The Frankfurt School on Religion

Key Writings by the Major Thinkers

Eduardo Mendieta, Eduardo Mendieta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135886981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

In "The Frankfurt School on Religion, " Eduardo Mendieta has brought together a collection of readings and essays revealing both the deep connections that the Frankfurt School has always maintained with religion as well as the significant contribution that its work has to offer. Rather than being unanimously antagonistic towards religion as has been the received wisdom, this collection shows the great diversity of responses that individual thinkers of the school developed and the seriousness and sophistication with which they engaged the core religious issues and major religious traditions.
Through a careful selection of writings from eleven prominent theorists, including several new and previously untranslated pieces from Leo Lowenthal, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas, this volume provides much needed sources for religious leaders, philosophers, and social theorists as they grapple with the nature and functions of religion in the contemporary social, political, and economic landscape.
"The Frankfurt School on Religion" recovers the religious dimensions of the Frankfurt School, for too long sidelined or ignored, and offers new perspectives and insights necessary to the development of a fuller and more nuanced critical theory of society.
Selections and essays from: Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Johann Baptist Metz, Jurgen Habermas, Helmut Peukert, Edmund Arens.

V
Theodor W. Adorno

8
Reason and Sacrifice

Theodor W. Adorno

Translated by Robert Huilot-Kentor

Self-Destruction of Idealism

Of those modern philosophies in which the self-imprisoned consciousness of idealism is aware of its own imprisonment and attempts to escape from its immanence, each develops an exclusive category, an undeviating intention, a distinguishing trait that, under the rule of the idea of totality acknowledged by all these philosophies, is intended to mollify the rigidity of this imprisonment. Ultimately, however, this category dissolves the idealist construction itself, which then disintegrates into its antinomies. Thus Hegel, the most extreme exponent of the idea of totality and to all appearances anything but a critic of idealism, developed a dialectical process that employed the claim to totality so dynamically that particular phenomena never result from the systematic subordinating concept; instead the system—from which reality truly results—is to be synonymous with the quintessence of fulfilled actuality. Kierkegaard tirelessly ridiculed Hegel for deferring every statement that would be binding for real existence until some imaginary completion of the system. But precisely in this regard Kierkegaard is more similar to Hegel than he would have cared to recognize. For through such deferment of the whole, the particular present—and even more the past—gains a concrete fullness that Kierkegaard’s repetitions seek in vain to procure.—Similarly, Feuerbach moved his enlightenment concept of humanity, as a corrective, to the center of his philosophy; a concept that can no longer be contained by autonomous spirit. Similarly, again, Marx ultimately subordinated all his thought to the category of exchange-value, of the commodity. Indeed even this category, as the quintessence of the phenomena of capitalist society, maintains allegiance to the concept of totality. However, it shifts the emphasis of explanation from the side of consciousness to that of the “material” in such a fashion that the unity of the “idea” of capitalist society is destroyed by contents that do not arise continuously from any idea because they place the reality of the idea itself in question. Although all these categories originate in the self-enclosing infinity of the system, they draw the systematic structures into themselves like whirlpools in which they disappear. Kierkegaard’s case is no different. He becomes a critic of the system because consciousness, as consciousness of an existence that is not deducible from itself, establishes itself as the ultimate contradiction of his idealism. From the totality of consciousness, which is extensive yet produced in a single point, his thought returns to this one point in order to gain the single category that will break the power of the system and restore ontology. The point that he seizes, his own fulcrum, is the archimedean point of systematic idealism itself: the prerogative of thought, as its own law, to found reality. The category that dialectically unfolds here, however, is that of paradoxical sacrifice. Nowhere is the prerogative of consciousness pushed further, nowhere more completely denied, than in the sacrifice of consciousness as in the fulfillment of ontological reconciliation. With a truly Pascalian expanse, Kierkegaard’s dialectic swings between the negation of consciousness and its unchallenged authority. His spiritualism, the historical figure of objectless inwardness, is to be understood according to the immanent logic of the crisis of idealism. For Kierkegaard, consciousness must have pulled itself free from all external being by a movement of “infinite resignation”; through choice and decisiveness, it must have freely posited every content in order finally, in the face of the semblance of its own omnipotence, to surrender its omnipotence and, foundering, to purify itself of the guilt it acquired in having supposed itself autonomous. The sacrifice of consciousness, however, is the innermost model of every sacrifice that occurs in his philosophy. It constitutes the nexus of the mythical and the intrahistorical in his categorical structure. For sacrifice indeed wants to absolve nature, and nature has its determining power at Kierkegaard’s historical moment and even for his knowledge in the spirit of the isolated individual. Just as, for Kierkegaard, the spirit of the individual stands as the archetype not only of all spirit, but of nature itself, which does not appear except as “spirit,” so sacrifice, the final category of nature to which he raises himself and at the same time the final category of the destruction of the natural, is in his terms a sacrifice of spirit. With the greatest tension of which system-building idealism was still capable, he carried out this sacrifice both for the system as a whole and in all phenomena that fall within the system. The category of sacrifice, by means of which the system transcends itself, at the same time and fully contrary to expectation, holds Kierkegaard’s philosophy systematically together as its encompassing unity through the sacrificial abstraction of all encountered phenomena. In intellectual sacrifice the mythical origin of sacrifice appears most unalloyed; its historical function appears most spontaneously. The two meet on the stage of spirit and carry out the dialogue of idealism as mythical thought’s own play of lamentation. Idealism, however, is ultimately revealed as mythical in that although it indeed transcends itself, it is unable to immanently fulfill the claim to reconciliation that it announces. Nature, withdrawn into human spirit, hardens itself in idealism and usurps the power of creation. While the ruin that idealism brings upon itself is therefore able to free it from the semblance of autonomy, reconciliation as catharsis cannot be vouchsafed for a fully collapsing idealism.

