[FRA:] Max Horkheimer on Religion

[Ralph Dumain]

I would think, though, that the process of liberalization and 
secularization has similarities across cultures.  Protestantism was 
the first historical example on a mass scale.  But note that the main 
intellectual protagonist of the Radical Enlightenment was Spinoza, a 
Jew.  Why not call secularization a Jewish phenomenon? Or maybe a 
Jewish-Christian phenomenon? The actual Jewish Enlightenment as a 
social phenomenon tailed on the German Enlightenment, somewhat tamer 
in many respects due to the precarious position of Jewish 
intellectuals, though aggressive outsiders like Salomon Maimon were 
more militant. One could examine the process in other cultures to 
ascertain possible commonalities--Ambedkar in India, perhaps?

It has not been lost on countless observers that Marx was a Jew, as 
were so many critical theorists.  There is, historically, since 
Spinoza, a Jewish-Christian cross-fertilization in the process of 
liberalization and enlightenment, which was necessitated on the 
Jewish end by the need to co-exist with their oppressors.  But I 
don't believe there's any such thing as a Judaeo-Christian tradition: 
it's tokenism, a concoction to conceal the fundamental, ineradicable 
anti-Semitism of Christian society.  Now Jews can with much less risk 
tell Christians to take a flying leap, which they generally don't do 
but should, esp. with characters like Huckabee on the loose and Bush 
at large and rednecks still waving their Confederate flags.

To say that historical materialism grows out of Protestantism is 
paradoxically an non-historical-materialist position.  Historical 
materialism is interested in what Protestantism grows out of.  They 
both grow out of social processes that drive the ideological 
superstructures.  Hence it is quite deceptive simply to claim 
religion as the ultimate origin of ideas or institutions.

If you want to understand critical theory, you have to understand 
Jews, but you can't understand Jews via studying Judaism; you can 
only get it by understanding their historical experience under the 
thumb of Christian monsters.

At 10:20 AM 1/31/2008, James Rovira wrote:
>Ralph --
>
>There's a historical element to Ken's response to you that you
>shouldn't overlook (regardless of your opinion of the relationship
>between religion and historical materialism today).
>
>The first thing I think we need to do to speak clearly about this is
>abandon the word "religion" in favor of the word "Protestantism."
>
>You need to understand that the -same rhetoric- used by historical
>materialists today (and since the 19th cent) to describe religion was
>used by  Protestants to describe Catholicism in centuries previous --
>and even into the 19th century.  Catholicism was "superstition."  To
>cite one example, there were some Protestants in England who devoted
>their time to refuting cases of demon possession -by careful
>observation-, and this was contemporaneous to the time of the Salem
>witch trials.  The proliferation of Catholicism was blamed for the
>spread of exorcisms.  These very same Protestants did believe in the
>devil and that, in theory, demon possession was possible, but they
>still devoted most of their time to debunking cases of demon
>possession by careful observation.  Historical materialist methods --
>the historical materialist impulse itself -- is a very Protestant
>phenomenon which directed itself against the Protestantism from which
>it came.
>
>It's not a coincidence that authors like Hume were from Scotland or
>Bacon, Newton, and Locke from England -- authors who had a strong
>influence upon the European continent, especially -Germany-.  Who
>awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers?  What got the ball rolling?
>This historical connection exists, and runs fairly deep, even to the
>point of shared moral judgments (it's not hard to see Marx's rage
>against mistreatment of the lower classes reflected in the Hebrew
>Scriptures).
>
>In the end, philosophically, any form of materialism is utterly
>incompatible with any form of religion, and I think for that reason
>"horseshit" is a reasonable response.  Especially these days, when
>critical theorists like Zizek are trying to produce some kind of
>materialist Christianity (see the journal Angelaki).  Horseshit needs
>to become a technical term.   But we need to understand the reason
>these connections keep coming up and what's motivating them, if we
>want to be -historical- in our approach.
>
>Jim R
>
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