Religion and Philosophy Max Horkheimer Translated by Eduardo Mendieta

From: The Frankfurt School on Religion PP. 243-250

To speak today of the relation between philosophy and religion without thinking of Paul Tillich is not possible. Like no one else, he has united both of them in his thought, and his death has left a deep void in intellectual life. When in 1929 he accepted the invitation to a chair of philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, he remained a Protestant theologian, and above all a Christian. In contrast to many of his faith, academic and lay, he took the commandment to love ones neighbor at every moment absolutely seriously. If he had not left Germany immediately after the beginning of the radical anti-Christianity movement, he would have been exterminated fairly soon. He had seen the ascendancy of Nazism, and he had opposed to it the ideal of a just society. He adhered to religious socialism. In the idea of the just society is superseded love for ones neighbor, the respect for the rights of each. A politics that, even if it were highly unreflexive, were it not to preserve in itself theology, would remain, no matter how adroit it would like to be, mere business. Tillich also had the presentiment that in Marxs work, in an unconscious way but logically inseparable from its content, theological postulates are decisive. In the contemporary period these are rapidly disempowered, not only in politics and science, in which already for a long time they serve as phrases, but also in those spheres, such as advanced art, in which they find expression today, although if only as openly negated. Instead of adapting, whether as ontology or positivism, to specialization, philosophy ought, against conformism, to give expression to the destruction of religion as well as to the consequences for Western civilization, as inevitable as this might be. European thinking, its decisive concepts, is closely bound up with theology. As much as progressive theologians, with Tillich united in this with Judaism, would like to define the essence of the Highest, even if only to name it in a proper manner, the Highest and the One have a linguistic priority that loses its sense with religion. Why should God be one and not many, high and not deep, above and not under? Is singularity more important that plurality? How should we consider life in the world that is thoroughly dominated by science, the universe conceived as the creation of the Highest, the One, when above all, the nature of the Highest harkens back to the most primitive, from which it stems, if not as an inversion? Linguistically, the good remains associated with that which is above and is the first, and this corresponds with the prince that at that time, although he was the founder of Christian thinking, was highly nonconformist, and always sought the good for the lowest and last. Already in the Renaissance, with the beginning of the new science, the representation of heaven above loses its sense. Like the concepts of creation, of above and below, the one and the many, the concepts of finitude and infinity, body and spirit are also immersed in crisis. It is certain that after death the body returns to the earth, from which in the last instance it comes. The emergence of the spirit, the soul, their eternity, appear

however as antithesis to its fragility and subtlety. Small physical affections can transform it. The I cannot even resist wine or drugs. It lets itself be sundered and overwhelmed, losing itself. To think that after the collapse of the nervous system, the spiritual, constantly threatened in life, should remain in its individuality, when individuality, singular properly of the individual, always carried the trace of the ephemeral, makes mockery of all experience. Theology has given preference, as the best, to the infinite over the finite, eternal duration over what is transitory; the soul over the flesh, and such a hierarchy is not to be dissolved from language. The progress of science, content-wise as well as formally, condemns thought to function, to instrument. The word is a sign for a fact, itself a fact in the infinity of facts, in which as much the sun, the moon and the Earth as the Milky Way, to which they belong, the one and everything, disappear never to be seen again. What transcends facts in the sense of an eternal sense becomes an unsustainable illusion, into a field of free speculation, an interpretation of the world proper to earlier stages of human development that have been superseded. The foul peace between science and faith understood as different disciplines, one oriented to the progress of life, economy, politics, and the defense of the nation, in one word, reality, and the other oriented to the soul, means the resignation of theology. The victor is generous. Our concepts, concedes the scientist, are methodologically speaking fruitful fictions, mechanisms for organization, signs for the predicting with exactitude events at the right moment and place. Science is a means for the domination of nature, for construction of automata and rockets, for the rationalization of society; absolute truth, whatever that may mean, is with pleasure abandoned for the exact investigation of priests and artists of whatever allegiance. To the extent that philosophy makes do with secondary logical labors, with the abstract history of philosophers and philosophemes, or busies itself with words such as being and entity, essence or presence, or with eternal values, the more it is reserved to an academic discipline. Religion also succumbs to the division of labor. Its place as a not evidently necessary discipline in the actual functioning of contemporary knowledge, such as it is performed in the schools and universities, means a regress, as with the civilization for which religion was once significant for its conception of the world and life. To the extent that since the Renaissance, emergent science, the expansion of its mode of thinking entered increasingly into contradiction with theology, so much more that philosophy took over the task of supporting the Christian teaching, at least its postulates, through rational methods used by science. The concept of God as the creator, lawgiver and judge, and above all the most important maxims for the functioning of society, should be as rational truths brought into harmony with science. Independently from the dangerous idea of revelation, its postulates were considered through thinkings reflection on itself as eternal maxims. On this conviction converged philosophical systems of different orientation. The tendency to save European culture in the face of the growing knowledge of the world, led to the origin of humanism as well as to the emergence of modern philosophy. This was linked more closely than the other to the conviction that without God morality, the immortality of the soul, and societys life must decline. Although Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant, are indebted to rigorous science, their legitimation of supreme religious principles

