put him on his feet, on which, to a large extent, he stood already anyway.
Thus, what Horkheimer and Adorno called the totally Other is what once in
the great world religions and world philosophies had been called the God
or Gods, Eternity, Heaven, Beauty, Infinite, Transcendence, Being, Idea,
Absolute, Unconditional, Absolute Spirit (Horkheimer 1985a). The great
Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, friend of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Fromm,
had spoken of the Ultimate Reality. Talcott Parsons, the father of American
structural-functionalism, the great positivistic competitor of the critical the-
ory of society, took over Tillich’s theological notion (O’Dea 1966; Parsons
1965; 1964). Parsons opened up his system of human condition, and partic-
ularly his human action system, embracing culture, society, personality and
behavioral organism, upward through culture, i.e., ideas, values, symbols,
techniques, toward the Ultimate Reality, and downward through the human
behavioral organism toward nature. Horkheimer discovered that Hegel did
not only have a very well developed positive theology, but also a negative
one, which reached, of course, far back to the Second and Third Commandment
of the Mosaic Law, i.e., the prohibition against making images of the Absolute
or naming it or conceptualizing it and thus disclosing its nature, qualities
and attributes (Solomon 1996).
Inverse Cipher Theology
Likewise, on the Island of Ibiza in the early 1930s, Adorno and Walter Benjamin
developed, out of Hegel’s positive and negative theology, an other, or an
inverse, or a cipher theology, particularly in response to Franz Kafka’s work
(Witte 1985:104; Adorno 1970; Scholem 1989). This new inverse cipher theol-
ogy allows some religious and theological contents to migrate from the depth
of the mythos into the secular discourse of the expert-cultures of psychology,
sociology, anthropology, philosophy, etc., and through it into communicative
and even political praxis, in order thus to stem the always new waves of
rebarbarization of Western civilization. Benjamin’s and Adorno’s inverse the-
ology is still at work in Habermas’s theory of communicative action, under
the auspices of his methodological atheism (Habermas 1990; 1991). Habermas
admittedly takes the Second and Third Commandment of the Mosaic law
and the inverse theology so radically seriously, that – unlike his teacher
Adorno – he never even mentions the concept of the totally Other, in spite
of the fact that he knows very well its origins not only in Hegel, but also in
Kant and Sören Kierkegaard (Küng 1990:70–71). Methodological atheism
Toward a Dialectical Sociology of Religion • 65