It is not orientated toward the beginning, but rather toward the end: the last
things rather than the first things.
The Concept of Infinity
The critical theory is a theodicy also in the sense of Horkheimer ’s book Eclipse
of Reasonof 1947. Here Horkheimer stated that without the thought of truth
and thereby of that which guaranteed it, the Infinite, the Absolute, the totally
Other, there was no knowledge of its opposite, the abandonment of the human
beings, for the sake of which the true philosophy had to be critical and pes-
simistic (Horkheimer 1985b). Without this thought of truth and what guar-
anteed it, the Unconditional, there was not even sorrow, without which there
was no happiness. While Horkheimer never mentioned Adorno’s and Ben-
jamin’s negative, inverse, cipher or semblance theology, he nevertheless prac-
ticed it continually as theodicy: which again was possible only because the
theodicy had been present in the inverse theology from its very start as well
(Adorno 1970a; Lonitz 1994; Horkheimer 1970; 1985a).
Absolute Truth
The critical theory is a theodicy in so far as it remembers the martyrs of our
time (Horkheimer 1947; 1985a; Siebert 1993). In the perspective of Horkheimer,
the real individuals of our time were the martyrs who have gone through
infernos of suffering and degradation in their resistance to conquest and
oppression: not the inflated personalities of popular culture, the conventional
dignitaries. These unsung heroes consciously exposed their existence as indi-
viduals to the terrorist annihilation that others undergo unconsciously through
the social process in antagonistic civil society (Horkheimer 1985a). For
Horkheimer, the task of philosophy was to translate what the martyrs had
done into a language that would be heard, even though their finite voices
had been silenced by the fascist tyranny. As philosophy fulfills this task it
turns into theodicy.
Semblance of Otherness
Horkheimer received the notion of the longing for the totally Other from
Adorno, who was the better Hegelian, not vice versa (Horkheimer 1985b).
Thus, it is not amazing that the theological dimension in the critical theory
of society reached its climax in Adorno’s (1973) conclusive work, Negative
68 • Rudolf J. Siebert