Religion and civil society: is the universalisation of religious or secular values and norms possible in the process of global modernization?
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| Zitieren: | Religion and civil society: is the universalisation of religious or secular values and norms possible in the process of global modernization? / Rudolf J. Siebert // Культура народов Причерноморья. — 2002. — № 28. — С. 100-107. — Бібліогр.: 10 назв. — анг. |
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Siebert, Rudolf J. 2016-11-11T06:54:41Z 2016-11-11T06:54:41Z 2002 Religion and civil society: is the universalisation of religious or secular values and norms possible in the process of global modernization? / Rudolf J. Siebert // Культура народов Причерноморья. — 2002. — № 28. — С. 100-107. — Бібліогр.: 10 назв. — анг. 1562-0808 https://nasplib.isofts.kiev.ua/handle/123456789/108588 en Кримський науковий центр НАН України і МОН України Культура народов Причерноморья Религия и общество Religion and civil society: is the universalisation of religious or secular values and norms possible in the process of global modernization? Article published earlier |
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Religion and civil society: is the universalisation of religious or secular values and norms possible in the process of global modernization? |
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Religion and civil society: is the universalisation of religious or secular values and norms possible in the process of global modernization? Siebert, Rudolf J. Религия и общество |
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Religion and civil society: is the universalisation of religious or secular values and norms possible in the process of global modernization? |
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Religion and civil society: is the universalisation of religious or secular values and norms possible in the process of global modernization? |
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Religion and civil society: is the universalisation of religious or secular values and norms possible in the process of global modernization? |
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Religion and civil society: is the universalisation of religious or secular values and norms possible in the process of global modernization? |
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religion and civil society: is the universalisation of religious or secular values and norms possible in the process of global modernization? |
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Siebert, Rudolf J. |
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Siebert, Rudolf J. |
| topic |
Религия и общество |
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Религия и общество |
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2002 |
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English |
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Культура народов Причерноморья |
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Кримський науковий центр НАН України і МОН України |
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Article |
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1562-0808 |
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https://nasplib.isofts.kiev.ua/handle/123456789/108588 |
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Religion and civil society: is the universalisation of religious or secular values and norms possible in the process of global modernization? / Rudolf J. Siebert // Культура народов Причерноморья. — 2002. — № 28. — С. 100-107. — Бібліогр.: 10 назв. — анг. |
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Rudolf J. Siebert
RELIGION AND CIVIL SOCIETY: IS THE UNIVERSALISATION OF RELIGIOUS
OR SECULAR VALUES AND NORMS POSSIBLE IN THE PROCESS OF GLOBAL
MODERNIZATION?
Dear Friends:
I would like to invite you to a short discourse about the problem of religious as well as
secular notions of unconditional meaning and universal moral values and norms in relation to
more or less possible, probable and desirable global alternative futures, as it appears in the
perspective of the by now globalized Frankfurt School.' In our discourse, we want to explore and
explain what the highly secularized critical theory of Society has to say about universal moral
values and norms rooted in unconditional meaning and being present or not in subjectivity and
intersubjectivity, civil society, political state, history and culture: particularly about the
possibility of the project of a world ethos incarnated in all of them and directed toward
alternative Future III – the right society as a solidary association or union of free human beings.
Discourse
We understand discourse as argumentative dialogue taking place in an ideal speech
situation and in a powerfree zone. We determine discourse as future - oriented remembrance of
human suffering, particularly the suffering of the innocent victims of the merciless
modernization of civil society, with the practical intent to diminish it. Precisely public discourse
is the medium in which values and norms, which originally belong to particular systems of
human condition and action systems, more specifically cultures, can nevertheless possibly be
universalized on the basis of the better arguments. In our discourse, we shall differentiate
sharply, if moral values and norms appear as the object of research, as subjective value-basis of
the researcher, or as integral part of the theoretical systematization process, and move at the
same time on all three levels. In any case, we are concerned with sociologically-factual, or at
least intentionally and tendentially religious or secular universal values as the love of the
neighbor, the negation of the talion, solidarity, personal and collective freedom, equality, social
justice, property, life, and truth, and the related norms and positive legal laws.
