Pious Brotherhood shows only too clearly and sadly, that over 60 years after Auschwitz and Treblinka not even the religious Anti-Semitism has been overcome completely, in spite of great efforts by the Second Vatican Council. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, in the heart of all prospective fascists not only in Germany but in other countries as well, the call to exterminate the Jews like vermin found a great echo. This call has become louder with every war of the State of Israel in its self-defense and for its survival (Horkheimer 19676: 302-320; 1974: chaps. 6, 7; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177-217, 218-275; Küng 1991a). In the image of the Jew, which the German fascists have erected before all the world, they have expressed their own being. The fascists’ desire goes for exclusive possessions, and appropriation, and for power without limits, and for any price. The Christian fascists load upon and burden the Jews with this their guilt as scapegoats, and they mock and sneer at them as rulers like the Roman soldiers did with Jesus of Nazareth, and they crucify them like him, and thus they repeat his sacrifice, in the redemptive power of which they can believe as little as Jews, or Muslims, or Buddhists (Matthew 27; Horkheimer 1967: 302-320; 1974b: chaps. 6, 7; 1974c: 96-97; 1989m: 7, 8, 9, 11, 16; Adorno 1997i/2: 7-142, 121-326; 1997: i/1: 121-141; 143-508; 1997h: 397-433; Fromm 1950, 1959, 1967, 1976, 1980b, 1990b, 1992, 1995, 2001; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Bloch 1960, 1970a, 1970b, Flechtheim 1971; Fechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Hedges 2007; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Siebert 2006d: 61-114; App. E).

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chapter twenty-four The End of the Capitalist Social Organization?

In the view of the dialectical religiology, through the Friedmannian or Chicago-School free market polices of de-regulation and privatization, the conservative-revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, or neo-conservative President Ronald Reagan turned upside down President Roosevelt’s New Deal and his Keynesian multiplier theory (Zinn 1999: chaps. 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 25). In 2009, President Barack Obama began to turn upside down the failed Reagan free-market policies through his new New Deal, the Keynesian multiplier theory, and nationalization, or federalization of large banks and industries under the euphemism of bail-outs or stimulus packages, and through progressive taxation as a possible step in direction of alternative Future III–the establishment of a social total subject, characterized through cooperation-association planning beyond a free market or commodity-exchange economy on one hand and a central administration economy on the other (Fetscher/Schmidt 2002: chaps. 4, 8, 9; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; App. G). This may mean the end of the false capitalist social organization and of its generation of fury, rage and wrath among the deceived masses in civil society to be directed against minorities, particularly the Jews. The end of capitalism and of the bourgeoisie would also means the end of bourgeois religion and its concrete supersession by a critical religion, characterized through an eschatological, inverse, cipher theology directed toward things beyond the resemblance of otherness, i.e. toward the wholly Other, and through the rescue of the hopeless, and through anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity out of personal autonomy, as well as through the consequent emancipation from all forms of racism, particularly Anti-Semitism (Adorno 1970b; 1973b: 402-495; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Brändle 1984; Hullot-Kentor 2006; Habermas 1976; 1978c; 1986: 53-55; Metz 1980; Metz/Wiesel 1993).

Liberal Thesis For Horkheimer and Adorno, the liberal thesis of the Jews as a purely religious group was true as idea (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177; 1972; 2002: 137-172; Adorno 1997h: 397-407, 408-433; 1997i/1: 7-142, 143-508; 1997i/2: 121-326). It contained the image of post-modern, post-capitalist, post-bourgeois, alternative Future III–a society, in which no longer fury or rage reproduced itself and looked and searched for qualities, properties, and attributes, against which it could become aggressively

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active (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177; 2002: 137-172; Adorno 1997h: 397407, 408-433; 1997i/1: 7-142, 143-508; 1997i/2: 121-326; Fromm 1972b; 1973; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 25, 28, 29; App. G). However, so Horkheimer and Adorno argued, as the liberal thesis posited the unity of humankind, which was like liberalism itself of religious origin and was more specifically rooted in the first two chapters of the Torah, as in principle already being realized, it supported the apology of the status quo in antagonistic civil society (Genesis 1and 2; Lieber 2001: 3-18; Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 177; 1972; 2002: 137-172; Adorno 1997h: 397-407, 408-433; 1997i/1: 7-142, 143-508; 1997i/2: 121-326; App. E, G). According to the critical theorists, the liberal attempt to avert the most extreme threat to freedom through special minority policies and democratic strategies was as ambiguous as the defensive of the last liberal bourgeois in general, be it in Germany, Europe, or the USA (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 177; 1972; 2002: 137-172; Adorno 1997h: 397-407, 408-433; 1997i/1: 7-142, 143-508; 1997i/2: 121-326; Horkheimer 1989m: 21; 1967b: 302-316, 317-320). The powerlessness of this defensive policy attracted the enemy of the impotence. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the existence and appearance of the Jews, to whom they themselves belonged as non-conformist intellectuals, compromised the extant general public through–in social Darwinistic language–the lack of adaptation. The Jews’ unchangeable holding on to their own order of life brought them into an uncertain and insecure relationship to the dominant mode of life in the life world and in the economic and political subsystems of late bourgeois society (App. B, C, D). The Jews expected to be maintained and sustained by the dominant order of life, without being in control of it. The Jews’ relationship to the masternations and-races was that of greed and fear. However, whenever the Jews gave up the difference to the dominant order of life, the successful ones among them exchanged for it the cold stoic character, which civil society has imposed and forced upon people up to the present–the 20th and 21st centuries. Such successful stoic Jews could be seen on American television every day during the past decade: Allen Greenspan, Milton Friedmann, Paul Wolfowitz, Allen Dershowitz, etc. (Klein 2007).

Dialectical Interconnection According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the dialectical interconnection between enlightenment and power and rule, the double relationship of progress to cruelty and liberation, which the Jews had to experience

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with the great enlighteners as well as with the democratic popular movements, showed itself also in the character of the successfully assimilated Jews themselves (Hegel 1972; 1976; 1979; 1986q: 50-95; Wiesenthal 1998; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 178; Horkheimer 1989m: 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 24, 25, 30, 31, 33, 35, 37; 1967b: 302-316; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; App. E). In the view of the critical theorists, the enlightened self-discipline, through which the well adapted and assimilated Jews overcame the embarrassing, awkward and painful marks and signs of remembrance of the rule, control and mastery by others, as it were their second circumcision, had lead them out of their own weathered community without reservation into the modern bourgeoisie. At the time, this bourgeosie was already in the process of falling back irresistibly into the utter and sheer oppression and to move forward into its reorganization as the fully developed Aryan race. For Horkheimer and Adorno, guided by the dialectical notion, race was not, as the German fascists wanted it to be, immediately the natural particular: it was rather the reduction to the natural, to mere force, the stubborn particularity, which in the extant modern civil society was precisely the universal (Hegel 1986f: 272-300; 1986g: 339-397; 1986q: 50-95). According to Adorno and Horkheimer, in the 20th and–so the dialectical religiologist may add–in the 21st century, race was the self-assertion of the bourgeois individual as being integrated into the barbarous collective. The liberal Jews confessed to the harmony in civil society and they still do today in 2010. However, so Horkheimer and Adorno stated in 1944, toward the end of World War II, the Jews had finally to experience this harmony of civil society as fascist peoples’ community on themselves. The Jews thought that antiSemitism first distorted the order of life in civil society, which after all could in truth not exist without the disfigurement of the human beings, who lived in it. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the persecution of the Jews, like persecution in general, could not be separated from such false capitalist social order of bourgeois society (App. C, D). The very being of such order, or rather disorder, no matter how much it may hide itself at times, was the force, the violence, and the terror, which in 1944 still manifested itself in fascist Germany and Europe.

The Fascist Society In Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s view, in fascist society only the blindness of anti-Semitism, its lack of intention, gave to the explanation, that it was a valve for aggressive frustrations produced by the false capitalist social or-

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ganization, a certain measure of truth (Hegel 1986g: 339-514; 1986l: 520540; Wiesenthal 1998; Neumann 1942; Marcuse 1960; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 180-181; 2002: 137-172; 1969a: 168-208; Lauder 2009: 1-4). In antagonistic civil society the rage, wrath and fury unloaded itself on that individual, who was noticeable and who was without protection. As the victims were exchangeable among each other depending on the political constellation in the modern civil society and state–street people, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Gypsies, Armenians, Latinos, Croats, Serbs, etc., each of them could step with the same blind desire for murder into the place of the murderers, as soon as the victim felt powerful as the norm, In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, former religious victims, who had held up their necks to the murderers for centuries, became revengeful murderers themselves a soon as they came into power. When the Ecclesia came into power, it treated the Synagogue as it had been treated by it in the first century (Acts 6-12; Revelation 2: 8-11; App. E). When after three centuries of martyrdom the Christians came into power in the late Roman Empire through Emperor Constantine the Great they began to treat the pagans as badly as they had been treated (Lortz 1964: 32, 54, 65, 104; 107-108, 127-128, 184, 244, 349, 907, 958; Küng 1994a: 62, 218-219, 222223, 225, 228, 140-241, 243, 246-248, 255, 258, 258, 282, 306, 324, 334, 337, 340, 345, 366, 376, 385-386, 413, 458, 462). Sometimes Israelis treat Palestinians not much better than they had been treated in Germany for many centuries.

Clients and Following For Adorno and Horkheimer, there had never existed any genuine antiSemitism, not even in the German fascist society (Neumann 1942; Wiesenthal 1998; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b; 2002: 137-172; 1969a: 168208; Lauder 2009: 1-4). There were certainly no born anti-Semites. AntiSemitism was learned. The adults in fascist Germany, to whom the call for the blood of the Jews had become second nature, knew as little why that had happened as the youth who was supposed to shed it. The high clients, of course, the members of the corporate ruling class, the Fords, Tyssens, Krupps, and Fords did know the reasons for Anti-Semitism (Baldwin 2001; Black 1999; 2001; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b; 2002: 137-172; 1969a: 168-208). The high clients did not hate the Jews, nor did they love the followers. The followers, however, who did not get their money’s worth economically or sexually, hated the Jews without end. The followers did not want to tolerate any relaxation, because they did not know any fulfill-

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ment. According to the critical theorists of modern society, it was indeed a kind of dynamic idealism, which animated the organized German fascists engaged in robbery and murder. The followers left and moved out to plunder. They had a great and splendid Aryan ideology. They talked nonsense about the rescue of the family, of the fatherland, and of humankind, as later on did the neo-conservative counter-revolutionaries, who reached their climax with the triumphant neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1989, and experienced their downfall in the global economic Pearl Harbor or catastrophe of 2008, 2009, 2010 (Adorno 1997/i: 17-141, 262-508; 1997i/2: 123-326; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b; 2002: 137-172; 1969a: 168-208; Klein 2007; Siebert 2006d: 61-114). However, since the German fascist followers remained the cheated people, what they, of course, had secretly already suspected, their miserable rational motive, the robbery, which the rationalization was supposed to serve, fell finally completely away, and the rationalization became honest against its will. The unenlightened Id, the aggressive drive or instinct, to which the rationalization was from the very start more related than to the Ego, or reason, took completely possession of the fascist followers (Freud 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; 1992; Fromm 1972b: 14-15, 74, 76, 80-81, 86; 1973; Marcuse 1962; 1980a; 1995; Adorno 1997h: 397-433; 1997i/17-141, 262-508; 1997i/2: 123-326; 1997j/2: 555572, 674-691; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 177-181; 2002: 137-172; 1969a: 168-208; Siebert 2006d: 61-114; App. C, D, E). According to the ideologycritics Horkheimer and Adorno, the rational island of the Ego was flooded and the desperate followers appeared only as the defenders of the truth and as being engaged in the renewal and restauration of the earth, who had still to reform its last corner. Everything became the material of their dreadful and frightful sacred duty, a la Immanuel Kant, which no inclination could loosen up or relax any longer (Kant 1970; 1974b; 1982; Hegel 1986a: 74, 188, 234, 254, 299, 301, 325-326, 359, 443; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 180-181; 2002: 137-172; 1969a: 168-208). Their deed became really autonomous self-purpose a la Johann Gottieb Fichte (Fichte 1794; Hegel 1986a: 102, 1986b: 9-138; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 180-281; 2002: 137-172; 1969a: 168-208). The deed cloaked and thus hid its own purposelessness. Always the anti-Semitism called to the still to be completed work. From the very start, there exited the most intimate and closest connection between anti-Semitism and totality. In the German fascist society blindness seized everything, because it did not comprehend anything.

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Stupidity In his Minima Moralia of 1951, dedicated to his friend Horkheimer, Adorno discussed the question whether it was the stupidity of its low bourgeois leaders that had lead to the final destruction of the German fascist society and national-socialism 6 years earlier, in May 1945 (Neumann 1942; Sohn-Rethel 1975; Adorno 1951: 134-136; 1997u: 89-91; Wiesenthal 1998). According to Adorno, whoever denied the objective historical forces pointing to alternative Future I–the totally administered society and to alternative Future II–the super-militaristic society, the positivists had it easy to claim the result of World War II as argument (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Adorno 1951: 134-136; 1997u: 89-91; 1997h: 9-19, 122-146, 238-245, 280-353, 354-372, 397-407, 408-433, 440-456, 478-493, 569-573, 578, 597; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; App. G). In reality the Germans had won the war: that they failed was the fault of the stupidity of their low middle class leaders. Well, for Adorno, who came like most of his colleagues in the Institute for Social Research from the German middle bourgeoisie, the so-called decisive stupidities of Hitler–his refusal to attack England in the middle of the war, his attack on Russia and America–had their precise social meaning, which unfolded itself in its own dialectic unavoidably from each rational step to the next, and down to the final catastrophe (Scheible 1989: chaps. 1-3; Gumnior/ Ringguth 1973: chaps. 1-3; Witte 1985: chaps. 1-2; Adorno 1951: 134-136; 1997u: 89-91; Lohmann 70-73). If, however, it had even been stupidity, it would remain historically comprehensible. Stupidity is in general not a natural quality, but something socially produced and re-enforced. In Adorno’s view, the German ruling class–the Krupps, the Thyssens, the Herren Club, etc.–Hitler’s employers, pushed toward World War II because they were excluded from the international imperialistic power positions (More1965: 87-108; Persico 1994; Rosenbaum 1998; Kershaw 2000; Sperr 1970; 1976; Adorno 1951: 134-136; 1997u: 89-91). In such exclusion, however, lay at the same time the reason of precisely that provinciality, clumsiness, and delusion, which made the politics of Adolf Hitler and of his Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, a former wine merchant, so unable to compete, and their war such a hazard (Persico 1994; Rosenbaum 1998; Kershaw 2000; Sperr 1970; 1976; Adorno 1951: 134-136; 1997u: 8991). The fact that Hitler and Ribbentrop were as badly informed and had such insufficient intelligence about the balance between the economical total, global interest on one hand, and the particular British interest among the Tories, and about the strength of the Soviet red army, as their

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own masses behind the cordon of the Third Reich, could not be separated from the historical determination of the national socialism, and almost from its energy. The chance of the fascist leaders’ daring and bold political and militaty action consisted alone in the fact that they did not know better, and that was at the same time the reason for its failure. Germany’s industrial remaining or falling behind or lag referred the politicians, who wanted to catch up with the advantage of the other industrial nations in the West, and who precisely as have-nots were particularly qualified for this purpose, to their immediate, narrow experience: that of the political façade.

The Hangman of Liberal Society According to Adorno, the fascist leaders did not see more in front of themselves than the gathering that jubilated around them and encouraged them, and the frightened negotiation partners (Neumann 1942; SohnRethel 1975; Adorno 1951: 134-136; 1997u: 89-91; Wiesenthal 1998; Persico 1994; Rosenbaum 1998; Kershaw 2000; Sperr 1970; 1976). That blocked for the fascist leaders the insight in the objective force of the larger mass of capital pushing toward alternative Future I and II (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Adorno 1951: 134-136; 1997u: 89-91; 1997h: 9-19, 122-146, 238-245, 280-353, 354-372, 397-407, 408-433, 440456, 478-493, 569-573, 578, 597; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; App. G). For Adorno, it was the immanent revenge on Hitler, that he, the hangman of the liberal society, was, nevertheless, according to the position of his own consciousness too liberal in order to recognize how under the covering of liberalism formed itself outside of Germany the unresistible power and rule of the international industrial potential. Adorno had to admit that Hitler saw like no other through the untruth in liberalism. In the 1930s, Hitler was widely viewed as a protectionist central planner, who recognized the failure of the free market and the need for nationally guided economic development (Adorno 1951: 134-136; 1997u: 89-91; Persico 1994; Rosenbaum1998; Kershaw 2000; Sperr 1970; 1976; Rockwell 2009: 1-2). The Proto-Keynesian socialist economist Joan Robinson wrote that Hitler found a cure against unemployment in civil society before Keynes was finished explaining it. Out of his identification of the untruth in liberalism, Hitler developed his economic policies: He suspended the gold standard. He embarked on huge public works, programs like the Autobahnen. He protected the industry from foreign competition. He expanded credit. He instituted job programs. He bullied the private sector on

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prices and production decisions. He later on vastly expanded the military. He enforced capital controls. He instituted family planning. He penalized smoking. He brought about national health care and unemployment insurance in the tradition of Chancellor Bismarck. He imposed education standards. He eventually ran huge deficits. The national socialist interventionist program was essential to the regimes rejection of the market economy. Keynes himself praised Hitler’s economic program, in the foreword to the German edition to the General Theory. Hitler’s economists rejected laissez-faire and admired Keynes, even foreshadowing him in many ways. The Keynesians admired Hitler (Adorno 1951: 134-136; 1997u: 89-91; Garvy 1975: 391-405). At the end of his life, Hitler was even aware of and regretted his own residual liberalism as a weakness, which he had not been able to overcome. Of course, Hitler’s economic policies can not be separated from his political policies of virulent anti-Semitism, racism and genocide, which he did not regret at all. (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Adorno 1951: 134-136; 1997u: 89-91; 1997h: 9-19, 122-146, 238-245, 280-353, 354-372, 397-407, 408-433, 440-456, 478-493, 569-573, 578-597; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Fest/Eichinger 2004; Rockwell 2009: 1-2; Ullrich 2009: 67-70). Analyzing Hitler’s actions through any other lens severely misses the point.

Objective Social Tendency According to Adorno, despite his insight into the untruth of liberalism Hitler could, nevertheless, not see completely through the power behind liberalism: i.e. the objective social tendency toward alternative Future I and II, which in him had merely its drummer (Neumann 1942; SohnRethel 1975; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Adorno 1951: 134-136; 1997u: 89-91; 1997h: 9-19, 122-146, 238-245, 280-353, 354-372, 397-407, 408-433, 440-456, 478-493, 569-573, 578, 597; Wiesenthal 1998; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Fest/Eichinger 2004; App. G). Hitler’s consciousness struck back to the standpoint of the defeated and shortsighted competitor from which he had started, in order to redevelop it and to make it financially sound. The hour of the Germans fell necessarily to such stupidity. This was so, because only those people, who were similar to those who were likewise limited in world economics and world knowledge, could use the Germans for the war, and could harness their stubbornness and obstinacy for the move and pull of the fascist enterprise, which was not checked or inhibited by any reflection. For Adorno, the stupidity of Hitler was a cunning of reason (Hegel 1986l: 19-55; Adorno

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1951: 134-136; 1997u: 89-91; Persico 1994; Rosenbaum 1998; Kershaw 2000; Speer 1970; 1976). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology the religious consciousness of the German petite bourgeois fascist leaders was no less limited and confused than their economic and political consciousness: only late in life did the autodidact Hitler hear about Julian, the Apostate, and recommended him to his visitors and listeners in his Barbarossa headquarter, the Wolfsschanze in the former East Prussia, for study and imitation, and even then he misunderstood the formerly Christian and then again pagan Roman Emperor’s failed and ultimately catastrophic counter-revolutionary enterprise (More 1965: 108-127; Hitler 1943: 112, 113, 267, 268, 379, 380, 454, 561-564, Trevor-Roper 2000: 6-8, 15, 29, 38, 49, 59, 76, 85, 89, 90, 122, 142, 143, 144, 145, 189, 218, 304, 306, 314, 320, 342, 410, 411, 412, 521, 606, 671, 718; Lortz 1964: 68, 104, 113114, 129, 140, 153; Küng 1994a: 172, 225, 243, 937).

Liberal Society According to Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment of 1944, liberal civil society, or liberalism, had–since the bourgeois enlightenment and the American and French Revolution and the bourgeois human rights declarations–granted to the Jews the right of property, but without the force of command or power (Hegel 1986g: 339-514; 1986l: 520-540; Marcuse 1960; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 180-181; 2002: 137-172). It had been the meaning of the human rights declarations to promise happiness also where there was no power. Because the deceived masses in liberal society had the premonition and suspicion that this universal promise of the bourgeoisie remained a lye, as long as there were still social classes, it excited and aroused their wrath, fury, and anger, and–as the critical religiologist can observe in Europe and America in the 21st century–still does so up to the present capitalist catastrophe of 2009/2010, in which millions of workers lose their jobs, houses, and pensions, for which they had worked so hard. The masses feel reified, unrecognized, disregarded, mocked, sneered at, held in contempt, humiliated, and deprived of majority (Hegel 1986g: 339-514; 1986l: 520-540; Marcuse 1960; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 180-181; 2002: 137-172; 1969a: 168208; Fromm 1957; 1961; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007). Even still as possibility or as idea the masses of the people living in antagonistic civil society must repress always anew the thought of that happiness, while also the thought of redemption disappears in the secularization process (More 1965; Hegel 1986g: 339-514;

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1986l: 520-540; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Marcuse 1960; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969b: 180-181; 2002: 137-172; 1969a: 168-208; Fromm 1957; 1961; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007). The masses more wildly denied or disowned the thought of happiness in liberal society, the more it was a sign of the time. Wherever the thought of happiness appeared in the midst of its fundamental denial in liberal civil society as being realized, the masses must repeat the repression and suppression, which was aimed at their own longing (Kracauer 1995; 1998; Horkheimer 1988a; 1987k: 289-328; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 180-181; 2002: 137-172; 1969a: 168-208; Fromm 1957; 1961; 1980a; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007). What became the occasion of such suppression, how unhappy it may be itself–Ahasver and Mignon, something foreign, which reminded of the promised land, beauty which reminded of the gender, the as nasty and horrid forbidden animal, which reminded of promiscuity–drew upon itself the desire to destroy the civilized people, who could never completely perform the process of civilization (Horkheimer 1988a; 1987k: 289-328; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 180-181; 2002: 137-172; 1969a: 168-208; Fromm 1957; 1961; 1966b; 1972b; 1973; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007). To those people, who controlled nature convulsively and desperately, the tortured nature reflected excitingly and stimulatingly the appearance of powerless happiness. The thought of happiness without power was unbearable for the civilized masses, because that precisely would not be happiness at all (Horkheimer 1971; 1988; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 180-181; 2002: 137-172; 1969a: 168-208). The fascist fantasy of the conspiracy of lustful, lecherous Jewish bankers, who finance the bolshevism, stood as sign of the inborn powerlessness, the good life as sign of happiness. With that was associated the image of the intellectual. The intellectual seemed to think, what the others did not allow themselves, and he did not shed the sweat of tribulation and physical energy. The banker as well as the intellectual, money and spirit, the exponents of circulation, were the denied wishful image of the masses of the people, who were maimed and mutilated through domination, which the corporate ruling class used in order to eternalize itself.

Religion and Fascism According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the folkish, German, fascist antiSemitism wanted to abstract from religion (Wiesenthal 1998; Neumann 1942; Sohn-Rethel 1975; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b:

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186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Weitensteiner 2002; Lauder 2009: 1-4; Siebert 1993; App. E). The fascist anti-Semitism asserted that what was really at stake was the purity of nation and race. The fascists had noticed that the people in secular antagonistic civil society had long renounced the care for eternal salvation (Hegel 1986g: 382-392; 1986q: 342-344; Horkheimer 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993; App. E, F). The average believer was already in 1944 as crafty, cunning, and clever as only a Cardinal had been in earlier times. The reproach against the Jews, that they were stubborn infidels, did no longer bring the masses of civil society into motion. However, the critical theorists had to admit that the religious enmity, which had driven for two thousand years the persecution of the Jews by the Christians, was not completely extinguished. It was rather that the zeal, with which particularly the German fascist anti-Semitism denied its religious tradition, witnessed only too clearly that Christian elements were still secretly immanent in it no less deeply than in earlier times–the secular idiosyncrasy was immanent in the religious faith-enthusiasm. Thus, the German fascists integrated religion as culture-good into their folkish philosophy and praxis. The German fascists did not concretely supersede religion like the critical theorists did in terms of their critical theory of society (Horkheimer 1972: chap. 4; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 2006; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Ott 2001; 2007; Siebert 2001; 2002a; 2005b). The alliance between enlightenment and domination and power had cut off for the moment of truth the entrance into the consciousness and had preserved its reified forms. Ultimately, both served fascism. As the critical theorists wanted to channel the longing for Otherness into a socialist-humanist revolution, so the fascists canalized the undisciplined longing of the masses into a counter-revolutionary, folkish rebellion (Horkheimer 1996s: 32-74; Fromm 1966c; 1967; 1981; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-88). The descendents of the Protestant Left, the evangelical Enthusiasts, were inverted according to the model of the Wagnerian guardians into conspirators of the SS blood-community and of the SS elite guards (Bloch 1960; 1979b; Marcuse 1970a; Horkheimer1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002). The fascist counter-revolution aped the socialist revolution down into its religious roots (Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Horkheimer 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188). In Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s view, the fascists partially entangled imme-

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diately religion as institution into the system of the Third Reich, and partially translated or inverted it into the spectacular festivities of mass culture and marches, as the feudal lords and the bourgeoisie had done before, only even more triumphalistically (Eco 1990; 2000a; 2000b; 2002; 2003: 60-61; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 128-176, 177-218; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993; App. E). The fanatic fascist faith, of which the leader and the following boasted so much, was no other than the grim and dogged religious faith, which in earlier times had kept the desperate masses under control. Only the religious faith content had gotten lost in the meantime. There was something formal about the fascist faith. From the content of the old religious faith survived only still the hate against those people, who did not share it. In the case of the German Christians under the Hitler appointed Empire-Bishop Müller, there remained nothing of the Christian religion of love than the anti-Semitism (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Tillich 1926; 1948; 1951; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Trivor-Roper1988: 412, 521; Küng 1994a; 1994b; Lauder 2009: 1-4; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993).

Judaism The Jewish scholars Horkheimer and Adorno argued against Hegel and all the great idealistst since Kant that Christianity, the Religion of Freedom, was a regression behind Judaism, the Religion of Sublimity (Hegel 1986q: 5095,185-346; Weber 1953; Wiesenthal 1998; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Fromm 1966b; 1992; Reich 1971; 1976; Küng1991b; 1994a; 1994b; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993; App. E). Certainly the God of Judaism had not yet completely thrown off during the transition from his henotheistic to his universal form the traits of the nature-demon (Freud 1939; 1946; Fromm 1966b; Scholem 1967; 1970a; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Habermas 1978c; App. E). However, for the critical theorists, the terror and the fright that stemmed from the pre-animistic, prehistoric times went over from nature into the notion of the absolute Self. This absolute Self–Elyon, El Shaddai, Yahweh, Elohim, Adonai–who was the Creator and the Lord of nature, subjected, subjugated, and submitted it completely (Psalm 91; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 2006; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Habermas 1978c; App. E). In all his indescribable power and glory, which gave to this absolute Self his alienation from nature, the

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Hebrew God was, nevertheless, reachable by human thought, which became universal precisely through the relationship to a Highest (Freud 1939; 1946; Fromm 1966b; Scholem 1967; 1970a; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Habermas 1978a; 1978c; 1982; 1986; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 1990: chap. 1). God as Spirit opposed nature as the other principle–the wholly Other–who could not merely stand up for its blind circulation like all mythical gods, but which could also liberate from it (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Freud 1939; 1946; Fromm 1966b; Scholem 1967; 1970a; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 40; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Habermas 1978a; 1978c; 1982; 1986; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 1990: chap. 1; App. E, G). Yet, in its abstractness and distance, the terror of the incommensurable wholly Other had at the same time increased and become stronger and more powerful. The Hebrew God’s iron word–I am becoming that which I am becoming-or my name is nameless– who did not tolerate anything or anyone beside him, outbid and surpassed in unavoidable force and power the more blind, but therefore more ambiguous saying, maxim, or judgment of the anonymous fate (Exodus 20; Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Freud 1939; 1946; Fromm 1966b; Scholem 1967; 1970a; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 40; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Habermas 1978a; 1978c; 1982; 1986; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 1990: chap. 1; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549; App. E). The God of Judaism demanded what was owed to him, and he got even with the defaulting person or nation (Hegel 1986p: 50-95; Fromm 1966b; Scholem 1967; 1970a; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 40; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Habermas 1978a; 1978c; 1982; 1986; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 1990: chap. 1; Küng 1991b). The Hebrew God entangled his creature into the fabric and tissue of guilt and merit. In contrast to Judaism, Christianity emphasized the moment of grace, which was of course already contained in Judaism itself in the covenants of God with men and in the Messianic promise (Jeremiah 2: 2; Lieber 2001: 350/2, 3; Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Fromm 1966b; Scholem 1967; 1970a; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 40; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969c; 1970b; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Habermas 1978a; 1978c; 1982; 1986; 1988b; 1991a: part III;

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1990: chap. 1; Küng 1994a; 1994b; App. E). Christianity has mitigated the terror of the Absolute, the totally Other, in that the creature found itself again in the Divinity (Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Fromm 1992; Reich 1976; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 40; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969c; 1970b; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Habermas 1978a; 1978c; 1982; 1986; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 1990: chap. 1; Küng 1970; 1994a; 1994b; App. E). The divine Mediator was called with a human name, and he died a human death (Matthew 26-28; Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Fromm 1992; Reich 1976; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 40; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969c; 1970b; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484498; Habermas 1978a; 1978c; 1982; 1986; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 1990: chap. 1; Küng 1970; 1994a; 1994b). The message of the divine Mediator was: Don’t be afraid! (Matthew 1: 20; 14: 27; 17: 7; 28: 5; Luke 5: 20; 12: 32; Blakney 1941: 226-232; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188). The law dissolved before the faith. Love became greater than all majesty (Matthew 5: 43, 44, 46; 6: 24; 19: 19; 22: 37; Mark 12: 6; Luke 7: 5, 42, 47; 11; 43; John 3: 16, 19, 35; 8: 42; 10: 17; 11: 3, 5, 36; 12: 25, 43; 13: 1, 23, 34, 35; Blakney 1941: 125-128, 224-232; Hegel 1986a; Fromm 1956; 1964; 1974; 1976; 1992; 1997; 2001; Tillich 1926; 1948; 1951; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37, 40; 1989m: chap. 20; Küng 1994a: 1994b). Love was the only commandment. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, while the moments of liberation, grace, no fear, higher reflectivity, and love were already latently present in Judaism, they were not yet made thematic (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991b; Kim 1996: 267-283; App. E). Such thematization took place in Christianity (Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Küng 1970; 1994a; 1994b). In its struggle against fear, Christianity anticipated the modern secular enlightenment, which is nothing else than the attempt to free people from their fears and to make them into masters of their fate (John 12: 15; 14: 27; Revelation 1: 17; Hegel 1986l: 520-540; Meyer 2009: 79-80).

Christianity However, in Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s view, in the power of the same moments through which Christianity removed and broke the ban, spell, or chain of the nature religions, it reproduced again the idolatry in spiritualized form, and precisely thereby regressed behind Judaism (Hegel 1986p; 1986q: 185-346, 347-536; Wiesenthal 1998; Horkheimer 1988d:

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chap. 2; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969c; 1970b; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Fromm 1950; 1966b; 1974; 1976; 1992; 1995; 2001; Lundgren 1998; Habermas 1978a; 1978c; 1982; 1986; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 1990: chap. 1; Küng 1970; 1972; 1976; 1982; 1984; 1987; 1989; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; Metz 1959; 1962; 1963; 1965; 1969; 1970; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1981; 1984; 1997; 1998; Metz/Peters 1991; App. E). To the extent to which Christianity brought the Absolute, the Infinite, the wholly Other closer to the finite, the more it absolutized the finite (Hegel 1986q: 185-346, 347-536; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969c; 1970b; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Habermas 1978a; 1978c; 1982; 1986; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 1990: chap. 1; Küng 1970; 1972; 1976; 1982; 1984; 1987; 1989; 1990b; 1991a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; Metz 1959; 1962; 1963; 1965; 1969; 1970; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1981; 1984; 1997; 1998; Metz/Peters 1991; App. E, F). Christ, the incarnated spirit, became the deified magician or fetishist (Hegel 1986p; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969c; 1970b; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402. 1958b: 484-498; App. E). The human self-reflection in the Absolute, the humanization of God through Christ became the proton pseudos of Christianity (Bloch 1970; 1972; 1985e; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1969c; 1970b; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Habermas 1978a: 1978c; 1982; 1986; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 1990: chap. 1; App. E). The progress of Christianity beyond Judaism had been bought with the assertion, that the man Jesus had been God: Elyon, El Shaddai, Yahweh, Elohim, Adonai–the wholly Other (Psalm 91; Horkheimer 1985f: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40, Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; App. E).

Miracles and Magic In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the very fact that Jesus performed miracles did not yet make him into a magician or a fetishist (Matthew 8 and 9; Hegel 1986p: 249-301; 1986q: 241-298; Kim 1996: 267283). The Rabbis differentiated between miracles and magic (Exodus 7; Lieber 2001: 357/7; Hegel 1986p; 1986q; App. E). For the Rabbis the confrontation between Moses and Aaron on one hand and the Magicians of the Pharaoh on the other was also one between miracles and magic (Exodus

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7; Lieber 2001: 357/7; Hegel 1986p: 249-301; 1986q: 241-298). In magic, so the Rabbis explain, humans try to impose their will on God. Miracles demonstrate God’s greatness beyond the limits of human power. Magic originated in the will of a human being to impress or fool other human beings. Miracles, although they may use a human instrument, were part of a larger divine design. A Hasidic comment took the words of God to Moses and Aaron–produce your marvel–to mean–produce a marvel that will astonish you as well (Exodus 7: 9; Lieber 2001: 357/8). A magic trick astonished the audience. A miracle astonished even those who performed it with God’s help.

Reflective Moment For Horkheimer, however, precisely the reflective moment of Christianity, the spiritualization of magic and fetishism, was guilty of the fatal misfortune (Psalm 91; Hegel 1986p: 249-301; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Benjamin 1996c: 58-67; Horkheimer 1985f: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Küng 1970; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; App. E). Christianity passed off as spiritual being, what proved itself before the spirit as natural being (Horkheimer 1974: 8, 18, 28-29, 96-97; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498). According to the critical theorists, precisely in the unfolding of the contradiction against such pretension of the finite consisted the spirit. Thus, the bad conscience had to recommend the prophet Jesus of Nazareth as symbol, and the magic praxis as transformation and transubstantiation (Matthew 26: 1-29; Jung 1958; 1990; 1933; Horkheimer 1974: 8, 18, 2829, 96-97; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; App. E). That precisely made Christianity into a religion: in a certain sense into the only religion; into the thoughtful binding to the thoughtful suspicious, into a particular cultural domain (Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; 1985g: chap. 37; App. E). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the enlighteners Adorno and Horkheimer remained deeply rooted in Judaism as the Religion of Sublimity precisely in that they tried through their longing for the wholly Other to make themselves immune against all residuals of nature religion, magic, fetishism, mythology, and idolatry: in the case of Horkheimer even against the temptation of the deification of his beloved wife Maidon into the highest (Exodus 20; Hegel 1986p: 249-301; 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 29-30; Küng 1991b). What separated the assimilated Jewish non-

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conformists Horkheimer and Adorno from Judaism was the theodicy experience of World War I, fascism, World War II and the Cold War: that Elohim, who was according to the Midrash the God of justice, was not just, and that YHVH, who was according to the Midrash the God of mercy, was not merciful, and that El Shaddai, the God of power, was not powerful (Psalm 91; Exodus 6: 2-4; Lieber 2001: 351-352; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). Thus, motivated by their theodicy experiences in the 20th century, the critical theorists of society moved from Jewish ethical monotheism through skepticism, pessimism and atheism, toward a humanistic post-theism; and toward their faith idea of the imageless and nameless totally Other, which was very similar to Karl Barth’s idea of the wholly Other and of Paul Tillich’s notion of the Ultimate Reality, but without their mythological overload; and toward an attitude of being, which had been practiced e.g. by Saint Francis of Asissi and Master Eckhart, and which leads to sainthood; and not toward the attitude of having, which has been practiced by the bourgeois, the dominant member of civil society, to an increasing extend in the past 400 years, and which leads to insanity (Blakney 1941; Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Tillich 1948; 1955a; 1955b; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1983; Barth 1950; 1959; Horkheimer 1967b: chaps. 216-228, 229-238; 239247, 302-316, 317-320; 1972: chaps. 4, 6; 1974c: 218-219; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 29, 37, 40; 1985l: 294-296; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1972b; 1973; 1990a; 1990b; 1995; 2001; Jung 1958: 201; Drewermann 1989; 1992a; 1992b; 1992c; Dirks 1968; 1983a; 1983b; 1985; App. E, F, G).

The Attitude of Having In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the attitude of having has most recently–in the deep financial crisis of 2008, 2009, 2010–driven CEOs of American banks and industries, e.g. of the AIG, the world’s largest insurance company, 80% of which have already been federalized by the American Government, to give themselves bonuses in the millions of dollars as reward for having lost billions of dollars through bad performance, The attitude of having and entitlement has been further expressed by these same CEO’s, who after having received billions of dollars as bail-out–or incentive–or rescue-packages from the Federal Government invested them in foreign countries or spent them on luxury vacations abroad, e.g. in Dubai, while at home the unemployment and the foreclosures of small businesses and houses and the connected frustrations were rising, and were leading toward more and more aggression and necrophilia, and toward the intensification of the pathology of reason and of individual

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and collective insanity (Klein 2007; Hedges 2007; Clinton 2004; Perkins 2004; 2007; Scahil 2007; Habermas 1985b; 1987a; 2001a; 2001c; 2006c; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Kinzer 2006; Emanue/Reed 2006; 2007; Metz 1978; 1980; 1995; Metz/ Wiesel 1993; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Küng 1994a; 1994b; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Wiesenthal 1960; Siebert 2005b; 2006a). Even as late as March 2009, there were Republican and Democratic Senators and Representatives in the American Congress, who were not able to let go of their failed neo-liberal, free-market ideology, and recommended socialDarwinistic legistlative measures to let go under unsuccessful banks and industries, no matter what the consequences would be for the 180 million workers depending on them for their jobs, pensions and houses, and would suggest in a populist outrage to the CEOs, who had received bonuses without performing accordingly to imitate the Japanese capitalists and apologize to the nation and then to commit hara-kiri. However, the anchormen and women on Fox News and CNN and their guests still speak stubbornly of the rescue of a capitalism, which has produced so much human suffering not only through the past 8 years, but throughout the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. One cannot speak about the two World Wars, the first great depression, fascism, the Cold War and the War against Terror without speaking of capitalism, and its limitless selfishness and greed without repentance, and atonement (Kim 1996: 267-283).

The Hardness of the Heart In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, there was present in the 8 years in the born-again second Bush Administration and in the corporate ruling class which it represented, what the story of the Pharaoh in the Torah called the hardness of the heart (Exodus 7; Kamenka 1983: 115116; App. E). According to the Rabbis, for the first 5 plagues, which the Pharaoh and Egypt had to suffer as punishment, the text read: Pharaoh’s heart was hardened (Exodus 7; Lieber 2001: 356). For the Rabbis that meant that the Pharaoh himself chose to be stubborn. Only for the last five plagues the text read: God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. In the beginning of the process, Pharaoh was equally free to be generous or to be stubborn and to let the Hebrew slaves go or not. Every time the Pharaoh chose the option of stubbornness, however, he gave away some of his free will. Each choice made it more likely that the Pharaoh would chose similarly the next time, both to spare himself the embarrassment of admitting that he was wrong and because he now had the self-image of a person who

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would not yield to Moses’ pleading. At first it was Pharaoh who hardened his heart. Henceforth, God shall contribute to the hardening. The great Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides wrote that sometimes a man’s offense was so grave that he foreclosed the possibility of repentance (Exodus 7; Lieber 2001: 356; Küng 1991b). At first, Pharaoh sinned repeatedly of his own free will, until he forfeited the capacity to repent. The critical theorist Erich Fromm wrote that Pharaoh’s heart hardened because he kept on doing evil (Exodus 7; Lieber 2001: 356; Fromm 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549). It hardened to a point where no more change or repentance was possible. The longer the Pharaoh refused to choose the right, the harder his heart became until there was no longer any freedom of choice left him. God has structured the human heart in such a way that Pharaoh prevented himself from changing. The same seems to have happened to the Bush Administration and the corporate ruling class. Even today, in March 2010, under a new Administration, little is said concretely even in American Synagogues, Churches or Mosques about repentance of the criminal decisions and actions, which have been performed by the Bush Administration and the corporate ruling class nationally and internationally, in the name of and against the American people, who believe to be Christians to a large extent. The hardness of the heart prevails. (Exodus 7; Lieber 2001: 356; Kamenka 1983: 115-116; Fromm 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; Mitscherlich 1993; 1994; App. E).

Logos However, in the view of the dialectical religiology, as far as Horkheimer’s critique of Christianity is concerned, it is important to notice that according to the Christian teachings it was not a man who was idolotrously mythologized and deified by the religious community, but it was rather the Logos of God who became flesh (Genesis 1-2; John 1; Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; Fromm 1966b; 1992; 2001; Lundgren 1998; Küng 1970; 1994a; 1994b; Kim 1996: 267-283; App. E). Even Moses Maimonides had no problem to recognize that Christianity was indeed monotheistic (Solomon 2000: 42-44, 70, 72, 91, 82-83, 102, 119, 136; Küng 1991b: 169-222). It must also be noticed that in the Ecumenical-Hellenistic Paradigm of the Christian Antiquity and in the Roman Catholic Paradigm of the Middle Age, it was not the priest who as magician or fetishist performed out of his own power the transubstantiation of the bread and the wine, but that he rather called upon God, the Father, to do so, no matter what naïve believers may have thought of it. Christianity

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has been fighting throughout all its paradigms against the return of magic and fetishism: to be sure more or less successfully, but certainly as consistently as did Judaism or Islam (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Horkheimer 1988d: chaps. 1, 5, 6, 7, 11; Adorno 1997i1: 7-141, 143-508; 1997i/2: 11-120; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b; Baum 2009; App. E). While Christianity is not–as Horkheimer thought–a synthesis of Jewish ethical monotheism and Greek polytheism, the Greek and Roman Church fathers did nevertheless apply the highest and deepest intellectual accomplishment of Greek philosophy, the dialectical notion– the self-particularizing or self-alienating and self-singularizing or selfreconciling universal to the New Testament, without which application the Christian Trinity dogma could not have been formulated, and so did the Christian mystics Master Eckhart and Jacob Böhme, and so did still the Lutheran Hegel, in spite of the de-Hellenization process intrinsic to the Reformation and to the bourgeois Enlightenment (John 1; Blakney 1941; Böhme 1992; Hegel1986b: 534, 536; 1986e: 122; 1986f: 243-300; 1986h: 28; 1986i: 30, 133, 1986j: 293; 1986k: 198, 227, 227; 1986p: 209, 240; 1986q: 185-346; 1986r 132; 1986t: 64, 69, 70, 74-119, 142-143, 166, 182, 196, 232, 233, 256, 445; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; 1985g: chap. 37; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; Küng 1994a; 1994b; App. E).

Sacrifice According to Horkheimer and Adorno, just like the great Asiatic religious systems so was Pre-Christian Judaism the faith that was hardly separated from the national life and from the general self-preservation of individuals and collectives (Hegel 1985p: 50-95; 1986q; 1988d: chap 1; 1987e: 320-350; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Jung 1958: 196-224; Drewermann 1989; 1992a; 1992b; 1992c; Küng 1991b; Küng/Ess/ Stietencron/Bechert 1984; App. E). The transformation of the pagan ritual of sacrifice took place neither only in the cult, nor only in the heart (Hegel 1986a: 39; 1985c: 523-524; 1986l: 33,68; 1986n: 36-38; 1986p: 225; 1986q: 91-92, 136; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402. 1958b: 484-498; Jung 1958: 196-224; Drewermann 1989; 1992a; 1992b; 1992c; Küng 1991b; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984). The transformation determined the form of the working process. As the scheme, plan, or pattern of the economic production process the sacrifice became rational. The taboo transformed itself into the rational regulation of the work-process (Marx 1977; Freud

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1946; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1967; 1980a; 1980b; 1990b; 2001; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Küng 1991b). The taboo ordered the administration in war and peace, the sowing and the harvesting, the preparation of meals and the slaughter of animals. While the rules did not originate from rational considerations, the rationality, nevertheless, originated from the rules. The effort to liberate oneself from the immediate fear created among primitive tribes the organization of the sacrificial ritual. This effort purified itself in Judaism into the sacred rhythm of the familial and political life in the state (Leviticus; Deuteronomy; Ezekiel 43; Lieber 2001: 518-523; 564-765, 980-1212; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Küng 1991b; App. E). The priests were determined as guardians, so that the custom would be followed. The function of the priests in the domination and power over the people became manifest in the theocratic praxis (Leviticus; Deuteronomy; Lieber 2001: 564-765, 9801212; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Küng 1991b; Bloch 1975b). Christianity, however, wanted to remain spiritual even where it was striving for power, rule and domination (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Küng 1970; 1972; 1976; 1982; 1984; 1987; 1989; 1990b; 1991a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; Metz 1959; 1962; 1963; 1965; 1969; 1970; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1981; 1984; 1997; 1998; Metz/Peters 1991; App. E). Christianity has broken the self-preservation through the last sacrifice, that of the God-man, in the ideology, but it thereby surrendered the devalued existence to the realm of the profane: the Mosaic law was abolished, but to Caesar was given what belonged to Caesar, and to God what belonged to God (Matthew 22: 15-22; Hegel 1986p: 9-88; Horkheimer 1988d: chaps. 1, 2; 1987e: 320-350; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Küng 1970; 1972; 1976; 1982; 1984; 1987; 1989; 1990b; 1991a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; Metz 1959; 1962; 1963; 1965; 1969; 1970; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1981; 1984; 1997; 1998; Metz/Peters 1991). Christianity confirmed the secular authority or it was usurped. Christianity was practiced as concessioned salvation resort. Christianity demanded and commanded the overcoming of self-preservation through the imitation of Christ. Thus, Christianity stripped the sacrificial love of its naiveté and separated it from the natural love–eros–and as caritas booked it as merit (Matthew 24: 12; Luke 11: 42; John 5: 42; 15: 9, 10, 13; 17: 26; Horkheimer/Adorno

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1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/ Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Marcuse 1962; Tillich 1926; 1948; 1955a; 1955b; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1983; Küng; 1970; 1972; 1976; 1982; 1984; 1987; 1989; 1990b; 1991a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; Metz 1959; 1962; 1963; 1965; 1969; 1970; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1981; 1984; 1997; 1998; Metz/ Peters 1991). However, at the same time Christianity wanted the love, which was mediated through the salvation-knowledge, nevertheless, also to be the immediate one. Christianity asserted that nature and super-nature were reconciled in this immediate love, mediated through salvation-knowledge. In this the critical theorists found the untruth of this love: in the deceptively affirmative meaning-giving of self-forgetfulness (Pope Benedict XVI 2009; App. E).

Meaning-Giving In the perspective of Horkheimer and Adorno, meaning-giving was deceptive, because, to be sure, the Church lived from the fact that human beings saw in following its teachings,–no matter if it demanded more works like the Roman Catholic Church or more faith like the Protestant Churches– the way to redemption, but that it could, nevertheless, not guarantee the goal: the eschatological, Messianic, heavenly Jerusalem of the future (Isaiah 63-66; Revelation 21-22; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1951; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137172; 1969b: 185-188; Wiesenthal 1998; Adordno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402. 1958b: 484-498; Küng; 1970; 1972; 1976; 1982; 1984; 1987; 1989; 1990b; 1991a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; Metz 1959; 1962; 1963; 1965; 1969; 1970; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1981; 1984; 1997; 1998; Metz/Peters 1991; App. E). In the view of the critical theory of religion, in May 1945 the Church could not really guarantee that Hitler went deservedly into hell, in spite of his criminal life, and therefore Cardinal Bertram of Breslau, the head of the German Bishops’ Conference, ordered a mass to be said for him in all German Catholic communities. Likewise the Church could not guarantee that Mother Theresa went deservedly into heaven in spite of her obviously saintly life. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the not–binding character of the spiritual promise of salvation, this Jewish and negative moment in the Christian doctrine, through which magic and fetishism and finally still the Church were relativized, was secretly refused and rejected by the naïve Christian believer. For the naïve Christian believer Christianity, its super-naturalism, became a magic or fetishistic ritual, a nature religion (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402;

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1958b: 484-498; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; App. E). The naïve Christian believer believed only as he forgot his faith. He talked knowledge and certainty into himself like an astrologist or a spiritualist (Adorno 1997i/1: 7-142; 1997i/211-118; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402. 1958b: 484-498; Küng 1994a; 1994b; App. E). That was not necessarily the worse opposite to the spiritualized theology. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the Italian grandmother who consecrated and dedicated a candle to the holy Gennaro for the protection of her grandson in the Second World War in faithful simplicity, may be closer to the truth than the army pastors or bishops, who being free from idolatry, nevertheless, blessed the most modern murder-weapons, against which the holy Gennaro was powerless. However, for the faithful simplicity the religion itself became the religionsubstitute. The premonition of that was associated to Christianity from its first days. Yet, only the anti-official, paradox Christians, from Blaise Pascal through Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Sören Kierkegaard to Karl Barth, made this contradictory premonition into the crucial or central point or into the key issue of their theologies (Schneider 1955; Hegel 1986g: 266; 1986r: 114; O’Regan 1994; Barth 1950; 1959; Adorno 1962; Horkheimer 1986g: chaps. 17, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, 37, 40; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adordno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Marcuse 1970a; Bloch 1960; 1970b; 1985e; Küng 1994a; 1994b; Ehrman 2006; 2009; App. E). The paradoxical theology had reached its climax already early on with Tertullian in the second century and moved through the whole history of Christian thought through Pascal and Lessing up to Hegel and his critical disciples Kierkegard and Barth in the 19th and 20th centuries: Et mortuus est Dei filius, prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est. Et sepultus resurrexit; certum est, quia impossibile est, (And the Son of God is dead, which is to be believed because it is absurd. And buried He rose again, which is certain because it is impossible) (Hegel 1986a: 21, 28, 613-614; 1986g: 266; 1986h: 22; 1986k: 279; 1986m: 499, 503; 1986o: 289-290, 491, 503; 1986r: 114; 1986t: 309, 311, 316; O’Regan 1994; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 22; Jung 1933; 1958: 200; 1990; Barth 1950; 1959; Drewermann 1989; 1992a; 1992b; 1992c; Küng 1994a: 140, 170, 182, 185, 215, 227, 232, 234, 340-341, 344, 350-352, 365, 373, 400, 351, 536, 930, 943, 993; 1994b; Lortz 1964: 31, 53, 56, 62, 66, 68, 69, 71, 7980, 81, 83, 87, 89, 91, 95, 100, 139, 203; App. E).

In their paradoxical consciousness, the anti-official Christians were not only the most radical thinkers, but also the most tolerant ones (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208;

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1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Marcuse 1970a; Bloch 1960; 1970b; 1985e; Kogon 1967; Küng 1994a; 1994b; App. E). Also Benjamin’s, Adorno’s, and Horkheimer’s inverse cipher theology longed for and aimed paradoxically at what was for the post-religious and post-metaphysical gaze, for which nothing any longer in civil society was justified by faith or dialectical notion, impossible and absurd–the wholly Other, including perfect justice, unconditional love, freedom of being, the resurrection of the flesh, forgiveness, redemption, Messianic anamnestic solidarity–and also, they were not only most radical, but also most tolerant (Exodus 7; Lieber 2001: 356-360; Hegel 1986q: 342-344; Wiesenthal 1998; Adorno 1951; 1960: 643-653; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973d; 1973e; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1968b: 484-498; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1987k: 289-328; 329-332; 1988a; 1996s: 62-67; Habermas 1990: 9-18; 1991a: part III; Wolin 2006; Jenemann 2007; Buck-Morss 1979; Hullot-Kentor 2006; Brändle 1984).

Secure Possession According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the other people, however, who repressed this contradictory premonition and who talked into themselves with bad conscience the Christianity as secure possession, had to let their eternal salvation to be affirmed and confirmed through the worldly fatal misfortune of those thinkers, who did not make the dull and gloomy sacrifice of reason (Kierkegaard 1954; 1959; 1984; Wiesenthal 1998; Adorno 1962; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Marcuse 1970a; Bloch 1960; 1970b; 1985e; Kogon 1967; Küng 1994a; 1994b; Ehrman 2006; 2009; App. E). For the critical theorists, precisely that sacrifice of reason was the origin of the anti-Semitism in fascist Germany and Europe, and before and afterwards (Kierkegaard 1954; 1959; 1984; Adorno 1962; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Marcuse 1970a; Bloch 1960; 1970b; 1985e; Kogon 1967; Küng 1994a; 1994b; Ehrman 2006; 2009; Lauder 2009: 1-4). The supporters of the Religion of the Father were being hated by the followers of the Religion of the Son as those who knew it better (Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402. 1958b: 484-498; Kierkegaard 1954; 1959; 1984; Adorno 1962; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188;

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2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Marcuse 1970a; Bloch 1960; 1970b; 1985e; Kogon 1967; Küng 1994a; 1994b; Ehrman 2006; Lauder 2009; App. E). It was, so Adorno and Horkheimer explained, the enmity of the spirit, which hardened itself as salvation against the spirit. The annoyance, the offence, the outrage, the scandal for the Christian enemies of the Jews was the truth, which stood firmly against and resisted the fatal misfortune, without rationalizing it, and which held fast to the idea of the undeserved bliss against the course of the world and the order of salvation, which they were supposed to cause and to bring about (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 168-208; 1969b: 186-188; 2002: 137-172; 1969b: 185-188; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498). According to the critical theorists, the anti-Semitism was supposed to confirm, acknowledge and legitimate, that the ritual of faith and history was right, as it executed it on those people, who negated such right.

Ticket-Thinking According to Adorno and Horkheimer, after World War II anti-Semitism appeared tendentially only as item on the interchangeable liberal political tickets in Western democracies (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 216-217). That justified indisputably the hope for the end of anti-Semitism. The critical theorists were aware in American exile that the Jews were still murdered in Europe in 1944, when the leaders could replace the anti-Semitc plank as easily as the following could be transferred from one place of the rationalized–through production in civil society into the other. The basis of the development, which with the end of World War II lead to the political ticketthinking, was in any case the universal reduction of all specific energies to the one and the same abstract form of work: from the battlefield to the studio. Yet, for the critical theorists the transition from such conditions of production to post-modern, alternative Future III–a more human and humane state, could not occur, because the same happened to the good as well as to the bad (App. G). Thus, the freedom on the progressive liberal ticket was as external to the power-political structures, to which progressive decisions necessarily came or amounted to, as was the Jew-enmity to the chemical trust of IG Farben, or IBM, or Ford Motor Company (Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969b: 216-217; Jeffreys 2008; Baldwin 2001; Black 1999; 2001; Charles 2005). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the same remains true in 2008, 2009, 2010 for the progressive, socially modified Roosevelt-liberal ticket in the middle of an enormous economic crisis

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characterized by nationalization and federalization of banks and industries pointing toward alternative Future I–one-dimensional corporatism, and alternative Future II–an even more aggressive militaristic society, on one hand, or an alternative Future III–a free, peaceful. socialist-humanist society, on the other (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 216-217; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1967; 1969b; 1970a; 1980a; 1987; 1995; 2005; Fromm 1957; 1961; 1966c; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 2001; Flechtheim 1959: 625-634; 1962: 27-34; 1963: 148-150; 1966: 455-464; 1971; Flechtheim/ Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1970a; 1971; 1975a; 1975b; 1985b; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; App. G). In spite of his most heroic attempts to develop a bi-partisan approach to the economic tsunami of 2009 in the American Congress, the Democratic President Obama was not able to overcome the ticket mentality of his Republican opponents. Only three Republican Senators and no Republican Representative voted for the over 700 billion Obama stimulus package in February 2009. The content of the Republican ticket-thinking was the suspicion that President Obama was engaging in a socialist experiment by giving the federal state a power over civil society, to the citoyen over the bourgeois, through nationalization and federalization of banks and industries, which it never had, at least not since the Roosevelt Administration (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 398-514; 1986l: 107-114, 133-141, 491-540; Zinn 1999: chaps. 13-25; Clinton 2004). For the critical religiology, all that happens against the cultural American background, in which capitalism had become the real–to be sure–idolatrous religion, which was now, in 2008, 2009, 2010, collapsing like all fetishes or idols do sooner or later, leaving the deceived believers behind in shock and deepest despair (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 216-217; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1967; 1969b; 1970a; 1980a; 1987; 1995; 2005; Fromm 1957; 1961; 1966c; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 2001; Flechtheim 1959: 625-634; 1962: 27-34; 1963: 148-150; 1966: 455-464; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1970a; 1971; 1975a; 1975b; 1985b; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Klein 2007; Scahill 2007; Hedges 2006; Clinton 2004; Perkins 2004; 2007; Kinzer 2006; Zinn 1999: 18-25; Hitzler/Pfadenhauer 2009: 25-27; Fischer 2009: 27-31; Woyke/Boll 2009: 31-33; Dauderstädt 2009: 33-37; Hirschel 2009: 37-40; Zimmermann 2009: 40-42; Gabriel 2009: 42-45; Lucke 2009: 45-48; Müller/ Thierse 2009: 48; Meyer 2009: 55-58; App. E).

Difference Horkheimer and Adorno admitted, that the psychologically more humane people in late capitalist society were attracted by the progressive

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liberal ticket (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 216-217; 1997j/2). However, so the critical theorists of society argued, at the end of the day the spreading loss of experience changed also the supporters of the progressive liberal ticket into enemies of difference. For Adorno and Horkheimer, not only the fascist anti-Semitic ticket was anti-Semitic but the ticket-mentality as such and in general (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 216-217; 1997j/2; Lauder 2009). The rage against the difference, which was immanent teleologically in the ticket mentality as such, was as resentment of the ruled, governed, mastered subjects of the nature-control ready to leap against the natural minority also where they first of all threatened the social one: the socially responsible elite in late capitalist society (Adorno 1997j/2; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 216-217; App. C, D). The corporate ruling class was in any case much harder to identify and to fix than the other minorities. In the fog of the property–possession-direction-disposal–and management, the capitalist ruling class withdrew itself and escaped successfully the theoretical determination, In the ideology of the race and in the reality of the social class appeared equally merely still the abstract difference against the majority. If, however, the progressive liberal ticket strove or endeavored for what was worse than its content, then the content of the fascist ticket was so null and void, that it could be maintained as substitute or replacement of the better only through the desperate efforts of the cheated, defrauded and deceived people, The horror of the content of the fascist ticket was that of the obvious and manifest and, nevertheless continuing lye. While this content of the fascist ticket did not allow any truth by which it could be measured, the truth came, nevertheless, negatively very close in the measurelessness of the contradictoriness. The masses without judgment could be kept away and separate from this truth only through the full loss and forfeiture of thinking. Only the enlightenment itself, which had come in control of itself, and which was becoming force and power, would be able to break through the limits of the enlightenment, and to end its dialectic, and to overcome not only the ideology of race, but also the reality of class toward post-modern alternative Future III–a society, in which the antagonism of freedom and justice would be reconciled together with the dichotomy of the religious and the secular (Hegel 1986l: 520-540; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 216-217; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1967; 1969b; 1970a; 1980a; 1987; 1995; 2005; Fromm 1957; 1961; 1966c; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 2001; Flechtheim 1959: 625-634; 1962: 27-34; 1963: 148-150; 1966: 455-464; 1971; Flechtheim/ Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1970a; 1971; 1975a; 1975b; 1985b; 1985e; Bloch/ Reif 1978; Lauder 2009; App. E, F, G). In the perspective of the dialectical

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religiology, a post-theistic, humanistic, non-authoritarian, non-dogmatic, non-ritualistic critical religion could possibly contribute to such enlightenment process. (Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1990b; 1995; 2001; Tillich 1926; 1948; 1951; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b; Küng 1970; 1972; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; 2009; Küng/Ess/ Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; Miranda 1982; Metz 1959; 1965; 1967; 1970; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1981; 1997; 1998; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; Sölle 1977; 1992; 1994; Sölle/Habermas 1975; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 216217; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1967; 1969b; 1970a; 1980a; 1987; 1995; 2005; Flechtheim 1959: 625-634; 1962: 27-34; 1963: 148-150; 1966: 455-464: 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1970a; 1971; 1975a; 1975b; 1985b; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978). It could do so, in so far as it would paradoxically preserve from the Abrahamic faith communities and earlier religions, in spite of all de-demonization or demythologization and methodological atheism, the reconciling, consoling, faithful theodicy-insight that the economic, political, military, artistic, religious, and philosophical history, and that what occurs biographically every day in peoples’ life world, does not only not happen atheistically or without God–the imageless and nameless wholly Other–but that it was essentially His own work–through His Logos, Reason, Word, in spite of all the horrible riddles of Providence and personal and collective tragedies in His world: and He does not fit into any human language, grammar or logic, and who ever fits into it, is not Him (Genesis 1, 2, 3; Jeremiah 1, 2; John 1; Holy Qur’an: Sura I and II; Lieber 2001: 3-23, 347-351; Leibniz 1996; Hegel 1986e: 43-44; 1986l: 28, 35-36, 540; 1986p; 1986q; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1967b: 248-268, 302-316, 317-320; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 2006: 115-120; Otto 1969; 1991; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 216-217; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1967; 1969b; 1970a; 1980a; 1987; 1995; 2005; Fromm 1957; 1961; 1966b; 1966c; 1967; 1968; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 2001; Flechtheim 1959: 625-634; 1962: 27-34; 1963: 148-150; 1966: 455-464: 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1970a; 1971; 1975a; 1975b; 1985b; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Küng 1991b: 726730; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stitencron/Bechert 1984; Metz 1959; 1963; 1967; 1970; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Oelmüller 1990; Finlayson 2005: chaps. 2-7; Baggini 2004; Ott 2001; 2004; 2007; Sölle 1977; 1992; 1994; Sölle/Habermas 1975; Sölle/Metz 1990; Siebert 1966; 1993; 1994b; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps 2, 6; 2005b; 2007g; 2008c). Early in 2009, the Rabbis were elated and rejoiced, because after

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almost 2,000 years of Church history, the Bishop of Rome, Pope Benedict XVI, asked–in contrast to the recent anti-Semitic, clerico-fascist Pious X Priest Brotherhood scandal–all Roman Catholics to follow the good example which their Jewish brothers and sisters had given since the end of the Babylonian Exile, namely, not to use the name YHVH, the pronunciation of which had been lost for a long time, any longer in their liturgies, but replace it by Adonai–Lord (Genesis 6; Lieber 2001: 351-352; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Priester 2009: 12-16; Siebert 1966; 1993; 1994b; 2002c: 187-193; 2005a; 2006d: 61-114; 2007g; Weitensteiner 2002; Pope Benedict XVI 2005; 2006; 2007a; 2007b; 2009). The Pope’s sensitive decision meant indeed progress in Jewish-Christian relations in general, and toward ending the Jewish-German tragedy in particular (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Baum 1959; 1999; 2003; 2005; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; Pope John XXIII 1962; 1963; Pope John Paul II 1993; 1998; Pope Paul VI 1966; 1968; Pope Benedict XVI 2005; 2006; 2007a; 2007b; 2009).

chapter twenty-five

From the Westphalian Peace to the Bourgeois and Socialist Revolutions The young Hegel remembered that what, before the Westphalian Peace, particularly in the horrible religious Thirty Year War from 1618 to 1638, was decided in the first German Empire and in Europe in general through the fist and through mad, wild, daring boldness, and personal energy, and the application of force, violence, torture and terror, was now decided through politics: i.e. through the support of more powerful nations, and through the might of those nations, who for the moment had the same interest, and through the favorable circumstances, i.e. the momentary inability of those nations, who had the opposite interests (Hegel 1986a: 601692; Bentley 1961: chap. 4; Lortz 1964: 679, 701, 703; Bloch 1972; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; App. E, F). Religious wars are much more cruel and horrible than economic or political wars, because in them nations fight for the highest they have: the absolute meaning of their existence (Hegel 1986g: 490-514; 1986p: 236-246; App. E).

Religious War The Westphalian Peace of 1648 was an important moment in the history of religions and of modern nations, as well as of force and terror, and the application of the jus gladii and lex talionis (Hegel 1986a: 527, 546, 548, 574575, 601-602, 601-692; 1986l: 517-518; Lortz 1964: 679, 701, 703; Küng 1994a: 336-601, 602-741; 1994b; App. E). The Westphalian Peace ended the most terrible and bloody religious war in Germany and Europe among individuals, groups and nations, who belonged on one hand to the Roman Catholic Paradigm of the Middle Ages, and on the other hand to the Protestant-Evangelical Paradigm of the Reformation. The Westphalian Peace diminished German political and religious freedom. In the Westphalian Peace the statelessness of Germany organized itself. The Westphalian Peace slowed down for Germany the development toward a modern state. It fixed the relationship of independence of the different parts of Germany. In the Westphalian Peace the independence of the Protestant

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Church was recognized not only for Germany and Europe, but also for the Americas and the other continents, to the huge and enormous disgrace, ignominy, and humiliation of the Catholic Church. For a long time the Westphalian Peace was considered to be the Palladium of Germany because it established its political constitution. However, this constitution was in reality a settlement and fixation of the private rights of the estates and their territories, into which Germany had disintegrated. There was not yet a trace of a thought, or an idea, or a representation of the purpose of a modern state in the Westphalian Peace Agreement (Hegel 1986l: 517518; 1986g: 398-514; Habermas 1992a; 1992b).

Devastation The religious Thirty Years War devastated large parts of Germany and Europe (Hegel 1986a: 601-692; Bentley 1961: chap. 4; Lortz 1964: 679, 701, 703; Bloch 1972; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; App. E). The Roman Catholic Paradigm had been initiated by St. Augustine, who also after the Constantinian turn and the alliance between Church and Roman state had, contrary to the Sermon on the Mount and to three hundred years of Christian tradition, developed the Seven Point Just War Theory, which declared that not all wars were unjust, but that there could be just wars in self-defense (Küng 1994b: chap. III; 1994a: 342-364, 481-483, 488-490, 499-501). The Protestant Paradigm had been initiated by Martin Luther, who also established the two swords-theory, which differentiated between the secular force of the state to execute prisoners and wage wars against external and internal enemies, e.g. the farmers of 1525, on one hand, and the religious power of the Church, in the service of which the state had to use its jus gladii, on the other (Bloch 1972; Lortz 1962: Vol. I and II; Küng 1994b: chap. V; 1994a: 602-630, 632-634, 640-649, 650-652, 656-658, 727-729, Siebert 2007a; 2007b; App. E, F). The Thirty Years War deepened considerably the modern dichotomy between the sacred and the profane, and strengthened the secular side in the long run. The Westphalian Peace established the principle Cuius Regio, Eius Religio. The Prince determined the religion of the citizens in his territory. That did not yet help the Jews. Religious antiSemitism or anti-Judaism continued in the Catholic and in the Protestant Paradigm and states: according to the religious prejudices the Jews were called Christ killers and even God killers, and there stubborn resistance against conversion was held responsible for the parousia delay, the nonappearance of the Messiah, and the prejudices lead to cruel and horrible pogroms in Germany and all over Europe for centuries (Horkheimer

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1185 1967b: 302-321; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 168-209; App. E, F). The more and more secularized modern, liberal, constitutional state became more and more neutral toward the religions of its citizens in its territory (Feuer 1966; Habermas 1991c; 1992a; 1992b). Religion was privatized in the liberal state. That indeed helped the Jewish emancipation in the form of the Assimilation Paradigm of Judaism, up to the fascist backlash of 1933 and the Shoa–Auschwitz and Treblinka: the climax of the Jewish-German tragedy (Küng 1991b; App. E, F).

Calculation of the Consequences According to Hegel, after the Westphalian Peace in the place of the sudden strike, hit, or fight stepped the calculation of the consequences; the personal courage’s scheming of the forces of the opponent or enemy (Hegel 1986a: 527, 546, 548, 574-575, 601-692; 1986l: 517-518). Functionalistic thinking entered the political and military spheres, and affected also the religious dimension (Weber 1953; 1963; 1969; 1978; 1992; 2002; Parsons 1964; Habermas 1973: 164-184; App. C, D, E, F). Calculation of the powers and forces in general, which stood for or against a particular national interest, replaced the fist. What appeared in European history was what could be called interest-politics. Hegel compared the difference that occurred with the Westphalian Peace among European nations with the difference between the chess game of young and old people, or with the difference between medieval tournaments, in which mounted knights in armor fought with blunted weapons, on one hand, and the campaigns of a Fabius, on the other. In case of the tournaments, push followed push, blow followed blow, thrust followed thrust, connected even with danger for the knights’ lives, and all that for the gratitude of the lady, and for honor. In case of the campaigns of Fabius, there took place years of slow, deliberate, reflective, thoughtful observation, bypassing, outflanking, circumvention of the enemy, and all this for economic possession. No judges sit in judgment either over the medieval tournaments or over the present–2008, 2009, 2010–modern political or military struggles. There is still today no effective universal Praetor presiding over world history, which would be able to protect the particular smaller nations against the force and the invasions by the most powerful ones (Hegel 1986l: 29-55; 1986a: 601-692). Where was the Praetor in 2008 who could possibly defend Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Columbia, Venezuela, Chile, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Sudan, etc, against a direct or proxy American attack or invasion for economic gains from cheap labor and natural resources in the name of

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freedom and democracy, or even religion (Scahill 2007; Perkins 2007; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; App. E). The Westphalian Peace Agreement was, nevertheless, one of the most important fundamental laws about the possessions of every estate and nation (Hegel 1986a: 601-692; Bentley 1961: chap. 4; Lortz 1964: 679, 701, 703; Bloch 1972; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; App. C, D). The particular estates were the powers, which would have to maintain the Westphalian Peace, and all the other laws of the first German Empire and Europe, and all the other peace treaties. In the Westphalian Peace itself, a concession was made to all particular estates and nations, whose rights, which had been established in it, would be violated to gain possession through self-help and attacks. In order to be able to do that, the particular estates or nations had, of course, to have force and power enough. The attack or the self-help became a matter of calculation and of politics.

Power Politics Finally, this condition lead to the application of modern Real Politic, or of modern power politics, which later on was practiced by the absolute kings, or by Napoleon, or by Metternich, or by Bismarck, and which was driven to its most fanatic and insane extreme consequences by Hitler (Hitler 1943: 7, 127, 145, 146, 155, 162, 172, 226, 234, 269, 333, 559, 564, 567569, 572, 614, 655, 656, 681). Henry Kissinger practiced masterfully–in the footsteps of Metternich and Bismark–such Real Politic in the Nixon Administration toward the Soviet Union and Communist China, and Central and Latin America, which implies much cunning and for which the purpose sanctifies the means (Genesis 34: 13; Lieber 2001: 208/13; Clinton 2004: 60, 97, 140, 141, 164, 317, 344, 353, 413, 415, 450, 451, 458459, 475, 478, 479, 490, 502, 503, 504, 530, 542, 546, 550, 557, 572, 573, 576, 581, 593, 613, 631, 661, 664, 679, 696, 710, 715, 752, 790, 796, 844, 860, 867, 872-873, 906, 929, 951). Such real or power politics involved Dr. Kissinger e.g. in the counter-revolution in Chile against the democratically elected socialist President, Dr. Salvator Allende and his government, who was overthrown and murdered with the help of General Augusto Pinochet. If there had been a successful national or international trial against General Pinochet, because of all the workers he let disappear, or put into concentration camps, or let simply be tortured and murdered, Dr. Kissinger would have been on trial as well. Today, Dr. Kissinger supports the second Bush Administration in its war against Iraq, in spite of the fact that he has been the only American politician, who has recognized in time and early on, that the country was involved in a furious, partially

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1187 religiously motivated and legitimated civil war, which the elections in January 2005 and March 2010 could only further ferment and intensify.

Real and Possible Force Hegel’s colleague and friend in Berlin, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who–like Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling–influenced his philosophical and political thinking most powerfully through his principles of intellectual perception, subjective identity of subject and object, and subjective totality, which as concretely superseded are still of relevance for the critical theory of society, and the dialectical religiology, in spite of, or even because of their turning away from all identity-religion and identity-philosophy and their historical-materialist and psychoanalytical shift, differentiated formally between real force and the possible force (Hegel 1986b: 9-138, 474; 1986a: 102; App. C, D). Religious or secular idealists identify subject and object without sufficient differentiation in terms of a positive dialectic: the negation of the negation leads to affirmation (Hegel 1986c: 37, 61, 66, 160, 161, 543). Thus, the Hebrew creation mythos tells that God created man and woman, and that they became one body, and Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth commented that they are therefore no longer two, but one body, and that thus what God had united, man must not divide, and thus forbid divorce, which Halakhah Roman Catholicism still takes seriously up to the present–2010–surely with great difficulties in the secular modern context (Genesis 1: 26-27; 2: 25; Matthew 19: 3-6; Fromm 1966b: chap. vi, ix; Siebert 1979e: 35-46; 1986: 442-457; 1987c; App. E). Modern religious and secular materialists emphasize the difference and non-identity in terms of a negative dialectic: the negation of the negation may not always result in affirmation (Hegel 1986s: 57; Adorno 1966).

Identity and Difference Thus, modern religious and secular materialists may stress of man and woman, even if they have become one flesh, one body, one soul, one spirit, or one consciousness in marriage, that they, nevertheless, still remain two different individuals, and that thus they may develop, grow, and decline physically and psychologically in different ways and speeds, and may get sick, and age, and die at different times, and that therefore all modern states have introduced the possibility of divorce: against the mythos and religious teaching (Hegel 1986g: 292-338; Siebert 1966; 1979b; 1979e;

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1986; 1987c; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; App. C, D, E, F). Likewise the critical theorists stressed non-identity not only in marriage and family, but also in religion, in their humanistic religiosity: the longing for the liberating wholly Other as the totally Non-Identical, the completely New (Exodus 6: 1-8; Lieber 2001: 351-352/1-8; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988c: chaps. 16, 18; 1989m: chap. 23; 1996s: 62-66; Horkheimer/ Fromm/Marcuse 1936; Fromm 1966b; 1976; 1995; 1997; 2001; Siebert 1966; 1979b; 1979e; 1986; 1987c; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). In the perspective of the inverse theology intrinsic to the dialectical religiology, already the great bourgeois and socialist, atheistic and humanistic enlighteners–from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche through Marx and Freud to Brecht and Kafka–had rescued Transcendence as well as the consequent sovereignty of the human Ego and its solidarity with others versus stimuli rising from the external reality and from the internal will to life or Id and its libidinous and aggressive aspects, precisely through their negation of the reification or thingification of this entirely Other, as they continued in secular form the de-demonization and de-mythologization and rationalization tendencies at work already in the history of the world religions since a long time from one religion to the other and from one of their paradigms to the other (Genesis 1, 2; Exodus 7, 20; John 1; The Holy Qu’ran Sura I and II; Lieber 2001: 356-360; Jamme/Schneider 1984: 11-14; Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Nietzsche 1967a; 1967b; 1967c; 1968; 1974; 1990; Marx 1953; Freud 1992; Brecht 1961; 1964; 1966; 1967; Kafka 1964; 1993a; 1993b; 2001; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Marcuse 1960; Adorno 1970b; Adorno/Kogon 1958a; 1958b; Habermas 1986: 53-55; 1990: 9-18; Baum 2009; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; App. E). The projecting, reifying, thingifying religious subjects do not really see the Transcendence or the wholly Other, but rather–like the patient in psychoanalysis who engages in child-like transfer-love–only himself or herself (Genesis 1, 2; Exodus 7, 20; John 1; The Holy Qu’ran Sura I and II; Lieber 2001: 356-360; Feuerbach 1904; 1957; 1996; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps 17, 29, 37, 40; Marcuse 1960; Adorno 1970b; Adorno/Kogon 1958a; 1958b; Habermas 1986: 53-55; 1990: 9-18; Baum 2009; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1893b; Drewermann 1989; 1992a: 43-70; 1992b; App. E). Even Hegel’s philosophy was in spite of its affirmative theology, very similar to the Talmud and its negative theology: both are concerned with the ultimate truth, toward which one could not point and which one could not say affirmatively, but which, nevertheless, is (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986e: 43-44;

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1189 Horkheimer 1967b: 312; 1985l: 483-492; 1989m: 265-268). According to Horkheimer, the contradiction lays in the Jewish tradition as in the dialectical philosophy, in which it became explicit as moment of a thinking, which aimed at the truth in the emphatic sense (Horkheimer 1967b: 312; App. E). That the Jews preserved through the long centuries of persecution their teaching, in which neither the reward of individual bliss nor the eternal punishment of the individual was decisive, and that they remained loyal to a law after their state, which could have enforced it, had disappeared with the defeat of Simeon ben Koseba or Bar Kochbar by the Romans, only on the basis of the Messianic hope, which was meant for the just people in all nations in the future, that precisely was the contradiction, which bound them together with the great philosophy in Germany from Kant to Hegel: even with all what in popular and ironical terms has been called idealism (Jamme/Schneider 1984: 11-14; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1967b: 312; Solomon 1996; Küng 1991b: 166, 394, 449, 779, 781, 785, 790; App. E).

Communicative Force against Governmental Force The identity philosopher Fichte had posited the real force as one, and as being united in the government (Fichte 1793; Hegel 1986b: 9-138, 474; 1986a: 102). According to Fichte, the opposite possible force was supposed to be able to force that reality of the governmental force. Today– in 2010–Jürgen Habermas opposes–following Fichte and the critical theorists Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse–to the administrative power of the state the communicative power of the protest movements of the people, and criticizes the former in the name of the latter (Benjamin 1978b; 1978c; 1978d; 1983a; 1983b; 1996c; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1978c; 1981c; 1985b; 1987d: chap. VIII; 1990; 1992a; 1995; 1998; 2001a; 2003b; 2004a; 2006c). In Fichte’s view, this second forceless existence of the common will was supposed to have the right to judge if the first force had left the government, to which it was bound, and if the first force of the government was no longer in conformity with the universal freedom. The second force was supposed to supervise the first supreme force of the government. When concerning the first force a private will stepped into the place of the universal one, the second force could tear away the first and supreme force from the government. The way in which that was to happen was supposed to be an absolutely effective public declaration that all actions of the supreme state force were null and void from that very moment on. According to Fichte, it was not allowed to happen that the

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second force would through its own judgment separate itself from the first force. That would be insurrection, as e.g. it is still taking place in this moment of history–in March 2010–in Afghanistan and Iraq under American occupation, and as it has been developing into a partially religious civil war, without the American public noticing it (Hegel 1986c: 275-276). This was not to happen because this pure force of the insurrection consisted out of merely private wills, which therefore could not constitute themselves as general will of the nation. Indeed, the present insurrection in Iraq consists of a large variety of mainly religious groups, which would fight each other, no matter if the American occupation force would remain or would suddenly withdraw, and disappear, and would as such not constitute a united governmental force (Cropley 2004: 1-3; Reuters 2004a: 1; 2004b: 1-3; Reuter 2004c: 1; 2004d: 1; 2004e: 1; Zavis 2004: 1-3). However, in Fichte’s view, it was that second common will, which would declare this mass of people as a community, or this pure force as also being united with the idea of the common will, since it was no longer present in the previous carriers of force.

The Forceful Law and Order of the World After having spoken in his Phenomenology of the Mind about the realization of the rational self-consciousness through itself, and about desire and necessity, and while he was dealing with the law of the heart, and the insanity of the self-conceit, and before considering virtue in the course of world history, Hegel argued that, opposite to the heart of the individual and its law stood an external objective reality: law and order (Hegel 1986c: 275276; App. C, D). A materialist could not have said it better. For Hegel, this was so, because in the heart of the individual the law was first of all only for itself, and not yet realized, and therefore it was at the same time something other than what was the dialectical notion: the unity of the universal and the particular in the singular (Hegel 1986f: 273-300; 1986c: 275-276). It was not yet the realized dialectical notion. Thereby this other, the dialectical notion, determined itself as a reality that was the opposite of what was to be realized. Thereby, this reality was the contradiction between the law and the singularity of the individual person. Thus, on one hand, this reality was a law, by which the singular individuality was kept down and oppressed. This reality was a forceful and violent order of the world. This forceful order of the world contradicted the law of the heart of the individual. On the other hand, the reality was a humanity, which suffered under the forceful order of the world, which did not follow the law of the heart,

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1191 but was subject to a foreign necessity. In Hegel’s view, this reality that appeared opposite to the present form of consciousness, namely, the heart of the individual, was nothing else than the previous form of consciousness: the disunion of the individuality of the individual and his or her truth, the relationship of a cruel necessity, through which the individuality was crushed. A new type of individuality was directed toward the concrete and determinate supersession of this cruel, forceful necessity, which contradicted the law of the heart, as well as of the extant suffering, which arose from this necessity. The critical theorists of society, from Herbert Marcuse to Jürgen Habermas, have promoted this new type of individuality, and its attempts to resist and to negate the terrible necessity of the alienated, forceful, and often violent order of the world: or better the dialectical series of always new world orders from liberalism through socialism and fascism, and back again to atomistic liberalism, with which the dialectical movement had started in the first place, because of the latter’s antagonism between the individual and the collective, and because of the social class discrepancy, the workers and the bourgeoisie, the rich and the poor, personal autonomy and universal solidarity, which has once more been deepening under the compassionate neo-liberal second Bush Administration, particularly in the present economic depression as described in President Bush’s press conference of July 15, 2008, and which could not even really be mitigated through the faith-based social initiatives of the Churches, not to speak of being reconciled (Exodus 6: 1-8; Lieber 2001: 351-352/1-8; Marx/Engels 2005; Marcuse 1969a; 1969b; Dews 1986; Cohen 1972; App. B, C, D, E, F).

Separation of Powers In 1808, Hegel explained to his students of the upper class in the Gymnasium in Nüremberg, Germany, that the secular modern state contained different powers or forces, which constituted the moments of its organization (Hegel 1986d: 63; 1986g: 441-457, 465-490; 1986p: 236-246; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1975; 1976; 1978c; 1981c; 1981d; 1984a; 1984b; 1985b; 1987d; 1990; 1992a; 1995; 1998; 2003b; 2004a; 2006b; 2006c; Habermas/Luhmann 1975; App. C, D). The legislative, juridical and executive powers were the abstract moments of this organization of the secular modern state. According to Hegel, the real forces were those of the courts and the police, as well as of the financial, administrative, military and political institutions, not any longer the Churches (Hegel 1986g: 339-502; 1986d: 63; 1986p: 236-246; Habermas 1992a; App. C, D). These real forces constitute the totality of the

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secular constitutional state. This abstract division or separation of powers appeared and was present in those real forces. All these abstract and real forces of the modern secular state have the government as their supreme center. The government has a monopoly of force, and sometimes even of terror. There is, of course, not only counter-revolutionary state terrorism as prepared and promoted e.g. by the School of the Americas, situated at Fort Benning, Georgia, but also revolutionary terrorism, as it was practiced e.g. by the Viet Kong during the Vietnam War. There is also nihilistic terrorism, in which e.g. the Baader-Meinolf Group in Germany was engaged. The group’s terrorism was nihilistic in the sense that there was no chance for revolution in Germany at that time.

Violation of the Individual Person In 1810, Hegel taught his students in the lower class of the Gymnasium in Nüremberg on the topics of rights, duties and religion (Genesis 34; Lieber 2001: 206-121; Hegel 1986d: 243-244; 1986g: 92-202; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1978a; 1978c; 1981c; 1983; 1984a; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1990; 1991b; 1992a; 1997a; 1999; 2001b; 2002; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; Habermas/ Bovenschen 1981; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Habermas/Henrich 1974; Gadamer/Habermas 1979; App. E). Here Hegel told his students about the application of violent force and the consequent violation of the individual’s external freedom, of his or her body, and of his or her life, or also of his or her property in general: the Habeas Corpus issue. For Hegel, to this application of violent force belonged first of all the illegal robbing of an individual’s freedom through imprisonment or slavery. It was for Hegel the robbery of the natural, external freedom, when the individual was not able to go, where he or she wanted to go, etc. To this also belonged the forceful violation of the body and of the life. This violation was for Hegel much more important than the robbery of the individual’s property. In spite of the fact that life and body were something external, like property, so Hegel explained to his students, the individual’s personality was, nevertheless, violated, because in his or her body itself was situated his or her immediate self-feeling.

Force as Appearance of Power According to Hegel’s dialectical Science of Logic, where he spoke non-positivistically about effect and counter-effect, the force was the appearance of

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1193 the power as the internal and essential: or the power as something external (Hegel 1986f: 235; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1975; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981c; 1985b; 1986; 1987; 1990; 1992a; 1995; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; App. C, D). However, so Hegel explained, power was external only in so far as the causative substance, in its working or in its having an effect, i.e. in the positing of itself, was at the same time presupposing itself, i.e. posited itself as superseded. Vice versa, what, therefore, was the action of force was likewise an action of power. It was only a presupposed other, on which the forceful cause had an effect. The effect of the forceful cause on the other was the negative relationship to itself, or the manifestation of itself. The passive other is the independent moment, which was only something posited, something broken in itself: a reality, which was the condition, i.e. a condition now in its truth–namely, a reality that was only a possibility, or vice versa a being-in-itself, which was only the determination of the being-in-itself, which was only passive. Therefore, the other, to which force happened, was not only able to receive it, but force must also be done to it. Whatever has force over the other has it only because it was the power of it, which manifested itself in it and the other. The passive substance was posited through the force only as that, what it was in truth, namely, to be only something posited, precisely because it was the simple positive or immediate substance. The pre, which it was as condition, was the appearance of the immediacy, which the effective causality took off from it.

Fate: From Power to Force According to Hegel’s dialectical Science of Logic, where he spoke about the real mechanical process, power became force through the fact, that it, an objective universality, was identical with the nature of the object, but that its determination, or its negativity, was not its own negative reflectionin-itself, according to which it was something singular (Hegel 1986f: 235, 420-421; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1975; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981c; 1985b; 1986; 1987; 1990; 1992a; 1995; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; App. C, D). Insofar as the negativity of the object did not through the power reflect itself in itself, the power was not its own relationship to itself. It was against it only abstract negativity, the manifestation of which was the downfall and decline. For Hegel, the power as the objective universality, and as force against the object, was what was called Fate (Hegel 1986a: 305-306, 342-344, 346, 1986f: 235, 420-421; Benjamin 1977: chap. 3; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1975; 1976; 1978a; 1978c;

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1981c; 1985b; 1986; 1987; 1990; 1992a; 1995; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; App. C, D, E). Thus, Adolf Hitler told his secretaries in the face of the complete breakdown of National Socialism and of the German Reich in the Führer Bunker in Berlin shortly before his suicide: Fate wanted it that way (Hitler 1943: 64-65; Fest/Eichinger 2004; App. C, D)! According to Hegel, this notion of Fate fell into the dimension of mechanics, insofar as it was called blind (Hegel 1986a: 305-306, 342-344, 346, 1986f: 235, 420-421). That meant that the subject did not recognize the objective universality of Fate in its specific peculiarity. For Hegel, the originally most religious notion of Fate of the living was in general the genus, which manifested itself through the transitoriness of the living individuals, who did not have it as genus in their real singularity, and as such were never adequate to it. Death was the forceful victory of the genus over the individual. For Hegel, there was a connection between the originally theological notion of Fate on one hand, and law on the other: jurisprudence was originally, and may still be today–in 2010– theological in its foundations in spite of all positivistic secularization (Hegel 1986a: 305-306, 342-344, 346-347, 345, 346, 347, 349, 351, 353, 517; 1986c: 237, 273, 342-354, 495, 496, 535, 548; 1986d: 289; 1986e: 390; 1986f: 421, 422; 1986h: 290; 1986l: 46, 51, 339, 1986n: 108-109; 1986p: 364; 1986q: 111-112; 1986r: 74; Hitler 1943: 64-65; Groh 1998; Mehring 1992; Meier 1994; Habermas 1992a; 2002; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Schmidt 1972; App. E). In Fate, man recognized his own life. Fate was connected with man’s longing for the lost life, and with love. Fate was incorruptible and unlimited as the life itself. The identity philosophers Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel believed in the iron Fate of the German nation. Fate indicated what was the determinate individuality in itself as internal, original certainty. Fate meant internal necessity. Fate was the absolute, pure dialectical notion itself, perceived as being. It was simple, irresistible, incessant, continuous, unstoppable relationship, the work of which was only the nothingness of the individuality. Fate was connected with the ethical action, with the human and divine knowledge, and with guilt. The powers and forms of the ethical world have sunk into the simple inner necessity of the empty Fate. There was the terrible, awful, unknown night of Fate. Fate without the self remained the unconscious night, which did not come into the differentiation in itself, e.g. a Trinitarian differentiation like in Hinduism, Neo-Platonism or Christianity, nor into the clarity of the self-knowledge (Hegel 1986a: 305-306, 342-344, 346-347, 345, 346, 347, 349, 351, 353, 517; 1986c: 237, 273, 342-354, 495, 496, 535, 548; 1986d: 289; 1986e: 390; 1986f: 421, 422; 1986h: 290; 1986l:

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1195 46, 51, 339: 1986n: 108-109; 1986p: 331-373, 364; 1986q: 111-112; 185-346; 1986r: 74, 131, 290; 1986s: 432, 435-535, 577; App. E). Man could remain in the selfless thought of the negative power: in the consciousness of the foreign Fate. There was the spirit of the tragic Fate, which collected all those individual gods and attributes of the Substance into the Pantheon, into the Spirit who was conscious of himself as Spirit. The measure in nature and history could be seen as Fate. Only the human self-consciousness had an actual and real Fate, because it was free in and for itself, and because it could alienate itself from the objective universality: the species and genus being. The reflection of the negativity was the universality, which was not a Fate, which stood opposite to the determinateness, but one which was determined in itself and rational. There was the Fate of the world-historical individuals as well as of virtue, and of social morality, and also of religiosity in worldhistory. Fate meant something different for the self-consciousness of Greek and Roman Antiquity on one hand, and of Modernity on the other (Hegel 1986a: 305-306, 342-344, 346-347, 345, 346, 347, 349, 351, 353, 517; 1986c: 237, 273, 342-354, 495, 496, 535, 548; 1986d: 289; 1986e: 390; 1986f: 421, 422; 1986h: 290; 1986l: 46, 51, 339; 1986n: 108-109; 1986p: 331-373, 364; 1986q: 96-184, 185-346; 1986r: 74, 131, 290; 1986s: 432, 435-535, 577). In Modernity politics became the Fate for the writers of tragedies (Hegel 1986m; 1986n; 1986o; Benjamin 1978a; 1978d; 1983a; 1983b). In Vienna before World War I, when Hitler delved more deeply into the teachings of Marxism, and thus in tranquil clarity submitted the deeds of the Jewish people to contemplation, Fate itself gave him the answer: the Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejected the aristocratic principle of Nature, and replaced the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of number and their dead weight (Hitler 1943: 64-65; Groh 1998; Mehring 1992; Meier 1994). Thus, it denied the value of personality in man, contested the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdrew from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture. Thus, for Hitler and his followers, it was Fate that 6 million Jews and 27 million communists had to be murdered by the SS and the fascist armies mostly in Eastern Europe, which was to be prepared for colonization. In Hitler’s view, it was also Fate when his Government, Party, and Empire crushed all around him in his Berlin bunker (Fest/Eichinger 2004). Daily, the critical theorists of religion can see on the mass media of antagonistic American and European civil society and can meet good people with a terrible Fate, particularly at the end of their lives–theodicy (Hegel 1986g: 382-397; 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Oelmüller 1990; Metz/Wiese 1993; Lütkehaus 2006: 61-64; Kim 1996: 267-283). Thus, on the Fox

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morning news of Thursday 17, 2008, the transfer was reported of two dead Israeli soldiers from Lebanon to Jerusalem, and of 190 dead Lebanese soldiers, and two living Lebanese soldiers, former prisoners of war, from Israel to Lebanon. The two dead Israeli soldiers were received in Jerusalem with great sadness and mourning. The two living Lebanese soldiers were received as heroes with great jubilation by Hezbollah and other people in Lebanon, who promised to continue their fight against Israel.

Mediation of the Purpose through Force Where Hegel spoke in his dialectical Science of Logic about the realized purpose, he stated that it could be considered as a matter of force that the purpose related itself immediately to an object, and made it into a means, and that the purpose through the means determined an other (Hegel 1986f: II, 235, 420-421, 452-453, 482-483). This was so, insofar as the purpose appeared to be of a completely different nature than the object, and insofar as both objects were likewise totalities, which were independent against each other. Hegel considered it to be the cunning of reason that the purpose posited itself into an indirect, mediated relationship to the object, and that it inserted between itself and it another object. According to Hegel, the finitude of rationality had that aspect that the purpose related itself to the presupposition, i.e. to the externality of the object. In the immediate relationship to the object, the purpose would enter itself into the mechanism or the chemistry, and would thus be subjected to the contingency, and to the downfall of its destiny: to be the dialectical notion in and for itself. However, here the purpose put out an object as means, and let it externally slave away, and work itself to pieces, and thus surrendered it to exhaustion and annihilation, while at the same time it maintained and preserved itself behind it against the mechanical force. That happened in all social systems of domination, in which men and women were not recognized as self-purpose, but were used as means and instruments of labor, as tools for the purpose of producing surplus value, in slave holder, feudal, and capitalist societies, and that would continue to take place, if post-modern global alternative Future III–the reconciled society would be missed, and if post-modern, global alternative Future II–the totally administered society would be realized (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l; 2005; Marx 1961a: 12, 16, 30, 39-40, 54, 55, 56-57, 61-62, 64, 67-69, 198, 310-312, 317, 834, 882, 835; 1961c: 873-874; Marx/Engels 2005; Flechtheim 1971; App. G). According to Hegel’s philosophy of history, Divine Reason or Providence used the world historical individuals and their nations as means to accomplish

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1197 through their work the divine purpose: the realm of freedom (Exodus 6: 1-8; Lieber 2001: 351-352/1-8; Hegel 1986l: 19-55). While these agents of historical change and their masses exhausted themselves and went under in their work for the divine purpose, Reason and Providence remained aloof and transcendent in their historical immanence, and untouched, and thus did not suffer. All suffering was done by the instrumentalized human beings. That precisely is the content of Hegel’s instrumental theodicy, which after Auschwitz and Treblinka seems to have become unacceptable and implausible not only for philosophers, like the critical theorists, but also for theologians (Hegel 1986g: 382-397; 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Oelmüller 1990; Metz/Wiese 1993; App. E).

Freedom of Will When Hegel spoke in his Philosophy of Law about compulsion and crime against property, contracts, and life, he also stated that as a living being man could admittedly be forced, tortured, terrorized, conquered, defeated, and overcome (Hegel 1986g: 178-179). That meant that man’s physical and external side could be brought under the power, and force and control of others. However, so Hegel insisted, the free will of man could in and for itself not be forced. Man could be forced only, insofar, as he did not withdraw out of the externality, which he was held on to, or out of its representation. Hegel was convinced that only that man could be forced, who wanted to let himself be forced. Because the human will, so Hegel argued, was only in so far as it had existence, and was idea, and was really free, and the existence, in which it had put itself, was being of freedom, therefore force or coercion destroyed themselves immediately in their very notion, as expression of a will, which superseded the expression or the existence of a will. For Hegel, force or coercion were, therefore, taken abstractly, and were thus, wrong, unlawful and illegal. According to Hegel, compulsion or coercion was force against a natural existence, into which a will had been put. If this will was a particular will against the universal will, then it was coercion as such, or the will was only in itself. Coercion destroyed itself in its notion, the real representation in the fact that compulsion was superseded by compulsion. It was, therefore, not only conditionally right, but necessarily so: namely, as second coercion that was a supersession of a first compulsion.

1198

chapter twenty-five The Origin of the State

Where Hegel talked in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences about the phenomenology of the spirit and the recognizing self-consciousness, he stated, that in spite of the fact that the state could also come into existence through force, it did, nevertheless, not rest on force (Hegel 1986g: 398-514; 1986j: III, 221-223). After World War II, violent force and terror have played a particular important role in the genesis and formation of the new State of Israel. It seems that the same is and will be true for the formation of a new Palestinian and Iraqian or Afghan state. According to Hegel, force has its rightful place in the genesis of a state, until the laws and the constitution have been brought into existence. The spirit of the nation, the customs, the personal and social morality, the ethos and the positive laws are dominant in the state. In the true state, man was recognized and treated as rational being, as being free, as person. The individual on his or her part made himself or herself worthy of this recognition through obeying the universal will being in and for itself, the laws, through overcoming the naturalness of his or her self-consciousness. That meant that the individual behaved toward others in a universally valid mode, and that he or she recognized them as that, for which he himself or she herself wanted to be taken: as free, as person. The individual followed the Golden Rule: So always treat others, as you would like them to treat you; that is the meaning of the Law and the Prophet, which had been present already in one form or the other long before the modern constitutional state in almost all world religions (Matthew 7, 12; Hegel 1986g: 398-514; 1986j: III, 221-223; Küng 1990b: 84, 114-115; 1991a: 16-19; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Kuschel/ Schlensog 2008; App. E). For Hegel, in the state the citizen received his honor through the office that he held, through his trade, and through other types of work activities in civil society. Thereby, the citizen’s honor had a substantial, universal, objective content, which no longer depended on the empty subjectivity. Such content was still missing in the natural state, in which the individuals, as they may be and as what they may be, wanted to force recognition for themselves. According to Hegel, the struggle for recognition between lordship and bondage, and the subjugation of the servant under the master, was the appearance, out of which originated the living together of human beings as the beginning of states (Exodus 6: 1-8; Lieber 2001: 351352/1-8; Hegel 1976: 228-240; 1986c: 137-177; 1986g: 398-514; 1986j: III, 221-223). The force, which was in this appearance the basis, was therefore not the ground of right. This was so, in spite of the fact, that force was the necessary and rightful moment in the transition

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1199 from the condition of the self-consciousness, immersed in desire, and passion, and singularity, to the condition of the universal, socialized selfconsciousness. It was the external or appearing beginning of the states, not their substantial principle.

Law and Force Hegel had learned from Greek history, particularly the story of the seven wise men, that the law as universal appeared to the individual first of all as force (Hegel 1986r: I, 183; App. C, D). This was because the individual had no insight into the law and did not comprehend it. Even in Hegel’s time in the first two decades of the 19th century, people in Berlin and Germany and Europe felt that the law was force. First, the whole nation considered law to be force, as did individuals later on. To Hegel, it seemed necessary that people had to be forced first until they came to insight, and the law became their law, and thus ceased to be something foreign. Hegel remembered that most lawgivers and founders of states took it upon themselves to force the people, and to be their tyrants. In the states, in which the lawgivers and founders did not take over the task of forcing the people, then other individuals had to do it. The thing itself was necessary. Hegel referred to the story of Solon. Even today–in 2010–in the most advanced and late capitalist societies and in the most mature liberal constitutional states of the G8, which pride themselves not to be governed by men, but by the law, the law still appears to individuals, particularly in the lower classes, as foreign and as force, about which they get angry, particularly during crises in the liberal class systems, like when in the present economic tsunami or Pearl Harbor workers are fired by General Motors and thus lose their income in Germany or Canada, but in addition and most Satanically lose also their health insurance in the USA (Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-373, 373-396, 569-573, 578-587; 1993b; 1997h: 9-19, 42-87, 122146, 177-195, 217-237, 238-244, 280-353, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 397407, 408-433, 440-456, 457-477, 569-573, 578-587). The law appears to be more the expression of the particular will of the corporate power elite, than the universal will of the people. During the American Presidential Campaign of 2008 many American workers, who do not suffer from the illusion that they are middle class, cannot find their will and interest represented in the law of the land, which is continually shaped by two, hardly qualitatively differentiated liberal bourgeois parties–there is no labor party–as well as by the most powerful corporations through an army of lobbyists.

1200

chapter twenty-five Roman Power and Force

Hegel learned also from Roman history about power and force. (Hegel 1986l: 342; 1986r: 405; 1986q: 286-292, 342-343; 1986g: 92-202). For Hegel, the Roman state rested throughout on the moment of force and violence. The Roman power was the real skepticism. On the Roman stage of history, the world had divided itself in its existence into two parts. On one hand, there were the atoms, the private people. On the other hand, there was the external bond of these private people. There was no social morality. This merely external bond was the power and the rule, the force as such. Likewise, this force was placed into the hands of the one subject: into the hands of the Emperor. In the late Roman Empire, complete despotism happened, and along with it, the decline and downfall of the peoples’ life, of all external life. People withdrew into their private lives, into private purposes, into private interests. Everything was privatized then, as it is today in 2010–in neo-liberal, late capitalist society. In the late Roman Empire, the formation of abstract or private right occurred, which related itself to the property of the individual persons, and to their contracts. Hegel saw this character of abstract universality, which was immediately connected with the singularization of the atomistic Roman civil society, completed also in the dimension of thinking. Society and culture corresponded precisely and fully to the abstract universality of private right. From Roman power and force came the symbol of the Fasces–a bundle of sticks with an ax in it. It was the Roman symbol for justice. Benito Mussolini made the Fasces the symbol of modern Italian fascism. The ax was a sign of force and violence, and possibly of terror in the execution of the jus gladii or the lex talionis. According to the dialectical religiology, if we want to understand and comprehend fully Modernity since the Westphalian Peace, and particularly our own transition period since the end of World War I, not as Counter-Modernity and not as Ultra-Modernity, but rather as the concrete supersession of Modernity into Post-Modernity, we must remember the late Roman Empire (Hegel 1986l: 339-412; 1986q: 280-291; Küng 1990b: 43-46; Kim 1996: 267-283; App. G).

The Terror of Death Hegel dealt with terror in his Phenomenology of Mind in connection with the great French Revolution and its idea of absolute freedom (Hegel 1986c: 431-441; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 3). While Hegel as a young student in the Tübingen Lutheran Seminary was very enthusiastic about the revolution

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1201 of 1789 in the neighboring country of France, and celebrated it with his friends Schelling and Hölderlin by planting together a freedom-tree, he was later on frightened by the Paris Revolutions of 1789 and 1830, a year before his death, because of their bloody terror activities (Singer 1983: chap. 1; Horkheimer 1969: 248-268, esp. 252; Wallace 1911: 205). Hegel knew of a religious, e.g. Jewish, Christian or Islamic terror, on one hand, and of a secular, bourgeois terror of freedom, on the other: Religion et Terreur and Liberte et Terreur (Hegel 1986l: 115, 140, 428-429; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; 1986s: 329-344; 1986c: 431-441; Benjamin 1988: chap. 3, esp. 42-43; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Baum 2003: 205-221; 2004; 2007; 2009). Both forms of terror have met in the near East and globally in the beginning of the 21st century: at least since September 11, 2001 (Housego 2004: 1-3; Pickler 2004: 1-2; Loven 2004: 1-3; App. C, D, E). That gives special actuality to Hegel’s concern with terror. According to Hegel, during the French Revolution of 1786 terror meant the completely unmediated, pure and abstract negation of the individual as being in the universality (Hegel 1986c: 431-441). The only work and deed of the absolute, universal freedom was, therefore, death, which had no internal extent and fulfillment. That was because what was negated was the unfulfilled point of the absolutely free self. This terror death under the guillotine was, therefore, the coldest, flattest, most spiritless death thinkable and possible. This death had no more meaning than the cutting through of a cabbage head, or a sip of water. Later on, the Left-Hegelian Lenin would compare the meaningless sex of the bourgeois with a sip of water. For Hegel, absolute freedom was in itself precisely this abstract self-consciousness, which exterminated and annihilated in itself all differences, and anything stable and structured. As this abstract self-consciousness, absolute freedom was object for itself. The terror of death was the perception of the negative essence of the absolute freedom. The quantity or crowd of the individual consciousnesses felt the fear of their absolute master: of death and its terror. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, both forms of terror, the religious, e.g. Jewish, Christian or Islamic terror, on one hand, and the secular, bourgeois, or socialist revolutionary, or counter-revolutionary terror, on the other–Religion et Terreur and Liberté et Terreur–have the tendency to violate and lose paradoxically the very best principles, in the name of which and for the purpose of which they are practiced: the kingdom of God, or the realm of liberté, égalité et fraternité (Hegel 1986l: 115, 133-141; 140, 428-429, 520540; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; 1986s: 329-344; 1986c: 431-441; Marx 1961c: 873-874; Horkheimer 1967: 252, 259-261; Benjamin 1988: chap. 3, esp. 42-43; Marcuse 1966; 1961; 1879a; 1980a; 1987; 2005; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Baum 2003: 205-221; 2004; 2007; 2009; Kim 1996: 267-283; App. E).

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chapter twenty-five Restauration

According to Hegel, having felt the terror of death during the French Revolution, individuals were willing again to put up with the negation and the organizational differences of society and state (Hegel 1986c: 431-441; Viviani 2008: 64-66; App. B, C, D). Individuals subordinated themselves again under the differentiated organization of the masses. Individuals returned again into the division of labor, and into a limited type of work. Individuals returned to their substantial reality. In Hegel’s view, in the world of education and culture, individual self-consciousness did not come to the point of perceiving its negation or alienation in the form of the pure abstraction. Its negation was rather a fulfilled one: either the honor or wealth, which he or she gained in the place of the self, from which it had alienated itself; or the language of the spirit in literature and of the insight of philosophy, which the torn, tattered, disunited, disintegrated consciousness had achieved; or the heaven of religious faith; or the utility of the bourgeois enlightenment. All these determinations were lost in the self-experience, in the absolute freedom of the French Revolution. Its negation was the meaningless death, the pure terror of the negative: the fury of disappearance. All this may sound, as if Hegel, who first celebrated the French Revolution, later on surrendered and resigned himself to the restauration. Yet, in the perspective of the dialectical religiology, it must not be forgotten that the differentiated bourgeois social order, which followed the shock of the abstract, undifferentiated absolute, revolutionary freedom and its force, and its terror, and its fury of disappearance, was qualitatively different from the Medieval feudal or absolutistic-monarchical order, which had preceded it before and even still after the Westphalian Peace, and which would never recover again completely after the French Revolution.

Terror and Virtue According to Hegel, during the bourgeois enlightenment and during the following French Revolution of 1786, the abstract principle of freedom and–as it is in the subjective will–of virtue, became dominant (Hegel 1986l: 520-540; 1986c: 431-441; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 3; Viviani 2008: 64-66). Now, virtue had to govern against the many, which had become unfaithful to virtue through their moral corruption, through their old interests, or also through the excesses of revolutionary freedom and passions. During the Revolution, virtue became a simple principle and differentiated only among those, who were in the right disposition, and who

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1203 had the right conviction, on one hand, and those who had not, on the other. Of course, so Hegel argued, the conviction could be recognized and judged only by the conviction. Thus, suspicion became dominant. Virtue, however, as soon as it became suspicious, was already condemned. Suspicion received an awful force, and brought the monarch, Louis XVI–whose subjective will was the Catholic religious conscience–and his wife and child, under the guillotine. Robespierre posited the principle of virtue as the highest value. Hegel had no doubt that Robespierre was serious about virtue. Now, under Robespierre virtue and terror were dominant. This was because the subjective virtue, which governed merely out of a subjective disposition, view, or conviction, brought with it the most awful tyranny and despotism. This tyranny practiced its power without judicial or legal forms, or procedures, and its punishment was also always only simple–the terror of death. This tyranny had, of course, to go under, because all inclinations, all interests, rationality itself, were against this terrible consequent absolute freedom, which appeared and behaved so fanatically in its concentration. Robespierre himself became the victim of his virtue, and of the guillotine, and of the terror of death. The Revolution swallowed its own children.

Dialectic of Modernity In Hegel’s view, under Robespierre, terror governed in France (Hegel 1986p: I, 246; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 3). Terror governed against those citizens, who were not in the disposition of absolute freedom, and who were under suspicion: i.e. for the sake of their conviction. Thus, also the ministry of Karl X had been under suspicion. According to the formalities of the constitution produced by the Revolution, the monarch was not exposed to any responsibility. However, the formalism of the constitution did not prevail. The dynasty was overthrown. That made it clear to Hegel that in the formally developed constitution, the last emergency anchor was after all again the subjective disposition of the citizens, their convictions, and their views, which in it had been put aside, but which, nevertheless, asserted themselves again with contempt for all forms. In Hegel’s perspective, from this contradiction and from the dominant unconsciousness concerning it, Modernity continued to suffer. This dialectic of modernity continued right into the American Presidential Election campaigns of 2008, in which the candidates were much more concerned with their personal convictions and suspicions than with the objectivity of the constitution, and with the latter only because of the former. At

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present–2010–, neither the national constitutions nor the constitution of the UN are able to stop the international terrorism and counter-terrorism driven by often very subjective religious or secular convictions and suspicions, shortly prejudices.

Right, Left and Center With the French Revolution came into existence also the fateful political, religious and philosophical division of Right, Left, and Center in France, and in Europe, and in the Americas, and in the rest of the world (Hegel 1986l: 520-540; 1986c: 431-441; Viviani 2008: 64-66; Harprecht 2008: 1516; App. F). This division had not existed before or after the Westphalian Peace up to the bourgeois enlightenment and the French Revolution. Nobody would have said that e.g. Thomas Münzer was on the political, revolutionary Left during the Farmer Revolution of 1525, or on the Left of the Reformation until Friedrich Engels wrote about him after the French Commune Revolution of 1830, and Ernst Bloch, who like Engels indeed stood on the socialist Left, would write about him after World War I, whose memory had been repressed by Catholic and Protestant historiography (Hegel 1986l: 520-540; 1986c: 431-441; Viviani 2008: 64-66; Harprecht 2008: 15-16; Bloch 1972; Siebert 2007a; 2007b). During the French Revolution, the radical Mountain Party, i.e. the Montaignards became one day the Left (Hegel 1986l: 520-540; 1986c: 431-441; Viviani 2008: 64-66; Harprecht 2008: 15-16). The Gerodins, however, i.e. the Liberal Federalists, became the Right. The Middle was characterized as the Plain or the Level, or less flattering, as the Le marais, the Swamp, or the Marsh. For decades now the American neo-conservative Right has tried to convince the socialistic Left, that the notions of Right and Left had long become obsolete. Yet, the notions Right and Left continue to assert themselves stubbornly since the French Revolution, and up to today–2010: they simply refuse to disappear. Since the French Revolution there is also a religious Right and Left and Center. For the religious Right, all sacred texts tend to be historical. For the religious Left all sacred texts tend to be mythological. For the religious Center, some sacred texts are mythological, and others are historical. Since the French Revolution there exists also a philosophical Right, Left, and Center. There appeared Left and Right Aristotelians, Left and Right Thomists, Left and Right Kantians, etc. There were particularly the Hegelian Right, Left, and Center (Hegel 1986l: 520-540; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1986c: 431-441; Viviani 2008: 64-66; Harprecht 2008: 15-16; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1985a; 1985b; 1988a; 1988b; 1990; Küng 1990b: 43-46, 142-

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1205 150; Honneth 1985; Dews 1986; Siebert 1979c; 1995; 2000; 2001; 2004a: 63-97; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b: 91-137; 2007a: 99-113; 2007g: 11-19; 2008c: 61-65; 2009d; App. F). Today–in 2010–we find on the Hegelian Left the praxis philosophy, which has been mediated through Western Marxism, American pragmatism, French existentialism, and psychoanalytical theory, and to which also the critical theory of society and the dialectical religiology belong (Habermas 1985a). The praxis philosophy holds on to the rational claim of the occidental rationalism, and to the continuation of the project Modernity toward Post-Modern alternative Future III–a society characterized by the reconciliation of personal autonomy and universal solidarity. On the Hegelian Right are situated the neo-conservativism and neo-liberalism, which have been mediated through Max Weber’s time diagnosis, the British and American liberal traditions, A. Gehlen’s pessimistic anthropology, and J. Ritter’s and E. Forsthoff ’s compensation theory. The neo-conservatives perform their identification with social modernity for the price of the rejected cultural Modernity. On the Hegelian Right, we also find the post-modern philosophy or deconstructionism, which has been mediated through Nietzsche as well as through the fundamental experiences of the aesthetical avant-garde from Heidegger, through Bataille, and Derrida, to Foucault. The post-modernists deconstruct the whole system of fundamental notions, in which Modernity has interpreted itself since the Westphalian Peace, and particularly since the bourgeois enlightenment and the bourgeois English, American and French Revolutions. Thinkers like Arnold Toynbee and Hans Küng have been situated in the Hegelian Center. The Hegelian Center is, like Hegel himself, on the basis of the intensive and extensive study of over 6,000 years of political and religious history, open toward the not revolutionary, but, nevertheless, reformatory concrete supersession of Modernity toward Post-Modernity (Habermas 1981d; 1990; 1992b; 1998; 2001c; 2004a; Toynbee 1957; 1958; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004; App. G). In the view of the critical theory of religion, when in the 21st century an anchorman or -woman of any large network in Europe or America identifies a politician or a theologian to stand to the Left or to the Right of the Center, that means simply that he is on the Right or the Left, but not extremely so.

The Notion of the Middle In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, paradoxically enough, the notion of the Middle is hard to determine exactly, be it in politics, religion, or philosophy (Hegel 1986l: 520-540; 1986c: 431-441; Viviani 2008: 64-66;

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Harprecht 2008: 15-16; Habermas 1985a; 1985b; 1988a; 1988b; 1990; Küng 1990a; 1990b: 43-46, 142-150; Honneth 1985; Dews 1986; Siebert 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b: 69-114; App. E, F). The notion of the Center looks sometimes like a political, or religious, or philosophical wandering dune, maybe even like a fiction, or an illusion. Yet, the notion of the Middle exists, nevertheless, as an idea in the heads of modern people, since the French Revolution, and it can as little be stamped out or exterminated as the notions Right or Left. Certainly, for the lexical the notion of the Middle does not seem to exist: not for the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie and not for the Encyclopedia Britannica. The latter simply points to the French center, under which all kinds of regions and institutions are mentioned. The Middle cannot even be defined geographically: the magnetic North Pole, which usually has been signified as the Center of the world, wanders up to 40 kilometers per year. Geopolitical notions, like the Middle East or Central Europe have remained extremely vague and historically continually shifting. The notion of the Center has occupied, nevertheless, most stubbornly the vocabulary and programs of politicians and religious people. There was already between World War I and World War II the Roman Catholic Center Party, which in the Weimar Republic placed itself into the Middle of the political scene between the socialists and the communists on the Left, and the liberal, nationalistic, and fascist parties on the Right, and helped to destroy the Republic completely by granting Hitler the emergency laws and thus, making him legally a dictator. In general Roman Catholic Social Ethics– solidarism–placed itself between the Right and the Left, but always with a certain inclination toward the Right, and thus helped to create the concordats with fascist states between World War I and World War II, and thus, supported the victorious neo-conservative counter-revolution of 1989, which helped to destroy the Soviet Empire. In 2008, the very conservative Pope Benedict XVI shook hands and celebrated his 80th birthday with the neo-liberal President Bush in the White House, while he was still conducting the second Iraq war, which had been condemned as being unjust by his predecessor Pope John Paul II and by himself, and which so far had produced over one million military and most of all civilian casualties: both standing far to the religious and political Right (Küng 2009). In 2009 Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of the four Bishops of the Pius Brotherhood, one of whom denied the Shoa, and all of whom were even further to the religious and political Right than the Pope. In 2009, many Catholics in Europe and America had the impression that their Church is regressing behind the Second Vatican Council instead of progressing toward the Jerusalem II Council, and some agree with this trend and others

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1207 reject it, and therefore may even leave the Church, particularly in Germany (Küng 1965; 1972; 1980; 1981b; 1984; 1990b; 1991a; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 2009; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/ Schlensog 2008; Metz 1959; 1965; 1967; 1969; 1970; 1972a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1981; 1984; Baum 1965; 1967; 1968; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1980a; 1994; 1996; 2005; 2007; Müller 2010: 76-77).

The New Middle The Middle stood in large letters on the desk of the 2009 German Chancellor Angela Merkel of the Christian Democratic Party during the last CDU Party Day (Dirks 1983a; 1983b; Kogon 1965; 1967; 2002; Schneider 2010: 13-15). In this Party, Conrad Adenauer had after World War II united members of the German Catholic and Protestant bourgeoisie. Since then this Party has continually moved further to the Right, and that not without the help of former members of the National Socialist Party and Government. During a speech at the CDU Party Day, Merkel used the word and notion Middle 34 times. When, in 1998, Merkel noticed the election campaign motto of the Social Democratic Party on the Left–The New Middle–she said dryly, With that they got us–and so they did. Merkel learned from her Party’s and her own defeat, and began to use the word and notion of the Middle as much as possible, and thus, won the next election. People like the Middle. It is popular. It gives people confidence. They distrust the Right and the Left. They hate the extremists! The good people are in the Middle, maybe precisely because it is hard to define, if at all. Already the Social Democratic Chancellor, Willy Brandt, had introduced the formula of the New Middle the first time into the political debate during the Dortmund Election Party Day in 1972, when the revolutionary youth movement still spoke about the New Left. Brandt wanted to subject the social-liberal coalition in Bonn to a higher-order and historically wellanchored idea. For Brandt, the idea of the New Middle meant that the social and liberal-libertarian, fundamental elements of democracy would come together also in Germany, if also with a delay of 100 years. That, however, meant that the Social Democratic Party on the Left would have to become eligible for the enlightened German bourgeoisie. It became clear to the first Social-Democratic Chancellor of the German Federal Republic, the victorious Brandt, that elections are won, in the name of God or of the Devil, in the Middle, defined or not. One can simply not lose an election in the Middle, be it in Germany, or in Europe, or in America, no matter how illusionary the middle may be.

