The Early Frankfurt School and Religion

The Early Frankfurt School and Religion Edited by

Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss

The Early Frankfurt School and Religion

Also by Margarete Kohlenbach DAS ENDE DER VOLLKOMMENHEIT: Zum Verständnis von Thomas Bernhards Korrektur WALTER BENJAMIN: Self-Reference and Religiosity Also by Raymond Geuss THE IDEA OF A CRITICAL THEORY HISTORY AND ILLUSION IN POLITICS MORALITY, CULTURE, AND HISTORY PUBLIC GOODS, PRIVATE GOODS POLITIK UND GLÜCK OUTSIDE ETHICS

The Early Frankfurt School and Religion Edited by

Margarete Kohlenbach and

Raymond Geuss

Editorial matter, selection, introduction © Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss 2005 Chapter 2 © Raymond Geuss 2005 Chapter 4 © Margarete Kohlenbach 2005 Remaining chapters © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–3557–2 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The early Frankfurt School and religion/edited by Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–3557–2 (cloth) 1. Religion – Philosophy – History – 20th century. 2. Sociology – Philosophy – History – 20th century. 3. Critical theory. 4. Frankfurt school of sociology. 5. Institut fèr Sozialforschung (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) I. Kohlenbach, Margarete. II. Geuss, Raymond. BL51.E27 2004 200’.7’043––dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne.

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Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Abbreviations and Translations

viii

Notes on the Contributors

ix

Introduction: The Frankfurt School and the Problem of Religion Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss

Part I

Students, Theologians, Critical Theorists

1 Max Horkheimer’s Supposed ‘Religious Conversion’: A Semantic Analysis Pascal Eitler 2 On the Usefulness and Uselessness of Religious Illusions Raymond Geuss

Part II

1

15 29

Constructions of Religious Experience

3 Emerging ‘Orders’: The Contemporary Relevance of Religion and Teaching in Walter Benjamin’s Early Thought Pierfrancesco Fiorato

45

4 Religion, Experience, Politics: On Erich Unger and Walter Benjamin Margarete Kohlenbach

64

5 Allegory, Metonymy and Creatureliness: Walter Benjamin and the Religious Roots of Modern Art Barnaba Maj

85

Part III

Legal Philosophy and Jewish Tradition

6 Law and Religion in Early Critical Theory Chris Thornhill v

103

vi

Contents

7 Jewish Law and Tradition in the Early Work of Erich Fromm David Groiser

128

8 Critical Theory and the New Thinking: A Preliminary Approach Howard Caygill

145

Part IV Dialectic of Enlightenment Reconsidered 9 Does Dialectic of Enlightenment Rest on Religious Foundations? Rüdiger Bittner 10 Secularisation, Myth, Anti-Semitism: Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Gérard Raulet

157

171

Notes

190

Bibliography

218

Index

234

Acknowledgements This book is the result of a working conference held at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at the University of Bielefeld in September 2003. The editors thank the Centre for its generous financial support, and for the professional and friendly assistance they received both before and during the conference. Thanks are also due to the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (Marbach) and the Max Horkheimer Archiv (Frankfurt/M.) for opening their collections to several contributors to this volume, and to Esther J. Ehrman ( Jerusalem) for granting us permission to quote from unpublished sources in Erich Unger’s estate. The University of Sussex and the University of Sassari supported the completion of this book by shouldering most of the translation costs. We are particularly grateful to Ladislaus Löb (Brighton) for the great skill and care with which he undertook the translation into English of three of the ten chapters, and for his general advice and bibliographical support. Our discussions at Bielefeld benefited a great deal from contributions by participants other than the authors assembled here. We thank especially Martin Bauer of the Hamburg Institute of Social Research and Michael Gormann-Thelen (Hanover) of the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Society. We are also grateful to Wolfgang Braungart, Jürgen Frese and Michael Wolff of Bielefeld University, and to Martin Bonacker (Hamburg), Martina Herrmann (Dortmund), Joachim Koch (Bad Oeynhausen), Christoph Lienkamp (Bremen), Timo Ogrzal (Hamburg), Johannes Sabel (Wipperfurth), Ingo Stucke (Bielefeld) and Andreas Seiverth (Frankfurt/M.).

vii

Abbreviations and Translations Primary and secondary sources are first cited by their complete title, then frequently with a characteristic abbreviation. Except for translations acknowledged in the bibliography or the notes, all quotations from non-English sources were translated either by the authors or, in the case of Chapters 1, 3 and 10, by the translator Ladislaus Löb. The following abbreviations are used throughout the volume: AB Cor

DA DE

GB MHGS SW TWAGS WBGS

Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, Frankfurt/M. 1994. Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, eds Gershom Scholem, Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson, Evelyn M. Jacobson, Chicago 1994. Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente, Frankfurt/M. 1977. Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Stanford 2002. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, eds Christoph Gödde, Henri Lonitz, 6 vols, Frankfurt/M. 1995–2000. Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, eds Alfred Schmidt, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, 19 vols, Frankfurt/M. 1985–96. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, eds Michael W. Jennings et al., 4 vols, Cambridge (Mass.) 1996–2003. Adorno, Theodor W., Gesammelte Schriften, eds Rolf Tiedemann et al., 20 vols, Frankfurt/M. 1970–86. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, eds Rolf Tiedemann et al., 7 vols, Frankfurt/M. 1974–89.

viii

Notes on the Contributors Rüdiger Bittner is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bielefeld. He is the author of What Reason Demands (1989), Doing Things for Reasons (2001), and the editor of Nietzsche’s Writings from the Late Notebooks (2003). Howard Caygill is Professor of Cultural History at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of Art of Judgement (1989), A Kant Dictionary (1996), Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (1998), and Levinas and the Political (2002). Pascal Eitler works as a historian at the Research Centre ‘The Political as a Space of Communication’ at the University of Bielefeld. He is completing a doctoral thesis on the relationship between politics and religion in West German society during the 1960s and 1970s. Pierfrancesco Fiorato is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Sassari. He is the author of Geschichtliche Ewigkeit: Ursprung und Zeitlichkeit in der Philosophie Hermann Cohens (1993) and has widely published on neo-Kantianism and German-Jewish thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is also the Italian editor and translator of several of Hermann Cohen’s works. Raymond Geuss is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. His main publications comprise The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (1981), Morality, Culture, and History (1999), History and Illusion in Politics (2001), and Public Goods, Private Goods (2001). In 2005 his Politik und Glück will be published, and a collection of his essays entitled Outside Ethics is soon to appear. David Groiser is Lecturer in German at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Brasenose College. He works on nineteenth- and twentiethcentury German intellectual history and literature, with a particular focus on the German-Jewish tradition. His Tradition and Revelation in the Works of Franz Rosenzweig will soon be published. He is also the editor of the forthcoming volume II of the Martin Buber Werkausgabe, Mythos und Mystik: Frühe Schriften 1900–1928. Margarete Kohlenbach is Reader in German at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Das Ende der Vollkommenheit: Zum Verständnis von ix

x Notes on the Contributors

Thomas Bernhards ‘Korrektur’ (1986) and Walter Benjamin: Self-Reference and Religiosity (2002). She works on German Romanticism and twentiethcentury German literature and culture. Barnaba Maj is Professor of Philosophy of History at the University of Bologna. He is the author of Walter Benjamin: sul concetto della storia (1994), L’unità di senso della storia nell’orizonte contemporaneo (2000), and Heimat: La cultura tedesca contemporanea (2001). He is also co-editor of Walter Benjamin tra critica romantica e critica del romanticismo (2000). Gérard Raulet is Professor of German Intellectual History at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. Between 1982 and 1999 he was Director of the Research Programme ‘Weimar Culture’ at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme; since 1999 he has been Director of the Research Programme ‘Contemporary Political Philosophy’ at the CNRS. His main publications include Natur und Ornament (1987), Herbert Marcuse (1992) and Le caractère destructeur: Esthétique, théologie et politique chez Walter Benjamin (1997). Chris Thornhill is Reader in German at King’s College, London. He is the author of Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus (1996), Political Theory in Modern Germany (2000), Karl Jaspers (2002), and co-author of Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Politics and Law (2003).

Introduction: The Frankfurt School and the Problem of Religion Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss

The work and development of the Institute of Social Research is well documented. Martin Jay’s and Rolf Wiggershaus’s histories offer detailed accounts of the foundation of the Institute by Felix J. Weil in Frankfurt in 1924, its work in Weimar Germany, after January 1931 under the directorship of Max Horkheimer, its metamorphosis during its period in the United States and its slow, partial and painful resettlement in West Germany after the war.1 Jay and Wiggershaus also document the intellectual, political and cultural differences among the members and associates of the Institute, and the diversity of their work. Many, sometimes conflicting, interests, talents, convictions, doubts, temperaments and idiosyncrasies went into what did not become known as ‘The Frankfurt School’ until 1950. The public image that the School acquired was to a large extent shaped by the appropriation of the ‘Critical Theory’ it advocated by parts of the neo-Marxist Student Movement of the 1960s. In Germany in particular, Critical Theory seemed to offer an alternative to those academic and cultural traditions that had been corrupted by their acceptance of, and support for, Nazi rule. In Western societies more widely, sections of the intelligentsia welcomed the School’s work as a way to overcome the liberal separation of theory from political practice, and of knowledge from existential concerns. However, the Left and the anti-liberal features in the School’s appeal did not coexist without tension. The discrepancies within the early positive reception of the School’s work clustered mainly around the question of the role that religion assumed in Critical Theory. On the one hand, Christian theologians drew support for their struggle against 1

2 Introduction

the modern privatisation of religion from the attempted integration, in Critical Theory, of cognitive, political and existential concerns. By arguing that in some way religious contents needed to be preserved in any truly emancipatory practice, Critical Theorists themselves seemed to authorise the politico-theological interpretation of their work. On the other hand, religion itself had of course also been compromised by its dealings with the Third Reich. In the twelve years of Nazi rule, the diplomatic opportunism of the Catholic Church had ‘competed’ with the frequently proactive adoption of National Socialist positions in German Protestantism. Traditional anti-Semitic motifs derived from Christian sources had combined with specifically modern forms of anti-Semitism, and it had seemed remarkably easy to integrate both into the neo-pagan rituals that National Socialism had invented for itself. In the face of these historical events, any apologetic and idealist distinction between the ‘true’ essence of religion and its political corruptions struck many secular adherents of Critical Theory as obsolete. They, too, found support in the School’s own work, especially in its elaborations of Marx’s critique of religion. On both the theological and the secular side, the political and cultural context of the reception of Critical Theory during the 1960s and 1970s led to considerable blindness. The secular, neo-Marxist reception, for which religion equalled ideology and domination, more or less ignored or repressed the affinities between religious traditions and Critical Theory. This procedure resulted in theoretically implausible positions, and in at times breathtaking hermeneutical inadequacies. The theological reception, which tried to celebrate religion as liberation, frequently failed to realise that for Critical Theory religion represented first and foremost a problem, even on those rare occasions when it seemed to be presented as a solution. Because of this failure, much of the theological reception of Critical Theory resulted in a contrived sectarianism and did not live up to its promise of allowing religion to break out of the dogmatic constraints under which it laboured. Today, a historical reassessment of the School’s work is important not only because its early reception was academically unsatisfactory, but also because the intellectual and political landscape has changed very significantly during the past half century. First, there is now a strong, renewed interest in religion in cultural studies, in the media, and perhaps in Western societies at large, the reasons of which require their own analysis. Second, while the political Left–Right spectrum – and related political terms such as ‘revolutionary’, ‘emancipatory’, ‘reformist’, ‘conservative’ and ‘reactionary’ – formed an obvious point

Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss 3

of departure for both the early Frankfurt School and its reception in the decades after the Second World War,2 it no longer seems to provide a clear orientation among the available political positions. The effects of these changes combine in the present reception of the Frankfurt School in a peculiar and confusing way. We have reached a point where even apparently secular commentators see in the School’s emphasis on ‘transcendence’ – a concept from Christian theology with a problematic role in Critical Theory – the decisive difference between the work of the early Frankfurt School and the German political and cultural conservatism that was contemporary to it.3 Others, however, emphasise the historical link that exists precisely between ‘transcendence’ and conservative thought, for instance in the political philosophy of Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821).4 In this relatively opaque situation, it seems appropriate to reconsider the relationships between early Critical Theory and religion. The more differentiated picture that recent research has established of the cultural background from which Critical Theory emerged facilitates this reassessment. Thomas Nipperdey’s central historical discussion of non-institutionalised, ‘ “vagabond” religiosity’ in Germany before the First World War was only one of a series of analyses that tackled the complexities of those processes of secularisation and re-sacralisation that affected large sections of German society and its cultural and political modes of communication in the decades before 1933: academics, philosophers, scientists and intellectuals were as affected as the participants in the various booming sub- and counter-cultures; and so were political activists and theorists, artists, writers and, indeed, theologians and clerics. Jewish intellectuals were no exception.5 The present book examines the problem that religion presents for the early Frankfurt School against this cultural background of secularisation and re-sacralisation. In what sense is religion a problem for Critical Theory? One answer to this question points to the coexistence, in the School’s work, of a Marxist critique of religion – frequently combined with Freudian and Nietzschean elements – and positive references to aspects of the religious tradition. Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) tells one long story about the way in which religion and myth have been implicated in suppression, alienation and exploitation. And it offers one, and only one, example of true practice: religion, or, more precisely, ‘the Jewish religion’ (DE, 17). Without doubt, this positive singling out of Judaism is an attempt at solidarity with those European Jews who unlike the authors did not escape the Nazi genocide. As such it deserves respect. It is also important, however, to recognise that it is a desperate

4 Introduction

symbolic expedient: helpless in practical terms, and theoretically unconvincing. Neither the implied claim that the idea of patriarchy, of all things, can be heightened ‘to the point of annihilating myth’ and can lead to a ‘disenchanted world’ free of the supposedly disastrous effects of modern disenchantment, nor Adorno and Horkheimer’s actual claim that this indeed is or was the case ‘in the Jewish religion’ is at all plausible. The authors do not present a case in support of these claims, and it is difficult to see how they could, given their overall story of the role of religion in social unfreedom. It is difficult, but perhaps not in principle impossible, consistently to combine an empirical modification of the Marxist critique of religion with a view that ascribes emancipatory potentials to religious practice and thought.6 If the latter view, too, were empirically supported, such an attempt would belong to the social sciences. If, in contrast, the positive notion of religion is not empirical, the attempted synthesis will come to resemble utopian and religious thought. To the extent to which the unfolding of the emancipatory potentials of religion is taken to imply changes to social practice, any corresponding programme is likely to share at least some of the characteristics of those religious projects for reform and reformation that we know from earlier European history. It is within the framework of such a polarity between the social sciences, on the one hand, and spiritually motivated programmes for social change, on the other, that we think the puzzling tension in early Critical Theory between a Marxist critique of, and positive references to, religion can be fruitfully addressed. As regards the pole of religious reform or reformation, the fact that Critical Theorists do not refer to any specific religious institutions, organisations, or communities as vehicles of possible social change is of course important. This fact certainly contributed to the widespread preference for speaking, with regard to Critical Theory, of political change or revolution, rather than of religious reform or reformation. Yet in itself, the fact hardly justifies the preference, for any religion possibly relevant to Critical Theory is not that of institutions that originated in pre-modern societies, but the ‘vagabond’ religion characteristic of the largely secularised society of twentieth-century Germany. Moreover, the political orientation of Critical Theory for its part is based neither on particular institutional affiliations, nor on unambiguous commitments to particular groups, parties or classes. A second motivation for discarding the affinities between the early Frankfurt School and religion is related to a second answer to the question why religion presents a problem to Critical Theory, which is

Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss 5

that Critical Theorists appeal to religion without holding positive religious beliefs. Cases in point are Walter Benjamin’s famous acceptance of theological principles in the very process of rejecting ‘immediately theological concepts’ or Horkheimer’s related rejection of the belief in the Day of Judgement, which he sees implied in Benjamin’s notion of remembrance, only to adopt a similar notion of remembrance in other contexts.7 These intricacies of what Adorno described as the ‘ “inverse” theology’ of Critical approaches raise problems of definition.8 Is it reasonable to describe projects as religious if they are not associated with any positive religious belief? Conversely, does the absence of positive religious belief suffice to characterise a project as political as opposed to religious if the formulation of the project relies on the reference to religious beliefs? Two substantial issues are involved here: the relevance of beliefs – in the sense both of mental states and of cognitive claims – to religion, and the relation of the social practice envisaged in Critical Theory to any concept of politics derivable from it. The second point explains why this volume focuses on ‘religion’ and not, like much of the earlier discussion, on ‘theology’. One way of approaching these issues starts from Clifford Geertz’s understanding of religion as a cultural system. According to Geertz, a religion is a system of symbols which acts […] to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men […] by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence […] and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality […] that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.9 This definition of religion, like any other substantive one, is unlikely to cover all the historical and cultural phenomena we call ‘religion’.10 The fact that there may be no essence of religion, only a ‘family resemblance’ between many of the phenomena people call religious, does not of course mean that we can afford not to say what we mean when using the term, or not to explain why we prefer one particular meaning to others. In our context, Geertz’s definition is helpful for a number of reasons. The definition is based on anthropological work on non-Western cultures, but retains enough elements that apply also to Western religions to enable hermeneutically fruitful reflections on the specific relationships between religion and Western modernity. This is important because Critical Theory attempts a critique of Western culture that in some respects reflects the interest in non-Western and pre-modern

6 Introduction

societies that emerged in the West in the first decades of the twentieth century – drawing on earlier developments, particularly in Romanticism, and assuming different forms in different countries. In Germany, ‘myth’ and ‘religion’ became key terms, central not only to the emergence of anthropology and sociology as academic disciplines, but also to philosophical reflection, religious controversies, political movements, cultural critique, artistic production and projects of life reform.11 The anthropological and ethnographic sources of Dialectic of Enlightenment and its parallels with Ernst Cassirer’s late, neo-Kantian Philosophy of Symbolic Forms document the position of Critical Theory in this context no less than Walter Benjamin’s academically less respectable interests in the occult. Geertz emphasises the practical and existential character of religion without ignoring its cognitive dimension: the conceptions of order developed by religious world views with the intention of shaping a group’s ethos and practice are meant to reflect the actual state of how things are. This can serve as a counterweight to the postmodern reduction of religion to a form of non-committal entertainment, which represents a major limitation in the present reception of Critical Theory and its cultural context. Even more important is Geertz’s implication that while claims to truth are important to religion, actual belief in the conceptions a religion propagates is not a necessary element, but one of the goals, of religious practice. This view can help to limit the impact of old apologetic confrontations between Christianity and Judaism that affect not only the Western understanding(s) of religion in general but also the assessment of the relevance to Critical Theory of the Jewish background of nearly all of its First Generation authors. Max Horkheimer’s explanation of the emphasis on practice in Critical Theory with reference to Judaism’s privileging of practice over belief,12 for example, relates to the fact that most Christian theology makes belief in certain dogmas a condition of salvation while Judaism does not. This difference has sometimes been interpreted as meaning that Christianity considers only the actual believer a religious person, while actual belief is of no importance in Judaism. Yet Geertz’s view of the individual’s belief not as a precondition but a goal in religion points to a common feature in Christian and Judaic practice that persists regardless of the theological controversies about the salvatory power of beliefs. Of course, in their pastoral practice Christian ministers know better than to treat people who can’t manage to believe in, say, the Immaculate Conception as irreligious or non-Christians. If they didn’t, church benches would be even emptier than they already are. And even those Jewish authors who, like

Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss 7

the Orthodox thinker Isaac Breuer, most rigorously deny that religious observance requires the individual’s belief in the divinity of the Torah also maintain that the individual Jew’s ‘inner conviction’ is the goal in that ‘education’ to which the divine law subjects him.13 Perhaps this agreement in actual Christian and Judaic practice makes it less surprising that in his comments on the role of practice in Critical Theory and Judaism Horkheimer referred not to any particular Jewish sources but to Paul Claudel (MHGS VII, 387–8). The fact that Critical Theorists appeal to religion without holding positive religious beliefs, then, is a problem for anyone who has internalised a modern, individualistic notion of morality that requires agreement between an individual’s beliefs and his actions, symbolic or other, but it is not a reason to deny that the practice of Critical thinking and writing has a religious dimension. Christianity, and in particular Protestantism, may have contributed to the development of modern, individualistic morality, but religious practice, both Jewish and Christian, differs from modern individualism in that it requires or encourages ritual and other conformity (even) without, or only in view of future, belief. To put it differently, Breuer’s affirmation of divine law as one that binds the will while allowing the individual freedom of belief is incompatible with any notion of autonomy that claims relevance not only to what we think, but also to what we do, to the actions and practice of our lives.14 This argument already touches on the second substantive issue identified above: the relation of the social practice envisaged in Critical Theory to politics. Indeed, the relationship between Critical Theory and its notion of ‘political’ practice looks very similar to that between Critical Theory and religion. Despite attempts by members of the Student Movement of the 1960s to appeal to the Frankfurt School, it seems that Critical Theory has no conception of politics, at least not one that would give concrete guidance for political action. Just as various very general religious conceptions and attitudes are part of the fabric of Critical Theory, without the members of the Frankfurt School themselves either holding or endorsing positive religious beliefs, their general theoretical commitment to politics and to the unity of theory and practice is not associated with any positive political programme. The intellectual embarrassment of a simultaneous affirmation and negation of religious thought finds its ‘practical’ counterpart in the conjunction of a commitment to modern individualism with appeals to substantial forms of community that will purportedly realise true human solidarity. Taken as contributions to either a social theory or a political programme, Adorno

8 Introduction

and Horkheimer’s negative notion of ‘the collective’ as the brutal agent of persecution, conformism and power in Dialectic of Enlightenment and Benjamin’s celebration, in ‘Surrealism’, of the bodily collective and the festive slaughtering of the bourgeois individual by the alliance of political with anthropological ‘materialism’ are incompatible. But so are Benjamin’s collectivism and his early – thoroughly non-Judaic – notion of solitude or solitariness as a condition of religious experience, which surprisingly manages to find its way into the Surrealism essay; or, for that matter, Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s mourning of the loss or absence of the responsible and aesthetically refined ‘subject’ and their appeal to solidarity as ‘the immediate social universal’.15 If we seek to circumscribe the minimal common position that lies behind this variety of views, we come across the claim that religious – or ‘metaphysical’ – contents are required to free human life from the new unfreedom that the failed Enlightenment attempt at secular emancipation created by establishing in modern liberalism and capitalism economic, bureaucratic and legal structures that have escaped from human control and become both all-encompassing and repressive. At least, this claim can be derived from writings and statements otherwise as disparate as Kirchheimer’s and Neumann’s legal studies, Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, Adorno and Horkheimer’s cultural critique, Horkheimer’s late interviews and Benjamin’s first, ‘youthful’, manifestoes and latest texts. If the wholly enlightened world radiates with total calamity (and we will not critically engage with this controversial presupposition in this context), then help has to come from the outside, and ‘religious contents’ are an obvious place to look for such ‘outside’ help. Geertz characterises religious conceptions as ‘ideas of order’ that are ‘most comprehensive’, but says hardly anything about their content.16 Nor do Critical Theorists seem to say much about the content of the religious ‘contents’ that are required to rescue us from the disaster of modernity. In many ways their appeals to religion are extremely formal: most if not all of them rule out the option of reviving any particular historical religion. The positive singling out of ‘the Jewish religion’ in Dialectics of Enlightenment is no exception in this regard, for the negative theology or Critical negativity Adorno and Horkheimer associate with the Jewish prohibition on graven images is in fact not the Jewish religion. No actual religion – and Judaism is no phantasm – can thrive exclusively on negativity, that is, without rituals which reinforce or aim to establish positive beliefs. Without a clear specification of the supposedly saving contents, we are in no position to judge the Critical claim about the necessity and

Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss 9

benefits of religion. Nor can we derive any political maxims from it, except perhaps – if that is a maxim – that some kind or other of an as yet non-existent religion needs to be created. The claim that religion in some sense is indispensable thus stands unconnected with any specific form of secular political practice. Any integration of actual beliefs, practical maxims and action seems absent from this scenario. Yet perhaps it is not. Perhaps early Critical Theory indeed engages in creating the ‘religion’, the necessity and benefit of which it preaches? Perhaps we should put the references to ‘religious contents’ aside and concentrate instead on the possibility that Critical Theory itself tries to fulfil some of the functions that religion had before the Enlightenment. The conceptions of Critical Theory, for all its emphasis on the particular and non-identical, are certainly broad enough to fulfil the function that Geertz ascribes to religion, namely to synthesise a group’s world view, ethos and practice.17 We could then continue to ask what the group in question would be – with the options ranging from assimilated, middle-class German-Jewish intellectuals to mankind – and how strong the similarities with the practices of historical religions are. Some of the contributions to this book pursue questions that belong with this line of inquiry. The overall picture that emerges, however, is that early Critical Theory is too diverse to be considered a ‘cultural system’, religious or not. Its affinities with religion do not justify labelling the Early Frankfurt School a religion but require a differentiated comprehension of its problematic relationships with historical religion. Rather than a unified religious project, early Critical Theory represents a record of, and response to, the disintegration of religion in the modern world. As far as we can see, the cognitive, moral and ritualistic elements of religion18 are never all fully developed at any one point in early Critical writing or communication more generally. But they all occur, scattered between different authors, texts and moments. Benjamin’s references to cosmic ‘orders’ perhaps represent the clearest example of the cognitive aspect of religious world views in Geertz’s sense.19 The widespread concern with remembrance assumes the character of a religious ethic, especially in its relation to the dead or ‘the past’. The ritualistic aspect seems least developed. But while Neumann and Kirchheimer certainly do not ‘clothe’ their conceptions with ‘an aura of factuality’,20 some of Adorno’s and more of Benjamin’s work does have auratic qualities – including, perhaps, Benjamin’s representation of the modern destruction of aura. Benjamin explicitly pursued the project of creating the conditions of the possibility of a new religion: as an activist of the Youth Culture Movement, as the author of the fundamental ‘On

10 Introduction

the Program of the Coming Philosophy’, and throughout his life by producing texts that use the devices of mystical literature. Adorno did not. The later Horkheimer even explicitly rejected the option of creating a new religion, yet he exercised his talents as manager and public spokesman in a series of interviews on Critical Theory and religion, as well as by attending Christian conventions and actually advocating a reform of existing religions in agreement with his own, Romantic, notion of religion as ‘longing’.21 Adorno’s despair about the ways of the world and his Aristotelian embrace of ‘theory’ as the road to true happiness are as much ‘rendered intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life ideally adapted to the actual state of affairs’ as any religious conception could be; and the emotional and aesthetic investment in their presentation is strong enough ‘to establish […] long-lasting moods and motivations’ in support of a contemplative life.22 The individual chapters of this volume address its topic through the examination of particular historical contexts, conceptual questions or texts. They do so from different perspectives: more or less close to Critical Theory, or not close at all; some accepting, some rejecting, the Critical claim to religion’s indispensability. After a basic historical and conceptual orientation in Part I, we focus in Part II on constructivist approaches to the early twentieth-century theme of ‘religious experience’, both in and outside Critical Theory. Part III deals with discussions of ‘law’ and ‘tradition’, which are especially relevant to the Critical concern with social practice and its Jewish context. Part IV attempts a reassessment of Dialectic of Enlightenment – perhaps the most influential and problematic book of the early Frankfurt School. Pascal Eitler opens Part I with a historical analysis of the German debate, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, about Horkheimer’s negativist affirmation of religion in the context of both Political Theology and the student movement. His contribution emphasises the public dimension of the problems that The Early Frankfurt School and Religion as a whole addresses through its scholarly and academic analyses. Raymond Geuss leads the reader through those aspects of, and changes in, the postEnlightenment philosophical discussion of religion that are most relevant to the early Frankfurt School’s combination of an affirmation of religion with its critique. Part II pursues Benjamin’s concern with ‘religious experience’ from the time of his engagement in the Youth Movement through his early epistemological writings and the theory of allegory in the Trauerspiel study to the conception of politics he advocated after his alignment with the political Left. Pierfrancesco Fiorato offers an integrated

Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss 11

commentary of Benjamin’s early religious thought in both ‘Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart’ (‘Dialogue on the religiosity of the present’) of 1912 – a text of fundamental importance, which to our knowledge has not been published in English – and Benjamin’s critical engagement with the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism. Margarete Kohlenbach compares Benjamin’s religious and political thought with the (re-)construction of religious experience in Erich Unger’s philosophy of religion, thus providing a point of reference for the assessment of Benjamin’s religious constructivism that is both close to Judaism and external to Critical Theory. In Barnaba Maj’s chapter, Benjamin’s idea of allegory is interpreted as a methodological and deeply rhetorical response to the religious antinomies in contemporary art and its spiritual concern, reinforced by the traumas of the First World War, with human creatureliness. In Part III, Chris Thornhill reconstructs the varying tendencies and common concerns in the legal philosophy of the early Frankfurt School and its critique of liberalism, which he then assesses in the broader context of legal, social and philosophical thought in Weimar Germany, including its expressions in the works of Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger. In different ways, the chapters by David Groiser and Howard Caygill focus on the relevance to Critical Theory of the Jewish ‘renaissance’ in Weimar culture. Groiser’s analysis of Erich Fromm’s 1922 doctoral dissertation on ‘Jewish law’ and the sociology of ‘Diaspora Judaism’ explains Fromm’s passage from a renewing Jewish Orthodoxy to the Institute of Social Research. Caygill’s comparison between Franz Rosenzweig’s and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s ‘New Thinking’ on the one hand, and Critical Theory on the other, engages with a historical background that remains important to current assessments of Critical Theory in relation to the ontological critiques inspired by Emmanuel Levinas. Rüdiger Bittner’s and Gérard Raulet’s reassessments of Dialectic of Enlightenment in the concluding Part IV open two different perspectives on this book. Bittner argues that Adorno and Horkheimer’s claim to present a dialectical argument is not justified, and that religious assumptions are essential to their central thesis that enlightenment reverts to mythology. In other words, the authors’ critique of Western civilisation is a religious critique. Raulet starts his reassessment by placing Adorno and Horkheimer’s second central thesis, according to which myth is already enlightenment, within the Enlightenment tradition itself. He then compares the different expressions of this Enlightenment motif in Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms and in Critical Theory,

12 Introduction

where he finds the motif linked to a dialectical conception of ‘the remembrance of nature within the subject’. In other words, Dialectic of Enlightenment is still – to some extent, and dialectically – an enlightenment project. The Early Frankfurt School and Religion does not aim for comprehensiveness. We hope that our discussions will stimulate further reflection and research.

Part I Students, Theologians, Critical Theorists

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1 Max Horkheimer’s Supposed ‘Religious Conversion’: A Semantic Analysis* Pascal Eitler

Introduction The present contribution attempts a semantic analysis of the statements relevant to the ‘religious conversion’ that was attributed to Max Horkheimer in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Section I, I will examine Horkheimer’s notion of religion and in particular his statements about the relationship between religion and politics. I will ask whether – and if so, how – Horkheimer’s thought changed between his earliest stories of 1915 and his last interviews of 1973: if we examine Horkheimer’s work as a whole, are we bound to speak of a ‘religious conversion’, or is the accusation of such a conversion, which is frequently levelled against him, based on an incomplete view of his œuvre? Horkheimer himself emphasises the continuities in his thought between the beginnings of Critical Theory in the 1930s on the one hand and his writings in the 1960s and 1970s on the other, and expressly rejects the idea that the latter express a conversion. Horkheimer scholars generally also stress the continuities in his work, arriving at the conclusion that he did not convert.1 Having assessed Horkheimer’s notion of religion in connection with his own perception of his work, I will in the second section discuss his public image and in particular the so-called ‘Horkheimer Dispute’ between 1968 and 1973 concerning his later publications. In an attempt to appreciate the historical context of these publications, I will consider Horkheimer’s reception by the German Extra-Parliamentary Opposition and by Political Theology. It is surprising how readily Horkheimer scholars so far seem to have ignored this historical context – almost as if they wanted to revive the same ‘dispute’ again and again. * Translated by Ladislaus Löb. 15

16 Max Horkheimer’s Supposed ‘Conversion’

The present contribution stresses the discontinuities, rather than the continuities in Horkheimer’s œuvre, and in so doing pays particular attention to the changing semantic relationship in his thought between ‘religion and politics’ on the one hand and other pairs of concepts such as ‘theory and practice’ or ‘longing and hope’ on the other. It should be emphasised that such a semantic analysis is not concerned with any truth that may or may not be contained in Horkheimer’s statements. I have no intention of either justifying or denouncing his later work; nor will I ask whether it represents ‘the appropriate and irrefutable radicalisation’ of the early work.2 My interest in the supposed ‘conversion’ of one of the undoubtedly most influential philosophers and sociologists in the post-war history of the Federal Republic of Germany is not philosophical, but decidedly historical. There is hardly any philosophical or sociological theory that lends itself more naturally to such a method of historicisation and contextualisation than Critical Theory.3 By ‘semantic relationship’ I mean a binarily coded conceptual system in which certain key words, with positive or negative connotations, mark out what belongs to oneself or, conversely, to the other. In such a binarily coded conceptual space boundaries are drawn, which may be contentious and undergo semantic shifts, as did for example the boundary between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ in the 1960s and 1970s. In that sense the ‘Horkheimer Dispute’ may be interpreted as a ‘semantic battle’.4 My contribution advocates a historical examination and radical contextualisation of the topic of religion and our own thinking about this topic – a truism which one cannot emphasise enough, bearing in mind one’s own careless generalisations. Horkheimer himself said in 1935 that ‘religion can mean altogether different things for different social strata and different ways of life’.5 I therefore propose to consider and assess not only the ‘Dispute’ but also its object, Horkheimer’s late work, within a specific semantic framework.

I Did Horkheimer convert – from Marxism or materialism to religion or theology? In comparison with the interest aroused by philosophers or sociologists today, the public attention paid to this question in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1960s and 1970s – above all between 1970 and 1973 – is remarkable. An adequate answer to the question can be given only with reference to Horkheimer’s work as a whole. This is generally divided into roughly three phases: the early work up to the end of the 1930s; the work of the

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1940s; and the late work of the 1950s to 1970s. Horkheimer’s supposed ‘religious conversion’ would belong to the last phase. The hypothesis of such a conversion is supported by the allegedly unmistakable differences between the evidently Marxist early work and the allegedly religious late work. In what follows I will describe and contrast the first and third phases in relation to Horkheimer’s attitude to and concept of religion. The work of the 1940s – including Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) and Eclipse of Reason (1947) – will be mentioned only in passing. On the whole, Horkheimer scholars agree that Horkheimer did not convert since he was always exercised by the topic of religion and since his attitude to religion never fundamentally changed, but always remained ambivalent or affirmative. However, the question is whether – and if so, how and to what extent – his concept of religion as such may have changed between 1915 and 1973. At this point it should be emphasised that to answer this question we must refer to some writings that were hardly, or not at all, available to the general public prior to the ‘Dispute’. This applies in particular to numerous texts from the 1930s and to those from the 1950s and 1960s left in Horkheimer’s estate, including above all the notes written between 1949 and 1965 (first published in Germany in 1974), and Friedrich Pollock’s notes about his conversations with Horkheimer, written down between 1950 and 1979, and published under the title Späne (‘Splinters’) in 1988. For an understanding and appraisal of the accusation of conversion, levelled against Horkheimer primarily by the ExtraParliamentary Opposition between 1970 and 1973, it is important to remember this fact.6 1

Horkheimer’s early work

The first phase of Horkheimer’s work is generally regarded as having been inspired by Marxism and is connected with his activities as director of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. The early work contains a number of essays that later became extremely influential in the ExtraParliamentary Opposition, such as ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ (1937) or ‘The Jews and Europe’ (1939). In these essays Horkheimer’s aim is to analyse, criticise and change the prevailing social conditions – above all those of capitalism and fascism. His dictum ‘whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism’7 in the 1960s and 1970s became the motto of the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition. However, he says nothing or only very little about religion in these essays. The Extra-Parliamentary Opposition was largely unaware of those essays of the 1930s in which Horkheimer deals explicitly with the topic

18 Max Horkheimer’s Supposed ‘Conversion’

of religion and which reveal an ambivalent if not already affirmative attitude to religion on his part. This is particularly true of ‘Thoughts on Religion’ (1935) and ‘Zu Theodor Häckers Der Christ und die Geschichte’ (‘On Theodor Häcker’s The Christian and History’) of 1936, which appeared in the documentation Kritische Theorie, edited by Alfred Schmidt in 1968, but characteristically in none of the pirated editions which followed.8 ‘Thoughts on Religion’ – only three pages in length – is often used by scholars to demonstrate that Horkheimer did not convert in the 1960s and 1970s. It begins as any one of many interviews from the late phase of Horkheimer’s work might do: The concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those to which nature and society give expression […]. Religion is the record of the wishes, desires, and accusations of countless generations.9 In this context, already in 1935, Horkheimer speaks of a ‘religious longing’ for ‘perfect justice’ and remarks: ‘Humanity loses religion as it moves through history, but the loss leaves its mark behind.’10 However, my thesis is that if one looks at Horkheimer’s earliest writings – for example, the stories in the volume Aus der Pubertät (‘From puberty’) and in particular ‘Sehnsucht’ (‘Longing’) of 1915 – one will not only find clear signs of Horkheimer’s ambivalent attitude to religion but also a concept of religion which differs significantly from that in his later work. In ‘Sehnsucht’ religion as such is not mentioned, but nevertheless a semantic relationship becomes apparent between the concept of religion, the concept of compassion and the concept of longing: compassion as the ‘most sacred feeling’ is able to ‘assuage’ longing. He was suffused by an all-embracing compassion, a profound understanding; he relieved suffering where he could, and he denounced the bad things that he encountered […]. Compassion – compassion is the most elevated, most sacred feeling, and this emotion had made him a true, great man. His longing was assuaged […]. [MHGS I, 140–1] As early as 1915, then, Horkheimer connected the concept of compassion with that of longing, although at that time the longing could still be ‘assuaged’ and ‘redemption’ achieved – an idea that Horkheimer was to reject radically in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Come with me, see all the sins and lies, understand the innumerable pains of mankind; yet don’t wish anything for yourself, but help, and then your longing will be assuaged, for you will have forgotten yourself, and that is redemption.11 In this first phase – in accordance with the Marxist orientation of Horkheimer’s early work – the concept of religion is understood in essentially practical terms in so far as the compassionate person is asked to ‘help’ and actively provides ‘help’: the ‘longing’ can be ‘assuaged’ and – I would argue – is patently not that ‘longing for the totally Other’ of which Horkheimer speaks in the 1960s and 1970s. From the outset Horkheimer is influenced by the idea of compassion, and in this respect by Schopenhauer in particular. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr rightly refers to Horkheimer’s ‘ethics of compassion’ and the ‘moral dignity’ Horkheimer attributes to compassion.12 In ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’ (1933) Horkheimer conceives morality on the basis of compassion or the ‘solidarity with suffering men’, and in ‘Materialism and Morality’ (1933) considers compassion the ‘existential foundation’ of morality, a physical and at the same time metaphysical foundation which in turn rests on the ‘solidarity of life as such’.13 The authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment describe compassion as ‘a kind of sensuous awareness of the identity of general and particular’ (DE, 79). And in the early story ‘Eva’ (1915) Horkheimer writes: ‘The innermost essence of everything that lives is one and the same; what is different applies only to externals’ (MHGS I, 98). However, the concept of compassion in Horkheimer’s early work makes the assessment appear doubtful that Schopenhauer’s ‘metaphysical pessimism’ provides the ‘secret foundation of Critical Theory’, as Alfred Schmidt believes.14 The term ‘compassion’ in Horkheimer’s early work does not mean the same as it does in his later writings. In the early work compassion actually grants a ‘redemption’ for which, according to the later Horkheimer, one can only ‘long’ but no longer ‘hope’. In this respect the early Horkheimer is much more optimistic than the later, and that is why, in a ‘note’ written at the beginning of the 1960s, Horkheimer himself can speak of Schopenhauer’s ‘metaphysical optimism’ with a critical intent.15 In any case, it is my contention that, in comparison with Horkheimer’s later work, there can be no question of any pessimism in his early work. In this context it should also be recalled that Horkheimer’s early texts reveal an altogether more ambivalent attitude to religion than his later writings: his critique of the ideology behind the contemporary form of religion is considerably more noticeable in his essays of the 1930s than

20 Max Horkheimer’s Supposed ‘Conversion’

in his writings from 1960 onwards. Accordingly, it is arguable that the early work ‘does not so much deny the truth content, but rather reveals the social function, of metaphysics’.16 In the early work – above all in Dämmerung (1934), one of the ‘cult books’ of the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition17 – Horkheimer writes about an ‘alliance of the church and the ruling clique’ and disparages religion as a ‘façon de parlerr’, an ‘allencompassing lie’ or, as one might also say, mere theory. Accordingly, he stresses the ‘gulf between the moral criteria of Christians, and their actual conduct’.18 All in all – and in strict contrast to his later work – Horkheimer’s early writings reveal an affirmative attitude to revolution. In this respect too his concept of compassion in the 1930s differs from that in and after the 1960s. It does so because it is situated in a different semantic context, for example, when he suggests: ‘It is not compassion but intelligence, courage, organizational skill that enable one to participate’ in revolution.19 In his statements about religion and the relationship between religion and politics in this first phase of his œuvre the prime position is held by revolution, that is, by politics rather than religion. 2

Horkheimer’s later work

In each phase of his work – in Dialectic of Enlightenment and Eclipse of Reason no less than in the notes and conversations of the 1950s and 1960s – Horkheimer is exercised by the topic of religion. However, it is not until the beginning of the 1960s that his affirmative attitude to religion emerges in the public domain, first in some essays and finally in a large number of interviews.20 The so-called ‘Horkheimer Dispute’ was finally unleashed by an interview entitled ‘Was wir “Sinn” nennen, wird verschwinden’ (‘What we call “meaning” will disappear’), which appeared in Der Spiegel, the most influential German news magazine since the war, on 5 January 1970. If a ‘religious conversion’ had really taken place in Horkheimer’s thought it would already have announced itself in 1963 rather than in 1970. It was in that year that Horkheimer published a seminal article entitled ‘Theismus – Atheismus’ in the Festschrift for Adorno’s sixtieth birthday. One year after the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, and two years before his own appearance, together with the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, at the 1965 Protestant Church Congress in Cologne, Horkheimer felt that ‘the opposition between theism and atheism’ had ‘ceased to be relevant’.21 According to Horkheimer, atheism once had a social function, a critical task, but in the changing social circumstances – in the age of

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‘instrumental reason’ – this task had been transferred to theism. Now it was necessary to preserve an ‘absolute meaning’ counter to ‘instrumental reason’ and widespread positivism. Without reference to such an absolute meaning, Horkheimer claims, morality and politics would become arbitrary.22 He regrets that ‘a politics that does not preserve theology or metaphysics, and thus of course also morality, ultimately remains business’, and he argues that anything ‘connected with morality ultimately and logically goes back to theology’.23 Religion is the foundation of morality and should also be the foundation of politics. Morality ‘without any reference to something transcendent […] becomes a matter of taste and fancy’.24 In 1933 Horkheimer had written: ‘Materialism finds no transcendent authority over human beings’.25 Thirty years later, in 1963, he writes: ‘Without God one will try in vain to preserve absolute meaning.’26 In the later writings, he delineates a kind of hierarchical dependency between religion and politics, in which religion guides politics – just as theory guides practice, albeit without becoming prescriptive. In this respect, too, Horkheimer is under the influence of Schopenhauer and the idea of compassion. He stresses that the ‘connection’ between Schopenhauer’s work and ‘the idea of theology’ can never be ‘sufficiently emphasised’.27 For Horkheimer the idea of compassion, as inspired by religion, continues to represent ‘the deepest foundation of morality’, and compassion, or solidarity, still springs from ‘the notion that everything that is is ultimately one’.28 ‘Theism’ in Horkheimer’s later writings means ‘longing’ – ‘longing for perfect justice’ – just as it does in his early work. However, the decisive fact is that in the 1960s and 1970s this ‘longing’ becomes one that can no longer be ‘assuaged’, a ‘longing for the totally Other’, for ‘something other than this world’, as he says in 1963.29 By refusing to define this ‘totally Other’, Horkheimer excludes any form of positive theology: ‘God thus becomes the object of longing and veneration, he ceases to be the object of knowledge and possession’.30 In accordance with one of the central ideas of Critical Theory – the idea of negativity – Horkheimer believes that he can only represent the bad, but not the good. This idea already appears in the 1930s in Dämmerung: ‘There is no metaphysics; a positive assertion about an absolute is not possible.’31 In so far as Horkheimer does not represent God – the good, the absolute – he aims at a ‘negative theology’, a religion beyond all churches and all denominations.32 He aims at a ‘negative theology’, not ‘in the sense that God does not exist’, but in the sense that God ‘cannot be represented’.33

22 Max Horkheimer’s Supposed ‘Conversion’

For Horkheimer, it is above all the love for one’s neighbour that makes religion important in the changing social conditions. The Marxist concept of solidarity appears to him to be profoundly related to the Christian concept of charity. The concept of solidarity seems to me to be extremely closely related to that of charity. I can imagine that all human beings […] are connected by recognising themselves as finite beings, with solidarity as the result […].34 In both cases what matters in the end is compassion. For Horkheimer, the idea of compassion, and the idea of solidarity arising from it, bear witness to the fact that ‘everything that is is ultimately one’, that ‘we all are one’; and from this perspective he is convinced that ‘in Marx’s work, too, theological postulates – always unconscious but inseparable from its content – are decisive’.35 In this context Horkheimer, predictably and quite correctly, was often compared to Ernst Bloch. However, in Horkheimer’s work of the 1960s and 1970s religion appears less as the ‘expression of a hope’ than as the ‘expression of a longing’. Although Horkheimer scholars generally fail to distinguish between ‘longing’ and ‘hope’,36 the question remains: why is the ‘central concept’37 of Horkheimer’s work ‘longing’ – ‘longing for the totally Other’ – and emphatically not ‘hope’, even though the concept of hope, bearing in mind Bloch’s philosophy of hope and Jürgen Moltmann’s theology of hope founded on it,38 was clearly more central, that is, more widespread and more influential, in the thought of the 1960s and 1970s? So far Horkheimer scholars in general have not paid enough attention to the fact that Horkheimer resolutely distances himself from the philosophy of hope and Bloch’s ‘messianism’. While Bloch, as Horkheimer remarks, is inspired by the ‘hope that one day everything in the world will be good’, for his part he feels unable to subscribe to the same belief. In this context he points out several times that ‘the messianic […] is problematical’.39 Bloch is by no means less ‘religious’ than Horkheimer – quite on the contrary. However, he operates at a different semantic level, speaking of hope and change, where Horkheimer speaks of longing and preservation. The divergences in content between the two authors often appear marginal, but at the semantic level the subtle differences between them are necessarily labelled for the purposes of public debate. In this context some concepts become taboo, while others are promoted – Bloch versus Horkheimer: ‘politics’ versus ‘religion’, ‘hope’ versus ‘longing’. Nor does

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Horkheimer consider Bloch alone too optimistic: he feels the same about the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, to whom he had been close since the 1920s.40 On the occasion of Tillich’s death he wrote: ‘I cannot go along with his great optimism, only with his nostalgia’ (MHGS VII, 283). In a semantic framework this distinction between ‘longing’ and ‘hope’ can also be understood as a distinction between theory and practice. Already towards the end of the 1950s Horkheimer states in a ‘note’ entitled ‘Critical Theory’: Right away, people always ask what should be done now, they demand an answer from philosophy as if it were a sect […]. It has replaced theology but found no new heaven to which it might point […]. But it is true that it cannot rid itself of that idea, which is the reason why people always ask it for the way that could take them there. As if it were not precisely the discovery of philosophy that heaven is none to which a way can be shown.41 The ‘longing for the totally Other’ knows no heaven, no hope, no redemption. It assumes that ‘ultimately that justice of which religion and theology spoke and still speak today does not exist’. In this context a special significance for the later work accrues to the assertion that ‘justice and freedom are dialectical concepts’: ‘the more justice, the less freedom; the more freedom, the less justice’ – the two are mutually exclusive. What remains is ‘mourning’.42 When Horkheimer was accused at the beginning of the 1970s of having converted, he replied that Critical Theory had always had ‘a double task’: ‘to name what needed to be changed and to preserve certain cultural elements’ (MHGS VII, 345–8). Addressing the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, he declared that ‘the true revolutionary is more closely related to the true conservative than to the so-called communist of today’ (MHGS VII, 354). In the semantic relationship under study the role of religion is to preserve and that of politics to change. ‘Preserving’ in this context means not least ‘remembering’. Only in remembrance does the suffering of human beings remain present. Commenting on the social function of theology, Horkheimer emphasises that religion is the guarantor of this remembrance (MHGS VII, 314–15). The distinction between ‘longing’ and ‘hope’ can be understood only in the context of Horkheimer’s changing attitude to revolution. Before the end of the Second World War, he says, he had still ‘hoped’ for a revolution. In this respect his writings in the 1930s and early 1940s are unequivocally inspired by Marxism, and in retrospect he refers to them

24 Max Horkheimer’s Supposed ‘Conversion’

as ‘Critical Theory in its stark form’. However, after the war Horkheimer – unlike Bloch – increasingly abandoned the hope for a revolution. National Socialism had been toppled, not by revolution, but by war, and the revolution he had hoped for had failed to materialise. In the changing conditions after the war he no longer saw any basis for a revolution. The hope for a revolution had been discredited in his eyes by Stalinism and Maoism for a long time to come.43 At the semantic level, then, ‘hope’ can be assigned to the semantic field of revolution, change, practice, justice, politics, while ‘longing’ belongs with reform, remembrance, theory, freedom, religion. Horkheimer’s later work is generally associated with Judaism as a result of his background, as well as his frequent references to the Jewish tradition, in particular the prohibition on images. His statement that he is ‘unable to represent the good’ is a case in point,44 yet he also stresses: ‘This is not merely […] a statement deriving from my Jewishness, but a decisive principle of Critical Theory.’45 He regards himself explicitly as ‘free from religious denominations’; instead of being allocated to any positive religion, his late work should be understood, to quote Hans Günter Holl, as ‘a broad fusion of Critical Theory with Judaism, Buddhism and Christianity’.46 Horkheimer’s negativism, or relativism, goes back not only to Kant and Schopenhauer, but also to Tillich. Kant, Schopenhauer and Tillich, according to Horkheimer, show ‘how far the world in which we live is to be interpreted as something relative’.47 This said, what still needs clarifying is how Horkheimer himself perceives his statements of the 1960s and 1970s. In an interview in 1972, when he was asked about his supposed conversion, he answered: I can see no conversion in the sense that I would have contradicted myself […]. To say that my thought had changed is correct only in so far as at any one time my intentions – which ultimately arise from the same profound conviction – changed in accordance with the situation and the implementation of what was possible, but not my original thoughts and feelings. [MHGS VII, 463–5] Horkheimer, then, is aware of a change in his own thought, although he does not want this change to be regarded as a fundamental one and does not consider it a conversion. As a matter of principle Critical Theory changes with the social conditions, and this is one of the well-known marks that distinguish it from what Horkheimer calls ‘traditional theory’. Horkheimer follows this principle of Critical Theory in turning to religion at the moment of its imminent disappearance.48

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Should or could one describe Horkheimer’s statements of the 1960s and 1970s as a conversion despite his own self-perception? My thesis is that it was not so much his attitude to, but rather his concept of, religion that changed between 1915 and 1973: in the early work ‘religion’ relates more optimistically to change and redemption, while in the later work the concept has a more pessimistic orientation towards preservation and mourning. It was the semantic framework in which the concepts of ‘religion’, ‘compassion’ and ‘longing’ are located that changed during the period concerned. The ‘longing for the totally Other’ could no longer be ‘assuaged’, and that is what in the later work distinguishes the concept of ‘longing’ from that of ‘hope’. But ultimately the question whether Horkheimer converted is ‘a pointless question’, as Werner Post rightly remarked as early as 1971.49 A semantic analysis need not answer such a question: rather, it is interested in why such a question is asked in the first place.

II Although, as explained, Horkheimer’s supposed conversion would have to be dated to 1963, there are hardly any statements available about this alleged change of position before 1970, that is, before the interview in Der Spiegel of 5 January of that year.50 However, this interview promptly unleashed a veritable public debate. There was criticism even from the ranks of Critical Theory. In a reader’s letter to Der Spiegel of 2 February 1970 Oskar Negt expressed his concern that Adorno’s name could be dragged through the mud together with that of Horkheimer. The so-called ‘Horkheimer Dispute’ – particularly between 1970 and 1973 – was noted and carried on in the daily press no less than in weeklies, and in provincial papers no less than in intellectual journals. The interview in Der Spiegel was followed by a spate of farewells to Horkheimer: Die Zeit, probably the most important German cultural weekly since the war, carried the headline ‘Frankfurt School at the End of its Tether’, while Merkur, a classical intellectual’s journal, claimed that Critical Theory had reached a ‘dead end’.51 On 21 June 1970, the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen television channel featured a whole programme on Horkheimer and religion. Hardly any of the numberless tributes to Horkheimer on his seventy-fifth birthday fail to mention the issue of his so-called conversion.52 Why did this interview unleash such a public debate? In order to answer this question I will consider Horkheimer’s image in the eyes of others and in so doing try to elucidate the historical context of the

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‘Dispute’. After a brief glance at Horkheimer’s reception by the ExtraParliamentary Opposition I will concentrate on the contrasting view held of him by Political Theology. The Extra-Parliamentary Opposition reacted to his late work in a predominantly negative way, while the response of Political Theory was for the most part extremely positive. If one considers the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition’s perception of Horkheimer one has the impression that in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1960s and 1970s there was a relatively clear semantic boundary between religion and politics. Concepts such as ‘theory’, ‘longing’, ‘preservation’ and ‘transcendence’ were assigned to the values of religion. Concepts such as ‘practice’, ‘hope’, ‘change’ and ‘immanence’ were reserved for politics. The Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, which initially took its bearings largely from Critical Theory, distanced itself from Horkheimer when he – like Adorno – increasingly withdrew from politics and revolution.53 With its total commitment to practice, that is, with the coordination of national and local resistance, the ExtraParliamentary Opposition saw Horkheimer’s later work as a ‘betrayal’ and, using a phrase of Horkheimer himself, ridiculed it as the ‘deathbed confession of the heretic’.54 The fact that the negative reception of Horkheimer occurred above all at the level of semantic relationships is demonstrated by the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition’s partly enthusiastic reception of Bloch – who is by no means less ‘religious’ than Horkheimer. The perception of Horkheimer by Political Theology is very different.55 The Catholic theologians Karl Rahner and Johann Baptist Metz and the Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann – perhaps the most important protagonists of Political Theology in the Federal Republic – engaged intensively with the Critical Theory of Horkheimer and Adorno: this is particularly true of Metz and Moltmann. Unmistakably this predominantly positive reception of Horkheimer’s later writings was connected with the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65 and the ‘Dialogue between Christianity and Marxism’ resulting from it between 1965 and 1975.56 While the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition reinforces the semantic boundary between religion and politics, Political Theology tries to shift it within the framework of the ‘Dialogue’.57 In the latter, traditional distinctions stabilising the semantic boundary between religion and politics – for example ‘the church and the world’, ‘this world and the beyond’, ‘redemption and emancipation’ – are systematically dropped, giving rise between 1965 and 1975 to a ‘theology of the world’, a ‘theology of revolution’ or a ‘theology of liberation’.58 Moltmann for

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one understands ‘the totally Other’ primarily as ‘that which brings about total change’.59 At the same time Political Theology, faced with the relationship between religion and politics, does not unequivocally come down in favour of politics and practice in the sense of revolution and liberation. With the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition in mind, it clearly distances itself from a ‘wild revolutionary fervour’. Rahner, much like Horkheimer, underlines the ‘will to preserve’ as opposed to such fervour, in which he can only recognise a ‘presumptuousness that sees nothing but what is available or that posits the unavailable as being at its disposal’.60 Metz, in turn, defines Political Theology ‘in contrast to any form of theology that is directly involved in politics’. The relationship of Political Theory with political action, like that of Critical Theory, should be ‘only indirect’: ‘Any direct transformation into political action carries the risk of sheer ideologisation.’61 In this context, and with direct reference to Horkheimer, Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Metz develops the concept of ‘faith as remembrance’ and speaks of the ‘dangerous kind of remembrance that calls our present into question because we remember an unendured future’.62 That is one of the ways in which Political Theology tries to bridge the semantic gaps between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’. The binarily encoded semantic relationships are gradually dissolved, and concepts identified as being either political or religious are no longer conceived as opposites or at any rate as irreconcilable opposites. Moltmann puts this very clearly: To make a correct distinction between God and the world, the absolute and the relative, the last things and the things before the last is one thing. […] But must we not go beyond that and from the start understand God in the world, the beyond in the this-worldly, the universal in the concrete and eschatology in the historical in order to arrive at […] a theology of real liberations?63 Political Theology welcomes Horkheimer’s later works as a clear-sighted attempt at problematising the same semantic boundary that Political Theology also tries to cross – the boundary between religion and politics, theory and practice, preservation and change. However, the representatives of Political Theology usually acknowledge Horkheimer’s distinction between a ‘theology of hope’ on the one hand and a ‘theology of doubt’ or ‘longing’ on the other64 as little as most Horkheimer scholars have done so far.

28 Max Horkheimer’s Supposed ‘Conversion’

Conclusion The historical context of the debate about the later Horkheimer is provided by the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition and Political Theology as its opposite poles – at least at the semantic level. Horkheimer’s statements in the 1960s and 1970s as well as his self-perception can only be understood against this background. If one does not define ‘politics’ in contrast to ‘religion’ – and such a contrastive definition is of course absent from both Political Theology and the ‘Dialogue between Christianity and Marxism’ – it is logical for Horkheimer to interpret the changes in his views about the relationship between religion and politics as a ‘development’ and to emphasise the continuities in his work in response to the accusation of conversion levelled against him by the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, which does define ‘politics’ in contrast to ‘religion’. The reason why the interview in Der Spiegel unleashed the ‘Horkheimer Dispute’ in 1970 was that it was understood and used as an indicator in a ‘semantic battle’ about the relationship between religion and politics, and indeed extremely different concepts of religion and politics. In 1963, seven years earlier, there could be no question of such a conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany.

2 On the Usefulness and Uselessness of Religious Illusions Raymond Geuss

General, discursively structured criticism of the way in which humans conceive and imagine the gods reaches back to the very beginnings of systematic Western philosophy. We have fragments of poems by Xenophanes written in the second half of the sixth century BC that contain a remarkably modern-sounding analysis and rejection of anthropomorphism (cf. DE, 4, 255, n. 6). Humans, he notes, think that the gods have human shape, but each race of men attributes to them its own characteristic physical features: African gods have dark skin and snub noses; Thracian gods have blue eyes and red hair. If horses made statues of gods, their gods would be equiform, so the fact that all humans think the gods have human shape is a fact about humans, not about the divine. What is historically perhaps most notable about this is that Xenophanes in presenting his case does not appeal to any form of esoteric lore, to intuition, revelation, or the inspiration of the muses, but merely to comparative, empirical observation and to everyday forms of human reasoning. It is by virtue of this method of enquiry, more than of the particular results to which he comes, that Xenophanes can count as an early representative of the general, pan-European movement called by members of the early Frankfurt School the ‘Enlightenment’. One of the basic claims of Critical Theory, in the form in which it was elaborated by Adorno and Horkheimer in the 1940s, is that Enlightenment is ‘totalitarian’ (DE, 3–4, 18). One of the central elements of this totalitarianism is the monolithically imposed requirement that human behaviour be construed as articulating verbally expressible beliefs and that means in fact that it be transformed as much as possible into a tacit form of expression of clear and unambiguously formulated ‘opinions’. These ‘opinions’ must in principle be capable of extraction from their original context and presented for general discussion to determine 29

30 Usefulness and Uselessness of Religious Illusions

whether they are argumentatively ‘justified’ or not. A speaker is committed to the logical consequences of the opinions he expresses. These demands are by no means self-evident, but represent a distinctive historical development. Western philosophy with its focus on the ‘argument’ and an associated set of concepts (for instance ‘definition’, ‘cogency’ and ‘justification’) has been a major force in promoting this enlightenment project. Just as for the grammarian all reality is grammatical, for philosophers, everything in the vicinity becomes a possible or actual opinion for which an argument must be given, even things that might originally not have been intended as contributions to a debate at all. Given this general commitment of philosophy to opinion and argumentation, it is in no way surprising that, when they come to think about religion, philosophers have considered it as a set of beliefs and opinions people hold. ‘Religious’ beliefs, they have claimed, differ from other sorts of beliefs because of their purported content. ‘Cosmological’ beliefs are beliefs about the structure of the universe; ‘biological’ beliefs are about living things; ‘religious’ beliefs are about the existence and properties of super-human entities (gods). For traditional Western philosophy religion is essentially theology, that is, it is a coherent, systematically organised, general discourse which purports to give some kind of knowledge of the gods and their relation to humans. There are some immediate objections to this conception of religion as fundamentally theology. First of all, this approach is not in general terribly illuminating when one tries to understand many non-Western religions. There are religions that have no gods or in which gods are relatively unimportant. Thus Buddhists think that in the strict sense there are no gods – they are an illusion just as everything else in the world is. The only serious problem for human beings is how to find release from the unceasing cycle of desire and subsequent suffering. Buddhism then is a religion of ‘salvation’ without a saviour in which the issue of salvation (from appearance/desire/suffering) is considered to be completely distinct from the question of the existence (or the properties) of god(s). Although Buddhism has an internally complex theoretical structure, a metaphysics, an epistemology, and a set of ethical precepts about the best way in which the human will can extinguish itself, thus ending the cycle of desire and suffering, it is not essentially a theology in our traditional sense, that is, it has no constitutive doctrine of the nature of god(s); if Buddhists express views about the gods, these are minor appendices, footnotes, or condescending accommodations to popular beliefs.

Raymond Geuss 31

There are, however, further objections against the traditional Western model of religion that go deeper than this. They share with this first objection the denial that theology is necessarily central to religion. However, the reason they give for this is different. They do not hold that it is fixation on the existence and nature of the gods that is wrong, rather it is the exaggerated fixation of traditional Western philosophies of religion on opinions, beliefs, doctrines, arguments tout court that is incorrect. It is the intellectualist attitude of traditional philosophy that blocks the path to an appropriate understanding of the essence of religion. Religion is not essentially a matter of opinion, belief, dogma and argument, at all, not even of ‘naive’, spontaneous, unreflective belief and opinion, but rather something essentially non-doxastic. Simplifying slightly one could say that if ‘theology’ means ‘conceptually articulated discourse’ (‘-logy’ from logos) ‘about god’ (‘theo-’ from theos), then the first objection rejects the claim that the essence of religion is theo-logy, whereas the three further objections I will canvass now reject the claim that theo-logy is the essence of religion. The three antitheological lines of argument I will investigate now are distinct in that each understands the non-doxastic element which constitutes the essence of religion in a different way. I will call the first of these three anti-theological approaches the ‘socio-ethnological’. Even rather narrow-minded philosophers must admit that most religions are not exclusively sets of beliefs and argument, but also social institutions: systems of practices, rites, rituals, ceremonies, and habitual forms of behaviour. An old tradition in philosophy in fact defines the ‘essence’ of any phenomenon as that which is invariant in it in a variety of circumstances over time. If one were to take this philosophical view seriously one would have to locate the essence of religion in these practices and rituals, not in dogmas. The second approach I wish to mention starts not from social institutions, but from purported features of human psychology. Those who take this second approach claim that there are religious feelings or experiences that are qualitatively different from other kinds of experiences or feelings.1 These religious experiences are ones in which a non-human reality is directly present to or for us, and as such they are the origin and the first element of religion.2 They are by their very nature ‘extraordinary’ experiences, they represent extreme departures from the kinds of experiences we have in our everyday life, and they inherently resist simple, direct linguistic expression, or at any rate direct linguistic expression that would be in any way adequate to their content. They have an element of the confrontation with the unknowable and uncontrollable.

32 Usefulness and Uselessness of Religious Illusions

Finally they have a certain highly characteristic emotional timbre: a mixture of high anxiety and overwhelming admiration.3 Religious statements, then, are by their very nature doomed attempts to react in an appropriate way to inherently non-rationalisable experiences. Rites, rituals, and ceremonies are also attempts to deal practically with phenomena that are the locus of extreme states of anxiety. One strategy which seems to have been rather successful, because it is found in a wide variety of different times and places is the separation of the conceptual, spatio-temporal, and social world into two distinct spheres: the profane, everyday, secular on the one hand, and the sacred, numinous, taboo, on the other. By maintaining a rigid distinction between the two spheres and inflexible rules about the access to the sacred and the way in which it is treated, one hopes to calm an anxiety which might otherwise spread in a paralysing way. The archaic formulae and rigid, stereotyped rituals that are characteristic of many religions are an expression of the primordial anxiety from which religions originally arose in pre-historic times. To be sure, Freud points out that feelings all by themselves cannot constitute a religion. Even assuming that feelings are of central importance, religions strictly so called arise only from interpretative reactions to particular experiences.4 Nietzsche seems to agree with this when he speaks of religion as an interpretation (or mis-interpretation) of a set of physio-psychological phenomena.5 This is no doubt true, but might be thought slightly to miss the point. To what extent, after all, can one hold sharply to a distinction between a feeling and an interpretation of a feeling? Do humans ever really have clinically pure, fully pre-doxastic feelings? Isn’t it more plausible to think that feeling/reaction/interpretation form a spectrum with unclear and shifting boundaries? The third anti-theological approach focuses not so much on the origin of religion, as on its goal, or end. What is most important in understanding religions is neither institutions, nor theological doctrines, nor phenomena of individual (or collective) psychology, but rather a particular human task and various attempts to discharge that task. Religion is concerned with human attitudes towards the whole of life, with the control of anxiety, the production of a sense of security, the satisfaction of the ‘metaphysical need’, the attempt to find, discover, or construct a sense or meaning of life. The attempt to give a theodicy or satisfy the metaphysical need is what defines religion. This way of thinking about religion is completely different from that which focuses on the origin of religion in certain feelings or experiences, although reference to certain feelings of insecurity or anxiety may play a role in both approaches.

