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

[Ralph Dumain]

At 07:07 AM 3/22/2007 -0500, Kenneth MacKendrick wrote:
> > Perhaps the F.S. is being used  improperly for the cause of religious
>restoration?
>
>I think it is a bit more complicated than that. On the one hand, yes:
>religion as critique, accompanied by the interest and desire to establish
>the FS as more "religious" than is evident in their work. Much of this
>emphasis is directed at stressing links between the FS and Bloch, Benjamin,
>Scholem, etc.
>
>On the other hand, no: there are people who are uncovering evidence that
>Marxians have been ignoring or hiding out of embarrassment, that there is in
>fact a link between messianic expectations and emancipation in the FS as
>evinced in their use of religious language.
>
>Here's the link for a group I've been working with that discusses some of
>these issues for which there isn't much consensus:
>http://www.criticaltheoryofreligion.org/

Reading the abstracts of this conference session, I conclude that it's 
total horseshit:

The Critical Theory of Religion:
The Dialectic between the Religious and the Secular
http://www.criticaltheoryofreligion.org/leipzig%20abstracts.htm

There is only one paper available on the site.  Hopefully, this group is 
not as bad as it looks.

>Jurgen Habermas has tried to sort some of this out by noting that discourse
>of liberation are in fact indebted to the Judaic-Christian legacy of
>salvation history (a term he borrows from Karl Lowith, I think) but that in
>modernity salvation history is transformed: no gods before me = freedom of
>religion; the wholly Other becomes the pluralism of others, perfect justice
>and redemption = justice through argumentation, ethics. He also suggests
>that religious language, like art, is indispensable as long as it serves as
>a source of inspiration but - it must forfeit its theological claims as
>unique.

There is something methodologically mistaken about all this. There's a 
causal attribution to religion that contravenes a Marxist understanding of 
society. If ideology is an expression of society, and society and its 
accompanying ideology undergo a historic shift accompanied by 
secularization, what exactly is to be claimed by asserting that liberation 
has its roots in the notion of salvation? All ideas have their roots in 
human need, do they not? Habermas' formulation, at least as you summarize 
it here, is uninformative, and seems rather weak-kneed, i.e. doesn't go 
beyond liberal tolerance. It is also possible that Habermas dimly remembers 
his dialectical heritage and it's getting garbled in translation.