Recognition
Of course, all such religious or secular moral values are historical: they have found their
recognition in a particular social and historical discourse-situation. There is not only a long
historical, mainly religious tradition of and discourse on personal and social morality, but also a
secular enlightenment tradition of the critique of morality, which reaches from Hobbes through
Kail Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche to Sigmund Freud and Max Horkheimer: of the unmasking,
the disillusionment, and the disenchantment of alleged higher values of a sacred or a profane,
which demand continually great sacrifices from people. Neither the religious tradition of
morality, nor the secular enlightenment tradition of the critique of morality was ever without
inner contradictions. There is not only a modem dialectic of the sacred and the profane, but also
a dialectic of the secular enlightenment and a dialectic of religion. Not only religious and secular
values can challenge each other, but also secular values can turn against themselves -
rationalization into irrationality, integration into disintegration, and religious nirms can turn
against themselves - religious truth into ideology as false consciousness, as the masking of racial,
national, and class interests, shortly as untruth, and religious love into hateful persecutions of
gentiles, pagans, heretics, apostates, witches and into most fanatic religious wars.
Moral Value
In spite of the fact that - as Nietzsche has discovered - whatever has a history can not
defined, we may ertheless determine historical, not physical, but moral value provisionally in
terms of a working definition as the measure of how strongly something is desired for its moral
beauty, usefulness, or rarity, especially expressed in terms of the effort one is willing toexpend in
acquiring and retaining possession of or preserving it. A moral value may be defined as a
principle, or a quality, that arouses such desire. We differentiate between morality and ethics.
We call moral the structure of action, which guides convictions, values, goals, normative
judgments and feelings being dominant in a certain location and at a certain time.
Correspondingly, there are secular scientific, i.e. psychological, sociological, or historical
theories of morality, which ask for the genesis and function of religious or secular moralities.
Contrary to morality, ethics is synonymous with reflection on morality, i.e. with moral
philosophy. Ethics gives reasons or justifies moral positions and thereby connects them with
everyday moral attitudes and judgments, which it analyzes conceptually and develops further.
The difference between moral theory and ethics corresponds to the observer- and participant-
perspective. We consider moral values or norms to be universal, when they transcend
sociologically-factually or tendentially or intentionally the fundamental dichotomies in the
totality of modern civil society: between the religious and the secular people, between the
genders, among the generations, among the races, among the nations, between the individual and
the collective, among the social classes, etc.. We consider moral values or norms to be universal
when in the by now globalized antagonistic totality of capitalist society they have found or can
possibly find recognition by religious and secular people, by both genders, by three or four
generations living together at the same time, by all races, by all nations, by the individual as well
as by the collective, by different social classes, etc..
Evolutionist Conception of Value
The secularized critical theory of society has of course its own value- and norm –presuppositions
like freedom, solidarity or justice. Different critical theorists, like Max Horkheimer, Theodor W.
Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock, Leo Lb'wenthal,
Alfred Sohn-Rethel, etc.have developed differentprofane value and norm positions. Concerning
the different conceptions of morality and ethics and thus of values and norms inside and outside
of the critical theory of society, recours ral principles to different evolutionary stages. Such
evolutionist theory of morality also allows in principle, to dissolve the sometimes confusing,
apparent paradox of a morally intended critique of morality. Thus, the seeming immorality of
psychoanalysis is not merely the expression of the critique of the disastrous or malign forces of
the critique of the disastrous or malign forces of morality, but at the same time also the vehicle of
an other, a new morality. Freud rejected some elements of the moral kode of his time insofar as
he made them corresponsible for neurotic structures, and thus aimed at the same time implicitly
at a post-conventional morality of the individual testing and examining of universal claims of
reason. What has been said here about the seeming immorality of psychoanalysis may also be
mentioned in a similar way concerning the seeming immorality of historical materialism. The
Marxian playwright Bertolt Brecht knew very well and confessed in his poem " To the Later
Born":
Also the hate against the humiliation
Distorts the features.
