Habermas 2001; 1991; 1998; 1990). The critical theory of religion aims at the
mitigation at least, of the fast approaching global alternative Future I – the
totally administered, bureaucratized, computerized, roboticized signal – soci-
ety; and at the resistance against the still possible and probable arrival of
global alternative Future II – the more and more militarized society possibly
involved in what Samuel Huntington, a student of Carl Schmitt and an advi-
sor to the Pentagon, has called the clash of religiously based civilizations,
which could easily climax not only into conventional local wars or civil wars,
but even into a third world war using nuclear, biological and chemical weapons
of mass destruction, and into the consequent ecological catastrophes; and the
critical theory of religion aims at the passionate promotion of alternative
Future III – a society, in which personal autonomy and universal, i.e., anam-
nestic, present and proleptic solidarity would be reconciled (Hegel 1986k;
1986j; 1986c; Marx 1961; Horkheimer 1985a; Adorno 1998; 2000; Tucker 1978;
Flechtheim 1962; 1966; 1971; 1985; Flechtheim, Lohmann and Martin 2003;
Bloch 1970a; 1970b; 1971; Habermas 1987; Kogon 1967; Küng 1994; 1991).
Unfortunately, while alternative Futures I and II are not desirable, they are,
nevertheless, very possible and probable, and while alternative Future III is
very desirable, it is, under the present neo-conservative and neo-liberal con-
ditions of advanced capitalist society, less possible and probable. The long-
ing for alternative Future III – a society characterized by the solidarity of one
human being with another without loss of his or her autonomy, is not the
same as, but rather the necessary concretization, presupposition for, and con-
sequence of, the hope for the totally Other than the slaughterhouse of nature
and history, in which almost everybody is programmed to eat everybody for
the purpose of self-preservation and self-maintenance (Siebert 2001; 2002).
The longing for the entirely Other transcends not only all personal longings
for another human being but also the collective historical longings: e.g., the
traditional European longing for India, or for Greece, or for Rome, or for
America, or for the Slavic world (Hegel 1986k). Theology cannot, and must
not, be reduced to anthropology.
Negative Theology
While for Hegel the finite was the other of the Infinite, for the critical theo-
rists the Infinite was the other of the finite: the totally Other of the finite
world as nature and history as gigantic sacrificial altar (Hegel 1986n). Like
Marx before, the critical theorists turned Hegel upside down once more and
64 • Rudolf J. Siebert