Raymond Geuss 33

It is one thing to say that an anxiety-tinged experience will give me some kind of quasi-cognitive way of encountering a non-human form of being, and quite another to say that anxiety might be part of the motivation I have (or ‘humanity’ has) to set myself (or ‘itself’) a task. This approach centring on theodicy and the metaphysical need also is sharply to be distinguished from the traditional one which emphasises theology as a descriptive or explanatory ontological discipline. For the theologian the propositional content (and the truth) of assertions of religious dogma are what is essential, whereas for those who take the approach under discussion now what is important is the suitability of certain statements to satisfying the metaphysical need or helping us solve the riddle of life. Why not assume, Nietzsche asks, that, for instance appearance (‘Schein’) or fiction, is more suitable than truth is to discharge the requisite function? Even if ‘truth’ and not mere belief, is a necessary condition for satisfying religious needs, the ‘truth’ seems here to have a functional, not, as for philosophic theology, a constitutive significance. Furthermore, even if some truth is functionally necessary, it does not follow that it must be a truth about gods. Buddhism, again, is an incontrovertible counterexample here. All four of the approaches I have just canvassed (religion as theology, as form of social organisation, as form of experience, as attempted solution to the riddle of life) share in their more primitive forms a common assumption, namely that there is such a thing as a timeless essence of religion which can be formulated in a definition of religion. Nietzsche, Wittgenstein und Foucault have, each in his own way, subjected this assumption to massive criticism, so it is, to say the least, no longer unproblematic. As Nietzsche famously asserts: ‘Only that which has no history can be defined’,6 and religions, no matter what else might or might not be true of them are eminently historical. Even at their most unitary they are configurations, contingent syntheses of historically changing elements. No definition can give an adequate account of the sorts of things they are, or tell us how to understand them. The definition of a concept was supposed minimally to give us a strict criterion for distinguishing those things to which the concept applied from those to which it did not. The definition contains a specification of a property or a small and surveyable set of properties which all the positive instances of the concept have and which nothing else has which is not an instance of the concept. It is perhaps possible to give a definition in this sense of non-historical concepts. A triangle is always and everywhere a closed geometric figure that has three sides. Historical concepts like ‘religion’ have a completely different structure. What we

34 Usefulness and Uselessness of Religious Illusions

call a ‘religion’ might not at all be any kind of unitary entity, but we might use the term to refer to a variety of different kinds of thing, each one an internally heterogeneous congeries of diverse components brought into conjunction only by the accidents of history. When we speak of ‘religion’ we might have in mind a few instances which we hold to be paradigmatic, for instance Christianity, Buddhism, a certain idealised conception of ‘ancient polytheism’. These instances might have no common essence, no set of properties and features which they all share and which are shared by nothing that is not a religion. They might rather have at best a ‘family resemblance’. To understand a certain religion does not mean therefore to discern in what way the (general) essence of religion has been concretely instantiated but rather to tell the story of the events that have led to the contingent conjunction of ceremonies, forms of ecclesiastical organisation, theological views, and customs which we call, for instance, ‘Islam’, ‘Christianity’, ‘Baha’i’. The philosophical discussion of religion should, therefore, not start from the search for a definition but from a natural history of religion, just as Nietzsche’s ‘science of morality’ starts from a natural history of morality.7 Adopting the perspective of a natural history of the many varieties of religion makes the problem of criticism more complex than it was during the eighteenth century in the period of the High Enlightenment. If there were a unique essence of religion, there would be a clear target for philosophical criticism. If, however, a ‘religion’ is a historically changing constellation of diverse elements, it is not so obvious where a fatal blow can be struck. There has always been criticism of individual points of religious practice and much of this criticism can itself plausibly be claimed to arise from religious motives, and is therefore in no sense part of a radical criticism of religion itself – the Puritan iconoclasts who destroyed the stained glass in East Anglian churches certainly did not think of themselves as attacking ‘religion’, and indeed that would be a slightly bizarre way for us nowadays to try to make sense of what they were doing. In the eighteenth century general criticism of religion was two-fold. On the one hand there was social criticism of the church as an institution; then, there was criticism of theology, as a discipline purportedly concerned with knowledge of things divine. Criticism of established churches, theology, and the clergy is not necessarily also criticism of religion itself. ‘L’infame’ which progressive thinkers in the eighteenth century vowed to root out, was not the popular religious belief of ordinary Frenchmen and Frenchwomen; Voltaire after all, thought it morally highly problematic and politically

Raymond Geuss 35

undesirable to enlighten the common people completely. Nor was l’infame the abstract deism of the philosophers. What roused the fury of enlightened Europe was the attempt on the part of a devious and selfinterested clerical hierarchy to exercise secular domination over the population through obscurantist mystification. Intensive criticism of the church as a social (and thus political) institution was also an established inner constituent of various very highly developed religious movements in the West, and in no way an expression of anti-religious sentiments. The criticism of theology can see itself as the direct heir of a philosophical tradition that goes back to Xenophanes. If religion is essentially theology, and the kernel of theology is a set of dogmatic beliefs or assertions about god(s), then criticism is simple. All one needs to do is show that these assertions are false or that they are groundless, or that they are ‘illusions’ (that is, they have extra-epistemological motivation). In the first of these cases the appropriate conclusion to be drawn would be atheism; in the second and third cases it would be scepticism, agnosticism or some other form of suspension of belief. Freud’s own basic attitude in matters of religion seems to have been one of relative straightforward rationalist unbelief; he held that religious dogmas were illusions, that is, not necessarily false, but rationally completely unmotivated convictions. The reasons why people believe them have little or nothing to do with the normal reasons that operate in the rational forms of empirical belief-formation we find, for instance in the sciences. If we were to allow the mechanisms of responsibly controlled formation of beliefs to operate as freely as they do in serious scientific enquiries, and were able to face accepting the results, we would have no truck at all with any form of religious belief. What disturbs the normal functioning of this mechanism is the urgency of some powerful components of our wish-structure. Religious belief, in short, is a kind of wishful thinking. We want to believe that there is an omnipotent, benevolent agency in charge of the universe, and the wish is the father of the belief. This seems to take us back to the questions addressed in the third anti-theological approach to religion. What is the task of religion? Can the need to discharge this task have any special urgency or any justificatory power? What human needs does religion satisfy? To put the point slightly differently: if we put aside the church as a social institution and also put aside theology, what remains as the object of a radical criticism of religion? What remains would seem to be what has been called variously ‘the metaphysical need’, ‘the need for finding out the meaning of life’, ‘the need for a higher orientation’ or ‘the need for a theodicy’.

36 Usefulness and Uselessness of Religious Illusions

The full-blown metaphysical need, as it was described in the Christian philosophical theology of the early modern period can only be understood by correctly grasping the three elements that were to be purportedly brought together when it is satisfied: (a) a metaphysical element, (b) an element of reconciliation, and (c) consolation. The metaphysical is that which is purportedly beyond normal experience, transcendent, a reality behind, beyond, or outside of our empirical world. Those who hold that all humans have a metaphysical need, believe that we have an uncontrollable urge to know what is beyond the bounds of our everyday experience, and to find there a standpoint which will allow us to see the reality of the world we live in and of our lives. Only when we see the ‘reality’ of our lives and are able to locate them within a scheme that is not immediately accessible to everyday experience or knowable by science, can we see what meaning they could possibly have. The metaphysical need is the need for a kind of transcendentally grounded orientation in life which can be satisfied only by knowing what lies behind or beyond appearances. The second aspect of the metaphysical need was of special interest to Freud. The orientation in life which religiously mediated access to the ‘world beyond’ gives must also satisfy a further requirement. For Freud human civilisation imposes a very extensive set of prohibitions on all of us as a precondition of its survival. The real function of religious belief is to reconcile us with the deprivations, the repression, and the forms of renunciation of the satisfaction of powerful human drives that are necessary if civilisation is to maintain itself.8 The need for a metaphysical world view is the need for a way of coming to accept our painful social and cultural reality. Third, it is not sufficient for religion, as it were, to tell us a metaphysical fairy tale which makes everything in the world make sense to us, tells us what to do, and shows us that it all is necessary and must be accepted. In addition, a religion must offer some positive compensatory satisfaction, some imaginary happiness or image of possible happiness that will make up for all the real pain and deprivation we must suffer.9 Religion must itself be or provide some positive source of pleasure to humans beings who will inevitably be forced by nature and society to suffer. If we then abstract from all the other aspects of religion and consider it merely as an attempt to satisfy the metaphysical need, is it beyond criticism? There would seem to be two possible tacks a critic could take. One could try to criticise the metaphysical need itself or the way in which this need is satisfied by religions.

Raymond Geuss 37

One might object that the first of these makes no sense. What would it mean to criticise a need? One either has a need or one does not, period.10 That is not, however, the end of the story because one can reasonably speak of criticism of needs in at least three senses. First of all I can criticise the claim ‘X is a human need’. It might simply not be the case that all humans, as the devotees of religion claim, need transcendentally based solace. Second, one can criticise something which purports to be a unitary human need, if one can dissolve it into constituent parts. It isn’t that there is a single need-for-consolationthrough-metaphysics, but rather we have a natural human tendency to wish to see as much of the world in as interconnected a way as possible, a need for a general scheme to orient us in our life, and a need for consolation for various deficiencies, imperfections, and forms of suffering that are the concomitants of many human lives, but these three separate things are not necessarily connected in the particular way the doctrine of the ‘metaphysical need’ requires. Third, it is possible for humans to develop needs that they might have avoided acquiring. I can criticise a certain need, for instance the need for drugs, alcohol, the particular kind of stimulation provided by gambling, by reference to their deleterious effect on other important aspects of human life, or I can criticise a particular person who by virtue of his own action develops needs that it would have been better for him not to have acquired, or I can criticise a society because it is structured in such a way that many people in it are not prevented from, or are even actively encouraged in developing highly undesirable needs. In the criticism of the metaphysical need, Nietzsche and Freud are allies. In two relatively early works, Nietzsche analyses the metaphysical need as a historically transitory phenomenon that arose under perfectly comprehensible conditions and is now in the process of dissolving itself.11 Freud’s criticism is couched in the language of the scientific naturalism which he generally favoured. It is, he thinks, in no way necessary to posit anything ‘outside’ the empirical reality which science studies. Science itself is fully sufficient to give us secure orientation in life and a sense of meaning. Religious justifications for cultural prescriptions and demands can be completely replaced with no loss of effectiveness by rational ones,12 and religious illusions are in any case a highly unsatisfactory source of pleasure for rational human agents. Freud seems in fact even to be uncharacteristically optimistic: religion will dissolve itself and disappear if left to its own devices because ‘in the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience’.13

38 Usefulness and Uselessness of Religious Illusions

Freud’s argument seems to be an expression of a very strong confidence in science, human reason, and our capacity to distinguish very sharply, very clearly, and incontrovertibly between ‘scientific’ forms of opinionformation and wishful thinking or illusion. It also seems to rest on a very robust confidence in the psychological power of science to convince people and allow them effectively to resist the lures of the obscure and at best only partially articulated desires that lurk within us. Freud’s own life shows very strikingly that it is possible for science or a ‘scientific world view’ to be powerful enough in exceptional cases to provide humans with all the ‘orientation’ in life they require. The scientific world view, however, is a world view, that is, it is closer to a philosophical stance than to a specific scientific theory. Is the distinction between science and illusion really as clear, sharp, and well grounded as Freud seems to suppose? ‘No, our science is no illusion’ he writes at the end of the Future of an Illusion, but he gives no reason for this claim.14 Freud himself, however, was one of those who taught us most persistently to be extremely sceptical of claims put forward like this with great conviction but without any cited justification. This is one point on which Freud and Nietzsche part company. Nietzsche had the highest esteem for empirical science, although he also pointed out that the systematic pursuit of scientific knowledge arose from a historically contingent ‘will to truth’ that was in various ways problematic. It seems likely that Nietzsche would have taken the views Freud expresses when he is being philosophical as an instance of the naive faith in science which Nietzsche was trying to call into question. The term ‘need’ is used in a number of different ways. In everyday life, for instance, ‘I need X’ can mean simply that I desire X intensely (and do not propose to tell you why). Two further senses of ‘need’ are, however, more immediately relevant here. First of all, it is used in a purely formal way to designate an instrumental relation that holds between some object in the world and a desire or want that I have. Thus, I ‘need’ a Latin dictionary because I wish to discover what some word means. This means that I do in fact wish to discover what the word in question means, that having a Latin dictionary will allow me to satisfy that wish, and that there is no other way in which I could equally efficiently satisfy that need in the given context – I don’t know the word myself, no other Latinists are standing by to be consulted, and so on. Assigning such a ‘need’ is highly relative to a particular context. The second way in which ‘need’ is used is one that adds to the above account that the wish or desire in question is not merely whimsical, but in some sense ‘vital’, or that the purpose to which I wish to put the object I claim to

Raymond Geuss 39

need is urgent and objectively compelling. I will call this need in the ‘strict’ sense. One can imagine someone denying that I really ‘need’ a Latin dictionary – at any rate I clearly do not ‘need’ it in the sense in which I ‘need’ a certain amount of water each week to drink if I am not to die. In both of these cases it is the instrumental structure connecting the object needed with some human wish, desire, purpose or end that is the focus of attention in a need claim. Ascribing a need automatically marks out a sphere of utility, because there is nothing so ‘useful’ as that which one needs. The category of the ‘useful’, however, extends beyond the realm of that which anyone ‘needs’ in the strict sense. I can find things ‘useful’ that are not essential to my well-being, provided that they subtend to promoting recognisable purposes or satisfying comprehensible human desires. Religion and Critical Theory have in common that they both deny that ‘utility’, that fundamental category of the Enlightenment, ought to have universal dominion over human life. Religion is inherently disconnected from the instrumental. The sacred is in no way useful, and the religious separation between the realm of ‘taboo’ and the profane sphere of everyday objects that can be used ad libitum sets a limit to utilitarian forms of thinking. Magic is (empirically poorly supported) action directed towards clearly utilitarian goals; religious actions are supposed not to be either useful or useless, but rather to belong to a sphere in which this distinction makes little sense.15 The metaphysical need, its supporters claim, ought not to be understood as a need for something which is ‘useful’, certainly not for anything that is instrumentally useful, but rather for something that has meaning and value in itself. In his programmatic statement of the aims of Critical Theory, Horkheimer claimed that it had no interest in improving the way in which anything in contemporary society functions.16 That, of course, is in principle compatible with thinking that what needs to be done is replacing contemporary society with another society that ‘functions’ in an altogether superior way. So the opposition of the Critical Theory to narrow forms of utilitarian thinking – what is better for the functioning of this society, or what is useful for humans, given that they live in this society – does not necessarily imply a general rejection of principles of utility. To be sure, at some point, as criticism of society becomes more and more radical, purported commitment to potential ‘usefulness’ will begin to ring hollow. I can ask whether one type of thermos is more useful on a trip than another, but once I begin to ask whether it is more useful for me to live or die, or for human society to exist at all or not, the question loses whatever sharp contours it might originally have had. In any case,

40 Usefulness and Uselessness of Religious Illusions

to put it in the paradoxical way that seemed natural to some of the earlier members of the Frankfurt School, the value of Critical Theory as a form of contemporary philosophising consisted precisely in the fact that it was utterly ‘useless’ in all the usual senses of the term. The same was also supposed to be true of the other two successors of Hegel’s absolute spirit – art and religion. What for the rationalists of the Enlightenment, and particularly for utilitarians, was one of the main objections to religions – their apparent complete uselessness – is, or at any rate could potentially be, an advantage in the eyes of Critical Theory. Religion does not fit into the modern world of universal functionality, and thus could, under some circumstances, become a bulwark against it. That religion is a stumbling block to the full development of fundamental features of modernity is not in itself a clearly sufficient reason to celebrate or even tolerate it. Not every relic of archaic times is a potential source of resistance to the present. To rehabilitate religion, Critical Theory would have to point out some distinctive features of it that have particular value. As far as I can see, the members of the Frankfurt School see two such features. First of all, religions are imaginative repositories of certain human values and aspirations which they express in a utopian form, and which humans would otherwise risk losing track of.17 Second, religion cultivates the metaphysical need and keeps open the possibility of transcendence,18 without which radical criticism of society would not be possible. Oddly enough, some crypto-protestant motifs rear their ugly heads in this context, especially in some of the later writings of Horkheimer. The possibility of a society that would be utterly different from any we know is, Horkheimer says, not an object of any possible knowledge, only of a ‘longing’. How is such a ‘longing’ to be distinguished from Christian ‘faith’? Is it in fact true that only transcendental metaphysics renders radical social criticism possible? If religion is no longer to have as its main task to provide comfort and consolation, but is rather to call constantly for resistance, it has become inherently political in a very definite sense. What could the political relevance of a religion oriented around ‘longing’ be in the contemporary world? The ‘classic’ form of the Critical Theory developed by Adorno and Horkheimer has three characteristic features: (1) it maintains a firm grip on liberal taboos about the human subject, (2) it is committed to the continued cultivation of the metaphysical need, and (3) it exhibits a paralysing and paranoid fear of instrumental reason. In all three of these respects it shows itself to be very similar to well-known properties of archaic religions. In contrast, philosophers who see themselves as the successors of Nietzsche and Foucault have no generalised fear of

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instrumental reason. They are willing to treat the liberal subject as one good among others, not as a fetish surrounded by a massive hedgework of taboos. Finally they have little interest in the metaphysical need except as an object of historical curiosity. This is the reason so many of our contemporaries believe that Nietzsche and Foucault are the true ‘progressive’ heirs of the Enlightenment, whereas the representatives of the Critical Theory often run the risk, to modify a phrase of Nietzsche’s, of choking while remasticating theological absurdities, or, like Jürgen Habermas, of becoming the conformist apologists of the liberal social order in which we at the moment are forced to live.

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Part II Constructions of Religious Experience

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3 Emerging ‘Orders’: The Contemporary Relevance of Religion and Teaching in Walter Benjamin’s Early Thought* Pierfrancesco Fiorato

Wir wissen ja nicht, weißt du, wir wissen ja nicht, was gilt.1 Paul Celan In an attempt to comprehend Walter Benjamin’s interest in religion and religiosity, I will primarily refer to those texts in which he explicitly discusses – and allocates a central role to – religion.2 Rather than starting with any established concept of religion, I will be guided by Benjamin’s own texts, from which I will quote extensively. Just what Benjamin may have meant by ‘religion’ is one of the questions to which the reflections which follow are intended to provide an answer. The task is not an easy one. The emphatic demands that Benjamin makes on religion in various writings between 1912 and 1922 are not supported by any real attempt at a clear definition. Indeed, one has the impression that a certain vagueness is itself an essential part of his argument. The religion of which Benjamin speaks is not an existing one, * Translated by Lasdilaus Löb. 45

46 Emerging ‘Orders’

but a religion of the future, which is passionately anticipated, but which as yet reveals no clear characteristics. In his 1912 ‘Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart’ (‘Dialogue on the religiosity of the present’) Benjamin speaks of the ‘germs of a future religiosity’ and claims to be living in the ‘heroic age of a new religion’ (WBGS II.1, 26). Ten years later, in ‘Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus’, he is still discussing ‘future religious orders’, although he adds: Not as if such orders were already visible on the horizon. What is visible is the fact that without them, none of the things that are struggling for life can make their appearance and mark these days as the first of a new epoch. [SW I, 294] The fact that Benjamin describes such as yet invisible ‘orders’ as ‘religious’ again confronts us with the question of the criteria for such a description. In the fragment ‘Capitalism as Religion’ (1921), Benjamin uses the cautious distancing formula ‘the so-called religions’ to describe something of the past that basically had a mere pacifying or compensatory function. Thus he sums up his thesis as follows: ‘A religion may be discerned in capitalism – that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers’ (SW I, 288, emphasis P. F.). However, one must not be deceived by Benjamin’s critical emphasis: his phrasing leaves open the question whether there might not be another religion that could not be reduced to such a function. At any rate, not many years earlier Benjamin was actively engaged in the project of writing a ‘De vera religione’ in those terms. In his ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’ (1917–18), we read: Philosophy is based upon the fact that the structure of experience lies within the structure of knowledge and is to be developed from it. This experience, then, also includes religion, as the true one, in which neither God nor man is object or subject of experience but in which this experience depends on pure knowledge, as the quintessence of which alone philosophy can and must think God.3 I will discuss the characteristics that ‘On the Program’ attributes to religion later. However, we may note at this point that Benjamin is not concerned with any one of the ‘historical religions’, but with a kind of religion that can become possible only if one fully commits oneself to

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one’s own time. He had already made the same point in his 1912 dialogue on religiosity, where he argued that it was necessary to inquire ‘about the religion of the time’ rather than ask ‘whether any of the historical religions could still be accommodated in it’ (WBGS II.1, 34). In ‘Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus’ – written one year after ‘Capitalism as Religion’ – Benjamin refers to ‘future religious orders’ in connection with the key concept of true ‘contemporary relevance’ (‘Aktualität’). On the one hand, he argues that the ‘vocation of a journal is to proclaim the spirit of its age’ (SW I, 292); on the other hand, he states that a journal can satisfy the demands of ‘intellectual universality’ implicit in its project only by means of a philosophical ‘treatment’ of its topics. It is in this context that he considers the problem of ‘the universal validity of spiritual utterances’ together with the question ‘whether they can lay claim to a place within future religious orders’. To Benjamin this alone provides a ‘touchstone’ for their ‘true contemporary relevance’: This philosophical universality is the touchstone that will enable the journal to demonstrate its true contemporary relevance most accurately. In its eyes, the universal validity of spiritual utterances must be bound up with the question of whether they can lay claim to a place within future religious orders. [SW I, 294] This is one of the earliest formulations of the central concept of contemporary relevance that can be traced through all the different phases of Benjamin’s thought. For example, he discusses it in the first version of his ‘Prologue’ to The Origin of German Tragic Drama (written in 1925), where he talks in religious or at least theological terms about ‘the discovery of the contemporary relevance of a phenomenon as a representative of forgotten connections of revelation’ (WBGS I.3, 936), and he returns to it in the late notes of the Arcades Project, where he conceives contemporary relevance as the ‘force field’ in which the historical dialectic is ‘played out’.4 The expression ‘the now of recognisability’, which will serve to articulate the notion of contemporary relevance through to the preliminary work for ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940),5 appears for the first time in an epistemological fragment of 1920–21, where Benjamin tersely declares: ‘Truth consists in the “now of recognisability” .’6 When reading his remarks, quoted above, about the problem of ‘universal validity’ in ‘Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus’ we must not forget the brief note he jotted down a year earlier: “The now of recognisability is

48 Emerging ‘Orders’

the logical time, which must be justified in place of timeless validity. Perhaps the concept of “general validity” belongs in the same context’ (WBGS VI, 46). In ‘On the Program’ the relationship between validity and temporality holds a central position in the complex argument that the ‘coming philosophy’ is to adopt.7 This is already apparent in the first pages, where Benjamin draws up the general outlines of his project, starting with the statement that universal philosophical interest is continually directed toward both the timeless validity of knowledge and the certainty of a temporal experience which is regarded as the immediate, if not the only, object of that knowledge. [SW I, 100–1] What is particularly relevant to ‘On the Program’ is that this experience, in its total structure, ‘had simply not been made manifest to philosophers as something singularly temporal’ (SW I, 101). The tension between the cognitive claim to ‘timeless validity’ on the one hand and a ‘singularly temporal’ experience that demands appropriate recognition on the other is the fundamental assumption of the whole essay. It is already implied in what is presented at the beginning as the ‘central task of the coming philosophy’, namely ‘to take the deepest intimations it draws from our times and our expectation of a great future, and turn them into knowledge by relating them to the Kantian system’ (SW I, 100). Indeed, it is only the assumption of such a tension that makes it possible to appreciate the full extent of the task that Benjamin ultimately only feels able to fulfil by introducing the concept of ‘teaching’, as he does towards the close of the essay: Thus, the demand upon the philosophy of the future can ultimately be put in these words: to create on the basis of the Kantian system a concept of knowledge to which a concept of experience corresponds, of which the knowledge is the teachings. [SW I, 108] Before discussing the consequences of the philosophically ambitious new approach of ‘On the Program’ and examining the meaning of Benjamin’s concept of teaching – which, according to Gershom Scholem, was closely connected with that of ‘order’ and lay at the heart of Benjamin’s interest in the ‘religious sphere’8 – I will consider ‘Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart’, in order to show how the questions sketched above are already visible in that text by the twenty-year old

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adherent of the Youth Culture Movement. As suggested, these questions, which were adumbrated as a central concern in Benjamin’s reflections on the problem of religion between 1912 and 1922, would survive in his later work in a no longer explicitly religious form. ‘Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart’ and ‘On the Program’ are fundamentally different in kind, which makes a comparison between the two texts extremely difficult. In ‘On the Program’, which was written five years later, Benjamin draws up the plan of a yet to be undertaken epistemological foundation of the concept of religious experience with reference to Kant and Hermann Cohen, while in the earlier text he conducts his ‘dialogue on the religious feeling of our time’9 primarily with reference to contemporary literature. Disparate as these texts may appear to be at first sight, the guiding principle of Benjamin’s interest in religion, as we have recognised it in the ‘Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus’ – written ten years after the dialogue on religiosity – provides them with a common core.

1

A ‘dialogue on the religious feeling of our time’

Initially, the most striking instance of continuity between ‘Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart’ and ‘On the Program’ is the fact that in both the religious element is defined in contrast to the mechanical. The ‘Program’ explicitly places ‘religious experience’ in opposition to ‘mechanical’ experience, conceiving the central concern of the ‘coming philosophy’ as the creation of a concept of knowledge that ‘makes not only mechanical but also religious experience logically possible’ (SW I, 105). In ‘Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart’ it would be pointless to look for any theory of religious experience. In 1912, Benjamin had not developed any demand for a separate, positive theory of experience, and a year later he was even to ‘mobilise’ all ‘the rebellious forces of youth against the word “experience” ’.10 Nevertheless, the opposition of the religious and the mechanical dimension appears fairly near the beginning of the dialogue on religiosity, where Benjamin quotes, adopts and claims to interpret Kant’s definition of religion: Religion is the recognition of our duties as divine commands, says Kant. This means that religion guarantees us something eternal in our daily work, and that is what is needed above all else. [WBGS II.1, 20] In Benjamin’s view the ‘degradation of all work to the technical’ (WBGS II.1, 20) and the hopeless entanglement of the personality ‘in the social

50 Emerging ‘Orders’

mechanism’ (WBGS II.1, 26), which ‘makes man a work machine’ (WBGS II.1, 20), will give rise to the ‘religiosity of the future’: ‘From this need a religion will grow’ (WBGS II.1, 26). ‘We live in need’ is Benjamin’s diagnosis of his time (WBGS II.1, 33). But if one is ‘serious about today’11, one must take this need as something ‘morally necessary’ (WBGS II.1, 33) without ‘setting one’s own accidental nature above historical necessity’ (WBGS II.1, 27). The need of the individual who suffers from the ‘dualism of social morality and personality’ (WBGS II.1, 26), but does not try to ‘escape from the personality’ (WBGS II.1, 32), is set by Benjamin against the ‘pantheistic attitude to life’ in the name of ‘honesty’ and identified as the birthplace of the new religion: Religions […] come from need and not from happiness. And if a pantheistic attitude to life praises this pure negativity, this self-loss and self-alienation as being absorbed in social existence, this is untrue. [WBGS II.1, 25] In contrast to such a facile embrace of the social, our task is to comprehend the need in which we live in moral terms. Benjamin summarises this task by exclaiming: ‘Let us once more spiritualise the need into virtue!’ (WBGS II.1, 33). The expression ‘to spiritualise’ (‘durchgeistigen’) is repeatedly used in the dialogue on religiosity to describe the work of the religion of the future.12 According to Benjamin this is not be understood as a pantheistic or ‘monistic’ glossing over conflicts. In opposition to the monists’ renewed invocation of the unity of spirit and nature, and the hypocrisy of the ‘flower days’ (WBGS II.1, 19) accompanying it, Benjamin stands by the ‘honesty of dualism’: ‘I simply do not believe in the religious sublimity of knowledge. […] I believe in our own scepticism, our own despair.’13 As Deuber-Mankowsky writes, ‘dualism in Benjamin’s sense does not refer to a system of oppositions, but to the experience of dividedness that underlies the setting up of oppositions’.14 The religion of the future is not to console us about existing conflicts but, on the contrary, should itself be understood as a new challenge in addition to ‘the prevailing social misery’ and its ‘flood of unresolved problems’ (WBGS II.1, 30). Benjamin counters the tendency to ‘shirk’ the ‘severity of the religious problem’ (WBGS II.1, 31) and to ‘escape from the honesty of dualism at the twelfth hour’ (WBGS II.1, 32) with his new concept of religion: ‘Religion is based on a dualism’ (WBGS II.1, 22). There is not much that can be said about this religion of the future in advance. At the end of ‘Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart’

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Benjamin is obliged to confess ‘that we can say nothing about the god and the teaching of this religion and little about its cultic life’ (WBGS II.1, 34). Still, ‘little’ is more than nothing. The reference to ‘cultic life’ must not be underestimated: it is an important sign of what was central to Benjamin’s expectations of religion, for it is only through ‘cultic life’ that religion ultimately seems able to provide ‘what is needed above all else’.15 If we search the dialogue on religiosity for any indications of the way in which ‘something eternal’ may be guaranteed for ‘our daily work’ we come upon the passages dealing with the question of how we can ‘spiritualise the conventions’ or make them ‘serious and dignified’ (WBGS II.1, 29–30). In this context the problem of ‘cultic life’ proves to be central: ‘Religion provides everyday life, or convention, with a new basis and a new nobility. It becomes cult. Do we not thirst for spiritual, cultic conventions?’16 In diametrical opposition to the ‘flower days’ of the monists such a transformation of everyday life into cult is to take account of the conviction, shared by Benjamin, that ‘a divinity which is everywhere, which we associate with every experience and feeling, is a false glorification of feeling and a profanation’ (WBGS II.1, 22). Benjamin’s words are directed against any kind of aestheticism. It is no coincidence that the themes with which the discussion about the (ir)religiosity of the present began were the difficulty of ‘enjoying art with a good conscience in our time’ and the dissatisfaction with ‘art for art’s sake’ (WBGS II.1, 16–17). The concept of ‘feeling’ plays a much more important part in the 1912 dialogue on religiosity than in Benjamin’s later works: ‘Our religious feelings are free. […] And thus we equip untrue conventions and emotional circumstances with the useless energy of reverence’ (WBGS II.1, 30). In fact, however, Benjamin seeks ‘that feeling’ which ‘can provide a religious foundation for our communal life’ (WBGS II.1, 21), and this leads to a constant and intense critical engagement with the various forms of the ‘aesthetic view of life’, among which he includes pantheism and humanism in particular (WBGS II.1, 21). When ‘The Friend’ introduces ‘pantheistic feeling’ to compensate for the soullessness of the modern world, the speaker called ‘I’ replies that ‘the claim to decisive feelings’ (‘maßgebliche Gefühle’) must ‘be examined’: However honestly any individual may feel his pantheism, only poets are able to make it decisive and communicable. And a feeling that is only possible at the apogee of its representation no longer counts as religion. [WBGS II.1, 21]

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Therefore, when Benjamin subsequently characterises the work of art as ‘the only honest manifestation of pantheistic feeling’ (WBGS II.1, 22), this can only be understood as an indication of the religious inadequacy of pantheism: ‘In pantheism we can experience the supreme, most harmonious moments of happiness – but at no time does pantheism have the power to determine the moral life’ (WBGS II.1, 21–2). Benjamin’s objections to neo-Classicism, which he brands as ‘a phenomenon of aesthetic reaction’ to the dualism in Kant’s philosophy, sound similar: Classicism united spirit and nature one more time: it exercised the faculty of judgement and created that unity which can only ever be the unity of the moment, of ecstasy, of the great seers. We cannot experience it honestly, fundamentally. It cannot become the foundation of life. It constitutes the aesthetic apogee of life. [WBGS II.1, 32] Thus the art that may help us morally to comprehend the need in which we live will have to be of a different kind. Significantly, Benjamin cites the authority of Wilhelm Bölsche, the co-founder of the Berlin Freie Volksbühne (‘Free People’s Stage’) and committed apostle of Naturalism, in this respect: ‘Bölsche once said that art intuitively anticipates the general consciousness and sphere of life of later times’ (WBGS II.1, 27–8). It is in the context of these reflections on Naturalism that the most important statements concerning our topic are found in ‘Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart’, where we encounter for the first time a problem that will be reiterated in ‘Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus’ in almost identical words ten years later. The problem of the ‘universal validity of spiritual utterances’ of life – which will be considered in ‘Announcement’ in connection with the question whether such utterances can ‘lay claim to a place in future religious orders’ – is raised in the 1912 dialogue in relation to the discovery of ‘individual language’ by Naturalism. The merit of Naturalism, for Benjamin, lies in this discovery. He describes the way in which ‘our individual feeling is elevated by it’ as follows: ‘What moves us so much, when we read our first Ibsen or Hauptmann, is that our most commonplace and intimate utterance grants us a right in literature, in a valid world order ’ (WBGS II.1, 28, emphasis P. F.). This is what constitutes the relevance of Naturalism to the ‘neo-religious consciousness’ (WBGS II.1, 28): it is from the tension between everyday life and a ‘valid world order’ that the strength needed to ‘spiritualise the conventions’ will be drawn.

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However, we should not be led astray by this identification of the ‘valid world order’ with literature: at this point we are nowhere near a purely aesthetic enjoyment of art. Rather, we must ‘aspire to transform values into life, into conventions’, and it is this aspiration that singles out the contemporary ‘literary intelligentsia’, whom Benjamin therefore calls the ‘bearers of the religious spirit in our time’ (WBGS II.1, 29). Religion will once again ‘issue from the enslaved, and the class that bears this historical, necessary enslavement today is the literary intelligentsia’.17 It is they who care for the new ways of life that we have today recognised as being human, i.e. whose spirit we have discovered (in art). Their solemn mission is to generate spirit for the life of the time from art, which they themselves are unable to make.18 Ten years later, in ‘Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus’ – based on a diagnosis of the time which surprisingly sounds very similar to that of the pre-war period, and on the conviction that ‘the vocation of a journal is to proclaim the spirit of its age’ – Benjamin declares his intention to lend an ear not to those who imagine that they have already discovered the arcanum but to those who objectively, dispassionately, and unobtrusively give expression to hardship and need, if only because the journal is not a place for the great. [SW I, 294–5]

2 Benjamin’s programme of an epistemological foundation of ‘religious experience’ The name of Kant appears repeatedly in ‘Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart’. I have already mentioned the passage in which Benjamin quotes and adopts Kant’s definition of religion. However, with regard to ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’, the dialogue on religiosity contains an even more important passage, in which Benjamin claims to be able to identify the ‘moment’ of the foundation of this ‘new religion’ based on his acceptance of dualism: It was the moment when Kant opened up the gulf between sensibility and intellect, recognising in all that happened the reign of moral, practical reason. Humanity had awoken from its developmental sleep, and at the same time this awakening had taken its unity away. [WBGS II.1, 31–2]

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An attempt to attribute any more specific characteristics to this ‘Back to Kant’ in ‘Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart’ runs into considerable difficulties. The name of Kant seems to stand quite generally for the religious ‘dualism’ that Benjamin opposes to the ‘aesthetic view of life’. However, since he finds this dualism or, more precisely, a ‘strictly dualistic view of life’, also particularly strongly represented among Jews,19 it may be seen as fitting in with what Hermann Cohen, in a lecture of 1910, discussed under the heading of the ‘internal relations’ of Kant’s philosophy to Judaism.20 Under the concept of ‘dualism’ Benjamin combines ‘the experience of duality with systematic philosophical duality at the epistemological level’, as Deuber-Mankowsky has noted,21 and this is precisely where his concept of ‘honesty’ – which, being a characteristic of dualism, at the same time is supposed to represent the ‘unified moral concept’ of religion22 – meets the Kantian tradition. Significantly, in his systemtheoretical reflections Cohen had stated about the problem of truth that the ‘honesty of the new era rests on the simple insight, which cannot be covered up, that mathematical certainty is one thing and moral certainty another’.23 This systemtheoretical dimension of dualism will prove to be of far-reaching importance for Benjamin’s later development, although the crucial dualism will be not so much the ‘gulf between sensibility and intellect’ but rather that between ‘spirit and nature’, both of which were mentioned in the same context in ‘Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart’ without any distinction being made between them (cf. WBGS II.1, 31–2). In ‘On the Program’ Benjamin will propose to ‘eliminate the distinction between intuition and intellect’ as ‘a metaphysical rudiment like the whole theory of the faculties’24 while emphatically endorsing, however, Kant’s ‘distinction between the realms of nature and freedom’: no matter how necessary and inevitable it may be to reconstruct, on the basis of a new transcendental logic, the realm of dialectics, the realm of the crossover between the theory of experience and the theory of freedom, it is just as imperative that this transformation not end up in a confounding of freedom and experience […].25 It is precisely the distinction between experience and epistemological reflection – which is not carried out explicitly in ‘Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart’ – that provides the premise of ‘On the Program’. The phrase ‘epistemological foundation of a higher concept of experience’ expresses the new philosophical and methodological

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awareness that distinguishes ‘On the Program’ from Benjamin’s earlier project.26 Whether this new methodological awareness is supported by a clear and rigorous definition and use of the concept of ‘foundation’ may be left open for the time being. If one is to reconstruct the development of the essay’s argument correctly, rather than place exclusive emphasis on the theme of metaphysical experience, however central this may be, it is necessary to give proper consideration to Benjamin’s words, which in this respect could hardly be clearer: But it is not only with reference to experience and metaphysics that philosophy must be concerned with the revision of Kant. And methodically considered – that is, as true philosophy should consider it – the revision should begin not with reference to experience and metaphysics but with reference to the concept of knowledge. [SW I, 102] Accordingly, the fundamental premise already quoted above runs: ‘Philosophy is based upon the fact that the structure of experience lies within the structure of knowledge and is to be developed from it.’ If Benjamin immediately adds that this experience ‘also includes religion, as the true one’, he is thinking, more accurately, of ‘a new and higher experience yet to come’,27 for which the ‘epistemological foundation’ must prepare the ground: he describes the ‘realm of religion’ in this sense as the ‘foremost’ of those realms the systematic classification of which is to be achieved on the basis of the new concept of knowledge (SW I, 108). As we have seen, Benjamin’s main concern here is ‘to create on the basis of the Kantian system a concept of knowledge to which a concept of experience corresponds, of which the knowledge is the teachings’. That is how he paraphrases the demand he expressed at the beginning of ‘On the Program’ that philosophy ‘take the deepest intimations it draws from our times and our expectation of a great future, and turn them into knowledge by relating them to the Kantian system’. Thus it is the concept of ‘teaching’ that is to resolve the tension that arises for philosophy from the claim of knowledge to ‘timeless validity’ on the one hand and an experience that demands to be appropriately recognised in its ‘singularly temporal’ character on the other. As a new version of the ‘valid world order’, which ‘Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart’ sought in literature, the concept of ‘teaching’ at the same time points to the ‘future religious orders’ of the ‘Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus’. Writing about the

56 Emerging ‘Orders’

significance of ‘metaphysical knowledge’ in his letter of 31 January 1918 to Scholem, Benjamin establishes a connection between the concepts of ‘order’ and ‘teaching’: metaphysical defines that body of knowledge that a priori seeks to understand science as a sphere in the absolute divine context of order, whose highest sphere is teaching and whose quintessence and first cause is God. It is also the knowledge that views the ‘autonomy’ of science as reasonable and possible only within this context.28 As we already saw, Benjamin defined God as the ‘quintessence of pure knowledge’, maintaining that the experience which comprises religion is based on such ‘pure knowledge’. This definition unavoidably raises the problem of the specific systematic classification of religion, which greatly exercised Benjamin’s mind in the winter of 1917–18 after he had written ‘On the Program’. It was probably the need to deal with this point more fully that in March 1918 induced him to write an ‘Addendum’ to that essay, in which he primarily expresses his views on the relationship between philosophy and religion. Benjamin’s emphatic use of the term ‘quintessence’ (‘Inbegriff’) may perhaps be traced back to the influence of Cohen, whose understanding of the ‘thing-in-itself’ as the ‘quintessence of scientific insights’ plays a considerable part in his Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (‘Kant’s theory of experience’), which Benjamin read together with Scholem at the time.29 On the other hand, the problem of the systematic classification of religion was central to Cohen’s last work published in his lifetime, Der Begriff der Religion im System der Philosophie (‘The concept of religion in the system of philosophy’). In any case the examination of Cohen’s neo-Kantianism is the focus of ‘On the Program’, which can be regarded as an attempt to overcome, on the basis of some shared premises, what Benjamin regarded as the shortcomings of neo-Kantianism. In agreement with the new epistemological approach, philosophy should restrict itself to creating a new concept of knowledge. More specifically, Benjamin describes this task as a ‘purification of epistemology’: It should be made a tenet of the program of future philosophy that in the course of the purification of epistemology […] not only a new concept of knowledge but also a new concept of experience should be established, in accordance with the relationship Kant found between the two. [SW I, 104]

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This ‘purification of epistemology’ – which emerges here as a new strategic starting point – is supposed to provide a concept of knowledge that, as we already saw, Benjamin expects to make ‘not only mechanical but also religious experience logically possible’. In this context ‘logical possibility’ must not be understood as the mere formal logical principle of non-contradiction: rather, what Benjamin has in mind here is the concept of knowledge as the transcendental logical condition of experience. Benjamin’s one-sided emphasis on the logical element can be explained by the great value that he attributes to the neo-Kantian approach of a ‘logic of knowledge’: ‘In the development of philosophy called for and considered proper here, one symptom can already be detected in neo-Kantianism.’30 And this, although he knows full well that the ‘transformation of the concept of experience’ that came into being with neo-Kantianism consisted in the ‘extreme extension of the mechanical aspect of the relatively empty Enlightenment concept of experience’.31 This initially surprising fact can be better understood if one recognises that the ‘purification of epistemology’, referred to in ‘On the Program’, occurs primarily as destruction, that is, as ‘annihilation’ of the ‘metaphysical elements’ inherent in Kant’s theory of knowledge: In epistemology every metaphysical element is the germ of a disease that expresses itself in the separation of knowledge from the realm of experience in its full freedom and depth. The development of philosophy is to be expected because each annihilation of these metaphysical elements in an epistemology simultaneously refers it to a deeper, more metaphysically fulfilled experience. [SW I, 102] In this sense the programme of ‘epistemological foundation’ proves to be a primarily negative one. The intention is above all to remove any obstacles that would otherwise impede or prevent experience.32 It is precisely in relation to the negativity of his own programme that Benjamin sees an important ‘sign’ in the neo-Kantian tendency to ‘reduce all experience […] to scientific experience’ (SW I, 105) or, to use Helmut Holzhey’s expression, in the neo-Kantian ‘apriorisation of “experience” in the concept of scientific knowledge’.33 For, if Benjamin considers the ‘conception of knowledge as a relation between some sort of subjects and objects’ and the ‘relation of knowledge and experience to human empirical consciousness’ as ‘primitive elements of an unproductive metaphysics’ rooted in the mythology of the ‘subject nature of this cognizing consciousness’ (SW I, 102–3), he can find many points of reference in the fact that the abandonment of the subjective foundation

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of knowledge is already a characteristic of the neo-Kantian programme. Holzhey’s reconstruction of Hermann Cohen’s approach is instructive in this respect: From now on knowledge should no longer be explained as the activity of the cognising subject, but as an ‘experience that has become real in printed books’. This explanation should no longer assert any subjective factors of sensibility or thought, but principles, and as the ultimate ground of all knowledge the ‘unity of consciousness’, seen exclusively as the ‘expression of regularity within a single all-embracing experience’, that is, as law.34 The analogy between Cohen’s and Benjamin’s approaches is obvious when Benjamin claims on the one hand that the ‘task of the coming philosophy’ consists in the ‘discovery or creation of that concept of knowledge’ which makes religious experience logically possible ‘by relating experience exclusively to the transcendental consciousness’, and on the other hand that ‘pure transcendental consciousness is different in kind from any empirical consciousness’, even to the point of raising the question ‘whether the application of the term “consciousness” is allowable here’ (SW I, 104–5). However, for our discussion, the relationship that exists in Cohen between the ‘apriorisation of experience in the concept of scientific knowledge’ and the realisation of experience in ‘printed books’ is of far-reaching importance, for this apriorisation ties experience to the historical fact of science. Cohen stresses this even more in the second edition of Kants Begründung der Ethik (‘Kant’s foundation of ethics’), where he amplifies the passage quoted by Holzhey by speaking of an experience ‘given in printed books and realised in a history’.35 The polemics against ‘false apriorism’36 and the attempt ‘to guard the treasure of apriorism and to avoid its ambiguities’ pervade Cohen’s entire œuvre, which like few others tries to do justice to both the historical dependency and the historical openness of experience: The debate about how the fundamental concepts are to be formulated and arranged should be kept going, the expression ‘innate concepts’ being in itself an evil. This already makes it clear that the establishment of principles, in the sense that they form unalterable foundations of science, has been fended off. As science advances, it seeks and finds ever more profound and precise foundations in accordance with its material progress; therefore it must continually

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reformulate its principles and thus change its fundamental concepts in accordance with its history.37 Once the classical speculative attempt to recognise reason as such has been abandoned, this transcendental method remains the only way still open to thought in order to achieve clarity about both ‘the preconditions of its foundations’ and ‘the means at its disposal’.38 It is characteristic of Benjamin that in his note ‘Über die transzendentale Methode’ (‘On the transcendental method’) of summer 1918 he fiercely criticises the ‘influence of positivism’ among Kant’s successors without, however, dropping the decisive methodological gesture of transcendental philosophy: the fundamental mistake of Kant and his successors was, as Benjamin writes, their failure to ‘realise that the concepts to be examined are given by language and not by science’ (WBGS VI, 53). It was with this substitution of language for science in mind that already in 1917, at a decisive point in ‘On the Program’, he had introduced the necessity of ‘relating knowledge to language’ while announcing his intention to cling to the transcendental method, even though this was somewhat overshadowed by his reference to Johann Georg Hamann: Just as Kantian theory itself, in order to find its principles, needed to be confronted with a science with reference to which it could define them, modern philosophy for its part will need to be confronted with something. The great transformation and correction which must be performed upon the concept of experience, oriented so one-sidedly along mathematical-mechanical lines, can be attained only by relating knowledge to language, as was attempted by Hamann during Kant’s lifetime.39 The ‘reformulation of “experience” as “metaphysics” ’ (SW I, 109) in Benjamin corresponds to the neo-Kantian ‘apriorisation of “experience” in the concept of scientific knowledge’. Both are attempts not to obliterate the temporally determined nature of experience, but on the contrary, to gain appropriate recognition for it. In this context, ‘relating knowledge to language’ represents a decisive step. The ‘task of the coming philosophy’, which is to discover or create a concept of knowledge that also ‘makes religious experience logically possible’, ultimately demands a reflection on the linguistic nature of knowledge: A concept of knowledge gained from reflection on the linguistic nature of knowledge will create a corresponding concept of experience which

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will also encompass realms that Kant failed to truly systematize. The realm of religion should be mentioned as the foremost of these. [SW I, 108, emphasis P. F.] Benjamin sees in language the new ‘giving’ or even, in a wording of 1918, ‘offering fact’40 which will present the possibility of creating the required ‘continuum of experience’. The abandonment of the common concept of experience leaves a gap that the neo-Kantian ‘system of the sciences’ is unable to fill. For Benjamin it is precisely at this juncture that ‘metaphysics’ begins: Certainly Kant tended to avoid dividing and fragmenting experience into the realms of the individual sciences. Even if later epistemology has to deny recourse to commonly understood experience (such as occurs in Kant), on the other hand, in the interest of the continuity of experience, the representation of experience as the system of the sciences as the neo-Kantians have it is still unsatisfactory. A way must be found in metaphysics to form a pure and systematic continuum of experience; indeed it seems that the true significance of metaphysics is to be sought in this task.41 Indeed, such an ‘interest’ in the continuity of experience – the ‘neglect’ of which, Benjamin suspects, is ‘the failing of neo-Kantianism’ (SW I, 109) – may justify the transition to a ‘metaphysics’ that is to guarantee the possibility of that continuity. On the basis of what has been said so far, however, we cannot see how the interest is to provide the justification. This question is of considerable importance for our topic because the description of religion as the ‘foremost’ of the realms which the new concept of knowledge is to open up, or which the new concept of experience is to comprise, is inseparably connected to it. In an attempt to substantiate his approach, Benjamin cites a fact that he considers decisive, namely the fact that ‘all philosophical knowledge has its unique expression in language’. This fact, as he moreover argues, is the reason why ‘the systematic supremacy of philosophy over all science […] is to be asserted’ (SW I, 108). But the assumption of the linguistic nature of philosophical knowledge does not suffice to build a bridge to religion, or at least does not reveal the reasons why one should regard religion in particular as the foremost of the realms of experience that open up as a result of the new concept of knowledge. At this point the concept of ‘teaching’ becomes decisive. In an important note of 1917–18, Benjamin connects it with the concept of

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language, stating more explicitly his understanding of the fact that ‘language gives the concepts that are to be examined’. Referring to ‘Kant’s esoterics’ and believing ‘the reason of Kant’s mysticism’ to lie in the ‘tremendous intention of the symbolic impregnation of all knowledge’, Benjamin defines the ‘task of ontology’. The task of ontology is to charge cognitions with symbolic intention in such a manner that they lose themselves, are absorbed, in truth or teaching without, however, providing their justification, for their justification is revelation, language.42 At this point we are closer to Hermann Cohen’s rationalism than might appear at first sight. For Cohen, given his definition of revelation as ‘creation of reason’,43 the deepest meaning of all revelation as the assertion of the originary character (‘Ursprünglichkeit’) of reason lies precisely in the anti-mythological assumption of something unfathomable.44 Yet for Benjamin, too, language as ‘revelation’ only ‘gives’ the ‘concepts to be examined’.45 In this sense it merely represents the impassable horizon, within which the philosophical examination (accompanied by the awareness of its own dependent nature) can operate. In the ‘Addendum’ to ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’, Benjamin comments on the relationship between philosophy and teaching as follows: only in teaching does philosophy encounter something absolute, as existence, and in so doing encounter that continuity in the nature of experience. The failing of neo-Kantianism can be suspected in its neglect of this continuity. [SW I, 109] A few lines earlier he claimed, in neo-Kantian fashion, that ‘philosophy in its questionings can never hit upon the unity of existence, but only upon new unities of various conformities to laws, whose integral is “existence” ’. The apparent contradiction between these two statements, in which the problem of the relationship between experience and knowledge recurs in a pointed form for the last time, can only be resolved through a closer definition of the concept of teaching. Accordingly, the two statements are decisively linked, but hardly reconciled, by an abrupt ‘But there is …’. First Benjamin refers to the ‘real epistemological significance’ of the ‘original and primary concept of knowledge’,46 maintaining that through its specification in the sciences ‘the original and primary concept of knowledge does not reach a

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concrete totality of experience […] any more than it reaches a concept of existence’. And then he continues: But there is a unity of experience that can by no means be understood as a sum of experiences, to which the concept of knowledge as teaching is immediately related in its continuous development. The object and the content of this teaching, this concrete totality of experience, is religion, which, however, is presented to philosophy in the first instance only as teaching. [SW I, 109] On the one hand, the authoritarian gesture with which Benjamin brings the ‘concrete totality of experience’ into play cuts short any further questions as to why religion in particular should be regarded as the foremost realm of experience; on the other hand, the precise character of the relation of knowledge to the ‘totality of experience’, as which religion is eventually defined here, still remains open. Philosophy cannot refer immediately to the ‘concrete totality of experience’, which is presented to it ‘in the first instance only as teaching’, since it is ‘only in teaching’ that philosophy has been said to ‘encounter something absolute, as existence, and in so doing encounter that continuity in the nature of experience’. But if Benjamin also claims that ‘the concept of knowledge as teaching is immediately related’47 to such a unity of experience, this can only mean that teaching must have a mediating role and that at the same time in teaching a final limit of philosophical knowledge finds its expression. As such a limit, teaching represents the problematic form in which something is presented, or ‘given’, to philosophical thinking – and is given precisely as a problem – that otherwise lies beyond its horizon. The definition of religion as the ‘concrete totality of experience’ is closely linked to the earlier one of God as the ‘quintessence of pure knowledge’. Here ‘teaching’ seems most closely related to such a ‘quintessence’. For philosophy, precisely as epistemology, the ‘concrete totality of experience’ through teaching proves to be inexhaustible: its quintessence – an infinite task, just like the thing-in-itself for Cohen – is ‘of a higher power’ than anything that all the questions that are given and that may be asked can demand.48 As Scholem reports, Benjamin sometimes ‘used the terms system and teaching almost interchangeably’.49 However, for Benjamin it is ‘the unity of philosophy – its system’ that is ‘as an answer, of a higher order than the infinite number of finite questions that can be posed’.50 The enigma remains, but it remains philosophical: confronted with the problem of its systematic structure,

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philosophical thinking meets its own problematic nature.51 Thus, in ‘Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus’, too, ‘philosophical universality’ (emphasis P. F.) is seen as the touchstone that will enable the journal to demonstrate its true contemporary relevance most accurately. […] Golden fruits in silver bowls are not to be expected. Instead we shall aspire to rationality right to the end, and […] none but free spirits are to discuss religion.52

4 Religion, Experience, Politics: On Erich Unger and Walter Benjamin* Margarete Kohlenbach

Throughout the 1920s, Walter Benjamin took a great interest in the work of the Jewish religious philosopher Erich Unger, which he considered close to his own thought in some respects. Benjamin cites Unger’s understanding of the ‘psychophysical problem’ as an example of their common concerns, that is, Unger’s understanding of the problematic relationship between mind and body.1 In Unger and Benjamin, as in much of early twentieth-century German thought, the traditional problem of commercium mentis et corporis assumes a cultural and existential significance that transcends the intellectual interests of an exclusively scientific investigation into mental processes. First, the psychophysical problem figures in Unger’s and Benjamin’s attempts at developing a new concept of experience that would allow them to repudiate Kant’s relegation of religion to the realm of faith. Second, the psychophysical problem informs Unger’s and Benjamin’s understanding of ‘politics’ for they maintain that particular psychophysical conditions, or altered states of consciousness, are essential constituents of any ‘true’ form of politics. On the basis of the psychophysiological problem, Unger outlined a political realisation of religious experience in his book Politik und Metaphysik (1921). Having attended Unger’s lectures on the topic, Benjamin assumed that this book would be ‘the most significant piece of writing on politics in our time’.2 In what follows I shall reconstruct, compare and assess the religio-political thought of the two authors. * I am grateful to Dr Esther J. Ehrman (Jerusalem), Erich Unger’s daughter, for her kind and helpful answers to many questions concerning her father’s background. 64

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In section I, I shall treat their concept of ‘religious experience’; section II will be devoted to their understanding of ‘politics’. My comparison is intended to contribute to the research into the interrelations between early Critical Theory and the discourses of cultural critique and Lebensphilosophie (‘philosophy of life’) that were contemporary to it.3 It is also part of the current attempts at establishing a balanced account of the complex tradition of Lebensphilosophie, elements of which, of course, were appropriated by National Socialism.4

I In his Das Problem der mythischen Realität (‘The problem of mythical reality’) of 1926, which offers a philosophical introduction to Oskar Goldberg’s Pentateuch interpretation Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer (‘The reality of the Hebrews’), Unger characterises the orthodox understanding of the Jewish Bible with reference to the miraculous events reported in the Pentateuch.5 He argues that, as represented in the Bible, these events both run counter to the laws of nature and are open to the sense experience of the Hebrews. According to the orthodox understanding, the miraculous events are real and the biblical texts thus literally true. Unger emphasises that in contrast to the symbolic or psychological interpretations of biblical and other myths in modern theology and mythology, the realism of the orthodox understanding fulfils the requirements of a genuine religion. In principle, modern man could therefore gain a true, undiluted religion only by starting from an orthodox position. Yet modern Orthodoxy for its part is enclosed in a possibly self-deceptive and ‘somewhat contrived and artificial’ attitude of faith, which lacks the solid foundations of ‘objective experience’ and knowledge. In other words, the Hebrews’ sense experience that according to biblical representation permits a knowledge of the supernatural is not that of modern man, orthodox or not. This is the point at which we can formulate the ambitious programme that Unger came to pursue, with modifications, throughout his life: philosophical thought is to seek to identify the conditions in which man could objectively experience, and thus know, that which in modern religiosity is at best believed, or somehow sensed, to be true.6 In his ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’ (1917–18), Benjamin considers it the task of philosophy to discover or create a concept of knowledge that in contrast to that of the Enlightenment and of all of modernity ‘makes […] religious experience logically possible’. This should not be taken to mean ‘that knowledge makes God possible but that it […] does make the experience and

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teaching of him possible’.7 Like Unger’s Das Problem der mythischen Realität, Benjamin’s essay on the ‘coming’ philosophy sets the tone for much of its author’s subsequent work. With their programmes, Benjamin and Unger respond to the limitations that Kant established with his critique of reason. Kant had rejected any metaphysical speculation on the ideas of reason (God, the world, the soul) on the grounds that the concepts of such speculation were ‘empty’, that is, not related to any intuitions that could be given in experience. In their recourse to ‘religious experience’ Unger and Benjamin both reflect and counter this criticism of traditional metaphysics. Both authors try to sever the meaning of ‘experience’ and ‘the empirical’ from the understanding of these concepts in modern everyday life and in the classical, mathematical sciences. Such understanding is Kant’s starting point, which, if it is extended into a world view, threatens to rule out from the very beginning any divine or supernatural presence in the world.8 Their insistence on experience separates Unger and Benjamin from the dogmatic philosophies of pre-Kantian metaphysics; their insistence on religious experience separates them from the dogmatic character that modern world views can assume if they absolutise the perspective of classical science. Of course, the word ‘experience’ itself can be used dogmatically, that is, in unjustified support of mere opinions or traditions. Where ‘experience’ does not designate a subjective interpretation of an event – and neither Unger nor Benjamin uses ‘experience’ in conjunction with ‘religious’ in this subjective sense – ‘experience’ denotes empirical kinds of knowledge.9 Hence people can wrongly believe themselves or others to have had certain experiences, but nobody can have wrong experiences. If Benjamin’s assertion that pre-Kantian experience was close to God is to mean that God’s closeness was experienced, then it means that God was close; and if, as Unger suggests, the Hebrews experienced that IHWH separated the waters of the Red Sea, then IHWH did precisely that.10 Since empirical knowledge and errors in empirical matters are closely linked to the situations in which they occur, science recognises as an experience only what can be confirmed by the reproduction of the respective processes under controlled conditions. Such an experimental confirmation, however, is extremely difficult, if not unthinkable, when as in Unger and Benjamin we are dealing with religious assertions that claim to render ‘experiences’ particular to past cultural epochs.11 The assumption that once there existed religious ‘experiences’ therefore contains the risk of surreptitiously introducing as empirical knowledge something that not only, as Unger and Benjamin emphasise, cannot be

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experienced (or known) at present but that also was perhaps never experienced (and known) in the first place. Let us now examine in some detail how Benjamin and Unger deal with this risk. Benjamin’s fragment ‘On Perception’ affords a point of entry into the concerns of his ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’. It shows that Benjamin wants both ‘to retain the highest determinants of knowledge established by Kant’ and to reject Kant’s ‘view of the structure of our knowledge of nature or experience’.12 Benjamin characterises the philosophy that is to achieve this dual goal as ‘a transformation of the transcendental philosophy of experience into a transcendental, but speculative, philosophy’ that would find support in the neo-Kantian tendency of abolishing Kant’s distinction between the forms of intuition and the categories. Benjamin here refers to Hermann Cohen’s placement of space and time within the categories, which amounts to the disqualification of intuition as a second source of knowledge, independent of the intellect. Cohen’s pupil Paul Natorp even came to consider as downright obsolete Kant’s view that the material for categorical formation is given to the intellect in intuition.13 Benjamin’s reference to the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism and his related comments on the role of the transcendental aesthetic in Kant show in what way Benjamin’s ‘coming’ philosophy would be ‘transcendental’: it would construct an autonomous sphere of knowledge, the significance of which would no longer be limited by Kant’s emphasis on the passivity of the manner in which the intellect receives perceptions.14 The ‘coming’ philosophy is ‘speculative’, one is at first inclined to assume, in trying somehow to deduce, precisely from this autonomous sphere, a ‘higher’ concept of experience, not as ordinary or indeed ‘vulgar’ as the modern and Kantian ones. However, Benjamin does not discuss the concepts of deduction and speculation in ‘On the Program’,15 and in ‘On Perception’ his discussion of these concepts oscillates between metaphysical and epistemological concerns. Even more important is the fact that the fragment, just before petering out, sceptically denies the possibility of a speculative deduction of religious experience: in spite of all its interest in such a deduction, pre-Kantian philosophy could never reach ‘divine experience […] by a process of deduction, nor will it ever be reached in this way’.16 Here, the prophet of a coming philosophy doubts that philosophy will ever have access to what is to come. In ‘On the Program’ Benjamin criticises Kant’s notion of experience not only for its religious insubstantiality, but also for its dependence on empirical consciousness and for its claim to be valid for all times, cultures and psychophysical dispositions (SW I, 100–5). With respect to

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the two latter points, Benjamin introduces instances of insane, parapsychological and natural religious consciousness and argues that their epistemic value matches that of the type of experience presupposed in Kant. Kantian ‘experience’ is considered a ‘mythology’ of empirical consciousness and a type of ‘madness’, just like the totemistic identification with sacred animals and plants, the identification of insane people with the objects of their perception, the sick person’s relating of his bodily sensations to other creatures or, finally, the clairvoyant’s (alleged) feeling of the sensations of others. These ‘empirical’ types of madness may have different values, for instance with regard to religious fruitfulness, but with regard to knowledge they are of equal, negative, value: truth in the sense of ‘the correctness of cognitions’ is, as Benjamin claims, necessarily immaterial to the sphere of empirical consciousness as a whole.17 For the ‘coming’ philosophy, Western rationality or modern experience are therefore no longer, as they were in Kant, the final epistemological points of reference. They have no special standing but are on the same epistemic level as the other forms of empirical consciousness that Benjamin discusses: totemistic identification, dementia, clairvoyance and so on. All of these together, Benjamin maintains, are the subject matter of psychology, a discipline subordinate to epistemology: ‘For an objective relation between the empirical consciousness and the objective concept of experience is impossible. All genuine experience rests upon the pure epistemological (transcendental) consciousness’ (SW I, 104). The neo-Kantian project of liberating the transcendental field from psychology and the appeal to empirical consciousness provides an important context to Benjamin’s reduction of Kantian ‘experience’ to a subject matter of psychology. However, the prospects for this project deteriorate drastically if, as in ‘On the Program’, modern, Kantian ‘experience’ counts as relative and as only one of a number of types of empirical consciousness that all fail to possess any cognitive value. The neo-Kantian rejection of psychological interpretations of Kantian epistemology and of psychological relics in Kant’s own thought, in favour of a really ‘pure’ consciousness, can make sense precisely because neo-Kantianism presupposes that certain acts of consciousness – for instance mathematical, logical or scientific ones – in principle can yield truths. Transcendental epistemology does not create knowledge but defines the conditions of the possibility of a presupposed knowledge, or of a possible, future knowledge that agrees in kind with the one that is presupposed. Transcendental epistemology can identify a content of ‘pure’ consciousness, that is, establish particular categorical forms, only

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if a finite number of compatible, empirical types of consciousness are accepted as possible sources of truth. If by contrast the correctness or incorrectness of purported forms of cognition counts as equally irrelevant to science, clairvoyance and to all other types of empirical consciousness in world history, as is the case in Benjamin’s ‘On the Program’, one cannot see how ‘transcendental consciousness’ could remain a meaningful concept. In view of this difficulty, a hidden feature of ‘On the Program’ gains in importance. Benjamin introduces psychophysiological alternatives, or alternatives from natural religions, as being cognitively of equal rank with Western rationality. However, this is not the whole story, for the future epistemology is said to have the task of finding ‘for knowledge the sphere of total neutrality in regard to the concepts of both subject and object’ (SW I, 104). It is to find in ‘pure knowledge’ a structure which is in agreement with the tendency not of science or everyday experience but of the alternatives to Western rationality that Benjamin lists, for each of these alternatives is at least oriented towards a state in which subject and object are not differentiated. From the structural point of view, totemism and clairvoyance are therefore closer to the ‘pure’ knowledge of the future philosophy than, say, Newtonian physics. This implicit preference for parapsychic, insane or natural religious types of consciousness yields a hypothesis that Benjamin in fact pursues in one dimension of his œuvre, namely the hypothesis that for philosophy, too, the anthropological study of arational experiences and world views may in the final analysis be more fruitful than Kant’s epistemological foundation of classical science.18 However, this anthropological project is not the route that Benjamin envisages explicitly in ‘On the Program’. Here, the ‘true’ and ‘genuine’ experience that is to be developed from the structure of pure knowledge lies not in totemism, insanity or the occult, but in ‘religion’ (SW I, 104). And as we have already seen, Benjamin disqualifies not only rational consciousness from providing the epistemological starting point of the ‘coming’ philosophy, but also any specific variety of empirical consciousness. This means, firstly, that the religion sought cannot be identical with any existing religion. Secondly, and more generally, it means that Benjamin comes to conceive ‘true’ knowledge as an ‘autonomous sphere in its own right’,19 the legitimacy and significance of which result no longer from the function of establishing the conditions under which certain kinds of empirical knowledge are possible. Therefore the term ‘Erkenntnistheorie’ – ‘epistemology’, literally: ‘theory of knowledge’ – that Benjamin chooses for his programme can be misleading. Knowledge

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is precisely what his ‘theory’ does not explain. With its metacritique of Kant, ‘On the Program’ operates in a merely negative manner: Benjamin rejects the psychological or metaphysical opposition of subject and object in Kantian critique but does not address the question of how this rejection leads to the foundation of some form of knowledge. And shortly after its sceptical denial that a speculative deduction of religious experience is possible, ‘On Perception’ concludes with the mystical and, as regards the notion of knowledge, tautological note: ‘To be in the being of knowledge is to know.’ In view of this combination of silence and tautology it is hard to see how we could expect a philosophical treatment of the ‘development’ of religious experience from the structure of pure knowledge. Indeed, Benjamin does not explain what ‘development’ here means. Although it would appear that the development in question is essential to his central intention of demonstrating the logical possibility of religious experience, he does not even discuss, or speculate upon, its character.20 The term ‘Erkenntnistheorie’ does not have to be misleading if we take seriously the following statement of the ‘Addendum’ to ‘On the Program’: ‘All of philosophy is thus theory of knowledge’ (‘Erkenntnistheorie’), ‘but just that – a theory, critical and dogmatic, of all knowledge’ (SW I, 108). According to this statement, the theory of all knowledge, that is, epistemology, has a critical and a dogmatic part. As critical theory, it places all empirical types of consciousness in the realm of madness and postulates a sphere of absolute indifference of subject and object that rules out any non-mystical understanding of ‘knowledge’. As dogmatic theory, the ‘coming’ philosophy ‘develops’ the concept of knowledge with immediate reference to that ‘concrete totality of experience’ that is religion, which, however, is given to philosophy ‘only as teaching’.21 Here, ‘knowledge’ is no longer to render possible the experience and teaching of God, as Benjamin proposed earlier22 but with its concept of knowledge philosophy starts from that ‘experience’ of religion that is given to it only ‘as teaching’ (and that, in spite of such necessary transmission through tradition, Benjamin also claims to be somehow immediately accessible). The critical and the dogmatic part of Benjamin’s ‘theory’ meet in one word: ‘God’. Criticism leads to that ‘total neutrality’ with regard to ‘subject’ and ‘object’ which is the basic characteristic of ‘pure’ knowledge, ‘as the quintessence of which alone’ philosophy ‘can and must think God’.23 However, since philosophy can ‘think’ God solely as the quintessence of pure knowledge, the god thus thought will remain a ‘god of philosophers’ only, a rather shallow entity for anyone – philosopher or not – who leads a religious life. Even in the true

