[FRA:] H-Net Book Review: The Early Frankfurt School and Religion

[James Rovira]

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German at h-net.msu.edu (January, 2007)

Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss, eds. _The Early Frankfurt School
and Religion_. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. x + 263 pp. Notes,
bibliography, index. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4039-3557-1.

Reviewed for H-German by Emily J. Levine, History
Department, Stanford University.

Dialectics of Enlightenment

This volume is the outcome of a growing academic interest in the
relationship between religion and Enlightenment broadly conceived. Just
as recent works have rewritten religion back into the Enlightenment
narrative so, too, this volume reminds us that critical theory was not
entirely hostile to religion as was once thought.[1] As Kohlenbach and
Geuss explain in their introduction, critical theory was first
introduced to the West in the postwar period by the neo-Marxist student
movement of the 1960s. Attracted to critical theory because of its claim
to link social theory and political practice, the student movement
nonetheless simply ignored or suppressed any anti-liberal features of
the philosophy that did not fit their own philosophy. This attitude
extended to any affinities between critical theory and religious
traditions. If the Left adopted a secularized form of critical theory
for its political purposes, then the theological camp, for its part,
exaggerated the existential concerns of critical theory as justification
for its own arguments against the privatization of religion and failed
to "realise that for Critical Theory religion represented first and
foremost a _problem_, even on those rare occasions when it seemed to be
presented as a solution" (emphasis in original, p. 2).

The outcome of a working conference held at the Centre for
Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at the University of Bielefeld in
September 2003, this volume of 11 essays re-examines the role of
religion in critical theory. The volume follows on the tails of recent
historical analysis by Thomas Nipperdey, among others, on the
"secularisation and re-sacralisation" of German society in the decades
leading up to 1933 (p. 3). Because of its members' deep animosity
towards the Enlightenment project and, at the same time, their
insistence on the implication of religion and myth in the alienation of
the liberal subject, not to mention their own assimilated Jewish
backgrounds, the Frankfurt School presents a challenge to attempts to
reach a coherent view on this subject. As Kohlenbach and Geuss argue,
"it is within the framework of such a polarity between the social
sciences, on the one hand, and spiritually motivated programmes for
social change, on the other, that we think the puzzling tension in early
Critical Theory between a Marxist critique of, and positive references
to, religion can be fruitfully addressed" (p. 4).

The excellent introduction is followed by essays grouped rather loosely
according to particular historical contexts, conceptual questions or the
analysis of texts from different perspectives. In part 1, "Students,
Theologians, Critical Theorists," Pascal Eitler discusses the
controversy in Germany in the early 1970s over Max Horkheimer's alleged
"conversion," which was sparked by an interview published in _Der
Spiegel_ on January 5, 1970. Raymond Geuss also contributes an essay to
this section about changes in the philosophical discussion of religion
in the post-Enlightenment period.

Despite Howard Caygill's caveat in the volume that work on the
relationship between religion and critical theory has remained limited
to the works of Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig (p. 145), part 2,
"Constructions of Religious Experience," focuses exclusively on Walter
Benjamin and "just what Benjamin may have meant by 'religion'" (p. 45).
Pierfrancesco Fiorato's essay offers a commentary on Benjamin's early
religious thought and his critical engagement with the Marburg School.
Also in this section, Margarete Kohlenbach compares Benjamin's religious
and political thought with the reconstruction of religious experience in
Jewish philosopher Erich Unger's philosophy of religion. Finally,
Barnaba Maj interprets Benjamin's idea of allegory as a methodological
and rhetorical response to the religious theme in Expressionist art
against the backdrop of the destruction of the First World War.

The third section, "Legal Philosophy and Jewish Tradition," is the
strongest of the book's divisions, adding valuable insights and
perspectives to this important topic. Here Chris Thornhill reconstructs
common themes in the legal philosophy of the early Frankfurt School and
its critique of liberalism in the context of contemporary thinkers such
as Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger. The section also includes essays
by both David Groiser and Howard Caygill, who focus in different ways on
the relevance of critical theory to the so-called Jewish Renaissance of
Weimar culture.

Thornhill argues that critical theory's critique of Enlightenment was
necessarily wed to a critique of modern legal theory because of the way
that modern rationality supplanted all natural and metaphysical law with
its own regulating system. Thornhill does an excellent job of
summarizing the paradoxical relationship of religion to critical theory,
which is revealed by his critique of the modern legal subject: "[T]he
first Enlightenment argued against metaphysics and religion because
these defined human authority and validity through reference to an
imputed categorical order of creation. The Enlightenment then took for
itself the task of cementing its own rational legal fabric at the heart
of the humanized universe. The different Enlightenment proposed by
thinkers linked to early Critical Theory argues, however, that
metaphysical and religious contents, dialectically construed, are now
vitally required in order to free human life from the autonomous
juridical structures which it has entered in its miscarried attempt at
secularisation and temporal emancipation" (p. 127). In other words,
Enlightenment rid itself of religion in order to be free and critical
theory, in turn, must utilize religion once again to rectify the
unfreedom of Enlightenment.

