B. Anti-Positivism
According to Adorno, the thesis of positivism from Auguste Comte to Max
Weber, Emile Durkheim, the Vienna School, Carl Popper, Talcott Parsons and
Niklas Luhmann and the cognitivists was, that even a theology or meta-
physics that had escaped to profanity was, nevertheless, void (Adorno
1973:402–405; Adorno 2003; 1970a; Marcuse 1966). In Adorno’s view, con-
temporary positivists sacrificed even the idea of truth on the account of which
positivism had been initiated in the first place. They were satisfied with the
simple correctness of statements concerning facts.
Transcendence
Adorno’s micrology did not decapitate thought, it turned into an other, neg-
ative, inverse cipher or semblance theology, engaged in what his friend
Benjamin had called anamnestic solidarity with the innocent victims (Habermas
1986:53–54). In the perspective of a dialectical theory of religion, Adorno’s
and Benjamin’s inverse cipher theology, which allows semantic potentials to
migrate from the depth of the mythos into the secular social-scientific dis-
course, can indeed mediate between monotheism on one hand and radical
enlightenment on the other (Habermas 1990; 1982). While we cannot at this
point in history reconcile the deep contradiction between faith and knowl-
edge, revelation and autonomous reason, and must express it honestly and
truthfully, we can at least point already the direction out of it in terms of an
open dialectic, which avoids either a fundamentalist or a scientistic-posi-
tivistic closure (Habermas 2001:9–31).
Reliability and Usefulness
According to Horkheimer, modern positivism or empiricism was the world-
view, which lived essentially from the forgetfulness of two moments (Siebert
1987). Both elements were related to the spiritual or cultural world. First of
all, the representatives of empiricism or positivism asserted most readily that
the generalizing conclusions, analogies, presumptions and probabilities, which
were drawn from the refined investigations through social and individual
objects concerning man and society, and the methods of which have been
taken from the natural sciences, were in themselves in no way reliable. The
studies aimed only at a limited circle of facts and a limited time and space,
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