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‘experience’ of religion, Benjamin states in the same context, ‘neither god nor man is object or subject of experience’. Perhaps the being ‘in the being of knowledge’ that is to count as knowledge can be thought of as unio mystica. What is certain is that it does not have to be thought of in this way, for with the same right we can see in the absence of all subjects and objects of experience the melancholy person’s void in which self and world are both lost. It is precisely at this point that redemptive teaching is to answer criticism: ‘only in teaching does philosophy encounter something absolute, as existence’ (SW I, 109, emphasis M. K.). Only in teaching, that is, does the ‘coming’ philosophy encounter a god who has the advantage of existing. In his further work, Benjamin pursues also this critico-dogmatic route, which in contrast to the anthropological one discussed above is explicitly outlined in ‘On the Program’. It comes to light in all those fractures of his texts at which he juxtaposes, without conceptual mediation, a decisionist metaphysics or an implicit ‘teaching’ with the mystical and formal constructions of his destructive criticism.24 Perhaps the decisionist aspect of his thought is most poignantly expressed in ‘Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus’ when he proposes to consider as universally valid only intellectual positions that ‘can lay claim to a place within future religious orders’ (SW I, 294). Without doubt, ‘On the Program’ testifies to its author’s wish that religious ‘experiences’ may possess a ‘certainty’ of the kind that he associates with the name ‘Kant’ (cf. SW I, 100–2). Ultimately, however, it is not any certainty actually reached by Kant that explains Benjamin’s recourse to Kantianism but the profundity of the genius that he discovers in Kant’s search for certainty.25 Benjamin complements his discovery of the genius in Kant, of all people, by the judgement that Kant was right in his ‘rough and tyrannical’ treatment of the ‘low’ experience of the Enlightenment period and, elsewhere, by the characterisation of Kant’s philosophy and terminology as mystical.26 All this shows that Benjamin is prepared to sacrifice the sober search for religious certainty to a sublime and authoritative attitude that no longer needs the support of rational argument. Unger, in his attempt at a transcendental foundation of religious experience, neither relies on a genius called Kant nor classifies, like Benjamin in ‘On Perception’, the religion of pre-Kantian metaphysicians as ‘experience’.27 For Unger, pre-Kantian metaphysics leaves the empirical sphere in order to find in a higher realm ‘eternal truths’ of a purely conceptual nature. By enclosing itself in the sphere of pure thinking, traditional metaphysics comes to be saddled, as it were, with ‘truths’

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to which there exists no empirical access. In contrast, Unger’s new metaphysics is to establish the thinkableness of experiences that possess a particular content, a thinkableness that Kant aimed for, but did not achieve, in his failing attempts at returning from the transcendental to the empirical level (for instance from ‘pure natural science’ to physics). Unger’s intentions diverge from Kant’s, however, in that Unger aims for a ‘second experience’ that would differ from the empirical data given to transcendental reflection at the outset. He considers the orientation towards such a ‘second experience’ justified because the existing ‘first’ experience, from which philosophy has to start, is fragmentary. His aim is to render thinkable that which eludes modern experience in those ‘enclaves’ – alternative terms are vacua, ‘empty spaces’, ‘negative facts’ (‘negative Gegebenheiten’) – with which our present experience of the world is interspersed.28 The fundamental difference between Unger and Kant, then, lies in Unger’s view that epistemology has to acknowledge the incomplete and ‘problematic’ nature of existing human knowledge. Epistemology cannot immediately solve, but from the start must take into account, those ‘problems’ that rest on objective shortcomings in the present perception of human beings.29 For Unger, the ‘psychophysiological problem’ is the most important problem of this kind. He considers it a negative Gegebenheit since in it we have a datum without a positive content. What is ‘given’ to present experience is the existence of a communication between the two ‘positive realms’ of psyche and body, but the content and the mode of this communication are unknown to both individual consciousness and science. Since the gap between the two positive realms of psyche and body cannot be closed, present experience lacks the continuity that according to Unger characterises what is positively given. In principle, philosophical thought can attempt to pave the way for such continuity, that is, for the construction of a second experience in which the psychophysiological problem would be resolved. To do this, philosophical thought obviously has to leave the initial sphere of present, positive experience. It leaves that sphere by forming general concepts that draw on the faculty of imagination. So far, these concepts do not correspond to any known reality, but their ‘concretisation’ may initiate a new configuration of empirical facts, in which the empty spaces of present experience would be filled.30 Unger chooses the concept of national spirit (‘Volksgeist’) to illustrate what he means by ‘concretisation’.31 The Romantic, vague, poetic and metaphorical notion of Volksgeist, as Unger argues, merely suggests analogies between ‘nation’ (‘Volk’) and ‘organism’.32 One concretises

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this notion by adding new contents to it, which are not deducible from the traditional notion of Volksgeist. These new contents are taken from the elements that characterise the individual after the components of ‘individual’ have been related to the psychophysiological problem. The consciousness of the individual, which by virtue of its autonomous nature is founded on itself, nevertheless knows itself to be founded on something other in so far as its constitution includes ‘certain data of its own materiality’. Knowing itself to depend upon the body related to it, however, individual consciousness knows itself to depend upon a ‘cause’33 that is effective also outside the individual. The constructive forces that form the structure of the individual’s body, after all, also inform (in part) the bodily structure of all other members of his biological group. The ‘cause’ of the physical organism to which it is linked, escapes (modern) consciousness no less than does the psychic counterpart of that cause that Unger postulates on the assumption of a comprehensive parallelism between the psychic and the physical. Yet in its remote ramifications, the other that is effective in the individual still affects the latter’s consciousness: it presents itself to thought in the existence of negative facts, and to perception in the limits that restrict the individual’s immediate experience and intentional use of his body. According to Unger, then, the concept of Volksgeist finds its material as well as psychic place in the physical and spiritual factors within the individual that point beyond the individual. Thus ‘concretised’, Volksgeist denotes the ‘consciousness of the individual in the direction of the constructive forces of the organism’; the materiality that belongs to Volksgeist ‘starts in the non-conscious corporeity of the individual’. Even apart from the implicit equation of Volk and biological group, Unger’s paradigmatic ‘concretisation’ contains a number of serious problems. First, the status of the knowledge the individual consciousness has of its dependence on something other remains unclear. According to Unger, this knowledge is not only negatively given to empirical consciousness but is also part of the structure of transcendental consciousness. The ‘structure of consciousness [is] nothing […] apart from: consciousness of the transcendence of consciousness. This transcendence represents the materiality in the structure of consciousness and it is constitutive of consciousness’.34 The expression ‘transcendence of consciousness’ here refers to the object-relatedness of consciousness or the fact that consciousness necessarily is consciousness of something. Consciousness, for Unger, is not an independently existing arsenal of forms to be imprinted upon the appearances of things-in-themselves but a mere ‘relatedness to things-in-themselves’, a relatedness, moreover, the

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forms of which ‘do not differ in content’ from those of reality as such. He emphasises against Kant that without such a recourse of transcendental logic – and of metaphysics, given Unger’s concern with ‘reality as such’ – to the idea of ‘indifference’, any attempt to reconnect transcendental consciousness to experience necessarily fails. In contrast to Benjamin’s merely negative reference to a ‘sphere of total neutrality in regard to the concepts of both subject and object’, Unger’s reflections at least contain the positive element of an object-relatedness of consciousness that precedes the idea of indifference and may make it more easily accessible. However, Unger does not succeed in theoretically substantiating the intended reconnection of transcendental consciousness with experience, for he fails to explain how the transcendence of consciousness can ‘represent’ materiality. Second, Unger’s concretisation of Volksgeist is in danger of responding to the mind–body problem by hypostatising it. The fact that so far the problem of commercium has not been solved of course does not mean that there has to exist a reality open to human experience, which has so far only eluded us, and the discovery of which would resolve the problem and, perhaps, justify speaking of Volksgeist. Perhaps human beings are animals, whose biological constitution necessarily lacks any comprehensive self-transparency; perhaps any possible solution of the psychophysical problem will remain inaccessible to direct psychophysiological experience. The fact, moreover, that the modes of the commercium are unknown and, in this sense, ‘lie in the unconscious’ does not show, as Unger maintains, that there must exist something both unconscious and spiritual.35 Finally, by postulating a psychic counterpart of the generating ‘cause’ of human organisms, Unger draws on a radical, metaphysical version of the doctrine of psychophysical parallelism.36 Given this postulate, Unger’s paradigmatic concretisation of Volksgeist results less from the psychophysical ‘problem’ as such than from certain problematic attempts at its resolution.37 In spite of these problems, the theoretical philosophy that Unger adopts in view of a possible construction of religious experience is, unlike Benjamin’s, neither dogmatic nor irrational. Benjamin betrays his alleged aim of establishing the logical possibility of both religious and ‘mechanical’ experience (SW I, 105) by classifying modern rationality as just one type of ‘madness’, and as completely irrelevant to knowledge; for any mechanical ‘experience’ that does not amount, or contribute, to knowledge in fact is no experience at all. Unger, for his part, does not deny the epistemological right of modern, non-religious experience but aims to complement that experience by filling in its

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‘blind spots’. Once gained, religious experience would not contradict rational experience but combine with it, as do the two layers of colour in a print, to form one, intensified picture.38 Whereas Benjamin’s destructive mysticism frequently almost seems to call for clashes with common sense, Unger’s ‘rational’ mysticism respects common sense, at least where it limits the range and power of speculative imagination: ‘The activity of imagination must be restricted to the domain of the unknown, and its products must not clash with the contents and constitution of the known world.’39 In contrast to Benjamin, moreover, Unger does not consider religious experience as something that is available to philosophy in ‘teaching’ and tradition, for the contents of Orthodox faith, which might do justice to the requirements of genuine religion, first of all have to be shown to be possible objects of a future experience. Therefore Unger’s philosophy does not, as does Benjamin’s ‘coming’ one, encounter ‘in teaching […] something absolute, as existence’; all it finds in Goldberg’s interpretation of the Pentateuch is an idea of the divine that it must prove, in its own philosophical work, to be thinkable and thus possibly true.40 The Benjamin of ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, in contrast, imports from Genesis without further explanations a concept of God that can serve as an ontological and metaphysical complement to his formalistic postulate of absolute language; the exegete operates here as if the truth of the ‘coming’ philosophy already were at his disposal. To sum up, in Benjamin religious experience is given ‘as teaching’ to both his future philosophy and his own exegetical practice. The future knowledge that corresponds to this experience itself may even be nothing more than ‘teachings’ and tradition (cf. SW I, 108). Unger does not prophesy a ‘coming’ philosophy. In his works, a philosophy that aims for the explanation of tradition is already present. It can be examined and proves, if it holds water, the thinkableness of religious experience. The differences outlined between the two authors need not surprise us. Both authors come from an assimilated background. Benjamin’s first, more intensive encounter with religion occurred in the formative years of his adherence to Gustav Wyneken’s Youth Culture Movement. For Wyneken, religion was closely entwined with art; it represented the highest cultural value in human life, but did so independently of cognitive claims to truth and of particular ritual requirements.41 Most sublime and most vague, religion seems to have become something of a fascinating object of worship to Benjamin, something that he continued to serve, for instance, by requiring philosophy to respect the mystery of revelation.42 Unger’s thinking arose in close proximity to

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Berlin’s neo-Orthodox community, that is, in a context in which religion made very specific ritual and intellectual demands on people’s lives. The young intellectual Unger responded to these demands not with fascination, at least not with one that came to dominate his thinking, but with a disappointment about what seemed to him Orthodoxy’s ‘somewhat contrived and artificial’ attitude of faith. As a result, he not only came to follow religious orthodoxy by rejecting any fusion of artistic and religious concerns more radically than Benjamin or any other thinker of the Frankfurt School,43 but also developed a rationalist philosophy of religion that renounced any reliance on the ‘quasiempirical’ sources of tradition and revelation on which Benjaminian ‘theory’ implicitly draws.44 One may object that in my comparison I did not treat Benjamin fairly because I did not consider the fact that Benjamin’s ‘On the Program’ was written before his reengagement – after his break with the Youth Culture Movement – with political matters. In contrast, all the texts by Unger on which the comparison drew could rely on the conception of politics that Unger had developed in Politik und Metaphysik. This difference is indeed important, for, first, it is of course easy for Unger to conceive his theoretical philosophy without the burden of any dogmatic baggage if ultimately it is the task not of thought, but of its political realisation, to prove the truth, as opposed to the thinkableness, of religious experience. And, second, as we shall shortly see in more detail, Unger’s conception of politics is far from being ‘undogmatic’ or sufficiently supported by rational argument. It is most unfortunate that of the great political work that Benjamin conceived – and probably also actually composed in part – around 1920, at the most ‘Critique of Violence’ and some notes seem to have survived.45 However, as I shall now try to show, in the little material that we have from Benjamin on ‘politics’, there is wideranging agreement with Unger’s conception of the political, not least with its problematic features.

II Unger knows that even ‘concretising’ thought is unable to create experiences. All it can achieve is to give an impulse to the formation of experiences by developing constructions that, like those developed in the applied sciences, subsequently ‘move into the realm of objects’.46 The field of praxis, however, in which such a realisation of the universals concretised by philosophical imagination can occur, is not technology, as it is for the sciences, but ‘politics’.47 The political blueprint contained

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in the concretised concept of Volksgeist consists in the project of extending the individual’s perception and control over his body in such a way that he can experience and manipulate the supra-individual biological and spiritual forces that constitute and work within his organism. According to Unger, the ecstatic and ascetic practices of oriental cultures at least provide initial models for the realisation of this project by extending the individual’s intentional control over central organic functions, such as breathing, sleep, metabolism, or sensitivity to pain.48 In a hierarchically structured community dominated by individuals with such a heightened sensibility and power, politics would to a large extent coincide with ritual practice. The constructive biologico-spiritual forces, common to all members of the group, could be activated at will. This could result in a concentration of the unconscious ‘life force’ that would conform to those ‘realisations’ of the totemistic, national or tribal gods of descent that Goldberg found described in the Pentateuch.49 Like any adversity within the group that threatens its existence, economic competition would be restricted from within the individuals by their own ‘bodily interest’; for they would physically experience their own existence and life as something that depended upon the community.50 As the recourse to totemism, insanity and parapsychology in Benjamin’s ‘On the Program’, so the experimental, vitalistic affirmation of a mythic reality ‘Volk’ is of only secondary importance for Unger and Goldberg.51 Ultimately, Unger and Goldberg consider a social reality that would correspond to the psychophysiological manifestation of tribal gods to be valuable only in view of the overcoming of that reality by IHWH, that is, by a god who is different in kind. According to Goldberg, a dual nature pertains to IHWH.52 As IHWH Echad, he differs from the tribal gods of totemism by being the transcendental and universal principle that in the act of creation first of all created the biological sphere with its multiplicity of tribes, nations and corresponding gods. As IHWH Elohim, that is, as a god who enters the finite world, he is dependent on a ‘national body’ in which he can materialise, just as the national gods do in their respective nations. However, since IHWH is not a biological ‘centre of descent’, the people of Israel does not form a biological or racial unity but results from a unique act of foundation. IHWH’s covenant with Israel thus represents a ‘revolutionary’ negation of the significance of the particular, biological differences between the various nations, in favour of attributes that are common to mankind as a whole. In this sense, Goldberg and Unger see in the Pentateuch the representation of a ‘counter-organism’ that is directed against the fundamental powers of the mythical world, that is, biologically defined

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nations and their gods.53 Accordingly, even Unger’s conception of Jewish politics, which Benjamin respected, is ultimately of a universalist nature.54 In spite of this universalist orientation, however, Unger and Goldberg during the 1920s seem to pay more attention to the disclosure of the particular, mythic reality of national gods than is required by their overall theoretical conception. In Goldberg, the ‘realisation’ of the universal IHWH is delegated to eschatology;55 IHWH Echad appears to suffer from the same shadowy existence that Goldberg ridicules in modern, ‘theological’, concepts of divinity. And compared to the general precision of his writings, Unger’s strategic reflections upon the ‘world political’ task of a new foundation of the Jewish people that he presents in Die staatslose Bildung eines jüdischen Volkes (‘The stateless creation of a Jewish people’) remain relatively vague. Unger, then, proposes to conceive ‘politics’ as a field in which religious intentions may be realised through a collective extension and intensification of psychophysical experience that may correspond to a disclosure of divine reality. Why should we prefer such a spiritual conception to the secular understanding of ‘politics’ in European modernity? Unger attempts to give an answer to this question that does not rely on religious beliefs, at least not directly. His answer contains two assumptions. First, he maintains that all history up to the present is ‘catastrophic’; if history has a meaning at all, then it is that of the continuous failure of all attempts at establishing a just and ethically satisfactory order of human society.56 Second, Unger claims that in the face of the chaotic power of economic interests, which is responsible for the catastrophic nature of modern history, all appeals to reason in its present form are necessarily ineffective; if at all, justice can be attained only through a ‘reason’ that itself is ‘material’. Such ‘reason’ could modify social reality directly and ‘in the manner of the body’. It would be capable of overcoming chaos and injustice by creating, through the parapsychically extended control over body and matter, a bodily ‘presence of the mind’.57 For Unger, the historical pessimism of the first assumption serves as an axiomatic starting point; he explicitly excludes it from any discussion or reflection and presents it, with an air of authority, as the correct intellectual attitude.58 As regards the second assumption, Unger presupposes, but does not show, that without parapsychic intensification a politically effective reason does not, or cannot, exist.59 Without discussion, he adopts the general belief in the impotence of reason that is characteristic of cultural pessimism. The lack of argumentative support for the two assumptions accounts for the ‘dogmatism’ of Unger’s political philosophy. It is thus not a religious dogmatic

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fundamentalism that shapes his political views but the ‘dogmatic’, general and intensive pessimism that was widespread in the German (non-established) intelligentsia of his time. Rather than being necessary concomitants of religious orthodoxy, his views are an instance of what Fritz Stern called ‘the politics’ of cultural despair. To the extent, however, that the central tenets of cultural pessimism cannot be rationalised without theological assumptions, it may be right to consider the intellectual attitude behind Unger’s Politik und Metaphysik quasi-religious. This attitude explains the categorical manner in which Unger rejects secular concepts of politics, no matter whether liberal or radical. Marx’s understanding of the spiritual sphere as epiphenomenal is the theoretical point that separates Unger from communism. On the practical level, it is the economic orientation of communist politics that to a large extent disregards precisely that sphere of human creatureliness and biological existence in which, according to Unger, spirit materialises itself.60 Given, however, that spirit is the ‘quintessence of all solutions to all problems’,61 this means that any discussion of the question of what communism can, and cannot, attain in terms of justice becomes superfluous. Democratic procedures for arriving at a balance of interests are rejected by Unger at the very outset of the Weimar Republic. Essential to this rejection is the conviction that any compromise contains elements of violence and constraint since even the ‘voluntary’ consideration of the interests of others remains heteronomous as long as these interests are not experienced as being organically linked to one’s own.62 In Politik und Metaphysik, Unger’s rejection of liberalism as intrinsically violent is blind because he fails to make a comparative assessment of the risks involved in democratic constraint and the risks of that myth-like, apparently much more brutal, violence that his political philosophy is apt to support (at least for a transitory period).63 Even if we concede that, once a mythic reality is disclosed, IHWH may overcome the mythic powers and the ‘catastrophic’ course of modern history, IHWH’s victory is far from certain. In the face of the danger that the disclosure of mythic-religious reality will not progress beyond an entanglement in social formations that are both hierocratic and extremely brutal it is reasonable to reconsider the prospects of a sober and rational realisation of justice, even if the likelihood of success is low. But this line of argument lies outside Unger’s horizon. Where Western civilisation counts as downright ‘catastrophic’, the ‘political’ realisation of religious experience gains an absolute value that rules out any goal-rational considerations. Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ shares with Unger’s political philosophy the evaluations of cultural pessimism. According to Benjamin, there

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is no non-catastrophic secular politics, for unambiguously non-violent ways of resolving conflicts exist only outside the law in the private sphere.64 This assessment leads, among other things, to a rather arbitrary, ‘private’ conception of diplomacy, for which contractual interests between states are negligible. With reference to Unger, Benjamin regards democratic compromises as violent in nature (SW I, 244). The absence of a comparative analysis of the effects of democratic and religious violence, which characterises Unger’s reflections, is a matter of principle for Benjamin. He explicitly and categorically rejects any goal-rational consideration of the possibly catastrophical consequences of revolutionary revolt, which he considers the highest human manifestation of divine violence (SW I, 246, 252). Accordingly, he does not even mention the brutal implications of Unger’s conception of politics although in passing he attributes great importance to it.65 On the one hand, Benjamin’s much discussed equation of mythic with legal violence represents a legal-philosophical anticipation of the identification of myth and enlightenment in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. On the other hand, it marks an important difference to Unger’s undialectical opposition of myth and modernity. Whereas Benjamin’s equation means that mythic violence remains effective in the legal fabric of modern societies, for Unger modern reality is decidedly non-mythic.66 However, this difference can conceal an underlying common feature in the thought of the two authors, for Benjamin introduces mythic violence in agreement with Goldberg and Unger, as the ‘objective manifestation’ of the existence of a (pagan) god (SW I, 248). And his identification of mythic and legal violence in principle accords to the manifestation of pagan gods that function of the formation of social organisms which characterises Unger’s notion of Volk. In contrast to Unger, Benjamin does not explain, either ‘biologically’ or otherwise, the realistic understanding of pagan beliefs that he implies. Therefore his introduction of mythic violence can appear more arbitrary than, given the parallel to Unger, it perhaps is. Just as Unger places IHWH in opposition to the mythic powers of the pagan world, Benjamin places divine in opposition to mythic violence.67 It is unlikely that this similarity results merely from a general continuation of monotheistic traditions, common to the two authors, for one of the most enigmatic features of Benjamin’s discussion of divine violence has a parallel in Unger. As is well known, shortly after presenting revolutionary violence both as ‘the highest manifestation of pure violence by man’ and as something demonstrably possible, Benjamin claims that it is not equally possible for human beings ‘to

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decide when pure violence has been realised in particular cases; for only mythic violence, not divine, will be recognisable as such with certainty’.68 Here, Benjamin’s apotheosis of the proletarian general strike at least threatens to collapse: in particular cases, this ‘highest manifestation of pure violence by man’ is not manifest after all and cannot be recognised with certainty. Subsequently, Benjamin refers not to that strike but to ‘the true war’ as one of the ‘eternal forms’ in which divine violence may manifest itself. This reference calls to mind Unger’s two dialogues entitled ‘Der Krieg’.69 In these dialogues, Unger construes the experience of the First World War as leading to the idea that the individual faces the Volk as a reality that both forms and destroys him. As logically prior to the reality of Volk, Unger argues, one would have to assume one single and transcendent ‘quantity’ that is supposed to explain the existence of both the individual and the Volk and therefore corresponds to Unger’s notion of god. Towards the end of the second dialogue, however, Unger maintains that it is impossible to decide in a logical manner whether war represents a ‘holy or satanic’ reality.70 Thus Benjamin shares with Unger both a general preparedness to see divine violence at work in war and the awareness of how difficult this is to recognise in particular cases. In contrast to Unger’s dialogues, however, Benjamin’s essay on violence, which was written after the revolutions at the end of war, extends this problematic configuration of divine violence to revolutionary violence.71 A notion of Volk that would be close to Unger’s does not figure in ‘Critique of Violence’. Such a notion does appear, however, in Benjamin’s posthumously published ‘Outline of the Psychophysical Problem’.72 In this outline, Benjamin discusses the concept of the person in the context of the relationship between mind and body. He regards the person as that ‘limited reality which is constituted by the establishment of a spiritual nature in a corpus’ (‘Körper’, ‘body’). Whatever uniqueness the person has does not derive from the individual. Rather, such uniqueness derives, like the limitation of the person’s spiritual nature and corpus from the circle of their maximal extension: the Volk. In addition to this supra-individual concept of personhood as one that is rooted in Volk, Benjamin outlines an individualistic notion of mankind, according to which mankind, ‘as an individuality’, will acquire one ‘Leib’ (‘body’). With his Leib, Benjamin states, man belongs to mankind’s historical life, whereas in his Körper, man belongs to God. While Benjamin considers Leib exclusively as a function and relation, he considers the Körper that belongs to God as a ‘reality’ and ‘substance’,73 which he takes to be founded on ‘existence as such’. In this, Benjamin’s ‘Outline’ exhibits a peculiarity which one finds more generally in his work. Here as elsewhere

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he combines a functionalist thesis with an ontological and metaphysical postulate that is full of religious implications. However, one will fail to understand his concerns in this text for at least two reasons, if one interprets his juxtaposition as an opposition between a secular, Leib-centred conception of human history, or politics, on the one hand, and a religious conception of human corporeity on the other. First, without religious assumptions we cannot hope to comprehend Benjamin’s claim that the formation of mankind’s body coincides with both the perfection and the annihilation (‘Untergang’) of bodily life. A worldly-minded thinker would perhaps claim ‘perfection’ but certainly not ‘annihilation’ in this context. Second, man’s corpus, the corpus, that is, which belongs to God and whose resurrection Benjamin takes to coincide with the dissolution of bodily (‘leiblich’) nature, is ‘one of the realities that stand within the historical process itself’, whereas Leib, as a function of human history is merely related to history. As in Goldberg the realisation of the transcendental, universal and supra-national IHWH Echad, in Benjamin the historico-political realisation of one humanity belongs to the eschatological finale of Heilsgeschichte.74 For Unger, as we saw, the anthropological, psychophysiological orientation of his understanding of ‘politics’ represents an alternative to communism. The notion of revolutionary politics that Benjamin develops from the mid-1920s onward consists to a large extent in the presentation of this same orientation as ‘communist’. In spite of the importance of ‘progress’ and humanistic ideas in the tradition of Marxism, this change in labels does not affect the underlying ‘pessimistic’ and socio-biological assumptions of Benjamin’s anthropology: they remain central to his concept of politics. Thus in ‘Surrealism’, it is not the attempt to establish rational control over economic power that counts as ‘communist’ but ‘the organization of pessimism’, that is, the organisation of an attitude that makes mistrust in the fate of European civilisation and ‘humanity’ a matter of principle (SW II, 216–18). For Benjamin, such organisation is to be realised by the formation of a new ‘physis’. This new physis resembles Unger’s Volk.75 First, both Benjamin’s physis and Unger’s Volk result from a modification of the psychophysiological nature of human life. Second, as Unger envisages the full realisation of the ‘Volk’ as the creation of a bodily, supra-individual being,76 so for Benjamin the new physis essentially belongs to a supra-individual entity. Following communist parlance, Benjamin now calls this supra-individual entity ‘the collective’ and no longer, as he did in ‘Outline’, ‘mankind’, let alone ‘Volk’. The new physis of the collective, however, is to be organised ‘in technology’ just as, according to the earlier text, the new ‘body of

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mankind’ would incorporate animate and (in part) inanimate nature by virtue of ‘technology’.77 Benjamin’s much discussed positive notion of technology is presented in a non-Romantic terminology but does not form a substantially different alternative to those organismic features of Romantic thought that Unger ‘concretises’ under the heading of Volksgeist and extends to mankind in his universalist conception of Judaism. This interpretation is further supported by the notion of the ‘image space’ in which, according to Benjamin, the generation of the new physis is to take place. Benjamin explains the inclusion of this space in ‘the space of political action’ – if not indeed the equation of the two spaces – with reference to the difficult idea of ‘an action that externalises and is the image’.78 This explanation ascribes to political action a structure that in the tradition of magia naturalis is used to explain the genesis of the animated organism. According to Jan Baptist van Helmont, for example, the formation of the organism results from the activity of the archeus, that is the (personalised) principle or vital force which governs animal and vegetable life: the archeus externalises the image or Urbild that inheres in him and this externalisation coincides with the bodily materialisation of the image that is the body or organism.79 Benjamin’s notion of political action thus agrees with Romantic thought and German Lebensphilosophie in general, and with Unger’s biocentric philosophy of religion in particular, in adopting the organismic and neo-Platonic elements of magia naturalis in a modified form.80 Benjamin seems to align this with the anti-religious orientation of communism when he introduces the ‘illumination’ that is to open up the ‘body and image space’ of true political practice as ‘profane’, and as ‘the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination’ (SW II, 209). In the same context, however, he presents religious practices as the outstanding models for ‘profane’ illumination, which, compared to opium and other drugs, provide a more rigorous introduction to ‘true’ politics. In his notes, he comments on this paradigmatic character of religion. The revolution, he maintains, must be linked to the ‘innermost world of the body’ as closely as Judaism and the great Indian religions linked their ‘morality’ to this unconscious, psychophysical ‘world’.81 For Unger, the establishment of a ‘political’ practice that corresponded to the ritual one that Goldberg had found in the Pentateuch was the sign of truly just, non-communist ‘politics’; in Benjamin’s ‘Surrealism’, it becomes the medium in which the ‘communist’ revolution is to be realised. It is true that Benjamin at first merely juxtaposes a surrealist, ‘anthropological materialism’ that focuses on man’s ‘physical creatureliness’ with the

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‘political materialism’ of communism; ultimately, however, the surrealists count as the only people that have understood the ordre du jour that Benjamin attributes to the Communist Manifesto (SW II, 217–18). Yet the reason Benjamin cites for this fails to convince. Perhaps the transformation of ‘all the bodily innervations of the collective’ into a ‘revolutionary discharge’ really represents, as he claims, a self-transcendence of reality. Such a collective and psychophysiological self-transcendence of reality, however, is not envisaged in the Communist Manifesto. Rather, it is the goal of Unger’s conception of ‘politics’, which tries to disclose, from within the lacunae in our knowledge of reality, the full and wider reality of a ‘second experience’.

5 Allegory, Metonymy and Creatureliness: Walter Benjamin and the Religious Roots of Modern Art Barnaba Maj

In many representative reconstructions of the Expressionist avant-garde the definition of its religious significance remains a vague connotation. In order to understand that significance one has to interpret the sociological and historico-political context of Expressionism from a spiritual and religious perspective. Seen in this way, art proves to be a focal point of historical experience, and the renewal of both philosophy and the theory of criticism that Walter Benjamin pursued in response to the antinomies of Expressionism proves to be of central importance.1 The present chapter focuses on significant interrelations between theatrical and pictorial issues in both Expressionism and the theory of allegory developed by Benjamin, against the background of Expressionist drama and painting, in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama (written in 1925). As a rhetorical and artistic device, metonymy is particularly suited to address the issue of man’s corporeal existence that with the First World War moved to the foreground of historical experience. I shall propose that in response to the war and modern technology in general Expressionism formed a new link between the metonymic and the allegorical that is central to its concern with both the meaning of creatural life and the genre of tragedy. Benjamin’s equalisation of Expressionist drama and Baroque Trauerspiel relates the theme of human corporeity to the ‘dialectical’ meaning of death. The connection, in his theory of allegory, between allegory and the metonymic chain suggests 85

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a dialectical way out of the Expressionist antinomies and amounts to an allegorisation of historical reality itself.

1

Allegory and symbolism in theatre and painting

In contrast to his contemporary Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), who unleashed a significant debate about the ‘neo-Euripidean’ character of Luigi Pirandello’s work, the young Benjamin seems to have been a reader and theorist of drama rather than a theatregoer. Apart from the important essay ‘The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy’ (1916), he writes on Shakespeare, Molière, Calderon, Hebbel, Shaw, Hauptmann and Hofmannsthal, but in his correspondence between 1910 and 1924 hardly mentions the most important Expressionist playwrights or the innovations of Expressionist mise-en-scène. This fact is remarkable, given that the theatre made an important contribution to Berlin’s rise to a form of modern, metropolitan life, one contemporary actually describing it as ‘one of the lungs of the city’.2 Yet when Expressionist drama ‘explodes’ in the 1910s, Benjamin is particularly interested in contemporary painting. In 1914 he considers his ‘appreciation of the fine arts’ the only field in which he may have made some progress.3 And three years later, while writing ‘Painting, or Signs and Marks’, he reflects on the role of colour in Cubism’s position between painting and the graphic arts and emphasises that first and foremost the profound emotion aroused by Paul Klee’s work requires a theoretical elaboration.4 It is Benjamin himself, then, who in a sense invites us to start with the figurative arts. Klee’s programmatical dictum according to which art ‘does not reproduce the visible but makes visible’ expresses the spiritual and at the same time physical concerns of much of the best contemporary painting.5 As regards Expressionism in particular, however, I would like to refer here to its significant spiritual, if critical, renewal of the traditional image of Christ. From anticipations such as James Ensor’s painting Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888) to Ernst Barlach’s bronze The Reunion (Christ Resurrected) of 1926, the image of Christ seems to provide a kind of sanction for the development of Expressionist art. It is in the context of this religious motif that the affinities between Expressionism and the Baroque period that underlie Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study find a first illustration. The comparison between Vincent van Gogh’s painting The Raising of Lazarus (1890) and its Baroque model, Rembrandt’s etching The Raising of Lazarus (1632), is instructive. Van Gogh’s work carries out a drastic reduction; it zooms in, as it were, on its model.

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While on the left of the Baroque etching Christ stands out among five people by virtue of his solemn and majestic figure, in van Gogh’s painting the image of Christ is altogether missing. The sun in the background may represent a sign of hope, a miracle may have been accomplished, but the overall meaning of the painting is clear: Christ has forsaken the world, Lazarus and his two sisters are alone. Van Gogh foresaw what the figurative arts would come to perceive more and more powerfully: the uncanny, subterranean presence of demonic powers of destruction that had grown in the ‘subatomic structure’ (Isaiah Berlin) of the technologisation and massification of the modern world. The First World War was not only a crucial historical event and the basis of the most important subsequent developments of the twentieth century, but also the context in which the young generation of Expressionist artists, even as it blossomed, personally and physically experienced the reality of those powers of destruction, however abstract and anonymous they may have appeared to be. Trench warfare made death meaningless. The problem, then, before being theological, was directly religious: can contemporary man still recognise himself in Christ, can he still perceive the human body as the form in which the divine may be present? Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, whose work Benjamin saw in 1914,6 in 1918 responded to these questions with the wasted face of Christ in his woodcut Ist euch nicht Christus erschienen? (‘Didn’t Christ appear to you?’). Like Emil Nolde, Oskar Kokoschka and others, Schmidt-Rottluff belonged to Die Brücke, that circle formed in Dresden which in the history of German art represents the turn of the new century. Real modern art, however, flourished in the Munich circle named Der blaue Reiter with Klee, Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky as its perhaps most significant members. In the German context, Der blaue Reiter stands for radical artistic innovations and the birth of abstract art, which marks, and at the same time is marked by, an epochal threshold. While formal innovation may be a valid criterion for the historiographic classification of works or artists, it is certainly not a decisive one in any spiritual phenomenology of art. Precisely if the irruption of new spiritual issues requires the invention of new forms, the elaboration of new forms is less crucial than the perception of the spiritual issues to which they respond. All differences in form and technique notwithstanding, there is a guiding principle connecting for instance the art of Nolde – the explicit advocate of a modern renewal of religious art – with that of Klee’s angel series. The underlying principle connecting the figurative and the abstract tendencies in much of the art of the period can be called ‘spiritual

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symbolism’. It was Kandinsky who between 1910 and 1914 developed a theoretical foundation of abstract Expressionism. A central argument in his famous Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) is that the absence of represented objects in a painting does not necessarily amount to a lack of thematic reference. The new, abstract paintings dealt with purely artistic matters such as configurations of colour and shape, but they dealt with these as spiritual symbols.7 Marc made a similar point when he emphasised that it is the duty of art to convey a world ‘in which things are made to speak’.8 Having put aside the traditional illusion of the image, Klee considers the abstract formal elements concrete substances: in the end the artist succeeds in producing ‘a formal cosmos […] so much like the Creation that a mere breath suffices to transform religion into act’.9 The search for new spiritual and religious symbols and forms coincides with the search for a new language corresponding to things. It is therefore not surprising that the same goal can also be pursued in non-abstract painting. Indeed, Kokoschka, the ‘visionary’ Austrian painter who was an exponent of Die Brücke, carried his figural painting to its furthermost limit, so much so that it ended up comprising an essentially symbolic conception of both the world and art. It is an established fact that Expressionism revolutionised not only the dramaturgical, but also the scenic language of theatre. Kurt Pinthus pointed out that the new theatre shared the same aims with the new music and, above all, with the new painting; indeed, it was a ‘theatre of painters’.10 Both the relationship between dramaturgical and scenic language in Expressionist performances and the frequent collaboration between painters and sculptors on the one hand and directors on the other took many different forms. However, even when all the efforts seemed to converge on the elaboration of new formal solutions, there was always an underlying search for a spiritual revolution. An example of this is the stage design for Kokoschka’s 1907 play Murderer, Hope of Women by the painter and sculptor Oskar Schlemmer. Schlemmer’s sets, which were fully approved by Walter Gropius, were characterised by a geometrical and abstract reduction, which explicitly aimed at both the ‘figural’ representation of metaphysical ideas and the personification of universal spiritual concepts.11 It is obvious that a procedure of this kind fully corresponds to the concept of the allegorical. Critics use this category not only for the Expressionist mise-en-scène but also for Expressionist theatre in general, especially since its characters are frequently anonymous personifications, or unnamed ‘empty forms’, like ‘the Father’, ‘the Banker’, ‘the Convict’, ‘the Son’, ‘the Young Girl’, and so on. There is therefore an important bifurcation in the relationship

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between theatre and painting. Even though they both take part in the same spiritual revolution, the new paintings tend to be symbolic while the new Expressionist theatre tends to be allegorical. However, since we are concerned here with a revolution in artistic languages, rooted in ultimately religious concerns, we must reconsider this traditional distinction, which in the German context is strongly informed by Goethe’s remarks on the topic. This seems to be not only the right path generally, but also the path that Benjamin followed in his Trauerspiel study.

2

Metonymy, creatureliness and the First World War

The spiritual concerns of modern art outlined above can be summarised as follows: the meaning of the world consists in language, but language cannot arrive at the fulfilment of the world; words can confer meaning on things only if they go towards them. This understanding of language not only epitomises a central feature of twentieth-century poetic language but also represents a rediscovery of the root and original meaning of the Greek term hermeneía.12 It is based on a more radical distinction between metaphor and metonymy than that proposed by Roman Jakobson. On this view, language itself adopts a metonymical character. If words can go towards things, words and things must partake of one medium or continuity – physical, spiritual or both – which is radically different from the mere similarity on which metaphors rest. The decisive novelty that characterises some of the most radical examples of poetic and literary expression in the twentieth century lies in the combination of allegory with a metonymical method of representation. In the German context, Kafka’s texts – which contemporary critics regarded as examples of an allegedly ‘minor Expressionism’ typical of Prague – are perhaps most important in this respect.13 To understand the revolutionary character of artistic devices that link allegory and metonymy, we need to consider the relationships between metonymy, symbol, allegory and metaphor. Metonymical methods of representation are by their very nature related to the symbolic; the concept of symbol, in fact, implies affinity between what symbolises and what is symbolised. In contrast, allegory presupposes an element of otherness, as does metaphor, which Aristotle considers an ‘extraneous noun’. In traditional rhetoric, allegory is even defined as an extended metaphor. If we illustrate these relationships graphically by means of a square, we have on the left the relationship between symbol and metonymy, with symbol at the top and metonymy at the bottom, and

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on the right the relationship between allegory and metaphor, with allegory at the top and metaphor at the bottom. The relationship between metonymy and allegory therefore corresponds to a diagonal. However, we must bear in mind the long tradition of rhetorical studies, in which symbol and allegory on the one hand, and metaphor and metonymy on the other are analysed as disjunctive pairs, without any relation to each other. Therefore the square we have drawn is a novelty. Its transverse relations urge us to ask if in any particular case the symbolic or the allegorical is achieved by means of a metaphorical or a metonymical method of representation. The relevance of this question shows that the Aristotelian concept of allegory – which according to current histories of rhetoric was accepted, in Cicero’s and Quintilian’s Latin transmission, by the entire tradition – did not in fact overcome the Platonic understanding of allegory as hypónoia, that is, a hidden meaning or sense. However, to the extent that allegory involves such a hidden meaning, its modern combination with metonymical representations is even more alienating; metonymy is after all deeply connected to the reality of things and their inner relations. What becomes inappropriate here is Gorgias’s famous analogy, according to which words are to the soul what medicines are to the body.14 While the metaphorical spiritualises the body by ‘resemanticising’ it, the metonymical remains anchored to the body and, so to speak, directly recognises its spirituality. The point from which we will proceed in our reasoning is the following: because of the abstract and uncontrollable violence of the powers that raged within it, the historical reality of the First World War imposed a metonymical method, which placed at the core of the matter the most individual and subjective of realities: the body and its vicissitudes. This involvement of the body brought with it the most radical of the issues concerning meaning in general: death. The war was a metonymical reality. Its boundless and meaningless violence made it resemble a cruel and unintelligible totem, which demanded the sacrifice of innumerable, nameless human beings. Expressionist dramaturgy responded to this historical experience by putting ‘the suffering creature’ at the centre of its metonymical representations.15 Rudolf Otto’s theological work, which reflects this new attention to human creatureliness, contributed significantly to the rapid spread of such terms as ‘creaturely’, ‘creaturefeeling’ and ‘creature-consciousness’.16 However, if we place Expressionism in the context of the contemporary philosophical debates on the idea of the tragic, we see that a stable theological framework to accommodate the war experience was actually missing.

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3

The antinomies of Expressionist drama

Suffering is a typically tragic creature-feeling, which originally arose in the world of Aeschylean tragedy. Expressionism’s focus on the suffering creature is therefore intrinsically related to the contemporary concern – from Georg Lukács’s essay ‘The Metaphysics of Tragedy’ of 1910 to Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study – with the idea of the tragic.17 Yet Aeschylus’s tragic world, in which pain is elevated by an essential relationship with knowledge, presupposes a stable religiosity and balanced recognition of the celestial and the chthonic gods that guarantee legitimacy and justice in the human city. This still provides the background for Antigone’s action, which aims at re-establishing both the limits of human and political power and due respect for the kingdom of the dead and its guarding, subterranean gods. Indeed, the central theme of Sophocles’s Antigone is the illegitimacy of the profanation of a corpse. These issues are still recognisable in the war experience of the Expressionist generation, but they now occur in an unprecedented and truly enormous manner. The almost insuperable hiatus is caused by the boundless violence of a technological war that recognises neither any ‘kingdom’ of the dead nor the laws of their religious sphere. Indeed, Antigone’s counterparts on the modern battlefields no longer find any corpses that, being ‘ruins of life’, preserve the physiognomy of what has been destroyed: what they find is organic ‘wreckage’ and piles of ‘debris’.18 Franz Werfel’s Die Troerinnen (‘Troades’) of 1915 is the most important Expressionist adaptation of an ancient tragedy. Werfel examines the religious bases of Euripides’ tragic world against the background of the destruction of Troy. It was Benjamin himself who noticed that Werfel’s play marked the beginning of Expressionist tragedy, in the same sense as Martin Opitz’s Die Troerinnen (1625) opened the series of Baroque Trauerspiele. This fact confirms the existence of a religious and spiritual affinity between the so-called Expressionist ‘scream’ and that Baroque ‘lament’ which Benjamin considers a constitutive element of the Trauerspiel. However, while Werfel directly follows Euripides, Opitz’s play actually is a rhythmic ‘translation’, made in the spirit of a melancholic Christianity that remains close to Seneca’s Troades and its stoic theme of constancy in a life of worldly tribulation.19 On that account, temporality here is devoid of redemption: it is subjected to ontological transience and doomed to death. Yet if we realise that the Christian iconology of the Baroque period uses the torsos of Greek sculpture as allegorical images of martyrdom, we can see the parallels between this case and the adaptation of ancient myths and tragedies in Expressionist

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dramaturgy. Thus, while in Werfel’s Die Troerinnen the character of Hecuba has the traits of a martyr, being at the same time a figure of revolt, the heroine of Walter Hasenclever’s Antigone (1916) has all the traits of the pure martyr. Indeed, it is due precisely to this spiritual and religious basis that Reinhold Zickel’s contemporary characterisation of the attitude of Expressionist drama towards the tragic remains true: instead of presenting a pure kind of tragedy, or a new idea of the tragic, Expressionist drama results from a mere will to the tragic that is unable to conceive a new historical reality and transform it into tragedy.20 Its ‘scream’ leaves the ‘bared creature’ (Paul Kornfeld) at its centre wavering between the heroic spirit of revolt and that of martyrdom, between conversion – especially typical of Ernst Toller (1893–1939) – and sacrifice. Peter Szondi proposes that Expressionist drama deliberately treats man as an abstract being that aims to dominate purely abstract forces, like paternal authority, the metropolis and war itself.21 It only knows a dialectic of inwardness which, from a socio-political point of view, is confined within the structures of bourgeois society. This critical assessment is related to the Marxist debate on Expressionism22 and, as regards Szondi, depends on a Hegelian conception of the tragic. However, we must reconsider this position since it fails to account for the fundamental religious orientation of Expressionism that shapes the experience of the historical tragedy which Expressionist drama tries to represent. In fact, this is the cause of its characteristic ambivalence. The crucial point is death. In his preface to Die Troerinnen, Werfel writes: The poet denies man the ‘right’ to die! Man’s duty is to live! And man’s life is his duty. Duty, however, requires defiance of the inhumane creation, struggle against nature, faith in the mediatory role of humanity, which exists in order to lend its meaning to the world.23 Despite Werfel’s references to the non-sacrificial duty to live and the inhumanity of creation, theological commentators, for their part, summarise the main aspect, and religious meaning, of Expressionist drama as follows: God is found in the suffering creature. In a complete reversal of Nietzsche’s doctrine, the suffering of the suppressed and the subdued becomes the true deed. Sacrifice takes the place of action and conquest, and establishes the relationship with what is eternal.24 The clear contradiction between these accounts of Expressionist drama also applies to its use of allegory. On the one hand, a critical reception

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ranging from Marxist currents to Szondi sees Expressionist allegory as a process of pure abstraction, which involves the concept of the human being as much as that of society and of their relationship. On the other hand, an explicitly religious or theological criticism sees it as focusing on the concept of man as a ‘suffering creature’, caught up in historical events. This theme, which explains more conclusively than any other the revival of Georg Büchner’s work during the Expressionist epoch,25 is closely linked to the Expressionist crisis of representation, discussed above with regard to the pictorial representations of Christ. We can say, then, that Expressionist allegory appears to be dominated by the motif of death on the one hand, and by an essential concern with life on the other. As regards the former interpretation, the vectors of meaning in the process of allegorisation are abstract personifications of general concepts, such as the metropolis, civilisation, mechanisation, the bourgeois family, the conflicts of which are brought back to purely abstract and generalising oppositions: war and peace, capitalism and socialism, and so on. If on the basis of this semantic process death is the actual source of all meaning, then the allegorical process always refers to death as the true hidden meaning. Death, in other words, would be the true signifying vector. Formally, this goes back to Friedrich Hölderlin’s conception of the tragic – most important to Benjamin – which regards death as the neutral point that reveals the oppositions between the powers dominant in human life.26 However, according to Hölderlin the death of the tragic hero reveals the relationship between the different powers dominating human life, whereas in the case of Expressionist drama death is the power that reveals itself to be dominant.

4

Tragic death and Benjamin’s theory of allegory

At this point, the importance of Benjamin’s comparative treatment of Baroque and Expressionist drama is again evident. His theory of allegory actually represents a subliminal resumption of death as a tragic motif. This was made possible by the fact that what Benjamin saw were not abstract historical concepts, as established criticism saw them, but an idea. As a result, the traditional understanding of allegory and, with it, the relationship between death and life were reversed. On the theoretical level, his method repeated the artistic combination of allegory and metonymy discussed above. However, while the method was new, the problems to which Benjamin applied it were not.27 His distinction between tragedy and Trauerspiel belongs to a tradition of philosophical and poetological reflection that includes contributions by Hölderlin, Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel and Kierkegaard. Among contemporary

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contributions, a turning point is represented by Franz Rosenzweig’s reflections on metaethics and the silence of the tragic hero,28 which incidentally are inspired by a key motif of Goethe’s Faust. Rosenzweig sees the self as that which in the human being is both ‘condemned to silence’ and ‘everywhere and at once understood’.29 To arouse the self within the other, it suffices to make the tragic self visible. Yet the tragic self does not perceive this process and remains tied to its silence, with its sight fixed to its own inwardness. Rosenzweig follows Aristotle by arguing that the other who sees the tragic self is moved by fear and pity. These passions, by speaking directly to the spectator’s inwardness, actually make him a self. Yet by immediately reverberating in his own inwardness, they make him a self tied up in himself. Everyone remains by himself, everyone remains self. No community originates. And yet there originates a common content. The selves do not converge, and yet the same note sounds in all: the feeling of one’s own self. This wordless transfer of the identical […] does not occur between soul and soul: there is no realm of souls yet. It occurs from self to self, from one silence to the other silence.30 According to Benjamin, Rosenzweig’s metaphysics of tragedy is close to the discussion of the tragic in Hölderlin’s ‘Ground for “Empedocles” ’. However, if Rosenzweig’s reflections concern (the impossibility of) a ‘dialogue between human souls’, Hölderlin focuses on the possibility of a community in which the political bond is based on an ethical-religious foundation. Benjamin’s theoretical intent largely converges with Florens Christian Rang’s research on the historical origin of tragedy, according to which tragedy arises from the violent circle of mythic ritual, and the demonic powers dwelling in that circle require a propitiatory sacrifice. This process is parallel to that of archaic law. The tragic hero breaks the mythic circle and, thanks to this ‘misdeed’, which condemns him, paradoxically founds a new ethical order of law.31 This function of the tragic hero in the transfiguration of the ethical and religious order – and thus also in the ethico-political order – is a premise to Benjamin’s theory of allegory. What Benjamin calls the ‘wreckage upon wreckage’ of history (SW IV, 392) can be traced back to the faces of the defeated and suffering creatures. This dissolves the Expressionist ambivalence between death and life. The concept of the tragic implies a relationship with the religious that is the opposite of an aestheticising view of life, that is, firstly and necessarily, of an aestheticisation of death. Thus the idea of the tragic manifests itself through allegory.

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On the one hand, then, there is an ultimately religious idea of the tragic, devoid of any historical dialectic. On the other hand, in Brechtian theatre, there is a dramaturgy which deals dialectically with historical conflicts but is devoid of the tragic or, rather, intentionally avoids it. Within this fundamental polarity in contemporary theatre, Benjamin’s theory of allegory represents the main link between the idea of the tragic and historical consciousness, a link which, in the loneliness of his untimely achievements, Büchner had anticipated.

5

The rhetoric of Benjaminian allegory

When we examine the religious assumptions and main points of Benjamin’s theory of allegory,32 the first obstacle to be removed is the neo-Classical prejudice according to which the phenomenon in which an idea appears in a work of art is by definition a symbol.33 According to Benjamin, this notion implies the concept of the perfect individual. ‘What is typically romantic is the placing of this perfect individual within a progression of events which is, it is true, infinite but is nevertheless heilsgeschichtlich, even sacred.’34 In the light of the breakdown of the ethical subject, which renders the concept of perfect individual problematic, ‘the baroque apotheosis’ itself is a dialectical one: it is accomplished in the rapid transformation of one extreme into the other. Thus allegory takes shape together with the typically Classical profane concept of the symbol: it is its speculative opposite, but at the same time provides the dark background against which the bright world of the symbol is supposed to stand out.35 This is the starting point of the traditional hypothesis, according to which allegory rests on a merely conventional relationship between an image and a meaning. Against this hypothesis, Benjamin argues that allegory ‘is not a playful illustrative technique, but a form of expression, just as speech is expression, and, indeed, just as writing is’.36 The question about the nature of the allegorical represents the core issue of the Baroque debate on writing as a system of signs.37 Benjamin pursues this question with reference to the historically related discussion of symbolism in the first volume of Friedrich Creuzer’s mythology. According to Creuzer’s distinction between symbolic and allegorical representation, the latter concerns merely a universal concept or an idea that differs from itself, whilst the former is the idea itself in a sensible, bodily mode. It follows that in the first case there is a process of substitution, while in the second it is the concept itself that has descended into the physical world so that we can recognise it directly in the image.38 Creuzer links his distinction to the concept of time, which has

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far-reaching consequences for the interpretation of myth. In the symbol, he argues, there is ‘momentary totality’, whereas allegory implies a progressive sequence of distinct moments. Hence it is not the symbol but allegory that comprises the mythic, the essence of which is best expressed in the progression of the epic poem.39 In its link with the ‘worldly, historical breadth’ at the basis of the allegorical intention, the category of time plays a decisive role in the transition to the dynamic field of semiotics. Benjamin captures the dynamic element by conceiving natural history as both the first medium of intentional signification and ‘dialectical in character’.40 Most importantly, however, the category of time is essential to his famous description of allegory as disclosing the facies hippocratica of history: Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape.41 The Latin facies is not only a medical, but also a geological term. It refers to a configuration in rocks that results from a process of sedimentation, the transformative stages of which can easily be traced by geological research. Facies, in other words, is an essentially temporal and historical concept. Benjamin may underline the relevance of this geological and temporal connotation of ‘facies’ by describing the facies hippocratica of history as ‘a petrified, primordial landscape’, that is, as a sedimentation in which the signs of its earliest epoch are still visible. It is as in a petrified, primordial landscape that the facies hippocratica of history is said to reveal itself in an allegory. This allegorical use of facies, resonant with the geological sense of the term, contains conspicuous, but not automatic, movements of semantic shift or translation. As a matter of fact, the notion of facies hippocratica merely implies those elements of facies generally assigned to natural history. Thus the move from the field of geology to that of medicine is anything but explicit. Moreover, it does not result in a complete symmetry: the appearance of an assumed landscape presents the signs through which we can trace its time and history, yet these signs in themselves have nothing pathological, unless they are ‘read’ in the religious way as signs of the suffering of nature itself. However, the ‘translation’ does exist, for otherwise it would be meaningless to speak of facies hippocratica ‘as a petrified, primordial landscape’.

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The asymmetry consists in the fact that the medical concept of facies implies the recognition of symptoms of sickness and pain. In other words, the image implies that as history acts on the face of nature, so the history of mankind has a body and a physique. This complex and apparently metaphorical procedure operates with a double exchange between metaphorical ‘vehicles’, based on an analogy that is not proportional (or of the Aristotelian type), but works with three terms (as the Platonic type). Aristotle’s proportional analogy can be traced back to Gorgias’s comparison, according to which words are to the human soul what medicines are to the body. Hence words are ‘medicines for the soul’ and medicines are ‘words for the body’. The common term of reference implied in Benjamin’s analogy is therefore the body.42 Since the body is not explicitly mentioned, however, the metaphor is defective. Yet Benjamin’s image has a persuasive effect because he actually moves the analogy to the metonymical level of the relationship between the ‘face’ of nature and the ‘facies hippocratica’ of history. The body as a concept common to nature and history leads to the idea of the face or facies – with its dual, geological and medical meaning – which represents the metonymy of both nature and history. This is confirmed by the sentence that follows immediately: ‘Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face – or rather in a death’s head.’ The allegorical connotation of this image lacks the classical freedom found in symbolic expressions of the human. Yet it contains, much more than ‘human nature’ in general does, the expression of all the connotations of the biographical historicity of the single human being: it is the figure of the human being in its extreme abandonment to nature. Benjamin’s famous definition of the very core of the Baroque practice of allegory as ‘the worldly exposition of history as the Passion of the world’, in which the most significant things are the stations of decline, derives from this.43 The transition from the static nature of the symbolic to the semiotic dynamism of allegory, which Benjamin sums up in the counter-intuitive formula according to which Baroque allegory ‘is not convention of expression, but expression of convention’,44 necessarily implies the interpretation of the signs that history impresses on nature as writing. This is the deepest sense of what Benjamin defines as the religious dialectic of the content. In nature itself there are the traces of sacred writing. The tie between the signs of historical writing and the traces of sacred writing is the hieroglyph, which is both image of the writing process and fragment. By being anchored to the traces of writing impressed on nature, the signs of pictography are committed to the suffering transience of nature itself.

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As a result, the metonymy of the face is so powerfully reinforced as to become a ‘metonymical chain’. In the Trauerspiel, indeed, history does not celebrate its apotheosis, but appears as writing. This happens because the ‘word “history” stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience’.45 Using one of his favourite terms, Benjamin defines what the Trauerspiel presents ‘as the allegorical physiognomy of nature-history’.46 Written in the characters of transience, this physiognomy is present in reality ‘in the form of the ruin’. Thanks to this new metonymical image, the chain grows and, this time, a proportional analogy is allowed: ‘Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.’47 What occurs here is one of the semantic shifts mentioned above: the most significant fragment that represents ‘the finest material’ in Baroque artistic creation is precisely what lies demolished in a pile of ‘wrecked matter’.48 The term Trümmer (wreckage, debris) – used again later on in Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ – has a more creaturely and religious connotation than ‘ruin’ has: it supports more strongly the idea of history as decay, Passion and pain and, as a correlate, of redemption. It is for this reason that in the allegory of the Trauerspiel the broken forms, precisely in their state of ‘wreckage’, serve as signs, and that the movement of history towards nature – which is the basis of the allegorical, according to the metonymical procedure we have described – corresponds, in a kind of counter-movement, to ‘Heilsgeschichte’.49 Therefore the Baroque projection of the figure of Christ – the theme with which the present discussion began – is consistent with the unreliable temporariness of everyday life and is deeply inscribed in the meaning of the allegorical. The symbolic intention aims to trace everything back to the human. Allegory shatters this intention, because it comes from the ground of being: ‘Where man is drawn towards the symbol, allegory emerges from the depths of being to intercept the intention, and to triumph over it.’50 Allegory clashes with the symbolic in that the primacy of the thing over the personal, the fragment over the total, represents a confrontation between the allegory and the symbol, to which it is the polar opposite and, for that very reason, its equal in power.51 This applies not only to the classical and conventional tie between metaphor and allegory, but also to Quintilian’s even more conventional

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understanding of metaphor as personification: Allegorical personification has always concealed the fact that its function is not to personify things, but rather to give to things a more imposing form by getting them up as persons.52 It is for this reason that a main concern of the Baroque period is the distinction and tension between word and writing. This distinction is basically religious, and it is not by chance that Benjamin relates it to the notion of creature: The spoken word […] is the ecstasy of the creature, it is exposure, rashness, powerlessness before God; the written word is the composure of the creature, dignity, superiority, omnipotence over the objects of the world.53 The relation between image and writing is the nerve centre of the dialectic tension of allegory. This explains the importance of Benjamin’s concept of emblem, which reaches its climax in the theme of the corpse as an emblem.54 The allegorization of the physis can only be carried through in all its vigour in respect of the corpse. And the characters of the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus, as corpses, that they can enter into the homeland of allegory.55 Where transience and eternity confront each other, allegory establishes itself most permanently.56 It is the dialectical expression of this confrontation. Allegory therefore stands under the sign of resurrection or, more precisely, of the resurrection of both the dead and the past.57 This intensely religious motif is one of the deepest in Benjamin’s entire thought. Moreover, the dialectic established here may help us to understand both his commitment to Brechtian theatre and his subsequent critical reflections.58 The metonymical and creatural basis of Benjamin’s interpretation of allegory at any rate attempts the solution of the existential and historical antinomies that within Expressionism characterise the religious content. Although he is not completely aware of doing it, Benjamin allegorises historical reality.59 The most recent historical research is only beginning to recognise the rhetorical context within reality itself.60

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Part III Legal Philosophy and Jewish Tradition

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6 Law and Religion in Early Critical Theory Chris Thornhill

1

The falsehoods of secularisation

One attitude which connects all political and philosophical perspectives broadly associated with early Critical Theory is a fundamental scepticism regarding the processes of rationalisation, liberalisation and secularisation which have conditioned modern social reality. All early Critical Theorists share the view that the experiences of political autonomy and rational independence, usually taken to characterise liberal social and political modernity, are illusory. All argue that the emergence of rationality in its specifically secular or modern-liberal form – that is, as a universal capacity for organising knowledge and for regulating individual and collective action – is merely a mask which covers ideological strategies of material exploitation and intellectual depletion. The condition of autonomy offered by such secular rationality, they claim, in fact relies on the suppression of far greater freedoms, both cognitive and practical, than those which it purports to provide and sustain. This line of argument is closely connected with the paradigms of legal reflection in early Critical Theory. Indeed, underlying the broad critique of modern rationality in early Critical Theory is a quite specific claim about modern law and about the relation between law and reason. This claim is, namely, that the emergence of modern reason is inextricable from the emergence of modern law: that rationality acts as a means of maintaining temporally and locally overarching sequences of predictability, calculability and organisation – that is, of securing conditions of legal regularity through society. Modern rationality, on this account, is co-genetic with the construction of the thinking person as a universally identifiable centre of imputation, and as a legislatively empowered agent, capable of ordering its social and cognitive relations in accordance 103

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with generalised conceptions of validity. Indeed, the defining positions in early Critical Theory all suggest – albeit in different terms – that the emergence of post-Enlightenment rationality manifests itself in a formal juridification of human reason, which impoverishes both reason and its contents by defining reason as an exclusively regulatory mechanism. The development of modern rationality is thus always parallel to the development of human subjectivity in the form of a regulatory subject or a legal subject.1 The legal subject provides a fulcrum for social order by making possible the imputation of responsibility, the assertion of regular expectations, and the legislation of conditions of societal and cognitive predictability across time and place. But the legal subject also marks a most restricted mode of social and cognitive agency, for it reduces thinking to that of a formal and possessive apparatus, emptied of determinate content and defensively confronting objects solely as facts for organisation and calibration (DE, 20). In political and sociological terms, the main implication of the relation posited in early Critical Theory between modern reason and modern law is that it sets out an epistemological critique of liberalism. Above all, it argues that the central foundation of liberal politics – the belief that the rational human subject, abstracted from determinate experience and centred in formal rights and entitlements, contains within itself the immutable foundations of its own autonomy and forms the irreducibly legitimising core of the political order under which it lives – has contributed to the production of a social reality based on a suppression of real freedom and on a pathological reduction of human social being for the satisfaction of ongoing economic interests. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, for example, are quite clear about the deceptive nature of the rational-legal subject of liberalism, and they view it as a malign fiction around whose organisational cognitive processes modern capitalism stabilises itself (DE, 2). In distant relation, Walter Benjamin argues that the types of liberal, constitutional or social-democratic order resulting from the rationalised model of subjective autonomy offer only the most self-deluding experiences of justice and legitimacy.2 Friedrich Pollock identifies a direct nexus between classical-liberal private law and the state-capitalist regulation of the economy in the 1930s.3 Similarly, Franz Neumann sees early liberal legal structures, centred in abstract rights and formal-legal autonomy, as mere ciphers which facilitate the contractual organisation of labour in the private economy.4 The formalisation of legal principles in liberalism, Neumann argues, obstructs the elaboration of emancipatory forms of law, and the promise of universal rationality and autonomy held out by liberal law directly impedes

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consideration of its ideological function. Otto Kirchheimer, likewise, claims that the modes of legal organisation in liberal society are invariably transparent to the balances of economic interest by which they are underpinned.5 The rationalised paradigms of liberal law, he explains, have no strict dignity in themselves, but are mere refractions of the short-lived monopolisation of power by a politically autonomous bourgeoisie and they pave the way for the assumption of political power by authoritarian capitalist political groups. Sociologically, therefore, all these views converge in the belief that the secular shape of modern reason and modern law merely reflects the emerging rationality of the economy, and that the formal-legal structure of modern reason marks little more than an internalisation of the processes of exchange, calculation and stabilisation required by this economy. However, the early proponents of Critical Theory see the juridification of reason in modern society not solely as the outcome of political and social evolution, but also as the result of a twofold philosophical reconfiguration of the role of human reason through the Enlightenment. They argue, first, that the genesis of modern reason can be found in the demand of Enlightenment that thinking should be entirely autonomous – that human thought should be wholly emancipated from laws of material causality, and consequently from all determination by material and natural experience. Modern reason thus explains itself to itself as rational and autonomous through a thorough demystification of the natural world, and, crucially, through an assumption for itself of the power to determine and regulate human action formerly possessed by nature (DE, 5). Second, the inner juridical structure of reason also develops through the demand that human reason should liberate itself from all obligation to overarching metaphysical conceptions of ineluctable order or residually theological assumptions that a true law, whose content reason must decipher, is either positively disclosed or implied in the created world. The social secularisation of reason as the self-reproducing juridical basis of capitalist exchange-relations is thus flanked by the philosophical transformation of reason into a fully autonomous self-regulating instance, capable of deducing laws without any external supplement or addition. In other words, post-Enlightenment rationality evolves through the transmutation of human reason into a faculty of legislation and selflegislation. Freed both from natural determination and from early-rational accounts of the world as underpinned by mythical or metaphysicaltheological forces, reason charges itself with responsibility for legislating the conditions of its own cognitive and practical reality, which had

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previously been derived from some heteronomous source. PostEnlightenment rationality thus replaces the view that nature contains a manifest order by which human life might be guided, and it repudiates the original metaphysical or theological belief that the world is transparent to a caused or formed order of right. In short, modern rationality, as exemplified by Kant, becomes the law, and it supplants and invalidates all natural, positively revealed or metaphysically imputed demonstrations of right and order. Instead of these, it proposes its own self-authorising operations as the regulative limits of conceivable right, and so as the regulative limits of the conceivable universe. For early Critical Theory, in consequence, Enlightenment witnesses the birth or the re-birth of human reason – or of humanity itself – as law. Here, human reason shifts away from the assumption that some natural, divine or originary order or causality inheres in the universe. Indeed, reason takes itself, as a rationallegal subject, to be the legislative source of the norms to which its cognitive and ethical procedures will, in the name of consistency and validity, be held accountable. For early Critical Theory, however, the birth or re-birth of human reason as law in the Enlightenment is always a birth ex nihilo; reason can only imagine itself as the formal centre of cognitive and practical order because it sets the terms of validity for its knowledge and actions without actually assuming any determinate content for what it knows or for what it does (DE, 20). Reason only becomes autonomous because it excludes from its own purview all natural, metaphysical or religious experiences for which it cannot independently account, and so invalidates all thought containing a content which it has not itself engendered. Reason thus only supplants the inherited imperatives of nature, metaphysics, tradition and religion because it magically draws from thin air a new framework of independence and autonomy in which it can provide evidence for the order of its consciousness, and so for the order of the world. At the very genesis of the realities of modern society, therefore – of liberalism, of rationality, and of secularity – is a great fraudulent vacuity, in which human thinking proclaims itself as free from natural and religious heteronomy, and takes for itself the power to legislate the conditions of all social and cognitive being. Human reason accomplishes this, however, only by being nothing. This nothingness then pervades the instrumental and regulatory strategies of secular reason in all areas of society – for reason, whose essential validity depends on its selfconstitution as experientially and materially evacuated, must necessarily sustain itself through surreptitiously dominatory cognitive processes. The political and social evolution of liberal rationality as the source of

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authoritarian late capitalism and the philosophical evolution of reason, leaving reason as nothing but a formally empty and repetitive sequence of operations, are thus two intimately correlated occurrences. The critique of the Enlightenment, and the critique of the law of the Enlightenment, set out by Critical Theory refer to a very large extent to the Kantian version of the Enlightenment. To the perspective of Critical Theory, Kantian philosophy exemplifies a system of reflection which guarantees the autonomy of reason only by possessively restricting the spheres of knowledge and action over which reason can reliably legislate, and so by reducing human being, thinking and experience to empty operations. These limits exclude metaphysical and religious experience, and they are also placed against natural and sensory stimulation. For the early theorists of the Frankfurt School, therefore, Kantian philosophy is the apotheosis of Enlightenment, which locates reason in a closed realm of desperately self-inflicted ‘mutilation’,6 where the actual constraints of knowledge and action are celebrated as their foundation and justification, and where the relentless blocking out of religious and metaphysical speculation is presented as a plausible account of the actual conditions of human knowledge. Perhaps the key political implication of these reflections on the shared genesis of modern reason and modern law is that the condition of human freedom – or of humanity itself – is falsely imagined by reason as one of autonomy. Here, autonomy, construed strictly as a process of rational law-deduction and subsequent legal compliance, is in fact the antithesis of freedom: it is a condition of self-incarceration in reductive and experientially hollowed processes of self-validation and normative compliance. Indeed, those contents which reason expels in its self-construction as the source of autonomy – especially material, religious and metaphysical experiences – always act as unnerving correctives, or as ciphers of difference and otherness, indicating to consciousness the potentials for freedom which it has eradicated in securing its secular form.

