The Early Frankfurt School &38; Religion

Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss, eds. The Early Frankfurt School and Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. x + 263 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4039-3557-1.

Reviewed for H-German by Emily J. Levine, History Department, Stanford University.

Dialectics of Enlightenment

This volume is the outcome of a growing academic interest in the relationship between religion and Enlightenment broadly conceived. Just as recent works have rewritten religion back into the Enlightenment narrative so, too, this volume reminds us that critical theory was not entirely hostile to religion as was once thought.[1] As Kohlenbach and Geuss explain in their introduction, critical theory was first introduced to the West in the postwar period by the neo-Marxist student movement of the 1960s. Attracted to critical theory because of its claim to link social theory and political practice, the student movement nonetheless simply ignored or suppressed any anti-liberal features of the philosophy that did not fit their own philosophy. This attitude extended to any affinities between critical theory and religious traditions. If the Left adopted a secularized form of critical theory for its political purposes, then the theological camp, for its part, exaggerated the existential concerns of critical theory as justification for its own arguments against the privatization of religion and 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” (emphasis in original, p. 2).

The outcome of a working conference held at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at the University of Bielefeld in September 2003, this volume of 11 essays re-examines the role of religion in critical theory. The volume follows on the tails of recent historical analysis by Thomas Nipperdey, among others, on the “secularisation and re-sacralisation” of German society in the decades leading up to 1933 (p. 3). Because of its members’ deep animosity towards the Enlightenment project and, at the same time, their insistence on the implication of religion and myth in the alienation of
the liberal subject, not to mention their own assimilated Jewish backgrounds, the Frankfurt School presents a challenge to attempts to reach a coherent view on this subject. As Kohlenbach and Geuss argue, “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” (p. 4).

The excellent introduction is followed by essays grouped rather loosely according to particular historical contexts, conceptual questions or the analysis of texts from different perspectives. In part 1, “Students, Theologians, Critical Theorists,” Pascal Eitler discusses the controversy in Germany in the early 1970s over Max Horkheimer’s alleged “conversion,” which was sparked by an interview published in _Der Spiegel_ on January 5, 1970. Raymond Geuss also contributes an essay to
this section about changes in the philosophical discussion of religion in the post-Enlightenment period.

Despite Howard Caygill’s caveat in the volume that work on the relationship between religion and critical theory has remained limited to the works of Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig (p. 145), part 2, “Constructions of Religious Experience,” focuses exclusively on Walter
Benjamin and “just what Benjamin may have meant by ‘religion’” (p. 45). Pierfrancesco Fiorato’s essay offers a commentary on Benjamin’s early religious thought and his critical engagement with the Marburg School. Also in this section, Margarete Kohlenbach compares Benjamin’s religious
and political thought with the reconstruction of religious experience in Jewish philosopher Erich Unger’s philosophy of religion. Finally, Barnaba Maj interprets Benjamin’s idea of allegory as a methodological and rhetorical response to the religious theme in Expressionist art
against the backdrop of the destruction of the First World War.

The third section, “Legal Philosophy and Jewish Tradition,” is the strongest of the book’s divisions, adding valuable insights and perspectives to this important topic. Here Chris Thornhill reconstructs
common themes in the legal philosophy of the early Frankfurt School and its critique of liberalism in the context of contemporary thinkers such as Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger. The section also includes essays by both David Groiser and Howard Caygill, who focus in different ways on
the relevance of critical theory to the so-called Jewish Renaissance of Weimar culture.

Thornhill argues that critical theory’s critique of Enlightenment was necessarily wed to a critique of modern legal theory because of the way that modern rationality supplanted all natural and metaphysical law with its own regulating system. Thornhill does an excellent job of
summarizing the paradoxical relationship of religion to critical theory, which is revealed by his critique of the modern legal subject: “[T]he 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 humanized 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” (p. 127). In other words, Enlightenment rid itself of religion in order to be free and critical theory, in turn, must utilize religion once again to rectify the
unfreedom of Enlightenment.