1208

chapter twenty-five The Obama Presidency

In July 2008 the American mass media on the Right, i.e. Fox News, were announcing correctly and triumphantly that the most liberal Senator Barack Obama on the Left, was as Presidential candidate moving gradually to the Center, religiously, politically and even militarily, and so, of course, he had to, if he wanted to win over the American white and black bourgeoisie, and even those millions of white and black American workers, who think that they are middle class, and if he wanted to be elected the first black President of the United States in November 2008, and if he wanted to realize his big Roosevelt-liberal ideas for America (Emanuel/Reed 2006; Schneider 2010: 13-15; App. F). In the American perspective, the middle class is situated between the extremes of the very poor and the very rich classes. If Senator Obama would not have moved to the Center, i.e. toward the Right, he would not have won the Presidential election of 2008. After Senator Obama had become President he had to move even further toward the Center, or rather toward the Right, and he had thereby somewhat to disappoint some of those many enthusiastic people on the Left who had voted for him and put him into office, or he would have risked to lose most of his followers and their loyalty, and thus to jeopardize his economic and social programs, and even to be shot like the Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King, the martyrs of freedom, whose political style and rhetoric he has imitated so far quite successfully in religious as well as in secular terms (Hegel 1986l: 520-540; 1986c: 431-441; Horkheimer 1985h: chaps. 2833; Viviani 2008: 64-66; Harprecht 2008: 15-16; Habermas 1985a; 1985b; 1988a; 1988b; Küng 1990b: 43-46, 142-150; Honneth 1985; Dews 1986; Siebert 2000; 2001; 2002a; Emanuel/Reed 2006). Thus, while President Clinton wanted to establish a 100% national health insurance in 1993 and failed, President Obama promises and moves toward a less than 100% national health insurance. By March 2009, President Obama has not yet taken any steps to bring to justice the CEOs of big banks and industries, who have been responsible for the economic Pearl Harbor of 2008, 2009, 2010, or the cabinet of the second Bush Administration which has been responsible for initiating and mishandling the war against Afghanistan and against Iraq in the past 8 years, Instead of ending the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, the Obama Administration has moved 30,000 American soldiers from Iraq to Afghanistan, where his plan to negotiate with the moderate Taliban may come too late and may not succeed, because they are victorious at the moment, and threaten even the capital Tabul. However, President Obama has promised in his first Presidential Address to

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1209 Congress that the American Government shall no longer torture prisoners at home or abroad nor will it continue to outsource torture to Egypt or Romania or anywhere else: that is indeed a good step forward in moral and legal evolution (Habermas 1969; 1970; 1971; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981c; 1983; 1984a; 1985a; 1987b; 1988a; 1991b; 1992a; 1992b; Siebert 2005b; 2006a; 2006c: 1-32; 2006d: 61-114; 2007a: 61-114; 2007b: 419-457; 2007c: 1-50; 2007d; 2007g: 11-19; 2008a: 180-210; Lucke 2010: 63-66).

The New Middle and the Extremists Of course, some people of the traditional Left or of the sharp New Left of 1968 and later, found the notion of the New Middle uncomfortable from the very start (Hegel 1986l: 520-540; 1986c: 431-441; Horkheimer 1985h: chaps. 28-33; Viviani 2008: 64-66; Harprecht 2008: 15-16; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1985a; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1988a; 1988b; Küng 1990b: 43-46, 142150; Honneth 1985; Dews 1986; Küng 1990b: 43-46, 142-150; Siebert 1965; 1966; 1978; 1979a; 1979c; 1979d; 1980; 1985; 1986; 1987b; 1987d; 1989; 1993; 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 1994d; 1995; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2004a: 63-97; 2004b: 37-68; 2005a; 2005b; Schneider 2010: 13-15). Thus, in Germany after the fall of Chancellor Brandt, they invented the name and notion LeftMiddle. This mixed notion had the disadvantage, of renouncing all, even a merely fictitious logic, and was thus forgotten very fast. The political, religious, and philosophical notion of the New Middle works particularly well with the young neo-bourgeoisie in Europe and America, with the technical elite, with engineers, with the informatic people, with the founders of small businesses, with the young entrepreneurs, and with the emancipated and politically engaged women, shortly with that middle stratum, layer, class, or level, which determined the Fate of modern civil society, in so far as the national and international corporate ruling class allows it. So far, no other notion has been able to replace the Middle, e.g., Solidary Majority: it is simply too abstract, and will therefore be forgotten only too soon. Religious or secular politicians would be well advised to remember that elections are won in the fictitious Middle, and if they do not want to write this simple truth into their party programs and platforms, then they should at least keep it in their heads, for the time being: no extremists. The critical theorist of religion remembers of course that Abraham with his ethical monotheism was rather extreme, and that the same is true also of Moses and the Decalogue, and of the Gautama Buddha and his compassion, and of the Rabbi Akiba and his Schema Israel, especially the passionate love for God in martyrdom, and of the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, and his Sermon

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on the Mount, particularly the love of the neighbor and even of the stranger and the enemy, and of Mohammed and his Five Pillars, and of all of them with their Golden Rule, and of the critical theorists with their categorical imperative and their apriori of the universal communication community: they all were extremely Left in sometimes extremely Right cultural contexts (Matthew 5-7; Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Kant 1970; 1974b; 1982; Fromm 1956; 1966a; 1966b; 1976; 1992; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 28, 37, 40; 1988a 1989m: chap. 20; Reich 1971; 1976; Apel 1976b; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1983; 1986; 1987b; 1988b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 1997a; 1999; 2001a; 2005; Küng 1970; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/ Bechert 1984: C; Schneider 2010: 13-15; Kannengiesser 2010: 15-18; Müller 2010: 76-77). Since the–before the Westphalian Peace still Aristotelian– Middle is really comfortably illusionary, every politician, or theologian or philosopher on the Left, who says that he is moving to the Center, is really moving to the Right, and every politician, or theologian, or philosopher, who is on the Right, and says, that he is moving to the Middle, is really moving to the Left (Hegel 1986l: 520-540; 1986c: 431-441; Horkheimer 1985h: chaps. 28-33; Viviani 2008: 64-66; Harprecht 2008: 15-16; Habermas 1985a; 1985b; 1988a; 1988b; 1990; Küng 1990b: 43-46, 142-150; Honneth 1985; Dews 1986; Siebert 2000; 2001; Schneider 2010: 13-15). While the Right and the Left are well-defined real, political, or religious, or philosophical positions, the Middle is a vague, non-existing, but, nevertheless, possibly very effective fiction. There is much dishonesty, and fraud, and ideology, i.e. untruth, involved in all these political, theological, or philosophical movements. For the dialectical theory of religion, the solution to the problem of the modern antagonism between the religious and the secular is not religious fundamentalism or a pure secularism, or something in the middle between them, but rather a secular socially modified and motivated humanism, driven by the longing for the otherness of light, friendship, and love, and alternative Future III–a reconciled society, and beyond that for the imageless, and nameless, and notionless wholly Other than the world of appearance and human loneliness, abandonment, and alienation, anxiety and depression, and all the unbearable injustices done to individuals and nations, as the Golden Rule in all its forms is continually and habitually broken among individuals as well as nationally and particularly internationally, as well as its secular equivalents, like the categorical imperative and the apriori of the unlimited communication community (Hegel 1986d: 243-245; Horkheimer 1988a; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1996s: 40-44, 44-49, 49-52, 52-54, 54-57, 60-62, 62-67, 72-75; Fromm 1966a;

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1211 1966b; 1976; Apel 1975; 1976b; 1990; Habermas 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1983; 2006c; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Küng 1994ab: 904-905; 1990b; Müller 2010: 76-77; App. G).

Genocide According to the Left-Hegelian Adorno, when Hegel in his Phenomenology of the Mind equated absolute freedom with the terror of death, he anticipated post-modern, global alternative Future I–the collection of the human species into an abstract totality, in which everything would stand under the principle of self-preservation, and in which partial genocide was used as the means of absolute integration, and in which the pure identity of all human beings with their notion was enforced as nothing else than the terror of death itself, as well as post-modern global alternative Future II– the possible universal genocide, the possible annihilation of humanity on this earth (Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c: 169-170; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 3; App. G). Through his unparalleled dialecticalspeculative energy of almost 200 years ago, Hegel had been able to gain the insight that the absolute self-preservation, and the absolute negation of everything living, and thereby finally also universal genocide were the same. For Hegel as well as for the critical theorists of society on the Hegelian Left, the fundamental energy of the infinite longing for the theological glowing fire, for the Absolute, for the Transcendence, for the totally Other, took the logical form of a dialectical-speculative energy: for the former an idealistic one, and for the latter a materialistic one (Hegel 1986a: 344-345, 417; 1986c: 72-77, 369, 423, 424, 590-591; 1986e: 48-53, 174, 267, 270; 1986m: 135; 1986r: 173; 1986l; 1986f: 548-574; 1986t: 386, 399, 407, 41; Jamme/Schneider 1984; Marx 1961a: 17-18; Adorno 1969; 1970: 286-287, 1997j/2: 608-617; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1985l: 286-287, 483-493; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 2324; Habermas 1990: 9-19; 127-143; 1991a: part III). At the time of Hegel, in the real historical perspective, nothing of the particular genocides of the 20th century could be foreseen yet: the annihilation of 1 million Armenians, or 6 million Jews, or 27 million Russians. Also at the time of Adorno, in the real historical perspective, nothing of the particular genocides of the 21st century could be foreseen yet: the annihilation of millions of people in Sudan, Rwanda, Darfur, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Palestine, particularly Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc. (Dallaire 2005). From Eugen Kogon, who as a Roman Catholic Christian had spent 7 years in the concentration camp Buchenwald, Adorno heard the story that the terrorist SS executioners

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told the Jehovah’s Witnesses shortly before they killed them with Cyclon B, pointing to the gas chambers and crematoria: Tomorrow you shall twist and wind yourself as smoke through this chimney into heaven (Kogon 1995: 5-12; Adorno 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c: 169-170; App. E). According to another Kogon report, the SS men called over to a Jew: Now it is 12 o’clock. At 12.05 o’clock you shall be with Jehovah (Yahweh). According to Kogon, the execution did not even last 5 minutes. For Adorno, what the SS men said to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or to the Jew, was the most precise formulation of the Satanic perversion of the theological and metaphysical thought of Immortality, as well as of God, and of Freedom, and thus of the substance of theology and metaphysics themselves, which the 20th century had to experience. Unfortunately, this experience has continued into the 21st century, into the many Abu Ghraibs and Guatanamo Bays, and their torturous water boarding operations for the purpose of intelligence, interrogation and information concerning past terror attacks, and of the prevention of future ones.

American Anti-Semitism Adorno and Horkheimer had experienced genocidal religious and secular anti-Semitism not only in Germany, but also during their exile in the United States (Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 168-208; Wiesenthal 1998; Baum 1959; 2003). It was portrayed very masterfully and critically by the Hollywood-Fox movie Gentlemen Agreement of 1947. At the time, Adorno and Horkheimer were still in the United States (Horkheimer 1996q: 778910). Some hotels, country clubs, medical and law schools, etc. were exclusively open for gentiles, and closed for Jews. However, some industries, like Hollywood were very much in the hands of Jews. American anti-Semitism shared with German anti-Semitism the opinion that Judaism and Marxist communism were connected with each other. Therefore to be critical of anti-Semitism meant to be in favor of communism. Thus, the AntiAmerican Activities Committee in Washington D.C held all people who had been engaged in the making of the movie Gentlemen Agreement under the suspicion not only of being critical of anti-Semitism but also under the suspicion of being communists. Many of them suffered very much and lost their careers and had their existence broken. Some rescued themselves by betraying their colleagues to the Anti-American Activities Committee. All this threw a dark shadow on Hollywood for many years. Some of the critical theorists were afraid that also American anti-Semitism would lead– like in Germany and Europe–to concentration camps and genocide, and

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1213 therefore sometimes had doubts and fell into despair concerning their own survival and the success of their own project: the Left-Hegelian critical theory of society (Horkheimer 1988d: chaps. 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11). The movie Gentlemen Agreement is shown again today–in March 2010–on American television in the face of new waves of new forms of anti-Semitism in the Middle East, Europe, the Americas and elsewhere. The Protocols of the Elder of Zion, which were used against the Jews by Adolf Hitler in Germany, and by Henry Ford in America, are re-published again today in large numbers, even in China (Marsden 1922; Ford 1920: Vol. I-IV; Coughlin 1932; 1933; Baldwin 2001). In the 1940s, the mainly Jewish Hollywood did not want only to reflect public opinion, but also to shape it: particularly, against anti-Semitism. At the time, Horkheimer and his wife Maidon lived at 13524 D’Este Drive, Pacific Palisades, California, and Adorno and his wife Gretel as well as Friedrich Pollock lived nearby, not too far from Los Angeles and Hollywood, with which they were in contact, and with which Brecht actively cooperated (Horkheimer 1996r). Here, Horkheimer and Adorno wrote together their Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which likewise elements of anti-Semitism were criticized in the context of the American culture industry and the bourgeois enlightenment as mass deception (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969). The critical theorists were very much aware of the limits of enlightenment, particularly in the face of German, European, and American anti-Semitism.

Man, Truth, Power, Force, and Terror In 1953, Adorno, Horkheimer and Kogon had a public discourse with each other about modern man and his many anxieties, and about terror as one source of them (Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 15, 25). They spoke about a human being, who stood before an overwhelming force, and who was supposed to hold on to his own truth. For the three discourse partners, the question of the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate to Jesus of Nazareth shortly before his crucifixion–What is the truth?–was still valid in the 20th century (Deuteronomy 10, 16; Hertz, 5716/1956: 789/16; John 18: 33-40; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; 1989m: 148; App. E). According to the dialectical religiology, so was the answer of Jesus: the Truth was the Kingdom of Heaven, which was not of this world, of the Jewish state, or of the Roman Empire, or of any other earthly empire and its armies (John 18: 33-40; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; 1989m: 148). This Truth the critical theorists of society inverted into the wholly Other of this finite world, with all its immeasurable powers, forces, injustices, tortures and terrors (John 18: 3340; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 37, 40;

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1989m: chaps. 15, 25; Habermas 1991a: part III; App. B, C, D). Who am I, so Horkheimer asked, that I could really stand to my truth, even if it appeared clear to me? For Horkheimer, the terror, which after all wanted to force on an individual another truth than his own, represented in a certain way the distortion of the Revelation. Terror did this by establishing a heteronomous truth as the real truth opposite the individual: something, which was not generated out of the autonomous, individual subject. Kogon complemented Horkheimer, by saying, that the heteronomous truth was stronger than the truth that the individual subject, who was abandoned, represented, not through its substance, but rather through being furnished and equipped with power, force, and terror. Yet, Horkheimer had to add that this individual subject had to ask himself or herself always in the face of power, force and terror, if indeed any sentence was so certain that we could not possibly doubt it? Horkheimer and Kogon agreed that consequently the individual doubted himself, and that this belonged to the essence of human reason, and of a decent human being. It appeared to Kogon that this was a specific weakness of the good human being in the face of power, force, and terror, since he or she was inclined to direct the doubt against himself or herself. For Horkheimer, it was the weakness of the good man that he knew something of the doubt, which was still connected with any truth that we found in ourselves. Adorno criticized philosophy, because in the face of power, force and terror, it made out of death a kind of religion, and it tried to let such things as anxiety, meaninglessness, and mere human existence appear through some opaque mythological manipulations in such a way as if they themselves were the meaning. Adorno thought particularly of the philosophy and the jargon of his archenemy Martin Heidegger: Cetero censeo Heidegerum delendum esse (Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1997f: 413-523; Horkheimer 1989m: 148-149). According to Adorno, this kind of Heideggerian existential philosophy had precisely the function, of giving to the condition of blind anxiety and meaninglessness in the face of power, force and terror a kind of a halo, so that now it looked as if this condition, into which people have fallen today, would hang together with the essence of man, with the creation, and with God knows what else. Thus, consequently nothing should be changed in them, but that one should take them upon oneself in all their horror, and finally even to affirm them. Horkheimer, Adorno, and Kogon agreed that it was necessary to educate again human beings, who learned to resist out of their own autonomy, power, force and terror. The three educators shared the belief that they were able to accomplish such education. All three thinkers wanted to help those tendencies in modern

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1215 civil society to victory, which aimed at making life important for people, and which helped them to recognize that what hindered them to do so was the haunting nightmare, and that the haunting did not lay in the hope that things could become different and otherwise than what was actually and positivistically the case in antagonistic late capitalistic society (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 397-407, 408-433, 569-573, 578-587; App. B, C, D, F).

Holy Terrors If, according to the critical theory of religion, one stands today–March 2010–on the secular side of the modern dichotomy between the sacred and the profane in late capitalist society, it may be very hard, to understand and to appreciate, how far Al-Qaeda, promoting holy terrors, constitutes a genuine religious movement or institution, that acts on behalf of a religious community, not to speak of a world religion like Islam, or if religion is only an ideological cover up for its secular economic and political interests (Habermas 2003b; 2006c; Lincoln 2004, Borradori 2003: 1-200; Müller 2010: 76-77; Lucke 2010: 62-66). If the critical theorist of religion compares the instructions given to the Islamic Jihad fighters, according to Mohammed Atta’s last will and testament, and to Osama bin Laden’s broadcasts, there can be no doubt that the Jihadist’s attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and against the Pentagon in Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001, were motivated by Islamic religious convictions (Esposito/Mogahed 2007; Bin Laden 2005; Habermas 2001a: 9-12; Borradori 2003). At the same time, the dialectical religiologist can discover parallels between the Islamic Jihadists’ statements on one hand, and the confessedly born-again Christian President George W. Bush’s pronouncements, on the other, and he can see that both sides make similar strong appeals to religious tradition, the one to Islam, and the other to Christianity, the one overtly and the other less so, but still very clearly and powerfully (Küng 1994a; 1994b; 2004; App. E). Thus, two world religions, Islam and Christianity, are pulled into the political and military praxis of force, violence, terror and the lex talionis: the application of terror and counter-terror (Habermas 2001a; 2006c; Borradori 2003). There is, of course, the difference that when the alleged Muslims practice the lex talionis, they find at least no opposition in the Holy Qu’ran, but when the allegedly born again Christian politician engages in actions of collective retaliation, he acts against and thus stands under the judgment of the New Testament in terms of inner criticism: the fourth and fifth commandment

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of the Sermon on the Mount. It is not true, that–as some post-Modernists assert–modernity has supposedly ended twice. The newer Marxist form of Modernity is supposed to have ended in Berlin in 1989. The older liberal or bourgeois form of Modernity is supposed to have ended on September 11, 2001, when Atta and his 18 Jihad fighters trans-functionalized the four civil airliners with their about 246 passengers into living rockets and guided them not into religious objects like the St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, or into the Episcopalian Cathedral in Washington D.C. but rather into the entirely secular World Trade Center, in New York, the capitalist citadel of the Western civilization, and into the likewise totally secular military center of this civilization, the Pentagon in Washington D.C., which in the eyes of the suicidal religious murderers executed the killing that supports the global stealing which is initiated by the other, the economic and financial center in New York. One can hardly say that Modernity has ended while the United States tries to replace French colonialism in Indochina and British colonialism in Iraq, and in general European colonialism in many other places. Colonialism and neo-colonialism belong into Modernity, and not to a post-Modern, post-bourgeois, post-capitalist world. The same is true of Jewish, Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, The premodern religious fathers, to whom fundamentalism would like to return– Abraham, Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed–were no religious fundamentalists or terrorists (Hegel 1986q; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; App. E).

Dialectical Analysis Of course, in order to understand the transition from Modernity to postModernity, i.e. alternative Futures I, II, or III, we need both large scale and focused analyses: a combination seldom to be found among deconstructionists, or neo-conservatives (Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Marcuse 1960; Lincoln 2004; Habermas 1970; 1971; 1973; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981d: 3-14; 1983; 1984a; 1984b; 1985a; 1985b; 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 1987d; 1988a; 1990; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 1992b; 2001c; 2004a; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; Dubiel 1988; 1992; 1993: 5-11; 1994: 5-13; 1996: 33-40; Kellner 1989; 1991; 2001; MacIntyre 2006; Wolin 2006; Buck-Morss 1977; Peukert 1976; Küng 1990b; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004). The post-modernists are really anti-modernists, like the old Orthodox Jews, Christians and Muslims, or the old romantics had been, and as such they simply do not have the mix of discrete and large pictures and notions, which the dialectical analysis by Hegelian historical idealism and by Marxian historical materialism had produced once. Dialectical

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1217 analysis can still bring to light nuances and shades of meaning that have eluded deconstructionist as well as neo-conservative analysts of contemporary events, and texts, and contexts: a broad range of topics reaching from the immediate impact of September 11, 2001 to the stances taken by President Bush and Osama bin Laden afterwards, to the broader role of religion in political conflicts and their application of force, terror, and lex talionis across world-history (Exodus 20: 13; 21: 24; Matthew 5: 3842; Holy Qur’an, Sura II,178; Matthew 38-42; Kannengiesser 2010: 15-17). According to the dialectical religiology, a daring and masterful dialectical time diagnosis and time prognosis would force us to reconsider many conventional ideas of religion, politics and culture.

Explosion In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, there can be no doubt that through the religiously motivated terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the general tension between secular civil society and profane, democratic, constitutional state on one hand, and the three prophetic Abrahamic religions, on the other, exploded in a very new way, and continues to do so (Habermas 2001; Kim 1996: 267-283; Müller 2010: 76-77). For the 19 terroristic Jihadists, who as they committed suicide killed about 3,000 other human beings, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were symbols of the globalized secular modernity, and as such embodied the Great Satan as he appears in the Holy Qur’an, as well as in the Hebrew Bible, and in the New Testament (1 Chronicle 21: 1; Job 1: 6; 2: 7; Zachariah 3: 1; Holy Qur’an, Sura II: 168, 169, 208; Matthew 4: 1, 3, 10, 11, 24; 7: 22; 9: 34; 10: 8; 11: 18; 12: 22, 26, 27, 28; 13: 29; 16: 23; 17: 17; 25: 41; Efron 2009; App. E). However, the millions of secular eyewitnesses of the quasi apocalyptic happening on the television screen also remembered the Biblical images during the masochistically repeated view of the collapse of the twin-towers of Manhattan (Isaiah 65, 66; Revelation 21, 22). According to Bin Laden, the terror attacks had taken place in retaliation for American crimes reaching from Hiroshima and Nagasaki through Vietnam to Palestine. They also, according to President Bush, now elicited a counter-retaliation in the forms of the war against Afghanistan and Iraq: lex talionis, which so far–2010–has lasted 9 years. The late Pope John Paul II, who courageously opposed Jihad as well as the American retaliation on the basis not only of the Augustinian Seven Point Just War Theory but also of the New Testament and its fourth commandment of the Sermon on the Mount, was not listened to on the Islamic or the American side. The language of the lex talionis, by which not only the

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American President reacted to the incomprehensible catastrophe, received a tone that seemed to come from the Hebrew Bible (Exodus 21: 24). It looked as if the terror attack had put into motion in the innermost dimension of the secular society a long repressed religious element. Masses of people in Europe and America began to fill the synagogues, the churches, and the mosques in order to pray. This underground correspondence, however, did not lead the civil-religious, sorrowful gathering of masses of people in the New York Stadium to a symmetrical attitude of hate, and demands for force, terror and retaliation. In spite of all patriotism, there arose no call for a limitation of the national criminal law in favor of a war of revenge.

The Non-Contemporaneity of Motives and Means In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, fundamentalism is an exclusively modern phenomenon in spite of its traditional religious language (Almond/Appleby/Sivan 2003; Habermas 2001a: 10-12.). Immediately, what Bloch had once called non-contemporaneity of the religious motives, on one hand, and the modern means of the 19 terroristic Jihadists, on the other, became visible. In the later was reflected a non-contemporaneity of culture and society in the home countries of the Jihadists, mainly Saudi Arabia, which had been the result of an accelerated and radically uprooting modernization process. What many people in the West had experienced under happier circumstances in the past 400 years at least as a process of what Habermas, following Hegel, called creative destruction, does not contain in the present–2010–Arabic world of the Middle East any promise of an experiential compensation for the pain of the disintegration of traditional religiously grounded life forms. Here, the lack of the promise of an improvement of the material conditions of life is only one factor. Decisive in the Middle East is the lack of a change of consciousness, because it is blocked through centuries of feeling of humiliation by proud people, who had once– in the Middle Ages–possessed a high culture superior to the West. This blocked change of consciousness expresses itself politically in terms of its opposition against the modern separation between religion and the state, which in the West had slowly evolved since the Westphalian Peace and particularly since the English, American, and French Revolutions (Hegel 1986p: 236-246; 1986g: 406-514; 1986l: 491-540; Habermas 1992a; Müller 2010: 76-77). Also in Europe and America, to whom history gave centuries in order to find a sensible attitude toward the Janus-head of Modernity, secularization is still today–in 2010–connected with ambivalent feelings, as the on-going struggle between believers and secularists inside and

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1219 outside the faith communities in American and European civil societies concerning homosexuality and lesbianism, human embryonic stem cell research, fetal experimentation, capital punishment, abortion, assisted suicide, the withdrawal of nutrition and hydration from terminally ill persons, negative artificial birth control, or the resort to war, force, violence, terror and revenge as a means of resolving disputes between nations, etc. shows only too clearly. Of course also in the West, the modern separation of Church and State has never prevented the close cooperation between them: e.g. the cooperation between the Vatican and the fascist states of the 20th century, and the Vatican and the liberal states in the 21st century, in spite of mutual criticism (Lortz 1964: 842-1023; Müller 2010: 76-77; App. E, F).

War Against Terrorism In the view of the critical theory of religion, there are hardened orthodoxies in Europe and America, as well as in the Middle East and the Far East, and Africa, which resist further religious or secular evolution: among Christians and Jews, and Muslims as well as among Taoist, Buddhists, Hindus, and Shintoists, as well as among the believers of other world religions (Hegel 1986a: 9-229, 234-238, 239-254, 274-418; 1986p: 302-389; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346, 347-536; Habermas 2001a: 10-12; Küng 1970; 1984; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; App. E). Whoever would like to avoid a war among cultures, including terror and retaliation, must remember the open dialectic of the occidental secularization process. The so-called war against terrorism, which President G.W. Bush has declared after the tragedy of September 11, 2001, and which continues today–in March 2010–under the new Obama Administration, is in reality no war at all. Wars can take place only between states, not between states and a religious movement (Hegel 1986g: 398514; Habermas 1992a; 1995; 1998). Terrorism also expresses the fatefully, speechless collision of worlds, which must develop a common language beyond the dumb force of the terrorists, as well as of the rockets directed against them. In the face of a globalization, which asserts itself over limitless markets, many enlightened Westerners–like e.g. Jürgen Habermas and his disciples and Hans Küng and his followers–had hoped for a return of the political in a different form: not in the Hobbesian or Schmittian primordial form of the globalized security state, i.e. in the dimension of police, secret service and military, but as worldwide civilizing formative power (Hegel 1986g: 398-514; Habermas 1992a; 1995; 1998; Küng 1990b; Colpe/SchmidtBiggemann 1993; Schmidt-Biggemann 1988; Meier 1994; Mehring 1992; Groh 1998; App. B, C, D).

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According to the critical theory of religion, the present–2010–waves of global Islamic terrorism cannot be understood without capitalist globalization, which Hegel had predicted already in the early decades of the 19th century in his Philosophy of Law in terms of the internally necessary expansion of modern civil society in its search for always cheaper labor, natural resources, and consumers in the form of colonization and empire building (Hegel 1986g: 382-393; Habermas 1990; 1992a; 1995; 1998; 2001a; 2003b; 2004a; 2004c; 2006c; Lucke 2010: 63-66). The contemporary, international development that goes by the name of Globalization refers to the continued systematic expansion of the capitalist productive relations and forces of production of the so-called First World, or primary countries, or G8 into the Third or Fourth World or peripheral countries of the world (Ott 2004; Klein 2007; Kinzer 2006; Perkins 2007; Scahill 2007). The stated rationale and purpose of this economically driven globalization process is to integrate all countries into a global economy, through which all nationstates and their citizens can supposedly improve their quality of life and participate in the development of prosperity, democracy, and peace. This is to be accomplished through such international bodies as the World Trade Organization [WTO], the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund [IMF], and their Structural Adjustment Programs [SAP’s], the socalled trans-national corporations, and the policies of trade liberalization, the growth of stable financial institutions, debt relief for poor countries, etc. George Soros, a leading proponent of such globalization, has stated: I have adopted a rather narrow definition of globalization: I equate it with the free movement of capital and the increasing domination of national economies by global financial markets and multinational corporations (Soros 2002: 1).

This development has also been called the globalization from above, the new economy, neo-liberalism or the globalization of corporate capitalism,

and its being marketed and also enforced as being inevitable. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, international Islamic terrorism is the inevitable response from below against this inevitable globalization from above. This inevitability, however, is in both cases an ideological matter, i.e. a matter of false consciousness, of the masking of class, national and racial interest, shortly, the untruth. As such, this inevitability produces the apologetical rationale for the extremely ominous and cruel consequences

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1221 of this globalization from above. Noam Chomsky’s critical and ironical definition of globalization expresses the driving spirit of this top-down, neo-liberal concept and its worldwide development: The poor complain, they always do, but that’s just idle chatter. Our system brings rewards to all, at least to all who matter.

In the form of international Islamic terrorism the poor classes and nations, of course, no longer only complain and chatter, but they attack with force, violence and terror, and that precisely at the moment when the neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1989 prides itself on having conquered Marxism as well as fascism once and for all. Of course, those who matter in this globalizing neo-liberal system are the same people that have mattered throughout the 500+ year development of the capitalist system itself, particularly since the Westphalian Peace and since the bourgeoisie revolutions: the corporate ruling class. It is this national and international capitalist class who, in the universal notion of globalization, strategically utilizes not only the economic, but also the political and military subsystems of the nations in order to achieve their own particular, private bourgeois interests. In this process, for the time being, the Islamic Jihadists and terrorists have taken the place of the beaten secular socialists and communists through the 1989 victorious neo-conservative counter-revolution. In Afghanistan, the American bourgeoisie used bin Laden and his organization and their terrorism against the Soviet army and occupation. Bin Laden thinks that he brought the Soviet Empire down and with it the newer, secular, socialist modernization, and that he is now able to do the same to the older secular bourgeois modernization: through force and terror and the praxis of the lex Talionis (Bin Laden 2005; Esposito/Moghahed 2007; App. C, D, E).

Return of Civil Society to Eastern Europe For many years George Soros, a liberal Hungarian Jew and billionaire, has supported the Eastern European professors and students in my two international courses in Dubrovnik, Croatia–The Future of Religion–and in Yalta, Crimea, Ukraine–Religion in Civil Society as part of his dream and project, of letting civil society return to Eastern Europe (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Habermas 1990; 1992a; 1995; 1998; 2001a; 2001c; 2006c; Soros 2002: 1). However, when his dream was finally fulfilled through the neoconservative counter-revolution of 1989, he was disappointed because the Eastern-European states were too weak to restrain the Western corporations breaking and streaming into their territories. Soros had not antici-

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pated a neo-liberal, but rather a liberal civil society for Eastern Europe, in which capitalism would be controlled by a socially modified liberal, democratic, constitutional state. Soros blames neo-liberalism, which once again split Eastern European societies and cities into rich and poor classes, a small wealthy new bourgeoisie on one hand, and a large poor proletariat, on the other, for the failure of the re-liberalization of the former socialist Eastern Europe. Thus today–in March 2010–Soros financially supports those forces in the American Democratic Party that stand for a socially modified liberalism, particularly the Democratic President Barack Obama, and liberal political movements, like Move On, which are critical of and fought against the neo-liberal second Bush Administration and its catastrophic domestic and international policies. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, while secular socialistic parties and movements are struggling today against globalization in the shadow of the Islamic rebellion, particularly in the Middle East, Central and Latin America, and Asia, they shall move into the foreground again as soon as the former will be exhausted. The real opponent of the global bourgeoisie is, and shall be, secular global humanistic socialism, not global Islam.

Maximalization of Profit In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, today–in March 2010– international Islamic terrorism is the other side of the search of the most advanced capitalist countries for always cheaper human labor and natural resources, rubber in Vietnam, or oil in Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, etc. (Ott 2004; Perkins 2007; Klein 2007; Kinzer 2006; Scahill 2007; Clinton 2004). The terror from below is met by terror from above. The neo-liberal globalization of the capitalist class’s corporate pursuit of the maximization of its profit and power is based quite parasitically on the systematic exploitation of the international debt, suffering and need of former colonized, Third and Fourth World countries, their workers, as well as their natural resources. For their very survival, debt-ridden and poverty-stricken Third and Fourth World countries are forced to go to the World Bank and IMF, in order to request a short-term loan for the country to remain solvent. However, to receive such a loan, these countries must submit to the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programs, which ravage the national economy through its privatization, the liberalization of its capital/investment market, the cutting of expenditures on non-profitable social welfare programs, and the increase in prices and taxation. What is, therefore, being globalized systematically is not only the profit driven interests of the international capitalist class, but

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1223 also its exploitive corollary of human and environmental domination, suffering, hopelessness, destruction, and death. This globalization from above has also been correctly called the race to the bottom for the so-called peripheral Third and Fourth World countries, as well as for the workers and their families throughout the world. This corporate capitalist globalization from above, however, has also spawned the world-wide protest and resistance to it in terms of a globalization from below, which has taken the form of massive world-wide street protests during the meetings of the WTO, and of the G8 First World politicians and financial ministers: and in terms of the escalation of international Islamic terrorism. According to Ulrich Beck, Professor of Sociology at the University of Munich, the current scare word of globalization, seemingly unavoidable in any public statement, points not to an end of politics, but rather to its escape from the categories of the national state, and even from the schema defining what is political and nonpolitical action (Beck 2004). For whatever the referent of the new globalization rhetoric may be–economy, markets, job competition, production, goods and services, financial flows, information, lifestyles, etc.–the political consequences of the stage-managed economic globalization risk stand out in sharp relief. One of these political consequences of the economic globalization is the international Jihadism and Islamic terrorism. Another consequence is the shift to the Left and the growth of socialism in Central and Latin America: Venezuela, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, etc. These political consequence can in the last analysis not be stopped militarily, or through counter-terrorism from above, but only politically, and socially, and economically in the context of the process of the nationalization of banks and industries in all advanced capitalist societies as response to the global economic tsunami of 2008, 2009, 2010 (Himick 2009: 1-3; Himmick/Drehs 2008: 1-3; Cooke 2008: 1-2; Lucke 2010: 63-66; Schneider 2010: 13-15).

Hope At this moment in history–in March 2010–there remains not much more than what Habermas has called, the pale hope for the Hegelian cunning of reason, and a little bit of self-reflection (Hegel 1986c: 53; 1986e: I, 398: 1986f: II, 452; 1986j: 365; 1986l: 119, l49; Habermas 2001: 10-12). This is because the dichotomy of the speechlessness splits up not only the different religiously based cultures or civilizations, but also the house of the West as well. The Westerners will encounter with adequate measure of the eye the risks of an elsewhere derailing secularization process only if they understand what secularization means in the Western post-secular societies. This

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problematic is connected with the old dichotomy of faith and knowledge (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986p: 9-88; [email protected]; Müller 2010: 76-77). At this time–in 2010–this modern dichotomy cannot be reconciled. Yet, maybe it is possible not to close up the dialectic of faith and knowledge, either fundamentalistically or scientistically and positivistically and naturalistically. The critical theory of religion aims at an open dialectic between religious faith on one hand, and secular experience and knowledge, on the other (Horkheimer 1985l: 483-492; Siebert 2006c: 1-32; 2006d: 61-114; 2007a: 99-113; 2007b: 419-457; 2007c: 1-50; 2007d; 2007e; 2007f: 1-68; 2007g: 11-19; Kim 1996: 267-283; Müller 2010: 76-77; App. E, F).

Rationality, Universality, and Equality When in 1810 Hegel taught his students in the lower class of the Gymnasium in Nuremberg on the topics of rights, duties and religion, he also spoke about the jus talionis or lex talionis (Hegel 1986d: 243-245). According to Hegel, the compulsive force, coercion, social restraints, which have been posited through the violation of the individual’s personal external freedom, crimes against property and life, had not only to be superseded, i.e. the negative representation of the inner nullity, invalidity, and futility of such an action against an individual’s external freedom, but the retaliation, reprisal, retribution must also enter in a positive way. Hegel demanded that against the violent and forceful action, which violated the external freedom of the individual, the validity of the form of rationality in general, of universality and equality, must be established. As the actor, so Hegel explained, was a rational being, so lay in his violent and forceful action, that it be something universal. If one individual robbed another person, he or she also robbed himself, or herself. If an individual murdered another person, he or she murdered all people, and himself or herself. No man was an island! The action is a law that the actor has established, and which he has recognized in and for itself through his or her action. According to Hegel, the actor could, therefore, for himself or for herself, be subsumed under the same mode of action, which he or she had established, and thus the equality, which he or she had violated through his or her violent and forceful action, could be restored again. That precisely was what Hegel called the jus talionis or the lex talionis (Exodus 21: 24; Matthew 5: 38-43; Hegel 1986d: 243-245).

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1225 Retaliation For Hegel, the jus talionis, or the right to retaliate, rested in general on the rational nature of the actor, who had done the wrong or the injustice: e.g. the robbery or the murder (Hegel 1986d: 243-245). The retaliation consisted in that the wrong, or the injustice, must turn over dialectically into what is right. The wrong or unjust action was admittedly a singular irrational act. However, because a rational being performed the act, it was not according to its content, but, nevertheless, according to its form something rational and universal. Furthermore, according to Hegel, the action must be considered as a principle, or as a law. Yet, as such the principle of the law was valid at the same time only for the actor, because only he recognized it through his action, not for the other individuals around him. Thus, the actor himself belonged essentially under this principle or under this law, which must be carried out on him as well. It was right for Hegel that the injustice, which the actor had done, was carried out on him as well. This was so, because through this second action, which he had recognized, a restoration of equality was established. Hegel was fully aware, that this was only formal right.

Revenge and Punishment Therefore, it was important for Hegel, that the jus talionis, or the retaliation, or the reprisal was not supposed to be carried out through the individual insulted, or offended, or violated, i.e. the victim of the violent and forceful act, or through his or her relatives (Hegel 1986d: 243-245). This was because in the case of the victim, or his or her relatives, the universal consideration of right was at the same time connected with the contingency of personal passion. Therefore, the application of the lex talionis had to be carried out by a third party having power and force, namely the judge, who merely established and executed the validity of the universal, the law. Such action of the judge, Hegel no longer considered to be revenge, but rather punishment. For Hegel, retaliation and punishment were differentiated from each other, in that revenge was a kind of retaliation, insofar as the insulted, offended, or violated, party, the victim, or his or her relatives, carried it out, and that punishment was a kind of retaliation, insofar as a judge in public applied it. Thus, the retaliation had to be carried out as punishment, because in the case of revenge or reprisal personal passion was influential, and right was, thereby, clouded. In Hegel’s view, furthermore the revenge or the reprisal did not have the form of

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right, but rather the form of arbitrariness, as the insulted, offended, and violated party was always acting out of feeling or a subjective motivating force. It was felt to be merely a singular action, and thus continued to be reproduced un-reconciled into a bad infinity. Hegel’s reflections on the jus talionis retain their validity today–in 2010–not only on the individual level, but also on the collective level of state and history. This the critical theorist could observe in Palestine since the first and second Intifada, and since September 11, 2001 in Afghanistan and Iraq (Hegel 1986d: 243245; Mroue 2004: 1-4; Jelinek 2004: 1-2; Brisson 2004: 1-2; Burns 2004: 1-6l; Marshall 2004: 1-2; Kucinic 2008). Therefore, nobody applauded in the full assembly of the United Nations on September 21, 2004, when President Bush revealed his intent to continue the war in Iraq, no matter what (Hegel 1986d: 243-245; Lindlaw 2004: 1-3). Shortly before President Bush’s speech, the Secretary of the U.N. had once more stressed in public, that the war against Iraq was illegal. That put President Bush under the suspicion of being a war criminal. Shortly after September 11, 2001, we in the American peace movement wrote letters to President Bush and Senators in Washington D.C with the demand: Not Lex talionis, but policy change! Yet, the American Government, instead of making policy changes in the Middle East, and elsewhere, took the law into its own hands, and in the name of its own sovereignty practiced revenge unilaterally against Afghanistan and Iraq for the September 11, 2001 attack, without the consensus of the Security Council and the UN, and in violation of its own constitution and international law, and all this in the name of decisonism justified by an emergency situation, rather than in the name of universal normativism, which could have changed the brutal revenge and retaliation into civilized punishment (Kucinic 2008).

Legal Punishment Where Hegel spoke in his Aesthetics about the individual independence in the heroic times of the Greek civilization, he differentiated once more between revenge and legal punishment (Hegel 1986m: 241-242; 1986g: 92203, 360-397). According to Hegel, the legal punishment made valid the universally posited and fixed right against the crimes, violating property and life, and was practiced according to universal norms, by the organs of public power and force, through courts and judges, who as persons were accidental, Hegel conceded, that revenge could sometimes likewise be just in itself. However, retaliation rested, nevertheless, on the subjectivity of those who took on the negative deed, which had happened, and who

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1227 revenged out of the right of their own heart and conviction the injustice on the guilty one, the criminal. In Hegel’s view, the revenge of Orestes for the murder of his father Agamemnon on his mother and her lover had been just. However, Orestes executed his retaliation only in conformity to the law of his particular virtue, not, however, according to the objective judgment and right. According to Hegel, there was indeed a right or law of revenge, retaliation, and reprisal: a jus gladii, a jus or a lex talionis. There was a time for retaliatory measures or reprisals. There was payback time. Today, the airwaves are full of those words as they are exchanged particularly between the American and the Arabic world (Housego 2004: 1-3; Pickler 2004: 1-2; Loven 2004: 1-3; Mroue 2004: 1-4; Jelinek 2004: 1-2; Brisson 2004: 1-2; Burns 2004: 1-6; Marshall 2004: 1-2). Here Horkheimer agreed with Hegel, particularly concerning the Eichmann case (Horkheimer 1968: 317-320). Of course, no religion can be critical of power, force, violence, torture or terror in the other religions, or in secular enlightenment movements, without criticizing itself first. Thus, before Christianity can criticize any other religion, or the bourgeois or socialist enlightenment and revolution for terror, it must critique itself first: it was terror when Christians after having come into power in the Roman Empire through Diocletian and Constantine began to kill heretics and pagans; when the Christian knights slaughtered Arabs and Jews on their crusades to the Holy Land and Jerusalem; when Christians initiated pogroms against the Jews; when the Roman Catholic knights sacked Orthodox Byzantium on one of their crusades; when the Holy Inquisition persecuted heretics, in order to preserve the unity of faith; when Christians killed 10 million witches because they had slept with the Devil; when Charles V sent General Frundsberg from Italy to annihilate the revolutionary farmers’ army in 1525; etc. (Lortz 1964). All such religiously motivated terror deserves not revenge, but legal punishment. Also the bourgeois and socialist enlightenment and revolutionary movements cannot criticize the religions or each other because of power, force, violence, torture and terror, before they have not criticized themselves. It was terror when the revolutionary bourgeois Puritans hanged their King Charles in England in the 17th century; when the bourgeois enlighteners and revolutionaries guillotined their King Louis XVI and his family in Paris; when the socialist enlighteners and revolutionaries shot Tsar Nicolaus and his whole family in Siberia. All such enlightenment motivated terror deserves not retaliation, but legal punishment.

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chapter twenty-five From the Lex Talionis to the Golden Rule

According to the critical theory of religion, today–in March 2010–with the global phenomenon of an often religiously based ethnization of the social and historical are connected new forms of force and terror, which seem to obey the age old, most archaic lex talionis as it can be found in the Hebrew Bible and in the Holy Qur’an, and as it is negated in the fourth commandment of the most revolutionary Sermon on the Mount from the Jewish-Apocalyptic Paradigm of the Primordial Christianity (Exodus 21, 24; Matthew 5: 38-42; Jamme/Schneider 1984; Hegel 1986q: 278-286; O’Reagan 1994; Küng 1994a: 89-144; 1994b; App. E). The dialectical religiology’s critique of nationalist power, force, violence, torture, and terror culminates in the question as to whether the spell of the lax Talionis that characterizes so much of the present slaughter bench of history can possibly be broken by the fourth commandment of the Sermon on the Mount: You have learned, how it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I say this to you: offer the wicked man no resistance. On the contrary, if any one hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well, if a man takes you to law and would have your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone orders you to go one mile, go two miles with him. Give to anyone who asks, and if anyone wants to borrow, do not turn away,

and its equivalents in other world religions: Hinduism, Jainism, Chinese Religion, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, etc. (Mathew 5: 38-42; 7, 12; Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Benjamin 1988: chap. 3; Küng 1990b: 84-85; 1991a: 18-19; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng/ Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel/Schlenson 2008; App. E). It has been practiced with non-violent, terror-less, and forceless force and with the power of the powerless better argument and example alone in the 20th century in the form of a political prior concession by the Hindu Mahatma Gandhi and by the Christian Martin Luther King and their followers. Can the jus talionis or the lex talionis be broken through the fifth commandments of the Sermon on the Mount: You have learned, how it was said: You must love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say this to you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you; in this way you will be sons of your Father in heaven, for he causes his sun to rise on bad men as well as good, and his rain to fall on honest and dishonest men alike. For if you love those who love you, what right have you to claim any credit? Even the tax collectors do as much, do they not? And if you save your greetings for your brothers, are you doing anything

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1229 exceptional? Even the pagans do as much, do they not? You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5: 43-48).

It has been practiced with non-violent, terror-less, and forceless force, and with the power of the powerless better argument and example alone in the 20th century in the form of a political prior concession by the Archbishop Romero in El Salvador and by his, by the fascist Arena Party martyred liberation theologians, and nuns, and other members of the Christian communities (Lernoux 1977: chaps. I-XII). The fascist Government of El Salvador was supported against its socialist insurrectionists and revolutionaries by the United States. Two of the robbed, raped, killed, and martyred nuns had been my students at Maryknoll, New York. Both commandments of the Sermon on the Mount, the fourth and the fifth, are concretely superseded in the Golden Rule (Matthew 7: 12). The breaking of the talion through the practice of the Golden Rule may seem illusionary and utterly irrational, until one is confronted with the unending, most irrational violent and terroristic, and fundamentally mad and insane retaliation and counter-retaliation in Palestine, Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya, Sudan, Rwanda, and elsewhere (Al-Obeidi, 2004: 1-3; Snow 2004: 1-2; Heintz 2004: 1-3; Lederer 2004: 1-2; Jehl/Schmitt 2004: 1-4; Housedo 2004: 1-3; Barzak 2004a: 1-3; 2004b: 1-2; Hendawim 2004: 1-3; Lester 2004: 1-2; Dunham 2004: 1-2; Ingram 2004: 1-3). Of course, the prior concession should always be made first by the more powerful individual or nation, since they take less of a risk. In any case, the practice of the Golden Rule takes by far more courage than the chronicle violent application of the lex talionis, since the one or two percent of humanity, which may be presupposed still to exist in the opponent by the prior concession, may de facto be missing. The Golden Rule is present not only in the Sermon on the Mount from Christianity as the Religion of Becoming and of Freedom, but also in the Chinese Religion of Measure, in Hinduism as the Religion of Imagination, in Buddhism as the Religion of Inwardness, in Jainism, and in Judaism as the Religion of Sublimity, and in Islam as the Religions of Law (Hegel 1986p: I, 302-330, 331-373, 374-389; 1986q: II, 50-95, 185-346; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng 1990b: 3-28, esp. 18-19; 1991b; 1994a; App. E). The Golden Rule is acceptable also for secular Marxist humanism as religion in inheritance as well as for other forms of humanism in all parts of the world (Bloch 1972; 1971; 1970a; 1970b: chaps. 1-15). Thus, the Golden Rule could possibly become the foundation of a discourse on a new global ethos among the worldreligions, as well as among the nations, and among small groups, and individuals in the everyday life world (Küng 1990a; 1990b: 3-28, esp. 18-19).

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This discourse has started already from the UN down to most member nations, and their universities and schools. Religious faith must not merely be a putting off toward a Beyond, but can be a basis for radical protest and resistance against injustice, force and terror here and today carried and strengthened by an unsatiable longing for the totally Other than the slaughter bench of nature, society and history (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40; 1989m: chaps. 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38; Küng 1994a: 904-905; 1994b).

Different Patterns of Life According to the dialectical religiology, an evolution has taken place and continues in religion as well as in secular enlightenment, in religious as well as in secular ethics and morality: e.g. the evolution from the lex talionis to the Golden Rule, and to its inversions into the categorical imperative, and into the post-conventional morality: the a priori of the universal communication community (Exodus 20; Matthew 5-7; The Holy Qur’an 1934: Sura II; Jamme/Schneider 1984; Hegel 1986a; 1986b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 5, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43; Apel 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Habermas 1976; 1983; 1991a; 1991b: part III; 2004a; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Dews 1986; Münch 1995; Honneth 1990; 1994; 2000; Honneth/ Joas 1986; Frazer/Honneth 2003; Efron 2009; App. E). The critical theory of religion sees the whole evolution of religion and enlightenment, and religious and secular ethics and morality so far including particularly the Golden Rule and its secular inversions, as possible center of a global ethos concretely superseded in a post-theistic, humanistic religiology, including an inverse cipher theology (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1970b; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1976; Küng 1990b; App. E). It has been prepared for centuries by great theologians and philosophers, as e.g. the Buddha, Jesus, Eckhart, Spinoza, Marx, and Freud (Blakney 1941; Fromm 1976: chaps. III, IX). Unfortunately, Master Eckhart has still not yet been freed from the excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church, imposed on him 800 years ago by the Holy Inquisition, in spite of his elaborate Defense, which had been accepted by the Church when he was still alive, but then was overturned after his death, when he could not defend himself any longer. To be sure, if the still authoritarian Roman Catholic Church would convert more to the spirit of the Gospels, there would be no difficulty any longer to lift the ban and rescind the excommunication of

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1231 Eckhart, as well as of many other so called heretics, e.g. Martin Luther, and to overcome the schism between the Western Church and the Eastern Church, and the Anglican Community. Master Eckhart, the great teacher of Hegel, and of his friend Franz von Baader, and of his opponent Arthur Schopenhauer, and of Benjamin, mediated through Baader, and of Fromm, anticipated the new humanistic, neither theistic, nor atheistic, humanistic reliogiosity and inverse theology, when he, the Dominican Prior, tried to answer for himself and his mainly monastic disciples the following question: How to be at peace and to follow after God, when you discover that you are not taking the pains and doing as Christ and many of his saints have done? (Blakney 1941: xii, 23-24; Hegel 1986b: 536; 1986p: 209; Fromm 1976: chaps. III, IX; O’Regan 1994).

Master Eckhart answered the question in the following way: Anxiety and discouragement may easily come to people, when they see, how strict and diligent the lives of our Lord Jesus Christ and his saints have been, and that humanly we are not up to their level, nor even much inclined to be. When people find that they are otherwise disposed, they think they are apart from God–so far apart that they cannot follow him. Let no one think that! No one may say at any time that he is apart from God, either because of his faults, or infirmities or anything else. If, however, by reason of a great fault, you are an outcast, so that you are not able to approach God at all, then, of all times, consider that God is near you, for great harm comes of feeling that God is distant. For let a man go away or come back: God never leaves. He is always at hand and if he cannot get into your life, still he is never farther away than the door. So it is with the strenuous life of discipleship. See how this applies to your discipleship. Notice, as you must have already, just what God exhorts you to do, for all people are not called to God by the same road, as St. Paul says. If you find that your shortest road is not via visible works and great efforts and privations, which things, after all, are of no great importance, unless one is specially required by God to do them–and one is strong enough to take it without disturbing his spiritual life–if, then, you find that this way is not for you, take it calmly and make nothing of it. Perhaps you will say: If these things make no difference, why did our forebears and many of the saints do them? Now consider: Our Lord was to them a pattern and also the strength to follow it as they understood it and therefore that was the way they could do their best; but God never tied man’s salvation to any pattern. Whatever possibilities inhere in any pattern of life inhere in all, because God has given it so and denied it to none, One good way does not conflict with another and people should know that they are wrong when, seeing or hearing of some good man that his way is not like their own, they say that this is just

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chapter twenty-five so much labor lost. Because that person’s life pattern does not please them, they decry it, together with his good intentions. That is not right! We ought rather to observe the ways of other good people and despise none of them. Let each keep his own way and absorb into it the good features of other ways and thus include in his own the merits of all. A change of life pattern makes for unstable mind and character. What you get out of one pattern may be worked out in another, provided it, too, is good, praiseworthy, and directed toward God only–for not all people may travel the same road. So it is with following the strenuous way of certain saints. You may admire the pattern of their lives; they may please you immensely. And still you may not be able to go their way.

Having-Pattern of Existence According to the critical theory of religion, Master Eckhart had described and analyzed particularly the difference between two contradictory patterns of life, the having-pattern and the being-pattern, with a penetration and clarity not surpassed by any teacher (Blakney 1941; Fromm 1976: 48-68). Master Eckhart’s greatest influence radiated particularly from his German sermons, which affected not only his contemporaries and disciples, but also mystics after him, and today–in 2010–those people, who are living in modern civil society, and who are seeking authentic guidance to a non-theistic, rational, yet religious, philosophy of life. The classic source of Eckhart’s views on the having-pattern of life and the being-pattern of existence was the Sermon on the Mount, especially: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5: 13; Blakney 1941: 227-232). Master Eckhart approached the problems of the having pattern of life, when he discussed the relation between possession and freedom. For Master Eckhart, human freedom was restricted to the extent, to which people were bound to possessions, works, and lastly, to their own egos. By being bound to their egos, i.e. ego-boundness or egomania, people stood in their own way and were blocked from bearing fruit, from realizing themselves fully. According to Eckhart, the human aim was to get rid of the fetters of ego-boundness and egocentricity, i.e. the having pattern of life or the property structure of the people, in order to arrive at full being. In the having-pattern of life, what matters is not the various objects of having–houses, cars, etc.–but rather peoples’ whole human attitude. Everything and anything can become an object of craving: things people use in daily life, property, rituals, good deeds, knowledge, and thoughts. While they are not in themselves bad, they become bad: i.e. when people hold on

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1233 to them, when they become chains that interfere with their freedom, then they block their self-realization. This having-pattern of existence, which dominates late capitalist societies like no other ever before, is the deepest source for so many power games, and for so much application of force, violence, torture, and terror in present–March 2010–world history (Adorno 1979: 9-20, 122-147, 177-196, 354-373, 392-397, 397-408, 408-434, 440457, 569-574, 578-587; 1993b; 1993c; Fromm 1976; 2001).

Being-Pattern of Life For Master Eckhart in a narrower, psychological sense, the being-pattern of life denoted the real, and often unconscious motivations, that impel human beings, in contrast to deeds and opinions as such, and separated from the acting and thinking person (Blakney 1941; Fromm 1976: chaps. III, IX; App. E). Eckhart was an extraordinary analyst of the soul. Eckhart never tired of uncovering the most secret ties of human behavior, the most hidden stirring of selfishness, of intentions and opinions, of denouncing the passionate longing for gratitude and rewards. This insight into the hidden motives of people made Eckhart most appealing to the PostFreudian critical theorist Fromm, who has overcome the naiveté of PreFreudian and still current–2010–behavioristic views, which claim that behavior and opinion are two final data that can be as little broken down as the atom was supposed to be at the beginning of the 20th century (Petuchowski 1956: 543-549). According to Eckhart, people should not consider so much what they are to do, as what they are. Ultimately for Eckhart, the being pattern of existence was life, activity, birth, renewal, outpouring, flowing out, productivity. In this sense, the being pattern was the very opposite of the having pattern, characterized by ego-boundness and egotism, The being pattern meant to Eckhart, to be active in the classic sense of the productive expression of man’s human potentials, not in the modern sense of being busy. Activity meant for Eckhart to go out of oneself. He called being a process of boiling, of giving birth, something that flows and flows in itself and beyond itself. For Eckhart, the man who was in the state of running, of continuous running into peace was a heavenly man. He continually runs and moves and seeks peace in running. Eckhart defined the active, alive man as a vessel that grows as it is filled and will never be full. For Eckhart, breaking through the having pattern of life was the condition for all genuine activity. In Eckhart’s theological and ethical system, the supreme virtue was the state of productive inner activity, for which the premise was the overcoming of all forms of ego-boundness and craving

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for fetishes and idols (Horkheimer 1988d: chaps: 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 11, Fromm 1966b: chaps. iii, ix; Lundgren 1998; App. E). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, most people living and acting in present–2010–civil societies in America and Europe, vacillate somehow between the having pattern of existence and the being pattern of life and find more or less elements of both sides in themselves. However, also here there is no real middle ground between the extremes, except a fictitious and illusionary one. If people would move on to the extreme in the having-pattern of life, they would end up in insanity (Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1976; 1990). If people would move on to the extreme in the being-pattern of existence, they would reach sainthood. While the having pattern of life leads necessarily to post-Modern, global alternative Future I–the totally administered society, and to post-Modern, global, alternative Future II– the entirely militarized society, which are both characterized by massive power, force, violence, torture and terror, the being pattern of existence is the precondition for the movement toward post-Modern, global, alternative Future III–the City of Being, which is the synthesis of the Medieval vision of the City of God, by which also Master Eckhart was moved and motivated, on one hand, and the modern vision of the earthly City of Progress, on the other, in which man can realize fully his potentials, and in which, therefore, friendly living together becomes possible, and in which, therefore, harmony and peace can prevail (Bentley 1961; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Fromm 1976; 1992: 203-212; Habermas 1976; 1983; 1991a; 1991b; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Dews 1986; Honneth 1990; 1994; 2000; Küng 1990b; 1991a; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Semashko 2008; App. E, F, G).

The Will to Otherness According to the dialectical religiology, the European religious wars and their end, the Westphalian Peace, and the consequent bourgeois and socialist enlightenment movements and revolutions, and the two World Wars, and the liberal and fascist anti-socialist counter-revolutions have been as bravely reflected in the theological and philosophical thinking of Paul Tillich and of other theologians in the 20th and 21st centuries–Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Rahner and his disciple Johannes B. Metz, and his students Helmut Peukert and Edmund Arens, Hans Küng and Karl-Joseph Kuschel–as in the philosophical and social-scientific writings of the critical theorists of society– from Horkheimer, Pollock, Neumann, Benjamin, Adorno, Fromm, Marcuse,

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1235 Günther Anders, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler through Habermas and von Friedeburg, to Honneth, Dubiel and Kellner (Tillich 1926; 1948; 1951; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977, 1982; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 25, 26; 1987k: 345-405; 1989m: 265-268; 1996s: 21-28; Stone/Weaver 1998; Reimer 2004). At the same time, the religious and the secular intellectuals, the theologians and philosophers and social scientists shared with each other and were in spite of all their differences united by their common will to Otherness: the other of the dichotomy between what was the case in late capitalist society on one hand and what ought to be, on the other–alternative Future III–a free, egalitarian, and brotherlysisterly society, and ultimately the entirely Other than the horror and terror of nature and particularly of an unfree and loveless and cruel positivistic society, state and history (Hegel 1986g: 339-514; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1987k: 287-332, 345-409, 409-417; 1989m: 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 25, 30, 31, 33, 36, 37, 38; 1996s: 21-28, 32-74; Küng 1994a: 904-905; Reimer 2004; App. G). In Horkheimer’s perspective, more specifically, in the theological and philosophical work of Tillich was negated as well as justified the thinking of his predecessors on the Chair for Philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität in Frankfurt a.M.: the empirio-criticism or positivism of Hans Cornelius and the mystical dynamic pantheism of Max Scheler (Horkheimer1087k: 100-118, 171-188, 418-425; 1989m: 265-266; Reimer 2004). Horkheimer had to admit that no matter how seriously the religious socialist Tillich recognized as his own the duty to contribute to the improvement of the conditions in the German or American antagonistic civil society, he never identified himself with what was happening in the history of the 20th century. Adorno would make the same admission as Horkheimer, in spite of the fact that for him the religious socialism of his teacher Tillich was nonsense. Horkheimer and Adorno recognized that Tillich shared with them the will to Otherness, to what was different from what was positivistically the case in family, society, state and history. Tillich’s will to Otherness connected his Christianity from the very start no less with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, than the critical theory of society. This prophetic will to Otherness never was in harmony with that what happened anyway in world history. Tillich had written in his book The Socialist Decision, which had come out in 1933 right before the outbreak of the fascist barbarism in Germany: the being loses its immediacy through the ought (Tillich 1933: 35; Horkheimer 1989m: 265-266). One could not be derived from the other: being not from ought, and ought not from being. Being was without ought, and ought was without being.

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Tillich quoted the word of Plato, according to which the good was to be thought beyond being (Plato 1905; 1955; 2008; Tillich 1933: 35; Horkheimer 1989m: 265-266; Reimer 2004). In 1961, at the occasion of Tillich’s 75th birthday, Horkheimer was very much aware that his friend had later on in his dogmatic theological writings in American exile identified being, or being itself, as ultimate Reality, as opposite to the world of appearance, with the Divinity, and that thereby he had violated the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue as well as the Kantian prohibition against penetrating the sphere of the Thing-in-itself, the Ens realissimum, and the things-in-themselves, and that thereby he had regressed into mythology, and that thereby he had come closer to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and its jargon of authenticity, and to existentialism (Exodus 20; Kant 1929: 24, 27, 29, 71-73, 74, 87, 89-90, 149, 172-173, 230, 265-267, 278-280, 282-284, 325, 346-348, 351-353, 356-358, 381-383, 440, 484486, 490, 449; Heidegger 1968; 2001; Tillich 1951; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; Adorno 1997f: 413-523; Horkheimer 1989m: 265266; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 29-30; Reimer 2004; Krieg 2004: 86, 92, 131, 143, 151; Wolin 1990: 2, 4, 6-8, 15, 26, 85, 97, 98, 105, 106, 107, 108, 168, 169; Lucas 1992: 237, 238, 239, 241-243, 246, 247; Ettinger 1995: 12, 22, 36-37, 48, 52, 53, 56, 64-65, 111, 112, 117-119). However, Horkheimer was also absolutely sure that Tillich never made any concessions to the rationalization of the horror and terror of this world. Horkheimer quoted as prove for that the explanation at the end of Tillich’s book Courage to Be of 1952: that such courage owed itself to the God, who appeared only when the God of theism had disappeared in the anxiety of doubt (Tillich 1952; 1972; Horkheimer 1989m: 265-266; App. E). For Horkheimer that explanation of Tillich did not sound like Scheler’s mystical-pantheistic announcement that the world in itself was immediately meaningful (Horkheimer 1987k: 289-328, 345-408; 1985g: chaps. 25, 26, 29, 37, 40; 1989m: 264-268; Jung 1933; 1958; 1990). Horkheimer sided with Tillich against Scheler. So does the critical theory of religion.

The Meaning of Life On May 25, 1961, Paul Tillich, who at the time was Professor at Harvard Divinity School, after having been professor of philosophy and theology at Union Theological Seminary for 22 years, and before becoming John Nuveen Professor of Theology at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, came to his old Frankfurt University, in order to participate at Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research in a discourse with professors

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1237 and students (Tillich 1926; 1933; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Horkheimer1985g: chaps. 25, 26, 29, 37, 40; 1987k: 289-328, 345-408; 1989m: 264-268; 1989m: 266; Stone/Weaver 1998; Reimer 2004). Among the questions that the professors and students asked Tillich during the discourse was also one which was concerned with the meaning of the world or of life. In socialist Eastern Europe, so one of the questioning discourse participants stated, the vulgar teaching of the Diamat–the dialectical materialism–as well as the enormous and monstrous political and military expansion took under the slogan of the victory of communism the place of the truth and of the meaning of the world. However in the capitalistic West, in contrast, the meaning of life threatened to disappear. It seemed even that in the West the notion of the truth lost and forfeited its significance and importance. Tillich answered by saying that it was characteristic for the present time–1961– that many people–and maybe the best people–experienced God as absent (Horkheimer 1989m: 264-268; 1989m: 266; Reimer 2004; Metz 1959; 1967; 1975a; 1977; 1980; 1995; 1997; 1998; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Sölle 1992; 1994). They noticed a gap where God would have to be unconditionally the meaning (Horkheimer 1989m: 264-268; 1989m: 266; Reimer 2004; Metz 1959; 1967; 1975a; 1977; 1980; 1995; 1997; 1998; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Sölle 1992; 1994; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1988a; 1988b; 1991a; part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Küng 1978; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004). As long, so Tillich argued, as the experience of the far away or absent God was felt as something painful, which could not be overcome by any external means, the West had still a greatness in itself, which had not yet been grasped and seized symbolically, For Tillich the world of the West was not so merely external or extrovert as people often characterized it (Horkheimer 1989m: 264-268; 1989m: 266; Reimer 2004; Jung 1933; 1958; 1990). According to Horkheimer, Tillich admittedly negated Scheler’s mystical, pantheistic affirmation of the world. However, so Horkheimer argued, as Tillich was able to recognize the negative, the loneliness, the abandonment in the course of the world, he attributed to history not a smaller but rather a deeper meaning, significance and importance than did the pantheistic mysticism, which wanted to identify the world with God: Deus sive natura (Horkheimer 1989m: 264-268; 1989m: 266; Reimer 2004; Habermas 1986: 53-54; App. E). The inverse theology of Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin and Fromm and of the dialectical religiology stresses with Tillich against Scheler the difference, the non-identity of God and the world, without however denying the possibility that ciphers of the

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wholly Other can be recognized in the world as nature and history, in spite of all its horror and terror, its loneliness and its abandonment: and be it only the cipher or symbol of the painfully missed and missing God (Adorno 1970b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1989m: 264268; 1989m: 266; Reimer 2004; Metz 1959; 1967; 1975a; 1977; 1980; 1995; 1997; 1998; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Sölle 1992; 1994; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1988a; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Küng 1978; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; App. E).

From Enlightenment to Positivism and Beyond In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, after its revolutionary victory over feudalism in the 19th century the bourgeoisie perverted restauratively its great deistic and secular enlightenment and revolution, which had not only been directed against absolute Catholic and Protestant kings but also and particularly so against their religious wars among each other, which had devastated all of Europe for centuries, and against the Westphalian Peace, which identified king, country, and religion–Cuius Regio, Eius Religio–into a theoretical and practical positivism: it moved from the bourgeois enlightenment of Francois de Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau to the positivism of Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Max Weber, Emil Dürkheim, Talcott Parsons, Karl Merton and Niclas Luhmann (Brailsford 1935; Hegel 1986a: 56, 74; 85, 104-236, 244, 323, 336-337, 438, 452, 459; 1986b: 420, 520, 526, 527-528; 1986c: 123, 427, 430; 1986e: 4986, 122; 1986i: 96, 346; 1986g: 80; 1986h: 105, 312, 313; 1986j: 68; 1986k: 80, 239, 276, 278, 304, 400; 1986l: 278, 491-540; 1986m: 61, 266-268, 305, 345346, 419; 1986o: 210, 352, 370, 414, 503; 1986q: 211; 1986r: 356; 1986s: 80, 129; 1986t: 248; 275, 290, 294, 300, 306-308, 311, 331, 365, 413; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1967; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a; 1970b; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; 2005; Adorno 1970a; Löwith 1967; Jay 1976; 1980; Lukacs 1970; 1971; 1974; 1979Habermas/Luhmann 1975; Lortz 573, 701, 703). According to Horkheimer, Tillich took this positivism, the critique of knowledge, the epistemology, which attributed to the exact natural sciences the ultimate judgment about reality, as Hans Cornelius wanted it in his empirio-criticism, into his thinking, insofar as in his words the religious experience could not say anything, which would come into conflict with the positive sciences (Tillich 1926; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Horkheimer 1952; 1953; 1985g: 269-271, 276-278; 1987k: 171-188; 345-348; 1989m:

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1239 266-268; Adorno 1970a). For Tillich the seemingly irreconcilable antagonism between faith and knowledge originated from the fact that in the name of theology assertions had been raised, for which it was not competent (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; Habermas 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007). Theologians, so Tillich charged, had seldom posited what had symbolical significance and meaning as reality. According to Tillich the positivism was correct and right, in so far as the establishment of reality was in question. Positivism was incorrect and wrong in so far as it acquiesced to what was the case. In Tillich’s view, it was inhuman to confess to positivism, to accept reality without question, and without transcending what was the case through sadness or hope. The place where it was hard for Horkheimer to follow Tillich and which through the long decades of their friendship had always been again the object of his questions, was the theologian’s confidence that the true or the existential despair already confirmed that Being, which was other than the world–the wholly Other (Horkheimer 1986g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1989m: 266-267). Horkheimer was fully aware that Tillich’s confidence led back again behind Kant to Anselm of Canterbury and to his ontological proof for the existence of God, which Hegel had once more represented in dialectical form (Anselm 1962; Hegel 1986q: 501-536; Horkheimer 1986g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1989m: 266-267; App. E). Horkheimer asked the question whether the great Anselm of Canterbury had maybe been right after all, when he thought that whoever only denied the Infinite, had already confessed and professed to Him and did already declare his support for Him and showed already where he really stood. Horkheimer left the question open and undecided. Horkheimer understood that Tillich’s theological formulations, which agreed precisely with Anselm’s ontological proof for the existence of God, were after all considered not only to be psychologically valid, but also and particularly so–ontologically. Horkheimer considered it possible that the energy and power of Tillich’s theological thinking owed itself precisely to the ontological proof of God, for which in 1961 existed a new need. Also Tillich’s student Adorno and his friend Benjamin searched for residuals of the ontological proof in their inverse cipher theology (Adorno 1970b; Benjamin 1977: chaps 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; App. E). Likewise for the dialectical religiology the ontological proof remains of great interest and importance (Anselm 1962; Hegel 1986q: 501-536; Adorno 1970b; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1989m: 267; App. E).

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For Horkheimer, there was among Tillich’s ideas one that had a particularly enlightening energy and power, and which moved through his whole theology and philosophy. It was his emphasis on the difference between such people, who only wanted to get through life skillfully, and cleverly, and with agility, on one hand, and those people who took life seriously (Tillich 1926; 1933; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 25, 26, 29, 37, 40; 1987k: 289-328, 345-408; 1989m: 264-268; Reimer 2004). In the perspective of the dialectical religio-logy, for Tillich a life was serious which was devoted to an ultimate concern or to the concern for an ultimate Reality, the wholly Other, the will and longing for which was shared most deeply by Tillich, Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Fromm (Tillich 1957: 9, 10, 14, 26, 30, 87, 116; 1963a: 102, 125, 130, 154, 223, 283, 287, 289, 293, 349, 427; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 25, 26, 29, 37, 40; 1987k: 289-328, 345-408; 1989m: 264-268; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10 and 11; Adorno 1970b; Fromm 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; 2001; Reimer 2004; Otto 1969; 1991; Barth 1950; 1959; Parsons 1964: chaps. 1 and 2; 1965: chaps. 1 and 2; 1971; Küng 1994a; 1994b). Horkheimer had to admit that this differentiation between the two types of people sounded banal, and obvious, and natural (Horkheimer 1989m: 264-268). Yet for Horkheimer, from this so expressed thought of difference came a necessary clarity. In Horkheimer’s view, this thought was the for the present–1961–most appropriate, suitable, commensurate, and adequate formulation of the difference of a human life, which did not exhaust itself in each of its particular purposes, and which produced autonomy, on one hand, and a human life, which did not know anything else than the sequence of particular purposes, which right away transformed themselves into means again, and which produced heteronomy, on the other. It was the difference of heteronomy and autonomy. For Horkheimer, on one hand there was a religious way to serve the higher Being, and to confess to it, and to praise it, which was precisely structured in the same way as the secular zealous willingness to serve heteronomously that which at any time has power on this earth. Thus, in the view of the critical theory of religion, there are today–in 2010–fundamentalist Christians living in American civil society, who engage heteronomously in Christotainment, and who sell Jesus through the secular popular mass culture and with the help of the secular culture industry (Adorno 2001a; 1997i/1: 7-142; 1997i/2: 7-120; Steinberg/ Kincheloe 2009; Küng 1994a; Siebert 2006d: 61-114). On the other hand, Horkheimer remembered autonomous people, who had been persecuted as

westphalian peace to bourgeois & socialist society 1241 deniers of God, and who were, nevertheless, more obedient to His will than those who tortured and tormented them in His name (Horkheimer 1989m: 264-268; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10 and 11; Adorno 1970b; Fromm 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; 2001; Rudolphi 1949; Siebert 1993; App. E). According to Horkheimer, as Tillich structured theology in such a way that it could escape in its judgment about human actions and thoughts the old deceptions, and illusions, and delusions, and the old narrowness, and that it could develop a new penetrating sharpness of sight for human beings in their suffering and misery, he exposed himself to the reproach of having extended too far the notion of religion (Hegel 1986p: 9-88; Freud 1939; 1946; 1962; 1964; Tillich 1957: 9, 10, 14, 26, 30, 87, 116; 1963a: 102, 125, 130, 154, 223, 283, 287, 289, 293, 349, 427; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 25, 26, 29, 37, 40; 1987k: 289-328, 345-408; 1989m: 264-268; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10 and 11; Adorno 1970b; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 2001; Reimer 2004; Küng 1990a; App. E). His critics reproached Tillich for having included into the circle of believers and confessors even those secular people, who were reluctant and desperate in religious matters, and for thus having pushed too far his liberalism. However, for Horkheimer things seemed to be the opposite way around. It appeared to Horkheimer, that if– as Tillich wanted it–only those, who were serious about their life, and who have an ultimate concern, and who were autonomous, were allowed to be called religious, then only a much smaller group of religious people would be left than those, who in 1961 identified themselves in Germany, or in Europe, or in America, as Catholics, Protestants, Jews or freethinkers. Horkheimer confirmed that Tillich himself belonged to those people, who were autonomous and meant life to be serious, and to be devoted to an ultimate concern. Tillich proved that to Horkheimer and to the other critical theorists through his work, to which the world owed gratitude, and through his life, which brought not only redemption but also genuine happiness to all, who really knew him personally (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1989m: 267-268; Stone/Weaver 1998; Reimer 2004). The critical theory of religion resists the modern trend toward the post-modern global alternative Future I–the finite, always changing and transitory, purpose-rational, completely heteronomous and alienated totally administered society without love and ultimate goal and meaning, and even more so the post-modern, global, alternative Future II–the likewise entirely heteronomous and alienated, extremely aggressive, totally militarized society aiming at always new conventional wars and finally at a most cruel and terroristic nuclear war between religious-or secular-ideologically based and motivated civilizations (Flechtheim 1971; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40;

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1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 25, 30, 31; Fromm 1972b; 1973; App. G). The dialectical religiology supports and promotes the modern tendency toward postmodern global alternative Future III–the reconciled society characterized by personal autonomy and sovereignty and universal, i.e. anamnestic, present and proleptic solidarity, which is a form of the human potential of recognition, and which is rooted in the will and in the longing for the Infinite, the Eternal, the ultimate Reality, and the wholly Other than the finite world of transitory, particular purposes and means (Exodus 7; Lieber 2001: 358; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986l: 19-33; 33-55, 491-540; Marx 1961c: 873-874; Tillich 1926; 1933; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Horkheimer 1988a; 1985g: chaps. 17, 25, 26, 29, 37, 40; 1987k: 289-328, 345-408; 1989m: 264-268; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392402; 1958b: 484-498; Stone/Weaver 1998; Reimer 2004; Flechtheim 1959: 625-634; 1962: 27-34; 1963: 148-150; 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Habermas 1986: 53-54; 1990: 9-18; Honneth 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; Fraser/Honneth 2003; Lentin 2009: 173184; Misheva 2009: 159-172; Siebert 1979b; 1979c; 1985; 1986; 1987a; 1987b; 1987d; 1989; 1993; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2004a; 2005b; Kim 1996: 267-283; App. G). This humanistic-theological trend has been unfolding in Modernity from the Reformation, through the Westphalian Peace, and the formation of nation states, to the bourgeois and socialist enlightenment movements and revolutions, and beyond them up to the present–2010–and perhaps out of the present economic crisis toward post-modern alternative Future III–a free and just society (More 1895; 1901; 1963; Hegel 1986l: 19-33, 33-55, 491-540; Marcuse 1960, 1961; 1962; 1969b; 1970a; 1980a; 1987; 2005; Fromm 1966b; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1990a; 1990b; 1995; 1997; 2001; Küng 1990a; 1990b; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Metz 1959; 1962; 1967; 1970; 1972b; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1981; 1998; Metz/Habermas/ Sölle 1994; Peukert 1976; Arens 1982; 1989a; 1989b; 1992; 1994b; 1995; 1997; 2007; 2009: 79-83; Hitzler/Pfadenhauer 2009: 25-27; Fischer 2009: 2731; Woyke/Boll 2009: 31-33; Dauderstädt 2009: 33-37; Hirschel 2009: 37-40; Zimmermann 2009: 40-42; Gabriel 2009: 42-45; Lucke 2009: 45-48; Müller/ Thierse 2009: 48; Meyer 2009: 55-58; Siebert 1965; 1966; 1978: 81-94; 1979; 1987b; 1987d; 1987c; 1993; 2001; 2002a; 2004a; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b: 91137; 2007a; 2007g: 11-19). It is opposed, of course, by neo-conservatives, like Glenn Beck of the neo-liberal Fox News Organization, who in March 2010 urged Christians to leave churches who use economic or social justice as code words for Communism and Nazism (Goodstein 2010: A14). However, outraged American Christians fired back in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7; Luke 6; Franken 2003; Goodstein 2010: A14).

chapter twenty-six

The Expansion and Contraction of God Jürgen Habermas, the up to the present–2010–still most outstanding critical theorist of the second, third, and fourth generation of the Frankfurt School, has traced the whole development from Jewish and Christian orthodoxy through Jewish and Christian mysticism, particularly Isaak Lurian and Jakob Boehme, through German idealism, particularly Kant, Schelling and Hegel, to historical materialism: from Marx to Bloch, and to the critical theorists of society, from Bloch through Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, to himself, his own theory of communicative action (Joshua 1: 1-18; Hertz 5716/1956: 919/18; Scholem 1967; 1970a; 1970b, 1973a; 1973b, 1977a, 1977b: 1-50; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; Habermas 1978a; 1978c: chaps. 5 and 6; 1982: 127-143; 1984a: chaps.3, 4, 5, 6, 7; 1991a Part III; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2005; Thompson/Held 1982: chap. 12; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; Misheva 2009: 159-172; Lentin 2008: 173-184; Mendieta 2005; Dews 1986: 53-64, 125-126; Thompson/Held 1982; Habermas/ Ratzinger 2006; McCarthy 1994; Efron 2009; App E). As they participated in the transition from dialectical idealism to historical materialism, idealistic dialectic to materialistic dialectic, the critical theorists of society, particularly Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm, Marcuse and Habermas, concretely superseded in their critical theories of society not only orthodox Judaism and Christianity, but particularly Jewish and Christian mysticism: the Kabbalah and Chassidism, Master Eckhart and Jakob Boehme (Marx 1961a: 15, 17-18; Horkheimer 1985l: 286-287; 367-397, 467-492, 526-541, 593-605; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; 1992: 3-212; 1976: chaps. III, VII, VIII, IX; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1978a; 1982; 1986; Thompson/ Held 1982: chap. 12; Lundgren 1998; Raines/Dean 1970; App. E).

Jewish Orthodoxy According to Habermas, Jewish and Christian mysticism and German idealism, in which it was concretely superseded, mediated between Jewish and Christian orthodoxy on one hand, and the secular bourgeois, Marxian

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and Freudian enlightenment movements, and thus the critical theory of society, which determinately negated them in itself, on the other (Habermas 1973; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c: chaps. 5 and 6; 1982: 438-440; 1986; Thompson/Held 1982: chap. 12; Dews 1986: 53-64, 125-126; App. E). The critical theorists, particularly Benjamin, Adorno and Habermas, were introduced to Jewish mysticism mainly through the Kabbalist Gerhard or Gershom Scholem (Joshua 1: 1-18; Psalm 91; Hertz 5716/1956: 919/18; 920-942; Scholem 1967; 1970; 1973; 1974: 1-50; 1977; 1982; 1989; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Opitz 1996; Smith 1988; Adorno 1997j/2: 608617; Tiedemann 1997; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1978c: chaps. 5 and 6; 1984a: chaps. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; 1982: 438-440; Dews 1986: 53-64, 124-126; Efron 2009; App. E). Jewish mysticism was, of course, based upon and concretely superseded in itself Jewish orthodoxy (Genesis 17: 1; 35: 1-5, 11; Joshua 1: 1-18; Psalm 91; Hertz 5716/1956: 919/18; 920-942; Lieber 2001: 211-212/1-5, 213/11; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Fromm 1966a; 1966b; Küng 1991b; App. E). For the Rabbis, there were four directions in which a man needed constantly to strengthen himself: 1) In the Torah, i.e. in his grasp of religious fundamentals. 2) In Good Deeds. Beneficence was the result of habitual action. 3) In Prayer. Daily worship not only expressed, but also kindled the flame of devotion in the soul. 4) In Derech Eretz, i.e. harmonious relationship with his fellow men. (Psalm 91; Hertz 5716/1956: 919/18; 920-942; Lieber 2001: 211-212/1-5; 213/11; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Efron 2009; App. E).

The very core of the Jewish Orthodoxy was the Shema Israel: Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. According to the Rabbis, these words enshrined Judaism’s greatest contribution to the religious thought and history of mankind. They constituted the primal confession of faith in the religion of the synagogue. These words declared that the Holy God, who was called Elyon, El Shaddai, Yahweh, Elohim, El, Adonai, and who could also be a God of terror as well as of mercy, and who was worshipped and proclaimed by Israel, was One. These words declared that He alone was God: Who was, is, and ever will be. That opening sentence of the Shema Israel rightly occupied the central place in Jewish religious thought. This was because every other Jewish belief turned upon it; all beliefs went back to it; all beliefs were flowing from it.

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Shema Israel The Shema Israel had far-reaching, negative and positive implications that have been of vital importance, not only for the different Jewish paradigms, but also for Christianity and Islam, and their paradigms, and for Jewish, Christian and Islamic mysticism, and for German idealism, and for the bourgeois, and still for the Schopenhaurian, Nietzschean, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment movements, and thus also for the critical theory of society (Joshua 1: 1-18; Hertz 5716/1956: 919/18; 920-942; Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Efron 2009; App. E). Some of the implications of the Shema Israel have been: 1)

The negation of polytheism, paganism, dualism, pantheism, trinitarianism, deism, and atheism. 2) The affirmation of the brotherhood of man, the unity of the universe, the unity of history, and the Messianic kingdom. 3) The martyrdom in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modernity. 4) Reward and punishment. 5) Jewish education. 6) Monarchy and freedom in Israel. 7) Ethical foundations. 8) Democratic institutions. 9) Dignity of labor. 10) Marriage, divorce, and the position of woman. 11) The hallowing of history. (Hertz 5716/1956: 919/18; 920-942).

While all the critical theorists of the first generation had critically departed from the orthodox Rabbinical Paradigm of Judaism and were dissenting members of the Assimilation Paradigm, they, nevertheless, also tried– with the help of Scholem–to preserve, radicalize, elevate and fulfill some of the elements and implications of the Shema Israel: moving dialectically from the Jewish monotheistic Orthodoxy, in which they were raised in their families and synagogues, through its negation–the natural science based Schopenhaurian, Nietzschean, Marxian and Freudian atheism–and the concrete negation of this atheistic negation in terms of a new posttheistic, humanistic religiology of the X-experience and of the longing for the Infinite, for the imageless, nameless, and notionless wholly Other than the very imperfect, often cruel, violent and terroristic world of appearance (Joshua 1: 1-18; Psalm 91; Hertz 5716/1956: 919/18; 920-942; Blakney 1941; Hegel 1986g: 266; 1986i; 1986r: 114; Marx 1961a: 15-18; 1953: 359340; Bottomore 1964; Tucker 1978: 681-727; Fromm 1966b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1985l: 129-132, 188-252, 286-287, 294-295,

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483-493; 1989m: chaps. 13, 28; 1989m: chaps. 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 30, 31, 37; Adorno 1979: 408-433; Schneider 1955; Witte 1985; Scheible 1989; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973; Scholem 1982; 1989; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Tillich 1972; Fromm 1976; Efron 2009; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549; Kim 1996: 267-283). In this dialectical sense, the critical theory of society would not be thinkable and possible without its roots in orthodox Judaism as the Religion of Sublimity (Joshua 1: 1-18; Psalm 91; Hertz 5716/1956: 919/18; 920-942; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; O’Reagan 1994; Scholem 1967; 1970a; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1977a: 1-50; 1977b; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Opitz 1996; Smith 1988; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-617; Tiedemann 1997: Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1973; 1974: chaps. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c: chaps. 5 and 6; 1982: 438-440; 1986; Thompson/Held 1982: chap. 12; Dews 1986: 53-64, 125-1261974: chaps. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; 1982: 438-440; Dews 1986: 53-64, 124-126; Küng 1991b; App. E). The same is true for the dialectical religiology: it also must go through the atheistic negation of the Schopenhaurian, Nietzschean, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment, in order to reach its own depth in the inverse theology: namely, the radicalization of the materialistic dialectic into its theological glowing fire, including at the same time the extreme sharpening of the social-economicaldialectical motive (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989: 1/493, 687; 2/227, 3/151-155, 463-470; 4/143, 160, 232; 5/459; Kaufmann 1986: 95-96; Marx 1961a: 15-18; Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; 1992; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1966b; 1967; 1980b; 1992; 1995; 2001; Bloch 1960; 1971; 1972; 1975b; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Adorno 1970b: 116-117; 1979: 408-433; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 28, 29; 1995o: 326-332; Siebert 2000; 2001; Kim 1996: 267-283; App. E).

Mystical Theology and Historical Materialism Horkheimer and Adorno met with the Kabbalist Scholem in a bar in New York shortly before World War II, in order to discuss Benjamin’s emigration from fascist Vichy France to America, to New York, to the International Institute for Social Research at Columbia University (Hegel 1986s: 425430, 512; 1986t: 15; Scholem 1982: 219-226; 1989: 267-268; Horkheimer 1995o: 99-101, 110-111, 193-194, 204, 219-220, 228-230, 246-247, 255257, 291-293, 302-304, 318-320, 369-370, 378-380, 413-416, 466-469, 488-490, 491-492, 540, 561, 568, 610-613, 619-620, 675-679, 684, 695-697, 735, 799-801; 1995p: 23-25, 34-35, 39-41, 50, 64, 66, 72, 81-91, 112-116, 125-127, 144, 147-148, 151, 213, 216, 240, 268-270, 305-309, 311-319,

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338-341, 359-363, 370, 378-382, 411, 416-417, 434-439, 475-477, 491-495, 564-568, 603-605, 607, 642-644, 670-674, 677-681, 712-713, 717-718, 750, 766-767, 770-771, 771-772, 774-775, 775-781). Horkheimer had been in contact with Benjamin already since 1933. Scholem, who was Benjamin’s friend, but considered Fromm and other critical theorists in the Institute to be Bolshevists, and therefore refused to visit it, and to give a paper there, was introduced to Adorno and Horkheimer through their friend, the Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich: Adorno’s teacher (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 25, 26; 1989m: chap. 29). While Horkheimer had a harder time to befriend himself to Scholem and his mystical-theological way of thinking, Adorno became very interested in him and his work: Scholem and Adorno would even work together after World War II, and together would edit a book on Benjamin (Scholem, 1982: 218-226, 227-234; Adorno 1970b). Originally Scholem wanted Benjamin to come to Jewish Palestine, and to Jerusalem, in order to become an outstanding linguist, a Jewish Wilhelm von Humboldt (Hegel 1986j: 272; 1986k: 131-204; Benjamin 1988: 9-26, 27-41, 67-95, 96-102). Benjamin thought about going to Jewish Palestine, and even started several times to learn Hebrew. However, Benjamin finally decided against Palestine and Zionism, and for Germany, and France, and Europe, and America. Benjamin agreed with the critical theorists’ mission of helping to redeem the West through Judaism. From its very start, Scholem was opposed to Benjamin’s project to reconcile mystical theology with dialectical materialism of the Brechtian or any other type. Scholem considered Benjamin’s project to be suicidal. Scholem stood as much on the extreme religious pole of the Hegelian continuum as Brecht was located on the extreme of the secular pole (Hegel 1986p: 9-88; App. E, F). There was no possibility of reconciliation. However, when Benjamin decided for Horkheimer’s International Institute for Social Research in New York rather than Jewish Palestine, Scholem supported him, in spite of his suspicion that the Institute was supposedly Marxist, and did what ever he could to bring him from Germany and France through Spain and Lisbon, Portugal, to New York and the Institute. He found an open ear and heart in Adorno, who together with Benjamin, Bloch, Fromm, and Tillich, constituted the most religiously and theologically inclined and interested subgroup in the Institute. In spite of the fact, that Scholem, Tillich, Horkheimer, and Adorno and his wife Gretel agreed fully to help Benjamin to come to New York, and took practical measures to receive him in the City and to help him, who did not like cities, make his adjustment as smooth as possible, he tragically never arrived in New York, but committed suicide in Port Bou, Spain on September 26, 1940 on his way to America.

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chapter twenty-six From Historical Idealism to Historical Materialism

After World War II, also Adorno’s student Habermas developed a rather close relationship to Scholem, and through him, to Benjamin, and to Jewish and Protestant mysticism (Habermas 1973: chaps. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; 1978a: chaps. 5 and 6; 1978c: chaps. 5 and 6; 1982: 127-143; 1984a: chaps.3, 4, 5, 6, 7; 1991a: Part III; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2005; Thompson/Held 1982: chap. 12; Dews 1986: 53-64, 125-126). Habermas, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s very mystical identity philosophy, came close to Scholem and Benjamin as well as to Brecht through Adorno. Also Bloch and Tillich were Schellingians (Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c: 11-32). Habermas explored the grounding of Schelling’s materialistic Age of the World in the Kabbalist dialectic of divine egoism and love (Schelling 1977; Hegel 1986a: 101; 1986b: 9-138; Jamme/Schneidee 1984; Habermas 1978c: 184-193). The dialectical religiology determinately and concretely negates into itself Jewish, Christian and Islamic orthodoxy, as well as mysticism, German idealism, historical materialism, psychoanalytical philosophy, and the critical theory of society (Küng/Ess/Stietencron/ Bechert 1984: A; Küng 1878; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; Siebert 1987a; 1987b; 1987c, 1987d; 2000). The critical theorist of religion remains interested in Benjamin’s project to transform Hegel’s historical-idealistic philosophy and theology of history into a historical-materialistic one, and the reconciliation of a reconstructed mystical theology on one hand, and a reconstructed historical materialism on the other: the realization of the mystical theology on the chess board of world history, through its concrete supersession into historical materialism (Hegel 1986l; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b; 1997j/2: 608-616; Habermas 1976; 1990: 14-15). In this dialectical process not only theology could be rescued through historical materialism, but also vice versa, dialectical materialism though theology. Even Brecht’s atheistic dialectical materialism could be rescued through the inverse cipher theology (Adorno 1970b).

The Break in the Absolute Habermas had to admit that with the historical-materialistic beginning of the construction of the world connection as a theogonic process in Schelling’s mystical identity philosophy, nothing was gained when the matter of the world could not at the same time be made comprehensible as the matter of the Absolute itself, and as the condition of the possibility of a break in the Unconditional (Habermas 1976; 1978a: 184-193; 1978c). According

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to Habermas, Schelling had connected himself with apocryphal Jewish and Christian mystical traditions, in which this demanded relationship had already been pre-thought, if also in mythical language. For Habermas, in his attempt to discover with the help of Scholem the Jewish and Christian mythical and mystical roots of dialectical idealism and dialectical materialism, and thus, also of the critical theory of society, three dialectical, theological topoi became relevant: 1) 2)

The representation of a nature in God. The representation of the Zimzum, the retreat, or the self-crossing, or the self-folding, or the contraction of God in himself. 3) Finally, the representation of a breaking away or apostasy of the first man, the Adam Kadmon, who pulled down the creation with him, and who opened history for the purpose of the Tiqqun: the redeeming return to and restoration of the original condition. (Schelling 1977, Scholem 1967; 1973b; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Habermas 1978a: 128-129; 1978c: 184; 1982: 438-440).

The three topoi follow the movement of the three moments in the dynamic of the dialectical, theological Notion–the self-particularization or self-estrangement, and the self-singularization or self-reconciliation of the Universal, which Schelling and Hegel, his former co-student in the Theological Seminary in Tübingen, and former friend, shared with each other (Hegel 1986f: 273-301, 548-573; Habermas 1978a: 128-129; 1978c 184; 1982: 438-440; 1978a: 128-129; 1978c 184; Küng 1978: B). Together, Hegel and Schelling and Hölderlin had produced the oldest system program of German idealism, a mythology of reason, in Frankfurt a.M. in 1800, which still had relevance for Habermas in the 1980s and 1990s (Jamme/ Schneider 1984; Adorno 1997j/2: 599-608; Benjamin 1977: 21-41; Habermas 1990: 14-15). In the perspective of the critical theorists of religion, of course, the penetration by the mystics and the German idealists into the dimension of the imageless and nameless wholly Other through faith and reason, the dialectical notion, if also still in magic and mythical form, and their whole use of the analogia entis, violated the radicalized second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue as well as the later Kantian prohibition against moving into the sphere of the Things-in-themselves, or the Thing-in-itself, or the Ens Realissmum: God, Freedom and Immortality (Exodus 20; Blakney 1941; Kant 1929: 27, 71-73, 74, 87, 149, 490; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Fromm 1966b: chaps. ii, iii; Horkheimer 1989m: 649-651).

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chapter twenty-six The Breakage of the Vessels

According to Habermas, Schelling spoke about the representation of the breakage of the vessels: that catastrophic event in the creation process that produced, still inside of the Divine Being itself, a difference and an original disorder, which also initiated the process of salvation (Habermas 1978a: 184-185). For Hegel, the Adam Kadmon was the original man, the Son of God (Hegel 1986p: I, 275). The Adam Kadmon was God’s Other; his Particularity; the Creator in the determination of the Logos before all creation; the externalizing speaking, expressing Word, which was immediate, but which also returned to its origin; his Sophia; his Wisdom; his Singularity; his Orasis; his Seeing; his determining Action; the original, completely pure Man; something Existing; something Other than the first Universality; the divine Love playing with itself; the original, primordial Image of Man; his only born Son, who remained in the divine lap; the difference which was, but which also was none; the second Person in the Christian Trinity (Hegel 1986e: 43-44; 1986q: II, 185-346). The Jewish scientist, Dr. Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project, named the first experimental atomic device Trinity, which he exploded at Jornada del Muerto, New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Oppenheimer understood the name Trinity to be a Divinity that destroyed, and out of destruction created again: a kind of Phoenix Bird, which burned itself up, and rose again out of its ashes, a creative destruction or fury of disappearance (Hegel 1986l: 98; 1986p: 407; 1986r: 197). Unfortunately, when Schelling took Hegel’s Philosophy Chair at the University of Berlin ten years after his death, in 1841, he transformed his dialectical into a positive philosophy, and thus became the Grandfather of the positive science of religion initiated by Müller, and continued and developed further later on by the fascist Mircea Eliade, and others, in opposition to the critical theory of religion from Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Kierkegaard, to Bloch, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Tillich, Adorno, and Fromm and to the dialectical religiology (Hegel 1986a; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno/ Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Eliade 1961; Bachika 2002; Light/ Wilson 2004; Marcuse 1962: 65-66; 1966; Raines/Dean 1970: 3-11; Siebert 2000; 2001). Schelling’s identity philosophy continued into positivism on the Right, instead of turning over into a non-identity philosophy on the Left: from sameness to Non-Identity and Otherness (Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Marcuse 1960).

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Identity and Non-Identity According to the dialectical religiology, while in Christianity the Kingdom of Heaven is a cipher for absolute Non-identity or Otherness, the Church still stands for sameness and identity (Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Küng 1994a; 1994b). Even if extra-terrestrial creatures would arrive from a far away, and therefore very old galaxy, and would land on our earth, they would still be representatives of sameness, rather than unconditional Otherness. The identity theology and philosophy has, of course, its roots in the mythos, which is also dominated by the identity principle. Thus, the Genesis lets God create an image of Himself in Adam and Eve, and the Gospel of John lets God posit an image of Himself in Jesus of Nazareth (Genesis 1 and 2; John 1; Benedict XVI 2007). In both cases the analogia entis seems to be at work, and the similarity or identity between God and man seem to be more important for all practical purposes than the non-identity. Also Genesis lets God unite Adam and Eve into one body, and lets it be forgotten that they remain also two bodies, and are therefore not only similar and identical but also dissimilar and non-identical and not the same. Once more, sameness is stressed over the non-identity. This preference has of course political consequences. In recent years the critical theorist has seen instances in the Middle East and in North America, in which the Abrahamic religions have allowed an identity of God and Government or nation to occur, which has led to moral catastrophes during elections, as it had happened in fascist Europe in the 20th century. Of course, the second commandment of the Mosaic Law forbids Jews, Christians and Muslims to make any images of the Absolute, which if followed would prevent such theocratic moral catastrophes in the political arena through sharply separating constitutionally Synagogue, Church, and Mosque on one hand and the State on the other (Exodus 20; Habermas 1992a; 1992b; 1995; 1997a; 1998; 1999; 2001a; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004). The critical theory of society connects the Mosaic second commandment with the Kantian inhibition against penetrating the realm of the Thingin-itself, God, Freedom and Immortality, precisely in order to prevent such theocratic identity of God and state and history, and the consequent moral-political disasters (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 23-24; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11). Nothing has been so disastrous for the history of the Abrahamic religions than there identification with the state (Hegel 1986q; Küng 1990b; 1991b; 1994a; 2004). Also the dialectical religiology is engaged in the breaking of the mythical, theological, and philosophical

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ban of the identity principle, and stresses and promotes the longing for the Non-Identical and the wholly Other than the finite man and his finite world of appearances, and its injustices, which will hopefully not be the last word of world-history (Horkheimer 1986l; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno1969a; 1973a; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1976; 1980b; 1993b Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1972; 1984; 2002; Horkheimer/ Fromm/Marcuse 1936; Hörisch 1991; 2003; Kim 1996: 267-283).

The Hands of God Through Scholem, Habermas discovered in the Zohar, the great Kabbalist text from the Castilia of the 13th century, the proposition about the two hands of God (Deuteronomy 33: 1-7, 27; 34: 3; Hertz 5716/1956: 909910/1-7, 914/27, 915/3l; Habermas 1978a: 184-185; 1978c: 128-129; 1982: 438-440; 1987b: chaps. 6, 14, 15; Thompson/Held 1982: 219-283). With his left hand, God passed judgment. With his right hand, God donated and gave grace. The quality of the severe, harsh, strict and sharp judgment of the court was also named the wrath or anger of God. This inextinguishable fire of wrath, which blazed in the ground of God, is also tamed, controlled, and restrained through God’s love, and mitigated, and softened through his grace. However, the dammed up fire flame of wrath could strike out toward the outside at any time, and could consume the sinner: as a deep hunger, which was reined in and curbed only arduously, and with great difficulty through the gentleness of the Divinity. Habermas had to admit that this did not come from Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, but was rather a later formula of Christian mysticism, of Jakob Boehme (Böhme 1992: 96-97; Hegel 1986b: 534; 1986e: 122; 1986h: 29; 1986i: 30, 133; 1986j: 293; 1986k: 198, 227, 227; 1986q: 240, 244; 1986r: 132; 1986t: 64, 69, 70, 74-119; Habermas 1978a: 184-185; 1978c: 128-129; 1982: 438-440; 1986: 125-126). In his teaching on spring or source spirits, Boehme had rediscovered once more the world of the Sefiroth: of the Divine qualities. Boehme’s spring of wrath appeared also under the complementary image of the pure darkness and the bitter, stern and austere pulling together, a kind of contraction. Boehme added: as in the winter, when it was fiercely and severely cold and when the water froze into ice, this energy of contraction was that which really gave duration and continuance. For Boehme, this was because the severity, and strictness, and sharpness, caused the pulling together and the posture, attitude, and composure of a body, and the hardness and harshness dried up the duration, giving power of contraction, so that it existed, lasted, endured and remained.

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God’s Retreat According to Habermas’s interpretation of Zohar and the shoemaker Boehme’s mystical theology, this first contraction–wrath, pure darkness, and bitter, stern, and austere pulling together–which God generated as an eternal nature in himself, and which he also communicated to the creation, must not be confused and mixed up with that other process of the shrinking and shriveling (Böhme 1938: 96-97; Habermas 1978a: 185). Through this process of atrophying, God literally opened up, admitted, and conceded a place for the world in him, because he could in the beginning not have anything outside of himself. That precisely was the contraction as deed of creation. A few decades before Jakob Boehme, Isaak Luria, the Kabbalist from Safed conceived in the image of the Simzum a going back of God into himself: a self-banishing, or self-exiling of God out of his own center. For the sake of the revelation, God crossed and folded himself in his own depth. While God negated himself, he thus gave freedom to the creation. Later Kabbalists formulated it in this way: God pulled himself back, withdrew himself, or retired from himself toward himself. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, it is of utmost importance that the contraction is not the last word in the history of the Divinity, but that it was only one essential moment in a process, which has itself for its goal.

The Breaking Away of the Adam Kadmon According to Habermas’s explication of the Jewish and Protestant mystical theology, both, Luria and Boehme, had in common the teaching of the breaking away of the Adam Kadmon (Genesis 3; Habermas 1978a: 185). This primordial man detached himself also through a contraction out of the association of the original creation, in order to be something for himself: the original sin (Genesis 3; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37; Habermas 1978a: 185). It happened in the way of that first pulling itself together of the God-Nature. However, this contraction of the Adam Kadmon did not originate out of the God-Nature, but rather out of man’s arbitrary will. Admittedly, from this creaturely, individual will received and accepted, so to speak retroactively, also the Nature in God the meaning of the divine egoism. According to Luria and Boehme, all will which went into its selfness and searched for the ground of the form of its life, stepped into its own. In Habermas’s view, this word of Boehme was valid for the initial birth in God, as well as for the renunciation of the first man, with which he tore, pulled, and dragged the creation into the abyss, and pushed almost God himself from his throne.

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According to Hegel’s interpretation of Jewish and Protestant mystical theology, there was besides the Adam Kadmon also the Adam in Paradise (Genesis 1 and 2; Hegel 1986l: 79-80/21; Efron 2009; App. E). Hegel remembered theologians who had asserted that God talked with Adam in Hebrew in Paradise. In Hegel’s time, Catholic thinkers particularly in France–like Felicite de Lamenais, a defender of Catholicism, who later on became a religious socialist and was excommunicated from the Church, Jean Pierre Abel Remusat, an orientalist, Antoine Jean Saint Martin, also an orientalist, and Ferdinand Baron von Eckstein, a French official and Catholic publicist–had with the support of their Government taken up again this older theological interest in the creation of Adam in Paradise under new historical circumstances and with new interests. They referred again to the original first two chapters of Genesis: the double story of the creation of Adam and Eve (Genesis 1 and 2; Hegel 1986l: 79-80/21). For Hegel, this Biblical story presented the original, primitive condition of the creation, partially in the few known traits, but partially also either in man as such–this would be the general human nature–or in so far as Adam was to be taken as individual, and thereby as one person–as being present and completed in this one man, or merely in one pair of human beings: Adam and Eve. The Romantic poet and historian, Friedrich von Schlegel, had stated poetically that nature stood in the beginning like a clear and bright mirror of the creation of God, openly and transparently, before the likewise clear eyes of Adam (Schlegel 1829: 44; Schoeller 2010: 73-76). For Adam, the divine truth was supposed to have been likewise open. Schlegel pointed out that Adam found himself in the beginning in the possession of an indeterminate, but in itself already extensive knowledge of the religious truth, which had been revealed to him immediately by God. From this original, revealed religious knowledge of Adam, all world religions were supposed to have started. Unfortunately, these religions supposedly had then in their history polluted and covered up the first religious truth, which Adam had possessed, through monstrous erroneous and wrong products, or inventions of imagination. However, in all those religious mythologies full of mistakes and errors, there existed supposedly, nevertheless, present and knowable traces of Adams original religious teachings of the truth. In their research into the history of the ancient Asiatic nations, and their conditions, and their religions, and mythologies, Schlegel and Humboldt and the French Catholic scholars tried to go back to the point in the history of religions, particularly Asiatic religion, e.g. Daoism–

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the Religion of Measure, Hinduism–the Religion of Imagination, and Buddhism–the Religion of Inwardness, where such fragments of Adam’s first revealed knowledge could supposedly still be found in greatest purity (Genesis 1 and 2; Schlegel 1829: 44; Hegel 1986k: 131-204; 1986l: 7980/21; 1986p: I, 302-330, 331-373, 374-389; Küng 1984; 1991a; Küng/Ess/ Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Schoeller 2010: 73-76; Zimmermann 2009b). Schlegel and Humboldt and the French Catholics did this, in order, thereby, to prove that the Catholic or universal religion was the oldest and truest one, reaching back to the primordial divine revelation and religious truth received by Adam from God immediately. Father Schmitt from Vienna carried this kind of religiological research into the 20th century.

Positivistic and Critical Interpretation The critical theorists rejected the romantic, and the Catholic, as well as the positivistic interpretation of the mythos of Judaism as the Religion of Sublimity (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Horkheimer 1988n: 331-332; Küng 1991b; Schoeller 2010: 73-76; Zimmermann 2009b; App. E). According to Horkheimer, the positivists answered the question of whether the Jews have a religion by saying that this depended on the definition of religion. The answer of the critical theory of society was: the religion is an intellectual, mental and spiritual reality. Unlike the positivists, the critical theorists had inherited the spirit from Judaism and Christianity and German idealism–Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel–and did not have to rediscover it, because they never lost it to the machine, tools, instruments, in the first place (Hegel 1986a: 182, 382, 381, 414, 415, 416, 421, 428-430, 435; 1985b: 137, 424, 503; 1986c: 15, 18, 19, 28, 29, 36, 38, 145, 165, 246, 259-260, 267, 324-494; Jamme/Schneider 1984; Searle 1996; App. E, F). Like the idealists, the critical theorists also reveal the essence of the spirit through the reconstruction of the relationship between nature and ego. The spirit’s living unity of the manifold was continually in progressive movement. The beginning of a new spirit was the product of a lengthy transformation of manifold educational forms or paradigms. Of course, for the idealists the spiritual alone had been the real reality. The life, which endured death and maintained itself in it, was the life of the spirit. The spirit was this power only as it looked the negative into its face, and stayed with it. The spirit was the movement to become an other of itself, and to supersede this otherness. Spirit was I, which was we, and we which was I. The spirit was a system of movements. The historical idealists or materialists opposed the bourgeois materialist’s thingification

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or reification of the spirit into a bone, the cell, the brain, as it happened around 1800 and around 1900, and again most recently around 2000. Reason was spirit in which the certainty to be all reality was elevated to the truth. According to Horkheimer, for Judaism as spiritual reality the stories of the creation of the world, of the miracles, etc., were trivial and unimportant (Genesis 1 and 2; Horkheimer 1988n: 331-332; App. E). Judaism believed in a God, whose name it is not allowed to express, and to whom one could in principle not pray in spite of all the little reformed or liberal Jewish prayers. The Jew lived according to the regulations and rules of his law rooted in the Five Books of Moses–the 613 Mitzvoth–and in the consciousness of being a part of his nation. The most severe punishment for the Jew was the Jewish family or community saying: we shall not remember you. The Jew’s hope was the Messiah. The critical theorists asked: in what consisted Jewish culture? In which sense was the Jewish culture superior to the European or American civilization, which in the early 1960s was in a process of dissolving? According to Horkheimer, the modern Jews had given up the higher culture, in order to accept the lower civilizations. For Horkheimer, that was the very essence of the Jewish assimilation to the European and American civilization. The Jews had been a nation that had been kept together, without power, alone through the thought of faithfulness to itself, to the law, to the spirit of the nation. In Judaism, the Lord said: Revenge is mine (Exodus 7: 14-11: 10; Lieber 2001: 458-359; App. E)! The atheist scoffed at this and taunted: this Lord does not exist. Here, Horkheimer answered that of all the great thinkers none had said that there was no God. In Horkheimer’s view, concerning the apparent exceptions, like Nietzsche and Russell, Judaism proves for itself that in their despair the notion of God was concretely superseded. Consequently, Horkheimer could say that not only the death penalty, but every code of criminal procedure in general should be removed. For Horkheimer, of course the consequences for civil society were obvious. Yet, so Horkheimer argued, the task of a thinking human being was not the repetition of platitudes of positivism and conformism. The task lies rather in the productive contradiction that would determinately supersede the apparently nonsensical thought and develop it further, so that the gigantic penal colony of Riker’s Island in New York would not continue into a bad infinity.

Deus Absconditus Horkheimer did not shy away from the deepest Jewish as well as Christian question, the theodicy question: Why did God–the Deus absconditus–

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who supposedly had created the world and governed it, let happen or even willed the terrible, the awful, all the wrong, all the cruelties, not only in the Jewish or Christian history but in world-history in general (Genesis 1 and 2; John 1; Skriver 1962; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988n: 333; Efron 2009; App. B, C, D, E, F)? According to Horkheimer, this question gained its meaning only out of the Judeo-Christian teaching, which expressed something about how the world should be and how it should not be. In Horkheimer’s view, the critical theory of society started a priori–like the first chapter of the Torah or of the Gospel of John or like Hegel’s or Schelling’s Philosophy of History–from a condition of society and man: how they should be, or from that what was right, and from there criticized the status quo of modern civil society. Horkheimer admitted that the problem of the critical theory of society lay in its starting point: how did the critical theorist know what was right, insofar as it was not shown to him through God or even ordered, as indeed it happened in the Torah or in the New Testament or in the Holy Qur’an. Neither Horkheimer nor Benjamin or Adorno, would have been willing to accept the linguistic answer to this question in Habermas’s pragmatic: to ground ethics and morality in the human potential of language and memory and in the evolutionary universal of the struggle for recognition (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 34, 37, 40; Adorno 1997j: /2: 608-617; Habermas 1983; 1990: 9-17; 1991a: Part III; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b: 1-25; 2007; Honneth 1994; 1996a; App. C, D). For Horkheimer and Adorno, their answer rather lay in their longing for the wholly Other than the finite world of appearance, and its universal injustice (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). Furthermore, for Horkheimer, to live meant to be in complicity, implicated and responsible concerning all the horror which has happened–Auschwitz and Treblinka–and which is happening now–in 2010–in Afghanistan and Iraq and Palestine, and elsewhere (Horkheimer 1988n: 67, 69, 73-74, 9788, 93, 100-101, 103, 123-124, 133-134, 203-204, 242-243, 288, 310-311, 314, 338-339, 343-344, 345). But what should an individual do? The individual could not change the world and human beings as they were. However, so Horkheimer argued in the spirit of the critical theory of society, the individual could nevertheless maintain the consciousness in an infinitesimal measure that there is also the wholly Other. That was possible only through the action and the risk of the individual person, in that he or she stormed against the opinions, and attitudes, and modes of behavior, and common sense being dominant in antagonistic civil society. According to Horkheimer in the 1960s–and the critical theorist of religion may add in 2010–books alone no longer had the right effect, if they ever did, long

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before they were partially replaced by television. In Horkheimer’s view, individuals had to engage themselves personally, in order to ignite at least in some people a small light. All the critical theorists have done so more or less, without ever stopping to write rather effective books or essays.

Dialectical Historicity A century before the critical theorists of society, Hegel appreciated the research of the romantic and Catholic scholars, and admitted that much could be learned from it (Genesis 1 and 2; Isaiah 41: 4; Hertz 5716/1956: 61/4; Schlegel 1829: 44; Hegel 1986e: 48-53; 1986f: 243-300; 1986l: 1933,79-80/21; 1986p: 302-330, 331-373, 374-389; 1986q: 50-95; Marcuse 1987; Adorno 1969b; Küng 1970: VII; 1991b: First Main Part; Efron 2009; Schoeller 2010: 73-76; Zimmermann 2009b). Yet, Hegel rejected, nevertheless, the romantic and Catholic research and its interest as a-historical, and thus contrary to the dialectical notion: historicity and the dialectical notion being after all the very pillars of his dialectical historical idealism, which was deeply rooted in the Hebrew Bible, as well as in the New Testament, and their notion of God, and their theology of history (Genesis 1 and 2; Isaiah 41: 4; Hertz 5716/1956: 61/4; Schlegel 1829: 44; Hegel 1986e: 48-53; 1986f: 243-300; 1986l: 19-33, 79-80/21; 1986p: 302-330, 331-373, 374-389; 1986q: 50-95; Marcuse 1987; Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; Küng 1970: VII; 1991b: First Main Part; App. E). According to the prophet Isaiah, God asks and answers in verse 41: 4: Who hath wrought and done it? He that called the generations from the beginning, I, the Lord, who am the first, And with the last am the same.

According to the Rabbis, commenting on Isaiah 41: 4, God was He, who from the first knew all future times and events, and summoned each to appear at its right moment. For the Rabbis, this verse was one of the most sublime in the Hebrew Bible. According to Rabbi Davidson, human history was the thought of God, the counsel of the Almighty. God was the First and the Last, in Greco-Christian translation the Alpha and the Omega, initiating all movements, calling the generations from the beginning and bringing them to a close (Isaiah 41: 4; Revelation 22: 13; App. E). Prediction and fulfillment were thus manifestations of God’s universal Wisdom and Power. Hegel’s philosophy of history, which called Judaism the Religion of Sublimity, starts precisely from this Jewish and also Christian and

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Islamic faith position. Not without good reason up to the present, do Hegel’s Jewish friends put pebbles of his grave stone: patterned after the holocaust altar of the first, second and third temple in Jerusalem as symbol of the sacrificial process of world-history moving toward the realm of the freedom and the Kingdom of God (Ezekiel 43: 26; Lieber 2001: 522/26; Hegel 1986l: 19-33, 79-80).

From Adam to the Messiah According to Hegel, the Biblical story of the Fall described the original sin in such a way that Adam ate from the tree of knowledge (Genesis 3; Hegel 1986q: 258; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37; Efron 2009; App. E). Thereby came about recognition, disunion, and separation, in which the good was for man, but also the bad. The Biblical story represented Adam as being forbidden by God to eat from the tree of knowledge. Thus, according to Hegel’s interpretation, the bad was represented formally as transgression of a Divine commandment, as disobedience, which could have had any kind of a concrete content. It was somewhat formal. Here nevertheless, so Hegel explained, this commandment had essentially and precisely this knowledge of good and evil for its content. Thereby, the rising, the opening up, the becoming clear of human consciousness was posited in the story. However, at the same time this position was imagined in the Biblical story as a standpoint and a condition, which was not to remain and which was to be superseded. Adam was not to remain standing in the disunion of his being for himself. Furthermore, the snake said in the story, that Adam would become equal to God through eating from the tree of knowledge. Thus, the snake claimed the pride of Adam. Then, God spoke to himself: See the man has become like one of us, with his knowledge of good and evil. In Hegel’s interpretation, thus the snake had not lied. God confirmed what the snake had said. Hegel remembered that the romantic and Catholic theologians and philosophers went through a lot of trouble and effort, in order to explain this passage, and went even so far, to explain it as mere and sheer irony. God himself was ironical concerning Adam’s aspiration to God-likeness. However, for Hegel the higher explanation was that under this first Adam the second Adam was understood and prefigured: the Messiah, or in Greco-Christian translation, the Christos or the Christ (Genesis 3; Hegel 1986q: 241-298, esp. 258; Küng 1970; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b). For Hegel, knowledge was the principle of separation and disunion, thus of spirituality. However, knowledge was also the principle of the healing of the damage of the separation and the disunion: of reconciliation. In this

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principle of knowledge was, indeed, also posited the principle of Divinity, which through further balancing, compensation, and equalization had to come to its reconciliation, and truth, and reality. In the principle of knowledge lay the promise and the certainty that Adam would become again the image of God, in which he had been created originally. Hegel found this promise expressed in the dialectical image, in which God said to the snake: I will make you enemies of each other: you and the woman, Your offspring and her offspring. It will crush your head and you will strike its heal (Genesis 3; Hegel 1986q: 258; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37).

Further consequences of the Fall were painful childbearing, and hard work, and death. As in the snake, so Hegel explained, the principle of knowledge was represented as being independent and outside of Adam, so it was admittedly completely consequential that in man as the concrete knowledge the other side of the turning back, the change, the turning around, the turning inside out, the turning upside down, the reversion, the inversion of the reflection was contained as well, and that this other side would crush under foot the head of the snake.

Historical Significance According to the critical theory of religion, as Hegel, so also did his great opponent, Arthur Schopenhauer, and the Left-Hegelian Horkheimer see the extraordinary significance and importance of the story of the Fall for the whole human history (Genesis 3; Hegel 1986q: 241-298, esp. 258; Schopenhauer 1946; 1877; 1989: 1/450, 484, 550-554; 2/648, 774, 779; 3/147; 4/77; 5/357-359; Adamson 1876: 491-509; Dolson 1901: 241-250; Gottfried 1975: 331-338; Gupta 1975: 721-728; Hollingdale 1970; Horkheimer 1985g: 391-392; 1967b: 252, 259-260; App. E). For Schopenhauer as for Horkheimer later on, the greatest and most splendid teaching in Judaism and Christianity was about the original or–in Christianity, but not in Judaism and Islam–inherited sin of human kind (Genesis 3; Horkheimer 1985g: 391-392; App. E, F). For Horkheimer in 1970, informed by Schopenhauer, and the dialectical religiologist may add in 2010, this original sin had determined world-history so far, and still determines the world for the thinking person. The original sin, so Horkheimer argued, was possible only under the presupposition that God had created man with a free will.

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The first act that man did with his free will in Paradise was to commit this great sin on the basis of which the whole history of humanity could really be explained theologically. Also, Horkheimer believed like Schopenhauer that the teaching about the original sin was one of the most significant teachings of the world religions. For Horkheimer, it had once had a social role to play, which it has lost today in civil society as well as in socialist society. Religion once said: when you do the good in the sense of the religion’s ethical orientation of action, then you shall be rewarded. Your soul will enter eternal bliss. When you do the bad, when you sin, you shall be punished. Then hell is waiting for you. The secular Schopenhauer of course did not believe this. Yet, he said something similar as he inverted the religious story of the Fall into a secular philosophical axiom. For Schopenhauer, the person who did the bad, and who thus negated with his will to life the will to life of other persons, and who was seeking his own happiness for the price of the happiness of the others, was born again in some way, without knowing about his previous life. Here, Schopenhauer combined Christianity and Buddhism. According to Schopenhauer, man being born again had to suffer himself all sufferings, until to him as a true and genuine martyr, the suffering of other persons was so close to him as his own suffering: until he could feel compassion and joy with others. In Schopenhauer’s view, the affirmation of one’s own self and the negation of the other individuals was really the original sin. As Hegel concretely sublated semantic potentials from the depth of the Hebrew mythos of the Fall into his dialectical philosophy, it was indeed more open for the Messianic, eschatological, apocalyptic future of human kind than Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and at least as open as Benjamin’s, Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critical theory of society, characterized by a negative and inverse theology, finally longing for the totally Other than the horror of nature and world history (Genesis 3; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986p: 78-79; 1986q: 241-298, esp. 258; Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989: 1/450, 484, 550-554; 2/648, 774,779; 3/147; 4/77; 5/357-359; Adamson 1876: 491-509; Dolson 1901: 241-250; Gottfried 1975: 331-338; Gupta 1975: 721-728; Hollingdale 1970; Horkheimer 1985g: 391-392, chaps. 23, 27, 28, 29; 1967b: 252, 259260). Of course, only a short look at the present daily course of world history would have easily shown Hegel and the critical theorists that the head of the snake has still not yet been crushed, and that the Messiah has still not yet arrived, and that human suffering in biological and economic reproduction and death prevail, if also in very modern forms, and that the horrible continuum of crime and punishment, of the jus or lex talionis goes on undiminished, and is even intensified (Kelley 2005: 1-2; Jehl 2005:

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1-4; Weber 2005: 1-2; Martin 2005: 1). However, it is precisely this corrupt creation that has regenerated always anew the longing for the entirely Other from one micrological cipher to the other (Adorno 1970b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 21, 17, 29, 37, 40).

