Functionaries
According to Horkheimer, through the way in which the positivists deter-
mined what was to be called science, they designated the scientist as mere
functionary of the already dominant operation and bustle of antagonistic civil
society. That was the reason, for Horkheimer, why the neopositivism was, in
the 1950s, and still is today in 2005, the identity card, the cipher, the code
name, the pass word, the mark and the characteristic of the reliable intellec-
tual elite, which gets all the grants and academic honors and promotions.
According to Ludwig von Friedeburg, a former director of the Frankfurt
Institute for Social Research, the great and most creative, but also very crit-
ical Adorno, never received any real academic award: the more critical the
less awards and maybe the more police files. The enthusiasm for Martin
Heidegger ’s fascist philosophy, even his metaphysics of death, fits excellently
into this picture (Adorno 2000). This was so because Heidegger ’s separation
of philosophy and positive science tended in the direction, that the latter, as
positivism wanted it, had to content itself with the facts and data alone.
Furthermore, this was so, because the Heideggerian craftsman- or tradesman-
like philosophy pretended, that in this division of labor between philosophy
and positive science the former could plough the field of Being as soberly,
as the professors in the latter, the different realms of beings. Through the way
in which positivists determine what is to be called a real science, they take
the natural sciences as their prototype rather than the social sciences, or the
humanities.
Eastern Europe
For Horkheimer, both positivism and Heidegger ’s fundamental ontology were
one in principle. Horkheimer predicted that both the positivists and the fun-
damental ontologists would come the more to an understanding with the
former socialist powers and rulers in Eastern Europe, the more the people
over there would have to eat (Marcuse 1961). Indeed, Heidegger ’s student,
Hans Georg Gadamer, was already in the 1950s as close to the Soviet cultural
attaches as to the cultural ministries of the German Federal Republic (Gadamer
and Habermas 1979; Habermas 1987; 1976). Since Stalin had come into power,
it had always been obvious, natural and self-evident for the rulers in Eastern
Europe that the idea of change could not be allowed to be inherent in thought.
Inside the Eastern-European Republics the defeated and overcome people
Toward a Dialectical Sociology of Religion • 75