Mythical Sacrifice

Of the many commentators, only Monrad gives any insight into the relation between Kierkegaard’s sacrifice and the mythical. As part of a sketch of Kierkegaard’s character, he quotes a passage from the Havamal of nordic mythology: “Odin speaks: I know that I hung from a wind-blown tree nine nights long, wounded by a spear, consecrated to Odin: I myself, consecrated to myself.”¹ Monrad emphasizes the phrase “consecrated to Odin: I myself, consecrated to myself “; it could in fact serve as the motto of a theology of sacrifice in which the individual must “perish” to become “himself.” Nothing is added here by the observation of more recent Danish authors of Kierkegaard’s “genuinely nordic character.”² The relation is evident in the material. The god sacrifices himself, that is, autonomously; for himself, that is, remaining in the natural domain of his own domination. Ultimately the sacrifice transpires, as the continuation of Monrad’s passage makes evident, because the god wanted “to procure a higher knowledge through the transcendence of runes”³; even Kierkegaard’s philosophical intention of “transparentness,” including the model of the cipher, is contained in the passage from the Edda. Kierkegaard himself compares the concept of philosophy with mythology: “No philosophy… no mythology… has ever had this idea.”⁴ The idea, however, that should overcome philosophy and the context of mere nature is that of the paradox.—Kierkegaard himself perceived in the aesthetic sphere that sacrifice is mythical. He wrote of Euripides’ “Iphigenia in Aulis”: “Agamemnon is about to sacrifice Iphigenia. Aesthetics demands silence of Agamemnon, inasmuch as it would be unworthy of the hero to seek comfort from any other person, just as out of solicitude for the women he ought to hide it from them as long as possible. On the other hand, in order to be a hero, the hero also has to be tried in the dreadful spiritual trial that the tears of Clytemnestra and Iphigenia will cause. What does aesthetics do? It has a way out; it has the old servant in readiness to disclose everything to Clytemnestra. Now everything is in order.”⁵ What is specified here as the aesthetic character of sacrifice is in truth mythical: it is the silence of speechless submission to fate; the mute struggle that the hero puts up against fate as he submits and by submitting inserts a caesura in the fateful circle. The servant’s speech, however, is no aesthetic “way out”; rather, his disembodied voice is the echo of fate itself that announces its consummation to the taciturn hero. The paradox also offers up a sacrifice, one comparable to the silent hero, and therefore falls prey to that mythology that Kierkegaard imagines never to have “had this idea.” For just as the hero, deprived of all hope, is handed over as absolution to blind natural forces, paradoxy sacrifices hope, the favorite child of spirit, to spirit itself as expiation. In this fashion Kierkegaard himself “aesthetically” bans the paradoxical, to which he “religiously” succumbs specifically in the mythical figure of memory. As mere imageless spirit, memory destroys the pictorial configuration of hope: “I can describe hope so vividly that every hoping individual will acknowledge my description; and yet it is a deception, for while I picture hope, I think of memory.”⁶ This already points the way, by means of a “transcendence of spheres,” to Kierkegaard’s Christology: while hope here falls to the mercy of memory that is as mythical as the recollection of what has always been, in the Christology all worldly existence is ultimately consecrated to the simply different that cancels the “deception” of existence but without reconciling it. The mythical figure of pure spirit ascends out of the hell of memory: “No power in the play, no power on earth, has been able to coerce Don Juan, only a spirit, an apparition from another world, can do that. If this be understood correctly, then this will again throw light upon the interpretation of Don Juan. A spirit, a ghost, is a replication; this is the mystery which lies in its apparition; Don Juan can do everything, can withstand everything, except the replication of life, precisely because he is immediate sensuous life, whose negation the spirit is.”