Also the anger about the injustice
Makes the voice hoarse.
Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
could ourselves not be friendly.
You, however, when things have come to the point,
That man is a helper for man,
Remember us
With leniency.
Both, psychoanalysis and historical materialism, may still lead to an other, a new
personal and ocial morality. Both theories have been determinately negated into the critical
theory of society : i.e. they have not only been critically negated, but also - at least tendentially -
been preserved, elevated, and thus are still to be fulfilled in alternative global Future III - a free
and just society, if it is not to be prevented through global alternative Future I - a totally
administered, computerized, automated, robotized signal society, or through global alternative
Future II - an entirely militarized society continually engaged in conventional wars and civil
wars and ultimately aiming at NEC wars and the consequent environmental catastropies.
Different Claims of Morality
Finally, the evolutionist conception of morality also permits to focus better on the most
important dimension of moral conflicts: namely that between the different claims of morality. In
the framework of the evolutionist conception of morality not only conflicts between the super-
ego and the moral values and norms it contains on one hand and the natural drives of the Id,
including the will to life with its libidinous and aggressive components, and the ego and the
reality principle on the other, become manifest, but also those among the values and norms
themselves, which organize themselves on different evolutionary levels. To be sure, there are no
guiding moral representations, which can not also be functionalized in their totality, with the
help of different defense mechanismsfor a pathological deformed life - design or plan. Dignity,
justice, freedom, peace, democracy and other moral principles and values have a psycho-social
history or evolution, through which they are also connected with their negation. These values can
then even be united, combined and reconciled with mass murder, when the victims are excluded
from the masses of those human beings for whom the moral notions are seen to be relevant.
There is not even any protection against the abuse of the negative dialectic of the critical theory
of society into a Satanic dialectic asfor restorative, regressive, or even counterrevolutionary of
society for reactionary and regressive purposes. There is at work sometimes in civil society
already what Adomo called a Satanic dialectic, which comes close to double speech - war is
peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, terrorism is heroism - which is supposed to
come about only in global alternative Future I - the totally administered society. However, the
second and the third generation of critical theorists have at least developed conceptual tools, in
order to justify in detail the dialectic of conventional and post-conventional morality, their unity
and their difference.
Civil Society
In our discourse we are mainly concerned with values and norms which operate or do not
operate in modern civil or bourgeois society. We understand under civil society that social unit
which has been developing already in the city states of Antiquity between the family on one
hand, and the political state - organization on the other. From its very start bourgeois society,
which evolved from the family, began to undermine and finally destroy both family and city
state. Homer's Odysseus, i.e. Nobody, can be seen as the prototype of the dominant member of
civil society, the bourgeois, particularly concerning the cunning ways in which he valued and
treated nature, the gods, other nations, women, children, marriage, family, workers, pain and
suffering, and concerning his insincere attitudes toward them and concerning the hypocritical
motivations of his actions. These values, attitudes and motivations belong to the very genesis of
the traditional and modern bourgeois as the dominant member of traditional and modern civil
society. The bourgeois is emancipated from the guidance of more specific biological instincts as
well as from the ethical norms of the traditional family or the traditional state. He separated
production from the family and made it the center of bourgeoisie society and left to the former
merely consumption and care. For civil society moral values were always less important than
economic values: fair return for one's investment; to get good value for one's money; purchasing
power; the value of the pound or the dollar or the Euro; the monetary equivalent of something;
property to the value of $10.000; use and exchange value; surplus labor and surplus value, etc..
All this makes it understandable why after the experiences of the past decade, particularly with
exploitative and predatory Mafia-capitalism, people in Eastern Europe would rather like to have
a civilized society than a civil society.Georges Sorro of course believes that there is another form
of capitalism: one characterized by social thought and controlled by the liberal state. Sorros
supports the spreading of such enlightened capitalism most generously thorugh Eastern Europe.