Because of his success in placing the questions of religion in the
context of a broader debate on legality in the 1920s, Thornhill's essay
also illustrates explicitly what is latent in some of the other essays:
the varying political tendencies of the re-sacralization of critique of
the Enlightenment and the modern legal subject. That the philosophies of
modernity could culminate in politics either of the Right or Left is an
argument one finds in many works of European cultural and intellectual
history of this period.[2] Thornhill's summary of the legal critiques of
thinkers as politically diverse as Georg Lukács and Heidegger make this
point clear. "Underlying all these perspectives is the claim that modern
liberal law has abandoned all living content, and merely stratifies
itself antinomically--as a formal system of regulation--against the
temporal, vital and associational aspects of human existence and
experience" (p. 112).

David Grosier's essay in the same section dovetails nicely with
Thornhill's, illustrating that this paradox of Enlightenment plays
itself out in the parallel development of religion itself, insofar as
religion becomes wedded to the ideology of Enlightenment and
emancipation in the modern period. Just as Kant seemed to offer freedom
from any naturally or metaphysically revealed order by turning modern
rationality into its own law, so, too, Moses Mendelssohn and William von
Humboldt had freedom of religion in mind when they resisted the right of
the state to dictate belief. The irony is that both developments
produced a "mixture of formal liberalism and substantial dogmatism" that
left the individual anything but free in the eyes of critical theorists
(p. 131).

That critical theory was slightly more susceptible to religious
alternatives because of its deep animosity for the so-called first
Enlightenment is a subtle irony mentioned by Geuss but surprisingly not
commented upon by other contributors. In fact, Geuss argues that if the
three main features of critical theory are that it "(1) maintains a firm
grip on liberal taboos about the human subject, (2) it is committed to
the continued cultivation of the metaphysical need, and (3) it exhibits
a paralysing fear of instrumental reason," then, "in all three of these
respects it shows itself to be very similar to well-known properties of
archaic religions" (p. 40).

In the final section, "Dialectic of Enlightenment Reconsidered," the
dialectics of Enlightenment and religion are addressed in the texts that
deal explicitly with the topic. Rüdiger Bittner argues that while
Theodor Adorno and Horkheimer lay claim to a dialectically structured
argument, they in fact present not the dialectics of Enlightenment, but
rather the failure of a historical development. Moreover, Bittner
contends that their critique of instrumental rationality rests on
religious assumptions. For Bittner, the irony of the _Dialectic of
Enlightenment_ (1947) is that their critique of Western civilization is
in fact a religious critique and the dialectic is that "without
[religion's] support the book will go nowhere" (p. 170).

Gérard Raulet's essay on Ernst Cassirer and Adorno is equally
commendable for the way that it reveals a different aspect of the
argument on religion. First, Roulet argues that Horkheimer's second
thesis that myth is already Enlightenment falls within the Enlightenment
tradition. This point is made clearer by Roulet's clever comparison of
_Dialectic of Enlightenment_ with expressions of the Enlightenment motif
in Cassirer's _Philosophy of Symbolic Forms_ (Vol. I, 1923; Vol. II,
1925; Vol. III, 1929). Horkheimer and Adorno's radical use of Cassirer's
philosophy of symbolic forms highlights the "dual conception of the
remembrance of nature within the subject" leading to the subjection of
women and Jews for they remind the subject of the uncontrollable aspects
of nature. According to Kohlenbach and Geuss, Roulet reveals that "[I]n
other words, _Dialectic of Enlightenment_ is still--to some extent, and
dialectically--an Enlightenment project" (pp. 11-12).

The dilemma of whether the _Dialectic of Enlightenment_ is a diatribe
against the Enlightenment, an Enlightenment critique of myth or a
religious critique of technical rationality is not resolved in these
pages. Rather, as in many conference proceedings, the contributors raise
interesting questions that leave room for future research. That there is
little to no positive mention of the theme of religion in the works of
members of the Frankfurt School presented an additional challenge to
this volume and is reflected in its creative and myriad hermeneutical
approaches to the topic. The result is a thought-provoking volume.

Notes

[1]. For recent works on religion and Enlightenment see, for example,
S.J. Barnett, _Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Robert Devigne, _J.S.
Mill's use of Ancient, Religious, Liberal and Romantic Moralities_ (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); David L. Holmes, _The Faiths of the
Founding Fathers_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Ole P.
Grell and Andrew Cunningham, eds., _Medicine and Religion in
Enlightenment Europe_ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

[2]. In addition to Carl Schorske's classic _Fin de Siècle Vienna:
Politics and Culture_ (New York: Random House, 1980), see, for example,
Kevin Repp, _Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity:
Anti-politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890-1914_ (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2000).


Copyright � 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the
redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational
purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web
location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities &
Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews
editorial staff at hbooks at mail.h-net.msu.edu.