The Tragedy of Man Horkheimer stated–combining Schopenhauer and Marx–in pre-fascist antagonistic German civil society between 1926 and 1931, that the activity of a proletarian party had for its goal the abolition of exploitation, and thus the transformation of the corrupt creation (Horkheimer 1987b: 445). However, the strengthening of this revolutionary proletarian party conditioned indirectly the sharpening of the pressure on the dominated working class, and in addition the merciless struggle against all other people, who are suspected to be in sympathy with it. After World War II, the 1968 revolutionary youth movement in the West, and the critical theorists engaged in it, had to experience this most painfully (Lucke 2008: 4-9; Meyer 2008: 21-27; Hofmann 2008: 27-31; Schwan 2008: 31-32; Negt 2008: 37-42). According to Horkheimer, the closer the final decision came, the more terrible and awful became the measures of oppression that the bourgeois corporate ruling class would take. The civil war itself, toward which the revolutionary proletarian party was driven in the historical dynamic, contained all the dreadfulness on earth. If the old capitalist order was victorious, then the fascist terror would begin and the endless horror. Only two years after Horkheimer wrote this in 1931, the fascists won over the socialists and communists, and 12 years of terror spread all over Germany and Europe, which was only ended by a likewise terrible war. In Horkheimer’s view, people who are serious about the improvement of civil society and the corrupt creation have to take all of this into consideration and have to put up with it. Horkheimer was convinced that the revolutionary action, through which society was to be helped, was cursed to increase the misery. The cynical counter-revolutionary member of the corporate ruling class is not even entirely wrong in the reproach against the ascetic proletarian revolutionary: that he conditioned immense suffering. This very same counter-revolutionary reproach was heard in August 2008: e.g. against the Castro brothers in Cuba, or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. This precisely is the corrupt world. Horkheimer’s friend, Paul Tillich saw in the fact that the revolutionary, who wanted to establish a new and more just social order, made his hands dirty and bloody as soon as he started his revolutionary activity. This is the very tragedy of humanity.

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On the other hand, there have been revolutionaries who thought and still think that the situation in the capitalist class society must get worse before it can get better. They obviously are not aware of or sensitive to the fact that the working class is suffering most from this situation. They thus ignore the tragic condition of humanity in terms of, what Schopenhauer called, a cursed optimism.

Light, Truth and Justice Between World War I and II, Horkheimer stated that when somebody was deep down in late capitalist society, and exposed to an eternity of pain, agony, anguish, and misery, then he nursed and harbored in his heart, like a redeeming wish-image, the thought that one–a Messiah–may come, who stood in the light, and who let happen to him truth and justice (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1980b: 333-334; Horkheimer 1987b: 452). That did not even have to happen to him in his own life time, and also not in the life time of those who tortured him to death, but some day everything was to be bent into the right shape. The lie, the false image, which one brought of the innocent victim into the world, without him being able to defend himself against them, was some day to pass away before the truth, and his real life, his thoughts and goals, as well as the suffering and injustice which was caused him at the end, was to become manifest. In Horkheimer’s view, it was bitter to die unappreciated and in darkness. For Horkheimer, it was the honor of historical research to clear up and lighten such darkness. The critical theory of society itself had such historical component. However, according to Horkheimer–in the 1920s and 1930s, and the dialectical religiologist may add the first decade of the 21st century–very seldom had historians forgotten this honor so resolutely as in the effort of the present to let historical understanding happen to the formerly dominant ruling classes and their hangmen. For Horkheimer, the dreams of heretics and witches, that a better and more human century would look back upon them, have indeed been fulfilled in such a way that the scholars and poets of today dream of returning into that darkness of the past, but not out of the youthful longing to liberate the victims, but in order to hold up those blessed times as a model to the present civil society in an informed way (Horkheimer 1987b: 452; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1980b: 333-334; Kesting 2008: 90-94). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, that indeed was certainly not the goal of the great Jewish, Christian and Islamic mystics or the German idealists, or the critical theorists of society: for them the victims were not forgotten.

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According to Habermas, for the Jewish mystics, the Kabbalists, the divine Being also initiated that problem that drove forward the salvationhistorical process (Habermas 1982: 438-440; 1978c: 128-129; App. E). The question arose for the Kabbalists, how the scattered and dispersed divine sparks could possibly be liberated and collected again from their encapsulation in the world of matter. After the fall of Adam and the overthrow of an almost completed world, this problem sharpened and became critical. God has now retreated so far that the repatriation of things to their original location was handed over and delivered to the efforts of men. Habermas understood also the Kabbalist Scholem’s own life story out of this same mystical drive to collect the dispersed sparks of the divine light, and to rescue and salvage the splinters of a Messianic future: the scientific lifework of the great Judaist about the Kabbalah, as well as also his life-long efforts to win his friend Walter Benjamin over to Zionism and the State of Israel, and finally to explore for 40 years after his death the reasons, why this attempt had failed. In Habermas’s view, all four mythical, mystical, theological topoi–nature in God, Zimzum, Tiqqun, and the breakage of the vessels–were in a peculiar way connected with the representation of a drawing or bringing together of energy: a contraction of God. Habermas traced the lines of Jewish and Christian mysticism, as discovered by Scholem, to Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Baader; to Marx, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Freud and Kafka; to Bloch, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Plessner and Löwith; to Hannah Arendt, Norbert Elias, Eric H. Erickson, Herbert Marcuse, and Alfred Schütz; to Karl Kraus, and Franz Rosenzweig; to Georg Simmel and the Freudo-Marxists (Habermas 1982: 438-440; 1978c: 128-129). When Habermas participated in my international course on the Future of Religion in the IUC, Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, in April 1978, he confessed that he tried to collect the sparks of communicative rationality not only in culture in general, but also and particularly in religion. At this time, Habermas was not yet aware of the fact that he had, indeed, at least the beginnings of a communicative theory of religion rooted in Jewish and Protestant mysticism, as well as in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, which in the meantime he not only admits, but which he is also continually developing further for the past three decades, always being concerned with salvaging the legacy of religion, but not as a religious, but rather as a secular, post-theistic, neither theistic nor atheistic, humanistic legacy in the tradition of Benjamin’s and Adorno’s inverse theology, and Fromm’s humanistic religiology (Jamme/Schneider 1984; Adorno 1970b;

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1997u; Habermas 1978a: chaps. 3, 4, 5; 1978b: 32-47, 48-95, 127-143; 1982: 438-440; 1990: 9-19; 1991a: Part III; 2001a: 9-31; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Dews 1986: 53-54, 98-99, 125-126, 139-140, 146, Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247; Mendieta 2005). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, nothing shows the intense humanistic religiosity of Habermas, who even after 1978 considered himself to be like Max Weber religiously unmusical, more clearly, than his comprehension of Jewish and Protestant mysticism. However, when Habermas used in the face of the new political, and sometimes even military activities of Christian liberation theologians and Basic Christian Communities in Central and Latin America, or of Buddhist monks in Burma, or Muslims in the Middle East or Indonesia, the notion of the post-secular society, then this did not mean that the secularization process had come to its end, or that religion was coming back again, in order to take up once more its former traditional position in the public life of modern civil society and liberal constitutional state. It meant only that the predictions of Nietzsche, Marx, or Freud concerning the end of religion had somewhat been pre-mature, and that it will continue to decline as substantial public power. Therefore, the good religious legacy had to be salvaged not as a religious one, but rather as a secular, humanistic one (Adorno 1970b; 1997j/2: 608-617; Habermas 1990: 14-15; 1991a: Part III; 2001; Dews 1986: 53-54, 125-126; App. E, F, G).

The Corruption of Nature According to Habermas, Friedrich Wilhelm Josef von Schelling–who had been Hegel’s friend, and who had together with him also been a Lutheran theologian in the Tübingen Seminary, and who had together with another Lutheran theology student, Hölderlin, participated in the production of the oldest system program of German idealism, a mythology of reason, in Bad Homburg near Frankfurt a.M. in 1800–let himself be guided by the experience of the corruption of the world as nature (Jamme/ Schneider 1984; Habermas 1978a: 185-186; 1978c: 128-129; 1982: 438-440). Besides the radicalized Protestant doctrine of the original sin, Schelling found the three mystical topoi from the Zohar being very well suitable in philosophical inversion and translation and sublation, to process, and to assimilate, and to digest this experience of the corruption of the world. Particularly, Schelling’s odd discourse about the connection between nature and the world of the spirits after the death of his beloved Carolina showed to Habermas, how deep this experience of the corruption of

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nature reached (Jaspers 1955; Habermas 1978a: 185-186; 1978b: 128-129; 1982: 438-440). According to Schelling, every step that led upwards, was lovely and charming, but that the same steps reached in the fall was terrible and dreadful. To Schelling, everything in the corrupt nature announced a fallen life. The mountains had not grown the way they stood there today: e.g. in the Austrian, Bavarian or Swiss Alps. The ground, which carried the people, had not originated through elevation, but rather through sinking back. In addition, here not a firm, steady order had prevailed, but after a once inhibited lawfulness of development, contingency and accidentally broke into nature. Nobody could possibly believe that the floods, which obviously had been effective everywhere, and which had torn through the valleys, and had left behind so many ossified sea creatures in the mountains, had produced all this according to an internal law. Nobody could assume that a Divine hand had stored heavy masses of rocks upon slippery clay, so that as a consequence they would glide down in horrible landslides and bury peaceful valleys sown with human habitats into terrible and dreadful ruin, and happy hikers in the midst of their way. The real ruins are not those wreckages of primordial human splendor and magnificence, because of which the curious travelers visited the deserts of Persia or the wilderness of India. The whole earth was one great ruin, in which the animals live as ghosts, and the human beings as spirits, and in which were seized and held fast and registered many hidden energies and treasures as through invisible powers, and as through the ban, or the spell of a magician or conjurer. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, Schelling’s theodicy of the corrupt nature was still a reaction to the great natural earthquake catastrophe of Lisbon in 1755, which, to be sure, was much smaller than the Tsunami in the Indian Ocean on Christmas 2004, or the earthquakes in Burma, Pakistan, China, Haiti and Chile from 2008-2010, but that shook, nevertheless, all of European culture to its religious foundations for decades and centuries to come. Schelling’s reaction came closer to Voltaire’s Candide than to Leibniz’s Theodicy of the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil (Leibniz 1996: Vol. I. 68-205, Parts One and Two; Hegel 1986t: 248, 294). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the contrast between God’s goodness and man’s freedom on one hand, and the natural evils and catastrophes, on the other, can hardly be exaggerated. One can observe daily what Schelling called the corruption of nature on all weather channels around the globe: hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, mudslides, heat waves, global warming, etc.

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The Corruption of History While Schelling concentrated his attention on the corruption of nature, Hegel was more concerned with the corruption of history (Deuteronomy 30: 19; 31: 14, 27; Hertz 5716/1956; 882/19; 896/1-4; 906/27; 920-921; Hegel 1986l: 19-36, 328, 529; 1986d: 54; 1986e: 44; 1986j: 45; 1986p: 379; 1986r: 124, 189-404, 406, 429, 441, 442-443, 448, 468; 1986s: 196, 373; Marcuse 1960: Part I; 1987; Efron 2009; App. E). To Hegel, the immediate, empirical view of history demonstrated and convinced him that the historical actions of men did not follow or imitate the Divine Providence as revealed by the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic prophets, or the Reason discovered by the Greek philosophers, but that they rather originated from their individual and collective needs, drives, instincts, inclinations, passions, and interests, characters, and talents. This happened in such a way that in the historical spectacle of human actions only the human needs, passions, interests appeared as the motivating force, and as that which was mainly effective. Hegel had to admit that in the spectacle of world history lay also general purposes, the will to goodness, noble patriotism, etc. However, so Hegel experienced and insisted, these virtues and general purposes stood only in an insignificant relationship to the corrupt historical process, and what it produced. Hegel had to admit that he could see realized the determinations of reason in the historical subjects themselves, and in the circle of their activities, but they stood in an unimportant relationship to the masses of humankind. Likewise were the size, range, scale, and circumference of the existence of peoples’ virtues of relatively minimal extension. To the contrary, so Hegel insisted, the passions, the purposes of the particular interests, the satisfaction of selfishness and egoism, were the most powerful, forceful, tremendous, violent elements in history. They had their power in that they respected no barriers or limits that abstract right and personal and social morality wanted to posit against them, and impose on them. Those forces of nature, in which almost everything is programmed to eat everything in order to maintain itself, lay much closer and were much more immediate to man, than the artificial and lengthy, long drawn out discipline and education toward law and order, and moderation, and toward right, personal, and social morality, state law, and religious codes and orientation of action (Hegel 1986p; 1986q: 381-382, 405, 409, 422, 435-436, 450-451, 457-460, 466, 475-478, 486, 511-517, 519-520; 1986l: 33-36; 1986g; App. E). According to Hegel, when we considered that historical spectacle or theater play of human passions, and when we looked at the consequences of their violence and aggression,

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and when we saw the lack of judgment and the folly, which associated itself not only with those passions, but also even with, and chiefly and especially so with good intentions and rightful and moral and legal and lawful purposes, and when we noticed the bad, evil, wrong and malicious results, which came out of all that, the downfall, the decline, and the doom of the most blooming empires, kingdoms, and realms that the spirit of man had ever produced, then we could only be filled with sorrow and mourning about this corruption, transitoriness, and impermanence of human history in general (Hegel 1986l: 19-55; 1986g: 203-291). In Hegel’s view, as this corruption and transitoriness was not only the work of nature, but also of the will of humanity, the attentive observer would end up with a moral grief, sorrow, sadness, melancholy, and with an indignation of the good spirit, if such spirit was still in him, about such spectacle.

Super-Capitalism In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, there happens sometimes in history an increase in the usual corruption, like i.e. the dissolution of the egalitarian social structures of the time immediately after World War II, under the more recent super-capitalism, and a rise of Right-extremism in recent decades (Hegel 1986l: 107-115; Dubiel/Friedeburg Schumm 1994; Reich 2008; Krugman 2008; Molthagen 2008; Hinchman 2008: 109-111; Abendroth 1969; Habermas 1973; 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 1987d; 1992a; 1992b; 1995; 1997a; 1998; 2001a; 2001b; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; Honneth 1990; 2000; Fraser/Honneth 2003; Flechtheim 1971; Meyer 2009: 55-59). Neither Schelling, nor Hegel, nor even Marx, Engels or Bakunin, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, or Freud had the slightest idea about the extension and intensity of the historical corruption produced by the present super-capitalism: as this corruption spreads cancer-like from antagonistic civil society through its foundation–marriage and family– and into its super-structure–state, international relations and even into art, religion, philosophy, and science. Since the Nixon Administration, and particularly since the victorious neo-conservative and neo-liberal counterrevolution of 1989, the era of shared prosperity of the affluent American society, and the party transcending consensus of democratic capitalism has been superseded by an era of super-capitalism, characterized by growing insecurity, inequality, and polarization in direction of alternative Future I–the entirely administered society, and of alternative Future II–the totally militarized society (App. G). The impressive growth of the US economy since about 1980 was of assistance mainly to the rich upper classes in

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American more and more antagonistic civil society, while the interests of the general public in economic, social, and ecological protective measures were very much neglected. Of course, even the prime time of the democratic capitalism after World War II was not precisely the Golden Age for all people in American civil society. Even during this historical period, oligopolies complicated innovations and led to high prices. The reasons why this somewhat less corrupt, more stable, more egalitarian economic system came to its end were: the strengthening of the neo-liberalism of the Chicago Friedmann School; the increasing social irresponsibility of the American corporate ruling class, particularly after the communist threat had disappeared; technical and economic changes that undermined the former comfortable business practices, like e.g. the use of container logistic, the spreading of computers, and of global provision chains, which again accelerated the automation, the de-industrialization, and the global competition. Slowly such developments undermined the older oligopolistic structures. Under the pressure of aggressive competitors at home and abroad, and of impatient investors, the management of the big corporations tried always more intensely to lower the costs of production through unsocial measures of all kinds. Of course, capitalist enterprises exist in order to maximize their gains, and that even more so under the present super-capitalism, than in the previous oligopoly-capitalist period. In recent decades, the rise of the Right wing of the Republican Party in the United States, and of neo-liberalism, with a strong religious legitimation, have influenced the un-egalitarian distribution of wealth much more than the technological and economic structural changes themselves. The relatively high degree of social justice, which the Americans had been allowed to enjoy between 1947 and 1973, was neither accidental nor prescribed by the market. It was rather the immediate consequence of the previous reforms; the social and tax policies of the New Deal of the Roosevelt Administration and its socially modified liberalism; the price and wage controls of the war time; the party transcending post-war consensus about the necessity of a welfare state. However, from the early 1970s on, the Right wing of the Republican Party undermined gradually the foundations of the egalitarianism of the post-war period. America’s landslide into social injustice was not caused first of all through the usually suspected factors, i.e. through technology, or through the sinking demand for unskilled factory workers, nor through globalization, but rather through the erosion of socio-ethical and legal norms and institutions, which once had promoted the social justice. The Right wing of the Republican Party has weakened these institutional barriers against extreme social inequality to

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such an extent that now the plutocratic conditions of the 1920s, which lead to fascism, have been restored again. The neo-liberal forces have reduced the inhibitions, which in earlier times kept in limits the extreme unequal distribution of wealth. In the past decades, the Republicans have repeatedly given tax cuts to the richest Americans, and have, thereby, gradually sharpened the social inequality, as they destroyed almost completely the formerly effective redistribution mechanism. Beyond that, the Republican Party together with its allies in the economy have weakened fatally the labor movement. Between 1960 and 1999, the number of labor union members has remained almost the same in Canada, about 30%, while in the United States in the same time period, this number has fallen from above 30% to merely 13%, and even lower. Since the United States and Canada have similar, inter-connected economies, this divergence can be explained only through political factors. Of course, also the European welfare states have become very wobbly and unsteady in the same time period under the influence of the same neo-conservative and neo-liberal forces active in America. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, as in the super-capitalistic period, neo-conservativism and neoliberalism massively promote social inequality and social injustice, as well as the horrible, most cruel wars against Afghanistan, and Iraq, which have cost so far–March 2010–the lives of over one million people; they further increase the corruption of history (Scahill 2007; Kinzer 2006; Perkins 2007; Klein 2001). In the Presidential election of November 2008, the American people had the choice, of voting for the Republican Senator John McCain and thereby for neo-conservativism and neo-liberalism, and thus for the further destruction of socio-ethical and legal norms and institutions, and thus for the continuation of super-capitalism, and for the further increase of the historical corruption, or for the Democratic Senator Barack Obama, and thereby for a further socially modified Roosevelt liberalism, and thus for the restoration of the socio-ethical and legal norms and institutions, and thus for the curbing of super-capitalism, and for a decrease in the corruption of history.

Slaughter Bench of History According to Hegel, the keen observer could elevate into the most terrible and awful picture or painting those consequences of the violence of human passions: the slaughter bench of corrupt history of past and present (Hegel 1986l: 35-55; Antflinger 2005: 1-2; Symonds 2005: 1-5; Pitman 2005: 1-3; Brummit 2005: 1-2; Skoloff 2005: 1-2; Jehl/Schmitt 2005: 1-4; Lederer 2005:

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1-2; Badger 2005a: 1-2; 2006a: 1-2; 2005b: 1-2; 2005c: 1-2; 2006b: 1-2; App. F). The observer could do that without any rhetorical exaggeration, and merely with the correct list and compilation of the misfortunes, calamities, disasters, unhappiness that the most marvelous, and splendid, and magnificent nations and state-formations and civilizations, as well as private virtues have suffered (Hegel 1986l; Samoson/Debelius 2008). Likewise, the observer could, thereby, raise the feeling into the deepest and most helpless sorrow, sadness, and melancholy, to which no consoling result kept the counter-balance. Against such melancholy, the observer could maybe fasten or strengthen himself, or could step out of it, through simply thinking positivistically: well, it has just happened that way; it is as it is; it is the case as it is; it is fate; it can not be changed. Then the observer could step back again out of the boredom, which those meaningless reflections of sorrow have produced, into his usual everyday feeling of life, and into the present and presence of his private purposes and interests, Shortly, the observer could move back into his narrow egoistic and selfish attitude. In such selfishness and egoism, the observer could stand at the quiet bank or shore of the stream of the more or less corrupt world history, and from there he could enjoy safely and securely the distant view and sight of the confused masses of historical wreckage, rubble, and ruins.

Cursed Optimism Horkheimer had to admit that Hegel was not so distant from his archenemy Schopenhauer, who hated him so much because of his cursed optimism (Horkheimer 1967b: 259-260, 311-312; Kaufmann 1967; 1968; 1986; Menke 1996). According to Hegel, as Horkheimer understood him, the life of the theological Notion, his Absolute, was the contradiction, the negative, the pain, the suffering (Hegel 1986f: Part Two; 1986l: 35; Horkheimer 1967b: 259-260; Dunanevskaja 2000; Nancy 2000; App. F). What Hegel called the Notion, the system of the intellectual and spiritual determinations that determinately negated each other, and thus resulted out of each other, and which were in eternal movement, was nothing else than the genesis, and the origin, and the passing away of what it comprehended toward the Unconditional, understood in terms of a Jewish and Christian mystical negative theology (Horkheimer 1967b: 259-260, 311312; 1985l: 483-490). In Horkheimer’s view, the great achievement of Hegel consisted exactly in that for him, the Notion did not exist only outside and independently from what disappeared, and was seized, and was held fast, and was recorded in it: the Infinite was rather in the finite, and the finite

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in the Infinite (Hertz 5716/1956: 920-942; Horkheimer 1967b: 259-260; Küng 1978: B). The consolation that Hegel’s so-called cursed optimism could give remained ultimately the insight into the necessary interconnection of the notions into the totality: that brittle and fragile unity, which was called system. The anamnesis or recognition of the logical structure in nature and the human world, on which according to Horkheimer everything depended, and was what really mattered in Hegel’s teaching on nature, subjective, objective and absolute spirit, was in no way so distant from Schopenhauer’s aesthetical and philosophical contemplation as it appeared to him (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989: Vol. I, chaps. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31; Hegel 1986l: 35; Horkheimer 1967b: 59-260). According to Horkheimer, Hegel spoke admittedly of the substantial determination, and destiny, and absolute, final purpose of world history. For Hegel, ultimately history came, and amounted to, and aimed at the absolute Spirit, which for Horkheimer was nothing else than the philosophical system, and the mere insight into the totality (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; Horkheimer 1967b: 59-60). However, Horkheimer had to admit that Hegel’s teleology, which was rooted in the beginning of Providence and Reason, and for which in Karl Kraus’s and Benjamin’s terms the origin is the goal, did in no way prevent him from presenting a most realistic and pessimistic portray of the real, external, empirical course of corrupt history, as a terrible slaughter bench, sacrificial altar, and Golgotha (Hegel 1986l: 19-26, 27-28, 29-141; Benjamin 1977: 258-259; 353-385; Horkheimer 1967b: 259-260).

Hypertrophy of the Brain Organ Horkheimer was very critical of the philosophy or theology of history as an academic discipline, in so far as they did not make manifest the corruption of world history, and tried to harmonize it optimistically and apologetically (Hegel 1986l; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1987e: 25-30, 256; 1988c: chap. 2; Menke 1996). According to Horkheimer, the human genus or species was not–as Schopenhauer and others had said–an escapade of the corrupt history of nature, a sideshow or a false or mistaken or erroneous formation, through hypertrophy of the human brain organ (Horkheimer 1987e: 25-30, 256; 1988c: chap. 2; Menke 1996). For Horkheimer, such escapade, sideshow, or false formation through hypertrophy of the human brain organ was true only for the human reason in certain individuals and maybe only in short periods of history, e.g. in modern time, and even then only for some countries, in which the economy gave certain

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individuals room to maneuver arbitrarily, like e.g. the liberal-capitalistic period of the 18th and 19th centuries (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 491540; Horkheimer 1987e: 25-30, 256; 1988c: chap. 2; Menke 1996). In Horkheimer’s view, the human brain organ, or what the cognitivists of the 20th and 21st centuries have been calling brain-mind or the human intelligence, was hefty enough in order to constitute a regular epoch in the corrupt history of the earth (Horkheimer 1987e: 25-30, 256; 1988c: chap. 2; Menke 1996; Gold/Engel 1998; Siebert 2005c: 135-160). The human species, including its machines, chemicals, and organizational forces, was in this modern epoch le dernier cri (the very last thing) of adaptation for the purpose of survival (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 491-540; Horkheimer 1987e: 25-30, 256; 1988c: chap. 2; Menke 1996; Parsons 1964; 1965; Gold/ Engel 1998; Siebert 2005c: 135-160). For Horkheimer, the machines, chemicals and organizational forces belonged to the human genus as teeth to the bears, since they served the same purpose–adaptation for survival– and only functioned better. According to Horkheimer, humans had not only overtaken their immediate animal predecessors, but they had already so fundamentally exterminated them as had never happened before among the animal species, including the meat-eating dinosaurs, which probably were providentially annihilated through an asteroid impact in the Caribbean 250,000 years ago. In the 1970s/1980s, Habermas and his disciples departed from Schelling and Hegel as well as from Horkheimer, Adorno and Benjamin in that they cancelled the philosophy or theology of history altogether and replaced them–maybe prematurely–by a kind of Darwinian-Parsonian evolutionism (Parsons 1964; 1965; Habermas 1984a; 1987d: chap. 8; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; Dubiel 1988; 1992; 1993: 5-11; 1994: 5-13; 1995: 14-25; 1996: 33-40; 1998: 25-35; Dubiel/Friedeburg 1996: 5-12; Dubiel/Friedeburg/Schumm 1994).

Freedom, Justice, Eternal Salvation For Horkheimer, in relation to that survival struggle of the human species on this earth, it seemed to be a kind of eccentricity to want to construct world history–as Hegel or Theodor Haecker or Reinhold Schneider or Romano Guardini had done–in reference to categories like freedom, or justice, or eternal salvation of the individual person (Exodus 7: 16; Lieber 2001: 359/16; Hegel 1986l; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1987e: 25-30, 256; 1988c: chap. 2; Menke 1996; Schneider 1955; Guardini 1925; 1935, 1948; 1952; Efron 2009). These categories stemmed indeed from individuals, who have gone astray: who, seen from the course of world history in its

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totality, meant nothing, except that they helped to bring about transitory social conditions in which, particularly many machines and chemicals were produced for the strengthening of the human species and for the subjugation of the other animal species. In the sense of this serious history, all ideas, prohibitions, religions, or political confessions were interesting only in so far as they–having originated from many different conditions–increased or decreased the natural chances of the human species on this earth, or in the universe. According to Horkheimer, the liberation of the bourgeois from the injustice of the feudal or absolutistic past served through liberalism to arouse the machinery, as the emancipation of the woman lead into her training for the military. The spirit and everything good was entangled terribly in their origin and in their existence into this horror. That precisely was the corruption of history. According to Horkheimer, the serum that the medical doctor gave to the child was the result of the attack against the defenseless creatures. In the endearments of the lovers as in the holiest symbols of Christianity sounded through the lust for the flesh of the little goat, as in this the ambiguous respect for the totem-animal (Freud 1946; Horkheimer 1987e: 25-30, 256; 1988c: chap. 2; Menke 1996; Efron 2009; App. E). For Horkheimer, even still the differentiated modern understanding for children, kitchen, and church was a consequence of the cunning division of labor in antagonistic civil society, which had to be paid highly for by nature inside and outside of man (Hegel 1986g: 292-338, 339-397; 1986l: 491-540; Freud 1930; 1946; 1955; 1962; 1964; 1977; 1992; 1993; 1995a; 1995b; Fromm 1950; 1957; 1959; 1961; 1967; 1972b; 1973; 1980b; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1967; 1980a; 1980b; 1995; 2005; Horkheimer 1967b; 1988c: chap. 2; 1987e: 2530, 256; Menke 1996). In the retroactive escalation of such organization lay the historical function of culture. Therefore, so Horkheimer explained, the genuine thinking, which abstracted itself from this organization, reason in its pure form, took on the trait of madness, which the down to earth people always noticed. In case, so Horkheimer predicted, reason in its pure form would be victorious in the human species, then this would endanger the supremacy of the human genus. The theory of the human species as escapade and sideshow would be correct after all. However, so Horkheimer argued, this theory, which once wanted to serve cynically the critique of the anthropocentric philosophy or theology of history, was itself too anthropocentric in order to be correct. According to Horkheimer, human reason played the role of the adaptation instrument, rooted in the human potential of work and tool and not of the quieting down factor, rooted in the evolutionary universals of language and memory, sexuality

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and eroticism, struggle for recognition and nationhood, as admittedly it could seem from the use which some, particularly religious and philosophical and artistic individuals sometimes make of it (Hegel 1965; 1969; 1972; 1979; 1986c: 503-591; 1986j; 1986m; 1986n; 1986o; 1986p; 1986q; 1986r; 1986s; 1986t; Heidegger 1968; 2001; Schneider 1955; Horkheimer 1987e: 25-30, 256; 1988c: chap. 2; Menke 1996; Bryant 1896). The cunning of functional reason consisted in making the human beings into always further reaching predatory beasts, and not in bringing about what Hegel had called the identity of subject and object. (Hegel 1986f: 36, 38-45, 461, 466-467, 482; 1986l: 29-55; Horkheimer 1987e: 254). Instrumental rationality shall lead to global alternative Future I–a human species, into which the individual was so completely integrated, as is the case in other species, e.g. the ants or the termites (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 38; 1987e: 254-255; Flechteim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; App. G).

Rule and Domination over Nature In the perspective of Horkheimer, a philosophical construction of worldhistory would have to show how, in spite of all detours and resistances, the consequent rule and domination over nature asserted itself always more decisively and integrated into itself everything internally human (Hegel 1986l: 11-141; Horkheimer 1932; 1967b; 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 38; 1987e: 254-255; Flechteim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2004; Menke 1996). Out of this perspective, Horkheimer wanted also to derive the formations of the productive relations, of class rule and domination, and of culture (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 38; 1987e: 254255; Flechteim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2004). For Horkheimer, the thought of the super-man could find application only in the sense of the turnover of quantity into quality. According to Horkheimer, as one could call a superman the flyer, who with some chemicals could in a few flights clean the last continents from the last free animals, in differentiation from the old-stone-age cave dweller, so may finally a human super-amphibian come into existence, in comparison with whom the flyer of today may appear to be a harmless swallow. It was questionable for Horkheimer, if it was at all possible that a genuine nature-historical next higher species after man could come into existence at all. In Horkheimer’s view, that much at least was true in anthropomorphic terms, that the natural history had not counted on the lucky throw that it achieved with humanity. Horkheimer agreed with Heisenberg: God had gambled and he had won. For Horkheimer, humanity’s ability to annihilate the world and himself

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promised to become so great, that when this human species had once exhausted itself, tabula rasa would be the end. Horkheimer predicted that the human species would either tear itself to pieces, or it would pull all plants and animals of the earth down with itself: global alternative Future II–thermonuclear World War III and the environmental consequences (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 38; 1987e: 254-255; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; App. G). According to Horkheimer, if the earth was still young enough, then as Marx put it, the whole thing would have to start again on a much lower level of evolution (Marx 1955: chap. VIII; Horkheimer 1987e: 254-255).

Humane Ideas According to Horkheimer, as the philosophy or the theology of history situated the humane ideas as effective powers into history itself and let it end with their triumph, they were deprived of their innocence, which belonged to their content (Hegel 1986l: Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1987e: 255-256). For Horkheimer, the scorn that the humane ideas had always made a fool of themselves and disgraced themselves, when the economy, i.e. the force, was not on their side, was the scorn in relation to all what was weak (Marx 1953: chap. VII; Bottomore 1984: 41-61; Horkheimer 1987e: 255-256). In this scorn the authors, Marx and Engels, have against their own will identified themselves with the oppression in civil society, which they wanted to abolish. In Horkheimer’s view, in the philosophy of history was repeated what had happened in Christianity: the good, which in truth remained delivered to suffering, was disguised as power, which determined the course of history and triumphed at the end. The good was deified as world spirit or at least as immanent law. However, in this way, so Horkheimer argued, history was not only immediately turned over into its opposite, but the Idea itself, which was supposed to break the necessity, the logical course of the happening, was distorted. The danger of the escapade or the sideshow was averted and turned away. The powerlessness, which was misunderstood as power, was through such elevation denied once more and withdrawn from remembrance. Thus, so Horkheimer concluded, Christianity, idealism and materialism, which as such also contained the truth, carried nevertheless their guilt concerning the rogue behavior, which had been practiced in their name. In Horkheimer’s view, as Christianity, idealism and historical materialism pronounced and proclaimed the power–and be it also the power of the good–they themselves became historical powers able to organize and have as such played their

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bloody role in the real corrupt history of the human species: the role of instruments of the organization.

Hope According to Horkheimer, because history as correlate of a unified theory, as something which could be constructed, was not good but rather corrupt, and as such horror-filled, therefore thinking was in truth a negative element (Hegel 1986l; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1987e: 255-256; Menke 1996). The hope for the better social conditions, as far as it was not merely an illusion, was grounded less in the assurance that they were also the guarantied, durable and ultimate ones, than precisely in the lack of respect before what in the midst of the universal suffering was grounded so firmly. According to the critical theory of society, the infinite patience, the never extinguishing tender drive of the creature toward expression and light, which seemed to mitigate and to satisfy in itself the force of the creative development, did not prescribe, like the rational philosophies of history, a determinate praxis as the salutary one: also not that of non-resistance (Fromm 1981; 1990a; 1990b; 1995; 2001; Horkheimer 1987e: 255-256; Menke 1996). The first lighting up of reason, which in such tender drive announced itself and which was reflected in the remembering thinking of man, met also on the happiest day its contradiction, which could not be superseded: the fate that reason alone could not turn around. Religious faith was needed (Hegel 1986l; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1987e: 255-256; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12; Efron 2009; App. E). In Hegel’s and Haecker’s philosophy and theology of history, faith and reason were to be reconciled (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986l; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1987e: 255-256; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12; Habermas 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006).

The Criminal According to Horkheimer, corrupt history is most concretely incarnated in and personified by the criminal in antagonistic civil society (Horkheimer 1987e: 257-260; 1985l: 266-277; Menke 1996; App. C, D, F). For Horkheimer, the criminal as well as the prison sentence was bourgeois, and belonged to modern civil society. In the Medieval feudal system, the children of the princes were incarcerated, in so far as they symbolized an uncomfortable

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claim to inheritance. In contrast, the criminal was tortured to death in order for the masses of the population to internalize respect for law and order because the example of severity, and strictness, and cruelty educated the strict and the cruel to love. In Horkheimer’s view, the regular prison sentence in modern civil society presupposed the rising need for workers. It mirrored the bourgeois mode of existence as suffering. The rows of prison cells in modern prisons or penitentiaries represent windowless monads in the authentic sense of Leibniz (Leibniz 1996; Hegel1986e: 179, 189; 1986f: 21198, 411, 413-414, 494; Horkheimer 1987e: 257-260; 1985l: 266-277). There was no direct influence of the monads upon each other. The regulation and coordination of their life took place through God, or the prison management. The absolute loneliness, the forcible reference of the prisoner toward his own self, the whole being of which consisted in working on and in coping with the material in the monotonous rhythm of labor, outlined as utter nightmare the existence of humanity in the modern capitalistic world. Radical isolation and radical reduction to always the same nothingness were identical. For Horkheimer, the person in the prison or the penitentiary was the virtual image of the bourgeois type, into which he was supposed to make himself in reality in the first place. To the people who did not succeed in accomplishing that task outside the prison, it was done inside it in a terrible purity. According to Horkheimer, the rationalization of the existence of prisons through the necessity to separate the criminal from the society, in order to protect it, or even through his improvement and rehabilitation, did not hit the very core of the arrangement. The penitentiaries were the image of the completely thought through bourgeois world of work, which image the hate of the people against that into which they had to make themselves, was put into the world as a symbol. In Horkheimer’s view, the weak, retarded, animalized people had to suffer in a qualified way in prison the order of life, to which the people outside the penitentiary had to adjust themselves without love. With grimness and doggedness, the introverted force was repeated on them. The criminal, for whom in his deed the self-preservation had been the most important issue, was in truth the weaker, more delicate and unstable self. For Horkheimer, the usual criminal was a weak, retarded, and unstable person, and precisely as such reflected the corruption of society and history.

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Fascism According to Horkheimer, fascism, which in the 20th century replaced liberalism in modern civil society, and which constituted the climax of historical corruption, pulled back both: the large prison buildings and the big lunatic asylums, which were separated almost only by their names, and which were often situated side by side, as, for example, on Blackwell Island and other islands around the city of New York (Neumann 1942; Horkheimer 1987e: 257-260; 1985l: 266-277; App. C, D, F). Under fascism the concentration of the command and control over the whole production brought the bourgeois society back again to the evolutionary stage of immediate domination. With the liberal detour over the market inside of the nations disappeared also the intellectual and spiritual mediation: among other things, abstract right, morality, family, religion, etc. (Hegel 1986g; Neumann 1942; Horkheimer 1987e: 257-260; 1985l: 266-277; App. E). In Horkheimer’s view, thinking, which had unfolded itself through economic transactions, as result of the egoism, which had to negotiate, turned completely into the planning of the forcible appropriation of surplus value. For Horkheimer, who himself was the son of a factory owner in Stuttgart, from the pure essence of the German, European, and American industrialist and manufacturer stepped forth the mass-murdering fascist, who could no longer be differentiated from the criminal, except through his greater power (Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 11-21; Neumann 1942; Horkheimer 1987e: 257-260; 1985l: 266-277). The liberal detour over the market became unnecessary in the fascist society. According to Horkheimer, while the civil law, which continued to function in the fascist state for the regulation of differences among the smaller entrepreneurs surviving in the shadow of the big industry and became a kind of court of arbitration, justice for the people situated lower no longer protected the interests of those affected, and turned into mere terror. However, according to Horkheimer, through the legal protection, which now disappeared in fascist society, property had been defined. The monopoly, as complete private property, annihilated its notion. In Horkheimer’s view, fascism retained of the validity and legality of the liberal state and the bourgeois social contract, which it replaced externally in the interaction with other powers through secret agreements, internally only the coercion of the universal or collective will, which its faithful servants executed voluntarily upon the rest of humanity: in the name of a charismatic and legitimately elected dictator, whom they believed to have been sent by God’s Providence (Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: 11-21; Neumann 1942; Horkheimer 1987e:

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257-260; 1985l: 266-277; Löwenthal 1980; Sohn-Rethel 1975; Haffner 2001; Bessel 2001; Goldhagen 2002; Wiesenthal 1997; Shandley 1998; Stone/ Wiever 1998; Rissmann 2001; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993; App. E). In the fascist, totalitarian state, punishment and crime were liquidated as superstitious residuals (Horkheimer 1987e: 293-319; Neumann 1942; Horkheimer 1987e: 257-260; 1985l: 266-277). The naked extermination of the people who resisted the new fascist order, spread–being certain of its political goal–under the regime of fascist criminals all over Germany and Europe. For Horkheimer, the prison appeared besides the concentration camp like a remembrance from the good old times. The isolation, which had once been done in liberal civil society to the prisoners from outside, asserted itself in the meantime in the fascist society universally in flesh and blood. The prisoners’ well trained souls and their happiness was waste, barren, dull, dreary and desolate like the prison cell, which the powerful could already dispense with, because all the workers of the nations had fallen to them as booty, loot, and prey. The prison sentence faded before the social reality of the fascist society, state and history. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, since the beginning of the war against Afghanistan and Iraq, the prison systems of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and other places have revealed most clearly the corruption of history. The fascist treatment of prisoners has been possible even in liberal and neo-liberal societies and constitutional states, long after the end of European fascism, and that not only in the Middle East, but also in Africa and in Central and Latin America (Scahill 2007; Kinzer 2006; Hedges 2006; Perkins 2007; Klein 2007).

The Power of the External over the Internal Habermas’s, like Hegel’s and Schelling’s theodicy of the corrupt world, as consequence of the contraction of God, manifested a baroque worldaspect in romantic language, which was allegedly overdrawn to the point of absurdity (Hegel 1986a: 101; 1986b: 90-138; 1986l; Benjamin 1974; Habermas 1978a: 185-186; 1978c: 128-129; 1982: 438-440). Schelling named in detail the following phenomena of his theodicy as proof for the power, which the external natural and historical world had in this earthly life over the internal spiritual world (Schelling 1946; 1860: Vol. IV, 351352; 1977a; 1977b; Habermas 1978a: 185-186; 1978c: 127-143; 1982: 438440). There was first of all the power of contingency and arbitrariness: i.e. the dark rest and remains of a fundamental irregularity, which escaped all

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scientific rationalization. Secondly, there was the faulty, and the transitoriness, and the finitude of all life: illness and the general necessity of death (Schelling 1860: Vol. IV, 351-352; Habermas 1978a: 185-186; Küng 1982). Thirdly, there was the phenomenon of the so-called evil of nature: namely, everything harmful and poisonous, also the horror produced in nature (Schelling 1860: Vol. IV: 260; Habermas 1978a: 185). Fourthly and finally, there was the presence of evil in the moral world: in a broader sense and in general misfortunes, bad luck, calamities, disasters, accidents, unhappiness, as well as needs, wants, troubles, necessities, emergencies, and grief and sorrow, and suffering, which multiply particularly in modern antagonistic civil society.

Vices According to Schelling, if we count in additionally how many vices the political state has developed, the poverty, the evil in large masses, then the picture of humanity, which had sunk down completely into the physical dimension, even into the struggle for existence, was completed (Schelling 1860: Vol. IV, 354; Habermas 1978a: 185; App. B, C, D, E, F). In spite of his otherwise overall, linguistically grounded, optimistic attitude, Habermas continued, nevertheless, Schelling’s, as well as Hegel’s, Marx’s, Freud’s, Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s theodicies in his own, rooted in his own experience in present antagonistic civil society in Germany, Europe and America: unhappiness and misery, guilt, loneliness, sickness, and death, and the fear of them (Dews 1986: 53-54). Often in private discourses in Frankfurt, Dubrovnik, and Villa Nova, Habermas had to admit that things do not fit in society and history. However, Habermas had also to concede that he heard and perceived out of the external pain and suffering of life portrayed in Schelling’s description of the corrupt world of nature and history always also something of the internal longing for the unknown, nameless Good. Schelling himself participated in this internal longing, and Habermas shared it with him. Schelling anticipated the critical theorists’ internal longing for the imageless and nameless totally Other than the horror and terror of corrupt nature and history (Schelling, 1860: Vol. IV, 354; Habermas 1978a: 185; Dews 1986: 53-54; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40).

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chapter twenty-six The Structure of the Negative

Habermas traced Schelling’s mystical theodicy, as it illuminated–like that of Hegel and Schopenhauer–the structure or anatomy of the negative in a few examples (Habermas 1978a: 187). While, according to Schelling, the error could be very intelligent and untrue at the same time, it did not consist in a lack of spirit. The error was rather perverted spirit. Error was not the privation of the truth, but it was rather itself something positive. In general, for Schelling, as Habermas understood him, the spirit was an understanding that had arisen dialectically from a lack of understanding. The spirit had delusion, madness, and insanity for its base and foundation. According to Schelling, human beings, who did not have madness in themselves, were of an empty, infertile, and fruitless understanding. What people, according to Schelling, called spontaneous, active understanding was nothing else than regulated, controlled, and settled insanity. For Schelling, the same was true for virtue. Without some self-interest, or mind of one’s own, virtue remained weak, powerless, invalid, and without merit. Therefore, it was completely correct to say that who ever did not have in himself material or energies directed toward evil, was also not efficient, able, or capable toward the good. The soul of all hate was love. In the fiercest and most violent anger and wrath showed and revealed itself dialectically only the in its innermost center attacked, incited, and stirred up quietness and stillness of love (Schelling 1946; 1860: Vol. IV, 258; 1977a; 1977b; Habermas 1978a: 187). Thus, so Habermas concluded, it seemed that for Schelling the error, the mistake, the wrong, the delusion, the madness, and the insanity broke in general out of the erection of a relative non-being over being: out of the inversion and the elevation of matter over that, which should break and refract itself in it, and should come as essence into appearance. In Schelling’s mystical view, the self-interested, egoistic power and domination of a barbarous principle, which was overcome, but which was not annihilated, was the real foundation of all greatness (Schelling 1946: 51; Habermas 1978a: 187). Schelling shared with Hegel the dialectical-logical principle of determinate negation, and so did the critical theorists of society up to Habermas and Honneth, in spite of their linguistic shift from the human potential of work and tool, to the evolutionary universals of language and memory, and struggle for recognition (Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-34; Habermas 1981a: I and II; 1984a; 1984b; 1987d; Honneth 1990; 1994; App. C, D). At the time, Hegel and Schelling also shared the still theological dialectical notion: the self-particularization and self-singu-

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larization of the universal (Hegel 1986f: 243-300; Schelling 1860). While for Hegel, the universal in the notion particularizes itself, for Schelling it expands. While for Hegel, the universal in the notion singularizes itself, for Schelling it contracts. The historical materialists secularized the notion, but they did not lose it. Even the critical theorists, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Fromm, still discovered in their project Studies on Authority and Family of 1936 the universal of the notion in culture, the particular of the notion in society, and the singular of the notion in marriage, family, and individual (Hegel 1986f; Horkheimer/Fromm/Marcuse 1936; 1987e: 293319, 377-396, 415-422; Adorno 1950; Siebert 1979b; 1979e: 35-46; 1986). They constructed their whole Study on Authority and Family on the dialectical notion (App. C, D).

Love and Anger Habermas was completely convinced that the categories that Schelling– and also Hegel and Schopenhauer–used in order to describe the structure or the anatomy of evil, were of mystical origin. (Habermas 1978a: 187; App. E). He proved this through the following exemplary quotation from Schelling and the Kabbalah. According to Schelling, the mere love for itself could not exist, and could not subsist (Schelling 1860: Vol. IV, 331; Habermas 1978a: 187; Dews 1986: 125-126; Siebert 1979b; 1979e35-46; 1986; 1987c). This was because love was by its very nature expansive and infinitely communicative. Thus, love would dissolve and melt away if there was not in it a contractive primordial energy. Neither humanity nor God could consist out of pure love. If there was, so Schelling argued, a love in God, then there was also anger: not only expansion, but also contraction. This anger, or egoistic energy, in God was what gave the love in him hold, ground, duration, continuance and balance. Schelling called the energy of contraction, which was present and prevailed not only in God, but also in all beings, the basis that underlay all existence (Scholem 1970b: 8183; Schelling 1860: Vol. IV, 331; Habermas 1978a: 187, 225/51). Scholem explained the mystical talk about the abyss in God through an example. According to Scholem, among the Kabbalists, Asriel of Gerona was the first to explain the location, where all beings stood in formless indifference as the infinite, limitless, and inexplorable abyss, which reached into the pure nothingness (Hegel 1986e: 82-114; Scholem 1970b: 81-83; Schelling 1860: Vol. IV, 331; Habermas 1978a: 187, 225/51). Later on this symbolism connected itself with the idea of the Zimzum or the contraction of God. Thus, in the mystical tradition, the Aristotelian teaching of the steresis

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could be reinterpreted in such a way that in every something was also given an abyss (Hegel 1986e: 82-114, 122-124; Scholem 1970b: 81-83; Schelling 1860: Vol. IV, 331; Habermas 1978a: 187, 225/51). According to Schelling, the essence of this power of contraction was amphibolic. This was so, since this energy of contraction at the same time withdrew and grounded. As itself not being real, this power of contraction was, nevertheless, what alone gave, conferred, and bestowed reality. This was because this energy of contraction twisted itself in itself, and fled, and gave, nevertheless, in this its hiding ground and footing to what alone showed itself and appeared. As long, so Schelling argued, as such matter was obedient and adapted itself to love, the latter found its essence. If, however, such matter elevated itself above the love, then nuisance and havoc came into power, and with it that force of the external over the internal, of which the corrupted world gave witness universally and generally. According to Schelling, since this corrupted world could not be a true life, which could only exist in the primordial relationship, there arose and resulted a peculiar, but false life: a life of the lie, a growth of unrest, trouble, ruin and corruption (Schelling 1860: Vol. IV; Habermas 1978a: 187-188, 225/51). For Schelling, here, illness or disease offered the most adequate parable or metaphor. Illness was the disorder that had come into nature through the abuse of freedom. In Schelling’s view, disease was the true counterimage of evil, or of sin. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, Schelling’s Ages of the World, particularly his originally mystical notion of the theological as well as the anthropological dialectic of expansion and contraction, love and anger, was besides Lurian Kabbalism, Jakob Boehme’s mysticism, Hegel’s early writings, and Adorno’s comments on the late romantic poet Eichendorff, one of the roots of Habermas’s theory of communicative action, and its attempt to reconcile the modern antagonism between the internal and the external world, and between personal autonomy and universal solidarity, and thus to contribute to the possible resolution of the theodicy problem in the tradition of Schelling, Hegel, Marx and Freud, Horkheimer and Adorno, Benjamin and Fromm, and in spite of Kant’s failure in his philosophical attempt in the theodicy, on the basis of his agnosticism (Kant 1975: 77-93; Hegel 1986l; Menke 1996; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 28, 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1978a: 187-188, 225/51; 1981a I-II; 1984a; 1984b; 1987d; Dews 1986: 73, 98-99, 125-126; Siebert 2001; 2002a; App. E, F). A century after Schelling, Rudolf Otto spoke of the wholly Other as the mysterium fascinosum– the God of love, and the mysterium tremendum–the God of wrath (Otto 1969). Also a century after Schelling the Schellingian philosopher

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and theologian, Paul Tillich, the teacher of Adorno and the friend of Horkheimer, announced the power of God expanding in love above the God of theism, who went under, disappeared, contracted in the anxiety of guilt, meaninglessness, doubt, and death (Tillich 1952: 186-190; 1955b; 1963b; 1972).

Theosophy From Scholem’s book Jewish Mysticism in its Main Streams Habermas learned about and gained insight into the theosophy of Isaak Lurian and Jakob Boehme (Boehme 1992; Hegel 1986b: 534; 1986e: 122; 1986h: 28; 1986i: 30, 133, 1986j: 293; Scholem 1967; Habermas 1978a: 187-188, 225/51, 198-199, 247). Habermas found out that behind Schelling’s The Ages of the World and Hegel’s Science of Logic–behind being, nothing and becoming, or behind being, essence and notion–and behind Franz von Baader’s studies in mysticism, particularly in the work of Master Eckhart, there stood not only the Catholic and Protestant mysticism, but also through the mediation of Knorr von Rosenroth that version of the Kabbala, in the antagonistic consequences of which more than anywhere else the figures of thought and the motives of the great idealistic and materialistic dialectical philosophy, including the critical theory of society of the Frankfurt School, had been thought through in advance (Blakney, 1941: xiii-xxviii; 247, 248, 271/16, 281/12, 16, 288/19,289/23, 319/41l; Hegel 1986b: 536; 1986p: 209; 1986s: 425-430, 512; 1986t: 15; Scholem 1967; Fromm 1976: chap. III; Boehme 1992). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, in the longing for the totally Other than the Golgotha of nature and history, of the negative and inverse theology contained in the critical theory of society, are concretely superseded, or sublated, or translated Scholem’s Kabbalist representations, as well as Brecht’s atheistic images, the two representatives of the extremes of Hegel’s continuum between faith and reason, revelation and enlightenment: critically negated in terms of the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue, and in terms of the Kantian prohibition against penetration of the sphere of the Thing-in-itself, as well as preserved, elevated and fulfilled (Exodus 20; Lieber 2001: 523; Kant 1929: 27, 74, 87, 149, 490; 1974a; 1975; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Habermas 1978c: 136-137; 1982: 438440).

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chapter twenty-six Creation out of Nothing

According to Habermas, while the processes of creation had in Antiquity always been thought of in the realm of the mythical as well as of the metaphysical thinking as a creation out of something, out of chaos, or out of a matter, which lay ahead of the creative principles, with the JudeoChristian formula of the Creatio Ex Nihilo a radically new thought came into the foreground (Genesis 1, 2; Horkheimer 1996s: chap. 13; 1985g: chaps. 23, 27, 28, 29). From now on, it was no longer allowed to represent the nothing, out of which the absolute Will created the world, as a potentiality outside the creative Power, as it had still happened even in the Pentateuch and in Orthodox Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In contrast to the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Orthodoxy, precisely the Jewish, Christian and Islamic mystical thinking, which immersed itself into the divine process of life, concentrated and fixed itself on this formula of the creation out of nothing (Scholem 1967: 53-55; Habermas 1978c: 136-137; 1982: 438-440; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004: 438-440).

Contraction Theodicy According to Habermas, Scholem engaged the positivistic instruments of the culture-scientific tradition, which he handled with great sovereignty, for completely non-positivistic purposes (Scholem 1977a; 1977b; 1977c: 79; 1980; 1982; 1989; Habermas 1978a: 198-199; 1978c: 136-137; 1982: 438-440; Horkheimer 1985l: 436-492; App. E). Scholem secured the lost traces of the school that had been connected with the name Isaak Lurian of Safed, and he had brought to light the movement that had been inspired by Sabbatai Sevi. Scholem’s main work was devoted to this mystical Messiah, who around the middle of the 17th century excited large parts of the Jewish people, who were dispersed over Europe and the Middle East. According to Habermas, following the explorations of Scholem, Isaak Lurian, as well as Jakob Boehme, could refer to, and start out from, and fasten, and tie onto the Kabbalist notion that God descended into his own primordial grounds in order to create himself out of them, and in order to think the creation out of nothing, according to the dialectical image of a God, who pulled himself together, or who contracted himself. Through his self-contraction, God generated an abyss in himself, into which he descended, and into which he pulled back, contracted, and retired. Thus, God freely gave the space, where creatures could and would take, and occupy. God’s first act of creation was a self-negation, an act of divine atheism, through which he, so

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to speak, called forth the nothing. According to Habermas, this Kabbalistic teaching put itself into strict opposition to the emanation representations, coming from Neo-Platonism. To Habermas, this Kabbalistic model offered the only consequent solution to the theodicy problem: a perfect world could not be created because it would then be God himself. God could only create a finite world, full of corruption, because he could not double himself up through creating another Infinite. He could only restrict himself through creating another finite. Thus, God had to limit himself, reduce himself, contract himself, or qualify himself. It was far from the Kabbalists, to be so naïve to expect from God to repeat himself. Habermas argued in Hegelian terms, that precisely because God could never repeat himself, his creation had to be subjected, and overcome, and defeated by this alienation, in which it, in order to be itself, had to put the evil outside of itself (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Scholem 1977: 79). That precisely was the Kabbalist contraction-theodicy, that evil did not immediately originate from God, but rather from nature and history, and in it had to be overcome. This contraction theodicy was much more plausible than any orthodox talion theodicy a la Genesis, or test theodicy, a la Jobab or Job, the King of the city of Dinhabah, or Goethe’s Faust, which in the face of the hell of Auschwitz or Treblinka–and all these names stand for, or more recently in the face of the earthquake and the tsunami in the Indian Ocean of Christmas 2004 and in Haiti and Chile in 2010, or of the Afghanistan or Iraq war, or of Fallujah, or of Abu Ghraib or of Guantanamo Bay of 2003 or 2004, seem to be absurd, if not blasphemous (Genesis 3: 36, 33; Job 1-42; Lieber 2001: 219/33; Goethe 1965; Hegel 1986l: 28, 540; 1985q: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455). According to Hegel, the divine knowledge sank down into mere edification, if the pain and the work of the negative was missing: if people were not serious about the otherness, the alienation, insanity, dualism, externalization, disunion, discord, disintegration, tattered state, conflict, rift, gulf, antagonisms, discrepancies in corrupt nature and history, and about the difficulties to reconcile them (Hegel 1986a: 181, 245, 276, 321, 330, 352, 394, 426, 435; 1986c: 24, 39, 149, 154, 157-158, 174-175, 274, 277, 278279, 280, 282, 358-441, 552, 564, 565-566, 575, 577, 586; 1986d: 82, 282).

Deficiency of the Contraction Theodicy In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, of course, also the dialectical contraction-theology–reconciling and consoling as without doubt it was–has, nevertheless, like all finite images of the Infinite its own deficiency (Habermas 1978c: 127-143; 1982: 438-440; Kim 1996: 267-283; App. E).

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If God had remained in his pre-creation state of a blessed playing with himself, and if he had not contracted and withdrawn himself into himself atheistically, narcisstically, egoistically and angrily, then admittedly no creation out of nothing would have occurred, but also not all the corruption and evilness of nature and history, in which particularly the higher evolved creatures continually must eat each other, in order to be able to maintain themselves, and to survive at all, since many millions of years: at least since they came out of Noah’s ark, after the great Tsunami (Genesis 5-11; Hegel 1986e: 43-44; 1986q: 501-535; Habermas 1978c: 136-137; 1982: 438-440). It is, of course, the necessity of the inner dialectic of God’s life that prevents him not only from doubling himself up in his world, but also from remaining alone in his blessed universality. Of course, the Kabbalists start not only from the necessity of the inner divine dialectic, but also from the optimistic and hopeful assumption, that the creation was better than nothing, and that it was worth the price and the risk of the immense negativity and corruption, and evilness, and pain, and suffering of billions and trillions of living beings in nature and history, and that ultimately it would with inner dialectical necessity be redeemed from all this negativity, and would return from exile and be repatriated into its original location (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986q: 273-274; 290-306). The critical theorists of society have turned materialistically upside down or inverted the Kabbalah. While for the Kabbalists, the creation was idealistically the other of God, the critical theorists are longing materialistically for the imageless and nameless totally Other of corrupt nature and history, and, their over all negativity (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 27, 28, 29, 37, 40). The dialectical religiologist has difficulty in finding it plausible and acceptable to explain or to justify the death of 6 million Jews, and of 27 million Russians, and overall of 60 million human beings in World War II out of God’s dialectical life, out of his wrathful contraction, even if his loving expansion was in sight (Kim 1996: 267-283; App. E, F). The critical theorist of religion remains faithful and obedient to the radicalized second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue, and to the Kantian prohibition against penetrating the dimension of the Thing-in-itself–God, Freedom and Immortality–and he remains engaged in theory and praxis in the insatiable longing for the wholly Other than the corrupt nature and history (Exodus 20; Kant 1929: 27, 74, 87, 149, 490; 1974a; 1975; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Habermas 1978c: 136-137; 1982: 438-440). While reason certainly entangles itself in antinomies when it tries to transcend the senses and the world of appearance with all its natural and historical corruptions, faith can, nevertheless, do so, and thus bring Divine Comfort to the believer, as the great Catholic

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mystic Master Eckhart had taught long before Schelling and Hegel, who learned form him, and as Horkheimer and his mother experienced when they prayed Psalm 91 in fascist Germany, the new Edom, the new historical tyranny, in the utter absence of God’s universal kingship, kingdom, and dominion, and even afterwards in liberal Germany and Switzerland (Psalm 91; Obadiah 1: 1-21; Lieber 2001: 221-222; Blakney 1941: 43-73; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Goldstein 2006: 61-114, 115120, 121-125). The mystics were men of faith, as well as of reason, which, nevertheless, yielded to the former, particularly in the theodicy issue.

Sabbathianism According to Habermas, the Jewish heretical movement of Sabbathai Sevi, or Sabbathianism, made Orthodox Judaism shudder until late into the 18th century (Efron 2009; Habermas 1978a: 198-199). The movement went back to the years 1665/1666, when Sabbathai Sevi made himself first known as Messiah. Then called before the Sultan and threatened with death, Sabbathai Sevi converted to Islam. In Habermas’s view, Sabbathai Sevi’s highly dialectical teaching, which did not only justify antinomistic actions, but which even demanded them in a sublime way, was an extreme variation of Lurian mysticism. The critical theorist of religion can find antinomism, of course, in many religious groups: from the disciples of John the Baptist to the Russian Starezies, particularly Rasputin, who played such a fatal political role in Moscow during World War I. Because the consuming positivity of evil, so Habermas explained, the demand of antinomistic actions could only be overcome through malice and spite itself. This was because for the mystically excited and aroused Judaism, the so far determining magic of interiority turned over into a magic of apostasy. Not the strict obedience to the Torah will ultimately give power to the weaker people over the strength and power of the corrupted world, but the world had rather sunk so deeply into its corruption, so that it could be restituted only through, so to speak, a surpassing depravity. The Messiah himself had to descend into the realm of evil in order to explode the prison of the locked up Divine Love, so to speak, from inside. The apostasy of the Messiah was followed by the collectively organized conversion of the heretical communities to Catholicism and Islam. The canonization of sin was the anarchism in the sanctuary of the law itself. When the radical praxis of such anarchism was not confirmed and affirmed in political-historical terms, it turned over into the critique of religion. Natural law rationalism inherited the unredeemed bill of exchange of Sabbathianism concerning

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emancipation: if it was only liberation from the Ghetto (Habermas 1978a: chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5). According to Habermas, it was only a small step from the mystical heresy to the bourgeois enlightenment. Jona Wehle, the head of the Prague mystics around 1800, quoted Sabbathai Sevi, as well as Mendelssohn, Kant and Isaak Luria as authorities (Scholem 1967: 33; 1970a: Vol. I and II; Habermas 1971: 37-39; 1978a: 187-188, 198-199, 225/51, 247).

Divine Egoism For Habermas, being informed by Schelling, Hegel and Scholem, the selfcrossing, or self-folding, or self-contraction of God was the archetypical form of the Jewish exile or self-banishment (Schelling 1860; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Scholem 1973: 151; Efron 2009; Habermas 1978c: 136-137; 1982: 438-440; Küng 1991b). This self-contraction of God explained to Scholem and Habermas that all being was from that primordial divine act on a being in exile, and that thus it was in need of being lead back home, and of redemption. In Habermas’ view, from this conception of the abyss, or of matter, or of anger, into which the God withdrew in his contraction, or in his literally understood divine egoism, different lines lead through Schelling and Hegel to Marx, historical materialism, and finally the critical theory of society, and the dialectical religiology. A first line ended in the materialistic nature dialectic. This was because already for the Lurian mystic, the continual creation meant that the contraction of God renewed and restored itself in every process of nature, and that in every life process the contact with the nothing repeated itself, and had to be negated. This became most obvious through the fundamental perils of human existence: such as guilt, alienation, meaninglessness, injustice, abandonment, loneliness, anxiety about illness, sickness, and ageing, fear of death, dying, and death itself, which no social theory or revolution could possibly entirely overcome (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 38, 39, 40, 42; Habermas 1978c: 136-137; Habermas 1982: 438-440). Bad actions intensified the nothing. Good actions negated the nothing. A second line lead from the abyss of the contraction and egoism of God to the revolutionary theory of society and history, including the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, in so far as it is still revolutionary (Dews 1986: 53-54; Habermas 1978c: 136-137; Habermas 1982: 438-440). A third line lead from the contraction of God, and the consequent abyss, matter, and anger to the nihilism of a post-revolutionary enlightenment. Scholem had intensively dealt with the revolutionary theory of history and with nihilism as religious phenomenon (Scholem 1970b: 84-86; 1973a: 198-217: 1973b: 135-137; 1977a: 77-79;

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1977b: 1-50; Habermas 1978c: 136-137; Habermas 1982: 438-440). Paul Tillich experienced such nihilism as an army chaplain among veterans in Germany after World War I, and again as philosopher and theologian among veterans in America after World War II.

Exile and Homeland It was obvious for Habermas that a God who contracted and thus banned himself, loaded up and charged the historical experience of the Jewish exile, be it in Babylon, or after the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 all over the Roman Empire, and finally all over the world, with heavy, difficult, hard, and serious meaning, significance, and importance (Obadiah 1: 1-21; Lieber 2001: 221-222; Efron 2009; Bloch 1972: 220-229; 1985: chap. 55, 220-229; Adorno 1970b; Habermas 1978c: 136137; 1982: 438-440). This was an eschatological-apocalyptic meaning at a point in history, when the force of the negative, the suffering from the catastrophe of the expulsion from the promised holy land of milk and honey, the suppression, and oppression, and isolation and ghettoization in foreign countries, were interpreted already as ciphers, signs and indications of the creative energy of the negative: for a turn toward the good–for the return from exile toward the homeland. Habermas quoted the saying of Hölderlin, the friend of Hegel and Schelling, and the co-founder of Hegel’s oldest system program of German idealism and its mythology of reason: that precisely in the greatest danger that, what rescued, was growing (Jamme/ Schneider 1984; Obadiah 1: 1-21; Lieber 2001: 221-222; Bloch 1972: 220229; 1985e: chap. 55; Adorno 1970b; Habermas 1978c: 136-137; 1982: 438440). Here in the Lurian Kabbala, Hölderlin’s word was anticipated. When even the creation, so Habermas argued following Scholem, began with a contraction or a self-exile of God, then the moment of greatest catastrophe meant an indication and a cipher of the chance of redemption. According to the Kabbalist, God told the believers that when they had sunk down to the lowest stage, or level of history, in that hour he would redeem them (Scholem 1970b: 135; Habermas 1978c: 136-137; 1982: 438-440).

The Creative Power of Negation In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the notion of the creative power of negation, as it appears in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticism, as well as in historical idealism, and historical materialism, and

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in the critical theory of society up to Adorno’s Negative Dialectic, had long been prefigured and pre-thought in the Hebrew Bible and in the postBiblical Jewish Orthodoxy (Deuteronomy 32: 36-39; Hertz 5716/1956: 901-902/36-39; Obadiah 1: 1-21; Lieber 2001: 221-222; Efron 2009; Hegel 1986l: 19-33; 1986q: 50-95; O’Reagan 1994; Adorno 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; Habermas 1978c: 136-137; 1982: 438-440; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972: 220-229; 1985e: chap. 55; Adorno 1970; 1982: 438-440; Küng 1991b). According to the Rabbis, the very extremity of Israel’s need moved Yahweh to vindicate it against foes and detractors (Deuteronomy 32: 36-39; Hertz 5716/1956: 901-902/36-39). Yahweh had compassion on his servants in their most desolate and downtrodden state, when nothing was left than the things imprisoned, or abandoned. God spoke to the Israelites through the extremity of their need. He brought them to understand, by the very logic of facts, that the foreign, heathen gods, in whom they trusted, were unworthy of their regard. God would so make it possible for him to interpose on the Israelites behalf. Moses endeavored to strengthen the Israelites’ faith in a moral government of the world: in a divine Providence, Plan, and Purpose. In spite of the extremely negative conditions, which might well make men despair entirely, the world was one in Divine Providence, Plan, and Purpose. Israel, to whom this Divine Providence, Plan and Purpose had been revealed, could endure through this dark night of the corrupt world. Israel alone had hope, and men, who had hope, could endure, even in moments of utter abandonment and despair (Deuteronomy 32: 36-39; Hertz 5716/1956: 901-902/36-39; Benedict XVI: 2007). It was not clear to the Rabbis, if the Prophet Obadiah saw Israelite restoration after the Babylonian exile in world-historical terms, or as a case of national liberation (Obadiah 1: 1-21; Lieber 2001: 221-222; Efron 2009). Obadiah’s Rabbinic heirs, however, clearly regarded the defeat of Edom, whose founding ancestor was Esau, and who had participated in the destruction of Jerusalem, as the end of historical tyranny, and the onset of God’s universal kinship: the global Kingdom of God. This was, because Edom had become a standard name for the hated Roman Empire. As a result, the prophecy of Obadiah fostered hopes for an end to this brutal domination, and a restoration of national religious service. That was the historical context, in which early prophetic, eschatological and apocalyptic, critical and revolutionary, Jewish Christianity was born (Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; Küng 1994a: 89-144; 1994b). In due course, when Christendom assumed the mantle of the might of Rome, the name Edom received a new identity (Lieber 2001: 221-222; Horkheimer 1974c: 260, 268, 316-320). The Rabbis dramatized

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the encounter between Jacob, the Father of Israel, and his brother Esau, the Father of Edom, in political terms through exemplifying Edom as imperial or medieval Rome, and in religious terms through exemplifying Edom as the civil cult of Rome or as Christendom: finally through exemplifying Edom as Hitler’s fascist empire, which planned the extermination of all Jews: a Jew-free Germany and Europe (Lieber 2001: 221-222; Horkheimer 1974c: 260, 268, 316-320; Ailsby/Christopher 2004; Macdonald/ Ziarek 2008; Bessel 2001; Black 2001; Kogon 1995; Gellately 2001; Krieg 2004; Erickson 1985; Shandley 1998; Kertzer 2001; Rosenbaum 1999). For all post-biblical Jewish readers, Obadiah’s prophecy of liberators ascending Mount Zion to destroy Edom, and the anticipation of God’s dominion– the Kingdom of God–was crucial. It was the consolation preached by ancient Jewish Sages and recited by synagogue poets: And the Lord shall be King over all the earth; in that day there shall be one Lord with one name (Obadiah 1: 21; Zechariah 14: 9). The critical theory of religion has inherited from the Jewish Orthodoxy and mysticism, as well as from Schelling and Hegel, the knowledge of the central dialectical, logical insight and sentence that the negative is just as much positive, or that the contradictory does not dissolve itself into zero, into the abstract nothing–as it does for the bourgeois skeptics–but essentially only into the negation of its particular content, or that such negation is not all negation, but the negation of the determinate thing, which dissolves itself, thus the determinate negation: the creative power of negation (Hegel 1986c: 72-75; 1986e: 48-53; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-34; 1973; Kim 1996: 267-283). Even the negative dialectics is still determinate (Adorno 1963; 1966).

Religious and Metaphysical Experiences What Adorno meant by metaphysical experience certainly could not be reduced to what had been called by theologians like Tillich since the 1930s primordial religious experiences (Adorno 1998c: 215-216; 2000: 15-17, 101-102, 104, 128; Horkheimer 1987k: 345-408; Tillich 1926; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957: 98, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 112, 113, 114, 120, 123, 124, 142, 147, 148, 159; 1963a: 146; 226, 288, 289, 290, 292; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Küng, 1991; 1994a; 1994b). For Adorno, the reason was simply that if he spent a littler time studying the dimension of theology which claimed to have access to such primordial religious experiences–that was, in crude terms, the mystical sphere, which had placed such primordial religious experiences higher than any codified theology– he became aware of something very peculiar and very surprising (Blakney

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1941; Boehme 1938; 2005; Horkheimer 1987k: 345-408; 1989m: chap. 29; Adorno 1998c: 215-216; 2000: 15-17, 101-102, 104, 128; Habermas 1986: 53-54, 125-126; Metz 1978; 1998; Metz/Peters 1991). In dialecticalreligiological perspective, the religious history went indeed from orthodoxy through mysticism to secular enlightenment (Scholem 1977a; 1982; 1989). According to Adorno, it was so that mystical texts and descriptions of fundamental mystical experiences, by no means had the primordial, immediate quality he might have expected, but were very strongly mediated by education. Thus, e.g. the intricate inter-relationship between gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, the Cabbala and later Christian, Catholic and Protestant, as well as Islamic mysticism gave rise to an era of historicity, which was equal to anything in the history of orthodox theological dogma (Blakney 1941; Boehme 1938; 2005; Scholem 1967; 1973b; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Marcuse 1960; 1987; Horkheimer 1987k: 345-408; 1989m: chap. 29; Adorno 1998c: 215-216; 2000: 15-17, 101-102, 104, 128; Habermas 1986: 53-54, 125-126; Metz 1978; 1998; Metz/Peters 1991). For Adorno, it was certainly no accident that the corpus in which the documents of Jewish mysticism had been brought together more or less disconnectedly, the Cabbala, bore the title of tradition (Scholem 1967; 1973b; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Efron 2009; Adorno 1998c: 215-216; 2000: 15-17, 101-102, 104, 128). In Adorno’s view, here far less emphasis was put on a primary, immediate vision than he had imagined. According to Adorno, here far more attention was paid to the topoi of so-called religious experience than to pure subjectivity, than might be supposed. The reasons belong into the dialectical religiology, or more specifically into the philosophy of religion.

Sacred Texts Adorno contented himself with one observation, that almost all the mystical speculations which existed–e.g. that about the expanding and contracting God–found their support in so-called sacred texts, which in the eyes of the mystical-metaphysical thinkers, e.g. Schelling or Hegel, Bloch, Tillich or Habermas–became symbolic in the sense that they meant something quite different from what was said in them (Blakney 1941; Boehme 1938; 2005; Scholem 1967; 1973b; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1979b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985a; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Marcuse 1960; 1987; Horkheimer 1987k: 345-408; 1989m: chap. 29; Adorno 1998c: 215-216; 2000: 15-17, 101-102, 104, 128; Habermas 1967; 1973b; 1977c; 1978c; 1980; 1982; 1986: 53-54, 125-126; 1988b; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Tillich 1926; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b;

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1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Metz 1978; 1998; Metz/Peters 1991). Adorno pointed e.g. to the famous interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis, as set out in the book Sohar (Genesis 1; Efron 2009; Scholem 1967; 1973b; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1988b; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007). Here the history of the creation of the world was interpreted as a history of the inner process of creation, which took place within the Divinity itself (Scholem 1935; 1967; 1973b; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Adorno 1998c: 215-216; 1998d). According to Adorno, this had been, incidentally, the model for the speculations of Schelling which, in a later phase, became famous under the name of positive philosophy, from which derived the positive religiology of Müller and all his successors up to the present–2010 (Schelling 1993; Adorno 2000: 187-188/4; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; Light/Wilson 2003; Ott 2007). In the perspective of the critical religiology, it may be, that the antithesis between religious tradition and scientific cognition, as initiated by Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon, may not be so irreconcilable as they and their successors have thought, but that Jewish, Christian Islamic and Buddhist mysticism may build a bridge between the religious and the secular not only for the great idealists, like Schelling and Hegel, but even also for historical materialists like Adorno and Benjamin and the other critical theorists as well (Hegel 1986b: 184, 263, 1986c: 427; 1986d: 431, 306, 341, 342, 345; 1986e: 406; 1986p: 9-88; 1986r: 123; 1986t: 69, 70, 74-119; Horkheimer 1987i: 75-102, 133-158; Scholem 1935; 1967; 1973b; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Adorno 1998c: 215-216; 1998d; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1950; 1966b; 1974; 1976; 2001; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Tillich 1926; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957: 98, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 112, 113, 114, 120, 123, 124, 142, 147, 148, 159; 1963a: 146; 226, 288, 289, 290, 292; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Küng, 1991; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/ Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: 411-624; Metz 1998).

Friendliness In 1966, Horkheimer remembered his recently deceased friend, the philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich, who had started his work like Bloch and later on Habermas from the pre-positivistic Schelling’s dialectical, mystical theology of the expanding and contracting God, as having been– apart from the martyrs of the Hitler time like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Alfred Delp, Sophie Scholl, etc.–not only a moral man in an immoral civil society, but even a real Christian in the context of the secular Western, i.e.

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European and American society, which once had called itself Christian, and among the people whom he had met and known throughout his life on three continents (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986q: 185-346; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 25, 26; Niebuhr 1932; 1964). It was hard for Horkheimer to signify in one word the reason for this his impression of Tillich as a real Christian. He found the right word nevertheless: friendliness. In Horkheimer’s view, friendliness or kindness was a quality, which once had been connected with the meaning of Christian love (Matthew 24: 12; Luke 11: 42; John 5: 42; 15: 9, 13, 19; 17: 26; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 25, 26). For Horkheimer, Tillich seriously tried to imitate and to practice the friendliness of the historical Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, who could not keep himself back to himself avariciously, and who belonged to all beings who suffered: until the rich and powerful people, whom he, the poor man had continually challenged through his kindness and in the name of God, persecuted, tortured and murdered him for God’s sake and the tranquility of the state (Matthew 26-28; Schelling 1977; Jamme/Schneider 1984; Hegel 1986a: 101; 1986b: 9-138; 1986p: 125-126; 1986q: 241-298; Kamenka 1983: 115-124; Tillich 1926; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957: 98, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 112, 113, 114, 120, 123, 124, 142, 147, 148, 159; 1963a: 146; 226, 288, 289, 290, 292; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Stone/Weaver 1998; Reimer 2004; Horkheimer 1967a; 1974c: 96-97; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973; Schneider 1955; Guardini 1925; 1935; 1948; 1952; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c: 11-32, 48-95, 127-143; 1986: 125-126; 1987: chaps. 6, 14, 15, Thompson/ Held 1982: 219-283; Bonhoeffer 1993; 2000; 2003; Scholl 2005; Rudolphi 1949; Dirks 1968; 1985; Metz 1978; 1998; Metz/Peters 1991; Siebert 1993; 2005b; 2007a; 2007g; Weitensteiner 2002; Efron 2009). The more, however, so Horkheimer argued, the friendliness spread together with bourgeois forms of life, the less even its most lively and vivacious expression pointed toward real internal disposition and conviction. In modern antagonistic civil society, the spontaneous expression of friendliness turned into a form of exchange, custom, rule, something traditional, and then it disappeared altogether. For Horkheimer kindness and friendliness was a quality of genuine Christianity and of the real Christian Tillich. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, like the personality and the theology of the kind Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, so Tillich’s personality and theology emphasized and expressed more intensely the lovingly expanding than the wrathfully contracting God of Jewish, Christian and Islamic mysticism (Matthew 5-9; Hegel 1986q: 241-298; Tillich 1926; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983;

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Schneider 1955; Guardini 1925; 1935; 1948; 1952; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c: 10-32, 48-95,127-143; 1982; 1986: 125-126; Fetscher/Machovec 1975; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Efron 2009; App. E). For the dialectical religiology, the friendliness of Christian origin is preserved not only in Horkheimer’s critical theory of society, but also in Brecht’s dialectical or epic theater and in Habermas’s theory of communicative action, and discourse ethics and in his longing for alternative Future III–a society in which people’s friendly living together would be possible, and on a very private level in the wish of my dying wife Margaret in 1977/1978, that after her cancer death I should marry again, if a friendly woman would come along (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 25, 26; 1989m: chap. 29; Brecht 1961; 1964; 1966; 1967; 1973; 1980; 1981; 1993a; 1993b; 1994; 2002; 2003; 2007; Thompson/ Held 1982: 219-283; Siebert 1986; 1993; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; App. E, G). The kindness of Christian origin is to be rescued through the inverse cipher theology intrinsic to the critical theory of religion (Adorno 1970b; Adorno/Kogon1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Habermas 1990: 9-18; Siebert 1986; 1993; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6).

True Expression According to Horkheimer, who ever had encountered Tillich in Germany or in America had still experienced true Christian friendliness (Schelling 1977; Jamme/Schneidee 1984; Hegel 1986a: 101; 1986b: 9-138; Tillich 1926; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Stone/Weaver 1998; Reimer 2004; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 25, 26, 29, 37, 40; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973; App. E). Whoever had to deal with Tillich knew that the coloring of his voice and his gestures, which reminded one of the theologian and of the minister, even the former German army chaplain at the Western front, was not merely formal surface and routine, but a true expression of his thinking and his striving and endeavor. Tillich’s students in the German and American universities have felt this. According to the Dean Jerald Brauer of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, it was impossible for any student to direct a stupid question at Tillich, because he took up every honestly expressed question and it was transformed into a deeper question through the mode of his discourse. Horkheimer remembered that who ever in his or her academic career needed Tillich, e.g. Horkheimer himself, and Adorno, and Benjamin, etc. owed him much more than what corresponded to the obligations and duties of a professor. Unfortunately, Benjamin could not be helped, neither by Cornelius nor by Tillich at the University

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of Frankfurt (Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 25; Witte 1992). Horkheimer confessed gratefully that without the understanding which Tillich offered him and the other critical theorists more than 35 years earlier, around 1930, at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität, the whole project of the Frankfurt School would not have come into existence.

Necessity of Change In Horkheimer’s view the form and content of Tillich’s theological university lectures did not exhaust themselves in the teaching of methods, data, facts and connections, in mere communication, no matter how useful they may have been for the students’ special carrier (Tillich 1926; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Horkheimer 1985g: 270; Reimer 2004; App. E). That corresponded precisely with Tillich’s will, not to content himself with that what was prescribed, be it in the university, in the state, or in the church (Hegel 1986p: 89-248; 1986q: 185-346; Tillich 1926; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Horkheimer 1985g: 270; Reimer 2004). Tillich’s theological work was always determined in small as well as in large issues by the necessity to change the status quo of antagonistic civil society toward otherness, toward alternative Future III– a better, more just and loving society (Horkheimer 1985g: 270; 1996: 3274; Stone/Weaver 1998; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Reimer 2004; App. E, G). Horkheimer remembered that when Tillich arrived at the Frankfurt University from Leipzig and Dresden in 1929, he had been one of the founders and active exponents and proponents of the religious socialism (Tillich 1933; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 25). Tillich was often treated with hostility because of his connection with the religious socialism: at the time, religious people in Germany were not socialists, and socialists were not religious. However, in those days the still young, only 15-year old mainly commercial Frankfurt University was still a world-open institution. That would change radically, when in 1933 the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität became fascist and Jew-free. After Max Scheler, the successor of Hans Cornelius, the no less unconventional, universally educated first philosopher of the Frankfurt University, had died all too early, already the decision to give to the progressive theologian Tillich the important philosophical chair proved the open-mindedness among some academic authorities and institutions, not at last and not at least the cultural ministry in Berlin. In 1933, all these academic authorities and institutions became fascist and nationalistically and fascistically narrow-minded and worked

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for a Jew-free Germany and Europe (Scheible1989; Fumnior/Ringguth 1988; Witte 1992; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; Ulrich 2009: 67-70). The new fascist cultural minister in Berlin closed the Institute for Social Research at the Frankfurt University and drove the critical theorists into exile in Switzerland, France, England and the United States, while Horkheimer’s home in the Taunus Mountain was occupied by the local SA and taken over as headquarter.

Progressive Tendencies Horkheimer remembered that as in the before 1933 darkening Germany the academic authorities trusted Tillich against that what was merely traditional, he did not disappoint them (Horkheimer 1967a; 1985g: 279271). Tillich organized and arranged at the University of Frankfurt common exercises, colloquia and discourses about themes of actuality with the representatives of progressive, but in other places neglected psychological and sociological tendencies: as e.g. the Gestalt-Theorie a la Pearls, rooted in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind, analytical social-psychology a la Fromm, and critical theory of society a la Horkheimer. Professors and students participated in these discourses with greatest interest (Hegel 1986c; Fromm 1932a; 1932b; Horkheimer 1988c: chaps. 2, 5, 7, 8, 14, 15, 16; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16; 1987k: 345-408). In spite of the fact, that the discourse participants belonged to different political parties, they found together nevertheless despite of everything in that spirit, which was opposed to the awakening folkish, nationalistic, and racist instincts, which also in universities had moved and stirred already for a long time.

Religious Socialism According to Horkheimer, Tillich’s religious socialism originated from the consciousness of the responsibility, to participate and cooperate with all his energies in the erection and establishment of global alternative Future III–a humane society (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 25, 26; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; App. E, G). Tillich had the premonition, that the before 1933 dominant German civil society, the Weimar Republic, would give birth to hell, but he did not really know it (Horkheimer 1985g: 270-271; Adorno 1970b). Horkheimer remembered that in the Winter Semester 1932/1933 he read his Introduction into Phi-

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losophy and that in his lectures he concentrated from February 1, 1933 on only still on the notion of freedom. At the time, Horkheimer had made the firm decision that he would escape Frankfurt and Germany at latest at the end of the Winter Semester. Tillich did not think of leaving Germany. Only after Horkheimer had read to Tillich quotations without compromise from his own writings The Religious Realization and the Socialist Decision did he give in (Horkheimer 1985g: 270-271; Tillich 1929; 1933). If Tillich had not yielded to Horkheimer and had not left Germany together with him in Fall 1933, whatever his fate would have been and if he had even remained alive against all expectations under the fascist regime, Horkheimer was convinced that the great things which he had achieved since then, his effect on three continents, which have helped so many people and which would enter history some day as one of the attempts to rescue religion even still in the 20th century–all that would not have seen the light of the day.

Class Struggle In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, Tillich, the former bourgeois and later religious socialist, was motivated by his friendliness, kindness and solidarity, rooted in the Judeo/Christian symbolism or symbolization of the ultimate Reality, to side with the workers in the international class struggle under unfettered liberal capitalism (Hegel 1986a: 555; 1986c: 152, 153, 154, 285; 1985g: 384, 389-390; 1986k: 94; 1986l: 346-348; Marx 1953; Marx/Engels 2005; Fromm 1966b; 1980a; Schmitt 1997; Berlin 1963; Tucker 1978; Kamenka 1983; Trotsky 2006; Niebuhr 1964; 1966c; 1967; 1981; 1990a; 1990b; 1992; Tillich 1955b; 1977; 1983; App. E, F, G). Already Hegel knew that in the class struggle the servitude would as consciousness, which was repressed into itself, go into itself, and that it thus would invert itself into the true independence and freedom (Hegel 1986a: 555; 1986c: 152, 153, 154, 285; 1985g: 384, 389-390; 1986k: 94; 1986l: 346-348; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1980a). The class struggle was the absolute becoming fluid of the status quo: the absolute negativity. The work was the inhibited desire, the retarded disappearance, or it was a formation process. The working consciousness superseded the opposite form; the alienated being. In the working or formation process, the being-for-itself of the working consciousness became as its own for itself, and it came to its consciousness–that it was in-and-for itself. If the unjust course of the world would be defeated and overcome, and if virtue would be victorious and win–that would decide itself out of the nature of the living weapons that

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the fighters used. That was so, because the weapons were nothing else than the very essence of the fighters themselves. The class struggle continued to manifest itself on March 31 and April 1 and 2, 2009, at the occasion of the meeting of the G20 in London, where thousands of protesting workers marched against the resistance of the riot police more or less peacefully into the financial district, and showed signs reading Capitalism does not work, and threw stones into the windows of the Bank of England, in the midst of the nationalization of banks and industries in all liberal capitalist societies as re-appropriation of their wealth by the tax-paying citizens from the private bourgeois owners, who were supposed to be its stewards, but had betrayed their stewardship through massive robbery and fraud particularly in the past 8 years, That may mean the beginning of a trend toward global alternative Future III–a secular or/and religious humanistic socialism (Hegel 1986a: 555; 1986c: 152, 153, 154, 285, 1985g: 384, 389390; 1986k: 94; 1986l: 346-348; Marx/Engels 2005; Fromm 1966b; 1980a; Schmitt1997; Berlin 1963; Tucker 1978; Kamenka 1983; Trotsky 2006; Niebuhr 1964; 1966c; 1967; 1981; 1990a; 1990b; 1992; Tillich 1955b; 1977; 1983; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; App. E, F, G). Any future neo-liberal attempt to invert the federalization process again after some stabilization of liberal capitalism, and to de-regulate and privatize again a la Reagan, Friedmann, Clinton, Greenspan, etc. and to return to free market policies would only lead to an even deeper and more catastrophic economic crisis (Fromm 1980a; Hitzler/Pfadenhauer 2009: 25-27; Fischer 2009: 27-31; Woyke/Boll 2009: 31-33; Hirschel 2009: 37-40; Zimmermann 2009: 40-42; Gabriel 2009: 42-45; Lucke 2009: 45-48; Müller/Thierse 2008: 48-52; Tillich 1933; Meyer 2009: 55-59; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002). At this time–March 2010–the average unemployment in the United States has already reached over 10%.

A New Reformation To Horkheimer appeared as a kind of new Reformation what was undertaken in 1966 in the different Christian denominations, in order to bring the confession of the individual in the Jewish/Christian revelation again into a relationship to his or her real life in secular civil society (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986q: 50-95; 185-346; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; 1985g: 23-30, 37, 40; Adorno 1970b; Asorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Habermas 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a; Part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 1996; Schneider 1955; Guardini 1925; 1935; 1948; 1952; Metz 1969; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; App. E). According to Horkheimer, already

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the first Protestant-Evangelical Paradigm of the Reformation of the 16th century had been initiated and conditioned not at least and not at last through the contradiction between the wording of the sacred texts of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament on one hand, and the forward storming positive sciences, on the other (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986p: 9-53; Horkheimer 1985g: 271; Lortz 1961a; 1962b; 1964: 553-698; Küng 1994a: 602-241; Metz 1963; 1965; 1967; 1969; 1970; 1972a; App. E, F). Luther tried to reconcile this contradiction through the notion of faith. In Horkheimer’s view, in 1966 the abyss between the Biblical stories and the exact sciences had become all too deep. Therefore, a new Reformation had become necessary, if Christianity was to be rescued. For Horkheimer, the words like heaven and earth, above and below, the soul of the individual human being, which could not be thought away from the sacred texts of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament as God’s word, have totally changed their meaning in Modernity (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 25, 26, 37, 40; App. E). In Horkheimer’s view, to understand literally the Biblical stories like those of the kind and friendly, expanding and unfolding God, who in spite of being almighty, permitted this His sometimes so cruel, terrible and horrible world to continue to exist, as well as the Biblical narratives of the creation, or of the ascension into heaven, was not more appropriate and suitable for the young people of the 1960s and later, particularly the students, who laughed mockingly about the Medieval witch-hunting delusion and madness, which cost the lives of 10 million women, and who were interested in he Sputnik and in the astronauts flying to the moon or to Mars, as planned and partially executed by the former SS Colonel Werner von Braun, who had produced Hitler’s Vengeance I and II, and the later Kennedy friend, than the report about the splitting of the Sea of Reeds, or the reaction of the Sun to the command of Joshua to stand still, or his trumpets, which had supposedly tumbled down the walls of Jericho, which had already fallen centuries earlier (Genesis 1 and 2; Exodus 13-16, Matthew 5-7, 27-28; Hegel 1986l: 1955; Horkheimer 1985g: 271; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25; 1988n: 120-121, 124, 138-139, 166-172, 219, 228-233, 276-277, 369-370, 405406, 459, 471-474, 481, 527-528, 536, 550-553; Zerfass 1988; Fetscher/ Machovec 1975; Metz 1995; Metz/Wieel 1993; Oelmüller 1990, 1992; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; App. E). Like so many other cancer patients in their last cruel and terrible days, so also my wife Margaret asked on her death bead: I know God is in this world, but where is he sometimes (Psalms 46 and 73; Berrigan 1978: 35-37, 53-56; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6)? There was no answer!

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Logical Positivism According to Horkheimer, the philosophy of logical positivism was characteristic for the 1960s (Horkheimer 1974: 101-104, 116-117, 200-202; 1985g: 271-272; 1985l: 69-75, 436-493; 1989m: chap. 31; 1988n: 304-305, 307, 318, 327, 329, 348, 351-352, 458-459, 1991f: 298-301, 404-405, 417, 424-429, 520-521, 525-526, 550-553; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-609; Benjamin 1955: Band 5, 494; Marcuse 1962). In Horkheimer’s view, logical positivism had wiped out most consequentially the antinomy between the sacred texts of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament as word of God, on one hand, and the exact sciences, on the other (Horkheimer 1985g: 272-272; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962: 65-66; 1967; 1970a: chap. 1; App. E, F). Logical positivism has proven superfluous in science, what Hegel had still called the emphatic notion of the truth, and left it generously to religion (Hegel 1986a: 193, 288, 374-375; 1986b: 31, 39, 153, 460-461, 511, 540, 545; 1986c: 1, 5, 40, 41-42, 42-43, 46, 47, 64, 76-77, 137-177; Horkheimer 1974c: 121123, 218-219; 1985g: chaps. 25, 26, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 12, 26; Marcuse 1960; 1962; 1970a: chap. 1; 1987; 2001; 2005; Habermas 1999; Schneider 1955: 26-31; Harprecht 2009: 75-78; Augstein 2009; App. E, F). Logical positivism drew more sharply the lines between the cultural dimensions: here science and over there music, theater, leisure time, and religion (Hegel 1986j; Horkheimer 1985g: 272-272; Marcuse 1960; 1962; 1970a; App. E, F). According to Horkheimer, in contrast to the thinking keeping with the time before, during and after World War II, and being split up into different cultural dimensions, what counted for Tillich and what he stressed was the unity and thereby the meaning of life. What believers–Jews, Christians or Muslims–were used to practice anyhow in their faith without reflecting upon it, the Lutheran Tillich–like the Lutherans Schelling and Hegel before–gave specific reasons for and justified (Jamme/Schneider 1984; Schelling 1860; 1946; 1977a; 1977b; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; 185-346, 347-536; App. E). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, Tillich was a Schellingian as well as a Hegelian.

Faith and Superstition Horkheimer differentiated with Tillich between genuine religious faith and superstition (Exodus 6: 2-7, 13; Lieber 2001: 351-360; 523/12; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1966a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; Horkheimer 1974c: 218-219; 1985g: 272; Adorno 1997i/1; 1997i/2: 7-142; Adorno/Frenkel-Brunswick/Levinson/Sanford 1950: Part IV). According to Tillich’s

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teaching, the religious representations and stories, all what in religion alone had been separated through the notion of faith from superstition, were to be understood not literally but rather as ciphers or symbols. Religious faith posited as absolute and comprehended literally as immediate truth, as it has happened in all forms of religious fundamentalism– Jewish, Christian, Islamic, etc.–was itself superstition. How much ever the Evangelium may vouch for the truth, who ever simply accepted it in the face of the secular science and technology without confronting them with it and without taking into himself the unavoidable doubt, he read merely a collection of fables and transformed like innumerably many people, probably the majority, religion into convention: into a marvelous fable convenue (John 18: 33-40; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 25, 26, 29, 47, 40; App. E). The dialectical religiologist remembers that since Bloch the critical theorists and their humanistic Christian friends–Tillich, Metz, Moltman, Dirks, Kogon and their disciples– understood like Schelling and Hegel and even Erasmus of Rotterdam and Thomas More and Thomas Münzer before, the eschatological and apocalyptic arch-Christian word–Now I am making the whole of creation new, the new heaven and the new earth, the entire book of Revelation–not literally, but rather as a symbolical expression of their thinking as transcending, and of their longing for the Truth, the wholly Other than the unredeemed world, which was the case around them (John 18: 33-40; Revelation 21-22; Ackroyd 1998; More 1895; 1901; 1963; Ackroyd 1998; Hegel 1986q: 5095, 185-346; Jamme/Schneider 1984; Schelling 1860; 1946; 1977a; 1977b; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; Bloch/Reif 1978: 70-74, 78-90, 282-284, 384-287, 316, 317-318, 319-320, 322; Metz 1959; 1965; 1967; 1970, 1972a; 1972b; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1978; 1980; 1985e; Adorno 1951: 333-334; 1962; 1963; 1969c; 1970b; Adorno/ Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1858b: 484-498; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1974c: 218-219; 1985g: 272; Habermas 1973: 11-32, 48-95, 127-143; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1966a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; Bultmann 1958; 1961; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b; Dirks 1968; 1983a; 1983b; 1985; Metz/Peters 1991; Küng 1991b; 1994a: 904905; 2004; Mon/Claus 1991; Rudolphi 1949; Guardini 1935; 1948; 1952; Siebert 2007a: 99-113; 2007g: 11-19; 2008b: 55-61; App. E, G). None of the great Jewish and Christian thinkers of Modernity read the narratives of the Torah or the New Testament merely literally as marvelous fables, but rather symbolically as ciphers of the ultimate Reality (Tillich 1955b; Fromm 1966b; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004).

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Symbolism Tillich, as Horkheimer understood him, tried to overcome through the notion of the symbol the modern contradiction between faith and knowledge, revelation and enlightenment, and to preserve the unity and truth without lie (Hegel 1986b: 283-434; 1986e: 247-248, 386; 1986f: 296; 1986l: 258, 263; 1986m: 109, 393-407, 413-485, 486-546; 1986p: 428-429; 1986r: 109; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1966a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; Horkheimer 1985g: 272; App. E, F). In this way, so it seemed to Horkheimer, Tillich did an infinite service to the seriously and badly threatened Christian life form. The reconciliation of scientific knowledge and kerygma or the preaching of the Evangelium could happen more adequately through the symbolism than through the faith teaching or doctrine (Bultmann 1958; 1961; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1966a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; Horkheimer 1985g: 272). That was so for Horkheimer with the exception, that in the present–in 1966–unlike in the first Reformation of the 16th century, which could not yet separate religion, on one hand, and power and rule, on the other, the realization as well as the balance and compensation of the contradiction between faith and knowledge, ultimately the philosophical thought, had lost its significance. In the late capitalist society nothing is justified any longer through religious faith or through the philosophical dialectical notion (Hegel 1986b: 297-433; 1986p: 9-88; 1986q: 342-344; Adorno 1997h: 9-19, 354-372, 373391, 392-396, 569-573, 578-587; App. A, B, C, D, E, F).

History of Symbolism In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, originally even in ciphers and symbols the truth was still clouded and veiled through the sensuous element (Hegel 1986b: 283-434; 1986e: 247-248, 386; 1986f: 296; 1986l: 258, 263; 1986m: 109, 393-407, 413-485, 486-546; 1986p: 428-429; 1986r: 109; Horkheimer 1985g: 272; Kim 1996: 267-283; App. E). The symbols contained presentiments and reminiscences of the dialectical notion. The Egyptian Religion of Riddle had inverted the animal forms into symbols. The first mainly oriental form of art, which was not yet separated and emancipated from religion, was the symbolical one, which as such was full of riddles and fermenting and longing in its search for the Truth. The symbol had first of all been a sign. The symbol was an external existence, which was immediately at hand for the human perception, and which was to be understood in a broader sense. The symbol was according to its very notion

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essentially ambiguous. The symbol was the moment of the negative: the death of the natural. The human spirit worked itself through the symbol out of the merely natural into an independent autonomous existence. For the symbol the form is the main thing. There is the connection between symbol and metamorphosis. The symbol was connected with the human subject, which was not immediately a natural being. Which ever religion was hiding the thought in the symbol did not have the dialectical notion yet, or had it already lost again. There was a conscious and an unconscious symbolism (Hegel 1986b: 283-434; 1986e: 247-248, 386; 1986f: 296; 1986l: 258, 263; 1986m: 109, 393-407, 413-485, 486-546; 1986p: 428-429; 1986r: 109; Horkheimer 1985g: 272; Jung 1958; Drewermann 1992a; 1992b; 1992c). The Jewish religion had its own symbolism of sublimity (Hegel 1986b: 283-434; 1986e: 247-248, 386; 1986f: 296; 1986l: 258, 263; 1986m: 109, 393-407, 413-485, 486-546; 1986p: 406-442; 1986r: 109; Horkheimer 1985g: 272; Jung 1958; Drewermann 1992a; 1992b; 1992c; Küng 1991b; App. E). There was a conscious symbolism of the comparative artistic form. There was the fantastic symbolism of the Indian Religion of Imagination connected with the Trimurti. The perfect example for the working through of the symbolical art form took place in the Syrian Religion of Pain with Ishtar and the dying and rising again Tamutz or Adonis, or better still in the Egyptian Religion of Riddle: the complete symbolism of the Memnons, of Isis and the dying and rising again Osiris, and of the Sphinx (Exodus 9: 3; Lieber 2001: 364/3; Hegel 1986b: 283-434; 1986e: 247-248, 386; 1986f: 296; 1986l: 258, 263; 1986m: 109, 393-407, 413-485, 486-546; 1986p: 406-442; 1986r: 109; App. E). In the conscious symbolism the meaning was expressively separated from the representation. The dialectic of life was the very content for the symbolical form of art (Hegel 1986m: 107, 114, 117, 124, 390-392, 393-546; 1986n: 20, 27, 66, 95, 121, 237, 246, 258, 269, 286, 375, 446; 1986o: 132, 256, 572; 1986t: 501; Horkheimer 1985g: 272). The kind of formation of the symbol corresponded to its fundamental meaning. The Egyptian pyramids were the simple image of the symbolical art form. In the Egyptian art form the symbolical turned into a riddle. Finally, the symbolical art form was determinately negated by the classical and romantic art forms and thus disappeared in them but was also preserved and elevated and fulfilled in them. The symbolical art form could not break through to a complete mutual inter-formation of meaning and expression. The very character of the symbolical consisted in that it could unite the soul of meaning only incompletely with its bodily form. In the symbolical, there remained the un-freedom of the separation of content and form. The symbolical art remained caught up in the work, to

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clarify for itself its own content. In the symbolical the meaning remained dark and contained something else than the external form. Residuals of the symbolical were present still in the mythology of the Greek Religion of Beauty and Fate. In the symbolical were present natural things as well as human personifications in the form of representation. The symbolical made it only to the affinity of content and form. In the symbolical the human self-consciousness had not yet matured to the complete fruit. From the standpoint of the ideal of beauty not only the symbolical art, but every determinate art form remained incomplete and imperfect. The symbolical art is the searching and longing art. The fundamental type of the symbolical art appeared in the Egyptian Religion of Riddle. In the symbolical art the connection between the universal meaning and the real appearance was loose. In the symbolical art the human subjectivity struggled to find itself as form and content. The nature of the symbolical was an existence which did ultimately not correspond to the infinite Idea or the idea of the Infinite, the ultimate Reality, the wholly Other than the finite world of appearance (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986f: 487-573; Tillich 1955b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; App. E).

Rescue Horkheimer asked rightly, what kind of a rescue of Christianity did Tillich’s symbolical theology really provide (Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1966a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; Horkheimer 1985g: 272-273; App. E, F)? According to Horkheimer, Tillich announced and explained the sacred texts of the Hebrew Bible and of the New Testament as symbols, of which could not be said, what they really stood for and what they were supposed to symbolize. Tillich was asked this question many times in many audiences in Europe and America, Horkheimer himself was often allowed to speak to Tillich about this question. For Tillich, as Horkheimer understood him, symbols were first of all the life, the death, and the idea of the founder Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ (Matthew 26-28, Mark 14-16; Luke 22-34; John 12-21; Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1966a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; Horkheimer 1974c: 96-97; 1985g: 272-273; Fromm 1992; Reich 1976; Guardini 1948; Schneider 1955; Küng 1970; 1994a; 1994b; Ratzinger 1994; 2004a; 2004b; Benedict XVI 2007; App. E). In Tillich’s view, this idea was by far better concretely superseded in the ordeal and martyrdom of the honest atheist than by those who called themselves besides–or alongside–or also Christians. Yet for Tillich, how ever that wholly Other, which was meant by the symbol

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and which could not be named, was to be interpreted–as the Kabbalists’ or Schelling’s expanding and contracting God or as Hegel’s absolute Spirit– whoever heard and perceived seriously and at his own risk, and without safe and secure guaranties, as the kerygma or news of the Unconditional, or of the ultimate Reality, and tried to follow it according to his best knowledge and conscience, and even who only lived in such a way that his willing did not exhaust itself in the always again newly given, transitory, often frustrated, particular individual or collective purposes, even those of nations and empires, and even finite religious goals a la the rational choice theory of religion, but who was at the same time concerned with the totally Other, be it even only through desperate denial, he witnessed, nevertheless, for the Truth, and he was in this sense still a Christian (Schelling 1860; 1946; 1977a; 1977b; Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986c: 590591; 1986f: 462-573; 1986p: 9-88; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346, 347-536; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1966a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 25, 26, 29, 37, 40; Goldstein 2006; Arens 1989a; 1989b; 1992; 1994a; App. E). In the perspective of the critical religiology, for Tillich people like his friends, the critical theorists of society, were in so far as they were driven by the insatiable longing for the wholly Other, for perfect justice and unconditional love, and that the murderer shall at least ultimately not triumph over his innocent victim, not only good humanists but also real Christians (Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1966a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 25, 26, 29, 37, 40; Siebert 2001; 2002a).

Seriousness or Autonomy Horkheimer dared to speak about Tillich’s symbolical theology only in order to show, how far he had driven tolerance in his endeavor to preserve and rescue religion in the West (Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1966a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; Horkheimer 1985g: 272-273; App. E). However, Tillich did not promote liberalism and tolerance so far as it may appear. In Horkheimer’s view, what Tillich had called seriousness differentiated the Christian not for instance from the Jew or from the free humanist, but rather from the indifferent bourgeois, from the total conformist to antagonistic civil society and authoritarian follower type (Kant 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1982; 1983; More 1895; 1901; 1963; Schneider 1955; Ackroyd 1998; Mon/Claus 1991; Horkheimer 1985g: 273-275; 1987b: 15148; Adorno/Frenke-Brunswick/Levinson/Sanford 1950: Part IV; App. B, C, D, E). In the 18th century, Kant had called Tillich’s seriousness

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autonomy (Kant 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1982; 1983; Horkheimer 1985g: 273-275; 1987b: 15-148; Siebert 2001; 2002a). For Kant, a subject was autonomous, who was responsible to his own conscience and who was sworn to freedom. Without such autonomy could not be thought what constituted a humane civilization. For Horkheimer, in contrast to Kant, Tillich knew that the idea of autonomy could not be abstracted from Christianity. That was so, because Kant’s categorical imperative commanded that man was to treat man never merely as means but also always as purpose. Without admitting it to himself, Kant had been–as the great newer philosophy in general, including even the historical materialism– influenced by Christianity to such an extent, that he identified its instruction or action orientation with the practical reason (Kant 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1982; 1983; Marx 1953; Marx/Engels 2005; Fromm 1966b; 1980a; Schmitt 1997; Berlin 1963; Tucker 1978; Kamenka 1983; Trotsky 2006; Niebuhr 1964; 1966c; 1967; 1981; 1990a; 1990b; 1992; Tillich 1955b; 1977; 1983; Horkheimer 1985g: 273-275; 1987b: 15-148; App. E). Horkheimer was convinced that what Kant’s transcendental philosophy formulated as law of social morality was inverted or secularized religion (Kant 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1982; 1983; Adorno 1970b; Horkheimer 1985g: 273-275; 1987b: 15-148; App. E). In Horkheimer’s view, Kant behaved as if practical or theoretical, Christian or Buddhist human reason could not likewise command the very opposite: that man should treat man never as purpose but always and alone as means (Kant 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1982; 1983; Adorno 1970b; Horkheimer 1985g: 273-275; 1987b: 15-148; Fromm 1950; 1957; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1966c; 1967, 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1976; 1980a; Fromm/Suzuki/ Martino 1960; Fromm/Xirau 1979; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1967; 1970a; Habermas 1976; App. E). In antagonistic civil society not only things but also human beings were increasingly commodified and thus had to instrumentalize themselves in order to be able to survive (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Adorno 1997h; App. C, D). According to Horkheimer, Kant’s assertion had been wrong. In Horkheimer’s perspective, the faith that love was better than hate, that goodness was better than cruelty or torture–and that not in the sense of the more skillful tactics, but better in itself–could not be justified in any other way than through the cultural tradition: ultimately, through the word of the sacred writings of the Torah and the New Testament and the Holy Qu’ran (Kant 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1982; 1983; Adorno 1970b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40, 41, 43; 1987b: 15-148; Fromm 1950; 1957; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1966c; 1967, 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1976; 1980a;

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Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Fromm/Xirau 1979; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1967; 1970a; Habermas 1976; 1978c; 1983; 1991a; Baum 2003; 2004; 2009; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004). According to Horkheimer, insofar as the penal code was not opposed to it, infamy could be as rational as the honesty. With the last trace of theology, the thought that the other human being was to be recognized and to be respected had lost its logical foundation. What was experienced by not a few people as the regression of civilization, was ultimately connected with the disappearance of the seriousness, which derived from religion. Tillich had tried to stop this disappearance of seriousness through his philosophical-theological attempts (Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1966a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; Horkheimer 1985g: 272-273; App. E). Horkheimer did not dare to judge the future effectiveness of Tillich’s symbolical theology. Horkheimer only knew for sure that the opposite theological attempt–the stubbornness, the inflexibility, the unbending traditional will, the fundamentalist return to the reified wording, the orthodoxy–was theoretically not clearer and brighter, and practically not more promising.

Self-critical Liberalism In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, Tillich’s tolerance was part of a self-critical liberalism (Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1966a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; Horkheimer 1970c; 1971; 1985g: 272-273). For Tillich as for the critical theorists of society, Marxism was the selfcriticism of liberalism (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 520-540; Marx 1871; 1906; 1951; 1953; 1956; Horkheimer 1970c; 1971; 1985g: 272-273). Like critical religion, e.g. the prophecies of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic Prophets, and like negative art, e.g. Brecht’s dialectical or epical theater, e.g. The Three Penny Opera, Saint Joan of the Stockyards, or Mother Courage, and like dialectical philosophy and social science, e.g. the critical theorists’ critical theory, so did Tillich’s negative symbolical theology hold up the mirror to antagonistic civil society being continually engaged in economic crises and conventional wars (Isaiah 11: 61-66; John 21-22; The Holy Qur’an Sura CIV-CXIV; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1967b; 1970c; 1971; 1985g: 272-273; Brecht 1961; 1964; 1966; 1867; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1963b; 1866; 1972; 1977; 1983; Horkheimer 1970c; 1971; 1985g: 272-273; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981a; 1981b; 1984a; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1990; 1992a; 1995; 1998; 2001a; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; App. C, D, E, F). There has been continual resistance against such self-

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criticism of liberalism, which has limited its tolerance (Horkheimer 1970c; 1971; 1985g: 272-273; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1963b; 1866; 1972; 1977; 1983). In spite of Tillich’s visit to Western Michigan University in 1964 and Eliade’s visit in 1967, it took us 44 years in order to bring any of Brecht’s plays to Western Michigan University, and our attempt to teach a critical futurology a la Flechtheim has been repressed, and Jürgen Habermas has still not yet been invited (Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003).

Practical Positivism According to Horkheimer, the practical positivist was the tactician who was hard to contact and to communicate with (Horkheimer 1974c: 102104, 116-117; 1985g: 274-275; Adorno 1952; 1963; 1970a). The practical positivist, deeply rooted in the human potential of work and tool and instrumental or functional rationality knew only purposes, which once being achieved turned right away into means again (Hegel 1972; 1979; 1986l: 1955; Horkheimer 1967b: 252, 259-260; 311-312; 1974c: 102-104, 116-117; 1985g: 274-275; Adorno 1952; 1963; 1970a; App. C, D). However, what Tillich opposed to the so defined obstinate, dogged instrumental seriousness of the practical positivist as religious seriousness, meant in no way the disrespect or contempt for those functional purposes, but their integration into a life, which transcended them. Tillich’s religious seriousness had nothing in itself of bureaucratic narrowness, of vice squad, of guardian of public morals, of pettiness or paltriness. Who only walked with Tillich through the landscape, e.g. here in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1964, knew how drastically his kind of being excluded the petite-bourgeois narrowmindedness. For Tillich, however, faithfulness was identical with seriousness. Tillich practiced this serious faithfulness toward his religion as well as toward his friends up to the end of his life. It was obvious for Horkheimer that in the disintegrated, decayed Western culture with the serious faithfulness also all the other true and false ideas went down into big words, not at least and not at last into the talk and jargon of the so called eternal values, which together with the ontological vocabulary of Heidegger like authenticity, which even Tillich did not see through (Heidegger 1968; 2001; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1966a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; Horkheimer 1985g: 272-275; Adorno 1997f: 413-526; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b). That talk or jargon served well the status quo of antagonistic civil society as mass ornament or decoration (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 491-540; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Tillich 1926; 1929;

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1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1966a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; Horkheimer 1985g: 272-275; Adorno 1997f: 413-526).

Totally Administered Society In Horkheimer’s perspective, on the way toward post-modern global alternative Future I–the totally organized through, entirely administered society without meaning and love, ideas would loose their significance in modern civil society (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Flechtheim 1971; App. E, F, G). In 1966, for Horkheimer ideas did not less turn into hollow phrases, or clichés and passwords in the capitalistic societies of the West than in the socialistic societies of the East (Marcuse 1961; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Flechtheim 1971; App. C, D). In the socialist societies of the East the notions of the Marxian theory had turned into the clichés of the Diamat–the so-called dialectical materialism. In West and East whatever run against the corporate, political, or bureaucratic carrier, the smooth integration into the social totality, appeared where only observation, establishment, protocol sentences, decree, proof have still validity, necessarily as eccentricity or quirk, as symptom of psychologically not completely balanced and equalized individuals. The longing for community and the escape from loneliness, which had once been overcome through religion, was now satisfied as immediately plausible phenomenon through the collectivism of the Right or Left type (Marcuse 1960; Fromm 1972a; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 25, 26, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; App. E). According to Horkheimer, in order to expect that National Socialism belonged alone to the past, one needed an astonishing degree of optimism in 1966, in the age of the Chinese and the Russian red fascism, as well as of the awakening nations everywhere, which were ruled and directed by cliques or rackets. For Horkheimer, this was the case not at least and not at last because the efforts, like the work of Paul Tillich, were admittedly discussed sometimes, but they were in no way multiplied through adequate pedagogical efforts. Horkheimer argued, that if culture was not only to be defended but also to be maintained, then during the present crisis of the family as well as of other institutions, which were decisive for the younger generation, the intellectual and spiritual as well as the material expenditure for education in the proper sense had to be decisively increased (Horkheimer/ Fromm/Marcuse 1936; Horkheimer 1985g: 274-275; Siebert 1979b; 1979e; 1986). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, in spite of the fact that since the 1960s the Eastern and the Western superpowers

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have substantially declined economically, politically and even militarily, Horkheimer’s time diagnosis and prognosis concerning the religious and educational and in general the cultural situation, remain valid and carry in themselves the potential to be developed further into the 21st century.

Kairos According to Horkheimer, in 1966 in the face of the governmental investments in seemingly more important branches of culture and the in spite of all soothing and calming down socially decisive phenomenon of inflation, the human action against the decline and dilapidation of the Western civilization remained very far behind what would be necessary to stop it (Horkheimer 1985g: 274-275). In Tillich’s view, as Horkheimer understood him, the biblical notion of the kairos, the historical moment, in which the will of God could be experienced by those who had a vocation for it, was in the 1920s characteristic for the movement of religious socialism, to which he belonged (Matthew 1: 15; 26: 18; Mark 12: 33; Luke 9: 51; John 7: 6; Kierkegaard 1954; 1959; 1964; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1948; 1955b; Horkheimer 1985g: 275; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; App. E). After World War I, Tillich had been a leading member of the Kairos Circle in Berlin, Germany, until it dissolved itself in 1924 (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933). However, Tillich was aware in the third volume of his Systematic Theology, which was dedicated to his second wife Hannah, that also the opponents, the National Socialists, used or rather abused the notion of kairos (Tillich 1963a: 371; Horkheimer 1986g: 275; 1988d: chap. 2). For the German fascists, Hitler was not only supposed to be the great phenomenologist of the political scene and of the historical process, but he also knew the kairos, the right moment, at which to act politically or militarily, and most of all–as he put it–providentially (Hitler 1943: 64-65, 120, 150; Tillich 1957: 130, 162; 1963a: 328, 337, 371-374; Horkheimer 1986g: 275; 1988d: chap. 2; App. E). According to Tillich, the spirit to whom National Socialism appealed was the spirit of the false prophets, who represented an idolatrous glorification of the nation and of the race (Tillich 1963a: 371; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; Lundgren 1998). Hannah told Paulus’s students at the University of Chicago, some of whom would later on become my colleagues in the Religion Department at Western Michigan University, to leave theology behind and to turn to art instead. Some of Tillich’s Chicago students became, nevertheless, theologians: God-is-dead theologians. They were with him on the evening before the night in which he died from a heart attack in his

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Chicago apartment. The God-is-dead theology was the only genuine, specifically American theology ever created. My colleagues had participated in seminars at Chicago University, which were taught cooperatively by the socialist Tillich and the fascist Mircea Eliade. My colleagues left theology, but not only for art, but rather for Eliade’s phenomenology of religion, and for a historical or cognitive comparative study of religion (Eliade 1961; Light/Wilson 2003). My colleagues rejected not only Tillich’s symbolical theology, but also his systematic way of thinking, and if they had known his Socialist Decision, which emphasized the class antagonism, and which he had hidden when he came to America, in order to introduce himself instead with his On the Boundary, which stressed the contradiction between the religious and the secular and its possible reconciliation and was as such more harmless, they would probably have opposed his religious socialism as well (Tillich 1933; 1951; 1957; 1963a; 1966). In 1966, Horkheimer was certain that the 1960s were no less characterized antinomically through the kairos than the 1920s and the 1930s and the 1940s. For the dialectical religiology, the same is still true for the first decade of the 21st century.

Demand Horkheimer and the critical theorists stated and showed the recognition and respect, which they owed and granted to the great thinker Paul Tillich, most of all through seeing to it, that his demand, not to remain indifferent, but against all the tendencies in civil society toward the alternative Future I–the totally administered society, and toward alternative Future II–the entirely militarized society, to stand up according to the Judeo-Christian symbols, for the arrival of alternative Future III–a society, in which personal autonomy and universal solidarity would be reconciled, and friendly human relations would be possible (Kierkegaard 1954; 1959; 1964; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985a: chap. 55; Fromm 1950; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1990a; 1990b; 1995; 2001; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; App. G). This demand remains valid and full of actuality also for the critical theory of religion in 2010, and beyond (Siebert 2001; 2002a). Today–in March 2010–Tillich would very probably

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demand in the spirit of his religious socialism that the Americans and Europeans take very seriously the present kairos and recognize: 1)

that the present governmental bail-out or stimulus packages for mayor banks and industries were simply a euphemism for their necessary nationalization, and 2) that this federalization was really the re-appropriation of their wealth by the free association of tax paying citizens from the private capitalists who instead of being the stewards of it considered it to be their own private property, and thus stole it most variously and greedily from the people who had produced it, and 3) that this nationalization meant the end of the anarchical, unregulated. always privatizing free market capitalism, and the beginning of a more communitarian economy carried by the social total subject of all citizens, united through public discourse in mutual recognition, and aiming at the transformation of the present commodity exchange society toward post-modern, global alternative Future III–a society, characterized by discourse mediated recognition as well as by redistribution of wealth, and by cooperative-associative planning beyond the models of the free market-and the central administration economy, and 4) that this historical transformation toward post-modern, global alternative Future III–a reconciled, peaceful society would be promoted in the light of an inverse cipher theology theoretically-theologically and practically-liturgically symbolizing and interpreting–e.g. through the notion of the Deus absconditus, the Thing-in-itself, the Unconditional, the expanding and contracting God, the Identity of the Identity and the Non-Identity, the qualitative Infinitude, the absolute Spirit, the ultimate Reality beyond all resemblances, or the as such imageless and nameless wholly Other than the contracting God and the so often terribly and horribly cursed natural and historical world: only recently in the wars of retaliation against Afghanistan and Iraq for the terror of September 11, 2001, over 5,000 American soldiers were sacrificed and 900 billion dollars were spent in order to kill over one million Afghans and Iraqis, including President Saddam Hussein and his sons, who had nothing to do with the original crime, and the wars still continue today–March 2010–with the usual hardness of the heart and without repentance and atonement and forgiveness (Genesis 1-4; Exodus 1-9; John 1; Acts 17: 23-34; Hole Qur’an: Sura 1-2; Lieber 2001: 315-368; Kant 1929; 1946; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Schelling 1860; 1946; 1977a; 1977b; Hegel 1986c: 590591; 1986e: 43-44; 73-74; 1986f; Jamme/Schneider 1984; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Benjamin 1977: chaps 10, 11; Adorno 1966; 1970b; Fromm 1966b; 1974; 2001; Marcuse 1970a: chap. 1; Buck/Morss 1977; Hullot/Kentor 2006; Fetscher/ Schmidt 2002; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36,

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chapter twenty-six 37, 40; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 29-30; Schneider 1955; Guardini 1935; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985a: chap. 55; Fromm 1950; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1990a; 1990b; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 1995; 2001; 2004; Marcuse 1960; 1962; 1969b; 1970a; 1980a; 1987; 1995; 2001; 2005; Schmidt 1972; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1981a; 1981b, 1982; 1983; 1984a; 1986; 1988a; 1988b; 1991a: Part III; 1991b; 1992a; 1992b; 1997a; 1999; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2003b; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b: 1-25; 2006c; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Edelstein/Habermas 1984; Fraser/Honneth 2003; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2001: 54-63; 2004; 2005; 2007; Honneth/Joas 2002; Kellner 1989; 2001; Best/Kellner 1991; Küenzlen 2003; Haecker 1918; 1933; 1935; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 61-65; Metz 1959; 1962; 1963; 1965; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; Peukert 1976; Arens 1982; 1989a; 1992; 1994a; 1995; 1997; 2007; 2009; Benedict XVI: 2007; App. G).