2 Kantian antinomies and the transformation of human law Underlying the critique in early Critical Theory of the post-Kantian juridification of reason is a far-reaching claim about the relation of reason and metaphysics in modern society. This is the claim that, in attempting to supersede the pre-modern condition in which human existence is determined by forces, laws or principles for which it cannot independently account, reason has succeeded only in instituting itself

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as a secondary metaphysics. That is to say that modern reason, as the selfproclaiming source of all cognitive, practical and political authority, has now internalised the originally imputed order of the created world into its operations of rational prescription and self-legislation. Modern rationality, in consequence, merely transmutes the original structures of metaphysics, stabilised in once-and-for-all foundation (perhaps as natural law, as prime mover, or as original cause), in a secondary metaphysics of the immanently self-legislating human person. This person reflects itself as the final arbiter of all questions of validity and truth, and it reifies itself and the universe around it into empty schemes of causal sequence and taxonomic explication. Of key importance in this is the relation between law and time. One reason why human reason, in the form of Enlightenment, first revolts against the heteronomous orders of classical metaphysics and theology is because metaphysics, postulating some kind of primary cause and some kind of created juridical order in the universe, is without time.7 Metaphysics is perceived as a perennial ontological order which withholds from human being the temporal liberty of free self-creation and self-authorisation and the temporal experience of its own uniqueness and diversity. The demand for a human (autonomous) law in the Enlightenment is thus also the demand for a human time, and the secularisation of law in the Enlightenment also goes hand in hand with an attempted secularisation of time. Time and law in fact emerge, through the Enlightenment, as the twin modalities of human independence, freedom and accountability. True humanity, freed from obligations not engendered by its own faculties, defines itself as a capacity for temporal responsibility: for assuming rational authority for oneself in a distinct and particular temporal location, and for legislating the norms (both personal and collective) which give structure to this specifically temporal experience. Human self-organisation through law and in time are thus the attributes of truly enlightened human existence, which is no longer bound by laws which it does not produce and no longer views its own unique time as the product of a higher will, as inferior to the last time of salvation or to the first time of praeternatural order. For the perspective of Critical Theory, however, the secularisation of law and the secularisation of time in the Enlightenment have not produced the anticipated result of free humanity. Instead, the rationality of Enlightenment produces laws which are still petrified against all material or temporal particularity. Such rationality takes accountability for its temporal structure only by fixing its cognitive and legislative processes in static categories against all determinate historico-temporal fact and

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experience, and then by legislating the universal conditions under which these can be interpreted. The rationality of Enlightenment thus allows itself to become temporal, to be in time, only by marking out a narrow arena of temporal experience over which it can exercise rational control. In short, in its secularisation of time and law, the Enlightenment fails to move beyond metaphysics. It merely reconstitutes the original atemporal order of metaphysics as the antinomical rationality of the modern subject, and so perpetuates both the primary timelessness and the originary juridicality of metaphysics, now fictitiously reconfigured as a rational-legal human subject. On this basis, it is arguable that even the most diverse threads of Critical Theory are held together by the attempt to describe or imagine the conditions of a more truthful secularisation of law. Such law, all intimate, will surely not replicate the ancient heteronomy of classical metaphysics or theology. But nor will it mirror the regulatory autonomy of a temporally depleted rationality, or reflect the ongoing self-reproduction of the exchange economy. In parallel to this, early Critical Theory also imagines a more truthful secularisation of time. This time, too, will not merely articulate a prior ontological order. But it will be a filled time, in which human reason will not be frozen in empty prescriptive stasis against its contents: it will be a time in which reason will escape its own juridical form and participate in thinking as a truly temporal, not legal, event. In diagnosing the legal aspects of the Enlightenment as reified secondary metaphysics, which fails to account for the temporal structure of human being and thinking and so exerts a profoundly reductive influence on human cognitive and practical reality, Critical Theory shares certain assumptions with other lines of legal and political thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In relation to nineteenthcentury theory, most obviously, the critique of the formal-legal subject coincides closely with Karl Marx’s early observations on law. Marx depicts the concepts of legal autonomy and entitlement emerging from the Enlightenment as mere ideological instruments of systemic stabilisation. These concepts, he argues, distil an abstracted model of the human person from the complex social and historical relations in which it is embedded, they set a stratum of falsely distilled (or meta-physical) value between the human person and its natural and social essence, and so they allow the legal subject to emerge as a focus for facilitating exchange, contract-formation, and economic predictability.8 The early Marx also gestures towards alternative models of legal subjectivity, outside the Kantian and Roman-law conceptions of the legal person, which might integrate co-operatively defined entitlements.9

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Strikingly, the critique of the juridified person in Critical Theory also links closely with Friedrich Nietzsche’s reflections on the legal subject in On the Genealogy of Morality. Here, Nietzsche too identifies the emergence of modern law and the emergence of modern reason as parallel and closely related processes. Modern rationality consolidates itself, he argues, by abstracting itself as a centre of imputation and regulation, in the form of a legal subject,10 from the chaos of natural meanings around it, and then by imposing a quasi-metaphysical series of regulatory constraints between the human being and the unpredictable experiences of nature. The modern rational-legal conception of the human subject thus emerges only through the enforced suppression of natural impulses, and its attributes of legislation and responsibility develop as devices for creating sequences of predictability and cross-temporal social control. Even in more mainstream political theory, the argument that the formal legal person or legal subject deriving from Kantian philosophy reflects a falsely metaphysical conception of human social existence is widespread. The Germanist school of legal thought, for example, routinely associated the post-Enlightenment legal person with corruptly metaphysical traditions of representation. Otto von Gierke saw the legal person as an outgrowth of Roman Catholicism which, carried over into Roman law, defined the individual person as an atomised and competitive agent and the political order as a formally empowered apparatus, and which separates human beings from more organic and associational modes of coexistence.11 Similar arguments are found in the works of Hugo Preuß.12 In early sociology, analogously, Georg Simmel argued against the formal metaphysical isolation of the Kantian legal subject, and he attempted instead to configure the origin of genuine human law as a vital impulse or imperative, in which the individual person identifies and follows the unconditioned directive of its own temporal existence.13 In the late period of historicism, also, Wilhelm Dilthey gave expression to the widely held belief that the conception of human cognition in the Enlightenment detaches human reason from its true historical, interpretive and communicative potentials, and reduces it to the empty role of the formal law-giver, so reproducing the original order of metaphysics.14 Even the distinct traditions of neo-Kantianism around 1900 are marked by the attempt finally to cleanse Kantian philosophy of all metaphysical traces, and to account for transcendental reason as a fully practical and this-worldly faculty of objective self-legislation.15 In the late Kaiserreich and the early Weimar period, the assault on the metaphysical traces in Kantian legal models became much more vehement.

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Most famously, Max Weber explained how the post-Enlightenment legal subject expels vital experience from political existence, and stabilises social order around formalised processes of repetition, dehumanisation and malevolently discreet instrumentality.16 Weber also identified the secularisation of religious contents in the establishment of modern law as the cause of a profound impoverishment of human experience, and he intimated possibilities for revivifying law beyond the reduced sequences of regularity by which modern social orders perpetuate themselves. Weber’s willingness (however tentative) to make explicit the sense that the rationalised exclusion of experience from modern law has deeply undermining consequences for political existence was also taken up in theological or quasi-theological debate in the Weimar era. Most notoriously, Carl Schmitt rejected the antinomical structure of post-Enlightenment legal theory, arguing that the fixed systems of legal order, derived from the immutable postulates of formally reasoning subjects, traumatise human life by imposing perennial values and obligations upon it, and so make human beings accountable to alienated and experientially neutralised imperatives. The conceptual basis of liberalism thus appeared to Schmitt as thinly rationalised and universalised political metaphysics. To combat such metaphysics, he advocated the establishment of political systems which might unify law’s representative function with common vital and historical experiences, and even with the religious symbols which were first ostracised from political life by the liberalism of the Enlightenment. In more orthodox theological debate, Paul Tillich also hoped for a post-Enlightenment legal order which would give greater substance to the legal forms growing out of liberalism, and so re-integrate into law the culturally unifying experiences of devotion and worship.17 On the reactionary theological wing of the Weimar Republic, the resurgence of Lutheran theology, exemplified by Friedrich Gogarten and Emanuel Hirsch, found its political centre in the decisionistic rejection of Enlightenment conceptions of legal universality and formal-subjective entitlement, and in the attempt to historicise divine law by representing national legal order as the manifestation of holy ordinance.18 Karl Barth and Karl Jaspers stand alone amidst inter-war intellectuals from a Christian background as thinkers who, for all their hostility to neo-Kantianism, to pure liberalism, and to purely metaphysical theology, evaded the argument that the antinomical abstraction of modern law could be overcome through a direct reconciliation of law, religious content and historical experience in the materially instituted polity.

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Of perhaps the greatest importance for reflections on law, metaphysics and rational subjectivity in the Frankfurt School, however, are the perspectives outlined by the great antipodes of philosophical and political reflection in the Weimar Republic – Georg Lukács and Martin Heidegger. Across the ideological divide which separated them, Lukács and Heidegger moved close together in the 1920s in the fact that both endeavoured to provide an account of human rationality and human law which might overcome Kant’s antinomical separation of legislative consciousness from material and historical experience. In so doing, both sought to dismantle the Kantian and neo-Kantian view of rationality as a formally regulative function, and, crucially for this debate, both argued that truly binding law is law that has grown out of a temporal human consciousness which is adequately mediated with its historical (Heidegger) or material (Lukács) conditions. Fully valid law, both argued, is law which provides a direct manifestation of the temporal reality of its addressees, arising from a fully realised historical consciousness (Heidegger) or a realised class-consciousness (Lukács). The reflections on law set out by Heidegger and Lukács also have implications for the consideration of the relation between law, metaphysics and the secularisation of religion. Both construed true law – or truly human law – as law cleansed of the last metaphysical traces attached to it by idealism, expressing itself as the objective form of a selfshaping temporal consciousness. Especially in the case of Heidegger, true law is always directly counterposed to law conceived in a Platonic or Christian tradition.19 True law might emerge as a local and historical expression of grace, as a spontaneous gift of being, or as the sheer force of fate weighing on historical life in its given limits and constraints – but true law can never take the form of a perennially stabilised value, originating either from formal metaphysics or a formally reasoning legal subject.20 The new law, for Heidegger, will arise from the overcoming of the formal reification of consciousness as the origin of ideas, values or immutable prescriptions, and its form will merely be the disclosure of the necessary and inevitable conditions of human being in one historical situation. Analogously, for Lukács, the post-antinomical law will be law in which the ancient metaphysical divisions of thinking and acting, of truth and fact, of prescription and obedience, will be overcome, and in which acceptance of the law will result automatically from the collectively mediated structure of the truly human class-consciousness.21 Generally, therefore, the endeavour to overcome the legal models underpinning the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment liberalism crossed most areas of German political discourse through the late

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nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Underlying all these perspectives is the claim that modern liberal law has abandoned all living content, and merely stratifies itself antinomically – as a formal system of regulation – against the temporal, vital and associational aspects of human existence and experience. This culminates in the anti-liberal views, across Left and Right, in the latter part of the Weimar Republic. However, the strategies for re-conceiving law under the banner of a revision of the Enlightenment pull in very different directions. Some of the theories outlined above (especially Schmitt’s and those of the reactionary political theologians) seek to recast law by revoking the entire course of the Enlightenment, and reintegrating into law the religious contents originally banned from it through the Enlightenment’s anti-theocratic position. Even Weber at times veers towards analogous perspectives. Such theories endorse the consolidation (at least in gesture) of pre-Enlightenment modes of authority, and they replace the antinomical or subjective formality of modern law with a decisionistic conception of authority. This model retraces the steps of modern thought back to a reality where political power demands obedience through representation of originary metaphysical contents, predating the rational metaphysics of the Enlightenment. In contrast to this, other theories considered above intimate that the critique of metaphysics in the politics of the Enlightenment – and especially the Kantian Enlightenment – was insufficiently rigorous, and that the expulsion of metaphysical contents from law should be pursued to far more radical conclusions. For these views, Kant’s critique of metaphysical heteronomy and his attempt to account for the temporality and independence of human experience should be continued and so allowed to culminate in a final temporalisation of legislative reason. This final temporalisation would lead to the abdication of reason’s claim that it can deduce the terms of law in abstraction from all historical or natural being, and it would accept valid law as a fully immanent reflection of human consciousness in its historical and natural situations. In these distinct lines of theory, therefore, the attempt to overcome law’s temporal abstraction, and to abandon the rational-legal human subject as the source and cause of law, deploys quite divergent means. In one line, this is accomplished by a return to the first metaphysical dream of an order instituted in the world. In the other, it is accomplished by an extension of the metaphysical critique of the Enlightenment, leading to a full temporalisation or materialisation of law’s source and cause. It is against this background that the questions of law, rationality and metaphysics, as these are posed by theorists

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associated with early Critical Theory, can be most effectively interpreted and assessed.

3

Across the legal divide in critical theory

Very eminent interpreters of the legacies of Critical Theory in its first and second generation have argued that the early Frankfurt School normally only accentuated the aspect of domination in the modern legal and political apparatus, and failed to examine ways in which law might engage in the transmission of value-rational norms for the foundation of legitimate political order.22 This accusation is most specifically levelled against Adorno and Horkheimer, although it might also extend to Pollock and Herbert Marcuse, and it sees Neumann and Kirchheimer as honourable exceptions – as theorists who were prepared to examine law in a perspective not exclusively focused on its potential for coercive instrumentality. Nonetheless, this accusation usually also contains the half-suppressed intimation that early proponents of Critical Theory were too taken up with rather arcane cultural, metaphysical or epistemological issues to provide a knowledgeable discussion of the more concrete questions of political legitimacy and legal justification. It is indeed the case that, most especially in their diagnostic writings on the systemic conditions behind the regime of the NSDAP, the most prominent early Critical Theorists at times tend towards a rather reductive account of the role of law in late-capitalist societies, and are prepared to recognise law only as an instrument of prerogative steering. At the same time, however, the major representatives of the early Frankfurt School are also deeply preoccupied with questions relating to the function of law, and, as discussed above, legal issues never recede from the centre of their overarching sociological and epistemological analyses, even where these address the apparently more recondite questions of metaphysics and theology. In fact, their cultural-critical, epistemological and metaphysical concerns combine to form a perspective which envisions a transfiguration of the form and the content of law, and of the rational substructure of the law, as crucial moments in the attempt to secure conditions of social existence beyond universal domination. For this reason, then, the claim that there exists a clear divide in Critical Theory between those in a minority who were willing to countenance a non-reductive, non-instrumental conception of law (Neumann and Kirchheimer) and those in a majority who had little interest in law, or for whom law was exclusively a medium of domination (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Pollock, Benjamin) is rather misguided. The legal

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divide in Critical Theory, as far as it exists, is in fact between those who set out an objective account of existing legal relations and argue that these can be organised in such a manner that they might maximise human freedom, and those who intimate that human freedom can emerge only from a quite fundamental reconception of the law, accomplished through a radical alteration of the legislative functions of human rationality itself. Across both sides of this divide, however, the legal-political perspectives of Critical Theory are quite distinct from the broader tendencies in post-Enlightenment legal reflection outlined above, for they opt neither for an intensification and continuation of the anti-metaphysical arguments which characterise the Enlightenment, nor for a wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment, as ways of re-imagining human law and human rationality. Instead, running through and connecting the diverse positions in early Critical Theory – albeit with very clear variations – is an account of the nexus between law, reason, metaphysics and religion which is quite unique in postEnlightenment legal-political thought. Neumann and Kirchheimer, the associates of the Institute of Social Research who focus most extensively on problems of legal application and validity, explain modern law, first and foremost, as a prerogative medium of regulation, serving only to shore up the increasingly prevalent types of authoritarian capitalism or monopoly capitalism. Building on the young Marx’s critique of the legal formulae of early liberalism, they examine how the standard rhetorics of legal fairness – due process, equality before the law, universal rights, common obligation, and the legal subject itself – are manipulated in late capitalism to constitute ideological figures which disguise the exploitative function of law. Most importantly, concentrating on the political experiences of the late Weimar era, both Neumann and Kirchheimer set out highly detailed accounts of the ways in which the law’s capacity for framing consensual or founding terms of political agreement – as constitutional law – are undermined by the subterfuges of liberal-capitalist legislation, and above all by the formal primacy of private law which is maintained and masked by the fictitiously constructed legal subjects of late-capitalist economies.23 Kirchheimer especially explains how the public law of capitalist societies, whatever its legitimately agreed content, is inevitably reduced to a set of formal, and often highly bureaucratic, devices for overseeing the production of excess capital and for stabilising fragile balances of class-interest and corporate interest.24 The opportunities which Neumann and Kirchheimer propose for reconstituting modern law on foundations of legitimacy distinct from

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the formal-rational devices of liberalism are varied, and they show certain inconsistencies which suggest that neither finally developed a paradigm for explaining the conditions which might put an end to law’s instrumental function. In his very earliest writings, Neumann is close to the Sinzheimer School of labour law, and he imagines that the institution of quasi-legislative bargaining fora in the private economy will facilitate more organic processes of legal agreement, beyond the formal principles of autonomy and exchange, and so facilitate a gradual socialisation of the economy, steered by law. The early Kirchheimer, in contrast, is much closer to the Austro-Marxist legal perspectives of Max Adler, and he echoes Adler’s view that only a universal abrogation – or at least a systematic restriction – of the conditions of inequality in the private economy will prevent that destabilisation of political agreements which inevitably occurs under the primacy of the private-legal order. In their later works, especially those of Neumann, we also find a clearer recourse to natural law models of legal validity, which stress the necessary ethical content of law. In their writings on the abuse of the legal state and the judicial apparatus in the Third Reich, Neumann and Kirchheimer concur in the unspoken claim that legitimate authority in law cannot be conceived without the ethical residues which are contained even in the formal liberal model of democracy, and that general law always contains an ideal or rational dignity against its perversion as mere prerogative or private-legal edict.25 The very heart of the legal-political writings of Neumann and Kirchheimer, however, is formed by a tendency towards a model of legal or constitutional existentialism. This model calls directly on the theoretical legacy of religion in its attempt to find a way beyond liberal law, and it shows its authors as manifest opponents of purely systemic or deterministic lines of Marxist analysis, which simply dismiss legal and political institutes as superstructural features. Against entirely secular attempts to found political legitimacy in the legal state and the legal subject, their existential conception of the constitution proposes a notion of legitimacy which sees order as legitimate only where it articulates the total and integral condition of authentic human-being – in the shared form of a cognitively and volitionally fulfilled life.26 Legitimate law, on this view, is not a thin order of norms, constraints or universal prescriptions: rather, law is legitimate where it communicates the innermost political character of its addressees, and where it makes this character manifest as a founding set of principles for a democratic polity. The content of legitimacy, therefore, must always be before the law, and legality which does not draw content from this existential

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foundation has a merely technical or subsidiary status. Legitimate political order, in short, elaborates that aspect of human life which is political; that is, which exists above all purely private, technical, systemic or exclusively goal-driven motivations, and in which the frail resources of non-exploitative co-existence are contained. It is for this reason that Neumann, in contrast to other revisionists of the 1920s and 1930s, defended the parliamentary-constitutional order of state against the encroachment of all pluralistic or corporate conceptions of shared power.27 Legitimate law, he explains, can only exist in the form of a constitution in which the conditions of non-technical human co-existence are recognisably articulated, in distinction from all motives of pure interest or pragmatic compromise. The key to such a constitution is that it can impose concrete and enduring checks on the colonisation of law by all exploitative or contractual modes of rationality. In its theoretical premises, the model of existential constitutionalism underlying the ideas of Neumann and Kirchheimer is conceived as an appropriation of Carl Schmitt’s quasi-theological vision of constitutional integrity for a political programme which is directly opposed to that of Schmitt himself. As is well known, Schmitt argued that political legitimacy is a condition of political being, in which the constitution provides categorical terms – placed above all material compromise, technical agreements, checks and balances in the political fabric, or interested cross-class bargains – in which citizens can interpret that ideal or originally religious quality of their existence which is not tied to purely material strategy or technique, and which is clearly detached from the sphere of natural or technical reproduction. Legitimacy, in consequence, gives representative form to the distinctively human capacity for political existence.28 In this existential account of political legitimacy, Schmitt at times places his theory on the finest edge of a dialectic between theological and anthropological concepts of human politics and legitimate law. He does not invariably advocate a resurrection of theocratic or hierocratic order, and on occasions he is prepared to condone the drift to secular or even functionalist political systems. Nonetheless, he consistently claims that a political order obtains legitimacy only where it is tied to an exclusive and overarching definition of what politics is, and where the content of this definition is made present, as a quasi-sacral political ethic, in all institutions of government and in all laws passed by the government. Politics founded in such an ethic will sweep away the countervailing institutions which the Enlightenment has produced,29 and this ethic will form the irreducibly legitimising content of all law. Such an ethic cannot be represented in the fictions of

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legal neutrality, the constitutional balances, the Basic Rights, or the technical protections of private interest, which have grown out of the rationalist – and especially the Kantian – theory of the legal state: it can only be demonstrated by an absolutely prior sovereign will informing all components of the political system.30 This will, then, unifies all constituents of the polity by representing to them binding and cohesive principles of political form. Neumann and Kirchheimer were naturally vehemently opposed to Schmitt, most obviously for party-political reasons. However, they also opposed him precisely because he tried to resurrect religious concepts in his attempt to envision the political foundation of law. For Neumann and Kirchheimer, in fact, the seducibility of Schmitt’s concept of the political is very closely bound up with his determination to imagine the content of politics in essentially theological terms. His wilfully archaicising failure to dissociate politics from religion, Neumann especially emphasises, makes his concept of political legitimacy highly susceptible to rather gratuitous aestheticisation, and it deflects from clear analysis of how specific systems might fail in their attempt to put out legitimised motivations for compliance.31 Schmitt’s nostalgia for religious accounts of legitimacy and representation thus too easily obscures the characteristics of the political systems for which he declares fondness and affection. This in turn creates a willingness to identify the conditions of legitimacy (or essential politicality) in states which fall short of every measurable definition of legitimacy or politics. However, the fact that Schmitt described that political quality of human being in flawed or dialectically naive terms does not, for Neumann and Kirchheimer, mean that Schmitt is entirely wrong in defining the political as a pure component of human being, and legitimacy in law as the manifestation of this quality.32 In fact, for Neumann and Kirchheimer the great deficiency in Schmitt’s thought was that he believed that the ideas of Political Theology could be introduced into law in their original quality as Political Theology – or at least that law mysteriously begins to obtain legitimacy wherever it expresses resolutely pre-Enlightenment principles. In contrast, Neumann and Kirchheimer imply that the originary or religious conception of the political as a pure aspect of non-material nature can only be meaningfully redeemed via a far-reaching transformation (but not a final negation) of its primary religious content. The condition of political legitimacy, both argue, relies on the institution of a political framework in which the eminently political quality of human existence is given full scope for selfelaboration, and in which the possibility of entirely free democratic

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foundation – the most essential quality of human-being – is liberated from prior material and technical constraints. A political order of this kind can only be established by a constitution which permits maximum liberty of ‘active participation in politics’ and interaction between citizens,33 yet which also sets unequivocal terms of economic equality and makes the economy subject to ‘communal domination’ exercised by an undivided political will.34 Schmitt’s notion of the political as an anthropologically or theologically specific attribute of human-being, marked by its distinction from all technical and material determinacy, is thus here carried over into a radical-democratic vision of the active polity. This transformation, however, does not entail a final abandonment of the theological conception of politics. In fact, for Neumann and Kirchheimer, it is only through its reconception in a conceptual framework which is no longer theological that the primary belief in the specific anthropological dignity attached to the political becomes sustainable.35 The false secularisation of law in liberal-capitalist formalism can surely not be undone by a direct recourse to theological principles. But it can also not be undone without a dialectical reconfiguration of these principles. In consequence, Neumann and Kirchheimer simultaneously oppose all principles of legal validity premised in the classical ideas of the liberal Enlightenment and all attempts to resuscitate accounts of legitimate power founded in pre-liberal or quasi-theocratic categories. Despite this, however, their works are also marked by the high degree of seriousness with which they address the residues of Political Theology, and with which they endeavour to make sense of political-theological motifs in the secular political arena. Indeed, one conclusion which might be drawn from their radical-democratic re-reading of Schmitt is that Political Theology, conceived strictly as theology, always runs the risk of forfeiting its content as a non-materialist account of human interaction in political existence. Schmitt himself might in fact stand witness to this danger, as a thinker whose theological interest in non-material politics led him to support a quasi-corporatist party-government bankrolled by cartels and heavy-industrial concerns. For Neumann and Kirchheimer, in any case, the primary quality of the political, theologically conceived, relies dialectically on its interpretation as a decidedly secular imperative to envisage and institute the conditions of human association not founded in instrumental balances of private interest. It can therefore be argued that even the most straightforward institutionalist theorists among the early proponents of Critical Theory are strongly informed by religious paradigms and residues. Indeed, it can be

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claimed that their most central theoretical ambitions revolve around a reconstruction of the religious legacy in politics, and that their proposed solutions to the problem of false autonomy in modern law hold a dialectical balance between pure-materialist and metaphysical or religious constructs. Although at times in their early trajectories Neumann and Kirchheimer brush shoulders with more orthodox Left-corporatist, Austro-Marxist and neo-Kantian perspectives, the fabric of their thinking is formed by the belief that the legitimacy of law can only be discussed as a disclosure of non-material or non-technical human nature – that is, of the profound capacity for a political life in which political agreements reflect an interest in commonality which is prior to all purely purposive, instrumental or antagonistic motives. For this reason, there always remains a distant yet abiding truth in the conviction that truly legitimate law reflects an aspect of the world which is not solely the result of the autonomous self-regulation of human reason, and certainly not the result of the socially and experientially depreciated reason of the contract-forming liberal mind. Legitimate law simply represents a political resource of human existence which is always prior to law itself, and which always denounces the strategic legal forms of liberalism as reductions and distortions of this political resource. Consequently, the path to a legitimately human politics is only accessible via a recourse to a dialectically non-materialist account of the origin of legitimate law.

4

Law beyond the law

For the thinkers linked more centrally to Critical Theory questions regarding law, law’s origin and the legitimacy of law are rarely posed as specifically institutional problems. However, for such theorists, for example Benjamin and Adorno, the attempt to counteract the ideological results of rational-legal secularisation has quite the same importance that it possesses for their institutionalist counterparts. In his reflections on law and politics, Benjamin, echoing Weber, makes clear his belief that the course of political secularisation and liberalisation has not engendered the conditions of a free society, and has not reduced the coercive aspect of law and governance. In ‘Critique of Violence’ he argues that the legal and institutional attributes of liberal society still have their origin in crudely conflictual acts of political foundation, and that the exercise of legislative authority is always rooted in violence (SW I, 143–4). Therefore, although the political condition of rational secularity is characterised by the endeavour to frame power in

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conceptions of normative neutrality, these, for Benjamin, fail to conceal law’s true essence, and they institute only the most illusory chimera of legally enshrined order. A political state free of regulatory coercion, he concludes, cannot be envisioned on the grounds of existing conditions of legal practice. Liberal society and the liberal legal state are thus sustained, for Benjamin, by the most profound self-delusion: by the belief that they secure their own neutrality through law, whilst they omit to recognise that law itself always transmits and perpetuates violence. Indeed, Benjamin especially stresses that the central institute of liberal private law – the institute of contract – is not based in reciprocal agreement, but in fact ‘confers on each party the right to resort to violence’ (SW I, 243). Most importantly, Benjamin indicates that it is only possible to found law in a source other than violence if human reason surrenders its ‘atheological’ assumptions about historical autonomy and legal independence, and if human politics opens itself to the metaphysical and religious possibilities widely erased through the course of liberalisation and rationalisation.36 In this respect, Benjamin sets the terms for a metaphysic of political experience, and he envisages the possibility of non-coercive law only as an intrusion – as ‘divine violence’ – on the fictions of legitimacy created by rational or representative legislation (SW I, 252). The foundation of law in violence can only be overcome, he states, if law is allowed to confront human reason and action as a signifier of the limits of practical political causality and autonomy, and if a law is invoked which shows up the inability of human reason, even in pacified and legally circumscribed states, to constitute the just conditions of its own secular legitimacy. For Benjamin, consequently, it is only as the expression of a divine origin, or of a ‘law-destroying’ force outside human prescription, that the law might be applied as something other than a medium of coercion (SW I, 249). As in the cases of Neumann and Kirchheimer discussed above, these arguments need not be taken to imply that Benjamin still subscribes to the primary metaphysical or religious view that there exists a final ordained order of justice in the world, or that he identifies the pure metaphysical tradition as a direct repository of emancipatory potentials. They do imply, however, that, for Benjamin, the metaphysical or religious legacy cannot simply be banished from reason’s accounts of its place in the world, and that human thinking cannot move lightly away from metaphysics and freely legislate an independent reality of legalpolitical foundation and enlightened reflection. On the contrary, the rationalised world is a world of coercive order, homogenised knowledge,

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and temporally evacuated experience. It is only through the vestiges of metaphysics and religion that reason can begin to envision a reality of justice beyond its own authority, and so escape the dominatory attitudes in which, as an autonomous agent, it has become ensnared. The invocation of the originally heteronomous reality of metaphysics and religion thus does not serve to recreate metaphysics as a sphere of originary being wholly external to human experience. However, the interpenetration of metaphysical and secular thinking permits the regularised order of the rational world to encounter another law, in a different temporal structure, and so it pierces the autonomy of the falsely humanised world and it corrects and challenges its constraints. Benjamin particularly stresses that only such interpenetration will allow human reason to free itself from the false timelessness and linearity of its rational existence; metaphysical experiences offer reason a sense of itself as filled time, as time to be other than what it already is.37 For humanity to live in complete secularity, or to be completely free of metaphysical or theological ideas is thus, for Benjamin, not to be either secular or human at all: it is to be re-incarcerated in the secondary heteronomy of formal reason and arbitrary political domination. Adorno’s work is rarely mentioned in conjunction with reflection on law, and at times a labour of reconstruction is required to make his thinking directly relevant to legal, or even institutional, theory. On a manifest level, his views on law are closely connected to more standard positions in the tradition of Critical Theory, as, like Pollock and others before him, he explains the modern political apparatus as a broad hegemonic bloc, maintaining the systemic conditions of late capitalism through the application of law as a prerogative mechanism of economic and political stabilisation.38 At a less apparent level, however, Adorno’s writings also contain a number of very important implications for the foundational and epistemological dimensions of legal thought. Interpreted in light of their legal content, in fact, Adorno’s work, even in its entirety, might be taken to indicate that the malaise of postEnlightenment rationality is a thoroughly juridical matter, and that the character and evolution of modern reason cannot be explained without consideration of reason’s juridical-regulatory functions. This connection between law and reason is manifest already in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where Adorno and Horkheimer repeatedly use legal vocabulary to describe the operations of modern reason. Modern subjectivity, they claim, is defined by its assertion of a ‘legal right’ to systematise, record and subordinate the natural objects which it encounters (DE, 20). Such reason is then oriented towards the establishment of

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‘automatic mechanisms of order’ by which it secures ‘absolute control’ over other things and people (DE, 23). Reason, on this account, is reduced to a regulatory mechanism for taxonomic evaluation and management: it is a faculty which, like modern law, expresses and duplicates the repetitive cycles of the economy, and which is bereft of inherent sensory or temporal content, and occluded against all substantial understanding of the things to which it is applied. In his later writings, Adorno is still more emphatic in the imputation of legal functions to reason, and he states directly that rationality in its post-Enlightenment form culminates in the duplicitous structure of the legal subject. The ‘ability to give oneself laws’, he explains, is the ‘supreme concept’ of post-Enlightenment philosophy – not only in its ethical and political implications, but also in its cognitive and epistemological attitudes.39 The assertion of practical and cognitive autonomy as the determinant of the human subject is in fact, Adorno claims, the ‘unifying factor’ at the heart of modern society, and this engenders the all-pervading illusion that the universe is anchored in the legislative acts of atomised persons and that occurrences and objects in this universe can always be measured through recourse to fixed categories of reason.40 The conception of the subject as legislator or as self-legislator is thus no less than that ‘very dark secret of bourgeois society’, which ideologically insinuates the ‘formal freedom of juridical subjects’ as a state of true emancipation, but in fact restricts human liberty to the minimal cognitive and practical functions of self-control, imputation and legislation required by the ongoing logic of capitalist domination.41 In any case, the positive account of freedom as autonomy given in the Enlightenment, and especially by Kant, is, for Adorno, invariably founded in ‘unfreedom’, and it acts only as a fiction which disguises ‘undiminished repression’.42 Adorno argues that, seen both as a cognitive and as a political medium, modern law, and the promises of positive liberty articulated in the medium of law, reflect the thorough determination of human existence by formalising and dominatory impulses. Modern reason, in fact, is law – or it is at least inseparable from the juridical exigencies which it enacts and to which it conforms. The fate of human reason has been to be pared down to a substantially and temporally empty juridical core, a pure legal subject. This legal subject stabilises itself around narrow and chimerical claims for autonomy; it arbitrarily adapts its objects to timelessly pre-formed cognitive categories (DE, 23), and it banishes from itself all natural impulses and all speculative questions, for the answers to which it cannot provide guarantees and over whose content it cannot exercise control. At the risk of excessive schematisation, in fact, Adorno’s

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entire philosophy might be construed as an attempt, with shifting points of focus, to protest against the reduction of reason to law, to illuminate the betrayed dream of human freedom in the self-assertion of reason as autonomous legislator, and so to grasp freedom as something other than the ‘as if’ to which it is restricted in the positive model of enlightened autonomy.43 His earlier theory of determinate negation might easily be viewed as the self-critique of reason which seeks to subvert the limitation of its thinking to regulation. Likewise, his later negative-dialectical theory sets out an account of the possible internal self-negation of reason as it revolts against its own juridification, and as it rejects the realised conditions of its own autonomy. This theory then outlines the possible hermeneutical encounters in which reason might interpret its own confinement, and so experience its contents as a durée, without reducing them to its own stabilised and rationally controllable forms.44 To a perhaps even greater extent than Benjamin, however, Adorno also argues that the formalisation of reason and law has not occurred solely through an impoverishment of reason in its relation to natural and material contents. Rather, this results in part from the transcendental ‘block’ placed by the Enlightenment on thinking about transcendence, and so from the temporal closure of reason against metaphysical and religious ideas. This, most particularly, is at the heart of Adorno’s debate with Kant, and with Kant’s limiting of transcendental reason against metaphysical speculation and transcendent experience. On a most manifest level, Adorno interprets Kant’s work as a simple example of the restrictions which the demand for self-legislation and accountability in Enlightenment imposes on reason’s capacity for natural and metaphysical experience. In Kant’s epistemology, he argues, the distinction between transcendence and the transcendental closes reason both against ontological or metaphysical truths and against the truthful phenomena in the world.45 This epistemology emerges, consequently, not as a true theory of knowledge, but merely as a formal registration of what reason cannot know, what it is ‘unable to comprehend’.46 As such, Kant’s epistemology directly parallels the possessive rationality of the emerging exchange-economy; like modern law, it offers an obsessive or quasi-proprietorial inventory of the bounds of sense, and it painstakingly provides a ‘stock of bourgeois wisdom’ on which autonomy can be cautiously preserved and unanswerable questions and subversive experiences can be marginalised from thought.47 At the same time, however, Adorno also analyses Kantian philosophy less critically as an inadvertent description of reason’s

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lament over the post-metaphysical violation to which it has been subjected, as Enlightenment, and he sees Kant’s figure of the transcendental as a document of a human consciousness traumatised by its loss of natural and metaphysical content and struggling against the reified limits which, for the sake of self-legislated validity, it has given itself. In consequence, he discerns in Kant’s epistemology ‘a kind of metaphysical mourning’,48 in which the transcendental, however counter-intentionally, enacts reason’s last despairing attempt to ‘salvage transcendence’: to rescue a final residue of metaphysical experience from the pure immanence of post-metaphysical knowledge, and so to resist the ultimate closure of reason.49 When interpreting Kant, therefore, Adorno describes metaphysical experience as a token of what has been lost and expelled by human thought in its secularity and possessive autonomy. Formal or juridical reason, he states, makes ‘the experienced world, the immanent world, the world in its this-ness, commensurate with us’. The result of this is ‘a radically metaphysical alienation’, in which meaning is ‘eliminated from the world’.50 However, he also implies that the desire for metaphysical knowledge still has the power to disrupt reason, and to call thought into a subversive dream of itself as other than its own existing autonomy. For all the labour of its formalisation, therefore, Kant’s epistemology – for Adorno – always both suppresses and reflects a deep sadness about the substantial meanings which it must banish in order to propose the subject as an autonomous unity. Indeed, Adorno even senses in Kant’s philosophy an ‘objectively inspiriting force’, which still clings to some echo of the sense that the subject might escape the ‘metaphysical night’ of reified reason, and which still registers the remote ‘constellation of the human and the transcendent’.51 Even the most extreme juridification of reason in the Enlightenment thus still divulges a secret about reason’s wish to escape its transcendental-legislative reduction. Once again, this does not mean that Adorno thinks that the false autonomy of reason can be cured by a return to pure metaphysics. Yet it might be taken to mean, at least, that the invocation of metaphysical or religious contents permits the imagination of a condition of human being which has not been prescribed by reason and which leads reason beyond the reified order of inner-worldly metaphysics, towards a more human reason. ‘Subjectively liberated experience and metaphysical experience’, Adorno states, ‘converge in humanity’.52 It is only where reason can take account of the falsity of its secularisation, and where it can imagine its contents as outside its own categorical and temporal order, that it might leap over the shadow of its own inhuman formality.

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For negative dialectics, in short, the present memory of metaphysics is always one crucial corrective to the nightmare of rational secularity and autonomy – that formal ‘immersion in inwardness’ – in which reason has become ensnared.53 If there is a determinate legal-political content in their work, therefore, Adorno and Benjamin might be seen to indicate that truly legitimate human being cannot be understood on the foundation of existing legal relations or existing epistemological conditions. In certain respects, Adorno appears closer to a quasi-religious antinomianism than Benjamin. Benjamin at least offers an account of the source of true law, and he suggests that an order of ‘divine power’ might, however distortedly, still be discernible in the world.54 Adorno, in contrast, is prepared to countenance a right order of existence only at the very end of consciousness in its present form, and so at the end of all legal structures inhering in this consciousness. Despite this, it might equally be claimed that Adorno’s work is still more intensely concerned with law than is Benjamin’s, and especially with the relation of law to reason and of reason to metaphysics and religion. Adorno repeatedly intimates that modern consciousness has an indelibly juridical character, and that the concepts of freedom posited and positivised by this consciousness are illusory. On these grounds, Adorno’s methods of negative dialectics and determinate negation are always attempts to think through regulatory consciousness towards a different human law, of politics and of thought – this law is always, dialectically, in ‘solidarity’ with religion and metaphysics, at least as an antidote to its own formal and timeless self-regulation.55 In the broadest terms of the critique of Enlightenment, in sum, Benjamin and Adorno concur in the claim that the legal form of secular rationality has produced a cognitive and political reality of sterile autonomy, from which the content and possibility of freedom have been banished. In this reality, the internal and external attributes of the world are regulated by formally self-regulating cognitive processes, and are pressed into temporal sequences of repetition and self-reproduction, which extirpate all true content from experience. Dialectically, however, one of the few breaches in this regulatory domination over time by law remains present in the original figures of metaphysics and religion, against which human reason, in its initial desire for a temporal and secular experience of autonomy, first sought to defend itself.

5

Conclusion

Enlightenment, it might be argued, protests against religion and metaphysics because these interpret the validity of human thinking and

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acting in accordance with immutable principles or laws which do not have their origin in human thinking and acting. It is for this reason that the category of autonomy obtains such significance in the doctrines of Enlightenment humanism. This category is centred on the demand that human validity should be established in purely secular and temporal terms, by secular and temporal laws. The critique of the Enlightenment around the Frankfurt School, however, argues that this primary critique of metaphysics and religion has catastrophically misfired, and that in the reified metaphysics of modern rationality human freedom is still less secure than under the primary heteronomy of the pre-Enlightenment. However, far from endorsing a step behind the Enlightenment, back to the myth of pre-stabilised order, the major perspectives in Critical Theory argue for a dialectical preservation of theological and metaphysical contents, which hopes that these might be made hermeneutically present to secular consciousness as signs of its own imprisonment. Paradoxically, therefore, the first Enlightenment argued against metaphysics and religion because these defined human authority and validity through reference to an imputed categorical order of creation. The Enlightenment then took for itself the task of cementing its own rational legal fabric at the heart of the humanised universe. The different Enlightenment proposed by thinkers linked to early Critical Theory argues, however, that metaphysical and religious contents, dialectically construed, are now vitally required in order to free human life from the autonomous juridical structures which it has entered in its miscarried attempt at secularisation and temporal emancipation.

7 Jewish Law and Tradition in the Early Work of Erich Fromm David Groiser

Introduction Within post-Kantian, liberal accounts of law, freedom emerges as the law that is moral. Opposed to the relative and restricted necessity of positive law, freedom is understood as a law that is individual and autonomously given. The space of such self-determination is protected, usually negatively, by positive law. Freedom and necessity, morality and law, autonomy and heteronomy: these summarise the oppositions within which much modern thinking has moved and moves to this day. For a traditional culture, these terms are irrelevant. The case is otherwise, however, for a traditionalist perspective of the kind that frequently emerges when the values and norms of a traditional world are ceasing or have ceased to be self-evident and now require justification. At such moments, the encounter with these oppositions becomes unavoidable. In the face of the new system that is threatening or replacing the old ways, three things of interest may occur. First, those old ways will almost inevitably be made explicit, and thus represented as a system. This may take one of two forms. As an apology such representation will register few qualms about thematising what was never experienced as such. Alternatively, an attempt is made to highlight the disparity between the artificial digest of a way of life and that life itself, as it was or is lived. In the latter case, the resistance of those traditional forms to the terms by which they are now called upon to justify themselves may give rise to the second major feature: the new, inimical values may, in turn, be subjected to criticism. Here apology of the usual kind is often held in contempt. Third, and finally, even where the stance is robustly nonapologetic, it may happen that tradition is frozen at its last defensible stage. Idealisation may easily render a process as a situation. Tradition is 128

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divested of its native dynamism and flexibility, in order to become serviceable for a polemical or an apologetic need. At the same time, we should not overlook the fact that the apparently subtle awareness of such dynamism may shade into idealisation in its own right. Whether this belongs to tradition as such or to the tradition of the invention of tradition will depend on the severity of the rupture in fact and in the experience of the historical agents. It is within the broad context of such reassessments of tradition and law, in comparison with their modern, liberal alternatives or antagonists, that the work of Erich Fromm (1900–80) should be understood. In the present chapter, this case will be argued from the perspectives provided in Fromm’s doctoral dissertation on Jewish Law.

1

Fromm, the Frankfurt School, and Judaism

Fromm’s relation to the Institute of Social Research, which began in the late 1920s, has been a point of debate. It has been suggested that his involvement was ‘deliberately ignored’, following his departure in the late 1930s, under the cloud of rancorous disputes with Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse.1 At its height, his part in the Institute’s activities seems to have been important. By the time of his association with the School, Fromm, like most members, has the twin inheritance of Marx and Freud (though not, unlike a good number, Hegel). He is thus predisposed to see religion as little more than a facet of class oppression and illusory psychic compensation. Given that his work engages profoundly with both thinkers, and seeks to fuse them in a new way, Fromm provides a good instance of the engagement of the Frankfurt School with religion. Like many in the Institute, he emerged from a Jewish background. Yet in contrast to the largely liberal or assimilated Jewish milieu of the Bildungsbürgertum – the educated middle and upper middle classes – to which most of the other members of the Institute belonged, Fromm’s parental home was Orthodox.2 Moreover, Fromm extended and deepened his involvement with Judaism in his adolescence and university years. He entertained close contacts with a renewing Orthodoxy, led by the charismatic Hungarian-born Rabbi Anton Nehemia Nobel (1871–1922).3 There he could encounter the likes of Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), Ernst Simon (1899–1988), Leo Löwenthal (1900–93), Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) and Nahum N. Glatzer (1903–90). By his own account, propelled by the horrors of the First World War to suspect all ideologies, Fromm sought to understand crowd irrationality and longed for ‘peace and international understanding’.4 His preference for

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the Prophets and a form of messianic universalism can be traced to this formative experience.5 Such leanings were, of course, common among modern Jewish apologists, who were eager to refute the charges of tribalism and legalism and to prove Judaism’s universal ethical credentials. In Fromm’s earlier writing on Judaism, this tendency is evident, but it is more than balanced by robust argument for law and tradition. Along with several other important figures from the Weimar Jewish renaissance, Fromm was in the years 1920–25 part of the daily Talmud circle around Salman Baruch Rabinkow (1882–1942). Rabinkow came from Lithuania in 1907 and, developing a modern scientific method for teaching and researching Talmud, Kabbalah, and Jewish thought, inspired in Heidelberg a small ‘yeshiva’ of largely observant, highly motivated young Jews.6 He mediated traditional and Orthodox study to comparatively acculturated Western European Jews, finding a ready reception among Fromm’s generation, which was impatient with the perceived failure of the Emancipation and Enlightenment projects, in the course of which their parents had shed many of the features of traditional Jewish life. In the person of Rabinkow, Fromm experienced a true fusion of Jewish tradition and modern culture and gained access to a traditionally rigorous, yet scientific approach to the Talmud, one that drew on the Lithuanian traditions of rabbinical learning.7 In addition to Talmud, they discussed philosophical, historical and sociological problems. Indeed, Fromm ventures that ‘Rabinkow influenced my life more than any other man, perhaps, and although in different forms and concepts, his ideas have remained alive in me’.8 Rabinkow joined the traditionalist Ludwig Krause and Nobel as the three figures out of whose teaching Fromm’s own views had grown: despite his lack of their theistic belief, ‘it is my conviction’, Fromm later maintained, ‘that at no point has the continuity between their teaching and my own views been interrupted’.9 Rabinkow, who espoused a politics of protest and – like Hermann Cohen – a version of messianic socialism, also led Fromm’s interests in the direction of that other East European contribution to modern Jewish culture: Hasidism. Raised in a Hasidic family, Rabinkow provided Fromm with an access to this tradition that extended beyond Martin Buber’s selective, neo-Romantic depiction, which tended to minimise, besides its doctrine, ‘the social character’ of Hasidism.10 While Buber’s preference for the tales over the theoretical texts, and his emphasis on Hasidism’s this-worldly activism, must have suited Fromm, the social character of Hasidism is central to Fromm’s account. In the early 1920s, Fromm edited a small Jewish newspaper, and participated in the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (‘Free Jewish School’) in Frankfurt,

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led by Rosenzweig, where he lectured (on Karaism) in 1923, as did his teacher, Rabinkow, in the winter 1923–24.11 Finally, we should note that even Fromm’s conversion to psychoanalysis and an atheistic or humanist religion occurred under a decidedly Jewish sign, when he joined Frieda Reichmann, his future wife, at her institution in Heidelberg, which sought to practice psychoanalysis alongside observance of Jewish traditions and as a result earned itself the informal title ‘Torapeutikum’.12 When attempting to assess the impact of early twentieth-century Jewish life on the Frankfurt School, and especially on its analyses of religion, Fromm offers us a particularly instructive example. Not only does he emerge from an intensively religious environment, but he also undertakes one of the more sustained engagements with those currents in Frankfurt School thinking – psychoanalysis and Marxism – that are axiomatically hostile to religion, and remains occupied with the question of religion throughout his life. Fromm’s early work on religion should be seen as part of the early twentieth-century reconceiving, among German Jews, of law and tradition. It challenges the equation of heteronomy and unfreedom, and its nuanced analysis of the dominant opposition between law and ethics already contains the seeds of a critique of ethics. A society which appears to have followed the recommendations of Moses Mendelssohn and Wilhelm von Humboldt, by renouncing the right of the state to dictate belief and any claim to oversee the minutiae of daily life, in fact performs a double disservice. It delivers the individual into the hands of the legal apparatus of the state; individuals are protected from their own kind, but unkindly, precisely not as one of their kind. Second, liberal society and the reformed religions that it fosters aim to leave religion to the discrimination of the individual, yet become increasingly prescriptive about substantial principles and beliefs: religion, by means of dogma; the state, through sanctioned norms and ideals. This mixture of formal liberalism and substantial dogmatism is one that profoundly exercised Fromm’s generation, as it took stock of the profit and loss made by a Judaism that, wedded to the ideologies of Emancipation and Enlightenment, had in little over a hundred years undergone changes more fundamental than at almost any time in nearly two thousand years prior.

2 Das jüdische Gesetz Fromm’s doctoral dissertation, Das jüdische Gesetz: Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie des Diaspora-Judentums (‘Jewish law: a contribution to the sociology of Diaspora Judaism’ ), represents his first major study of religion.

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It was written under the supervision of Alfred Weber, submitted to the University of Heidelberg in 1922, and not published until 1989. Arguably, the major intellectual presence in Fromm’s life at this time was Rabinkow.13 Nonetheless, Fromm acknowledges the influence of Alfred Weber’s sociology, which is plain throughout, both conceptually and terminologically.14 Fromm applies Weber’s model for relating the historical social structure of a people, its ‘social body’, to both its production of culture and ideas, the ‘cultural movement’, and its existence as an ‘historical body’. The Jewish people participates in the ‘civilisation process’ of the host societies in which it lives: the process of scientific and technical progress, whose advances change the world and induce, in response, new cultural forms. The new ‘structures of meaning’, produced by culturally creative personalities as a response to changes in the world, in turn ‘saturate’ the social processes of civilisation. Taken together, these effects constitute a cycle that is, for Weber, the ‘process of history’. Socially and culturally, Fromm observes, the Jews remained a world apart, even though they were ‘embedded’ in the civilisation of the host society. Their unique life and system of laws guaranteed their persistence as a separate historical body. The dissertation discusses the significance of Jewish law in traditional Judaism, Karaism, Reform Judaism and Hasidism, and follows a similar method throughout: the examination of the specific economic, political, and cultural situation of the group is the foundation for discussing its ‘socio-religious structure’.15 The aim of the book’s first section is to grasp the relationship between the social structures of Judaism, its ethnic and experiential unity, and its unity as a religion. Since ethnic and religious spheres were distinct, the Jewish ‘religion’ was not called upon, traditionally, to secure the unity of the Jewish people as a social group. Judaism’s distinctive historical existence expresses the correlation of these two facets: its physical and its metaphysical unity. Physical cohesion rested on the ‘fact of […] autonomous ties of blood relation and ethnicity’, and hence social ties did not need to be forged by religious ideas.16 Ensuring the coherence of the group thus did not fall to dogmatics or to a church. A central difference between Judaism and Christianity emerges: the religious ideas of Judaism could remain a matter for the individual; religious content, in this sense, is essentially ‘an individual category’.17 What connects the social or physical existence of the Jewish people with its cultural, religious or metaphysical side is the law. In Weber’s terms, Jewish law expresses the way in which the ‘soul’ of Jewish culture

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permeates its ‘social body’. Drawing on the language of Hermann Cohen’s portrayal of Judaism, Fromm condenses this culture into that of ‘ethical monotheism’.18 The law has seen to it that Jewish society has been thoroughly infused with the spirit of Judaism: It does not have the task of guaranteeing for the church the existence of the group, but reckons with the autonomous existence of the people as a presupposition and then has, rather, the function of fusing the people, as a group bound by the ties of blood kinship, with the religious idea that is supposed to be immanent to it and of forming this idea into a lasting and indestructible idea.19 The law is a ‘system of norms’ valid for all and ‘has its roots in the religious idea that is supposed to inhere in the people’.20 The terms in which the religious idea is described here deserve careful note. For it is at once meant to be immanent and yet still a task. Though supposed to be one with the people, the idea must be made to permeate it. Indeed, the idea itself only acquires its force as a result of this process of melding. The law is embedded ethos. That is, for Fromm, its excellence. It allows religious and ethical ideals to be lived, realised in action, rather than professed at the level of creed. The need for theology is obviated by the meaning which law gives to life. Contending that the historical fate of Judaism in its encounter with other societies can be read off the fate of the law, Fromm sets out the significance of Jewish law (halakhah).21 In particular, he analyses the part the law has played in the preservation of the Jewish people since the destruction of the Second Temple and the consequent dispersal. Beginning with a discussion of the significance of the law in traditional Judaism, he moves on to three case studies, each involving a moment at which the law is called into question and its validity reformulated: Karaism, Reform Judaism, and Hasidism. For Fromm, these are paradigm cases, ‘particularly characteristic facts of Jewish history’.22 While traditional Judaism and Hasidism are described positively, Karaism and Reform come in for severe criticism. Indeed, Hasidism, he claims, renews what was most valuable about traditional rabbinic Judaism, and which the intervening attempts at reform imperilled.23 Fromm’s dissertation definitely belongs, in other words, to that reaction against what was seen as the reforming, largely assimilationist drive of emancipation Judaism which had dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the title suggests, the study focuses on Diaspora Jewish existence. While for obvious reasons this has been a theme of abiding interest to

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Jewish authors generally, exile or galut becomes in the early twentieth century the subject of considerable attention among those reflecting on the place of Jews and Judaism. The clear catalyst for this is the growth of the Zionist movement, which challenged traditional religious assumptions about the redemptive meaning of exile, decrying its supposed rootlessness, instead, as the cause of the problems afflicting Jewish existence.24 For Fromm, the Jews, on account of their Diaspora existence, have wanted for a polity, a land, and a vernacular tongue.25 The absence of these normally constituent elements defines Judaism’s ‘Eigenart’ (‘particularity’) – a term taken from Hermann Cohen, who exerted a lasting influence on Fromm’s work.26 Not these political and cultural ties, but those of kinship and common experience have, as we saw, held the Jews together. However, the dissertation is written from the assumption that the traditional physical cohesion of Judaism has been greatly diminished, if not altogether lost.27 It understands itself as situated at a critical new point in Jewish history. The loss of unity has precipitated a radical change in the nature of Jewish tradition. The relationship between law and belief has become fundamentally different from what it was throughout the previous centuries.28 It is therefore not surprising that law and dogmatism are the contending terms according to which Fromm judges the various Jewish movements.

3 The non-dogmatic, collective, and practical nature of Jewish law We saw that Fromm ties the question of religion in Judaism indissolubly to that of law. In historical terms, this begins when an already existent people is called to its religious or metaphysical vocation through the giving of the law at Sinai. Having shown how ethnos and ethos come together, Fromm proceeds to analyse the distinctive nature of Jewish law, which consists, above all, in its anti-dogmatic character. As the repository of religious ideas and feeling, the law is still anything but theology. Its medium is not thought or belief, but action. This action is ‘national, social, “value-rational” (Max Weber)’.29 The commandments presuppose the core formulations of Jewish belief, found in the Pentateuch and Prophets. These formulations are minimal: belief in God’s reality and uniqueness, and in the coming of the Messiah. Rather than entailing propositions about God that the believer is required to profess, the formulations of belief are merely ‘the expression of the people’s basic religious attitude’.30 Although Fromm

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emphasises the priority of religious practice over dogma, of right action over right belief, it is worth noting that he first sets out these, as he sees them, fundamental constituents of Judaism’s ethos. ‘There is here the strong belief in God, belief in the Messiah, but no belief in statements about God or in statements about the Messiah.’31 Anticipating the preferences of a lifetime, he bases his characterisation of Jewish ethos largely on the prophetic writings. The elements of Judaism’s ‘religious content’ do not amount to dogma. What is more, by virtue of the way in which the law mediates the ideas of Judaism to the people, they neither need nor can be turned into dogmas. Fromm argues that, where dogma has been attempted – as for instance in Karaism or, in mainstream Judaism, by the ‘philosopher of religion’, Maimonides – this happened due to the contact of Judaism with other cultures and religions, and has frequently been extracted under duress for polemical purposes.32 It is in the context of medieval politics and apologetics that anything like a creed first emerges. For Fromm, such creed could never be native to Jewish tradition and indeed amounts to ‘a form of mimicry’.33 Significantly, attempts at legitimising Judaism in the form of a theological system never gained widespread acceptance. They remained without social impact and persisted unreconciled among themselves, as the personal opinions of individual scholars. By contrast, the law found relatively rare codification. Central to Fromm’s depiction of the law is the fact that it has a collective form. This grounds perhaps the fundamental argument of the book. In traditional Judaism, the law’s collectively binding form actually safeguards the space for an individual relationship to the content of belief, while preserving the communal and historical dimensions of the group. ‘The form protects the content contained within it; but it also protects the individuality of the person filled with this content.’34 Law’s collective form only adumbrates religious content, rather than giving it as such. By contrast, where the form is individual, collective identity must be preserved by making the content collective. Individualisation of the law goes hand in hand with a collectivism of belief.35 What produces and polices collective belief is dogma. The collective form of the law yields a substantial, rather than merely formal democracy. The law, valid for all and before which all are equal, is the best expression of the democratic principle underlying Jewish culture. Fromm attempts to tackle the obvious point that men and women are treated differently in Jewish law by differentiating between the people as bearer of the entire law and the practice of specific laws or types of law for particular sub-groups. The fact that women are exempted

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from laws tied to a specific time is explained with reference to the function that these laws have of raising the observer above worldly time, a service of which men are said to have far greater need than women.36 While perhaps generally true in terms of the ideal life prescribed by religion – though even here custom varies considerably over time and space – this justification applies only to certain epochs and classes and clearly falls wide of the historical reality for most Jewish women. The law, Fromm writes, referring to the root of halakhah in halakh (‘to go’), is a way to knowledge of God, not the goal itself.37 The way to knowledge is understood here not as speculative or contemplative, but as active sanctification of the world. Hence nothing is offered beyond the ‘elementary belief in God’s uniqueness’: ‘What knowledge of God itself is supposed to be, about this the law is silent.’38 Clearing such a path oneself would be possible only for a few, whereas the path already cleared by law and tradition is open to the entire community. Hence the law works not on individuals, but on the world they inhabit. ‘The law wishes to change the world around them, not the people directly.’39 As emerges particularly clearly in his analysis of Hasidism, Fromm stresses the importance of symbolic or immediate sanctification through ritual observance and religious feeling over cognitive, abstract, rationalist systems of thought.40 Knowing God is realising God in the world.

4

Tradition and the origin of law

Fromm analyses the idea of the divine origin of the law, as revealed (Torah), in relation to the people whom it commands and to the oral tradition of rabbinic Judaism. He argues that neo-Orthodoxy, inspired by Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88) and itself, in part, a response to Reform, has imported a basically Christian notion of revelation, by making the historical moment of law-giving the ground of law’s holiness, and by drawing the consequence that every letter of the text is ‘sacrosanct and unchangeable’.41 As a supposed Orthodoxy, it might be expected to stand opposed to the dogma of reforming tendencies, yet this freezing of the content of law means that it has, Fromm claims, ‘dogmatised’ the concept of law’s divine origin. Fromm recognises that, although the commentaries and halakhic decisions of the rabbis are, viewed historically, human creations, they represent, in religious terms, ‘themselves religious revelation’.42 He refers to the notion of the oral law as the gradual unfolding of the revelation at Sinai and emphasises this dynamic understanding of revelation. Paradoxically, revelation here is both complete in itself and

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continuously occurring in the work of tradition. The important injunction that every Jew must view themselves as though they received the original revelation directly does not demand belief in an historical event (Sinai), but the feeling and knowing of Torah as a divine and ‘metaphysical reality’. Fromm indeed outlines a phenomenology of tradition, according to which Judaism is not interested in historical differences: ‘The concept of the historical moment is completely alien to Judaism.’43 In a phrase that recalls Leopold von Ranke’s famous dictum – but makes religion, not history, the decisive variable – Fromm describes historical Judaism as discriminating historically ‘according to the nearness to God in every people and in each place’.44 What determines the divine status of Torah is not an issue of authorship, but the fact that Torah is related, in its ‘totality’, to the divine sphere.45 The law’s ‘present relation’ to this sphere defies conventional and historical proof. It can be ‘grasped only on the basis of the evidence and reality of knowing its unity […] and […] its unified relation to the divine sphere’. Fromm’s application to the law of Buber’s language of immediacy would no doubt have surprised Buber himself, even if his anti-conceptual emphasis and a kindred vagueness survive. Fromm’s notion of the law’s presence is not exclusive, in the strong sense which Buber gives that term.46 For without detracting from its presentness, the law’s divinity necessarily embraces a connection with history and that first revelation of the law, since the moments of revelation are united in the fact that the Jewish people has become the bearer of the divine spirit. From this continuity follow the ideas of the divine nature and unity of tradition. This unity of law is a formal conservatism which, paradoxically, permits a substantial dynamism. The rules of interpretation, including those for amending the law, are envisaged as already given to Moses at Sinai. Hence all subsequent changes to the law are legitimated as long as they observe these rules, whose central principle merely demands that any new ruling relate to a sentence from the Torah. This purely formal criterion of the law’s legitimate development secures near complete freedom in respect of its content.47 According to Fromm, Reform Judaism and neo-Orthodoxy fail to preserve the present divine reality of law as oral law that was essential to traditional Judaism, which accorded equal validity to all developments of the law and thus subordinated time to a metaphysical simultaneity. Both fix on the historical fact, the original document; the only difference being that modern Orthodoxy dogmatises not just scripture, but the entire rabbinic tradition. In the scriptural fundamentalism that

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results, ‘the divine nature of the Bible becomes dogma’, while modern Orthodoxy extends this rigid literalism to tradition as such.48

5

Karaism, Reform Judaism and neo-Orthodoxy

In the case studies that follow, Fromm shows how moves to weaken, or even abandon completely, the unity of the Jewish people and the normative force of Jewish law have inevitably led to dogma. Karaism rejected all post-biblical writings and thus tradition as such, insisting on the unique holiness of scripture.49 Whereas traditional Judaism had allowed the individual ‘free investigation’ of the law, but not a ‘free decision’, insisting on collective decisions and practice, Karaism disallows individual investigation, but grants individual decision.50 Reform, beginning in the early nineteenth century, breaks with the formal conservatism of the law, as it seeks to dismantle the national character of Judaism. Neither Karaism nor Reform is, in Fromm’s opinion, creative.51 No new ideas, religious principles or emotions emerged, only diminution of practice, undermining of a dynamic tradition, and hardening of belief. The traditional combination of formal prescription of law and substantial freedom of belief is reversed, to give formal freedom and substantial prescription, that is, dogma. In modern neo-Orthodoxy, the old freedom of interpretation is curbed by the dogmatisation of tradition. These changes occurred, Fromm argues, not primarily out of a desire to offer some new religious principle – however much they were rationalised as such – but in order to exploit political and economic advantages. Karaism, on this view, anticipated the assimilation of West European Jewry to the requirements and opportunities of modern capitalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by removing the traditional Jewish laws inhibiting the free pursuit of trade and assimilation into Islamic society.52 While Jewish unity was largely unaffected, however, when the Karaites became a sect, the threat to unity posed by Reform Judaism is radical. Reform does not become a sect, because the ‘historical force’ of Judaism, the sense in which Jewish law is the presupposition for being Jewish, is no longer what it was around the eighth century.53 Reform represents the collision of Jewish law with fullyfledged high capitalism: the ‘bourgeois-capitalist historical body’. One law after another falls to the demands of the time for economic liberalism and social integration. Fromm delights in showing how this is justified by inconsistent methods and opportunistic arguments that derive from Reform’s ‘lack of principles’.54 ‘Although German Judaism is, according to its ideology, a community of faith, it has de facto cast off

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precisely this religious character and become purely national’ – a process which, according to Fromm, is reinforced by lack of integration into German society, the law governing religious affiliation, and antiSemitism.55 No less than Reform, though differently, modern Orthodoxy has succumbed to capitalism. In neo-Orthodoxy’s ideal of Torah im derekh eretz (Torah together with the prevailing culture) Jewish law and life are ultimately sundered: Jewish law freezes into a ‘rigid system of customs’.56 Fromm devotes a long section to describing traditional Jewish attitudes to work and vocation. While he draws positively on Max Weber’s work on Protestantism and capitalism, the target of his argument is the contemporary attempt to link Judaism and capitalism in Werner Sombart’s The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911), a work which exercised many Jewish writers at the time.57 Against Sombart, Fromm argues for the existence of an essentially anti-capitalist bent in Jewish law and the traditional society it formed.58 He points out that Sombart overlooks capitalism’s equation of time and money; that he mistakes rationalism for capitalism, and Judaism for rationalism, ignoring the line – Fromm’s favourite – that runs from the Prophets to the Kabbalah and Hasidism; and that historical factors go unmentioned, such as the exclusion of Jews from political and civil spheres, and the relative security of money, not to mention the restriction of Jews to finance. Most importantly, he contends that the existence of a positive normative system governing all aspects of life makes it unnecessary and impossible to invest one’s vocation with a particular religious significance. Work is never an end in itself, but always in the service of knowledge and study. The rabbinic view of work is ‘traditionalist’ (Max Weber), and hence ‘non-capitalist’. Yet work is valued and commended to all because of the positive attitude towards the world and the resistance to anything that would promote the development of a labouring class. Through its unrestricted sanctification, law thus also militates against asceticism. A people called to be a kingdom of priests must also be a kingdom of workers: none too much, but each definitely enough. While they also express his changing commitment to Freud, Fromm’s analyses of the institution of the Sabbath consistently emphasise this ethos.59 Whereas many in the early twentieth century would accept the demise of religious belief and seek to renew Jewish community as a ‘cultural community’, Fromm and those like him looked elsewhere for the possibility of renewing Jewish tradition.60 Besides nationalist and ethnic options, there was the turn eastwards, to the learning and piety of East European Jews, as we see in the account of Hasidism that concludes Fromm’s thesis.