⁷ Thus power over natural life remains dedicated to its annihilation in spirit rather than to reconciliation. The annihilation of natural life, originating in the statue of the commander, is correctly understood as ghostly. For here it is not merely natural life that is destroyed by spirit; spirit itself is annihilated natural life and bound to mythology. For this reason, spirit is without hope, and, even in Kierkegaard’s doctrine of faith, paradoxy distorts hope as the simple annihilation of nature by spirit: “And next the spirit brings hope, hope in the strictest Christian sense, this hope which is hope against hope. For in every man there is a spontaneous hope, in one man it may be more vitally strong than in another, but in death (i.e. when thou dost die from) every such hope dies and transforms itself into hopelessness. Into this night of hopelessness (it is in fact death we are describing) comes then the life-giving spirit and brings hope, the hope of eternity. It is against hope, for according to that merely natural hope there was no hope left, and so this is hope against hope.”⁸ In spite of its forcefulness, this image of hope is false. Hope does not unfold in this image in the absurdity of a life that is natural, fallen to nature, and yet at the same time created. Rather the absurdity turns against hope itself. By annihilating nature, hope enters the vicious circle of nature; originating in nature itself, hope is only able to truly overcome it by maintaining the trace of nature. The twilight of Kierkegaardian hope is the sallow light of the twilight of the gods that proclaims the vain end of an age or the aimless beginning of a new one, but not salvation. Thus, in the dialectic of hope, Kierkegaard’s paradoxy proves to be caught up in nature by virtue of its antinatural spiritualism. His polemic against mythical hope becomes mythical hopelessness just as the movement of “existence” changes into the despair that initiated its flight into the labyrinth. According to its stated intention, his interpretation of Christianity is directly opposed to any mythological interpretation. He would like to exclude every mythical content that propagates itself in images; with the greatest severity, he criticizes “childish religiosity”⁹ for its “immediacy”; and he equally repudiates infant baptism and anabaptism as “external” because of their theological symbolic form, which he attribute to myth. Blinded, however, it escapes him that the image of sacrifice is itself mythical and occupies the innermost cell of his thought, accessible equally by way of his philosophy as by his theology. The sacrifice of Christ and the “disciple” of reason cannot be finally distinguished. The claim “that Christ came into the world to suffer,”¹⁰ paradoxical and yet all too laconic, transforms the Christian doctrine of reconciliation itself into the mythical. However unrelentingly he undertook to extirpate the mythical origin of sacrifice through dialectics and however effectively the ambiguity of this mythical origin supported him in this, he nevertheless unintentionally betrays the mythical essence of his theology in otherwise unimposing sentences: “If Christianity once changed the face of the world by overcoming the crude passions of immediacy and ennobling the state, it will find in culture a resistance just as great.”¹¹ Thus the dialectical refraction of subordination to nature, of the “crude passions of immediacy,” is to become a danger for Christianity itself, is to break Christianity—with the result that Christianity reverts to subordination to nature. The fact that Kierkegaard, to mollify nature, polemically substituted the reified and questionable concept of culture for a reconciling dialectic that issues from nature changes nothing in this situation.

“Gnosis”