In the perspective of Paul Tillich’s cipher- or symbol-theology, the critical theorists of society were not only radical enlighteners in the tradition of Rousseau and Voltaire, Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, but also genuinely religious persons, good Jews, and maybe even–what Karl Rahner called–anonymous Christians, in so far as their work and their lives did not exhaust themselves in finite projects and purposes alone, but were ultimately concerned with the wholly Other or–what Rahner named–the absolute Future in terms of the Truth which at least for Adorno was manifested e.g. through Johann Sebastian Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion Play (Exodus 9: 3; Isaiah 11: 6566; Psalm 22; Matthew 26, 27, 28; Revelation 21-22; Lieber 2001: 364/3; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b: chap. ix; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1990b; 1992; 1995; 1997; 2001; Marcuse 1970a: chap. 1; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a; 1969b; Horkheimer 1988a; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 49; 1996s: 32-74; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-616; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392402; 1958b: 484-402; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Bloch/Reif 1978: 17-26, 62-66, 70-74, 78-90, 114-117, 282-283, 284-286, 294-298, 316, 317, 319, 322; Reich 1976; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: Part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b: 1-25; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Sölle/Habermas 1975; Sölle/Metz 1990; Schneider 1954: 99-101; 1955; Guardini 1935; Rahner 1964; 1968a; 1968b; 1976; Lehmann/ Raffelt 1979; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; Metz 1975a; 1984; Moltmann 1969;

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1996; 2002a; 2002b; Siebert 1979d; 1995; 2005b; 2006b: 91-137; Efron 2009; App. E, G).

chapter twenty-seven

The Desperate Hope for the Rescue of the Hopeless For the enlighteners Horkheimer and Adorno, like for Hegel and unlike for Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, it was not possible to formulate the notion of truth without a determinate concept of theology: i.e. negative, inverse, cipher theology (Kaufmann 1986: 95-96; Kamenka 1983: 115-116; Freud 1964: 24-28; 1962: 11-12; Schmidt 1972; Adorno 1970b; 1974; Adorno/ Dirks 1974; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1985l: 492). Horkheimer and Adorno could also not formulate a determinate notion of the truth without the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless and for the power of the powerless: beyond the death of the beloved person, and of the innocent victims of nature, society, and history: and neither can the dialectical religiologist (Bloch 1993: vol. I and II; Horkheimer 1995p: 34-35; 1988d: chap. 2; Benedict XVI 2007; Dragicevic/Oyen 2009: 66-68; 121-131, 166-174; App. E).

Humanistic Catholicism In his letter from New York of September 12, 1936, to his former psychoanalyst and now friend, Karl Landauer, in Amsterdam, Holland, who later on starved to death in a German concentration camp, Horkheimer reported that in connection with his fundamental thoughts on the difference between materialism and positivism, and between historical materialism and a vulgar positivistic materialism, which he had carried along with himself for a long time, he had produced an argumentative essay concerned with the humanistic Catholicism (Haecker 1918; 1935; Horkheimer 1995o: 633, 674; App. E). Horkheimer’s essay dealt with Theodor Haecker’s new book The Christian and the History, of 1935 (Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2). Horkheimer assumed that Landauer knew Haecker through his very likeable and congenial, if also orthodox Catholic writings that he published immediately after World War I. Horkheimer used the occasion of Haecker’s new book, in order to outline in principle the position of the critical theorist of society toward religion. Before and during World War I, Haecker had still been an atheist. He then converted to

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Catholicism. He also learned much from Sören Kierkegaard. Haecker developed a humanistic Catholic theology and philosophy of history, which brought him into conflict with the neo-pagan National Socialism, and after 1933 with Hitler’s regime. Haecker was forbidden to teach, and was also imprisoned. He suffered much. Haecker continued, nevertheless, to give guidance to priests in Germany, who likewise resisted fascism. One of these priests was the Pastor Georg W. Rudolphi in Frankfurt a.M. who became my teacher since 1933, and who helped to shape from the start my antifascist attitude in Haecker’s spirit, together with my teachers in the Lessing Gymnasium, a humanistic high school (Siebert 1993; Weitensteiner 2002). Haecker died shortly before the end of World War II, and thus did not see the final defeat of fascism.

The Chinese Story In his letter from Paris of December 24, 1936, Benjamin told Horkheimer in New York that he had just read his essay on Theodor Haecker (Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995o: 633, 674, 799; 1988d: chap. 2). Benjamin did not know Haecker’s book on The Christian and the History. However, several years earlier, Benjamin had dealt with Haecker’s book on Vergil in the Literary World. According to Benjamin, Horkheimer’s essay on Haecker’s new book breathed, in spite of all moderation, the imperturbable determination of a man, who was willing to speak German for once: i.e. to apply a clear and radical critique of religion, in terms of the critical theory of society. It was very significant for Benjamin that the Chinese Story was contained in Horkheimer’s essay on Haecker (Dsi 1911; Blofeld 1965; Haecker 1935; Hegel 1986d: 590-591; 1986p: 302-330; Horkheimer 1995o: 633, 674, 799; 1988d: chap. 2). According to Horkheimer, the Chinese narrative was by far superior to the Christian legend concerning the point it wanted to make. The story reported about the fate of several princes. Four princes were good, and two were bad. The two bad princes, tyrants and exploiters, who drained and oppressed the people, lead a rich, and happy, and cheerful life up to their end. The terror that the bad princes spread, suffocated any disobedience. After the death of the two bad princes the people said, admittedly, evil things about them. But the bad princes themselves did not know anything any longer about all the slander and libel, abuses and insults. The two bad princes differentiated themselves in nothing any longer from a dried-up tree stump, or a clod of earth. The four good princes, friends of their subjects, servants of the country, experienced failures and famine, invasions of enemies from outside and internal insurrections. The four good

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1321 princes died in misery and exile. After their death, the four good princes earned fame and glory for centuries, but the good princes did not know anything any longer about all this honor. The four good princes differentiated themselves in nothing any longer from a dried-up tree stump or a clod of earth. The story did forego any use to a good effect. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the Chinese story presents adequately the materialistic position. Contrary to the Christian story, in the Chinese story and in historical materialism, death and loss of consciousness has the last word: there is no resurrection of the dead and no last Judgment, and no divine remembrance (Adorno 1997u: 100). Therefore, there is some metaphysical sadness, sorrow, or melancholy connected with historical materialism, if it does not ally itself with theology, as Benjamin recommended early on in his Theological-Political Fragment and toward the end of his life in his Notion of History (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995o: 633, 674, 799; 1988d: chap. 2; Adorno 1970b; App. E).

Metaphysical Sorrow What Horkheimer said in his Haecker essay about the metaphysical sorrow or melancholy of the historical materialist, touched Benjamin from a particular side (Hegel 1986a; 67-69,440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134-135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995o: 633, 674, 799; 1988d: chap. 2). According to Horkheimer, contrary to Haecker’s opinion, the materialist did not have to fall into insanity. However, Horkheimer had to admit that one could feel a metaphysical sorrow in the writings of the great materialists. For Horkheimer, the joy, the delight, the desire that the materialistic thinking is essentially concerned with, carried in themselves already as mere phenomena the consciousness of transitoriness, and the bitterness of the end. This knowledge belonged to their very essence. In Horkheimer’s view, the indignation about the meaninglessly diminished life of the majority of all human beings on this earth, the affinity of hedonism and historical partiality, had its origin in the experience of the irretrievability of human happiness. According to Horkheimer, the question of why a behavior toward the world, for which also the good appeared according to its essence connected with something negative, did not turn over into insanity, this

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psychological problem, which Haecker dismissed a priori, could less be answered through the analysis of atheism, than through the proof that the ability for joy, delight and desire was not bound to the egoistic or selfish constitution of the soul of most religious people. In Horkheimer’s view, the psychological structure out of which Haecker, in contradiction to certain sides of his work, considered the holding out of the historical materialist in his materialistic theory to be impossible, constituted an, admittedly, widely spread special case, which will–as the critical theorists of society firmly believed–someday cease to appear natural and disappear: at the end of the modern bourgeois life form. When, so Horkheimer predicted on the basis of the critical theory of society, not only the mass delusion, and mass alienation, and mass insanity, through which, according to Haecker’s true word in 1936, the experience of the irreparable transitoriness of man and his happiness was drowned out and sealed, and also the consolation of religion had lost its power, then with the entrance of conditions, which were no longer in need of legends, certainly only the social and not also the natural ground for the metaphysical melancholy that was in man would fall away. However, this natural ground, death, would change its sight under conditions, in which the purposes of the individuals would– differently from the way it is in the present antagonistic civil society, characterized by competition–be concretely superseded in the social whole; namely, in post-modern, post-capitalistic, global alternative Future III–a society, in which freedom and justice, personal autonomy and universal solidarity would be reconciled (Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; 1995o: 633, 674, 799; 1988d: chap. 2; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Dews 1986; App. G). Death would also be able, after being freed from religious and secular ideologies, to raise and increase limitlessly the solidarity of everything living on this earth. According to Horkheimer, Haecker’s religious faith and hope in the new creation of the world after its downfall, went one space too far in the fight against the metaphysical sorrow and melancholy (Revelation 21: 5; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; 1995o: 633, 674, 799; 1988d: chap. 2; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Dews 1986; App. E, G).

Threads of Joy, Delight, and Desire Benjamin was so deeply touched by Horkheimer’s statements about the metaphysical sorrow of the historical materialist, because of his old love for the great materialist Swiss writer, Gottfried Keller (Hegel 1986a; 67-69, 440-442, 614,620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436,

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1323 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134-135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Keller 1994; Laumont 2000: 5-77; Benjamin 1988: chap. 29; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995o: 633, 674, 799; 1988d: chap. 2). For Benjamin, Keller’s great and splendid materialistic sadness, was really permeated by the colorful threads of joy, delight, and desire: Slow and glimmering fell a rain, into which the evening sun was shining (Keller 1972: 255; Laumont 2000: 5-77; Benjamin 1988: chap. 29; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995o: 633, 674, 799; 1988d: chap. 2).

Yet, for Benjamin this materialistic melancholy was a long chapter that he could not deal with immediately. Benjamin saw in Horkheimer’s essay out of all those writings that were planned to be put into the Materialistic Reader, the one in which the findings could be most surprising (Horkheimer 1995o: 799-801, 517-519). The Materialistic Reader had been planned by Bloch, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Eduard Fuchs, Henry Grossmann, Paul Honigsheim, and Hans Mayer, in order to clarify the at the time–1936–so confused differentiation between materialism and idealism (Horkheimer 1985l: 349-397; 1995o: 799-801, 517-519). It was to embrace the materialistic teachings of the occidental philosophy from Antiquity to the end of the 19th century. It was to give expression to the tendencies of materialism, which had been overlooked in the usual histories of philosophy, or which had been neglected. Such materialistic tendencies could be found even in the writings of the great idealistic philosophers, e.g. of Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel. Thus, Hegel had already long before Marx turned around materialistically the Sermon on he Mount in his Phenomenology of Spirit, as Benjamin found out in his last essay on The Notion of History: from Set your hearts on his (God’s) Kingdom first, and on its righteousness, and all these other things (food and clothing) will be given you as well, into Set your hearts on food and clothing first, then the Kingdom of God will fall to you by itself (Matthew 6: 33-34; Hegel 1986c; Benjamin 1977: 252, 253; App. E). Benjamin commented on Hegel’s materialistic turn over of the Sermon on the Mount by saying that the class struggle, which was always before his eyes as a historian who had been educated by Marx, was a struggle of the workers for the raw, coarse, crude material things, without which there were no fine, refined, intellectual and spiritual, cultural things. These fine things were, nevertheless, present already in the class struggle in a different form than the representation of a

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booty, or loot, or prey, which fell to the victor, or the winner. These fine things were alive in the class struggle as confidence, as courage, as humor, as cunning, as fortitude. These fine things were effective backward into the distance of the time. These fine cultural things always put into question again every victory that ever fell to the dominating ruling classes. According to Benjamin, as flowers turned their heads toward the sun, so strove what had been in the past, in the power of a heliotropism of a secret kind, to turn toward that sun that rose on the sky of world-history. The historical materialists–Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, etc.–had to understand this most insignificant of all changes. To the materialistic tendencies in the history of philosophy, and maybe also of theology, which were to be discussed in the Materialistic Reader, belonged particularly the following problem circles: the metaphysical sorrow of the materialist; the class struggle; the suffering and misery in corrupt history; the meaninglessness of the world; the injustice and oppression; the critique of religion and morality; the connection of theory with the historical praxis; the demand of a better organization of society; etc. Unfortunately, the so necessary Materialistic Reader was never realized. Benjamin himself experienced this materialistic melancholy so strongly that once he even planned his suicide in all detail, even composing a last will and testament, through which he wanted to leave his picture Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee, to his friend Gerhard Scholem. However, at the time, Benjamin did not go through with his plan. That was long before Benjamin actually committed suicide as apatrida with an overdose of morphine in Port Bou, on September 26, 1940, on his way through Lisbon to New York, and to the Institute for Social Research at Columbia University, and to his friends Theodor and Gretel Adorno, Max and Maidon Horkheimer (Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995p: 717-775; 1995o: 633, 674, 799; 1988d: chap. 2).

Monstrosity According to his letter from Oxford to Horkheimer in New York of January 25, 1937, Adorno, like Benjamin, had also been deeply impressed by the latter’s essay of 1936 on Haecker’s book The Christian and the History of 1935: particularly by its deeply serious and substantial theological formulations (Hegel 1986a; 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q:

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1325 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 33; Haecker 1918; 1933; 1935; Horkheimer 1995p: 34-35; 1988d: chap. 2; Benjamin 1955a; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1974; Adorno/Dirks 1974; App. E). For Adorno, the theological motives in Horkheimer’s essay were the only ones that had ever been able to talk and tempt him into the use of the theological categories (Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1974; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Horkheimer 1995p: 34-35; 1988d: chap. 2; App. E). Adorno and Horkheimer had discussed those theological motives before 1933 and their emigration to America in the latter’s house in Kronberg/Taunus, near Frankfurt a.M.: before it was confiscated by the SA and made into their Headquarters. Adorno criticized the use of the names monstrous and monstrosity in Horkheimer’s essay (Horkheimer 1988d: 99-100; 1995p: 3435; 1988d: chap. 2; Benjamin 1955a; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1974; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Thompson/Held 1982: 246-247). In his essay, Horkheimer had refuted Haecker’s charge that the theoretical materialist, like the bourgeois positivistic materialist, had to posit transitory goods as absolute after he ceased to be religious: fetishes or idols into the place of God. According to Horkheimer, the historical materialist knew only that the wish for the eternity of happiness, this religious dream of humanity, could not be fulfilled. In his essay, Horkheimer had considered it to be monstrous or a monstrosity that the prayers of the persecuted people in the highest need, want, trouble, necessity, emergency or distress, that the prayers of the innocent people, who had to die without clarification of their case and cause, that the last hopes for a super-human instance reached no goal, and that the night, which no human light illuminated, was also not penetrated by any divine light. Certainly, the critical theorist of religion can experience such monstrous, hopeless situations continually: in June 2008 a little boy died from cancer, whose very loving and desperate parents were members of our St. Thomas More Student Parish at the very positivistic Western Michigan University, for whom we had prayed every Sunday for several years, without any human or divine Instance being able to stop the most cruel disease, and to rescue the child (Siebert 2001; 2002a). While the good parish priests, and student chaplains, and deacons, talked about God’s infinitely expanding love all the time, and that everything has a good reason, and prayed with Psalm 46–The Lord is Lord, Our Refuge, Our Strength, the old orthodox believers and the mystics had also still spoken about God’s anger, and contraction, and absence, and had prayed with Psalm 73: And Where in the World Are You? (Berrigan 1978: 35-37, 53-56). When my wife Margaret on her death-

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bed, suffering from colon, liver and lung cancer in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and London, Ontario, once prayed Psalm 46 and Psalm 73, she wrote a little note to me, asking: How do you–how can one reconcile this Psalm 46 with Psalm 73? Are there some dialectics involved? Probably!!! I know God is in this world–but really–where is He at times? If you are still doing questioning about God in class–could you use this Psalm (73)? (If you haven’t already!) I think it’s very powerful (Berrigan 1978: 35-37, 53-56; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chap. 2, 6; App. E).

Dialectics of the Living God In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, long before the Jewish, Christian, or Islamic mystics, the Hebrew Psalmists had discovered the dialectics in the life of the living God, who expanded lovingly, but also contracted angrily and wrathfully into his own internal abyss, his nothingness (Scholem 1967; 1973b; 1977a; 1977b; Habermas 1978a: 172-227; 1978c: 48-95, 127-143; App. E). That precisely is the theodicy for the believer: the missing and missed God. Yet, the mystics resolved this theodicy problem dialectically by asserting that precisely out of God’s internal abyss and nothingness arose new life. The dialectical symbol of the Rose in the Cross on Margie’s and my own grave on the Mountain Home Cemetery in Kalamazoo, which is taken from Dante, Luther, and Hegel, indicates that one had to take the cross of the present corrupt world upon one self, in order to recognize and comprehend the Rose of divine Reason, Logos, and Providence in it (Hegel 1986g: 26-27; 42-43; 1986p: 272-273; App. E). Under the Rose in the Cross is written the beginning of Psalm 4, which Margie and I used to pray during her final illness: Answer me when I call, O God of my right! You have given me room when I was in distress, Be gracious to me, and hear my prayer.

Such dialectical theodicy may or may not be very consoling, or comforting, in the face of the innocent child’s or adult’s years of horrible suffering and dying. Of course, nothing can, with St. Paul’s practical theodicy, separate the believers from the love of God: not even God’s contraction and absence and the monstrous, torturous sufferings of innocent children in spite of all prayers, at home, or abroad: e.g. in the recent Tsunami and earthquakes in

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1327 the South Pacific, Haiti, and Chile, not to speak of the cruel wars or civil wars of Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan, Dafur, Indonesia, Georgia, etc. which killed particularly many children. Mother Teresa of Calcutta experienced many years of God’s contraction and absence, but was clinging to his expanding love anyway (Kolodiejchuk 2007; App. E). However, one of the brothers Karamazov in the Christian Dostoevsky’s novel of the same name, an engineer, wanted to give his entrance ticket back to this corrupt world because of the death of one innocent child, and became an atheist, and finally committed suicide, out of protest against the monstrosity, horror, and terror of the universe (Dostoevsky 1950). Karamazov was, of course, very much the counter-figure to the Christ-like Prince Myshkin, the Idiot, in Dostoevsky’s novel of the same name, who represented God’s loving expansion rather than his angry contraction (Dostoevsky 1969; Scholem 1967; 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Benjamin 1988: chap. 12; App. E).

Eternal Truth and Infinite Love For Horkheimer, without God the eternal truth had as little any ground and hold as the infinite love (Horkheimer 1995p: 34-35; 1988d: chap. 2; Benjamin 1955a; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Adorno/Dirks 1974; App. E). The eternal truth and the eternal love rather became unthinkable notions. However, for Horkheimer such monstrosity of lost prayers and a missed God was no valid or conclusive argument against the assertion or the denial of the facts of the case. The positivistic or dialectical logic did not contain any law that a judgment was false if its consequence would be despair. According to Horkheimer, the error that this small earth was a predestined, determined space, and that it was in the unlimited numbers of galaxies a selected and privileged star, this pious faith, which Haecker saw once more proven through the statements of modern astronomers, and on the basis of experiences, corresponded to a longing that also atheists had very well understood. For Horkheimer, all these wishes for eternity, and most of all for the entrance of the universal justice and goodness, materialistic thinkers had in common with the religious believers: in opposition to the dullness of the positivistic, scientific attitude (Horkheimer 1995p: 34-35; 1988d: chap. 2; Benjamin 1955a; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/

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Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Marcuse 1962: 65-66; Siebert 2001; 2002a 2005b; 2006a; 2006b: 91-137; 2007a: 99113; 2007g: 11-19; App. E). If however, so Horkheimer argued, the religious believer acquiesced with the thought that the wish for eternity, and universal justice, and goodness, was already fulfilled anyway, then the historical-materialistic thinker was permeated by the feeling of the unlimited loneliness and lonesomeness of the human beings, which was the only true answer to the impossible hope (Horkheimer 1995p: 34-35; 1988d: chap. 2; Benjamin 1955a; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/ Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Benedict XVI 2007; Siebert 2001; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b: 91-137; 2007a: 99-113; 2007g: 11-19). For Adorno, Horkheimer’s name of monstrosity sounded somewhat too quantitative, in order to express what was meant qualitatively: namely, simply the despair of good people (Horkheimer 1995p: 3435; 1988d: chap. 2; Benjamin 1955a; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498).

Selfishness and Egoism Unlike Benjamin, Adorno rejected Horkheimer’s use of the expression metaphysical sorrow of the historical materialist, maybe because he himself had once used it all too passionately (Hegel 1986a; 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152154, 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Mitscherlich 1993; Horkheimer 1995p: 34-35; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2; Benjamin 1955a; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/ Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Adorno/Dirks 1974). However, Adorno had in general the feeling that the critical theorists found themselves here concerning Haecker’s book, on a glowing hot ground, indeed that of hell, and that every step that they took caused necessarily great pain. In conclusion, Adorno, who was a baptized Catholic like his beloved

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1329 mother and aunt, criticized Horkheimer’s statement that the Catholics’ hope in a Beyond, on one hand, and the bourgeois bad materialists, on the other, had their selfishness and their egoism in common (Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995p: 34-35; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2). Horkheimer had stated in his Haecker essay that in contrast to the historical materialists, who had given themselves up in the struggle for the oppressed and exploited working classes so that they may live and live freely, the bourgeois materialist of the everyday life world in modern antagonistic civil society, and the believing Catholic, even the one ready for martyrdom, like Haecker and his friends under German fascism, had always had in common that their action was essentially related to the well being of their own person (Hegel 1986g: 223-242; Horkheimer 1995p: 34-35; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2; Benjamin 1955a; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392402; 1958b: 484-498; Adorno/Dirks 1974; App. E, G). The representation of the eternal bliss of the early Christians, as well as also of the masses of the later ones, differentiated itself admittedly concerning its duration, but much less according to its content, from the earthly purposes of the children of this world, the bourgeois members of civil society (Hegel 1986g: 339397; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1988d: 98-99; 1988n: 77). According to Horkheimer, therefore both attitudes, the Catholic and the bourgeois one, entered in the same subject an excellent personal union. Also the Church in general was used to stand on the side of the bigger property as well as the larger battalions. In July 2008 the Catholic Church in Michigan stood– mediated through the services of Father Robert Sirico in Kalamazoo– very much on the side of the Blackwater Worldwide in North Carolina, which is famous not only for its large property, but also for its often murderous mercenary army in Iraq (Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1988d: 9899; Scahill 2007). In Horkheimer’s view, the childlike faith that Haecker spread through his books, had constituted not seldom in world-history the naïve super-structure on a corrupt and inhuman reality, and continues to do so today–in 2010–in Michigan, in the USA, in the Middle East, and elsewhere. Horkheimer had to admit that it belonged to the greatness and wisdom of Catholicism not to have diluted the thought of eternity and not to have abstracted it from material wishes, as it has been the rule in Protestant denominations (Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1988d: 98-99; Küng 1994a; 1994b; App. E). However, so Horkheimer argued, when the materialistic bourgeois praxis in modern civil society represented in a certain way the truth of theology, then in the historical-materialistic theory,

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which Haecker rejected and which precisely held up the mirror to this bourgeois praxis, the theological motives were not simply to be forgotten but to be concretely superseded in the form of a negative, inverse, cipher theology (Adorno 1970b; 1974; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7; 1988d: 98-99; Haecker 1935; Küng 1994a; 1994b). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, in civil society Christian bourgeois, or bourgeois Christians–contradictions in adjecto–acted not only egoistically and selfishly in personal and collective affairs, but also interpreted the behavior of more solidary people, e.g. humanistic socialists, out of the same egoistic and selfish motives: e.g. Chavez from Venezuela, or Castro from Cuba were supposed to be driven only by their own selfish power drive rather than by social justice, and were therefore to be removed from power through assassination or war (Fromm 1950; 1959; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980a; 1980b; 1981; 1990a; 1990b; 1995; 1997; 2001; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Ott 2007: chap. 20; Goldstein 2006: 61-114). However, when the Catholics act egoistically and selfishly, they are in opposition to their own Catholic solidarism. When the bourgeois acts in the same way, he does so in conformity with liberalism, and particularly neo-liberalism: selfishness and egoism are good! In the past 10 years of American political life, from 2000-2010, the dialectical religiologist still found verified Horkheimer’s observations in America of 1936 and in Germany before 1933 and after 1945 concerning the egoism and selfishness of Catholics and Evangelicals, and of bourgeois members of civil society, and of those workers, who falsely believed, that they were middle class (Horkheimer 1988d: chaps. 1, 2). The masses of Catholics, but also the masses of Evangelicals, who voted twice massively for the neo-liberal second Bush Administration, were as much as their secular bourgeois neighbors motivated to do so by personal as well as by collective, i.e. nationalistic, egoism and selfishness. They abused their religion for the realization of their own egoistic and selfish personal and collective purposes.

The Notion of God According to Horkheimer, his historical-materialistic critique of religion admittedly took back the theological projection and hypostatization of the abstract man into the sky, which was discovered by Feuerbach, through developing the notion of God out of determinate historical conditions (Schmidt 1972; Feuerbach 1957; 1996; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995p: 34-35; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2; Benjamin 1955a; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963;

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1331 1966; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; 1974; Adorno/Dirks 1974; App. E). The materialistic critique understood this human abstraction, which was inspired, and sanctified, and hallowed by religious faith, as the result of the social dynamic of secular civil society. As human beings, so the historical-materialistic critique taught, encountered each other no longer mainly as masters and slaves but rather as free persons, and as the life of the social whole renewed and restored itself through commodity exchange, they posited their activities, their labor product, themselves as being equal with each other, and thus came to the representation of man as such: i.e. the man without time and place, and without a determinate fate. According to Horkheimer, this abstract representation of man was carried out in the modern notion of God: e.g. in bourgeois deism (Schmidt 1972; Feuerbach 1957; 1996; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995p: 34-35; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2; Benjamin 1955a; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; 1974; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Küng 1978; App. E). For Horkheimer, real were the historically determined human beings, who were bound together in this particular form of social life in civil society: i.e. the subjects of this theological-anthropological abstraction, which reflected the social being only inaccurately, i.e. abstractly. In Horkheimer’s view, real was not the hypostatized, eternalized content of the God-abstraction. Horkheimer had to admit that not every structure of thought, or every connection of knowledge, was a socially conditioned necessary appearance, i.e. ideology, false consciousness, the masking of egoistic and selfish race, gender, national, or class interests. However, Horkheimer was sure that the notion of God of the last four modern centuries, to which supposedly also Haecker’s theistic God-representation belonged, proved itself as being bound to a transitory form of social being: i.e. to modern civil society (Hegel 1986g: 339-395; Schmidt 1972; Feuerbach 1957; 1996; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995p: 34-35; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2; Benjamin 1955a; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; 1974; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Küng 1978). However, according to Horkheimer, the historical materialistic critical theory of society, and all psychological, economic, sociological, anthropological, philosophical, religiological and

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theological hypotheses included in it, did not in the least prevent him from considering the Christian teaching as a decisive cultural progress beyond the pagan religious forms, or beyond making smaller, or beyond veiling and covering up the truth and scope of the thoughts that have connected themselves with Christianity (Hegel 1986g: 339-395; Schmidt 1972; Feuerbach 1957; 1996; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995p: 34-35; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2; Benjamin 1955a; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/ Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; 1974; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Küng 1978; 1994a; 1994b; App. E). To the contrary! For Horkheimer, as the Christian ideas of the resurrection of the dead, of the last judgment, of eternal life were determinately negated by the critical theory of society as dogmatic positions, the need and the longing of human beings for infinite bliss and happiness became completely obvious, apparent, manifest, and revealed, and moved into opposition to the bad earthly social and historical conditions of the liberal, socialist, and fascist societies of 1936, and–so the critical theorist of religion may add–of 2010 (Hegel 1986g: 339-395; Schmidt 1972; Feuerbach 1957; 1996; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1972: chap. 129-131; 1995p: 34-35; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2; Benjamin 1955a; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; 1974; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Küng 1978; Scahill 2007; Zinn 2003; Hedges 2006; Buchanan 2006; Clinton 2004; Kinzer 2006; Perkins 2007).

The Unfolding of God in the World The dialectical religiologist is quite certain that Horkheimer would also have explained and developed Küng’s most advanced center-Hegelian, affirmative definition of the notion of God–which was supposed to satisfy not only the believers of the three Abrahamic religions and of the Far Eastern religions, but also even still the modern enlighteners in so far as they shared with them Transcendence, as e.g. the critical theorists of society, and to answer the historical-materialistic critique of Christianity and of the other world religions–out of the modern economic, social, cultural, and historical context, at least since Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel: The World is as creation of God to think in such a way that the creation does not remain external to his work, that the creation can rather be com-

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1333 prehended as the unfolding of God in the world, without the world losing itself to God or God to the world, without that the world would give up its independence or that God would dissolve himself in the world. Thus creation in unfolding or unfolding through creation: no being made into God, but also no being outside of God and added to God. And God is to be understood as the all-present, unspeakable mystery of this world, the origin of its being, its becoming, its order, its goal, and that in such a way, that man and world do neither exist independently from God, nor merely as appearance and illusion, but as relative reality, neither identity without differentiation, nor remaining difference of God and individual self, but difference dialectically superseded in identity (Hegel 1986p; 1996q; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-617; Habermas 1990: 14-15; Küng 1970; 1978: B; 1984: 304; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008).

For Horkheimer and Adorno this definition of the notion of God also would fall under the critique of their non-theistic and non-atheistic, posttheistic negative, inverse, cipher theology, based on the radicalized second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue, and the Kantian prohibition against reason entering the sphere of the Thing-in-itself (Genesis 20; Kant 1965: 490; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; 1974; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Horkheimer/Adorno11969: 29-30; App. E). It was still the result of identity philosophy. For the critical theorists’ inverse theology, being, however philosophically sanctioned, was the dear God without love: thus, the lowest rather than the highest being, one with the horror of the universe, in which the good went under–because of which it went under (Horkheimer 1988n: 124, 136; App. E). For Horkheimer, the highest being appeared to be rather that which was not, but which disappeared–the powerless, and not the powerful. The positive philosophy, no matter if it announced the fact, the value, or the being, lied. The mathematical logic, the phenomenology, the fundamental ontology were all fundamentally wrong. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, of course, also the Left-Hegelian critical theory of society, including its historical-materialistic critique of religion and its negative inverse theology, must understand itself self-reflectively out of the modern historical context (Schmidt 1972; Mendieta 2005; Habermas 2002). The same is true for the dialectical religiology.

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Adorno believed that here in his Haecker essay, Horkheimer did an injustice to the theological motive (Hegel 1986a; 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134-135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Horkheimer 1995p: 34-35; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2: Brändle 1984; Hullot/Kentor 2006; Tiedemann 1997; Thompson/Held 1982: 246-247; Peukert 1976: 278-280; Scuster/Boschert/Kimmig 1993; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; App. E). For Adorno, this was so because the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless, the hope against all hope, in which alone that seemed to him to consist in religion, in which it was more than mere veiling and covering up, was not so much the care and worry concerning the Catholic’s own ego, but rather the issue that one could not think the death and the irretrievable being lost of the beloved human being, or the death or the being lost of the innocent victims, to whom injustice had happened. Even in 1937, when the German concentration camps had not yet been transformed from cheap labor camps for the corporations into death camps, Adorno often could not understand how one could possibly take one breath without hope for these victims. Adorno reminded Horkheimer that Benjamin had expressed in the third chapter of his work on Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaft, which at the time he still considered to be the best he had ever produced, that hope was valid only for the other, and never for the hoping person (Benjamin 1972; 1977: chap. 5; Horkheimer 1995p: 34-35; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2: Brändle 1984; Tiedemann 1997; Thompson/Held 1982: 246-247; Peukert 1976: 278-280; Scuster/Boschert/Kimmig 1993; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). Adorno believed that Jewish theology agreed with Benjamin’s statement (Efron 2009). Maybe, so Adorno argued, it was this smallest trait that allowed him here in the sphere of religion not to tear everything to the ground. Yet, Adorno knew, of course, that the critical theorists of society had to be silent about this desperate hope in secular civil society for a long time, and maybe for their life time. In the dialectical religiologist’s view, not only Haecker, but also Catholicism in general were not silent about this desperate hope, and neither were the critical theorists of society, and neither will be the critical theory of religion: this remembrance of the dead and this desperate hope for the innocent victims of nature, society and history, are the greatest elements, which not only

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1335 Catholicism, or Christianity in general, or Judaism, but other world religions as well, have still to offer to Modernity and Post-Modernity, and which remain the center of the post-theistic, humanistic religiosity, and inverse, cipher theology (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; 1974; Adorno/ Dirks 1974; Horkheimer 1995p: 34-35; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2; Tiedemann 1997; Fromm 1964; 1966a 1966b; 1976; Tillich 1972; Mendieta 2005; Habermas 2002; Thompson/Held 1982: 246-247; Peukert 1976: 278-280; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; App. E). The desperate hope is the hermeneutical principle of the dialectical religiology, through which it can be summed up in its totality (Schuster/Bochert/ Kimmig 1993; Oelmüller 1990; Siebert 2001; 2002a). As in the Torah, in the New Testament, and in the Holy Qur’an, all ethics and morality, and resurrection and judgment day presuppose Yahweh or Allah, and as in the Kantian philosophy in the Thing-in-itself freedom and immortality presuppose God, so in the critical theory of society the desperate hope and the power of the powerless presuppose the wholly Other than the world of appearance, particularly antagonistic civil society, and its night watchman state, with all their public and official disgrace and ignominy (Hegel 1986g: 339-514; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974: 255-258; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; 1974; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988d: chap. 2l: 1995p: 50).

The Christian Martyrs In his letter from New York to Adorno in Oxford of February 22, 1937, Horkheimer assured the latter that he and his friends had thoroughly discussed the terminus monstrosity in his Haecker essay of 1936, before they sent the manuscript to the publisher (Hegel 1986a; 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134-135, 152154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Horkheimer 1988d: chaps. 1, 2; 1995p: 50). While Horkheimer

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admitted to Adorno that much could be said against the terminus, there were also some considerations that spoke for it. Therefore, the terminus remained in the manuscript. Concerning the expression metaphysical sorrow of the historical materialist, Horkheimer felt somewhat freer than Adorno, since in his own consciousness it was less burdened, or incriminated. Horkheimer mentioned a series of witnesses in support of this expression of metaphysical sorrow–Voltaire, Maupassant, Delacrois–who allowed him to retain his position in the manuscript that the materialists suffer from a certain amount of metaphysical melancholy. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, such metaphysical sorrow can, of course, also be found among Catholics, and Christians in general, and among other religious people, as well as among idealists (Kolodiejchuk 2007; App. E). Horkheimer admitted that he did injustice to the theological motive, as far as Adorno himself was in question (Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; 1974; Adorno/ Dirks 1974; Horkheimer 1988d: chaps. 1, 2; 1995p: 50; App. E). However, Horkheimer could not recognize that Adorno was right with his interpretation of the Catholic, or more precisely of the Christian martyr, to whom his remarks in his Haecker essay were related. For Horkheimer, not only theology but also history spoke against Adorno’s interpretation. Horkheimer recommended to Adorno to read what the Protestant theologian and historian of religion, Adolf von Harnack, had to say about the Christian martyrs. Horkheimer had to admit to Adorno that his own thought of the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless was very close to his. However, unlike Adorno, Horkheimer believed that the critical theorists did not at all have to be silent about this thought of desperate hope in secular civil society. Horkheimer had to admit that neither he nor Adorno had indeed kept this thought secret, as Horkheimer’s essay on Haecker and the end of Adorno’s own book on Kierkergaard showed only too clearly (Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966: 4002-5005; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974: 255-258; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; 1974; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Horkheimer 1988d: chaps. 1, 2; 1995p: 50; Hullot-Kentor 2006; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247; Peukert 1976: 278-282; App. E). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, Haecker, informed by Kierkegaard, and the priests and lay people, who followed him in his resistance against German fascism, came often very close to martyrdom in Hitler’s neo-pagan Empire, and

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1337 some of them shared even the complete martyrdom of many Jews and communists in the work and death camps, and they all lived to their very end with an open more or less desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless, either on this earth, or Beyond (Haecker 1918; 1933; 1935; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; 1974; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Ackermann 2005; Schneider 1995; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993; 2001; 2002a; Hullot/Kentor 1996; Baudis/Clausert/Schliski/Wegener 1979; App. E).

Pessimism In his letter from New York, of March 8, 1937, Horkheimer told the critical theorist and specialist for Chinese civilization at the New York International Institute for Social Research, Karl August Witttfogel in Peking, China, that the pessimism that one could find in his attitude toward the unthinkable death of a beloved person, or of the innocent victims of society in his Haecker essay of 1936, was in any case incompatible with quietistic consequences for social and political praxis and history (Hegel 1986a; 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Horkheimer 1995p: 74; 1988d: chap. 2). Horkheimer also pointed to other witnesses, who would affirm the fact that the view of death can change after it once had been freed from all religious and secular ideology. Horkheimer seemed to have overcome his pessimism concerning death, when in later years he determined that the second verse of the de-ideologized Psalm 91 should be written on his gravestone in the Jewish cemetery of Bern: In You, Eternal One, I trust (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 28, 29, 37, 40; Goldstein 2006: 61-114, 115-120, 121-150; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6).

The Powerlessness of Power According to Horkheimer, the old, often Biblical Christian teachings that Haecker had used in his book on The Christian and the History, were in

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spite of their venerable age no truer than other opinions of any other religion, or sect (Haecker 1935: 62, 84; Dsi 1911: 85-87; Horkheimer 1988d: 95; App. E). For Horkheimer, the length of a tradition and the stage of the truth stood in no immediate relationship. In Haecker’s view, as Horkheimer understood it, God, the all-powerful Lord of history, was supposed to use the Devil and man for his own eternal purposes. According to Haecker’s biblical faith, no sparrow was to fall from the roof without God’s knowledge: not to speak, so Horkheimer added, a head under the ax of the executioner. According to Haecker’s faith, angels, i.e. spirits without bodies, were supposed to help to maintain the world, or to hinder, or prevent its maintenance. Murder and manslaughter were supposed to continue on and on, until God was victorious and triumphant in infinity (Isaiah 6566; Revelation 21-22; Haecker 1935: 62, 84; Dsi 1911: 85-87; Horkheimer 1988d: 95; App. E). For Horkheimer, this whole partially consoling, and partially horrific and dreadful Christian–in the perspective of the dialectical religiology partially also Jewish and Islamic–mythos did not become more rational through Haecker’s respect-demanding truthfulness and honesty. According to Horkheimer, Haecker’s faith in the power of God, the Lord of history, was admittedly able to give meaning to reality, but not reality to meaning. In Horkheimer’s view, Haecker’s faith in the power of the divine Lord of history was disproved and de-validated daily by worldhistory itself. For Horkheimer, the beautiful biblical prophecy that whoever runs against the cornerstone will earlier or later be stricken dead by it, was by no degree more trustworthy than its own opposite: that also the just person was stricken dead. According to the critical theory of religion, all the religious martyrs gave in their last moment not only witness to God’s glory, but also to his inability to rescue them, his powerlessness, or his unwillingness to use his power, and thus, his lack of compassion and love. Horkheimer had to admit that Haecker did not try to find proofs for God’s effective power and triumph in the present–in 1935, when the fascist concentration camps had already started to operate in Germany. According to Haecker, God rather aimed at Eternity, not at time. However, Haecker could at least recognize signs of the time. According to Horkheimer, Haecker’s modest claim for the credibility of his Christian conception of history appeared in such interpretation of signs in opposition to the scale of other less modest and triumphalistic ecclesiastical claims. In Horkheimer’s view, Haecker’s opinion that Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow and Russia stood in connection with his excommunication by the Vatican, and that regardless of all other explanations this military event was to be interpreted as the consequence of the anathema of a Pope,

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1339 challenged and provoked the question as to whether other heads or chiefs of states, who in place of the excommunication at the same time with the curse of unhappy nations earned for themselves the blessing of a Pope, were also more agreeable and acceptable to the Eternal One. Over a century after Napoleon, Hitler had to retreat together with all the other fascists of Europe from Moscow, and Saint Petersburg, and Stalingrad, and Kursk, and Kiev, to Berlin (Horkheimer 1988n: 245-247; Lohmann 2008: 100103; Ailsby 2004). Unlike Napoleon, Hitler had never been excommunicated by the Vatican, which even had a Concordat with him. Hitler earned the curse of unhappy nations, whose sons and daughters he had murdered, as well as the blessing of Pope Pious XII, and of many Bishops and theologians and army chaplains. Hitler always believed himself–even against the Church–to be acceptable to divine Providence, and that he was continually guided and protected by the almighty Lord of history, up to the very end in April 1945, in Berlin (Fest/Eichinger 2004; Trevor-Roper 1953: 521; Deschner 1998; Ericksen 1985; Goldhagen 2002; Sayer/Botting 2004; App. E). Even if, so Horkheimer argued, the meaning of all worldhistorical events, the crises, wars and revolutions and counter-revolutions, would really determine itself according to their significance for the salvation of the individual, as Haecker asserted, then the friendship of the Church constituted truly a bad instruction how this measure or standard was to be applied. The decent human modes of behavior, to which some parts of Haecker’s book may encourage, were certainly not more closely related to the historically effective Christianity, than to the worst heresy. According to Horkheimer, with Haecker’s objection that what mattered and counted in history was not so much the position toward the human beings, but rather that toward God, then with this thought, which was maybe close to the believer, things were, however, not in better shape than with the just refuted opinion, to which it belonged.

Pseudo-Theology In Horkheimer’s view, Haecker hardly considered or kept in mind the materialistic philosophy of history, which was substantially opposed to his own Catholic philosophy and theology of history (Haecker 1935: 15, 65, 89, 92; Horkheimer 1988d: 87; 1988n: 374, 499-501, 517; App. E, F). Unlike the Catholic theology of history, this historical-materialistic philosophy denied a supernatural meaning of history, without at the same time losing, like the positivistic pseudo-philosophy, the understanding for what Haecker had called the untearable connection of the whole and all parts. Goethe had

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spoken about that divine Reality that held the world together, and, according to Pope Benedict XVI’s discourse with Habermas in 2006, continues to do so today (Haecker 1935: 15, 65, 89, 92; Horkheimer 1974: 101104, 116-117; 1988d: 87, 94-97; 1988n: 139, 307, 327, 331-332, 348, 425, 520-521; Benjamin 1977: chap. 5; Adorno 1970b; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006: Part II). According to Haecker, the pure and clean atheist, which he had been before his conversion to Catholicism, was a thoroughly aristocratic figure. However, for Haecker, the atheist’s conviction belonged, of course, to a pseudo-kind of theology. According to Horkheimer, Haecker had this assertion in common with Max Scheler, against whom he usually fought, because he did not convert to or stay in Catholicism. Scheler could no longer share Catholicism’s theodicy after he had experienced as a Jewish German soldier the horrible Battle of Verdun in World War I, in which one million German and French soldiers murdered each other in one square mile, in the most brutal and atrocious way over several months. According to Haecker’s assertion, every struggle against the announced religious opinion or conviction should be sheer vanity, simply because the counter-theoreticians or pseudo-theologians necessarily posited some temporal good as the highest in the place of God: power, fame, glory, money, pleasure, or consumption. The atheistic pseudo-theology moved from ethical monotheism to polytheism, i.e. fetishism and idolatry (Genesis 20; Weber 1963; Haecker 1935: 15, 65, 89, 92; Horkheimer 1974c: 101104, 116-117; 1988d: 87, 94-97; 1988n: 139, 307, 327, 331-332, 348, 425, 520-521; Benjamin 1977: chap. 5; Adorno 1970b; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006: Part II). In Horkheimer’s view, in spite of the astuteness and shrewdness that theologians had already for centuries used for and spent on this argument, it was correct historically and indeed applied to the bourgeois, who–since Homer’s Odysseus, the archetype of the bourgeois, moved from mythos to enlightenment, through all polytheistic civil societies, from the city states of Antiquity to the present modern bourgeois societies, particularly the G8–had always behaved in principle indifferently toward religion, as well as to the spirit in general (Homer 1922; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 50-88). The theological argument was also correct, and applied to the modern man of action for action’s sake, a type of human being that was particularly very much hated by Haecker, which appears most frequently in American bourgeois politics and religion. For Horkheimer, in relation to the historical materialist, who was conscious of himself, Haecker’s old theological argument against the so-called pseudo-theology of the atheist remained in any case an empty assurance. According to Horkheimer, the better social conditions, which the historical materialist

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1341 wants to achieve–sometimes even against the Church–must not at all be reified or eternalized, or fetishized, or made into an idol. Horkheimer was convinced that the community with the real interests of the globally bound and fettered humanity, and the sharpness of the dialectical thinking–determinate negation–preserved people from fetishism and idolatry more effectively and thoroughly than the obedience toward the Church: may it also be essentially superior to the in 1935 widely spread so-called fascist leader-personalities. For the critical theorists of society, the pseudo-theology appeared to consist much more in the traditional theology of Haecker or his contemporary colleague, the great humanistic neo-scholastic Jacques Maritain, in so far as it degraded the idea of the highest Wisdom, Love, and Justice into the almighty Lord of history. According to Horkheimer, from the instrumental theodicy, which he shared with Hegel, Haecker expected the impossible achievement to make this contradiction, nevertheless, believable and acceptable (Hegel 1986l; Haecker 1935). Haecker said about the theodicy that God did not only allow it to happen, but that he even willed it. However, in Horkheimer’s view, already Leibnitz had achieved sad fame and glory with such theodicy in Voltaire’s Candide, and far beyond that up to the present–March 2010 (Leibniz 1996: Vol. I and II; Hegel 1986l; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2). According to Horkheimer, Benjamin and Adorno, the traditional theology and theodicy was the pseudo-theology, and not the negative, inverse cipher theology as theodicy intrinsic to the historical-materialistic critical theory of society, which consisted of the longing for the wholly Other, and of the indignation about the monstrosity of the unanswered prayers of the victims in extreme distress, and of the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless beloved friends and innocent victims of history–particularly of Auschwitz and Treblinka–from turning into unconscious clods of earth or into ashes, who do not know any longer what history may say about them and about their good deeds, and about their torture and their suffering (Adorno 1970a; 1974: 255-259; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37, 40; 1988d: chap. 2; Kierkegaard 1954; 1959; 1964; Kogon 1995; Haecker 1935: 62, 84; Dsi 1911: 85-87). Only slowly, the critical theorists found the courage to reveal to a secular public in civil society not only their longing for the totally Other, but also their desperate hope for rescue of the hopeless: the dead (Horkheimer 1988n: 117, 133-134, 149-150, 219, 209-210, 215, 224-225, 240, 321-322, 330, 338-339, 369-370, 388-389, 404-405, 405-406, 445-447, 466, 490-491, 498-499, 507-509, 517, 518-519, 536). However, the traditional theologians were not so far removed from the critical theorists of society as the latter assumed, since they shared after all with the latter not

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only their longing for the wholly Other as perfect justice and unconditional love, but also the firm hope that all innocent victims of history– slaves, serfs, wage laborers–would be rescued like the poor man, Jesus of Nazareth, who had been tortured and murdered by the rich and powerful people, whom he had challenged that the prevailing universal injustice would not be the last word of history, and that the exploited, and beaten, and slaughtered people would still have their day in court (Matthew 27, 28; Revelation 21, 22; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; 1988n: 117, 133-134, 149-150, 219, 209-210, 215, 224-225, 240, 321-322, 330, 338-339, 369-370, 388-389, 404-405, 405-406, 445-447, 466, 490-491, 498-499, 507-509, 517, 518-519, 536, Bloch 1972; 1993: chaps. 53-55; Bloch/Reif 1978: 62-67, 70-74, 78-90; Metz 1978; Küng 1970; 1994a: 804-905; 1994b; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; Schneider 1995; Moltmann 1996; Peters/Urban Gutierrez 1971; Peukert 1976; Ackermann 2005; Benedict XVI 2007; App. E). In any case, if the Chinese story would still be valid, then the first, mainly Jewish generation of critical theorists, who have all died in the meantime, may still be remembered by the Jewish community, and by their disciples and friends, but they themselves would for sure not know any longer, what people say about them, the Frankfurters, the Frankfurt School, or how the critical theory of society evolved after their death and how it is doing today– March 2010–in a neo-liberal context, and they would as little have their day in court, as those Jews and communists, who died in Auschwitz and Birkenau, and the murderers would have triumphed over their innocent victims. That was definitely contrary to the critical theorists longing for the wholly Other than the horror and terror of corrupt world history (Horkheimer 1985e: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988d: chap. 2; 1988n: 117, 133134, 149-150, 209-210, 215, 219, 224-225, 240, 321-322, 330, 338-339, 369-370, 388-389, 404-405, 405-406, 445-447, 466, 490-491, 498-499, 507-509, 517, 518-519, 536; Bloch 1972; 1993: chaps. 53-55; Bloch/Reif 1978: 62-67,70-74, 78-90; Metz 1978; Küng 1970; 1994a: 804-905; 1994b; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; Schneider 1995; Moltmann 1996; Peters/Urban Gutierrez 1971; Peukert 1976; Ackermann 2005; Benedict XVI 2007). This had been a suffocating, unthinkable thought for the critical theorists of society, and it remains precisely that for the dialectical religiologist.

The Power of the Powerless Adorno stressed the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless victims, and the power of the powerless no less than Haecker had done, when he

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1343 spoke of the way of the Evangelium and its prescription, to be victorious without weapons and alone through the spirit, and to bless those who curse, even if the representatives of the Church may often not do so (Matthew 5-7; Kierkegaard 1954; 1959; 1964; Hegel 1986a; 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 5253, 331; Adorno 1974: 255-259; Kogon 1995; Haecker 1935: 62, 84; Dsi 1911: 85-87; Horkheimer 1988d: 91, 95). Adorno stated at the end of his book on Kierkegaard, which he wrote in 1929/1930, three years before the SS state was born out of the liberal Weimar Republic in Germany, and the concentration camps for Jews and communists and others started, that Theodor Haecker had learned from Kierkegaard, that everything official was disgrace and ignominy (Kierkegaard 1954; 1959; 1964; Adorno 1974: 255-259; Kogon 1995). Kierkegaard wrote into his diary a note against the conservative mentality of Bishop Martensen of the Lutheran Church of Denmark, which has retained its validity far beyond Denmark and Europe, up to the present–March 2010–into the future: The New Testament contains the Divinely true, as high as it stands above all losing one’s way, eccentricity, etc. so deep lays the mediocrity, the chatter, the childishness, the stupid gossip under every one-sidedness. But since the chatter has, nevertheless, the quality that it is not one-sided, thus it makes use of that for itself, and presents itself as the true Divine, which stands high above all one-sidedness (Kierkegaard 1959: 355; Adorno 1974: 255-259).

According to Adorno, the religious people with the conservative mentality of Bishop Martensen were still against all one-sidedness in 1929 or 1930, three years before Hitler and fascism came into power in Berlin: not religious people like Haecker and Rudolphi, of course, who opposed him, but rather religious people like the Lutheran Empire Bishop Müller. For Adorno, it was sufficient that one simply represented Bishop Martensen for oneself, in order to know who and what one had to oppose, and that had been for a long time no longer merely the Lutheran Church of Denmark. Soon, Hitler would establish the Lutheran Empire Bishop Müller in Berlin, as Pope of the Evangelical Church, and also Catholic theologians would cooperate with National Socialism together with Protestant theologians (Trevor-Roper 1988: 412, 521; Krieg 2004). In Adorno’s perspective, in the dialectic, i.e. in the determinate negation, inherited from Hegel, Kierkegaard in his own language stepped out of the inwardness of the in-

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dividual. If for Kierkegaard the social whole of civil society, as totality and system, was the absolute deception and illusion, then he indeed took on the whole, and not only the Lutheran Church of Denmark, into which he was inserted like everybody else. According to Adorno, that was exemplary for Kierkegaard. From the day on which Kierkegaard collapsed on the street, nothing intellectual and spiritual has been of any value any longer that would be more modest (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Kierkegaard 1954; 1959; 1964; Adorno 1974: 255-259). Kierkegaard had made into a potential the Pascalian On ne doit plus dormer [“Sleeping is no longer permitted”] (Schneider 1955; Guardini 1935; Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Kierkegaard 1954; 1959; 1964; Adorno 1974: 255-259). According to Adorno, the Kierkegaardian curve was the inversion of the Brechtian Yes-man, according to whom the collective would have to believe that it was most of all important to learn understanding, agreement, and consent (Brecht 1961; 1964; 1966; 1967; 1973; 1980; 1981; 1993a; 1993b; 1994; 2002; 2003; 2007; Adorno 1974: 255-259). In Adorno’s perspective, after Kierkegaard there was no friendship any longer with the world of civil society, because, as it affirmed positivistically the world as it was the case, it eternalized the bad in it and prevented that it would become what would and could be loved (Schneider 1955; Guardini 1935; Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Kierkegaard 1954; 1959; 1964; Adorno 1974: 255-259; Brecht 1961; 1964; 1966; 1967; 1973; 1980; 1981; 1993a; 1993b; 1994; 2002; 2003; 2007). For Adorno, whoever had been present, when in 1925 Karl Kraus drove Imre Bekessy out of Vienna through his pure word alone, he has still experienced something of the concrete power of that, what in Kierkegaard appeared so abstract and so monomanic: of the power of the powerless word and spirit without physical weapons (Kierkegaard 1954; 1959; 1964; Adorno 1974: 255-259; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11, 23; 1988: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Horkheimer 1988n: 65-66).

The Dialectic of the Openness and Closedness of History In his letter to Benjamin in Paris from New York on March 16, 1937, Horkheimer confessed that he had meditated for a long time about the question of whether the work of the past was concluded and finished, or if it was still open (Hegel 1986a; 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419;

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1345 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Horkheimer 1985: 483-492; 1995p: 82-83; Peukert 1976: 278-280). Horkheimer wanted to let stand Benjamin’s assertion that the work of the past was still open. However, for Horkheimer, also here existed a relationship that could be comprehended only dialectically. In Horkheimer’s view, Benjamin’s position that the work of the past was not concluded but was still open was an idealistic one, if the conclusion was not taken into the openness. In the interpretation of the critical theory of religion, Horkheimer’s dialectical statement meant that only after one had admitted that the dead were really dead, and that the slaughtered and crucified were really slaughtered and crucified, could one dare to entertain the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless innocent victims. Horkheimer insisted that the past injustice had happened and was concluded. Those, who had been stricken dead, had really been stricken dead. For Horkheimer, ultimately Benjamin’s statement that the world of history was still open was a theological one. If one, so Horkheimer argued, took completely seriously the openness of history, then one had to believe in the resurrection of the dead and in the Day of the Lord, the Last Judgment, like Jews, Christians and Muslims do (Obadiah 1: 15; Amos 5: 18, 20; Ezekiel 30: 3; Joel 1: 15; Lieber 2001: 224/15; Revelation 21-22; Horkheimer 1985g: 483-492; 1995p: 82-83; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Pope Benedict XVI 2007; Adorno 1997u: 100; App. E). For such belief in the Last Judgment, so Horkheimer confessed, his thinking was for the time being–1937–too much materialistically contaminated. According to the dialectical religiology, if this abstract, undialectical thesis of the closedness of history would stand, then, of course, at least in the profane perspective and gaze, Auschwitz and Treblinka and all the following genocides and mass murder had happened and the case was closed, and nothing could be done about it any more, and the dull positivists would be correct, and the mass murderers had triumphed over their victims, and most of them got away with it, and were not tried by any earthly or heavenly court, and also the innocent victims would never be vindicated (Horkheimer 1972: chap. 2, 4, 5; Dews 1986: 53-66). If this thesis of the closedness of history would become a matter of common sense, it would have the potential to undermine all ethics and social ethics, and all morality once and for all. Maybe, so Horkheimer argued, there consisted in relation to the openness of the work of the past a difference between the positive and the negative, so that the injustice, the force, the violence, the terror, the pains of the past were irreparable. On Monday, July 28, 2008, several Iraqi women, some of them war widows acting out of Jihad, but maybe also out of revenge for their murdered hus-

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bands or children, became terrorists and blew themselves up in Baghdad and Mosul, and killed altogether over 50 people, and wounded hundreds, who had been engaged in religious and political activities. The critical theorist of religion can imagine that the mass murderers of the present and of the past may hope that history is indeed closed, and that their evil deeds and their innocent victims may be forgotten, and that there may be no retaliation, and no justice on earth or in heaven. The dialectical religiologist must ask whether the recent suicide attacks in Iraq were revenge for injustices of the past, and thus proved that the work of the past was still open, or if the work of yesterday was today closed up already, and would remain closed forever, without any consequences. According to Horkheimer, the practiced justice, the joy, the good works relate themselves differently to the time, because their positive character was to a large extent negated through their transitoriness. This was first of all valid for the individual existence, in which not happiness, but rather unhappiness was sealed through death. For Horkheimer, certainly the good and the bad did not relate themselves to time in the same way. Horkheimer insisted that also for these categories, discursive logic, which was indifferent toward the content of the notion, was therefore insufficient. A materialistic dialectical logic was needed (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969; Adorno 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; Horkheimer 1985g: 483-492; 1995p: 82-83; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004).

Losing a War or a Trial Benjamin answered Horkheimer in his letter of March 28, 1937, that the latter’s excursion about the closed or open work of the past had been very significant for him (Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Horkheimer 1995p: 89-90). Benjamin certainly believed to have understood Horkheimer’s excursion. According to Benjamin, if he was not in error, Horkheimer’s thought communicated with a consideration, which had often kept him occupied. For Benjamin, the question had always been important of how the odd figure of speech had to be understood: to lose a war, or to lose a trial, or a case in court. According to Benjamin, after all not the war or trial were the action, stake, or the risk, but rather the act of

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1347 decision about it. Benjamin finally put this in order for himself in the following way: whoever loses the war, or the trial, for him in this argument that happening was really concluded, and thus lost for his praxis. However, for his partner, who had won the war, or the trial, that was not the case: for him the happening was still open. In Benjamin’s view, the victory produced its fruits very differently than the defeat. That lead Benjamin to the precise opposite of Ibsen’s word: Happiness is born out of loss, eternal is only what is lost. For Benjamin, happiness is not born out of loss, and finite is only what is lost. The Germans, who lost two world-world wars in one century, had ample opportunity to test Benjamin’s thesis, particularly his own generation. Americans have a similar opportunity concerning the lost Vietnam War, and maybe also the lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Extermination of the Jews and the Communists Horkheimer’s, Adorno’s, and Benjamin’s discourse about the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless, of the beloved person, and of the innocent victims of society, and of the power of the powerless, and the closedness or openness of history, took place in the context of the persecution and the preparation of the execution and extermination of 6 million Jews, and 27 million communists (Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Horkheimer 1995p: 392-394; Burrin 1993; Hilberg 1992; Fest 1973; Fest/ Eichinger 2004; Ailsby 2004). The fascists were aware that the drama of oppression, and redemption, and liberation, constituted the central motif of the Biblical theology of the Jews, and that the socialists and communists had secularized this motif, and therefore they identified them both as arch-enemies of Germany, the Germanic race, and humanity (Genesis 37; Lieber 2001: 226; Hitler 1943: 56, 57, 63, 65, 125, 155, 178, 231, 232, 253, 287, 300-308, 319-321, 324, 382, 447, 457, 472; Trevor-Roper 1988: 2, 7, 24, 76, 126; App. E). The Jews were supposed to be the inventors not only of Christianity, but also of Bolshevism (Isaac 1956; Trevor-Roper 1988: 2, 7, 24, 76, 126). Already in his letter of February 15, 1938 from London, Adorno spoke to Horkheimer in New York about the completely desperate situation in Europe, and the coming horrible terror, and the extermination of the Jews. Adorno’s alarming and frightening ability to observe and

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to predict on the basis of the dialectical theory of society, was particularly astonishing, when the critical theorist of religion remembers that the reprisals against the Jews aimed still up to 1941 officially mainly at their expulsion from Germany. As a matter of fact, only the year 1938 was a turning point toward a brutally enforced emigration policy and politics. Since the Fall of 1939, the secret and concealed, systematic murder of handicapped and mentally ill people went on in Hadamar, Hessen, Germany, which my Bishop in the Diocese of Limburg, discovered, and against which he protested to the fascist Culture Ministry in Berlin with some, but very transitory success. At the same time, there was still a reservation planned for the Jews. The reservation should take place in areas near Lublin in Poland, and later on in Madagascar, or Siberia. American fascists thought of a Jewish reservation in Alaska. The definite and manifest decision of Hitler for the mass annihilation of the Jews must, with great probability, be dated on September 1941, with prohibitions since March 1941, when the mass extermination of communists in the Campaign Barbarossa was already in full swing all over Eastern Europe. The mass extermination of the Jews took on its form in the same measure, to which the campaign against the Soviet Union failed. However, the notion of the extermination of Jews and communists appeared with Hitler already at the beginning of the 1930s, when Adorno wrote his book on Kierkegaard (Adorno 1974). For the German Fascists, extermination was first and most of all the supposed intention of Jews and Bolshevists against the German nation, which had to defend itself against it likewise through extermination or removal of Jews and communists (Hitler 1943). If de facto close followers of Hitler could understand such expressions rather metaphorically still up to 1941, that was, however, certainly not the case with Adorno. There can also be no doubt that the literal, physical meaning of extermination corresponded from the very beginning to Hitler’s fundamental convictions and principles, with which the official reservation plans were really incompatible. It would mean to misunderstand the intentional core of Hitler in a coarse and gross way, if one would interpret the genocidal massacres of the Jews in Eastern Europe as the expression of a growing embitterment about the course of the war, as an act of revenge, against the old symbolical enemy. The massacres against the Jews lay rather completely in the consequence of Hitler’s folkish, nationalistic, and racist thinking from its very start, and they were in the perspective of his premises absolutely unavoidable (Hitler 1943: 56, 57, 63, 65, 93, 120, 125, 155, 178, 231, 232, 253, 287, 300-308, 312, 313, 319-321, 324, 382, 447, 457, 472; Trevor-Roper 1953: 2, 7, 24, 66, 68, 72, 76, 77, 78, 87, 117, 126, 134, 140, 146, 160, 192, 196, 216, 235, 260, 313, 332,

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1349 349, 370, 374, 397, 484, 513, 563). That Adorno saw already in February 1938 the genocide against the Jews, as well as the turning away by different nations, like Cuba, USA, etc. of many Jewish emigrants from Germany or Europe, confirmed his early insight–rooted in experiences from his youth in Frankfurt a.M., and later on in the critical theory of society–into that intentional core of Hitler’s thinking, and its projective mechanisms, but also into the priority, primacy, prime importance of the pretended national interests among the other states, outside of the German Empire and influence sphere. Adorno’s friend Benjamin became a victim of the emigration limitations against stateless people by fascist Spain in Port Bou, on September 26, 1940 (Horkheimer 1995p: 760-779).

The Wholly Other and Immortality According to the Hebrew Bible and the Rabbis, immortality was connected with God: in God’s sight, Jacob and Abraham, who had died, were nevertheless alive (Genesis 2: 17; 15: 15; Micah 7: 20; Psalm 4; Psalm 91; Psalm 104; Hertz 5716/1956: 55/15, 893/20; Efron 2009; Hegel 1986a; 6769, 440-442, 614,620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460, 483-485; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Mann 1999; Joyce 1996: 766-769; Schilling 1951; Küng 1982; App. E). Abraham was supposed to go home to his fathers. According to the Rabbis, the death of Abraham was predicted in one of those remarkable phrases, which seem to prove that the Hebrews were not unacquainted with the doctrine of immortality (Küng 1982; 1991b). In the prediction of Abrams death, the return of the soul to the eternal abodes of the fathers was, with some distinctness, separated from the internment of the body. That both could not be identical was evident: for while Abraham was entombed in Canaan, all his forefathers died, and were buried in Mesopotamia. The doctrine of immortality was also still valid for the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, besides the later Pharisaic idea of the resurrection of the dead, which was denied by the Hellenistically enlightened Sadducees (Genesis 2: 17; 15: 15; Micah 7: 20; Psalm 4; Psalm 91; Psalm 104: 2; Maccabees 7: 9, 14; 2: 43; Matthew 22: 23, 28, 30, 31; 27: 53: Hertz 5716/1956: 55/15, 893/20; Hegel 1986m: 483-485; Mann 1999; Joyce 1996: 766-769; App. E). On the basis of the Prophet Micah,

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the Rabbis declared that Jacob, their father, who had certainly died, was, nevertheless, not dead. (Micah 7: 20; Hertz 5716/1956: 893/20). Even as Jacob’s children were alive, so was he alive. Jacob and Abraham were, therefore, equivalent to the seed of Jacob and Abraham. Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth asked the Sadducees, concerning the resurrection of the dead, have you never read what God himself said to you: I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob (Matthew 22: 23-33)? For Jesus, God was God not of the dead, but of the living. Also, for the critical theorists of society–as for the old Jews and Christian, and for the related German idealists–Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel before–not only freedom but also immortality presupposed the totally Other than the finite slaughter bench of nature and history, the horrible events that can daily be seen on television around the globe (Horkheimer 1974: 352-354; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 34, 37, 40; Küng 1982: 10, 17, 18, 42, 43, 52, 55, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 78, 84, 95, 101, 102, 141, 151, 152, 197, 222, 227, 229, 240, 251, 255, 271, 288, 291, 292, 293, 295, 302, 306, 315, 319; Graham 2005: 1-2; Badger 2005: 1-2; Zernike 2005: 1-4; Hunbt 2005: 1-2; Graham 2005: 1; Federman 2005: 1-2; Ring 2005: 1-2; Johnson 2005: 1-2; Benedict XVI 2007). Just as for the old Jews, Abraham and Jacob could not be alive without God, so for the critical theorists of society, there was no immortality or resurrection without the entirely Other than the sacrificial altar of nature and history. The longing for the totally Other contained in itself the youthful longing to liberate the innocent victims of the past, who were slaughtered on the Golgotha of history without ever having had their day in court. Also here, the critical theory of society further demythologized and radicalized Judaism and Christianity, often with the help of the most advanced modern writers, e.g. Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, Valery Proust, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Mann, or Bertolt Brecht, and composers like Arnold Schönberg and Alban Berg in the context of late capitalist society characterized by a culture of death. This necrophilic cultural context has been most recently expressed in the obscenely public dying and death of Terri Schiavo in Florida and of John Paul II in the Vatican, not to speak of the likewise obscenely public dying of President Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, and the likewise obscenely public deaths on the battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan and Georgia, and the likewise obscenely public deaths during the recent earthquakes and Tsunami catastrophes in the South Pacific, Haiti, and

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1351 Chile (Joyce 1996: 406-412, 904-905; Adorno 1997j/1: 97-122, 152-180, 181-194, 286-287; Horkheimer1967b: 216-228, 229-238, 239-247, 248268, 302-316, 317-320; 1974c: 8, 16, 18, 28-29, 33, 81-82, 92-93, 96-97, 121123, 127, 131-132, 141-142, 148, 148-151, 157-158, 158-160, 164-165, 169, 192, 208, 213, 218-219, 247-248, 260, 268, 286-287, 288-289, 316-320, 352354; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Harriett 2005; Lee 2005; Daniel 2005: 26-27).

The Resurrection of the Dead According to Adorno, Kafka’s teaching on the failing death had an inverse side to it (Hegel 1986a; 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Adorno 1997j/2: 286-287; Schweppenhäuser 1981; Habermas 1983: 9-16). For Kafka, that the so damaged and corrupted creation could no longer die, was the only promise of immortality, which the modern enlightener did not avenge and punish with the second commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue: the prohibition against making images of the Absolute (Exodus 20: 4-6; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 23-24; Adorno 1997j/2: 286-287; Efron 2009; App. E). In Adorno’s view, this promise of immortality was connected with the rescue of things, which were not any longer involved in the guilt connection of modern antagonistic civil society as absolute commodityexchange society, and which were unexhangeable and useless and without any function (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Kafka 1993b: 239-245: Adorno 1997j/2: 286-287; Adorno 1997i/1; 1997i/2: 443-445; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002). Later on, Adorno called this attitude towards small and useless things micrology. In Adorno’s view, Kafka’s innermost stratum of meaning of the obsolete aimed at those small, and useless, and unexchangeable things. Kafka’s world of ideas was–as in the Nature Theater of Oklahoma–one of the unsaleable items. For Adorno, no theologumenon could come closer to Kafka than the title of the American movie comedy Shopworn Angel. While, according to Adorno’s interpretation of Kafka’s novels, evil and misfortune wreaked havoc in the interior rooms of the houses, in which human beings lived, abandoned places, like the staircase, were locations of desperate hope. For Kafka, the resurrection of the dead would have to take place on the car dump. According to Kafka, as Adorno understood him, the innocence

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and blamelessness of the useless things posited the counterpoint to the parasitic things. In Kafka’s view, idleness was the beginning of all vices, and the coronation of all virtues. According to the witness of Kafka’s novels, in the entangled world of contradictory modern civil society, everything positive and every contribution, one could almost say human work itself, which continually reproduced life, promoted only further the universal entanglement, from which also the critical theory of society or the dialectical religiology was not save.

The Negative and the Positive Adorno affirmed Kafka’s statement that only the task to do the negative was still imposed on the present generation in civil society: the positive was already given to it (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Adorno 1997j/1: 286-287; Schweppenhäuser 1981; Habermas 1983: 9-16). For Kafka, as Adorno understood him, the remedy against the half uselessness of the life, which did not live, was only the whole uselessness. Thus, Kafka fraternized with death. For Kafka, as Adorno saw him, the corrupt creation gained preference, precedence, and priority over the living people. In his novels, Kafka shattered and demolished the human self, the inner most position of the mythos. Kafka rejected, quashed, and condemned the deception and illusion of mere nature. In his novel The Trial, Kafka described a dream (Kafka 1964; 1993a; 1993b: 239-245; 2001; Adorno 1997j/1: 286-287). In that dream, the artist waited until K. had quieted down. Then the artist decided, since he did not find any other way out, nevertheless, to go on writing. The first small line that the artist made was a redemption for K. However the artist could enviously accomplish the small line only with the most extreme reluctancy. The script was also no longer so beautiful. Most of all the gold seemed to be missing in the script. The line extended pale and uncertain. Only the letter J became very large. The letter J was almost complete, when the artist stamped angrily with one of his feet into the grave hill. The soil flew up all around. Finally K. understood the artist. There was no time any longer for K. to apologize to the artist. The artist dug with all his fingers into the earth, which almost did not resist. Everything seemed to be ready. Only as a matter of appearance a thin earth crust was erected. Right behind the earthy crust there opened itself up with steep walls a large hole. K., being turned over on his back by a soft stream, sank into the hole. While K. was received below already by the impenetrable depth, his head still being erected in the back of his neck, above his name raised with powerful ornaments beyond the grave stone. Delighted by this sight, K. awakened from his dream.

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1353 The Name in Positivism and Judaism According to Adorno’s interpretation of the dream in Kafka’s Trial, the name alone, which became manifest through the natural death, not the living soul vouches for and guaranties the immortal part of man (Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Adorno 1970b; 1997j/1: 286-287). In Adorno and Horkheimer’s view, as a nominalist movement the bourgeois, Marxist and Freudian enlightenment had called a halt before the nomen, the exclusive, precise concept, the proper name (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 23-24; Adorno 1970b; 1997j/1: 286-287). Horkheimer and Adorno were not certain if the proper names were originally species names as well. However, the critical theorists were sure that the proper names had not yet shared the nominalistic fate of the species names (Tönnies 1908: 31; Adorno1997j/1: 286-287; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 23-24). In any case, for Adorno and Horkheimer the substantial ego refuted and denied by the nominalists, positivists and cognitivists, was not synonymous with the proper name (Horkheimer 1990j: 340-352; 1987i: 171-188; 1974: 101-104, 116-117; Tönnies 1908: 31; Adorno 1980b; 1997j/1: 286-287; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 23-24; Gold/Engel 1998; Light/Wilson 2004). According to the critical theorists of society, in the Jewish Religion of Sublimity the patriarchal idea had escalated into the annihilation of the mythos (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Küng 1991b; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 23-24; Efron 2009; App. E). However, in Judaism remained the bond between name and being recognized through the–by the critical theorists radicalized–third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue: the prohibition against expressing the name of God (Exodus 20: 7; Matthew 5: 33-37; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 23-24; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b). In Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s view, the demythologized and disenchanted world of Judaism reconciled magic and fetishism through their determinate negation in the idea of God (Hegel 1986p: 259-301; 1986q: 50-95; Adorno 1970b; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 23-24; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b). The Jewish religion did not tolerate any word that would have granted consolation and comfort to the despair of all mortals. Desperate hope connected itself only to the third commandment of the Mosaic Law:

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the prohibition to call out to or to call on the false and untrue as God: the finite as the Infinite, the lie as the truth–idolatry. The security of rescue of the hopeless lies alone in the turning away from all faith, which took its place: the knowledge in the denunciation of the illusion, delusion, madness, and insanity of individuals and masses in modern antagonistic civil society. However, this process of negation in Judaism was not an abstract and general one, but rather a concrete, and specific one (Hegel 1986c: 7277; 1986e: 48-52; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 23-24; Efron 2009; App. E).

Dependence on Nature and Culture In his 16th Lecture on Metaphysics at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität in Frankfurt on July 27, 1965, Adorno spoke about the interconnection between metaphysics–the concern with God, freedom and immortality–and modern culture (Adorno 1998c: 188-200; 2000: 112128). The 1968 youth revolution, which Adorno had inspired through his University lectures, and his continual presentations on the radio, and on television, as well as through his books, was slowly starting in Frankfurt and throughout civil societies from Tokyo, through Washington, Paris and Berlin to Rome, and would soon misunderstand him, and would thus finally contribute to his own death, after he had already suffered for some time from a heart ailment (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 27, 28, 29; 1985l: Jäger 2004: chaps. 15, 16, 209-213). Here in his 16th Lecture, Adorno stated in summary that the spectacular failure of culture in 1965 had radically undermined the possibility of metaphysics. When after World War II I began my studies at the Universities of Frankfurt and Mainz in 1946, the question–Is metaphysics possible–stood in the center of discourse in the Philosophy and Theology Departments, and in the Studium Generale. The Scholastics answered yes and the others no.

Naturalism In his 17th Lecture on metaphysics, Adorno added that on the other hand, the failure of modern culture did not give thought a kind of free passage to some natural state: to naturalism (Adorno 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000a: 129136; 2000b; Habermas 1988a; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2005; 2006a). Adorno wanted to make this addition not only in order to prevent misunderstandings, but because completeness of metaphysical thought required concern not only with God and freedom, but also with death and immortality

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1355 (Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: I, 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986d: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 240, 266, 266-268, 382, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 134-135; 1986p; Adorno 1998c: 201-213; Küng 1982: Parts A, B, C). According to Adorno, the failure of culture could not give metaphysical thought a kind of free passage to some natural state or naturalism, because it stemmed from its own naturalness (Adorno 1998c: 201-213; Habermas 1992b; 2005; 2006a; Habermas/Henrich 1974; Gadamer/ Habermas 1979). The failure of culture was the result of its own persistent character as a natural entity. In Adorno’s as well as in Horkheimer’s diagnosis, modern culture had failed because it had clung to mere self-preservation against the fury of disappearance characteristic of nature, as well as of history, and its various derivatives in a situation, in which humanity had simply outgrown that principle (Hegel 1986a: 275; 1986f: 453, 480; 1986d: 33-41, 61; 1986g: 98; 1986i: 13; 1986p: 283, 365; Horkheimer 1981a: chap. 4; 1981b; 1981c; 1974a: chap. III; Adorno 1998a; 1998b; 1998c: 201-213). For Adorno, modern humanity was no longer confined by direct necessity to compulsive self-preservation. Humanity was no longer compelled to extend the principle of self-preservation or mastery over both, internal and external nature, into an indefinite future: into post-modern alternative Future I–the totally administered society and into alternative Future II–the entirely militarized society (Bloch 1970a; 1970b; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/ Lohmann, 2003; Adorno 1998a; 1998b; 1998c: 201-213; App. G). Thus, alternative Future III–the reconciled society, could become possible and probable. The critical theorist of religion remembers that already the rock of Christianity, the Sermon on the Mount, recommended the relaxation of a compulsive self-preservation through faith in God’s loving and caring Providence: the movement from the mode of having to the mode of being (Matthew 6: 25-34; Hegel 1986d: 33-41, 61; Adorno 1998a; 1998b; 1998c: 201-213; Fromm 1976: chap. III; App. E). Often non-contemporaneous religious texts have anticipated religious, and metaphysical, and ethical problems, which then were materialized at a much later stage of social evolution and learning: as e.g. the possible relaxation of the no longer necessary compulsive self-preservation in modernity.

The Question Concerning Death Against the background of the works of Aristotle, the Gnostics, Schelling, Hegel, Scheler, Tillich, and Kafka, and in the context of the dependence

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of philosophy on nature and culture, and on the basis of an evolutionary concept of God and freedom, Adorno tried to develop his very own, unique philosophical answer to the modern question concerning death and immortality, four years before he died from a heart attack in the village of Visp, in Valais, Switzerland, in the wonderful view of the, since his youth very much loved Matterhorn, during his summer vacation on August 6, 1969, and was buried on the Main Cemetery of his hometown Frankfurt a.M, on August 13, 1969 (Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Adorno 1998a; 1998b; 1998c: 188-226; Jäger 2004: 209-213; Wiggershaus 1987: 7-26; Scheible 1989: 131-146; Jäger 2004: chap. 16, 209-213; Schweppenhäuser 2000). At the same time the youth-revolution raged on in Frankfurt and globally (Horkheimer 1988n: 452-453, 459460, 472, 512-513). Adorno had become a victim of his intense struggle against any return of fascism, and at the end he had the feeling that he had failed. Some elements in the revolutionary youth movement had become positivistic or red-fascist, without even being aware of it. In Adorno’s up to his end negative metaphysical perspective, death broke into modern culture as something entirely alien and foreign. For Adorno, in a very un-German way culture was identical with the whole network of civilization. Death was so foreign to modern civilization that it could not even be mastered by its best connections. In the face of death, nobody could cut a powerful figure. That is even true for a great prophet, like Jesus of Nazareth, or a prophet, statesman, and military leader like Mohammed (Psalm 22: 1; Matthew 17: 45-47; Mark 15: 33-34; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; 195-346; Fromm 1966b: 231-236; 1992: 3-94; 1995; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004). While it is true that Jesus of Nazareth, during his execution and shortly before his heart attack, quoted Psalm 22: 1, a Psalm that ends Messianically and hopefully, his outcry Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? (My God, my God, why have you deserted me?)

remains, nevertheless, particularly in comparison with the quiet, ironical death of Socrates, the other prototype of dying in the West–a horrible expression of despair in the extreme distress of dying, as most Christian theologians agree (Psalm 22: 1; Matthew 27: 45-47; Mark 15: 33-34; Hegel

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1357 1986q: 50-95, 195-346; Fromm 1966b: 231-236; 1992: 3-94; 1995; Küng 1970; 1982; 1994a; 1994b; 2004: 158; App. E). Of course, also some of the Jews, who stood under the cross while Jesus was dying in agony, gave his words a Messiah-Liberator interpretation by referring to the Prophet Elijah, who had been taken into Heaven by Yahweh, without the agony of death: They said: ‘The man is calling Elijah,’ and one of them quickly ran to get a sponge which he dipped in vinegar and, putting it on a reed, gave it to him to drink.’ Wait!’ said the rest of them,’ and see if Elijah will come to save him.’ But Jesus, again crying out in a loud voice, yielded up his spirit (Genesis 5: 24; Obadiah 1: 21; Hertz 5716/1956: 18/24; Lieber 2001: 225/21; Matthew 6: 10-13, 27, 47-50).

According to the Prophet Malachi, Yahweh had promised: Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet Before the coming Of the great and terrible day of the Lord. And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, And the heart of the children to their fathers; Lest I come and smite the land with utter destruction (Malachi 3: 23, 24; Obadiah 1: 15; Lieber 2001: 224/15).

According to the Rabbis, far more than the prophet of zeal and fire of the Biblical narrative, Elijah was to later Jewish generations the helper and healer, the reconciler and peace bringer, the herald of the days of the Messiah, the Liberator (Malachi 3: 4-6, 23-24; Obadiah 1: 21; Hertz 5716/ 1956: 967/4-6, 970/23-24, 971; Lieber 2001: 225/21; Küng 1991b; 2004: 167; Efron 2009; App. E). Elijah would effect a reconciliation between the old and the new not merely by awakening the sympathy of one for the other, but by endowing them with a full understanding of the religious and the moral obligations held together by both sections: the fathers and the children. It was the home divided against itself, the estrangement of the youth from the elders that especially filled the Prophet Elijah with pain and horror as something unnatural–a curse, which, if not removed, must blight the land. First reconciling parents and children, Elijah would turn the hearts of both to God. The Haftorah Sabbath Hagadol ended with the announcement of the reappearance of the powerful and violent Prophet Elijah. Passover, as the Festival of Redemption in the past, was always associated with the Redemption of the Future, when humankind

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would be delivered from all oppression, physical and spiritual. Elijah was traditionally regarded as the advance messenger, who would appear at Passover-time and announce the dawn of that Messianic era. Even if Jesus had cried out not to God, Eli in Hebrew, or Eloi in Aramaeic, but to the Prophet Elijah instead–and if this was not a misunderstanding of the Jews under the cross, when he died on it during the Passover time of the year 33–to be sure, neither Yahweh nor the prophet came to save him, and he ended in utter despair forsaken by God and humanity.

Brother Death After further two thousand years of non-appearance or non-reappearance of the prophet Elijah, not to speak of the Messiah, the liberator, or the Messianic age, the necrophilous and most destructive Adolf Hitler’s Wagnerian fascist orchestration, dramatization, and heroization of his long foreseen final catastrophe and his own death, while his wife Eva Hitler, nee Brown, and hundred thousands of Russians and Germans were dying with him in the so-called struggle against atheistic communism in Berlin on April 30-May 1, 1945, was no help against the entirely foreign character of death (Hegel 1986a; 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Fromm 1973: chap. XIII; Fest/Eichinger 2004; Trevor-Roper 1968; Gun 1968: chaps. 1821). Death remained as foreign and strange as it had ever been in modern civil, socialist, or fascist society in the past 400 years. There were, of course, also exceptions from pre-modern times, like the philosopher Socrates and the Jewish martyr Rabbi Akiba, and the greatest saint of Christianity, Francis of Assisi, who called death his brother–Brother Death–and for whom death seemed to be rather familiar, and who remained like Socrates and Akiba a powerful figure right into death (Fromm 1966b: 232; Lortz 1964: 184, 371, 373, 376, 391, 392, 394-496). According to the Talmud, Akiba, while being tortured, smiled, and when asked why he smiled by the Roman General in charge of his execution, answered: All my life I have prayed: You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, (i.e. life), and with all your power. I never could love him ‘with all my life’ until now. That is why I am happy (Fromm 1966b: 232).

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1359 In modernity, particularly during World War II, there have also been many brave and stubborn atheists even in the trenches, in the concentration camps, in execution places, like Plötzensee, in Berlin, who went to a cruel death quietly and without assistance of a priest, a minister, or a Rabbi, and without calling for an absent, or missing or missed God. Yet, how foreign must their very modern death have been for them! The critical theory of religion has inherited from Judaism, Christianity and Islam, through Schelling, Hegel, and Marx, as well as through the enlighteners Bloch, Benjamin, Adorno, and Horkheimer, and through the believers Dirks, Metz, Moltmann, and Sölle the eschatological reservation: the preference of eschatology over protology (Psalm 22: 1; Matthew 6: 10-13; 27: 45-47; Mark 15: 33-34; Revelation 21-22; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986q: 273-274, 278, 299; Fromm 1966b: 231-236; 1992: 3-94; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Bloch/Reif1978: 88; Adorno 1980b: 333-334; Horkheimer 1985l: 483-492; 1985g: chaps. 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 37, 40; Metz 1959; 1970; 1972b; 1973b; 1975b; 1977; 1997; Metz/Peters 1991: chaps. 14; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Dirks 1968; Sölle 1977; 1992: 135164, 169-175; 1994; Peters 1998; Berrigan 1978: 35-37, 53-56; Küng 1991b; 1994a 1994b; 2004a; 2004b; App. E). In spite of the most painful open flank of the parousia delay, the non-appearance, or non-re-appearance of the Liberator, the Messiah, which opens up the Abrahamic religions to modern atheistic attacks, the dialectical theory of religion applies this eschatological reservation also, and particularly so, to the modern question of death: the believer dies out of the Golgotha of the horror and terror of nature and history into the remembrance of God’s Spirit–the most radical, but still determinate negation of the most radical negativity of death (Obadiah 1: 21; Lieber 2001: 225/21; Hegel 1986c: 591; 1986q: 273-274; 291-292; Pieper 1969; Küng 1982).

Gateway into Metaphysics According to Adorno, modern bourgeois culture had not been able to integrate death into itself, or if it had done so, had made itself utterly ridiculous (Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Adorno 1998a; 1998b; 1998c: 202-203; Jäger 2004: chaps. 15, 16, 209-213). Today in 2010,

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even during funerals in churches, synagogues, or mosques, priests, ministers, rabbis or mullahs, and their communities prefer to remember and to celebrate the life of the deceased person, rather than to face his or her unthinkable death. For Adorno, the inability of modern culture to integrate death was shown very clearly in Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One (Waugh 1948; Adorno 1998c: 202-203). Therefore, so Adorno argued, philosophy had used death, expressly or tacitly, latently or manifestly, as the gateway through which to break into metaphysics, and the dialectical religiologist may add, also into theology. Adorno had to admit that this had not just happened since the theology and philosophy of his great opponent, Martin Heidegger (Heidegger 2001: 235-266; Adorno 1997f: 413-523; Adorno 1998a; 1998b; 1998c: 202-203; App. E). It rather had always been said that death was the great, true spur to metaphysical and theological speculation. The helplessness of people in the face of death provided the impetus for thoughts that were seeking to penetrate beyond–in Kantian rather than in Hegelian terms–the boundaries of experience (Kant 1929: 30-31, 325, 331, 333-335, 364, 369-377, 379-380, 639, 649, 650; 1946; 1968; Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129, 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Adorno 1997f: 413-523; 1970; 1974a; 1974, 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Siebert 2001: xi-xvi, chap. III; 2002b: chaps. 2 and 6; App. E). However, for Adorno–also here a good Kantian rather than a good Hegelian–the metaphysics of death seemed to be impotent in principle (Kant 1929: 30-31, 325, 331, 333-335, 364, 369-377, 379-380, 639, 649, 650; Hegel 1986a: cit. 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986l: 266; 1986p: 387-388, 424, 425; 1986q: 129; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53; Adorno 1997f: 413523). However, Adorno did not understand this philosophical impotence in the sense that one should not reflect on death at all.

The Structure of Death It seemed to be very curious to Adorno, that Heidegger sought to use reflection on death to discourage, precisely, reflection on death (Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155,

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1361 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458460; 1986n: 134-135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Heidegger 2001: 235-266; Adorno 1998a; 1998b; 1998c: 203; 1997f: 413-523; 2002a; Horkheimer 1988n: 7273, 202, 272, 276-277, 302; Eco 2000: 13, 21, 26, 38, 43, 47, 65, 83, 85, 99, 476, 521-513; Macdonald/Ziarek 2008). For Adorno, it was one of the quaintest features of Heidegger’s philosophy that, on the one hand, it gained its concept of authenticity, and thus its central speculative motor, through reflecting on, what he called, the structure of death, but, on the other, he was furious with anyone who, as he contemptuously put it, brooded on death (Heidegger 1968: 305-306; 2001; Adorno 1997f: 413523; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c: 203). In his most famous book, Being and Time, Heidegger had written that if by being toward death we did not have in view an actualizing of death, neither could we mean dwelling upon the end in its possibility (Heidegger 2001: 235-266). For Heidegger, this was the way one comports oneself when one thinks about death: pondering over when and how this possibility may perhaps be actualized. Of course, so Heidegger emphasized, such brooding over death did not fully take away from it its character as a possibility. Indeed, it always got brooded over as something that was coming; but in such brooding men weakened it by calculating how we were to have it at our disposal. In Adorno’s view, however, what Heidegger did in his philosophy was not at all different from brooding on death. In Heidegger’s philosophy, any thought about death could not possibly be anything other than brooding. At the same time, in Heidegger’s view, death, of course, was something closed off and impenetrable to thought. Adorno brought this point to his students’ attention in his Frankfurt lecture of July 27, 1965 only, in order to show them how contradictory and inconsistent Heidegger’s thought was, and how much, even on such central matter as death, his philosophy was organized by privilege and control. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, it is entirely possible that Heidegger’s contradictory obsession with death has its theological roots in the Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity, from which he came, and in which he once studied for the priesthood in a Jesuit seminary, and into which Paradigm the Jesuits always wanted to bring him back again, but without success (Küng 1994a: C, III, 25, 649, 756, 894; Simpson 2005: 1-2; D’Emiio 2005: 1-2; App. E). More precisely, Heidegger came from the Right wing of that Roman Catholic Paradigm, which at his time allied itself with fascism, and which today is connected and lets itself be functionalized by neo-liberalism via Opus Dei, and the Acton Institute, etc. (Schwarz 2005: 1-2; Kay 2005: 1-2; App. E). Heidegger

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died as a fascist, like his colleagues on the Right, Carl Schmitt and Mircea Eliade.

Heroic Possibilities of Death What appeared to Adorno to be the impotence of the metaphysics of death, was not the fruitlessness of brooding, which Heidegger had criticized, or the belief that in the face of death only a posture of tight-lipped readiness, or some such thing, was appropriate (Hegel 1986a; 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Adorno 1996: 203-204; Macdonald/Ziarek 2008). Adorno found incidentally very similar formulations concerning the problem of death to those of Heidegger in the philosophical work of Karl Jaspers. For Adorno, Heidegger and Jaspers, these two seemingly so antithetical thinkers, nevertheless, got along very well with each other concerning their cultivation of the heroic possibilities of death. In Adorno’s view, Heidegger’s metaphysics of death was impotent because it necessarily degenerated into a kind of propaganda for death, elevating it to something meaningful. Thus in the end, Heidegger’s metaphysics prepared people to receive the death intended for them by their societies and states as joyfully as possible. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, after the Frankfurt University had become fascist in January 1933, when Hitler came into power, and the Institute for Social Research was to be closed and confiscated by the Culture Minister of Prussia, and the critical theorists were to be forced into exile, the Professor of Pedagogy and President of the University, Ernst Krieck, declared that only the sacrificial victims would liberate the students before him: sacrifice for its own sake (Horkheimer 1996r: 420; Adorno 1998a; 1998b; 1998c: 203-204; Reijek 1992: 39-40; Wiggershaus 1987: chaps. 1, 2; Rosen 1995, Part I; Scheible 1989). According to Adorno, if one left aside this heroic aspect of such metaphysics of death, which justified death as the meaning of existence, any reflections on death were of such a necessarily general and formal kind, that they amounted to tautologies. In his The Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno quoted such tautologies by Heidegger as, e.g. his definition of death as the possibility of absolute nonbeing of existence (Heidegger 2001: #50; Adorno 1998c: 204-205; 1997u: 504-506). In another less well-known, tautological formulation from the

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1363 1960s, Heidegger announced solemnly with eyebrows lifted up, that when we die, a corpse was left behind (Heidegger 2001: #47; Adorno 1998c: 204-205, 284/234). For Adorno, thus spoke the high school teacher in Wedekind’s Spring Awakening. According to Adorno, for Heidegger the characteristic universalism of existence as something mortal, took the place of what must die (Adorno 1997f: 504-506). Thus, for Heidegger, death was maneuvered into that which was authentic. Existence was honored and decorated ontologically as what it was anyway. The analytical judgment was made into the abyss-like philosophem. The empty universality of the notion was made into the particular. A sign of honor was given to death as excellent status of the future.

Abolishment of Death According to Adorno, Heidegger’s teaching on human authenticity did not only have its measure in death, but also its ideal (Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Adorno 1997f: 504-506; Eco 2000: 21, 39, 40; Macdonald/Ziarek 2008). For Heidegger, death became what was essential in human existence. If thought, so Adorno argued, referred and related itself as on its ground on the absolutely isolated individuality, then there remained in its hands de facto nothing else than mortality. For Heidegger, everything else followed only out of the world. As for the German idealists, so for Heidegger, this world was only secondary. According to Heidegger, when someone has died, his being-no-longer-in-the world, if we understand it in an extreme way, was still a being, but in the sense of being-just-present-at-hand-no-more of a corporal thing. (Heidegger 2001: 250, 281-282; Adorno 1997f: 505). For Heidegger, the end of the entity qua existence was the beginning of the same entity qua something presentat-hand. From Heidegger’s theoretical view, even the corpse, which was present-at-hand, was still a possible object for the student of pathological anatomy, whose understanding tended to be oriented to the idea of life. According to Adorno, for Heidegger death became the representative of God. The Heidegger of Being and Time considered himself still to be too modern and secular to use the name of God. That was not the case for Adorno and Benjamin or the other critical theorists of society up to

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Habermas. In their negative, inverse, cipher theology, Adorno and Benjamin spoke freely about the Divine (Adorno 1962; 1963; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1974; 1980b; 1993a; 1993c; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997j/2: 608-616; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Benjamin 1955a; 1977: chaps. 10, 11; 1978a; 1978b; 1983a; 1983b; 1988; 1996c; Schmidt 1972; Fromm 1966b; 2001; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1986; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: Part III; 1992b; 1997a; 1999; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Henrich 1974; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Gadamer/ Habermas 1979; Sölle/Habermss 1975; Jäger 2004: 211; App. E). Thus Adorno, wrote already at Easter 1921 in view of the Matterhorn, which he loved as a cipher of the Divine, which later on became the wholly Other: In our experience of nature the formation of the world takes place in the ego; a formed world enters meaningfully into a formed ego, radiant in the reflected glow of the Divine (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 29, 37; Adorno 1962; 1963; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1974; 1980b; 1993a; 1993c; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997j/2: 608-616; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Jäger 2004: 211; App. E).

For Heidegger, it would have been blasphemous even only to think the possibility of the negation, or abolishment, or liquidation, or cancellation, or supersession of death, as it had happened in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and other world religions, and still in German idealism, particularly in Schelling and Hegel: the negation of the negation of death toward the affirmation of resurrection and immortality (Hegel 1986q: 286-299; Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1997j/1: 285-287; Adorno 1997f: 504-596; Küng 1982: 99-126, 127-154, 155-188; 1991b: 412, 424; 1994a: 58-66, 9499; 1994b; 2004: 588-603; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; App. E). The critical theory of religion is aware that in the Medieval Roman Catholic Paradigm of Christianity, from which Heidegger came as a theologian and philosopher, there had been much talk about death: but, nevertheless, also about resurrection and eternal life (Küng 1994a: 336-601; 1994b). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, there had never been in Roman Catholicism a cult of death as being absolute, but rather of the resurrection of the flesh (2 Maccabees 7: 9,14; 12: 43; Matthew 22: 23, 28, 30, 31; 27: 53; 28; Mark 16; Luke 2: 34; 14: 14; 20: 36; 24; John 5: 29; 11: 24, 25; 20: 21; Acts 1: 22; 2: 31; 4: 2, 33; 17: 32; 23: 6; 24: 15: 25: 23; Romans 1: 4; 6: 5; Hegel 1986a; 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1365 149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Haecker 1935; Schneider 1955; Guardini 1935; 1948; 1952; Rahner 1964; 1968a; 1968b; 1976; Lehmann/ Raffelt 1979; Metz 1962; 1963; 1965; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973b; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1981; 1995; 1997; 1998; Küng 1970; 1972; 1978; 1982; 1990a; 1990b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 1998; 2003; 2009; Baum 1959; 1965; 1967; 1968; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1980a; 1980b; 1982; 1991; 1994; 1996; 1999, 2001; 2002; 2003; 2005; 2007; App. E).

The Cult of Death According to Adorno, the former Catholic Heidegger separated expressively and explicitly the being-toward-death as existential from the possibility of its mere ontic abolishment, or liquidation (Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1997f: 504-596; Eco, 2000: 40-42; Macdonald/Ziarek 2008). In Heidegger’s view, because death was supposed to be absolute as existential horizon of human existence, it turned into the absolute as the venerable: the admirable and the wonderful. Heidegger went back to the cult of death. Therefore, in Adorno’s view, since the beginnings of National Socialism, Heidegger’s jargon of authenticity got along very well with Hitler’s rearmament for World War II, which finally cost the lives of 60 million people. In Adorno’s view, in 1962-1964 as in the 1930s or 1940s, the information was still valid, which his friend Horkheimer had given to a woman, who was fascinated and deeply moved by fascism and Heidegger, and thus had stated that he had after all at least finally put people again before death. Horkheimer told the woman that General Erich von Ludendorff, colleague and co-hero of General von Hindenburg in World War I, and Hitler’s former friend and collaborator during his counter-revolutionary National Socialist revolt or putsch in Munich, had dealt with that issue of making people aware of death much better than Heidegger (Hitler 1943: 146, 231, 275; Adorno 1997j/1: 504-596). According to Adorno, Heidegger identified death and existence. For Heidegger, death turned into pure identity as that in a being, which simply was not fitting for any other, except itself. In Adorno’s view, Heidegger’s analysis of consciousness was sliding over the most immediate and the most trivial in the relationship of existence and death; namely, their non-identity as such: that death destroyed and truly negated existence. It did so without escaping the trivi-

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ality that death was the simple impossibility of existence (Heidegger 2001: 250-251; Adorno 1997f: 504-596).

The Insufficiency of Consciousness Adorno believed, that this insufficiency of consciousness in the face of death in Heidegger’s work, its inability to extract the alleged meaning from it, not only had to do with the absolute inaccessibility of what is being talked about (Heidegger 2001: 250-251; Adorno 1997f: 505-596; 1998c: 204-205; Macdonald/Ziarek 2008). Adorno was of the opinion that even if we left aside the truly unfathomable question of whether we can talk meaningfully about death at all, something else was in play that was really connected with consciousness, and perhaps with the present state of modern consciousness: with history in 1965. According to Adorno, although nature, in the form of death, juts into society and culture as something not yet integrated, nevertheless the experience of death, the side that it turned toward living people, was undoubtedly determined in part by society. For Adorno, this was one of the strongest arguments against the attempt to wring metaphysics from death, a la Heidegger (Heidegger 2001: 250-251; Adorno 1997f: 504-596; 1998c: 204-205; Eco 2001: 21, 39, 40-42). For Adorno, dying, if not death itself, was certainly a social phenomenon. If any one took the trouble, so Adorno argued, to investigate how people die, that person would find as much mediation of society and culture in this side of death, which is turned toward human beings, as in any other phenomena. However, what Adorno meant was something different: namely, that human consciousness clearly was not capable of withstanding the experience of death. In my last discourses with Adorno’s friend, the Christian Walter Dirks, toward the end of his life, when he suffered from the disease of Alzheimer, he stated that he was not able any longer to believe in the Greek notion of immortality, but, nevertheless, still held on to the Hebrew notion of resurrection as re-creation (2 Maccabees 7: 9, 14; 12: 43; Matthew 22: 23, 28, 30, 31; 27: 53; Mark 12: 18; Luke 20: 27; Acts 23: 8; Adorno 1998c: 209-213; Dirks 1983a; 1983b; Siebert 1979d; 1986; 1987d; 1993; 2005b; App. E). The reason for this was that Walter could not believe that the human consciousness, which was so vulnerable already in relation to drugs, could possibly withstand and endure the experience of death. As for Adorno, so also for Walter, death had not only a social outside, but also a personal inside, about which the philosopher did not know anything, but the theologian had some knowledge through faith: the God, who created the world out of nothing, could also

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1367 resurrect, i.e. re-create the individual person out of the annihilation of death (Genesis 3; Hertz 5716/1956: 10-13/1-24; Matthew 27-28; Mark 1516; Luke 23-24; John 19-20; Hegel 1986q: 286-299; Küng 1982; App. E).

Endurable Death According to Adorno the Heideggerian metaphysics of death, as it was practiced in the 1960s was much more a vain solace or the fact that human beings had lost what in the Middle Ages or in Antiquity may have made death endurable: the unity of experience (Adorno 1998c: 207; 2000c: 133134; Küng 1982; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; App. E). In Adorno’s view, the problematic feature of all the resurrected theological and metaphysical systems, which one would probably need to destroy to be free to reflect on matters of death and dying without ideology, i.e. false consciousness, was that they acted as a kind of substitute (Adorno 1998c: 207; Küng 1982; 1991b; 1994a; Haag 1983; 2005). What for Adorno was most deeply suspect in the popular theological and metaphysical systems of the 1960s was that they always conveyed the message, even if peripherally and as if from far off, that things are really not so bad. The critical religiologist knows of many songs which in contemporary church services in America repeat again and again in the midst of two wars and the economic tsunami of 2008, 2009, 2010 as loud as possible their main theme in many variations: It is alright! It is alright! It is alright! According to Adorno, the popular theological and metaphysical systems of the 1960s tried to reassure the people about certain essentialities which, precisely, have become problematic: particularly after Auschwitz and the horror and terror this name stands for, and which–so the critical theorist of religion may add–unfortunately have continued in new forms into the 21st century (Adorno 1998c: 207; 1997u; Küng 1982; 1991b; 1994a; Haag 1983; 2005). Adorno referred here, above all, to the essentiality of kairos or time (Exodus 9: 8; Lieber 2001: 2-1, 365/8; Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1998c: 207; 1997f: 415-526; 1997u; Küng 1982; 1991b; 1994a; Haag 1983; 2005; App. E).

Time In 1965, Adorno–four years before his own death in 1969–had little doubt that the awareness human beings had of time, and the very possibility of a continuous experience of time had been deeply disrupted in late capitalist society (Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1998c: 207; 1997f: 415-526; 1997u;

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2000c: 133-134; Küng 1982; 1991b; 1994a; Haag 1983; 2005). It seemed to Adorno, to be a precise response to this situation, though actually a mere cultural reflection to it, that the theological and metaphysical systems of the 1960s were now attempting to rescue the conception of time, which was no longer accessible to experience, and to present temporality as a constituent of human existence itself. For Adorno, these systems therefore had a tendency to conjure up what was no longer experienced. That precisely was the true reason, which went much deeper than a superficial, positivistic psychological or sociological or philosophical interpretation, why the current theological or metaphysical thinkers sympathized in this curious way with primitive or archaic conditions no longer important to antagonistic civil society: especially with agrarian conditions of those or with a simple, small-town barter economy (Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1970a; 1998c: 207; 1997f: 415-526; 1997u; Küng 1982; 1991b; 1994a; Haag 1983; 2005). For Adorno, all world religions had a certain village smell (App. E).

Epic of Death According to Adorno, the so-called epic of death, which had been present in Heidegger’s doctrine of death as a necessary moment of the wholeness of existence, and which was really at the very root of all these death-theologies and-metaphysics, was no longer possible, because such a wholeness of life no longer existed: in spite of all the wholistic medicine the dialectical religiologist hears about today in 2010 (Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1970a; 1998c: 207-208; 1997f: 415-526; 1997u; Küng 1982; 1991b; 1994a; Haag 1983; 2005). In his Introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Schriften, Adorno attempted to express the idea that a concept such as the life’s work had become problematic in 1965, because the human existence had long ceased to follow a quasi organic law immanent to it, but was rather determined by all kinds of powers in antagonistic late capitalist society, which denied it such an immanent unfolding (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Heidegger 1968; 2001; Benjamin 1950; 1955c; Adorno 1970a; 1998c: 207-208; 1997f: 415-526; 1997h: 9-18, 354-373, 373-391, 392-396, 569-573, 578-587; 1997u; Küng 1982; 1991b; 1994a; Haag 1983; 2005; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; App. C, D, E, F). For Adorno, a belief in such wholeness of life, to which death might correspond as something meaningful, already has the character of a chimera. But Adorno went even further. In Adorno’s perspective, it had doubtlessly become obvious by 1965 that the notion of wholeness was a kind of Ersatz-theology or metaphysics, because it attempted to underpin the assertion of meaningful being or life with the positivist

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1369 credentials of something immediately given, as e.g. in Friedrich Pearl’s Gestalt psychology (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Heidegger 1968; 2001; Benjamin 1950; 1955c; Adorno 1970a; 1998c: 207-208; 1997f: 415-526; 1997h: 9-18, 354-373, 373-391, 392-396, 569-573, 578-587; 1997u; Küng 1982; 1991b; 1994a; Haag 1983; 2005; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; Hodgson 1997). However, Adorno wanted to go even a step beyond that. For the students, to whom Adorno lectured on July 27, 1965, might very well have asked him whether that kind of epic wholeness of life, the ancient Biblical idea, that Abraham died old and sated with life, whether this wishful image of a life stretching out in time so that it could be narrated, and rounded off in its own death, had not always been a transfiguration: The number of years Abraham lived was a hundred and seventy-five. Then Abraham breathed his last, dying at a ripe old age, an old man who had lived his full span of years; and he was gathered to his people (Genesis 25: 7-11; Schilling 1951; Hegel 1986a: 67-69,440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302, 339-397; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995o: 633, 674, 799; 1988d: chap. 2; Heidegger 1968; 2001; Benjamin 1950; 1955c; Horkheimer 1995o: 633, 674, 799; 1988d: chap. 2; Adorno 1970a; 1998c: 207-208; 1997f: 415-526; 1997h: 9-18, 354-373, 373-391, 392-396, 569-573, 578-587; 1997u; Küng 1982; 1991b; 1994a; Haag 1983; 2005; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; App. E).

Like Max Weber before, Adorno would have answered the students’ question concerning the transfiguration in the affirmative.

The Heterogeneousness of Death Adorno could not escape the suspicion, that wherever such an Abrahamic harmony between a self-contained life on one hand, and death, on the other, appeared to have existed in Antiquity or in the Middle Ages, the life of those to which the harmony was attributed had been subjected to so inordinate a burden, was–as one was apt to say in the 1960s–so alienated from them, that they did not even get so far as to perceive the heterogeneousness or total otherness of death, and integrated themselves with death out of a kind of–as Nietzsche would say–weakness (Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j:

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21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 4849, 52-53, 331; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995o: 633, 674, 799; 1988d: chap. 2; Adorno 1998c: 208-209; Hodgson 1997; App. E). Consequently, so Adorno argued, the Abrahamic idea of a complete life, meaningful within itself, had probably to be abandoned together with the Heideggerian conception of the epic of death. For, according to Adorno, catastrophes always had the power to draw into themselves remote realities and events from the most distant past. In Adorno’s perspective, if mortally weary people took an affirmative view of death, it was most likely the case, that death relieved them of a burden. For Adorno, the reason for the allegedly positive relationship to death taught by these Heideggerian theologies and metaphysics was none other than the one which came forcibly to mind in 1965, twenty years after the end of World War II, which had cost the lives of over 60 million human beings, including 27 million communists and 6 million Jews: that the life in question amounted to so little that there was little resistance to its ending (Adorno 1997f: 413-523; 1998c: 208-209; Fest/Eichinger 2004; Persico 1994). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, as little as the Hebrews were able to perceive the heterogeneousness of the death of Abraham, or the Buddhists that of the death of the Gautama, or the Syrians that of the death of Tamutz or Adonis, or the Egyptians that of the death of Osiris, so little the Jewish, Greek or Roman Christians were able to understand the entire otherness of the death of Jesus on the cross: maybe with the exception of Jesus himself, when he sweat blood in the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, or when during his heart attack on the cross he felt totally abandoned by his Ab in heaven, and thus cried out in his Aramaic language: Eli, Eli lamaha azavtani–My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? (Matthew 26: 3646; 27: 45-47; Mark 14: 32-42; Luke 22: 39-46; Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 374-389, 406-408, 409-442; 1986q: 50-95, 129, 185346, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995o: 633, 674, 799; 1988d: chap. 2; Adorno 1998c: 208-209; Fromm 1966b: chap. ix; Küng 1984: 411-514; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; App. E). Mohammed by-passed the heterogeneousness of the death of the Prophet Jesus on the cross by denying it altogether, because in his sensitivity he

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1371 could not face the theodicy problem: that the all-merciful and all-powerful Allah would or could have willed or let happen such horrible torturous death to such a just and righteous man like Jesus of Nazareth (Holy Qur’an: Sura I and II; Küng 2004). Through the centuries people have been periodically obsessed with guilt, meaninglessness, or death (Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995o: 633, 674, 799; 1988d: chap. 2; Adorno 1998c: 208-209; App. E). While ultimately no image or name, cipher, symbol or sign could possibly penetrate the total otherness of death, there was always something in it which again and again elicited–as in the case of the Things-in-themselves, notions of God, Freedom and Immortality–an impossible symbolization and interpretation (Exodus 20; Kant 1929: 27, 28-29, 30-31, 74, 87, 89-90, 149, 325, 331, 333-335, 364, 369-377, 379-380, 392, 409-410, 412-414, 490, 639, 648-650; Hegel 1986a; 18, 67-69, 71, 101, 102, 182, 182, 204, 269, 289, 300, 308, 337, 350, 373-374, 381, 390, 394, 400, 421, 439, 440-442, 453, 465467, 485, 555, 570, 571-577, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 387-388, 419, 424, 425; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995o: 633, 674, 799; 1988d: chap. 2; Hodgson 1997).

Incorporation of Death It was remarkable for Adorno all the same, that modern people were so little able to incorporate death, since in view of their continuing state of non-identity with themselves, the opposite might be expected (Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995o: 633, 674, 799; 1988d: chap. 2; Adorno 1998c: 209-210; Hodgson 1997).

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According to Adorno, even the power of the instinct of self-preservation seemed to be insufficient to explain it, if it was taken on its own (Adorno 1998c: 209-210; Horkheimer 1987e: 320-350). Here Adorno wished to speak of an instinct in spite of the fact that Freud did sanction it by introducing the concept of the Ego-drives (Freud 1955; 1962a: Vol. I, 213-214; 1977; 1992; Adorno 1998c: 209-210). As far as Adorno had been able to observe these matters, it was the case that it was precisely the people who were not old and frail who put up no resistance to death, who experienced it as contingent and, in a curious way, as accidental. If a very large number of people fell victim to accidents today–in 1965–in comparison to earlier times, this seemed to Adorno to indicate something structural in the experience of death: that to the precise extent, that modern people were relatively autonomous beings aware of themselves, they experienced death, or even serious illness, as a misfortune which came upon them as perils entirely from outside and not as the result of an internal organic process (Adorno 1998c: 209-210; Habermas 1986: 53-54).

Non Confundar At the same time however, so Adorno argued, it was also the case, that, when people died very old, their great age often did not appear as something joyous (Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Adorno 1998c: 209-210; Habermas 1986: 53-54; Hodgson 1997). Adorno was speaking here of the intra-mundane aspects of death, which modern reflection on it could not really ignore, but in which it had nevertheless shown itself curiously uninterested up to the 1960s. Adorno was not speaking here to his young students of the discomforts associated with old age in the epic ideal. Yet as far as the experience of Adorno–who at this time was 63 years old–extended, there was also something immeasurably sad in the fact that in Modernity, with the decline of very old people the hope of the Christian non confundar–I shall not perish, of something which will be preserved from the radical negation of death, was also eroded, because, especially if one loved them–as he had loved his Jewish father Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund, his Catholic mother Maria Wiesengrund née Calvelli-Adorno delle Piane, and his Catholic aunt and second mother

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1373 Agathe Calvelli-Adorno delle Piane–one became so aware of the decrepitude of that part of them which one would like to regard as the immortal that one could hardly imagine what was to be left over from such a poor, infirm creature which was no longer identical with itself (Scheible 1989: 7-38; Adorno 1998c: 209-210; 2002a; 2003a; Küng 1982; 1994a: 336601; App. E). Adorno differentiated between the personified and incarnate and naked interest of the Hamlet monologue, if every individual was absolutely annihilated with death, and if he had the hope of the Christian non confundar (Shakespeare 1978: 1164-1211; Krauss 1880; Adorno 2003a: 313-314). The non confudar came from the Te Deum, the Ambrosian praise-song, a hymn, which had originated in the 5th/6th centuries and which the Roman Catholic Church used in the Matutinservice (Adorno 2003a: 313-314, 410/317; App. E). Luther had made a German translation of the Te Deum for the Protestant-Evangelical hymn book. A large number of composers from Orlando di Lasso to Zoltan Kodaly, from Bach to Mozart, from Berlioz through Bruckner to Verdi, had put the Te Deum to music. The last verse of the hymn followed the Vulgata text of Psalm 30 or 70: In te Domine speravi non confundar in aeternum (I hope in you, o Lord; I may not perish in eternity) (Adorno 2002a: 313-314, 410/317; App. E).

Adorno quoted this formula very often not only in connection with religion and its eschatological/apocalyptic tendencies, but also with art and its utopian promises (Adorno 1997f: 119; 1997g: 199-200; 1997k: 214; 1997p: 320). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, unlike Max Weber, Marcuse, and Habermas, and like Fromm and Benjamin, Adorno was very much religiously musical.

Abstract Existence Thus, according to Adorno, very old people, who were really reduced to what Hegel would have called their mere abstract existence, those who had defied death longest, were precisely the ones who most strongly awakened the idea of absolute annulment (Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986d: 164; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 259, 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 49, 535539, 1986j: 21, 286; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408;

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1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Adorno 1998c: 209-210; Habermas 1982; 1986: 53-54; 1988b; Hodgson 1997). Nevertheless, for Adorno, this experience of death as something fortuitous and external–rather like an illness one had been infected with, without knowing its source–did contain a moment connected with the autonomy of mind (Hegel 1986c; Adorno 1963; 1998c: 209-210). It was that, because the mind had wrested itself so strongly from what humans merely were, had made itself so autonomous, this in itself gave rise to a hope that mere immediate existence might not be everything. While Horkheimer and Adorno and the other critical theorists, did like Kant and unlike Hegel not know the Thing-in-itself, they, nevertheless, believed like Kant and Hegel, but not in a Lutheran or Calvinistic Christian, but rather in a Jewish sense, in God, Freedom and Immortality: their longing for the radically demythologized wholly Other included not only the yearning for liberation and happiness, but also the desperate hope for the Christian non confundar, so powerfully expressed in Mozart’s Catholic Requiem–the rescue of the hopeless, particularly the innocent victims of history on Judgment Day: Dies Irae, Dies Illa (Day of Wrath, that Day) (Isaiah 65-66; Revelation 21-22; Holy Qur’an, Sura 7: 87, 20: 112; 21: 47; 27: 83-90; 37: 37-39; Kant 1929: 490; Hegel 1986a67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571, 590591; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539, 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 59-95, 129, 185-346; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1995o: 633, 674, 799; 1988d: chap. 2; 1986q: 59-95, 185-346; Adorno 1998c: 209-213; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Küng 1983; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; 2005a; 2005b; 2005d; 2006a; 2006b: 91-137; App. E).

Paradoxical Hope: Immortality According to Adorno, if people did not cling to the thesis of the identity of subject and object taught by idealism from Kant through Fichte and Schelling to Hegel, and if the subject, mind, reflecting itself critically, did not equate itself to, and devour everything which existed, it may happen that the mind, which had become as unidentical to the world as the world had become to it, took on a small moment of not-being-engulfed-inblind-contingency: Adorno called it a very paradoxical form of hope (Hegel

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1375 1986b: 10, 11, 22, 37, 38, 39, 48, 50-52, 58, 60-61, 67-68, 71, 94, 95, 96, 87, 98, 99, 111, 112, 252, 255, 307, 309, 310, 311, 312, 322, 329, 371-372, 414, 457; 1986c: 568; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985c; 195d; 1985e; Marcuse 1960; 1970a: chap. 1; 1987; Adorno 1998c: 211-212; Metz 1975b; Metz/Wiesel 1993; App. E). In Adorno’s view, the very curious persistence of the idea of immortality in Modernity may be connected to this paradoxical hope. For this idea of immortality seemed to Adorno to manifest itself more substantially where consciousness was more advanced than in the official positive religions (Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124, 155, 226, 240, 266-268, 387-388, 424, 425, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458460; 1986n: 134, 135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 129; 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 331; Haecker 1935; Horkheimer 1985g: 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 29, 37, 40; 1988d: chap. 2; 1995o: 633, 674, 799; Adorno 1998c: 211-212; App. E). Even as a child in Frankfurt a.M. Adorno had been surprised how little attention was paid to these last things–e.g. just a few pages in a Protestant hymn book or for that matter, so the dialectical religiologist may add, a small chapter at the end of large Catholic dogmatic books–whereas he expected them to be the only ones which mattered to a religion (Revelation 21-22; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978: 70-74, 78-90; Küng 1984; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; Metz 1959; 1972a; 1972b; 1973b; 1975b; 1977; 1980; Metz/Wiesel 1993; 1995; 1997; 1998; App. E). Here Adorno reminded his students, on July 27, 1965, of the magnificent passage in Marcel Proust depicting the death of the writer Bergotte, who was Anatole France, in which in a truly grandiose, regenerative, mystical speculation, the writer’s books, displayed by his deathbed, were interpreted as allegories of the fact that, on account of its goodness, this life had not been wholly in vain (Proust 1981; 2004; Adorno 1973c; 1973d; 1998c: 211-212; 2000c: 186/14). Proust wrote about Bergotte: He was dead. Permanently dead? Who shall say? Certainly our experiments in spiritualism prove no more than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying the burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the condition of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be fastidious, to be polite even, nor make the talented artist consider himself obliged to begin over again a core of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his body devoured by worms, like the patch of

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chapter twenty-seven yellow wall painted with so much knowledge and skill by an artist who must for ever remain unknown and is barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations which have not their sanction in our present life seem to belong to a different world, founded upon kindness, scrupulosity, selfsacrifice, a world entirely different from this, which we leave in order to be born into this world, before perhaps returning to the other to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we have obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, knowing not whose hand had traced them there–those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only–and still!–to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not wholly and permanently dead is by no means improbable (Proust 1981; 2004; Adorno 2000c: 186/14).

