also has no real future, other than the progress of what already is. In this,
there is no future or anything new. The mythical expression of this real, his-
torical life process of qualitative change and becoming, in terms of a differ-
entiated experience of time, is not contained in positivistic logic or sciences.
The Greek notion of “Kyrios,”or the mystical “nunc stans”or “Jetztzeit”(the
revolutionary “now time” of something other or new) that explodes open
and puts an end to the mechanical, repetitious, horrifying and deadly con-
tinuum of history under the reign of “Chronos” (clock time) and thereby opens
history toward its possible new creation, is unthinkable, if not forbidden, in
positivism. Through its reified paradigm of bourgeois subjectivity and the
resulting instrumental and authoritarian rationality and praxis that is pro-
duced, Rational Choice Theory does not concern itself with the qualitative
socio-historical change of the revolutionary kyriostime but only with advo-
cating as rational a self-serving, utilitarian system of conformity, if not power-
driven behavior, of individuals, social institutions, and nations that strengthens
and further legitimates the deadly progression of what is the case. It is just
this a-historical, abstract yet concretely exploitive system of a capitalist social
totality that the advocates of the Rational Choice Theory of religion have
extrinsically applied to the functioning and purpose [telos] of religious insti-
tutions within that society. Rational Choice Theory of religion is little more
than another form of an ideological bourgeois civil religion, which distorts
if not destroys the liberational, redemptive, hope-filled cry and longing of
the oppressed, for a better future society as well as for the kyriosof the totally
Other, which is the revolutionary content and call to action of the prophetic
and Messianic religions ( Judeo-Christianity) to which this Theory appeals.
Rational Choice Theory instrumentally objectifies religion into being nothing
more than a service-oriented institution within the capitalist civil society.
Dialectical Methodology
Unlike the positivism of Rational Choice Theory, the Critical Theory of soci-
ety and religion is founded upon and is expressive of the revolutionary logic
and socio-historically applied methodology of dialectics, particularly that of
negative dialectics. In January 1930, Horkheimer became the third director
of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research since its beginning in 1922. It
was under the directorship of Horkheimer, whom Habermas (1993b:49) called
its “spiritus rector,” that what is now known as the critical theory of the
The Notion of the Totally “Other” • 129