Frankfurt School began. In 1971, Horkheimer reflectively gave expression to
his critical theory of society and religion’s purpose from its very beginning.
In this interview, he stated that the driving dynamic of the appeal to the
totally other than this world is concretely grounded in the cries for help and
justice of the innocent victims that are systemically created by the unjust,
“untrue” (Adorno), exploitive and deadly structures of the existing status
quo ( Jay 1971:xii). This materialistic inversion of the meaning and purpose
of metaphysics and theology back into the cries of suffering and oppressed
humanity for liberation and a better, more happy future gave a more posi-
tive judgment to religion as a fundamental element of the entire critical the-
ory. As Horkheimer (1973a:xii) stated, “the hope that earthly horror does not
possess the last word is, to be sure, a non-scientific wish.” However, it is pre-
cisely herewith this non-scientific wish for a more reconciled future society
that, as Adorno (1973:207) stated, “materialism comes to agree with theol-
ogy.” The determinate negation of this religious “non-scientific wish” for a
truly revolutionary ending of the historical continuum of the systematically
produced horrors of modern capitalist society, which could open up the future
for the creation of a new, more reconciled society, is the very substance and
purpose of the materialistic critical theory of society and religion.
As will be developed in the later part of this essay, the critical theory of
society and religion’s appeal to a totally “Other” than this “untrue” world is
the radically secularized expression of Judaism’s prohibition of naming or
imaging God, as expressed in the second and third commandment of the
Decalogue. This negative or inverse theology of the critical theory is also
philosophically founded on the materialistic sublimation of G. W. F. Hegel’s
dialectical methodology of determinate negation (Ott 2001, chapt. 5). For the
critical theorists, dialectics is the consistent recognition of the non-identity
between the socially created concept of a thing and the thing itself. Contrary
to positivism, dialectics is “the ontology of the wrong state of things” as they
actually are (Adorno 1973:11). Dialectics is the thinking against the thought
of what merely is given. It shows the delusion of thought and its logical claim
to universality, which thereby becomes totalitarian. As Herbert Marcuse
(1960:viii) states,
the power of negative thinking is the driving power of dialectical thought,
used as a tool for analyzing the world of facts in terms of its internal
inadequacy.130 • Michael R. Ott