Those who ask for a civilized society are resisting global alternative Future I - the entirely
administered society,which may be undesirable but is nevertheless very possible and probable, as
well as global alternative Future II - the in terms of the military-industrial complex totally
militarized society ready always ready to nuke its potential enemies no matter what the
consequences, which is absolutely undesirable but nevertheless once more possible and probable,
and they are longing and hoping for global alternative Future III - the society in which personal
autonomy and universal, i.e. anamnestic, present and proleptic solidaritry would be reconciled,
which is very desirable but which at this moment in the history of the monopoly- and oligopoly-
capitalist world-"civilization" is unfortunately not very possible or probable. The deep insight
into nature's secrets, which has been achieved in die bourgeois epoch of history if unrestrained
by considations of humanity may stikk threaten the very existence of mankind. In any case, civil
society can be known by its antagonisms -class-, gender-generation-,race-, religious- etc.
struggles - and its member, the bourgeois, by their intemalization.
The Bourgeois
From the very start, the bourgeois had either no other at all, or merely one he could
instrumentalize and commodify for his puiposes: even in the form of business-friendships. He
was more determined by instrumental or functional than by mimetic or communicative
rationality. Thus, through his science and technology the bourgeois demythologized and
consequentially dominated and exploited nature and thus indeed shaped the face of the earth for
better or for worse more than any other human type or social character before. Slaveholders,
feudal lords,etc. were children in comparison to the bourgeois. As the "middle class' man of civil
society demythologized the world progressively, he has also reified it, and he has thereby
delivered it to amnesia. Thus, Henry Ford, the author of the fascist, anti-Semitic book The
International Jew and friend of Hi tier could state:
History is bunk!
Amnesia, of course, is eufunctional for civil society. Otherwise, some day the workers
could remember and ask and demand back the surplus value of their labor, which they had
produced, but which they had not appropriated: as recently the workers from the concentration
camps have done, and as the former slaves in North America may do soon. The historical
memory of the slaves, serfs or "free" wage laborers is dangerous for the masters and their
systems. It is continually most painful for parents, who have done an excellent educational job
with their children in family and lifeworld, still determined by mimetic and communicative
rationality and steered over moral values and norms, to see them and even their grandchildren
morally deformed, as soon as they enter civil society, particularly its economic subsystem,
characterized by functional rationality and steered over the medium of money, and its political
subsystem, determined also by instrumental rationality, but steered over the medium of power
and force. More generally, civil society is immoral in the sense, that it can not reconcile the
particular and the universal, the individual and the collective, the arbitrary autonomy and the
universal solidarity. Nobody can deny the great accomplishments of modem Western
bourgeoisie in terms of the improvement of all instruments of production, the immensely
facilitated means of communication, the high levels of art, philosophy and science. But as great
as have been the bourgeois' economic and cultural accomplishments, so shocking has been his
potential for radical evil: for stealing, killing and lying. Can the good be separated from the evil ?
Destruction of Foundations
More and more through Western history civil society reproduced a type of human being,
a social character, which had an always harder time to become an adequate marriage partner or
family member, or citizen of the state,or an honest member of any world religion. Not
Judaism,Christianity,or Islam, or any Far Eastern religion, but the traditional and particularly the
modem bourgeois and civil society destroyed the old family systems and city states and empires
of Antiquity, including the Roman Empire, and continue to endanger the modern ones as well.
Daily we can observe, how modern civil society destroys in one merciless modernization push
after the other its own foundations not only in nature inside and outside of human beings, but
also in the family and in the state and in religion. When the bourgeois breaks through in the
marriage partners, that means divorce and the end of the family. When the bourgeois asserts
himself in the citizen holding a high political office, that means corruption. When the bourgeois
breaks through in the religious person, even religion turns into a business. Daily modem states
struggle with their bourgeois societies and try to impose on them social thought and moral values
and norms in the form of positive laws, in order thus to protect the consumer form the producer,
and the worker from the owner, and the smaller corporation from the bigger one, and the family
member and the citizen from the bourgeois, and thus to prevent civil society from committing
suicide and from tearing down with itself its own natural, social and cultural foundations as well.