For the critical theorist of religion in Proust’s writing religion is not only criticized and left behind, but also preserved: his writing contains residuals of the teleological and even the originally Christian ontological proof for the existence of God, and thus also for the possibility and probability of human freedom and immortality (Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; 347-536; Proust 1981; 2004; Adorno 2000c: 186/14; App. E). While here Proust and Adorno go beyond Kant they fall nevertheless behind Hegel: they move inbetween the two great thinkers (Kant 1929: 500-532; 1974a; 1974b; 1975: 77-93; 1982; Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; 347-536; Horkheimer 1987: 1399, 100-118, 133-137, 138-144, 221-232, 263, 264-266, 270-271, 273-274, 278, 280-284, 345-408; Proust 1981; 2004; Adorno 2000c: 186/14). It is not unlikely, that Adorno saw his own life, and work and particularly his own death–which at the time, on July 27, 1965, was approaching fast as he with his heart illness worked and fought very hard with all his energy against the return of the brown or red fascism, the overpowering positivistic attitude, and the so called German administration of justice, which blamed him for the whole revolutionary student movement from Tokyo through Frankfurt to Rome–very much in the light of Proust’s description of the death of the poet Bergotte, or Anatole France (Adorno 1998c: 201226; 2000c: 186/14; Adorno/Mann 2003; Scheible 1989: 131-146).

Topography of the Void On July 1965, Adorno told his students, that they would find something similar about death as in the work of Marcel Proust also in the writings of Samuel Beckett, who had of course been anathema to all affirmative people and in whose work everything revolved around the question what nothingness actually contained: the question, Adorno was almost tempted

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1377 to say, of a topography of the void (Beckett 1970; 1972a; 1972b; Adorno 1973d: 167-214; 1998c: 211-213). According to Adorno, here informed by Hegel’s dialectic of being, nothing and becoming in the beginning of his Science of Logic, Beckett’s work had really been an attempt so to conceive nothingness that it was, at the same time, not merely nothingness, but to do so within complete negativity (Hegel 1986e: 82-114; Beckett 1970; 1972a; 1972b; Adorno 1973d: 167-214; 1997f; 1998c: 211-213, 214-226; 2000c: 186-187/15). In Adorno’s view, the question was: is nothingness the same as nothing (Tiedemann 1994: 44, 73; 1998c: 211-213; Adorno 2000c: 186/15)? With Beckett absolutely everything was thrown away, because there was only hope where nothing was kept back: the fullness of nothingness. This was the reason for Beckett’s insistence on the zero point. For Adorno, the positive categories, such as hope, were the absolutely negative ones in Beckett’s work. Yet, according to Adorno, that word of complete negativity, too, should be said with extreme gentleness and circumspection (Adorno 2000c: 186/15; 1998c: 211-213; Tiedemann 1994: 44, 73).

Non-Permanence of Death It was maybe no accident that in the passage of Proust, Adorno had just referred to the writer who chose a formulation which bore a curious resemblance to statements of Kafka, with whom he had otherwise nothing directly in common (Kafka 1964; 1993a; 1993b; 2001; Schweppenhäuser 1981; Adorno 2000c: 186/15; 1998c: 211-213; Tiedemann 1994: 44,73). Adorno attempted to explore this connection in his the Kleine Proust Kommentar in the second volume of his Noten zur Literatur (Adorno 1981; 1997k: 213-215; 2000c: 186/15; 1998c: 211-213; Schweppenhäuser 1981; Adorno 2000c: 186/15; 1998c: 211-213; Tiedemann 1994: 44, 73). In his comparison between Proust and Kafka, Adorno found a Proust-statement, which had echoes of Kafka. It was the idea that Bergotte was not wholly and permanently dead, which was by no means improbable: the non-permanence of death (Kafka 1964; 1993a; 1993b; 2001; Proust 1981; Adorno 1981; 1997k: 213-215; 1998c: 211-213; 2000c: 186/15; Schweppenhäuser 1981; Tiedemann 1994: 44, 73). According to Adorno, the less people really lived, or perhaps more correctly, the more they became aware that they had been damaged and had not really lived, the more abrupt and frightening death became for them, and the more it appeared as a misfortune (Krauss 1880; Kafka 1964; 1993a; 1993b; 2001; Proust 1981; Adorno 1951; 1981; 1997k: 213-215; 1998c: 211-213; 2000c: 186/15; Schweppenhäuser 1981; Tiedemann 1994: 44, 73). It was for Adorno, as if, in death, people

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experienced their own reification: that they had been corpses from the first. In Adorno’s view, such an experience was expressed in the most diverse passages of expressionist poetry, by Heym and Trakl or, so the dialectical religiologist may add, Mon and Claus, taking a curiously identical form in writers otherwise at opposite poles (Mon/Claus 1991). For Adorno, the terror of death today–in 1965–was largely the terror of seeing how much the living in antagonistic capitalist society resemble it (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Adorno 1997h: 9-19, 20-41, 122-136, 147-176, 177-195, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 397-407, 408-433, 434-439, 457-477, 569-573, 578587; 1997u; Adorno 1951; 1981; 1997k: 213-215; 1998c: 211-213; 2000c: 186/15; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 30). According to Adorno, if life were lived rightly in alternative Future III–the reconciled society, the experience of death would also be changed radically, in its innermost composition (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Kafka 1964; 1993a; 1993b; 2001; Proust 1981; Adorno 1951; 1981; 1997k: 213-215; 1998c: 211-213; 2000c: 186/15; Schweppenhäuser 1981; Tiedemann 1994: 44,73; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; App. G). Of course, Adorno had moved under the impression of World War II, which once more did not end in a real peace and a truly new world order, but rather in the Cold War, from Hegel’s positive dialectic to his own negative dialectic (Adorno 1966). Thus, the negation of the negation, nothingness, did not necessarily and in a guaranteed way end in the affirmation, in becoming (Hegel 1986e: 82-114; Adorno 1998c: 214-226). Nevertheless, for Adorno as for Proust, Beckett and Kafka before death did probably not mean an abstract negation, after which nothing remained, but rather a concrete negation, after which not all was lost (Hegel 1986c: 72-76; 1986e: 4853; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30). Throughout the 20th century, the critical theorists made the greatest efforts, not to regress behind the specific, concrete, determinate negation into the general, abstract, indeterminate negation, and thus to fall into extreme bourgeois skepticism and pessimism (Hegel 1986c: 72-76; 1986e: 48-53; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 17, 18, 19, 21, 29, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1989m: chap. 7).

Critical Theory in Poetical and Musical Form When two decades after Adorno’s death in 1969, I visited his old very reflective Christian friend Walter Dirks, the great European journalist, who had learned much from him about the critical theory as well as about literature and music since the 1920s, and with whom he cooperated in the

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1379 Frankfurter Hefte and in the Institute for Social Research since 1945, at his home in the Black Forest, he told me not only that he was dying from a terminal disease, but also that in the face of his frail body and soul he could no longer believe in the Greek idea of the survival of the soul after the death of the body, but that he was still able to hold on to the JewishChristian idea of the resurrection of the flesh understood as annihilation and recreation, and that he could still believe, that even if death meant nothingness that that would still be interesting, since he had never experienced it before (Dirks 1968; 1983a; 1983b; 1985; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Siebert 1986; 1987d; 1993; App. E). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, as during World War I Horkheimer developed the critical theory of society out of his poetical writings, so later on it was represented in the poetical works of great writers like Kafka, Proust and Beckett, etc (Horkheimer 1988a; 1987k: 289-344; Adorno 1973a; 1973d; 1973e; 1981; 1997g; 1997k; 1997u; 1998c: 211-213; 2000c: 186/15; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 22, 23, 24, 25; 1988: chaps. 1, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 43, 44, 47, 48). Their writings were the critical theory of society in poetical form. The critical theory was deeply rooted not only in great modern literature, but also in great modern music like that of Beethoven, Mahler, Schönberg, Berg, etc. (Adorno 1960; 1973c; 1981; 1991b; 1993a; 1996; 1997h; 1997k; 1997l; 1997m; 1997n; 1997o; 1997p; 1997q; 1997r; 1997s; 2002b; 2002c). Their works were the critical theory of society in musical form.

Death and History That whole topography of the void was probably the most audacious and extreme negative-dialectical, negative-metaphysical, cipher-theological speculation about death and the paradoxical, desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless by which Adorno could demonstrate, at least as a possibility, the link between the historical immanent sphere and what were called the great theological and metaphysical categories (Adorno 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1974; 1980b; 1982; 1990; 1993c; 1997a; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997e; 1997f; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c: 212-213; 2000b; 2000c; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d; Adorno/ Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Adorno/ Dirks 1974; Brändle 1984; Habermas 1986: 53-54; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247; Peukert 1976: 278-282; App. E). According to Adorno, death and history formed a constellation. For Adorno, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and a product of Luther’s Wittenberg, was the first wholly self-aware and

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despondently self-reflecting individual (Shakespeare 1878: 1164-1211; Adorno 1998c: 212-213; Lortz 1962a; 1962b). For Adorno, Hamlet experienced his essence as something absolutely transitory. In Hamlet the absolute experience of the individual as the self, and the experience of its absolute transience, that the rest is silence, coincided. By contrast, so Adorno argued, it was probably the case today–in 1965–that, because the individual actually no longer existed in modern civil society, death had become something wholly incommensurable: the annihilation of a nothing. He who died realized that he had been cheated out of everything. For Adorno, that was precisely why death was so unbearable in modern bourgeois or socialist society. Adorno pointed out, that in this fact that the horizon of death had been displaced in a curious way, what he might call the good side of the decline of the individual revealed not only modern peoples’ ego-weakness, not only functionalization of the ego, not only the expropriation of the ego, but also took away something of the illusoriness and guilt which had always persisted in the category of individuation up to the threshold of the modern age (Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 2, 6, 8, 9, 14,15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 33, 34, 37; Mitscherlich 1993; 1994; Landauer 1999; Jung 1933; 1958; 1990; Drewermann 1989; 1992a; 1992b; 1992c; Mitscherlich 1993; 1994).

Decline of Academic Freedom What Adorno experienced in 1965 inside and outside the university as ego-weakness, functionalization and expropriation of the ego, of its language and of its conscience the dialectical religiologist could experience during the neo-liberal era between the Nixon and the second Bush Administration as further developed and as manifested inside American and European universities in the form of the decline of academic freedom of individual scholars to express critical ideas and action without fear of retribution through dictates and censure of administrators, political authorities and public pressures and the application of Fordism and Tailorism to the academic work process in the interest of more efficient production strategies (Marcuse 1960; 1962: 65-66; 1967; 1969b; 1970a: chap. 1; 2001; Habermas 1969; 1970; Zaggarell 2009; Siebert 1978; 2005a; 2005b; 2007a: 99-113; 2007f: 1-168; 2007g). The faculties have become more faceless. The protection of academic freedom, the freedom from fear, reprisal and repression of critical ideas and praxis, the guarantee of participation in the governing of the higher educational institutions could no longer be dependent on the traditional model of the heroic actions of responsible

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1381 individuals, as praiseworthy as those actions had been, but could only be achieved through more intensive and extensive unionization: solidarity (Habermas 1986; Zaggarell 2009; Siebert 2001; 2002a).

Determinate Negation For Adorno, there existed a crucial distinction between his own considerations about death and the decline of the individual and the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless, and other metaphysical categories, on one hand, and the Hegelian philosophy to which his own negative metaphysics owned so much, on the other (Adorno 1998c: 214-226; Haag 1983; 2005). The crucial distinction lay in the fact that Hegel’s philosophy contained a moment by which that philosophy, despite having made the principle of determinate negation its vital nerve, had passed over into affirmation and therefore into mythology and ideology: the belief that negation, by being pushed far enough, and by reflecting itself, was one with positivity (Adorno 1963; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 23-24; 2002: 17-18). This Hegelian doctrine of the positive negation was precisely and strictly the point at which Adorno and all the other critical theorists of society refused passionately to follow Hegel. According to Adorno, people might be inclined to think that if the present situation of 1965 was really experienced as negatively as they all experienced it, and as only he had taken it upon himself as a kind of Biblical scapegoat, to express it–that being the only difference separating him from other people–then people might think that by negating this negativity he had already attained the positive. That was indeed a very great temptation. When Adorno told his students in 1965 that the form of determinate negation was the only form in which metaphysical experience survived today, Adorno himself was moving at least in the direction of that idea.

The Negation of the Negation However, for Adorno, this transition was not itself compelling (Adorno 1963; 1998c: 214-226; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 23-24; 2002: 17-18; Haag 1983; 2005). For if Adorno said that the negation of the negation was the positive, that idea would contain within itself a thesis of the philosophy of identity and could only be carried through, if he had already assumed the unity of subject and object, which was supposed to emerge at the end of his discourse with his students. If, however, his students took

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seriously the idea Adorno had put forward, that the truth of ideas was bound up with the possibility of their being wrong, the possibility of their failure, then they would see that this idea was invalidated by the proposition that, merely by negating the negation, he already had the positive. In that case, Adorno and his students would be back again in the sphere of false, deceptive and mythical and ideological certainty in which nothing could be wrong and in which, probably, for that reason, everything he and the students said, would be all the more hopelessly lost, Here the critical theorist of religion remembers, that the students, with whom Adorno discoursed in 1965, would soon rebel against liberal society and even against his own Institute for Social Research, believing that they were translating his theory into political praxis (Scheible 1989: 131-146; Adorno 1963; 1998c: 214-226; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 23-24; 2002: 17-18; Haag 1983; 2005; Habermas 1969; 1970).

Transcendence According to Adorno, for thought there was really no other possibility and no other opportunity, than to do what the miner’s adage forbid: to work it’s way through the darkness, like Hamlet’s mole dug its way up to the light, without a lamp, without possessing the positive through the higher concept of the negation of the negation, and to immerse itself in the darkness as deeply as it possibly could (Shakespeare 1878: 1164-1211; Adorno 1963; 1970b; 1998c: 212-226; Lortz 1962a; 1962b; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969a: 23-24; 2002: 17-18; Haag 1983; 2005; Habermas 1969; 1970). For one thing was undoubtedly true for Adorno: where there was no longer life, the temptation to mistake its remnants for the Absolute, for flashes of meaning, was extremely great. Adorno did not want to take that truth back. Nevertheless, so Adorno argued, nothing could be even experienced as living, if it did not contain a promise of something transcending life–the wholly Other (Adorno 1963; 1998c: 212-226; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; App. E). This Transcendence therefore was, and at the same time was not–and beyond that contradiction it was no doubt very difficult, and probably impossible, for thought to go. Adorno had the feeling that he had reached the point where the insufficiency of his own reflections converged with the impossibility of thinking that which must, nevertheless, be thought. Adorno hoped that he might have given his students at least an idea of that convergence.

the desperate hope for the rescue of the hopeless 1383 Exodus: Redemption and Liberation The dialectical religiologist remembers that the Hebrew prophets saw history as a recurrent pattern of divine acts of redemption (Ezekiel 2829; Lieber 2001: 369-373; App. E). As a prophecy of future liberation the Prophet Ezekiel drew on the imagery of the first great act of divine salvation for Israel: the Exodus from Egypt (Exodus 10-24; Lieber 2001: 369480; App. E). Through His saving acts God again will be recognized as the transcendent source of redemption and will vindicate human hopes in freedom from oppression. Ezekiel’s prophecy was thus a counterpoint to historical despair. The people were challenged to look beyond political alliances and the false confidence they bring. Only divine power will liberate the people. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, Jews, Christians and Muslims, like Suzuki and Martino, Scholem and Wiesel, Tillich, Rahner and Barth, Dirks and Kogon, Metz, Peters, Peukert and Arens, Baum, Küng, Kuschel, and Milbank, and Tariq Ramadan on one hand, and secular enlighteners and humanists like Bloch, Adorno, Bloch, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Sohn-Rethel, Fromm, Habermas, Honneth, Dubiel and Zizek as well as Thomas Mann, Brecht, and Beckett, on the other, could encounter death in history through different symbolical theodicy models, in order thereby not to affirm, or justify, or legitimate positivistically, fascistically, or neo-liberally what is the case as if it ought to be, but rather if not to understand or comprehend the monstrous, meaningless human suffering theoretically, then at least to endure it trustingly and thus to find true confidence and a paradoxical–a la Pascal–or a dialectical– a la Hegel–hope for the hopeless in the Eternal, or in the wholly Other than the inverted, unjust, finite world: a practical theodicy (Ezekiel 2829; Lieber 2001: 368-373; Matthew 5-7; Leibniz 1996; Hegel 1986a: 198, 462, 485-491, 539-540, 545, 571, 604; 1986b: 641-482; 1986c: 335, 353, 590-591; 1986g: 26-27, 42-43, 335, 353, 492, 494, 502; 1986l: 28, 313315, 324-330, 369, 370, 549; 1986o: 353; 1986p: 88, 216; 1986q: 273-274, 289-299; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; Kamenka 1983: 115-116; Miranda 1982; Lischer 1979; Norris 1974l; Schneider 1955; Adorno 1997j/2: 608626; 1998c: 201-226; 2002a: 302-341; Brunkhorst 1999; Adorno/SohnRethel 1991; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Adorno/ Tobisch 2003; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno/ Mann 2003; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1974c: 101-104, 116-117; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1990b; 1992; 1995; 2001; Fromm/ Suzuki/Martino 1960; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1982; 1990: chap.

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1; Zizek/Milbank 2009; Sölle/Haberms 1975; Arens 2007; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; Schilling 1951; Baum 2003; 2004; 2009; Küng 1970; 1991b: 726-730; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Metz 1975b; 1977; 1995; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Oelmüller 1990; 1992; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; 2005b; 2006d; App. E). While the Abrahamic Religions like the Chinese Religion of Measure, Hinduism as the Religion of Imagination, Jainism, Buddhism as the Religion of Inwardness have advanced to the Golden Rule, they unfortunately also still remain under the spell of the Jus or Lex Talionis: the Talion-Theodicy (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Küng 1970; 1984; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Beckert 1984; De Chardin 1965; Efron 2009; Kim 1996: 267-283; Ott 2009; Petuchowski 1956: 543-549; Peukert 2009; Siebert 2009k; 2010). Adam and Eve and the whole human species suffer hard labor, difficult births, and death for the great original sin (Genesis 31; Horkheimer 1971). For the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth a pillar fell on people and killed them because they had sinned and had not repented. The mass murderer Pilate killed Galileans while they sacrificed in the Temple because they had sinned and had not repented. Jesus’s friends interpreted his torturous death on the cross in terms of the Talion-Theodicy: he had to die not for his own sins, but for the sin or the sins of the whole human species (Matthew 26-28; Mark 14-16; Luke 22-24; John 18-20; App. E). The dialectical religiology maintains the desperate hope, that the Lex Talionis and the Talion-Theodicy will be concretely superseded and that the Golden Rule–Love–will be practiced and that the hopeless innocent victims will be rescued (Petuchowski 1956: 543-594; Peukert 2009; Siebert 2009k; 2010; Kim 1996: 267-283; Pope Benedict XVI 2009).

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Trust in the Eternal One According to the critical theory of society, religion was no longer understood as it was for the Jews as the fear of the Lord, but rather according to the Jewish Christians as the call not to be afraid, and to be friendly and kind, and to estimate love to be higher than the law (Horkheimer 1988a; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; Wheatland 2009; Efron 2009; App. E). Religion was the longing for perfect justice and unconditional love. Religion was the yearning that the murderer would not triumph over the innocent victim in spite of or precisely because of the fact that in the 20th and 21st centuries by far not all mass murderers in high political places were sent to the Nürnberg Trial or the Tokyo Trial or later on the War Criminal Tribunal in Den Haag built out of the advances in international law made during the former trials (Persico 1994; Tudjman 1996; Habermas 1993a).

New Translation of Religion In Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s view, religion was the chorismas or abyss between the all-benevolent and all-powerful God on one hand, and the murderous world on the other: the exact opposite of the Deus sive nature of pantheism and idealism (Hegel 198l; 1986g: 339-514; Horkheimer 1988a; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1970b; Persico1994; Tudjman 1996; Habermas 1993a; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b). It was the precise opposite of the fascist aristocratic principle of nature, which affirmed the supremacy of the predator over the prey, and according to which almost every living being was programmed to eat other living beings for its own sustenance and survival (Hegel 1986g: 382-397; 490-514, 1986l: 33-55; 1986q: 501535; Hitler 1943: chap. II). Contrary to fascism, for the critical theorists God did not reward the predators and punish the prey, be they individuals or nations. The dialectical religiology continues the new interpretation of religion and the identification of what was missing in secular antagonistic civil society started by the critical theory of society (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Siebert 2000; 2001; 2002a).

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Horkheimer’s critical theory of society reached its theological and metaphysical climax in his trust in the Eternal (Genesis 20; Psalm 81; Ezekiel 2829; Lieber 2001: 368-373; Matthew 6: 25-34; John 18: 28-40; Horkheimer 1985g: 17, 29, 37, 40; App. E). Horkheimer’s confidence in the Eternal was rooted in the Torah, the word understood in the broader sense, and in the New Testament as well as in the Kantian and Hegelian philosophy, and permeated his whole work from the very start, and transcended life and death (Hegel 1986c; 1986p; 1986q; Horkheimer 1974c: 86-97; 1988a; 1985g: 17, 29, 37, 40; 1987k: 289-328; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1998c: 201-226; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1974; 1976; 1990b; 1997; 2001; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Ott 2001; 2004; 2007; Siebert 2005b). For Horkheimer, as for Adorno before, death had most of all a social side: it was a social phenomenon (Genesis 4: 1-16; Hertz 5716/1956: 13-15/1-16; Horkheimer 1974c: 254255, 288-289; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-626; 1998c: 201-226; 2002a: 302-341; Brunkhorst 1999; App. E). In the view of Horkheimer, who survived both of his friends, Tillich the believer and theologian, and Adorno the enlightener and philosopher, this social character of death had been true from the Biblical days of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4; Horkheimer1974c: 254255, 288-289; 1987b: 381-382; 1985g: chaps. 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29; 1989m: chap. 29; Adorno 1997j/2: 608-626; 1998c: 201-226; 2002a: 302-341; App. E). In Horkheimer’s perspective, the Biblical story of Cain and Abel was the mythologized remembrance of a revolution and of a liberating action of the slaves against their masters (Genesis 4; Hegel 1986c: 145-155; Horkheimer1974c: 254-255, 288-289; 1987b: 381-382; App. E). The bourgeois ideologues immediately interpreted the insurrection as a product of resentment: And Cain was very annoyed, and his countenance fell. If however, so Horkheimer argued, this Biblical story was to be taken literally, then Cain could have invented that notion of resentment when the blood of Abel cried to heaven: Don’t listen to these screams; it cries out of resentment. In any case, in the perspective of the critical theory of religion, death and dying have an external social side, besides an internal, theological one. Already Heraclitus, philosopher of becoming, who lived from 535 until 475 BC, understood death externally and internally as a boundary that needs to be crossed so that we may meet with our loved ones again (Genesis 4; Hegel 1986c: 145-155; 1986e: 84, 185, 226; 1986h: 57, 193; 1986i: 146, 336, 522; 1986q: 499; 1986r: 14, 194, 216, 238, 301, 319-343; Horkheimer 1974c: 254-255, 288-289; 1987b: 381-382; Gosic 2008: 227).

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Inequality of Death Horkheimer stated already before the Second World War, four decades before his own death in 1973, that all people had to die, but that in antagonistic modern civil society not all people died in the same and equal way (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Horkheimer 1974c: 254-255; 1987b: 338-339, 373-379, 382-383, 386-387, 397; Adorno 1997h: 9-19, 42-85, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 440-456; 569-573, 578-587). Horkheimer did not want to talk of the rich people who could prolong their lives with a thousand means. Horkheimer also did not want to talk about the fact that the art of surgery was extremely expensive. He rather wanted to talk simply about dying. Horkheimer had to admit that the more or less painful causes of death were relatively equally distributed among the social classes of late capitalist society (Adorno 1979: Vol. I, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 440456, 569-573, 578-587; Horkheimer 1974c: 255). Yet, so Horkheimer argued, there existed already differences inside the same illness, which came about through class-specifically differentiated attention in prophylaxis, treatment, and care. However for Horkheimer that would still be the least problem. In Horkheimer’s view, one small observation and remark was sufficient in order to make the whole ideology of impartiality of death stagger and waver. Horkheimer suggested a mental experiment: One may make known everywhere that the surviving relatives of those who will die in the next 14 days, no matter in which way, should be decently fed and clothed for the rest of their lives. Then, not only the suicide rate and statistics would shoot up all over the world. There would also be a respectable number of human beings, women and men, who would execute these suicides with a cool and calm attitude, which would be to the honor of every stoic (Hegel 1986g: 259-260; 1986j: 301-302; 1986k: 469; 1986l: 96; 1986r: 523, 544, 551, 554, 1986s: 255-296; 1986t: 368, 457; Horkheimer 1974c: 255). Here it was obvious for Horkheimer, that the death of the millionaire was not the same as the death of the proletarian. Death was the last part of life. The poor man knew in this last stage of his life that his family would be chastised, after he died and perished. Horkheimer told the story of a female worker, whose feet had been scattered and crushed in an accident. A minute after the accident, the female worker wailed: now I cannot work any longer; my poor man, my poor children, now I am useless. Horkheimer stressed that the female worker did not think of herself. Horkheimer compared this case of the female worker with that of a lady, who had fallen from her horse, or who had suffered a car accident. During her illness, this lady experienced other perspectives than the female worker.

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The large number of the lady’s friends need not care concerning the loss of her usefulness, but are allowed to be concerned with the care of her personally.

Healthcare Differential In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, Horkheimer himself belonged to those rich people in Germany, to the middle bourgeoisie, and so did most of his colleagues in the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and New York, at least originally (Gumnior/Ringguth 1973: chaps. 1-3; Rosen 1995: Part I; Scheible 1989: chaps. 1-3). Yet, when Horkheimer’s life came to its end in 1973, through a heart disease and prostate cancer, he did not use any extraordinary means, which the millionaire could easily have afforded, in order to prolong his life (Haag 1982; Gumnior/Ringguth 1973; Horkheimer 1974c: 254-255, 288-289). The health care differential in different social classes in European and particularly American liberal civil societies continues today–in March 2010. At present in the USA, 40 million people are without health insurance. The critical religiologist knows from experience that when poor people come to American hospitals today–in 2010–they must be treated by law. However, since they cannot pay, they are treated only very superficially, except maybe in a Catholic hospital, which then pays itself for the poor patients’ care, and is soon threatened by bankruptcy. People who are on Medicare are not treated on the same level as people are taken care of who can afford a private insurance. In April 2009, a young mentally ill black man died suddenly in a local hospital here in Kalamazoo. His poor family was terribly upset about his death because they lived from the pension that he received because of his mental illness. Due to his death, the pension would cease and the family would starve. The poor family planned to sue the doctors and the hospital in order thus to find a new source of income in the midst of the present economic tsunami. The healthcare differential and the consequent inequality of death are important factors in the latently or manifestly ongoing class struggle in late capitalist society, based on the principle: egoism and selfishness are good (Hegel 1986a: 555; 1986c: 152, 153, 154, 185; 1986g: 384, 339-397; 1986k: 94; 1986l: 346-348; Marx/Engels 2005; Horkheimer 1974c: 254-255; 1987b: 338-339, 373-379, 382-383, 386-387, 397; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2; Adorno 1997h: 9-19, 42-85, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 440-456; 569-573, 578-587).

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Divine Home Like his great teacher Kant, Horkheimer did not know much about the Thing-in-itself: God, freedom and immortality, and thus, was also not aware of what would come after death (Kant 1929: 28-29, 30-31, 89-90, 325, 331, 333-335, 364, 369-377, 379-380, 392, 409-411, 412-414, 430, 438, 464-479, 490, 559, 639, 548-650; Adorno 1979: Vol. I, 354-372, 373391, 392-396, 440-456, 569-573, 578-587; Horkheimer 1974c: 255; 1987b: 15-74, 75-146; 1985g: chaps. 3, 13; Joyce 1996: 984-988; Harprecht 2005: 8-9). While Horkheimer engaged, like so many thinkers between Kant and Habermas, in methodological atheism, he was never a substantial, or existential, or scientific atheist (Horkheimer 1974c: chaps. 2, 3, 4; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 28, 29, 37, 40). For such substantial atheism, there was after all too much beauty and happiness in nature, and even in history, in spite of all their horror and terror (Jäger 2004: 209-213). Horkheimer was neither an atheist, nor a theist, but rather a humanistic post-theist, longing for the totally Other. In Horkheimer’s post-theism, theism as well as atheism were determinately negated. As a post-theist, Horkheimer did not know what came after death. He did know, however, that what lay before death took place in the context of the late capitalistic class society. However, in spite of the fact that Horkheimer, as critical theorist, did not have much to say about the totally Other beyond the slaughter bench of nature and history, he, nevertheless, longed for it, and despite of the fact that he did not know anything about life after death, or eternal life, he, nevertheless, hoped for it (Horkheimer 1985g: 207-212). Thus, while still being in American exile, Horkheimer requested in 1945 through the Synagogue in Bern, in which he had a seat, and the Jewish Social Services in Switzerland, and through his lawyer, that the first verse of Psalm 91, be written on the gravestone of his parents, Moriz Horkheimer (1858-1945), factory owner, and Babette Horkheimer, nee Lauchheimer (1869-1946), in the Jewish cemetery of Bern, in his own free German version from the Lutheran translation, as many Jewish and Christian believers, theologians and religionists had done before him: Wer im Schirm des Höchsten wohnt, der ist im Schatten des Allmächtigen geborgen. [Who lives in the shelter of the Most High (Elyon), he makes his home in the shadow of the Almighty–God in heaven, El Shaddai] (Psalm 91: 1; Haag 1982; Goldstein 2006: chap. 4; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; Goldstein 2006: 61-150; Efron 2009; App. E).

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According to the Lutheran translation, which Horkheimer presupposed, Psalm 91: 1 reads: Wer unter dem Schirm des Höchsten sitzt und unter dem Schatten des Allmächtigen bleibt. [If you live in the shelter of Elyon and make your home in the shadow of El Shaddai] (Horkheimer 1985g: 206-207; App. E).

Horkheimer made this request because his mother had loved this Psalm 91. Horkheimer was never able to separate Psalm 91 from the remembrance of the shine in her eyes up to 1968, five years before his own death. According to Horkheimer, Psalm 91 was the expression of his mother’s certainty of a Divine home, in the face of the trouble, and terror, and fright in the reality of fascist Germany and Europe. Horkheimer’s father and mother were finally driven by car–against Nazi orders–by a Catholic driver from their hometown of Stuttgart into Swiss exile, and were thus rescued from the German concentration camps. Horkheimer remained always deeply grateful to the Catholic driver, who had risked much. Later on, Horkheimer along with Thomas Mann did research about religious support for persecuted Jews in fascist Germany, and found out that conservative Catholics had been most helpful (Horkheimer 1988n: 452; Adorno/Mann 2003). I myself had the opportunity to witness and participate in such support, when I was a member of the Catholic Youth movement in fascist Germany (Horkheimer 1991f: 214-215, 225, 363-364, 344345, 345-346, 347-350, 417; 1985l: 165-171, 172-184; Dalin 2005; Haffner 2001; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993). On April 21, 2009, on Holocaust Memorial Day, I remembered and had to admit that unfortunately such Catholic help did not make much of a difference concerning the Shoa as a whole. In 1946, shortly after the end of World War II, the Catholic Youth produced a play on the ruins of the bombed out old city of Frankfurt a.M., the message of which was that this whole catastrophe happened because the Germans had forgotten to pray the Our Father, the text of which is entirely Jewish, or because they had even perverted idolatrously the prayer by replacing the heavenly Father by the Führer. While the play may have looked somewhat childlike to the secular audience, it, nevertheless, carried much meaning and truth for the believers. Not only Horkheimer, but also Adorno and Bloch spoke, like Goethe and Hölderlin, Schubert and Mahler, Eichendorff and Nietzsche and Maupassant before, about such an eternal home or homeland, which had been indicated through natural and historical ciphers; and which had been shining into the childhood of all people, religious as well as secular; and in which nobody had ever been yet; and in which human beings would lose themselves in order to find

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themselves; and in which they would find their souls, as they would be raised to it (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972: 227-229; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985e: chap. 55; Jäger 2004: 209-213; App. E).

Hope and Confidence in the Eternal Horkheimer requested through his testament that the Synagogue of Bern should put on his and his wife Maidon’s gravestone in the Jewish cemetery of Bern the second verse of Psalm 91 (Genesis17: 2; Psalm 91: 2; Hertz 5716/1956: 57-58/2; Haag 1982; Goldstein 2006; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; Efron 2009; App. E). Today–in 2010–the inscription on Horkheimer’s gravestone reads: Maidon Horkheimer Geb. Riekher 1887-1969 Prof. Dr. Max Horkheimer Ehrenbürger von Frankfurt A.M. 1895-1973 Denn Du Ewiger Bist Meine Zuversicht. TNZBH.

According to the Lutheran translation that Horkheimer used, Psalm 91: 2 reads: Meine Zuversicht und meine Burg, mein Gott, auf den ich hoffe (My refuge, and my fortress, my God in whom I hope)

Horkheimer translated freely: Denn Du, Ewiger, bist meine Zuversicht (i.e. For You, Eternal, Are My Confidence).

Horkheimer added the conjunctive Denn, (i.e. for), in order thereby to connect verse 2 of Psalm 91 on his gravestone, with verse 1 on the gravestone of his parents. Horkheimer left out the word God, which in the Hebrew text is Elyon, Shaddai, Elohim, or Yahweh, the Tetragramm, and replaced it by the word Eternal (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; Benjamin 1977: 261-263; Eco 1988: 28-36). Of course, since the Babylonian Exile up to the present–March 2010–pious Jews have not pronounced the word Yahweh (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11). They say Adonai–Lord–instead. Obviously, even Lord was still too mythological and anthropomorphic for Horkheimer and Adorno. It con-

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tradicted Horkheimer and Adorno’s radical understanding of the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30; Horkheimer 1996s: 62-67; 1985g: 17, 23, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; 1996r: 188-200; 1996s: 62-67; App. E). It also contradicted their democratic consciousness. As a matter of fact, while Psalm 91: 1-2 contains four names for God: Elyon, El Shaddai, Yahweh and Elohim, i.e. Most High, the God of heaven, the Lord, and God, Horkheimer used none of these names. However, Horkheimer still addressed the Eternal in the intimate second person, with the personal Du (i.e. You). In German, all this sounds even more powerful than the calling on the benevolent Father above the stars in Friedrich Schiller’s and Ludwig van Beethoven’s very Kantian Ode to Joy, and the 9th Symphony. For Horkheimer, his trust in the Eternal is not exclusive, but rather includes his wife Maidon, and his parents, just as for Jews, Christians, and Muslims the love of God includes the love of the neighbor. For Horkheimer and Adorno, their longing for the totally Other than the horror and terror of nature and history concretely superseded in itself all divine names contained in Psalm 91 (Adorno 1998: 199200; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; App. E). It critically negated them, but it also preserved, elevated and fulfilled them. Also, the critical theorist’s longing for the entirely Other did not exclude, but rather included marriage, family, and alternative Future III–the reconciled society (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; App. B, C, D, E, G).

The Bond of Life Eternal The members of the Jewish community of Bern, to which all the Horkheimers belonged–including Maidon, and which buried them all in the Jewish cemetery, wrote on Horkheimer’s and his parent’s gravestone, what can be found on many Jewish gravestones: TNZBH (Tihiyeh Nishmato Tz’roorah BeTzoor Hacahyim) (Genesis 7: 14; Psalm 91: 2; Hertz 5715/1956: 59/14; Haag 1982; Goldstein 2006; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; Efron 2009; App. E).

It means in traditional rendering: May his life be inscribed among the multiplicity of the living

or May his soul be bound to the bond of life eternal

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Of course, the idea of eternal life was not always equally present in Judaism (Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Schilling 1951; Küng 1982: B and C; 1991b: First Main Part; 1994a: A, B, C; 1994b; App. E). The Pharisaic belief in the resurrection came about only 200 years before the beginning of the Common Era. The Sect of the Nazarene inherited this belief from the Pharisees against the opinion of the Hellenistically enlightened Sadducees, who perished with the second temple in the year 70 AD. Yet, while the Israelites knew of the graves of Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rebecca, but not of Moses, these ancestors, nevertheless, continued to live in the memory of the people and beyond. It was this memory of the still living ancestors, which gave power to this terrible Jewish curse over the uncircumcised, the excommunicated, the apostate, or semi-apostate, as e.g. Benedict Spinoza: We shall forget you! The soul of anybody who had broken the Covenants would be cut off from his people, either through punishment at the hands of God or through expulsion from the community. However, this memory also gave power to the blessing on Jewish graves up to the present–March 2010: TNZBH. Horkheimer’s Mosaic and Kantian, and thus agnostic critical theory of society–agnostic in the sense of a docta ignorantia concerning God, freedom and immortality–did not prevent him from longing, and trusting, and having confidence, in the totally Other, and hoping for the rescue of the hopeless, and expecting to see his parents and particularly his wife Maidon again after death (Horkheimer 1988l: 38; Horkheimer 1988n: 517). Horkheimer agreed with Adorno’s often quoted psalm verse: In te Domine speravi non-confundar in aeternum (Psalm 30; Psalm 70; Adorno 1997f: 119; 1997g: 199-200; 1997k: 214; 1997p: 320; 2002a: 313-314, 410/317).

The Praise of God and the Rescue of the Just According to Horkheimer, the Jews had sung the Hebrew psalms through thousands of years (Horkheimer 1985g: 209-210; Efron 2009; App. E). Doing so, the Jews always knew that only too often they themselves had been counted among those who had been abandoned, sacrificed, and exposed to the swords of the barbarians, and to the torture chambers, and to the stake. However, so Horkheimer argued, the Jews had rather preferred to count their own dead, their own people, the individuals as well as the collective, among the rightly punished, than to forego or give up the love, and the exuberance, and the praise of the God, who would ultimately rescue them as well as the just of all nations (Isaiah 62-66; Revelation 21-22; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1951: 333-334; App. E). It appeared

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to Horkheimer that the imperturbability of the Jews was made easier through the circumstance that in Judaism the teaching about the individual human soul had not already the significance as it was the case in Christianity later on (3 Moses 17: 11; 4 Moses 23: 10; Matthew 10: 28, 39; 11: 29; 16: 26; 22: 37; Mark 8: 36, 37; 12: 30-33; Luke 10: 27; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 15, 17; App. E). According to Horkheimer, when Psalm 91 stated: You have only to look around To see how the wicked are repaid, You who can say, “Yahweh my refuge,” And make Elyon your fortress. No disaster can overtake you, No plague come near your tent: He will put you in his angels’ charge To guard you wherever you go. They will support you on their hands In case you hurt your foot against a stone; You will tread on lion and adder, Trample on savage lions and dragons.

then, this Divine protection concerned the whole of the Jewish nation as well as the individual (Psalm 91: 8-13; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 17; App. E). That attitude of insufficiency of man is the exact opposite of that of the Pharaoh, who according to the Prophet Ezekiel boasted of having created the Nile and to have made himself, and thus claimed self-sufficiency (Psalm 91: 8-13; Ezekiel 29: 3; Lieber 2001: 370/3; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 17; App. E). According to the understanding of many Rabbinic midrashim and liturgical poems, this was the more radical mythic assertion, laden with the hubris of self-creation. In Horkheimer’s view, the Jews considered the whole, however, to be the Jewish nation, which was bound together through the praxis of the Divine commandments even still in the diaspora: not in each present moment or in an already past historical situation, but as the one totality up to the end of times. This connection and relationship between the individual and the Jewish nation must not be confused with the modern nationalism, which came to its climax in the European fascism of the 20th century (Psalm 91: 8-13; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 17; Hitler 1953; 1986; App. E).

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Everlasting Life According to Horkheimer, the Jewish idea of everlasting life first of all meant in old Judaism not life in the Beyond, but the connection and relationship between the individual and the Jewish nation (Horkheimer 1985g: 210, 389-390; App. E). In Horkheimer’s view, this relationship between the individual and his nation had been crassly distorted in modern forms of nationalism. This connectedness between individual and nation had, nevertheless, its prehistory in the Hebrew Bible. As, so Horkheimer explained, the individual arranged his or her life according to the Torah, and spent his days, months and years in obedience to the Law, he or she became in spite of individual differences so much one with the others that he continued to exist after his own death in his people, in their practice of the tradition, their love to the family and to the tribe: in the expectation that some day things shall turn out well in the world (Fromm 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; Horkheimer 1985g: 210, 389-390; App. E, G). According to Horkheimer, giving witness to this eschatological expectation and the vouching for it, determined the individual Jew’s belonging to the chosen people and the disposition, views and mentality of the Jewish martyrs through the centuries, and vice versa.

The Meaning of History According to Horkheimer, however, the verses of Psalm 91, the first two of which finally appeared on his parents and his own gravestone in the Jewish cemetery of Bern, may have to be interpreted historically. For many people who sang them, including his own mother under fascist threat, they proclaimed and pronounced a meaning of history contrary to and against the ratio, i.e. the analytical understanding or instrumental rationality and action (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985g: 210-211; Fromm 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; Efron 2009; App. E). This meaning of history ran counter to what was the case in nature and history. However, this meaning of history was, nevertheless, so far distant from illusion, delusion, madness, insanity and untruth as any science (Marx 1953: 339-340; Kamenka 1883: 115-116; Niebuhr 1932; 1964; 1964; Freud 1939; 1946; 1962b; 1964; Marcuse 1970a: chap. 1; App. E). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, while the faith of the Psalmists contradicts the analytical understanding of the positivists, it comes nevertheless close to dialectical reason (Hegel 1986p: 16-26; 1986q: 342-344; Efron 2009; Hodgson 1997). There is a greater chance of reconciliation between religious faith and dialectical reason, than between

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faith and positivism, or analytical understanding, or instrumental rationality, which, of course, is dominant in the present civil society of 2010.

Sublimity Here, concerning Psalm 91 and the meaning of history it manifested, Horkheimer referred once more back to Hegel, who had called the Hebrew Psalms classical examples of genuine sublimity (Hegel 1986m: 499; Horkheimer 1985g: 210-211; Efron 2009; Hodgson 1997; App. E). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the Hebrew psalms were not at last and not at least the reason why Hegel called Judaism the religion of sublimity (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Hodgson 1997). According to Hegel, the Hebrew psalms were put down as model patterns, and classical examples for all times. For Hegel, the psalms as models expressed splendidly and brilliantly and with the strongest elevation of the soul what man had before himself in his religious representation of God. Nothing in the world was allowed to claim independence, because everything was and existed only through God’s power and was only there, in order to serve the praise of this power. Here, Hegel came somewhat close to the definition of religion by Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher, the initiator of the Reason and Progress Guided and Orientated Enlightened, Modern Paradigm of Christianity–which he otherwise ridiculed as dog-like attitude: Religion is the feeling of dependence (Hegel 1972: 13; 1986g: 317; 1986rr: 322; 1986s: 20; Küng 1994a: 742-899; 1994b; Hodgson 1997; App. E). According to Hegel, in the Hebrew psalms was to be admired the power of elevation of the feelings of the human person, which lets everything fall in order to proclaim and pronounce the only power of God (Hegel 1986p: 11-15; 1986m: 499; Horkheimer 1985g: 210-211; Hodgson 1997). According to Horkheimer, this, which in the modern bourgeois era had once been called reason, was no more distant to such trust as expressed in Psalm 91 and other Jewish psalms than morality and humanity. Horkheimer remembered that Kant had considered the notion of duty, the moral commandments, the categorical imperative as moments of practical reason (Liddell 1970; Horkheimer 1987b: 15-74, 75-148; 1985g: chaps. 3, 13, 21). According to Kant, such moments were native to all human beings. Whoever, so Horkheimer argued, accepted as valid, necessary and true Kant’s demand to treat the neighbor never only as means, but always also as purpose, from which he postulated–since it was inborn in humanity–the idea of the autonomous individual as well as the idea of the just God, could not simply dismiss or brush aside the trust, which was stated and shown in Psalm 91

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and other Hebrew psalms as well. In Horkheimer’s view, such imperturbable certainty of faith, as it appeared in Psalm 91, had once been no less a quality of the today deeply threatened Western civilization, than the recognition of Kant’s categorical imperative, which without such trust in God, as expressed in Psalm 91, was highly problematic. Such trust had been the property of the bourgeois enlightenment of the 18th century. In Horkheimer’s perspective, differently from the categorical principles ascribed and attributed to the ratio by the bourgeois enlightenment, the thought of a refuge, a recourse, or a resort, as it expresses itself in Psalm 91, awakened not only obedience but also the love to that which was other than the slaughter bench of nature and history, the totally Other, and conferred and bestowed meaning to the life and suffering and death, which took place on it: World War I and II, Fascism, Auschwitz and Treblinka, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cold War, Vietnam, the War on Terror, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon, Gaza, Tsunami, Katrina, global economic catastrophe, etc. The thought of the totally Other did this in spite of everything: He rescues you from the snares Of fowlers hoping to destroy you; he covers you with his feathers, and you find shelter underneath his wings. Though a thousand fall at your side, Ten thousand at your right hand, You yourself will remain unscathed, With his faithfulness for shield and buckler (Psalm 91: 3-7; Hegel 1986p: 11-15; Horkheimer 1996s: 62-67; Efron 2009; App. E).

In his commentary on Psalm 91, with the help of the Hebrew psalms and Hegel, Horkheimer tried to reconcile the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane, faith and enlightenment. Horkheimer even indicated that particularly the moral core of the modern enlightenment, practical reason, the categorical imperative could not stand without the religious faith (Hegel 1986p: 9-88; 1986q: 341-344; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17; Hodgson 1997; Efron 2009; App. E). For Horkheimer, all attempts to ground morality instead of with reference to a Beyond–the totally Other–on earthly prudence rested on harmonistic illusions. That would include also KarlOtto Apel’s and Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics (Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Habermas 1983; 1984a; 1991a: Part III; 1991b; 1992a). In Horkheimer’s view, all that hung together with morality went ultimately back to theology (Horkheimer 1985g: 389; chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 25,

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26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 40; Habermas 1991a: Part III). All morality is grounded in theology, no matter how much one may try to conceive of theology most carefully: as, for example, in the case of Adorno’s and Benjamin’s negative, inverse, cipher or semblance theology (Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37; 1985l: 493-492; Adorno 1970b: 102-110, 111-125; 1973b: 361-408; Habermas 1991a: Part III, 127-156; Hodgson 1997). While Horkheimer had as little an adequate theoretical theodicy answer as presently the world religions or the secular enlightenment movements, he found, nevertheless, in the Hebrew psalms guidance for how to deal practically with the negative impulses, which the theodicy problem, i.e. the perils of human existence, could produce, and which, if not dealt with, could threaten all personal and collective morality (Kant 1975: 77-93; Hegel 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248-455; Hodgson 1997; Horkheimer 1985g: 389; chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 1920, 21, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 40; 1967b: 248-268, 302-316, Habermas 1986: 53-54; Küng 1991b: 726-728; 2004: 357-358, 366; Metz 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Oelmüller 1990; Colpe/Biggemann 1993; Vann 2003). Horkheimer agreed with Kant that a philosophical, theoretical theodicy was no longer possible after the proof for the existence of God had been dissolved (Kant 1929: 485-572; 1975: 77-93; Hegel 1986q: 347-536; Horkheimer 1985g: 389; chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 80). Horkheimer shared with Hegel, not only his appreciation for the Hebrew psalms, but also the trust in God’s almighty and all benevolent Providence and the correlated meaning of personal and collective history, which they expressed (Hegel 1986m: 499; 1986l: 19-55; 1985g: 210-211; Hodgson 1997). While Horkheimer found his practical theodicy in Psalm 91, Erich Fromm discovered his not only in the psalms, particularly in Psalm 22, which Jesus of Nazareth had started to quote when he was dying on the cross near Jerusalem, but also in the prophetic idea of Shalom (Psalm 22; Psalm 91; Fromm 1966b: 231-236; 1992: 203-212; Horkheimer 1985g: 210211). More recently, here in America the Berrigan brothers found their practical theodicy likewise in the psalms, and on their basis struggled against the Vietnam War and against the development of weapons of massdestruction (Psalm 4; Berrigan 1978: ix-xii, 1-4, 35-37, 53-56). From the Berrigan Brothers, my wife Margie and I learned to pray Psalm 4, while she, mother of 8 children, was suffering and dying from colon-, liver- and lungcancer (Siebert 2000; 2001: chaps. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; Berrigan 1978: ix-xii, 1-4, 35-37, 53-56). In October 1978, I put Psalm 4: 1 on our common grave stone, which is shaped according to Hegel’s dialectical image of the Rose of Reason and Providence in the Cross of the dark present: that is the catastrophe, that things go on as they do in the bad infinity of the globalized late

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capitalist society (Psalm 4; Hegel 1986g: 26-27; Hodgson 1997; Siebert 2000; 2001: chaps. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; Berrigan 1978: ix-xii, 1-4, 35-37, 53-56).

Temptation Horkheimer was, of course, aware of the psychological, sociological and theological ambiguities in the text of Psalm 91 and other Hebrew psalms, and of the possibility that it could be mythologically and ideologically abused (Psalm 91; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 17; App. E). The dialectical religiologist remembers that Psalm 91 was quoted even by Satan not during the first temptation of Christ, which was concerned with bread alone, and not during the third temptation concerning power alone but rather during the second temptation concerned with God alone: The devil then took him to the holy city and made him stand on the parapet of the Temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down; for Scripture says: He will put you in his angels’ charge And they will support you on their hands in case you hurt your foot against a stone,” Jesus said to him, “Scripture also says: You must not put the Lord your God to the test.” (Psalm 91: 11-12; Matthew 4: 1-11; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 17; Siebert 1993: chap. IV; App. E).

It meant for Christians of the 1920s and 1930s, like Haecker and Rudolphi, that human beings ignored the orders of nature and history which God had given to them as mandates: let’s say the traditionally and originally stoic and then baptized natural law teaching, which for hundreds of years had found its expression in the Papal social encyclical letters. According to the symbolical interpretation of Haecker and Rudolphi, antifascist contemporaries of Tillich and Horkheimer, a person lived from God alone through the refusal to carefully and step by step climb down the ladder that led from the parapet of the temple down to earth. In the second temptation, it was demanded from God to dispense humanity from this step by step climbing down from God through the whole hierarchical order of the cosmos. It is demanded that God should send an angel to carry man on his hands down to earth, so that man would not suffer the consequences of the law of gravity, and thus would not hit his feet at a stone. While the first temptation dealt with the economic living standard and the third with political power, the second temptation was concerned with the relative autonomy of nature and history: e.g., the law of gravity

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and the law of freedom (Hegel 1986l: 29-33; Haecker 1835; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; Siebert 1993: chap. IV).

One Power While Horkheimer asserted that the dead, the innocent victims of history, were indeed and definitely dead, he went at the same time beyond the extremely abstract secularist and atheistic position of Bertolt Brecht, according to which the religious belief in immortality was merely a temptation and seduction, and according to which there was no return from death, and according to which humans died like animals, and according to which nothing came after death (Brecht 1961; 1964; 1966; 1967; 1973; 1980; 1981; 1993a; 1993b; 1994; 2002; 2003; 2007; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; Thompson/Held 1982: 246; Peukert 1976: 282; Küng 1982: 39-41). Horkheimer followed those Jewish scientists who had moved beyond religion as well as a merely positivistic, naturalistic scientistic, secularistic, abstract-atheist science. Thus, the noted Jewish scientist Haffkine stated that science is slowly and by degree being brought to recognize in the universe the existence of One Power, which was of no beginning and no end, and which has existed before all things were formed, and would remain in its integrity, when all is gone: the Source and Origin of all, in itself beyond any conception or image that man could form and set up before his eyes or mind (Hertz 5716/1956: 194; Hegel 1986q: 501-535; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; Küng 1978: A-G; 1982; Efron 2009; Hodgson 1997; App. E). For Haffkine, this sum total of the scientific discoveries of all lands and times was the approach of the world’s thought to the Jewish Adon Olam, the sublime chant, by means of which the Jew had wrought and will further work the most momentous changes in the world. Thus, the secular antagonistic modern society transforms itself into a post-modern, and post-secular society, which is ready and willing to rescue semantic and semiotic materials and potentials from the depth of the religious mythos into the secular discourse of its expert cultures, and thus transcends itself (Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1969d: 22; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: Part III; 2001a: 9-31; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Mendieta 2005; App. B, C, D, E, F, G). In this sense, Horkheimer longed and hoped that the murderer shall not triumph over the innocent victim: at least not ultimately (Horkheimer 1985g: 37, 40). On April 21, 2009, on Holocaust Memorial Day, several American television stations showed the movie Schindler’s List and remembered the murder of 6 million Jews. Only recently a former polish SS guardsman in one of the many

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Eastern European Nazi death camps, who had been charged with 22,000 murder cases, was once again not deported from Detroit to Munich because his son declared that such a trip would be for his 89 years old father equal to prolonged torture. Horkheimer hoped that even if the murderer would triumph over his victim in this earthly history, justice would be done, nevertheless, in eternity. Unlike Heidegger, whom he had heard at the University of Freiburg as well as Edmund Husserl, Horkheimer did as little as Adorno absolutize death or the corpse (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1972; 2002; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 1998d; 2000c; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498). Neither Hegel, or Horkheimer, or Adorno, or Benjamin, or Fromm, or Bloch, or Habermas, or any other critical theorist of society considered the hope for the liquidation of death, as it appears in the Abrahamic religions, to be blasphemous (Efron 2009; Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74; 148-149, 149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l: 100-101, 124155, 240, 266, 266-268, 382, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 458-460; 1986n: 134-135, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1989s: 331; Hodgson 1997; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988d: chap. 2; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1972; 2002; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 1998d; 2000c; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Benjamin 1955a; 1972; 1974; 1977: chaps. 10, 11; 1978a; 1978b; 1983a; 1983b; 1995b; 1995c; 1996c; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1990b; 1992; 1995; 2001; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1982; 1986; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a; Part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247; Peukert 1976: 273-282, 289302; Küng 1970; 1982; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Siebert 1993; 2000; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 1, 6; 2004a: 63-97).

Faith and Knowledge Horkheimer did not know whether there was a God and immortality, but he nevertheless believed in them, in spite of or even because of the horror and

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terror of the slaughter bench of history (Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986l: 3355; 1986q: 241-298; Hodgson 1997; Horkheimer 1991f: 417; Habermas 1991a: Part III; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007). He accomplished Hegel’s dialectical turn from the horrible Golgotha of nature and history to God’s Providence and Reason, purpose and plan, but not as in the Torah, or in Hegel’s Philosophy of History based on it, as an a priori presupposition or as a matter of idealistic dialectical logic, but rather as a matter of faith, longing, hope, confidence and trust (Genesis 37; Lieber 2001: 226; Efron 2009; Hegel 1986l: 19-36; 1986q: 347-535; Hodgson 1997; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1991f: 417). According to the Rabbis, the Biblical story of Joseph was not only a narrative of a young man blessed by God with a special grace, so that no matter what misfortune befell him he was able to surmount it (Genesis 37; Lieber 2001: 226; Mann 1999: 11-56). It was also a story of unintended consequences, of an effort to do harm that ended up doing good and of an apparent triumph that set the stage for the Israelites’ descent into slavery. For Rabbi N. Leibowitz, on the surface the actors in the Joseph story made their own way in life. In fact, however, it transpired that it is divine Providence that is carrying out through humankind its own predestined plan and purpose. The critical theorists of society inverted such Torah stories not into dogmas, but rather into their yearning and desperate hope for the wholly Other, and freedom and immortality (Efron 2009; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). The dialectical religiology will continue in the spirit of the critical theorists of society to trace and pursue in theory and praxis the insatiable longing for the wholly Other, through and beyond the world religions as well as the secular humanistic enlightenment movements, as it carries and strengthens their cooperative protest and resistance against conditions of injustice in the national and international class struggle toward global, post-modern alternative Future III–a society, in which man and nature, freedom and justice, personal autonomy and universal solidarity would be reconciled; and in which a friendly and happy life would be possible for all people; and which would respect also the rights of animals and plants in their natural environment; and which would transcend itself toward the possible end of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic parousia delay (Isaiah 65-66; Revelation 21-22; Holy Qur’an, Sure 7: 87, 20: 112; 21: 47; 27: 8390; 37: 37-39; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986g: 339-514; 1986l; 1986p; 1986q; Marx/Engels 2005; Tucker 1978; Horkheimer 1987b: 329-330, 336, 345346, 350-351, 354-355, 373-379, 397, 450-452; 1987e: 253-256, 256-257; 1991f: 195, 205-206, 208, 214-215, 217, 218-219, 219-220, 221, 237, 241, 243-244, 248, 253, 270-271, 303-304, 305-307, 326, 340-341, 367-368, 423,

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423-424, 424-429; 1985g: chaps. 5, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42; 1985l: 246-247, 260-261, 263264, 282-296, 294-296, 298, 306, 318-319, 320-323; 1988n: 48, 52, 75, 76, 77, 78, 92, 114-115, 115-116, 117, 124-125, 126, 129-130, 162-163, 204-205, 216, 219, 220, 224-225, 228-232, 238-239, 240-241, 242-243, 249, 265-266, 276-277, 285, 296-297, 297-300, 304, 315-316, 320, 333, 338, 338-339, 347348, 351, 363, 368, 369, 369-370, 370, 378-379, 383-384, 387-389, 390-391, 392-393, 400, 405, 411-412, 426, 432-433, 443-444, 445-447, 448, 455-456, 456-457, 466, 487-488, 498-499, 503-504, 509-510, 514-515, 526, 533, 535, 536, 536-537, 540; 1996s: 28-31, 49-52, 52-54, 54-57, 62-67, 72-75; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1985: chaps. 54, 55; Adorno 1998c 201-213, 214-225; Küng 1991b; 1994a: 904-905; 1994b; 2004; Siebert 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2002c: 187-193; 2004a: 63-97; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007e; 2007f; 2008a; 2008b; 2008c; Efron 2009; Hodgson 1997; App. E, G). According to Rabbi Rashi, after all he had been through Jacob or Israel thought he was going to settle down after he had returned to Canaan, but events would not permit him to do so (Genesis 37: 1; Lieber 2001: 226). According to the Rabbis, people often think that once they reach a certain milestone, they will be able to settle down to a life free of challenges. However, life never promised to be tranquil. The Jewish Sages saw this settling as an effort to disengage from the problems of living. According to Rabbi Zornberg, the full tension of composure and discomposure, of order and disorder, of static and dynamic in the world, was felt most acutely by the righteous people, by those whose sense of beauty and desire for order exposed them to the shock of reality. Esau by contrast to Jacob settled in the land of Seir, without incident (Genesis 36: 8; Lieber 2001: 226). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the dialectic of faith and knowledge remains unsettled, and demands the continuation of an open discourse among the world religions and particularly between the world-religions and secular Modernity and Post-Modernity toward alternative Future III–a society characterized by reconciliation and Shalom (Hegel 1986b: 287-434; 1986p: 9-88; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 21, 22; Mendieta 2005; Fromm 1966b; 1976; 1992: 203-212; Habermas 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/ Ratzinger 2006; Pope Benedict XVI 2007; App. E, G). The dialectical religiology understands itself as such continuing open discourse between believers and humanistic enlighteners (Habermas 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Küng 1990a; 1990b; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 1998; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Siebert 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b: 69-114; 2002c: 187-193; 2003: 194-208; 2004a: 63-97;

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2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007a: 99-113; 2007b: 419-457; 2007c: 1-50; 2007d; 2007e; 2007f: 1-68; 2007g: 11-19; 2008a: 180-210; 2008b: 55-61; App. E, F).

Trust and Confidence In 1967, after the death of the theologian Paul Tillich, Horkheimer remembered that already in the 1930s and in the early 1940s his friend had felt–like he himself–the terrible and awful events, which would come with fascism and Hitler, and opposed them through his religious socialism (Hitler 1943; Horkheimer 1985g: 277-283; Habermas 2009; Küng/Homolka 2009). According to Horkheimer, Tillich had had the trust and the confidence that something better was indeed possible. At the time, Horkheimer had been–like Hitler, Freud and Thomas Mann and many others–very much connected with the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and thus had been very pessimistic (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Horkheimer 1988a; 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 19, 21, 26). In 1967, Horkheimer was happy that he had been so pessimistic 40 years earlier, because that had meant that he already found an asylum in Switzerland in 1929, in spite of the fact that he stayed and taught in Frankfurt up to 1933. Horkheimer had entered discourse with Tillich in Frankfurt, who astonishingly enough had as theologian received a chair at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University for sociology and philosophy, because he believed that there was no philosophy that he could affirm, which did not also carry a theological element in itself. This was so for Horkheimer because what really mattered was to recognize in which way the world, in which he and his friends lived, was to be interpreted as something relative. In Horkheimer’s opinion, Kant and Schopenhauer knew that, and philosophical efforts that were not aware of this theological element were none at all. According to the dialectical religiology, the so called scientific philosophy, which is so widely spread through American and European universities and which has emancipated itself from all theology, is neither philosophy nor science.

Character and Change Being asked to describe the character of Tillich whom he had known for over 30 years in Germany and in American exile, Horkheimer answered that now in 1967 he did not want to mention the problems that lay in this notion of character itself (Benjamin 1977: 3, 14; Fromm 1992: chaps. 3,

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5; Landauer 1999; Habermas 2009; Küng/Homolka 2009; App. C, D). For Horkheimer, what usually was called character meant that a person did not have the gift to change. However, the first thing that Horkheimer had to say about Tillich was that he did not have this firm, determinate unchangeable character, but that he could be impressed in a beautiful sense. When Horkheimer spoke with Tillich, it was not certain from the start that he would still think the same thing at the end of the discourse as he did at the beginning. For Tillich, it was possible to create something new through the process of discourse. The same had been valid for Tillich’s life in general. Tillich was open for all beautiful things. Tillich could be tempted and seduced by beauty. In Horkheimer’s view, this precisely belonged to a real human being. When Horkheimer went out with Tillich in New York or in Frankfurt and when they stood before a nice restaurant or even a night-bar, then Tillich could say: should we not go in? Tillich could have entertained himself well in the bar, but in a way that would not touch on what was called faithfulness. Tillich was able to be faithful to people without becoming closed up against others.

Boundary Tillich had spoken again and again about the notion of boundary: particularly the boundary between the sacred and the profane, the religious and the secular (Hegel 1986c: 590; 1986d: 14-15, 95, 126, 167, 187, 221; 1986e: 125, 131-139, 312-314; 1986h: 197; 1986j: 14-15; 1986m: 128-129, 134135; 1986p: 9-53, 109, 179, 310-311; 1986q: 117; 185-346; 347-536; 1986r: 288-289; 1986s: 477-479; 1986t: 169, 397-398; Horkheimer 1985g: 278279; 1988n: 390-391; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Habermas 2009; Küng/Homolka 2009; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; App. F). Tillich thought that the boundary was a fruitful and productive location of knowledge. Horkheimer always understood Tillich’s notion of the boundary in such a way that the philosophically thinking person was supposed to see reality as relative (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 26, 29, 37,40; Siebert 1979d; 1985; 1987a; 1987d; 1989; 1993; 1994c; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2004a; 2005b). That meant for Horkheimer, that all the judgments which human beings passed about reality were not absolute, and that the world, which was relative, presupposed according to its very meaning an Absolute, an entirely Other, which they could nevertheless not know: docta ignorantia (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 26, 29, 37, 40; 1988n: 38; 58, 124). The dialectical religiology continues to understand Tillich’s notion of the boundary

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as Horkheimer had done (Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Horkheimer 1985g: 278-279; Siebert 2008e; 2009f; 2009g; 2009h; App. F). Not only Tillich’s critical theology, but also Horkheimer’s critical philosophy have proven the great productivity of the notion of boundary, which continues to be used in the dialectical religiology (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 26, 29, 37, 40; 1988n: 38; 58, 124; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Horkheimer 1985g: 278-279; Siebert 2008e; 2009f; 2009g; 2009h; App. F).

Beyond the Boundary In the perspective of the critical theory, as Hegel attempted to overcome the system of Kant he emphasized that whoever became aware of a boundary was already beyond it, and thereby was able to combine with his negative a positive theology (Hegel 1986c: 590; 1986d: 14-15, 95, 126, 167, 187, 221; 1986e: 125, 131-139, 312-314; 1986h: 197; 1986j: 14-15; 1986m: 128-129, 134-135; 1986p: 109, 179, 310-311; 1986q: 117; 185-346, 347-536; 1986r: 288-289; 1986s: 477-479; 1986t: 169, 397-398; Hodgson 1997; Horkheimer 1967: 311-312; 1985g: 278-279; 1988n: 390-391; Habermas 2009; Küng/ Homolka 2009). For Hegel, the world of appearance was the boundary between God and the finite human spirit, which differentiated and which related one to the other: it was the relationship toward the Other. According to Horkheimer, Hegel attempted to overcome the invalidity of the theses of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which themselves lapsed into critique and became invalid (Kant 1929; Horkheimer 1988n: 390-391). For Horkheimer, Hegel was right when he said that one had to throw Kant to the old iron, when his own theory was valid. This was so because Hegel’s proof that the world of appearance went back to subjective factors of knowledge was valid for these factors as well. According to Hegel, the categories that people used belonged themselves to the world of appearance, so that the Kantian sentence, that through them all appearances were formed, was itself invalid. For Horkheimer, this Hegelian consideration was the reason why the Hegelian philosophy was an indispensable supplement and completion of the Kantian philosophy. For the dialectical religiology, the Hegelian philosophy is the concrete supersession of the Kantian philosophy. In Horkheimer’s view, Hegel tried to overcome the contradictions of the Kantian philosophy in the notion of the Absolute: the Identity of the Identity and the Non-Identity, the Identity of the Ideal and the Real,

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the Identity of the Unity and the Multitude, the Unity of the Indifference and the Relationship (Hegel 1986b: 11, 17, 19, 20, 25, 50, 52, 57, 94, 96, 112, 113, 129-130, 170, 288, 399, 409, 410, 435, 442, 456, 457, 503, 543; Hodgson 1997; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). However, for Horkheimer, Hegel’s attempt to comprehend the Absolute or the wholly Other also failed (Horkheimer 1988n: 390-391).

The Hope for the Messiah According to Horkheimer, what had been in Judaism the decisive creed, the hope that there was still something Other and Better than this world of injustice, coldness and hostility, shortly, the hope for the Messiah, remained merely a faith that was supported by a tradition, which Kant had justified in a great and splendid way (Efron 2009; Kant 1929; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Hodgson 1997; Horkheimer 1967: 302-316; 1988n: 391; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Habermas 2009; Küng 1991b; Küng/Homolka 2009; Küng 1991b). As Kant proved that our statements as well as the world were relative, and that we could not know anything about the Thing-in-itself, he made room for the hope that there existed something other than the world of which we know (Kant 1929; Horkheimer 1967: 302-316; 1988n: 391; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b). In Horkheimer’s view, Hegel’s position toward the opposition of realism-nominalism meant that both were not true in themselves, but that it needed a motion of thought into a notion in which both were concretely superseded (Kant 1929; Hegel 1986d: 112; 1986g: 107; 1986i: 438; 1986k: 346, 467-486; 1986r: 441; 1986s: 546, 570-579; 1986t: 66; Horkheimer 1967: 302-316; 1988n: 391; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b). To Horkheimer’s and the critical theorists’ of society intellectual family tree belonged Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, Voltaire and Karl Kraus, as confirmation and acknowledgement, and most of all Judaism and its Messianic hope (Efron 2009; Kant 1929; Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Hodgson 1997; Marx 1871; 1906; 1951; 1953; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1963; 1964; 1974; 1977; Nietzsche 1967a; 1967b; 1967c; 1968; 1974; 1990; Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962a; 1962b; 1964; 1977; 1992; Brailsford 1935; Horkheimer 1967: 302-316; 1988n: 391; 1989m: chaps. 13, 28; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11, 23; Adorno 1970b; Habermas 2009; Küng/Homolka 2009).

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Both Horkheimer and Tillich said in their writings that truth arose and resulted when theologians or philosophers criticized the miserable social conditions as they existed in bourgeois and socialist societies in the 20th century and when they uncovered and showed them to such an extent that truth came into the bright daylight (Hegel 1986a: 193, 288, 374-375; 1986b: 31, 39, 153, 460-461, 511, 540, 545; 1986c: 15, 40, 41, 41-42, 42-43, 46, 47, 64, 76-77, 137-177; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1988n: 117, 118-119, 123-124, 125, 126, 139, 162-163, 278, 316, 321, 329-330, 338, 352, 369-370, 390-391, 405-406, 487-488, 535, 536; 1996s: 32-74; 1989m: chaps. 7, 12, 19, 26, 29, 36, 38; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Küng 1991b). According to Horkheimer, the truth could not at all be represented in a positive way. For Horkheimer, it was rather so that the truth appeared as thinking people behaved responsibly-critically toward the reality, the status quo of the antagonistic modern society, in which they lived. In Horkheimer’s view, the similarity between the Christian thinking of Tillich and the Jewish thinking consisted in that also the Jews were able to represent or to portray God, i.e. the Absolute or the wholly Other (Hegel 1986q: 50-96, 185-346; Horkheimer 1985g: 17, 28, 29, 37, 40; Tillich 1955b; Fromm 1966b; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; Efron 2009; Petuchowski 1956: 543-594). According to Horkheimer, it was even customary in Judaism as the Religion of Sublimity that the name God not simply be written out. Tillich thought in a similar way. It was Tillich’s conviction that God could not be adequately named. Therefore, Tillich engaged in the critical behavior toward reality, because in this critical behavior, in which thinking people mark, characterize, describe, show, or indicate, what ought not to be, what was in opposition to God, appeared the Absolute, the totally Other, the Good (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 25, 26, 29, 37, 40). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, as the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth criticized what ought not to be in Israel and the Roman Empire, what was in opposition to God, he revealed God’s Presence to his friends and precisely therefore was persecuted and executed by the rich and powerful people (Matthew 5-7; 26-28; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97; Fromm 1966: chap. ix; 1992: chap. 1, 8; Reich 1976). In the view of the critical theory of religion, the dialectical-epical work of an atheistic playwright like Bertholt Brecht can be rescued through the inverse cipher theology in so far as it describes what ought not to be and what is opposite to the wholly Other, and thus indirectly opens the horizon for the appearance of the Other, of

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the Good (Brecht 1961; 1964; 1966; 1967; 1973; 1980; 1981; 1993a; 1993b; 1994; 2002; 2003; 2007; Adorno 1970b; Brändle 1984; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; Benjamin 1955a; 1974; 1977: chaps. 7, 8, 10, 11; 1978a; 1978c; 1978d; 1983a; 1983b; 1988: chaps. 3, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 29, 30, 40, 42, 47, 48). Critical religious people and humanists agree that what is the case in nature and history must not triumph over what ought to be and the longing for the wholly Other (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Brecht 1961; 1964; 1966; 1967; 1973; 1980; 1981; 1993a; 1993b; 1994; 2002; 2003; 2007; Adorno 1970b; Brändle 1984; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1972a; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1976; Benjamin 1955a; 1974; 1977: chaps. 7, 8, 10, 11; 1978a; 1978c; 1978d; 1983a; 1983b; 1988: chaps. 3, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 29, 30, 40, 42, 47, 48; Küng 1990b; 1991b; 1994a; 2004). As the critical theory of religion continues to engage in the critical behavior toward the social reality of the more and more administered late capitalist society, and marks and indicates what ought not to be, what is in opposition to totally Other, and thus opens up the horizon toward the Absolute, the Good, the Truth, it also restitutes theology, or better still radicalizes the dialectic of nature and history into the theological glowing fire, and extremely sharpens the economic–and social–dialectical motive (Marx 1961: 17-18; Adorno 1970: 116-117; 1997h: 9-19, 42-86, 222-247, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 569-573, 578-587; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42; Habermas 2009; Küng/Homolka 2009).

Functionalism According to Horkheimer, Tillich treated these problems of theological truth with great seriousness (Horkheimer 1967a; 1985g: chaps. 25, 26; 1989: chap. 29; Adorno 1997h: 547-568; Habermas 2009; Küng 1991b; 1994a, 2004; 2009). For Horkheimer, the modern German or American civil society, in which he and Tillich and their friends had been living and to which they had belonged, was of such a kind and was characterized in such a way that everything that was said and done in it, happened really only because of a determinate purpose, which right away became again a means for another purpose. Thus, all the thinking and the whole language of the people living in late capitalist society was really merely functional: it was, so to speak under the spell of instrumental or functional rationality

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and action or of functionalism rooted in the evolutionary universal of work and tool (Hegel 1972; 1979; Hodgson 1997; Parsons 1964; 1965; 1971; Parsons/Shils 1951; Merton 1964; Horkheimer 1967b; 1970a; 1971; Habermas 1973; Habermas/Luhmann 1975; App. C, D). Yet, for Horkheimer there existed also such a type of action and speaking, which happened for its own sake, because it was true and because it ought to be that way. It belonged, so to speak, to the type of mimetic or communicative rationality and action rooted in the human potentials of language and memory, sexuality and eroticism, struggle for recognition and nationhood (Hegel 1972; 1979; Hodgson 1997; Horkheimer 1985l: 590-593; Benjamin 1988: chaps. 4, 5; Habermas 1971; 1976; 1978c; 1983; 1984a; 1984b; 1987d; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 1997a; 1997b; 1999; 2001a; 2009; App. C, D). That type of action and speaking was what Tillich had called seriousness. Thereby, Tillich meant that the person who spoke and lived seriously was already– no matter what his opinion was about the Absolute–not only religious, but also even a Christian (Hegel 1972; 1979; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Küng 1994a; 1994b; Horkheimer 1985l: 590-593; Benjamin 1988: chaps. 4, 5; Habermas 1971; 1976; 1978c; 1983; 1984a; 1984b; 1987d; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 1997a; 1997b; 1999; 2001a; 2009; App. C, D, E). The dialectical religiologist can experience functional behavior, particularly in the form of a Tayloristic time management in the office of any internist or dentist, or even in the office of a Rabbi, a priest, a minister or a Mullah in American or European urban centers, but very seldom a truly expressive, meaningful communicative action. There is just not time enough any longer! However, on May 9, 2009, my good, very secular friend, Bill Kozar, the gifted architect, confessed to me in the restaurant La Cantina, Paw Paw, Michigan that all the many family homes, commercial buildings and doctor offices that he had constructed in and around Kalamazoo so far, were extremely instrumental and functional, but that there was also something mimetic and communicative in them, which was hard to express: maybe something conclusive, which was the result of hard work, maybe even something religious or mystical (Hegel 1986n: 266-350; Hodgson 1997; App. C, D, E).

Language and Religion According to Horkheimer, Tillich had the suspicion and presentiment that by the 1950s, the language in America and Europe had been affected very deeply by the decline and fall of theology, the historically condi-

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tioned endangerment of religion (Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997u; 1998c; 2000c; 2002d; 2003d; Adorno/ Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; MüllerDoohm 2005; Habermas 1969; 1971; 1975; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1979a; 1979b; 1982; 1983; 1984a; 1984b; 1986; 1987c; 1987d; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: chap. 2; 1991a: Part III; 1999; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006d; 2007; 2009). Tillich knew how closely the European languages had been connected with the theology, and that they, if religion would disappear, would themselves lose their meaning. Horkheimer could try to indicate this or to hint at it: God was One. Horkheimer himself spoke in his interpretation of Psalm 91 of the Eternal One (Psalm 91; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 25, 26, 29, 37, 40). God was high and not deep; God was above and not below. Consequently, there was present in these words in the European languages a moment that could just not be abstracted from the theological dimension. The singular was in a certain sense more significant and meaningful than the plural. Thinking human beings could not in the modern life dominated and permeated by the positive sciences comprehend the world, the universe, as the creation of the One, since after all according to the modern sciences everywhere in nature the higher form pointed back to the lower or more primitive one, from which it stemmed, and not vice versa (Hegel 1986q: 501-535; Hodgson 1997; Horkheimer 1985g: 280-281). Nevertheless, Horkheimer thought that linguistically the Good remained in spite of everything associated with the Above and the First. Horkheimer had to admit that he found it rather non-conformistic that the founder of the Christian thinking, Jesus of Nazareth, identified the Good with the lower classes (Horkheimer 1974: 96-97; 1985g: 280-281; Fromm 1992; Petuchowski 1956: 543-594; Reich 1976; App. E). However, Horkheimer made his remark about language only in order to indicate the close connection between living language and the theological dimension, which with Tillich played an important role (Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Küng 1994a; 1994b; Horkheimer 1985l: 590-593; Benjamin 1988: chaps. 4, 5; Habermas 1971; 1976; 1978c; 1983; 1984a; 1984b; 1987d; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 1997a; 1997b; 1999; 2001a; 2009; App. B, C, D, E).

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chapter twenty-eight Skepticism

According to Horkheimer, while Tillich was fully aware that there was a connection between language and religion, and that the two had something to do with each other, and that not only religion said something about language, but that also language told something about religion, in all what he had thought and said the word doubt had played a particularly great role (Hegel 1986b: 137, 213-272; Hodgson 1997; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Küng 1994a; 1994b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 18, 25, 26, 29, 37, 40; 1985l: 590-593; Benjamin 1988: chaps. 4, 5; Habermas 1971; 1976; 1978c; 1983; 1984a; 1984b; 1987d; 1991a; 1991b; 1992a; 1997a; 1997b; 1999; 2001a; 2009; App. C, D, E). Tillich thought after all that the person who had doubts was much closer to the faith, than the one who did not doubt. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, Tillich would probably have subsumed under this statement also contemporary skeptics like Richard Dawkins, Timothy Keller, Bill Maher, Phil Zuckermann, or Christopher Hitchens (Hegel 1986c: 63, 72-74, 79, 90, 155-177; Hodgson 1997; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 18, 25, 28; Dawkins 2008; Keller 2008; Hitchens 2007; Maher 2008; Zuckermann 2008). According to Horkheimer, Tillich was fully aware of the fact that the simple, unproblematic saying-yes was much too comfortable in antagonistic civil society, dominated and permeated by science and apparatuses, and that only that person–who continually had to overcome doubt, and who was caught up in doubt, and who was even really in despair– seriously said yes to religion. The desperate person was closer to the religion than the one who simply accepted it, so to speak, as a routine. For Horkheimer in 1967, here following Tillich, doubt simply belonged to genuine religious life. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, doubt has remained part of authentic, critical religious life right into the 21st century, and does not show any signs of disappearing from it up to the present, March 2010 (Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Siebert 2001; 2002a; 2005b; App. E). It is often certainly much easier for modern or post-modern people, caught up in the present transition period, to doubt rather than to believe that the rich and powerful who tortured and murdered Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth did not triumph over their innocent victim, but that he was resurrected again from the dead, and that he ascended to the right hand of his heavenly Father, and that he has been sitting there for 2,000 years and that he is still to come to redeem the world of nature and history from its horror and terror and to rescue the hopeless, and to

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bring Shalom; that there has not taken place just another–as the Rabbis say–false Messianic alarm (Isaiah 11, 65, 66; Matthew 26-28; Revelation 2122; Efron 2009; Küng 1970; 1884a; 1994b; Metz 1959; 1963; 1965; 1967; 1870; 1972a; 1972b; 1973b; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1995; 1997; 1998). For the critical theorist of religion skepticism is concretely superseded in dialectics (Hegel 1986b: 137, 213-272; 1986c: 63, 72-74, 79, 90, 155-177; 1986e: 217; 1986f: 20, 558-559, 1986h: 12, 87, 98, 112, 168, 175-176; 1986l: 385, 398; 1986p: 349; 1986q: 266; 1986r: 125, 128-129, 186, 188, 434-436, 536; 1986s: 131, 247, 249, 249-403; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 18, 25, 28; Dawkins 2008; Keller 2008; Hitchens 2007; Maher 2008; Zuckermann 2008). The dialectical religiology is critical of what ought not to be–regressive premodern attitudes, the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the lack of national health insurance, overcrowded urban and rural areas, slums, unemployment, economic depressions–for the sake of the longing for the wholly Other, including the yearning for light, friendship, love and alternative Future III–a free and reconciled society (Bloch 1960; 1870a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 25, 26, 29, 37, 40; 1996s: 32-74; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; App. E, G). The critical theorist of religion participates in highly symbolical, e.g. Jewish, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Islamic, Hindu, or Buddhist religious services and liturgies, in so far as they keep alive and promote this longing for the wholly Other in the context of the globalized, late capitalist society (Adorno 1997h: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396; 569-573, 578-587; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 25, 26, 29, 37, 40; Fetscher/Machovec 1974; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003: Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Küng/Ess/ Stietencron/Bechert 1984; App. B, C, D, E, F, G).

Affirmation of Christianity Tillich did not really change Horkheimer’s thoughts about Christianity or diminish his critique of it: of what ought not to be in it (Horkheimer 1985g: 282-282; App. E). Horkheimer had affirmed and said yes to Christianity from the very start of his intellectual work, in so far as it recognized and respected as model and ideal Jesus of Nazareth, who devoted himself out of love to the misery and to the suffering of others (Horkheimer 1988a; 1987k: 289-328, 329-332; 1974: 96-97; Reich 1976; Fromm 1992; Adorno/ Kogon 1985a: 392-402; 1985a: 484-498; Küng 1970; 1994a; 1994b). The critical philosopher Horkheimer doubted the question of whether this suffering Jesus of Nazareth was a god, even less than the theologian Tillich himself (Hegel 1986q: 50-95; 185-346; 1974: 96-97; Hodgson 1997; Reich

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1976; Fromm 1992; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Reimer 1989; 1992; 2004; Küng 1970; 1994a; 1994b). Horkheimer and Tillich met each other particularly in this their Christological attitude. For Horkheimer, here following Schopenhauer, in this attitude Christianity was closer to Buddhism than it usually appeared to be (Hegel 1986p: 374-389, 1986q: 185-345; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 37; Fromm 1950; 2001; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: C; App. E).

New Formulation of Symbols Horkheimer was fully aware of Tillich’s attempts to formulate newly the so rigid symbols of Christianity (Hegel 1986e: 247-248, 386; 1986f: 296; 1986l: 109, 258, 267, 263, 393, 407; 1986m: 389-546; 1986o: 132, 256, 572; 1986t: 501; Hodgson 1997; Jung 1933; 1958; 1990; Horkheimer 1985g: 281282). Tillich had introduced completely new words (Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Horkheimer 1985g: 281-282; Habermas 2004b; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; 2009; Reimer 1989; 1992). He had used completely new images. In Horkheimer’s view, Tillich had formulated the problem of symbolism in a very liberating way. Long before Tillich, this had been a matter of course in the arts and in philosophy. Yet, no theologian before Tillich had dared to say that all the stories of the Hebrew Bible and of the New Testament, all the references to God and the saints and the Beyond were not to be taken immediately literally, but that they had to be understood symbolically. For Horkheimer, the literal acceptance of the sacred texts was really and thus, necessarily connected with a lack of what Tillich had called seriousness. Horkheimer thought that symbolism was a necessary form of religion if it was to continue to exist beyond the present transition period between Modernity and Post-Modernity: alternative Futures I, II, and III (Hodgson 1997; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; App. E, G). Also, Adorno’s and Benjamin’s inverse theology was a cipher or symbolical theology (Adorno 1970b; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Brändle 1984; Horkheimer 1985g: 281-282). According to Horkheimer, Tillich’s struggle for the rescue of religion was in reality the wrestling for the preservation of the Western culture (App. A, B, C, D, E, G).

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Preservation of Religion and Western Culture Particularly after the death of Tillich, Horkheimer thought very often about what it really was that the capitalist West had to defend against the socialist East, which is returning today–2010–in more forms (Horkheimer 1985g: 281-282; App. A, C, D, E). Horkheimer found that what the West had to defend was not sufficiently handed down and transmitted to the younger generation in Germany, Europe or America. When, in 1967, the youth were asked what the people in the West really defended culturally, then many young people had great difficulties to give an adequate answer. According to Horkheimer, as Tillich had tried to rescue religion through his theological symbolism, he had done an important step forward in the direction of an answer to that question of the self-defense of the West against Eastern socialism (Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Horkheimer 1985g: 281-282; Habermas 2004b; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; 2009; Reimer 1989; 1992). However, Horkheimer believed that still much more had to happen in this direction than what Tillich had done. Horkheimer knew that Tillich himself would still have done much more, if he was still living: e.g. in the dimension of education. When Horkheimer thought of the religious education at the German schools of 1967, then he believed that it did not achieve what it could really have. According to Horkheimer, in the history of religion, e.g. the teacher would have to talk much more about the unfolding of the different world-religions. The negative in the evolution of the different religions, which was so infinitely difficult to be accepted, would have to be openly discussed. Yet, also the positive would have to be talked about: e.g. that every religion had its martyrs, and what they had on their mind when they took upon themselves their terrible fate (Bonhoeffer 1993; 2000; 2003; Horkheimer 1985g: 281-283; App. E). For Horkheimer, all this was not sufficiently dealt with in the religious education of 1967. In Horkheimer’s view, something similar happened in reference to religion as to what for the workers was the case in reference to their different theories: different forms of historical materialism or socialist humanism (Bloch 1971; 1972; Marcuse 1970a: chap. 1; Fromm 1967; 1976; 1992; 1995; 2001; Fromm 1966c; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1986). According to Horkheimer, in 1967 the original Marxism had long faded in the consciousness of the European, not to speak of the American workers. The old Marxist theories of the workers had long become conventions, as had for so many religious people their own religion. For Horkheimer, in 1967 it was time to also be concerned with those worker’s theories, which have much

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more to do with religion than people usually suspect (Bloch 1971; 1972; Marcuse 1970a: chap. 1; Fromm 1967; 1976; 1992; 1995; 2001; Fromm 1966c; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1978a; 1978c; 1986; App. E). Particularly after 1989 and the fall of Eastern communism, and after the attack of members of Islam against symbols of secular bourgeois modernity on September 11, 2001, the dialectical religiology must stress the question of what the West has to defend not only against far Eastern, Chinese communism, but also against Near Eastern Islam in the present transition period between Modernity and Post-Modernity (Habermas 2001a; 2001c; 2003b; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; 2009; Baum 2003; 2004; 2007; 2009; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; 2009; Küng/Homolka 2009; Bellah/ Tipton 2006; Stanczak 2006; Greely/Hout 2006; Hanson 2006; Beyer 2006; Levitt 2007; Tabak./Mickelson 2009: 49-64; App. A, B, C, D, E, G).

Religious Education Between the completion of my leadership studies at the Catholic University of America, Washington D.C. in 1953/1954, and my emigration to the USA in 1962, I was engaged in religious education on different levels of the German school system south and north of Frankfurt a.M., in the states of Hessen and Westphalia, in the German Federal Republic, and also in the trade school system, where I prepared working class boys and girls for a late entrance into the university in the framework of a so-called BerufsAufbau Schule, a social-democratic invention (Horkheimer 1985g: 281-182; Siebert 1966; 1993; 1994b; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). Following my teacher Hermann Schlachter, I practiced a kind of pedagogy of the oppressed, who experience poverty in a more and more affluent society (Freire 1973; Meissner 1966). It was at that time that I began to develop out of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critical theory of society a dialectical religiology (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40; Siebert 1965; 1966; 1978; 1979a; 1879d; 1979e: 35-46; 1980: 35-46; 1985; 1986; 1987a; 1987d; 1989; 1993; 1994a; 1994b: 69-90; 1994c; 1994d; 1995; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b: 69-114; 2002c: 187-193; 2003: 194-208; 2004a: 63-97; 2004b; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c: 135-160; 2005d: 57-114; 2009d; 2009e; 2009f; 2009g; 2009h; Dragizevic/ Oyen 2009: 66-68, 94-95, 121-131, 166-174; App. E). I began to teach this critical theory of religion in German schools in continual connection with Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, and with Walter Dirks and Eugen Kogon, and the whole circle of scholars around the Left-wing Catholic journal Frankfurter Hefte, today–in 2010–Neue

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Gesellschaft-Frankfurter Hefte, and with Schlachter, who played a leading role in the religious education at trade schools in Germany (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40; 1988d: chaps. 14, 15, 16; Siebert 1965; 1966; 1978; 1979a; 1879d; 1979e: 35-46; 1980: 35-46; 1985; 1986; 1987a; 1987d; 1989; 1993; 1994a; 1994b: 69-90; 1994c; 1994d; 1995; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b: 69-114; 2002c: 187-193; 2003: 194-208; 2004a: 63-97; 2004b; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c: 135-160; 2005d: 57-114; 2009d; 2009e; 2009f; 2009g; 2009h; Dragizevic/ Oyen 2009: 66-68, 94-95, 121-131, 166-174; App. E). In our dialecticalreligiological discourses in German schools, we traced the evolution of Christianity and other still living world religions, without repressing in any way their negative, necrophilous, pathological, or even criminal aspects, or their positive, biophilous, charitable and humanizing traits (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Hodgson 1997; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng 1965; 1970; 1972; 1976; 1978; 1980; 1984; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Homolka 2009). We talked about the martyrs of the different world religions and their motivations in a comparative way. We spoke about conventional as well as critical religion, like the religion of blacks in the USA and the black theology of liberation (Washington 1964; Cone 1970). We showed the inter-connection between religion and historical materialism as it appeared in the in the 1960s surfacing Marxist-Christian dialogues (Horkheimer 1985g: 281-182; Garaudy 1962; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; App. E). We concentrated on and made the very basis of our dialectical religiology the evolution from the original traditional union between the secular and the secular, through their modern dichotomy, toward their possible post-modern reunion (Hegel 1986p: 9-53; 1986q: 341-344; Hodgson 1997). The goal of our religious and other education was to rescue religion and the Western civilization, and to prevent under all circumstances the return of fascism, and another Auschwitz (Horkheimer 1985g: 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1997u). From the very start in 1954, my teaching of the critical theory of religion found among my working class students as well as among my bourgeois students on the different levels of the German school system, a most positive response. The evolution of the dialectical religiology went through 55 years in Europe and America, and most recently reached another climax in the 33rd international course on the Future of Religion: Mutual Treatment of the Believing and Non-Believing Citizens, in which scholars from 9 nations participated and contributed excellent critical papers (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40; Siebert 1965; 1966; 1978; 1979a; 1879d; 1979e: 35-46; 1980: 35-46; 1985; 1986; 1987a; 1987d; 1989;

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1993; 1994a; 1994b: 69-90; 1994c; 1994d; 1995; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b: 69-114; 2002c: 187-193; 2003: 194-208; 2004a: 63-97; 2004b; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c: 135-160; 2005d: 57-114; 2009d; 2009e; 2009f; 2009g; 2009h; Dragizevic/Oyen 2009: 66-68. 94-95, 121-131, 166-174; App. E).

Philosophy and the Sciences Horkheimer did not hesitate to count Tillich among the universally interested people in Western civilization: the so-called Renaissance men (Hokheimer 1985g: 281-182). Tillich was interested in socialism and Marxism, as well as in psychoanalysis, and culture, and architecture like the critical theorists of society whom he supported in their work (Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9; 1985g: 281-282; Fromm 1932a; 1932b; 1950; 1959; 1967; 1980b; Landauer 1999; Mitcherlich 1993; 1994; Marcuse 1962; 1980a; 1995; Reich 1971; 1976; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975b; 1975c; 1979; 1985a; 1985b; 1985c; 1085d; 1985e; Habermas 2004b; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; 2009; Reimer 1989; 1992). Horkheimer remembered that once philosophy had been that discipline that included in principle all other disciplines (Hegel 1986a: 236, 423; 1986b: 15-16, 16-17, 19, 20-25, 35-41, 45-51, 53-54, 86, 120-121, 122, 136, 169-530; Hodgson 1997; Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9; 1985g: 281-282; 1985g: 282-283; 1987b: 15-148, 172-178, 252-270, 295-311; 1987i; 1987k: 13-99, 100-118, 145-158, 171-189, 189-195, 202-208, 209220, 221-232; 1988a). The philosopher could not philosophize without being instructed quite precisely about the status of the different positive sciences. Horkheimer wanted to make that clear concerning Tillich and psychoanalysis (Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962a; 1962b; 1964; 1977; 1992; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Horkheimer 1985g: 282-283; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1980b; Landauer 1999; Mitcherlich 1993; 1994; Marcuse 1962; 1980a; 1995; Reich 1971; 1976). According to Horkheimer, when Tillich spoke of somebody doing good to somebody else, he was right away and at the same time also aware psychoanalytically as well as theologically of the fact that with man himself in this good, there was present not only the good, but also a piece of self-consciousness, of vanity, and of prestige (Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962a; 1962b; 1964; 1977; 1992; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Horkheimer 1985g: 282-283; Drewermann 1989; 1992a; 1992b; 1992c). For Tillich, as Horkheimer understood him, it was necessary to

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express this psychoanalytical phenomenon adequately when philosophy and theology were to fulfill the function that they once had (Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9; 1985g: 281-282). Horkheimer believed that psychoanalysis and psychology in general had to be taught in philosophical as well as law faculties. For Horkheimer, a judge or a lawyer could never fully correctly practice his profession without understanding something of psychology. A university professor could not achieve the highest, if he or she had no idea of the modern accomplishments of psychology (Horkheimer 1985g: 282-283; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1980b; Landauer 1999; Mitcherlich 1993; 1994; Marcuse 1962; 1980a; 1995; Reich 1971; 1976; Adorno 1997h: 20-41, 42-85, 245-279, 392-396, 397-407, 408, 433, 434-439, 440-456, 547-569). Tillich was very much aware of this interdisciplinary requirement also for the faculty of theology. Horkheimer and the other critical theorists were very much aware of this same interdisciplinary requirement also for the critical theory of society (Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9; 1985g: 281282; Fromm 1932a; 1932b; 1950; 1959; 1967; 1980b; Landauer 1999; Mitcherlich 1993; 1994; Marcuse 1962; 1980a; 1995; Reich 1971; 1976; Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975b; 1975c; 1979; 1985a; 1985b; 1985c; 1085d; 1985e; Habermas 2004b; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; 2009; Reimer 1989; 1992; App. A, B, C, D, E, F, G).

God and Beyond: Home Horkheimer and Tillich had many of their themes in different disciplines in common and agreed on them (Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9; 1985g: 281-282; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983). Yet, there was one theme which differentiated the philosopher Horkheimer from the theologian Tillich. Yet, it did not differentiate the philosopher and the theologian in such away that they could not recognize and respect each other’s perspectives in a certain sense. The theme which differentiated Horkheimer and Tillich was that Horkheimer, as a philosopher, thought that human beings could not immediately speak about God and the Beyond: eternal life (Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9; 1985g: 281-282; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Küng 1978; 1982). Tillich, however, as a theologian insisted that the Beyond meant perfect justice (Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977;

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1983; Küng 1978; 1982). Precisely concerning that Beyond, Horkheimer had serious doubts. Horkheimer could not join or take part in Tillich’s great Judeo-Christian, theological, eschatological optimism (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 25, 26, 37, 40; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Küng 1978; 1982; App. E). In 1967, 6 years before his own death, Horkheimer could only share the longing and hope and trust in the Eternal One, and the yearning for the home, which, according to Bloch, was shining into the childhood of everybody, but in which still nobody was (Horkheimer 1986g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1972; 1875b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e: 16, 28; Bloch/Reif 1978; Habermas 1978c; 1982; Küng 1978; 1982; Schröder 1995: 78-92). According to the Rabbis, the light of every Shabbat was a foretaste of the messianic world to come (Exodus 10: 21; Lieber 2001376/2; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11). In this Messianic homeland, Horkheimer longed and hoped to see his dear parents again and his beloved wife Maidon, who died from a heart attack in Switzerland in the same year as Adorno, in 1969 (Psalm 91; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 17, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40). According to Benjamin, for the old Jews the future was not homogeneous and empty time, because in it every second was the small gate through which the Messiah could enter (Isaiah 65, 66; Revelation 21-22; Psalm 81; Benjamin 1977: 261; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 17, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; App. E).

Materialistic Melancholy When, in 1973, the theologian and philosopher Karl-Heinz Haag met Horkheimer in the last year of his life, when he came for medical treatment of his heart illness and prostate cancer, and when they discussed with each other the political and cultural situation in Germany, Europe, and America, he did not discover in his great teacher any symptoms of what he had called in 1936 the sadness and melancholy of the materialist (Haag 1982; 1983; 2005; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 18, 19, 21, 37, 40). According to the Rabbis the word “melancholy” came from a Greek root meaning “dark mood” (Exodus 10: 23; Lieber 2001: 377/23 Efron 2009). Sometimes the Rabbis interpreted the Egyptian plague of darkness not as a physical darkness, such as a sandstorm, or a solar eclipse that could not last longer than a few minutes and never for three days, but rather symbolically as a spiritual or psychological darkness, a deep depression (Exodus 10: 23; Lieber 2001: 377/23; Efron 2009). According to the Rabbis, people suffering from a depression lack the energy to move about or to be concerned with

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anyone other than themselves, precisely as the Torah described the Egyptians during the plague of darkness. Perhaps, so the Rabbis argue, the Egyptians were depressed by the series of calamities that had struck them, or by the realization of how much their own comfort depended on the enslavement of the others, the Hebrews. In the Rabbis view, the person who could not see his neighbor was incapable of spiritual growth, and of rising from where he was currently. In Jewish legal discussion defining how early one may recite the morning prayers,” dawn” was defined as “when one can recognize the face of a friend.” When one could see other people and recognize them as friends, the darkness had begun to lift. Horkheimer was helped by his trust in the Eternal One and by his longing for the Messianic home, to conquer the negative, dark, desperate impulses in his personality up to his end (Psalm 91; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 18, 19, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; Landauer 1999; Mitscherlich 1993; 1994; Haag 1982; App. E).

Insight and Knowledge Horkheimer remembered in late 1969, the year in which Adorno had died from a heart infarct on August 6, in Visp, Wallis, Switzerland, in the midst of the global youth revolution of which he had been the Spiritus Rectus, that he had met him the first time at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in 1921, two years after he himself had come to the Frankfurt University in 1919, shortly after the end of World War I and his own service in the German army (Horkheimer 1985g: 284-285; Müller-Doohm 2005; Gumnior/ Ringguth 1988: 26-27, 29, 45, 51, 53, 56-57, 60, 62, 63-64, 78-80, 84-85, 88-89, 92, 128, 131; Scheible 1989: 8, 34-44, 46, 49, 55, 58, 74, 83, 90-91, 95, 101-102, 104, 106, 110, 113, 118, 124, 125-126, 129, 140). Both scholars had become friends right away. Both friends felt a similar wish for insight and knowledge in the form of a critical theory of society (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23, 27, 28, 29; 1988d: chaps. 5, 6, 7; Adorno 1932: 103-124; 356-378; 1995a: 5277; 1998: 17-66; 1998a: 35-90; 1998b; 1998c: 143-184; 1995: 52-77; 1998: 1766; Adorno/Kerenyi 1998: 89-105; Tiedemann 1991: 9-33; 1998a: 9-34; 1994; 1998a: 9-36; 1998b: 196-198; 1998c; 1998d; Schröder 1995: 78-92; Reemtsma 1995: 93-108; Goebel 1995: 209-116; Schmidt 1995: 117-139; Bölich 1998: 208-209; App. A, C, D). For the friends, it mattered a lot to experience at least that what other thinkers had thought about the world and about its meaning or the lack of it, and what they had said. The friends wanted to become familiar with the works of the great philosophers, not only with those of Antiquity or the Middle Ages, but most of all with those of Modernity (Horkheimer 1987i; 1987k; 1988a; 1987b: 15-311; 1988d: chaps. 2, 8, 9, 10,

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11, 12, 13; 1990j). The friends could understand the works of the great philosophers only through studying also a series of other disciplines: sociology, political economy, psychology and even the natural sciences. According to Horkheimer, Adorno had been a philosopher as well as a sociologist and a psychologist, and one of the greatest experts of music in the 20th century, being even a composer and pianist himself (Horkheimer 1985g: 286-287; Adorno 1932; 1951; 1952: 585-595; 1960; 1962; 1963; 1973a; 1973c; 1979; 1990; 1995b; Schröder 1995: 78-92). Adorno did not believe one could formulate the truth through simple answers to simple questions. He could express truth only in a most differentiated way. According to Adorno, every work of thought was to be a work of art. Therefore, for Adorno language was in philosophy infinitely more important than according to most professors who taught at American or European universities in the 20th century.

The Embodiment and Expression of Truth According to Horkheimer, Adorno had indeed fought against positivism throughout his life (Horkheimer 1985g: 287; Adorno 1980a). Positivism precisely was the name of the philosophy, according to which positive science alone was the truth. What really mattered for positivistic philosophy was to signify facts and to set data in a row and to arrange them in series, and to string them together in such a way that knowledge became useful in a given case. However, for Adorno every nuance of language was important, in order to form the true image of the reality which was under discussion. Adorno’s critique of positivism grounded in the fact that it researched things only under the perspective of their usability. For Adorno, what was decisive was not only what was technically important, but the detailed presentation of that what was at hand and at stake. Therefore, Horkheimer and Adorno formed in common reflection and meditation the notion of the instrumental rationality rooted in the human potential of work and tool (Efron 2009; Hegel 1972; 1979; Hodgson 1997; Horkheimer 1967b; 1972; 1973; 1974a; 1974b; App. A, C, D). For both critical theorists, reason was not only instrumental and functional, but also the embodiment and expression of truth in terms of an open dialectic or determinate negativity (Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53; Horkheimer 1985g: 287; 1985l: 483-492; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 29-30, 33). While Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critical theory of society refused–like the Torah, Kant, and Hegel, and Tillich– to pass a determinate judgment about or represent or portray the Absolute, it was nevertheless in principle continually determined and driven by the longing for the wholly Other (Exodus 20; Efron 2009; Horkheimer 1985g:

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chap. 17, 29, 37, 40). Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critical theory signified in the thought of the totally Other the antagonistic civil society in which they lived, be it Germany, Europe or America, as the bad status quo, what ought not to be, what stood in opposition to God–the Good. However, for Horkheimer and Adorno, to present positively the Absolute, would have meant ultimately to engage in a kind of idolatry (Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 23-24; Fromm 1966b; Lundgren 1998; App. E).

The Domination of Nature According to Adorno’s Moral Philosophy, Kant defined the realm of theory in his Critique of Pure Reason as that of theoretical physics and mathematics: the mathematical sciences as a whole (Kant 1929; Adorno 2000b: 55-77; 2001c). For Adorno, it was more than a little paradoxical that this sphere of theory should turn out to be synonymous with practice in the somewhat narrower and more restricted and even more philistine sense that prompted such positivistic questions as What is the use of that? or What can I do with that? or How can this take me any further in the technique of mastering nature? In Adorno’s perspective, this was very much in the spirit of the empirical sciences and the ways in which the possibilities of controlling nature had been defined in the Novum Organum by Francis Bacon, informed by the Protestant mystic Jacob Boehme, and developed further by John Locke, and by David Hume up to Kant (Kant 1929; Hegel 1986a: 446; 1986b: 260, 304, 314, 376-377, 394-395, 1986d: 431; 1986e: 406; 1986h: 380; 1986r: 132; 1986s: 133, 311; 1986t: 69-70, 74-119, 203; Horkheimer 1987b: 150-153; 295-311; 1987i: 75-102, 306-345, 425-450, 459-466, 467482; 1990j; 1987k: 130-344, Adorno 1979a; 2000b: 55-77; 2001c; App. C, D). Here, according to Adorno, these two concepts of practicism and the domination of nature converged to the point where most paradoxically it was the theoretical reason in its preoccupation with the knowledge of nature that was linked in a particular positivistic sense in Kant’s philosophy to the measuring rod of practice. For Adorno, the truth of this was indicated by such positivistic questions as What is the use of that? or How does this take me any further? or What do I get out of the whole thing? Today–in 2010– positivist religiology asks such question even concerning religion in the context of late antagonistic civil society as commodity-exchange society: e.g. the rational choice theory of religion or the cognitive theory of religion (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Adorno 1979a; 1997h: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 469-573, 578-567; 2000b: 55-77; 2001c; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Goldstein 2006; Light/Wilson 2003; App. C, D, E).

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chapter twenty-eight The Possibility of Immortality

In Adorno’s thought, it was very beneficial for him and his students at the Frankfurt University in May 1963, to distance themselves from Kant sufficiently to obtain a clear view of such consequences of his Critique of Pure Reason and to see that they lead him to make an extremely remarkable and astonishing statement (Kant 1929; Hegel 1986a: 446; 1986b: 260, 304, 314, 376-377, 394-395; 1986d: 431; 1986e: 406; 1986h: 380; 1986r: 132; 1986s: 133, 311; 1986t: 69-70, 74-119, 203; Horkheimer 1987b: 150-153; 295-311; 1987i: 75-102, 306-345, 425-450, 459-466, 467-482; 1990j; 1987k: 130344, Adorno 1979a; 2000b: 55-77; 2001c). According to Adorno, Kant said in effect that the existence of God, the possibility of immortality and the freedom of will could be a matter of perfect indifference to him, since he could do nothing with these things in the world of experience. For Adorno–being himself at the time only six years away from his own death in Switzerland–this Kantian view of things informed by Bacon, Locke and Hume, completely ignored the fact that if death was what his teacher Tillich had called the ultimate reality and if there was nothing but the brief life that people had, and if they surrendered entirely to a blind principle, or rather a non-principle, a dead end, then their lives were exposed to a degree of meaninglessness of which modern philosophy, even in its less rigorous variants, had made an all too liberal and popular use: e.g. the Heideggerian philosophy (Kant 1929; Tillich 1926; 1929, 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Adorno 1979a; 1997f: 413-523; 2000b: 55-77; 2001c; Marcuse 2005). What Adorno meant to say was that his inability to make any sense of God, freedom and immortality, could not blind him and his students to the fact that their entire life and every moment they were alive assumed a very different complexion depending on whether or not this life was all there was.

The Basic Reality of Death For Adorno it was barely comprehensible that a thinker of Kant’s insight into metaphysics should have simply ignored this basic reality of death (Adorno 2000b: 55-77; 2001c). Of course, Kant’s great student Hegel ignored the fundamental reality of death and dying as little as the Abrahamic religions. The same can be said for Nietzsche, Tillich, and the critical theorists of society (Hegel 1986a: 67-69, 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986e: 440; 1986f: 473, 486; 1986g: 192, 302; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; 1986l:

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100-101, 124, 155, 240, 266, 266-268, 382, 533; 1986m: 162, 450-451, 456, 458-460; 1986n: 134-136, 152-154; 1986p: 232, 419; 1986q: 289, 292, 408; 1986r: 447; 1986s: 331; Hodgson 1997; Menke 1996; Nietzsche 1967a; 1967b; 1967c; 1968; 1974; 1990; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 16, 17, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 2000b: 55-77; 2001c; Habermas 1986: 53-54; 1988: 60, 278-279; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247; Peukert 1976: 278-282; Abbot Joseph 2009: 34-37). According to Adorno, even the wicked, antimoral and anti-Christian Nietzsche, from whom he learned even more than from Hegel, drew attention to the basic reality of death with his assertion: But all joy wants eternity (Nietzsche 1967a: 333; 1967b; 1967c; 1968; 1974; 1990; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 16, 17, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 2000b: 55-77; 2001c). According to Adorno’s critique of populist tendencies in philosophy in his Negative Dialectics, pleasure, which according to the inspired saying of Nietzsche, was not the only thing to balk at transitoriness. If death, so Nietzsche argued, were the absolute thing that philosophy tried in vain to conjure up positively, then everything was nothing at all; our every thought was thinking into a void; none could be thought with truth (Adorno 1997f: 364). For Adorno, Nietzsche was aware of the crucial insight that what happened in the world was dependent on immortality, and conversely the theory of such ideas was bound up with what people experience here in this life (Kant 1929; Adorno 2000b: 55-77; 2001c). Yet in Adorno’s view, this was really the heart of this Kantian line of argument, namely, the belief that these ideas concerning God, Freedom and Immortality were a matter of indifference to people because they could not do anything with them in terms of their knowledge of nature or its domination. Hence, Adorno and his students found in Kant only the sphere of the knowledge of nature, in the sense of an unrestrained pragmatism which asked What can I do with it? on the one hand, while on the other, there was the sphere of morality, which was a dimension in which the laws of reason held absolute sway (Kant 1929; 1946; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Adorno 1951; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1973b; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 200b: 62; 2000c; 2001b; 2001c; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d; App. C, D, E, F). Yet for Adorno, these two spheres were so far apart from each other that, thanks to this split, even genuinely simple and urgent questions like those about death and immortality were sinking without a trace as if into a pit, and are lost to view. However, in the perspective of the critical theory of religion, a negative metaphysics of God, Freedom and Immortality is the necessary demand of a rational conception of the world (Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005). Such negative metaphysics meets with the prophetic religion and the negative

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theology (Isaiah 11, 65, 66; Revelation 21, 22; Adorno 1970b; Horkheimer 1985l: 483-492; Haag 1981, 1982, 1983, 2005). A godless, unfree, and death-bound world cannot be the ultimate reality and last word of history: at least ultimately, the thieves, murderers and liars shall not triumph over their innocent victims (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). Thus, the dialectical religiology moves from Kant through Schelling and Hegel, as well as through Nietzsche, and through Tillich and Scholem, and through Dirks and Kogon to the critical theorists of society Bloch, Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Fromm, Marcuse, Habermas, Haag, and beyond, while the unrestrained pragmatism, positivism, naturalism, functionalism continues to prevail and to rage on in and dominate the widely indifferent and profane, massively deterministically instrumentalized, functionalized and administered antagonistic civil society, and its universities and schools (Kant 1929; Schelling 1946; 1977a; 1977b; 1993; Hegel 1986g: 339-405, 50-95, 185-346, 347-536; 1986q; Hodgson 1997; Kaufmann 1967; 1968; 1986; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1948; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Scholem 1935; 1967; 1970b; 1973b; 1977a: 1-50; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Dirks 1968; 1983a; 1983b; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Kogon 2003a; 2003b; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1979; 1985a; 1985b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Bloch/ Reif 1978; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1950; 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1995, 2001; Petuchowski 1956: 543-594; Adorno 1951; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1970b; 1973b; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b: 62; 2000c; 2001b; 2001c; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Marcuse 1960; 1967; 1970a: chap. 1; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 25, 29, 31, 37; Habermas 1973; 1991a: Part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; 2009; Haag: 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005; Siebert 1980: 35-46; 1986: 442-457; 1993; 2001; 2002a; 2005b).

Genius Horkheimer stated in his obituary for Adorno in August 1969, that if an intellectual in this present transition period between Modernity and PostModernity deserved to bear the name of genius, then it certainly was most fitting and suitable for Adorno (Horkheimer 1985g: 287-289; 1988n: 380; Habermas 2001c; Müller-Doohm 2005: chap. 19; Schulz 2003: 50-52; Lenk 2003: 56-59; Schmidt 2003: 56-59; Hielscher 2003: 60-62; Zimmermann 2003: 63-66). According to Horkheimer, Adorno mastered equally the

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most different cultural areas, be it the sociology of music or the aesthetical aspects of musical works from Bach to Schönberg or of literary works, from Eichendorff to Kafka or Brecht (Adorno 1932; 1960; 1973a; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; 1976; 1981; 1991b: 79-84; 1992: 35-90; 1993a; 1995a; 1996; 1997g; 1997k; 1997l; 1997m; 1997n; 1997o; 1997p; 1997q; 1997r; 1997s; 2002b; 2002c). Adorno’s writings on Gustav Mahler and Richard Wagner were considered as being pioneering in aesthetical as well as in a music-sociological perspective. However, Horkheimer remembered that since the 1920s Adorno had also been concerned with philosophical, sociological, and psychological problems (Adorno 1951; 1952: 585-495; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1969d; 1970a; 1970b; 1973b; 1974; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1980c; 1982; 1990; 1991a; 1993b; 1993c; 1994; 1995b; 1997a; 1997b; 1997c; 1997e; 1997f; 1997h; 1997i-1; 1997i-2; 1997j1; 1997j-2; 1997t-1; 1997t-2; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 1998d; 2000a; 2000b; 2000c; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002e; 2003b; 2003c; 2003d; Adorno, et al. 1976; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno et al. 1950). Adorno’s books about Husserl and Kierkegaard gave witness to his productive work on great philosophical efforts. In Horkheimer’s view, Adorno’s attitude rooted in the critical theory of society reached its first climax in his Minima Moralia, which he dedicated to his older friend Horkheimer: in gratitude and as promise (Adorno 1951; Horkheimer 1985g: 288). Adorno’s criticaltheoretical attitude found its coronation in his Negative Dialectic of 1966 (Adorno 1966; Horkheimer 1985g: 288). According to Horkheimer, Adorno’s passionate efforts concerning language had been stimulated by Karl Kraus (Benjamin 1977: 4, 23; 1988: 1, 4, 5, 20, 25, 48; Horkheimer 1985g: 288; 1989m: chap. 2). They found their most adequate expression in Adorno’s essay on the Jargon of Authenticity against Heidegger (Adorno 1997f: 413-524; Horkheimer 1985g: 288). According to Horkheimer, Adorno had defended his dialectical philosophy in a book about the struggle of positivism in Germany, which was supposed to appear posthumously in Fall 1969, in an extensive essay against the arguments of the positivists, e.g. Karl Popper’s critical rationalism (Horkheimer 1985g: 288; Popper 1968a; 1968b; 1969; 1971). Horkheimer was fully aware that all that he stated in his obituary gave only a very incomplete picture of the almost incomprehensible, indefatigable decoction and unique literary energy of Adorno. The great success of Adorno’s teaching activity became manifest in the great number of his important students, who were obliged to him (Horkheimer 1985g: 288; 33-47; Habermas 1978c; 1987b).

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chapter twenty-eight Linguistic Turn

According to the dialectical religiology, Adorno’s passionate linguistic efforts, rooted in the human potential of language and memory, and in the evolutionary potential of the struggle for recognition, were continued most ingeniously in the work of his greatest student, Jürgen Habermas, and in the linguistic turn that he initiated in the critical theory of society (Hegel 1972; 1979; Habermas 1984a; 1984b; 1987d). The critical theorist of religion can not emphasize enough the fact that Adorno’s whole life work was permeated by religiological and theological as well as philosophical, sociological and psychological categories (Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1974; 1980b; 1995b; 1997b; 1997c; 1997f; 1997u; 1998d; 2000b; 2000c; 2001b; 2001c; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Kogon 1956a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Adorno/Keresenye 1998: 89-104; Habermas 1990: chap. 1). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, Adorno shall remain the genius of the Frankfurt School also in the future. It will take generations of scholars to interpret and fathom the depth of his thoughts not only in musicology, philosophy, sociology and psychology but also in religiology and theology. Today, in 2010, Adorno’s great literary energy and productivity is symbolized in a monument in his honor: his desk, his chair, and his chronometer enshrined in a glass container, standing in Frankfurt-Bockenheim near the old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität.

Dependence and Power According to Adorno, the dependence of and the power over the people, the very center point of the culture industry, could not be characterized and signified more faithfully than by that American research guinea pig, who was of the opinion that all the needs, wants, troubles, emergencies, and problems of the present age would come to their end if people would simply follow the prominent personalities or celebrities on the radio or on television (Adorno 1997j-1: 345). On May 20, 2009 the dialectical religiologist of religion thought of the prominent American television personality and celebrity Oprah Winfrey, who for years has told millions of Americans and Europeans what ought to be and what was right and what a successful and happy life was and how it could easily be achieved by following her example down to her diet. At the same time, the critical theorist of religion also thought of the prominent personalities of the former

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Vice President Dick Cheney of the second Bush Administration, and his faithful daughter, who continually appear on television in order to defend its failed policies, including the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, and the application of torture to prisoners of war, all of which finally lead to the political, military and economic disaster of 2008, 2009, 2010, and in order to convince the masses particularly through cynical fear-tactics to follow his example and resist the new Obama Administration (Fuhr 2003b: 39-41; Harprecht 2003: 17-19; 2008d: 31-33; Riese 2008: 41-45; Zierock 2008: 59-61; Scherrer 2008: 63-67; Walther 2008: 103-105; Gujer 2008: 4-7; Thies 2008a: 34-36; Thränert 2008b: 37-40).

Vicarious Satisfaction In Adorno’s view, the vicarious satisfaction that the culture industry granted to the masses of the people through awakening the happy feeling that the world was precisely in that good order that it wanted to suggest to them, cheated them out of and defrauded them of that very happiness (Horkheimer 1967b; 1974a; 1987e; 1997j-1: 345). In Adorno’s view, the total effect of the culture industry was that of an anti-enlightenment. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, this anti-enlightenment, namely, the progressing technical domination of nature, turned into mass deception and fraud, into a means for the confinement of the consciousness of the people. The anti-enlightenment prevented the education and formation of autonomous, independent, consciously judging and self-deciding individuals. According to Adorno, precisely such individuals however are the presupposition of a democratic society, which can only maintain and unfold itself in people who have come of age. If, so Adorno argued, the masses were unjustly abused and reviled, then it was not at least and not at last the culture industry that made them into the masses which it despised and which it prevented from emancipation, for which the people themselves would be as mature and ready, as the productive forces of the age would allow. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, even the churches in so far as they turn into businesses with masses of consumers become part of the culture industry and advertise opiate-like salvation and let people sing over and over again It is alright, It is alright, It is alright in spite of the fact, that not much was or is alright in late capitalist society (Hegel 1986: 339-397; Hodgson 1997; Kamenka 1983: 131-146; Adorno 1997h: 9-19, 93-121, 122-146, 147-176, 177-195, 354-372, 373-391, 292396, 397-407, 408-433, 434-439, 440-456, 532-538, 569-573, 574-577, 578567; 1997i-1: 7-142; 143-508; Hedges 2006; Kinzer 2006; Emanuel/Reed

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2006; Scahill 2007; Perkins 2007; Klein 2007; 1997j-1: 337-345, 375-395; 1997j-2: 499-506, 507-517, 518-532, 792-740; App. B, C, D, E, F). Throughout his work, Adorno expressed the hope that when the complete negativity of society and history was clearly seen, it could be read as the mirror image of its opposite: alternative Future III–the free, just, and reconciled society (Marx 1961c: 873-874; Zimmermann 2003: 63-66; Müller-Doohm 2005; App. B, C, D, E, F, G).

