Productive Forces
In his essay “Thoughts on Religion,” Horkheimer was of the firm conviction
that human kind was in the process of losing religion as it moved through
history (Horkheimer 1988b). But that loss, so Horkheimer was certain, left its
mark behind. According to Horkheimer, part of the drives and desires, which
religious belief had preserved and kept alive, were detached from the inhibit-
ing religious form and became productive forces in the social practice toward
alternative Future III – the realm of the freedom of All rather than only the
freedom of the One or the Few (Adorno 2001; Hegel 1986k). In this process,
so Horkheimer argued, even the immoderation characteristic of shattered
religious illusions acquired a positive form, and was truly transformed. In
Horkheimer ’s critical-theoretical perspective, in a really free mind the con-
cept of Infinity – which entered world history only through the Jewish and
Christian and Islamic prophets – was preserved in an awareness of the final-
ity of human life, and of the inalterable aloneness of human beings (Horkheimer
1988b; Adorno 1998). The notion of Infinity kept modern civil society from
indulging in a feeble-minded optimism: in an inflation of its own scientific
and technological knowledge into a new religion. Obviously, Horkheimer did
not only want to allow the image of perfect justice, but also the notion of the
Infinite, to migrate from Judaism and Christianity and Islam into the secu-
lar critical theory of society in the form of a negative, inverse cipher or sem-
blance theology, and through it into a political praxis, which could successfully
resist the always new waves of rebarbarization, and prepare the way to alter-
native Future III – a post-modern society, in which the reconciliation of the
religious and the secular could be accomplished on the secular side, and in
which the reconciliation of personal autonomy and of universal solidarity
could be achieved on the side of solidarity, and – in Brecht’s and Habermas’s
words – a friendly and helpful living together could be made possible (Hork-
heimer 1988b; Adorno 1970a; Horkheimer 1970; Brecht 1961). This inverse
theology was also a negative one in so far as the Infinite could not be imag-
ined or named: in the last analysis, not even as perfect justice or uncondi-
tional love (Horkheimer 1985a). Later on, Horkheimer and Adorno spoke
instead of the concept of Infinity rather of the notion of the totally Other: or
better still, of the longing or of the hope for the entirely Other, or even just
of the fear, that such Otherness may exist as little as the religious notions of
Heaven, Eternity, or Beauty had done before (Horkheimer 1970; Habermas
1991).
Toward a Dialectical Sociology of Religion • 103