At present churches and believers and even priests and Archbishops and Cardinals are pulled
down into the the avalanche of secularization and of the atomistic corrosion and decompostion
of all human relationships and into the disintegration of every moral bond still existing in late
capitalist society.
Prophets and Philosophers
Therefore, Jewish, Christian and Islamic prophets as well as most philosophers from
Plato to Hegel and Marx and Freud criticized civil society because of the absence of right moral
values and norms, universal or particular. Already the Jewish and Christian prophets condemned
early city states like Sodom, Babylon, Rome, etc. the more so the more in them a civil society
and its polytheism and its social immorality had developed. Already Plato, who wanted to rescue
the Greek city state from the destructive tendencies of its intrinsic civil society, counseled,
advised and recommended, that if one wanted to have a good son one should make him the
citizen of a good state, not a member of civil society dominated by sophistry. While Hegel saw
the necessity and productivity of civil society, he nevertheless predicted that it would concretely
supersede itself through its own class-contradictions, and the consequent colonialism, and
imperialism, and always more abstract and generalized wars into alternative Future III - the
rational and free constitutional state, rather than into alternative Future I - a totally mechanized
and automated society, or into alternative Future II - a totally militarized society engaging in
always more and more universalized warfare. Carl Popper has made a whole list of philosophers,
who were "enemies" of - what he called euphemistically - the "open society," and opposed to
them the few philosophers who were friends of civil society: particularly Hobbes, the spiritual
father of Carl Schmidt, Hitler's jurist and political theologian. Hobbes had anticipated
affirmatively the concentration camps for so called strangers or foreigners. Both thinkers,
Hobbes and Schmidt, one of the initiators of present neoconservativism and deconstructionism,
concentrated on the Leviathan from the end of the Book of Job, and used the monster as an
image for civil society which Hegel had called the state of necessity and analytical understanding
in distinction from the real state of freedom and dialectical reason. The critical theorist Franz
Neumann used the other monster from the end of the Book of Job. Behemoth, in order to
characterize civil society in its fascist form. For prophets and philosophers, civil society was not
the right, but rather the wrong society. Civil society as the wrong society was not only the
absolute contrast to what Jewish, Christian and Islamic prophets hoped for as the ultimate
theocracy, but also to that what philosophers from Plato through Thomas More to Hegel and
Marx anticipated as the great Utopia: alternative Future III - the good state, the rational state, the
realm of the freedom not only of the One, or the Few, but of All. Prophets and philosophers
agree concerning the negation of the negativity of civil society toward the affirmation of man,
and even of God.
Paradigm Change
While for Hegel the rational state, legitimated by religion, still included in itself family
and civil society, one century later for the structural-functionalists Talcott Parsons and Nicholas
Luhmann family, state and religion were all placed as specific functional pattern-maintenance -,
goal-attainment - and integrative - subsystems into antagonistic civil society, and had to serve its
survival. This theoretical paradigm change reflects in itself a real historical development. Any
discourse about universal values and norms and their relationships to the global alternative
Futures I, II and III needs to take this theoretical and practical - historical development into
consideration. Sorros, the founder of the Open Society Institute, does so, when he blames rightly
for the failure of the re-introduction of civil society into Eastern Europe since 1989 the lack of
social thought and governmental control. President Putin does so, when he states, that Russia
does not want a civil society but rather a civilized society. Well, there is indeed a great
difference: the civilized society would be in compliance with universal moral values and norms,
the civil society is not. If the bourgeoisie would conform to its own universal values, norms and
positive laws nationally and internationally, the world would already be a better place.