Direction of Thinking According to Horkheimer, the question concerning the direction and meaning of Adorno’s thinking could not–and that was particularly important–simply be answered through sentences, the formulation of which was not as differentiated as those of his writings (Horkheimer 1985g: 293-294). The thought that one could simply answer this question concerning direction and meaning of Adorno’s thinking instead through the infinitely subtle kind of expression, which he conveyed not only in his writings but also in his talks and lectures, would have appeared to him as being most questionable and dubious. Therefore, Horkheimer hesitated in 1969 to react to the question concerning the direction and meaning of Adorno’s thinking with any other word than that of responsibility and complexity, or even concreteness–from the Latin concrescere meaning “to grow together”– of his formulations (Guardini 1925; Horkheimer 1985g: 293-294). For Horkheimer, it was Adorno’s consideration not of the large and the universal, but rather of the small, the individual, the particular, and the singular, which forced such complexity in his thinking. Adorno had taken from Benjamin the conception that the truth was hidden in the small figures of appearance, and that it resulted from the configuration of the particular phenomena, and that the intentionless reality had to be interpreted (Zimmermann 2003: 63-66; Müller-Doohm 2003: 97-99; 2005). Adorno even found it easier to believe in the small and little Christ child than in the great Jesus, the Christ, the Pantocrator (Küng 1994a; Hodgson 1997; MüllerDoohm 2005: 482-491; Baruch 2008: 30-34; App. E). In the view of the critical religiology, Adorno materialistically turned upside down Hegel’s idealistic dialectical notion: Universal, Particular, Singular (Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53; 1986f: 273-300; Marx 19561a: 17-18; Hodgson 1997; Horkheimer 1985g: 250-295; 1985l: 286-287, 367-397, 436-493, 593-605). According to Horkheimer, it would have contradicted the very ethos of Adorno’s thinking to express general formulations. Therefore, also the other, the interpreter of Adorno’s thinking, was not allowed to do so. All that

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meant that the complexity of Adorno’s thinking had been necessary and unavoidable, and inescapable, and ineluctable for him because the consideration of the small, the particular, the singular, which after all was the reality, was so great with him (Adorno 1952: 585-595; Horkheimer 1985g: 293-294). The critical theorist of religion may call Adorno’s consideration, attitude and method dialectical micrology. The same direction and meaning was in different degrees also valid for the thinking of Horkheimer himself, and of any of the other non-conformist intellectuals of the Frankfurt School throughout the past four generations (Adorno 1952: 585-595; Horkheimer 1985g: 293-294; Arato/Gebhardt 1982; Wiggershaus 1987).

Psychological and Physical Liberation Ultimately, Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s and the other critical theorists’ thinking was directed toward the Truth, the Eternal One, the wholly Other (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40). In Judaism– from Abraham and Moses through the Psalmists and the Prophets to the Rabbis–the notion of the Eternal One was continually purified: this same purification continues in the critical theory of society and the dialectical religiology with the help of the Buddha, of the Jewish and Christian mystics, of Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer, and of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud (Schelling 1860; 1946; 1977a; 1977b; 1993; Hegel 1986p: 374-389; 1986q: 50-95; 185-346; Hodgson 1997; Schopenhauer 1989: 1/486, 518520, 558; 2/218-219, 557, 651, 717, 779, 781, 799; 3/46, 464; 4/50, 149; 5/48, 268, 387, 406-414, 420-423, 427-445,447, 450-455, 459-466, 473; Kaufmann 1967; 1968; 1986; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975b; 1975c; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Fromm 1959; 1966b; 1967, 1968; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1990b; 1992; 1995; 1999; 2001; Fromm/ Suzuki/Martino 1960; Petuchowski 1956: 543-594; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; 1988d: chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16; Küng 1970; 1991b; 1995a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Homolka 2009; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: A, C; Siebert 2001; 2002a; 2005b; Kim 1996: 267-283; App. E). Purification meant demythologization as emancipation from idolatry of heavenly bodies and Egyptian pagan deities and rituals as preparation for social and political liberation (Exodus 12: 3; Lieber 2001: 380-381/2-3; Horkheimer 1988d: chaps. 2, 6, 7, 11). Before the Exodus, each member of the covenant community of Israel had to take a lamb to a family and to a household (Exodus 12: 1-4; Efron 2009). According to the Rabbis, the act of the paschal sacrifice of the lamb broke the sense of fear and of dread by the enslaved Israelites and removed the

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psychological barrier to liberation (Exodus 12; Lieber 2001: 3-4). The public slaughter of the lamb and the marking of the doorpost with its blood, which no Egyptian would do, was an important step toward the psychological liberation of the Hebrew slaves (Exodus 12; Lieber 2001: 2-3). In this way, the Israelites proclaimed their psychological liberation from fear of Egyptian opinion and from an eagerness to imitate Egyptian customs: a necessary prerequisite of physical liberation. The Hebrew Sages saw the lamb as a symbol of idol worship and its slaughter as a repudiation of idolatry (Exodus 12; Lieber 2001: 2-3; Fromm 1966b; Lundgren 1998). According to the Rabbis, in times of drastic change people needed specific, action-oriented advice. This gave the people a sense of control over a chaotic situation, as one could see with mourning customs in the wake of a death. The eating of the lamb was an essential part of the Paschal ritual and offering (Exodus 12: 3-13; Lieber 2001: 380-381/34). By means of this sacrificial meal of the lamb, kinship ties were strengthened, family and neighborly solidarity was improved, and communion with God was established. The daubing of the entrances of the houses with the blood of the lamb served to identify them as houses of the Israelites, for the blood was designated a sign (Exodus 12: 7; Lieber 2001: 382/7). The blood was not only a readily available coloring substance, but it also possessed symbolic significance because it was looked upon as the life essence. Most importantly, the lintel and doorposts formed the demarcation between the sacred Israelite interior and the profane world outside. The blood on the doorpost may have been a sign that this family had the courage to defy their Egyptian neighbors and demonstrate an inner liberation. It perhaps was a sign that this family had already suffered and should be spared. It may simply have been a sign that this family had complied with God’s command. Of course, God could distinguish between Israelite and Egyptian homes. The Talmud said that once a plague had begun, it did not distinguish between the righteous and the wicked. Some means was needed to mark the home that merited being spared (Exodus 12: 7; Lieber 2001: 382/7; Psalm 91). According to the Rabbis every spring at the Pesah Seder, every week when the Jews pause on Shabbat to demonstrate that they were free people and not slaves, praising Shabbat in the Kiddush as a reminder of their liberation of from Egypt as well as of the arrival of the Messianic redemption, indeed every day the Jews recalled that Jewish history had begun with God’s intervention on behalf of an enslaved people, leading them to freedom, and giving them the Torah (Exodus 12: 48; Lieber 390/49; Efron 2009; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Bloch 1960: 220-225; 227-229; Adorno 1951: 333-334; Adorno 1997f: 362-363; Fromm 1966b;

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Petuchowski 1956: 543-594; Siebert 2006a; 2007a: 99-113). For the Rabbis, that future-oriented memory was to be personal, not merely a fact of ancient history: It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went free from Egypt (Exodus 12: 48; 13: 8; Lieber 390/49; Efron 2009).

Prototype In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, this Hebrew Paschal meal and offering for psychological and physical liberation became the prototype for the Passover supper, which the poor Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth celebrated with his friends in the Valley of Kidron under the walls of Jerusalem and the second Temple on the day before his torture and execution, his murder and martyrdom and victimization by the rich and powerful people, and for the institution of the Eucharist in Christianity (John 18: 1; Fromm 1992: 3-94; Reich 1976; 1999: 34-36; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97; Küng 1970; 1994a; 1994b; Baruch 2009: 30-34). Adorno’s and Benjamin’s micrological cipher theology moved precisely from the not yet or no more functionalized smallest, most particular and singular details in nature, society and history to the imageless, nameless, and notionless Eternal One or wholly Other: the most purified, i.e. de-demonized and de-mythologized theological heir of Elyon, El Shaddai, Yahweh, or Adonai; of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; of the God of Moses; of the God of Jesus; of the God of Mohammed; of the Deus absconditus, who transcended and reconciled all antagonisms in nature and society, the Coincidentia oppositorum (Psalm 91; Nicholas de Cusa 1962; Schneider 1955; Adorno 1970b; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; 1983a: 45-78; 1983b: 991-1959; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1996s: 2, 5; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1974; 1976; 1990b; 1992; Küng 1970; 1978: G; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Baruch 2009: 30-34; App. E). Pascal still found the Deus absconditus in the bread and wine of the Eucharist (Schneider 1955). The revolutionary moment in Judaism was Moses’ exodus from the Egyptian slaveholder society (Exodus 12; Lieber 2001: 380-390; Efron 2009). The revolutionary moment in Christianity was when the rich people in Roman Palestine murdered the poor man Jesus, the author of the so-called Sermon on the Mount, and when his friends refused to accept this murder as the last word of history, and when they announced that the murderers had at least ultimately not triumphed over their innocent victim, and when they inverted the cross of the crucified from an instrument of non-recognition and humiliation and annihilation of slaves, into a sign of recognition and affirmation and victory (Matthew 5-7, 26-27; Hegel 1986q: 289-306; App.

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E). This revolutionary moment was betrayed and spoiled at least since the Constantinian turn, whenever the Church went to bed with the state or with bourgeois civil society, as Benedict XVI did in 2008, when he celebrated his 80th birthday in the G.W. Bush White House without protest against the unjust Iraq war, Abu-Ghraib and the Guantanamo prison. However, this revolution was awakened again whenever Christians became critical and non-conformists in the late Middle Ages and in Modernity from Thomas Münzer to the Basic Christian communities and the liberation theologians in Central and Latin America, and elsewhere (Lortz 1962: 32, 54, 65, 104, 107-108, 127-128, 184, 244, 349, 907, 958; Küng 1994a: 62, 218219, 222-223, 225, 228, 240-241, 245, 246-248, 255, 258, 282, 306, 324, 334, 337, 340, 345, 366, 376, 385-386, 413, 458, 462; 2009; Marcuse 1960; 1970a: chap. 1; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; Berrigan 1972; 1978; 1989; Stone/Weaver 1998; Metz 1970; 1972b; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; Kogon 1967; Dirks 1983a; 1983b; 1985; 1987; 1988; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1965; 1978; 1979d; 1986; 1987b; 1993; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2007a; 2007g; 2008b: 55-61; 2008c; 2008f; 2009i; App. E).

Exile and Exodus In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the Exile-Exodus-liberation story may be called the prototype, the symbol and the motivation of the critical theory of society as well as of the critical theory of religion (Zimmermann 2003: 63-66; Müller-Doohm 2005; Kim 1996: 267-283). Adorno saw himself as the professional homeless (Adorno/Mann 2003; Zimmermann 2003: 63-66; Müller-Doohm 2005). Out of this perspective of the homeless man in America or Europe, Adorno gained a new entrance to the role of the non-conformist intellectual. Out of this view of the homeless man and the non-conformist intellectual Adorno saw the constitution of the world as a system of horror. He saw his exile as signum of a whole epoch: the 20th century, and the dialectical religiologist may add the beginning of the 21st century. Precisely this experience of alienation and homelessness was the reason for the radicalization of Adorno’s thinking: the radicalization of the dialectic into the theological glowing fire as well as an extreme sharpening of the social-dialectical and even the economic motives (Adorno 1970b: 116-117; Adorno 1973b; Benjamin 1983a; 1983b). The dialectical religiologist remembers that Adorno and his wife Gretel never built a house or a home for themselves, be it in New York or in California or in Frankfurt a.M. On August 6, at 11.20 a.m., Adorno died–after a very hard two years of struggling with the rebellious students and their

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reactionary opponents, and in general with collective insanity, after which he called himself in letters to Marcuse deeply depressed and a badly battered Teddie–quietly and peacefully, but alone, in the Catholic St. Maria Hospital in Visp, near Zermatt, at the foot of the much loved Matterhorn (Müller-Doohm 2005: chap. 19; Zimmermann 2003: 63-66; App. E).

Anthropomorphisms The inverse theology removed in its purification process all anthropomorphisms from the Abrahamic religions, which attributed a human activity to God (Exodus 12: 12; Efron 2009; Lieber 2001: 383; Adorno 1970b; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11). When, for example, Exodus 13: 13 stated that God will go through the land of Egypt and strike down every first-born, both man and beast and will meet out punishment to all gods of Egypt, then for the Rabbis this anthropomorphism may have been used to make God’s active presence in history more vividly and dramatically perceived. In the Rabbi’s view, God’s power to liberate Israel physically and psychologically from Egyptian slavery manifested His own exclusivity, mocks the professed divinity of Pharaoh, and exposed the deities of Egypt as non-gods. Despite the Rabbis’ emphatic anti-anthropomorphic statement, however, the Jewish tradition frequently spoke mythologically of the Angel of Death, not God, as the destroyer, the Mysterium Tremendum (Exodus 12: 12-23; Lieber 2001: 383-386/12-23; Efron 2009; Adorno 1970b; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Otto 1969). The inverse theology of the critical theorists went far beyond the Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition in its purifying or dedemonizing, or de-demythologizing the sacred texts from all forms of particularly necrophilous anthropomorphic and mythological elements, and so does the dialectical religiology (Exodus 12: 12; Lieber 2001: 383; Adorno 1970b; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Siebert 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2002c; 2003; 2004a; 2005b; 2005c: 135-160; Kim 1996: 267-283).

The Existence of God Concerning the inescapable complexity or concreteness of Adorno’s thinking, Horkheimer was reminded particularly of the theological dimension (Horkheimer 1985g: 293-294). According to Horkheimer, if somebody had asked Adorno Does God exist? and what can be said about him, then he would have answered and his answer would have corresponded to the great negative-theological thoughts of the Jewish and Christian history:

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I cannot simply answer by saying: there is a God, and God is just, and God is good (Exodus 20; Blakney 1941; Boehme 1992; Hegel 1986q: 347-536; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1985l: 483-492; Küng 1978: B, C, D, E, F; App. E). This was so for Adorno because he ultimately could not formulate positively the word just, and the word good, as well as the word God themselves, but only that which was really not God: namely, the smallest and most insignificant particular detail of the secular reality (Adorno 1997j-1: 302-319, 326-329, 362-366, 396-400, 423-431; Horkheimer 1985g: 293-294; Sölle 1977; 1992; Sölle/Metz 1990; 1994; Sölle/Habermas 1975). The dialectical religiologist may say in the language of Dorothy Sölle that Adorno looked for God in the garbage of the slums of the big capitalist cities and believed in Him atheistically (Horkheimer 1985g: 293294; Sölle 1977; 1992; Sölle/Metz 1990; 1994; Sölle/Habermas 1975). For Adorno’s and Benjamin’s inverse theology, each smallest, most non-functional and useless detail could turn into a cipher stimulating the longing for the totally Other (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b). Particularly each theodicy event could elicit this yearning (Metz 1995; Adorno 1970b). Adorno explained, announced, professed, avowed, and acknowledged precisely that negative theology in his Negative Dialectics (Adorno 1973b: 361-408; 1997f; Horkheimer 1985g: 293-294; 1985l: 483-492). Precisely that negative theology was thought through throughout the whole development of the critical theory of society from its very start, and it continues to be thought through in the dialectical religiology (Horkheimer 1988; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Siebert 2000; 2001; 2002a; Kim 1996: 267-283). In spite of the fact that Adorno was not able to form a positive answer to the question Does God exist, there was intrinsic in the negativity of his answer the affirmation of an Other, which he could signify only through this word of the Other (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1996s: 62-67; Adorno 1973b: 361-408). Horkheimer remembered that Adorno talked always about the longing for the wholly Other without using the word Heaven, or Eternity, or Beauty, or any other traditional word. Horkheimer thought that this was precisely the great and splendid element in his theological question-position, that while he asked for the world he meant ultimately the entirely Other. Yet at the same time, Adorno had the conviction that the totally Other could not be comprehended through describing it, but rather through representing the world, as it was, in reference to the fact that it was not the only thing at which the thoughts of man are aiming. For Horkheimer, that precisely was Adorno’s and his own negative theology but not in the negative sense, that God does not exist, but rather in the sense that God could not be represented or described (Horkheimer 1985l: 483-

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492; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; App. E). It was from Adorno that Horkheimer inherited the notion of the wholly Other. There was indeed for both critical theorists a transcending of yearning: without the wish there was no truth, but the wish could not guarantee it (Horkheimer 1985l: 483492; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Müller-Doohm 2005: 481-492; App. E).

Sorrow In 1972, only a few months away from his own death on July 7, 1973, Horkheimer remembered how beautiful had been the living together with his beloved wife Maidon, the former Rosa Riekher, private secretary of his father Moritz Horkheimer, from 1915 up to her death from a heart attack in Montagnola, Switzerland, on October 17, 1969, two months after Adorno had died in Wisp (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 42; 1995o: 15-79). Horkheimer confessed in the last year of his life that his living together with Maidon did not become less beautiful through the 54 years it lasted, but it became always more beautiful up to the day of her death. Both helped each other in every respect and way. Horkheimer believed that he would not have done most of the positive things which he had accomplished if Maidon had not helped him with them or if she had not virtually begged him to do them: e.g. certain publications or the foundation of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt a.M. Maidon had made Horkheimer’s life so infinitely beautiful, so that he could now in 1972 show more clearly through his sorrow, which he felt for her, and particularly say what moved him so deeply theoretically. Horkheimer remembered that according to Freud and to positive science in general sorrow and mourning and the faithfulness after the death of the beloved person was really a meaningless happening, since the deceased, in this case Maidon, no longer knew anything of it (Hegel 1986g: 292-338; Freud 1955; 1962a; 1962b; 1964; 1977; 1992; Fromm 1959; 1980b; Marcuse 1962; 1980a; 1995; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 42; 1995o: 15-79; Benjamin 1978a; Mitscherlich 1993; Küng 1982; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; App. E). However, Horkheimer thought that this romantic mode of behavior belonged precisely to the beauty of life and to love, which was now in the process of disappearing (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 40, 42; Siebert 1979b; 1979d; 1979e; 1986; 1987d; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). Horkheimer remained faithful to his wife Maidon throughout their long marriage: not even the beloved friend of his youth, Suzanne Neumeier, later on married to Lucien in Paris, one of his partners besides Friedrich Pollock on the L’ile heureuse, remained a temptation for him (Horkheimer 1987k: 289-328; 1995o: 11-15; 1996q:

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979-1981). In contrast, his younger friend Adorno had–like his teacher Tillich–several love affairs outside his marriage with Margaret or Gretel Adorno, née Karplus: one unhappy one even a year before his death (Adorno/ Tobisch 2003; Müller-Doohm 2005: chaps. 19 and Epilogue; Djerassi 2008). Gretel who survived her husband by over two decades, and who continued to live in their apartment at the Kettenhofweg 123 in Frankfurt a.M., and who helped faithfully to complete his posthumously published aesthetics, afterwards tried to commit suicide, but failed, and from then on needed continual assistance, until she was brought into a sanatorium in the Taunus Mountains, where she died close to Hitler’s former headquarter during the Ardennes Offensive in December 1944/January 1945 (Adorno 1973a; 1997g; Adorno 2007; Müller-Doohm 2003; 2005: chaps. 19 and Epilogue; Djerassi 2008).

Dialectic of Love and Sorrow Horkheimer was not able to overcome that dialectic of love in the present transition period from Modernity to Post-Modern alternative Future I– the totally administered society of over sized skyscrapers and highways, over-crowded and blocked by thousands of cars (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Horkheimer 1986g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 49, 42; Adorno 1970a; Marcuse 1967; Fromm 1957: 9-11; 1961; 1970: B699-B705; 1990a; Flechtheim 1971; Gumnior/Ringguth 1988: 115; Siebert 1979b; 1979e; 1986: 442-457; 1987c; App. B, C, D, G). Horkheimer was aware that this dialectic of love had its good and its bad side. In Horkheimer’s view, the romantic love disappeared like everything else intellectual, and spiritual, and emotional, and was being leveled out in the process of the arrival of alternative Future I–the totally bureaucratized, one-dimensional and reifying society, and only what was purposeful and suitable and scientifically grounded remained (Horkheimer 1986g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 49, 42; Adorno 1970a; Marcuse 1967; Fromm 1957: 9-11; 1961; 1970: B699-B705; 1990a; Flechtheim 1971; App. G). In Horkheimer’s view, to these emotions belonged also the sorrow, which was itself a problematic scientific matter and which will probably disappear as well. However, for Horkheimer not only love but also sorrow contained in itself a positive element. Thus, Horkheimer did not only think of a dialectic of romantic love but also of sorrow. The death of a beloved human being, to remain faithful to him or to her, to maintain the hope to him or her, all these were feelings, which in the face of science were merely illusions and superstitions (Freud 1964; Kamenka 1983: 115-124; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 42; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002b: chaps. 2, 6; App. E). All these

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feelings were illusions and superstitions not only in the perspective of science but also in the view of the philosopher Kant’s teaching, the boundary of which he himself had overstepped no less than his great idealistic successors Fichte, Schelling and Hegel: namely, that people could not say anything about the Absolute, the Intelligible, or any kind of a Beyond, shortly God, Freedom and Immortality (Kant 1929; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1982; 1983; Freud 1964; Kamenka 1983: 115-124; Horkheimer 1987b: 15148, 295-311; 1985g: chaps. 37, 42; 1987i: 467-482; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002b: chaps. 2, 6); App. E. Thus, Horkheimer asked in the perspective of science: why should one be faithful to dust? Why should one feel sorrow about someone who no longer exists and why apply internal energies to something, which were entirely unproductive? In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, in spite of all this scientific skepticism, Horkheimer felt sorrow about Maidon, who no longer existed, for four years up to his own death and applied psychic energies to Maidon’s memory, which would be considered by science to be unproductive. Maybe Marx came to the boundary of science and the end of the dialectic of enlightenment, when after the death of his beloved wife and his most preferred daughter in the same year he walked along the beeches of the French Riviera without finding much consolation in his The Capital. Yet, maybe Marx may also have known from his Hegelian start that the metaphysics of God, Freedom and Immortality was the demand of a rational conception of the world as nature, society and history, and thus he may after all not have been a substantial atheist, but rather a pantheist a la Baruch Spinoza (Hegel 1986a: 74; 1986b: 101, 37, 106, 229-230, 263, 327, 339-352, 401, 409-410; 1986d: 430, 456-457, 459; 1986e: 48, 98, 121, 178-179, 274, 291-293, 388-390, 454-455; Kamenka 1983: 115-124; Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005; Dirks 1983b; 1987; 1988; App. E).

Intellectual Functions According to Horkheimer, the human notions, which in the perspective of science related themselves only to the empirical reality, the world of appearance, and which Kant had seen precisely as intellectual functions, and which had to be attributed to the appearance that they create, and which constituted the order in this world, were in theology and metaphysics suddenly applied to the non-empirical, to what could not be established factually: to God, Freedom and Immortality (Kant 1929; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1982; 1983; Hegel 1986q: 347-536; Freud 1964; Kamenka 1983: 115-124; Horkheimer 1987b: 15-148, 295-311; 1985g: chaps. 37, 42;

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1987i: 467-482; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002b: chaps. 2, 6; App. E). Such theologically or metaphysically applied notions were in the perspective of science unscientific, naïve, mere tradition, superstition, and even pathological. Horkheimer tried to prove this scientific position by quoting a passage from Freud’s meta-psychology. According to Freud, the grave sorrow, the reaction to the loss of the beloved person contained and included the loss of interest for the external world in so far as it did not remind of the deceased person; the loss of the ability to chose any new love object, which would mean to replace the mourned person, i.e. in Horkheimer’s terms to be faithful to him or to her, which would mean a loss; the turning away from any achievement which did not stand in a relationship to the memory of the deceased person (Kant 1929; Horkheimer 1985g: 477-478; Freud 1955; 1962a; 1969: 429; 1977; 1992). According to Freud, people comprehended easily that this inhibition and restriction and limitation of the Ego as the expression of the exclusive devotion to sorrow, leaves no energies for other intentions and interests. For Freud, such behavior appeared to other people only therefore not as being pathological because they knew so well how to explain it.

Dissolution and Preservation In Horkheimer’s dialectical perspective, human sorrow, explained scientifically, had necessarily to dissolve itself (Kant 1929; Horkheimer 1985g: 477478; Freud 1955; 1962a; 1969: 429; 1977; 1992; Horkheimer 1985g: 477178). Horkheimer was of the opinion that this completely right, and correct, and proper happening was likewise also a negative one, and that the sorrow should in spite of everything also be preserved nevertheless. According to Horkheimer, the same was also true for the burning love to a human being already during life. In such burning love was present already, that one would be faithful to him or to her also beyond life (Horkheimer 1985g: 477-178; Abbot Joseph 2009: 334-337; Küng 1982; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). Horkheimer thought of the great literature, of Shakespeare and of all what was concerned with man’s finitude and immortality (Shakespeare 1978; Adorno 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1981; 1993c; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997g; 1997k; 1997u; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Horkheimer 1985g: 477-178; Abbot Joseph 2009: 334-337; Küng 1982; App. E). For Horkheimer, if sorrow and love dissolved and disappeared, then something went away and got lost that belonged essentially to what could not be justified scientifically but which was nevertheless intellectually

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and spiritually positive. It was the task of the individual to decide this issue for himself or herself. Yet in Horkheimer’s opinion, the individual could not prevent the disappearance of these things, these emotions, like sorrow and love, in the present transition period from Modernity to Post-Modern alternative Future I (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42; App. G).

Sorrow in Happiness In 1972, shortly before his death, Horkheimer confessed that sorrow from the very start already belonged to what was called happiness (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40, 42). According to Horkheimer, his wife Maidon, who had by that time converted from Christianity to Judaism, actually always knew and mourned about the fact that so many terrible and awful and cruel things happened on this earth, and had to happen (Hegel 1986l: 30-55; 1986q: 501-535; 1986g: 339-514; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1967: 258-261, 311-313; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40, 42; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25; Hastings 2009: 16-18; Echternkamp 2008; Tudjman 1996; Rakidzija 2006; App. B, C, D, E, F). Horkheimer admitted that such thinking and mourning was not very suitable and appropriate and purposeful in the scientific perspective and that it was something, which perhaps would be realized only later on in reference to human beings and even to animals but which belonged immediately first of all to the being of the individual and which had more to do with the religious, particularly Christian dimension than may appear (Hegel 1986l: 30-55; 1986q: 185-346, 501-535; 1986g: 339-514; Horkheimer 1967: 258-261; 311-313; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40, 42; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25; Küng 1978; 1984; 1990b; 1994a; 1994b; App. E). This Horkheimer’s great teacher Schopenhauer also had always known and said (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 21, 37, 40, 42). After all, Schopenhauer had once signified himself as the most Christian of all philosophers. However, that did not mean for Horkheimer that people should only see this side of the dialectic of sorrow and love, but it rather meant that the disappearance of such emotions like sorrow and love was maybe necessarily connected with the historical progress, but that it contained also a negative moment (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40, 42).

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chapter twenty-eight The Good and the Youth Movement

In the year of his death, in 1973, Horkheimer still insisted in public that the Good had no name (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40, 42, 43). People should not make an image of God, because such image would turn into a fetish and therefore into a pseudo-legitimation of force and power and terror (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Genesis 20; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 30, 37, 40, 42, 43; 1989m: chaps. 6, 8, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 25; Hastings 2009; Echternkamp 2008; Tudjman 1996; Rakidzija 2006). The 1968 youth movement had, however, many names for the Good: freedom from domination, overcoming of the system, classless society, satisfying, and gratifying existence, rational society, etc. (Horkheimer 1985: chaps. 30, 31, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43; Habermas 1969; 1970; App. G). However, that was not really what separated Adorno or Horkheimer from the 1968 protesting youth movement (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 27, 30, 40, 43). Admittedly for Horkheimer, the Good could not simply be determined. Yet, what really separated Horkheimer from the youth movement in 1973 was immediately more the spacial distance between Montagnola and Frankfurt a.M. than the content of the convictions. For Horkheimer, the main difficulty lay in that in consequence of the direction of the collectives it was very difficult if at all possible to have a real public discourse. What mattered for the direction of the collectives, be it of the youth or of the adults, was more the following than the Truth and the Good (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43; 1989m: chaps. 12, 19, 26; Habermas 1999; App. E). Up to their death, Horkheimer and Adorno were longing for and trusted and had confidence in the imageless and nameless wholly Other, the Eternal One, as well as in Freedom and Immortality, in spite of the fact that the ambiguity of their theology and of their metaphysics, which for them were the demand of a rational conception of the world, was even more grandiose than that of their great teachers Immanuel Kant and Georg W. F. Hegel (Psalm 91; Efron 2009; Blakney 1942: xiii; Kant 1929; 1946; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Hegel 1986l: 1955; 1986q: 185-346, 347-536; Hodgson 1997; O’Regan 1994; Horkheimer 1967: 177-202, 203-215, 216-228, 229-238, 239-247, 268-269, 311-312, 335-354; 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42; 1987b: 15-74,75-148, 149-153, 237-251; 1989m: chaps. 2, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37; 1988n: 497, 498-499, 503504, 507-509, 517-520, 527-528, 530-531, 533, 535-536, 542-543, 1996s:

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chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997j-1: 97-122; 1997j-2: 608-616; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 1998d; 2008; 2000b; 2000c; 2001b; 2001c; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005; Habermas 1978c; 1985a; 1987b; 1988a; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: Part III; 1992b; Goldstein 2006: 61-114, 115120, 121-150; Ott 2001; 2007; Kim 1996: 267-283; App. E). The critical theologian Georg W. Rüdolphi still saw World War II and the saturation bombing of open cities in terms of the Talion Theodicy, and therefore asked if his city of Frankfurt a.M. was more guilty than the city of London, since the former had been bombed more than the latter in spite of the allforgiving and atoneing continual sacrifice of Jesus, God’s Son and Messiah, which he performed and celebrated when he read the mass in his Sta. Familia Parish in Frankfurt every morning (Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2, 11; Küng 1994a; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993). The dialectical religiology is the heir of the theological and metaphysical trust in the Eternal One and yearning for the entirely Other intrinsic in the critical theory of society from its beginning as response to the unending theodicy experiences of individuals and nations (Horkheimer 1988a: 100-157; 1988d: chaps. 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12; 1985g: chaps. 17, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 40; 1996s: 32-74; Petuchowski 1996: 543-549; Efron 2009; Siebert 1993; 2001; 2002a; Kim 1996: 267-283; App. A, B, C, D, E, F, G).

EPILOGUE

God, Freedom and Immortality The critical theory of society of the Frankfurt School before, during and after its American exile was from its very start engaged in a new translation of the semantic and semiotic materials and potentials of religion, in the differentiation between religion and positivism, between religion and naturalism, between liberal religion and religious and political theocratic fundamentalism, between religion and liberalism, between religion and rationality, between religion and socialism, between religion and fascism, between religion and ultimate meaning, between traditional and critical religion, between a mythological and critical faith idea, between religion and death, between eschatological religion and political utopia, between religion and theology, between religion and metaphysics, between religion and art, between religion and morality and ethics, between religion and autonomy and solidarity, between religion and politics, between religion and terror, between religion and idolatry, between traditional Buddhist, Jewish and Christian religiousness and radical humanism, between theistic humanism and radical non-theistic humanism, between authoritarian and revolutionary, humanistic religion, and in the identification of what was missing in profane, late modernity: God, freedom and immortality; the X-experience; the Eternal One; the wholly Other (Genesis 1 and 2; Psalm 22; Psalm 91; John 1; Metzger/Koogan 1993: 645; Horkheimer 1988a; 1988n: 165-166, 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988n: 498-499, 503, 507-509, 510-512, 517-518, 519, 520, 521-522, 523, 527-528, 533, 535536, 1996s: 32-74; Adorno 2000a; 2000b; 2000c; 2001b; 2001c; 2002a; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Fromm 1966: chaps. ii, vii, ix; 1992: 3-94, 203-212; 1999: 34-36; Habermas 1982; 1986; 1987b; 1988a; 1988b; 1991a: Part III; 1992b; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006c; 2007; Habermas 2009; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Bahr 2007; Wheatland 2009; Marx/Schwarz/Schwarz/Wizisla 2007; Küng/Homolka 2009; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Budd 1973; Wolff 1964: 14-15, 190-192, 359; Dragicevic/Oyen 2009: 66-68; 121-131, 166-174; Meyer 2009b: 1115; Brochhagen 2009: 59-62; Ott 2001; 2007; 2009; Wheatland 2009; Pals

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2009; Siebert 1965; 2009e; 2009f; 2009g; 2009h). Religion was to be rescued through critique, demythologization, de-demonization, inversion and translation (Horkheimer 1988a; Adorno 1970b; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Habermas 1982; 1986; 1987b; 1988a; 1988b; 1991a: Part III; 1992b; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006c; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Dragicevic/Oyen 2009: 66-68; 121-131, 166-174; Meyer 2009b: 11-15; Brochhagen 2009: 59-62; Deppe/Herding/Hoss 1978).

Temporality and Eternal Ideas In 1966, three years before his death, Adorno wrote toward the end of his climactic work, the Negative Dialectics, that after Auschwitz and its traumatization people could no longer say, as did Plato and Aristotle and all their followers throughout Antiquity, Middle Ages and Modernity, that the immutable was the truth, and that the mobile and transitory was mere appearance (Plato 1905; 1955, 2008; Aristotle 1986; Hegel 1986a: 82, 85, 205, 227, 244, 314, 386, 452; 1986b: 97-98, 182, 228, 234, 243, 312, 372, 422, 485, 490, 492-493, 497, 500, 505, 558, 560; 1986c: 26, 66, 245; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 38; Adorno 1997f: 354-358; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Ebeling 1979; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Metz/Wiesel 1993). For Adorno, after Auschwitz the mutual indifference of or chorismos between temporality and eternal ideas was no longer tenable even with Hegel’s bold explanation that temporal existence, by virtue of the destruction inherent in its dialectical notion, served the eternal represented by the eternity of destruction (Hegel 1986l: 19-55; Horkheimer 1967: 260; Adorno 1997f: 354-358; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009). According to Horkheimer, Hegel had seen the Kantian Thing-in-itself, i.e. God, freedom, and immortality, as the living notion, the infinite dialectical movement, in which the opposition of thing and thought proved itself as conditioned (Kant 1929: 24, 27, 71-74, 85-87, 89, 172-173, 230, 265-267, 278-280, 282-284, 440, 449, 490; Horkheimer 1967: 260). However, for Hegel, Adorno, Horkheimer or Bloch and their disciples, the unanswered great questions remain for the meaning of life, for the rescue from the ax-cut, which the great anti-utopian–the individual’s death–represents: the tearing down of all purpose series (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971a;

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1971b: 42-43; 1972; 1975b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; 2009; Bloch/Reif 1978; Küng 1982).

Three Propositions Already on June 18, 1963, Adorno had reminded his students in the Philosophy Department of the University of Frankfurt a.M., that the three cardinal propositions, that Kant had regarded as the cardinal propositions of ethics, were those that maintained the existence of freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God (Kant 1929: 24, 27, 71-74, 85-87, 89, 172-173, 230, 265-267, 278-280, 282-284, 440, 449, 490; Horkheimer 1967: 260; 1985g: chaps. 3, 5, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 25, 26, 29, 37, 40; 1987b: 15-74, 75-148; 1989m: chaps. 12, 21, 29, 33, 34; 1990j: 11-168; Adorno 2000: 67-68; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Ebeling 1979; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74). According to Kant, as Adorno understood him, these three propositions had their decisive meaning not in theoretical philosophy, i.e., not in our knowledge of what was the case, but in practical philosophy (Kant 1929; 1946; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Hegel 1986t: 329-386; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3; 13; 198ti: 467-482; 1990j: 24-63, 353; 1987b: 15-74, 75-148; Adorno 1970a; 2000: 67-68; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74). For Adorno, following the Kantian theory, this meant that the three propositions were strictly and necessarily bound up with the question: What shall we do? As such, this could really only be understood and explained in connection with what people ought to do. To Adorno, Kant’s separation of this question from the realm of theory seemed to do violence to the problem: i.e., Kant’s disclaimer that theory–including the mathematized natural sciences–and the modern civil society built no longer on religion and metaphysics, faith and the dialectical notion, but rather on the natural sciences and the positive social sciences that were imitating them, and on technology, no longer had any interest in these three propositions, did not seem to be entirely convincing (Kant 1929; 1946; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986q: 342-344; Hegel 1986t: 329-386; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3; 13; 1987i: 467-482; 1990j: 24-63, 353; 1987b: 15-74, 75-148; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372; 569-573, 578-587; 2000: 6768; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 7274). Adorno argued that if anything matters to man in his own life, aside from his actions, then it must be the question whether or not everything came to an end with his death. In Adorno’s view, what Kant had meant

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was that theoretical reason, i.e. our knowledge of nature, has no great interest in those three propositions, because it could not hope to provide a proper, positive explanation of them. In Adorno’s perspective, there had been something in Kant’s philosophy that intimated to the people that the metaphysical ideas concerning God, freedom, and immortality were matters that they should not worry about. It could not be in peoples’ interest to pursue questions that appeared insoluble from the outset in the sphere to which they had been assigned by him: the dimension of the Thingin-itself (Kant 1929; 1946; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Adorno 2000: 67-68; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74). Adorno regarded this line of Kantian thinking as highly problematic. According to Adorno, in the course of the development of modern philosophy it had been this positivistic line of thought that had increasingly led to the elimination of those questions worthy of human beings: the questions that had led people to philosophize in the first place (Kant 1929; 1946; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Adorno 1969b; 1970a; 2000: 67-68; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/ Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Horkheimer 1990j: 169-334). While in this way the process of converting philosophy into a science has advanced inexorably, philosophy itself has increasingly declined in interest: i.e., it refused increasingly to make any statement or judgment on the matters about which people expected philosophy to have something to say: namely, God, freedom, and particularly immortality (Kant 1929; 1946; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Adorno 1969b; 1970a; 2000: 67-68; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Habermas 1971; 1973; 1982; 1984a; 1985a; 1986; 1987b; 1987c; 1988a; 1988b; 1990 chap. 1; 1991a: part III; 1999; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, Adorno and Horkheimer and the other critical theorists of society have refused to participate in this decline of philosophy and thus, have continued to speak about the three propositions of God, freedom and immortality, if also in a negative, theological or negative metaphysical way (Adorno 1970b; 2000: 67-69; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Horkheimer 1985l: 483-492; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005). In the future, all reconstruction of historical materialism will have to be guided–in contrast to the former Soviet Marxism–by such negative theology or metaphysic concerned with the tree propositions of God, freedom and immortality (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1985a; 1985b; 2000: 67-69; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer

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2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Marcuse 1961; 1970a: chap. 1; 2001; 2005; Kogon 1967; Habermas 1976; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1982; 1990: chap. 1; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005).

The Life of the Dialectical Notion In Horkheimer’s view, his two great teachers, Schopenhauer and Hegel, were not so far away and apart from each other as they had once thought (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Hegel 1986f: 243-300, 548-573; 1986c: 11-81, 590-591; 1986l 27-55; Horkheimer 1967: 260, 311-312; Adorno 1997f: 354-358; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Ebeling 1979 Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74). For Hegel, as Horkheimer understood him, the life of the dialectical Notion, the Absolute, was the contradiction, the negative, the pain, and death (Hegel 1986f: 243-300, 548-573; 1986c: 11-81, 590-591; Horkheimer 1967: 260, 311-312; Adorno 1997f: 354-358; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74). For Horkheimer, what Hegel named the dialectical Notion, the system of the intellectual determinations that resulted out of each other and were in eternal movement, was nothing else than the appearance and the disappearance of that which it comprehended. The great achievement of Hegel’s philosophy consisted in that the dialectical Notion did not exist outside and independent from what disappeared, and which was held on to and maintained in it, but that it included in itself pain, suffering, and death (Hegel 1986q: 185-346, 347-536; Hegel 1986f: 243-300, 548-573; 1986c: 11-81, 590-591; Horkheimer 1967: 260, 311-312; Adorno 1997f: 354-358; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Bacevic 2009). The consolation–his theodicy–that Hegel’s theological optimism, so hated by Schopenhauer, was able to give, was ultimately the insight into the necessary inter-connection of the notions in the whole, which was the truth: the fragile unity, which was named totality or system (Leibniz 1996; Hegel 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 455; 1986q: 185-346, 347-536; 1986f: 243-300, 548-573; 1986c: 11-81, 590-591; Horkheimer 1967: 260, 311-312; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25, 34; Adorno 1997f: 354-358; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Metz 1995; Oelmüller 1990; 1992; Habermas 1986: 53-54). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, Schopenhauer was Hegel without the theological optimism, and Hegel was Schopenhauer with the theological optimism (Hegel 1986e; 1986f; 1986l; Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Horkheimer 1967; 260, 311-312; 1989m:

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chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25, 34; Adorno 1997f: 354-358; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74).

Mystical Impulses According to Adorno, influenced by Jewish and Christian mysticism, as well as by Hegel, Schopenhauer and Horkheimer, one of the mystical impulses secularized in the Hegelian dialectics was the doctrine that the intra-mundane and historic reality was relevant to what traditional metaphysics distinguished as Transcendence: or at least, expressed less agnostically and radically that it was relevant to the position taken by human consciousness on the questions, which the canon of philosophy had assigned to theology and metaphysics (Blakney 1941; Boehme 1992; Hegel 1986f: 243-300, 548-573; 1986c: 11-81, 590-591; Scholem 1935; 1967; 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Horkheimer 1967: 260, 311-312; 1985g: 17, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 29, 37, 40, 42, 43; Adorno 1997f: 354-355; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Habermas 1978c: 33-45, 46-95, 127-543; 1986: 53-54; 125-126, 139-140; 144, 146 147; 1990: chap. 1). For Adorno, after Auschwitz and all the horror and terror and cruelty and torture this name stands for concerning World War II, including other prison, work and death camps of the time, and–so the dialectical religiologist may add–the post-World War II wars against Algeria, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and the civilwars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Sudan, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, cold war, war on terror, etc., the critical theorists’ feelings resisted any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wrong and most of all as injustice against the innocent victims (Horkheimer 1967: 260, 311-312; 1985g: 17, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 29, 37, 40, 42, 43; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 30, 31; Adorno 1997f: 354-355; 2000: 9698; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 7274; Habermas 1986: 53-54, 125-126, 139-140; 144, 146, 147; 1990: chap. 1, Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Kogon 2003a; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Peukert 1976: 278-280; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247; Hastings 2009: 16-18; Echternkamp 2008; Dallaire 2003; Tudjman 1996; Bacevic 2009). The critical theorists’ feelings balked at squeezing any kind of sense and meaning, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate. The feelings of the critical theorists had an objective side about events that made a mockery out of the construction of immanence as endowed with a meaning radiated by an affirmatively posited Transcendence, or Ab-

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solute, or X-experience, or Truth, or wholly Other, without which there would be and could be no liberation, or happiness, or ethics and morality, or perfect justice, or unconditional love, and no immortality, and no rescue of the hopeless victims of society and history, and no anamnestic solidarity with and faithfulness toward the dead, and no ultimate meaning, and no genuine art, religion, or philosophy, or even science (Horkheimer 1967: 260, 311-312; 1985g: 17, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 29, 39, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40, 42, 43; 1989m: chaps. 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 33, 37; Adorno 1997j-1: 87-122; 1997j-2: 608-617; 1997f: 354355; 2000: 96-98; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Fromm 1970; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1999; 2001; Habermas 1986: 53-54, 125-126, 139-140, 144, 146, 147; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: Part III; 1999; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; 2009; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Kogon 2003a; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Peukert 1976: 278-280; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247; Hastings 2009: 16-18; Echternkamp 2008; Dallaire 2003; Tudjman 1996; Bacevic 2009; Habermas 1982; 1986; Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005; Peukert 1976: 278-280; Siebert 1993; 2000; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 5, 6). Such construction would only affirm the absolute negativity, and it would ideologically be its continuation, which in reality lay in any case in the principle of the existing antagonistic civil society, down to its future self-destruction (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 120-167; Adorno 1997h: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 569-573, 578-587; 1997j-1: 11-41, 47-71, 72-96, 87-122, 254-288; 1997j-2: 499-506, 507-517, 518-532, 555-572, 573-594, 608-627, 617-638, 674-690, 702-740, 803-820; 1997f: 354-355; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/ Frei/Goschler 2009; Bacevic 2009).

Absolute Negativity In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the absolute negativity of bourgeois society and world history has indeed continued since Hegel and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse and Fromm, Neumann, Löwenthal, and Sohn-Rethel, and has continually found ideological support on the Hegelian Right and sometimes even in the Hegelian Center, up to the present, May 2009 (Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 168-208; Adorno 1997f: 354-355; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; SohnRether 1975; Löwenthal 1980; 1989; 1990a; 1990b; Löwith 1967; Hast-

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ings 2008; Echternkamp 2008; Scahill 2007; Kinzer 2006; Perkins 2007; Hedges 2006; Bonfiglio 2005; Zinn 1999: chaps. 16-25; Klein 2007; Dallaire 2003; Toynbee 1957; 1958; Bacevic 2009). According to the Rabbis, the silver and gold given by the Egyptians to the Israelites before their exodus from Egypt, constituted a protest against the negative policies of the royal tyrant, the Pharaoh, the continued enslavement of the Israelites, and the unwillingness to let them go (Exodus 12: 35; Lieber 2001: 387/35). They demonstrated a renewal of public conscience in Egypt. The Rabbis remembered that similar gifts were given to Jews leaving the Babylonian captivity to return to Judea, and to rebuild Jerusalem and to erect the second temple (Ezra 1: 4; Exodus 12: 35; Lieber 2001: 387/35). The critical theorist of religion remembers that such gifts were given after World War II by the Federal Republic of Germany as a whole and by some of its individual citizens to the State of Israel and to some of its individual citizens in remembrance of the Shoa (Mitscherlich 1993; Lohmann 1994). Had the Israelites, so the Rabbis argued, left Egypt or Babylon with nothing after so many years of producing surplus labor and surplus value for their Egyptian or Babylonian masters, and for all their connected suffering, the hatred in their hearts toward the Egyptians or the Babylonians would have been never ending: Lex Talionis (Ezra 1: 4; Exodus 12: 35; Lieber 2001: 387/35; Siebert 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2008a)! In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the same could by applied to the Germans (Mitscherlich 1993; Lohmann 1994; Sohn-Rethel 1975; Neumann 1942). Benno Jacob, who like the critical theorists of society, was born and grew up in Germany, and had to escape to England after the Nazis came into power in January 1933, commented that the Torah wanted the Egyptian people to send the Israelites off with gifts so that it would be easier for the Israelites to fulfill the Mitsvah: You shall not abhor the Egyptians (Deuteronomy 23: 8; Ezra 1: 4; Exodus 12: 35; Lieber 2001: 387/35). Benno Jacob understood that the purpose of the commandment was to cleanse the Jewish memory of bitterness and hatred. The dialectical religiologist can only hope that the gifts which the German Federal Republic made to the State of Israel in the past 64 years, will have paid back Jewish surplus labor and surplus values produced in the German work camps for German industry, and all the suffering connected with it, and will make it easier for the Jewish people not to abhor the Germans and to cleanse their memory of bitterness and hatred. More important than the gifts would be, of course, that the Germans would learn to mourn and to repent and to atone for the horrible crimes committed against their Jewish brothers and sisters, and thus to mitigate the absolute negativity of bourgeois society and his-

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tory (Mitscherlich 1993; 1995; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; 2003b: 5963; Adorno 1997f: 354-355 Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74).

Freedom and Culture According to the Rabbis, for some people, Egypt was the house of culture, science, and mathematics (Exodus 20: 2; Lieber 2001: 443; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1967b: 177-202, 203-215, 248-268, 302-316, 317-320, 335-354; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1989: chaps. 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 35, 37, 38). For God and God’s people, however, it was the house of bondage. Cultural and scientific accomplishments can not make up for a nation’s treating some of its people as less than human. In Benno Jacob’s view, if freedom and culture cannot coexist, people should bid farewell to culture for the sake of freedom. In the perspective of the critical religiology that remains true also for modern and postmodern societies and states (Exodus 20: 2; Lieber 2001: 443; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1967b: 177-202, 203-215, 248-268, 302-316, 317-320, 335-354; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1989: chaps. 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 35, 37, 38; Habermas 1962; 1969; 1970; 1976; 1977; 1978a; 1978c; 1978d; 1981b; 1982; 1983; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1988b; 1990; 1991c; 1992a; 1992c; 1997a; 1998; 2001a; 2001c; 2003b; 2006c; 2009; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; 2009).

Administrative Murder Adorno remembered that the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755 and the following murderous tidal wave sufficed to cure Francois de Voltaire of the theodicy of Leibniz, and to make an amusing and funny passage of it and a cheerful satire on it, and let him promote genuine healthy common sense, the principles of deism, tolerance, and morality, and to deny the belief in miracles, accidents, and non-intellectual and non-spiritual things and attitudes (Leibniz, 1996; Hegel 1986a: 452; 1986b: 420; 1986i: 96, 346; 1986j: 68; 1986k: 278; 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 248, 453; 1986m: 305, 345-346, 354; 1986o: 352, 370, 414, 503; 1986p: 211; 1986t: 248, 294; Adorno 1997f: 254-255; Ebeling 1979). In Adorno’s view, the visible disaster of the first nature was insignificant in comparison with the second, the social nature, which defied human imagination as it dis-

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tilled a real hell from human evil: Auschwitz, the fascist tsunami (Adorno 1970b; 1997f: 354-355; 1997u; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Neumann 1942; Sohn-Rethel 1975; Fromm 1972b; 1973; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993). Here, the critical theorists’ metaphysical faculty was paralyzed because actual events had shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could possibly be reconciled with experience. According to Adorno, here once again, the dialectical motif of quantity recoiling into quality scored an unspeakable triumph: The murderers triumphed over their innocent victims (Horkheimer 1985: chap. 37; Adorno 1970b; 1997f: 354-355; 1997u; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Neumann 1942; SohnRethel 1975; Fromm 1972b; 1973; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Reich 1971; 1976; Siebert 1993; Weitensteiner 2002). The administrative murder of millions of Jews before and after the Wannsee Conference made of death a thing one had never yet had to fear in just this fashion. There was no chance any longer for death to come into the individual’s empirical life as somehow conformable with the course of that life, as it once had happened to Abraham, or Isaac, or Jacob, or Moses. The last and poorest possession of the murdered individual was expropriated. Adorno was certain that in the German concentration camps, it was no longer an individual who died but a specimen, and that this was a fact bound to affect as well the dying of those who escaped the administrative measure: for example, most of the critical theorists of society of the first generation. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, if there is any comparison at all, then death came suddenly and abruptly into the lives of the prisoners of the concentration camps as it once had entered the lives of the Rabbis Akiba and Jesus of Nazareth; and their friends and followers, the Jewish and Christian martyrs, as they were tortured and crucified and slaughtered by the Roman authorities (Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 241-298; Fromm 1966b: chap. ix; 1992: 3-94; Reich 1971; 1976; Horkheimer 1936; 1971; 1974c: 96-97; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Wiesel 1982; 1992; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; Siebert 2007a: 99-113; 2007b; 419-457).

Genocide For Adorno, the genocide of the 20th century-and the critical theorists of religion may add the beginning of the 21st century-was the absolute integration, which prepared itself everywhere where human beings were leveled down in a false egalitarianism, or where they were ground down

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or cut down or polished off, as drilling was called in the German army, on the way from Modernity to Post-modern alternative Future I–the totally administered society, and to Post-modern alternative Future II–the entirely militarized society, until they–deviations from the notion of their complete nullity, invalidity and futility–were literally erased (Huxley 1968; Orwell 1945; 2001; Adorno 1997f: 355-400; 1997j-1: 47-71, 97-122; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Dallaire 2003; Tudjman 1996; Bacevic 2009; Ebeling 1979). To Adorno, Auschwitz confirmed Hegel’s philosophical statement about pure identity being death (Hegel 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; 1986f: 473; 1986i: 535-539; 1986j: 21; 1986k: 535, 558-559; Adorno 1997f: 355-400; 1997j-1: 47-71, 97-122; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002). The most far out dictum of the End Game by Samuel Beckett, who produced the critical theory of society in poetical form, that there was not much to be feared any more, reacted to a practice whose first sample was given in the concentration camps, and in whose concept-venerable once upon a timethe destruction of non-identity was teleologically lurking (Beckett 1970; 1972a; 1973b; Adorno 1973d; 1973e; Adorno 1997f: 355-400; 1997j-1: 4771, 97-122; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002). In the concentration camps, absolute negativity was in plain sight and had ceased to surprise any one (Kogon 1965; 1995; 2002; Adorno 1997f: 355-365). Adorno remembered that fear used to be tied to the principium individuationis of self-preservation: even-so the critical theorist of religion may add-in the Jewish definition of religion as fear of the Lord (Genesis 9: 2; 20: 11; Exodus 20: 20; Samuel 6: 9; 2; Nehemiah 5: 9; 6: 15; Tobias 2: 14; 13: 6; Job 4: 6; 28: 28; Psalm 18: 10; 33: 12; 110: 10; Horkheimer 1987e: 293-319, 320-350; Adorno 1997f: 355-356). Precisely, that individuation principle abolished itself by its own consistency in Auschwitz and the other camps. What, according to Eugen Kogon, the sadists of the SS-State foretold their victims in the camps, namely, “Tomorrow you’ll be wiggling skyward as smoke from this chimney, ” bespoke for Adorno the indifference of each individual life that was the direction of history toward post-modern alternative Future I–the totally administered world (Kogon 1965; 1995; 2002; Adorno 1997f: 355-365; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/ Frei/Goschler 2009; Horkheimer 1987e: 104-144, 1997: 238; 1989m: 14, 15; Dallaire 2003; Tudjman 1996; Bacevic 2009). Even, so Adorno argued, in his or her formal freedom the individual was as fungible and replaceable as he or she would be under the liquidator’s boots (Kogon 1965; 1995; 2002; Adorno 1997f: 355-365; Dallaire 2003; Tudjman 1996; Bacevic

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2009). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the indifference of each individual life is already sadly symbolized by the infinite rows of mere small plates in newer urban American cemeteries, which all look alike, and carry nothing else than the name, date of birth and date of death: nothing personal is left. Already for centuries, military cemeteries, often established near former battlefields, e.g. in the Normandy, have been organized in such extreme uniformity that no room is left for the expression of the personal lives and sufferings and deaths of the soldiers buried there. Today, even churches with young believers, e.g. the St. Thomas More Student Parish in Kalamazoo, Michigan, reject works of art that they consider to be too personal, being unaware that precisely the most personal may also be the most humanly universal, and vice versa, and opt for an abstract generality, and thus, for the untruth (Siebert 1965; 1966; 1979b; 1979e; 1986; 1987c; 1993; 1994b; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; 2007a; 2007g).

Inversion of the Golden Rule According to Adorno, a new categorical imperative had been imposed by Adolf Hitler upon un-free humankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz would not repeat itself: so that nothing similar will ever happen again (Hitler 1943: 64-65; Adorno 1997f: 359-360; Wiesel 1982; 1992; Bacevic 2009; Siebert 2000; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; 2003a; 2003b). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, for Adorno, Hitler’s new categorical imperative was to replace the old Kantian categorical imperative, which constituted an inversion, secularization and rationalization of the religious Golden Rule, which almost all living world religions have in common (Volume I: Appendix B; Kant 1929: 472474, 633-634; Adorno 1997f: 359-360; Küng 1984; 1990b: 63-64, 84-85; 1991a: 18-19; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Küng/Homolka 2009; Siebert 2004b: 3768; 2007c: 1-50; 2007d). The critical theorist of religion remembers that such inversion, translation, rationalization, secularization, enlightenment as demythologization started already in religion itself, while enlightened modern people have often been returning to myths (Adorno 1997f: 359360; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Kogon 1967; Küng 1990b: 80-90; 1991a; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; Camman 2009: 72-74; Goldstein 2009: 157-178). Like many enlightened modern people, such as Francois de Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau and their deistic followers, so the ancient and medieval Rabbis had difficulty to accept, for example,

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the literal veracity of the splitting of the Sea of Reeds in the Book Exodus, the classic example of God working a miracle for Israel’s sake (Exodus 14: 21; Lieber 2001: 404/21; Brailsford 1935; Hegel 1986a: 56, 74, 85, 438, 452; 1986g: 80; 1986b: 420; 1986i: 96, 346; 1986j: 68; 1986k: 239, 278, 1986l: 61, 419, 304, 400; 1986h: 278, 312-313; 1986m: 305, 345-346, 354; 1986o: 210, 352, 370, 414, 503; 1986p: 211; 1986r: 358; 1986s: 129; 1986t: 249, 275, 290, 294, 300, 306-308, 311, 331, 365, 413; Adorno 1997f: 359-360; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Kogon 1967). The Rabbis believed still in the divine miracle, but were–like the later bourgeois enlighteners–reluctant to accept the suspension of natural law (Exodus 14: 21; Lieber 2001: 404/21; Exodus 14: 21; Lieber 2001: 404/21; Brailsford 1935; Hegel 1986a: 56, 74, 85, 438, 452; 1986g: 80; 1986b: 420; 1986i: 96, 346; 1986j: 68; 1986k: 239, 278, 1986l: 61, 419, 304, 400; 1986h: 278, 312313; 1986m: 305, 345-346, 354; 1986o: 210, 352, 370, 414, 503; 1986p: 211; 1986r: 358; 1986s: 129; 1986t: 249, 275, 290, 294, 300, 306-308, 311, 331, 365, 413; Adorno 1997f: 359-360; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498). The Rabbis fastened on the apparently superfluous words–a strong east wind–as a hint that the splitting of the Sea of Reeds had been accomplished through natural rather than supernatural or metaphysical means. Similarly in the 19th century, Levi Yitzbak of Berdichev translated the Hebrew words ru-ah kadim not as east wind but as an ancient wind, explaining, “God does not change or suspend the laws of nature in order to work miracles. The wind that divided the Sea of Reeds had been created for that purpose at the time of the creation of the world.” According to one Midrash, the Sea of Reeds would not part until the Israelites showed enough faith to march into the waters. They were reluctant to do so, waiting for God to work a miracle first. Finally, Nabshon son of Amminadab, of the tribe of Judah, was bold enough to march into the sea. Only at that point did the sea respond to his act of faith by separating, allowing the Israelites to cross on dry land. According to the Rabbis, another legend would have it that Pharaoh alone of all the Egyptians survived. Because he had learned his lesson, he was appointed King of Nineveh. In that capacity, he led his people in penitential prayer and fasting to avert the decree of destruction of the frustrated prophet Jonah. When the former Pharaoh and now King of Nineveh died, he was stationed at the gates of the underworld, Gehenna, where he would greet tyrants of a later generation with the words: “Why did you not learn from my example?” In the view of the dialectical religiologist, many generations later one of those tyrants may very well have been the fascist dictator Adolf Hitler or the socialist dictator Joseph Stalin (Exodus 14: 21; Lieber 2001: 404/21; Adorno 1997f:

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359-360; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Kogon 1967; Rosenbaum 1998; Jeffreys 2008; Kershaw 2001; Bessel 2001; Haffner 2001; Stone/Weaver 1998; Baldwin 2001).

A 614th Mitzvah The critical religiologist also remembers that unfortunately similar Auschwitz-like things have happened since Hitler’s death in 1945 in the Near East and Africa, on the Balkan, and in Central and Latin America, and elsewhere (Tudjman 1996; Rakidzija 2006; Perkins 2007; Kinzer 2006; Scahill 2007; Hedges 2006; Klein 2007; Adorno 1997f: 359-360; Bacevic 2009). After becoming fully aware of and deeply shocked by the tragedy of Auschwitz, the Jewish philosopher and theologian Emil Fackenheim, who taught in Toronto, Ontario, Canada for many years, produced a 614th Mitzvah, which was very similar to Adorno’s new categorical imperative, and which read: Every Jew must behave in such a way that he does not give Hitler post-humus victories (Fackenheim 1967; Adorno 1997f359360; Gross/Simmons 2009: 101-129; Harprecht 2009b: 9-13; Kogon 2002). He finally immigrated to Israel, where he died. Unfortunately since 1945, Hitler has been granted all to many posthumous victories, which should never have happened (Fackenheim 1967; Adorno 1997f: 359-360; Tudjman 1996; Rakidzija 2006; Perkins 2007; Kinzer 2006; Scahill 2007; Hedges 2006; Klein 2007; Adorno 1997f: 359-360; Bacevic 2009). When Adorno wanted to find reasons for the new categorical imperative, it was as refractory as the given one of Kant had been once upon a time (Kant 1929: 472-474, 633-634; Adorno 1997f: 358-359). Adorno knew that to deal with the new categorical imperative discursively would be an outrage, for it gave him a bodily sensation of the moral addendum. The sensation would be bodily for Adorno because it was now the practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony to which individuals were exposed, even with individuality about to vanish as a form of mental reflection. According to Adorno, it was in the unvarnished historical-materialistic motive only that morality survived. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the morality of the new categorical imperative imposed by Adorno on the world aimed at the mitigation at least of alternative Future I–the totally administered society, which is very probable and possible but not very desirable; at the complete prevention of alternative Future II–the militaristic society that moves from one conventional war and civil war to the next and makes an atomic or hydrogen war more and more likely in spite of all, often hypocritical anti-proliferation treaties, attempts, and

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efforts, and which is still very probable and possible if also entirely undesirable; and at the passionate promotion of alternative Future III–a new free, wise, sane and reconciled world order of the 21st century, in which all gender, generational, race, national, class, educational and religious antagonisms have been overcome; and in which the democratic transformation has taken place; and which has been freed from all mythologization and ideologization; and which is characterized by universal solidarity without loss of personal autonomy; and which is built on human and civil rights and duties and which is grounded in being rather than in having, and which includes a humane world-climate order, world-finance order, and world-nuclear order, and which for the time being is most desirable, but unfortunately also not yet very possible or probable; and for which the construction of the institutional presuppositions the dialectical religiology is as much committed as the critical theory of society (Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1975b; 1975c; 1985a; 1985e; Fromm 1956; 1957: 9-11; 1959; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1970: B699-B705; 1972a; 1927b: 1415, 74, 76, 80-81; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1990a; 1990b; 1995; 1999: 3436; 2001; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Kogon 1967; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1975; 1976; 1977; 1978a; 1978b; 1978c; 1978d; 1979a; 1979b; 1981a; 1981b; 1985b; 1986; 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 1990; 1991c; 1992a; 1992c; 1995; 1997a; 1998; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2003b; 2004a; 2006c; 2009; Schwengel 2009: 4-8; Bennet 2008; Harprecht 2009b: 9-13; Telo 2009: 14-17; Zöpel 2009: 18-20; Müller 2009: 21-24; Schergorn 2009: 250-27; Thränert 2009: 28-31; Münkler 2009: 32-34; Khanna 2009: 35-38; Maas-Albert 2009: 39-41; Machnig 2009: 42-47; Kosta 2009: 47-49; Meyer 2009c: 50-54; 2009d: 66-69; Meng 2009: 4547; Rossum 2009: 55-56; Kalir 2009: 130-156; Bacevic 2009; Siebert 2001; 2002b; 2006b: 91-137; 2006c: 1-32; 2007a: 99-113 2007b: 419-457; 2009; Rossi 2009: 467-497; Roberts/Piopping/Pan 2009: 498-525; Yang/Rodriguez 2009: 526-556; Kankaras/Moore 2009: 557-579; Abada/Tankorang 2009: 580-608; Siebert 2002a).

Reconciliation On his way in clarifying the presuppositions and the theoretical justification of human praxis as understanding-orientated action from his Structural Change of the Public Sphere of 1962, through his Theory of Communicative Action of 1981, to his Religion and Rationality of 2002 and his Between Naturalism and Religion of 2005, Habermas has rationalized further the theoretical heritage of the Frankfurt School in a substantial

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sense (Habermas 1962; 1978d; 1984a; 1984b; 1987d; 2002; 2005; 2006a; 2007; Meyer 2009: 44-45; Mendieta 2005). In this rationalization process, Habermas did not really–as the political scientist Thomas Meyer assumed–send off or expel the Frankfurt School’s religiously grounded wish for reconciliation, rooted in Hegel’s dialectical philosophy, particularly the reconciliation between the religious and the secular, redemption and emancipation or happiness, which had motivated the social-critical thinking particularly of Adorno, Benjamin and Horkheimer, from his scientific theory of communicative action (Hegel 1986a: 192, 305, 350, 351; 1986b: 291; 1986c: 26, 165, 431, 493, 567, 570, 574, 578-579; 1986g: 27, 512; 1986l: 28, 139, 140, 485, 386, 391, 392, 413, 417, 460, 487, 496, 502, 504, 521, 527, 529, 540; 1986p: 9-88; Adorno 1970b; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Habermas 1962; 1978d; 1984a; 1984b; 1987d; 2002; 2005; 2006a; 2007; Meyer 2009: 44-45). While Habermas gave to the thought of emancipation a social-theoretically, deeply grounded rational foundation in the human potential of language and memory and in the evolutionary universal of the struggle for recognition, he, the student of Adorno, Benjamin and Horkheimer, did not reject at all outright the idea of redemption (Hegel 1972; 1979; Adorno 1970b; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Habermas 1962; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1984a; 1984b; 1986; 1987d; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III; 1992b; 1992c; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2007; Arens 1997; 2009: 79-83 Arens/John/Rottländer 1991; Meyer 2009: 44-45; Mendieta 2005). Even Meyer had to admit-when some critics remarked that Habermas’ understanding orientated thinking was itself merely a last secular form of the longing for reconciliation-that this did not characterize a specific weakness of his theory, but rather the insurmountable core of all human forms of social life (Meyer 2009: 44-45). Insofar as reconciliation was one of the goals in Habermas’ efforts concerning mutual understanding, there was not meant any romantic unification of separate singular persons, but rather the possibility of a peaceful balance among them, and the expectation that the all-present conflicts could be carried out through arguments rather than through aggression and violence (Fromm 1972b: 14-15, 74, 76, 80-81; 1973; Benjamin 1978d; Habermas 1983; 1991b; Meyer 2009: 44-45; Linehan 1993: chaps. 2, 3; Bacevic 2009). In this rational form was present in Habermas’ thinking without doubt a utopian residual, which it of course shared with the whole philosophy of religion, morality and social morality, and law, and without which human forms of life are not possible at all (Kant 1929; 1946; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982; 1983; Hegel 1896; 1965; 1969; 1972; 1976; 1979; 1986a; 1986b; 1986c; 1986g; 1986j; 1986l; 1986p; 1986q; Meyer

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2009: 44-45). To this utopian residual belonged also the recommendation, which in recent times has become more and more urgent, to deal with the religious and metaphysical surplus, which could not be rationalized, most cautiously and carefully: none of the traditional meaning and reconciliation motives should fall victim to destructive criticism before there was a replacement in sight through the concrete or determinate negation of religious and metaphysical semantic material and potentials (Adorno 1997j-2: 608-616; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Habermas 1990: chap. 1; 1991a; Meyer 2009: 44-45). According to Habermas, the religiously impregnated life worlds were in need of particular protection since they represented a motivation-reservoir, which was at all times endangered, for the social persistence of socio-moral actions (Habermas 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/ Ratzinger 2006; Arens 1997; 2009: 79-83; Arens/John/Rottländer 1991; Meyer 2009: 44-45; Kött 2008: 253-258). That was, of course, a thought about which Meyer and other critics of Habermas were ready to argue, dispute and debate most seriously with him in the face of the provable ambivalent role of the religions between war and peace: e.g. in the Near East, where for years members of the three Abrahamic religions have killed each other, and have so far–July 2009–not come to any reconciliation (Meyer 2009: 68-69; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004).

Crisis Theology For Adorno, the theology of crisis had registered that against which it rebelled abstractly and therefore in vain: namely, the fusion of metaphysics with the culture industry (Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 120-167; Adorno 1997f: 360-361; Habermas 1988a). According to Adorno, the absolute character of the spirit, the aureole of culture, was the same principle that tirelessly did violence to what it pretended to express (Hegel 1986c: 590591; 1986f: 548-573; Adorno 1997f: 360-361). For Adorno, after Auschwitz there was no word tinged from on high, not even a theological one, not even a theodicy putting God on trial, that had any right unless it underwent a transformation (Leibniz 1996; Hegel 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 238, 455; Wiesel 1982; 1992; Adorno 1969c; 1997j-2: 608-616; 1997f: 360-361; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 392-402; Habermas 1982; 1988b; 1990; 1991a: Part III; 2006a; 2006b: 1-25; 2007; Metz 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Oelmüller 1990; Bacevic 2009). Adorno remembered a man whose admirable strength enabled him to survive Auschwitz and other work and death camps, and who said in an outburst

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against Beckett, that if Beckett had been in Auschwitz he would have been writing differently, more positively, with the front-line creed of the escapee (Beckett 1970; 1971a; 1971b; Adorno 1973d; 1973e). The dialectical religiologist may add that the same could be said of Adorno and his critical theory of society. Adorno conceded that the Auschwitz escapee was right in a fashion other than he thought. Beckett, or whoever remained in control of himself, e.g. Adorno, or any of the other critical theorists of society who had escaped into American exile, would have been broken in Auschwitz and probably forced to confess the frontline creed, which the Auschwitz escapee clothed into the words–Trying to give men courage–as if that were up to any structure of the human mind–Ego, Superego or aggressive or libidinous Id; as if the attempt to address men, to adjust to them, did not rob them of what was their due, even if they believed the contrary (Freud 1955; 1962a; 1977; 2002; Tillich 1952; Adorno 1997f: 360361; Brunner 2001; 2004: 724; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 28, 29). In Adorno’s view, that was what men had come down to in theology and metaphysics in the present transition period from Modernity to Post-Modernity (Adorno 1997f: 360361; Habermas 1987c; 1990; 1991a: Part III; 1991c; 1992b; 1992; 1997a; 1999; 2001a; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/ Ratzinger 2006; Bacevic 2009). The critical theorist of religion identified crisis theology, which like all theology was originally and essentially a theodicy, with the contemporary theologies of Tillich, Bultmann and Barth, Rahner, Metz, Küng, and Baum, Peukert and Arens, and most of all with Adorno’s and Benjamin’s own Kafka and Beckett inspired inverse, cipher theology (Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; Bultmann 1958; 1961; Barth 1950, 1959; Rahner 1964; 1968a; 1968b; Metz 1962; 1963; 1967; 1969; 1970; 1972a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; Küng 1965; 1970; 1978; 1980; 1981b; 1982; 1989; 1990b; 1991a; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Baum 1959; 1965; 1967; 1968; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1980a; 1992; 1994a; Adorno 1970b; Benjamin 1977: chap. 10, 11; 1983a 45-78; 1983b: 655-1066; Brändle 1984; Peukert 1976; Arens 1989b; 1997; 2007; 2009; Arens/Rottländer 1991; Küng 1978: 363-368, 363-367, 540-542; 1994a; 1994b; Siebert 1965; 1966; 1978: 81-94; 1980: 35-46; 1985; 1986; 1987a; 1993; 1994a; 1994b; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2002b: 69-104). If the first Jewish generation of critical theorists had not succeeded in escaping Nazi Germany in time, they all would have ended up in Auschwitz or in one of the other work and death camps, like Karl Landauer (Landauer 1999; Lohmann 1994: 15-23; 24-37, 253-258, 259265 Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler

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2009). The critical theorists, because they escaped, felt guilty for the rest of their lives, and therefore devoted their critical theory to the remembrance of the innocent victims who could not escape and to the analysis of fascist society, so that it could be prevented from rising again out of liberal society some day (Neumann 1942; Sohn-Rethel 1975; Adorno/Sohn-Rethel 1991; Adorno 1979: 397-407, 408-433; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Wiggershaus 1986; 1987). Precisely, therefore, Adorno and Horkheimer were so terribly shocked when they noticed that the rebellious 1968 students in Frankfurt and elsewhere did not only more or less unconsciously turn into positivists, but even into red fascists, and asked themselves if they had done right when they returned from the American exile to Frankfurt a.M. after World War II. However, the critical theorists ultimately did not regret their return to Germany, and they did not capitulate and resign themselves, and they did not desert to the conservative or reactionary Right in the German Federal Republic (Müller/Doohm 2005: chap. 18, Epilogue; Meyer 2008: 66-69; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 30; 1989m: chaps. 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 31, 33, 34; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the crisis theologians had in common with the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and the Holy Qu’ran and the critical theory of society that faith did not mainly mean belief in a doctrine or a creed: it rather referred to trust and loyalty expressed through commitment and submission and obedience to the wholly Other (Exodus 14: 31; Lieber 2001: 405/31; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; 185-346; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37; Goldstein 2006: 61-114, 115120, 121-150; Ott 2001; 2007/2009: 1-70; chaps. 6, 20; Meyer 2009: 66-69; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004).

Right Thought: Death of No Concern The idealist Hegel agreed with the materialist Epicurus, Marx’s great materialistic prototype, concerning his consideration of death, the negative for human existence, for the self-feeling of man (Hegel 1986g: 19, 108; 1986j: 392; 1986l: 24; 1986p: 381; 1986r: 358; 1986s: 245, 297-336; 1986t: 239; Marx 1963: 14, 86, 327; Ebeling 1979: 27). In Hegel’s view, it was important for people to have the right representation of death, because it otherwise clouded their peace and quiet. Epicurus had asked people to

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get accustomed to the thought that the negative, death, was not of their concern. That was so, because everything good and evil was after all in the feeling or sentiment. Even if it was ataraxie, i.e. painlessness, etc., it still belonged to feeling. Death, however, was a robbery, a non-being, a ceasing of sentiment, a deprivation. Therefore, so Epicurus concluded, the right thought that death was of no concern for the people made the mortal or mortality of life into something pleasurable. That happened insofar as the representation of the negative, what death was, did not interfere with the feeling of liveliness, while this thought in the representation did not add an infinite time, but rather took away the longing for immortality. Epicurus did not understand why he should be afraid of death. Death was of no concern for people because when they existed, death was not present; and when death was present, then they were not there. According to Hegel, the Epicurean thought that death was therefore of no concern for people was right in reference to the immediate life. For Hegel, it was an intelligent thought to remove the fear of death. The negative, the nothingness, so Hegel argued, was not to be brought in and to be held on to in the life, which was positive. People were not to torture themselves with the representation, feeling, or thought of death. As for the old Jews, so for Hegel, the future in general did neither belong to the people, nor did it not belong to them, so that they would not expect it as one that shall be, nor that they doubted, as if it shall not be (Hegel 1986s: 331; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Lütkehaus 2009; Gödde/Lonitz 2003, 2005, 2008). According to Hegel, it was of no concern of the people, neither that the future was, nor that it was not. People must not have any restlessness concerning the future. For Hegel, as for Epicurus and also for the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth before, but not for Heidegger, this precisely was the right thought about the future in general, and about death in particular: So do not worry about tomorrow: tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own (Matthew 6: 25-34; Hegel 1986s: 331; Hegel 1986g: 19, 108; 1986j: 392; 1986l: 24; 1986p: 381; 1986r: 358; 1986s: 245, 297-336; Hegel 1986s: 331; 1986t: 239; Marx 1963: 14, 86, 327; Adorno 1997f: 413-523; Ebeling 1979).

This-Worldly Utopia Ernst Bloch agreed in his historical-materialist thanatology with Epicur and Hegel, that death was of no concern (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971b; 1971c; 1985e; 2009; Ebeling 1979: 27-28, 102-105; Küng 1982). Bloch was even more perfect than Epicur or Hegel in that he did not only

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take death for nothing, but that beyond that he bet continually on the continuity of a We, no matter if the individual still existed or not. This was for Bloch the this-worldly utopia of a world, over which death had no power any longer. In Bloch’s view, the personal consciousness was so very much concretely superseded into the proletarian class consciousness, that it remained for the individual person not even decisive, if he or she was remembered on the way to the victory of the working class, or on the day of that victory, or not. (Lukacs 1970; 1971; 1974; 1979; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971b; 1971c; 1985e; 2009; Adorno 1951: 255-264; Ebeling 1979: 27-28, 102-105; Küng 1982). Thus, in Bloch’s perspective, here no idea in the sense of an abstract belief, but rather the concrete common ground of the proletarian class consciousness, the communist cause itself, kept men upright, without being delirious, but with strength. For Bloch, this certainty of the proletarian class consciousness, which determinately negated in itself the individual continuance, was indeed a novum against death. Bloch outbid and surpassed the certainty and the determinateness of death against Heidegger through the certainty of an all-determening proletarian class consciousness, to which then Heidegger appeared merely as reconciler, ideologue, or propagandist of the late capitalist fascist world (Bloch (1959)1985d: 1365; Adorno 1979: 354-372, 373-391, 397-407, 457477, 578-587; Ebeling 1979: 28). Bloch spoke of a metaphorical immortality in the work and of the fear of not coming to the completion (Bloch (1959)1985d: 1366-1372). For the dialectial religiologist, both statements seem not to be bound to a particular class consciousness. Thus Bloch thought very highly of Friedrich Nietzsche, who certainly did not share in the proletarian class consciousness, but who had nevertheless recognized, that precisely that author had drawn the happiest ticket number, who as an old man could say that all what had been in him of life-generating, strengthening, elevating, enlightening thoughts and feelings, lived still on in his writings, and that he himself signified merely still the gray ashes, while the fire was everywhere rescued and carried on (Nietzsche 1968; Adorno 1970b: 116-117; Lukacs 1970; 1971; 1974; 1979; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971b; 1971c; (1959) 1985d: 1365-1372; 1985e; 2009; Ebeling 1979: 27-28, 102-105). On one hand, in the face of the possible catastrophic collective self-negation of the human species in alternative Future II–a collision of civilizations with atomic or hydrogene bombs or other weapons of mass destruction, even Bloch’s historical materialist thanatology, his way to deal with death, may also already be determined by what he called in relation to religion the non-contemporaneous, On the other hand, for the time being–i.e. 2010–there remains preserved, what was

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written on the gravestone of Ernst Bloch in 1978: Thinking means Transcending. The Principle Hope (Bloch/Reif 1978; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971b; 1971c; 1985e; 2009; Ebeling 1979: 27-28, 102-105; Küng 1982).

Against Ontological Inversion Herbert Marcuse, tried to deconstruct even Bloch’s assumption, that the natural death could not be touched by any social liberation (Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1965; 1967; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a: chap. 1; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971b; 1971c; 1985e; 2009; Ebeling 1979: 27-28, 102-105, 106-115; Habermas 1969; 1976; 1977; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1986; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Arens/John/Rottländer 1991). Marcuse’s struggle was emphatically directed against Heideggerian ontological inversion, through which death as a mere biological fact was turned and transformed into the rank of an indispensability a priori (Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1997f: 413-523; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1965; 1967; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a: chap. 1; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971b; 1971c; 1985e; 2009; Ebeling 1979: 27-28, 102-105, 106-115; Habermas 1969; 1976; 1977; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1986; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981). That meant for Marcuse, that the ideological veiling, or screening of death as an in-variable and as something, which could not be superseded, was considered only as ideological concealment of claims of domination in late capitalist society, which could not be legitimated in any other way any longer. (Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 93-121, 280-353, 354-372, 373-391 397-407, 408-433, 434-539, 457-477, 1997f: 413-523; 569-573, 574-577, 578-587; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1965; 1967; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a: chap. 1; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971b; 1971c; 1985e; 2009; Ebeling 1979: 27-28, 102-105, 106-115; Habermas 1969; 1976; 1977; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1986; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981). In Marcuse’s perspective, contrary to that a non-ideological thanathology would have to recognice the chance and opportunity, how with a rising life extectancy also the death would go over into the self-determination of the human species and would no longer have the status of an indispensability apriori, not to speak of an ontological one.While, according to Marcuse, the fearful acceptance of death had become an integral element of private and public morality in bourgeois society, the new future thanatology must carry with itself and in itself an explosive transvaluation of social concepts,

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If daath, so Marcuse argued, would be no longer an instrument for the creation and stabilization of conditions of social domination by a ruling class of bankers and industrialists with the active help and support of the ideology of death, then the collaps of the present extant capitalist system would be the necessary consequence. Unexpectedly, the death could no longer justify any injustice any longer. Now the positivistic Hegelian delusion, madness and insanity would be said good by to, that namely the progress of reason takes place through the death on the field of honor, in the mines and on the highways, from unconquered desease and poverty, by the state and its organs: the only aspect of Hegel’s philosophy which the German fascists inherited and accepted from him, and practiced in society and history (Hegel 1976; 1986g; 1986j; 1986l; Hitler 1943; 1986; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1965; 1967; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a: chap. 1; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971b; 1971c; 1985e; 2009; Ebeling 1979: 27-28, 102-105, 106-115; Fromm 1959; 1961; 1967; 1970; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1975; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1990a; 1990b; 2001; Reich 1971; 1976; Habermas 1969; 1976; 1977; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1986; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Hinkelammert 1985; 2009).What in Marcuse’s view had to be fought against, was the complicity with death as a heteronomous indispensability a priori. For Marcuse, compliance with death was compliance with the master of death: the polis, the state, nature, or the god. (Hegel 1801; 1965; 1969; 1976; 1986g; 1986i; 1986j; 1986l; 1986p; 1986q; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1965; 1967; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a: chap. 1; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971b; 1971c; 1985e; 2009; Ebeling 1979: 27-28, 102-105, 106-115; Habermas 1969; 1976; 1977; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1986; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Hinkelammert 1985; 2009).

Accusation against Culture In Marcuse’s perspective, not those who die, constitute the great accusation aganst the modern culture, but rather those who die before they must and want to die: those who die in agony and pain (Hegel 1986a: 67-69; 440-442, 614, 620; 1986b: 479, ; 1986c: 36, 45, 74, 148-149, 332, 335, 436, 566, 570-571; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1965; 1967; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a: chap. 1; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971b; 1971c; 1985e; 2009; Ebeling 1979: 27-28, 102-105, 106-115; Habermas 1969; 1976; 1977; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1986; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Hinkelammert 1985; 2009; Arens/

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John/Rottländer 1991; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). They were also the witnesses for the guilt of humanity, which could not be expiated. For Marcuse, their death awakened the painful consciousness, that it had been unnecessary, that things could have been otherwise. According to Marcuse, it needed all the institutions and work of a repressive social order, in order to bring to rest the bad conscience about this guilt. Marcuse pointed to the obvious deep connection between death drive and guilt feeling (Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962a; 1962b; 1964; 1969; 1977; 1992; Fromm 1959; 1972b; 1973; 1974; 1980b; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1965; 1967; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a: chap. 1; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971b; 1971c; 1985e; 2009; Ebeling 1979: 27-28, 102-105, 106-115; Habermas 1969; 1976; 1977; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1986; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Hinkelammert 1985; 2009; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). For Marcuse the silent consent of the medical doctors to the fact of death and illness was maybe the most widely spread expression of the death drive, : or better still of its social usefulness. In a repressive civilization, death itself became an instrument of oppression. In Marcuse’s view, no matter if death was feared as continual threat, or if it was glorified as highest sacrifice, or if it was merely accepted as mere fact, always the education toward agreement and consent with death brought from the very beginning an element of submission and abandonment into human life. Such education suffocated from the very start all efforts, which in bourgeois society were rejected and condemned as utopian. The dominant powers in modern civil society–particularly the ruling class of bankers and industrialists in the form of the military industrial complex, have a deep affinity to death (Bloch 1960; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1965; 1967; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a: chap. 1; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971b; 1971c; 1985e; 2009; Ebeling 1979: 27-28, 102-105, 106-115; Habermas 1969; 1976; 1977; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1986; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Hinkelammert 1985; 2009; 2009; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; Hedges 2006; Bacevic 2009; Scahill 2007; Fleischer/Hazard/Klipper 1988; Perkins 2007; Siebert 2006a; 2007a). For Marcuse, death was a symbol and an emblem of the lack of freedom and of defeat. In Marcuse’s view, today–in the 20th century–theology and philosophy competed with each other for the glorification of death as existential category. As theology and philosophy transformed death as a biological fact into an ontological essence, they gave to the guilt of humanity, which they helped to hush or cover up, their transcendental blessing. Theology and philosophy betrayed the promise of the concrete

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utopia. According to Marcuse, in contrast, a critical philosophy, which would not work as dogsbody of the capitalist oppression, would react to the fact of death with the great refusal-the refusal of Orpheus, the liberator. For Marcuse. it was possible that the death could become a symbol of freedom. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, Marcuse failed to remember here, that Christianity once transformed the death on the cross in the late Roman Empire from an instrument of enslavement into a symbol of liberation and redemption (Hegel 1986q: 289-299, 342-344; Bloch 1960; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1965; 1967; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a: chap. 1; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971b; 1971c; 1985e; 2009; Ebeling 1979: 27-28, 102-105, 106-115; Habermas 1969; 1976; 1977; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1986; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Hinkelammert 1985; 2009; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; Hedges 2006; Bacevic 2009; Scahill 2007; Fleischer/Hazard/Klipper 1988; Perkins 2007; Siebert 2006a; 2007a). Unfortunately, up to the present–2010–death has not yet become an emblem of freedom, but rather a symbol of the lack of freedom to an extend as in no previous period or epoch of human history (Hegel 1986l; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1965; 1967; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a: chap. 1; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971b; 1971c; 1985e; 2009; Ebeling 1979: 27-28, 102-105, 106-115; Habermas 1969; 1976; 1977; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1986; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Hinkelammert 1985; 2009; 2009; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; Hedges 2006; Bacevic 2009; Scahill 2007; Fleischer/Hazard/Klipper 1988; Perkins 2007). Therefore, Marcuse’s historical materialist thanatology remains even more so a thanatology of alternative Future III (Hegel 1986l; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1965; 1967; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a: chap. 1; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1984; 1987; 1995; 2001; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971b; 1971c; 1985e; 2009; Ebeling 1979: 27-28, 102-105, 106-115; Habermas 1969; 1976; 1977; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1986; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Hinkelammert 1985; 2009; 2009; Kinzer 2006; Klein 2007; Hedges 2006; Bacevic 2009; Scahill 2007; Fleischer/Hazard/Klipper 1988; Perkins 2007 Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003).

Theodicy of Death With Adorno, the Heideggerian jargon of authenticity was not only ideology of death, but also theodicy of death (Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1997f: 413-523; Ebeling 1979: 30, 116-131; Metz 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993). For Adorno the complicity with death included the violence also

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against oneself. This was so after all, because it always fit well together in modern bourgeois society, that on one hand everything, also oneself, was worth to go under, and that on the other hand one followed with a disparaging so what one’s own narrow-minded interest. The theodicy turned into Ersatz, or a substitute, or a replacement, or a compensation (Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1997f: 413-523; Ebeling 1979: 30, 116131; Metz 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993). According to Adorno, the death became the debuty or representative of God, for whom the former Catholic theologian Heidegger of Being and Time felt himself still to be too modern (Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1997f: 413-523; Ebeling 1979: 30, 116-131). In Adono’s perspective, only to think even the possibility of the abolition of death–as it happened in Christianity and still with Hegel–would have been for Heidegger a blasphemy (Hegel 1986q : 273-274, 290-292; Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1997f: 413-523; Ebeling 1979: 30, 116-131; Küng 1970; 1982; 1984; 1994a; 1994b; Metz 1959; 1962; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1975b; 1977; 1980 Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a; chaps. 2, 6). For Heidgger, the being toward death as existential was expressively separated from the possibility of its merely ontic abolishment. According to Adorno, because death was for Heidegger as existential horizon of human existence supposed to be absolute, it became for him the Absolute as Venerabile. Heidegger, as Adorno understood him, regressed to the primitive and archaic cult of death (Hegel 1986p; 319330, 409-442; Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1997f: 413-523; Ebeling 1979: 30, 116-131; Küng 1970; 1982; 1984; 1994a; 1994b; Metz 1959; 1962; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1975b; 1977; 1980 Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a; chaps. 2, 6), Therefore, Heidegger’s jargon of authenticity tolerated and got along so very well with the fascist rearmament in preparation of World War II. In the perspective of Adorno and Horkheimer, one could encounter and oppose a rationality, to which belonged. from the very start also the practical tendency toward self-annihilation, only with seeing all things in such a way as they represent themselves from the standpoint of redemption (Horkheimer 1987e: 320-350; 1988d: chap. 1, 2; Adorno 1980b: 333-334; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 7; Ebeling 1976: 41-75 ; Metz 1959; 1962; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1975b; 1977; 1980). For Adorno, the historical-materialist, inverted negative theology, or thanatology, became as critique of the status quo of the late capitalist society the model for what would be other and different and better (Adorno 1970b: 103-125; 1979: 354-372, 578-587; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 23, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; 1985l: 483-492; 1996s: 32-74).

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Future Life According to Adorno, who like Hegel tried to overcome Kant up to the end of his life and work, hardly any human subject bore out Hegel’s doctrine that whatever was would perish of itself (Hegel 1986q: 347-536; Adorno 1966; 1969b; 1973b; 1997c; 1997f: 363-364; 1998c; 2000b; 2000c; 2001c; 2002a; 2002d; 2003d; Ebeling 1979; Küng 1982; Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005). Even so the 63-year-old Adorno argued, to the aging persons who perceived the signs of their debility, the fact that they must die seemed rather like an accident caused by their own physics, with traits of the same contingency as that of the external accidents typical nowadays on the highways. For Adorno, this strengthened a speculation in counterpoint to the insight of the object’s supremacy: whether the human mind had not an element of independence, an unmixed element, liberated precisely at the very time when the mind was not on its part devouring everything and by itself reproducing the doom of death (Jung 1933; 1958; 1990; Adorno 1997f: 363-364). Despite the deceptive concern with self-preservation, it would hardly be possible without that mental element to explain the resistant strength of the idea of immortality or future life, as Kant and Hegel still harbored it together with the ideas of God and freedom (Kant 1929: 31-31, 325-326, 331, 333-335, 364, 369-377, 379-380, 639, 649, 650; Hegel 1986l: 266; 1986p: 387-388, 424, 425; 1986q: 129; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53; Horkheimer 1988d: 9-88, 89-101; 1987e: 320-359; Adorno 1997f: 363-364; Küng 1982). Adorno observed, nevertheless, that those powers of resistance seemed to wane in the history of the human species, as they did in decrepit individuals as seen after the decline-long ratified in secretof the objective positive religions, particularly Buddhism and the Abrahamic religions, that had pledged to rid death of its sting (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Adorno 1997f: 363-364; Küng 1982; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004). For Adorno, death was now–in the 20th century, and the dialectical religiologist may add the beginning of the 21st century–rendered completely and utterly alien by the socially determined decline of continuous human experience as such in late capitalist society (Adorno 1979: 9-19, 93-121, 147-176, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396; 434-339, 440-456, 569-573; 574-577, 578-587; 1997f: 363-364; Küng 1982).

Metaphysical Need In Adorno’s philosophical and theological perspective, in the fascist labor and death camps death had a novel horror (Kogon 1965; 1995; 2002;

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Kogon 2003a; 2003b; Adorno 1997f: 363-365; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 25; Ebeling 1979). For Adorno, since Auschwitz, fearing death meant fearing worse than death. According to Adorno, what death did to the socially condemned Jews, Gypsies, communists, homosexuals, etc. could be anticipated biologically on old people, whom he loved, e.g. his long suffering old parents and friends (Gödde/Lonitz 2003; Adorno 1997f: 363-365; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/ Frei/Goschler 2009). Not only their bodies, but also their very Egos, all the things that justified their definition as human beings, crumbled often without illness, without violence from outside (Freud 1992; Adorno 1997f: 363-365). For Adorno, the remnant of confidence in the beloved human beings’ transcendent duration vanished already during their life on earth, so to speak. Adorno asked: what should be the part of them that was not dying? Adorno’s Catholic friend Walter Dirks asked the same question as he faced his Alzheimer’s illness and death (Gödde/Lonitz 2003; Adorno 1997f: 363-365; Dirks 1987; 1988). I asked the same question when I saw my wife Margaret dying from cancer of the colon, the liver, and the lungs in London, Ontario, Canada (Gödde/Lonitz 2003; Adorno 1997f: 363365; Siebert 2001: chap. III, 2002a: chaps. 2, 6). According to Adorno, the comfort of faith–that even in such disintegration, or in madness, the core of men continued to exist–sounded foolish and cynical in its indifference to such immediate experience (Adorno 1997f: 363-365; Bennet 2008; Linehan 1993). For Adorno, it extended into infinity. It was a pearl of pompous philistine wisdom to say: One always remains what he is. In Adorno’s view, the man, who turned his back on the negation of a possible fulfillment of his metaphysical need, was sneering at that need.

Death: the Last and Absolute Thing? Even so, Adorno stated emphatically that it was impossible to think of death as the last thing, pure and simple (Adorno 1997f: 371-372; Küng 1970; 1978; 1982; Ebeling 1979). For Adorno, attempts to express death in language were futile all the way into logic, for who should be the subject of which people predicate that it was dead here and now? (Hegel 1986e; 1986f; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1997f: 371-372; 1997j-2: 608-616; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484498; Küng 1970; 1978; 1982). Friedrich Nietzsche, Adornos’ great teacher, made the luminous statement, that all lust wants eternity (Nietzsche 1967a; 1967b; 1967c; 1968; 1974; 1990; Adorno 1997f: 371-372; Horkheimer 1989m: chap. 13). For Adorno, lust was not the only one to balk at

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passing away. If, so Adorno argued, death were that absolute that philosophy tried in vain to conjure positively, everything would be nothing: all that we would think, too, would be thought into the void; none of it would be truly thinkable (Adorno 1997f: 371-372; Küng 1978: C, D). The notion of truth could not be formulated without at least a negative theology (Exodus 20: 3-7; Blakney 1941; Anselm 1962; Horkheimer 1967: 259-260, 311-312; 1985l: 483-492; Adorno 1997f: 371-372). For in Adorno’s view, it was a feature of truth that it would last, along with its temporal core. Without any duration at all there would be no truth, and the last trace of it would be engulfed in death, as the absolute (Adorno 1997f: 371-372; Habermas 1988a: 59-60, 278-279; Theunissen 1982; 1983: 41-65; 1992).

Metaphysical Experience For Adorno, even in a post-religious and post-metaphysical age the idea of absolute death was hardly less unthinkable than that of immortality (Adorno 1997f: 364-366; Habermas 1988a: 59-60, 278-279; Ebeling 1979; Theunissen 1982; 1983: 41-65; 1992; Küng 1982). Yet, so Adorno argued, for all its being unthinkable, the thought of death was no proof against the unreliability of any kind of metaphysical experience. According to Adorno, the web of semblance, in which people were caught, extended to their imagined ways of tearing the veil of Kant’s epistemological question How is metaphysics possible, which gained new actuality in German universities after World War II, yielded to questions from the philosophy of history: Is it still possible to have a metaphysical experience? (Kant 1929: 7-9, 13-14, 21-23, 25-27, 29-31, 37, 46-48, 54-56, 68, 106-119, 198n, 325n; 659-661, 664-665; Adorno 1997f: 364-366; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 25, 30, 32, 33; Habermas 1988a: 59-60, 278-279; Theunissen 1982; 1983: 41-65; 1992). For Adorno, that metaphysical experience had never been located so far beyond the temporal as the academic use of the word metaphysics suggested. Adorno’s friend, Gerhard Scholem, had observed that mysticism, whose very name expressed the hope that institutionalization may save the immediacy of metaphysical experience from being lost altogether, established social traditions and came from tradition, across the lines of demarcation drawn by religions that regarded each other as heretical (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; O’Regan 1994; Scholem 1935; 1967; 1970a; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Küng 1984; 1990b; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Habermas 1978c: 1132, 33-47, 48-95, 127-143; Adorno 1997f: 364-366). Adorno remembered that Cabbala, the name of the body of Jewish mysticism, meant tradition

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(Hegel 1986a: 43, 365-367, 375; 1986k: 161, 226, 227, 230; 1986m: 416, 474, 478; 1986n: 169; 1986q: 327; 1986s: 425-430, 512, 583-587; 1986t: 15, 91; Scholem 1967; 1973b; 1977c; 1980; Adorno 1970b; 1997f: 364-366). According to Adorno, in its farthest ventures metaphysical experience and immediacy did not deny how much of it was not immediate.

Despair of the Unbelievers According to Adorno, of all the disgrace deservedly reaped by theology, the worst was the positive religions’ howl of rejoicing at the unbelievers’ despair concerning God, freedom, and immortality (Kant 1929: 28-29, 30-31, 89-90, 325, 331, 333-335, 364, 369-377, 379-380, 392, 409-411, 412-414, 430, 438, 464-479, 484-450, 559, 639, 648-650; Hegel 1986a: 18, 71, 101, 102, 182, 204, 269, 289, 300, 337, 308, 373-374, 381, 390, 394, 400, 421; 1986b: 411, 508, 537, 552; 1986c: 26-27, 62, 494, 551, 552, 554-555; 1986l: 266; 1986p: 387-388, 424, 425; 1986q: 129; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53; Adorno 1997f: 365-366; Ebeling 1979; Vahanian 1967; Pieper 1968; Lubac 1950; Arens 1994b; 2009: 79-83; Arens/John/Rottländer 1991; Küng 1972; 1978; 1982). The positive religions have gradually come to intone their Te Deum, including the non confundar, wherever God was denied and declared to be dead, and where there was no trust or confidence in the Eternal One left any longer, because at least his name was still mentioned in his denial (Nietzsche 1967a; 1967b; 1867c; 1968; 1974; 1990; Kaufmann 1967; 1968; 1986: 95-96; Adorno 1997f: 365-366; Adorno 1997f: 365-366; Vahanian 1967; Pieper 1968; Lubac 1950; Arens 1994b; 2009: 79-83; Arens/John/Rottländer 1991; Küng 1972; 1978; 1982). As, so Adorno explained, the means usurped the end in the ideology swallowed by all populations on earth, so in the metaphysics that has risen nowadays, i.e. since the 1960’s, e.g. that of Heidegger and of his many disciples, did the need usurp that which was lacking and missing in the post-metaphysical age (Kaufmann 1967; 1968; 1986: 95-96; Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1997f: 365-366, 413-523; Habermas 1991a: Part III; 1992b; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006b; 2007; Bahr 1975; Metz 1980; 1998; 1995; Metz/ Habermas/Sölle 1994; Metz/Peters 1999; Metz/Wiesel 1993). According to Adorno, the truth content of the deficiency, which for the critical theorists of society was the main and ultimate concern, became a matter of indifference in civil society: the metaphysicians asserted it merely because it was supposed to be good for the people (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 40, 40, 42; 1985l: 483-492; 1989m: chaps. 10, 12, 19, 26, 29, 30, 31,

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32, 34, 35; Adorno 1997f: 365-366; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1984a; 1985a; 1987b; 1987c; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: Part III; 1999; 2001a). In Adorno’s view, the advocates of metaphysics argued in unison with the pragmatists, whom they hold in contempt: with the pragmatism of bread alone that dissolved metaphysics apriori (Matthew 4: 1-11; Luke 3: 1-13; Adorno 1997f: 365-366, 413-523; Farhat-Holzmann 2002; 2003; 2008; 2009: 1-12; Siebert 1993: 94-96; 2006a; 2009i: 1-70). Likewise, so Adorno argued, despair was the final ideology, historically and socially conditioned, as the course of cognition in antagonistic civil society, that had been gnawing at the metaphysical ideas–God, freedom and immortality– for a long time, and could not be stopped by a cui bono (Hegel 1986g: 339-397, 398-514; Adorno 1997f: 365-366, 413-523). The dialectical religiologist remembers that the enlightened and rational Thomas Jefferson thought that it was good when the people in American civil society would read the Bible because then they could be governed better (Kant 1929: 2829, 30-31, 89-90, 325, 331, 333-335, 364, 369-377, 379-380, 392, 409-411, 412-414, 430, 438, 464-479, 484-450, 559, 639, 648-650; Hegel 1986a: 18, 71, 101, 102, 182, 204, 269, 289, 300, 337, 308, 373-374, 381, 390m, 394, 400, 421; 1986b: 411, 508, 537, 552; 1986c: 26-27, 62, 494, 551, 552, 554555; 1986l: 266; 1986p: 387-388, 424, 425; 1986q: 129; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53; Hegel 1986g: 339-397, 398-514; 1986: 107-114, 520-540; 1986p: 236-245; Adorno 1997f: 365-366; Farhat-Holzmann 2002; 2003; 2008; 2009: 1-12; Siebert 1993: 94-96; 2006a; 2009i: 1-70).

Reification In Adorno’s view, the category of reification had once been inspired by the wishful image of unbroken subjective immediacy (Hegel 1986a: 104189, 239-239, 254, 274-428; 1986b: 425; 1986c: 150, 176, 549, 577; 1986d: 82, 349; 1986f: 99, 102, 1986k: 278; 1986n: 125; 1986o: 259; 1986q: 328; Adorno 1970b: 123-125; 1997f: 367-368; Honneth 2005; 2007). For Hegel, the spirit of his time–the spirit of the civil society of the 18th century and the beginning 19th century–revealed itself in the objectification or reification of its God concept in theistic or deistic form (Hegel 1986a: 212; 1986b: 425; 1986c: 150; 176, 549, 577; 1986d: 82 349; 1986g: 99, 102, 104-105; 339-397; 1986q: 328; Riedel 1975: 294-312, 323-349, 350-364, 365-394, 395-410, 411-424; Taylor 1993: chaps. XIV, XV, XVI, XVIII, XIX, XX). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, bourgeois deism had been invented by Francois de Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau as response to the theodicy experience of the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755, as

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a theodicy solution after the theistic theodicies had collapsed long before Auschwitz (Hegel 1986a: 452; 1986b: 429; 1986j: 68; 1986k: 278; 1986l: 61, 419; 1986m: 305, 345-346, 354; 1986o: 219, 352, 370, 414, 503; 1986p: 211; 1986t: 248, 294; 1997f: 367-368; 1997u; Oelmüller 1990; Metz 1995; Metz/ Wiesel 1993). God had simply left the world to itself and to its misery after he had created it, and thus, the world was as Godless and miserable as God was worldless and lonely. According to Hegel, the notion became the absolutely objectified, and reified, the absolute thing, on which to be dependent meant the annihilation of all freedom (Hegel 1986b: 425). The master was against the servant consciousness, which was for itself, and which synthesized with independent being or reification as such (Hegel 1986c: 150, 176, 549, 577). Daily in American civil society, the critical theorist of religion can meet and observe reified workers who identified with their masters, and in the class struggle take the side of the owners, and defend their interests and vote for the Republican Party, the party of the owners (Hegel 1986a: 555; 1986c: 152, 153, 164, 274, 285, 386; 1986g: 384, 464; 1986k 94, 553; 1986l: 346-348; Marx 1961a: 12-13, 141, 282, 296, 689; Marx/Engels 2005; Adorno 1997f: 367-368; Honneth 2005; 2007).

Achievement Society In Hegel’s view, the self-consciousness of man could be made into a thing, or it could be thingified (Hegel 1986c: 150, 176, 549, 577; Adorno 1997f: 367-368). Art as externalization of absolute substance, form of individuality, could become a thing. The being of ego could turn into a thing. The ego was in alienated labor merely as form, and the objectivity or reification existed as a being separated from the ego (Marx 1961b: 16, 28, 29, 30, 220, 267, 217, 354, 382-383, 384, 388, 444; Hegel 1986d: 82, 349, 102, 104105; Freud 1977, 1992; 1997f: 367-368; Fromm 1957; 1959; 1961; 1967; 1970; 1980a; 1980b; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962). According to Hegel, in civil society, man was valid only through his achievement: only through his reification. From its start, bourgeois society was an achievement society. With Kant, as Hegel understood him, marriage and family relationships were personal rights in a reified way (Kant 1968; 1970; 1983; Hegel 1986a: 212; 1986b: 425; 1986c: 150, 176, 549, 577, 1986d: 82 349; 1986g: 99, 102, 104-105, 1986q: 328; Horkheimer 1987b: 15-74, 75-148; Adorno 1970b: 123-125; 1997f: 374-375; Siebert 1979b; 1986). Knowledge and abilities were treated as things and possessions. The value of the thing was its true substantiality. Action was treated as objective self-movement of the form (Hegel 1986h: 288). The thing or the possession was the middle

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through which independent persons connected themselves together with each other (Hegel 1986h: 307). For the Protestant Hegel, the very foundation of the Roman Catholic Church was God as a thing, namely the host in the Eucharist, according to the scholastic trans-substantialization theory in contrast to the Lutheran con-substantialization theory, or the Calvinistic symbolical theory (Hegel 1986a: 212; 1986b: 425; 1986c: 150, 176, 549, 577; 1986d: 82, 349; 1986g: 99, 102, 104-105; 1986p: 236-245; 1986q: 299-347, esp. 328; Adorno 1970b: 123-125; 1997f: 367-368; Küng 1994a: 336-601, 602-741). In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, while on one hand reified religion has often in history affirmed and legitimated economic and political reification, economic systems, polities and religious communities could hardly have lasted without some thingification (Hegel 1986a: 104-189, 239-239, 254, 274-428; 1986b: 425; 1986c: 150, 176, 549, 577; 1986d: 82, 349; 1986f: 99-102, 1986k: 278; 1986n: 125; 1986o: 259; 1986q: 328; Adorno 1970b: 123-125; 1997f: 367-368).

Apologetical Thinking However, according to Adorno, in contrast to Hegel, the category of reification no longer merited the key position overzealously accorded to it by an apologetic thinking, happy to absorb historical-materialistic thinking in a post-idealistic age (Adorno 1970b: 123-125; 1997f: 367-368; Habermas 1988a; 1957; 1961; 1967; 1970). This apologetical thinking acted back upon whatever went under the concept of metaphysical experience: the wish for the earliest Hebrew utopia-a land flowing with milk and honey, or the X-experience, or the insatiable longing for the non-reified wholly Other, or the trust and confidence in the Thing-in-itself, the Ens Realissimum, the Eternal One, including freedom, and immortality (Exodus 3: 8; 13: 5; 15; Psalm 91; Lieber 2001: 392/5, 406-414; Kant 1929: 490; Hegel 1986b: 310; 1986d: 439-440; 1986e: 26, 40-41, 60, 129-130; 1986f: 20, 129-133, 135, 135-136, 149, 307, 320, 489-490, 503; 1986g: 106; 1986h: 120-121, 254-255; 1986q: 434; 1986t: 338; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40, 42; 1996s: 32-74; Adorno 1970b; 1997f: 367-368; Fromm 1950; 1966b; 1974; 1976; 1990b; 1999; 2001). Adorno remembered that from the young Hegel on, philosophers had been attacking objective theological categories–such as trans-substantialization–as reifications, and those theological categories were by no means mere residues, which dialectics could simply have eliminated (Hegel 1986a; Jamme/Schneider 1984: chaps. I, IV; Adorno 1970b: 123-125; 1997f: 367-368).

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epilogue Apologetical Ideology

In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, in the 20th century and in the beginning of the 21st century, such reified theological categories have often been functionalized into an apologetical ideology of civil society no matter how antagonistic it may have been (Hegel 1986a; 1986g: 339-397; 1986p: 236-245; Riedel 1975; Taylor 1983: chaps. XIV, XV, XVI, XVIII; Adorno 1970b: 123-125; 1997f: 367-368; Farhat-Holzmann 2002; 2003; 2008; 2009: 1-12; Siebert 1993: 94-96; 2006a; 2009i: 1-70). Since shortly after the great French revolution, the Third Estate discovered that it would be much more beneficial for its interests to use the Second Estate and religious people in general for its own economic, political, and military purposes than to guillotine or exile them, the bourgeoisie has continually transformed or liberalized religion according to its own image, as it tried to replace the La religion et la terreur of the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries into Robespierre’s La liberte et la terreur of the 18th century, which extended into the 19th and 20th centuries and into the beginning of the 21st century, when both forms of terror clashed in the so-called war on terror, particularly after September 11, 2001 (Hegel 1986a; 1986g: 503-514; 1986l: 431, 520-540; 1986p: 236-245; Marx 1963; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969: 50-87, 88-127, 128-176, 177-217; Riedel 1975; Bloch 1960; Tudjman 1996; Dallaire 2003; Lawrence 2005; Esposito/Mogahed 2007; Farhat-Holzmann 2002; 2003; 2008; 2009: 1-12; Ott 2007/2009: chap. 20; Siebert 1993: 94-96; 2006a; 2007a: 99-113; 2009i: 1-70). The bourgeoisie has admittedly made a profitable business out of religion. They have made it the object of their skillful marketing techniques and thus, commodified it. They have integrated it into their culture industry (Horkheimer/Adorno 1969: 128-176). When the antagonisms of civil society and the consequent betrayal of its closure values of freedom, equality and brotherhood in relation to the Fourth Estate produced socialist revolutions and societies, the bourgeoisie functionalized and mobilized such reified theological categories against them in the service of his own defense. When fascist counterrevolutions and societies arose against the socialist societies, the fascists used reified theological categories, like inscrutable Destiny, or Providence, or Fate, in support of themselves (Hitler 1943; Trevor-Roper 1988; Fest/ Eichinger 2004; Cruise 2008). After liberal civil society had been victorious again over socialism and fascism in the neo-liberal counter-revolution of 1989, the born-again bourgeois used reified theological categories once more in order to win over the religious votes for completely secular neo-liberal economic, political, and military goals and purposes (Missel-

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witz 2009: 50-53; Kocka 2009: 46-50; Fetscher 2009: 72-74; Hamann 2009: 78-80; Bacevic 2009). This went on up to the present–2008/2009–global catastrophe of the neo-liberal theory and praxis and the nationalization and federalization of main banks and industries (Rudolph 2009: 2830; Hirschel 2009: 40-43). The road of history may once more lead to a renaissance of socialism or fascism, i.e. corporatism (James 2009: 22-25; Kromphardt 2009: 30-33; Farhat-Holzmann 2002; 2003; 2008; 2009: 1-12; Siebert 1993: 94-96; 2006a; 2009i: 1-70; Bacevic 2009). On June 8, 2009, Mikhail Gorbachev, who initiated Perestroika but who never gave up Leninism, stated in an article in a European journal that capitalism had collapsed in 2008, and that it had been illusionary and delusionary in the first place, and that it did not need to be adjusted but rather replaced by a social system emphasizing the needs of the people and the public goods, shortly, socialism (Horkheimer 1987k: 171-188; 1985l: 349-397, 398-416, 417-430, 436-492, 559-586; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396; 569-573, 578-587; Gorbachev 1987). On the same day, an anchorman and commentator of the American News Organization CNN reminded Gorbachev that the capitalists had paid him well since 1989, and charged him with hypocrisy and ingratitude. During the 20th century and in the beginning of the 21st century, when theologians, in order to avoid reified theological categories–following Hegel’s advice that it could be useful and helpful to avoid the name of God altogether–, honestly enough did not say anything at all any longer about God, and were silent about the Absolute altogether, then critical theorists of society, like Habermas, would ask them why they still call themselves still theo-logians, people engaged in God-talk at all, and not rather theorists of communicative action, including finite religious praxis (Hegel 1986c: 26-27, 62, 494, 551-552, 554-555; Habermas 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Arens 1982; 1989a; 1989b; 1992; 1994a; 1994b; 1995; 1997; 2007; 2009: 79-83; Arens/John/Rottländer 1991). Adorno and Benjamin, nevertheless, had still spoken of their inverse cipher-, sign-, or symbol theology, which was still rooted in the Torah, and which dealt–if also open-dialectically and determinately-negatively–with the Absolute, as well as with the liberation and the rescue of the hopeless victims of society and history, and the categories of which were admittedly de-reified, nonapologetically, and de-ideological and de-mythologized, and de-demonologized and de-anthropomorphized in radicalized obedience to the second and third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue (Exodus 13: 16; 20: 4-7; Lieber 2001: 393-394/16; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; 1983a: 9-78; 1983b: 655-1059; Adorno 1970b; Horkheimer 1985l: 483-492; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 23-24).

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epilogue The Element of Otherness

For Adorno, the reified theological categories were complementary to the weakness of the idealistic dialectics, of an “identity” thought that laid claim to what was outside thought: although there was no possible definition of something contrasted with thought as its mere Otherness (Hegel 1986c: 37, 61, 66, 160, 161, 543; 1986d: 56, 87, 90-91, 91-96, 96-99, 99-102; 1986e: 50, 51, 52, 105-106, 109, 110, 111, 124, 125-131, 138, 193; 1986f: 19; 1986i: 216; 1986h: 196-197, 1986q: 93, 243, 246, 247, 237, 273, 458; Marx 1961a: 17-18; Horkheimer 1985l: 286-287, 483-492; 1996s: 6267; 1989m: chaps. 12, 29; 1988n: 369-370, 390-391, 398-399, 405-406, 418, 445-447, 466, 459-470, 481, 487-488, 518, 535, 536, Adorno 1997f: 367368). For Hegel’s idealistic philosophy, the Other-being of God as the free contained the affirmation, the principle of identity as the negative (Hegel 1986q: 93, 243, 246, 273). This Other-being was released by the Idea as a free being (Hegel 1986q: 243). The necessity existed as mediation through the negation of the Other-being (Hegel 1986q: 247, 458). According to the Existentialists, as Adorno understood them, congealed civil society was deposited in the objectivity of the metaphysical categories (Sartre 1964; Adorno 1997f: 367-368). However, according to Adorno, that objectivity was also a deposit of the object’s supremacy as a moment of dialectics. In Adorno’s view, the total liquefaction of everything thing-like regressed to the subjectivism of the pure act, and hypostatized the indirect as direct. For Adorno, pure immediacy and magic or fetishism were equally untrue (Hegel 1986p: 259-302; Adorno 1997f: 367-368). In the critical theorists’ insistence on immediacy against reification they were–as perceived in Hegel’s institutionalization of the state as the power of the rational in the necessity, which state the Greeks considered to be divine–relinquishing the element of Otherness in dialectics: which was as arbitrary a procedure as the later Hegel’s unfeasible practice to arrest dialectics in something solid beyond it–the absolute Idea or Spirit (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986f: 410, 548-573; 1986q: 87; 1986s: 123; Adorno 1997f: 367-368). Yet for Adorno, the surplus over the subject, which a subjective metaphysical experience could not be talked out of, and the element of truth in reality–these two extremes touched each other in the idea of truth (Adorno 1997f: 367-368; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 12, 16, 26, 29; Habermas 1988a; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 1990: chap. 1; 1992b; 1999). This was so for Adorno, because there could be no more truth without a subjective freeing itself from delusions than there could be truth without that

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which was not the subject: that in which truth had its archetype (Horkheimer 1985l: 483-492; Adorno 1997f: 367-361).

The Transcendent and the Relative According to Adorno, nothing of what Bloch had called symbolic intentionality was proof against adulteration by mere life (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1979; 1985a; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Adorno 1997f: 368; Habermas 1987b: chaps. 6, 7, 14, 15; Siebert 1987d; 2004a; 2005b; 2007a: 99-113). Idle waiting for the Eschaton or the eschata did not guarantee what was expected (Isaiah 65, 66; Revelation 21, 22; Adorno 1997f: 368; Ebeling 1979; Siebert 2006b; 2007a). It reflected the condition measured by its denial: the parousia delay (Isaiah 65, 66; Revelation 21, 22; Adorno 1997f: 368). For Adorno, the less life lived and the less remained of it in antagonistic civil society, the greater became the temptation for the peoples’ consciousness to take the sparse and abrupt living remnants for the phenomenal absolute. Even so, so Adorno argued, nothing could be experienced as truly alive if something that transcended life was not promised also: no straining of the notion lead beyond that (Adorno 1967f: 368; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Ott 2001; 2006; 2007; 2009; Siebert 1979d; 1987d; 2004a: 63-97; 2005b). For Adorno, the Transcendent was, and it was not. For Adorno, the Transcendent, the wholly Other, was and was not (Adorno 1967f: 368; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Habermas 1990: chap. 1). The critical theorists often despaired of what was the case in bourgeois society and its history, and their despair spread to the transcendental ideas as well–God, freedom and immortality, which in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and even still in the beginning of Modernity used to call a halt to despair. According to Adorno, that the relative finite world of infinite injustice and agony might be encompassed by a divine cosmic plan, had to impress anyone not engaged in the world’s business as the kind of madness that went so well with positive normalcy (Hegel 1986l: 19-55; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 34; Adorno 19967f: 368; 1997u; Habermas 1995; 1998; 2001c; 2003b; 2006c; 2009; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; Bacevic 2009).

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According to the dialectical religiology, it must never be forgotten that the critical theory’s Transcendence was deeply rooted in the faith idea of the Abrahamic religions, in spite of all differences: in their notions of God, freedom, and immortality (Hegel 1986l: 115, 140, 428-430; 1986o: 248250; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Horkheimer 1974: 218-219; Habermas 1982; 1987b: chaps. 6, 7, 14, 15, 18; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: Part III; 2001a; Ebeling 1979; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004). The Rabbis commented in terms of their faith idea concerning the victory of Yahweh over the Egyptian army at the Sea of Reeds–“Horse and driver he has hurled into the sea”– that the driver said: “Why punish me?” (Exodus 15; Lieber 2001: 406407; Hegel 1986o: 248-250; Horkheimer 1974: 218-219; Habermas 1982; 1987b: chaps. 6, 7, 14, 15, 18: 1988b; 1990; chap. 1; 1991a: Part III; 2001a). “I could not have pursued the Israelites if the horse had nor carried me so swiftly.” The horse said: “Why punish me? I only did the driver’s bidding. What did God do?” God judged the driver and the horse together. In the view of the Rabbis’ faith idea, similarly in the world to come, the soul will plead: “Why punish me? It was the body that sinned.” And the body will say, “I would have done nothing, but the soul directed me to act.” What will God do: God will reject the duality that separates body from soul and judge both together. Other Rabbis described the angels as wishing to chant their hymns while the Egyptian pursuers were drowning. However, God silenced them asking: “How can you sing hymns when my creatures are perishing?” In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, God produced his own theodicy (Lieber 2001: 406; Adorno 1997g: 216-217). According to the Rabbis, this diviner theodicy was like the Jewish custom to spill drops of wine from the cups at the Pesach Seder. In the Rabbis’ view, the Jewish cup of deliverance or rescue and rejoicing could not be full when the Jews recalled that innocent Egyptians had to suffer because of their ruler’s stubbornness. In the Rabbis’ perspective, a similar outlook was behind the custom of breaking a glass at the conclusion of a wedding, to remind the Jews of the destruction of the first and second Temple and other mournful events of Jewish history. According to the Rabbis, the personal happiness of the Jews should never leave them unmindful of the sorrows and misfortune afflicting others. In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, the critical theorists had the same attitude toward the defeat of the German nation after World War II. They were never triumphant about it and they always remembered also the German innocent victims, as glad as they were about the liquidation

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of German and European fascism (Horkheimer 1986m: chaps. 14, 15, 17; 1996q: 617-694; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Adorno/ Dirks 1974; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Kogon 2003a; 2003b; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009).