Because of his success in placing the questions of religion in the context of a broader debate on legality in the 1920s, Thornhill’s essay also illustrates explicitly what is latent in some of the other essays: the varying political tendencies of the re-sacralization of critique of the Enlightenment and the modern legal subject. That the philosophies of modernity could culminate in politics either of the Right or Left is an argument one finds in many works of European cultural and intellectual
history of this period.[2] Thornhill’s summary of the legal critiques of thinkers as politically diverse as Georg Lukács and Heidegger make this point clear. “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” (p. 112).

David Grosier’s essay in the same section dovetails nicely with Thornhill’s, illustrating that this paradox of Enlightenment plays itself out in the parallel development of religion itself, insofar as
religion becomes wedded to the ideology of Enlightenment and emancipation in the modern period. Just as Kant seemed to offer freedom from any naturally or metaphysically revealed order by turning modern rationality into its own law, so, too, Moses Mendelssohn and William von
Humboldt had freedom of religion in mind when they resisted the right of the state to dictate belief. The irony is that both developments produced a “mixture of formal liberalism and substantial dogmatism” that left the individual anything but free in the eyes of critical theorists (p. 131).

That critical theory was slightly more susceptible to religious alternatives because of its deep animosity for the so-called first Enlightenment is a subtle irony mentioned by Geuss but surprisingly not commented upon by other contributors. In fact, Geuss argues that if the
three main features of critical theory are that it “(1) 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 fear of instrumental reason,” then, “in all three of these respects it shows itself to be very similar to well-known properties of archaic religions” (p. 40).

In the final section, “Dialectic of Enlightenment Reconsidered,” the dialectics of Enlightenment and religion are addressed in the texts that deal explicitly with the topic. Rüdiger Bittner argues that while Theodor Adorno and Horkheimer lay claim to a dialectically structured argument, they in fact present not the dialectics of Enlightenment, but rather the failure of a historical development. Moreover, Bittner contends that their critique of instrumental rationality rests on religious assumptions. For Bittner, the irony of the _Dialectic of Enlightenment_ (1947) is that their critique of Western civilization is in fact a religious critique and the dialectic is that “without [religion's] support the book will go nowhere” (p. 170).

Gérard Raulet’s essay on Ernst Cassirer and Adorno is equally commendable for the way that it reveals a different aspect of the argument on religion. First, Roulet argues that Horkheimer’s second
thesis that myth is already Enlightenment falls within the Enlightenment tradition. This point is made clearer by Roulet’s clever comparison of _Dialectic of Enlightenment_ with expressions of the Enlightenment motif in Cassirer’s _Philosophy of Symbolic Forms_ (Vol. I, 1923; Vol. II,
1925; Vol. III, 1929). Horkheimer and Adorno’s radical use of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms highlights the “dual conception of the remembrance of nature within the subject” leading to the subjection of women and Jews for they remind the subject of the uncontrollable aspects
of nature. According to Kohlenbach and Geuss, Roulet reveals that “[I]n other words, _Dialectic of Enlightenment_ is still–to some extent, and dialectically–an Enlightenment project” (pp. 11-12).

The dilemma of whether the _Dialectic of Enlightenment_ is a diatribe against the Enlightenment, an Enlightenment critique of myth or a religious critique of technical rationality is not resolved in these pages. Rather, as in many conference proceedings, the contributors raise interesting questions that leave room for future research. That there is little to no positive mention of the theme of religion in the works of members of the Frankfurt School presented an additional challenge to
this volume and is reflected in its creative and myriad hermeneutica approaches to the topic. The result is a thought-provoking volume.

Notes

[1]. For recent works on religion and Enlightenment see, for example,
S.J. Barnett, _Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Robert Devigne, _J.S.
Mill’s use of Ancient, Religious, Liberal and Romantic Moralities_ (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); David L. Holmes, _The Faiths of the
Founding Fathers_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Ole P.
Grell and Andrew Cunningham, eds., _Medicine and Religion in
Enlightenment Europe_ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

[2]. In addition to Carl Schorske’s classic _Fin de Siècle Vienna:
Politics and Culture_ (New York: Random House, 1980), see, for example,
Kevin Repp, _Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity:
Anti-politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890-1914_ (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2000).

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