The Tiny Ball in the Universe
In the perspective of Horkheimer, the initiator of the critical theory of society, and his
colleagues in the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, since the decisive discoveries of the
Renaissance concerning the universe, the earth is no longer seen as the center, or the foundation
of the cosmos, and man as its peak, but rather as what his great teacher, Arthur Schopenhauer,
called a tiny ball with a coating of mold - plant, animal and human life - on top of it, rolling
around in the infinite space. The Schopenhaurian Hitler treated the coating of mold on the tiny
ball of the earth precisely as such according to the aristocratic principle of nature, the supremacy
of the predator over the prey: and he, the vegetarian, often dealt with animals better than with
humans.Modern philosophical-literary thinkers have tried to give to the reactions of the
submicroscopical beings, which are teeming, crawling and swarming on the minute ball, the
cosmologically void, invalid, trivial and insignificant activities of the human beings, a moral
meaning, which would transcend the mere limited purpose - conditioned human existence and its
survival. Since morality - including all moral universal values and norms - can only with great
difficulties, if at all, be grounded and legitimated without reference to generally binding,
ultimately divine commandments, in the 17th and 18th centuries the philosophical task was to a
large extend identical with the coping and overcoming of the contradiction between religion and
science. Particularly on the European continent, in France and Germany, philosophers from
Descartes to Kant and their idealistic successors took refuge to the thesis, that the notion of the
almighty God was immanent to human reason, or that the certainty of his existence followed
with necessity from constant concepts and sentences which belonged to it. Since also the science
was referred to maxims of reason, namely the logic, such rationalistic theories seemed to be
sufficient to satisfy the psychologically and socially compelling and cogent need for divine
moral imperatives. The period of bourgeois enlightenment was at least partially still connected
with the conscious or unconscious assumption, that the binding nature and validity of moral
duties and obligations was based on the idea of the perfect Being, however in no way on the
traditional, supposedly already obsolete, old-fashioned, out of date teachings and narratives and
stories and legends and myths, what the German enlightener Ebrahim Lessing had called the
flood of arbitrary sentences of the positive religions. In modernity universal values and norms
can be discovered only in and through the dichotomy between the religious and the secular,
between faith and reason, between religion and science.
Micrology
The critical theorists belong to the great secular tradition of the bourgeois, Marxian and
Freudian enlightenment movements. Thus, the critical theory remains at least partially connected
with the conscious or unconscious assumption, that the binding nature and validity of moral
duties and obligations - including the possibility of universal values and norms, of a universal
ethos - is based on the idea of the totally Other than the world as nature and history, in which not
only the enlightenment idea of a perfect Being, but also the God-hypostasies of the supposedly
obsolete teachings, narratives, stories and myths of the positive world-religions were concretely
superseded, i.e. not only critically negated, but also preserved, elevated and fulfilled. The
direction, the meaning of the critical theorist Adomo's whole thinking was micrological, and only
through micrology could he reach out for the totally Other. Adorno's thinking was characterized
by his showing consideration for the small, and for the little and for the individual. Adorno's
consideration for the particular and the singular exacted an extreme differentiation in his
formulations. It contradicted the veiy ethos of Adomo's thinking, to express any general
formulations, including those about universal values and norms and their grounding and
legitimation. The differentiation was necessary and unavoidable for Adomo, because the
consideration for the small and the particular, which is of course reality, was so great and intense
with him. Adomo's micrology anticipated Foucault's deconstructionism, and the whole
movement of post-modernism, in so far as it stressed the particular against the universal.
Foucault once stated, that he could have saved himself a lot of work, if he had read Adorno
earlier. However, for Adomo it was precisely his micrology, which lead him and Horkheimer to
his notion of the totally Other as source of unconditional meaning and of moral validity claims
and of possible theodicy solutions.
The Totally Other
Adorno's micrology became particularly obvious, when he was concerned with the
foundation of the binding nature and validity of universal values and norms in the notion of the
totally Other: the theological dimension. Concerning the existence of God, Adorno would
answer in conformity with the great enlightenment - thoughts of the past, that he could not
simply say, that there was a God and that he was just and good. This was so, because Adorno
and Horkheimer had already in their common work the Dialectic of Enlightenment explained and
expounded, that the words just, or good, or even God could not at all be formulated positively.
