dence of a deeper social experience than does a mere account of currently
existing attitudes. It offers an opportunity to examine experiences that might
“reflect the negation of the finite which finiteness requires” (Adorno 1995:392).
Just as the concept of freedom challenges current experiences of unfreedom,
religious expressions can be understood to challenge the foreclosure of the
present on itself.
Horkheimer argues, therefore, that religion has provided Western culture
with an invaluable inheritance:
[Human]kind loses religion as it moves through history, but the loss leaves
its mark behind. Part of the drives and desires which religious belief pre-
served and kept alive are detached from the inhibiting religious form and
become productive forces in social practice.... In a really free mind the
concept of infinity is preserved in an awareness of the finality of human life
and of the inalterable aloneness of [human beings], and it keeps society
from indulging in a thoughtless optimism, an inflation of its own knowl-
edge into a new religion. (1995b:130–31)The legacy Horkheimer points to in this statement is religion’s relation to the
concept of objective truth. He acknowledges that throughout history religious
thought has also been intertwined with myth and illusion, so that, gradually,
reason “aspires to replace traditional religion” (1974:13). But although Hork-
heimer appreciates this shift, he also laments it, for, as we have seen above,
he observes that rationality often gets reduced to instrumentality and calcu-
lation. And so he writes, “the divorce of reason from religion marked a fur-
ther step in the weakening of its objective aspect” (p. 14). With the rise and
subsequent dominance of technical rationality, particularly in the form of
modern science, human thought and social experience increasingly get locked
into the confines of the status quo’s actuality. As the quotation at the outset
of this paper laments, what the Enlightenment “killed was not the church
but metaphysics and the objective content of reason itself” (p. 18). Suffering
continues, and so individuals and communities continue to express it, some-
times in the form of religious discourse and practice. But what becomes
increasingly difficult to articulate, in the view of Adorno and Horkheimer, is
the hope for a better world, and an understanding of society that probes
beneath the presuppositions of the current age.
This is the starting point for the study of religion offered by Adorno and
Horkheimer; one that represents a marked contrast to the model presented
From A Beautiful Mindto the Beautiful Soul • 175