The Reality of God According to the Rabbis, “a common woman at the Sea of Reeds saw God more clearly than any of the prophets did” (Exodus 15: 2; Lieber 2001: 406). This was, so the Rabbis explained, why the woman could proclaim “This is my God.” In the Rabbis’ view, for those who experienced God’s saving power as they left Egypt, God was inescapably real, not the subject of abstract speculation. In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the same was still true of the critical theorists experience of the wholly Other (Exodus 15: 2; Lieber 2001: 406; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). The Rabbis commented of Moses’ promise to God at the Sea of Reed: “I will enshrine Him or I will build Him a permanent sanctuary, ” that the moments in the Jews lives when God seemed so real to them were overpowering, but fleeting. To keep those memories accessible, the Jews needed to establish a place where they could reconnect with those feelings of being in God’s presence. According to the Rabbis, Moses could also have meant “I will glorify Him” (Exodus 15: 2; Lieber 2001: 406; Matthew 4: 43-48; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40).

Paradox For Adorno, the theological conception of the paradox, that last, starvedout bastion of theology, was past rescuing: a fact ratified by the course of the world, in which the scandalon that caught Kierkegaard’s eye, was translated into outright blasphemy (Kierkegaard 1954; 1959; 1964; Horkheimer 1085g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40; Adorno 1962; 1997f: 368; 1997u; Bacevic 2009). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, to call holy or sacred ground the old battlefields, on which thousands of young men, and more recently even women, had slaughtered each other with the at the time most advanced murder weapons and that even for the highest, and most noble, and just causes and goals, which mutual murder ought, nevertheless, not to have taken place, and was therefore as such against God, was not only a theological paradox and scandalon, but also utter blasphemy, in spite and precisely because of

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all the consoling words of the army chaplains on both sides of the national borderline. The ground on which the farmer Cain killed the shepherd Abel, because his sacrifice had not been accepted by Yahweh, did not become holy or sacred, but from it cried out to heaven the murdered brother’s blood, while the murderer refused to be his brother’s guardian (Genesis 4; Siebert 1965; 1966: 12-14; 1978: 81-94; 1979c; 1979d; 1987b; 1987d; 1993; 1994b; 1995; 2000; 2004c; 2005a; 2005b; 2006a; 2007a; 2007b: 419457; 2007g: 11-19; 2008a: 180-210; 2008c: 61-65). The surviving veterans– and I am one of them–know best how terrible, horrible, utterly profane and cursed the battlefields of the 20th century and of the beginning of the 21st century are, on which the combatants had butchered each other systematically and without mercy (Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 25; Kogon 1965; 1995; 2002; Tudjman 1996; Siebert 1965; 1966: 12-14; 1978: 81-94; 1979c; 1979d; 1987b; 1987d; 1993; 1994b; 1995; 2000; 2004c; 2005a; 2005b; 2006a; 2007a; 2007b: 419-457; 2007g: 11-19; 2008a: 180-210; 2008c: 61-65; Bacevic 2009). In any case, who ever speaks honestly not only of theological paradox and scandal, but also of blasphemy presupposes with necessity the existence of a non-reified Transcendent: the Absolute, the Eternal One, the wholly Other than the horror and terror of nature and history (Exodus 13: 14; Hegel 1986l: 19-29; 1986q: 347536; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 25; Adorno 1997f: 368; Kogon 1965; 1995; 2002; Tudjman 1996; Bacevic 2009; Siebert 1965; 1966: 12-14; 1978: 81-94; 1979c; 1979d; 1987b; 1987d; 1993; 1994b; 1995; 2000; 2004c; 2005a; 2005b; 2006a; 2007a; 2007b: 419-457; 2007g: 11-19; 2008a: 180-210; 2008c: 61-65; Bacevic 2009).

Meaning According to Adorno, a life that had any point or meaning at all would not need to inquire about it: the question would put the point or meaning to flight (Adorno 1951; 1997f: 369-370). However, so Adorno argued, the opposite of meaning, i.e. abstract nihilism, the consequence of atheism, would be silenced by the counter-question: “And for what are you living” (Scholem 1977a: 1-50; Adorno 1951; 1997f: 369-370; Küng 1978: D, E)? For Adorno, to go after the whole, which for Hegel had been the truth, and to calculate the net-profit of life–this was death, which the so-called question of meaning tried to evade, even if the lack of another way out made it enthuse about the meaning of death without redemption, as it happened in the philosophy of Heidegger (Hegel 1986c: 24-25; Heidegger 1968; 2001; Adorno 1951; 1997f: 369-370, 413-523; 1997l: 27-

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33). Of course, the positivists would like to ignore or cancel the question of meaning altogether (Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 8, 9, 10, 12, 17, 19, 24, 26, 31, 32; Adorno 1980a; 1982; 1990; 1993b; 1993c; 2002d). Thus, the more Adorno’s students from the 1968 protest movement turned more or less unconsciously from the critical theory to positivism, pragmatism, empiricism and red fascism, the less they were interested any longer in Kant’s “Thing-in-itself ” or the things-in-themselves opposed to the world of appearances, and thus, in the question of meaning (Kant 1929: 24 27, 71-74, 85-87, 89, 149, 172-173, 230, 265-267, 278-280, 282-284, 346-348, 351-353, 350-352, 453-455, 440, 457, 449, 460, 466-468, 482-482, 490; Adorno 1997f: 369-370; 2000a; 2000b; 2001b; 2001c; Scheible 1989: 131146; Wheatland 2009; Misselwitz 2009: 50-53; Fetscher 2009: 72-74; Hamann 2009: 78-80). The students learned again to endure the conditional, Weber’s iron cage of capitalism, and unlearned again to think the Unconditional, God, freedom and immortality, and thus failed in their original revolutionary intent, efforts and endeavors (Kant 1929: 24-27, 71-74, 8587, 89, 149, 172-173, 230, 265-267, 278-280, 282-284, 346-348, 351-353, 350-352, 453-455, 440, 449, 457, 460, 466-468, 482-482, 490; Adorno 1997f: 369-370; 2000a; 2000b; 2001b; 2001c; Müller-Doohm 2003: Part IV; Scheible 1989: 131-146; Wheatland 2009; Misselwitz 2009: 50-53; Fetscher 2009: 72-74; Hamann 2009: 78-80; Lucke 2009a: 45-48; 2009b: 5659; Brochhagen 2009: 59-62; Menasse 2009: 62-65; Offe 2009: 56-59; Greffrath 2008; 2009: 64-67).

The Nihilistic Thesis In Adorno’s view, what might not have to be ashamed of the name of meaning lay in candor, not in self-seclusion, or hyper-activism (Hegel 1986m: 173; Adorno 1951; 1997f: 369-370). For Adorno, as a positive statement, the nihilistic thesis that life was senseless or meaningless, would be as foolish as it was false to avow the contrary (Hegel 1986m: 173; Adorno 1951; 1997f: 369-370; Ebeling 1979; Küng 1978: D, E; 1982). In Adorno’s view, the nihilistic thesis, which after all had once had religious and mystical roots, was still true only as a blow at the high-flown idealistic avowals (Scholem 1977a; Adorno 1951; 1997f: 369-370; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11). Still for Benjamin, nature was Messianic out of its eternal and total transitoriness, and to strive for such impermanence also for those stages of man, which were nature, was the task of worldpolitics, the method of which had to be called nihilism: methodological nihilism (Adorno 1951; 1997f: 369-370; Benjamin 1977: 263-263). In spite

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of the fact that Adorno shared his great teacher Schopenhauer with Nietzsche and Wagner, Freud and Mann, and with Horkheimer, and even with the fascists Hitler and Goebbels, but not with the second, third and fourth generation of critical theorists, for him the metaphysical pessimist’s inclination to identify the essence of the world, the blind will to life, as absolutely negative, was from a humane viewpoint no longer fitting in 1966 (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Hitler 1943: 305; Trevor-Roper 1988: 89, 358; Taylor 1983: 138, 304; Adorno/Mann 2003; Horkheimer 1967: 248-268; 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 21; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009). For Hitler, already in his book Mein Kampf, the Jew’s life as a so-called parasite in the body of other nations and states explained a characteristic that once caused Schopenhauer to call him “the great master in lying” (Schopenhauer 1989 vol. 1: 551-552; vol. 2: 216, 220, 623, 647-648, 743, 774-775, 796-800; vol. 4: 177; vol. 5: 309-312, 406, 423, 428, 447-450; Hitler 1943: 305; Baldwin 2001: chaps. 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19). Hitler predicted on October 5, 1941, that in case of their victory the Jews would immediately eliminate Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kant (Trevor-Roper 1988: 89). Under victorious Jews and Bolsheviks, these great German men would fall into oblivion, or else they would be presented to future generations as criminals and bandits. Hitler stated on March 7, 1942, that only writers of genius could have the right to modify the German language (Trevor-Roper 1988: 358). In the past generation, Hitler could think of practically nobody but Schopenhauer, who could have dared to do such a thing. On October 11, 1940, Goebbels wanted Rainer Schlösser, the Reich Dramaturge, to take far-reaching steps to eliminate the evil of ideological dance (Taylor 1983: 138). Dance had to speak to the senses, and not to the intellect. Otherwise it was no longer dance but philosophy. In that case, Goebbels would rather have liked to read Schopenhauer than to go into the theater. On April 8 1941, Goebbels described Hitler as a man totally attuned to Antiquity (Taylor 1983: 304305). In Goebbel’s view, Hitler hated Jewish Christianity because it had crippled all that was noble in humanity. According to Schopenhauer as Goebbels and Hitler understood him, Jewish Christianity and syphilis had made humanity unhappy and unfree (Schopenhauer 1989 vol. 1: 404, 447, 550, 548-554, 706; vol. 2: 644, 773-774, 778-779, 806, 812; vol. 4: 76, 149, 259; vol. 5: 387, 406-414, 420-423, 427-445, 450-45, 459-466, 473; Taylor 1983: 304-305). What a difference between the benevolent, smiling Zeus and the pain-wracked Crucified Christ! The ancient peoples’ view of God was also much nobler and more humane than the Jewish Christians. What a difference between a gloomy cathedral and a light, airy ancient temple!

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Schopenhauer described life in ancient Rome characterized by clarity, greatness, monumentality (Schopenhauer 1989 vol. 1: 268, 351-352; vol. 2: 385, 708, 736; vol. 3: 176; vol. 4: 249, 486, 572; vol. 5: 654-655, 519520; Taylor 1983: 304-305). Rome had been the most wonderful republic in history. We would feel no disappointment, Schopenhauer, Hitler and Goebbels believed, if we were now suddenly to be transported to the old, eternal city of Rome. Hitler loved the Roman and Greek elements in the Catholic Church, to which he formally belonged to the end, as much as he hated the more important Jewish moment in it, and its mixture of business acumen and hypocrisy (Hitler 1943: 93, 100, 108-110, 113-117, 119, 432, 459, 475, 561, 562, 563; 1986: 57, 66; Trevor-Roper 1988: 89, 91, 109, 142, 218, 419; 1986; Küng 1994a: 336-601). In the perspective of the dialectical reliogiology, from Rome, after all, Hitler’s friend Benito Mussolini took the name fascism: from the fasces, the sticks around the ax, which symbolized Roman justice (Trevor-Roper 1988: 9, 11, 48, 67, 80, 135, 139, 186, 266, 312, 417, 437, 450, 456, 460, 537, 538, 592, 607, 614, 620, 647, 665, 666; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1966; 1993). Schopenhauer’s and the fascists’ condemnation of the Jews as masters in lying was related not only to them as individuals or groups in past and present, but also to the Torah in the narrower and broader sense, including particularly the Jewish claim to be the chosen people, and thus would affect as such also the strong Jewish elements in the New Testament, and in Christianity, and in the Holy Qu’ran and in Islam, and would make those religions untrue as well (Schopenhauer 1989 vol. 1: 551-552; vol. 2: 216, 220, 623, 647-648, 743, 774-775, 796-800; vol. 4: 177; vol. 5: 309-312, 406, 423, 428, 447-450; Hitler 1943: 305; Baldwin 2001: chaps. 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004).

Neo-Fascism and Anti-Semitism In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, unfortunately all this fascism and anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism was by far not only a matter of past history (Neumann 1942; Sohn-Rethel 1975; Horkheimer/Adorno1972: 168-208; Horkheimer 1967: 302-316; 1972: 168-208; 1985l: 587592; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 17, 25, 30; Adorno 1979: 397-407, 408-433). Today, on June 10, 2009, at 1:00 p.m., the 88-year old neo-fascist and white supremacist James von Brunn, a former American naval officer and war hero, and artist, and a writer from Maryland–motivated by Schopenhauer’s, Hitler’s and Goebbel’s anti-Semitic prejudice, that all Jews are liars–penetrated the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.

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and shot and killed the African-American security guard, Steve Tyron Johns, and was critically wounded himself by two other guards (Schopenhauer 1989 vol. 1: 551-552; vol. 2: 216, 220, 623, 647-648, 743, 774775, 796-800; vol. 4: 177; vol. 5: 309-312, 406, 423, 428, 447-450; Hitler 1943: 52, 54-56, 64, 119-122, 305, 560, 561; 1986: 23, 58, 76, 105 133, 134, 135, 175, 189, 208, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, Trevor-Roper 1988: 146). Already in 1981, at a time of economic depression and at the beginning of President Reagan’s neo-liberal de-regulation policies, which lead to the economic disaster of 2008/2009, von Brunn, a great believer in Jewish conspiracy theories, entered the Federal Reserve Board Building in Washington D.C., in order to arrest some of its members, because supposedly the Jews had taken over and controlled the American financial system, and had founded the World Bank, and had increased the interest rate. Von Brunn had read the fraudulent Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as thoroughly as Hitler and Henry Ford, and Father Charles Coughlin of Kalamazoo and Detroit, a Hitler-Goebbels-and Ford-friend, had done before (Hitler 1943: 307; Baldwin 2001: 82, 100-101, 116, 135, 140-145, 149, 160, 163, 164, 199, 237, 238, 266, 280, 297, 298). Six years imprisonment did not free von Brunn from his neo-fascism and anti-Semitism and overall racism. After his release from prison, von Brunn opened his racist website, and in 2002 wrote a book on line against Blacks and Jews, entitled Kill the Best Gentiles, which was patterned after William Luther Pierce’s Turner Diaries, in which he geneticized Schopenhauer’s prejudice of the Jews as chronicle liars, and in which he applied this prejudice to the Shoa and called it a lie, and became thus a holocaust denier. Von Brunn was of the opinion that Hitler had made only one great mistake: namely, that he had not gassed the Jews. Today, June 2009, in the midst of a new economic crisis all the white supremacist groups, hate groups, clan groups, national socialist parties, and anti-Semitic movements in America and around the world jubilate and celebrate von Brunn as martyr of their common cause: the defense of the supposedly threatened Aryan race and gene-pool (Hitler 1943: 150, 290, 291, 294-300, 304, 308, 309, 383, 391, 393, 427, 447, 497, 561, 562, 640, 649; 1986: 212; Trevor-Roper 1988: 3, 10, 19, 24, 34, 47, 76, 82, 88, 105, 106, 115, 140-143, 207, 472, 473, 618, 695; Southern Poverty Law Center 2009a; 2009b). The more the global capitalist crisis deepened in 2008/2009, the more increased the rate of hate crimes, i.e. fascist crimes, in the American antagonistic civil society. The American news organizations asked why the Rightwing assassinations increased so much after the start of the Obama Administration in January 2009: the first African American President. In the perspective of the critical theory of re-

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ligion, the answer is simple: under the neo-conservative and neo-liberal Administrations the Rightwing groups felt safe and found their interests secure. Under the new Roosevelt-liberal Administration of Obama with its new New Deal and its federalization of banks and industries, however, the Rightwing groups feel threatened and think that they have to take care of their interests themselves, and they do that with intensified violence. At this time–June 2009–the American Rightwing news organizations try desperately to locate the Rightwing assassinations on the Left and even blame the Obama Administration, in order to protect themselves. The Right also knows that the Roosevelt New Deal did not rescue capitalism, but that rather World War II did it, and that therefore the Obama New Deal will not rescue capitalism either, in spite of massive federalization of banks, industries, and insurance companies. The resistance against neo-fascism and anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism and other forms of racism obviously remains an important task of the critical theory of society and the dialectical religiology (Dubiel 1988; 1992; 1993: 5-11; 1995: 5-13; 1996: 33-40; 1998: 25-35; Dubiel/Friedeburg/Schumm 1994; Dubiel/Friedeburg 1996; Siebert 1993; 2001; 2002a; Weitensteiner 2002; Ott 2001; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2004d; 2005; 2006; 2007; 2009).

Nature Religion According to Adorno, Schopenhauer’s negative claim of the total subsumption of everything under the will to life, was far too analogous to the positive claim of his despised contemporaries, the idealists, particularly Fichte, Schelling and Hegel (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989: vol 1: 149-241; vol. 3: 682, 694; vol. 5: 99, 684; Adorno 1951; 1993c; 1997f: 369-370; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 19, 21). What for Adorno flickered up here again in Schopenhauer’s work was nature religion, the fear of demons, which the Hellenistic enlightenment of the materialist Epicurus, Marx’s patron saint, once opposed by depicting the wretched idea of disinterested divine spectators of the horror and terror of nature and history as something better (Hegel 1986g: 19, 108; 1986j: 392, 1986l: 24; 1986p: 259-389; 1986q: 501-535; Marx 1953: 14, 86, 327; Adorno 1951; 1993c; 1997f: 369-370; Jung 1933; 1958: 196-224; 1990). Adorno insisted against the fascists Hitler and Goebbels, that compared with Schopenhauer’s irrationalism the Abrahamic monotheism, which he attacked in the spirit of the bourgeois enlightenment, had some truth to it also (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Hegel 1986q: 50-95, 185-346; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37,

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40, 42; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1969c; 1970b; 1993c; 1997f: 369-370; 1997j2: 608-617; Adorno/Benjamin 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Küng 1978: F, G; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Arens 1982; 1989a; 1989b; 1992; 1994a; 1995; 1997; 2007; 2009: 79-83; Arens/John/Rottländer 1991).

The Motive of Freedom According to Adorno, Schopenhauer’s metaphysics had regressed to a phase in world-history before the awakening of speaking and remembering human genius amidst the mute world of nature (Hegel 1972; 1979; 1986b; 1986l; Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 10, 11, 21; 1989m: chaps. 1, 4, 15, 16, 17; Adorno 1997f: 370-371; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 3-119). In Adorno’s view, Schopenhauer had denied the motive of freedom, which men remembered for the time being and–so the dialectical religiologist may add–maybe even into the global alternative Future I–the society of total unfreedom (Hegel 1986l; Orwell 1945; 2001; Huxley 1968; Adorno 1997j: 47-71, 97-122, 254-288; Adorno 1997f: 370-371; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Siebert 1978: 81-94; 1979b; 1979c; 1997d; 1987b; 1987c). Adorno had to admit that Schopenhauer got to the bottom of the delusiveness of individuation. However, so Adorno argued, his recipe for freedom in his book The World as Will and Representation, i.e., to deny the will to life, was no less delusive (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989 Vol. 4). Schopenhauer sounded as if the ephemerally individualized human being could have the slightest power over its negative absolute: the will as a thing in itself. Schopenhauer sounded as if the individualized human being could escape from the spell of that will as a thing in itself without either deceiving itself or through allowing the whole metaphysics of that will to get away through the gap. For Adorno, total determinism was no less mythical than were the totalities of Hegel’s logic (Hegel 1986e; 1986f; Adorno 1997f: 370-371). In the perspective of the dialectical theory of religion, it would be of interest, whether Hitler and Goebbels in their last telephone talks about Schopenhauer in Berlin in the last days of World War II were concerned with the first three volumes of Schopenhauer’s work, which dealt with the will to life, or with the fourth volume, which was concerned with the liberation and redemption from the negative absolute of the will to life, if also in a delusionary way (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Hitler 1943: 305; Trevor-Roper 1988: 89, 358; Taylor 1983: 138, 304; Adorno/Mann 2003; Horkheimer 1967: 248-

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268; 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 21; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009). When in May 1945, Cardinal Bertram of Breslau, the head of the German Bishops Conference, still ordered masses to be said all over Germany for Hitler, who had just married outside the Church, and committed a double suicide with his new wife Eva Braun in the Führer Bunker, after he had systematically killed 27 million Russians and 6 million Jews, and innumerable other innocent people, and had ruined Germany and Europe as Fate, Providence or the Almighty Creator supposedly wanted it according to his Darwinistic theology, the Church, who had pronounced dogmatically and infallibly against Augustine and the Gospels the universal will of God to save, must still have been of the theological opinion that even he, the mass murderer, still had a chance of redemption into immortality, into eternal life: against the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth’s warning Enter by the narrow gate, since the road that leads to perdition is wide and spacious, and many take it; but it is a narrow gate and a hard road that leads to life, and only a few find it (Matthew 7: 13-14; Hitler 1943: 64-65; Sayer/ Botting 2004: Parts 4 and 5; Gun 1969; Wykes 1971: chaps. 5, 6, 7; Waite 1977; Lortz 1964: 994-885, 1005; Küng 1982; 1994a: 25, 649, 756; 894; Rosenbaum1998; Fest/Eichinger 2004; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Siebert 1993; 1994b; Weitensteiner 2002).

Totality and System For Adorno, Schopenhauer was an idealist malgre lui-meme, a spokesman of the magic spell of the nature religion (Hegel 1986p: 249-301; Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Adorno 1997f: 370-371; Horkheimer 1967: 248-268; 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 21, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 28, 36). According to Adorno, for Schopenhauer, as well as for his opponent Hegel and the other idealists, the totum–the whole, the totality, the system–was the totem (Hegel 1986a: 427; 1986b: 19, 26, 30, 31, 35, 106, 400-402, 416, 440, 442-443, 481, 482, 523 524, 525, 554; 1986c: 575; 1986p: 249-301; Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Freud 1939; 1946; Adorno 1997f: 370-371; Adorno 1963; 1969b; 1997f: 370-371; Bloch 1975c). For Hegel, from the very start of his philosophy the totality had been the infinity of the finite (Hegel 1986a: 427). In Hegel’s view, totality was present in every philosophy (Hegel 1986b: 19). Reflection guided through reason came to the totality of necessity (Hegel 1986b: 26). Totality was a whole of knowledge, in which every part was at the same time the whole (Hegel 1986b: 30). Speculative or dialectical philosophy recognized as reality of knowledge only

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the being of knowledge in the totality (Hegel 1986b: 31). The relationship of common sense to the absolute Totality-the absolute Idea, or the absolute Spirit, concretely superseding God, freedom and immortality, and embracing all relative systems of nature and history, was merely unconscious (Kant 1929: 24, 172-173, 230, 265-267, 278-280, 282-284, 346-348, 350-353, 381-383, 441, 443, 444-446, 447-449, 453-455, 457, 460, 466-468, 482-484, 490; Hegel 1986b: 31; 1986c: 590-591; 1986e: 43-44; 1986f: 548573; 1986q: 185-346, 347-536; Freud 1939; 1946; Horkheimer 1967: 259260; 311-312; Küng 1970; 1978: B, F, G; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 61-65). For Hegel, philosophy was nothing else than a totality of knowledge produced through reflection: a system (Hegel 1986b: 35). For Fichte and Hegel, everything was only in a totality: the objective totality and the subjective totality; the system of nature and the system of intelligence were one and the same (Fichte 1794; Hegel 1986b: 106, 400-402). For philosophical knowledge, the parts had simply to be determined: the whole had to be the first in knowledge (Hegel 1986b: 402; 1986e; 1986f). For Fichte and Hegel, a totality, which had been produced or rather found merely through empirical research, had no validity for philosophical knowledge (Fichte 1794; Hegel 1986b: 402, 416). In contrast, the empirical science has in mind a totality of variety (Hegel 19862: 442-443). In Hegel’s perspective, a nation was a socio-ethical totality (Hegel 1986b: 481; 1986g: 398-514). The political economy was a system of mutual dependence (Hegel 1986b: 482; 1986g: 339-397). All determinations of the socio-ethical relationships were determined through the social whole (Hegel 1986b: 524; 1986g: 292-514; Horkheimer/Fromm/Marcuse 1936; Horkheimer 1989: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 23, 25, 28, 30, 32, 34; Siebert 1978: 8194; 1979a; 1979b; 1979c; 1979e: 35-46; 1980: 35-46; 1985; 1986: 442-457; 1987b; 1987c; 1989; 1993; 1995; 2001; 2002a). Out of this individuality of the social whole the entire social system had to be understood, into which the absolute Totality had organized itself, and it had to represent itself and appear in the nation, and every particular moment was the whole (Hegel 1986b: 525, 554; 1986g). For Hegel, also the individual human consciousness was the totality of its moments (Hegel 1986c: 575).

The Hope for Resurrection According to Adorno, grayness could not fill people with despair if their minds did not harbor the concept of different colors, scattered traces of which were not absent from Schopenhauer’s negative whole (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Adorno 1997f: 370-371 Ebeling 1979). For Ador-

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no, the traces always came from the past, and peoples’ hopes came from their counterpart, from that which was or is doomed (Adorno 1997k: 233251; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1975b; 1975c; 1979; 1985a; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e). Adorno had to admit such an interpretation may very well fit the last line of his teacher and friend Benjamin’s text on Elective Affinities: For the sake of the hopeless only are we given hope (Adorno 1997f: 370-371; 1997k: 495-514; 567-582, 583-590; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 5, 10, 11; 1988: chaps. 3, 12, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 47, 48).

However, in Adorno’s view it was tempting, nevertheless, to look for sense and meaning not in life at large, in the wholeness or system of life, as the idealists did, but rather micrologically in the particular fulfilled moments of the present existence that make up for its refusal to tolerate anything outside its totality (Hegel 1986a: 427; 1986b: 19, 26, 30, 31 35, 106; 400402, 416, 440, 442-443, 481, 482, 523, 524, 525, 554; 1986c: 575; 1986p: 249-301; Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Freud 1939; 1946; Adorno 1963; 1969b; 1997f: 370-371; Bloch 1975c). For Adorno, incomparable power was flowing from Marcel Proust, the metaphysicist, because he surrendered to this temptation to look for meaning in the fulfilled moment rather than in the totalities of life with the unbridled urge to happiness of no other man, with no wish to hold back his Ego (Proust 1981; 2004; Benjamin 1977: 335-348; Adorno 1997f: 370-371; 1997k: 203-235, 647653, 669-675). However, so Adorno argued, in the course of his novel Remembrance of Things Past the incorruptible Proust confirmed that even the fullness of life, the instant saved by remembrance, was not it (Proust 1981, 2004; Adorno 1963; 1969b; 1997f: 370-371). In Adorno’s view, for all of Proust’s proximity to the realm of experience of Bergson, who had built a theory on the conception of life as meaningful in its concretion, Proust was, nevertheless, an heir to the French novel of disillusionment and as such a critic of Bergsonianism (Benjamin 1977: 335-348; 1988: 264-291; Adorno 1997f: 370-371; 1997k: 293-235, 669-675). According to Adorno, the talk of the fullness of life was a lucus a non lucendo even were it radiated. This talk of the fullness of life was rendered idle by its immeasurable discrepancy with death. In Adorno’s view, since death was irrevocable, it was ideological–false consciousness, untruth–to assert that a meaning might rise in the light of fragmentary, albeit genuine, experience. This, so Adorno explained, was, why one of the central points of Proust’s work, the death of Bergotte, found Proust helping, gropingly, to express hope for a resurrection: against all philosophy of life, yet without seeking cover from the positive religions, be it the Syrian Religion of Pain, the Egyptian Re-

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ligion of Riddle, the Jewish Religion of Sublimity, or the Christian Religion of Freedom (Hegel 1986p: 406-408, 409-442; 1986q: 50-95, 241-298; 1986c: 590-591; Proust 1981; 2004; Adorno 1997f: 370-371; 1997k: 293235, 669-675; Habermas 1986: 53-54). Here, the dialectical religiologist must emphasize that the singular fulfilled and meaningful and happy moments of the present existence do not happen in empty space and time, but that they always presuppose and are mediated through the natural and social system and maybe also through a theological Totality (Genesis 1 and 2; John 1; Hegel 1986b: 31; 1986c: 590-591; 1986e: 43-44; 1986f: 548-573; 1986q: 185-346, 347-536; Freud 1939; 1946; Horkheimer 1967: 259-260, 311-312; Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005; Habermas 1977; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1982; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: Part III; 1992b; 1999; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b: 1-25; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Küng 1970; 1978: B, F, G; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 61-65). According to the critical theory of religion, “the land flowing with milk and honey” presupposes and is mediated through “the land of captivity, ” and vice versa; the singular and the particular through the Universal; the autonomy through the heteronomy; and the realm of freedom through the realm of natural and economic necessity (Exodus 13; Jeremiah 46: 13-28; Lieber 2001: 391-401; Hegel 1986 f: 243-300; 1986h; 1986i; 1986j; Marx 1961: 873-874; Adorno 2000a; 2000b: Lecture I-VI; 2000c; 2002a; Habermas 1978: chap. 5; 1986).

The Truth of Theology According to Adorno, the idea of a fullness of life, including the one held out to human kind by the socialist conceptions, was not the utopianism people have mistaken it for (Exodus 13; Jeremiah 46: 13-28; Lieber 2001: 391-401; Hegel 1986f: 243-300; 1986h; 1986i; 1986j; Marx 1961: 873-874; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Horkheimer 1996: 21-27, 28-31, 32-74; Adorno 1997f: 371-372; 2000a; 2000b: Lecture I-VI; 2000c; 2002a; Ebeling 1979; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Habermas 1978: chap. 5; 1986; Siebert 1978: 81-94; 1979e: 35-46; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b: 91-137; 2007a: 99-113; Ott 2001; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2004d; 2005; 2006; 2007; 2009). For Adorno, this fullness of life was not a utopianism, because it was inseparable from the craving for what the fin de siecle had called “living life to the full, ” from a desire in which violence and subjugation were inherent. If, so Adorno argued, there was no hope without quenching the desire in the Schopenhaurian sense, the desire in turn was harnessed to

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the infamous context of “like for like: ” in terms of the dialectical religiology the jus or lex talionis instead of the Golden Rule of the world religions, or Kant’s categorical imperative or Peirce’s, Apel’s, and Habermas’s apriori of the unlimited communication community (Matthew 5-7; Adorno 1997f: 371-372; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Habermas 1983; 1984a; 1991b; 1992a; 1997a; 1999; 2001a; 2001b; 2002; 2004a; 2005; 2006a; 2009; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Siebert 2006a; 2007a; 2007c). For Adorno, that precisely would be hopeless. There was no fullness of life without bicepflexing. According to Adorno, negatively, due to the sense of nonentity, theology pointing toward God, freedom and immortality, and driven by the longing for the wholly Other than the horror and terror of nature and history, turned out to be right and true against the secular believers in this life on earth alone (Barth 1950; 1959; Tillich 1936; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Bonhoeffer 1993; 2000; 2003; Bultmann 1958; 1961; Rahner 1964; 1968a; 1968b; 1976; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97, 98, 141-142, 219-219, 247-248, 316-320, 352-353; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40, 42; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1969c; 1970b; 1974; 1997f: 371-372; 1997u; 1998c; 1998d; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Metz 1959; 1962; 1963; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1978; 1980; 1984; 1995; 1997; 1998; Peukert 1976; Arens 1982; 1989a; 1989b; 1992; 1994a; 1997; 2007; 2009; Arens/Rottländer 1991; Küng 1970; 1978; 1980; 1982; 1984; 1990a; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a: 904905; 1994b; 1998; 2004; 2009; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng/ Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Küng/Homolka 2009; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/ Schlensog 2008). For Adorno, that much at least of the Jeremiad about the emptiness of life was true (Jeremiah 46: 13-28; Lieber 2001: 395-398; Adorno 1997f: 371-372). However, so Adorno argued, that emptiness of life would not be curable from within, in a secular way, by men having a change of heart. It could only be cured by abolishing the bourgeois and Schopenhaurian principle of denial of the will to life (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Adorno 1997f: 371-372). With that abolishment, so Adorno was confident, the cycle of fulfillment and appropriation of the late capitalist class society would also vanish in the long run and in the end (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Adorno 1997f: 371-372; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 20-41, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 569-573, 578-587; Adorno 1997f: 371-372). In the view of the dialectical theory of religion, maybe Adorno had second thoughts about the abolishment of the negation of the will to life, which

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happened only a few years later in the 1968 student protest movement (Adorno 1997f: 371-372; Müller-Doohm 2005: chap. 19).

Theology, Metaphysics, and Society In 1966, for Adorno, nevertheless, the metaphysics of God, freedom and immortality on one hand, and the arrangement of life in antagonistic civil society on the other, were very much intertwined (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Adorno 1951; 1963; 1970b: 103-125; 1979: 9-19, 20-41; 354-372, 373391, 392-396, 569-573, 578-587; 1990; 1993b; 1993c; 1997a; 1997b; 1997f: 371-372; 1998a; 1998c; 2000a; 2000b; 2000c; 2001b; 2001c; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Benjamin 1977: chap. 10, 11). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, certainly in the Jewish religion, in spite of all sublimity, theology and the arrangement of social and political life had been closely interconnected (Exodus 13, 14; Jeremiah 46: 13-28; Lieber 2001: 391-406; Hegel 1986q: 50-95; Küng 1991b). The same was the case in the critical theory of society (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b). In the perspective of the critical religiology, also in the American culture theology and metaphysics remain closely intertwined with the everyday life world. When on June 11, 2009 the former CIA Chief and U.S. President Bush senior parachuted from 10,000 feet on the occasion of his 85th birthday simply for the purpose of an exhilarating experience, his wife was happy that his landing cross was situated closely to an old church. No matter how secularized the bourgeoisie has become in all aspects of its life since Homer’s Odysseus and particularly in modernity, it was still even in June 2009 in need of some sacred space and time, particularly in moments of danger (Homer 1922; Nietzsche 1968: 32-39; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 50-87; Metz 1980). While the bourgeois feels such religious or metaphysical need, s/he, nevertheless, may tolerate or even promote what is the case in liberal or neo-liberal civil society–e.g. wars abroad, violence at home, intelligence and counter-intelligence with and without torture, terror and counter-terror, millions of people being unemployed, losing their homes and their pensions, being without health insurance, and living in urban and country slums, remaining uneducated, and in general the whole neo-conservative new world disorder–in spite of the fact that it contradicts what ought to be and thus, does not conform to the will of God, and then the bourgeois may even justify such unjust conditions in the name of God, and thus he may commit the worst of all crimes: blasphemy (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 490-502; Nietzsche 1990; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 147-176, 354-372, 373-391, 392-397, 569-573, 574-577, 578-587;

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1997i-1: 7-142; Perkins 2007; Bonfiglio 2005; Clinton 2004; Moore 1990; 2002; 2004; Ramo 2009; Scahill 2007; Klein 2007; Hedges 2006; Kinzer 2006). When Nietzsche, the last great bourgeois enlightener, blamed the liberal civil society and its science for the killing of God, he overlooked that the death of God meant also the end of genuine freedom as the basis of social morality, as well as the end of the longing for immortality, and the inability to integrate death into its culture (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 490-502; Nietzsche 1968: 95-96; 1967a; 1967b; 1967c; 1974; 1990; Adorno 1993b; 1993c; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997h; 1997i-1; 1997i-2; 1997j-1; 1997j-2; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 1998d; 2000a; 2000b; 2000c; 2001a; 2001c; 2001b; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392402; 1958b: 484-498; Habermas 1982; 2001a; Küng 1982). The bourgeoisie either never learned or unlearned again that any violation of the Golden Rule or its secular inversions, like the categorical imperative or the apriori unlimited communication community activates with necessity the jus or lex talionis (Matthew 7: 12; Kant 1929; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1982; 1983; Hegel 1986g: 339-397, 490-502; Nietzsche 1990; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Siebert 2006a; 2007a: 99-113; 2007c: 99-113; 2007d; 2007g: 11-19; 2008a: 11-19). According to Osama Bin Laden, September 11, 2001 was the retaliation for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the terror bombings of European cities in World War II, the support of Israel self-defense against the surrounding Islamic states, etc. (Lawrence 2005; Habermas 2001a; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009). He wanted to give the Americans a taste of the suffering they have caused to other nations particularly in the Near East in the 20th and 21st centuries. As late as July 11, 2009, in a world-wide broadcasted video Osama Bin Laden threatened the Government of Pakistan with retaliation if it would continue to cooperate with America’s and the West’s struggle against the Taliban and Islam. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, new violations of the Golden Rule by the second Bush Administration in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, did not make the American homeland or Europe more safe and secure against new Islamic vengeance terror attacks, in spite of some, unfortunately merely technical, anti-terror defense improvements (Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Siebert 2006a; 2007a: 99-113; 2007c: 99-113; 2007d; 2007g: 11-19; 2008a: 11-19).

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In the view of the critical theory of religion informed by Adorno, the relative totality of nature as the result of the Big Bang and life as the outcome of the chemical evolution of the cosmic system, and thus the will to life, which objectivates itself in all organisms on this earth, was not the Absolute, the theological Totality, of which the bourgeois common sense was not conscious, or all there was, is or will be (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Hegel 1986b: 19, 26, 30, 31, 32; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346, 347-536; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; Ebeling 1979). Schopenhauer’s talk about redemption through art, religion, and philosophy in the fourth volume of his book The World as Will and Representation makes sense only if the will to life, which he described in the volumes one to three, was not the Absolute (Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989; Hegel 1986b: 19, 26, 30, 31, 32; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346, 347-536; Horkheimer 1985l: 483-492; 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1951: 333-334). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the will to life is neither to be abstractly negated nor abstractly affirmed, if civilization should be possible. The Schopenhaurian will to life or the Freudian Id, with its libidinous and aggressive components, is rather to be determinately or concretely negated: i.e. it is not only to be repressed, but also to be preserved, elevated, sublimated, and humanely fulfilled in genuine human culture, which is no longer–as Bertolt Brecht and Adorno put it–“built out of dog shit, ” and which therefore no longer clashes with other civilizations in terms of the theory of the late Samuel Huntington, former Harvard Professor, Pentagon Advisor and disciple of Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s General Council and political theologian (Hegel 1986a: 199; 1986d: 79, 1986k: 33; 1986l: 93, 116; 538; Schopenhauer 1946, 1977; 1989; Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962a; 1962b; 1964; 1969; 1977; 1992; Reich 1971; 1976; Adorno 1991a; 1997f: 377-379; 1997j-1; 1997j-2; 2001a; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Marcuse 1960; 1962; 1969b; 1970a; 1979; 1980a; 1980b; 1987; 1995; 2001; 2005; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1966c; 1967; 1968; 1972b: 14-15, 74, 76, 80-81, 86; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1990a; 1990b; 1992; 1995; 1997; 1999; 2001; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Fromm/Xirau 1979; Fromm/Reichmann 1960; Brecht 1961; 1964; 1966; 1967; 1973; 1980; 1981; 1993a; 1993b; 1994; 2002; 2003; 2007; Benjamin 1978c; 1978d; 1995b: 41-51; 1995c; 1988: chaps. 3, 8, 19, 21, 23, 48; Arens/

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John/Rottländer 1991; Huntington 1996; 1998; Farhat-Holzmann 2002; 2003; 2008; 2009; Moore 1990; 2002).

Institutionalized Negation Adorno found that nihilism was associated with the slogans of the meaninglessness of life (Hegel 19861: 245; 1986c: 74, 91, 166; 1986e: 73, 73, 83, 83-111; Adorno 1997f: 377-379; Scholem 1977a: 1-50; Ebeling 1979). The critical theorist of religion remembers that Friedrich H. Jacobi was the first thinker who put the term nihilism to philosophical use (Hegel 1986t: 315-328; Adorno 1997f: 377-379; Scholem 1977a: 1-50). Jacobi had stated “I am the atheist, the God-less” and appealed to the action that emancipated itself from the law (Hegel 1986d: 429-461). He criticized that people wanted to move from the conditional to the Unconditional. He also criticized the theological proofs of God because they meant to do philosophy in the form of the Christian religion. He reminded his contemporaries of the pantheist Giordano Bruno, who had been burned by the Holy Inquisition (Hegel 1986g: 426; 1986s: 108, 130, 235; 1986t: 22-39, 50, 70, 96, 130, 163-164, 184, 310-311). Moses Mendelssohn, the first modern Jew and Jewish enlightener who stood behind his friend Ebrahim Lessing’s poetical figure Nathan the Wise, struggled with Jacobi in defense of Lessing against the charge of Spinozism, pantheism and atheism in Berlin, only three years before the bourgeois attack against the Bastille in Paris, on July 14, 1789 (Hegel 1986a: 299; 1986b: 336, 343; 1986f: 379, 492; 1986k: 279, 335; 1986m: 53; 1986p: 212; 1986q: 530; 1986r: 539; 1986s: 68; 1986t: 264, 309, 311, 316, 317-318, 318, 335; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 22; Küng 1991b: 248-253, 254, 288, 803). According to Jacobi, who in Hegel’s view was a most noble character and deeply educated man, the Absolute and the True could not be known, and knowledge could relate itself only to the finite and conditioned world of appearances, and all mediation between the representation of God and immediate being was untrue (Hegel 1986t: 315-329, 331, 335-336, 383, 384). In Hegel’s perspective, Jacobi ended up in notionless prophetic talk (Hegel 1986t: 384, 417, 427, 436, 450). According to Adorno, Friedrich Nietzsche, who in the view of the dialectical religiology tried to inverse the Sermon on the Mount from slave morality into one to be practiced from the standpoint of strength and power, adopted the term nihilism from Jacobi (Nietzsche 1967a; 1967b; 1967c; 1968; 1974; 1990; Horkheimer 1989m: chap. 13; Adorno 1997f: 371-372). Jacobi did this presumably from newspaper accounts of terrorist acts in Tsarist Russia. For Adorno, with an irony to which the eyes of the people

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had been dulled in the meantime–by 1966, Nietzsche used the word nihilism to denounce the opposite of what it meant in the practice of political conspirators: to denounce ascetic, Manichaeicized, monasticized Christianity as the institutionalized negation of the will to life (Hegel 1986q; Küng 1994a; 1994b; Nietzsche 1967a; 1967b; 1967c; 1968; 1974; 1990; Adorno 19979f: 371-372).

The Cross In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, indeed after the Roman Empire having used the cross for centuries as a profane instrument of torture and execution in order to keep the slaves in their place in the class struggle as well as the subjugated populations in the conquered territories, e.g. Palestine, it was often used as a Christian symbol to signify and to realize the negation of the will to life: in cruce salus es (Boehme 1962: 16-17; Hegel 1986q: 289-292; Schopenhauer 1989 Vol. 2: 94; Vol. 3: 768; Vol. 5: 384, 405; Ebeling 1979; Küng 1994a). While Hegel accepted and took seriously the Christian cross as negation of the will to life, his friend Goethe rejected it (Hegel 1986q: 286-299; Küng 1970). However, in any case, the initiator of Christianity was not an ascetic, or a mystic. or an Essene like the monks who initiated or realized the later Christian paradigms, i.e. Origines, Gregory, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, Francis of Assisi, Dominicus, Ignatius of Loyola, etc. (Guardini 1925; 1935; 1948; 1952; Dirks 1968; 1985; 1987; 1988; Küng 1970; 1994a; 1994b; Metz 1975a; 1978; 1981; 1984; 1998; Metz/Peters 1991; Arens 1992; 1997; 2007; 2009). The dialectical religiologist is also aware of the fact that not the abstract, but nevertheless the concrete negation of the will to life is necessary, if there should be culture at all, and that Christianity was indeed culture-forming in the barbarous Europe of the Middle Ages and still in the beginning of Modernity through such specific negation (Horkheimer 1974: 96-97, 316-320; Lortz 1964; Küng 1994a). In the metastasis of cancer in any organism, the will to life rages without the restraint of the principium individuationis (Schopenhauer 1989 Vol. 1: 173 193, 222, 302, 359, 380, 450-455, 467, 488, 495, 498-499, 540; Vol. 2: 616, 634, 728, 780; Vol. 3: 122, 805, 808-809; Vol. 4: 50; Vol. 5: 270). Private capitalism driven by an unlimited and insatiable egoism, malice and spite, and by an overwhelming greed for money and power, and having rather than being to the point of insanity in bourgeois society, sometimes even in religious form, unrestrained by the state, greatly intensified since the neo-conservative and neo-liberal Reagan Administration’s de-regulation and privatization of

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banks, industries and insurance companies of 1981, source of all social injustice, has been a most powerful corporatisation of the will to life and its libidinous as well as aggressive forces (Schopenhauer 1989 Vol. 1: 103, 390, 438, 454-456, 463, 468-472, 478, 494-408, 502, 508-509, 703; Vol. 2: 266, 284, 305, 688-693, 768-770, 791; Vol. 3: 636-637, 683-687, 650, 727-734, 793; Vol. 4: 149-152; Vol. 5: 252-253; Hegel 1986a: 13; 1986f: 62; 1986g: 339-397; 1986k: 21; 1986l: 370; Marx 1955: 317-318, 394-395, 489, 526528, 540-541, 557; 1961: 6-7, 15-17, 39, 58, 160-162, 175, 192, 240, 281282, 295, 300, 322-324, 345-347, 507, 592-594, 659-660, 789, 843, 175-177, 206-207, 350, 536, 538, 606-607, 791, 806; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 40; 1987e: 293-319, 320-350, 354-359, 364-372, Fromm 1957: 9-11; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b: 14-15, 74, 76, 80-81). In the CNN Program House of Cards of July 16, 2009, the Jewish neo-liberal economist Alan Greenspan, who as federal officer had the task and the duty to predict on the basis of his highly mathematical models the global capitalist catastrophe of 2008, in order to intervene into civil society and the market and thus to prevent or at least to mitigate it, explained it mythically, mystically, fatalistically and with resignation out of universal greed, rooted not in the will to life, but rather in a metaphysical flaw of human nature, some kind of a Jewish theological original sin and a Christian inherited sin, a fomes peccati, which could not be resisted, broken, and overcome by any social system between market and central economic administration: not by neoliberalism, or by the Roosevelt socially modified liberalism, or by any form of socialism, or fascism, i.e. corporatism (Genesis 3; Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372; 373-391, 392-396, 569-573, 578-587; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002). The producers and traders of highly profitable drugs or porno movies could likewise explain drug addiction and sexual perversions instead out of the libidinous aspect of the will to life, out of uncorrectable and insurmountable mythological flaws of human nature (Freud 1939; 1955; 1962a; 1962b; 1964; 1969; 1977; 1992; 1993; 1995a; 1995b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3740; Fromm 1956; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1997; Marcuse 1962; 1980a; 1995; Djerassi 2008). German fascism, inspired by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and misunderstanding both, and reflected in Carl G. Jung’s “Aryan” individuation psychology against Freud’s supposedly “decadent Semitic” or “Jewish” psychoanalysis, as well as in Mircea Eliade’s likewise “Aryan” religiology, allowed and even encouraged the barbarous unlimited release of the will to life and power with its aggressive as well as libidinous tendencies, of which its cult of the body in the HJ and BDM was the symbolical expression, and which reached its climax in the attack of three million men from

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all Western and Central European countries against the Slavic and communist Soviet Union and the murder of 27 million Russians and 6 million Jews (Freud 1939; 1955; 1962a; 1962b; 1964; 1969; 1977; 1992; 1993; 1995a; 1995b; Jones 1961; Jung 1933; 1958; 1990; Hitler 1943: chap. II; Taylor 1986; Trevor-Roper 2000; Eliade 1961; Reich 1971; Neumann 1942; Marcuse 1960; 1961; Sohn-Rethel 1975; Horkheimer 1987e: 354-359, 364-372, 373-376, 396-405, 406-411, 412-414, 415-422; Horkheimer/Adorno 1979: 397-407, 408-433; 1969: 177-217; Fromm 1950; Haffner 2001; Rissmann 2001; Bessel 2001; Lohmann 1994: 54-77; Kershaw 2000; Rosenbaum 1998; Lotz 1967: chap. 10; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009). Great music and literature, and art in general as well as religion and philosophy, which are unlike positive science and technology not in the service of the will to life and its aggressive and libidinous aspects, but rather negate, suppress, articulate, sublimate and discipline it, they nevertheless also preserve it in a new form, and elevate it, and fulfill it, and thus redeem it toward the super-sensual wholly Other, which it is as little as all the natural organisms, including the human body, in which it objectifies and corporatizes itself (Exodus 15; Psalm 91; Lieber 2001: 106-414; Blakney 1941; Boehme 1962; 1992; Schopenhauer 1989 Vol. 1: 52, 168, 173, 179, 193, 197, 222, 302, 359, 380, 450-455, 467, 488, 495, 498-499, 540, 586, 608, 649, 670, 674, 700, 714; Vol. 2: 73, 226, 364, 383, 382, 616, 634, 685, 703, 728, 780; Vol. 3: 122, 408, 548, 805, 808-809; Vol. 4: 50; Vol. 5: 112, 270; Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962a; 1962b; 1964; 1969; 1977; 1992; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 17, 21, 29, 37, 40; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1951; 1960; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1991b: 79-84; 1992: 35-90; 1993a; 1993c; 1995a; 1996; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997g; 1997k; 1997l; 1997m; 1997n; 1997o; 1997p; 1997q; 1997r; 1997s; 1997u; 1998c; 2000b; 2000c; 2001b; 2001c; 2002a; 2002b; 2002c; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Goldstein 2006: 61-114, 115-120, 121-150).

The Ontological Argument According to Adorno, constrained by the convergence of all thoughts in something Absolute, Kant did not leave it at the absolute line between Absoluteness and finite existence (Kant 1929; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1982; 1983; Horkheimer 1987b: 15-74, 75-148; Adorno 1997f: 377-379). However, Kant was no less constrained to draw that line between the Absolute and human existence. In Adorno’s view, Kant held on to the metaphysical ideas of God, freedom and immortality, and yet he forbade jump-

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ing from thoughts of the Absolute, which might one day be realized, such as “eternal peace” (Kant 1929; 1946; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1975; 1974b; 1981; 1982; 1983; Horkheimer 1987b: 15-74, 75-148; Adorno 1997f: 377-379). According to Adorno, Kant’s philosophy circled about the ontological argument for God’s existence, like probably every other philosophy. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the great Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological proof of God– O Lord, thou art not only that than which a greater cannot be conceived, but thou art a being greater than can be conceived. For, since it can be conceived that there is such a being, if thou art not this very being, a greater than thou can be conceived. But this is impossible–

was the result and the beginning of the cosmological and the teleological proofs (Anselm 1962: 22; Hegel 1986h: 167, 348-349; 1986p: 29; 1986q: 209-212, 351, 501-535; 1986s: 554-560, 581; 1986t: 138, 360; Adorno 1997f: 377-379, 393; 2000: 67-77). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, while the ontological argument for the being of the imageless, nameless, and notionless wholly Other, without which the notion of the truth could not be formulated, had been articulated first in Christianity, it had, nevertheless, been at least implicitly presupposed by all great world religions, in spite of the fact that it was often not only not made manifest and thematic, but it was even covered up and hidden through overgrown cosmo-morphic and anthropo-morphic myths and rituals, and thus remained more or less unconscious for the respective believers (Psalm 91; Anselm 1962: 22; Hegel 1986h: 167, 348-349; 1986p; 1986q; 1986s: 554560, 581; 1986t: 138, 360; Barth 1950; 1959; Horkheimer 1974: 218-219; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1985l: 483; Küng 1991fl; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 22-25; Jung 1933; 1958; 1990; Küng/Ens/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Goldstein 2006: 61, 61-114, 115-120, 121-150; Ott 2007/2009: 1-70, chaps. 6, 20). According to Hegel, the ontological argument was articulated and formulated in Christianity, in spite of the fact that it was the most anthropomorphic of all world-religions, and the Hegelian and Schellingian Bloch traced the Christian anthropomorphism vein to its extreme: namely to atheism in Christianity (Hegel 1986c: 409, 420; 1986l: 304, 393; 1986n: 23, 109-120 129, 149, 461; 1986q: 241-298; 1986s: 508; 1986t: 496-497, 503; Bloch 1960; 1970b; 1972; 1985e; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1971; 1974c: 96-97, 121-123, 210-211, 213, 268, 286-287, 316-320; 1985g: chaps. 25, 26, 30, 32, 34, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 7, 12, 16, 24, 29; 1996s: 62-67; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1974; 1976; 1990b; 1992; 1995; 1999: 34-36; 2001; Marcuse 1962; 1970a: chap. 1;

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Benedict XVI: 2007). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the determination of the relationship of the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth to his Father, the wholly Other, and thus also to freedom and immortality, is far from being complete, and the long history of Christology remains open into the future (Matthew 3: 13-17; John 18: 36-38; Haecker 1918; 1933; 1935; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1971; 1972: chap. 4, 5, 6, 7; 1974c: 96-97; Reich 1976; Fromm 1992: 3-94; Küng 1970; 1994a; 1994b; Arens 1992; 1997; Arens/John/Rottländer 1991; Benedict XVI: 2007).

Faith and Knowledge The great theologian Anselm believed in order to know–credo ut intelligam, and the great philosopher Anselm knew in order to believe–intelligo ut credam (Anselm 1962; Thomas Aquinas 1922; Pegis 1948; Blakney 1941; Boehme 1962; 1992; Hegel 1986b: 287-433; 1986p: 29; 1986q: 209212, 351, 523; 1986s: 554-560, 591; 1986t: 138, 360). Anselm posited the unity of thinking and being (Anselm 1962: 22; Hegel 1986b; 1986h: 167, 348-349). He determined faith from the perspective of philosophy (Anselm 1962: 22; Hegel 1986p: 29). For Anselm, God was the most Perfect One, who included all reality, the Ens Realissimum (Anselm 1962: 22; Kant 1929; 490; Hegel 1986q: 209-211). According to Hegel, it was the deficiency of the ontological proof that it made–like the modern view in general–“assumptions” (Anselm 1962: xvii-xx; Hegel 1986q: 210-212; 1986s: 554-560, 591; 1986t: 138-360). Anselm comprehended, nevertheless, the transition from God to being (Hegel 1986f: 579-573; 1986q: 523). However, the deficiency remained that Anselm presupposed the unity of notion and being, instead of developing it (Anselm 1962; Hegel 1986q: 526-527). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, Hegel tried to overcome this deficiency of Anselm in his dialectical logic and in the dialectical reconstruction of the traditional proofs for the existence of God, as well as of freedom and immortality, against Kant up to the very end of his life in Berlin in 1831 (Anselm 1962: xvii-xx; Kant 1982: 252266; 1974: 387-456; Hegel 1986e; 1986f; 1986q: 210-212, 347-536; 1986s: 554-560, 591; 1986t: 138-360; Küng 1970: 467-500). According to Karl Barth, Hegel was not only a great philosopher, but also a most genuine theologian (Hegel 1986e; 1986f; 1986q: 210-212, 347-536; 1986s: 554560, 591; 1986t: 138-360; Barth 1950; 1959; Küng 1970; 1974a; 1974b). For Barth, Hegel could and should have become the Thomas of Aquinas for Protestants and Catholics in the 19th and 20th centuries and beyond (Barth 1950; 1959; Pegis 1948; Küng 1970; 1974a; 1974b). In the perspec-

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tive of the dialectical religiology, unfortunately, that has not happened yet up to the present–2009 (Thomas Aquinas 1922; Pegis 1948; Hegel 1986q: 185-346; Rahner 1964; 1968a; 1968b; 1976; Lotz 1967: chaps. 2, 3, 4, 8; Küng 1970; 1978: B; 1994a; 1994b; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008).

Teaching of the Church In Hegel’s view, Anselm had tried to prove the teaching of the Church in a philosophical way, and thus to connect theology and philosophy (Anselm 1962; Hegel 1986s: 554, 555, 560, 591). Hegel tried to accomplish the same (Hegel 1986e; 1986f; 1986q: 210-212, 347-536; 1986s: 554-560, 591; 1986t: 138-360; Barth 1950; 1959; Küng 1970). Even Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm and Marcuse still tried to do the same for the Synagogue and the Church (Psalm 91; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1971; 1972: chap. 4, 5, 6, 7; 1985g: chaps. 17, 37; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1969a; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1974b; 1980b; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Adorno/Kareenyi 1998: 89-104; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1974; 1976; 1990b; 1992; 1995; 1999; Marcuse 1962; 1970a: chap. 1; Habermas 1977; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1986; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III; 1992c; 1999; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Goldstein 2006: 61-114, 115-120, 121-150; Ott 2007/2009: 1-70; chaps. 6, 20). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, out of the old classical faculties of theology, philosophy, jurisprudence and medicine, the first one has been entirely canceled in the secular American state universities, or at best has been replaced by positivistic studies of religion, and the second one has been scientistically reduced, so that it is today, in 2009, neither philosophy nor science in the genuine and emphatic sense (Marcuse 1962: 65-66; Zeidler 2008: 217-218; Hardon 1967; 2009: 1-8). Thus, in American state universities the problems connected with God, freedom and immortality can not seriously be discussed any longer in theology or in philosophy. Concerning the present culture-war between the Abrahamic religions or at least the Kantian negative metaphysics of God, freedom and immortality on one hand, and the scientistic, social-Darwinistic naturalism on the other, the Kantian critical theorists of society, particularly Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas, stood closer to the former than to the latter, in spite of an occasional weak naturalism of their own (Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1971; 1988a; 2006; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1974; 1980b; 1997b; 1997u; 1998c; 1998d; 200c; 2001c; 2002a; 2002d; 2003d;

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Adorno/Kogon 1958a; 392-402; 1958b: 484-498. Adorno/Dirks 1974; Habermas 2001b; 2002; 2005; 2008a; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Benedict XVI: 2007; Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 1985; Zeidler 2008: 217-218; Kemp/ Rendtorff 2008: 240, 242). Not only many modern philosophers circled around the ontological argument, as e.g., Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Wolff, J. A. Dorner, Lotze, Robert Flint, but also the critical theorists of society, particularly Bloch, Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Fromm and Marcuse, and maybe even Habermas (Anselm 1962: ix-xxvi; Blakney 1941; Hegel 1986q: 429; Bloch 1960; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1979; 1985b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1985: 483-492; Adorno 1970b; 1997f: 377379; 2000: 75-77; Adorno/Kogon 1985a: 392-402; 1985b: 484-498; 1997j2: 608-616; 1997k: 69-94, 158-202, 203-215, 233-250, 583-590, 647-653, 669-676, 680-685, 686-692; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Adorno/Kogon 1985a: 392-402; 1985b: 484-498; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1990b; 1992; 1995; 1997; 1999: 34-36; 2001; Marcuse 1962; 1970a: chap. 1; 1987; 2005; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1978d; 1977; 1982; 1986; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: Part III; 1992c; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Arens 1997; 2009: 79-83).

Openness: Grandiose Ambiguity In 1966, Adorno stressed that Kant in spite of the fact that his philosophy circled around the ontological argument for the existence of God, his own philosophical position remained, nevertheless, open in a grandiose ambiguity (Anselm 1962: ix-xxvi, 22; Blakney 1941; Boehme 1962; 1992; Hegel 1986q: 429; Kant 1929; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1982; 1983; Horkheimer 1987b: 15-74, 75-148; Adorno 1997f: 377-379; 2001). For Adorno there was a motif of Muss ein ewiger Vater wohnen (must live an eternal Father),

which Ludwig van Beethoven’s composition of Friedrich Schiller’s Kantian Hymn to Joy accentuated in true Kantian spirit, on the word must (Schiller 1986: 59-60; Hegel 1986a: 184, 447; 1986c: 590-591; 1986g: 152, 233, 319320; 1986h: 140; 1986q: 273-274; Adorno 1993a; Adorno 1993a; 1997f: 377-379; 2001). For Adorno, there were the passages in which Kant–here being as close to Schopenhauer as Schopenhauer later claimed–spurned the metaphysical ideas of God, freedom and particularly that of immor-

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tality as being imprisoned in our view of space and time, and thus, being restricted on their part (Kant 1929: 28-29, 30-31, 89-90, 325, 331, 333-334, 364, 369-377, 379-380, 392, 409-411, 412-414, 430, 438, 464-479, 484-486, 493, 495-524, 553, 559, 559-560, 639, 648-650; Boehme 1962; Schopenhauer 1946; 1977; 1989 Vol. 1: 376, 581; 662, 681-685; Vol. 2: 204; Vol. 3: 150-151, 155; Vol. 4: 132-133, 139-140, 151; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21; Adorno 1997f: 377-379; 2001). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, precisely therefore the great mystics had abstracted from time and space and causality, in order to reach the imageless and notionless One, or wholly Other (Blakney 1941; Boehme 1962; 1992). Kant disdained–like Adorno and Horkheimer and the other critical theorists of society later on–the passage to the affirmation of these metaphysical ideas. Their metaphysics remained negative, which did however not mean that there was no God, freedom, or immortality, but rather that while one could think about them, one could not describe them positively in a scientific way without getting entangled in innumerable antinomies; but one certainly could long for them (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1997f: 377-379; Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005). According to the critical theory of religion, Beethoven’s emphasis on the word must in his Hymn to Joy indicated the modern bourgeois’ doubt concerning the Eternal Father, freedom and particularly immortality, which had continually to be conquered by faith (Schiller 1986: 59-60; Hegel 1986a: 184, 447; 1986c: 590-591; 1986g: 152, 233, 319-320; 1986h: 140; 1986q: 273-274; Adorno 1993a; 1997f: 377-379; 2001; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 18, 19, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40).

Theology Preserved in Metaphysics For Adorno, in comparison with theology, metaphysics was not merely a historically later stage, as it was the case according to Auguste Comte’s positivistic doctrine (Adorno 1980a; 1997f: 389-390; Marcuse 1960). Metaphysics dialectically preserved theology in its critique by uncovering the possibility of what theology may force upon the people, and may thus desecrate. According to Adorno, the cosmos of the spirit was exploded by the forces it had bound. Thereby, the spiritual cosmos received its just deserts. In Adorno’s view, the autonomous Beethoven was more metaphysical and therefore truer, than Bach’s theological ordo (Adorno 1993a; 1997f: 389390). For Adorno, subjectively liberated experience and metaphysical experience converged in humanity. Even in the late modern age, when the great works of art fell silent, they nevertheless still expressed hope more

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powerfully than the traditional theological texts, and any such expression was configurative with that of the human side-nowhere as unequivocally as in moments of Beethoven and maybe also–so the critical religiologist may add–in moments of Mozart, as traces of Transcendence (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985a; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Bloch/ Reif 1978; Adorno 1951; 1960; 1969c; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1991b; 1992: 35-90; 1993a; 1995a; 1996; 1997b; 1997d; 1997f: 389-390; 1997g; 1997k; 1997l; 1997m; 1997n; 1997o; 1997p; 1997q; 1997r; 1997s; 2002b; 2002c; Habermas 1990: chap. 1; 1991a; 1992c; 1977; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Arens 1997; 2009; Arens/John/Rottländer 1991; Küng 1998). In any case, for Adorno signs, traces, and ciphers, that not everything was futile, came from sympathy with the human: from the self-reflection of the human subject’s natural side. According to Adorno, it was only in experiencing his own naturalness, that genius soared above nature into Transcendence (Adorno 1970b; 1993a; 1997f: 389-390; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; Küng 1978; 1981a; 1982; 1990a; 1998). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, Adorno found micrologically traces, signs, ciphers of God, freedom and immortality more likely in the smallest details of the great works of music and of literature, than in an authoritarian theology (Adorno 1951; 1960; 1969c; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1991b; 1992: 35-90; 1993a; 1995a; 1996; 1997b; 1997d; 1997f: 389-390; 1997f: 389-390; 1997g; 1997k; 1997l; 1997m; 1997n; 1997o; 1997p; 1997q; 1997r; 1997s; 1097u; 2002b; 2002c).

The Last Things What for Adorno remained venerable about Kant, was that in his theory of the realm of the Intelligible he registered the constellation of the human and the Transcendent as no philosopher beside him had done (Kant 1929; 1946; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1981; 1982; Hegel 1986a: 74, 188, 234, 254, 299, 301, 325-326, 359, 443, 1986b: 287, 288, 289, 294, 296, 298, 301-333; 1986e: 13, 45, 45-46, 52, 59, 60-61, 266; 1986q: 209, 210, 211-212, 240, 271, 421-448, 1986t: 267-313, 330, 331, 332, 333, 344, 361, 364-365, 407 408; Adorno 1997f: 390-391; Ebeling 1979; Siebert 1987d; 2005b). Adorno remembered that before humanity opened its eyes, the objective pressure of the miseries of life made men exhaust themselves in their neighbor’s shame, and the immanence of meaning in life was the cover of their imprisonment (Kant 1929; 1946; 1968; 1970; 1974a; 1974b; 1975; 1981; 1982;

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1983; Hegel 1986g; 1986l; Adorno 1997f: 390-391). For Adorno, ever since there appeared something like organized society, a solidly built autarkic context, the urge to leave it has been weak. According to Adorno, who while having been baptized a Catholic, had, nevertheless, been raised a Protestant, a child who had not been prepared already could not help noticing in his Protestant hymn book how poor and tenuous the part entitled The Last Things was in comparison with all the training exercises for what the faithful should believe and how they ought to behave (Adorno 1997f: 390-391; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Habermas 1982; 2001a; Pieper 1968; Küng 1982; Metz 1959; 1970; 1973a; 1973b; 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993). According to the dialectical religiology, the same has been true for Catholic hymn- and dogmatic books. In Adorno’s view, enlighteners had long suspected that magic and superstition might continue to flourish in the world-religions, and the reverse of this suspicion was, that the core, the hope for a Beyond, was hardly ever so important to the positive religions as their very concept required in terms of inner criticism (Hegel 1986p: 251-301; Adorno 1997f: 390-391; 1997i-1: 7-142; 1997i-2: 7-120). For Adorno, here metaphysical speculation united with speculation in the philosophy of history (Adorno 1997f: 390-391; 1998b; 2001b; 2003b). For the chance of the right consciousness even of those last things, metaphysics would trust nothing but a future without life’s miseries. In the view of the critical theory of religion, while Adorno and Horkheimer were still deeply involved in metaphysical thinking, one generation later their student Habermas engaged in post-metaphysical thinking, and replaced the history of philosophy by a Parsonian model of evolution (Horkheimer 1987b: 15-74, 75-148, 295-311; 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 23, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1963; 1997f: 390-391; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2000c; 2001b; 2001c; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d; Parsons 1964: chaps. 1, 2; 1965: chaps. 1, 2; Habermas 1984a; 1984b; 1987d; 1988a; 1992b; 1992c; 2004a). However, while Adorno had spoken of the miseries of human kind, also Habermas was still fully aware of the “perils of human existence, ” and the Habermas-influenced Barcelona Declaration towards a European and global integrated approach to basic ethical principles of 1998 emphasized the “vulnerability” of human and even of animal and plant life as one of its main principles, besides autonomy, dignity, and integrity (Habermas 1986: 53-54; Kemp/Rendtorff 2008: 239-251). Since 1966, when Adorno published his Negative Dialectics, Protestant theologians, like Jürgen Moltmann, and Catholic theologians, like John B. Metz, have tried, motivated by Bloch, Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin and the whole Frankfurt School, to overcome the lack of an adequate theological

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teaching about the last things by paying more attention to eschatology: to the Eschaton and the eschata (Isaiah 65, 66; Revelation 21, 22; Bloch 1960; 1970b; 1972; 1975b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1974; 1997f: 390-391; 1997u; 2002d; Adorno/ Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Horkheimer 1971; 1987c; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Kogon 1967; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b; Metz 1959; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1981; 1997; 1998; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Gutierrez 1973; 1988). However, much more has still to be done in theology, in theory as well as in practice, concerning the Last Things, as the negation of the miseries of antagonistic late capitalist society, particularly after Auschwitz as well as after the wars against Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Iraq with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Lebanon, Gaza, etc., with or without moral equivalence (Adorno 1979: 354-372, 373-391; 569-573, 578-587; 1997u; Metz 1959; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1981; 1995; 1997; 1998; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; Wiesenthal 1997; Fleischer/Hazard/Klipper 1988; Persico 1994; Goldhagen 1996; 2002; Bonfiglio 2005).

Immanence and Transcendence According to Adorno, the curse of these miseries of late bourgeois society was that instead of spurring people beyond mere existence, they disguised existence and confirmed it as a metaphysical authority (Adorno 1980a; 1997g: 390-391; Siebert 1993; 2005b). Adorno remembered that ever since the Israelite King Solomon–who ruled 300 years after Moses and believed like him in God’s sovereign control over nature and history, e.g. demonstrated in the drowning of the Egyptians in the Sea of Reeds, and who loved 700 mostly foreign and pagan and gentile wives and was deeply attached to them, not only Pharaoh’s daughter, but also Moabites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites, besides 300 concubines, against all laws of Hebrew endogamy and against idolatry–great theologians had endowed world immanence with his word: “All is vanity” (Exodus 15: 1-21; Numbers 23: 21; Lieber 2001: 410/18). According to the Rabbis, already the Song at the Sea of Reeds had closed as it had opened with the exaltation of God, now expressed in terms of sovereignty (Exodus15: 1-21; Lieber 2001: 410/18). This had been the earliest Biblical statement of this metaphor of God as King, found elsewhere in the Torah (Exodus 15: 1-21; Numbers 23: 21; Lieber 2001: 410/18). This finale of the Song at the Sea of Reeds had been the climax of the basic themes of the poem: God’s absolute sovereignty

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over nature and history (Exodus15: 1-21; Numbers 23: 21; Lieber 2001: 410/18; Hegel 1986l). Nevertheless, for King Solomon all in nature and history was vanity (Exodus15: 1-21; Numbers 23: 21; Lieber 2001: 410/18; Hegel 1986e; 1986f; 1986g; 1986h; 1986i; 1986j; 1986l; 1986m; 1986n; 1986o; 1986p; 1986q; 1986r; 1986s; 1986t). Yet for Adorno, this word of King Solomon about the vanity of the world as nature and history dominated by the will to life was too abstract and not dialectical enough, so as to guide people in the 20th century beyond the immanence of the world into the Transcendence or the wholly Other (Exodus15: 1-21; Numbers 23: 21; Lieber 2001: 410/18; Adorno 1980a; 1997g: 390-391; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40). Where, so Adorno argued, people were assured that their existence was a matter of indifference, they were not going to lodge any protest against the status quo of their society. As long as peoples’ defaitistic attitude toward existence remained unchanged, the rest of the world seemed vain to them also. According to Adorno, if a person like King Salomon accused entity of non-entity without differentiation, and without a perspective of possibility, he or she aided and abetted the dull hustle and bustle of traditional or modern civil society (Hegel 1986: 339397; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 122-146, 177-195, 280-353, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396; 569-573, 578-587; 1997g: 390-391). In Adorno’s perspective, the bestiality that such total practice in–what Hegel had called–the spiritual animal society amounted to was worse than the original bestiality, before man separated from the chimpanzees seven million years ago: it came to be a principle unto itself (Hegel 1986: 339-397; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 122146, 177-195, 280-353, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 569-573, 578-587; 1997g: 390-391; Horkheimer/Adorno 1951: 284-291; Fromm 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1973b: 14-15, 74, 76, 80-81; 1973; 1974; Küng 1991b: 25-28).

Traces of the Wholly Other Adorno remembered that the Capuchin Sermon or any other theological sermon about the vanity of immanence secretly liquidated Transcendence as well, because Transcendence dialectically fed on nothing but the experience people had in immanence: the inner-worldly traces, ciphers, signs of the wholly Other (Bloch 1960; 1970b; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1970b; 1997f: 390-391; Fromm 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1973b: 14-15, 74, 76, 80-81; 1973; 1974; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Marcuse 1970a: chap. 1; Habermas 1977; 1978c; 1978d; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: Part III; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Ott 2007/2009: 1-70, chap. 20; Siebert 1993; 2005b). However, so Adorno

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argued, the neutralization proudly sworn to that worldly immanence had survived even the natural, economic, political and military catastrophes, which according to the clarion calls of the theological apologists were to have thrown men back upon their–what Tillich had called–the radical concerns with the Ultimate Reality, with the Last Things, or with what Adorno and Horkheimer had named the wholly Other (Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1983; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1970b; 1997f: 390391). In Adorno’s view, people have not returned to their ultimate concern, toward which the theologians called them, because there had been no qualitative change in civil society’s basic condition, in spite of powerful theodicy experiences, such as devastating tsunamis and earth quakes, two world wars, economic depressions, fascism, cold war, war on terror, etc. The theology and metaphysics, so Adorno argued, that necessity resurrected were condemned–despite some valiant Protestant resistance, e.g. by Tillich, Barth, or Bonhoeffer and their disciples, and so the critical theorist of religion may add, some brave Catholic resistance, e.g., by Rahner, Alfred Delp, Metz, and Küng and their students–to serve as ideological passports of conformism to late capitalist society, be it in its liberal, or neo-liberal, or fascist forms (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 397-407, 408-433, 434-439, 440-456, 569573, 578-587; 1997f: 390-391; Neumann 1942; Sohn-Rethel 1975; Reich 1971; Marcuse 1970a: chap. 1; Fromm 1966b; 1974; 1976; Lohmann 1994; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1983; Stone/Weaver 1998; Barth 1950; 1959; Bonhoeffer 1993; 2000; 2003; Rahner 1964; 1968a; 1968b; 1976; Metz 1965; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973b; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1978; 1980; 1984; 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Peukert 1976; Arens 1982; 1989b; 1992; 1994a; 1997; 2007; 2009; Küng 1972; 1978; 1980; 1981b; 1982; 1989; 1990b; 1991a; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 2009; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; Siebert 1979a; 1993; 1997). According to Adorno, no rebellion of mere consciousness would lead beyond that. In Adorno’s view, in the minds of the subjects, too, a bourgeoisie society would chose total destruction, its objective potential particularly in the atomic age, rather than rise to reflections that would threaten its basic stratum (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 93-121, 177-195, 280-353, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 397-407, 408433, 434-439, 440-456, 457-477, 569-573, 574-577, 576-587; 1997f: 390391). The metaphysical interests of men, so Adorno argued, would require that their material ones would be fully looked after: that they would have food, housing, jobs, health insurance, etc. (Benjamin 1977: 252-253;

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1997f: 390-391). According to Adorno, while peoples’ material interests were shrouded from them, they live under the veil of Maya: in Hinduism people were prevented from becoming conscious of being Brahma, the highest Being, through Maya, the worldly deception or illusion, or delusion (Hegel 1986l: 195; Adorno 1997f: 390-391; Fromm 1990b). What was the case in antagonistic civil society had to be changeable, if it was not to be all (Horkheimer 1996s: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Adorno 1997f: 390391). In the perspective of the dialectical reliogiology, the wholly Other than nature’s cruelties and human brutality, which the critical theorists of society longed for so passionately, was not only identical with change in civil society toward alternative Future III–a reconciled, free, just, happy, and healthy society, and the completion and perfection of the immanence of the world, but rather also with the end of the world of appearance and its injustices: its radical, however still determinate negation (Exodus 15: 22; 17: 16; Lieber 2001: 412-419; Isaiah 11, 65, 66; Revelation 21, 22; Hegel 1986a: 344-345, 412; 1986c: 169, 423, 424; 1986e: 124, 125-131, 267, 270; 1986f: 19; 1986h: 196-197; 1986i: 216; 1986l: 174; 1986m: 135; 1986q: 83, 243, 247, 273, 458; 1986r: 173; 1986t: 386, 399, 418, 497; Otto 1969; 1991; Horkheimer 1996s: 32-74; 1988n: 458-458, 466, 469-470, 517, 527-528, 530-531, 535, 536, 544; 1989m: chaps. 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 28, 30, 35, 37, 38; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1974; 1976; 1999: 34-36; 2001; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Habermas 1997b: 4158, 73-83, 98-111, 112-135; Siebert 1965; 1979d; 1986: 442-457; 1987d; 1993; 2000; 2001; 2002a; 2004a: 63-97; 2005b).

The Promises of Theology In 1966, three years before his death under the Matterhorn, Adorno asked in all seriousness for the eschatological promises of theology concerning the Last Things (Adorno 1997f: 391-392; Müller-Doohm 2005: 478-479; Ebeling 1979). According to Adorno, decades after the great progressive composer Arnold Schönberg had set Stephan George’s Rapture to music, he wrote a commentary praising the poem as a prophetic anticipation of the feelings of astronauts (Schönberg 1996; 1997; Adorno 1973c: 29-134; 1981: 523-535; 1997f: 392-392). In this naïve reduction, so Adorno criticized, of one of George’s most important works to the level of science fiction, Schönberg had been involuntarily acting out the metaphysical need. The subject matter, so Adorno explained, of that neo-romanticist George

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poem, the face of a man setting foot on another planet, was beyond doubt a parable from something internal: ecstasy and exaltation. The ecstasy was not one in space, not even in the space of cosmic experience, although it had to take its images from that experience. Yet, precisely that showed to Adorno the objective ground of the excessively earthly interpretation. For Adorno, taking literally what theology promised concerning the Last Things would be as barbarian as that earthly interpretation. According to Adorno, historically accumulated respect alone prevented peoples’ consciousness from doing so. Like the symbolic language of that entire George-cycle, poetic exaltation has been pilfered from the theological realm (Schönberg 1996; 1997; Adorno 1973c: 29-134; 1981: 523-535; 1997f: 392-392). For Adorno, religion a la letter would be like science fiction, space travel would take people to the really promised heaven. Adorno observed that theologians had been unable to refrain from childishly pondering the consequences of rocket trips–as they, so the dialectical religiologist may add in 2009, 40 years after the astronaut Armstrong’s stepping on the moon, were planned by NASA to the moon and Mars in the 21st century–for their Christology, and the other way around. The infantile interest in space travel brought to light the infantilism, that was latent in theological messages of salvation. Yet, so Adorno had to admit, if these theological messages of redemption would be cleansed of all subject matter, i.e. if their sublimation would be complete, their disseminators, the theologians, would be acutely embarrassed if asked to say what the theological messages really stood for (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b; 1973c: 29-134; 1980: 333-334; 1981: 523-535; 1997f: 392-392). For Adorno and Horkheimer, if every symbol symbolized nothing but another symbol, another conceptuality, their core would remain empty–and so would religion (Horkheimer 1972: 10-46, 129-131, 132-187, 188-243; 1985l: 294-296, 483-492; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 26, 29, 30, 31, 34; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b; 1973c: 29-134; 1980: 333-334; 1981: 523-535; 1997f: 392-392).

Theological Antinomy According to Adorno, that reduction of symbols to symbols into a bad infinity precisely was the antinomy of theological consciousness in 1966 and remained so up to the present, in 2009 (Horkheimer 1972: 10-46, 129-131, 132-187, 188-243; 1985l: 294-296, 483-492; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29; 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40; 1989m:

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chaps. 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 26, 29, 30, 31, 34; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b; 1973c: 29-134; 1980: 333-334; 1981: 523-535; 1997f: 392-392). In Adorno’s view, getting along with this antinomistic theological consciousness would be easiest for the anachronistic primitive Christianity of Leo Tolstoy, a successio or imitatio Christi here and now, with closed eyes and without reflection (Tolstoy 1960; 1961; 1968; Horkheimer 1972: 10-46, 129-131, 132-187, 188-243; 1985l: 294296, 483-492; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 26, 29, 30, 31, 34; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b; 1973c: 29-134; 1980: 333-334; 1981: 523-535; 1997f: 392-392). According to Adorno, Hegel’s friend Goethe’s construction of Faust already had a touch of the theological antinomy (Goethe 1965; Tolstoy 1960; 1961; 1968; Horkheimer 1972: 10-46, 129-131, 132-187, 188-243 1985l: 294296, 483-492; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 26, 29, 30, 31, 34; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b; 1973c: 29-134; 1980: 333-334; 1981: 523-535; 1997f: 392-392). It could be noticed in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind as well as in Goethe’s Faust (Hegel 1986c; Goethe 1965; Bloch 1970a: chaps. 8, 9, 10). When Faust said Die Botschaft hör ich wohl, allein mir fehlt der Glaube (I hear the message, yet I lack the faith),

the depth of the emotions that held him back from suicide was interpreted by him as a return of deceptively consoling Christian childhood traditions (Hegel 1986c; Goethe 1965; Bloch 1970a: chaps. 8, 9, 10; Durkheim 1966; Tolstoy 1960; 1961; 1968; Horkheimer 1972: 10-46, 129-131, 132-187, 188-243; 1985l: 294-296, 483-492; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 26, 29, 30, 31, 34; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1970b; 1973c: 29-134; 1980: 333-334; 1981: 523-535; 1997f: 392-392). Yet, Faust was saved into the Marian heaven. In Adorno’s view, Goethe’s dramatic Faust poem left unsettled, whether its gradual progress refuted the skepticism of the thinking adult, or whether its last word was once more another symbol– nur ein Gleichnis (only a parable)–

and Transcendence was secularized, in more or less Hegelian fashion, into a picture of the whole of fulfilled immanence (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986e: 43-44; 1986f: 548-573; 1986e; 1986f; 1986q: 273-274; Goethe 1965;

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Bloch 1970a: chaps. 8, 9, 10; 1986e: 43-44; 1986f: 548-573; 1986e; 1986f; 1986q: 273-274; Adorno 1997f: 391-392; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 37, 40; Arens 1982; Arens/Rottländer 1991; Küng 1978 B; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 6365). The critical theorist of religion remembers that for the friends Goethe and Hegel there was a similarity and affinity between the journey that is knowing, the itinerary, the walk in Goethe’s Faust and the theme, models on the way and thesis of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Goethe 1830; 1965; Hegel 1986c; Bloch 1970a: chaps. 8, 9, 10; Adorno 1963).

The Transfigured Body For Adorno, all metaphysical speculations were fatally thrust into the apocryphal dimension (Adorno 1997f: 391-392; Ebeling 1979). In Adorno’s view, the ideological untruth in the conception of Transcendence was the “separation of body and soul: ” a superstructure reflex of the division of labor in slave holder-, feudal- and capitalist societies (Marx 1961b: 3334, 128, 231; Durkheim 1984; Adorno 1997f: 391-392; Sohn-Rethel 1973; 1975; 1978; 1985; Adorno/Sohn-Rethel 1991). This ideological untruth lead to the idolization of what Descartes had called the res cogitans as the nature controlling principle, and to the material denials that would founder on the concept of a Transcendence beyond the context of guilt. However, what, according to the historical materialist Adorno, hope was really clinging to was the transfigured body (Bloch 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Adorno 1997f: 391-392; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b). Metaphysics did not want to hear of such transfiguration of the body (Acts 17: 1634; Adorno 1997f: 391-392). It did not want to demean itself to material things. That was the reason why metaphysics passed the line to an inferior faith in spirits. For Adorno, theology would have nothing in hand without the hypostasis of a non-corporeal but, nevertheless, individuated spirit. However, in Adorno’s view, between such hypostasis of an non-corporeal and yet individuated spirit on one hand, and spiritualism, the mendacious assertion that purely spiritual beings exist, on the other, the only difference was the historical dignity clothing the concept of spirit. Already Hegel demythologized and purged angels as purely spiritual beings from his philosophy of the subjective, objective, and absolute Spirit (Hegel 1986a: 182, 328, 381, 414, 415, 416, 421, 428-430, 435; 1986b: 137, 424, 503; 1986c: 15, 18, 19, 28, 29, 36, 38, 145, 165, 245, 259-260, 263, 267, 324, 324-494; 1986j; Adorno 1969b; 1997f: 391-392). According to Adorno, the effect of this historical dignity of the notion of spirit was that power, social suc-

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cess, came to be the criterion of metaphysical truth. Adorno remembered that the English language had dropped the German distinction between spiritismus, the German word for spiritualism, and spiritualismus: in German the doctrine of the spirit as the individual-substantial principle. The equivocation, so Adorno explained, came from the epistemological need, which once upon a time moved the German idealists to go beyond the analysis of individual consciousness and to construe a transcendental or absolute one (Hegel 1986a: 182, 382, 381, 414, 415, 416, 421, 428-430, 435; 1986b: 137, 424, 503, 1986c: 15, 18, 19, 28, 29, 36, 38, 145, 165, 246, 259260, 267, 324, 324-494, 495-496, 498, 502, 505, 512, 550, 551, 552, 553, 554-555, 557, 559, 560-561, 562, 567, 568, 569, 572, 572, 584, 587, 590; 1986d: 11, 41-56; 1986j; 1986l; Adorno 1997f: 391-392). For Adorno as well as for Horkheimer, the individual consciousness was a piece of the spatial-temporal world of appearance: a piece without any prerogatives over that world and not conceivable by human faculties as detached from the corporeal world (Adorno 1997f: 391-392; Horkheimer 1932: 125-144; 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1985g: chaps. 16, 17, 29, 37, 40; 1989m: chap. 34). In Adorno’s perspective, the idealistic construction, which proposed to eliminate the earthly remains, became void as it wholly expunged that egoity, which had served as the model for the concept of spirit. Hence came the idealistic assumption of a non-sensory egoity, which as existence, contrary to its own definition, was nonetheless to manifest itself in space and time (Hegel 1986a: 182, 382, 381, 414, 415, 416, 421, 428-430, 435; 1986b: 137, 424, 503, 1986c: 15, 18, 19, 28, 29, 36, 38, 145, 165, 246, 259-260, 267, 324, 324-494, 495-496, 498, 502, 505, 512, 550, 551, 552, 553, 554-555, 557, 559, 560-561, 562, 567, 568, 569, 572, 572, 584, 587, 590; 1986d: 11, 4156; 1986j; 1986l; Freud 1939; 1946; 1955; 1962a; 1962b; 1964; 1969; 1977; 1992; Marcuse 1962; 1980a; 1987; 1995; 2005; Fromm 1932b: 253; 1950; 1959; 1976; 1980b; 1990a; 1992; 1997; 2001; Adorno 1997f: 391-392).

The Resurrection of the Flesh In Adorno’s view, according to the present–1966–state of cosmology and–so the dialectical religiologist may add–as it manifests itself today in 2009 to the eye of the scholar through the newly repaired Hubble telescope–heaven and hell as religious entities in space were simple archaicisms (Adorno 1997f: 391-392; Ebeling 1979). This, so Adorno concluded, would relegate immortality to the realm of spirits, lending it a spectral and unreal character that would mock its own concept in terms of inner criticism. Adorno remembered that Christian dogmatics, in which the souls

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were conceived as awakening simultaneously with the resurrection of the flesh, was metaphysically more consistent and more enlightened than speculative metaphysics: just as hope meant a physical resurrection and felt defrauded of the best part by its spiritualization (Adorno 1997f: 391392; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1972; 1975b; 1985c; 1985d; 19853; Bloch/ Reif 1978; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b; Metz 1959; 1962; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1975b; 1977; 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Peukert 1976: 273-282; Habermas 1986 53-54; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247). Here, according to the dialectical religiology, with Adorno Jerusalem won over Athens (Matthew 27-28; Acts 17: 16-34; Adorno 1997f: 391392; Habermas 1997b: 41-58, 73-83, 98-111, 112-135). For Adorno, with that, however, the impositions of metaphysical speculation originating in Athens, waxed intolerably (Adorno 1997f: 391-392; Habermas 1997b: 4158, 73-83, 98-111, 112-135). In Adorno’s view, cognition weighed heavily in the scale of absolute mortality. That precisely was something that metaphysical speculation could not bear. It was something that made it a matter of absolute indifference to itself. For Adorno, the idea of truth was supreme among the metaphysical ideas, and this was where it took him: the resurrection of the flesh (Hegel 1986q: 290-292; Horkheimer 1985l: 483-492; 1989m: chaps. 12, 16, 19, 26, 29, 34, 36; 1985g: chaps. 16, 17, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37; 40; Adorno 1997f: 391-392; Habermas 1997b: 41-58, 73-83, 98-111, 112-135). This was the reason, in Adorno’s view, why the person who believed in God could not believe in God, and why the possibility represented by the divine name–Yahweh, Elyon, El Shaddai, Elohim–was maintained, rather, by the person who did not believe (Exodus 20: 7; Psalm 91: 1-2; Blakney 1941; Boehme 1962; 1992; Hegel 1986: 68, 99-101, 140-142, 147-149, 157, 161, 162, 163, 172, 175, 177-179, 195, 198, 247, 265, 289, 301-302, 312-313, 321-322, 330, 359-360, 370-371, 382, 382, 409, 421, 448, 510-511; Adorno 1997f: 391-392; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a; 1969b: 29-30; 1972: 23-24; 2002). The dialectical religiologist remembers that Atheists asked the American Supreme Court in 2008 to prevent the Presidential candidate Barak Obama from taking his oath of office on the Bible. However Christians should have done this on the basis of the fourth commandment of the Sermon on the Mount: Again you have learned how it was said to our ancestors: you must not break your oath, but must fulfill your oath to the Lord. But I say this to you: do not swear at all. All you need say is Yes if you mean yes, No if you mean no; anything more than this comes from the evil one (Exodus 20: 7; Matthew 5: 33-37).

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In January 2009, President Obama took the Presidential oath of office even twice on the same Bible, which in the New Testament forbid it as being Satanic (Matthew 5: 33-37).

Second and Third Commandment Once upon a time, so Adorno explained in agreement with Horkheimer, the image ban of the second commandment of the Mosaic law extended into the third commandment against pronouncing the name of Yahweh: now–in 1966 and beyond–the ban itself had in that form come to evoke suspicions of superstition (Exodus 20: 4-7; Adorno 1997f: 391-392; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a; 1969b: 29-30; 1972: 23-24; 2002). The ban has been exacerbated: the mere thought of hope was a transgression against it, and an act of working against it (Exodus 20: 4-7; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Horkheimer 1988n: 445-447, Adorno 1997f: 391-392; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a; 1969b: 29-30; 1972: 23-24; 2002; Fromm 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1995; 1999; 2001; Metz 1975b; Metz/Wiesel 1993). According to Adorno, so deeply embedded was the history of metaphysical truth: of the truth that vainly denied history, which was progressive demythologization (Exodus 20: 4-7; Bultmann 1958; Adorno 1997f: 391-392; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a; 1969b: 29-30; 1972: 23-24; 2002). Yet, so Adorno knew only too well, that demythologization devoured itself, as the mythical gods, e.g. the god Chronos from the Greek Religion of Beauty and Fate, liked to devour their children (Hegel 1986q: 96-154; Bultmann 1958; Adorno 1997f: 391392; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a; 1969b: 29-30; 1972: 23-24; 2002). According to Adorno, as demythologization was leaving behind nothing but what was positivistically merely the case, it recoiled back into the mythos (Bultmann 1958; Adorno 1980a; 1997f: 391-392; Horkheimer 1988n: 153154; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a; 1969b: 29-30; 1972: 23-24; 2002). This was so because the mythos was nothing else than the closed system of immanence, precisely of that, which was the case (Hegel 1986l: 142, 304, 389; 1986p: 142-143; 1986q: 75-77, 107, 165; 1986r: 84, 85, 109, 377; 1986s: 28, 30, 38, 45-46, 48, 74, 486, 561; Adorno 1988a; 1997f: 391-392). In 1966 for Adorno, metaphysics had now coalesced into this contradiction. According to Adorno, to a thinking that tried to remove the contradiction, untruth threatened here and there. The dialectical religiology agrees with Hegel, that mythos or mythology do not yet contain history (Hegel 1986l: 142, 304; 1986p: 143). Mythos and mythology preserve the beginnings of culture and education (Hegel 1986q: 107, 165). After thinking has once

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gained strength, mythos and mythology turn into superfluous decorations (Hegel 1986r: 109; Kracauer 1995; 1998). Mythos and mythology belong to the earlier pedagogy of the human species (Hegel 1986s: 30, 45-46; 486, 561; Bultmann 1958; Adorno 1997f: 391-392; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a; 1969b: 29-30; 1972: 23-24; 2002). Later on, apocalyptic eschatology and revolutionary enlightenment break out of the immanent mythos into Transcendence and the wholly Other of all immanence (Isaiah 11, 63, 64, 65, 66; Revelation 21, 22 ; The HolyQur’an: Sura CX-Sura CXIV; Adorno 1961; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Kogon 1967; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37; Fromm 1966b; 1999; 2001; Habermas 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III).

The New Jerusalem On the occasion of Bloch receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in Frankfurt a.M. in October 1967, Horkheimer remembered that his hope-Marxism had not orientated itself in conformity with the communism at the time still practiced in Eastern Europe, but rather according to an end-time representation, which had its origin in the apocalyptic Jewish-Christian eschatology (Isaiah 11, 63, 64, 65, 66; Revelation 21, 22; Bloch 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Horkheimer 1988n: 445-447; Ebeling 1979). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, behind this Jewish-Christian eschatology stood the healing God of the Torah (Exodus 15: 26; Lieber 2001: 413-414/26; Horkheimer 1988n: 445-447; Marcuse 1961). According to the Rabbis, God was the ultimate source of all healing. Just as he cured the bitter waters of Marah, so would he heal the ills of obedient Israelites. Here in the Book of Exodus, a great deed of God was cited, to support an injunction to the Israelites. Until now, God’s miracles had been directed to convincing Pharaoh to let Israel go. According to Horkheimer, already the German philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) had discovered in Marx’s communism on one hand and in the Hebrew Bible prophecy on the other, a certain affinity: e.g., the vision of the Prophet Isaiah of Yahweh’s realm was a model for the classless society of Marxism (Isaiah 11, 63, 64, 65, 66; Marx 1961c: 873-874; Marx/Engels 1955; 2005; Horkheimer 1988n: 445-447). According to Isaiah, in the new realm of Yahweh there should no longer be children, who live only a few days; or old people, who do not fulfill their years. Human beings should not build houses, in which only others live. They should not plant, what only others eat. Horkheimer was fully aware that after Marx, other Jewish thinkers, following him, had taken over Hebrew Bible end-time prophe-

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cies: e.g. Marcuse, Fromm, and Adorno. Marcuse’s concept of the existence of satisfaction and gratification, in which human and animal were protected from cruelty, was firmly Biblical (Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a: chap. 1; 1984; 1987; 2001; 2005; Horkheimer 1988n: 445-447). Fromm propagated the writings of the Hebrew prophets Isaiah, Amos and Hosea, because of their promise of the end of the days (Isaiah 1, 2, 3; Amos 1, 2, 3; Hosea 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Fromm 1950; 1961; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1981; 1990a; 1990b; 1992; 1995; 1999; 2001; Lundgren 1998; Funk 1995; 1999; 2008; 200b; Horkheimer 1988n: 445-447). For Adorno in 1967, all happiness signaled as a cipher what had not yet been: a happiness, which was only hindered through the profane bourgeois faith in private satisfaction on this earth (Jamme/Schneider 1984: 11-14; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1992: 35-90; 1997j-1: 97-122; 1997j-2: 608-616; Horkheimer 1988n: 445-447; Habermas 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III). According to Horkheimer, in spite of the rejection that Bloch experienced in the German Democratic Republic, and in spite of the fact that he knew very well at least since the building of the Berlin Wall that Marxism had been changed in the East beyond recognition, for him the New Jerusalem, or the realm of freedom, or the classless society, was still to be expected to arrive not in Western Europe, or–as for Hegel–in America, but rather in Eastern Europe, in Russia, in the Slavic world (Hegel 1986a: 218; 1986l: 107-115, 413, 418, 422, 490-491, 500, 513; 1986o: 352; 1986t: 62; 1986g: 465; Marx 1981c: 673-874; Marcuse 1961; Horkheimer 1988n: 445-447). Horkheimer remembered that Bloch, after he had worked as a plate washer and caretaker at Harvard University throughout his exile in America during World War II, and after he had taught at universities in the German Democratic Republic after the war, did not follow Adorno’s invitation to teach at the University of Frankfurt a.M. and at the Institute for Social Research, because he did not want to serve capitalism (Horkheimer 1988n: 44-447). Bloch remained a Marxist and Leninist to the end of his life: Ubi Lenin, ibi Jerusalem (Bloch 1960; 1971; Bloch/Reif 1978; Horkheimer 1988n: 445-447)! Where there was the true Marxism, there was the realm of freedom. Bloch believed in Marx and Lenin, not in Brezhnev, Marcuse, Fromm and Adorno, inversed or concretely superseded at least partially the New Jerusalem into the alternative Future III– the realm of freedom on the basis of the realm of natural and economic necessity (Marx 1961c: 873-874; Marx/Engels 1955; 2005; Marcuse 1960; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Horkheimer 1988n: 445447; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1978a).

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epilogue Non-Identity

In 1966, Adorno remembered that in spite of and absorbing the Kantian critique, the ontological argument for the existence of God, and thus also for freedom and immortality, was resurrected again in the Hegelian dialectics, together with the cosmological and teleological proofs (Anselm 1962; Kant 1929; Hegel 1986q: 501-535 Adorno 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1997f: 394-396; Marcuse 1960; 1987; 2005). For Adorno, in Hegel’s consistent resolution of non-identity into pure identity, the dialectical notion became the guarantor of the Non-Conceptual (Adorno 1997f: 394-396; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967b: 311-312; 1985g: chaps. 17, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; 1989m: 29). Already Horkheimer had discovered the similarity between the Talmud and Hegel (Horkheimer 1967b: 311-312). Both critical theorists shared a negative theology (Horkheimer 1967b: 311312; 1985l: 483-492; Friedeburg/Habermas 1983; Theunissen 1982; 1983: 41-65; 1992; Habermas 1988: 277-279). Both critical theorists were concerned with the truth, which one could not point to and which one could not express affirmatively, and which nevertheless is (Horkheimer 1967b: 311-312; 1989m: chaps. 12, 26, 29). This contradiction lay in the Jewish tradition as well as in the Hegelian dialectical philosophy, in which it had become explicit as moment of a thinking, which was aiming at the truth. The contradiction, which connected the Jews–including the critical theorists of society of the first generation–with German idealism from Kant through Fichte and Schelling to Hegel, and with all that was popularly and ironically called idealism, lay in the fact that the Jews preserved their teaching through long centuries of persecution, in which neither the reward of individual bliss nor the eternal punishment of the individual were decisive motivations, and that they remained loyal to the law even after the Jewish state had disappeared with the catastrophe of the failed rebellion of the false Messiah Simeon ben Koseba or Bar Kochba against the Romans of 132-135AD, which could have inforced it only on the basis of the universal Messianic hope, which was valid for the just people from all nations in the future, in spite of all false Messianic alarms on the long way (Jamme/Schneider 1984; Horkheimer 1967: 311-312; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Küng 1991b: 166, 394, 449, 779, 787 785, 790). According to Adorno, with Hegel, however, Transcendence captured by the immanence of the human spirit, was at the same time turned into the totality of the Spirit and thus supposedly abolished altogether (Hegel 1986c; 1986f; 1986 j; Adorno 1997f: 394-397; Horkheimer 1967b: 311-312; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Habermas 1990: chap. 1; Küng 1991b). In Adorno’s view, the

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more Transcendence crumbled after German idealism and Hegel under the bourgeois, Marxian and Freudian enlightenment, both in the world of civil society and in the human mind, the more arcane would it be, as though concentrating in an outmost point above all mediations: the wholly Other (Adorno 1997f: 394-397; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III; Goldstein 2006: 61-114, 115-120, 121-150; Ott 2007/2009: 1-70; chaps. 6, 20). According to Adorno, in this sense, the anti-historical dialectical theology of downright Otherness had its historical index (Horkheimer 1974: 218-219 247, 248, 352-353; Adorno 1970b; 1997f: 394-397). Now the question of metaphysics was sharpened into the question, whether this utter tenuousness, abstractness, indefiniteness was the last, already lost defensive position of metaphysics, or whether metaphysics survived only in the meanest and shabbiest: whether a state of consummate insignificance will restore reason to the autocratic reason that performed its office without resistance or reflection. For Adorno and Benjamin, all thoughts converged upon the concept of something that differed radically from the unspeakable world of horror and terror and suffering: the imageless and nameless totally Other (Adorno 1970b; 1997f: 394-397; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Horkheimer 1967 229-238, 229-238, 239-247, 248-268, 302316; 335-364; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40).

Happiness In Adorno’s view, as in Kafka’s writings, the disturbed and damaged course of the world was incommensurable also with the sense of its sheer senselessness and blindness; the critical theorists of society could not stringently construe it according to their principle (Kafka 1964; 1993a; 1993b; 2001; Adorno 1997f: 194-195; Benjamin 1988: chap. 19). The damaged course of the world resisted all attempts of a desperate consciousness, to posit despair as an absolute. For Adorno, the world’s course was not absolutely conclusive, nor was absolute despair: rather, despair was its conclusiveness. Adorno argued that however void every trace of Otherness in it, how ever much all happiness was marred by revocability, in the breaks that belied identity, entity was still pervaded by the ever broken pledges of that Otherness (Hegel 1986a: 10, 90, 195, 196; 1986c: 267, 268, 270, 302, 444-445, 454-455, 459; 1986g: 71; 1986j: 299-300; 1986l: 42; 1986o: 41; 1986q: 161; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1997f: 394-397; 1997l: 333; Horkheimer 1972: chap. 4; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988n: 445447). For Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin, all happiness was but a

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fragment of the entire happiness people were denied, and were denied by themselves (Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1997f: 394-397; 1997l: 333). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, contrary to the insight of Bloch and Benjamin that political theocracies were not possible any longer in and beyond the 20th century, and that the goal of politics could no longer be the kingdom of God or eternal redemption, but rather finite and transitory happiness, attempts are still being made into the 21st century in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq Lebanon, Gaza, etc. to establish a theocracy mediated through a regime of Mullahs, the Holy Qur’an, the Sharia law and the establishment of a new universal Caliphat and to make redemption rather than happiness the goal of politics (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1975b; 1975c; 1985b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Küng 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: A; Baum 2004; 2009). In this theocracy, secular means–the French or the American constitutions, quantum physics, atomic energy, and advanced modern weapons–are used for traditional religious goals. The critical theorist of religion predicts that in the long run such secular means will work like a Trojan horse and undermine the theocracy and the religious goals of politics. This has become obvious most recently at the occasion of the Iranian Presidential election of June 2009 through the rebellion of part of the younger generation in Teheran and elsewhere in Iran, who wanted to have freedom, human and civil rights, democracy and happiness, against the victory of the incumbent conservative candidate, whose political goal is the maintenance of a theocracy, rather than the happiness of the people, particularly of the educated middle classes. While at present, in 2009, there exists a deep antagonism between the Holy Qur’an and the Sharia law on one hand, and human and civil rights on the other in several states of the Near East, the reconciliation of religious redemption and profane happiness, may very well be a possibility of the future (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1975b; 1975c; 1985b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Küng 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: A; Baum 2004; 2009). On July 21, 2009, Dr. Marwan Tabbara, an Islamic scholar and practicing psychiatrist from Lebanon stated in public discourse in the Mosque of Kalamazoo, Michigan, that the Holy Qur’an was not at all opposed to finite human happiness on this earth as prefiguring the eternal happiness of the redeemed people in Paradise (The Holy Qur’an: Sura CCCXIV; Hegel 1986q: 168; 1986l: 63; 1986r: 186; 1986s: 85, 222, 281, 284, 283, 285, 288, 289, 325, 327, 347, 353; 1986t: 334; Tabarra 2009; Baum 2004; 2009). According to Tabbara, religions, particularly their eschatology’s, contribute to human happiness as they protect people, admittedly

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not against biologically determined mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, but nevertheless against those personality disorders, which are produced by the social environment, like depression concerning the past or anxieties related to the future (The Holy Qur’an: Sura C-CCXIV; Tabarra 2009; Linehan 1003; Pope Benedict XVI 2009; Baum 2004; 2009).

Convergence According to Adorno, the convergence, the humanly promised Otherness than nature and history, pointed unswervingly to what ontology had illegitimately located before nature and history, or exempted from them (Adorno 1997f: 394-397; 2000c; 2001b; 2001c; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d). For Adorno, as for Kant before, the Notion was not real, as Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God would have it, but there also would be no conceiving it if people were not urged to conceive it by something in the matter itself (Anselm 1962; Kant 1929; Hegel 1986q: 347-536; Adorno 1997f: 394-397; Horkheimer 1989m: chap. 12, 29, 36). Adorno remembered that Karl Kraus, armored against every tangible, imaginatively unimaginative assertion of Transcendence, preferred to read Transcendence longingly rather than to strike it out altogether: and he was not a romantically liberal metaphoricist (Adorno 1997f: 395-397; Benjamin 1977: chap. 23; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1989m: chap. 2; Habermas 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III). Adorno was convinced that metaphysics could not be resurrected and rise again (Hegel 1986q: 291-292; Adorno 1997f: 395-397; Habermas 1993b). For Adorno, the concept of resurrection belonged to creatures, not to something created like metaphysics and ontology, and in the structure of the mind it was an indication of untruth (Hegel 1986q: 291-292; Adorno 1997f: 395-397). Yet in Adorno’s view, metaphysics as knowledge of the Absolute, of the wholly Other, may perhaps originate again, but only with the realization of that which was thought in its sign (Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1973b; 1974; 1997f: 395-397; 1997u; 1998a; 1998c; 200b; 2000c; 2001c; 2002a; 2003d; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40).

Affirmative and Negative Art For Adorno, art anticipated some of this new originating of metaphysics with the realization of what has been thought in its sign (Adorno 1960: 643-653; 1997f: 395-397; 1962; 1973a; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; 1976; 1981;

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1991b; 1992: 35-90; 1993a; 1995a; 1997g; 1997o). Adorno remembered that his great teacher Nietzsche’s work was brimful of anti-metaphysical invective, but no formula described metaphysics as faithfully as Zarathustra’s Pure fool, pure poet, as–so the critical theorist of religion may add–no formula described religion as faithfully as Nietzsche’s poem The Madman, which announced the death of God (Nietzsche 1967a; 1967b; 1967c; 1968: 95-96; 1974; 1990; Adorno 1997f: 396-397; Horkheimer 1989m: chap. 13). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, when Adorno spoke of art, he meant negative, progressive art, such as the music of Schönberg, and not affirmative and restorative music like that of Stravinski, or on a more popular level that of Elvis Presley, the King of Rock, who was received, honored and awarded in the White House by the neo-conservative President Nixon, or Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, who was received, honored and awarded by the neo-liberal President Reagan (Adorno 1973: 29-137, 138-218; 1997j-1: 123-137, 138-151, 152-180). Both singers and dancers became quasi-religious world-super-stars, icons and gurus as they delivered the circenses to the panem for the well conditioned masses in late capitalist society (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 339-412, 491-540; 1986q: 289-292, 342-344; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 93-121, 122-146, 147-176, 177-195, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 440-456, 457-477, 569-573, 474577, 578-587). Both artists produced the most magic music, which fetishized elements from the mass culture for the culture industry, and was fetishized itself as well as commodified (Hegel 1986p: 259-301; Adorno 1932: 103-124, 356-378; 1976: 61-114; 1991a; 1997o; 2001a). Both artists called themselves by the archaic title The King. Both artists showed often a bizarre behavior. Both were brutally consumed and abused by the modern culture industry, as they promoted affirmative, conformist mass culture and bourgeois enlightenment as mass deception (Horkheimer 1972: chap. 9; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a: 120-167). Both artists were magnets for innumerable litigations in American courts. Both artists were over drugged by their doctors and handlers, in order to mitigate their chronic pain. Thus, both artists died young and suddenly. Jackson reproduced the often betrayed American dream of a young African American from the slums of the environmentally most unhealthy Gary, Indiana, in his most fantastic Neverland Ranch in California, a children’s paradise. After the sudden death of the two musical gurus, Presley and Jackson, no commentator or anchorperson of the news organizations of profane civil society mentioned any traces of genuine Transcendence, or freedom, or immortality in their music, except maybe their artistic transcendence from inside into this-worldliness and its bad quantitative infinity, instead of into

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the good and true qualitative Infinitude: the totally Other (Hegel 1986e: 115-173; 1986q: 291-292; Adorno 1997f: 395-397; 1997j-1: 47-71, 72-96, 97-122, 123-137, 138-151, 152-180; 1997j-2: 608-617; Habermas 1990: 1415; 1991a: 127-156; Küng 1998). The masses of his fans, nevertheless, canonized Jackson during his memorial service in Los Angels and made him into a saint, while his opponents criticized his dark side and his perversity, and his gender, race, and class identity struggles. The same bourgeois religious ambiguity, which was present in Jackson’s life, became manifest also in the American army, when one general in Afghanistan told his troops, that they were on a crusade, and another one ordered Bibles to be burned, so that they could not be distributed to the Islamic Afghans, with the intent to convert them to Christianity.

Negative and Affirmative Religion The dialectical religiologist differentiates sharply not only between negative and affirmative art, but also between negative and progressive religion, like that of Tillich, Niebuhr, Barth, Rahner, Metz, Peukert, Arens, Küng, Kuschel, Schlensog and Archbishop Romero and his liberation theologians and members of the Basic Christian communities who were tortured and murdered as communists by the fascist Arena Party in El Salvador, John XXIII and Paul II, as well as Rabbi Walter Homolka and Tariq Ramadan, on one hand, and affirmative and restorative religion like that of Pope Benedict XVI, who was received, honored and awarded by the neo-liberal President Bush junior in the White House, and the Tridentines, the Society of Saint Pious X, the Fraternity of Saint Pious X, Opus Dei, Father Coughlin, the fascist radio-priest, the Jesuit Hardon, the conservative former Vatican radio-priest, and the neo-liberal Father Sirico, and their followers in 20th century Kalamazoo and Detroit and Michigan (Marcuse 1960; 1970a; Coughlin 1932; 1933; Baldwin 2001: chap. 19; Küng 2009; Küng/Homolka 2008; Baum 2003: 205-221; 2004; 2009; Mills 1962; 1964; Lohmann 1994; Hardon 1967; 2009: 1-8; Sirico 2007; 2008; Pope Benedict XVI 2009; Siebert 2006d: 61-114). While beatification preparations are in process for Father Hardon in the Archdiocese of Saint Louis, Missouri, on the Christian Right, that is not the case for Archbishop Romero and his liberation theologians, including Jesuits, and Maryknoll nuns and members of the Basic Christian communities, on the Christian Left, who have been murdered by the fascist Arena Government and its death squads in El Salvador, or for laymen or lay women, who are the majority in the Church, or for workers, or for mothers, who raised 7

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or 8 children in a Christian way under most difficult economic conditions and without family allowances, until they died too early from a most cruel cancer illness: neglected and forgotten, more or less anonymous martyrs all of them (Siebert 1993: chap. V; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6).

Semblance from Non-Semblance According to Adorno, the thinking artist, like he himself, understood the un-thought art (Adorno 1997f: 396-397). In Adorno’s view, a thought, that did not capitulate to the wretchedly ontical reality, to that which was the case in late capitalist society, would founder upon its criteria (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 491-540; Adorno 1972: 9-19, 93-121, 147-176, 177-195, 280-353, 354-372, 373-391, 392-386, 434-439, 457-477, 569-573, 574-577, 578-587; 1997f: 396-397; Horkheimer 1985l: 417-430, 559-586; Pensky 1997; Holloway/Matamoros/Tischler 2009; Jameson 2007; Sherman 2007; Hammer 2006; Honneth 2009; Edgar 2005). Truth would turn into untruth. Philosophy would turn into folly. However, so Adorno argued emphatically, philosophy could not abdicate, if stupidity was not to triumph in realized unreason. For Adorno, folly was truth in the form that people were struck with, as amid untruth they would not let truth go. According to Adorno, art was semblance even at its highest peaks. Yet art’s semblance, the irresistible part of it, was given to it by what was not semblance: the Non-Semblance, the super-sensual, imageless and nameless totally Other (Exodus 20; Blakney 1941; Boehme 1962; 1992; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1997f: 396-397; Bloch 1972; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: Part III; 1992b; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Arens 1997; 2009: 79-83; Arens/John/Rottländer 1991; Adams 2006). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the same is true for semblance in religion as well, which also here is given by the NonSemblance (Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Pope Benedict XVI: 2007b).

Semblance as Promise of Non-Semblance For Adorno, what art, notably the art decried as nihilistic, said in refraining from judgments was that everything was not just nothing: if it were, whatever was would be pale, colorless, indifferent (Hegel 1986a: 245; 1986c: 74, 94, 174; 1986d: 13 91, 166; 1986e: 73, 83-111, 1986f: 283; 1986l: 44, 91; 1986m; 1986n; 1986o; 1986q: 290-291; Adorno 1951; 1960: 643653; 1962; 1969c; 1970b; 1973a; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1976; 1980b;

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1981; 1997 f: 396-397; Horkheimer 1988n: 221; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Küng 1978: D, E). Already at the end of his Minima Moralia of 1951, Adorno stated that philosophy, as it could alone still be done responsibly and justifiably in the face of the universal despair, would be the attempt to look at things in such a way as they represent themselves from the standpoint of the Messianic redemption (Adorno 1951: 333-334; 1997f: 396397). For Adorno, already at that time knowledge had no light except that which was shining on the world from the future Messianic redemption. Everything else exhausted itself in reconstruction and remained a piece of positivistic technique (Adorno 1951: 333-334; 1980a; 1997f: 396-397). In his Negative Dialectic of 1966, Adorno stated that no light fell on men and things without reflecting Transcendence (Adorno 1951: 333-334; 1980a; 1997f: 396-397; Habermas 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III). According to Adorno, indelible from the resistance to the fungible world of barter, i.e. late capitalist society, was the resistance of the eye that did not want the colors of the world to fade. In art, religion, and philosophy, metaphysical semblance was a promise of Non-Semblance: the totally Other, including liberation, happiness, resurrection of the flesh, truth, and peace (Kant 1946; Hegel 1986q: 290-292; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1996s: chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5; Fromm 1950; 1964, 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1992; 1995; 1999: 34-36; 2001; Marcuse 1970a: chap. 1; Adorno 1951: 333-334; 1980a; 1997f: 396-397; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 29-31; Habermas 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III; Goldstein 2006: 61-114, 115-120, 121-150; Ott 2007/2009: 1-70; chap. 6; Linehan 1993: chaps. 2, 3). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the Marxist sociologist and philosopher Adorno came closer to an eschatological theodicy, than the Rabbis (Horkheimer 1988n: 445-446; Adorno 1951; 1960: 643-653; 1962; 1969c; 1970b; 1973a; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1997f: 396-397; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11). According to the modern Rabbis, the purpose of religion was not to explain life’s bitterness through a talion- or test-theodicy, but rather to sweeten it (Exodus 15: 25; Lieber 2001: 413). The Midrash envisioned Moses asking God Why did you create brackish water in Your world, a liquid that serves no purpose? God replied: Instead of asking philosophical questions, do something to make the bitter water sweet. The dialectical religiologist interprets the Rabbis to mean that Auschwitz was not to be explained by a theoretical theodicy, but rather to be prevented by a practical theodicy for the future. Even a Messianic theodicy may be more practical than theoretical (Adorno 1997u; Küng 1991b: 726-734).

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epilogue Knowledge of the Absolute

Up to the end of his life in Switzerland in 1969, the historical materialist and negative dialectician Adorno was driven by and struggled with the question, whether metaphysics as the knowledge of the Absolute, or of the wholly Other, was at all possible without the construction of the absolute knowledge: without that idealism which supplied the title for the last chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (Hegel 1986c: 575-591; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f: 397-400; 1997j-2: 608616; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2000c; 2001b; 2001c; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b: 168-171; 2003d; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Habermas 1976; 1977; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1985a; 1986; 1987b; 1987c; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III; 1992b; 1992c; 1999; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Adams 2006; Edgar 2005; Müller-Doohm 2005: chap. 19; Jameson 2007; Sherman 2007; Holloway/Matamoros/Tischler2009; Pensky 1997; Hammer 2005; Pope Benedict XVI: 2005; 2006; 2007a; 2007b; 2009). The final chapter VIII of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, entitled Absolute Knowledge, ended with the summarizing, conclusive statement: The goal, which is Absolute Knowledge, or Spirit knowing itself as Spirit, finds its pathway in the recollection of spiritual forms (Geister) as they are in themselves, and as they accomplish the organization of their spiritual kingdom. Their conversation, looked at from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History; looked at from the side of their intellectually comprehended organization, it is the Science of the ways in which knowledge appears. Both together, or History (intellectually) comprehended (begriffen), form at once the recollection and the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit, the reality, the truth, the certainty of its throne, without which it were lifeless, solitary, and alone. Only The chalice of this realm of spirits Foams forth to God His own Infinitude (Isaiah 11, 65-66; Revelation 21, 22; Schiller 1986: 591/1; Hegel 1986c: 591; 1986f: 548-573; Adorno 1997f: 397-400; Kesting 2009: 83-86).

On one hand, Adorno asked if a person, such as Hegel or he himself, who dealt with the Absolute, or the totally Other was not necessarily claiming to be the thinking organ with the capacity to do so, and thus to be the Absolute itself (Hegel 1986c: 591; 1986f: 548-573; Adorno 1997f: 397400; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40)? Adorno asked on the other hand, if dialectics turned into a metaphysics that was not simply like

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dialectics, would it not violate its own strict concept of negativity (Hegel 1986c: 72-77; 1986e: 48-53; Marx 1961a: 17-18; Adorno 1997f: 397-400; Horkheimer 1985g: 286-287, 349-397, 398-416, 436-492, 526-541, 587592, 593-605; Marcuse 1960; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a: chap. 1; 1970b; 1973; 1987; 2001; 2005; Jameson 2007; Hammer 2005; Pensky 1997; Holloway/ Matamoros/Tischler 2009; Sherman 2007). According to Adorno, dialectics, the epitome of negative knowledge, would have nothing beside it: like the God of Israel (Genesis 20; Hegel 1986c: 591; Adorno 1997f: 397400). In Adorno’s view, even a negative dialectics dragged along the commandment of exclusiveness from the positive one, from the system (Hegel 1986c: 37, 61, 66, 160, 543; 1986d: 56, 87, 90-96; 1986a: 181, 234-236, 419427; 1986b: 9-138; Jamme/Schneider 1984: 11-14; Adorno 1997f: 397400). Such reasoning, so Adorno explained, would require a non-dialectical consciousness to be negated as finite and fallible. Adorno remembered that in all its historical forms, dialectics prohibited stepping out of it (Hegel 1986a: 422; 1986c: 18, 43, 59, 79, 384, 385-386, 386-387; 1986e: 384; 1986f: 379; 1986g: 53, 57, 77, 157, 198, 213, 242, 292; Adorno 1997f: 397400). Dialectics played the part of a conceptual mediator between the unconditional Spirit and the finite spirit of man: like the Christ in Christianity (Hegel 1986q: 241-298, 299-346; Adorno 1997f: 397-400; Küng 1970; 1984; 1992; 1993a; 1994a; 1994b; Pope John XXIII 1962; 1963; Pope Paul VI 1966; 1968; Pope John Paul II 1993; 1998; Pope Benedict XVI 2005; 2006; 2007a; 2007b; 2009). According to Adorno, this precisely was what intermittently kept making theology the enemy of dialectics. Although dialectics allowed the dialecticians, including the critical theorists of society, to think the Absolute, the Absolute as transmitted by dialectics remained in bondage to conditioned thinking, In Adorno’s perspective, if Hegel’s Absolute was a secularization of the Deity, it was still the Deity’s secularization (Hegel 1986c: chap. VIII; Adorno 1997f: 397-400; Küng 1970; 1978: B, F, G; 1993a; 1994a; 1994b; Adorno 1997f: 397-400). Even as the totality of mind and spirit, that Absolute remained chained to its finite human model. In the perspective of the dialectical religiology the longing for the wholly Other must even leave this human model behind in the process of de-mythologization, de-demonization, de-anthropomorphization, dereification, shortly dialectical enlightenment: the unconditional must be hoped for in its being surrendered (Horkheimer 1988n: 77, 105-106, 159, 163-164, 222, 228-233, 240, 321, 369-370, 390-391, 405, 410-411, 433436, 445-447, 466, 499-501, 503-504, 507-509, 510-512, 517-518, 518-519, 530-531, 535-536, 536; 1996s: 62-66; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 407; Adorno 1997f: 397-400; Küng 1978; 1982).

