the society and history. For the critical theory, being grounded in and expres-
sive of the desperate cries of the innocent victims of the “slaughter-bench”
(Hegel 1956:21) of history and society, the religious notion of the totally
“Other” translated into a materialistic theory and praxis has the potential of
being a socio-historical force of revolutionary social change for the creation
of a better future society.
However, unlike the negative and positive dialectics of Hegel, who ideal-
istically professed to know in advance the positive goal toward which his-
tory was moving, Horkheimer and the other critical theorists sought only the
determinate negation of the existing socio-historical produced antagonisms
that produce the needless suffering, horror and death of humanity and the
destruction of nature. For the critical theory of society and religion, the future
is open toward something new, if at all, only in a negative not a positive way.
As stated above, the focal point of the critical theory’s negative dialectical
method was summarized in Adorno’s dialectical inversion of Hegel’s state-
ment that “the truth is the whole” (Hegel 1967a:81). For the entire critical
theory, “the whole is the untrue” (Adorno 1974:50). Such a critical statement
avoids falling into the meaninglessness of absolute nihilism or becoming a
metaphysical dogmatic fundamentalism or collapsing into bourgeois skepti-
cism and positivism only by maintaining the dialectical tension with the false-
ness and negativity of what is by means of the humanistic notion of and
longing for that which is “other” than what is; of that which is ultimately
grounded in the religious notion of the totally Other than this false socio-
historical totality.
Religion’s Migration into Secular Form
Along with Adorno and Benjamin, Horkheimer sought to allow the still rel-
evant and meaningful, liberating and humanistic content of religion to migrate
into a modern secular form and thereby become a possible anamnestic, pre-
sent and proleptic force of resistance to the development of an “iron caged,”
totally administered, cybernetic, dehumanizing and oppressive society.
According to Horkheimer, this secular form was his critical theory of society
and religion. For Horkheimer, religion – particularly the prophetic and Messianic
religions of Judaism and Christianity – was not merely a pre-modern, mytho-
logical expression of the antediluvian childhood of humanity, which thereby
needed to be forgotten. Neither was religion only understood to be an ideo-
132 • Michael R. Ott