through the mediation of their identification with the concept of reason constitute a decisive moment in their thinking. Against them, David Hume, among the greatest of that period of the English bourgeoisie, remitted morality to rationally neutral human love, and reduce religion to a mere convention. Luther had already anticipated the futility of the rationalist attempts. For this reason, he came to hate Erasmus and philosophy as such. Reason, you are a prostitute, I will not follow you.1 Since he had abandoned to the irrational principle with all its consequences, to grace, and deprecated to deduce concrete behavior from reason, he had no other social alternative but to deify the state and administration, the established authority. His teaching represented an attempt to save religion. Beyond science there is nothing, there is only error and superstition. Among the representations that cannot be grounded through experience and reason, Christian ones ought to be considered valid inasmuch as they are beliefs. Beyond what is right and false there is a third, Gods word. Had High Scholastic thought not acknowledged any contradiction between theological and secular knowledge, and sought only to describe the highest truths of Christianity through supernatural light, few of these truths would remain. This is the case after Luthers perspective, who with the Bibles own world perspective challenged the new scientific outlook, unmediated by philosophy. There is a relation among earth, heaven, hell, humans, soul, and God that the developing knowledge is not close; it is the realm of the Greek Gods or astrology and magic and nonetheless must be valid as holy text. This sums up news, theses and commandments, which are sanctioned through the tradition and institutions, which are separated from experience and evidence by a deepening abyss; for religion will be repressed by the developing education of the understanding. 2 The part of the youth, which due to the transformed family life does not preserve religion as a moment of its own substance, but rather acknowledges a bifurcated tradition, remains fundamentally helpless. The last great philosophical attempt to salvage the core of Christianity was Schopenhauers work. He agreed with Tillich in some important thoughts. If you take Christian dogma sensu propio, then Voltaire is right. Taken allegorically, on the other hand, it is a sacred myth, a vehicle for bringing to the people truths which would otherwise be altogether inaccessible to them.3 He anticipated the symbolism that Tillich would develop in a differentiated way. Christianity is thoroughly symbolic in nature.4 What Schopenhauer calls the weakest point for all religions, Tillich wanted to supersede, namely the they cannot be openly but only surreptitiously allegorical.5 Man, according to Tillich, receives revelation according to his own finite, delimited situation, under the conditions of mans estranged character.6 The parables are to be understood symbolically, taken literally they would be superstition, at least in the contemporary epoch. Schopenhauers metaphysics, distantly separated from Tillichs unwavering confidence, offers an explicitly formulated theory of the relation between the beyond and the worldly, transience and eternity, the conditioned and the unconditional. In a determined way, no longer distanced from science, it gives expression to what Tillich, and before him, Kant, held for unsayable. That the world, how humans know it, the products of their intellect apparatus, which is capable of perception and understanding, is a phenomenon that is mediated by transitory functions, Kant had already made clear. Technical results that would like to preserve in many other constellations the

