These negative commandments, i.e., “You shall not.. .,” are to lead the fol-
lowers of Judaism to a dynamic, socio-historical praxis expressive of the long-
ing for the totally Other, which rejects all knowledge or guarantees of salvation
as utter delusion. In this way, Israel – meaning those who wrestle with God
and humanity (Genesis 32:28) – is to become the light of the nations who will
come to Israel in search of wisdom and thereby change their weapons of war
into implements for human well-being (Isaiah 2:2–4). The truth and justness
of the image and/or name of the totally Other is thereby maintained by such
negation, by its prohibition. This negativity of the totally Other, however, is
not a total negation, which is equally a delusion. Such absolute negation of
that which is other than what is the case of the given status quo is, as
Horkheimer and Adorno called it, the metaphysics of positivism.
Radicalization of Kant’s Critique of Reason
Horkheimer ’s critical theory is rooted negatively not only in proverbial “Jeru-
salem” – the religious foundation of Western Civilization, but also in “Athens” –
the rational, humanistic, secular Enlightenment heritage. It is the negative
dialectical synthesis of “faith” and “reason” that seeks to determinately negate
both forms of human experience and thought into a dynamic critical mate-
rialism of human liberation, both subjectively and objectively. Thus, Horkheimer
not only radicalizes the commandments of Judaism in regards to finite images
or names of the infinite, but also radicalizes Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,
(1929) in stating that humanity does not and cannot have any knowledge of
anything that transcends human understanding based on experience and
intuition. Humanity has no knowledge of anything noumenal, and thus does
not need to bother with it. This rejection of the noumenaof theistic religion,
of metaphysics, of idealism is, however, quite different from that of posi-
tivism and bourgeois skepticism/agnosticism, which dualistically “brackets
out” all questions of anything other than what is the case in human experi-
ence. However, unlike Kant (1929:29), Horkheimer does not find it “neces-
sary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith” and religion in the
face of the development of human reason and science. Rather, Horkheimer
materialistically grounds the truth of religion not in the noumena, as a sepa-
rate entity or sphere of being and value that can be thereby disassociated
from all matters of this world, but in the cries and longings of the innocent
victims of this world for a better future society and the totally Other.
The Notion of the Totally “Other” • 141