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6

Hasidism

The individualisation of law and the collectivism of belief that emerge with the assimilation to capitalism in Reform Judaism and neoOrthodoxy amount to the reduction of the embedded religious and moral ethos of traditional Judaism to a ‘community of faith’.61 Against this confessionalised, accommodated Judaism, Hasidism represents, for Fromm, the truly popular movement of an under-class. Instead of the elite’s reform, driven by economic imperatives, Hasidism attempts a religious solution to economic problems. Reform effects, at best, a political and legal emancipation, precisely that formal emancipation criticised by later commentators.62 Hasidism, rejecting the ‘ambiguous gift of emancipation’,63 achieves, by contrast, social ‘auto-emancipation’; from inauspicious beginnings, it became ‘one of the most magnificent phenomena of Jewish history’.64 Fromm has recourse to the negative and positive clichés of contemporary discourse about East European Jewry in general and Hasidism in particular.65 In the early seventeenth century, while they held a middle role between the Polish feudal landowners and the Ukrainian peasants as tenant farmers, the Jews’ religious and intellectual state was parlous: intellect alone was cultivated, along with a ‘hair-splitting faculty of judgement’, mere ‘cleverness’ and ‘arrogance’. These are not unusual terms for a decadent Jewry whose corruption Fromm also sees manifested in a form of ‘plutocracy’.66 By the eighteenth century, following pogroms, the Ukrainian Jews appeared benighted: ‘Ignorance and dulled sensibility was the lot of this intellectually and materially impoverished and down-at-heel population.’67 The desperate longing for redemption, however, which tempted many to embrace the false messianic movements of Sabbatai Zevi (1626–76) and Jacob Frank (1726–91), also provided the ground from which Hasidism grew. The historical figure is a favourite one: the extremity of the darkest hour compels a final stand, from which renewal springs.68 Against its Orthodox opponents, Hasidism is held to champion the ‘primacy of religious feeling’, real equality, true piety and a vital, even mystical community. Radically democratic in social and economic terms, Hasidism was fundamentally non-capitalist and even ‘anti-capitalist’. Fromm praises Hasidism for its strong emphasis on joy and its messianic love of Palestine.69 Finally, he incorporates the almost obligatory narrative of Hasidism’s decline into powerful rival dynasties, whose leadership becomes hereditary.70 This stage in the accepted view of Hasidism involves its own routinisation, a key term here being

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‘degeneration’ (‘Ausartung’), which almost invariably figures somewhere towards the end of even the most positive accounts.71 Radical democracy gives way to feudalistic authority, the leaders or zaddikim (‘just persons’) often presented as pseudo-princes. What distinguishes Fromm’s account of Hasidism from Buber’s profoundly influential one is, apart from the emphasis on the social character of Hasidism, Fromm’s acknowledgment of Hasidism’s place within mainstream halakhic Judaism. While praising the way in which Hasidism supplements an over-emphasis on learning at the time with other routes to knowledge of God – such as prayer, song, sociability, and contemplation – he also states that the Kabbalists, on whom Hasidism drew, were frequently eminent rabbis, and hence the ‘ideas of Hasidism did not contradict rabbinic Judaism’.72 Buber acknowledges this legal conservatism, but ultimately blames it for Hasidism’s demise, whereas Fromm traces the demise directly to the waning authority of the law.73 Supported by later scholarship on the Kabbalah, the nexus of law and mysticism is fundamental to reassessments of Jewish tradition in the early twentieth century and merits comprehensive study. Moreover, Fromm’s account belongs to a wider and complex discourse concerning the existence of Jewish dogma, one that extends from Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) down to the Weimar period. Fromm’s Gesetz points to an awareness among German-Jewish intellectuals, at varying distances from normative Judaism, of the inadequacies and dangers of a reforming abandonment of halakhic and aggadic tradition in the name of a pristine essence or principles of Judaism. Members of the generation formed, intellectually, by Buber’s spiritualised Hasidic religiosity, and, socially, by a confessionalised and assertively post-traditional Jewish community, nevertheless question the viability of a religion with confession, but without code.

Conclusion Fromm maintained that the ideas of his early religious teachers lived on in his work. Having considered the arguments of his first book on religion, we can offer, by way of conclusion, the following suggestions as to the lines which a thorough examination of the continuity in his work must pursue. In other studies of religion, such as ‘Der Sabbat’ (1927) and ‘The Dogma of Christ’ (1930), which already belong to his psychoanalytical writings, Fromm emphasises the original radicalism of religion. In the manner of so many historical critiques, especially those since the

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Romantic period, Fromm seeks to retrieve an original impulse, a first force, against which any subsequent development may be judged and is usually found wanting.74 The idea never leaves him that religion, particularly an activist one such as Hasidism or that of the early Christians, might advance the realisation of justice in this world. Almost axiomatically, the original impulse of religion is seen as socially and ethically anti-capitalist and democratic. The radical democratic emphasis and the critical approach to ideologies of accommodation persist in Fromm’s argument that Freudian analysis is essentially conservative, concerned with social adjustment and conformity, and needs replacing with an analysis that is ready to recognise that neurosis may be political and to take society to task.75 Fromm’s later work offers anthropological and functional arguments for the universal presence of religion, as the systematic response to our need for ‘a frame of orientation and an object of devotion’.76 In its reference to a system of ‘thought and action’, however, this notion of religion connects with the early concept of religious tradition, which already focused on action and realisation, to the near exclusion of dogmatic belief. The serious account of the value of ritual in the early work finds its analogue in Fromm’s later awareness of the significance of ritual in our lives.77 His criticism of Protestantism, in works such as Escape from Freedom, is also rooted in his initial engagement with Jewish law and religion. Having been schooled early in the consequences of the shift from a tradition of normative praxis to a culture of interiority, Fromm can distinguish the negative effects of an individualistic soteriology from religion as such. Though unwavering in his insistence on individual responsibility and independence,78 he recognises the problems of the individualism left in the wake of traditional communities. The sense in which the individual is an abstraction and must – like ideology – be understood with reference to its social context is a premise whose emergence seems inseparable from the subjects of his early writing. For this premise translates a religious and social resistance into the sphere of critical method, and thus strives to avoid reproducing at the methodological level the structures of capitalism, which manifest themselves in a bias towards the individual and the autonomy of ideas. The social psychology developed by Fromm extends the psychoanalytical suspicion regarding professed belief beyond the confines of the individual – however genetically, in terms of life history, they might be understood – into an account that does justice to our basic interrelatedness. In the light of his first study of Jewish law and tradition, this method might be termed

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anti-dogmatic, inasmuch as its account of the dogmatisation of religion and individualisation of law is exposed by a critique which moves in the opposite direction, tracing belief back to its social and economic determinants. Moreover, Fromm’s methodological historical emphasis represents a curious analogue to the traditional religion that he first studied. Although, as we saw, ‘historical’ Judaism is not itself concerned with history or time in the modern sense,79 the spectacle it offers of a normatively structured society, with explicit rules governing its development, motions analysis in the direction of historical and social causality. If a society based on negative liberty is locked into methodological individualism, one in which individual freedom emerges within and by virtue of an otherwise comprehensively legislated world, this cautions against both ahistorical generalisation of the juridical ‘person’ and the belief in the possibility of an ahistorical account of human nature. Fromm’s later arguments for the universal presence of religion – together with his view of a given, though dynamic, instinctual apparatus and corresponding social relationships – remain bare enough to admit of an historical approach. Fromm later employs religious concepts in a non-theistic sense: thus ‘idolatry’ becomes the worship of some finite thing, on to which – echoing Ludwig Feuerbach’s account of religion – a human quality is said to be projected and so alienated from humankind itself.80 His call for a ‘science of idols’ is placed firmly in the context of Jewish monotheism, which is held to render theology absurd – as, in Gesetz, Jewish law was said to render theology superfluous – and to represent a fundamental challenge to idolatry.81 In principle, the connection of law and mysticism, especially in the context of a strong conception of tradition, can lead to the provocative idea of an atheistic religion, delivered over to the responsibility of human beings. An enquiry into the practical value and form of religious symbols – ideas and rituals – displaces the customary preoccupation with their truth content. The non-theistic or humanistic religion of Fromm’s mature thinking springs in some measure from the early configuration of ‘law’, ‘tradition’ and mysticism.82 Resolutely secular in his perspective, he nevertheless remains convinced that the most valuable elements of the religious impulse, especially its ‘humanistic spirit’ or ‘radical humanism’,83 can be appropriated for a secular project. As such, psychoanalysis itself can be deemed to have ‘very definitely a religious function’; although, as we should now expect, Fromm adds that ‘it will usually lead to a more critical attitude toward theistic dogma’.84 The early work on law prepares this approach, inasmuch as it reveals the

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traditional freedom secured by a normative tradition that need not coerce belief. Religion as a form of life, rather than as articles of faith, may more readily be imagined stripped of its theistic commitments, as radical praxis. The study of Jewish law already orientated itself from social structure. Without practising a simple determinism, it does justice to the interaction between culture and social context, anticipating the fully-fledged social psychology of subsequent writings. Fromm’s continued interest in religion is not the expression of a nostalgic longing for the certainties of his pre-psychoanalytic days or an unreconstructed remnant. As his early writings demonstrate, he begins with a vision of religion radically different from the modern religion targeted, in the tradition of the Enlightenment, by the critiques of religion in Marxism and Freudianism. His exploration of Jewish law and tradition envisages a religious practice that might be incompatible with the social conditioning, ideological function, and imaginary compensation of injustice rejected by Freud and Marx. This early exploration also allows Fromm a critical perspective on the antinomies structuring the modern subject, legal and philosophical, who is strung between freedom and nature, autonomy and heteronomy, mind and body, self and society. As much as it encourages him, more than many associated with the Frankfurt School, to continue to look for positive impulses in the original or radical moments of various religions, it allows him to transcend reductive psychoanalytic and Marxist approaches and to contribute substantially to the School’s critical projects.

8 Critical Theory and the New Thinking: A Preliminary Approach* Howard Caygill

The exploration of the historical and conceptual relationships between Critical Theory and the ‘new thinking’ – between what we might call the two ‘Frankfurt Schools’ of the Institut für Sozialforschung and the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (‘Free Jewish School’) – has largely been confined to philological work focusing upon the links between Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin.1 The focus on this relationship, while important, risks distracting attention from the broader philosophical significance of the contrasts between the two schools of thought. Beyond the shared origins in the critique of German Idealism and certain parallels in their development, the confrontation of still vital traditions of Critical Theory and ‘new thinking’ remains an important issue in contemporary philosophy. Not only for the diverse critical perspectives that each brings to the themes of the end of philosophy, religion and totalitarian politics, but also as living bodies of thought. For both schools remain contemporary, with the seemingly eclipsed ‘new thinking’ given new life by the critiques of ontology inspired by the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. The central figure in the continuing tradition of the ‘new thinking’ is Franz Rosenzweig. As the head of the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (founded 1920) and the inspiration behind its reform of Jewish adult education, Rosenzweig was a key figure in a movement of religious and political thought that described itself as ‘the new thinking’. His article * I would like to thank Michael Gormann-Thelen (Hanover) for his generous advice and guidance on the ‘new thinking’ and the thought of Eugen RosenstockHuessy. His introduction to Rosenstock-Huessy, Au risque du langage (pp. 7–23) offers an unrivalled overview of Rosenstock-Huessy’s work and significance. 145

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‘The New Thinking’ (1925) marks an important stage in its self-definition and a near-definitive statement of its ambitions to achieve a religious transcendence of philosophy and its history. Yet his contribution must be set in the context of the much broader concerns of the movement of ‘new thinking’ such as law, religious education and medicine that informed it. Rosenzweig’s statement of the ‘new thinking’ should also be related to the contributions of other ‘new thinkers’ who developed the tradition in different ways, above all the head of a third Frankfurt school – the Akademie der Arbeit (‘Academy of Work’, founded 1921) – Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Rosenstock-Huessy’s Die Europäischen Revolutionen – Volkscharaktere und Staatenbildung (‘The European revolutions: national characters and the formation of states, 1931), rewritten in English as Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man (1938), remains along with Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption (1921) an abiding testament to the ‘new thinking’. These two books in many ways represent its divided heritage, with The Star inspiring the post-war critique of ontology associated with the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, and Out of Revolution inspiring the historical approach to Political Theology represented above all in the remarkable work of Harold J. Berman.2 The division in the ‘new thinking’ between the critique of philosophy and the critique of political and legal theory parallels that within Critical Theory between the critiques of philosophy associated with Adorno and Horkheimer and the political and legal theories developed by Otto Kirchheimer, Franz Neumann and Friedrich Pollock. While the contrast between the legal and political theories of Rosenstock-Huessy and authors of the Frankfurt School would reward closer study, I will focus in this chapter on the philosophical affinities and differences between ‘new’ and ‘critical’ thinking. It is hoped that the comparison will make some contribution to the contemporary reflection upon the relationship between Critical Theory and the thought of Levinas and Derrida. For it is worth repeating that the ‘new thinking’ inaugurated by Rosenzweig and his circle of friends was continued in the work of Levinas, who in the Preface to Totality and Infinity described The Star as a work ‘too often present to be cited’.3 Under the guise of a radical development of phenomenology, Levinas and Derrida emphasise many of the key themes of the ‘new thinking’ such as ‘difference’, the ‘Other’, and ‘resistance to totality’. An understanding of the shared ground and differences between the original formulations of ‘critical’ thinking by Adorno and Horkheimer and the ‘new thinking’ by Rosenzweig may thus be considered a contribution to the debate

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between contemporary Critical Theory and Levinasian ethics and deconstruction. The pursuit of such understanding will proceed via three linked themes central to both Critical Theory and ‘new thinking’. The first is the negotiation of the ‘end of philosophy’ and the understanding of the role of the critique of ‘German Idealism’ in this ending. The second is the understanding of modern individuality and its significance for philosophy while the third is the question of where to locate ‘alterity’ or the ‘non-identical’. The ‘new thinking’ is not to be found in any single text by Rosenzweig, certainly not exclusively in The Star, which marks an important stage in an ongoing discussion of the time. Rosenzweig refers on a number of occasions to fellow practitioners of the ‘new thinking’, recording the anticipations of it in the works of Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Hermann Cohen, as well contributions of contemporaries such as those listed in the 1925 essay ‘The New Thinking’ – Eugen Rosenstock, Hans Ehrenberg, Victor von Weizsäcker, and Rudolf Ehrenberg. In the proximity of the ‘new’ thinking Rosenzweig also identified Martin Buber, Ferdinand Ebner and Florens Christian Rang.4 In one of his last essays – ‘Transposed Fronts’ (1929), on the Davos debate between Ernst Cassirer and Heidegger – Rosenzweig even acknowledged Heidegger as contributing to ‘new thinking’, noting that Heidegger ‘advocated against Cassirer a philosophical position [that is] precisely our position, that of the new thinking, which falls entirely into line with what starts from that “last” Cohen’.5 Rosenzweig identifies as their shared position the finitude of Dasein and explains it by the shared radical legacy of the late Cohen.6 The inclusion of Heidegger among the ‘new’ thinkers would seem at first glance to facilitate the confrontation between ‘critical’ and ‘new’ thinking, making it a matter of extending Adorno’s critique of Heidegger in The Jargon of Authenticity to ‘new thinking’ as a whole. However, the proximity between the latter and Heidegger is by no means as clear as Rosenzweig thought. Indeed, Levinas’s work insists on the differences between Heidegger and the insights of the ‘new thinking’, differences that cluster around the key concept of the ‘new thinking’, namely ‘revelation’. Before considering this further it is necessary to look at the emergence of the ‘new thinking’. Rosenzweig’s formulation of it through dialogue, meetings, correspondence, books, translations7 and his explications and replies to critics of The Star exemplify the dialogical character of that emergence. Its stages were charted by the contributors themselves, with its beginnings identified in Rosenzweig’s evening discussion of

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7 July 1913 with Eugen Rosenstock, the letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg of 31 October 1913 explaining the decision not to convert to Christianity, and the recognition of the end of the ‘old philosophy’ in 1800 in the letters to Hans Ehrenberg. Other stages include the celebrated letter to Rudolf Ehrenberg from 1917 – the so-called ‘Urzelle’ to The Star – the discovery of a copy of Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, the composition of The Star on the front and subsequently its parerga Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, the Halevi translation and the essay ‘The New Thinking’. Within this extended dialogue, which passed through crucial discussions of the history of philosophy from Ionia to Jena and beyond, Rosenzweig oriented himself with respect to what he called the ‘new thinking’. There are a number of particularly salient moments in this dialogue that marked turning points in the development of the ‘new thinking’. The discussions with Rosenstock-Huessy were crucial for appreciating the significance of revelation, of orientation with respect to revelation and of speech as an intersubjective locus of thinking. Hans Ehrenberg’s critiques of German Idealism confirmed and extended some of Rosenzweig’s own doubts about this legacy, and Weizsäcker and Rudolf Ehrenberg’s work on medicine and biology confirmed what can justly be described as the rejection of the concept of nature, an important point of difference between the ‘new thinking’ and Critical Theory. To these should be added, among the contemporary influences, Cohen’s concept of correlation with God, which supplied an important element of the ‘new thinking’ that served to distinguish it from the largely secular orientation of Critical Theory. The claim for the newness of the ‘new’ thinking brings it close to both Critical Theory and to the work of Heidegger, sharing with them the ambition of making a new beginning in philosophy. For Rosenzweig, an epoch of thought – from Ionia to Jena – ended with Hegel. However, he also maintained that its demise was not properly mourned and that it in many ways continued to haunt nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought. This was not an improperly mourned ending in the sense of Adorno’s mourning of the end of philosophy through negative dialectic, namely mourning of the moment when philosophy failed to ‘realise itself’,8 but one in which philosophy did not dissolve itself rapidly and thoroughly enough. The old thinking, allegedly culminating in Hegel, was for Rosenzweig obsessed with the question of essence – the search for a characteristic or ‘idea’ removed from and immune to the effects of temporality. According to Rosenzweig, the locus of essence was the ‘cosmos’ for ancient Greek thought, ‘God’ for medieval thought and ‘man’

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for modern thought. Although the epochs of thought seemed to differ – moving from the domination of physics, to theology and then to anthropology – they shared the basic question of where to locate essence. The ‘new thinking’, by contrast, concerned itself with understanding temporal events rather than timeless essences. I would like to observe parenthetically two peculiar features of Rosenzweig’s argument as it has emerged so far. The first is the resort to what Heidegger in What is a Thing? referred to as the ‘bad novel’ approach to the history of philosophy. This is the idea that two and a half millennia of thinking can be contained in a few formulas such as ‘the search for essence’. Heidegger himself, as an author of historical romances (including What is a Thing?) falls under his own stricture, but so too does much of the work of Critical Theory. Many of its calls for historical specificity often remain at the level of rhetoric; they remain precisely ‘calls’ that are rarely answered with specific histories. The second, equally strange, feature of Rosenzweig’s argument is a peculiarly truncated reading of Hegel. Rosenzweig seems to stop at the logic of essence as if this were the terminus of Hegelian thinking – it was of course just a stage. Here he is close to what Gillian Rose identified in Adorno’s reading of Hegel – a desire for a simplified notion of dialectic in Hegel that did not fully recognise the claims and the power of speculative thought.9 A more historically situated and subtle Hegel would put into difficulty any claims for an uninterrupted adventure of thought from Ionia to Jena. Nevertheless and in spite of such reservations, it is possible to appreciate the motivation for the abbreviations of the history of philosophy perpetrated by Critical Theory and the ‘new thinking’. The attempt to make a new beginning in philosophy was not consistent with a monumental or antiquarian understanding of its past. Rosenzweig’s understanding of the end of the old thinking in Hegel thus had two aspects that are clearly defined by the time of writing the Urzelle in 1917. One was the dissolution of the claim of philosophy to speak in the name of a universal reason. In place of ‘philosophy’ there were now ‘philosophies’: philosophy was the outcome of the individual reflections of individual philosophers. Rosenzweig names Schopenhauer as exemplary of this trend, citing also Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. In this view, philosophers were finite beings, thinking in definite historical circumstances and above all pursuing their own interests in the realm of thought. The second aspect of the critique of the old thinking lay in an emphasis upon revelation. Rosenzweig argues at length that revelation cannot be thought; it cannot be brought to reason. From his conversations

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with Rosenstock-Huessy he drew the idea that Revelation provides an absolute orientation that overwhelms, indeed disorients the sectarian partial struggles of this world as well as their expressions in thought. In an inaugural statement of what Levinas would subsequently develop into a ‘prophetic politics’, Rosenzweig deliberately pits his view of revelation against Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and its unfolding of the agonal development of the shapes of consciousness. Rosenzweig writes in the Urzelle: Revelation pushes itself into the world as a wedge; the This struggles against the This. Therefore the resistance of the prophet against his mission, his struggle against the gradually ascending image, cannot be confused with ethical struggles. There the higher does not battle against the lower, rather the called against everything else which would be merely possible, notwithstanding [the fact] that to this possible the ‘height’ also belongs; it lacks every comparability, every suitability for organization into the system of the higher and lower.10 Although the term is not used, the idea that revelation upsets any totality or ‘restricted economy’ is clearly intimated, and would be developed at length in Levinas’s professedly anti-Hegelian Totality and Infinity. The focus of struggle is no longer the ethical struggle between higher and lower – the laws of the polis and those of the family in Hegel’s example of Antigone – but the prophetic revelation of ‘infinity’ against the claims of ‘the possible’ or ‘totality’. What would seem to be an inconsistent relationship between the dissolution of philosophy into philosophies and the disruptive entry of revelation into the philosophical (Hegelian) system is clarified by Rosenzweig’s adoption of certain thoughts drawn from the middle and later Schelling. In place of the Hegelian adventure of thinking the absolute, bringing it to reason, the ‘absolute’ becomes the unthinkable – the dark ground – that lowers itself into the historical world through revelation but whose meaning cannot be grasped from within the historical world – God being ‘before all relation’. At this crucial point a dangerous temptation seems to beckon Rosenzweig, namely to bring together the two aspects of his anti-Hegelianism, to align individual philosophising with revelation. Inwardness becomes the site of revelation and the individual philosopher the ‘dark’ abyss ‘before all relation’, especially those relations that make up the philosophical system. The philosopher of the ‘new thinking’ might be identified with the prophet who resists his prophetic mission. Indeed Rosenzweig goes so far as to

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propose an analogy between revelation and the insight of the individual, post-Hegelian philosopher that approaches an identification: The mere ‘interior’ of God is still unfruitful; first the interiorization, first the descent of God, in His own depths is ‘beginning’. Just as philosophizing [mind] is dead without philosophy, although philosophy comes to life, if it descends to him who is independent, condescends to him and so begins the progress of philosophizing, which concludes with the recognition of the absoluteness of philosophy and the existence-of-man-only-in-relation-to-it.11 Here emerges a complex analogy between the revelation of God to himself in inwardness and the revelation of philosophy to the inwardness of the philosopher. It is sustained by the need to discover a link between the two manifestations of the dissolution of Hegelian philosophy – individual philosophising and revelation. The philosopher is in danger of becoming a prophet. At this point Rosenzweig’s thinking seems vulnerable to the sustained critique of absolute inwardness mounted by Adorno in Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1933). There the absolute inwardness of Kierkegaard’s personal rejection of the system is equated in its immediacy with the mythical reversion of history to nature and the inwardness of the modern bourgeois individual whose sociality is focused upon the reified exchange relations of the market. In these terms, Rosenzweig’s link between revelation and inwardness would seem to fall before the same critique – the mythical naturalisation of an historically specific construction of individuality. Yet the temptation to elide individual philosopher and prophetic revelation was successfully resisted and overcome by Rosenzweig through a critique of what he saw as the Christian foundations of post-Hegelian philosophy. In a letter of 1 December 1917 to Rudolf Ehrenberg, Rosenzweig described Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as philosophers ‘stuck up to the ears and beyond in Christian concepts: conversion, overcoming, change of will, the holy, rebirth, compassion, hardness’.12 The individualism of the post-Hegelians is located within a Protestant Christian subjectivity which Rosenzweig recognised as forming a part of, but by no means wholly encompassing, his own historical predicament as a thinker. Rosenzweig’s commitment to his historical location within Judaism qualified the individualism of his philosophising – indeed he consistently insisted upon the Jewish character of The Star. His philosophising does not in this case issue from individual inwardness, but from within

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the community and the liturgical practice of Judaism. Revelation in this case is not a once and for all event that befalls an individual, but is accomplished through the communal festivals of the liturgical year that mark the proximity of eternity. Thinking and revelation intersect not in some privileged act of revelation, but in the idea of ‘the Sabbath of thinking’ – a suspension of everyday activity and temporality and a contact with the eternal. Rosenzweig consistently identified himself as a liminal thinker – the Sabbath of thinking was not to be understood as achieved revelation, but as an approach to the threshold of revelation. The final, controversial words of The Star that evoke the door and the step into life exemplifies this thought of liminality – the book is the Sabbath of thinking from which the readers are to step out – renewed – into life.13 Another line of argument against the absolute character of inwardness and the immediacy of revelation also develops the insights of Rosenstock-Huessy. Revelation is always related to orientation – it is never fully present, but indicative. Furthermore it is inseparable from speech: there is a correlation between speech and revelation in so far as neither can be predicted: speech embodies the possibility of being astonished by the words of the other, the utterance of the interlocutor cannot be predicted; similarly with revelation. At this point the liminality of the Sabbath of thinking is given a social content consisting in the unpredictable entry of the other into the heart of thought. This would be rigorously developed by Levinas and Derrida, and is a feature that perhaps distinguishes the ‘new’ thinking from ‘critical’ thinking – thinking for it is communal, immanently mediated and oriented to the future; it is not the mourning of a missed opportunity to realise community. One of the most important aspects of the ‘new thinking’ as developed by Rosenzweig was its character as an ‘open system’. This raises the issue of the non-identical in Rosenzweig’s thought. At first glance, the triad of God, World, Man that dominates The Star seems a pre-critical gesture – a re-adoption of the traditional organisation of metaphysics – the ‘pure reason’ decisively criticised by Kant in the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ of the Critique of Pure Reason. The adoption of the triad of dogmatic metaphysics seems paradoxical, especially since Kant’s critique of it departed from its ignoring the spatio-temporal character of appearances. Kant thus seems more of a ‘new’ thinker than Rosenzweig. However, Rosenzweig’s intent in using the triad is quite different. It is primarily diagnostic – showing how in the old thinking one term dominated the others – but also points to the differential character of thinking. God, world, man are inseparable but also differentiated – forming a configuration that is open to the future.

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Rosenzweig’s version of the ‘new thinking’ may be seen to emerge from premises similar to those of Critical Theory, but to arrive at radically distinct conclusions. In his hands, the ‘new’ thinking departs from an understanding of the end of philosophy, but as an event to be celebrated rather than mourned. The end of the Hegelian philosophical system and the disintegration of philosophy into philosophies is secured from the critiques of bourgeois inwardness directed by Adorno against Kierkegaard by Rosenzweig’s identification of such inwardness in Protestantism. By situating the ‘new thinking’ of The Star within a Jewish liturgical context, he is able to align with a communal approach to divine alterity. Unlike the ‘non-identical’ in Adorno, Rosenzweig’s alterity is absolute, located in the divine and approachable if never attainable. Alterity becomes a mark for orientation, an insight developed further by Levinas in his ethics and Derrida in his politics. While this discussion has only offered a few preliminary links between Critical Theory and the ‘new thinking’, it has hopefully reasoned the need for more work in this direction. This would include textual comparison of the works of Rosenzweig and Adorno, above all The Star and Negative Dialectics, but perhaps also the analysis of the legal and political theories of Critical Theory and the ‘new thinking’ as developed by Kirchheimer, Neumann, Pollock, Rosenstock-Huessy and Berman. The comparative work would not only enrich both traditions, but also point to their own internal limits. In the case of Critical Theory this limit is of course its secular orientation, its resistance to revelation. This forms a limit that can be seen to govern not only its internal structure but also its attempts to think or criticise religion.

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Part IV Dialectic of Enlightenment Reconsidered

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9 Does Dialectic of Enlightenment Rest on Religious Foundations?* Rüdiger Bittner

The text of Dialectic of Enlightenment is studded with words of religious origin. We find talk of guilt, of ban, of expiation and reconciliation and, especially prominently, of Unheil – a word that preserves a religious meaning thanks to its evident relation to ‘Heil’ (‘salvation’).1 Horkheimer and Adorno use this vocabulary frequently and with emphasis, and nota bene, they use it in their own name, not only where they lend their voice to mythical or religious thought. Question then: is this talk rhetoric, or is it substantial? By ‘rhetoric’ I mean those features of something written or said that are intended to attract an audience, hold their attention, impress them and thereby make them inclined to side with the speaker. Religious vocabulary is certainly suitable for this job. It is more enticing to speak of guilt and salvation than about somebody’s having done something bad or somebody’s being just fine. Talk peppered with religion is stimulating, for some of us more, for others less, much in the way that hardly any product is advertised today without being made more agreeable by the picture of a pretty woman. To be sure, the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment would protest against this comparison, but this is not decisive: no one is aware of all the rhetoric he uses. On the other hand, if the religious vocabulary is part of the substance of the book, Dialectic of Enlightenment turns into theology. ‘Aber die vollends aufgeklärte Erde strahlt im Zeichen triumphalen Unheils’ – ‘Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity’ – the second sentence of the section ‘Concept of Enlightenment’ says.2 If ‘Unheil’ (‘calamity’) here is not merely a rhetorical, if common, overstatement of * I am grateful to Tom Cook (Rollins College, Florida) for the critical reading he gave to a previous version of this chapter. 157

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the fact that many people are very badly off, then the authors need a theological basis for what they are saying: the concept of Unheil, at least in its pure form, is only available from theologians. However, to buy from them and thus to make the enterprise of the book theological in substance is a danger for Dialectic of Enlightenment. The book would no longer represent thought or indeed enlightened thought, which is the banner the authors invoke (cf. DE, xvi, xviii, 31–2). The Hegelian claims inherent in terms like ‘concept’ and ‘truth’ would be mere pretence on behalf of particular beliefs, not to mention that ‘dialectic’ would be a bad title for such parochial talk. It needs to be examined, then, whether Dialectic of Enlightenment is built on a theological or even religious basis in that its framework of concepts makes sense only within a theological context, or its central statements cannot be supported other than by theological means, or both.3 The text that suggests itself for this examination is ‘Concept of Enlightenment’, the opening section of the book, for the other ‘philosophical fragments’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment are related to this one as developments and applications of the core ideas presented there. ‘Concept of Enlightenment’ puts forward two theses: ‘Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology’ (DE, xviii). I shall leave aside the first of the two. For one thing, it is not new. Horkheimer and Adorno may have found particularly pointed expressions, but in substance the idea figures already in Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.4 For another, the first thesis is not the one the authors really care about. Consider the opening of ‘Concept of Enlightenment’. It starts with a splash, jumping at you, as it were, with the compact formula of its main theme: Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. [DE, 1] This is essentially the second thesis; it does not touch the first. Besides, it is understandable that the authors should care more about the second thesis. Dialectic of Enlightenment resonates with the social and political events of its time and claims to explain them. The first thesis does not contribute to such an undertaking: it is a thesis about the past, and a fairly remote past. Only the second thesis can be expected to help in understanding the present.

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Second thesis, then: enlightenment reverts to mythology. What does this mean? Adorno and Horkheimer use the verb ‘zurückschlagen in’ to characterise the relationship between enlightenment und mythology.5 Presumably ‘zurückschlagen in’ is formed in analogy to ‘umschlagen in’, an expression that is frequently used in modern German for changes of the weather, especially for rapid and extreme changes. So its meaning is only historically linked to the basic meaning of ‘schlagen’(‘to beat’). More immediately it derives from that special meaning of ‘schlagen’ that is evident in some of its cognates, like ‘jemandem nachschlagen’ (‘to take after someone’) or ‘Geschlecht’ (‘gender’), namely, ‘being of a certain kind’. Thus ‘umschlagen in’ means ‘to change to’ or ‘to turn into’. With this meaning the expression is often used by Hegel and his followers, a tradition on which Horkheimer and Adorno evidently are drawing. In Science of Logic, for instance, Hegel speaks of the ‘Umschlagen’ of Nothing into Being, of a ‘conversion’ or ‘turning into’ Being, that is, by which Nothing proves to be its opposite.6 Horkheimer and Adorno’s enlightenment similarly proves to be its opposite, by turning into mythology. However, Horkheimer and Adorno’s enlightenment does not ‘umschlagen’, but rather ‘zurückschlagen’. This means that the mythology it turns out to be is not only its opposite, but also what it, enlightenment, used to be. The authors’ later use of the verb makes this explicit: ‘Enlightenment […] regresses to the mythology it has never been able to escape.’7 If in Hegel something ‘schlägt um’, then something novel is appearing, things do not remain the way they were, just as a different weather may arise. It is this implication which the authors are eliminating by using ‘zurück’ (‘back’), instead of ‘um’ (‘in’, ‘into’). ‘Aufklärung schlägt zurück in Mythologie’ means, then: enlightenment turns into mythology, which is its opposite, but with this it rather returns to its former state. There is no progress here: the old things prevail in the end. ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ is therefore a misnomer. Dialectic is an immanent conceptual or historical process, leading to a new, often opposite, determination of thought or social formation. If in the end we are only back with the old things, we do not have a dialectic but the history of a failed attempt. Indeed, that is what the authors themselves suggest when they speak of ‘the mythology’ enlightenment ‘has never been able to escape’: enlightenment did try to leave mythology behind, but failed. The same point emerges even more clearly from the opening statement of ‘Concept of Enlightenment’ quoted above. Enlightenment pursued a goal, the removal of fear, but something quite different was

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the result: triumphant calamity. This is not dialectic, but the report of an enterprise gone awry. To claim and to argue that an enterprise has gone awry is to criticise it. A critique of enlightenment is, on this line of interpretation, what is offered in the book misleadingly entitled ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’. The difference matters. Dialecticians need to show that one determination of thought or one social formation turns by an immanent necessity, by virtue of just what it is, into the opposite. Therefore they do not build their case on historical evidence. At most they might illustrate with historical material the transitions recognised independently, as Hegel did in his Phenomenology of Spirit. By contrast, critics who show some attempt to have failed argue precisely from history. Basically they tell a story: this is where people started, this is what they intended to do, this is what they ended up with. So the point is not just about finding a fitting title for Horkheimer and Adorno’s book. Dialectic and critique are two kinds of thing, and the point is about finding out what the book itself intended to do and hence by what measure it needs to be judged. On the evidence considered so far, I propose that it is a historical study, describing the intentions, showing the failure, and thus giving a critique, of the movement of enlightenment broadly construed. It is comparatively easy to understand the intentions that this account, following again the opening statement of ‘Concept of Enlightenment’, ascribes to enlightenment. Taking away men’s fear – yes, we know that this is deemed desirable and that some important enlightenment texts, notably those engaged in the critique of religion, saw themselves as pursuing this aim. Installing men as masters – this is more difficult. For one thing, it is not clear that installing men as masters is desirable and that enlightenment was committed to this aim. The choice of Francis Bacon as enlightenment’s chief spokesman serves Horkheimer and Adorno’s interpretation;8 with Descartes and Spinoza, even with Thomas Hobbes, they would have had a much harder time. More importantly, the relation between the dispelling of fear and the installation of masters is obscure. Is the former supposed to depend on the latter? And if so, why? On the whole, however, the authors’ main line regarding enlightenment’s intentions is fairly clear. And while not everybody may agree with this line, it certainly represents a standard view of the enlightenment. Turn to the other end, then, of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critical story. What is the triumphant calamity that on their view crowned the efforts of enlightenment to dispel human fear and to establish men as masters? The authors are quite eloquent on this point. Here are some of

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the phrases they employ in ‘Concept of Enlightenment’ to characterise the dismal results of enlightenment: loss of meaning, objectification of nature, alienation from nature, levelling of things through abstraction, mathematisation of reality, bewitchment of human relations, empowerment of the system. This motley collection of expressions indicates one line of thought: once we let ourselves be governed in our dealing with the world by technical rationality, this world becomes an accumulation of dead objects of manipulation, humans as well are treated as mere objects by other humans, and everything, humans and things alike, is subjected to the direction of a system which itself is not directed by anybody. This is a familiar line of thought: Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man tell roughly the same story. It also grows on the opposite side of the political spectrum, for instance in the works of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and in Christian edification. In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer offer a variation of a dominant theme in the German critique of culture (Kulturkritik) of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Dialectic of Enlightenment, then, is not a political book. Written during the age of European fascism, it pretends to comprehend the social and political experience of the years of its genesis but in fact never enters the political arena. The authors use the political upheavals they are witnessing merely as a peg on which to hang a Kulturkritik that does not refer to the political actors and the political changes of their time. The core criticism of this Kulturkritik is: the enlightenment or, to use the expression usually employed in this context, technical rationality, has disastrous effects for human life. Yet where is the disaster, really? Nature is being made an object. Let us concede that an intellectual current like enlightenment can accomplish that. What is it that we lose in ‘objectifying nature’, or what injustice are we committing? Children learn in school at ten why leaves are green, and they learn at the same time how in principle to figure out such things. Why should this turn the trees into dead matter and deprive the children of their humanity? To be sure, leaves under the microscope are objects, but so are leaves enjoyed in spring and leaves raked together in the autumn. Objecthood, that is, does not make a difference: things are no worse for being objects. Or take mathematisation of reality – why should things be made any poorer by becoming calculable? As for the comprehensive system that administrates people’s lives and thus turns them magically into mere objects for each other,9 this seems just to be talk for frightening readers. To be sure, people are being deceived, manipulated, shoved around. But that is done to them under particular conditions by particular people,

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with particular intentions and more or less success. It is not done to them by technical rationality’s reducing everything to abstract quantity. Technical rationality does nothing bad to people and things. It is innocuous. Here is what I have been arguing so far: Dialectic of Enlightenment is actually a critique of what is commonly called technical rationality. The critique consists in the purported proof that technical rationality has harmful effects. The proof fails: technical rationality does no harm. The initial question, though, was how much theology or indeed religion Dialectic of Enlightenment actually involves, as opposed to merely using religious vocabulary for rhetorical purposes. On the basis of the argument presented so far it is natural to answer that religion has no substantial function in the book. The authors want to say that technical rationality is bad because it has bad effects, and no religion is needed to say that. The religious vocabulary is only brought in to make the alleged bad effects appear grandly bad, but it does not contribute to the argument. This answer, while natural, is premature. Religion could still have a substantial task. The bad effects of technical rationality that the authors complain about may not be bad period, but only religiously bad; perhaps their badness reveals itself only to a religiously informed gaze. Small wonder in that case that the uninitiated like myself fail to recognise it. On this line of interpretation, however, the theory is going to end up on the other horn of the dilemma, the sectarian one: the authors would be talking only to the fellow-believers in their creed or to people on the point of conversion. In that case, what Adorno and Horkheimer are offering could not even be called a critique of enlightenment; rather it would be polemics or indeed denunciation, since it is only the sect’s standard by which enlightenment is judged bad. The main issue, then, is still open. It does look as if religion only served in the book as a rhetorical device to make the authors’ complaint more exciting for readers. Yet it could be that religion has a substantive role in the argument in that the evils the authors lay at enlightenment’s door can be said to be evils only under certain religious assumptions. Leaving the matter in abeyance for the time being, let us turn to the positive part of ‘Concept of Enlightenment’. There is such a part, for the two theses that served as our starting point – myth already is enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology – are said to summarise only the critical part of ‘Concept of Enlightenment’ (DE, xviii). So there must be another part that may be called without too much distortion the positive part. Let us subject it to a similar examination: is it built on religious foundations?

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The positive part is not a subsection that could be demarcated by page numbers. As ‘Concept of Enlightenment’ is not proceeding in a linear fashion anyway, its positive part consists of a number of scattered passages opening lines of thought that go beyond what is covered by the two critical theses. A difficult and important passage of this sort is the following: Thought thus becomes illusory whenever it seeks to deny its function of separating, distancing and objectifying. All mystical unification remains a deception, the impotently inward trace of the forfeited revolution. Enlightenment, however, rightly opposes any hypostatization of utopia and coldly insists that domination is disunity, and, by virtue of this, the rupture between subject and object, which it will not allow to be covered over, becomes the index of its own untruth and of the truth.10 Here is a paraphrase of the three sentences. Thought is bound to be about objects of thought that are different, and in this sense at a distance, from thought itself. Therefore, whenever thought tries to deny the separation between itself and its objects, it produces deceptions. Mysticism pretends to perform the feat of unifying thought and its objects, but actually it doesn’t. The unity it achieves is powerless because it is only felt or thought, not real. Being merely ideal, the unity is only a faint image of a real unity that would be present in the revolution, but the revolution was renounced in exchange for lesser goods. Thus enlightenment is right to reject, against mysticism, any claim that the unity sought for is substantiated somewhere, and against all temptations to make one’s peace with the powers that be it is right to insist that where there is domination, there is disunity. In this way it prevents the duality of thought and its objects from being made invisible. In enlightenment’s insistence on the separation of thought and its objects, however, this duality comes to indicate that it itself is false, and it comes to indicate what is true instead. This reading is certainly disputable, but I shall not defend it in detail. I shall concentrate instead on the last sentence of the passage quoted, which is surely its most problematic part, and explicate its claim. The first thing to note here is that enlightenment, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, is right against the hypostatisation of utopia, not against utopia! Utopia seems to be alright as long as it stays utopia, as long as it is not deemed present in anything existing. There is nothing deceptive in utopian unity as such, but only in the claim to have found it somewhere.

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One is reminded of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement in the Tractatus: ‘What the solipsist means is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but shows itself.’11 Whatever it may be for solipsism’s truth to show itself, Horkheimer and Adorno deny for mysticism as Wittgenstein denies for solipsism that what these things mean can be captured in statements identifying it. However, it is unsatisfactory to hear no more than that. If enlightenment is right against the hypostatisation of utopia only, what is it that enlightenment is not right against? We are not told, presumably because saying what it is already distorts it. Secondly, in saying that the rupture of subject and object becomes the index of its own falsity and of the truth, the authors allude to the scholastic theorem ‘verum index sui et falsi’: the true is an indicator of both itself and the false.12 This doctrine claims that a true statement, beyond merely being true, also makes evident that it is true and makes evident that statements incompatible with it are false. The idea is that one cannot be merely acquainted with what is in fact a true statement without knowing at the same time that it is true. Conversely, as long as one is wavering between various views on some matter, one can be sure that they are all false: the truth would shine forth, were it only present. In general, the doctrine seems to be mistaken, as multiple choice questions show. However, Horkheimer and Adorno turn the doctrine on its head, and in addition they hold it only for one case. For them, it is not the true that indicates its truth, but rather the false indicates its falsity; and only one falsehood does so: the rupture between subject and object. On the analogy with the traditional doctrine this means: as soon as you are acquainted with this rupture, you also know that it is false. Once faced, it confesses. This shows that the authors use ‘true’ and ‘false’ not as predicates of statements written, spoken or thought, but of states of affairs. After all, it is the rupture between subject and object that is said to indicate its own falsity, not a statement to the effect that there is this rupture. What, then, is a true state of affairs? Presumably it is one that holds, and false is one that does not hold although it may seem to. The true is that which is, the false is that which is not. It follows that, according to the sentence under discussion, there is no duality of thought and its objects. If the rupture indicates its falsity, there is indeed no rupture. Hence mysticism is right after all. To be sure, it must not say what it means, just like Wittgenstein’s solipsist, for that would turn the unity it envisions into some thing, into a substance. But the fault here would lie with the saying, not with what is meant. The unity that is meant is true. It is the truth which the rupture indicates in

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addition to its own falsity. The very word ‘rupture’ (‘Bruch’) already carries this implication. Where there is rupture, there was a breaking, and you can break only what was initially one and whole. However, the rupture between thought and its objects doesn’t come to indicate its own falsity and the truth out of the blue. The rupture comes to do so by virtue of 13 enlightenment’s justified protesting against all declarations of unity and of its stubborn refusal to let domination pass for reconciliation. This is an extraordinary claim, for what the rupture is said to indicate seems to be just the opposite of what enlightenment, insisting on the rupture, kept saying. To be sure, there is no contradiction here: it is certainly compatible with enlightenment’s saying that there is disunity that in fact there is unity. What is remarkable is the thought that this should turn out to be the case by virtue of enlightenment’s saying the opposite. Enlighteners do away with all ideas of fundamental unity, of being with oneself in absolute otherness, as Hegel might have put it, they see the world as a collection of alien objects, but precisely in their insisting on the separateness of subject and world this separation, as Adorno and Horkheimer claim, shows both its own falsity and the truth, which is, as we saw, unity. So the truth does show in the end. It shows in enlightenment’s persistent refusal to have found and identified it, and presumably it only shows there. It cannot be said. Those who try are deceivers or deceived. That does not reduce us to silence. We can raise our voice against the pretence of unity and insist on separation. We will not be speaking the truth then. Nobody does. We may be saying something that shows, by virtue of our saying it, its own falsity and thus the truth. This completes what I consider the positive thesis of ‘Concept of Enlightenment’: what enlightenment says, while not itself true, may yet, by showing its own falsity, allow truth to appear. Clearly this thesis can be called positive: it describes what good enlightenment does whereas the negative thesis considered earlier told us about its ills. Ascribing the positive thesis to the authors is supported by similar passages elsewhere in Dialectic of Enlightenment, among which I would single out the conclusion of ‘For Voltaire’ in the book’s final part (‘Notes and Sketches’),14 and also by related passages at least in Adorno’s subsequent writings. Moreover, similar ideas can be found in some of Horkheimer and Adorno’s contemporaries. It is not only Wittgenstein’s distinction between showing and saying that reappears here in the distinction between what enlightenment says and what, by saying it, it indicates. The positive thesis also finds a close parallel in the philosophical attitude that Heidegger proffered, especially in the 1930s and

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1940s, namely, not to pretend to teach the truth, but in thinking merely to wait for truth to turn to us.15 And it finds a parallel in the hope, expressed in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Moscow Diary’, that it is precisely the anti-auratic ‘destruction of language’ in contemporary Soviet culture that will coincide with mystical revelation (WBGS VI, 330–1). I shall not pursue these historical echoes and ramifications. I would rather like to ask why the positive thesis should be true. What the authors are claiming here is, after all, fairly adventurous. In the negative part we saw enlightenment’s objectification of the world being attacked, which may well lead us to think that by shedding the idea of objects as something from which we are separated we reach the truth. Not so, we are told in the positive part, the chance you have of truth appearing is to be found, not in relinquishing your enlightenment post, but in sticking to it faithfully and insisting on separation; for in your doing so, the separation may show its falsity and unity may emerge as the truth it is. Don’t you try to do that showing yourself! You could only hide, not heal the rupture. Stay rather where you are. Never stop criticising those who claim to have found reconciliation. In such untiring critique of pretended unities the falsity of the separation you insist upon may come out, and with it the truth. Why should it, though? Why should the enlighteners’ efforts at holding on to an objective world and keeping mysticism of whatever kind at bay make visible the untruth of what they insist upon and thereby true unity? Note that we are not concerned here with the enlighteners’ doing a bad job. The mysticism they are not clever enough to eradicate is still false, its survival does not show the falsity of the enlighteners’ endeavour. We are concerned with their doing a perfect job. The world is clean and objective: no mystery, no myth, no meaning remains; and precisely then, with the enlightenment task completed, the falsity of the separation that enlightenment insisted upon and the truth of unity are said to appear. Yet what reason is there to think that they do appear? It could be, couldn’t it, that enlightenment is not surpassed by the revelation of its falsity, but that it has the last word on the matter. Then why doesn’t it have the last word? Here, if anywhere, religion would have to come in to help, since other ways to rescue the argument are not apparent. And religion does come in – the question will be whether it helps. In the Jewish religion, in which the idea of the patriarchy is heightened to the point of annihilating myth, the link between name and being is still acknowledged in the prohibition on uttering the name

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of God. The disenchanted world of Judaism reconciles enchantment by negating it in the idea of God. The Jewish religion brooks no word which might bring solace to the despair of all mortality. It places all hope in the prohibition on invoking falsity as God, the finite as the infinite, the lie as truth. The pledge of salvation lies in the rejection of any faith that poses as salvation, knowledge in the denunciation of illusion.16 This passage displays the same pattern of thought as the passage discussed before. The positions in the pattern, however, have different occupiers here and there. What is being said is this: it is misguided to give a positive account, of God (here), of the truth (there), and to pretend to find God or the truth present in some thing in the world. Yet, here in turning away from any faith pretending to ensure salvation, and there in the enlightened critique of any hypostatisation of the truth, there lies (here) a pledge of salvation and thus hope, and (there) an indication of the truth. Here and there, the message is that there is no finding but in ever refusing to believe that one has found. So in their positive thesis the authors repeat the Judaic prohibition on images, expressed for instance in Ex. 20: 4, or rather they repeat what they take that prohibition to be. I shall not dwell on this difference: let us suppose that they get the prohibition right. I am no more concerned with whether more generally they get Jewish religion right. While I wonder whether their understanding of Judaism is not highly idiosyncratic, I will not pursue this question, but rather assume they are right here as well. The question that I will pursue is what the evident parallel between the prohibition on images and the authors’ positive thesis does for the argument of the book; and more particularly, since I claimed that this thesis is in trouble, whether the parallel may turn the argument around. Adorno and Horkheimer do not present their reference to the prohibition on images as supporting their positive thesis, the way medieval authors present their reference to biblical sources as supporting their claims. Ostensibly, the relation here is paratactic. The fact that Jewish religion finds hope only in the prohibition on invoking falsity as God is not put forward as a reason to think that only in the relentless critique of false hypostatisation does there appear an indication of the truth. It is put forward merely alongside the latter claim.17 Yet why is it then put forward at all? The most probable explanation seems to be this. The prohibition on images and the book’s positive thesis are related the way that in certain games of children the movements of the first player are related to the

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movements of the other children, or that in some dances the movements of first dancer and chorus are related, or more abstractly, the way that in contrapuntal music the line in one part may be related to the lines in other parts. That is to say, they are related the way imitation is related to what is imitated. With their thesis the authors are taking up an intellectual gesture from Jewish religion. It is a pointed and memorable gesture: that one must not presume to make present what is highest and can serve it only by driving away its impostors. Still, in Dialectic of Enlightenment it is a gesture only: the Judaic prohibition on images is not enlisted to help support the authors’ thesis; and indeed how could it, since it would stand as much in need of argumentative support? It is called in as giving the theme for which the authors produce a variation. So the parallel between the Judaic prohibition on images and the authors’ positive thesis does not provide support for the latter, nor is it meant to. This leaves us without any argument for the positive thesis, however, which is bad news for the present interpretation. It is a dubious reading that leaves the central positive idea of its text floating in mid-air. Here is a desperate move to change this result. No, the Judaic prohibition on images does not support the authors’ positive thesis and is not meant to. The converse is true: their positive thesis is part of a plea for Jewish religion or for what the authors consider its central tenet, the ban on images. Sure enough, the positive thesis, itself unsupported, gives little argumentative support to religious doctrines. Argumentative support, though, is not what matters on the present reading. Dialectic of Enlightenment, read in this way, is a religious tract, intended to be fortifying for adherents, attractive for not-yet adherents, but staying out of the business of reason-giving altogether. Floating in mid-air is fine for the central idea of this text, once understood as a piece of religious edification. We may stop worrying why the faithful enlightener, denying himself steadfastly all mystical sweets, can expect the truth, which is unity, to appear in his very insistence on separation. There is no reason here to be expected, as little as there is a reason for saying that the ‘pledge of salvation lies in turning away from any faith that poses as salvation’. This is not something to be argued, it is a promise; and Dialectic of Enlightenment is basically a report of this promise – ‘promise’ as in ‘promised land’.18 This interpretative move is desperate because it rejects the authors’ own presentation of their work. As they tell us right at the beginning, the book is intended to investigate ‘why humanity, instead of entering

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a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’ (DE, xiv). No doubt this is an ambitious project, but as regards the kind of question being asked here it does not go beyond the confines of ordinary academic philosophy. For instance, Professor Hegel 120 years earlier may be taken to have investigated a very similar topic, namely, why humanity is about to enter a truly human state. Furthermore, while expressing distrust both in the organisation and the conceptual equipment of traditional academic disciplines, the authors nonetheless use the material provided in these disciplines and place themselves unmistakably in the tradition of scholarly discourse. To be sure, in the authors’ view their book is not complete, but incompleteness does not disqualify from being part of that tradition. Accordingly, the authors twice call ‘Concept of Enlightenment’, the text I am here especially concerned with, an ‘Abhandlung’ (‘treatise’) (DA, 5). And they subtitle the entire book ‘philosophical fragments’, thus indicating that their writing, however fragmentary, is a philosophical enterprise. All these indications would be given the lie by reading the book as religious speech. Treatise or tract – the choice here corresponds precisely to the one left open at the end of the discussion of the critical part of ‘Concept of Enlightenment’. That part could on the one hand be read as a critique of enlightenment, a critique just rhetorically embellished by some religious vocabulary. To that reading corresponds here an understanding of the positive part as a treatise, however unfounded its main contentions may be. On the other hand, the critical part could be read as an antienlightenment polemics from a religious viewpoint, and with that reading accords an understanding of the positive part as a religious tract that gives voice to a hope beyond reason and reminds others of that hope to which they may be committed as well. The initial question, however, was whether religion does substantial or only rhetorical work in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and it is no answer to be told that either reading is possible. One would like to have a reading that does justice to the evidence on both sides. Now all things considered, it would seem that the book wishes to be a treatise, but cannot make it. It boasts dialectics and ‘Arbeit des Begriffs’ (‘work of concepts’) (DA, 4, DE, xvii), which is Hegelian for rational and rigorous argument, and thus presents itself as speaking out in the open market-place of thought, not inside the church or synagogue. By such means, however, neither the book’s critical nor its positive agenda, neither its rebuttal of enlightenment nor its view of how truth may appear can be made good. In the hour of need, therefore, the book rather draws upon religious

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sources. It blames enlightenment for a loss of unity that can only be deemed a loss from a religious viewpoint and, following the lead of the prohibition on images, it expects truth to appear in the rigorous abstention from making it explicit. So in the end the answer is: Yes, religion does substantial work in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Without its support the book will go nowhere.

10 Secularisation, Myth, Anti-Semitism: Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms* Gérard Raulet

Introduction In their joint Preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer claim that their theses on anti-Semitism are closely connected to the other ‘fragments’ of that work and in particular to the main essay, ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’, to which they had initially referred as ‘work on mythologies’. They suggest that ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’ should be understood as exemplifying a central topic of the main essay, that is, the ‘reversion of enlightened civilization to barbarism’ (DE, xix). On the assumption that this connection between ‘Elements’ and the main essay is anything but obvious, I will try to outline in some detail the conceptions of secularisation and myth brought into play by Dialectic of Enlightenment, before attempting any kind of ‘application’. My intention, then, is not primarily to ‘apply’ the theorems of the founding fathers of Critical Theory to the problem of the place of religion in civil society today, although the theses on anti-Semitism in particular could perhaps be updated for that purpose. It is common knowledge that the concept of myth in Dialectic of Enlightenment is ambiguous and that Adorno and Horkheimer not only largely equate myth and mythology but also use the term in a literal * Translated by Ladislaus Löb. 171

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sense at some times and in a figurative sense at other times, in order to demonstrate a continuity between myth and logos. Of course, this approach is not a new one. It goes back to the consistent and intensive critique to which the Enlightenment subjected all forms of superstition and to the related notion – for example in Fontenelle’s ‘Histoire des oracles’ (1686) and De l’origine des fables (written before 1700, published 1724) – that both myths and religions are (early) forms of the logos: ‘a crude philosophy which necessarily reigned in the first centuries’.1 This is precisely the notion that is also asserted by Ernst Cassirer in Mythical Thought (1924), the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. I will therefore start by drawing attention to this underrated source of Dialectic of Enlightenment. I want to show that by ‘mythical thought’ Adorno and Horkheimer, like Cassirer, mean a certain relationship with reality – a ‘spiritual form’2 – which must be granted a lasting presence even in the supposedly enlightened world, despite all ‘secularisation’, and which cannot be eliminated for good by any demythologisation. The intention of the three authors is obviously to read the process of secularisation against the grain. This approach may not only contribute to an understanding of the connection that Adorno and Horkheimer claim to exist between ‘Elements’ and their main essay, but also to a more differentiated treatment of the problematic position of religion in today’s societies. At the same time it may provide an incentive to test the radical nature of Dialectic of Enlightenment. For my part, I will restrict myself to exemplifying Adorno and Horkheimer’s position on secularisation and the limits of demythologisation by ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’, which the authors sub-titled ‘Limits of Enlightenment’ and which, as a whole, treat religion as something that in modernity ‘has been incorporated as cultural heritage, not abolished’ (DE, 144).

I The thinkers of the Enlightenment – in particular Fontenelle, who must be regarded as one of the initiators of the demythologisation movement – were already fully aware of the fact that myth can be defined as myth only from the point of view of the logos, that myth already represents a way of interpreting the world, and that mythology as narrative is already a form of history. Nevertheless, they considered myth a product of superstition, which reason was to destroy in order to end the rule of superstition over human beings. In his ‘Histoire des

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oracles’ Fontenelle writes: I do not believe that the original establishment of the oracles was a premeditated fraud; rather, the people succumbed to some superstition, which enabled those who were a little more artful to take advantage of them. For the follies of the people are often unpredictable, and sometimes those who deceive them had not the slightest intention to do so, but were invited by the people themselves to deceive them.3 In De l’origine des fables Fontenelle spares neither the culture of Antiquity nor the Judeo-Christian tradition. Compared with the former, the latter by no means signifies the entrance into the age of truth. By means of the comparative method, which he himself helped to introduce, Fontenelle sets out to show that the processes of human thought remain similar in all times and places: ‘The same ignorance has produced more or less the same effects among all the peoples.’4 In this respect ancient mythology, held in such high regard by the humanists of the Renaissance, is by no means superior to the fables of the so-called savage peoples: ‘If it were necessary I could easily show an astonishing agreement between the fables of the Americans and those of the Greeks.’5 In short, myth for Fontenelle is an archaic form of reason – ‘a crude philosophy which necessarily reigned in the first centuries’.6 It depends on ignorance, for ‘the more ignorant one is and the less experience one has, the more miracles one sees. Therefore the first men saw a great many.’7 Nevertheless, myth already aspires to rationality: Even in those crude times there was philosophy and it contributed a great deal to the birth of fables. Those people who have a little more genius than the others are naturally impelled to search for the causes of what they see.8 In its own way, Dialectic of Enlightenment picks up the view that myth represents an early form of rationality, and there are many indications that Adorno and Horkheimer took their bearings from Cassirer’s Mythical Thought. When they speak of myth or mythological thought they mean, as Cassirer does, a certain relation of thought to reality, a ‘spiritual form’.9 Without doubt, one of Cassirer’s great merits was to see myth no longer merely as a complex of belief and narrative, but as a form of intuition, thought and life. This form of thought and life primarily involves phenomena such as mana, taboo, totemism, magic practices, sacrifices and other cultic rites, as described by anthropologists

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and ethnologists, and naturally also myths, that is, a body of narratives constituting the transmitted history of so-called pre-historic civilisations. Moreover it constitutes a particular kind of intuition and thought that has outlasted those early periods and remains effective in the deep structures of thought even in ‘civilised’ times. According to Cassirer’s basic assumptions it is by no means the case that myth has a merely expressive function, while science has a purely representational function. Rather, both are forms of symbolic experience. Cassirer aims at an idealtypological theory of the function of mythical thought and action. The mythical form of thought and life not only assumes very different forms of expression, but its function changes in accordance with its forms of expression up to the point at which reason arises from myth: […] in advancing along this road it [the function of mythical formation] reaches a turning point at which the law that governs it becomes a problem. This may seem strange at first glance, for we do not usually give the naive mythical consciousness credit for such a change of attitude.10 Cassirer recognises no real epistemological break between the age of myth and that of reason, but rather a kind of parthenogenesis, in which mythical thought becomes divided in itself. That is why he criticises Auguste Comte’s theory of the three stages, which distinguishes a theological age from a metaphysical age, and both from the so-called ‘positive’ age: ‘Comte’s law of the “trois états” does not permit a purely immanent evaluation of the achievement of the mythical-religious consciousness.’ This critique leads to a statement that would not be out of place in Dialectic of Enlightenment: To the continuous building up of the mythical world of images there corresponds a continuous drive to surpass it, but in such a way that both the position and the negation belong to the form of the mythical-religious consciousness itself and in it join to constitute a single indivisible act. The process of destruction proves on closer scrutiny to be a process of self-assertion; conversely, the latter can only be effected on the basis of the former, and it is only in their permanent cooperation that the two together produce the true essence and meaning of the mythical-religious form.11 A reading of the fourth section of Cassirer’s Mythical Thought – ‘The Dialectic of Mythical Consciousness’ – thus confirms the close relationship

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between Dialectic of Enlightenment and The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. This relationship is seen, firstly, in the schematisation of rational progress, which distinguishes the three phases – mimic, analogical and symbolic expression – without assuming any real breach of continuity between them; secondly in the parallel between the progress of religion and that of language,12 which is fundamental to Cassirer’s thought; and above all in the circumstance that in this development towards symbolic abstraction the Jewish religion with its ban on names and images represents a decisive threshold of demythologisation – a development ‘from the image to the imageless’, or a ‘process of religious thought and speculation’ in which ‘the mythical world gradually sinks into nothingness’.13 Religion takes the decisive step that is essentially alien to myth: in its use of sensuous images and signs it recognizes them as such – a means of expression which, though they reveal a determinate meaning, must necessarily remain inadequate to it, which ‘point’ to this meaning but never wholly exhaust it.14 But paradoxically – and this is the idea appropriated by Dialectic of Enlightenment – the ban on naming and making graven images of God gives evidence of a substantial bond between name and being, a bond beyond any attempt at representation: In the Jewish religion, in which the idea of the patriarchy is heightened to the point of annihilating myth, the link between name and being is still acknowledged in the prohibition on uttering the name of God. The disenchanted world of Judaism reconciles enchantment by negating it in the idea of God. The Jewish religion brooks no word which might bring solace to the despair of all mortality. It places all hope in the prohibition on invoking falsity as God, the finite as the infinite, the lie as truth.15 It is this stage of demythologisation on which Dialectic of Enlightenment and Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason try to base their countermove against a kind of reason that seems to be, but is not really, demythologised. They confront the nominalism of formal and positivist rationality, for which the name replaces the thing, with the ban on names: ‘Enlightenment as a nominalist tendency stops short before the nomen, the non-extensive, restricted concept, the proper name’ (DE, 17). Horkheimer refers to those systems of ‘objective reason’ which, like

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Platonism, have preserved ‘the idea that truth is the correspondence of language to reality’, however much ‘they are glorifications of an inexorable order of the universe and therefore mythological’.16 This concept of truth – the adequation of name and thing – inherent in every genuine philosophy, enables thought to withstand if not to overcome the demoralizing and mutilating effects of formalized reason.17 In parallel, however, Dialectic of Enlightenment sketches a different strategy, which takes up Hegel’s determinate negation and asserts that the ‘right of the image is rescued in the faithful observance of its prohibition’ (DE, 18). This means that the representations must be evaluated as records of a meaning that transcends them and at the same time denounced because of their inadequacy and falseness. Unlike rigorism, determinate negation does not simply reject imperfect representations of the absolute, idols, by confronting them with the idea they are unable to match. Rather, dialectic discloses each image as script. It teaches us to read from its features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth. [DE, 18] This rescue of the image undoubtedly owes more to Walter Benjamin than to Hegel. It clearly corresponds to Benjamin’s understanding of Baroque allegory. But in Cassirer’s view too the symbolic stage – which at the time of the Jewish prophets separated the image, that is, the concrete presentation or representation, from the meaning18 – resulted in a development of allegory in seventeenth-century Christianity which devalued the profane world in favour of a transcendent meaning, albeit without being able to dispense with the image element. Therefore one thing is certain: the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment agree with Cassirer’s critique of the philosophy of identity. They reject the element of sublation, which is supposed to celebrate the apotheosis of the mediation between image and truth in the concept. Cassirer even points out that the philosophy of identity, the conception of the sublation of all differences, originated in the development of mythical consciousness into religious consciousness, the fundamental idea of which is redemption seen as the abolition of the difference between God and the world.19 In the words of Dialectic of Enlightenment, then, transcendence assumes the function of general equivalent. ‘Things and events do not now simply signify themselves but have become an indication of something “other”, something “transcendent.” ’20

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This explains Cassirer’s search for a function which would be common to both religion and language because of their, at least, similar development towards increasing abstraction. The central question of the philosophy of symbolic forms, he writes, is directed not toward a common origin, but toward a common structure. It does not seek a common unity of foundation for both language and religion but asks whether in these two absolutely independent and unique forms a unity of function may not be demonstrable.21 In full agreement with Cassirer, the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment locate this common function – in other words, the beginning of functionalisation and instrumentalisation – in the Enlightenment and more accurately in Leibniz’s project of a mathesis universalis. Cassirer was without doubt the first to formulate and understand this profound connection between the meaning of the word ‘symbol’ for rationalism, in particular in mathematics, and its religious origin. It is only in the history of modern philosophical idealism that the new view of the ‘symbol’ that emerges in mysticism achieves its full intellectual form. Leibniz starts expressly from Eckhart’s saying that all individual being is a ‘footstep of God’ […]. Here [in Leibniz] arises a kind of symbolism which does not exclude, but rather includes, the idea of the thoroughgoing and unbroken lawfulness of all being and all change, which indeed is essentially based on this idea. The sign has definitely cast off all character of the particular and accidental; it has become the pure expression of a universal order. In the system of universal harmony there are no more ‘miracles’. Rather, the harmony itself is the enduring, universal miracle which negates and thereby absorbs all others in itself. […] ‘Toute la nature’, writes Leibniz to Bossuet, ‘est pleine de miracles, mais de miracles de raison’. Thus a new and original synthesis is effected between the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘rational’.22

II However, the consequences that Dialectic of Enlightenment draws from this continuity are diametrically opposed both to those of the philosophers of the Enlightenment and Cassirer. Adorno and Horkheimer counter the formula of a progress from myth to reason with their famous thesis: ‘Just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every

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step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology’ (DE, 8). They interpret the survival of mythical forms of thought in the modern ways of experience and thought ‘pessimistically’ as proof of a regression or of the continuing dependence of even the apparently most enlightened thought on myth. Cassirer pointed out the intermingling of magic and science in pioneering ideas, for example in Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella and Johannes Kepler,23 but unlike him the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment are no longer exclusively concerned with these features of an, on the whole, progressive development of scientific thought. They abolish Cassirer’s distinction between expression and meaning: for them, even meaning is merely a more formalised form of expression. In contrast, Cassirer denied myths neither an explicative nature nor an awareness of the categories of cause and effect, but he clung to the fundamental difference between individual metamorphoses and the claim to universally valid rules. For Dialectic of Enlightenment, on the other hand, even the most formalised sciences are merely more subtle forms of rituals: Mathematical procedure became a kind of ritual of thought. Despite its axiomatic self-limitation, it installed itself as necessary and objective: mathematics made thought into a thing – a tool, to use its own terms. [DE, 19] For Adorno and Horkheimer, accordingly, the ‘mathematical formula’, like the magic ritual, amounts to a ‘consciously manipulated regression’; it is only ‘the most sublimated form of mimicry’ (DE, 149). By bestowing the status of a scientific law on mythical repetition, which had a cathartic function and tried to cast a spell on an inexorably self-repeating fate, reason confirmed the power of myth: But the more the illusion of magic vanishes, the more implacably repetition, in the guise of regularity, imprisons human beings in the cycle now objectified in the laws of nature, to which they believe they owe their security as free subjects. The principle of immanence, the explanation of every event as repetition, which enlightenment upholds against mythical imagination, is that of myth itself. [DE, 8] Dialectic of Enlightenment itself cannot escape this logic, but must work against it from within and develop its ‘philosophical construction of world history’ as a ‘philosophia narrativa’ – at the risk of being accused of being a ‘mythology of reason’.24 It attempts to wring the normative

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base which it has lost out of its own engagement with myths – primarily with the legend of the ruse of Odysseus.25 But precisely in so doing – by compromising with myth in order to outwit it, as it were – it is able to be ‘prehistory’, that is, to generate a historical reconstruction with a more radical approach than all other possible forms of historiography, all of which remain dependent on that rational paradigm whose deeper logic is precisely that which must be unmasked. This radicalisation of the relationship between myth and reason seems fundamentally to distinguish the position of Adorno and Horkheimer from that of Cassirer. They no longer regard the relationship between the symbolic forms of myth and reason as a logical progression in stages, but as the regressive persistence of mythical patterns of thought or behaviour underneath, and within, the rational ways of thought and behaviour. From this point of view there can no longer even be a question of ‘ “reoccupying” identical systematic positions’, as Hans Blumenberg put it26 – a view that after all accepts the progressive character of the new functional re-interpretations. By, so to speak, demonising myth as the doom of thought, Horkheimer and Adorno seem to close their minds to Cassirer’s fundamental view that human societies are always symbolic societies, which as such are always confronted with the problem of the more or less mythical character of their normative ideas. In fact this is only an illusion, as the bold counter-strategy of Dialectic of Enlightenment – which itself assumes the form of myth – immediately intimates. But before considering this in detail I wish to warn against oversimplifying Cassirer’s position. Cassirer later revised his view of the development of symbolic forms as a logical progression in stages. In his Swedish and American exile he firmly devoted himself to the question of the continuing effects of myth in contemporary societies. Although he generally kept a clear head even in the circumstances of exile, his book The Myth of the State – which appeared in 1946, almost at the same time as Dialectic of Enlightenment – betrays his amazement at the facticity and power of myth in modernity. Nevertheless, he was prepared to acknowledge that in the developmental history of humanity, even in political matters, there are some laws that in the long run cannot be ignored with impunity: For myth has not been really vanquished and subjugated. It is always there, lurking in the dark and waiting for its hour and opportunity. This hour comes as soon as the other binding forces of man’s social life, for one reason or another, lose their strength and are no longer able to combat the demonic mythical powers.27

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In his Conclusion to The Myth of the State Cassirer then writes: Our science, our poetry, our art, and our religion are only the upper layer of a much older stratum that reaches down to a great depth. We must always be prepared for violent concussions that may shake our cultural world and our social order to its very foundations.28 However, even this frightening idea of a battle against mythical forces, which has to be joined again and again, clings to the duality of myth and reason, which Horkheimer and Adorno simply deny. Of course, Adorno and Horkheimer try to conceive the indistinguishability of reason and myth dialectically. Their reflections on mimesis, which include the defence of image mentioned above, are devoted to this. It is not as if they simply wanted to overcome or banish mimesis. On the one hand it is through mimesis that reason proves to be mythical; on the other hand magic mimesis is fundamentally different from rational mimesis, which conquers only inanimate nature and to that extent is itself Mimesis ans Tote: an imitative adaptation to lifelessness.29 This has determined the path of demythologization, of enlightenment, which equates the living with the nonliving as myth had equated the nonliving with the living. Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized. The pure immanence of positivism, its ultimate product, is nothing other than a form of universal taboo. Nothing is allowed to remain outside […]. [DE, 11] This is the difference: while reason imitates only rigidity, magical mimesis imitates, and adapts to, life. Magic as a form of natural religion presupposes the subject’s sympathetic relationship with nature.30 In technology, however, the adaptation to lifelessness in the service of self-preservation is no longer accomplished, as in magic, by bodily imitation of external nature, but by automating mental processes, turning them into blind sequences. [DE, 149] The theme of ‘remembrance of nature within the subject’ (DE, 32) must also be thought of in dialectical terms. It is not by chance that the final pages of ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’ with their renewed appeal to an unyielding spirit of utopia are devoted to this theme. On the one hand, this theme occurs in the context of the rebellion of

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suppressed nature, the effects of which will be discussed in connection with the mechanisms of anti-Semitism; on the other hand this rebellion projects into the Jew everything that the subject had to sacrifice in order to survive. In the form of revenge the harm done to the other still bears witness to that suffered by oneself, just as hatred is partly self-hatred and partly envy, in which the ideal of another civilisation continues to exist in a distorted form. Even as a paranoiac projection, Mimesis ans Tote is mimesis, a longing for assimilation and reconciliation. In this respect it may also be significant for the critical theory of Dialectic of Enlightenment that Cassirer stresses the bodily element in mythical thought,31 even regarding mythical thought as helpful to an understanding of the mind–body problem, given that Adorno and Horkheimer are concerned precisely with the repression of the body and bodily thinking or the return of these repressed factors. They do not really demand more enlightenment – that is, an even more radical rationalisation of mythical thought – but rather ‘another enlightenment’, which would include the ‘remembrance of nature’ as an integral part of its programme.