There is thus a mythologization of Christianity in the last instance, although in all preceding instances, nature had been driven out of Christianity. Christ’s death itself is for Kierkegaard not so much an act of reconciliation as a propitiating sacrifice. However the Training in Christianity may employ the phrase “reconciling death,”¹² the “doctrine of reconciliation” is still explicitly defined as atonement: “It is taught that Christ has made satisfaction for hereditary sin.”¹³ In vain, Kierkegaard denies that which to him marks Christ and likewise man as an “exception”: “It was not in order to appease the angry gods that Abraham transgressed the universal”¹⁴—but why else? For all authentic existence is atonement for Kierkegaard: in The Instant he demands that Christians “live as sacrificed men in this world of falsehood and evil.”¹⁵ All thereby violate “the universal.” Moral requirements are properly promulgated only in a life for which reconciliation is a continuous possibility; if life is sacrificed, ethos disappears with it in the abyss of the natural. The distinction of good and evil no longer holds under the domination of death. For this reason, ethics constitutes for Kierkegaard a “transitional stage”; since no life is begrudged it, it cannot prove itself. Sacrifice is that point in the system where the tangent of an abstract and unreachable “meaning” touches the closed circle of life, and his doctrine insists on this “point” without progressing along the circumference; if, according to the paradox, it is only here that he can participate in “meaning,” he must pay for it according to a graceless mythical calculus with the loss of the living person. In his ethics human life sets itself, powerlessly, against sacrificial annihilation— Through sacrifice, the difference between Christ and man is abolished. If Christ, as sacrifice, falls to the mercy of the natural, in sacrifice the individual raises himself up, sacrificially, as a follower. Of Christ, it is said: “This story, the story of constant maltreatment which finally ended in death, or shall I say the story of this suffering, is the story of his whole life. It can be told in several ways. It can be told briefly in two words, nay even in one: it was the story of the passion.”¹⁶ Thus the story is mythically reduced to a sacrifice, systematically reduced to a single point, as in the morose thesis that “indeed every day of His life was a day of burial for Him who was appointed to be a sacrifice.”¹⁷ The life of the individual is “relegated”—through sacrifice—to nothing else: “Now if for any individual an eternal happiness is his highest good, this will mean that all finite satisfactions are volitionally relegated to the status of what must be renounced in favor of an eternal happiness.”¹⁸ Renounced by the strength of the “follower”: the Christian is to “make ‘the pattern’ so vividly present that” he experiences “such suffering as if in contemporaneousness you had recognized Him for what he is. All ado made afterwards, all ado about building his tomb etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., is, according to the judgment of Jesus Christ, hypocrisy and the same blood-guilt as that of those who put him to death. This is the Christian requirement. The mildest, mildest form for it after all is surely that which I have used in Training in Christianity: that you must admit that this is the requirement, and then have recourse to grace”¹⁹—a grace for which Kierkegaard knows no other criterion than suffering. The mythical content of suffering is hardly mastered by Christology and by being a follower; occasionally this mythical content breaks through, autonomously, and sacrifice is presented in its true natural form: as expiation, performed for the sinful corps of the present “generation.” “The thought goes very far back in my recollection that in every generation there are two or three who are sacrificed for the others, are led by frightful sufferings to discover what redounds to the good of others. So it was that in my melancholy I understood myself as singled out for such a fate.”²⁰ The emancipation from the Christian prototype, the separation of the sacrifice from the name and fulfillment of Christ, the fetishistic autonomization of the sacrifice are—in this passage—no accident of expression. In fact his philosophy develops the cult of sacrifice with such tenacity that it finally becomes a gnosis, which Kierkegaard as a Protestant would have otherwise passionately opposed. Gnosis erupts in late idealism when—through spiritualism—mythical thought gains power over Christian thought and, in spite of all talk of grace, draws Christianity into the graceless immanence of the course of nature. Kierkegaard’s gnostic doctrines are presented as “literary works” and fantasies. This is perhaps not simply on formal grounds the result of the requirements of the material, as set out in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, but also in order to mask the heterodox character of these doctrines—a requirement that Kierkegaard must have been aware of. Yet these gnostic doctrines return so relentlessly; they present such a tight nexus of motives; they pursue so strictly the course of transcendence defined by the system of spheres; that the critic of the mythical content of Kierkegaard’s philosophy finds its real basis in them. The mythical character of sacrifice becomes evident in the fateful necessity of the “offense,” over which God is supposed to have no control: “This precisely is the sorrow in Christ: ‘He can do no other.’ He can humble himself, take the form of a servant, suffer and die for man, invite all to come unto him, sacrifice every day of his life and every hour of the day, and sacrifice his life—but the possibility of the offense he cannot take away. Oh, unique work of love! Oh, unfathomable sorrow of love! that God himself cannot, as in another sense he does not will, cannot will it, but, even if he would, he could not make it impossible that this work of love might not turn out to be for a person exactly the opposite, to be the extremest misery! For the greatest possible human misery, greater even than sin, is to be offended in Christ and remain offended. And Christ cannot, ‘love’ cannot render this impossible. Lo, for this reason He says, ‘Blessed is he who shall not be offended in me.’ More he cannot do.”²¹ Indeed, it is not the sacrifice itself, but its acceptance by the creature that is withdrawn from the control of the deity; just as in the astrology of the spheres, so in the demonic “offense,” necessity rules. God’s sadness over the unreachable, the “lost” person, responds gnostically to this necessity as the final word of Kierkegaard’s theology. In ambiguous reconciliation divine love itself laments: “Behold, he therefore brought to compl...