Truth of Religion
For Horkheimer, the truth of real or good religion does not come as conso-
lation to a person who is unjustly suffering and in need, but rather isthe cry
against that very concrete suffering and need not only of the individual but
of the oppressed social class as well. The truth of religion, for Horkheimer
therefore, is to keep alive the critical, compassionate impulse for social change,
to break the dehumanizing, ideological “spell” of capitalism, which could
open the future up toward the creation of a non-antagonistic society as well
as toward the unknown totally Other. As Horkheimer (1978:163) states, “we
have religion where life down to its every gesture is marked by this resolve.”
This materialistic, negative dialectical “resolve” is grounded in and expres-
sive of the prophetic, Messianic, critical notion of the “totally Other” than
this world. Horkheimer ’s critical theory of religion negatively and material-
istically embodies both notions of the malum physicum – not only the terror
of nature but the horror of the antagonisms of the capitalist social totality –
and themalum metaphysicum – not Schopenhauer ’s ontological notion of the
“will to life” but the consciousness of humanity’s absolute abandonment; that
human history is a socially created slaughterbench and a Golgotha for bil-
lions of innocent victims of its horror, with the dialectical, materialistic “resolve”
to lessen if not negate this horror with the given technological and scientific
means available to create a better future society.
Human Social Praxis
There is no other religion that has this commandment of not making any
image or name of God. According to Horkheimer, this is due to the fact that
the central focus of Judaism is not on the metaphysical question of God’s
existence but inversely on human beings becoming godly, holy, just, good in
their praxis of life, both personally and socially. The central religious concern
of Judaism – and I would say, of Christianity as well – e.g., Matthew 5–7,
Matthew 25:31–46, Mark 8:34–38, Luke 3:4–17, Luke 4:18–19, Romans 12:1–2,
James 2:14–18 – is not on what one believes to be true but on what one does
for the sake of truth. As Horkheimer (1993:14) stated: it is this indomitable
will to serve with single minded devotion this negative, dialectical material-
istic notion of the truth that is the guiding principle of the entire critical the-
ory. It is thus dialectically both important and unimportant, according to
Horkheimer, whether there is a God or not. It is unimportant since nothing
142 • Michael R. Ott