They could be formulated only negatively in terms of an Other, which could be signified only
through this word other and through nothing else. It is the longing for this totally Other which so
far has prevented the critical theorists from putting the very notion of the society on the index as
the positivists among the sociologists have done, or the notion of the soul as the scientistic
psychologists have done. The critical theory of society does not resign as critical sociology, or as
critical psychology. The longing for the entirely Other also has prevented so far the critical
theory from falling victim to sociologism, or psychologism, or any other form of positivism. The
longing for the entirely Other hindered the critical theorists from yielding to the bourgeois
resignation: to that refusal to make any significant statement on the crucial questions and to
simply setting up house in the finite world and explore in it every direction.
Atheism
The longing for the entirely Other also prevented the critical theorists from subscribing to
a radical abstract atheism of some philosophers of the bourgeois enlightenment, such as
Helvetius, or La Metric, or Holbach, who really did give negative answers to the God-question,
and in whose thought reason was sufficiently confident to make negative statements about the
Absolute. Like Kant the critical theorists are rather guided by the conviction, that reason is
denied the right to stray into the realm of the Absolute: to move into the intelligible worlds. This
explains, why the critical theorists can stand with both feet firmly planted on the ground of
reality and that they really know what it is that they can positively and definitely know and what
not. It is the hope for the totally Other which keeps the critical theorists from falling for the
theodicy or anthropodicy of bourgeois life, which is conscious of its own practical activity while
despairing of the fulfillment of its own universal values and norms, and its own Utopia. Finally,
the longing for the totally Other has enabled the critical theorists of society to participate
realistically in the global discourse on universal values and norms and their possible negation.
Heaven, Eternity, Beauty
Adorno and then also Horkheimer always talked of the longing for the entirely Other,
without using traditional words like Heaven, or Eternity, or Beauty. That was precisely the
marvelous, splendid and brilliant element in Adorno's question-position, that as he always asked
for the world, he really meant in the last analysis the totally Other than nature, and society, and
history. At the same time, Adorno was convinced that the totally Other could not be
comprehended by describing it directly, but only by representing the world as it is: in view of the
fact that it is not the only reality at which the thoughts of the critical theorists aim. Thus critical
theorists shared a negative theology not in the sense that there was no God, but rather in the
sense, that he could not be represented: in strictest and most radical obedience to the second and
third commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue. This negative theology, this longing for the
entirely Other, constituted the ethos of the thinking at least of the critical theorists of the first
generation: particularly their thinking about universal values like love, solidarity, justice, or
freedom. Even when this negative theology was replaced by Jiirgen Habermas and the second
generation of critical theorists, through the discourse ethics and its basic principle of the
unlimited communication community, it still continued to function nevertheless at least as
motivating power for a communicative practice realizing universal values and norms.
The Illuminated and the Illuminating
In any case, like Goethe the critical theorists are determined to see what is illuminated in
the world, but not the light, the totally Other, which does the illuminating. For the critical
theorists - as for Hegel, or for Gustav Mahler - there is nevertheless the totally Other, the Non-
Immanent that nevertheless arises out of immanence: the Non-Identical, the absolutely New, the
ultimate Utopia. Of course, already the early Jews and Christians had prayed to the God who
would make the whole creation new, and who would let disappear the first heaven and the first
earth, and who would create a new heaven and a new earth.
For the old Jews and Christians all the moral commandments pointed in this
eschatological-apocalyptic direction. They saw the existing world in terms of their eschatological
reservation. For the materialistic critical theory, the realized historical materialism would also be
its own liquidation: the abolition of materialistic interests. Only then the spirit would come forth
which now in civil society can only be anticipated in the forms of a non-bourgeois art, or a non-
bourgeoisie religion, or a non-bourgeois philosophy, no matter how weak they may be.
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18, 179-204.
Rudolf J. Siebert
Literature
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