for the survival of civil society, but it is untrue. No genuine religious person
could possibly accept such compromise. In Marcuse’s view, where religion
still preserved the uncompromised, critical and revolutionary aspirations for
peace and happiness, its so-called illusions would still have a higher truth
value than the positivistic sciences, which for so long have worked for their
elimination (Freud 1961; Marcuse 1962:65–66).
Mythology and Metaphysics
If people in secularized civil or socialistic society, so Horkheimer argued,
would overall be still more genuinely inclined toward religion, the positivists
would probably not have less scruples to recommend the renunciation of
mythology, than Francois de Voltaire, together with Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
the fathers of deism, for whom it seemed still to be indispensable for the
canaille – the proletariat. The struggle of the positivists was directed against
the critical theory of society, which, contrary to the presently dominant rul-
ing class in antagonistic civil society, has for its immanent precondition the
idea of alternative Future III – the more adequate, humane, more right, truer,
more proper condition of the reconciled society, in which the deep contra-
dictions of present civil society would be overcome (Horkheimer 1985a).
According to Horkheimer, as the positivists did only want to grant validity
to the facts and data, they banished the difference between the right and the
wrong intention out of the dimension of reason, and left it to the status quo
of civil society alone, to determine the tasks and the ways, how it was to be
judged. It was the mythology and metaphysics of the positivists to elevate
the status quo of civil society to the one and all, the only thing, besides which
one should not have any other gods. The positivists violated in their mythol-
ogy and metaphysics the second and third commandment of the Mosaic
Decalogue: the prohibition against making images of the Absolute and nam-
ing it. The positivists committed idolatry. Of course, Weber had already noticed
that modern civil society and its iron cage of capitalism were as polytheistic
as the Greek or Roman societies, just less poetical and more prosaic in their
conception of their gods or fundamental natural and social forces: capital
instead of Pluto, commerce instead of Mercury, pill-love instead of Venus or
Aphrodite, war instead of Mars, restless oceans instead of Poseidon, etc.
(Habermas 1981).
74 • Rudolf J. Siebert