III If we try to apply Adorno and Horkheimer’s more general dialectics to the argument of ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’, we first note a peculiar structure. Despite their undeniable explosive force one may today be inclined to attribute a substantial part of these reflections to sheer common sense. Nevertheless, the authors support their reflections by massive references to psychoanalysis, as well as by scattered references to historical materialism and its understanding of society as a class society, which contrast sharply with the psychoanalytic approach.32 It may seem questionable how far these references can be reconciled with the fundamental thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment – the thesis of a victorious rationality which asserts itself as domination and which is inseparable from domination, a rationality for which class domination is only a historically determined epiphenomenon. In contrast, ‘philosophy of religion’ remains the real hard core that links the theses on anti-Semitism with the other parts of the fragmentary work. This philosophy conceives all religion as a negotiation with the power of nature: all religion has its origin in myth and ritual, and the mythical and ritual dimension of religion constitutes not only its mental but also its practical truth; in other words, it informs both mythical thought itself and its social and political effects.

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This thesis cannot deny its dual origin. On the one hand it stems from Max Weber, in so far as it aims to identify practically effective patterns of rationality,33 while on the other hand it is an almost literal, practical application of Cassirer’s interpretation of mythical thought. ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’ and ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’ can be connected in a variety of ways. For example, one may begin with the ‘prehistory of subjectivity’ and characterise the anti-Semitic personality as the product of its catastrophe, or one may establish a link between the references to the dependence of the problem of anti-Semitism on class society and those passages in which the mythological archetype of the subject is presented: Odysseus, the master and landowner. Nevertheless these are subordinate reflections which, however important they may be, are derived from the basic thesis of the relapse of reason into myth.34 In what follows I will therefore try to reconstruct the logic of ‘Elements’ on the basis of this thesis. This line of reconstruction is anything but obvious and will probably open up further perspectives in need of more detailed exploration, rather than supply any conclusive proofs. According to the Preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment, the discussion, in the form of theses, of ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’ deals with the reversion of enlightened civilization to barbarism in reality. The not merely theoretical but practical tendency toward selfdestruction has been inherent in rationality from the first, not only in the present phase when it is emerging nakedly. For this reason, a philosophical prehistory of anti-Semitism is sketched. […] The ‘elements’ are directly related to empirical research by the Institute of Social Research […]. [DE, xix] The last sentence refers to Studies in the Authoritarian Personality and the contributions of Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman on fascist agitation and the role of prejudice.35 The difficulty of tying these results of empirical research together into a coherent thesis,36 and indeed using them to exemplify the fundamental thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment, may go part of the way to explain the frequently allusive character of the theses on anti-Semitism, which were not meant to be a mere research report, but claim to develop a ‘philosophical’ interpretation. This justification refers to the statements in the Preface that the relapse of reason into myth is not a merely theoretical tendency but a practical reality, which must not be reduced to the mythologies of

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political agitation. Adorno and Horkheimer claim to have shown that the cause of enlightenment’s relapse into mythology is to be sought not so much in the nationalist, pagan, or other modern mythologies, concocted specifically to cause such a relapse as in the fear of truth which petrifies enlightenment itself. Both these terms […] are to be understood as pertaining not merely to intellectual history but also to […] reality. [DE, xvi] Here the authors themselves refer to their fundamental thesis and the truth which petrifies enlightenment: ‘Myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology’ (DE, xviii). Only the connection between the reflections on anti-Semitism and this thesis – that is, the insight that ‘the particular fate of the Jews reveals the general fate’37 – distinguishes these reflections from Horkheimer’s approach in ‘The Jews and Europe’: outbreaks of anti-Semitism are not mere diversionary strategies of the ruling classes, but the effects of a social order that for its part results from the inescapable logic of rationality and civilisation. Even the fascist state proves to be the successor and executor of this civilisation, which carries out, against the Jews, ‘the destructive urge’ produced by ‘the wrong social order’ (DE, 137). If one is to demonstrate this connection with any stringency one must start from the passages that describe anti-Semitism explicitly with the help of those categories with which ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’ represents the self-assertion and self-destruction of reason. In what follows I will concentrate on three fundamental and complex themes. 1

‘Religion without myth’ No matter what the makeup of the Jews may be in reality, their image, that of the defeated, has characteristics which must make totalitarian rule their mortal enemy: happiness without power, reward without work, a homeland without frontiers, religion without myth. [DE, 164–5, emphasis G. R.]

In this statement two lines of argument are linked: one which may be called historical-materialist38 and which expands the thesis of Horkheimer’s 1939 essay ‘The Jews and Europe’, and another which is directly related to the central thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment. The first is concerned with the fact that in the development of capitalism a special status fell to the Jews. The split into productive and speculative

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capital enabled them to work their way up to social recognition within, and by means of, circulation. The point here is not only that bankers, lawyers and intellectuals, for example, are part of the sphere of circulation, but also that in the course of this radical change the Jews were ‘lucky’ and indeed seemed to have achieved happiness. Anti-Semitism is a knot of happiness and denial. ‘The banker and the intellectual, money and mind, the exponents of circulation are the disowned wishful image of those mutilated by power […]’ (DE, 141). Therefore anti-Semitism is the sudden change from the frustrations suffered by the subject to desires of violence against minorities that apparently have not been affected by these denials or have used them to their own advantage. In a 1962 article on the fight against anti-Semitism, Adorno writes: ‘Without the sphere of mediation, the sphere of trade, finance capital and mobility, the freedom of the mind, which detaches itself from the mere immediacy of given conditions, would have been unthinkable.’39 The Jews are ‘the colonizers of progress’ (DE, 143) and representatives of modernity. They became, in keeping with their patriarchal religion, representatives of urban, civic, and finally industrial conditions. As bearers of capitalist modes of existence from country to country they earned the hatred of those who suffered under that system. [DE, 143] From this point of view Judaism, which represented a decisive change in Cassirer’s ideal-typological reconstruction of the history of rationality no less than in that of Dialectic of Enlightenment, undoubtedly made a powerful contribution to the victory of modern rationality in both the practical and the theoretical realm.40 As Horkheimer already indicated in ‘The Jews and Europe’, the misfortune of the Jews was that objectively they had been the carriers of the advance of enlightenment and taken an active part in the ‘disenchantment of the world’ for centuries, but became marginalised in the course of the development to which they themselves contributed. As a result of this marginalisation the Jews find themselves ‘between two stools’. In the excursus ‘Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality’ Adorno and Horkheimer suggest a parallel between the Jew and woman, which underlines their deeper concern of comprehending the relationships between the persecution of the Jews, social domination, and the domination over nature. If civilisation is essentially based on domination, the Jew and woman are the two disruptive factors in the struggle for total domination over nature that ignite the aggression of a rationality

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fighting for its identity. Where nature does not fit into the purposeful order of reason,41 it arouses fright and natural defensive reactions. As Horkheimer and Adorno elaborate in the fourth section of ‘Elements’, which one might describe as an anthropology of idiosyncrasy, the aggression is directed against ‘whatever has failed to keep up or infringes the commands in which the progress of centuries has been sedimented’,42 thus threatening the total domination over nature. In so far as woman embodies the characteristics of the ‘natural being’ she represents the enemy. Regardless of whether or not this idea is a ‘product of history’, woman becomes the symbol of the enemy in the struggle to resist the temptation of nature: ‘To eradicate utterly the hated but overwhelming temptation to lapse back into nature – that is the cruelty which stems from failed civilization; it is barbarism, the other side of culture’ (DE, 87–9). The parallel between the Jew and woman points to the fear of civilisation and domination that their power might be called into question by a recognition of the rights of those who are weaker, oppressed and placed in a condition of dependence and minority. Having lost his economic position as mediator, which to all appearances allowed him to profit from the work of others, the Jew is more than ever a ‘natural man’, the wandering Jew, the embodiment of the phantasm of a nomadic culture, which is incompatible with the rationality he himself has helped to accomplish. Through his very homelessness the Jew continues to symbolise the longed-for freedom: ‘individualism, abstract law, the concept of the person’ (DE, 143–4). However, this must be tied up with the historical reference to Judaism as a ‘religion without myth’, which provides the link to the myth thesis and thus includes the problem of anti-Semitism in the progressive process that the Jewish religion represents for Adorno and Horkheimer no less than for Cassirer. 2

Christ as ‘deified sorcerer’

The partial responsibility of Christianity for anti-Semitism is also interpreted in ‘Elements’ in the light of this development. The ‘religious origin of anti-Semitism’ is said to consist in the need to confirm the binding force of the promise of salvation through the ‘worldly ruin of those who refused to make the murky sacrifice of reason’, that is, those who did not convert to the certainty of salvation – a demonstration that Horkheimer and Adorno call a ritual (DE, 146–7). In so doing they interpret the Christian rationalisation of myth as a relapse beyond Judaism. They claim that the Jews had succeeded in disempowering magic not so much by eradicating ‘the adaptation to nature’ as by sublating it into

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‘the pure duties of ritual’, that is, by sublimating primitive ritual into ‘the sanctified rhythm of family and national life’ (DE, 153, 146). On the other hand the satisfactio vicarians, the gratification of the son, appears as a higher form of magic representation. ‘Magic implies specific representation. […] the sacrificial animal is slain in place of the god’ (DE, 6). In Christianity the ‘Lamb of God’ is substituted for the sacrificial animal and takes all sacrifices upon himself. In that sense it may be said with Horkheimer and Adorno that Christianity only apparently, ‘in ideology’, broke with the idea of self-preservation through sacrifice in order to relapse, in reality, ‘through symbols into mythology’ (DE, 146, 153). This ‘spiritualization of magic’ (DE, 145), which is the price of progress beyond Judaism, therefore really means a relapse into magical ritual, into natural religion. Here the development from myth to symbol, the spiritualisation of magic, is read against the grain, rationalisation being presented as remythologisation and the Christian theology of liberation turned inside out into a theology of unfreedom. The proton pseudos of Christianity is that a ‘spiritual essence is attributed to something which the mind identifies as natural’. To sum up: Christ is the ‘deified sorcerer’ (DE, 145). The representative character of sacrifice […] cannot be separated from the deification of the sacrificial victim, from the fraudulent priestly rationalization of murder through the apotheosis of the chosen victim. [DE, 40] Apart from the side-swipe at the priests – which would itself need a detailed discussion, given the remarks on priests elsewhere in Dialectic of Enlightenment and the resemblance to the idea that the rulers instrumentalise anti-Semitism – the point of the argument is that the rationalisation carried out by Christianity initially seemed to take account of the fact that demythologisation ‘always takes the form of the irresistible experience of the futility and the superfluity of sacrifices’,43 but in the final analysis confirms the logic of domination: ‘If the principle of sacrifice was proved transient by its irrationality, at the same time it survives through its rationality. This rationality has transformed itself, not disappeared’ (DE, 42). 3

False projection

‘Anti-Semitic behavior is unleashed in situations in which blinded people, deprived of subjectivity, are let loose as subjects’ (DE, 140). In anti-Semitism, ‘psychological possibilities’ that ‘in certain objective social and political conditions’ become realities are given a break, as Adorno

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sums up in 1959.44 Like the historical-materialist argument, this psychological explanation, which is borrowed from The Authoritarian Personality, is linked to the myth thesis by the understanding of antiSemitism as the revenge of subjectivity for the sacrifices that it was obliged to make for the sake of its constitution and self-preservation. The persecution of the Jews manifests the nature of a social order, which in reality cannot exist without disfiguring human beings. The persecution of the Jews, like any persecution, cannot be separated from that order. Its essence, however successfully it may hide itself at times, is the violence which today is openly revealed. [DE, 138–9] For humanity ‘had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self – the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings – was created’ (DE, 26). These sacrifices are repeated in the shape of a ritual directed against the other, the Jew. They serve, as it were, to confirm the myth that domination and sacrifice are the price of self-preservation. Pogroms are the ‘true ritual murders’ of civilisation (DE, 149). Outbreaks of anti-Semitism represent a possibility of ‘abrogating the taboo on violence without being punished’.45 Adorno and Horkheimer’s definition of anti-Semitism as ‘a false projection’46 provides an opportunity to discuss the dialectics of mimesis in more detail. The definition indicates the replacement of mimesis with delusion, that is, with the kind of paranoia that leads the damaged subject to see conspiracies everywhere. Jews are suspected to be everywhere. Both psychologically and in connection with the progressive development of myth into reason, this replacement is a regression. Although mimetic behaviour characterises the mythical-religious relation to the world, Horkheimer and Adorno do not regard mimesis exclusively as something negative. Mimesis, for them, is in fact an essential element of the subject–object relationship: it constitutes at one and the same time the world and the subject itself and it corresponds, on the whole, to what Kant called the transcendental synthesis. From the traces the world leaves behind in its senses the subject recreates the world outside it: the unity of the thing in its manifold properties and states; and in so doing, in learning how to impart a synthetic unity not only to the outward impressions but to the inward ones which gradually separate themselves from them, it retroactively constitutes the self.47

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However, in the case of ‘false projection’ this constitutive relationship is reversed: If mimesis makes itself resemble its surroundings, false projection makes its surroundings resemble itself. If, for the former, the outward becomes the model to which the inward adapts, so that the alien becomes the intimately known, the latter displaces the inward, ready to leap, into the outer world, branding the intimate friend as foe.48 Similarly, another passage states that the bourgeois knights of industry secretly despise themselves in the Jew: ‘their anti-Semitism is self-hate, the bad conscience of the parasite’ (DE, 144). This remark occurs in the authors’ reflections upon the Jew as an ideal, which in turn lead to the idea that the paranoid subject ‘can project nothing except its own unhappiness, from the cause of which, residing in itself, it is cut off by its lack of reflection’ (DE, 158). Here the element of reflection, which prevents the subject and the object merging into one – no matter how dependent their very constitution makes them on each other – disappears; and what disappears with it is the non-identity, which, according to Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, protects dialectical thought from the (paranoid) delusion of the idealistic system. While true mimesis is ‘organic adaptation to otherness’ (DE, 148), false projection is connected with death: it is an adaptation to the second nature of socialisation, in which ‘the tribute’ that ‘life pays for its continued existence is adaptation to death’ (DE, 148). Life thus adapts to a social domination whose coercion proves to be as relentless as the coercion of blind nature, which social domination was meant to control in the first place. Such Mimesis ans Tote characterises the paranoid behaviour of the anti-Semites who believe themselves to be persecuted and who see ‘in the victim the pursuer’ (DE, 154).

Conclusion In this chapter I investigated how the convoluted dialectic of myth and reason works in Dialectic of Enlightenment if it is put to the test by means of those essays and fragments appended to ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’ for that purpose. This attempt would need to be deepened and developed more methodically and extended, for example, to the essay entitled ‘The Culture Industry’. At a purely philological level we note that Horkheimer and Adorno are dealing with a concept of mythological thought which underlay Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic

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forms and which went beyond a naive opposition of myth and reason, even though it adopted many suggestions from the Enlightenment. This result might seem meagre, were it not for the more radical use that Adorno and Horkheimer make of Cassirer’s, all in all, rather consensual philosophy of symbolic forms.49 The fact that processes of social integration occur by means of symbolic forms has been demonstrated more clearly than ever in today’s societies by the very immaterialisation of these processes. That is why we must continue to ask what is meant by ‘symbolic forms’. In this respect the tangled construct of Dialectic of Enlightenment is an example of what remains to be done today.

Notes

Introduction: The Frankfurt School and the Problem of Religion 1 Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research (1973); Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance (1988). 2 Although early Critical Theorists frequently used the Left–Right opposition that dominated the political landscape during the first half of the twentieth century to position their work, it is important to note that to some extent they seem to have been aware of the fact that their work also undercut various of the distinctions related to that opposition. Indications of this are, for example, Benjamin’s esteem for thinkers such as Max Kommerell and Carl Schmitt or Max Horkheimer’s alignment of the ‘true’ revolutionary with the ‘true’ conservative in ‘Was wir “Sinn” nennen, wird verschwinden’ (‘What we call “meaning” will disappear’, MHGS VII, 354). 3 Cf. Willem van Reijen, ‘Konservative Rhetorik in der “Dialektik der Aufklärung” ’, pp. 204–6. 4 Cf. Raymond Geuss, ‘Liberalism and its discontents’, pp. 332–6. 5 Thomas Nipperdey, Religion im Umbruch: Deutschland 1870–1918, esp. pp. 124–57; Mitchell G. Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture (1890–1967), pp. 1–322; Peter Berghoff, Der Tod des politischen Kollektivs; Manfred Gangl, Gérard Raulet (eds), Intellektuellendiskurse in der Weimarer Republik; Steve Giles, Maike Oerkel (eds), Counter–Cultures in Germany and Central Europe, pp. 87–169, 193–239; Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science; Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism; Jacob Katz (ed.), The Role of Religion in Modern Jewish History; Hans G. Kippenberg, Brigitte Luchesi (eds), Religionswissenschaft und Kulturkritik; Thomas Rohkrämer, Eine andere Moderne?; Stefanie von Schnurbein, Justus H. Ulbricht (eds), Völkische Religion und Krisen der Moderne. 6 See the case made for this possibility in James Bohman, ‘Wahrheit, Ideologie, Religion’. 7 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 471 (N8,1), cf. WBGS V.1, 588–9; Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason, p. 186; MHGS III, 247–8 (‘Zu Bergsons Metaphysik der Zeit’, ‘On Bergson’s metaphysics of time’). On this issue, see also Margarete Kohlenbach, Walter Benjamin: Self-Reference and Religiosity, pp. x–xii. 8 Cf. AB, 90 (Adorno, Letter to Walter Benjamin, 17 December 1934). 9 Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, quotations, pp. 89–91, 94, 98, 109, 119. 10 For the problems involved in any definition of ‘religion’, see for instance Georg Simmel, ‘On the Sociology of Religion’, pp. 275–6, 286–7, or, more recently, Stephen J. Hunt, Religion in Western Society, pp. 1–13, or Volkhard Krech, Religionssoziologie, esp. pp. 75–8. 11 In his Weimar Culture, Peter Gay discusses ‘the hunger for wholeness’ as a characteristic feature of the period. See also Theodore Ziolkowski, ‘Der 190

Notes 191

12 13

14 15

16 17 18

19

20 21 22

Hunger nach dem Mythos’, Jost Hermand, Frank Trommler, Die Kultur der Weimarer Republik, pp. 151–61, and the contemporary discussion in Erich Unger, Wirklichkeit, Mythos, Erkenntnis (‘Reality, myth, knowledge’), pp. 3–39. MHGS VII, 387–8 (‘Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen’, ‘The longing for the totally Other’). Isaac Breuer, Concepts of Judaism, p. 35. For the historical context of Breuer’s stance, see the editor’s introduction, esp. pp. 3–4, for the selection and the various translations and retranslations of the texts collected in this volume, the editor’s introduction, pp. 24–5. Cf. Breuer, Concepts of Judaism, p. 35. See for instance DE 9, 16, 27–8, 124, 139, and SW II, 216–17 (‘Surrealism’), SW I, 395 (‘Outline of the Psychophysical Problem’). Benjamin uses the one term ‘Einsamkeit’, translated in SW I and SW II by ‘solitariness’ and ‘solitude’ respectively, in both texts. See Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, p. 89, and the largely functionalist discussion of religious conceptions, pp. 98–108. Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, pp. 89–90. As the context makes clear, the ritual aspect is represented in Geertz’s definition by the reference to an ‘aura’ of factuality. Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, pp. 109–18. Cf. for instance SW I, 295 (‘Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus’), WBGS II.2, 680–1 (‘Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer’), SW I, 245, 252, note 4 (‘Critique of Violence’). Cf. Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, pp. 109–18. MHGS VII, 351 (‘Was wir “Sinn” nennen’). Cf. Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, pp. 89–90, 94.

1 Max Horkheimer’s Supposed ‘Religious Conversion’: A Semantic Analysis 1 Michael R. Ott, Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory of Religion, pp. 81–3; Gérard Raulet, ‘Kritik der Vernunft und kritischer Gebrauch des Pessimismus’, pp. 31–51; Hans Günter Holl, ‘Religion und Metaphysik im Spätwerk Max Horkheimers’; Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Gesten aus Begriffen, pp. 153–97; Hans-Walter Nörtersheuser, Max Horkheimer, pp. 316–20; Juan José Sánchez, Wider die Logik der Geschichte, pp. 11–12, 124–5. 2 Cf. Raulet, ‘Kritik der Vernunft’, p. 36. 3 Cf. Schmid Noerr, Gesten, p. 9. 4 Fritz Kuhn, ‘ “Begriffe besetzen”: Anmerkungen zu einer Metapher aus der Welt der Machbarkeit’, pp. 96–105; Josef Klein, ‘Kann man “Begriffe besetzen”?’, pp. 57–62; Josef Klein, ‘Wortschatz, Wortkampf, Wortfelder in der Politik’, pp. 3–50. 5 Horkheimer, ‘On the Problem of Truth’, p. 215. 6 Cf. Nörtersheuser, Max Horkheimer, pp. 318–19. 7 Horkheimer, ‘The Jews and Europe’, p. 78. 8 Cf. Horkheimer, Kritische Theorie: Eine Dokumentation, ed. Alfred Schmidt, vol. I, pp. 361–76 and Horkheimer, Kritische Theorie der Gesellschaft, ed. Marxismus-Kollektiv, vol. I.

192 Notes 9 Horkheimer, ‘Thoughts on Religion’, p. 129. 10 ‘Thoughts on Religion’, p. 131. See also Nörtersheuser, Max Horkheimer, p. 168. 11 MHGS I, 140 (‘Sehnsucht’). See also Nörtersheuser, Max Horkheimer, pp. 125–31. 12 Schmid Noerr, Gesten, pp. 153–73. See also Holl, ‘Religion und Metaphysik’, pp. 131, 141–2. 13 ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’, p. 44; ‘Materialism and Morality’, p. 36 (trans. modified), MHGS III, 136–7. 14 Schmidt, ‘Nachwort des Herausgebers’, p. 365. 15 Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline, p. 219. See also Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, ‘Humanität und Religion: Zu Max Horkheimers Deutung des Christentums’, p. 121. 16 Schmid Noerr, ‘Nachwort des Herausgebers’, p. 462. 17 Wolfgang Kraushaar, ‘Die Anti-Elite als Avantgarde’, p. 3. 18 Dawn and Decline, pp. 60, 91. See also Sánchez, Wider die Logik, pp. 33–7, 69–73; Nörtersheuser, Max Horkheimer, pp. 37–41, 172–3; and Holl, ‘Religion und Metaphysik’, pp. 129, 138. 19 Dawn and Decline, p. 84. 20 Lutz-Bachmann, ‘Humanität und Religion’, p. 108; Nörtersheuser, Max Horkheimer, pp. 318–19. 21 ‘Theism and Atheism’, p. 49 (trans. modified), MHGS VII, 185. See also Nörtersheuser, Max Horkheimer, pp. 318–19. 22 ‘Theism and Atheism’, pp. 48–9. Cf. MHGS VII, 194 (‘Religion und Philosophie’). 23 MHGS VII, 349–50 (‘Was wir “Sinn” nennen’). 24 MHGS VII, 194 (‘Religion und Philosophie’). See also Jürgen Habermas, ‘Remarks on the Development of Horkheimer’s Work’, pp. 60–1, and Holl, ‘Religion und Metaphysik’, p. 141. 25 ‘Materialism and Morality’, p. 33. 26 ‘Theism and Atheism’, p. 47. 27 MHGS VII, 140–1 (‘Die Aktualität Schopenhauers’, ‘Schopenhauer’s contemporary relevance’). Cf. MHGS VII, 232 (‘Pessimismus heute’, ‘Pessimism today’). 28 MHGS VII, 251–2 (‘Schopenhauers Denken im Verhältnis zu Wissenschaft und Religion’, ‘Schopenhauer’s thought in relation to science and religion’). Cf. MHGS VII, 194 (‘Religion und Philosophie’). 29 MHGS VII, 350–1 (‘Was wir “Sinn” nennen’); MHGS VII, 393–5 (‘Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen’, ‘The longing for the totally Other’); ‘Theism and Atheism’, p. 50. See also Nörtersheuser, Max Horkheimer, pp. 288–300. 30 MHGS VII, 238–9 (‘Bemerkungen zur Liberalisierung der Religion’, ‘Remarks on the liberalisation of religion’). 31 Dawn and Decline, p. 101. See also Ott, Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory, pp. 75, 123–4 and Nörtersheuser, Max Horkheimer, pp. 257–66. 32 MHGS VII, 434 (‘Die Zukunft der Kritischen Theorie’, ‘The future of Critical Theory’); MHGS VII, 238–9 (‘Liberalisierung’); MHGS VII, 293–4 (‘ “Himmel, Ewigkeit und Schönheit” ’, ‘ “Heaven, eternity and beauty” ’); MHGS VII, 350–2 (‘Was wir “Sinn” nennen’). See also Nörtersheuser, Max Horkheimer, pp. 257–63. 33 MHGS VII, 293–4 (‘ “Himmel” ’).

Notes 193 34 MHGS VII, 311–13, quotation, 312 (‘Die Funktion der Theologie in der Gesellschaft’, ‘The social function of theology’). 35 MHGS VII, 187, 194 (‘Religion und Philosophie’); MHGS VII, 386 (‘Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen’). Cf. Lutz-Bachmann, ‘Humanität und Religion’, p. 114. 36 Cf. Nörtersheuser, Max Horkheimer, p. 294. In the worst case the distinction is completely ignored, cf. Ott, Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory, pp. 13, 94, 103–5. 37 Nörtersheuser, Max Horkheimer, pp. 290–300, quotation, p. 298. 38 Cf. Bloch, The Principle of Hope and Moltmann, Theology of Hope. 39 MHGS VII, 433–4 (‘Die Zukunft der kritischen Theorie’). See also MHGS VII, 389 (‘Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen’), MHGS VII, 352–3 (‘Was wir “Sinn” nennen’), as well as Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, ‘Die Vermittlung von Gottesfrage und Offenbarung im gesellschaftlichen Handeln’, pp. 276–7. 40 Nörtersheuser, Max Horkheimer, pp. 267–71. 41 Dawn and Decline, p. 148. 42 MHGS VII, 380 (‘Verwaltete Welt’, ‘A world subjected to administration’); MHGS VII, 347–8 (‘Was wir “Sinn” nennen’); MHGS VII, 403 (‘Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen’). See also Nörtersheuser, Max Horkheimer, pp. 237–8 and Holl, ‘Religion und Metaphysik’, p. 139. 43 MHGS VII, 340–1 (‘Dokumente – Stationen’); MHGS VII, 415–16 (‘Neues Denken über Revolution’, ‘New thoughts on revolution’); MHGS VII, 345–7 (‘Was wir “Sinn” nennen’). 44 MHGS VII, 352 (‘Was wir “Sinn” nennen’). See also Nörtersheuser, Max Horkheimer, pp. 255–62, and Ott, Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory, p. 119. 45 MHGS VII, 387 (‘Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen’). Cf. Raulet, ‘Kritik der Vernunft’, p. 44. 46 MHGS VII, 194 (‘Religion und Philosophie’). Cf. MHGS VII, 431–4 (‘Die Zukunft der Kritischen Theorie’). See also Holl, ‘Religion und Metaphysik’, p. 140. 47 MHGS VII, 276–83, quotation, 276 (‘Erinnerung an Paul Tillich’, ‘In memoriam Paul Tillich’); MHGS VII, 350 (‘Was wir “Sinn” nennen’). 48 Cf. Nörtersheuser, Max Horkheimer, p. 320, and Sánchez, Wider die Logik, p. 284. 49 Post, Kritische Theorie und metaphysischer Pessimismus, pp. 80–2. Cf. Sánchez, Wider die Logik, pp. 284–5. 50 Nörtersheuser, Max Horkheimer, pp. 226–33. 51 Cf. Claus Grossner, ‘Anfang und Ende der Frankfurter Schule’, and Michael Westarp, ‘Kritische Theorie in der Sackgasse’. 52 Cf. the extensive collection of newspaper articles in the Max Horkheimer Archive, Frankfurt/M. (MHA XXII, 91–101). 53 See Kraushaar (ed.), Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung, Ingrid GilcherHoltey (ed.), 1968, and Alex Demirovic, ‘Der nonkonformistische Intellektuelle’, pp: 856–909. 54 Dawn and Decline, p. 57. 55 Rudolf Siebert, From Critical Theory to Critical Political Theology; Volker Spülbeck, Neo-Marxismus und Theologie; Siegfried Wiedenhofer, Politische Theologie. 56 Roger Garaudy, Johann Baptist Metz, Karl Rahner, From Anathema to Dialogue: the Challenge of Marxist-Christian Cooperation; Erich Kellner (ed.), Christentum und Marxismus heute; Wolf-Dieter Marsch, ‘Marxismus und Christentum’.

194 Notes 57 Moltmann, Theology of Hope; Moltmann, The Crucified God; Wiedenhofer, Politische Theologie. 58 Metz, Theology of the World; Kurt Lüthi, Theologie als Dialog mit der Welt von heute; Wiedenhofer, Politische Theologie. 59 Moltmann, ‘Die Zukunft als neues Paradigma der Transzendenz’, p. 9. 60 Rahner, ‘Zur Theologie der Hoffnung’, p. 77. 61 Metz, ‘“Politische Theologie” in der Diskussion’, pp. 268, 280–1. 62 Metz, ‘ “Politische Theologie” ’, pp. 286–8; Metz, ‘Erlösung und Emanzipation’, pp. 125–7; Metz, Moltmann, Leidensgeschichte. On Metz and the Frankfurt School, see Spülbeck, Neomarxismus und Theologie, pp. 231–4, and Wiedenhofer, Politische Theologie, pp. 40–3. 63 Moltmann, The Crucified God, p. 321. 64 Cf. Moltmann, Theology of Hope and Horkheimer, ‘Für eine Theologie des Zweifels’.

2 On the Usefulness and Uselessness of Religious Illusions 1 ‘[…] if there be any single domain of human experience that presents us with something unmistakably specific and unique, peculiar to itself, assuredly it is that of the religious life’ (Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 4). 2 Otto, Idea of the Holy, pp. 8–11. 3 Idea of the Holy, pp. 12–30. 4 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, pp. 28–9. 5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, pp. 60, 70–7 (§§ 108, 132–41); Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, pp. 100–1 (3rd essay, § 16). At other places, for instance The Gay Science, pp. 210–11 (§ 353), Nietzsche analyses religion as the interpretation of a form of life. 6 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, pp. 56–8 (2nd essay, § 13). 7 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 108–28 (§§ 186–203). For further discussion of the methodological issues here, see Raymond Geuss, ‘Nietzsche and Genealogy’. 8 Freud, Future of an Illusion, pp. 33–5. 9 Future of an Illusion, pp. 33, 45. 10 For the best analytical account of the concept of a need, see David Wiggins, Needs, Values, and Truth, pp. 1–57. 11 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, pp. 75–7 (§ 141); Nietzsche, Gay Science, p. 131 (§ 151). 12 Freud, Future of an Illusion, pp. 36–42. 13 Future of an Illusion, p. 50. 14 Future of an Illusion, p. 52. 15 Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Magic, Science and Religion’. 16 Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, pp. 206–7. 17 Horkheimer, ‘Thoughts on Religion’, esp. pp. 129, 131. 18 MHGS VII, 213–23 (‘Über den Zweifel’, ‘On doubt’), 224–32 (‘Pessimismus heute’, ‘Pessimism today’), 233–9 (‘Bemerkungen zur Liberalisierung der Religion’, ‘Remarks on the liberalisation of religion’), 240–52 (‘Schopenhauers Denken im Verhältnis zu Wissenschaft und Religion’, ‘Schopenhauer’s thought in relation to science and religion’).

Notes 195

3 Emerging ‘Orders’: The Contemporary Relevance of Religion and Teaching in Walter Benjamin’s Early Thought 1 ‘We / don’t know, you know, / we / don’t know, do we?, / what / counts’ (trans. Michael Hamburger, Poems of Paul Celan, pp. 156–7). 2 For a detailed discussion of Benjamin’s religiosity that also considers texts where Benjamin does not explicitly deal with religion, see Margarete Kohlenbach, Walter Benjamin: Self-Reference and Religiosity. 3 SW I, 104 (trans. modified), WBGS II.1, 163. 4 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 470, cf. WBGS V.1, 587–8 (N7a,1). In the translation of N7a,1 in The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s term ‘Aktualität’ is rendered by ‘the present instant’ while in the present chapter ‘Aktualität’ is consistently translated as ‘contemporary relevance’. 5 See ‘Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History” ’, SW IV, 405, and WBGS I.3, 1243 (Ms 474); see also The Arcades Project, pp. 462–3 and 473 (N3,1 and N9,7). 6 WBGS VI, 46 (‘Erkenntnistheorie’). 7 For the importance of ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’ for the further development of Benjamin’s thought, see for instance Gérard Raulet, Walter Benjamin, pp. 4–11 and Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience, pp. 1–33. 8 Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, p. 55. 9 GB I, 73 (Letter to Ludwig Strauss, 10 October 1912). 10 Cf. ‘ “Experience” ’, SW I, 3–5, and Benjamin’s later comments on this text, quoted by the editors in WBGS II.3, 902. 11 Cf. GB I, 63 (Letter to Strauss, 11 September 1912), where the phrase ‘serious about today’ applies to ‘men of letters’ (‘Literaten’), whom the ‘Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart’ calls the ‘bearers of the religious spirit in our time’ (WBGS II.1, 29). The letters to Ludwig Strauss of 11 September, 10 October, 21 November 1912 and 7–9 January 1913 accompany the composition of ‘Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart’, sharing several features with it. They are therefore valuable for the explanation of individual passages. 12 Cf. in particular WBGS II.1, 29 about the necessity of creating the appropriate preconditions for ‘spiritualising the conventions’. I will return to this passage later. 13 WBGS II.1, 32, 24. For Benjamin’s concern with the ‘honesty of dualism’, see Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, Der frühe Walter Benjamin und Hermann Cohen, pp. 317–40. 14 Deuber-Mankowsky, Walter Benjamin und Hermann Cohen, p. 340. 15 Characteristically, Benjamin’s interest in the cultic element persists through the different phases of his thought, despite all the profound changes in his intellectual paradigms. In ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (written in 1939) it recurs in the context of Baudelaire’s correspondances that are said to ‘encompass a concept of experience which includes cultic elements’. Cf. SW IV, 333 (trans. modified), WBGS I.2, 638. Of course, as Benjamin’s comment suggests, modern man finds it extremely difficult to relate to such an experience: ‘Only by approaching these elements was Baudelaire able to

196 Notes

16 17

18

19

20 21 22 23 24 25

26

fathom the full meaning of the breakdown which he, as a modern man, was witnessing.’ However, even the historical materialist Benjamin regards the survival of cultic elements in the mutilated experience of modernity as an indispensable resource, which he incorporates under the heading of ‘remembrance’ in his own theory of the experience of history. WBGS II.1, 29. On this issue, see also Kohlenbach, Self-Reference, 51–2. WBGS II.1, 28. See also GB I, 64 (Letter to Strauss, 11 September 1912): ‘I will say no more about the literary intelligentsia (as an idea) than that they are called to be for the new social consciousness what “the poor in spirit, the enslaved and the humble” were for the first Christians’. GB I, 63 (Letter to Strauss, 11 September 1912, emphasis P. F.). DeuberMankowsky (Walter Benjamin und Hermann Cohen, p. 378) has underlined the connection between Benjamin’s characterisation of the literary intelligentsia and Alois Riegl’s concept of ‘artistic will’ (‘Kunstwollen’), which was to become important for Benjamin later. See GB I, 71 (Letter to Strauss, 10 October 1912): ‘To be completely personal, I find among them [the Jews] a strictly dualistic world view that I find (not by chance!) in myself and in the Wickersdorf view of life. Buber also speaks about this dualism.’ On the interrelations between ‘Jews’ and ‘literary intelligentsia’ in Benjamin’s thought around 1912 see Deuber-Mankowsky, Walter Benjamin und Hermann Cohen, pp. 282–383. Cohen, ‘Innere Beziehungen der Kantischen Philosophie zum Judentum’ (‘The internal relations of Kant’s philosophy to Judaism’). Walter Benjamin und Hermann Cohen, p. 322. WBGS II.1, 34 (‘Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart’). Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willens, 2nd edition, p. 444. SW I, 105 (trans. modified), WBGS II.1, 164. SW I, 106. However, in ‘On the Program’ we no longer read about ‘dualism’ in this context, but about the ‘trichotomy of the Kantian system’: ‘the trichotomy of the Kantian system is one of the great features […] which is to be preserved, and it, more than any other, must be preserved’ (SW I, 106). This passage and the related problem of causality through freedom reveal most clearly the influence on Benjamin of Felix Noeggerath’s doctoral dissertation Synthesis und Systembegriff in der Philosophie: Ein Beitrag zur Kritik des Antirationalismus (‘Synthesis and the concept of system in philosophy: a contribution to the critique of antirationalism’). See Tamara Tagliacozzo, Esperienza e compito infinito nella filosofia del primo Benjamin, pp. 374–6. SW I, 102 (emphasis P. F.). Following established conventions ‘epistemological’ here – and throughout the present chapter – stands for the German ‘erkenntnistheoretisch’. However, in the ‘Addendum’ to ‘Program’ Benjamin maintains that all philosophy is ‘Erkenntnistheorie’ or ‘theory of knowledge, but just that – a theory, critical and dogmatic, of all knowledge’ (SW I, 108, WBGS II.1, 169). Here the term Erkenntnistheorie, rather than referring simply to epistemology or a specific philosophical discipline, indicates the ‘rehabilitation of philosophy’ as Erkenntnistheorie that had marked neoKantianism in the nineteenth century. (Cf. Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933, 103–6.) For the history of the term, see Klaus Christian Köhnke, ‘Über den Ursprung des Wortes Erkenntnistheorie – und dessen vermeintliche Synonyme’, Köhnke, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism,

Notes 197

27 28 29 30 31

32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44

45 46

47

pp. 36–66, and for its importance in Benjamin, esp. in the Convolute N of The Arcades Project, Pierfrancesco Fiorato, ‘Teoria della conoscenza e concetto di storia’. SW I, 102 (emphasis P. F.). Cor, 112 (trans. modified), GB I, 422. Cf. Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, p. 660. SW I, 105 (trans. modified), WBGS II.1, 164. SW I, 105. To recognise the ‘mechanical’ one-sidedness of neo-Kantianism, Benjamin need not have read Kants Theorie der Erfahrung. The fact, however, that once he had written ‘On the Program’ he was still interested in reading this work casts some doubts on Scholem’s report on this entire process in The Story of a Friendship. See Fiorato, ‘Die Erfahrung, das Unbedingte und die Religion: Walter Benjamin als Leser von Kants Theorie der Erfahrung’. The elements that Benjamin offers the reader for a closer definition of the positive side of the relationship between knowledge and experience are sparse. His positive characterisation of the epistemological foundation in question does not seem to go beyond the reference to a process of ‘referring’ (see above) or, elsewhere, ‘envisioning’: ‘It is a question of finding, on the basis of Kantian typology, prolegomena to a future metaphysics and, in the process, of envisioning this future metaphysics, this higher experience’ (SW I, 102, emphasis P. F.). Holzhey, Cohen and Natorp, vol. I, p. 133. Cohen and Natorp, vol. I, p. 131. The quotations in this passage relate to Cohen, Kants Begründung der Ethik, 1st edition, pp. 27 and 47. Cohen, Kants Begründung der Ethik, 2nd edition, p. 35 (emphasis P. F.). Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, p. 59. Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, p. 585. Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, p. 21. SW I, 107–8 (trans. modified), WBGS II.1, 168. Cf. ‘das darreichende Faktum’, WBGS VI, 53 (‘Über die transzendentale Methode’). SW I, 105 (trans. modified), WBGS II.1, 164. WBGS VI, 39 (‘Zum verlornen Abschluss der Notiz über die Symbolik in der Erkenntnis’, ‘On the lost conclusion of the note about symbolism in knowledge’). Cohen, Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, p. 72. See my discussion of Cohen’s notion of revelation in Fiorato, ‘ “Das Erbe des Allmächtigen aus der Höhe”: Offenbarung und Tradition in einer “Religion der (problematischen) Vernunft” ’. WBGS VI, 53 (‘Über die transzendentale Methode’, emphasis P. F.). SW I, 109 (trans. modified), WBGS II.1, 170. The terms ‘original concept’ (‘Urbegriff’) and ‘primary concept’ (‘Stammbegriff’) are used by Kant in his ‘metaphysical deduction’ with reference to the categories. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 114–16 (KrV B 107–8, 111). In this context the term ‘immediately’, emphasised by Benjamin himself, proves central. It encapsulates the problem of how to provide a foundation for the concept of religious experience that his entire project struggles to resolve. Benjamin himself explicitly stresses the problematic nature of his notion of immediacy when he writes that in ‘a purely metaphysical respect,

198 Notes

48 49 50 51 52

the primary concept of experience is transformed into the totality of experience in a sense quite different from the way it is transformed into its individual specifications, the sciences – that is, immediately, where the meaning of this immediacy vis-à-vis the former mediacy remains to be determined’ (SW I, 109–10, trans. modified, WBGS II.1, 170, latter emphasis P. F.). WBGS VI, 51 (‘Die unendliche Aufgabe’, ‘The infinite task’, dated December 1917 by the editors). Scholem, The Story of a Friendship, pp. 60–1. SW I, 217 ‘The Theory of Criticism’, 1921–23. See Holzhey, Die Vernunft des Problems. SW I, 294–5 (trans. modified), WBGS II.1, 244.

4 Religion, Experience, Politics: On Erich Unger and Walter Benjamin 1 Cor, 173 (Letter to Gershom Scholem, January 1921). On most occasions Unger uses ‘psychophysiological’ to characterise the problem in question, whereas Benjamin prefers ‘psychophysical’. For Unger’s terminological distinction between the two expressions, see Unger, Das psychophysiologische Problem und sein Arbeitsgebiet (‘The psychophysiological problem and its field of research’), pp. v–vi. 2 Cor, 172 (Letter to Scholem, January 1921). 3 See, also for literature on the topic, Michael Grossheim, ‘ “Die namenlose Dummheit, die das Resultat des Fortschritts ist”: Lebensphilosophische und dialektische Kritik der Moderne.’ 4 See for instance Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1981–33, pp. 139–60, Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, and, more recently, Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science, Cornelia Klinger, Flucht Trost Revolte, and Thomas Rohkrämer, Eine andere Moderne? 5 See, also for what follows, Unger, Das Problem der mythischen Realität, pp. 5–11. On Unger, Goldberg and the circle around Goldberg in general, see Judith Friedlander, ‘Religious Metaphysics and the Nation-State’, Manfred Voigts, Oskar Goldberg, and Voigts, ‘Walter Benjamin und Erich Unger’. According to Esther J. Ehrman, Unger (1887–1950) came from a ‘wholly assimilated’ background and met Goldberg (1885–1952), who first taught him Talmud, as his fellow-student at the liberal Berlin Friedrichs-Gymnasium. Goldberg both moved in early Expressionist circles and took part in the life of Berlin’s Jewish neo-Orthodox community. The characterisation of Unger, in Scholem’s Encyclopaedia Judaica article on Goldberg, as Goldberg’s ‘most important disciple’ may conceal the philosophical rigour and independent-mindedness of Unger’s work. These attitudes will have contributed to his final break with Goldberg over the latter’s book Maimonides (1935). For the Jewish contribution to German Expressionism in general, see Hanni Mittelmann, ‘Expressionismus und Judentum’, for the anti-modernist and modern aspects of Jewish neoOrthodoxy in Wilhelmine Germany – which can help to explain the puzzling combination of modernist and archaic features in Goldberg’s and Unger’s thought – Mordechai Breuer, Modernity Within Tradition.

Notes 199 6 For the later Unger’s insistence, against Goldberg, on a strict methodological separation between Pentateuch exegesis and philosophy that may amount to the abandonment of the earlier goal of proving the Pentateuch to be literally true, see Unger, ‘Introductory Remark’ (unpublished manuscript, Unger estate, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, box 4) and Unger, Das Lebendige und das Goettliche (‘The living and the divine’, written 1941–44), pp. 3–4, 36–8, 64–5. 7 SW I, 105 (trans. modified), WBGS II.1, 164 and SW I, 100–1. For ‘Lehre’ (‘teaching’, ‘doctrine’) as a central concept in Benjamin’s religious thought, see Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, pp. 55–6. 8 Cf. Vernon Pratt, Religion and Secularisation, pp. 1–24. 9 For the use of ‘Erfahrung’ (‘experience’) in early twentieth-century science, philosophy and ordinary German, see Paul F. Linke’s discussion in his ‘Das Recht der Phänomenologie’, pp. 167–71, with which Benjamin was familiar. 10 Cf. SW I, 95 (‘On Perception’), and Unger, ‘Mythos und Wirklichkeit’ (‘Myth and reality’), p. 89. 11 Both Goldberg and Unger – to various degrees and in various ways – considered the possibility of an ‘experimental’ confirmation of mythic beliefs. See Voigts, Oskar Goldberg, pp. 32–7, 173–9; Goldberg, Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer, esp. pp. 5–6, 16–17, 94, 117–18; Unger, Das psychophysiologische Problem, pp. 4–7, 19–20, and Unger, Die staatslose Bildung eines jüdischen Volkes, pp. 24–30. The later Unger (Das Lebendige, pp. 7–8, 31, 52–61) denies that religious ‘truth’ can be demonstrated by experiments or the natural sciences but retains the idea of a pragmatic confirmation of religious speculation. 12 See, also for what follows, SW I, 93–6 (trans. modified) or WBGS VI, 33–8. 13 Cohen, Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, 1st edition, pp. 127–8, 161–2; Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 3rd edition, pp. 275–6, 785–7; Natorp, ‘Kant und die Marburger Schule’, p. 201. 14 Cf. SW I, 103–5 (‘On the Program’). 15 Implicitly, ‘speculation’ and deduction’ may be part of Benjamin’s requirement that the structure of true experience ‘is to be developed’ from that of pure knowledge (SW I, 104). 16 SW I, 96 (emphasis M. K., trans. modified), WBGS VI, 37. 17 Benjamin’s rejection of ‘the correctness of cognitions’ as a criterion for the evaluation of empirical beliefs amounts to an abandonment of the correspondence notion of truth, at least for the empirical realm. However, he does not deal with the decisive question of how a possible, ‘transcendental, but speculative’ version of that notion or, indeed, an alternative notion of truth can be substantiated that would justify his view of religion as true experience. 18 Benjamin’s early notes on perception as ‘Lesen’ (‘reading’, ‘gathering’) belong to this ‘anthropological’ dimension of his work, as do his later ones on the ‘mimetic faculty’, his interest in Ludwig Klages’s cosmic physiognomy and his notion – for instance in ‘Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer’ (WBGS II.2, 680–1) – of forgotten ‘laws’ that connect the human body to higher and wider ‘orders’. 19 SW I, 104 (trans. modified), WBGS II.1, 163. 20 Compare the following passage from ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ (1916): ‘the present argument […] follows it [the Bible] in presupposing language to be an ultimate, inexplicable and mystical reality, perceptible only in its development’ (SW I, 67, trans. modified, WBGS II.1, 147).

200 Notes

21

22 23 24 25 26

27

28 29

30

31

32 33

Here ‘development’ characterises the sole access to a mystical ‘knowledge’ that agrees with its object in remaining necessarily inexplicable. SW I, 109. Benjamin qualifies the statement that religion is given to philosophy only as teaching by the adverb ‘zunächst’ (‘for the time being’, ‘in the first instance’). For Benjamin’s related use of ‘zunächst’ in ‘On Language’, see Margarete Kohlenbach, Walter Benjamin: Self-Reference and Religiosity, pp. 5 and 46–7. SW I, 105 (trans. modified), WBGS II.1, 164. SW I, 104 (trans. modified), WBGS II.1, 163. Cf. Kohlenbach, Self-Reference, pp. 24–8, 83–90, 94–5, 106–9, 114–16, 179–80, 186–8. Gustav Wyneken, Benjamin’s mentor before the First World War, uses the name ‘Kant’ in a similar manner. Wyneken, ‘Was ist Jugendkultur?’, pp. 125–6. WBGS VI, 39 (‘Zum verlornen Abschluss der Notiz über die Symbolik in der Erkenntnis’, ‘On the lost conclusion of the note about symbolism in knowledge’). See Unger, Gegen die Dichtung (‘Against literature’), esp. pp. 112–16, 134, 140–5 and Unger, ‘Verteidigung eines Werkes gegen seinen Autor’ (‘Defence of a work against its author’). In the latter essay, Unger rejects the appeal to Kantian philosophy by which Salomon Friedlaender tries to support his philosophy of ‘creative indifference’, which both Unger and Benjamin held in great esteem. Gegen die Dichtung, pp. 131, 136, 141. Gegen die Dichtung, pp. 104–5, 110. See also Unger, Wirklichkeit, Mythos, Erkenntnis (‘Reality, myth, knowledge’), pp. 148–51, 222–3 and the related reflections in Unger’s letter to Kurt Breysig of 7 February 1915. This letter deals with issues that are likely to have figured in a lost article by Unger that Benjamin intended to include in the first issue of Angelus Novus. Cf. GB II, 232–3 (Letter to Richard Weissbach, 21 January 1922). Gegen die Dichtung, pp. 110–11, 144–51, Wirklichkeit, Mythos, Erkenntnis, pp. 156–62, 169–71. For Unger’s non-Aristotelian understanding of the general concepts that are subjected to philosophical ‘concretisation’ as universalia in re, see Gegen die Dichtung, pp. 104–12. For the importance, in his thought, of an unrestricted yet rational use of the imagination, see his essay ‘The Imagination of Reason’. This choice is far from accidental. As we shall see in section II of the present chapter, the concretisation of Volksgeist is central to Unger’s 1921 conception of ‘politics’, in which Volksgeist to a large extent agrees with Goldberg’s notion of Volksgott (‘national god’, ‘tribal god’). Unger’s attempt to derive from Goldberg’s interpretation of the Pentateuch a conception of the relationship between individual and ‘Volk’ puts to the test Max Horkheimer’s claim that the Jewish tradition preserves ‘the true relationship between individual and Volk’ (MHGS XIV, 401, ‘Individuum und Volk’). For Unger’s abandonment of the notion of Volksgeist after the Holocaust, see his ‘A Restatement of Judaism’, pp. 63 and 58. For what follows, see Gegen die Dichtung, pp. 151–9. For Unger’s use of ‘cause’, which seems to combine a concept of archetype with religious connotations of ‘creation’, see Politik und Metaphysik, p. 27, and Das Lebendige, pp. 34–8.

Notes 201 34 Gegen die Dichtung, p. 122. 35 Gegen die Dichtung, p. 154. 36 The classical doctrine of psychophysical parallelism tries to resolve the mind–body problem by assuming that for each mental event there is a corresponding physical event – and vice versa, in some radical versions – and that the two kinds of event exist in parallel, without any psychophysical interaction or causation between them. For basic information on the meaning, history and problems of ‘psychophysical parallelism’ see H. Hildebrandt, ‘Parallelismus, psychophysischer’, M. Kurthen, ‘Parallelismus’, Arthur S. Reber, ‘Parallelism, psychophysical’ or Stuart Sutherland, ‘Psychophysical parallelism’. 37 Unger was familiar with the argument in Heinrich Rickert’s Psychophysische Causalität und psychophysischer Parallelismus (pp. 62–6) that to the extent that theories of psychophysical parallelism not only deny psychophysical interaction but also aim to replace theories of psychophysical causality, they necessarily imply the Romantic belief in a pervasively animate cosmos. Unger’s postulate discussed above can be described as his realisation of this problematic implication of a problematic doctrine. (Cf. Unger, Das psychophysiologische Problem, p. ix.) 38 Cf. Gegen die Dichtung, p. 144. 39 Unger, ‘Use and Misuse of the Unknown’, p. 240. In this essay, Unger develops criteria for a ‘rational mysticism’, in the unpublished manuscript ‘The Content of Judaism’ (Unger estate, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, box 2), he characterises Judaism as a ‘mystical rationalism’. 40 Unger, Das Problem der mythischen Realität, p. 33. See also Unger, ‘Modern Judaism’s Need for Philosophy’. 41 Kohlenbach, ‘Walter Benjamin, Gustav Wyneken and the Jugendkulturbewegung’, pp. 137–45. 42 See for instance SW I, 267–8 (‘Riddle and Mystery’), SW I, 164–5 (The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism), SW I, 351 (‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’), The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 31, as well as the apparent rejection of the mysterious in Benjamin’s 1929 essay ‘Surrealism’ that paradoxically insists on the knowledge of ‘the everyday as impenetrable’ (SW II, 216). Benjamin shares the emphasis on ‘mystery’ as something in itself valuable with Klages. This may explain the fact that in 1930 he vehemently prefers the first volume of Klages’s Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (‘The spirit as the enemy of the soul’) to Unger’s Wirklichkeit, Mythos, Erkenntnis and criticises the latter book precisely for its discursive and explicative representation. Cf. Klages, Vom Wesen des Bewusstseins, pp. 84–5 and GB III, 537–8 (Letter to Scholem, 15 August 1930, partly trans. in Cor, 366–7). 43 In Gegen die Dichtung, Unger uncompromisingly denies the cultural value of art and literature on the grounds that they bind those powers of the imagination to the enjoyment of illusion that are needed for the philosophical construction of the world as a possible place of religious experience. Perhaps a cultural-historical approach to Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory could reconstruct Adorno’s negativist idea of art as the paradoxical combination of an Ungerian rejection of art with a substantial dose of aestheticism. 44 See Unger, ‘Use and Misuse’, esp. p. 243. 45 Cf. the editors’ comments in WBGS II.3, 943, and Uwe Steiner, ‘Der wahre Politiker: Walter Benjamins Begriff des “Politischen” ’, pp. 49, 66–7.

202 Notes 46 Gegen die Dichtung, pp. 148–9. 47 For what follows, see Politik und Metaphysik, pp. 26–33. 48 Das psychophysiologische Problem, pp. 23, 33–7; Wirklichkeit, Mythos, Erkenntnis, pp. 257–8. 49 Cf. Unger, Das Problem der mythischen Realität, pp. 11–13, 28. 50 Politik und Metaphysik, p. 22. 51 For a differentiated assessment of Goldberg’s closeness to völkisch ideology, see Christian Hülshörster, Thomas Mann und Oskar Goldbergs ‘Wirklichkeit der Hebräer’. Jacob Taubes (‘From Cult to Culture’, pp. 390–2) both explains Thomas Mann’s fascination by Goldberg and interprets Goldberg’s thought – in basic agreement with Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment – as an unintended confirmation of ‘the morphological congruity between magical ritualism and technical “know-how” ’. In his ‘Constitution and Spirit of the German Universities since the National-Socialist Revolution’, Unger presents an argument in favour of the dissociation of Lebensphilosophie from its appropriations by the Nazis. 52 Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer, pp. 68–75. 53 Unger, Das Problem mythischer Realität, pp. 25, 30. The peculiar affirmation of mythic or pagan reality in view of its negation is not particular to Goldberg and Unger. In a similar way, the Protestant ‘phenomenologist’ of religion and cultural critic Gerardus van der Leeuw welcomed both Lucien Lévy-Brühl’s work on so-called primitive mentality and Stefan George’s new paganism. Paganism, as van der Leeuw argued, is at least a position with which Christianity can engage in a common religious arena, whereas Positivism does not even recognise that arena. The fact that increasingly Unger engaged directly with science and contemporary neo-Positivism bears witness to his intellectual integrity. For van der Leeuw, see the contributions in Hans G. Kippenberg and Brigitte Luchesi (eds), Religionswissenschaft und Kulturkritik, and esp. Kippenberg’s introduction, pp. 16, 18, 26–7. 54 Unger, Die staatslose Bildung, esp. pp. 8, 22, 27–8, 30–2; GB II, 242 (Letter to Scholem, 26 February 1922). Unger’s posthumously published discussion of universalism – in ‘Erich Unger’s “Der Universalismus des Hebräertums” ’ (with English translation) – is somewhat burdened by the polemical controversies between Scholem and Goldberg. 55 Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer, p. 70. 56 Politik und Metaphysik, pp. 7–8. 57 Politik und Metaphysik, pp. 9–15. For Benjamin’s ‘political’ notion of ‘presence of mind’ in relation to Unger, see Kohlenbach, Self-Reference, pp. 172–7. 58 Politik und Metaphysik, pp. 7–8. 59 Politik und Metaphysik, pp. 9, 14–16. Perhaps it was his criticism of the post-Expressionist ‘Activism’ advocated by Kurt Hiller under the heading of ‘logocracy’ that led Unger to consider any parapsychically unmodified intellectual opposition against Realpolitik as necessarily ineffective. In principle, however, a psychophysiologically hyped-up ‘reason’ is as much a merely formal and empty yardstick where political options are concerned as is, according to Unger, Hiller’s logos. Thus the contemporary watchword ‘psychocracy’ – which agrees with some of Unger’s intentions and was adopted, for instance, by Hermann Hesse – stood for opposite political orientations, ranging from Gusto Gräser’s pacifism to Emil Gustav Paulk’s

Notes 203

60 61 62 63

64

65

66

67

(alias Paul Keminski’s) imperialist goals. (Ulrich Linse, ‘Asien als Alternative?’, pp. 353–9.) Cf. Politik und Metaphysik, pp. 13–22, and, for Benjamin’s related criticism of Hiller, SW I, 251 (‘Critique of violence’), WBGS III, esp. 352 (‘Der Irrtum des Aktivismus’, ‘The error of Activism’) and SW II, 772–3 (‘The Author as Producer’). Politik und Metaphysik, pp. 17, 22, 32; Wirklichkeit, Mythos, Erkenntnis, pp. 274–5. Politik und Metaphysik, p. 14. Politik und Metaphysik, p. 12. Cf. Politik und Metaphysik, pp. 49–51. In his ‘Der Krieg’ (‘War’) of 1915–16, Unger prefers the ‘clean’ cruelty of ‘ancient’ genocides to the ‘rotten-smelling humanity’ of modern liberalism, which he considers responsible for the First World War. If at all, ‘world peace’ would arise from the former rather than the latter. This complex position combines an explicit, Nietzschean affirmation of cruelty with an implicit, hypothetical recognition of universal peace as a goal. (‘Der Krieg’, esp. pp. 54–5.) SW I, 244–7. Benjamin’s conception of the proletarian general strike as a ‘pure means’ does not contradict the judgement above, given that he replaced the previous equation of ‘pure means’ with ‘nonviolent means’ with a suspension of the means–ends relationship in favour of a notion of pure medium that agrees with ‘the nonmediate function’ of divine violence (Cf. SW I, 248–50, 252). For his problematic use of ‘means’, in this context, see Bettine Menke, Sprachfiguren, pp. 42–5, Werner Hamacher, ‘Afformative, Strike’, esp. p. 129 (note 13), and Kohlenbach, Self-Reference, p. 205 (note 35). Benjamin maintains that if ‘the fear of mutual disadvantages that threaten to arise from violent confrontation’ could at all motivate political action, then it could do so only if those higher ‘orders’ were recognised, for an illustration of which he then refers to Unger’s reflections concerning the psychophysiological discovery of supra-individual corporeity. (Cf. SW I, 245, 252 (note 4), and Unger, Politik und Metaphysik, pp. 22–4.) This reference to Unger suggests that in the ‘biological’ orientation of Unger’s notion of politics Benjamin saw the contemporary alternative to Hobbes’s ‘mechanical’ conception of sovereignty. In spite of Unger’s non-dialectical conception of myth and modernity, his thought may be closer to Hegel’s than is Benjamin’s. (Cf. for instance Wirklichkeit, Mythos, Erkenntnis, pp. 132–42, 174–7, 287, 302–4, Das Lebendige, pp. 19–20, and Unger, ‘Ethics, Nature and Reality’, p. 60.) In the meetings of the Berlin ‘Philosophical Group’, which he organised before his emigration, Unger gave a lecture on Hegelian dialectics as a principle of mysticism. For the great thematic variety in the Group’s work – that included contributions by thinkers as different as Karl Korsch, Carl Schmitt and Hans Reichenbach – see the list of lectures entitled ‘Philosophische Gruppe /Berlin: Aus den Vorträgen 1927–1932’ (Unger estate, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, box 5). SW I, 249–50. Benjamin illustrates the notion of divine violence with reference to God’s destruction of the Kohathites and their leader Korah (Num. 4: 15–20, Num. 16), on which Goldberg also comments. (Cf. Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer, pp. 194–5.) Both commentators appeal to the notion of a ‘higher’ life.