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epilogue Micrology

According to Adorno, the identification of the Absolute–what for Kant, Jacobi and Fichte had been beyond reason, and a Beyond in faith or feeling, and nothing for the recognizing reason, and what Hegel had called the Identity of the identity and the non-identity, the Identity of the ideal and the real, the Identity of the unity and the plurality, the Unity of the indifference and the relationship–transposed it upon man as the source of the identity principle (Hegel 1986b: 11, 17, 19, 20, 25, 50, 52, 57, 94, 96, 112, 113, 129, 130, 163, 170, 288, 388, 399, 409, 410, 435, 442, 456, 456, 457, 503, 543; 1986c: 15, 20-22, 24, 70, 312, 404, 416, 442, 450, Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 407; Adorno 1997f: 398-400; Küng 1978; 1982; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 63-65). In Adorno’s view, as the identifications admitted now and then, and as enlightenment could strikingly point out to them every time, they were anthropomorphisms. This was why, so Adorno explained, at the approach of the mind, the Absolute was fleeing from the mind: its approach was a mirage. Probably however, so Adorno thought, the successful elimination of any anthropomorphism, the elimination with which the delusive content seemed to be removed, coincided in the end with that context, with absolute identity. Adorno was aware that denying the mystery by identification, by ripping more and more scraps out of it, did not resolve it (Adorno 1997f: 398-400; Habermas 1992b). Rather, so Adorno had to admit, the mystery belied peoples’ control of nature by reminding them of the impotence of their power. According to Adorno, enlightenment left practically nothing of the metaphysical content of truth: God, freedom and immortality. That metaphysical content, which receded, kept getting smaller and smaller, as Hegel’s friend Goethe described it in the parable of New Melusine’s box, designating an extremity. The metaphysical content grew more and more insignificant in civil society. For Adorno, this was why, in the critique of cognition as well as in the philosophy of history, metaphysics immigrated into micrology (Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1974; 1980b; 1990; 1993c; 1997a; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997u; 1998a; 1998b; 1998c; 2000b; 2000c; 2001b; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d; 1997f: 398-400; Habermas 1992b). In Adorno’s perspective, micrology was the place where metaphysics–God, freedom and immortality–found a haven from totality. Adorno insisted that no Absolute could be expressed otherwise than in topics and categories, signs and ciphers of immanence, although neither in its conditionality nor as its totality was immanence to be deified: negative or micrological metaphysics or theol-

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ogy (Adorno 1970b; 1997f: 398-400; 1997j-2: 608-616; Habermas 1977; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III; 1992b; 1992c; Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005).

Dialectical Constellation For Adorno according to its own very notion, metaphysics could not be a deductive context of judgments about things in being, and neither could it be conceived after the model of an absolute Otherness, terribly defying thought (Hegel 1986b: 11, 17, 19, 20, 25, 50, 52, 57, 94, 96, 112, 113, 129, 130, 163, 170, 288, 388, 399, 409, 410, 435, 442, 456, 456, 457, 503, 543; 1986c: 15, 20-22, 24, 70, 312, 404, 416, 442, 450; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 407; Adorno 1997f: 398-400; Küng 1978; 1982; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 63-65). According to Adorno, metaphysics would be possible only as a legible dialectical constellation of things in being. From those things it would get the material, without which it would not be. However, metaphysics would not transfigure the existence of its elements, but would bring them into a dialectical configuration, in which the moments would unite to form a script (Adorno 1970b; 1997f: 398-400). For that end, so Adorno argued, metaphysics had to know how to wish and to long (Hegel 1986a: 344-345; 417; 1986c: 169, 423, 424; 1986e: 267; 1986t: 386, 399, 407, 418; Horkheimer 1988a: 100-157; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 27, 40; Adorno 1997f: 398-400). Adorno remembered very well that the saying that the wish was a poor father of thought had been one of the general theses of European enlightenment ever since Xenophanes: according to Hegel the first occidental philosopher, who determined the Absolute as the One (Hegel 1986n: 23; 1986q: 499; 1986r: 99, 277-284, 301; 1986t: 300, 363, 496; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37; Adorno 1997f: 398-400; Küng 1978; 1982; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 63-65). According to Adorno, the thesis about the wish being a poor father of thought applied undiminished to the modern attempts to restore ontology (Adorno 1997f: 398400; Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005).

The Need in Thinking However for Adorno, human thinking, itself a mode of conduct, contained the need–the vital need, at the outset–in itself (Adorno 1997f: 398400; Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005). The need was what people were thinking from, even where they disdained wishful thinking. The motor of the

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need, so Adorno explained, was the effort that involved thought as action. For Adorno, the object of critique was not the need in thinking, but the relationship between the two. Yet, so Adorno argued, the need in human thinking was what made people think (Horkheimer 1988n: 289-290, 316, 466, 487-488, 530; Adorno 1997f: 399-400). The need in thinking asked to be negated by thinking. The need in thinking had to disappear in thought, if it was to be really satisfied: and in this negation it survived. For Adorno, represented in the inmost cell of thought was that which was unlike thought: the super-sensual and notionless wholly Other (Blakney 1941; Boehme 1962; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Adorno 1997f: 399-400; Goldstein 2006: 61-114, 115-120, 121-150; Ott 2007/2009: 1-70; chap. 6). In Adorno’s perspective, the smallest intramundane traits or ciphers would be of relevance to the Absolute, for the micrological view cracked the shells of what, measured by the subsuming cover-notion, the universal, was helplessly isolated, and exploded its identity: the delusion that it was but a particular specimen (Hegel 1986f: 243-301; Adorno 1970b; 1997f: 399-400). Adorno materialistically turned upside down the dialectical notion of universal, particular, and singular (Hegel 1986f: 243-301; Marx 1961a: 17-18; Horkheimer 1985l: 286-287; Adorno 1997f: 399-400). For Adorno, there was solidarity between such thinking of the critical theorists of society on one hand, and theology and metaphysics at the time of their fall in the present transition period from Modernity to Post-Modernity, on the other (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 20, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; Adorno 1997f: 396-400; 1997j-2: 608-616; Benjamin 1955 Vol. 1: 494; 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Priest 2009b: 68-72; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1992b; 1992c; 1997a; 1999; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2996b: 1-25; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Pope Benedict XVI: 2007; 2009). When on June 28, 2009 a priest preached in Kalamazoo, which took its name Boiling Pot from the annihilated race of native Americans, to his believers about transitory physical cures of illnesses, they still knew what he meant. Yet, when he spoke about metaphysical or theological healing that lasted for ever, they were no longer sure what he was talking about. There will, however, also be solidarity between critical, dialectical thinking of the critical theorists of society on one hand, and theology and metaphysics, on the other, should the latter be produced again in new revolutionary forms out of the insatiable longing for the entirely Other than the horror and terror of the finite world of nature and history, and should they no longer be small and ugly, and should they be able to let themselves be seen again effectively in public

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on the way to post-modern alternative Future III–a free and reconciled society, in which people could live friendly together with each other (Brecht 1961; 1964; 1966; 1967; 1973; 1980; 1993a; 1993b; 1994; 2002; 2003; 2007a; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Benjamin 1950; 1955a; 1955c Vol. 1: 494; 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Priester 2009b: 68-72; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2; Adorno 1970b; 1997f: 396-400; 1997j-2: 608-616; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Lohmann 1994; Mills 1962; 1964; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Sherman 2007; Holloway/Matamoros/Tischler 2009; Pensky 1997; Hammer 2006; Jameson 2007).

Redemption Through Remembrance In the globalizing late capitalist society, which suffers intensely from universal amnesia and loss of solidarity, the dialectical religiology remains– like the Abrahamic religions and Buddhism, German idealism from Kant through Fichte, and Schelling to Hegel, Kierkegardian, Tillichian, Bultmannian, and Barthian theology, Marxian historical materialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, all concretely superseded in the critical theory of society–deeply rooted in remembrance and universal anamnestic solidarity with the innocent victims of history, and out of such solidary recollection it continually revives the redemptive wish, longing, and hope for the wholly Other than the finite world with all its catastrophes of the first and second nature, and with all its terror, cruelty, injustices and sufferings of humans and animals (Hegel 1986g: 339-387; 1986l: 491-540; 1986q: 289292, 342-344; Horkheimer 1967: 7-174, 248-268; 302-316, 317-320, 335354; 1972: 10-46, 129-131, 132-187, 188-243, 244-252, 253-272; 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 9, 10, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 34, 35, 36, 37, 40; 19867b: 1574, 75-148, 295-311, 338-339; 1989m: chaps. 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 28, 29, 30; 1988n: 533; 1988n: 346; Adorno 1962, 1963; 1969b; 1970b; 1974; 1979: 354-372, 578-587; 1993c; 1997b; 1997j-1: 9-10, 11-30, 47-71, 72-96, 97-122, 254-288, 310-320, 346-352, 375-395; 1997j-2: 499-506, 555-572, 573-594, 599-607, 608-616, 674-690, 702-740, 785-793, 794-802, 816-820; 1998d; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Bloch 1971; 1972; Bloch/Reif 1978; Fromm 1959; 1966b; 1966c; 1967; 1980b; 1992; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1980a; 1987; 1995; 2005; Habermas 1969; 1976; 1977; 1978c; 1982; 1985a; 1987c; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005; Honneth 2008; Ebeling 1979; Pope Benedict XVI 2009; Küng

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1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 1990a; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984: A, C; Pope Benedict XVI 2009; Scahill 2007; Hedged 2006; Klein 2007; Clinton 2004; Jameson 2007; Pensky 1997; Holloway/Matamoros/Tischler 2009; Sherman 2007; Hammer 2006; Adams 2006; Edgar 2005). Dialectics itself contains not only the moment of negation, but also the element of preservation, elevation, and fulfillment, and thus of re-membrance and re-collection (Hegel 1986e: 72-77, 590-591; 1986f: 48-53; Marx 1981a: 17-18; Horkheimer 1985l: 286-287, 398-416, 436-492, 526-541, 587-592, 593-605). If the moment of creative negativity is missing, as in Pope Benedict XVI’s undialectical theology of development, then remembrance leads to pure conservativism in spite of occasional progressive language (Hegel 1986e: 72-77, 590-591; 1986f: 48-53; Horkheimer 1985l: 286-287, 398-416, 436-492, 526-541, 587-592, 593-605; Marcuse 1960; 1962; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a: chap. 1; 1970b; 1973; 1975; 1980a; 1987; 2001; 2005; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Pope Benedict XVI: 2005; 2006; 2007a; 2007b; 2009; Lohmann 1994: 151-152). After the catastrophe of the false Messiah Sabbatai Sevi, who converted to Islam, the charismatic Elieser Baal Shem Tov, shortly Bescht, founder of the Eastern-European Chassidism, commented in relation to the rebellion of the Israelites against Moses at the Sea of Reeds, and their suggestion to escape freedom and to return to Egypt, the land of bondage, when Pharaoh’s hostile armies appeared in order to kill them, that often in life, we think we can escape our problems by running away, only to find our problems running after us (Exodus 14: 10; Lieber 2001: 402/10; Scholem 1935; 1967; 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Fromm 1972a; Habermas 1978c: 33-47, 48-95; 127-143; 1982; Küng 1991b: 227). The dialectical religiologist takes seriously Elieser Baal Shem Tov’s warning and advice: Forgetfulness leads to exile, While remembrance is the secret of redemption (Adorno 1951: 333-334; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Metz 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; Arens/John/Rottländer 1991; Küng 1991b: 277; Siebert 2002: xii).

For the old Jews, the remembrance of the Sabbath day and the keeping it holy was the basis for their anticipation and expectation of the Messianic redemption (Exodus 20: 7-11; Isaiah 11: 65-66; Bloch 1960: 227-229; Benjamin 1977: chap. 10, 11; Priester 2009b: 68-72; Adorno 1951: 333-334; Küng 1991b). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the anamnestic solidarity with the hopeless innocent victims of the past, and the present, and the future, is the source for the hope of liberation in postmodern alternative Future III–the reconciled society, and for the redemp-

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tion into the wholly Other, i.e. the absolute Truth understood as the determinate negation of the injustice, abandonment, loneliness, alienation, guilt, meaninglessness, sickness, old age, and even death in this finite world; and into the unthinkable, infinite happiness, without the thought of which there exists not even the consciousness of the earthly, transitory happiness, which in view of its impermanence that can not be superseded, can never be without sadness and sorrow (Exodus 16: 4; Isaiah 11: 65, 66; Matthew 27, 28; Revelation 21, 22; Lieber 2001: 414-415; Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986q: 290-299; Marx 1961c: 873-874; Horkheimer 1970: 40-41; 1985g: chaps. 7, 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988d: 2, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12; 1989m: chaps. 7, 10, 12, 16, 26, 29, 36, 38; 1996s: chap. 5; Fromm 1967; 1968; 1972a; 1974; 1976; Marcuse 1960; 1962; 1969b; 1970a: chap. 1; 1987; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1975b; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Adorno 1951: 333-334; 1979: 354372, 578-587; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; 1983a: 9-77; 1983b: 655-1066; Priester 2009: 68-72; Habermas 1978a; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1986: 53-54; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III; 1991c; 1992b; 1992c; 1997a; 1997b; 1999; 2001a; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b: 1-25; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Arens 1997; 2009: 79-83; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247; Arens/John/Rottländer 1991; Thompson/Held 1982: 245247; Adams 2006; Edgar 2005; Honneth 2009; Pope Benedict XVI 2009; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Metz 1959; 1965; 1967; 1970; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1978; 1980; 1981; 1995; 1997; Metz/ Habermas/Sölle 1994; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Peukert 1976: 273-282; Hastings 2009: 16-18; Echternkamp 2008; Dallaire 2003; Tudjman 1996; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; 2005; 2006).

Life and Happiness The dialectical religiologist agrees with a word by the Orthodox Christian Fyodor M. Dostoevsky about the undamaged life and the genuine happiness of humanity (Dostoevsky 1950; 1969; 1972; Adorno 1951 Lohmann 1944: 139-130, 155). It was quoted by the German psychoanalyst John F. Rittmeister, who combined Marx and Freud, as Fromm, Marcuse and Reich had done, and who was sentenced to death on September 26, 1942 by the Reichskriegsgericht (Empire Court Martial) and was executed in Berlin-Plötzensee on May 13, 1943 together with some of his friends from the Gestapo-named Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra), an anti-Nazi resistance group, which had first been condemned by the fascist Third Reich dur-

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ing World War II for collaboration with the Soviet Union, and then once more by the liberal German Federal Republic during the Cold War for the same reason (Dostoevsky 1950; 1969; 1972; Adorno 1951; Fromm 1959; 1967; 198b; Marcuse 1961; 1962; 1970a: chap. 1; 1980a; 2001; 2005; Lohmann 1944: 139-130, 155; Neumann 1942; Reich 1971; 1976; Sohn-Rethel 1975; Fromm 1972b: 14-15, 74, 76, 80-81; 1973: chap. VIII; Tillich 1933; 1977; 1983; Lagodinski 2009: 66-70; Küng 1994a: 145-335). According to the later martyred Rittmeister, Dostoevsky let the ridiculous man discover–after all his falls and crashes into world-less adventures of destruction and annihilation–the other, very simply the existence of the other human being outside of himself, and thereby let him close his dream journey or voyage (Lohmann 1994: 155; Habermas 1997a; Arens 1989b; 1995; 1997). In Dostoevsky’s view, people had to fight and he himself struggled against the axioms that the knowledge of life was higher than the life itself, and that the knowledge of the laws of happiness was higher than the happiness itself (Lohmann 1994: 155; Wohlfahrt 2009: 98-100). Dostoevsky was convinced that if only all people wanted to fight these axioms, everything on earth would change right away. With Rittmeister and Bloch and all the other critical theorists of society, the dialectical religiologist continues to struggle not only against those axioms, but also against all religious and secular forms of crypto-fascism, which provides art as a substitute for religion, and religion as replacement of and compensation for life, and both for a tired bourgeoisie (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; Lohmann 1994: 155; Neumann 1942; Reich 1971; 1976; Sohn-Rethel 1975; Fromm 1972b: 1415, 74, 76, 80-81; 1973: chap. VIII; Adorno 1979: 9-19, 122-146, 177-195, 289-353, 354-372, 373-391, 392-396, 408-433, 440-456, 569-573, 574577, 578-587; 1997f; 1997i-1: 7-142; Dubiel/Friedeburg/Schumm 1994; Baldwin 2001: chaps. 18, 19; Hedges 2006; Caglar 2009: 80-83; Lütkehaus 2009: 90-93; Grebing 2009: 110-112; Siebert 2006d: 61-114).

From Modernity to Post-Modernity As the dialectical religiology concretely supersedes into itself the Abrahamic religions and Buddhism as well as modern dialectical and historical idealism and reconstructed dialectical and historical materialism, it moves–guided by the Golden Rule of language, remembrance, discourse mediated, mutual recognition and reciprocity between the one and the other–from Modernity toward Post-modern, global, alternative Future III–the reconciled society (Genesis 4; Exodus 14, 15, 16, 17, 20; Lieber 2001: 406/2, 407/4; 408/4, 11; 409/3; 410/18; 411/13; 413/25; 414/4; 415/4,

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416/9; 419/33, 34; 420/8; 422/8-14; Matthew 7: 12; Acts 17: 16-34; Blakney 1941; Boehme 1962; 1992; Scholem 1935; 1967; 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Kant 1929: 27, 29, 30-31, 34, 71-74, 85 87, 89-90, 117, 149, 172-173, 230, 265-267, 278-280, 282-284, 312, 325n, 331, 333-335, 346-348, 352-353, 356-358, 364, 369-377, 379-380, 381-383, 392, 409-411, 412-414, 430, 438, 440-449, 464-479, 484-486, 490, 493, 531, 525, 531, 553, 559-561, 495-534, 565-567, 595, 600, 602-604, 625, 631-632, 638-640, 644, 648-650; Hegel 1972; 1979; 1986a: 344-345, 417; 1986c: 169, 423, 424, 474, 548, 590, 591; 1986e: 115-165, 267; 1986d: 45-46; 1986f: 13, 122; 1986j: 158-262; 1986l: 17; 174, 266, 491-540; 1986m: 135, 249; 1986n; 1986o; 1986p: 374-389, 424, 425; 1986q: 129; 1986r; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 216; 1986 r: 173, 501; 1986s: 44, 331, 404, 407; 1986t: 53, 68, 99-100, 129, 140-142, 147-149, 154-155, 157, 161, 162, 163, 172, 175, 177-179, 195, 198, 247, 253, 265, 289, 292, 301-302, 307, 312-313, 321-322, 329, 330, 331, 357, 359-360, 365, 367, 369, 370-371, 382, 386, 399, 409, 413, 418, 421, 448, 505, 510-511; Jamme/Schneider 1984: 11-14; Marx 1861c: 873874; Bultmann 1958; 1961; Nietzsche 1967a; 1967b; 1967c; 1968: 95-96; Freud 1939; 1946; 1962b; 1964; 1993; 1995a; 1995b; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1963a: 284; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Otto 1969; 1991; Horkheimer 1971: 40-41, 54-90; 1974c: 96-97, 121123, 127, 131-132, 210-211, 247-248, 254-255, 288-289, 316-320, 325-326, 352-355; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 38, 40; 1988a: 100-157; 1988n: 52-53, 69-70, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 90-91, 95, 95-96, 96-97, 97-98, 99-100, 103, 105106, 110, 114-115, 117, 118-119, 122, 123, 124, 126, 129-130, 132, 134135, 136-137, 138-139, 143, 144, 150-151, 162-163, 163-164, 166-172, 197, 200, 203-204, 215, 218-219, 222, 228, 247-248, 282-284, 301, 314-315, 315-316, 321-322, 326-327, 333, 338, 338-339, 340-341, 345, 347-348, 351, 352, 356, 369-370, 371, 374, 388-389, 390-391, 394-395, 392, 397-398, 405-406, 410-411, 455, 456, 457-458, 466, 467-468, 486-487, 487-488, 507-509, 510-512, 517, 530-531, 533, 535-536, 1987k: 289-328, 329-332; 1996s: 21-28, 28-31, 32-74; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25 30, 31; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1993a; 1997j-2: 608616; Kogon 1967; 2002; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1967; 1966b; 1972a; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1990a; 2001; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Lundgren 1998; Flechtheim 1971; Lohmann 1994: 123-124, 159-209; Frankl 1990; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Habermas 1970; 1976; 1977; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1978d; 1981b; 1983; 1984a; 1986; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III; 1991b; 1991c; 1992c;

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1997a; 1997b: chaps. 2, 4, 6, 7; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 1996b: 13-32; 2000; 2004; 2005; 2007; 2009; Kogon 1967; Küng 1972; 1978; 1982; 1990b; 1991a; 1994a: 89-144, 145335, 904-905; 1994b: 13-44, 45-78; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1985: C; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 61-65; Arens 2007; 2009: 79-83; Perels 2009: 15-17; König 2009: 86-89; Lütkehaus 2009: 90-93; Grebing 2009: 110-112; Lee 2009: 24-27; Heil 2009: 70-74; Rack 2009: 93-98; Morris 1980: 92-101; Rudolphi 1949; Weitensteiner 2002; Siebert 1993; 1994c; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; 2004a: 63-97; 2005b; 2006a; 2007a: 99-113; 2007d). This happens against the horizon of the super-sensual, but nevertheless thinkable, completely demythologized, but most real wholly Other as the radical, but nevertheless specific and concrete negation of the often most terrible and horrible finite natural and historical appearances, phenomena, facts, data and experiences in space and time, produced through evolutionary causality (Blakney 1941; Boehme 1962; 1992; Scholem 1935; 1967; 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Kant 1929: 27, 29, 30-31, 34, 71-74, 85-87, 89-90, 117, 149, 172-173, 230, 265-267, 278-280, 282-284, 312, 325n, 331, 333-335, 346-348, 352-353, 356-358, 364, 369-377, 379380, 381-383, 392, 409-411, 412-414, 430, 438, 440-449, 464-479, 484-486, 490, 493, 525, 531, 553, 559-561, 565-567, 595, 600, 602-604, 625, 631632, 638-640, 644, 648-650; Horkheimer 1971: 40-41, 54-90; 1974c: 96-97, 121-123, 127, 131-132, 210-211, 247-248, 254-255, 288-289, 316-320, 325-326, 352-355; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 38, 40; 1988a: 100-157; 1988n: 52-53, 69-70, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 90-91, 95, 95-96, 96-97, 97-98, 99-100, 103, 105-106, 110, 114-115, 117, 118-119, 122, 123, 124, 126, 129-130, 132, 134-135, 136-137, 138-139, 143, 144, 150-151, 162-163, 163-164, 166-172, 197, 200, 203-204, 215, 218-219, 222, 228, 247-248, 282-284, 301, 314-315, 315-316, 321-322, 326-327, 333, 338, 338-339, 340-341, 345, 347-348, 351, 352, 356, 369-370, 371, 374, 388-389, 390-391, 394-395, 392, 397-398, 405-406, 410-411, 455, 456, 457-458, 466, 467-468, 486-487, 487-488, 507-509, 510-512, 517, 530-531, 533, 535-536, 1987k: 289-328, 329-332; 1996s: 21-28, 28-31, 32-74; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25 30, 31; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1993a; 1997j2: 608-616; Kogon 1967; 2002; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498). According to the Torah, all this has been so far a history full of wars, greed for profit, and hunger for revenge, of malice and hatred, from generation to generation (Genesis 4; Exodus 14, 15, 16, 17, 20; Lieber 2001: 406/2, 407/4; 408/4, 11; 409/3; 410/18; 411/13; 413/25; 414/4; 415/4, 416/9; 419/33, 34; 420/8 422/8-14). In the view of the Torah, all this has

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happened since Cain and since Amalek, who was like a mad dog attacking without provocation, or like a fly appearing only where dirt and filth accumulate, and whose memory God would ultimately utterly blot out (Exodus 17: 14-15; Lieber 2001: 421-422/14-16). According to the Rabbis, Jews were commanded to combat Amalek in every generation, even as they wait for God to eradicate Amalek entirely. On Purim, when the Jews make noise to blot out the name of Haman, who is considered a descendant of Amalek both biologically and spiritually, the Jews are fulfilling this commandment. God’s sovereignty is incomplete as long as Amalek is at work in the world. In the perspective of Hegel, all this was a history without happiness (Hegel 1972; 1979; 1986a: 344-345, 417; 1986c: 169, 423, 424, 474. 548, 590, 591; 1986e: 115-165, 267; 1986d: 45-46; 1986f: 13, 122, 1986j: 158-262; 1986l: 17; 174, 266; 1986m: 135, 249; 1986n; 1986o; 1986p: 374-389, 424, 425; 1986q: 129; 1986r; 1986s: 48-49, 52-53, 216; 1986r: 173, 501; 1986s 44, 331, 404, 407; 1986t: 53, 68, 99-100, 129, 140-142, 147149, 154-155, 157, 161, 162, 163, 172, 175, 177-179, 195, 198, 247, 253, 265, 289, 292, 301-302, 307, 312-313, 321-322, 329, 330, 331, 357, 359360, 365, 367, 369, 370-371, 382, 386, 399, 409, 413, 418, 421, 448, 505, 510-511, Jamme/Schneider 1984: 11-14). In Marx’s terms, the grandson and nephew of Rabbis, all this was still pre-history (Marx 1861c: 873-874; Grebing 2009: 110-111). According to Freud, who at the age of 82 and suffering from cancer the fascists drove as part of the Jewish World Enemy No I out of his home in Vienna into exile in London, while his daughter Anna was investigated and interrogated by the Gestapo and his sisters were killed, all this was a history of murder (Freud 1939; 1946; 1962b; 1964; 1993; 1995a; 1995b; Jones 1961; Lohmann 1994: 123-124, 159-209, 237; Küng 1990a). In Horkheimer’s, Adorno’s and Kogon’s view, all this was a history full of extreme terror and cruelty (Horkheimer 1971: 40-41, 54-90; 1974c: 96-97, 121-123, 127, 131-132, 210-211, 247-248, 254-255, 288-289, 316-320, 325-326, 352-355; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 38, 40; 1988a: 100157; 1988n: 52-53, 69-70, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 90-91, 95, 95-96, 96-97, 97-98, 99-100, 103, 105-106, 110, 114-115, 117, 118-119, 122, 123, 124, 126, 129130, 132, 134-135, 136-137, 138-139, 143, 144, 150-151, 162-163, 163-164, 166-172, 197, 200, 203-204, 215, 218-219, 222, 228, 247-248, 282-284, 301, 314-315, 315-316, 321-322, 326-327, 333, 338, 338-339, 340-341, 345, 347-348, 351, 352, 356, 369-370, 371, 374, 388-389, 390-391, 394-395, 392, 397-398, 405-406, 410-411, 455, 456, 457-458, 466, 467-468, 486-487, 487-488, 507-509, 510-512, 517, 530-531, 533, 535-536, 1987k: 289-328, 329-332; 1996s: 21-28, 28-31, 32-74; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25 30, 31; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b;

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1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1993a; 1997j2: 608-616; Kogon 1967; 2002; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Priest 2009b: 68-72). Since the end of World War I the world-historical process of the determinate negation of the modern, bourgeois, capitalist life form through the post-modern life form from one economic, political, military, or cultural crisis to the next, was characterized by particularly horrible events: from the Great Depression 1929-1939 and the crisis of liberalism, from Stalinism and fascism and World War II, and from the final solution of the Jewish question in the concentration, labor, and death camps of Kulmdorf, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibor, and Auschwitz, through the saturation bombings of open European cities and the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the cold war, and to the most cruel wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Gaza, and to the war against terror, etc.–as well as by strong tendencies toward global alternative Future I–the totally administered and bureaucratized signal society, and global alternative Future II–the completely militarized society (Hegel 1986l: 491-540; Flechtheim 1966: 455-464; 1971; Marcuse 1967; Fromm 1957; 1961; 1970: B 699-B 705; 1080a; 1990a; 1972b; 1973; Adorno 1997-1: 47-71; 72-96, 97122; 1997 j-2: 608-616; Lohmann 1994: 259-265; Trojanov/Zeh 2009a; 2009b: 4-8; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004).

Theos Agnotos In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the totally Other than this horrible world history was the unknown and unknowable, ultimate and infinite direction and aim of the dialectics of being, life, liberation, happiness, and immortality, i.e. future life, (Horkheimer 1971: 40-41, 5490; 1974c: 96-97, 121-123, 127, 131-132, 210-211, 247-248, 254-255, 288289, 316-320, 325-326, 352-355; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 38, 40; 1988a: 100-157; 1988n: 52-53, 69-70, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 90-91, 95, 95-96, 96-97, 97-98, 99-100, 103, 105-106, 110, 114-115, 117, 118-119, 122, 123, 124, 126, 129-130, 132, 134-135, 136-137, 138-139, 143, 144, 150-151, 162-163, 163-164, 166-172, 197, 200, 203-204, 215, 218-219, 222, 228, 247-248, 282-284, 301, 314-315, 315-316, 321-322, 326-327, 333, 338, 338-339, 340-341, 345, 347-348, 351, 352, 356, 369-370, 371, 374, 388-389, 390391, 394-395, 392, 397-398, 405-406, 410-411, 455, 456, 457-458, 466, 467-468, 486-487, 487-488, 507-509, 510-512, 517, 530-531, 533, 535-536, 1987k: 289-328, 329-332; 1996s: 21-28, 28-31, 32-74; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25 30, 31; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b;

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1969c; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1993a; 1997j-2: 608-616; Ebeling 1979; Küng 1972; 1978; 1982; 1990b; 1991a; 1994a: 89-144, 145-335, 904-905; 1994b: 13-44, 45-78; Siebert 1993; 1994c; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; 2004a: 63-97; 2005b; 2006a; 2007a: 99-113; 2007d). For the dialectical religiologist, the imageless, nameless, and notionless, entirely Other was the goal of the community of all those people who hope for the Unconditional through its determinate negation, i.e. its abandonment and sacrifice (Kant 1975: 77-93; Hegel 1986t: 248, 249; Horkheimer 1971: 40-41, 54-90; 1974c: 96-97, 121123, 127, 131-132, 210-211, 247-248, 254-255, 288-289, 316-320, 325-326, 352-355; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 38, 40; 1988a: 100-157; 1988n: 52-53, 69-70, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 90-91, 95, 95-96, 96-97, 97-98, 99-100, 103, 105106, 110, 114-115, 117, 118-119, 122, 123, 124, 126, 129-130, 132, 134135, 136-137, 138-139, 143, 144, 150-151, 162-163, 163-164, 166-172, 197, 200, 203-204, 215, 218-219, 222, 228, 247-248, 282-284, 301, 314-315, 315-316, 321-322, 326-327, 333, 338, 338-339, 340-341, 345, 347-348, 351, 352, 356, 369-370, 371, 374, 388-389, 390-391, 394-395, 392, 397398, 405-406, 410-411, 455, 456, 457-458, 466, 467-468, 486-487, 487-488, 507-509, 510-512, 517, 530-531, 533, 535-536, 1987k: 289-328, 329-332; 1996s: 21-28, 28-31, 32-74; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25 30, 31). These people were nevertheless passionately engaged in the transcending, present as well as anamnestic and proleptic, insatiable longing for the Theos agnoton or Deus absconditus (Acts 17: 16-34; Blakney 1941; Boehme 1962; 1992; Kant 1975: 77-93; Hegel 1986t: 248, 249; Scholem 1935; 1967; 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Horkheimer 1971: 40-41, 54-90; 1974c: 96-97, 121-123, 127, 131-132, 210-211, 247-248, 254-255, 288-289, 316-320, 325-326, 352-355; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 38, 40; 1988a: 100157; 1988n: 52-53, 69-70, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 90-91, 95, 95-96, 96-97, 97-98, 99-100, 103, 105-106, 110, 114-115, 117, 118-119, 122, 123, 124, 126, 129130, 132, 134-135, 136-137, 138-139, 143, 144, 150-151, 162-163, 163-164, 166-172, 197, 200, 203-204, 215, 218-219, 222, 228, 247-248, 282-284, 301, 314-315, 315-316, 321-322, 326-327, 333, 338, 338-339, 340-341, 345, 347-348, 351, 352, 356, 369-370, 371, 374, 388-389, 390-391, 394-395, 392, 397-398, 405-406, 410-411, 455, 456, 457-458, 466, 467-468, 486-487, 487-488, 507-509, 510-512, 517, 530-531, 533, 535-536, 1987k: 289-328, 329-332; 1996s: 21-28, 28-31, 32-74; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25 30, 31; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1993a; 1997j-2: 608616). This yearning had been consciously or unconsciously the dominant motive and the fundamental energy in all great religion, art, and philoso-

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phy (Kant 1975: 77-93; Hegel 1972; 1979; 1986a: 344-345, 417; 1986c: 169, 423, 424, 474, 548, 590, 591; 1986e: 115-165, 267; 1986d: 45-46; 1986f: 13, 122; 1986j: 158-262; 1986l: 17; 174, 266; 1986m: 135, 249; 1986n; 1986o; 1986p: 374-389, 424, 425; 1986q: 129; 1986r 173, 501; 1986s: 44, 48-49, 52-53, 216; 331, 404, 407; 1986t: 53, 68, 99-100, 129, 140-142, 147149, 154-155, 157, 161, 162, 163, 172, 175, 177-179, 195, 198, 247, 253, 265, 289, 292, 301-302, 307, 312-313, 321-322, 329, 330, 331, 357, 359360, 365, 367, 369, 370-371, 382, 386, 399, 409, 413, 418, 421, 448, 505, 510-511; Jamme/Schneider 1984: 11-14; Küng 1972; 1978; 1982; 1990b; 1991a; 1994a: 89-144, 145-335, 904-905; 1994b: 13-44, 45-78; Küng/Ess/ Stietencron/Bechert 1985: C; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 61-65; Arens 2007; 2009: 79-83). This longing has been articulated and summarized most adequately by Saul or Paul, a Jew originally from Tarsus, and the earliest initiator, long before Origines, of the transition from the Jewish Apocalyptic Paradigm of the Primordial Christianity to the Oecumenical-Hellenistic Paradigm of Christian Antiquity (Acts 17: 16-34; Küng 1972; 1978; 1982; 1990b; 1991a; 1994a: 89-144, 145-335, 904-905; 1994b: 13-44, 45-78; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1985: C; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 61-65). Paul concretized this longing, when he came from Jerusalem to Athens, and here addressed the Council of the Areopagus: Men of Athens, I have seen for myself how extremely scrupulous you are in all religious matters, because I noticed, as I strolled around admiring your sacred monuments, that you had an altar inscribed: ‘to an unknown God.’ (Theon agnoton). Well, the God whom I proclaim is in fact the one whom you already worship without knowing it. Since the God who made the world and everything in it is himself Lord of heaven and earth, he does not make his home in shrines made by human hands. Nor is he dependent on anything that human hands can do for him, since he can never be in need of anything; on the contrary, it is he who gives everything–including life and breath–to everyone. From one single stock he not only created the whole human race so that they could occupy the entire earth, but he decreed how long each nation should flourish and what the boundaries of its territory should be. And he did this so that all nations might seek the Deity and, by feeling their way toward him, succeed in finding him. Yet in fact he is not far from any of us, since it is in him that we live, and move, and exist (expression suggested by the poet Epimenides) as indeed some of your own writers have said: ‘we are all his children’ (from the Phainomena of Aratus). Since we are the children of God, we have no excuse for thinking that the Deity looks like anything in gold, silver, or stone that has been carved and designed by man. God overlooked that sort of thing (idolatry) when men were ignorant, but now he is telling everyone everywhere that they must repent, because he has fixed a day when the whole world will be judged, and judged

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in righteousness, and he has appointed a man to be the judge. And God has publicly proved this by raising this man from the dead. At this mention of rising from the dead, some of them (Epicuruseans, Stoics, etc.) burst out laughing; others said, we would like to hear you talk about this again. After that Paul left them, but there were some who attached themselves to him and became believers, among them Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman called Damaris. (Acts 17: 16-34; Metzger/Coogan 1993: 786).

Survival According to the dialectical religiology, the Theos agnotos alone survived the clash and the twilight of the Greek, Roman and Germanic gods at the end of Antiquity and at the beginning of the Middle Ages (Acts 17: 16-34; Kant 1975: 77-93; Blakney 1941; Boehme 1938; 1962; 1992/2005; Hegel 1986l: 275-338; 339-412, 413-490; 1986q: 50-95, 96-154, 155-184, 185-346; 1986t: 248, 249; Horkheimer 1967: 216-228, 229-238; 259-260, 311-312; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Fromm 1966b; 1999: 34-36; 2001; Horkheimer 1967b: 311-312; Adorno 1970b; Metz 1959; 1977; 1980; 1995; 1997; 1998; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Metz/Peters 1991; Küng 1978; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Ott 2001; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2004d; 2005: 155-180; 2006; 2007/2009: 1-70, chaps. 6, 20; Goldstein 2006: 61-114, 115-120, 121-150). However, none of the professors of the University of Athens converted to Christianity because of the koinae-proletarian Greek of the Gospels–and because of the message of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth until the University was closed through force by a Christian Emperor in the sixth century (Lortz 1964: 67-77; Küng 1991b: 726-730; 1994a: 48, 53, 65-66, 69, 72, 84, 101-102, 104, 123-126, 131-133, 146-158, 161-163, 172-174, 904-906). At the end of Modernity, while the critical theorists of society found the Theon agnoton–because of the non-appearance of the man appointed by God to judge the whole world in righteousness, and because of the theoretically unresolved and in the 20th century even extremely intensified theodicy problem–still as not understandable and incomprehensible as the Stoics and Epicureans on the Areopagus before and after Paul came from Jerusalem and partially revealed Him in the Jewish and the Christian way, they were nevertheless still as revolted at the sight of all forms of idolatry as Paul had been when he saw Athens full of statues of gods and goddesses, and they were still as convinced as he had been of the reality of the Deus absconditus, and they were still driven as he had been by the longing for God, freedom and immortality, for Transcendence, for the Truth as concrete supersession of suffering in na-

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ture, society, and history, and by the trust in the Eternal One, and by the yearning for the imageless and nameless wholly Other than this cursed finitude, and for the transitory happiness according to the rhythms of nature and for the ultimate Messianic redemption and salvation: in terms of the negative, inverse, cipher theology as the radicalization of the dialectic into the theological glowing fire, including the social-dialectical and economical motive (Psalm 91; John 18: 28-40; Acts 17: 16-34; Revelation 1722; Kant 1975: 77-93; Hegel 1986a: 139, 209; 1986c: 155-177; 1986g: 19, 108, 259; 1986h; 1986i; 1986j; 1986e; 1986f; 1986j: 301, 392; 1986k: 469; 1986l: 24, 96, 384, 491-540; 1986p: 381; 1986q: 218-346, 347-536; 1986r: 32, 125, 128, 188, 358, 523, 540, 544, 546, 549, 551, 554; 1986s: 245, 249, 253, 255-296, 267, 287-336, 360, 371-372, 379, 403, 415, 569-570; 1986t: 15, 457; Otto 1969; 1001; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; 1983a; 1983b; Priest 2009b: 68-72; Wizisla 2009; Fromm 1950; 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1992; 1995; 1999: 34-36; Lundgren 1998; Horkheimer 1971; 1974c: 96-97, 213, 247-248, 316-320; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37; 1985l: 483-492; 1988d: chaps. 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11; Ott 2001; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2004d; 2005; 2006; 2007; 2009; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969c; 1970b: 116-117; 1973b; 1974; 1980b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997j-2: 608-616; 1997u; 1998a; 1998c; 1998d; 2000c; 2001b; 2001c; 2002a; 2002d; 2003d; Adorno/Benjamin 1994; Adorno/Dirks 1974; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392402; 1958b: 484-498; Adorno/Kereenyi 1998: 89-104; Brändle 1984; Kogon 1967; 2002; Reich 1971; 1976; Habermas 1977; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III; 1992b; 1991c; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Arens 1989b; 1997; 2009; Arens/Rottländer 1991; Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005; Küng 1978: B-G; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 63-65; Pope Benedict XVI 2005, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2009; Pope John XXIII 1962, 1963).

Internal Sense Long before Horkheimer and Adorno articulated the longing and the hope for and the trust in the wholly Other, Augustine, the initiator of the Roman Catholic Paradigm of the Middle Ages, indicated in his discourse on the free will the existence within the human soul of an “internal sense” (Augustine 1952: VII, 16, 24; X, 24, 35; XI, 2, 4; 1958; 1984; Anselm 1962; Benedict XVI 2009: 20/88, 53/88; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Küng 1994a: 336-601, 904-905; 1994b: III). This sense consisted in an act that was fulfilled outside the normal functions of reason, an act that was not the result of reflection, but was almost instinctive, through which

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human reason, realizing its transient and fallible nature, admitted the existence of something eternal, higher than itself, something absolutely true and certain. At times, Augustine gave to this interior Truth the name of God, and more often that of the Messiah or the Christ (Judges 5: 1; Isaiah 42: 10; Lieber 2001: 426/1 Augustine 1952: VII, 16, 24; X, 24, 35; XI, 2, 4; 1958; 1984; Anselm 1962; Benedict XVI 2009: 20/88, 53/88; Hegel 1986a: 344-345; 1986c: 169; 1986e: 267, 270; 1986l: 175; 1986m: 135; 1986r: 173; 1986t: 386, 399, 418; Adorno 1970b; Benjamin 1977: chap. 10, 11; Priester 2009b: 68-72; Wizisla 2009; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Küng 1994a: 336-601, 904-905; 1994b: III). In contrast to Augustine and other orthodox members of the Abrahamic faith community–the Muslims have 99 names for Allah–the critical theorists of society rarely gave any name at all to this interior Truth, this totally Other (Psalm 91; Augustine 1952: VII, 16, 24; X, 24, 35; XI, 2, 4; 1958; 1984; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1971; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Siebert 2005b; Ott 2001; 2004b; 2004c; 2004d; 2006; 2007; 2009; Shanley 2009: 1-2). At the beginning of Post-Modernity, the Theos agnotos seems to survive even the God of the traditional Abrahamic religions: the unknown God who appears when the God of Jewish, Christian and Islamic monotheism has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt, guilt, loneliness, meaninglessness, abandonment, injustice, alienation, unhappiness and misery, and in the fear of sickness, old age, dying and death (Judges 5: 1; Isaiah 42: 10; Psalm 91; Lieber 2001: 426/1; Acts 17: 16-34; Augustine 1952: VII, 16, 24; X, 24, 35; XI, 2, 4; 1958; 1984; Anselm 1962; Scholem 1935; 1967; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Blakney 1941; Böhme 1938; 1962; 2005; Hegel 1986a: 344-345; 1986c: 169; 1986e: 267, 270; 1986l: 175; 1986m: 135; 1986p; 1986q; 1986r: 173; 1986t: 386, 399, 418; Otto 1969; 1991; Barth 1950; 1959; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972: 182-190; 1977; 1983; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1974; 1976; 1992; 1995; 2001; Marcuse 1970a: chap. 1; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b: 116-117; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1997u; 1998c; 2002c; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Benjamin 1977: chap. 10, 11; Priester 2009b: 6872; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1967b: 259-260, 311-312; 1971; 1981c; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 17, 25, 26, 29, 37, 40; 1987c; 1988a; 1989m: chaps; 12, 14, 15, 16, 20, 25, 29, 34; 2006; Lohmann 1994; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Trojanov/Zeh 2009a; 2009b: 4-8) Habermas 1977; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1978d; 1981b; 1982; 1986: 53-58; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III; 1991c; 1992b; 1992c; 1997a; 1997b; 2001a; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007). That means ethical theism

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concretely transcended through ethical post-theism; traditional theology is determinately superseded by negative, inverse, revolutionary theology or better theodicy, understood as radicalization of the dialectic into the theological glowing fire and at the same time an extreme sharpening of the economic-social-political motive; theology as longing that the murderer shall at least ultimately not triumph over the innocent victim, mediated through a reconstructed historical materialism with the concrete chessboard of history; the true or genuine Infinity; God above God; the X-experience; the confidence in the Eternal One; the yearning for the totally Other (Exodus 19: 5-8; 20: 1-6; Lieber 2001: 441-444/1-6; Judges 5: 1; Isaiah 42: 10; Psalm 91; Lieber 2001: 426/1, 437, 438/5, 6, 8; Luke 16: 1931; Acts 17: 16-34; Augustine 1952: VII, 16, 24; X, 24, 35; XI, 2, 4; 1958; 1984; Anselm 1962; Scholem 1935; 1967; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Blakney 1941; Böhme 1938; 1962; 2005; Hegel 1986a: 344-345; 1986c: 169; 1986e: 267, 270; 1986l: 175; 1986m: 135; 1986p: 1986q; 1986r: 173; 1986t: 386, 399, 418; Tanassas 2009: 70-94; Otto 1969; 1991; Barth 1950; 1959; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972: 182-190; 1977; 1983; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Priester 2009b: 68-72; Wizisla 2009; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1974; 1976; 1992; 1995; 2001; Marcuse 1970a: chap. 1; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b: 116-117; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980b; 1997u; 1998c; 2002c; Kogon 1967; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1967b: 259-260, 311-312; 1971; 1981c; 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 17, 25, 26, 29, 37, 40; 1987c; 1988a; 1989m: chaps: 12, 14, 15, 16, 20, 25, 29, 34; 2006; Lohmann 1994; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Trojanov/Zeh 2009a; 2009b: 4-8; Habermas 1977; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1978d; 1981b; 1982; 1986: 53-58; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III; 1991c; 1992b; 1992c; 1997a; 1997b; 2001a; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Macke 2009: 78-79; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247; Frankl 1990: 92-92; Metz 1959; 1965; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1981; 1995; 1997; 1998; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Benedict XVI 2009: 20/88, 53/88; Peukert 278-282; Arens 1994a; 1997; 2007; 2009; Arens/Rottländer 1991; Ott 2001; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2004d; 2005; 2006; 2007; 2009; Küng 1970; 1978: B; 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a: 336-601, 904-905; 1994b: III; 2004; 2009; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 61-65).

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The Bosom of Abraham According to the dialectical image of “The rich man and Lazarus” from the eschatological-apocalyptic theology of the Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, all class domination and exploitation was to be turned upside down in a revolutionary way: the rich man who did not share his wealth with the poor Lazarus landed after his death in the fires of Hades, while Lazarus, who had been hungry and sick and homeless on earth, was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham (Judges 5: 31; Lieber 2001: 430/31; Luke 16: 19-31; Acts 17: 16-34; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Ebeling 1979; Frankl 1990: 91-92; Metz 1959; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; Kogon 1967; Pope Benedict XVI 2009: 15-16). The Greeks called the location of death “Hades” (Landauer 1991: 34-35). Later in Judaism and Christianity, the dead person was believed to be with the Father in Heaven. Even in modernity for many people the beloved dead often still continue to live on in their personal and collective consciousness or at least unconsciousness. There also continues to live a hope for reunion, which sometimes even accelerates the death of the grieving partner and thus makes real the story of Philemon and Baukis, (Landauer 1991: 34-35; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Frankl 1990: 92-92). When on September 6, 2009, President Obama gave the eulogy during the memorial service for the great liberal journalist Walter Cronkite, he asserted that now Walter had joined again his beloved wife, who had preceded him in death by years (Landauer 1991: 34-35; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 40; Frankl 1990: 92-92). On September 11, 2009, on the new Service and Remembrance Day, President Obama gave expression to the American personal and collective consciousness and unconsciousness when he remembered in public the innocent victims of New York, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001, as if they were not only dead but also still alive (Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Frankl 1990: 92-92; Landauer 1991: 34-35, 44-45; Habermas 2001; Macke 2009: 78-79; Metz 1980). Both remembrances presuppose in the otherwise secular President and U.S. Presidency the at least deistic religious belief in God, freedom and immortality: deism being after all the civil religion of the American bourgeois society and constitutional state, as witnessed in the Declaration of Independence (Hegel 1986h: 312-313 1986k: 278; 1986l: 61, 419; 1986o: 210; 1986t: 275, 290, 294, 300, 306-308; 331, 364, 433; Landauer 1991: 34-35; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 37, 40; Küng 1978; 1982; Metz 1980). However, the remembrance of September 11, 2001 went far beyond deism

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back into Judaism, Christianity and Islam, when the victims of Flight 93, who died in the crash near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, were portrayed as angels in a provisional monument. Deism no longer has any angels.

Resurrection and Judgment The New Testament, deeply rooted in Moses and the Hebrew prophets, remembered, anticipated, hoped and expected that the rich and powerful people, who had exploited, tortured and crucified the poor man, would not triumph over him ultimately, but that he was resurrected and would sit in judgment over them (Exodus 18: 21; Lieber 2001: 435/21; Matthew 28; Luke 16: 19-31; Acts 17: 16-34; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Ebeling 1979; Metz 1959; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; Kogon 1967; Luke 16: 19-31; Acts 17: 16-34; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Metz 1959; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; Frankl 1990: 91-92; Kogon 1967). Up to the present–2009–the Theos agnotos remains unknown even for the believers who have received a revelation: e.g. the lack of knowledge of the precise day when the whole world will be judged in righteousness, and when the man comes to be the judge, who has publicly been proved as such by being raised from the dead, and of all the issues connected with the theodicy problem (Isaiah 11, 65, 66; John 5: 22, 27, 29, 30; 8: 16; 9: 39; 16: 8; Acts 17: 16-34; 24: 25; Revelation 21, 22; Küng 1991b: 726-728; 1994a; 2004; Metz 1959; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1975b; 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993).

Knowledge of God and Man According to the dialectical religiology, as today in 2009, the Theos agnotos still remains essentially unknown in his uncontrollable totality in spite of all the revelations in the world-religions and all the primitive, archaic, or historical-intermediate anthropomorphic projections: to say otherwise would mean utter blasphemy (Exodus 18: 21; 19: 4; Isaiah 6: 1-7, 13; 9: 5-6; Lieber 2001: 435/21, 437/4; 451-455/13; Psalm 91; Acts 17: 16-34; Hegel 1986a; 452; 1986b: 420; 1986i: 96, 346; 1986j: 68, 1986k: 278; 1986l: 30-55, 520-542; 1986m: 305, 345-346, 354; 1986p; 1986q; 1986t: 248, 294; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1967b: 177-202, 203-215, 216-228, 239-247, 248-269, 302-316, 317-320, 335-354; 1985g: chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 34, 36, 37,

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40; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1990b; 1999: 34-36; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1967; 1970a: chap. 1; 1980b; 1987; 1995; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985e; Habermas 2001b; Macke 2009: 78-79; Siebert 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2007a). Likewise the anthropos agnotos still remains essentially unknown and uncontrolled in his wholeness in spite of all cunning of reason and in spite of the great bourgeois, Marxian, and Freudian enlightenment movements (Exodus 18: 21; 19: 4; Lieber 2001: 435/21, 437/4; Psalm 91; Acts 17: 16-34; Hegel 1986l: 452; 1986b: 420; 1986i: 96, 346; 1986j: 68, 1986k: 278; 1986l: 30-55, 520-542; 1986m: 305, 345-346, 354; 1986p; 1986q; 1986t: 248, 294; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1967b: 177-202, 203215, 216-228, 239-247, 248-269, 302-316, 317-320, 335-354; 1985g: chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 34, 36, 37, 40; Adorno 1997d; 1997u: 89-91; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1990b; 1999: 34-36; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1967; 1970a: chap. 1; 1980b; 1987; 1995; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985e; Habermas 2001b; Macke 2009: 78-79; Siebert 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2007a Shanley 2009: 1-2; Trojanov/Zeh 2009a; 2009b: 4-8). Likewise, the world around man remains largely unknown and uncontrolled in its dark totality, in spite of all Einstein- and Heisenberg-quantum physics (Exodus 18: 21; 19: 4; Lieber 2001: 435/21, 437/4; Psalm 91; Acts 17: 16-34; Hegel 1986a; 452; 1986b: 420; 1986i: 96, 346; 1986j: 68, 1986k: 278; 1986l: 30-55, 520542; 1986m: 305, 345-346, 354; 1986p; 1986q; 1986t: 248, 294; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1967b: 177-202, 203-215, 216-228, 239-247, 248-269, 302-316, 317-320, 335-354; 1985g: chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 34, 36, 37, 40; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1967; 1968; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1990b; 1999: 34-36; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1967; 1970a: chap. 1; 1980b; 1987; 1995; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985e; Habermas 2001b; Macke 2009: 78-79; Siebert 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2007a; Trojanov/Zeh 2009a; 2009b: 4-8)). All what theologians may know about God negative-metaphysically with some certainty, is that if he wanted to create at all, he could not double himself up, and that therefore he could not make another Infinite, but only a finite world (Scholem 1935; 1967; 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Blakney 1941; Böhme 1938; 1962; 1992/2005; Hegel 1986f: 571-573; 1986h; 1986i; 1986j; 1986q: 50-95, 218240, 347-536; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1967b: 216-228, 228-238; 1988c: chap. 16; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1988a; 1988b; 1991a: Part III; Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005; Pals 2009). The analogia entis cannot be res-

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cued, except maybe in the most reduced and minimal form (Barth 1950; 1959; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1974c: 218-219). All what anthropologists may know negative-metaphysically about man with some certitude, is that he like all the other finite animals and plants tries to extend and prolong his finite life span as much as possible through egoism and self preservation and instrumental action and rationality via the process of theoretical and practical assimilation and the genus process, which libidinous activities are connected with more or less cruel aggressiveness (Hegel 1986i; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1967b: 239-247; 1974a; 1974b; 1987e: 242-245, 248, 253-256, 256-257, 257-260, 262-263, 277-287, 293-319, 320350, 354-359, 364-372, 396-405, 406-411, 412-414, 415-422; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2; Fromm 1966b; 1972b; 1973; 1992; Mitscherlich 1993; 1994; Lohmann 1994; 2008; Pals 2009; Frankl 1990; Siebert 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6 Shanley 2009: 1-2; Trojanov/Zeh 2009a; 2009b: 4-8). According to a Spiegel report of September 3, 2009, in remembrance of the beginning of World War II on September 1, 1939, when the German nation attacked the world with the first Stuka terror bombardment of the peaceful, small Polish town of Wielun, an attack that was prepared by the Luftwaffe in Guernica during the Spanish civil war, survivors asked at the 70th anniversary of the event, on September 1, 2009: “Why does man prepare and cause for man such hell?” (Priester 2009: 68-72; Trojanov/Zeh 2009: 4-8) Even after seventy years there is no adequate anthropodicy- or theodicyanswer to this question! Not only Judaism but also none of the other still living world religions can account for the sufferings of the righteous (Exodus 23: 26l Lieber 2001: 475/26; Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Küng 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Metz 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Trojanov/Zeh 2009a; 2009b: 4-8). That, theodicy or anthropodicy, precisely, has been and remains the central problem for the critical theory of society and of religion, which has often contributed to the oppression, exploitation and suffering of the lower classes, but which nevertheless at the same time has also contained and still carries in itself for them a potential of meaning and happiness, liberation and redemption beyond any and all primitive or archaic sacrifice mythology or ideology (Genesis 22; Anselm 1982: 177-299; Kierkegaard 1954; 1959; 1964; Kadarkay 1995; Adorno 1962; Horkheimer 1972: chaps. 2, 4, 5, 6, 7; 1974c: 96-97; 1985g: 294-296; chaps. 4, 9, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 25, 29, 30; Horkheimer/ Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1972; 2002; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Habermas 1982; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Baron 2009: 74-78; Macke 2009: 78-79; Peukert 1976: 278-282; Thompson/Held 1982:

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345-247; Mendieta 2002; 2005; Oelmüller 1990; Metz 1959; 1965; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973b; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1981; 1995; 1997; Metz/ Habermas/Sölle 1994; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; Bruhin/ Füssel/Petzel/Schlette 2009; Bieberstein/Schmitt 2009; Hinkelammert 1985; 2009; Füssel/Ramminger 2009; Schüssler-Fiorenza 2009; Trojanov/ Zeh 2009a; 2009b: 4-8).

Theodicy and Anthropodicy According to the comparative critical theory of religion, the anthropodicy problem is as dark and can as little be resolved at this time–in 2009– as the theodicy problem, and vice versa: the individually and collectively unbroken mysterium iniquitatis (Genesis: 3-4; Exodus 19: 4; Psalm 91; Lieber 2001: 437/4; Schopenhauer 1989: Vol. 1: 550, 552, 553; Vol. 2: 747, 800; Vol. 4: 81; Vol. 5: 450; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986l: 27-55, 389, 520-542; 1986p: 265, 271, 272; 1986q: 75-77, 341-344, 501-535; 1986s: 498-499; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 4, 9, 17, 21, 37, 40; Priester 2009b: 68-72; Ebeling 1979; Frankl 1990: 94; Rosenbaum 1990; Hedges 2006; Klein 2007; Kinzer 2006; Oelmüller 1990; Baron 2009: 7478; Metz 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Küng 1991b: 726-734; Siebert 1993; 2005b; 2006a; Shanley 2009: 1-2Ott 2001; 2004a; 2004b: 45-62; 2004d; 2005: 155-180; 2006; 2007; 2009; Trojanov/Zeh 2009a; 2009b: 4-8). Both, theologians and anthropologists know negative-metaphysically that the good, qualitative Infinite as such can not become finite, and that the finite a such can not become infinite (Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986q: 241-298, 299-346, 346-536; Horkheimer 1967b: 248-268, 302-316; 1988d: 89-101; 398-332, Adorno 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1980b; 1998c; 1998d; 2000c; 2002a; 2003d; Frankl 1990). While the Rabbis may very well be right that the noises of modern life make it hard for people to hear the divine message, that God is constantly trying to communicate to them, there remain nevertheless riddles of Providence in all three Abrahamic religions and in other world religions as well, and in so far as these theodicy-riddles prevail, the God as well as man, his image, are still unknown for modern and post-modern people, in spite of all revelations out of His sovereignty, and in spite of all secular enlightenment (Genesis 1 and 2; Exodus 19: 2; 20: 1-7; Lieber 2001: 436-437/2; 443-444/3-7; Hegel 1986l: 19-55; Horkheimer 1967b: 248-268, 302-316; 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42; Küng 1991b; 1994a. 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Metz 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Oelmüller 1990; Tro-

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janov/Zeh 2009a; 2009b; 4-8). As long as the theodicy and the anthropodicy problem can not be resolved theologically or philosophically, God and man remain essentially unknown (Genesis 3 and 4; Exodus 19: 4; Psalm 91; Lieber 2001: 437/4; Kant 1929: 29, 89-90, 325, 484-490, 495-524, 648649; 1974a; 1975; Schopenhauer 1989: Vol. 1: 550, 552, 553; Vol. 2: 747, 800; Vol. 4: 81; Vol. 5: 450; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986l: 27-55, 389, 520542; 1986p: 265, 271, 272; 1986q: 75-77, 341-344, 501-535; 1986s: 498499; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1985g: chap. 4, 9, 17, 21, 37, 40; Priester 2009b: 68-72; Frankl 1990: 94; Rosenbaum 1990; Hedges 2006; Klein 2007; Kinzer 2006; Oelmüller 1990; Metz 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Kogon 1965; 1987; 1995; 2002; Küng 1991b: 726-734; Siebert 1993; 2005b; 2006a; Ott 2001; 2004a; 2004b: 45-62; 2004d; 2005: 155-180; 2006; 2007; 2009). Most of God and man remain unconscious for man, i.e. latent at the time, or permanently unconscious (Freud 1977: chap. IX; Landauer 1991). To the negative theology corresponds a negative anthropology (Horkheimer 1985l: 483-492; Habermas 1988: 60, 278-279; Friedeburg/Habermas 1983; Macke 2009: 78-79; Theunissen 1982). After the moral catastrophes of the 20th and 21st centuries, it has become easier to talk also about man more negatively–no angel, no animal–than positively–animal rationale, animal economicum, animal symbolicum etc. (Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1988n: 166, 119, 121, 126, 128-120, 130-131, 137, 236; Priester 2009b: 68-72). When, in public discourse in 1971, the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner was somewhat embarrassed to speak about angels, e.g. their bodies or wings, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch pointed out that it was easier to describe demons, and spoke of the demonic behavior of the SS men, who–most of them being baptized Catholics or Protestants serving under a Concordat between the Vatican and the German fascist state-in Auschwitz and other death camps threw little children against the walls, while they gassed their parents, and then wrote loving letters to their own families at home, and asked for the wellbeing of their own children, who were as old as the ones they had just murdered (Bloch 1971b: 3839; 1972; Markun 1977; Adorno 1997u; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1988n: 247-248; 342-343, 445-447; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Metz 1975a ; Priester 2009b: 68-72). Bloch suggested the development of a new demonology after Auschwitz (Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971b; 1972; 1975b; 1985a; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; 2009; Horkheimer 1988n: 247-248; 342-343, 445-447; 1989m: chaps. 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 25, 30; Adorno 1966; 1969c; 1970b; 1973d; 1973e; 1980b; 1997c; 1997u; 1997j2: 608-616; Priester 2009: 68-72; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; 2003a; 2003b; Trojanov/Zeh 2009a; 2009b: 4-8).

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Nothingness In the perspective of the comparative dialectical religiology, even if God was nothingness, no human being has ever experienced it (Blakney 1941; Boehme 1938; 1962; 1992/2005; Hegel 1986e: 82-114; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 40; 1988d: chaps. 2, 11; Scholem 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989: 122-125; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Priester 2009b: 68-72; Wizisla 2009; 1988: chaps. 19, 21, 23, 29, 30, 42, 47, 49; Ebeling 1979; Schweppenhäuser 1981; Dirks 1968; 1983a; 1983b; 1987; 1988; Küng 1978). There exists, nevertheless, a long mystical tradition in the Abrahamic and other world religions, according to which the radical theological dialectic grounds extremely deepens, sharpens, and intensifies the natural, economical, social, historical, and cultural dialectic, and vice versa (Genesis 1-3; Exodus 19: 4-6; Lieber 2001: 437-438/4-6; Matthew 27, 28; Scholem 1935; 1967; 1973b; 1977a; 1977c; 1980; 1982; 1989; Blakney 1941; Boehme 1938; 1962; 1992/2005; Kant 1929: 29, 89-90, 325, 484-490, 495-524, 648-649; 1974a; 1975; Fichte 1794; Schelling 1946; 1977a; 1977b; 1993; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986e: 43-44; 1986f: 548-573; 1986g: 1986h; 1986j; 1986j; 1986l: 19-55, 107-114, 520-542; 1986p; 1986q; 1986s: 425-430, 512; 1986t: 15; O’Regan 1994; Marx 1953a; 1953b; 1953c; 1955; 1960; 1961a: 17-18; 1961c: 873-874; 2005; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1985l: 227-231, 247-249, 286-287, 297-298, 299-302, 398-416, 417-430, 436-492, 526-552, 593-605; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; 1978c; 1978d; 1983a; 1983b; Priester 2009: 6872. Adorno 1970b: 116-117; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966b: chaps. ii, iv, ix; iii; 1974; 1976; 1990a; 1990b; 1992; 1995; 1999: 34-36; 2001; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1962; 1969a; 1969b; 1970a: chap. 1; 1970b; 1973; 1987; 2001; 2005; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1876; 1977; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1978d; Derrida 1992; 1994; 2001; 2002; 1982; 1986; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 1992b; 1992c; 2001a; 2002; 2006a; 2006c; 2009; Baron 2009: 74-78; Küng 1978: B; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 61-65; Dragicevic/Oyen 2009).

Idolatry and Mythology In the view of the comparative critical theory of religion, it means utter idolatry to hypostatize finite beings–stars, mountains, plants, animals, humans, gender, generation, race, nation, leader, institutions–into supposedly infinite, divine, holy beings: not to speak of vulgar deifications of all kinds (Exodus 19: 1; 20; Lieber 2001: 436/1; Horkheimer 1988d: chap. 2;

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Adorno I-2: 7-120; Fromm 1966b; Mitscherlich 1994: 157-165; Lundgren 1998; Pals 2009; Frankl 1990: 79-100; Kuschel/Schlesnosg 2008; Baron 2009: 74-78). The whole dialectical history of religion and of secular enlightenment is a continual progressive struggle against idolatry and attempt to transcend mythology, and nature, and even history, via natural and historical ciphers (Psalm 91; Exodus 18: 11; 19: 4; 20; Lieber 2001: 433/11; 437/4; Hegel 1986g; 1986p; 1986q; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1985: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12; Adorno 1970b; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Fromm 1966b; 1990b; Derrida 1992; 1994; 2001; 2002). Today in 2009, nobody can possibly explain or comprehend completely and adequately theologically or anthropologically Stalingrad or Dresden, Auschwitz or Treblinka, Hiroshima or Nagasaki and all the terror and horror of modern history before and after those events (Hegel 1986l: 28, 540; 1986p: 88; 1986s: 497; 1986t: 455; Adorno 1997u; Horkheimer 1967b: 177-202, 203-215, 216-228 239-247, 248-269, 302-316, 317-320, 335-354; 1985g: chaps. 4, 9, 21, 37, 40; 1985e: 248-250; Kogon 1965; 1967; 2002; Mitscherlich 1993; 1994; Lohmann 1994; 2006a: 60-63; 2007a: 64-66; 2007b; 2008; 2009; Habermas 2006c; 2009; Derrida 1992; 1994; 2001; 2002; Metz 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Ashley 1998; Rosenbaum 1999; Frankl 1990: 79-100; Baron 2009: 74-78; Siebert 1966; 1993; 1994b: 69-90; 1995; 2000; 2006a; 2007g; Ott 2004c; 2004d). Thus, religion as well as secular enlightenment still remain incomplete human projects, which encounter each other in open dialectical discourse toward alternative Future III–the free, responsible, and reconciled society, a discourse which must not be arrested fundamentalistically or positivistically and scientistically (Hegel 1986g: 339-397, 503-514; 1986l: 520-540; 1986q: 341-344, 347-535; Marx1961a: 873-874; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Lohmann 2006b: 66-68; Habermas 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2003b; 2004a; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Habermas/Ratzimger 2006; Derrida1992; 1994; 2001; 2002; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Küng/Ess/ Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Pals 2009; Ashley 1998; Baron 2009: 74-78; Dragicevic/Oyen 2009; Siebert 1994a; 1994b; 1994c; 1994d; 2001; 2002a; 2002b; 2002c; 2003; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d; 2005e; 2005f; 2006b; 2006c: 1-32; 2007c; 2007d; 2007f; 2008a; 2008c; 2008f; Ott 2001; 2005: 155-180; 2006; 2007; 2009; Shanley 2009: 1-2; Trojanov/Zeh 2009a; 2009b: 4-8).

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Anticipation, Hope, and Expectation In the perspective of the comparative dialectical religiology, it was as hard for the Athenians of the first century, particularly the Stoics and Epicureans on the Areopagus, to foresee that the theological proclamation of the Theos agnotos by Paul, whom they considered to be a ridiculous parrot from Jerusalem, would radically and determinately negate the Greek Religion of Beauty, especially the known Pantheon in Athens described by Hesiod–not only Chronos and the Titans and Typhon and Hercules, but also Zeus and the Olympians like Apollo, Athena, Hera, Hercules or Medusa, and even the all-dominant Fate, as well as the Roman Religion of Utility, particularly the known Pantheon of Jupiter in Rome–, as it is difficult today in 2009 for modern people to anticipate, hope for, and expect new post-modern paradigms in the Abrahamic religions, or in Hinduism and Buddhism, or a new religion altogether, not to speak of the end of the delayed Messianic parousia promised by Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Metzger/Cogan 1993: 571; Kant 1975: 77-93; Hegel 1986l: 275338, 339-412, 413-490, 1986q: 96-154, 155-184; 1986t: 248, 249; Derrida 2002; Ebeling 1979; Küng 1970; 1978; 1980; 1984; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; 2009). For the critical religiology, the anticipated, hoped for, and expected New, the Non-identical, can, and does, and should indeed happen in the history of religions as well as in world history as a whole, and beyond (Exodus 20: 1-7; Lieber 2001: 441-444/1-7; Isaiah 11, 65, 66; Revelation 21, 22; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1971: 40-41, 54-90; 1974c: 96-97, 121-123, 127, 131-132, 210-211, 247-248, 254255, 288-289, 316-320, 325-326, 352-355; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 38, 40; 1988a: 100-157; 1988n: 52-53, 69-70, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 90-91, 95, 95-96, 96-97, 97-98, 99-100, 103, 105-106, 110, 114-115, 117, 118-119, 122, 123, 124, 126, 129-130, 132, 134-135, 136-137, 138-139, 143, 144, 150-151, 162-163, 163-164, 166-172, 197, 200, 203-204, 215, 218-219, 222, 228, 247-248, 282-284, 301, 314-315, 315-316, 321-322, 326-327, 333, 338, 338-339, 340-341, 345, 347-348, 351, 352, 356, 369-370, 371, 374, 388389, 390-391, 394-395, 392, 397-398, 405-406, 410-411, 455, 456, 457-458, 466, 467-468, 486-487, 487-488, 507-509, 510-512, 517, 530-531, 533, 535-536, 1987k: 289-328, 329-332; 1996s: 21-28, 28-31, 32-74; 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25 30, 31; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973a; 1973b; 1973c; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1981; 1993a; 1997j-2: 608-616; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 29-30; Priester 2009: 68-72; Kogon 1967; 2002; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/ Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402;

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1958b: 484-498; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Wizisla 2009; Fromm 1950; 1959; 1967; 1966b; 1972a; 1973; 1974; 1976; 1980b; 1990a; 2001; Fromm/ Suzuki/Martino 1960; Lundgren 1998; Flechtheim 1971; Lohmann 1994: 123-124, 159-209; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1975c; 1985a; 1985b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Bloch/Reif 1978; Derrida 1992; 1994; 2001; 2002 ; Baron 2009: 74-78; Trojanov/Zeh 2009a; 2009b: 4-8; Dragicevic/Oyen 2009).

Religion, Socialism, and Democracy versus Capitalism In the view of the comparative critical theory of religion, Christianity–in so far as it was not perverted after the Constantinian turn by slaveholders, feudal lords, or capitalists into ideological Christendom–has been from its very start rebellious and revolutionary in the interest and on the side of the arduous, laborious, loaded, exploited and oppressed, as well as of the humiliated, degraded, insulted, offended, alienated, and traumatized; shortly, of the poor people (Kadarkay 1995; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971a; 1971b; 1972; 1975b; 1985e; 2009; Bloch/Reif 1978; Markun 1977; Marcuse 1978: chap. 1; Boal 2000: parts 3 and 4; Moore 1990; 2002; 2004; 2009; Dirks 1968; 1983b; 1985; 1987; 1988; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; Baum 1959; 1975b; 1980b; 1982; Lortz 1964: 32, 54, 605, 104, 107-108. 127-128, 184, 244, 349, 907, 958; Küng 1994a: 62, 218219, 22-223, 225, 228, 240-241, 243, 246-248, 255, 258, 282, 306, 385-386, 458-462; 1994b; Moore 1990; 2002; 2004; 2009; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Siebert 1965; 1966: 1214; 1993; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; Shanley 2009: 1-2). Modern capitalism as scientifically and technologically mediated private appropriation of collective labor is incompatible with Christianity, deeply rooted in Judaism: the rich were to give their money to the poor; the Almighty would send the rich empty away; the rich have their consolation already now; no one can be the slave of two masters: he will either hate the first and love the second, or treat the first with respect and the second with scorn–you can not be the slave both of God and of money; it will be hard, if not impossible, for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 6: 24; 19: 18-26; Luke 1: 53; 6: 24; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971a; 1971b; 1972; 1975b; 1985a; 1985b; 1985e; 2009; Marcuse 1970a: chap. 1; Habermas 1976; 1969; Macke 2009: 78-79; Perkins 2004; 2007; Fleischer/Hazard/Klipper 1988; Scahill 2007; Klein 2007; Kinzer 2006; Moore 1990; 2002; 2004; 2009; Siebert 1965; 1993; 2005b; 2006a; 2007a; 2007b; Shanley 2009: 1-2). Likewise, modern capitalism is incompatible with material democracy: there is no democra-

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cy without socialism, and there is no socialism without democracy (Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971a; 1971b; 1972; 1975b; 1985a; 1985b; 1985e; 2009; Fromm 1966c; 1967; 1980a; 1981; 2001; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; Perkins 2004; 2007; Fleischer/Hazard/Klipper 1988; Scahill 2007; Klein 2007; Kinzer 2006; Siebert 1965; 1993; 2005b; 2006a; 2007a; 20067b; Shanley 2009: 1-2). Modern capitalism distorts the Abrahamic religions as well as democracy into their very core: theoretically as well as practically (Acts 5: 1-11; Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986l: 520-540; More 1895; 1905; 1963; Kadarkay 1995; Sohn-Rethel 1973; 1975; 1978; 1985; Fetscher 2009: 72-74; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Fetscher/Machovec 1974; 1975; Moore 1990; 2002; 2004; 2009; Fetscher/Schmidt 2002; Perkins 2004; 2007; Fleischer/ Hazard/Klipper 1988; Scahill 2007; Klein 2007; Kinzer 2006; Zizek 2007; 2009; Zizek/Milbank 2008; Moore 1990; 2002; 2004; 2009; Trojanov/Zeh 2009: 4-8). Early on, Christians did not only let Jesus, the “son of man, ” concretely supersede the Father–“I and the Father are one–Who sees me sees the Father”–and the Spirit determinately negate both of them, the Father and the son, and the Christians were not only called atheoi, atheists, and charged with high treason in Emperor Nero’s court, because they did not believe in Jupiter, and did not sacrifice to him and the other gods in the Pantheon, and because they were not only longing for the God above and beyond God, for the wholly Other, and they were therefore persecuted and martyrized in the Roman Empire for almost three hundred years, but they also lived in communist communities in Jerusalem and elsewhere, in which each member gave according to his or her ability and received according to his or her needs, and they continued to do so in the monasteries throughout the centuries up to the present (Exodus 20; Lieber 2001: 441-450; Matthew 8: 20; 9: 6; 10: 23; 11: 19; 12: 8, 32, 40; 13: 37, 41; 16: 13, 27, 28; 17: 9, 12, 21, 18: 11; 19: 28; 20: 28; 24: 27, 30, 44; 26: 24, 64; Mark 1: 10 12: 36; 13: 11; Luke 22: 15, 35, 41, 67; John 10: 20; 14: 9, 26; 15: 26; Acts 1: 2, 5, 8, 16; 2: 4, 33, 38, 42-47; 4: 8, 25, 32-35; 5: 3, 32; 6: 3, 7: 51, 55; 8: 15, 18, 19; 9: 17, 31; 10: 38, 44, 45, 47, 11: 16, 24; 13: 2, 4, 9, 52; 15: 8, 28; 16: 6; 19: 2, 6; 20: 23, 28; 21: 11; 28: 25; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346, 347-536; O’Regan 1994; Bloch 1971b: 40-41; 1972; 1975b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; Markun 1977; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1974: 96-97; 1985g: chaps. 17, 25, 26, 29, 37, 40; Fromm 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1972a; 1974; 1976; 1990a; 1990b; 1992; 1999; 2001; Reich 1976; Marcuse 1970a: chap. 1; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; Tillich 1972: 186-190; Kogon 1967; Dirks 1968; 1983a; 1983b; 1985; 1987; 1988; Metz 1959; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973a; 1973b; 1978; 1980; Metz/Peters 1991; Ashley 1998; Arens 1992; 1994a; 2007; Arens/John/Rottländer 1991; Lortz 1964: 56-58; Küng

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1970; 1978; 1984; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a: 43, 116, 168-169; 1994b; Küng/Homolka 2009; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; Dragicevic/Oyen 2009).

World Conscience: Global Responsibility In the perspective of the comparative dialectical religiology, today–in 2009–the West could in remembrance of Auschwitz, the Shoa, the Holocaust, and out of the longing and the hope for and the anticipation and expectation of the Theon agnoton develop Christianity further to its logical completion, in which every human being would participate in a worldconscience, and would feel globally responsible for the deeds of all other people: a development critical theorists of society have proposed already for a long time (Kadarkay 1995; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971a; 1971b; 1972; 1975b; 1985e; 2009; Bloch/Reif 1978; Horkheimer 1932; 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1967b; 1970b; 1970c; 1971; 1972; 1973; 1974a; 1974b; 1974c; 1978; 1981a; 1981c; 1985g; 1987c; 1988a; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1997j-2: 608-616; 1997u; 2000b; 2001b; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Adorno/Kogon 1958a: 392-402; 1958b: 484-498; Marcuse1970a: chap. 1; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Lohmann 1994; Frankl 1990; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Derrida 1992; 1994; 2001; 2002; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 1994a; 1994b; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Metz 1980; Metz/Habermas/ Sölle 1994; Ashley 1998; Schimmang 2009; Zimmermann 2009: 75-77; Schröder 2009: 77-79; Baron 2009: 74-78; Siebert 1965; 1966: 12-14; 1993; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2009k: 130-172; Shanley 2009: 1-2; Trojanov/Zeh 2009a; 2009b: 4-8). That could mean that the notion of collective guilt would turn into that of the guilt of humanity in every case of a violation of ethical principles in the national and international sphere, and into that of global atonement, the reconciled society, in which no one would any longer dominate, and exploit, and humiliate any other, as anticipated, hoped for and expected not only in the universalistic ethical systems of the great world-religions, but also, in an inverse-theological form, in the modern bourgeois, Marxian, and Freudian enlightenment movements. That could mean the reconciliation of humanity with the Theon agnoton; not only the God of creation or the First Cause of metaphysics and intellectual speculation, but also and particularly so the God of the Exodus, Who acts in history, and Who frees the enslaved people; and Who gave them the commandment You shall not steal, in order to avoid dividing

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society into two hostile camps–the very rich and the very poor–which might drive some of the poor to rebel against the economic inequity by striking at the property of the rich, in which social order no one, however wealthy or prominent, would feel secure; and for Whom men long and yearn; and Who is the source of all existence and the Provider of ultimate meaning: the God of faith and observance (Exodus 19: 11, 15-21; 20: 1-7, 13; 21: 1; Isaiah 6: 1-13; 65; 66; Lieber 2001: 439-340/11, 15-21; 441-444/1-7; 439-340/11, 15-21; 448/13; 451-55; 456-457/1; Psalm 91; Acts 2: 42-47; 4: 32-35; 17: 16-34; Matthew 27, 28; Mark 16; Luke 24; John 20; Revelation 21, 22; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1972: 10-46, 129-131, 132-187, 188-243, 244-252 253-272; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1977; 1978a; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1983; 1984; 1986; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III; 1991b; 1991c; 1992a; 1997a; 1999; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Macke 2009: 78-79; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Harpprecht 2009: 72-74; Posener 2009; Arens 1997; 2009; Bleckmann/Yasuda 2007 ; Schimmang 2009; Zimmermann 2009: 75-77; Schröder 2009: 77-79; Ashley 1998; Baron 2009: 74-78; Dragicevic/Oyen 2009; Siebert 2009k: 130172; Shanley 2009: 1-2).

Abolishment of Slavery In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the Torah did not abolish slavery yet, but left that to later generations, who–when there would be no altars any longer–would not only pray, but also build a just society as the equivalent of bringing sacrifices (Exodus 19: 11, 15-21; 20: 1-7, 13; 21: 1; Isaiah 6: 1-13; 65; 66; Lieber 2001: 439-340/11, 15-21; 441-444/17; 439-340/11, 15-21; 448/13; 451-55; 456-457/1; Psalm 91; Acts 2: 42-47; 4: 32-35; 17: 16-34; Matthew 27, 28; Mark 16; Luke 24; John 20; Revelation 21, 22; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1972: 10-46, 129-131, 132-187, 188-243, 244-252, 253-272; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1977; 1978a; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1983; 1984; 1986; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III; 1991b; 1991c; 1992a; 1997a; 1999; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Macke 2009: 78-79; Harpprecht 2009: 72-74; Posener 2009; Arens 1997; 2009; Bleckmann/Yasuda 2007 ; Schimmang 2009; Zimmermann 2009: 75-77; Schröder 2009: 77-79; Ashley 1998; Baron 2009: 74-78; Siebert 2009k: 130-172; Shanley 2009: 1-2). Unlike the secular legal traditions of other societies, the laws of the Abrahamic and other world religions were cited not as the products of hu-

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man wisdom and experience, but rather as a reflection of divine principles built into the world (Exodus 21: 1; Lieber 2001: 456/1; Hegel 1986p; 1986q; Küng 1970; 1978; 1984; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng/Homolka 2009; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; Ashley 1998; Baron 2009: 74-78; Siebert 2009k: 130-172; Shanley 2009: 1-2). Thus, the dignity of a human being was as much a permanent part of God’s creation as the law of gravity. Outside of Israel, scholars would have to go to three different sources to get such insight. The Torah combined law–as in the Code of Hammurabi (1792-1750 B.C.E.) cultic instructions–from a priestly manual, and moral exhortation–as found in wisdom literature (Exodus 21: 23; Lieber 2001; 462/23). Judaism, which combined law, cult, and wisdom, was based not only on the major pronouncements of the Mosaic Decalogue, but also on the hundreds of minor ways, in which Jews were called on to sanctify their relationships with other people. To obey properly the tenth commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue–“You shall not covet”–, the Jews needed to know to what they were entitled, and what belonged to their neighbors. Jewish standards for how the Jews treated others had to be based not only on social-utilitarian concerns, the desire for an orderly society, but also and particularly so on the recognition of the image of God in every person and the presence of God in every relationship (Exodus 21: 1, 23; Lieber 2001: 456/1, 462/23; Habermas 1982; 1988b; 2001a; Küng 1970; 1978; 1984; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Siebert 2009k: 130-172). The Jewish legal code began with the treatment of slaves, even as the Mosaic Decalogue started with a reference to Israel’s enslavement in Egypt (Exodus 20; 21: 2; Lieber 2001: 456/1; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1988b; 2001a; Macke 2009: 78-79; Küng 1970; 1978; 1984; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Ashley 1998; Siebert 2009k: 130-172; Shanley 2009: 1-2). The Rabbis are aware that for many modern readers, the subject of slavery raises questions about the morality of the Torah’s legislation: how could God possibly countenance slavery–or for that matter later on serfdom or capitalist wage labor? (Exodus 21: 2; Lieber 2001: 456/1; Marx 1971; 1906; 1951; 1953; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1963; 1964; 1974; 1977; Engels 1967; Marx/Engels 1953a; 1953b; 1953c; 1955; 1960; 2005; Kadarkay 1995; Bloch 1960; 1971a; 1972; 1975; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1970a: chap. 1; Fromm 1966b; 1966c; 1967; Habermas 1976; 1978c; 1982; 1988b; 2001a; Macke 2009: 78-79; Küng 1970; 1978; 1984; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Siebert 2009k: 130-172; Shanley 2009: 1-2; Trojanov/Zeh 2009a; 2009b: 4-8). According to the Rabbis, the modern reader must first note that the Torah passages on slavery did not refer

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to the Egyptian model of slavery: a condition of cruel, permanent bondage. They rather dealt with people, who found themselves obliged to sell their labor for a fixed time to repay a debt, or as a result of bankruptcy. Second, the Torah’s overall emphasis on human freedom and dignity, its insistence that humans are called to serve God and not a human master, in time led to a strengthening of the rules protecting the rights of slaves and, ultimately, to a rejection of slavery entirely. While the status of a slave in the Torah was better than that of a slave in Egypt, it still fell short of the Torah’s vision of innate human dignity. Exodus still considered the slave and his or her family as the master’s property, and called for decent treatment. Deuteronomy, a later compilation of Exodus, considered slaves as virtually members of the master’s family, to be included in festival celebrations and sent off with gifts at the end of their period of service. The Hebrew slave turned into a brother in Deuteronomy, as later on in the New Testament (Exodus 20; 21: 2; Lieber 2001: 456/1; Galations. 3: 28; 1 Timothy 6: 1-2; Philemon 8-21). It seems to the Rabbis that the Israelites, newly freed from Egypt, could not imagine a society without slavery–any more than Plato and Aristotle could in ancient Greece. Yet over the course of history, determined by revolutionary class struggle, a more humane view of the slave and finally the abolishment of slavery as well as of serfdom evolved: maybe some day even the capitalist wage laborer shall be liberated (Exodus 21: 2; Lieber 2001: 456/1; Galatians 3: 28; 1 Timothy 6: 1-2; Philemon 8-21; Hegel 1986l; Marx 1971; 1906; 1951; 1953; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1963; 1964; 1974; 1977; Engels 1967; Marx/Engels 1953a; 1953b; 1953c; 1955; 1960; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1971a; 1972; 1975; Kadarkay 1995; Marcuse 1960; 1961; 1970a: chap. 1; Fromm 1966b; 1966c; 1967; Habermas 1976; 1978c; 1982; 1988b; 2001a; Macke 2009: 78-79; Jay 1984; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1993; 1994; 1996a; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; 2009; Frazer/Honneth 2003; Schimmang 2009; Zimmermann 2009: 7577; Schröder 2009: 77-79; Küng 1970; 1978; 1984; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Baron 2009: 74-78; Dörre 2009: 40-43; Siebert 2009k: 130-172; Shanley 2009: 1-2; Trojanov/Zeh 2009a; 2009b: 4-8). While affirmative religion supports systems of domination, exploitation, and humiliation, negative or critical religion, following the catholic or holistic or the protestant or individualistic principles, or a reconciling combination of both, resists and seeks to abolish them (Exodus 21: 2; Lieber 2001: 456/1; Galatians 3: 28; 1 Timothy 6: 1-2; Philemon 8-21; Jay 1984; Ashley 1998; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; Schimmang 2009; Zimmermann 2009: 75-77;

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Schröder 2009: 77-79; Baron 2009: 74-78; Siebert 2009k: 130-172; Shanley 2009: 1-2; Trojanov/Zeh 2009a; 2009b: 4-8).

Pact with the Devil While today, in 2010, the post-bourgeois, negative, critical political or liberation theology intends to free the oppressed, exploited and humiliated working classes, the affirmative traditional political theology defends the unfree status quo (Hegel 1986 p; 1986q; Metz 1965; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973c; 1977; 1978; 1980, 1981; 1995; 1997; 1998; Metz/Habermas/ Sölle 1994; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; Siebert 2006a). Thus, the conservative political theologian, Pat Robertson, television evangelist and leader of the 700 Club and of the silent majority, suggested the assassination of the socialist President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in the name of the American bourgeoisie ruling class of bankers and industrialists, and was supported in this by the Catholic traditional political theologian, Father Sirico of Kalamazoo, director of the conservative Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, which wants to reconcile Catholicism and neo-liberalism and is in connection with Blackwater and its most powerful mercenary army (Scahill 2007; Waters 2010: 1-6). Both traditional political theologians work in the service of the American power elite, and are ratings boosters in the mass media, and millions of Christian fundamentalists listen to them and support them financially. Robertson also once wanted to nuke the U.S. State Department, because of its pagan policies. Robertson also blamed the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina on pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays and lesbians in American civil society. The Protestant traditional political theologian Robertson also attributed most shamefully the Haitian earth quake of January 12, 2010, which caused massive destruction and cost the lives of over 100,000 people, as well as all the poverty and misery of Haiti before, to the pact with the devil, which the Haitian slaves supposedly made, in order to liberate themselves from Napoleon III and from French colonialism in the 19th century, as well as to their practice of some form of voodoo and of Roman Catholicism, the official religion of Haiti. (Waters 2010: 1-6).As so many traditional affirmative political theologians before him, Robertson used the retaliation rather than an eschatological theodicy, in order to keep the slaves on their place, in utter opposition to the Mosaic and Jesuanic Exodus theology: the liberation of the slaves, the serfs and the wage laborers (Exodus 12-15; Matthew 26-28; Hegel 1986q; Metz 1965; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973c; 1977; 1978; 1980, 1981; 1995; 1997; 1998; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1975;

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1976; 1977; 1978a; 1978c; 1978d; 1992c; 1997a; 2002; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; 2009; Honneth 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; 2009; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Gutierrez 1973; 1988; Peukert 1976; 2009; Arens 1989b; 1992; 1994a; 1995; 1997; 2007; 2009; Arens/John/Rottländer 1991; Küng 1970; 1972; 1984; 1990b; 1991a; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron Bechert 1984; Küng/ Homolka 2009; Küng.Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; Siebert 1986; 1987d; 1993; 2000; 2002b; 2004b; 2004c; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2007d; 2007g; 2008a; 2008b; 2009d; 2009e).

Human Dignity and Freedom According to the Rabbis, the Torah is full of rules that deal with the liberation of Hebrew slaves (Jeremiah 34; Lieber 2001: 481-483). To the Rabbis, the divine concern to limit debt bondage was an expression of the Torah’s overall concern for human dignity rooted in economic freedom. Virtually all the Torah’s norms of slavery, debts, and indenture complicated or frustrated the desire for economic enrichment at the expense of other persons, be it under the slaveholder-, feudal- or capitalist system, and not seldom caused Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism (Exodus 21: 2-6; 23: 9-12; Leviticus 25; Deuteronomy 15; Jeremiah 34; Lieber 2001: 481-483; Adorno 1979: 397-407, 408-433). According to the Rabbis toward this end the rules of the Torah repeatedly invoked the periodic restoration of land and release from debts. These social benefits derived from divine authority. They depended on social enactment and enforcement Jeremiah’s and other prophet’s rebukes suggested that the people’s disregard for human freedom violated their ancient covenant with God, who had brought them out of Egypt–the house of bondage (Exodus 20: 2; 21: 2-6; 23: 9-12; Leviticus 25; Deuteronomy 15; Jeremiah 34; Lieber 2001: 481-483). In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, this prophetic longing and insistence on human dignity and freedom has been concretely superseded into Christianity and Islam, and it has been inverted into Marxism as the selfcritique of liberalism, and into the critical theory of society, and into the dialectical religiology (Exodus 20: 2; 21: 2-6; 23: 9-12; Leviticus 25; Deuteronomy 15; Jeremiah 34; Lieber 2001: 481-483; Marx 1971; 1951; 1953; 1956; 1961a; 1961b; 1961c; 1963; 1964; 1974; 1977; Marx/Engels 1953a; 1953b; 1953c; 1955; 1960; 2005; Horkheimer1985 g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; Küng 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 2004; Miranda 1974; McGovern 1981; Arens

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1989b; 1997; Arens/John/Rottländer 1991; Norris 1974; Dragicevic/Oyen 2009; Siebert 2001; 2002a)

Seeking, Feeling, Thinking and Finding In the view of the critical theory of religion, the new world conscience could mean the yearning for, and the seeking, and the feeling the way toward, and the thinking of, and finally the succeeding in finding the Deity or Divinity, the absolute Transcendence beyond all images and names, anthropomorphic conceptions and depictions: the Elyon, the Shaddai, the Yahweh, the Elohim, the Adonai; the I am who I am or the I shall be who I shall be; the Eternal One; the Tien or the Dao; the Brahma or the Brahman; the Nirvana; the Ahuramazda; the Ormuzd or Adonis and the Osiris, who died and arose again after three days; the Zeus; the Jupiter; the Gnosis Gnoseos; the Theos agnotos; the Allah; the full Reality; the Deus absconditus; the Causa sui ipsius; the Ens a se; the One greater than whom nothing can be thought or experienced; the Fullness of being; the eternal Connection of Being and Thought; the One who is the negation of negations, the desire of desires, the denial of denials and who denies of every one that it is anything except himself; the One who is pure, sheer and limpid; the One who is a not-god, a not-ghost, apersonal, formless and in whom there is no duality; the God who expands and contracts; the Coincidentia oppositorum; the Supreme Being; the Ens realissimum; the Thing in itself; the concrete, qualitative Infinity; the Absolute, the Unconditional, who conditions everything else; the absolute Idea; the absolute Spirit; the Logos, the Reason; the Providence; the Idenity of the Identical and the non-identical; the absolute Substance; the Unity of the absolutely differentiated determinations; the Unity of the Things and the Thinking; the absoute Wholeness; the ultimate concern with the Ultimate Reality; the God after and above the God of theism, who died in the horror and terror, the anxiety and the despair and the overall guilt connection in the modern antagonistic bourgeois society and history of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, in which members of the Abrahamic faith community–Christians, Muslims and Jews–have murdered each other mutually and systematically; the Truth as the radical, but nevertheless determinate negation of the negativity in this world; the imageless, nameless, and notionless wholly transcendent, but nevertheless also immanent Other than the natural and social identity, which for the sake of the in absolute contingency starved, tortured, crucified, guillotined, shot, hanged, and gassed hopeless innocent victims may not be all there is and the last word; the all-present, un-

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speakable mystery of this world, the origin of its being, its becoming, its order, and its goal (Genesis 1 and 2; Exodus 3: 14; 19: 11, 15-21; 20: 1-7, 13; 21: 23-25; 26: 6; 33: 22; Leviticus 10: 3; 18: 21; II Samuel 23: 8; Psalm 91; Ezekiel 1: 28; Isaiah 3: 2-3 6: 1-13; 40: 5; 65; 66; Lieber 2001: 3-18, 439340/11, 15-21; 441-444/1-7; 439-340/11, 15-21; 448/13; 451-55; 452/2-3; 492: 6; Acts 2: 42-47; 4: 32-35; 17: 16-34; 462: 23-24; Matthew 27, 28; Mark 16; Luke 24; John 1; 20; Acts 2: 42-47; 4: 32-35; 5: 1-16; 17: 16-34; Ephesians 6: 12; Revelation 21, 22; Ali 1934; The Holy Qur’an: Sura LXXXIV; Kant 1975: 77-93; Anselm 1962: 1-34, 153-288; Thomas Aquinas 1922; Nicolas de Cusa 1962; Blakney 1941: 247/41, 248/42, 290/27, 329/41; Boehme 1938; 1962; 1992/2005; Kant 1929: 490; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986e: 43-44; 115-173; 1986f: 548-573; 1986j: 367-395; 1986l: 19-55, 520-540; 1986p: 50-95, 185-318, 319-331, 331-374, 374-389; 390405, 406-408, 409-442; 1986q: 347-536; 1986s: 94, 158, 167, 508, 559; 1986t: 198; 248, 249; Goethe 1962: Vol. 2, 334-337, 343-353; Nietzsche 1967a; 1967b; 1967c; 1968: 95-96; 1974; 1990; Bloch 1960; 1970b; 1971b; 1975b; 1985a; 1985e; 2009; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Priester 2009b: 68-72; Wizisla 2009; Kadarkay 1995; Bloch/Reif 1978; Horkheimer 1971; 1974c: 96-97; 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40; 1985l: 483-492; 1988a; 1989m: chaps. 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38; 1995p: 82-83; 1996s: 32-74; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1966; 1970b; 1973b; 1993c; 1997c; 1997u; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/ Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 2930; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971a; 1971b; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985e; 2009; 1985: 483-492; 1995p: 82-83; Fromm 1959; 1966b; 1967; 1976; 1980b; 1992; 1995; 2001; Marcuse 1970a: chap. 1; Fromm 1950; 1966b; 1972b; 1992; 2001; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Habermas 1978c; 1982; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: Part III; 2001a; Macke 2009: 78-79; Dörre 2009: 4043; Reich 1971; 1976; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Jung 1933; 1958: 196-224; 1990; Garaudy 1962; Lubac 1950; Vahanian 1967; Drewermann 1989; 1992a; 1992b; 1992c; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Kogon 1967; Küng 1970; 1978; 1984: 304; 1991b; 1992; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1998; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008: 63-65; Bleckmann/Yasuda 2007; Schimmang 2009; Zimmermann 2009: 75-77; Schröder 2009: 77-79; Baron 2009: 74-78; Siebert 1993; 2000; 2005b; 2006a; 2007a; 2009k: 130172; Shanley 2009: 1-2; Trojanov/Zeh 2009a; 2009b: 4-8). The new global responsibility could mean that biography and history may not be closed,

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but may rather be open toward the horizon of Otherness: the movement from modern plutocracy toward post-modern alternative Future III–a society characterized by liberation, happiness, and not only formal but also material democracy; and beyond that the Messianic future determined by justice, peace, redemption, and the resurrection of the flesh (Exodus 19: 11, 15-21; 20: 1-7, 13; Isaiah 6: 1-13; 65; 66; Lieber 2001: 439-340/11, 1521; 441-444/1-7; 439-340/11, 15-21; 448/13; 451-55; Psalm 91; Acts 2: 4247; 4: 32-35; 17: 16-34; Matthew 27, 28; Mark 16; Luke 24; John 20; Revelation 21, 22; Kant 1975: 77-93; Anselm 1962: 1-34, 153-288; Blakney 1941; Boehme 1938; 1962; 1992/2005; Hegel 1986c: 590-591, 1986l: 19-55, 520-540; 1986q: 50-95, 185-346, esp. 291, 347-536; 1986t: 248, 249; Kadarkay 1995; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Priester 2009b: 68-72; Wizisla 2009; Horkheimer 1971; 1985g: chaps. 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40; 1988a; 1989m: chaps. 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38; 1995p: 82-83; 1996s: 32-74; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1966; 1970b; 1973b; 1993c; 1997c; 1997u Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 29-30; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971a; 1971b; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985e; 2009; 1985: 483-492; 1995p: 82-83; Fromm 1959; 1966b; 1967; 1976; 1980b; 1992; 1995; 2001; Marcuse 1970a: chap. 1; Reich 1976; Flechtheim 1971; Flechtheim/Lohmann 2003; Habermas 1969; 1970; 1976; 1977; 1978a; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1983; 1984a; 1986; 1987a; 1988a: 52-60; 267-279; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: part III; 1991b; 1992b; 1997a; 1997b; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b; 2000; 2002a; 2004; 2007; 2009; Macke 2009: 78-79; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Derrida 1992; 1994; 2001; 2002; Foucault 1989a; 1989b; 1994; 1995; Boal 2000: parts 3 and 4; Moore 1990; 2002; 2004; 2009; Dörre 2009: 40-43; Derrida 1992; 1994; 2001; 2002; Arens 2009; Thompson/Held 1982: 238-250, 250231; Frankl 1990; Wiesenthal 1998; Wiesel 1982; 1992; Lohmann 1994: 159-209; Kogon 1967; 2002; Norris 1974; Pope John XXIII 1963; Drewermann 1992b; Metz 1959; 1967; 1970; 1972a; 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1981; 1995; 1997; 1998; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Macke 2009: 78-79; Ashley 1998; Peukert 1976: 278-280; Küng 1982; 1990b; 1991b: 726-734; 1994a: 904-905; 1994b; 2004; Kuschel 1990; Küng/ Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Küng/Homolka 2009; Baum 1959; 1967; 1971; 1972; 1980a; 1980b; 1994; 1996; 2001; 2003; 2004; 2009; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b; Bleckmann/Yasuda 2007; Schimmang 2009; Zimmermann 2009: 75-77; Schröder 2009: 77-79; Baron 2009: 74-78; Siebert 1966;

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1993; 1994b; 2000; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 2, 6; 2004a; 2004c; 2005a; 2005b; 2006a; 2007a; 2007c; 2007d; 2007g; 2008a; 2008b; 2008c; 2008e; Shanley 2009: 3; Ott 2001; 2004a; 2004b; 2006; 2007; 2009k: 130-172). The new world conscience could mean the concrete super session of a theologically grounded ethics by the categorical imperative, and by the postconventional morality, and by the discourse- or communicative ethics: by the apriori of the unlimited, universal communication community (Exodus 20; Lieber 2001: 441-450; Kadarkay 1995; Apel 1975; 1976a; 1976b; 1982; 1990; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1970c: 10-46, 129-131, 132187, 188-243, 244-252; 1971; Habermas 1978d; 1983; 1984a; 1984b; 1987d; 1991a: Part III; 1991b; 1992a; 1992c; 1997a; 1999; 2004a; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006d; 2007; Macke 2009: 78-79; Dörre 2009: 40-43; Küng 1990b; 1991a; 2009; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; 1993b; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; Küng/Homolka 2009; Bleckmann/Yasuda 2007; Schimang 2009; Zimmermann 2009: 75-77; Schröder 2009: 77-79; Siebert 1965; 1966; 1978; 1979d; 1987d; 1993; 1995; 2001; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2007a; 2007c; 2007d; 2007g; 2008a; Baron 2009: 74-78; Siebert 2009k: 130-172; Dragicevic/ Oyen 2009; Shanley 2009: 1-2).

Life, Movement, and Existence in the Wholly Other In the perspective of the dialectical religiology, the new global responsibility could mean that the wholly Other was not far from people, since it was in them, and since they lived, and moved, and existed in it, and since they were all God’s children, and therefore had no excuse for thinking that the Deity looked like anything in gold, silver, or stone, that had been carved and designed by a man: idolatry as the source of all social evils (Exodus 20; 21; Lieber 2001: 441-449; 456-464; Acts 17: 16-34; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 17, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 37, 40; 1985l: 483-493; 1988d: chaps. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 17; 1988n: 498501, 503-504; 507-512, 517-519, 527-528, 535-536, 542-544, 1989: chaps. 7, 12, 29 31; Adorno 1997u; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Horkheimer/Adorno 1972: 23-24; Benjamin 1955a; 1977: chaps. 10, 11; 1978a; 1996c; Priester 2009b: 68-72; Wizisla 2009; Fromm 1966b; 1974; 1976; 1990b; 1992; 1995; 1991; 2001; Funk 1995; 1999; 2000a; 2000b; Lundgren 1998; Bleckmann/Yasuda 2007; Ebeling 1979; Siebert 2009k: 130-172; Shanley 2009: 3). In the midst of all the present-in 2009-new scientific discoveries and insights in all dimensions of physics, and of all the technological inventions and progress, there remains, nevertheless, in the process of natural, and biographical, and his-

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torical appearance and disappearance very much alive in modern and post-modern people, consciously or unconsciously, manifestly or latently, the religious and metaphysical anamnestic universal-solidary longing for the non confundar: that the hopeless, the innocent victims, whose desperate prayers in direst need in persecution and torture were not heard and yielded to by any human or superhuman authority, may nevertheless not perish ultimately, but may be rescued by the wholly Other, in whom alone eternal truth and infinite love have their grounding (Acts 17: 16-34; Hegel 1986c: 590-591; 1986e; 1986f; 1986i; 1986j; 1986l: 11-141; 1986p; 1986q: 290-292; Einstein 1954; Kadarkay 1995; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1967b: 252, 259-261, 311-313; 1971; 1974c: 8, 96, 97, 105-106, 157-158, 208, 215, 218-210; 1985g: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1988a; 1988d: chaps. 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11; Benjamin 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Priester 2009b: 68-72; Wizisla 2009; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970b; 1973b; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997j-2: 608-616; 1997u; 1998c; 1998d; 2000b; 2000c; 2001b; 2001c; 2002a; 2002d; 2003d; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Haag 1981; 1982; 1983; 2005; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971b; 1972; 1975a; 1975b; 1985a; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; 2009; Fromm 1950; 1956; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1968; 1974; 1976; 1990b; 1992; 1995; 1997; 1999; 2001; Habermas 1962; 1969; 1970; 1976; 1977; 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1978d; 1981b; 1982; 1985a; 1985b; 1987a; 1987b; 1987c; 1988a; 1988b; 1990; 1991a: Part III; 1991c; 1992a; 1992b; 1992c; 1995; 1998; 2001a; 2001b; 2001c; 2002; 2003a; 2003b; 2003c; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; 2009; Habermas/Bovenschen 1981; Habermas/Luhmann 1975; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Macke 2009: 78-79; Brunner 2001; 2004: 7-24; 2005: 91-105; 2009; Brunner/Frei/Goschler 2009; Thompson/Held 1982: 246; Brändle 1984; Barth 1950; 1959; Moltmann 1969; 1996; 2002a; 2002b; Metz 1969; 1962; 1970; 1972a; 1972b; 1973b; 1977; 1980; 1995; Drewermann 1992; Metz/ Wiesel 1993; Ashley 1998; Peukert 1976: 278-303; Arens 2009; Küng 1970; 1978; 1982; 1990a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 1998; 2004; Küng/Homolka 2009; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; Bleckmann/Yasuda 2007; Baron 2009: 74-78; Siebert 1966; 1993; 2000; 2001: chap. III; 2002a: chaps. 3 and 6; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2007a; 2007g; 2008b; Ott 2001; 2004a; 2006; 2007; 2009k: 130-172; Shanley 2009: 1-2; Dragicecic/Oyen 2009).

The Unconditional and the Conditional The critical theory of religion concludes with Adorn, who had determined his and Benjamin’s negative, inverse, cipher theology as longing for the

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radical, dialectical glowing fire or for the totally Other than the horror and terror of nature and history, that the regressing modern consciousness in antagonistic civil society has lost the energy, to think the Unconditional and to endure the conditional, in so far as it can not be changed by reform or revolution: theodicy (Adorno 1951: 321-329; Adorno 1970b: 103-161; Benjamin 1977L chaps. 10, 22; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1970c; 1971; 1972; 1985g: chaps. 17, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42; Horkheimer/Adorno 1951; 1956; 1969a; 1969b; 1972; 1984; 2002; Habermas 1976; 1986: 53-54; 1990; Thompson/Held 1982: 245-247; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Metz, 1973c; 1977; 1980; 1995; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Peukert 278-282; Greinacher 1986; Oelmüller 1992; Küng 1991b: 726-728l 1994a: 904-905; Küng/Homolka 2009; Siebert 2007a; 2007b; 2007g; 2008b; Ott 2001; 2004a; 2004b: 45-62; 2004c; 2005: 155-180; 2006; 2007). According to Adorno, instead of determining both–the Unconditional and the conditional–in terms of unity and difference, in the work and effort of the dialectical notion, the weak modern consciousness has blended both indiscriminately (Hegel 1986 f: 273-300; 1986f: Adorno 1951: 320; Habermas 1990: chap. 1; 1991a: Part III; Siebert 1979d; 1985; 1993; 1994c; 2000; 2004a; 2005b; 2005c; 2005d; 2006a; 2007a), The Unconditional turned into a factum. The conditional became immediately significant, considerable, and essential. The Jewish, Christian and Islamic monotheism decomposed and dissolved in modern civil society into a second mythology (Adorno 1951: 321; 1980; 1995b; Küng 1970; 1978; 1980; 1981a; 1984; 1990a; 1991a; 1991b; 1993a; 1993a; 1993b; 1994a; 1994b; 1998; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng/Homolka 2009; Küng/Kuschel 1993a; Kuschel 1990; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008) Adorno heard a man, who was questioned during an American social-psychological research and investigation concerning the authoritarian and democratic character or personality, say, that he believed in astrology, because he could no longer believe in God (Adorno 1951: 321; 1980; 1995b). For Adorno, the human reason, which was engaged in the dispensation of justice, and which had elevated itself to the notion of the one God, seemed to have been pulled and dragged down into His fall and overthrow (Genesis 20; Adorno 1951: 321; Küng 1978). It reached its extreme depth in Friedrich Nietzsche’s, the last bourgeois enlightener’s story of The Madman, who in the late 19th century announced the death of God still prematurely: that antagonistic civil society had killed Him, before even any atheistic socialist society arose in world-history, so that now, in the end of the 20th century and in the beginning of the 21st century He was missing for and missed by many people (Nietzsche 1967a; 1967b; 1967c; 1968:

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95-96; 1974; 1990; Habermas 1976; 1977; 1978 a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1988b; 1991a; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2007; 2009; Honneth 1985; 1990; 1994; 1996a; 1996b: 13-32; 2002a; 2004; 2005; 2007; 2009; Metz 1973c; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1984; 1995; 1998; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/Rendtorf 1971; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Peters 1998; Greinacher 1986; Oelmüller 1992; Arens 2009).According to Adorno, the Spirit disintegrated into spirits and in this process lost and forfeited the ability to recognize, that they did not exist at all. While already Hegel knew, that these spirits did not exist, except the spirits of nations, Max Weber, who considered himself religiously unmusical, identified, nevertheless, modern bourgeois society as polytheistic (Hegel 1965; 1969; 1986c; 1986g: 339-397; 1986l; 1986p; 1986q; Weber 1952; 1963; 1992; 2002; Küng 1978). In Adorno’s view, the veiled and concealed tendency of evil, misfortune, and disaster of antagonistic civil society has fooled its victims in false revelations: in the hallucinated phenomenon. For Adorno, the victims hoped in vain, to look in the fragmentary meaningfulness of the hallucinated phenomenon into the eye of the total disastrous fate, and to stand firm against it, and to resist it. Adorno saw humanity panicking again after thousands of years of enlightenment inside and outside the great world religions, whose power and rule over nature had as domination over human beings left far behind the horror and terror and cruelty, which humans had ever had to fear from nature (Hegel 1986g: 339-397; 1986i; 1986j; 1986q: 501-517; Adorno1951: 321; Horkheimer 1989m: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25, 30, 31, 37). In the perspective of the critical theory of religion, the fallen God of theism is to be concretely superseded by the God of post-theism: the un-reified, unconditional Ultimate Reality beyond the system of human condition, including the telic subsystem, nature, the unconditioned human behavioral organism, and the human action system, including culture, society, personality and the conditioned human organism, or the absolute Wholeness, or Ex-experience, or the wholly Other than death, and the recent entirely unjustified, most murderous earthquakes and tsunamis, wars and tortures, and terrible global epidemics (Thomas Aquinas 1922; Hegel 1986c: 575-591; 1986q: 347-536; Tillich 1926; 1929; 1933; 1948; 1951; 1952; 1955a; 1955b; 1957; 1963a; 1963b; 1966; 1972; 1977; 1983; Parsons 1964: chaps. 1, 2; 1965: chaps. 1, 2; 1971; Parsons/Shils 1951; Bloch 1960; 1970b; 1971b; 1972; 1975b; 1985c; 1985d; 1985e; 2009; Bloch/Reif 1978; Horkheimer 1985g: chaps. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 40; 1989m: chaps. 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 31, 36, 37 38; Adorno 341-334; 1962; 1963;

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1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c; 1970a; 1970b; 1973b; 1973d; 1973e; 1974; 1980a; 1980b; 1993a; 1993c; 1994; 1997c; 1997d; 1997f; 1997u; 1998a; 1998c; 1998d; 2000b; 2000c; 2001b; 2001c; 2002a; 2002d; 2003b; 2003d ; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1974; 1976; 1990b; 1992; 1995; 1999: 34-36; 2001; Marcuse 1970a: chap. 1; 1987; 2005; Habermas 1978a: chap. 5; 1978c; 1978d; 1982; 1986; 1988a; 1988b; 1990: chap. 1; 1991a; Part III; 1992b; 1992c; 1999; 2001a; 2001c; 2002; 2004b; 2004c; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Henrich 1974; Haberms/Ratzinger 2006; Kogon 1965; 1967; 1995; 2002; Arens 1989b; 1992; 1994a; 2007; 2009; Arens/John/Rottländer 1991)

Bodily Fulfillment The dialectical religiology concludes with Adorno, that the great world religions–Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc.–have been, after the prohibition or the ban against making images of or naming the Absolute, either silent concerning the rescue of the hopeless, of the dead, or they have taught the resurrection of the flesh (Exodus 20; 25/23; Lieber 2001: 489/23; Matthew 29; Mark 16; Luke 24; 20; Hegel 1986q: 290-292; Adorno 1951: 326-327; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969a; 1969b; 1972; 2002; Fromm 1950; 1964; 1966a; 1966b; 1974; 1976; 1992; 1995; 1999; 2001; Fromm/Suzuki/Martino 1960; Küng 1970; 1982; 1984; 1991a; 1991b; 1993b; 1994b; 2004; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng/Homolka 2009; Kuschel 1990).In Adorno’s view, the world-religions have their seriousness and sincerity in the inseparability of the intellectual, mental and spiritual sphere on one hand and the bodily dimension on the other (Exodus25/23; Lieber 2001: 489/23 ; Adorno 1951: 326-327). There was no intention, nothing spiritual, which was not somehow grounded in bodily perception, observation, or awareness, and which longed and yearned again for bodily fulfillment. The historical materialists did not like the idealists consider themselves to be too good for the thought of the resurrection of the flesh. Unlike the idealists, the historical materialists really wanted the rescue of the hopeless. For the historical materialists unlike for the idealists the thought of resurrection and of redemption is not too coarse or too gross. For the historical materialist only in the parable of the body could the notion of the pure Spirit be grasped and comprehended at all. At the same time, the parable of the body concretely superseded the notion of the pure Spirit. The spirits were negated already through their reification. The historical-materialistic dialectical religiology, as it can alone be done responsibly today–in 2010–in the face of the universal despair, is the at-

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tempt to consider all things as they represent themselves from the standpoint of redemption: i.e. the resurrection of the flesh (Isaiah 11; 64-66; Matthew 29; Mark 16; Luke 24; 20; Revelation 11; 63-66; 21-22; Benjamin 1955a; 1968: chaps. 10, 11; 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1951: 333-334). For the dialectical religiologist, human knowledge has no light except that, which shines from the redemption on the antagonistic world. Everything else exhausts itself in positivistic reconstruction and remains a piece of technology. In the dialectical-religiological perspective, the world posits itself, alienates itself, and reveals its tears and abysses in a similar way as it shall lay once as poor and needy and distorted in the Messianic light (Isaiah 11; 64-66. Revelation 11; 63-66; 21-22; Benjamin 1955a; 1968: chaps. 10, 11; 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1951: 333-334) The dialectical religiology agrees with Adorno’s insight, that the more passionately the thought sealed itself off against its being conditioned for the sake of the Unconditional, the more unconsciously, and thereby fatally and disastrously, it falls prey to the world as it is the case. The thought must comprehend even still its own impossibility for the sake of the possible. For the dialectical religiology, opposite the demand, which thereby is directed toward thought, the question concerning the reality or unreality of the redemption and the resurrection of the flesh is not entirely indifferent or unimportant: the negation of negation, the death of death, the stage of reconciliation, belongs to faith, mediated and supported by dialectical reason (Isaiah 11; 64-66; Matthew 29; Mark 16; Luke 24; 20; Revelation 11; 63-66; 21-22; Benjamin 1955a; 1968: chaps. 10, 11; 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1951: 333-334; Hegel 1986a: 121-123; 1986c 590-591; 1986p: 423; 1986q: 291, 347-536; Benjamin 1955a; 1968: chaps. 10, 11; 1977: chaps. 10, 11; Adorno 1951: 333-334; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1971; 1988a; 1988d: chaps. 2, 5, 6, 7, 11; 1989m: chaps. 12, 29; 33; 34; Küng 1970; 1978; 1982; 1984; 1990a; 1991b; 1994a; 1994b; 1998; 2004). Anselm (of Canterbury): If we have said anything that needs correction, I am willing to make the correction if it were a reasonable one. But if the conclusions which we have arrived at by reason seem confirmed by the testimony of the truth, then ought we to attribute it, not to ourselves, but to God, who is blessed for ever-Amen. (Genesis 1; Exodus 20: 1-7; Lieber 2001: 441-444/1-7; Psalm 91; John 1; Anselm 1962: 177-288; Thomas Aquinas 1922; Hegel 1986h: 167, 348-349; 1986p: 29; 1986q: 50-95; 185-346, 518-536; 1986s: 554-560, 591; 1986t: 138, 360; Kadarkay 1995; Bloch 1960; 1970a; 1970b; 1971a; 1971b; 1972; 1975b; 1985e; 2009; Bloch/Reif 1978; Horkheimer 1936; 1966; 1967a; 1971; 1985h: chaps. 17, 29, 37, 40; 1985l: 483-492; 1988a: 100-157; Löwenthal 1987: 9-14; chaps. 7, 8, 9, 10; Adorno 1951; 1962; 1963; 1966; 1969a; 1969b; 1969c;

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1970b; 1973b: 300-360, 361-408; 1974; 1980b; 1993c; 1997b; 1997c; 1997f; 1997j-2: 608-616; 1997u; 1998a; 1998c; 1998d; 2000c; 2001b; 2001c; 2002a; 2002d; 2003d; Kracauer 1995; 1998; Adorno/Kracauer 2008; Lütkehaus 2009b: 72-74; Brändle 1984; Horkheimer/Adorno 1969b: 29-30; Habermas 1982; 1988b; 1991a: part III; 2001a; 2002; 2004b; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007; Habermas/Ratzinger 2006; Macke 2009: 78-79; Derrida 1992; 1994; 2001; 2002; Pope John XXIII 1962; 1963; Pope Benedict XVI 2005; 2006; 2007a; 2007b; 2009; Harpprecht 2009: 72-74; Posener 2009; Küng 1970; 1991b; 1994a; 2004; 2009; Küng/Ess/Stietencron/Bechert 1984; Küng/Homolka 2009; Kuschel/Schlensog 2008; Goldstein 2001: 246-289; 2005: 115152; 2006; 2009b: 61-114; 115-120, 121-150; Ott 2001; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2004d; 2005; 2006; 2007; 2009k: 130-172; Metz 1973c; 1975a; 1975b; 1975b; 1977; 1980; 1984; 1985; 1997; 1998; Metz/Habermas/Sölle 1994; Metz/Peters 1991; Metz/Wiesel 1993; Ashley 1998; Shanley 2009: 3).

References Abada, Teresa and Eric Yeboah Tenkorang. 2009. “Gender Differences in Educational Attainment among the Children of Canadian Immigrants,” in International Sociology Journal of the International Sociological Association/ISA. Volume 24. Number 4: 580-608. Abadie, D. 1886. Klee et la musique. Centre Georges Pompidou. Musee national d’art moderne, 10 October 1985–1er janier 1986. Abbot, Joseph. 2009. “I Believe in the Life of the World to Come,” in New Oxford Review. Volume LXXVI, Number 1: 34-37. Abbot, Walter M., S. J. 1966. The Documents of Vatican II: All Sixteen Official Texts promulgated by the Ecumenical Council 1963–1965. New York: Guild Press. Abdullah, Adel Kamel. 2006. “Surviving after Guantanamo Bay,” Cage Prisoners, Dec. 28, www.cageprisoners.com/articles.php?id=18118. Abdul–Zhara, Quassim. 2007. “Two Saddam Aides Executed; One Beheaded,” the Associated Press, in AOL News, Jan. 16. Abendroth, Wolfgang. 1969. Sozialgeschichte der europäischen Arbeiterbewegung. 1974; Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag. Abrams, Jim. 2004. “Civility drops to a Low Point in Congress,” the Associated Press, in