204 Notes 68 SW I, 252 (trans. modified), WBGS II.1, 202–3. 69 See, also for what follows, Unger, ‘Der Krieg’, esp. pp. 58–60. Georges Sorel, too, links revolutionary violence to war. However, Benjamin’s quotations from the corresponding passages disregard this connection in Sorel, from which any reference to divine violence is absent. Cf. Sorel, Refléctions sur la violence, pp. 208–12, esp. pp. 211–12 and SW I, 245–6. 70 As regards the First World War, Unger is positive that its hatred rests on economic competition and not on spiritual antagonism, or different ‘gods’. 71 Most probably, Benjamin knew Unger’s ‘Der Krieg’, the first part of which appeared in the same issue of the journal Der Neue Merkur as Benjamin’s ‘The Life of Students’. In his ‘Theories of German Fascism’, Benjamin refers to Unger in the context of cultic concepts of war. Benjamin’s own characterisation of the First World War as an event that had absorbed all of ‘the material and spiritual substance’ of the Volk may be derived from Unger’s understanding of mythic reality. Benjamin’s explicit derivation of that characterisation from the alleged ambiguity of the expressions ‘to win’ and ‘to lose a war’, at any rate, is problematic. See SW II, 314–15, WBGS III, 241–3, and the editorial comments in Unger, Vom Expressionismus zum Mythos des Hebräertums, p. 53 and WBGS II.3, 917. 72 For what follows, see SW I, 393–5 (trans. modified), WBGS VI, 78–81. 73 The fact that Benjamin considers Körper a substance strongly limits the significance of Paul Häberlin, his teacher at the University of Bern, for Benjamin’s psychophysical reflections. In Häberlin, neither Körper nor Leib refers to anything real or essential, and only ‘soul’ – a concept that does not figure in Benjamin’s ‘Outline’ – is considered a substance. See Häberlin, Der Leib und die Seele, esp. pp. 64–5, 105–6, 137, 143, 166, and, for a different assessment, Steiner, ‘Von Bern nach Muri’, esp. p. 486. 74 Cf. the similarly problematic relationship between the messianic and the historical in Benjamin’s so-called Theologico-Political Fragment (SW III, 305–6). For an interpretation of Benjamin’s notion of politics as emphatically ‘secular’, see Steiner, ‘Der wahre Politiker’, esp. pp. 54–5, 75, 79. 75 Benjamin adopts the watchword ‘organisation of pessimism’ from Pierre Naville, but clearly leaves less distance than Naville between pessimism and surrealism on the one hand and communism on the other. (Cf. Naville, ‘La Révolution et les intellectuels’, pp. 66–8, 76–7, 83, 88, 93–4, and Naville, ‘Mieux et moins bien’, pp. 104–7, 110–23.) Benjamin’s ‘anthropological’ interpretation of the watchword is not derived from Naville. If the editors’ deciphering ‘Ungersche [?] Dichtungen’ in Benjamin’s notes for the surrealism essay is correct (cf. WBGS II.3, 1023), and if the phrase refers to Erich Unger, Benjamin thought of Unger as a precursor of surrealism – or at least as someone who was close to its precursors – during his work on the essay. (Cf. GB III, 340, Letter to Franz Blei, 29 February 1928.) The reference to Unger in Benjamin’s Drug protocol of 29 September 1928 (WBGS VI, 585) relates to major issues in Unger’s thought: the problematic function of literature, the problem of universalist humanism, and the importance of animals. The reference may also evoke the sexual context of the dramatic scenes ‘Die Gehemmten’ (‘The inhibited’), which Unger published in the Expressionist journal Der Sturm in 1910. 76 Politik und Metaphysik, pp. 19–24.

Notes 205 77 SW I, 395. By understanding technology as a medium in which mankind’s new ‘body’ can be created, Benjamin responds to a ‘task’ which Unger, too, identified. This is the task of complementing the concluded development of ‘men as a species’ by the development of ‘mankind as a species’. Cf. SW I, 487 (One-Way Street) and Unger, ‘Ethics, Nature and Reality’, pp. 15, 86, Das Lebendige, pp. 151–73, ‘Gott, Mensch und Evolution’ (God, man and evolution’), p. 187. Like the Benjamin of ‘On Language’, Unger interprets ‘technology’ as a spiritual phenomenon. For Unger, modern technology can be intensified by the inclusion of the ‘bio-technology’ of ritual practice, but also offers compensatory gratifications that hinder the ‘biological fulfilment’ to be found in rites and ‘philosophical experiment[s]’. Cf. SW I, 62 and Unger, Wirklichkeit, Mythos, Erkenntnis, pp. 72–3, 172, 270, as well as ‘Erich Unger’s “The Natural Order of Miracles” ’, pp. 176, 183. 78 SW II, 217 (trans. modified), WBGS II.1, 309–10. 79 See Monika Fick, Sinnenwelt und Weltenseele, pp. 118–19. 80 Cf. Fick, Sinnenwelt, pp. 105–29, Unger, Das Lebendige, pp. 79, 85, 89–92, 123 (note), 127, and ‘Erich Unger’s “The Natural Order of Miracles” ’, pp. 147–8, 155–6, 179 (note). 81 WBGS II.3 1040 (‘Paralipomena zu Surrealismus’). For the significance of Indian religions in Goldberg and Unger, see Voigts, Oskar Goldberg, pp. 29–36, Unger, Das psychophysiologische Problem, pp. 18, 35–7, and ‘Erich Unger’s “The Natural Order of Miracles” ’, p. 179.

5 Allegory, Metonymy and Creatureliness: Walter Benjamin and the Religious Roots of Modern Art 1 Paul Hamilton, ‘Historicism and Historical Criticism’; Robert Holub, ‘Modernism, Modernity, Modernisation’; Alex Callinicos, ‘Marxism and Literary Criticism’; Andrew Edgar, ‘Adorno and the early Frankfurt School’. 2 Herbert Jhering, Theaterstadt Berlin, p. 116. For the relationship, in the German cultural context, between metropolitan life and aesthetic conceptions of modernity, see David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity. 3 Letter to Herbert Blumenthal (also called ‘Belmore’), 6–7 July 1914, Cor, 71. 4 Letter to Gershom Scholem, 22 October 1917, Cor, 101. 5 Klee, ‘Creative Credo’, p. 76. 6 Cor, 71. 7 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, esp. pp. 19, 28–9, incl. note 6, 34–6, 41–5, 49–51. 8 Marc, Briefe, Aufzeichnungen und Aphorismen, vol. I, p. 84. Marc here summarises his concerns in his notes of 1912–13, including his ideas about the relationship between art and religion. 9 ‘Creative Credo’, p. 79. For a contemporary discussion of the religious aspects of modern art, see Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, Kunst und Religion. 10 Cf. Pinthus, ‘Versuch eines zukünftigen Dramas’, p. 391. See also Georg Fuchs, Revolution in the Theatre (1909), esp. pp. 33–7, 47, 66–102, 155. 11 Schlemmer, ‘Man and Art Figure’, esp. pp. 17–22, 27, 44–5; Schlemmer, Briefe und Tagebücher, p. 330. On this issue see also Horst Denkler, Drama des Expressionismus.

206 Notes 12 The understanding of ‘language’ sketched above moreover agrees with some of the basic assumptions in Benjamin’s ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ (1916). For a detailed discussion, see Margarete Kohlenbach, Walter Benjamin: Self-Reference and Religiosity, pp. 1–60. 13 This is especially true of ‘The Metamorphosis’ and the beginning of The Trial. Paul Celan’s poetry, too, represents an extreme case of a rigorously metonymical language. 14 Cf. DK 82 B 11 (14) or Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers, p. 133. Aristotle’s notion of catharsis and his notion of metaphor as epiphorá share basic assumptions with Gorgias’s analogy. 15 In this, Expressionism contrasts sharply with the ‘metaphorisation’ of the war in later right-wing representations, for instance in the title of Ernst Jünger’s Storms of Steel. 16 Otto, The Idea of the Holy (1917), esp. pp. 9–11, 20–2, 49–51, 88–92; Otto, Religious Essays, pp. 32–7, 48–9. 17 See Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic. 18 By associating ‘the dead’ of catastrophic history with ‘wreckage’, in ‘On the Concept of History’ Benjamin honours both this experience of modern warfare and the semantic difference – perhaps clearer in German than in other languages – between ‘Trümmer’ (‘wreckage’, ‘debris’) and ‘Ruinen’ (‘ruins’). See SW IV, 392, WBGW I.2, 697 and, for an important contemporary source, Georg Simmel, ‘The Ruin’. 19 Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Troades; Paul Stachel, Seneca und das deutsche Renaissancedrama. 20 Zickel, ‘Ist ein expressionistisches Drama möglich?’, pp. 97–9. 21 Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, pp. 63–5. 22 See Hans-Jürgen Schmitt (ed.), Die Expressionismusdebatte. 23 Die Troerinnen, p. 9. 24 R. Samuel, ‘Deutsche Literatur des Expressionismus’, col. 840. 25 Theodor W. Adorno (Alban Berg, pp. 5–6, 84–8) pointed out that it was thanks to Berg’s Expressionist poetic intuition that the chronological hiatus separating the composition of his opera Wozzek from Büchner’s play could be filled. 26 Hölderlin, ‘Ground for “Empedocles” ’, esp. pp. 53–7. 27 Cf. Benjamin’s own related comments in The Arcades Project, pp. 150 (F1,1), 155 (F2a,5), 156 (F3,4), 160 (F4,5), 456 (N1,2), 461–3 (N2a,1–3, N3,1), 473 (N9,2). 28 Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, pp. 76–80. 29 The Star, p. 80. 30 The Star, p. 81. 31 However, the following observation is worth noting: Oedipus – in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus – is himself finally reconciled while bringing about reconciliation, and he is ‘elevated to the company of the gods, […] and […] deemed worthy of the honor of a special sacrificial ceremony’. Goethe, ‘On Interpreting Aristotle’s Poetics’, pp. 198–9. 32 See, also for literature on this topic, Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, Stavros Arabatzis, Allegorie und Symbol and Klaus Garber, ‘Antiklassische Ästhetik aus antiempfindsamem Geist’. 33 Cf. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 160.

Notes 207 34 35 36 37

38 39

40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58

59

60

Origin, p. 160 (trans. modified), WBGS I.1, 337. Origin, p. 161. Origin, p. 162. Origin, pp. 162–3. Benjamin cites Herbert Cysarz on German Baroque literature, but the Italian debate ranging from the criticism of Torquato Tasso’s linguistic ‘mannerism’ to Emmanuele Tesauro’s Cannocchiale aristotelico (1654) is no less relevant. Origin, pp. 164–5. Origin, p. 165. This passage shows that in spite of the distinction between tragedy and Trauerspiel, in the debate on allegory the problem of myth is again raised for discussion. Within the confines of the present chapter, I cannot pursue this line of thought, which leads to Friedrich W. J. Schelling’s ‘tautegorical’ understanding of myth. Origin, p. 166. Origin, p. 166. See Sigrid Weigel, Body – and Image – Space, E. D. Yeats, ‘Translating the Symbolising in the Symbolised’, and Carol Jacobs, In the Language of Walter Benjamin. Origin, p. 166 (trans. modified), WBGS I.1, 343. Origin, p. 175. Origin, p. 177. Origin, p. 177 (emphasis B. M.). Origin, p. 178. Origin, p. 178 (trans. modified), WBGS I.1, 354. Origin, p. 182 (trans. modified), WBGS I.1, 358. Origin, p. 183. Origin, p. 187. Origin, p. 187 (trans. modified), WBGS I.1, 362–3. Origin, p. 201. The theme of the corpse is of great importance in Homer’s epic even prior to tragedy. See Erwin Rohde, Psyche, pp. 3–43, and Simone Weil, The Iliad, esp. pp. 3–7, 14, 16. Origin, p. 217. Origin, p. 224. Origin, p. 232. See Benjamin’s writings on Brecht in SW II-IV. For an interpretation of Benjamin’s engagement with Epic Theatre as religiously motivated, see Kohlenbach, Self-Reference, pp. 161–9. For the Benjaminian motif of resurrection in the context of modern, non-Brechtian literature, see James A. Hunsen, ‘The Uncreating Conscience: Memory and Apparitions in Joyce and Benjamin’ and Barnaba Maj, ‘La resurrezione dei morti e l’Anticristo nella teoria benjaminiana della storia: Da motivi di James Joyce e Herman Melville’. See Werner Letschka, ‘ “Geburt der Utopie aus dem Geist der Destruktion”: Anmerkungen zu allegorischen Strukturen in der Geschichtsphilosophie Blochs und Benjamins’, and Heinz Drügh, Anders-Rede: Zur Struktur und historischen Systematik des Allegorischen. See Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, ‘Corps perdus, corps retrouvés: Trois exemples de deuils de guerre’.

208 Notes

6 Law and Religion in Early Critical Theory 1 DE, 20. In my use of the term ‘legal subject’ here I expressly refer to the Kantian and neo-Kantian understanding of this idea, which associates the status of the person as a subject of law with this subject’s rational capacity for self-legislation, and with its resultant power to deduce and insist on the legal conditions of necessary political order. The legal subject, in this sense, is distinct from the later Positivist use of the term, which limits the legal subject to a formal bearer of private rights and entitlements, which is guaranteed minimal concessions of legal protection, but is not implicated in legislation, nor called upon to sanction legislation. 2 SW I, 243–4, 246 (‘Critique of Violence’). 3 Pollock, Stadien des Kapitalismus, p. 26. 4 Neumann, ‘The Change in the Function of Law in Modern Society’, p. 40. Cf. Alfons Söllner, Geschichte und Herrschaft, p. 130. 5 Kirchheimer, ‘Changes in the Structure of Political Compromise’. 6 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 388. 7 See Michael Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit, pp. 89–130. 8 Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’. 9 Marx, ‘Verhandlungen des 6. rheinischen Landtags: Debatten über das Holzdiebstahlsgesetz’, p. 119. 10 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, p. 43 (2nd essay, § 4). 11 For example, Gierke, Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, vol. II: Geschichte des deutschen Körperschaftsbegriffs, p. 24. 12 Preuß, ‘Die Persönlichkeit des Staates, organisch und individualistisch betrachtet’. 13 Simmel, Das individuelle Gesetz, p. 226. 14 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, esp. pp. 236–8. 15 This is expressed most clearly by Paul Natorp, but the hostility to metaphysics is also clear in the works of Hermann Cohen. See: Natorp, ‘Kant und die Marburger Schule’, p. 198, and Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willens, 1st edition, p. 18. 16 Weber, Economy and Society, vol. I, pp. 636–7. 17 Tillich, ‘On the Idea of a Theology of Culture’. 18 See especially Gogarten, Ist Volksgesetz Gottesgesetz? (1934). 19 Heidegger, ‘Einleitung in die Phänomenologie der Religion’, p. 49. 20 Heidegger, ‘Origin of the Work of Art’, p. 77. 21 Cf. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 109. 22 See, for example, Axel Honneth, The Fragmented World of the Social, p. 78. 23 Neumann, ‘On the Precondition and Legal Concepts of an Economic Constitution’, p. 51; Kirchheimer, ‘Legality and Legitimacy’, p. 147. See also Joachim Perels, Kapitalismus und politische Demokratie, p. 9. 24 Kirchheimer, ‘Verfassungswirklichkeit und politische Zukunft der Arbeiterbewegung’. 25 Kirchheimer, ‘Marxismus, Diktatur und Organisationsform des Proletariats’, p. 112; Neumann, ‘Change in the Function of Law’, p. 66. 26 Kirchheimer, ‘Weimar – und was dann? Analyse einer Verfassung’, p. 21; Neumann, ‘The Concept of Political Freedom’. 27 Neumann, ‘Precondition and Legal Concepts’, pp. 49–51.

Notes 209 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, pp. 209–10. Verfassungslehre, p. 76. Schmitt, Political Theology, pp. 5–11. Neumann, ‘Change in the Function of Law’, pp. 61–2. Close to my argument here is Gert Schäfer, see his ‘Ein Intellektueller an der Seite der Arbeiterbewegung’, p. 55. Neumann, ‘Concept of Political Freedom’, p. 184. Kirchheimer, ‘Constitutional Reform and Social Democracy’, p. 192. Neumann expressly announced his intention of reformulating Schmitt’s conception of legality and legitimacy in ‘economic and sociological’ terms. See Rainer Erd (ed.), Reform und Resignation: Gespräche über Franz Neumann, p. 79. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 471 (N8,1). For Benjamin’s view of the relationship between politics and religion as a ‘paradoxical’ identity, see his letter to Gershom Scholem of 29 May 1926, Cor, 300–1. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, pp. 474–5 (N9a6–8, N10, 3, N10a,1–3). TWAGS VIII, 366–7 (‘Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft? Einleitungsvortrag zum 16. Deutschen Soziologentag’). Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. 54. Adorno, Kant’s Critique, p. 54. Kant’s Critique, p. 55. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 232. Negative Dialectics, p. 231. Negative Dialectics, p. 393. Kant’s Critique, pp. 174–7, 179. Kant’s Critique, p. 178. Kant’s Critique, p. 178. Kant’s Critique, p. 176. Kant’s Critique, p. 222. Kant’s Critique, p. 110. Kant’s Critique, pp. 111, 112; Negative Dialectics, p. 397. Negative Dialectics, p. 397. Kant’s Critique, p. 112. Cf. SW I, 249 (‘Critique of Violence’). Negative Dialectics, p. 408.

7 Jewish Law and Tradition in the Early Work of Erich Fromm 1 Rainer Funk (Erich Fromm: The Courage to be Human, p. 296, n. 11) contends that, in addition to disagreements about ‘Freudianism’ and the Institute’s tendency to disown dissident former members, Fromm’s Marxism may have become an embarrassment to a politically reconstructed School. Douglas Kellner (‘Erich Fromm joins the Institute for Social Research’, p. 481) claims that between 1928 and 1938 Fromm became one of the most influential members of the Institute. 2 For an attempt to sort the members into camps, see Zoltan Tarr, Judith Marcus, ‘Erich Fromm und das Judentum’, p. 214.

210 Notes 3 On Nobel, see Franz Rosenzweig, ‘Nehemia Anton Nobel’, Leo Baeck, ‘Nehemia Anton Nobel’ and, more recently, Rachel Heuberger, ‘Orthodoxy versus Reform’, Martin Jay, ‘The Free Jewish School’, pp. 395–6, and David Ellenson, ‘Gemeindeorthodoxie in Weimar Germany’. 4 Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, p. 9. 5 Funk, Courage, p. 2. 6 On Rabinkow and the Talmudisches Seminar zu Heidelberg, see Georg Herlitz, Bruno Kirschner (eds), Jüdisches Lexikon, vol. IV.2, col. 1219, Peter Honigmann, ‘Jüdische Studenten zwischen Orthodoxie und moderner Wissenschaft’, esp. pp. 87–9, Mordechai Breuer, Modernity Within Tradition, pp. 368, 371, 476 (n. 53), Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, pp. 71, 88, and Gershom Scholem’s comments – from 1918 – in Scholem, Briefe, vol. I, pp. 141, 159, 185. 7 Honigmann, ‘Jüdische Studenten’, p. 87. 8 Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods, p. 13. Cf. Fromm, ‘Reminiscences of Shlomo Baruch Rabinkow’, p. 105, and Funk, Erich Fromm: His Life and Ideas, p. 54. 9 You Shall Be, p. 13. 10 Cf. Scholem, ‘Martin Buber’s Interpretation of Judaism’, p. 231. 11 Funk, Life, p. 42; Funk, Erich Fromm, p. 34. The Karaite sect emerged in the eighth century CE. Its name (from kara, ‘to read’) reflects its reliance on Scripture and rejection of rabbinic tradition. Modern scholars view with scepticism the idea – followed by Fromm – that Anan ben David’s failure to become exilarch in Babylon initiated the movement. 12 Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, p. 156; Kellner, ‘Erich Fromm’, p. 481. 13 ‘He [Rabinkow] took a great interest and was very helpful in my doctoral dissertation’ (Fromm, ‘Reminiscences’, quoted in Funk, Life, p. 54). 14 The central text is Weber’s 1921 article ‘Prinzipielles zur Kultursoziologie’ (trans. Fundamentals of Culture-Sociology). 15 See, for example, Fromm, Gesetz, p. 70. 16 Gesetz, p. 18. 17 Gesetz, p. 19. 18 Gesetz, p. 20. 19 Gesetz, p. 20. 20 Gesetz, pp. 20–1. 21 Gesetz, p. 16. 22 Gesetz, p. 16. 23 Gesetz, p. 171. 24 David Vital, Zionism: The Formative Years, pp. 349–50. 25 Gesetz, p. 15. Given his close acquaintance with figures from Eastern Europe, it is perhaps surprising, though perfectly commonplace for the time and context, that Fromm does not mention Yiddish at this point. For a later reference to Yiddish, see Gesetz, p. 132. 26 Cf. Gesetz, pp. 18, 40. See also You Shall Be, p. 13, and Funk, Courage, pp. 188–95. 27 Gesetz, pp. 64–5. 28 As will emerge, Karaism anticipated this change, yet Babylon as a geographical centre of Judaism at the time ensured that Karaism remained a sect. 29 Gesetz, p. 21. 30 Gesetz, pp. 22–5, quotation, p. 25.

Notes 211 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62

63 64 65 66

Gesetz, p. 25. Gesetz, p. 27. Gesetz, p. 26. Gesetz, pp. 29–30, quotation, p. 29. Gesetz, p. 96. Gesetz, pp. 32–3. Gesetz, p. 32. Cf. You Shall Be, p. 179. Gesetz, p. 40. Gesetz, p. 32. On the symbolical or direct impact of particular laws and rituals, see Gesetz, pp. 34–9. Gesetz, pp. 161–6. Gesetz, p. 58. Gesetz, p. 57. Gesetz, p. 58. Gesetz, p. 59. Gesetz, p. 61. For Buber’s notions of ‘relation’ and ‘exclusiveness’ see, for example, Buber, I and Thou, pp. 16–21. Cf. Gesetz, p. 63. For Scholem’s related reflections on Jewish law and revelation, see his ‘Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism’, p. 289. See also Ephraim Urbach, The Sages, vol. I, p. 330, and Günter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, pp. 238–9. Gesetz, p. 65. Gesetz, p. 85. Gesetz, p. 92. Gesetz, pp. 93, 145. Gesetz, pp. 70–9. Gesetz, p. 152. Gesetz, pp. 145–50. Gesetz, pp. 153–4. Almost identical are Scholem’s comments in ‘On the Social Psychology of the Jews in Germany 1900–1933’, pp. 16–17. Gesetz, p. 113. See Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, ‘Werner Sombart’s The Jews and Modern Capitalism’. See, also for what follows, Gesetz, pp. 17, 47–8, 53–4, 172. Gesetz, pp. 36–8, 141–2, 147–9; ‘Der Sabbat’; ‘The Sabbath Ritual’; You Shall Be, pp. 193–9. On the shift from a Kultusgemeinde to a Kulturgemeinde, see Brenner, Renaissance, pp. 54–65. For related attempts at communal renewal, see Brenner and Derek J. Penslar, In Search of Jewish Community. Gesetz, p. 127. See, for example, Hannah Arendt, ‘Portrait of a Period’, Arendt, ‘The Jew as Pariah’. On the limited social integration, see Scholem, ‘On the Social Psychology’, pp. 18–20. Gesetz, p. 175. Gesetz, pp. 161–2. With the expression ‘auto-emancipation’ Fromm probably alludes to Leon Pinsker’s ‘Auto-Emancipation’ (1882). Cf. Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers, and Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland. Gesetz, pp. 158–9.

212 Notes 67 Gesetz, p. 160. 68 For a classic liberal use of the same figure, see H. Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. V, pp. 291–2. 69 Gesetz, pp. 54, 161–6, 170–4, 183. 70 Gesetz, pp. 167–8. 71 Cf. Alexander Eliasberg, ‘Der Chassidismus’, pp. 48–52. Among the few texts that avoid idealisation or vilification is Binjamin Segel’s Die Entdeckungsreise des Herrn Dr. Theodor Lessing zu den Juden (1910). 72 Gesetz, p. 184. For a similar anti-antinomian interpretation of Hasidism, see Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, pp. 21–3. 73 Gesetz, pp. 186–7. 74 Fromm’s critique in ‘The Dogma of Christ’ draws on Adolf von Harnack’s idea of an original Christianity (‘Urchristentum’), since replaced by scholarly emphasis on situating early Christianity in its Jewish context. 75 Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion, pp. 65–98. 76 Psychoanalysis and Religion, p. 21. 77 See, for instance, Psychoanalysis and Religion, pp. 107–13. 78 See, for example, Fromm’s argument about the need to ‘break incestuous ties’, Psychoanalysis and Religion, pp. 79–83. 79 See also Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. 80 Psychoanalysis and Religion, pp. 49–53, 102. 81 You Shall Be, pp. 42, 47. 82 Psychoanalysis and Religion, pp. 113–14; You Shall Be, pp. 42–52. Cf. ‘If I could define my position approximately, I would call it that of a monotheistic mysticism’ (You Shall Be, p. 19). 83 Psychoanalysis and Religion, p. 47; You Shall Be, p. 14. 84 Cf. Psychoanalysis and Religion, p. 76.

8 Critical Theory and the New Thinking: A Preliminary Approach 1 See Stéphane Mosès, ‘Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig’. 2 Berman’s work, above all the seminal Law and Revolution, marks a development of the ‘new thinking’ that emerged from Rosenstock-Huessy’s teaching in the United States after his emigration. For Berman’s acknowledgement of the debt to ‘new thinking’, see Berman, ‘Law and History after the World Wars’. 3 ‘We were impressed by the opposition to the idea of totality in Franz Rosenzweig’s Stern der Erlösung, a work too often present in this book to be cited’ (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 28). Levinas particularly praised the anti-Hegelianism of Rosenzweig’s ‘new’ thinking, but distinguished his own ‘presentation and development’ of its approach by his use of Husserlian phenomenology. For further insight into Levinas’s appreciation of Rosenzweig, see Levinas, ‘Franz Rosenzweig’ (1964) and Levinas, ‘The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig’ (1982). 4 ‘The New Thinking’, pp. 127–8. See also the invaluable edition edited and translated by Alan Udoff and Barbara E. Galli, Franz Rosenzweig’s New Thinking.

Notes 213 5 ‘Transposed Fronts’, p. 150. ‘[that is]’ is part of the quoted text. 6 For the background to this claim, see Andrea Poma, The Critical Philosophy of Hermann Cohen, and Pierfrancesco Fiorato, Geschichtliche Ewigkeit. 7 Notably the translation of Jehuda Halevi, itself available in English in the exemplary edition by Barbara Ellen Galli in Galli, Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi. 8 Adorno’s Negative Dialectics opens with an echo of Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’: ‘Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realise it was missed’ (p. 3). 9 Rose, ‘From Speculative to Dialectical Thinking – Hegel and Adorno’. 10 ‘Urzelle’ to the Star of Redemption’, p. 65. ‘[the fact]’ is part of the quoted text. 11 ‘Urzelle’, p. 59. ‘[mind]’ is part of the quoted text. 12 Quoted in Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, pp. 51–2, note 11, quotation, p. 52. 13 Rosenzweig was intemperately disappointed by Rudolf Ehrenberg’s failure to understand this. In his review of The Star for Die Frankfurter Zeitung, Ehrenberg had professed ‘regret’ at what he saw as a modish appeal ‘from philosophy to life’.

9 Does Dialectic of Enlightenment Rest on Religious Foundations? 1 In the current English translations of ‘Unheil’ by ‘disaster’ or ‘calamity’ the religious meaning of ‘Unheil’ is no longer obvious. 2 DA, 7, DE, 1. 3 For the difference between theology and religion, see Chapter 2 above. 4 See Chapter 10 below. 5 DA, 5, DE, xviii. See also DA, 27–8 and DE, 20. 6 Hegel’s Science of Logic, p. 100. Cf. Georg W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. I, p. 86. 7 DE, 20, cf. DA 27–8. 8 Cf. DE, 1–2, 33–4. 9 For Adorno and Horkheimer’s claim that in the enlightened world human relationships ‘have themselves been bewitched’ by the objectification of mind, see DE, 21. 10 DE, 31 (trans. modified), DA, 38–9. 11 Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, p. 90 (5.62). 12 Cf. the editor’s note, DE, 258. 13 The German conjunction used by Adorno and Horkheimer is ‘indem’ (DA, 38). 14 ‘Invocation of the sun is idolatry. Only in the gaze upon the tree withered in its heat does there remain alive a presentiment of the majesty of the day which will not scorch the world on which it shines’ (DE, 182, trans. modified, DA, 196). 15 For the parallels between Dialectic of Enlightenment and Heidegger’s antimetaphysical ontology, see also the similar point made by Michael Theunissen in his Kritische Theorie und Gesellschaft, p. 18. 16 DE, 17 (trans. modified), DA, 24–5.

214 Notes 17 For a related juxtaposition of Critical Theory and Judaism, see Horkheimer’s observations in his conversation with Helmut Gumnior ‘Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen’ (‘The longing for the totally Other’), MHGS VII, 387–90. 18 I am indebted to a remark made in discussion by Michael Wolff, which led me to take seriously the line of argument developed in this paragraph.

10 Secularisation, Myth, Anti-Semitism: Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, De l’origine des fables, p. 390. Cassirer, Mythical Thought, p. 235. Fontenelle, ‘Histoire des oracles’, p. 126. Fontenelle, De l’origine des fables, p. 396. De l’origine des fables, p. 395. De l’origine des fables, p. 390. De l’origine des fables, p. 388. De l’origine des fables, p. 389. Cassirer, Mythical Thought, p. 235. Mythical Thought, p. 235. For what follows, see Mythical Thought, pp. 235–7. Mythical Thought, p. 237 (trans. modified), Cassirer, Das mythische Denken, p. 283. Cf. Mythical Thought, p. 254. Mythical Thought, pp. 241, 245. Mythical Thought, p. 239. DE, 17 (trans. modified), DA, 24. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, p. 180. Eclipse of Reason, p. 180. Mythical Thought, p. 241. Mythical Thought, pp. 250–1. Mythical Thought, p. 252. Mythical Thought, p. 254. Mythical Thought, pp. 258–9. Cf. Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, pp. 102, 120–1. Cf. Odo Marquard, Farewell to Matters of Principle, esp. p. 105, and Jacob Taubes, ‘Zur Konjunktur des Polytheismus’, p. 460. On this issue see Gérard Raulet, Gehemmte Zukunft, p. 145. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, p. 28. Cassirer, The Myth of the State, p. 280. The Myth of the State, p. 297. For the expression ‘Mimesis ans Tote’ see DA 53, cf. DE 44. For the discussion of reason as a form of mimesis in general, see also DE, 6–7 and 148–9. Cf. the following passage: ‘Civilization replaced the organic adaptation to otherness, mimetic behavior proper, firstly, in the magical phase, with the organized manipulation of mimesis, and finally, in the historical phase, with rational practice, work.’ DE, 148. Cf. Cassirer, Mythical Thought, pp. 227–8.

Notes 215 32 This view is shared by Martin Jay, who comments on the title ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’ as follows: ‘A difficulty arises here from Adorno and Horkheimer’s refusal to structure the various theses that they propose in a hierarchical order. […] Instead Adorno and Horkheimer mapped out a kind of decentralised structure in which the various explanatory factors were placed alongside each other without conceptual mediation’ (Jay, ‘Frankurter Schule und Judentum’, p. 448). However allusive it may appear, the psychological and psychoanalytical explanation of anti-Semitism predominates – see the reflections on projection and paranoia below – and represents the real backbone of the essay. It stems on the one hand from Adorno’s In Search of Wagner (1939), which in turn drew on the category of sado-masochism developed by Erich Fromm in his contributions to the work of the Institute, and on the other hand from the investigations into the attitude of American workers to Jews, carried out from 1943 with the support of the Jewish Labor Committee, and Studies in Prejudice, realised with the support of the American Jewish Committee from 1944. The contributions to Studies in Prejudice had a primarily psychological orientation. (On the psychoanalytical explanation see also Lars Rensmann, Kritische Theorie über den Antisemitismus, esp. chapter 2.) Jay’s explanation of the departure from the historical-materialist line of interpretation and the partial return, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, to the views of Horkheimer’s ‘The Jews and Europe’ is that in the empirical studies of the Institute Horkheimer and Adorno played down the Marxist approaches for the sake of their sponsors, making concessions to the American liberal ideology and perhaps even deliberately writing the ‘philosophical prehistory of anti-Semitism’ – that is, ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’ – in German. 33 Cf. for instance the following observation: ‘Although the rules may not arise from rational reflection, rationality arises from them’ (DE, 147). Of course there are also passages in Weber that make Weber’s influence on Adorno and Horkheimer’s view of mythical thought appear plausible. However, not only is the famous essay ‘Science as a Vocation’ (emphasis G. R.) itself based on the idea of a reversal of the process of disenchantment, but Weber conceives the ‘enterprise’ of the professional magician as both rational magic and the oldest ‘profession’, as Hauke Brunkhorst has shown. Cf. Weber, Economy and Society, vol. I, pp. 424–5, and Brunkhorst, ‘Skepsis und Solidarität’, pp. 50–4. 34 The same holds for Adorno and Horkheimer’s discussion of the prehistory of subjectivity. 35 On the relationship between the theses on anti-Semitism and Lowenthal and Guterman’s Prophets of Deceit and the study The Authoritarian Personality (both published in 1949–50 as parts of the five-volume collective work Studies in Prejudice) see Jay, ‘Frankfurter Schule und Judentum’, p. 444. 36 Jay (‘Frankfurter Schule und Judentum’, p. 444) points out that the results of the 1943 investigation into the attitude of American workers to Jews were not published ‘due to numerous organisational and theoretical difficulties’. 37 MHGS V, 353 (‘Einige Betrachtungen zum Curfew’, 1942). 38 Cf. esp. the third section of ‘Elements’, DE, 141–4. 39 TWAGS XX.1, 370 (‘Zur Bekämpfung des Antisemitismus heute’). 40 ‘The reshaping of the heathen ritual of sacrifice not only took place in worship and in the mind but determined the form of the labor process. In providing the schema for the latter, sacrifice becomes rational. The taboo is

216 Notes

41 42 43 44 45 46

47

transformed into the rational organization of the work process. It regulates administration in war and peace, sowing and harvesting, food preparation and slaughter. Although the rules may not arise from rational reflection, rationality arises from them. The effort of primitive peoples to free themselves from immediate fear engendered among them the institution of ritual; this was refined by Judaism into the sanctified rhythm of family and national life’ (DE, 146). This account calls to mind Max Weber’s view that Judaism, like Protestantism, is an ‘inner-worldly’ religion. Nevertheless, for Weber the ethics of Judaism lacks precisely ‘the hallmark of the inner-worldly type of asceticism’, namely that unique and ‘integrated relationship to the world from the point of view of the individual’s conviction of salvation (certitudo salutis)’ which, as the centre, ‘nurtures all else’ (Weber, Economy and Society, vol. I, p. 620). As we shall see, for Dialectic of Enlightenment too this point constitutes the contrast between Judaism and Christianity. However, in respect of the relationship between Jewish ethics and the ‘spirit’ of capitalism Adorno and Horkheimer’s position differs from Weber’s, for Weber argues – against Werner Sombart’s The Jews and Modern Capitalism – that ‘the Jews stood on the side of the politically and speculatively oriented adventurous capitalism; their ethos was, in a word, that of pariah-capitalism’ (Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, pp. 165–6). It is in this context that the mathematical formula is called ‘the most sublimated form of mimicry’ (DE, 149). DE, 147–8 (trans. modified), DA 161. DE, 42 (trans. modified), DA 50. TWAGS IX.2, 375 (‘Starrheit und Integration’). Detlev Claussen, Grenzen der Aufklärung, p. 23. DE, 154. The thesis of the Jew as the victim of a paranoid projection had been strongly asserted by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman in their Prophets of Deceit. DE, 155 (trans. modified), DA, 169. Cf. the quotation from Critique of Pure Reason: ‘In this way his [man’s] objective world has been constituted as a product of that “art which is concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real devices nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze” ’ (DE, 154, trans. modified, DA, 168). Horkheimer’s programmatic essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ (1937) already referred to this passage, in order to explain the dependence of knowledge on social organisation. In a note written between 1949 and 1952 Horkheimer once more pointed out that the task of Critical Theory was to write ‘a critique of reason, like Kant, except that […] the mechanism which turns the material into a “unified” experience’ would have to consist in ‘the social schematism’ instead of the intellect and the pure forms of intuition (Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline, p. 116). Similarly, the last, seventh section of ‘Elements’ attributes the lack of a synthesis to the changes in the late industrial methods of production: ‘In the world of mass production, the stereotypes of its patterns replace the categorical work of the mind. Judgments are no longer based on a genuine synthesis but on blind subsumption’ (DE, 166–7, trans. modified, DA, 180). In this respect the seventh section, which was added on belatedly, rounds off ‘Elements’ by providing the psychoanalytical explanation of anti-Semitism, which has already been phylogenetically expanded through

Notes 217 the theory of the return of myth, with a historical-materialist basis, almost in the manner of Herbert Marcuse. The section thereby decisively distances itself from the psychological approach prevailing in the empirical American investigations of the Institute. ‘Paranoia no longer pursues its goal on the basis of the individual case history of the persecutor’ (DE, 171), for the late industrial methods of production entail that the persecutor, as an individual, is in the process of disappearing. 48 DE, 154 (trans. modified), DA, 167. 49 For Adorno and Horkheimer’s radicalisation of Cassirer the psychological, ethnological and anthropological references of Dialectic of Enlightenment are important. On this issue see Raulet, ‘Interdisciplinarité ou essayisme?’, esp. pp. 131–42, Raulet, ‘La théorie critique et l’ethnologie’ (unpubl. contribution to the research project ‘Anthropologische und enthnologische Diskurse der Zwischenkriegszeit’ of the Groupe de recherche sur la culture de Weimar, Paris, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme/CNRS), as well as Stefano Cochetti, Mythos und ‘Dialektik der Aufklärung’.

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Index

Bold type is used for references to the explanation or translation of non-English terms. Multiple occurrences on the same page are noted only once. For ‘Frankfurt School’, see ‘Critical Theory’, ‘Institute of Social Research’ and / or individual names, concepts or titles. absolute, the, 21, 62, 71, 150, 176 abstraction, 88, 92–3, 161–2, 177 action, see practice Activism, 202–3 (n. 59) Adler, Max, 116 Adorno, Theodor W., 5, 9, 10, 25, 26, 27, 29, 40, 104, 114, 120, 122–6, 146, 148, 153, 165 Aesthetic Theory, 201 (n. 43) Alban Berg, 206 (n. 25) The Authoritarian Personality, 182, 187, 215 (n. 35) ‘Zur Bekämpfung des Antisemitismus heute’, 184, 215 (n. 39) Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3–4, 6, 7–8, 11–12, 19, 20, 80, 104, 122–3, 157–70, 171–2, 173–6, 177–89, 202 (n. 51), 208 (n. 1) The Jargon of Authenticity, 147 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 123, 124–5, 209 (n. 53) Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, 151 Negative Dialectics, 8, 153, 188, 208 (n. 6), 209 (n 42–4), 209 (n. 52), 209 (n. 55), 213 (n. 8) In Search of Wagner, 215 (n. 32) ‘Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft? Einleitungsvortrag zum 16. Deutschen Soziologentag’, 209 (n. 38) ‘Starrheit und Integration’, 216 (n. 44) Aeschylus, 90 aestheticisation, 94, 118

aestheticism, 201 (n. 43) critique of, 51, 52, 54, 94 agnosticism, 35 Akademie der Arbeit, 146 Aktualität, see relevance, contemporary alienation, 3, 50, 111, 143 metaphysical, 125 from nature, 161 self-, 50 allegorisation, of historical reality, 86, 99 allegory, 88–9, 90, 92–9 and abstraction, 92–3 Baroque, 95, 97–9, 176 as hypónoia, 90, 93 and metaphor, 89–90, 98 and metonymy, 85–6, 89–90, 93, 99 and personification, 98–9 rhetoric of, 95–9 and symbol, 89–90, 95–6, 97–8 and time, 96 alterity, see otherness American Jewish Committee, 215 (n. 32) Anan ben David, 210 (n. 11) animals, 204 (n. 75) anthropology, 6, 8, 69, 82–3, 142, 149, 173–4, 199 (n. 18), 204 (n. 75), 217 (n. 49) anthropomorphism, 29, 143 anti-Semitism, 2, 139, 171, 181, 182, 183–8 anxiety, 32, 33, 158, 160, 180, 183, 185 Arabatzis, Stavros, 206 (n. 32) Arendt, Hannah, 211 (n. 62)

234

Index 235 argument, see justification, argumentative Aristotle, 10, 89, 90, 94, 97, 206 (n. 14) Aron, Betty, see under Adorno, ‘The Authoritarian Personality’ art, 6, 8, 40, 51, 86, 180, 201 (n. 43) as anticipatory, 52 and Kunstwollen, 196 (n. 18) and language, 89 modern, 85–99 neo-religious reception of, 53 and pantheistic feeling, 52 and religion, 75–6, 85–99, 141, 205 (n 8–9) see also Baroque; Cubism; Expressionism; literature; music; Naturalism; painting; poetry; theatre; Weimar Classicism asceticism, 77, 139, 215–16 (n. 40) Aschheim, Steven E., 211 (n. 65) Ash, Mitchell G., 190 (n. 5) atheism, 20–1, 35, 130 atheistic religion, 131, 143 Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane, 207 (n. 60) aura, 5, 9, 191 (n. 18) authority, 92, 108 authoritative attitudes, 62, 71, 78, 113 decisionistic conception of, 113 legislative, 120 legitimate legal, 115–16 and modern reason, 108 pre-Enlightenment modes of, 113, 126–7, 141 transcendent, 21 autonomy, 7, 121–2, 125, 126–7, 128, 162, 196 (n. 25) of consciousness, 73 formal-legal, 104–5, 109, 116, 120, 123–4, 125–6 as different from freedom, 103, 104, 107, 122–4, 126–7, 131 of human thought, 103, 105, 121, 125, 126, 142 of knowledge, 67, 69, 123 and law, 108, 120

limits of, 121–2, 124–5 political, 103, 105 of practice, 7, 123 and reason, 105, 106–7, 109, 120, 121–2, 123–4, 125–7 of science, 56 of the subject, 104, 123, 125 Bacon, Francis, 160 Baeck, Leo, 210 (n. 3) ban on graven images, 8, 24, 166–8, 170, 175–6 Barlach, Ernst, 86 Baroque, 91, 95, 97–9, 176, 207 (n. 37) and Expressionism, 86, 91–2, 93 Trauerspiel, 85, 91, 93, 98–9, 207 (n. 39) Barth, Karl, 111 Baudelaire, Charles, 195–6 (n. 15) behaviour, 20, 29–30 habitual, 31, 139 beliefs, 6–7, 9, 30, 31, 35 and behaviour, 29–30 empirical formation of, 35, 38 justification of, 29–30, 61, 199 (n. 11), 199 (n. 17) and myth, 173 religious, 5, 6–7, 8, 30, 33, 34, 35, 130, 132, 134–5, 140, 142, 199 (n. 11) Belmore, Herbert (Herbert Blumenthal), 205 (n. 3) Benjamin, Walter, 5, 6, 8, 9–10, 27, 45–63, 64–71, 74–6, 77, 79–84, 85–6, 87, 91, 92, 93, 94, 104, 120, 124, 126, 145, 176, 190 (n. 2), 200 (n. 27), 200 (n. 29), 202 (n. 57) ‘Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus’, 46, 47, 52, 53, 55, 63, 71, 191 (n. 19) The Arcades Project, 47, 190 (n. 7), 195 (n 4–5), 196–7 (n. 26), 206 (n. 27), 209 (n 36–7) ‘The Author as Producer’, 202–3 (n. 59) ‘Capitalism as Religion’, 46 The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, 201 (n. 42)

236 Index Benjamin, Walter – continued ‘On the Concept of History’, 47, 98, 195 (n. 5), 206 (n. 18) ‘Critique of Violence’, 76, 79–81, 120–2, 191 (n. 19), 202–3 (n. 59), 208 (n. 2), 209 (n. 54) ‘Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart’, 11, 46–7, 48–54, 55, 195 (n. 11), 196 (n. 22) Drug protocol of 29 September 1928, 204 (n. 75) ‘Erkenntnistheorie’, 195 (n. 6) ‘ “Experience” ‘, 195 (n. 10) ‘Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer’, 191 (n. 19), 199 (n. 18) ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’, 201 (n. 42) ‘Der Irrtum des Aktivismus’, 202–3 (n. 59) ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, 75, 199–200 (n 20–1), 205 (n. 77), 206 (n. 12) ‘Moscow Diary’, 166 One-Way Street, 205 (n. 77) The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 47, 85, 86, 89, 91, 95–9, 201 (n. 42) ‘Outline of the Psychophysical Problem’, 81–2, 191 (n. 15), 204 (n. 73) ‘Painting, or Signs and Marks’, 86 ‘On Perception’, 67, 70, 71, 199 (n. 10) ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’, 9–10, 46, 48–9, 53–62, 65–6, 67–71, 76, 77, 195 (n. 7) ‘Riddle and Mystery’, 201 (n. 42) ‘The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy’, 86 ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, 195–6 (n. 15) ‘Surrealism’, 8, 82–4, 201 (n. 42), 204 (n. 75), 205 (n. 81) [Theologico-Political Fragment], 204 (n. 74) ‘Theories of German Fascism’, 204 (n. 71)

‘The Theory of Criticism’, 198 (n. 50) ‘Über die transzendentale Methode’, 59, 197 (n. 40), 197 (n. 45) ‘Die unendliche Aufgabe’, 198 (n. 48) ‘Zum verlornen Abschluss der Notiz über die Symbolik in der Erkenntnis’, 197 (n. 42), 200 (n. 26) Berg, Alban, 206 (n. 25) Berghoff, Peter, 190 (n. 5) Berlin, 52, 75–6, 86, 198 (n. 5) Berlin, Isaiah, 87 Berman, Harold J., 146, 153 ‘Law and History after the World War’, 212 (n. 2) Law and Revolution, 212 (n. 2) Bible, 65, 138 Genesis, 75 Ex. 20: 4, 166–8 Num. 4: 15–20, 203 (n. 67) Num. 16, 203 (n. 67) Pentateuch, 65, 75, 77, 83, 134, 199 (n. 6), 200 (n. 31) Prophets, 129–30, 134, 139, 176 Bildungsbürgertum, 129 biology, 148 see also thought, socio-biological Blei, Franz, 204 (n. 75) Bloch, Ernst, 22–3, 24, 26, 193 (n. 38) Blumenberg, Hans, 179, 214 (n. 26) Blumenthal, Herbert (Herbert Belmore), 205 (n. 3) body, 8, 73, 77, 81–2, 83–4, 90, 91, 97, 199 (n. 18), 204 (n. 73) ‘the bodily collective’, 8, 82, 84 experience of, 73, 74, 77, 78 and images of Christ, 87 of mankind, 81–2, 97, 205 (n. 77) and metonymy, 90, 97 and mimesis, 180, 187 and mind, 32, 68, 72–4, 78, 81, 162, 181 and myth, 181 and new physis, 82–4, 205 (n. 77) suppression of the, 110, 123, 181, 184–5, 187

Index 237 body – continued see also creatureliness; mind–body problem; politics, and the body; presence of mind Bohman, James, 190 (n. 6) Bölsche, Wilhelm, 52 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 177 bourgeoisie, 8, 92, 105, 123, 138, 151, 153 Bildungsbürgertum, 129 Brecht, Bertolt, 95, 99, 207 (n. 58) Brenner, Michael, 210 (n. 6), 211 (n. 60) Breuer, Isaac, 7 Breuer, Mordechai, 198 (n. 5), 210 (n. 6) Brunkhorst, Hauke, 215 (n. 33) Bruno, Giordano, 178 Buber, Martin, 130, 137, 141, 147, 196 (n. 19), 211 (n. 46) Büchner, Georg, 93, 95 Buddhism, 24, 30, 33 calculation, 103, 105, 161, 162 Calderon de la Barqua, Pedro, 86 Callinicos, Alex, 205 (n. 1) Campanella, Tommaso, 178 capitalism, 8, 93, 105, 114, 115, 119, 122–3, 142, 183–4 authoritarian, 105, 107, 114, 115 and circulation, 184 and fascism, 17, 114 and Jews, 138–9, 140, 183–5, 215–16 (n. 40) modern, 104, 138–9, 216–17 (n. 47) monopoly, 115 and Protestantism, 139, 215–16 (n. 40) and religion, 142, 215–16 (n. 40) as religion, 46 state-, 104 Cassirer, Ernst, 147, 182, 184, 185, 188, 189, 217 (n. 49) The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, 214 (n. 23) The Myth of the State, 179–80, 214 (n 27–8)

Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 6, 158, 172, 173–9, 181, 214 (n. 31) Catholicism, 2, 20, 26, 110 causality, 105, 124, 143, 178, 201 (n 36–7) through freedom, 196 (n. 25) cause, 73, 74, 173, 200 (n. 33) first, 56, 108 Caygill, Howard, 195 (n. 7) Celan, Paul, 45, 206 (n. 13) certainty, 54, 71, 81, 185, 215–16 (n. 40) certitudo salutis, 185, 215–16 (n. 40) charity, 22 Christ, images of, 86–7, 93 Christianity, 22, 24, 40, 112, 151, 161, 176, 185–6, 202 (n. 53) and anti-Semitism, 2, 185 Christian congresses: Second Vatican Council, 20, 26; 1965 Protestant Church Congress (Cologne), 20 and Judaism, 6–7, 132, 136, 142, 147–8, 173, 176, 185–6, 212 (n. 74), 215–16 (n. 40) and Marxism, 26–7, 28 and myth, 185–6 and stoicism, 91 Christian theology, 1–2, 3, 6–7, 26, 27, 36, 92–3, 111, 113, 151, 186 Urchristentum, 142, 196 (n. 17), 212 (n. 74) see also Catholicism; Christ, images of; Christians; Protestantism; religion Christians, 20, 111, 142, 196 (n. 17), 212 (n. 74) Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 90 civilisation, see culture clairvoyance, 68–9 class, see bourgeoisie; class-consciousness; domination, class; politics, and social class; religion, and social class; proletariat; society, and class class-consciousness, 112 Claudel, Paul, 7 Claussen, Detlev, 216 (n. 45) Cochetti, Stefano, 217 (n. 49)

238 Index Cohen, Hermann, 49, 54, 58–9, 61, 62, 67, 130, 133, 134, 147, 148 Der Begriff der Religion im System der Philosophie, 56 Ethik des reinen Willens, 196 (n. 23), 208 (n. 15) ‘Innere Beziehungen der Kantischen Philosophie zum Judentum’, 196 (n. 20) Kants Begründung der Ethik, 197 (n 34–5) Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 56, 58, 197 (n 29–30), 199 (n. 13) Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, 197 (n 36–8), 199 (n. 13) Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, 148, 197 (n. 43) collective, the, 7–8, 82, 84 common sense, 75 communism, 8, 23–4, 79, 82–4, 204 (n. 75) Communist Manifesto, 84 see also Marxism; materialism, historical community, 7, 94, 109, 118–19, 120, 134, 139, 142, 152 and myth, 179 and human life, 116–20 and religion, 51, 77, 135, 136, 138–9, 140, 151–2, 153 see also collective, the; society, social integration; solidarity; ‘Volk’ compassion, 18–19, 20, 21, 22 compromise, 79, 80, 117 Comte, Auguste, 174 concepts, 58, 72, 88, 95, 200 (n. 30) of function, 81–2, 177, 179 of substance, 81–2 ‘work of’, 169 concretisation, 72–4, 76–7, 83 conformism, 7, 8, 142 consciousness, absence of, 73, 74, 77 altered states of, 64, 68–9, 78 as autonomous, 73 class-consciousness, 112 creature-consciousness, 90

and corporeity, 73, 78 as dependent, 73 dialectical development of, 150 empirical, 57, 58, 67–9, 70, 73 historical, 95, 111–12 individual, 72–3 mythical-religious, 173–6 object-relatedness of, 73–4 pure, 58, 68 subject nature of, 57–8 transcendental, 58, 67–9, 73–4 unity of, 58 conservatism, 3, 23, 137–8, 141, 190 (n. 2) see also preservation consolation, 36, 37, 40, 50, 167 constancy, 91 contemplation, 10, 136, 141 contemporary relevance see relevance, contemporary control of economic power, 82 of matter, 78, 122–3 over nature, 188 over organic functions, 77, 78 over temporal experience, 108–9 self-, 123 social, 110, 123 the uncontrollable, 27, 31, 123–4 corpse, 91, 99 correspondances, 195–6 (n. 15) cosmos, 9, 148–9, 199 (n. 18) counter-cultures, 3 creation, 88, 92, 105, 127, 200 (n. 33) creature-consciousness, 90 creature-feeling, 90, 91 creatureliness, 79, 83, 85, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 98, 99 Creuzer, Friedrich, 95–6 Critical Theory, 16, 24, 29, 65, 103–9, 103–9, 142–3, 144, 145, 146–7, 148–9, 152, 153, 198 (n. 3) and critique of religion, 2, 3–4, 19–20, 40, 131, 144, 185–6 reception of, 1–3, 6, 15, 17–18, 20, 25–8, 114–15, 191 (n. 8) and religion, 1–10, 24, 40–1, 75–6, 116, 118–22, 124, 125, 126–7,

Index 239 Critical Theory – continued 141–4, 148, 153, 157–70, 175–6, 183–4, 185–6 and rhetoric, 95–9, 149, 157, 162, 169–70 criticism, 85, 93 critique of religion, 29, 34–8 and Critical Theory, 2, 3–4, 19–20, 40, 131, 144, 185–6 Enlightenment, 29–30, 34–5, 106–7, 144, 160, 172–3 Freudian, 3, 35–8, 129, 144 Marxist, 2, 3, 4, 129, 131, 144 Nietzschean, 3, 37–8 Cubism, 86 cult, 50–1, 173, 195–6 (n. 15) and conventions, 51 and war, 204 (n. 71) culture, 36, 67, 139, 179–80, 201 (n. 43) ancient, 91, 173, 203 (n. 63) ancient Greek, 91, 148–9, 173 and barbarism, 168–9, 171, 179–80, 182–3, 184–5 and counter-cultures, 3 critique of, 5, 6, 8, 78–9, 141–2, 160–2, 202 (n. 53), 214 (n. 30) European, 82 and Kultursoziologie, 132–3, 210 (n. 14) modern Jewish, 130, 131, 145–6 non-Western, 5, 67–8, 173–4 oriental, 77, 83 pre-modern, 5–6, 173–4, 215–16 (n. 40) Torah im derekh eretz, 139 traditional, 128–9, 139, 142–3 and subcultures, 3 and ‘cultural system’, 5, 9 Western, 5, 79, 130 and Youth Culture Movement, 9, 49, 75–6, 196 (n. 19) see also tradition Cysarz, Herbert, 207 (n. 37) dead, the, 9, 91, 99, 206 (n. 18) death, 82, 90, 91, 93–5, 167 and meaning, 85, 87, 93 see also finitude, of ‘Dasein’; mimesis, ‘Mimesis ans Tote’

deception, 161, 163, 173 priestly, 186 self-, 65, 121 decisionism, 71, 111, 113 deduction, 67, 197 (n. 46) and ‘development’, 70, 199 (n. 15), 199–200 (n. 20) degeneration, 140–1 deism, 35 Demirovic, Alex, 193 (n. 53) democracy, 79–80, 116, 117, 135, 142 radical, 118–19, 141 Denkler, Horst, 205 (n. 11) Derrida, Jacques, 146, 152, 153 Descartes, René, 160 despair, 10, 50, 78–9, 167 determinate negation, see negation, determinate Deuber-Mankowsky, Astrid, 50, 54, 195 (n 13–14), 196 (n 18–19) dialectic, 23, 95, 117, 119–20, 125, 126–7, 158, 159–60, 176, 187–8 in allegory, 99 and critique, 160 and determinate negation, 124, 126, 176 Hegelian, 149, 150, 158, 159, 165, 176, 203 (n. 66) of inwardness, 92 of mimesis, 187–8 and mysticism, 203 (n. 66) of myth and reason, 180 negative, 9, 124, 126, 148, 152, 153, 188 religious, 97 and ‘redemption’, 176 of remembrance of nature, 180–1 transcendental, 54 and umschlagen in, 159 and zurückschlagen in, 159 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 110, 208 (n. 14) disenchantment, 3–4, 8, 105, 165, 167, 175, 184, 185–6, 215 (n. 33) dogmatisation, 131, 136, 137–8, 143 dogmatism, 74–6, 78–9, 131, 134 and scientific world views, 66 see also philosophy, dogmatic; theology, dogmatic

240 Index domination, 2, 35, 77, 123–4, 126, 161–2, 183, 184–5, 187, 188 capitalist, 123 class, 181, 183 communal, 119 and disunity, 163 legal, 114–15, 123–4 and myth, 3, 77 over nature, 77, 110, 122, 123, 180–1, 184–5, 187, 188 political, 114, 122, 161–2 and rationality, 106, 122–4, 126, 161–2, 181, 182–3, 184–5, 186 and religion, 2, 4, 19–20, 35, 77, 129, 183, 186 totalitarian, 145, 183 doubt, 27 Drügh, Heinz, 207 (n. 59) dualism, 50, 52, 54, 195 (n. 13), 196 (n. 18), 196 (n. 25) Ebner, Ferdinand, 147 Eckhart (Meister), 177 economy, 79, 104–5, 116, 123, 140–1, 151, 216–17 (n. 47) and competition, 77, 204 (n. 70) and interests, 78, 104, 105, 115, 138–9, 140 exchange, 109, 116, 124 and power, 78, 82 socialisation of, 116, 119 state-capitalist regulation of, 104 ecstasy, 52, 77, 99 Edgar, Andrew, 205 (n. 1) education, Jewish adult, 145–6 Ehrenberg, Hans, 147, 148 Ehrenberg, Rudolf, 147, 148, 151, 213 (n. 13) Ehrman, Esther J., 64 (note), 198 (n. 5) Eliasberg, Alexander, 212 (n. 71) Ellenson, David, 210 (n. 3) emancipation, 8, 26, 121, 127 ‘auto-emancipation’, 140, 211 (n. 64) formal, 140 Jewish, 130, 131, 133, 139 and law, 104 and practice, 2, 3, 4 of thought, 105, 121–2

Enlightenment, 8, 29, 39, 40, 41, 105–6, 119, 122–5, 131, 177–8 critique of, 103–7, 117–18, 122–5, 126–7, 130, 160–2, 169–70 and critique of religion, 29–30, 34–5, 106–7, 144, 160, 172–3 and deism, 35 a different, 127, 181 and experience, 57, 71, 107 and fear, 158, 160, 180, 183 humanism of the, 126–7 and hypostatisation of utopia, 163–7, 167–8 and ‘installing men as masters’, 158, 160 Kantian, 107, 113, 123–5 and law, 8, 105–6, 108–9, 117–18 and myth, 80, 158–9, 162, 171–2, 177–9, 180, 182–3 and nominalism, 175 and ‘progress’, 177 radicalisation of, 112–13, 115 rejection of, 112–13, 115, 117–18, 119, 126 and reversion to barbarism, 171, 182–3, 184–5 and reversion to mythology, 80, 158–9, 162, 177–9, 182–3 enlightened thought, 158, 178 as ‘totalitarian’, 29, 123, 161 Ensor, James, 86 epistemology, 49, 54–5, 58–9, 61–3, 67–70, 72, 122–5 and conformity to laws, 58, 61, 103–4, 177, 178, 215 (n. 33), 215–16 (n. 40) Erkenntnistheorie, 70, 196–7 (n. 26) and ‘experience’, 54–5, 57–8, 70–1, 72, 197 (n. 32), 197–8 (n. 47) and law, 58, 103–4, 122–5 and psychology, 68 ‘purification of’, 56–7 see also knowledge; neoKantianism; transcendental philosophy Erd, Rainer, 209 (n. 35) eschatology, 27, 78, 82

Index 241 esoterics, 61 essence, 33–4, 148–9 Hegel’s logic of, 149 and ‘religion’, 2, 5, 30, 31, 33–4 eternity, 49, 51, 99, 152 ethics, see morality ethos, 5, 6, 133, 134, 140, 215–16 (n. 40) Euripides, 86, 91 everyday, the, 32, 36, 69, 152, 201 (n. 42) everyday life, 31, 38, 49, 51, 52, 66, 98, 131, 152, 215–16 (n. 40) existence, 61–2, 81 experience, 36, 37, 49, 51, 54–5, 57–60, 62, 66–7, 72, 74, 105, 106–7, 129, 134, 199 (n. 9), 216–17 (n. 47) of the body, 73, 74, 77, 78 ‘concrete totality of’, 61–2, 79 Enlightenment concept of, 57, 71, 107 epistemological foundation of, 54–5, 57–8, 71–2, 197 (n. 32), 197–8 (n. 47) vs. faith, 65 first, 72 vs. ignorance, 173 Kant’s concept of, 66, 67–8 and knowledge, 55–8, 61–2, 66–7, 68–9, 107, 173, 197 (n. 32) and language, 59–60 ‘mechanical’, 49–50, 57, 59, 74 and metaphysics, 55–6, 57, 59–60, 66, 71–2, 73–4, 107, 108–9, 121–2, 124–5 modern, 67, 68, 72, 73, 74–5, 195–6 (n. 15) new, 55, 64, 72–3, 84 religious, 8, 49, 54–5, 56–8, 59–60, 64–74, 76–84, 106–7, 121, 124–5, 197–8 (n. 47) scientific, 58, 66 second, 72, 84 sense, 65, 67 and social organisation, 216–17 (n. 47) symbolic, 174 as temporal, 48, 55, 58–9, 108–9

and transcendental consciousness, 68, 73–4 see also beliefs, empirical formation of; consciousness, empirical; everyday, the; everyday life; observation, empirical; religion, as experience exploitation, 3, 103, 115, 117 expression, 31, 95, 97, 99, 174, 175, 178 Expressionism, 85–6, 90, 198 (n. 5), 204 (n. 75) and Activism, 202–3 (n. 59) and Baroque, 86, 91–2, 93 and the First World War, 87, 90, 91 Expressionist painting, 86–9, 93 and Prague, 89 and religion, 85, 92–3, 99 Expressionist sculpture, 86, 88 Expressionist theatre, 86, 88–9, 90–3 Expressionism Debate, 92 faith, 40, 64, 65, 75, 76, 138, 140, 144, 167 in humanity, 92 as remembrance, 27 in science, 38 fascism, 17, 161, 183 see also Holocaust, the; National Socialism; Third Reich, the fate, 112, 178 Federal Republic of Germany, 1–2, 4, 7, 15–16, 26–7, 28, 184, 185–6, 215 (n. 39), 216 (n. 44) feeling, 18, 51–2 creature-, 90, 91 religious, 18–19, 31–2, 136, 137, 138, 140 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 143, 147 Fick, Monika, 205 (n 79–80) finitude, of Dasein, 147 Fiorato, Pierfrancesco, 196–7 (n. 26), 197 (n. 31), 197 (n. 44), 213 (n. 6) First World War, 53, 81, 85–6, 87, 90, 91, 129, 203 (n. 63), 204 (n 70–1) Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de, 172–3

242 Index forms, spiritual, 172, 173 symbolic, 172, 173–6, 177–80, 189 Foucault, Michel, 33, 41 Frank, Jacob, 140 Frankfurt am Main, 130–1, 145, 146, 213 (n. 13) freedom, 23, 24, 54, 97, 103, 108, 115, 121, 126–7, 128–9, 185 as different from autonomy, 103, 104, 107, 122–4, 126–7, 131 causality through, 196 (n. 25) cognitive, 6–7, 103 formal, 107, 122–4, 126, 138 of interpretation, 6–7, 131, 137, 138 and nature, 54, 97, 118–19, 144, 178 Freeman, Kathleen, 206 (n. 14) Freie Volksbühne, 52 Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, 130, 131, 145 Frenkel-Brunswick, Else, The Authoritarian Personality, 182, 187, 215 (n. 35) Freud, Sigmund, 3, 32, 35, 36, 37–8, 129, 139, 144 The Future of an Illusion, 194 (n. 2), 194 (n 8–9), 194 (n 12–14) Friedlaender, Salomon, 200 (n. 27) Friedlander, Judith, 198 (n. 5) Frisby, David, 205 (n. 2) Fromm, Erich, 128–44, 215 (n. 32) Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 210 (n. 4) ‘The Dogma of Christ’, 141, 212 (n. 74) Escape from Freedom, 142 Das jüdische Gesetz, 129, 131–44 Psychoanalysis and Religion, 212 (n 75–8), 212 (n. 80), 212 (n 82–4) ‘Reminiscences of Shlomo Baruch Rabinkow’, 210 (n. 8), 210 (n. 13) ‘Der Sabbat’, 141, 211 (n. 59) ‘The Sabbath Ritual’, 211 (n. 59) You Shall Be as Gods, 210 (n 8–9), 210 (n. 26), 211 (n. 37), 211 (n. 59), 212 (n. 82) Fuchs, Georg, 205 (n. 10)

Funk, Rainer, 209 (n. 1), 210 (n. 5), 210 (n. 8), 210 (n. 11), 210 (n. 13), 210 (n. 26) future, the, 27, 48, 49, 52, 55, 152 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 161 Gangl, Manfred, 190 (n. 5) Galli, Barbara E., 212 (n. 4), 213 (n. 7) Garaudy, Roger, 193 (n. 56) Garber, Klaus, 206 (n. 32) Gay, Peter, 190–1 (n. 11) Geertz, Clifford, 5, 6, 8, 9 genius, 71 George, Stefan, 202 (n. 53) German Idealism, 145, 147, 148, 188 Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie, 193 (n. 39) Geuss, Raymond, 190 (n. 4) Gierke, Otto von, 110, 208 (n. 11) Gilcher-Holtey, Ingrid, 193 (n. 53) Giles, Steve, 190 (n. 5) Glatzer, Nahum, N., 129 God, 18, 21, 27, 35, 56, 62, 65, 66, 70–1, 75, 77–8, 80–2, 99, 134–5, 136, 141, 148, 150–1, 167, 176, 177 see also atheism; deism; gods; law, divine; monotheism; pantheism; power, divine; spirit, divine; theism; violence, divine gods, 29, 30, 33, 35, 51, 71, 77–8, 80, 81, 91, 176, 200 (n. 31), 206 (n. 31) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 89, 93, 94, 206 (n. 31) Gogarten, Friedrich, 111, 208 (n. 18) Gogh, Vincent van, 86–7 Goldberg, Oskar, 65, 75, 77, 78, 80, 82, 198–9 (n 5–6), 199 (n. 11), 200 (n. 31), 202 (n. 51), 202 (n 53–4), 203 (n. 67), 205 (n. 81) Gorgias, 90, 97, 206 (n. 14) Gormann-Thelen, Michael, 145 (note) Graetz, H., 212 (n. 68) Gramsci, Antonio, 86 Gräser, Gusto, 202–3 (n. 59) Gropius, Walter, 88 Grossheim, Michael, 198 (n. 3)

Index 243 Grossner, Claus, 193 (n. 51) Gumnior, Helmut, 214 (n. 17) Guterman, Norbert, 182 Prophets of Deceit, 215 (n. 35), 216 (n. 46) Häberlin, Paul, 204 (n. 73) Habermas, Jürgen, 41, 192 (n. 24) Halevi, Jehuda, 148, 213 (n. 7) Hamacher, Werner, 203 (n. 64) Hamann, Johann Georg, 59 Hamilton, Paul, 205 (n. 1) happiness, 10, 36, 50, 52, 183, 184 Harnack, Adolf von, 212 (n. 74) Harrington, Anne, 190 (n. 5), 198 (n. 4) Hartlaub, Gustav Friedrich, 205 (n. 9) Hasenclever, Walter, 92 Hasidism, 130, 132, 133, 136, 139–41, 142 Hauptmann, Gerhard, 86 Hebbel, Christian Friedrich, 86 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 40, 92, 93, 129, 148–51, 153, 158, 159, 165, 169, 176, 203 (n. 66), 212 (n. 3) Phenomenology of Spirit, 150, 160 Science of Logic, 149, 159, 213 (n. 6) Heidegger, Martin, 112, 147, 148–9, 161, 165–6, 208 (n 19–20), 213 (n. 15) Heidelberg, 130, 131, 132, 210 (n. 6) Heilsgeschichte, 82, 95, 98 Helmont, Jan Baptist van, 83 Herlitz, Georg, 210 (n. 6) Hermand, Jost, 190–1 (n. 11) Hertz Levison, Maria, The Authoritarian Personality, 182, 187, 215 (n. 35) Hesse, Hermann, 202–3 (n. 59) Heuberger, Rachel, 210 (n. 3) hierocracy, 79, 117 Hildebrandt, H., 201 (n. 36) Hiller, Kurt, 202–3 (n. 59) Hirsch, Emanuel, 111 Hirsch, Samson Raphael, 136 historicism, 110 historicity, 58–9, 97

history, 16, 58–9, 81–2, 85–6, 94, 96, 99, 132, 136–7, 140, 173, 182–3, 195–6 (n. 15), 204 (n. 74) and the body, 81–2, 90, 97 as catastrophic, 78, 94, 206 (n. 18) facies hippocratica of, 96–7 experience of, 86, 92, 129, 195–6 (n. 15) metonymy of, 97, 99 modern, 78 myth as early form of, 172, 173 and nature, 96–8, 151 and necessity, 50, 53 as Passion of the world, 97–8 as ‘prehistory’ (‘Urgeschichte’), 179 and ‘religion’, 3, 16, 33–4 as writing, 98 compare natural history Hobbes, Thomas, 160, 203 (n. 65) Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 86 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 93, 94 Holl, Günter, 24, 191 (n.1), 192 (n. 12), 192 (n. 18), 192 (n. 24), 193 (n. 42), 193 (n. 46) Holocaust, the, 3, 183, 187, 200 (n. 31) Holub, Robert, 205 (n. 1) holy, the, see sacred, the Holzhey, Helmut, 57–8, 197 (n. 34), 198 (n. 51) Homer, 207 (n. 54) honesty, 50, 52, 54, 195 (n. 13) Honigmann, Peter, 210 (n 6–7) Honneth, Axel, 208 (n. 22) hope, 16, 19, 22–5, 26, 27, 167, 169 Horkheimer, Max, 1, 5, 6–7, 8, 10, 15–28, 29, 39, 40, 104, 114, 122, 126, 129, 146, 157–70, 171–2, 173–6, 177–89, 194 (n. 64), 200 (n. 31) ‘Die Aktualität Schopenhauers’, 192 (n. 27) ‘Bemerkungen zur Liberalisierung der Religion’, 192 (n. 30), 192 (n. 32), 194 (n. 18) ‘Zu Bergsons Metaphysik der Zeit’, 190 (n. 7) Dämmerung, 20, 21

244 Index Horkheimer, Max – continued Dawn and Decline, 192 (n. 15), 192 (n. 18), 192 (n. 19), 192 (n. 31), 193 (n. 41), 193 (n. 54), 216–17 (n. 47) Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3–4, 6, 7–8, 11–12, 19, 20, 80, 104, 122–3, 157–70, 171–2, 173–6, 177–89, 202 (n. 51), 208 (n. 1) ‘Dokumente – Stationen’, 193 (n. 43) The Eclipse of Reason, 20, 161, 175, 190 (n. 7), 214 (n 16–17) ‘Einige Betrachtungen zum Curfew’, 215 (n. 37) ‘Erinnerung an Paul Tillich’, 193 (n. 47) ‘Eva’, 19 ‘Die Funktion der Theologie in der Gesellschaft’, 193 (n. 34) ‘Für eine Theologie des Zweifels’, 27, 194 (n. 64) ‘ “Himmel, Ewigkeit, Schönheit” ’, 192 (n. 32), 192 (n. 33) ‘Individuum und Volk’, 200 (n. 31) ‘The Jews and Europe’, 17, 183, 184, 191 (n. 7), 215 (n. 32) ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’, 192 (n. 13) ‘Materialism and Morality’, 19, 192 (n. 13), 192 (n. 25) ‘Neues Denken über Revolution’, 193 (n. 43) ‘Pessimismus heute’, 192 (n. 27), 194 (n. 18) ‘On the Problem of Truth’, 191 (n. 5) ‘Religion und Philosophie’, 192 (n. 24), 192 (n. 28), 193 (n. 35), 193 (n. 46) ‘Schopenhauers Denken im Verhältnis zu Wissenschaft und Religion’, 192 (n. 28), 194 (n. 18) ‘Sehnsucht’, 18, 19, 192 (n. 11) ‘Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen’, 191 (n. 12), 193 (n. 29), 193 (n. 35), 193 (n. 39), 193 (n. 42), 193 (n. 45), 214 (n. 17)

Späne, 17 ‘Theism and Atheism’, 20–1, 192 (n. 26), 192 (n. 29) ‘Zu Theodor Haeckers Der Christ und die Geschichte’, 18 ‘Thoughts on Religion’, 18, 194 (n. 17) ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, 17, 194 (n. 16), 216–17 (n. 47) ‘Über den Zweifel’, 194 (n. 18) ‘Verwaltete Welt’, 193 (n. 42) ‘Was wir “Sinn” nennen, wird verschwinden’, 20, 190 (n. 2), 191 (n. 21), 192 (n. 23), 192 (n. 29), 193 (n. 39), 193 (n. 42), 193 (n. 43), 193 (n. 44), 193 (n. 47) ‘Die Zukunft der Kritischen Theorie’, 192 (n. 32), 193 (n. 39), 193 (n. 46) Horkheimer Dispute, 15–16, 20, 25–8 Hülshörster, Christian, 202 (n. 51) humanism, 51, 82, 122, 126–7, 143, 173, 204 (n. 75) humanistic religion, 131, 143 humanity, 33, 53, 82, 92, 106, 107, 108, 122, 125, 168–9, 187 and barbarism, 168–9 and social being, 104, 179 social nature of, 116–19 see also mankind Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 131 Hunsen, James A., 207 (n. 58) Hunt, Stephen J., 190 (n. 10) Husserl, Edmund, 212 (n. 3) idealism, 112, 177, 188 German Idealism, 145, 147, 148, 188 ideologisation, 27 ideology, 2, 103, 129, 142 of German Judaism, 138 liberal, 104–5, 109, 115, 123, 131, 215 (n. 32) and religion, 2, 4, 19–20, 144, 185–6, 190 (n. 6), 202 (n. 51) völkisch, 202 (n. 51) idolatry, 143 illumination, profane, 83

Index 245 illusion, 35, 38, 201 (n. 43) and magic, 178 and religion, 35, 37, 129, 144, 201 (n. 43) see also modernity, illusions of image space, 83–4 imagination, 72, 75, 125, 178, 200 (n. 30), 201 (n. 43) immanence, 26–7, 124–6, 133, 152, 178, 180 immediacy, 62, 70, 137, 151, 197–8 (n. 47), 203 (n. 64) imperialism, 202–3 (n. 59) indifference, ‘creative’, 200 (n. 27) of subject and object, 69, 70–1, 74 individual, the, 73, 77, 81, 97, 123, 131, 132, 135, 136, 138, 140, 142–3, 147, 151, 216–17 (n. 47) the bourgeois individual, 8, 151, 153 the perfect individual, 95 and state, 131 supra-individual conceptions of, 73, 77, 142–3 and philosophising, 149, 150–1, 153 and Volk, 77, 81, 132, 200 (n. 31) see also individualism; personality; personhood; subject individualism, 7, 142, 147, 185 Institute of Social Research, 1, 17, 115, 129, 131, 144, 145, 146, 209 (n 1–2) empirical research of, 182, 215 (n. 32), 216–17 (n. 47) institutionalist theorists of, 115–20 and Jewish backgrounds, 6, 8, 24, 129, 167, 209 (n. 2) in the USA, 1, 209 (n. 1), 215 (n. 32), 216–17 (n. 47) intellect, and intuition, 54, 67, 216–17 (n. 47) and sensibility, 53–4 interpretation, freedom of, 6–7, 131, 137–8 and functional re-interpretation, 179 of psycho-physical phenomena, 32 intuition, 29, 66, 173 and intellect, 54, 67, 216–17 (n. 47)

inwardness, 92, 94, 142, 150–2, 153 irrationality, crowd irrationality, 129 Jacobs, Carol, 207 (n. 42) Jacobson, Roman, 89 Jaspers, Karl, 111 Jay, Martin, 1, 210 (n. 3), 215 (n. 35), 215 (n. 36) Jewish Labor Committee, 215 (n. 32) Jews, 54, 78, 130, 145, 183, 184–5, 196 (n. 18), 198 (n. 5), 215 (n. 32), 215 (n. 36) and capitalism, 138–9, 140, 183–5, 215–16 (n. 40) Jewish committees: American Jewish Committee, 215 (n. 32); Jewish Labor Committee, 215 (n. 32) East European, 130, 139, 140, 210 (n. 25) Jewish emancipation, 130, 131, 133, 139 and gender, 135–6, 184–5 German-Jewish intellectuals, 3, 9, 54, 129–30, 131, 141, 145–6, 196 (n.19), 198 (n. 5) Hebrew, 65, 77 and the German literary intelligentsia, 196 (n. 19), 198 (n. 5) Lithuanian, 130 and modernisation, 130, 138–9, 183–5, 198 (n. 5) and re-sacralisation, 3, 130 Jewish schools: Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, 130, 131, 145; Talmudisches Seminar zu Heidelberg, 130 ‘the wandering Jew’, 185 West European, 130, 138–9 and Yiddish, 210 (n. 25) and Zionism, 134, 139 see also anti-Semitism; culture, modern Jewish; Fromm, Das jüdische Gesetz; Holocaust, the; Institute of Social Research, and Jewish backgrounds; Judaism; law, Jewish; New Thinking, the; politics, Jewish; society, social

246 Index Jews – continued integration; tradition, Jewish; Weimar Republic, Jewish ‘renaissance’ Jhering, Herbert, 205 (n. 2) joy, 140 Judaism, 3–4, 8, 24, 83, 129–30, 132, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 151–2, 153, 175, 176, 183–4, 185, 200 (n. 31), 215–16 (n. 40) and ban on graven images, 8, 24, 166–8, 170, 175–6 and Christianity, 6–7, 132, 136, 142, 147–8, 173, 176, 185–6, 212 (n. 74), 215–16 (n. 40) and disenchantment, 3–4, 8, 167, 175, 184, 185–6, 215–16 (n. 40) and galut, 133, 134 German, 138–9 Hasidic, 130, 132, 133, 136, 139–41, 142 Karaite, 131, 132, 133, 135, 138, 210 (n. 11), 210 (n. 28) as mystical rationalism, 201 (n. 39) and myth, 3–4, 65, 77–8, 80, 166–7, 175, 183–4, 185–6 national conceptions of, 78, 138, 139 Orthodox, 7, 65, 75, 76, 129, 130, 136, 137–8, 139, 140, 198 (n. 5) and patriarchy, 3–4, 166, 184 and philosophy, 54, 75, 151–2 rabbinic, 130, 136–8, 139, 141 Reform, 132, 133, 136, 137, 138–9, 140 and theology, 6–7, 133, 134, 135, 141 and sanctification, 136, 139, 186, 215–16 (n. 40) and Talmud, 130, 136–7, 141, 198 (n. 5), 210 (n. 6) as ‘true’ practice, 3 universalist conceptions of, 77–8, 83, 130 see also Bible; culture, modern Jewish; Fromm, Das jüdische Gesetz; Jews; law, Jewish; Kabbalah; messianism; New Thinking, the; politics, Jewish;

religion; tradition, Jewish; Weimar Republic, Jewish ‘renaissance’ judgement, 52, 216–17 (n. 47) Jugendkulturbewegung, see Youth Culture Movement Jünger, Ernst, 206 (n. 15) justice, 18, 21, 23, 24, 78, 79, 91, 104, 121–2, 142 justification, argumentative, 31, 45–6, 71, 74–5, 162, 166–70 of beliefs, 29–30, 61, 199 (n. 11), 199 (n. 17) and needs, 35 Kabbalah, 130, 139, 141 Kafka, Franz, 89, 206 (n. 13) Kandinsky, Wassily, 87, 88 Kant, Immanuel, 24, 48, 49, 52, 53–4, 55, 56–7, 59, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 106, 107, 124–5, 152, 187, 196 (n.25), 200 (n. 25), 208 (n. 1), 216–17 (n. 47) Critique of Pure Reason, 152, 197 (n. 46), 216–17 (n. 47) see also experience, Kant’s concept of; Enlightenment, Kantian; neo-Kantianism; philosophy, critical Katz, Jacob, 190 (n. 5) Kellner, Douglas, 209 (n. 1), 210 (n. 12) Kellner, Erich, 193 (n. 56) Keminski, Paul (Emil Gustav Paulk), 202–3 (n. 59) Kepler, Johannes, 178 Kierkegaard, Søren, 93, 147, 149, 151, 153 Kippenberg, Hans G., 190 (n. 5), 202 (n. 53) Kirchheimer, Otto, 8, 9, 105, 114–15, 115–20, 121, 146, 153 ‘Changes in the Structure of Political Compromise’, 208 (n. 5) ‘Constitutional Reform and Social Democracy’, 209 (n. 34) ‘Legality and Legitimacy’, 208 (n. 23)

Index 247 Kirchheimer, Otto – continued ‘Marxismus, Diktatur und Organisationsform des Proletariats’, 208 (n. 25) ‘Verfassungswirklichkeit und politische Zukunft der Arbeiterbewegung’, 208 (n. 24) ‘Weimar – und was dann? Analyse einer Verfassung’, 208 (n. 26) Kirschner, Bruno, 210 (n. 6) Klages, Ludwig, 199 (n. 18), 201 (n. 42) Klee, Paul, 86, 87, 88 Klein, Josef, 191 (n. 4) Klinger, Cornelia, 198 (n. 4) knowledge, 55, 56–8, 61–2, 65, 67–70, 91, 124–5, 167, 197 (n. 46) autonomy of, 67, 69, 123 and domination, 106, 122–4, 126 and experience, 55–8, 61–2, 66–7, 68–9, 91, 107, 173, 197 (n. 32) as fragmentary, 72, 84 and ‘God’, 56, 62, 65, 70–1 of God, 136, 141 and language, 59–60 and possession, 21, 124 mystical notions of, 70, 71, 200 (n. 29) new concept of, 55, 56–7, 60 pure, 56, 62, 69, 70, 199 (n. 15) and social organisation, 216–17 (n. 47) and teaching, 60–2, 70–1 the unknowable, 31, 124 the unknown, 72, 74–5, 84 see also epistemology; neoKantianism; transcendental philosophy Kohlenbach, Margarete, 190 (n. 7), 195 (n. 2), 196 (n. 16), 200 (n. 21), 200 (n. 24), 201 (n. 41), 202 (n. 57), 203 (n. 64), 206 (n. 12), 207 (n. 58) Köhnke, Christian, 196–7 (n. 26) Kokoschka, Oskar, 87, 88 Kommerell, Max, 190 (n. 2) Kornfeld, Paul, 92 Korsch, Karl, 203 (n. 66) Kracauer, Siegfried, 129

Krause, Ludwig, 130 Kraushaar, Wolfgang, 192 (n. 17), 193 (n. 53) Krech, Volkhard, 190 (n. 10) Kuhn, Fritz, 191 (n. 4) Kultursoziologie, 132–3, 210 (n. 14) Kurthen, M., 201 (n. 36) language, 89–90, 97, 206 (n. 14) absolute, 75 and art, 89 and experience, 59–61 functions of, 174, 178 and knowledge, 59–60 and philosophy, 59–60, 147–8 and religion, 59–60, 175, 177 and revelation, 59, 152 vs. science, 59 and silence, 94 and teaching, 60–1 see also expression; speech; symbolism; writing law, 94, 103–5, 115–17, 128–9, 185 constitutional, 104, 115, 116–19 and co-operatively defined entitlements, 109 divine, 7, 111, 121, 136–7 and emancipation, 104 and Enlightenment, 8, 105–6, 108–9, 117–18 and epistemology, 58, 103–4, 122–5 international, 80 Jewish, 130, 131, 132–8, 139, 140, 141, 144, 211 (n. 47) labour, 116 and Marxism, 109, 115, 116 and morality, 116, 117, 128–9, 131, 133 and mysticism, 141, 143 and myth, 91, 94, 80 national conceptions of, 111, 132–3 natural, 116 non-instrumental conceptions of, 109, 114, 116–18, 122 legal philosophy, 80, 103–27, 146, 153 and politics, 103–27 positive, 128 private, 104, 115–16, 121

248 Index law – continued public, 115 and rationality, 103–8, 110, 122–5 and religion, 91, 103–27, 132–8, 141, 143–4, 211 (n. 39) Roman, 109, 110 secularisation of, 108–9, 118, 119, 120 legal subject, 104, 106, 109, 110, 116, 122–3, 144, 208 (n. 1) and time, 108–9, 113, 126, 136, 137 legal validity, 112, 113, 115, 116, 119 legal violence, 80, 120–1 compare justice; laws; legitimacy; violence, divine; violence, mythical laws, 199 (n. 18) conformity to, 58, 61, 103–4, 177, 178, 215 (n. 33), 215–16 (n. 40) natural, 65, 177–8 Lebensphilosophie, 65, 83, 202 (n. 51) Leeuw, Gerardus van der, 202 (n. 53) Left, the, see politics, and Left–Right spectrum legitimacy, 91, 104, 114, 115, 116–17, 118–20, 121, 137 Lehre, see teaching Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 177 Letschka, Werner, 207 (n. 59) Levinas, Emmanuel, 145, 146–7, 150, 152, 153, 212 (n. 3) Levison, Daniel J., see under Adorno, ‘The Authoritarian Personality’ Lévy-Brühl, Lucien, 202 (n. 53) liberalisation, 103, 121 see also religion, liberalised liberalism, 1, 8, 40–1, 79, 103, 104–5, 115, 120–1, 128–9, 131, 138–9 liberal democracy, 116, 117 and authoritarian capitalism, 107, 115 epistemological critique of, 104 in the USA, 215 (n. 32) life, 19, 32, 35, 36, 37, 50, 52, 92, 93, 94, 116, 152, 173, 186, 213 (n. 13), 215–16 (n. 40) bodily, 81–2, 85–6 Lebensphilosophie, 65, 83, 202 (n. 51)

life force, 77, 83 ‘higher’, 203 (n. 67) of mankind, 81–2 and mimesis, 180 and values, 53 ways of, 16, 50, 53, 54, 86, 128, 130, 144, 173–4 see also everyday life Linke, Paul F., 199 (n. 9) Linse, Ulrich, 202–3 (n. 59) literature, 15, 201 (n. 43), 204 (n. 75) German twentieth-century, 89 literary intelligentsia, 53, 195 (n. 11), 196 (n. 17), 196 (n. 19), 198 (n. 5) literary mannerism, 207 (n. 37) modern, 207 (n. 58) mystical, 10 as ‘valid world order’, 52–3 see also poetry; theatre Lithuania, 130 logocracy, 202–3 (n. 59) longing, 10, 16, 19, 22–4, 25, 26, 27, 40 for the totally Other, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25 Löwenthal, Leo, 129, 182 Prophets of Deceit, 215 (n. 35), 216 (n. 46) Luchesi, Brigitte, 190 (n. 5), 202 (n. 53) Lukács, Georg, 91, 112, 208 (n. 21) Lüthi, Kurt, 194 (n. 58) Lutz-Bachmann, Matthias, 192 (n. 15), 192 (n. 20), 193 (n. 35) madness, 68, 69, 70 magia naturalis, 83 magic, 39, 161, 173, 178, 180, 202 (n. 51), 213 (n. 9) and mimesis, 180, 214 (n. 30) as profession, 215 (n. 33) as rational, 215 (n. 33) and rationalisation, 215 (n. 33), 215–16 (n. 40) and science, 178, 216 (n. 41) spiritualisation of, 174, 185–6 Maimonides, 135, 198 (n. 5) Maistre, Joseph de, 3

Index 249 Maj, Barnaba, 207 (n. 58) Malinowski, Bronislaw, 194 (n. 15) mana, 173 mankind, 7, 9, 19, 77, 97, 143, 148–9 body of, 81–2, 97, 205 (n. 77) as individuality, 81 see also humanity Mann, Thomas, 202 (n. 51) Marc, Franz, 87, 88, 205 (n. 8) Marcus, Judith, 209 (n. 2) Marcuse, Herbert, 114, 129, 216–17 (n. 47) One-Dimensional Man, 161 Marquard, Odo, 214 (n. 24) Marsch, Wolf-Dieter, 193 (n. 56) martyrdom, 91–2 Marx, Karl, 2, 22, 79, 109, 115, 129, 144 Communist Manifesto, 84 ‘Debatten über das Holzdiebstahlsgesetz’, 208 (n. 9) ‘On the Jewish Question’, 208 (n. 8) ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, 213 (n. 8) Marxism, 3–4, 16–17, 19, 23–4, 82, 92–3, 116, 209 (n. 1) Austro-, 116, 120 and Christianity, 26–7, 28 and critique of religion, 2, 3, 4, 129, 131, 144 and law, 109, 115, 116 and religion, 22, 26–7, 28 see also communism; materialism, historical materialism, 16, 21 anthropological, 8, 69, 82–4, 199 (n. 18), 204 (n. 75) historical, 79, 181, 183, 215 (n. 32), 216–17 (n. 47) political, see communism Maurer, Trude, 211 (n. 65) meaning, 39, 89, 90, 92, 125, 132, 175, 176, 178 absolute, 21 and death, 93 of death, 85, 87 and expression, 178 of life, 32, 35–6, 37, 85, 142, 148, 152 loss of, 161, 165

medicine, 146, 148 melancholy, 71, 91 Mendelssohn, Moses, 131, 141 Mendes-Flohr, R., 211 (n. 57) Menke, Bettine, 203 (n. 64) messianism, 22, 130, 135, 140, 204 (n. 74) messianic socialism, 130 metaphor, 72, 90, 206 (n. 14) and allegory, 89–90, 98 and metonymy, 89–90, 206 (n. 15) and personification, 99 and symbol, 89–90 metaphysics, 8, 54–5, 56, 57, 67, 71–2, 82, 105, 121, 124–6, 152 critique of traditional, 66, 71–2, 108, 152, 213 (n. 15) and experience, 55–6, 57, 59–60, 66, 71–2, 73–4, 107, 108–9, 121–2, 124–5 metaphysical need, 32–3, 35–8, 39, 40–1 new, 72, 74 secondary, 108, 109, 111 metonymy, 85–6 and allegory, 85–6, 89–90, 93, 99 and body, 90, 97 and the First World War, 90 of history, 97 and metaphor, 89–90, 206 (n. 15) of nature, 97 and symbol, 89–90 Metz, Johann Baptist, 27, 193 (n. 56), 194 (n. 58), 194 (n. 61), 194 (n. 62) mimesis, 180–1, 187–8, 199 (n. 18), 214 (n. 30) and ban on graven images, 167–8, 175 and body, 180, 187 magical, 180, 214 (n. 30) Mimesis ans Tote, 180, 181, 188, 214 (n. 29) rational, 180, 214 (n 29–30) and transcendental synthesis, 187 mimicry, 178, 216 (n. 41) mind, see body, and mind; mind–body problem; presence of mind; spirit

250 Index mind–body problem, 64, 72–4, 181, 198 (n. 1), 201 (n 36–7) and politics, 64 and psychophysical parallelism, 73, 74, 201 (n 36–7) and religion, 64 miracles, 65, 173, 177 ‘miracles de raison’, 177 Mittelmann, Hanni, 198 (n. 5) modernity, 4, 8–9, 39–40, 65, 78, 80, 87, 103, 128–9, 148–9, 183–5, 195–6 (n. 15), 198 (n. 5), 203 (n. 63) modern art, 85–99 and circulation, 184 and the city, 86, 92, 205 (n. 2) and experience, 67, 68, 72, 73, 74, 195–6 (n. 15) illusions of, 103, 104, 107, 121, 123, 124, 126, 131, 178 and morality, 7, 110, 128–9 and myth, 80, 178–9, 182–3, 203 (n. 66) modern rationality, 103–6, 107–8, 108–9, 122–5, 126–7, 160–2, 182–4 and religion, 2, 5, 9, 65, 131, 144, 172 modern society, 8, 39–40, 80, 103, 105, 106–7, 122–3, 183–5 modern subject, 108, 109, 123, 144, 147, 216–17 (n. 47) and technology, 85, 87, 91 see also culture, modern Jewish; Enlightenment; experience, modern; rationality, modern; individualism; Jews, and modernisation Molière, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 86 Moltmann, Jürgen, 22, 26–7, 193 (n. 38), 194 (n. 57), 194 (n. 59), 194 (n. 62), 194 (n. 63), 194 (n. 64) monism, 50, 51 monotheism, 80, 133, 143, 212 (n. 82) morality, 7, 19, 21, 34, 53–4, 95, 123, 134, 196 (n. 25) individualistic conceptions of, 7, 95, 142

and law, 116, 117, 128–9, 131, 133 and modernity, 7, 110, 128–9 and politics, 21, 78, 83, 116, 123, 142 and religion, 9, 20, 21, 30, 54–5, 83, 132, 133 social, 50, 52, 142–3 see also charity; compassion; community; constancy; ethos; responsibility; solidarity Morrow, William, see under Adorno, ‘The Authoritarian Personality’ Moses ben Maimon, 135, 198 (n. 5) Mosès, Stéphane, 212 (n. 1) mourning, 23, 25, 152 of the end of philosophy, 148 metaphysical, 124–5 music, 206 (n. 25), 141 mystery, 165, 201 (n. 42) mysticism, 61, 70, 71, 141, 163–5, 199–200 (n. 20), 200 (n. 29) mystical communities, 140 and dialectic, 203 (n. 66) and law, 141, 142 mystical monotheism, 212 (n. 82) rational, 75, 201 (n. 39) and rationalism, 177 and revolution, 163 and unification, 163–5 unio mystica, 71 mystical writing, 10 see also Kabbalah myth, 4, 6, 65, 91–2, 94, 96, 165, 171–5, 178–80, 199 (n. 18), 207 (n. 39) and body, 181 and domination, 3, 77 and enlightenment, 80, 158–9, 162, 171–2, 177–9, 180, 182–3 functional change of, 174 as early form of history, 171, 173 and imagination, 178 and modernity, 80, 178–9, 182–3, 203 (n. 66) ‘myth’ and ‘mythology’, 171–2 and norms, 178–9 and rationality, 171–4, 178–80, 182–5

Index 251 myth – continued and reality, 65, 77–8, 79, 80, 182–5, 199 (n. 11), 202 (n. 53), 204 (n. 71) and religion, 3–4, 65, 77–8, 80–1, 166–7, 172, 173–6, 180, 181, 183–4, 185–6 and repetition, 178 and reversion of history to nature, 151 and secularisation, 172 as ‘spiritual form’, 172, 173 as symbolic experience, 174 mythical thought, 172–5, 176, 178–80, 181, 215 (n. 33) and time, 95–6 mythical violence, 79, 80, 81, 94 see also mythology; order; sacrifice; ritual mythology, 57, 95, 171–2, 207 (n. 39) ancient, 173 modern, 65 ‘mythology’ and ‘myth’, 171–2 modern mythologies, 183 nationalist mythologies, 183 [neo-]pagan mythologies, 183 realist, 65, 199 (n. 11) reversion to, 80, 158–9, 162, 177–9, 182–3 see also myth; order National Socialism, 1, 2, 24, 65, 114, 119, 161, 202 (n. 51) see also fascism; Holocaust, the; Third Reich, the Natorp, Paul, 67, 208 (n. 15) natural history, 96–9 of morality, 34 of religion, 34 Naturalism, 52 nature, 18, 36, 92, 105–8, 110, 118, 122, 148, 178, 180 alienation from, 161 animate, 83, 161, 180 bodily, 81–2 domination over, 77, 110, 122, 123, 180–1, 184–5, 187, 188 and freedom, 54, 97, 118–19, 144, 178

and history, 96–9, 151 inanimate, 83, 161, 180 natural laws, 65, 177–8 and magia naturalis, 83 metonymy of, 97 and miracles, 65, 177 objectification of, 161–2, 178 and physis, 82–3, 99, 205 (n. 77) relentlessness of, 188 and religion, 96–9, 181 remembrance of, 180–1 sacred writing in, 97–8 and spirit, 50, 52, 54 as suffering, 96–9 temptation of, 185 Naville, Pierre, 204 (n. 75) needs, 37, 38–9, 49–50, 53 metaphysical need, 32–3, 35–8, 39, 40–1 negation, determinate, 124, 126, 176 negative dialectic, see Adorno, ‘Negative Dialectics’; dialectic, negative negativity, 8, 21, 23, 57, 70 Negt, Oskar, 25 neo-Kantianism, 6, 56–62, 67, 68–9, 110, 111, 112, 120, 197 (n. 31), 208 (n. 1) neo-Paganism, 2, 183, 202 (n. 53) Neumann, Franz, 8, 9, 104, 114, 115–20, 121, 146, 153, 209 (n. 35) ‘The Change in the Function of Law in Modern Society’, 208 (n. 4), 208 (n. 25), 209 (n. 31) ‘The Concept of Political Freedom’, 208 (n. 26), 209 (n. 33) ‘On the Precondition and Legal Concepts of an Economic Constitution’, 208 (n. 23), 208 (n. 27) New Thinking, the, 94, 129, 130–1, 145–53, 210 (n. 3) Newitt, R., The Authoritarian Personality, 182, 187, 215 (n. 35) Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 32, 33, 37, 40–1, 92, 147, 149, 151, 203 (n. 63) Beyond Good and Evil, 194 (n. 7)

252 Index Nietzsche, Friedrich – continued The Gay Science, 194 (n. 5), 194 (n. 11) On the Genealogy of Morality, 110, 194 (n 5–6) Human, All Too Human, 194 (n. 5), 194 (n. 11) Nipperdey, Thomas, 3, 190 (n. 5) Nobel, Anton Nehemia, 129, 130, 210 (n. 3) Noeggerath, Felix, 196 (n. 25) Nolde, Emil, 87 nominalism, 175 non-identity, see under dialectic, negative norms, 18, 108, 114, 116, 121, 128, 131, 133, 141, 143 and myth, 178–9 Nörtersheuser, Hans-Walter, 191 (n. 1), 191 (n. 6), 192 (n 10–11), 192 (n. 18), 192 (n 20–1), 192 (n. 29), 192 (n 31–2), 193 (n 36–7), 193 (n. 40), 193 (n. 42), 193 (n. 44), 193 (n. 48), 193 (n. 50) object, 76, 99, 104, 122–3, 161–2, 165 and consciousness, 73–4 and subject, 57, 69, 70–1, 74, 104, 122–3, 163, 164–5, 187–8 compare reification; things, and persons objectification, of nature, 161–2 and thought, 163, 164–5, 178, 180, 187 compare reification; things, and persons observation, empirical, 29 occult, the, 6, 68–9 Oerkel, Maike, 190 (n. 5) ontology, 61, 98, 108, 112, 124, 213 (n. 15) critique of, 145, 146 Opitz, Martin, 91 order, concept of, 48, 55 ‘future religious orders’, 46, 47, 55, 71

mythico-religious conceptions of, 5, 6, 8, 9, 32, 105, 199 (n. 18), 203 (n. 65) and ‘teaching’, 55 of the universe, 176 universal, 177 ‘world order’, 52–3, 55 organism, 76–7, 79 and ‘adaptation to otherness’, 188, 214 (n. 30) and formation, 72–3, 80, 83 and functions, 77 and processes, 116 and Volk, 72–3, 80, 81 compare pessimism, organisation of; society, social organisation orientation, 37–8 absolute, 150 and alterity, 153 need for, 35–6, 37, 142 and revelation, 148, 150, 152 otherness, 107, 147, 153, 176, 188, 214 (n. 30) the Other, 21, 22, 23, 25, 146 Ott, Michael R., 191 (n.1), 192 (n. 31), 193 (n. 36), 193 (n. 44) Otto, Rudolf, 90, 194 (n 1–3) pacifism, 202–3 (n. 59) Paganism, 80, 202 (n. 53), 215–16 (n. 40) neo-Paganism, 2, 183, 202 (n. 53) compare religions, natural painting, 86–7, 91 abstract, 87–8 and spiritual symbolism, 87–8, 89 pantheism, 50, 51–2 religious inadequacy of, 52 parallelism, psychophysical, 73, 74, 201 (n 36–7) parapsychology, 68–9, 78 past, the, 9, 99, 158 Paulk, Emil Gustav (Paul Keminski), 202–3 (n. 59) peace, 93, 129 universal, 203 (n. 63) Pensky, Max, 206 (n. 32) Penslar, Derek J., 211 (n. 60)

Index 253 perception, 67 as Lesen, 199 (n. 18) Perels, Joachim, 208 (n. 23) persecution, 8, 140, 183–5, 186–7, 188, 216–17 (n. 47) see also Holocaust, the personality, 50 personhood, 81, 108, 109, 184–5 and things, 98–9, 123, 161–2 supra-individual conception of, 81 pessimism, 19, 82, 204 (n. 75) cultural and historical, 78–9, 178–80 metaphysical, 19 organisation of, 82, 204 (n. 75) phenomenology, 146, 212 (n. 3) Philosophische Gruppe, 203 (n. 66) philosophy, 6, 16, 31, 38, 40, 47, 69, 72, 85, 105, 123, 130, 148, 149, 150–1, 213 (n. 8), 205 (n. 77) absoluteness of, 151 critical, 54, 66, 70, 107, 124–5, 152, 200 (n. 27), 208 (n. 1) critique of, 146–7 dogmatic, 66, 70–1 the end of, 145, 147, 148–9, 153 history of, 146, 148, 149 as individual philosophising, 149, 150–1, 153 and language, 59–60, 147–8 legal, 80, 103–27, 146, 153 and method, 54–5, 59, 199 (n. 6) political, 78, 79, 80, 103–27, 146, 153 realisation of, 148, 213 (n. 8) and religion, 23, 56, 65–6, 67, 76–7, 146, 150–1, 168–70, 200 (n. 21), 201 (n. 42) of religion, 30, 76, 135, 181 and science, 58–9 speculative, 67, 70, 75, 107, 123, 124, 136, 149, 199 (n. 11), 199 (n. 15), 199 (n. 17) supremacy of, 60 and ‘system’, 62–3, 150–1, 152–3, 188 systematic, 54–5, 56, 59–60, 61–2 and teaching, 61–2, 70–1

and theology, 23, 33, 151 theoretical, 74, 76 and the tragic, 90–5 philosophical universality, 47, 63, 149, 150 Western, 29–30 see also epistemology; idealism; Judaism, and philosophy; ‘Lebensphilosophie’; Marxism; materialism; metaphysics; neo-Kantianism; New Thinking, the; ontology; phenomenology; transcendental philosophy physiognomy, 91 cosmic, 199 (n. 18) of nature-history, 98 Pinsker, Leon, 211 (n. 64) Pinthus, Kurt, 7 Pirandello, Luigi, 86 Plato, 90, 97, 112 plutocracy, 140 poetry, 51–2, 180 epic, 96, 207 (n. 54) German twentieth-century, 89 pogroms, see persecution Political Theology, 1–2, 15, 26–8, 113, 117–19 politics, 4, 5, 7–9, 24, 26, 27, 78, 82, 91, 123, 153, 179 and the body, 8, 76–7, 78, 83–4, 203 (n. 65) and diplomacy, 80 Jewish, 78 and law, 103–27 and Left–Right spectrum, 2–3, 82, 113, 118, 161, 190 (n. 2) and morality, 21, 78, 83, 116, 123, 142 prophetic, 150 political movements, 6 political parties, 4, 118 and practice, 1–2, 5, 7–9, 27, 76–7, 83, 181, 203 (n. 65) and religion, 2, 4, 5, 9, 10, 15, 16, 20–1, 22, 26–8, 40, 64, 67, 76–84, 94, 107, 111, 113, 115, 116–20, 121–2, 126, 130, 132, 135, 138–9, 140, 145–6, 150, 179, 181

254 Index politics – continued religious notions of, 9, 21, 27, 28, 76–84, 94, 113, 117–20, 140, 150 secular, 5, 9, 78–9, 80, 82, 116, 117, 119, 120 and social class, 4, 81, 115, 181, 183, 203 (n. 64), 215 (n. 32), 215 (n. 36) totalitarian, 145, 183 see also capitalism; communism; compromise; conservatism; democracy; fascism; Federal Republic of Germany; First World War; hierocracy; imperialism; legitimacy; liberalism; Marxism; National Socialism; pacifism; peace; philosophy, political; plutocracy; Political Theology; power; reform; revolution; Second World War; Social Democracy; socialism; sovereignty; Student Movement of the 1960s; Third Reich, the; violence; war; Weimar Republic; Wilhelmine Germany; Youth Culture Movement Pollock, Friedrich, 17, 104, 114, 122, 146, 153 Späne, 17 Stadien des Kapitalismus, 208 (n. 3) Poma, Andrea, 213 (n. 6) Positivism, 21, 59, 175, 180, 208 (n. 1) and religion, 202 (n. 53) Post, Werner, 25, 193 (n. 49) power, 8, 77, 78, 82, 105, 113, 120–1, 140–1, 184 divine, 126 limits of human and political, 91 practice, 3, 6, 7, 9, 19, 24, 26, 27, 134–5, 136, 138 and emancipation, 2, 3, 4 magical, 39, 173, 202 (n. 51), 214 (n. 30) political, 1–2, 5, 7–9, 27, 76–7, 83, 181, 203 (n. 65) rational, 214 (n. 30)

religious, 4, 6–7, 9, 39, 76–7, 111, 134, 136, 138, 141, 142, 143–4, 152, 205 (n. 77), 211 (n. 39) social, 4, 5, 31, 181, 215 (n. 33), 215–16 (n. 40) symbolic, 7, 136, 143, 189, 211 (n. 39) and theory, 1–2, 7, 16, 21, 23, 27, 64, 76–7, 79, 136, 142, 148, 151–2, 213 (n. 8) Pratt, Vernon, 199 (n. 8) prayer, 141 presence of mind, 78 present, the, 27, 48, 55, 158 see also relevance, contemporary preservation, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27 self-, 36, 74, 181, 186, 187, 188 Preuß, Hugo, 110 progress, 41, 82, 175, 177–80, 184, 185 progression, infinite and sacred, 95 profanation, 51 profane, the, see secularity proletariat, 81, 203 (n. 64), 215 (n. 32), 215 (n. 36) Protestant Church Congress (Cologne 1965), 20 Protestantism, 2, 7, 20, 23, 34, 40, 111, 142, 151, 153, 202 (n. 53), 215–16 (n. 40) and capitalism, 139, 215–16 (n. 40) psychoanalysis, 32, 131 and critique of religion, 3, 35, 36, 37–8, 129, 144 and Erich Fromm, 131, 139, 141–4, 209 (n. 1) and ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’, 181, 186–8, 215 (n. 32), 216–17 (n. 47) and religion, 131, 142, 143–4 psychocracy, 202–3 (n. 59) psychology, 68, 217 (n. 49) social, 142–3, 144 Quintilian, Marcus Fabius, 90, 98 Rabinkow, Salman Baruch, 130–1, 132, 210 (n. 6), 210 (n. 13)

Index 255 radicalism, 16, 39–40, 79, 112–13, 115, 119, 141–2, 144, 188 Rahner, Karl, 20, 27, 193 (n. 56), 194 (n. 60) Rang, Florens Christian, 94, 147 Ranke, Leopold von, 137 rationalisation, 103, 121 and magic, 215 (n. 33), 215–16 (n. 40) rationalism, 37, 40, 61, 76, 139, 177 mystical, 201 (n. 39) and mysticism, 177 rationality, 37, 63, 68, 69, 74–5, 78, 183–5 and domination, 106, 122–4, 126, 161–2, 181, 182–3, 184–5, 186 goal-, 79, 80, 117, 187 and law, 103–8, 110, 122–5 and magic, 215 (n. 33), 215–16 (n. 40) and mimesis, 180, 214 (n 29–30) modern, 103–6, 107–8, 108–9, 122–5, 126–7, 161–2, 182–4 and myth, 171–4, 178–80, 182–5 and religion, 61, 149–50, 172 and sacrifice, 186, 187, 215–16 (n. 40) and self-destruction, 182–3 and ‘symbol’, 177 technical, 161–2 value-, 79, 114, 134 see also justification, argumentative; reason Raulet, Gérard, 190 (n. 5), 191 (n. 1), 191 (n. 2), 193 (n. 45), 195 (n. 7), 214 (n. 25), 217 (n. 49) reaction, 111, 113 aesthetic, 52 realisation, 64, 76–8, 79, 82 of philosophy, 148, 213 (n. 8) reality, 74, 99 mathematisation of, 161–2 self-transcendence of, 84 see also myth, and reality reason, 59, 78–9, 106–7 and autonomy, 105, 106–7, 109, 120, 121–2, 123–4, 125–7 formal, 104–5, 106–7, 110, 111, 112, 122, 124, 125, 126, 175

instrumental, 20–1, 39–41, 106, 161–2 practical, 53, 105 regulatory function of, 103–4, 105, 112, 120, 123, 124 and revelation, 61, 149–50 as secondary metaphysics, 108, 109, 111 see also rationality Reber, Arthur S., 201 (n. 36) reconciliation, 157, 165, 181 compare religion, as psychic compensation redemption, 18–19, 23, 25, 26, 91, 96, 98, 140, 176 reification, 108, 109, 125, 127 reform, 2, 4, 24, 115 life reform, 6 reformation, 4, 34–5 regularity, see laws, conformity to Reichenbach, Hans, 203 (n. 66) Reichmann, Frieda, 131 Reijen, Willem van, 190 (n. 3) relativism, 24 relevance, contemporary, 47–8, 50, 53, 55, 63, 84, 158, 195 (n. 4) religion, 24, 26, 31, 40, 49, 53, 54–5, 62–3, 64, 67–8, 69–71, 75–6, 106, 136–7, 143–4, 145–6, 173–6 atheistic, 131, 143 religious attitudes, 5, 7, 111, 134, 142 religious beliefs, 5, 6–7, 8, 30, 33, 34, 35, 130, 132, 134–5, 140, 142, 199 (n. 11) and community, 51, 77, 135, 136, 138–9, 140, 151–2, 153 religious contents, 8, 9, 111, 113, 118–19, 124–5, 127 as a cultural system, 5, 9 problem of defining, 5, 16, 31, 33–4, 45–6, 61–2, 190 (n. 10) and domination, 2, 4, 19–20, 35, 77, 129, 183, 186 and edification, 161, 168 religious emotions, 18–19, 31–2, 136, 137, 138, 140 as experience, 31–2, 51, 136, 199 (n. 17)

256 Index religion – continued religious experience, 8, 49, 54–5, 56–8, 59–60, 64–74, 76–84, 106–7, 121, 124–5, 197–8 (n. 47) functions of, 9, 20–1, 23, 32–3, 142, 191 (n. 16) humanistic, 131, 143 and ideology, 2, 4, 19–20, 144, 185–6, 190 (n. 6), 202 (n. 51) ‘indispensability’ of, 8, 10, 117, 118–20, 121–2, 125, 127, 142 religious institutions, 4, 20, 26, 34–5 and language, 59–60, 175, 177 and law, 91, 103–27, 132–8, 141, 143–4, 211 (n. 39) liberalised, 131, 135, 138–9, 140, 141, 143, 144, 192 (n. 30), 192 (n. 32), 194 (n. 18) and metaphysical need, 32–3, 35–8, 39, 40–1 and modernity, 2, 5, 9, 65, 131, 144, 172 and morality, 9, 20, 21, 30, 54–5, 83, 132, 133 religious movements, 34–5, 140–1 and myth, 3–4, 65, 77–8, 80–1, 166–7, 172, 173–6, 180, 181, 183–4, 185–6 national conceptions of, 77–8, 138, 139 and nature, 96–9, 181 new, 9, 10, 45–7, 50, 51, 53, 69 as non-doxastic, 31–3, 134–5 and philosophy, 23, 56, 65–6, 67, 76–7, 146, 150–1, 168–70, 200 (n. 21), 201 (n. 42) and politics, 2, 4, 5, 9, 10, 15, 16, 20–1, 22, 26–8, 40, 64, 67, 76–84, 94, 107, 111, 113, 115, 116–20, 121–2, 126, 130, 132, 135, 138–9, 140, 145–6, 150, 179, 181 religious practice, 4, 6–7, 9, 39, 76–7, 111, 134, 136, 138, 141, 142, 143–4, 152, 205 (n. 77), 211 (n. 39) as psychic compensation, 35, 36, 37, 46, 129, 144

radicalism of, 16, 141–2, 144 and rationality, 61, 149–50, 172 and rhetoric, 95–9, 157 religious sects, 138, 210 (n. 11), 210 (n. 28) and secularity, 26–7, 117, 118–20, 121–2, 125, 126–7, 130, 136–7, 142, 176 and social class, 16, 20, 129, 136, 139, 140, 141–2, 183 and social organisation, 4, 31, 34–5, 132, 181, 184, 215–16 (n. 40) systematic classification of, 56 and theology, 6–7, 30–3, 133, 134, 135, 158 religious thought, 4, 6, 7, 9, 30, 138, 143, 145–6, 175–6, 199 (n. 6), 199 (n. 11) and truth, 6, 20, 33, 65, 75, 143, 163–7, 199 (n. 11), 199 (n. 17) universal presence of, 142 universalist conceptions of, 77–8, 83, 130, 202 (n. 54) see also art, and religion; creation; creatureliness; critique of religion; cult; deism; Expressionism, and religion; faith; God; gods; Horkheimer Dispute; hope; immanence; law, divine; longing; Marxism, and religion; monotheism; mysticism; order; pantheism; philosophy, of religion; politics, religious notions of; Positivism, and religion; psychoanalysis, and religion; reconciliation; redemption; religions; revelation; resurrection; sacred, the; sacrifice; salvation; secularisation, and re-sacralisation; teaching; theism; theology; tradition; transcendence; violence, divine; violence, religious religions, archaic, 40 historical, 9, 46–7 Indian, 24, 30, 33, 83, 205 (n. 81) ‘inner-worldly’, 215–16 (n. 40)

Index 257 religions – continued natural, 68–9, 74, 186 non-Western, 5, 30 Western, 5, 6 see also Bible; Christianity; Judaism; Paganism; religion religiosity, 45–6, 53, 75, 141 of the future, 50 quasi-religious attitudes, 79 ‘vagabond’, 3, 4 Rembrandt, R. Harmensz van Rijn, 86–7 remembrance, 5, 9, 23, 24, 195–6 (n. 15) faith as, 27 of nature within the subject, 180–1 Renaissance, 173 Rensmann, Lars, 215 (n. 32) resistance, 26, 40, 142 to totality, 146, 150 responsibility, 8, 104, 108, 110, 142 resurrection, 82, 99 revelation, 29, 47, 75, 136–7, 147, 148, 149–52, 153, 165, 211 (n. 47) and language, 61, 152 and orientation, 148, 150, 152 and reason, 61, 149–50 revolt, 80, 92 revolution, 4, 20, 23–4, 26, 27, 80, 81, 82–3, 115 and mysticism, 163 spiritual, 88 theology of, 26–7 revolutionary violence, 80–1, 204 (n. 69) rhetoric, tradition of, 90 see also Critical Theory, and rhetoric Rickert, Heinrich, 201 (n. 37) Riegl, Alois, 196 (n. 18) Right, the, see politics, and Left–Right spectrum ritual, 7, 8, 9, 31, 75, 77, 94, 136, 142, 143, 173, 181, 185–6, 211 (n. 39) and fear, 32, 215–16 (n. 40) magical, 186 in National Socialism, 2 and pogroms, 187 and science, 178, 216 (n. 41)

and technology, 202 (n. 51), 205 (n. 77) Rohde, Erwin, 207 (n. 54) Rohkrämer, Thomas, 198 (n. 4) Romanticism, 6, 142 romantic thought, 10, 72–3, 83, 95–6 neo-Romantic reception of Hasidism, 130, 141 Rose, Gillian, 149, 213 (n. 9) Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen, 145 (note), 146, 147–8, 150, 152, 153 Die Europäischen Revolutionen, 146 Out of Revolution, 146 Rosenzweig, Franz, 94, 129, 131, 145–6, 147, 148–9, 150–2, 153, 212 (n. 3) Halevi translation, 148 ‘Nehemia Anton Nobel’, 210 (n. 3) ‘The New Thinking’, 145–6, 148, 212 (n. 4) The Star of Redemption, 94, 146, 147–8, 151–2, 153, 213 (n. 13) ‘Transposed Fronts’, 147, 213 (n. 5) Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, 149 ‘Urzelle’ to The Star of Redemption, 148, 149–50, 213 (n 10–11) ruins, 91, 98 and Trümmer, 98, 206 (n. 18) sacred, the, 32, 39, 81, 95, 97, 136 sacred feeling, 18 and secularity, 21, 32, 91, 97, 136, 139, 176 see also sanctification; secularisation, and re-sacralisation sacrifice, 92, 94, 173, 185–6, 187, 206 (n. 31) of reason, 185 and rationality, 186, 187, 215–16 (n. 40) salvation, 6, 30, 108, 157, 167, 185 and certitudo salutis, 185, 215–16 (n. 40) and Unheil, 157–8, 213 (n. 1) Samuel, R. (n. 24) Sánchez, Juan José, 191 (n. 1), 192 (n. 18), 193 (n. 48), 193 (n. 49)

258

Index

sanctification, 136, 139, 186, 215–16 (n. 40) satisfactio vicarians, 186 scepticism, 35, 50, 67, 70 Schäfer, Gert, 209 (n. 32) Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Josef, 150, 207 (n. 39) Schlegel, Friedrich, 93 Schlemmer, Oskar, 88 Schmid Noerr, Gunzelin, 19, 191 (n.1), 191 (n. 3), 192 (n. 12), 192 (n. 16) Schmidt, Alfred, 18, 19 Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl, 87 Schmitt, Carl, 111, 113, 117–19, 190 (n. 2), 203 (n. 66), 209 (n 28–30), 209 (n. 35) Schmitt, Hans-Jürgen, 206 (n. 22) Schnädelbach, Herbert, 196–7 (n. 26), 198 (n. 4) Schnurbein, Stefanie von, 190 (n. 5) Scholem, Gershom, 56, 62, 195 (n. 8), 197 (n. 31), 198 (n. 49), 198 (n 1–2), 198 (n. 5), 199 (n. 7), 201 (n. 42), 202 (n. 54), 205 (n. 4), 210 (n. 6), 210 (n. 10), 210 (n. 12), 211 (n. 47), 211 (n. 55), 211 (n. 62), 212 (n. 72) Schopenhauer, Arthur, 19, 21, 24, 147, 149, 151 science, 35, 36, 37–8, 66, 68–9, 178, 180 applied sciences, 76 autonomy of, 56 vs. language, 59 and magic, 178, 216 (n. 41) mathematical sciences, 54, 66, 68, 161–2, 177, 178 natural sciences, 199 (n. 11) in neo-Kantianism, 56, 57–60 and philosophy, 58–9 as ritual, 178, 216 (n. 41) social sciences, 4, 6 as symbolic experience, 174 scientific world views, 38, 66 see also anthropology; biology; medicine; psychology; sociology

Second Vatican Council, 20, 26 Second World War, 23–4 secularisation, 4, 18, 26–7, 111, 112, 116, 118–20, 125, 143, 172 critique of, 103–7, 108–9, 121–2, 125, 126–7, 143–4 of law, 108–9, 118, 119, 120 and myth, 172 of religious concepts, 143 and re-sacralisation, 3, 111, 130, 139, 183, 215 (n. 33) of time, 108–9 secularity, 32, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 106–7, 116, 117, 119, 120–1, 122, 125, 126, 143–4, 176 and religion, 26–7, 117, 118–20, 121–2, 125, 126–7, 130, 136–7, 142, 176 and the sacred, 21, 32, 91, 97, 136, 139, 176 and ‘symbol’, 95 see also politics, secular Segel, Binjamin, 212 (n. 71) self-alienation, 50 self-control, 123 self-deception, 65, 121 self-destruction, 182–3 self-hatred, 181, 188 self-preservation, 36, 74, 181, 186, 187, 188 self-transcendence, of reality, 84 semantic analysis, 15–16, 191 (n. 4) semiotics, 96, 97 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 91 sensibility, 58 and intellect, 53–4 Siebert, Rudolf, 193 (n. 55) Shakespeare, William, 86 Shaw, George Bernard, 86 Simmel, Georg, 110, 190 (n. 10), 206 (n. 18), 208 (n. 13) Simon, Ernst, 129 Sinzheimer School (of labour law), 116 sociability, 141 Social Democracy, 104 social psychology, 142–4 socialisation, 188 of the economy, 116, 119

Index 259 socialism, 93 messianic, 130 society, 36, 37, 78, 93, 179 bourgeois, 92, 105, 123, 138 and change, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 136 and circulation, 184 and class, 16, 18, 112, 115, 129, 136, 139, 140, 141–2, 181, 183 and human nature, 116–20 social integration, 139, 179, 189, 211 (n. 62) Islamic, 138 liberal, 41, 103, 104–5, 120–1, 131 ‘the social mechanism’, 49–50 and misery, 50 modern, 8, 39–40, 80, 103, 105, 106–7, 122–3, 183–5 non-Western societies, 5–6 social organisation, 4, 31, 132, 181, 184, 215–16 (n. 40), 216–17 (n. 47) and ‘organism’, 72–3, 76–7, 79, 80 social practice, 4, 5, 31, 181, 215 (n. 33), 215–16 (n. 40) pre-modern societies, 4, 5–6, 173–4, 215–16 (n. 40) and the private sphere, 80 social relationships, 143, 161–2, 213 (n. 9) the social, 32, 50, 144 and symbolism, 179, 189 Western societies, 2 sociology, 6, 16, 130 of culture (‘Kultursoziologie’), 132–3, 210 (n. 14) and psychology, 142–4 see also thought, socio-biological solace, see consolation solidarity, 7–8, 19, 21, 22, 126 solitude, 8 Söllner, Alfons, 208 (n. 4) Sombart, Werner, 139, 215–16 (n. 40) Sophocles, 91, 206 (n. 31) Sorel, Georges, 204 (n. 69) soul, 66, 90, 94, 204 (n. 73) sovereignty, 118, 203 (n. 65) speculation, see philosophy, speculative

speech, 95, 99, 148, 152 Spinoza, Baruch de, 160 spirit, 50–1, 52, 53, 79, 90, 103, 141, 185–6, 195 (n. 11) absolute, 40 divine, 137 spiritual forces, 77 spiritual form, 172, 173 humanistic, 143 and nature, 50, 52, 54 religious, 53 spiritual symbolism, 87–8 unconscious, 74 of utopia, 180 Volksgeist, 72, 73–4, 76–7, 200 (n. 31) compare body, and mind; mind-body problem spiritualisation, 50–1, 52, 141, 174–5, 185–6, 195 (n. 11) Spülbeck, Volker, 193 (n. 55), 194 (n. 62) Stachel, Paul, 206 (n. 19) Steiner, Uwe, 201 (n. 45), 204 (n. 73), 204 (n. 74) Stemberger, Günter, 211 (n. 47) Stern, Fritz, 79, 198 (n. 4) stoicism, 91 Strauss, Ludwig, 195 (n. 9), 195 (n. 11), 196 (n 17–18) strike, general proletarian, 81, 203 (n. 64) Student Movement of the 1960s, 1–2, 7 Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, 15, 17–18, 20, 23, 26, 27, 28 subcultures, 3 subject, 8, 57–8, 40, 95, 122–3, 125, 151, 178, 184–5, 216–17 (n. 47) autonomy of, 104, 123, 125 and false projection, 186–8 legal, 104, 106, 109, 110, 116, 122–3, 144, 208 (n. 1) modern, 108, 109, 123, 144, 147, 216–17 (n. 47) and object, 57, 69, 70–1, 74, 104, 122–3, 163, 164–5, 187–8 ‘remembrance of nature within the’, 180–1

260 Index subject – continued see also individual, the; inwardness; personhood; self-preservation; things, and persons subsumption, 216–17 (n. 47) suffering, 18–19, 23, 30, 36, 37, 90, 92, 93, 94 of nature, 96–9 and self-preservation, 181, 187 supernatural, the, 65, 66 suppression, 4, 8, 53, 123, 129, 131, 161–2, 186 of natural impulses, 110, 123, 181, 184–5, 187 Surrealism, 83–4, 204 (n. 75) Sutherland, Stuart, 201 (n. 36) symbol, 177 and allegory, 89–90, 95–6, 97–8 Classical concept of, 95 and metaphor, 89–90 and metonymy, 89–90 symbolic forms, see forms, symbolic symbolism, 97, 98, 172, 173–6, 177–80, 189 and abstraction, 177 and experience, 174 in Expressionist painting, 87–8, 89 and knowledge, 61 and practice, 7, 136, 143, 211 (n. 39) and rationalism, 177 and society, 179, 189 Szondi, Peter, 92, 93, 206 (n. 17) taboo, 32, 39, 40, 173, 180 Tagliacozzo, Tamara, 196 (n. 25) Talmudisches Seminar zu Heidelberg, 130 Tarr, Zoltan, 209 (n. 2) task, infinite, 62 Tasso, Torquato, 207 (n. 37) Taubes, Jacob, 202 (n. 51), 214 (n. 24) teaching (‘Lehre’), 48, 51, 55–6, 60–2, 70–1, 75, 199 (n. 7) and knowledge, 60–2, 70–1 and language, 60–1 and ‘order’, 55 and philosophy, 61–2, 70–1 and religion, 60–2

and ‘system’, 62 compare tradition, Jewish technology, 76, 82–3, 91, 205 (n. 77) modern, 85, 87, 91 and ritual, 202 (n. 51), 205 (n. 77) compare reason, instrumental temporality, 48, 55, 59, 91, 108–9, 126, 147, 148–9, 152 Tesauro, Emmanuele, 207 (n. 37) theatre, 52, 86 Brechtian, 95, 99, 207 (n. 58) Expressionist, 86, 88–9, 91–3 see also tragedy; ‘Trauerspiel’ theism, 20–1 lack of theistic belief, 130 theodicy, 32, 35 theology, 1–2, 5, 33, 34, 35, 78, 105–6, 108, 109, 111, 113, 149, 157–8 apologetic, 6–7 Christian, 1–2, 3, 6–7, 26, 35–6, 92–3, 111, 113, 151 dogmatic, 2, 6–7, 35, 131, 134, 141 ‘inverse’, 5 and Judaism, 6–7, 133, 134, 135, 141 of liberation, 2, 26, 27, 186 Lutheran, 111, 113 modern, 65, 78 negative, 8, 21, 23 and philosophy, 23, 33, 151 political, 1–2, 15, 26–8, 113, 117–19 and religion, 6–7, 30–3, 133, 134, 135, 158 ‘of the world’, 26 see also eschatology; God; gods; Heilsgeschichte; monotheism; teaching; theism theory, 24, 26 ‘critical and dogmatic’, 70–1, 196–7 (n. 26) and happiness, 10 and practice, 1–2, 7, 16, 21, 23, 27, 64, 76–7, 79, 136, 142, 148, 151–2, 213 (n. 8) ‘traditional’, 24 see also Critical Theory Theunissen, Michael, 208 (n. 7), 213 (n. 15)

Index 261 thing-in-itself, 56, 62, 73 things, and persons, 98–9, 123, 161–2 thinkableness, 72, 75, 76 thinking, see thought Third Reich, the, 2, 4, 6, 116, 119 see also fascism; Holocaust, the; National Socialism thought, 58, 76, 173–4, 215 (n. 33) ancient Greek, 148–9 enlightened, 158, 178 medieval, 148–9 modern, 148–9 and objectification, 163, 164–5, 178, 180, 187 and possession, 104, 107, 124 socio-biological, 72–3, 74, 76–7, 79, 83–4, 205 (n. 77) utilitarian, 39–40 utopian, 4, 40, 163–4 see also myth, mythical thought; New Thinking, the; order; religion, religious thought; thinkableness; wishful thinking Tillich, Paul, 23, 24, 111 time, 96, 143 as durée, 124 filled, 109, 122 and law, 108–9, 113, 126, 136, 137 secularisation of, 108–9 and space, 32, 67, 152 and truth, 47–8, 55, 67, 71–2, 108, 109, 112, 148–9 and validity, 47–8, 55, 67, 108, 112, 127 see also experience, temporal; future, the; past, the; present, the; relevance, contemporary; remembrance; temporality; transience Toller, Ernst, 92 totality, of experience, 61–2, 70 resistance to, 146, 150 totemism, 68, 69, 77, 173 tradition, 70, 75, 76, 106, 121, 128–9, 137–8, 144 traditional culture, 128–9, 139, 144 critique of, 128–9

dynamism of, 129, 137, 138 idealisation of, 128–9 invention of, 129 Jewish, 129–30, 130–1, 134, 135, 136–8, 139, 141 Judaeo-Christian, 173 Lithuanian-Jewish, 130 and work, 139 tragedy, 85, 90–5, 207 (n. 39), 207 (n. 54) transcendence, 3, 21, 26–7, 40, 124–5, 176, 180 of consciousness, 73 and reality, 84 transcendental consciousness, 58, 68, 69, 73–4 transcendental dialectic, 54 transcendental logic, 54, 57, 74 transcendental philosophy, 57–60, 67–9, 71–2, 124–5, 199 (n. 17), 216–17 (n. 47) and ‘social schematism’, 216–17 (n. 47) and subject, 57–8 see also epistemology; neoKantianism; philosophy, critical transcendental synthesis, and mimesis, 187 transience, 91, 97–8, 99, 147 Trauerspiel, 85, 91, 93, 98–9, 207 (n. 39) Trommler, Frank, 190–1 (n. 11) Trümmer, 98, 206 (n. 18) truth, 33, 65, 68–9, 76, 108, 112, 124, 164, 170, 175–6, 199 (n. 17) and appearance, 33 correspondence theory of, 176, 199 (n. 17) as disclosure, 163–4, 165–7 and time, 47–8, 55, 67, 71–2, 108, 109, 112, 148–9 verum index sui et falsi, 164 will to, 38 see also religion, and truth; Wittgenstein, saying and showing Udoff, Alan, 212 (n. 4) Ulbricht, Justus, H., 190 (n. 5)

262 Index unconscious, see consciousness, absence of unfreedom, see suppression Unger, Erich, 64–7, 71–9, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 198–9 (n 5–6), 199 (n. 11), 200 (n. 27), 203 (n. 63), 203 (n. 65), 204 (n. 75), 205 (n. 77) ‘Constitution and Spirit of the German Universities since the National-Socialist Revolution’, 202 (n. 51) ‘Ethics, Nature and Reality’, 203 (n. 66), 205 (n. 77) Gegen die Dichtung, 200 (n. 27), 200 (n 28–30), 200 (n. 32), 201 (n 34–5), 201 (n. 38), 201 (n. 43), 202 (n. 46) ‘Die Gehemmten’, 204 (n. 75) ‘Gott, Mensch und Evolution’, 205 (n. 77) ‘The Imagination of Reason’, 200 (n. 30) ‘Der Krieg’, 81, 203 (n. 63), 204 (n. 69), 204 (n. 71) Das Lebendige und das Goettliche, 199 (n. 6), 199 (n. 11), 200 (n. 33), 203 (n. 66), 205 (n. 80) ‘Modern Judaism’s Need for Philosophy’, 201 (n. 40) ‘Mythos und Wirklichkeit’, 199 (n. 10) ‘Erich Unger’s “The Natural Order of Miracles” ‘, 205 (n. 77), 205 (n 80–1) Politik und Metaphysik, 64, 76, 79, 200 (n. 33), 202 (n. 47), 202 (n. 50), 202 (n 56–7), 202–3 (n 58–9), 203 (n 60–3), 203 (n. 65), 204 (n. 76) Das Problem der mythischen Realität, 65, 198 (n. 5), 201 (n. 40), 202 (n. 49), 202 (n. 53) Das psychophysiologische Problem und sein Arbeitsgebiet, 198 (n.1), 199 (n. 11), 201 (n. 37), 202 (n. 48), 205 (n. 81) ‘A Restatement of Judaism’, 200 (n. 31)

Die staatslose Bildung eines jüdischen Volkes, 78, 199 (n. 11), 202 (n. 54) ‘Erich Unger’s “Der Universalismus des Hebräertuns” ‘, 202 (n. 54) ‘Use and Misuse of the Unknown’, 201 (n. 39), 201 (n. 44) ‘Verteidigung eines Werkes gegen seinen Autor’, 200 (n. 27) Wirklichkeit, Mythos, Erkenntnis, 190–1 (n. 11), 200 (n 29–30), 201 (n. 42), 202 (n. 48), 203 (n. 66), 205 (n. 77) United States of America, 1, 210 (n.1), 215 (n. 32), 216–17 (n. 47) Urbach, Ephraim, 211 (n. 47) uselessness, 39–40 utility, 39 utopia, 163, 180 hypostatisation of, 163–7, 167–8 utopian thought, 4, 40, 163 validity, 47, 52–3, 55, 106, 108, 125, 126–7 generalised conceptions of, 104 legal, 112, 113, 115, 116, 119 and time, 47–8, 55, 67, 108, 112, 127 universal, 47, 63, 71, 178 values, 68, 79, 111, 112, 128, 201 (n. 43) and life, 53 Vital, David, 210 (n. 24) violence, 90, 91, 184–5, 187, 203 (n. 65) democratic, 79, 80 divine, 80, 81, 126, 203 (n. 64), 203 (n. 67) legal, 80, 120–1 mythical, 79, 80, 81, 94 and non-violent means, 80, 203 (n. 64) pure, 81 religious, 79, 80 revolutionary, 80–1, 204 (n. 69) Voigts, Manfred, 198 (n. 5), 199 (n. 11) Volk, 72, 73, 77–8, 80, 81, 82, 132, 204 (n. 71) body of, 77

Index 263 Volk – continued völkisch ideology, 202 (n. 51) and the individual, 81, 132, 200 (n. 31) and ‘organism’, 72–3, 80, 81 Volksgeist, 72, 73–4, 76–7, 200 (n. 31) Volksgott, 200 (n. 31) Voltaire, (François-Marie Arouet), 34–5, 165 war, 92, 93, 81, 204 (n. 69) cultic conceptions of, 204 (n. 71) see also First World War; Second World War Weber, Alfred, 132–3, 210 (n. 14) Weber, Max, 111, 113, 120, 134, 139, 182, 208 (n. 16), 215 (n. 33), 215–16 (n. 40) Weigel, Sigrid, 207 (n. 42) Weil, Felix J., 1 Weil, Simone, 207 (n. 54) Weimar Classicism, 52, 95 Weimar Republic, 3, 4, 6, 79, 110–13, 217 (n. 49) Jewish ‘renaissance’, 11, 130, 131 Weissbach, Richard, 200 (n. 29) Weizsäcker, Victor von, 147, 148 Werfel, Franz, 91–2

Wertheimer, Jack, 211 (n. 65) Westarp, Michael, 193 (n. 51) Wiedenhofer, Siegfried, 193 (n. 55), 194 (n. 57), 194 (n. 62) Wiggershaus, Rolf, 1 Wilhelmine Germany, 3, 4, 6, 110, 198 (n. 5) wishful thinking, 35, 38 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 33 saying and showing, 164, 165 work, 49–50, 104, 106, 139, 146, 183, 214 (n. 30), 215 (n. 33), 215–16 (n. 40) world views, 5, 9, 38 scientific, 38, 66 writing, 95, 97–9, 176 Wyneken, Gustav, 75, 200 (n. 25) Xenophanes, 29, 35 Yeats, E. D., 207 (n. 42) Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 212 (n. 79) Youth Culture Movement, 9, 49, 75, 76, 196 (n. 19) Zevi, Sabbatai, 140 Zickel, Reinhold, 92 Ziolkowski, Theodore, 190–1 (n. 11)