control of the nature of the earth leave undisturbed the relation of the finite to the absolute truth. Conceptual digressions into reality independent from the subject, as it is in itself, speculation about appearances not constituted through a human-mental realm of forms of experience, are a fraud. Human consciousness remains enclosed within the gestalt of the universe that is dependent on him, no matter how much he would like to reach the truth despite the fact this project is infinite. The world in itself, the other of the subjectively conditioned, is related to thought, knowledge corresponds only to relatives. Kants disciple Schopenhauer dissociated himself from such agnosticism. While in Tillich, the unknown Other, God above God, meant to approximate the Higher and Highest, and is at the same time an opposition to horrible reality, becomes in Schopenhauer the absolute that denounces the eternally blind, insatiable will, which serves and belongs to the last end, what is manifest in the world. To him what can lead to the only substance does not mean in the same sense objectification as knowledge from appearances or speculation about another world. What deeply moves me is neither the realm of the perceptive nor the conceivable, the sagaciously disclosed or constructed; rather everyone can feel this inner movement in their conviction that their thoughts, plans, actions, their picture and conception of the world, which they may owe to their own meditation or however they may have been acquired, have risen from strivings of the will, which all expression of life thoroughly dominates as the identical. The individual, insofar as he reflects upon himself, experiences this, the psychic power, not unlike the libido in Freuds sense, as what belongs to him, a durable impulse, as one of its many inner essences. In truth, he is in different points, blindness and non-infirmities still the same: plurality is appearance, the affirmation of one man over another is foolishness. The in itself is One, struggle, oppression, domination, bloody world history is in an emphatic sense meaningless. The Kantian commandment, which wonders out of the world, will disclose the realization that unity is not reconstituted as truer than multiplicity, as is usual for theology, but instead that both are categorical instruments of understanding that make possible for the new interpretation of the world as a whole. This summary recollection of Schopenhauers ideas should clarify the indication that his philosophical salvation of the Christian faith is accomplished through these theorems, which are contrary to faith itself. This is disconcerting to the believers who worship the creator of the world, even a good one, even when the destiny of everything that is living, including humanity, contradicts openly this dogma, and only with an escape like that offered by the doctrine of an inscrutable divine design can it go against the absurd. It would be more rational, as is the case in Buddhism and Hinduism, to worship a world overcomer and in a sense world destroyer, and preferable to place Christianity among these Asiatic religions.7 Nothing would be better than what is. The justification of Christian morality is derived from this negation. If the realm of phenomena, reality that can be experienced, is not work of a positive power, expression of being in itself good and eternal, but instead of the will that affirms itself in everything that is finite, that is reflected, disfigures, and in multiplicity and is, with everything, profoundly identical, then every entity has reason to feel like any other entity, not with its specific motives, but with its very condition

of being trapped in the illusion, responsible and moved by the same passion, in enjoyment and decline. The life and destiny of the founder of Christianity becomes thus an exemplar, no longer by reason of a commandment, but from the knowledge of the intimate essence of the world. With respect to itself, his founding of morality, the thesis of the despicable character of the world, as Schopenhauer says, his teaching could be considered the genuine Christian philosophy.8 Who acknowledges his work as truth does not affirm in any way the dogmas, but instead the spirit of the gospels. The arguments of pessimist philosophy that point to Christianity, even if today they can only be taken on with extreme caution, are in any case more plausible than those of the rationalists, even including those of criticism that in their practical part are extremely close to them. The conviction that moral prescriptions form a part of reason is superseded. The doctrine according to which the categorical imperative is found in every being that thinks is an absolutization of the product of the tradition. Kant attempted to secure philosophically the dream of the great enlightenment. Voltaires conviction that dans le coeur Dieu se grave lui-mme9 has a long prehistory and reaches to the most significant literature of our times. The beautiful proclamation of morality as the will written in the heart by Godespoused by Tolstoy in his work Resurrectionthat Kant, more scientifically, named practical reason, rests however on a precipitated induction. Even when in all acts the thinking being is completely confident that in their place each would act as him, reason acts neutrally towards the categorical imperative. Next to moral acts, reason also justifies actions whose maxim can hardly be universalized. The categorical imperative characterizes the civilized mentality, but not reason as such. It is no more evident that morality is to be derived from it than are divine precepts. Jealousy and ambition are as far and close to reason as are love and abnegation, and they are absolutely no less productive. Notwithstanding its geniality and veracity, the way out proposed by Kant is no more viable than is the theological. The grounding of love for our neighbor, departing from the idea that everything that exists is in the last instance one, contains more critical consciousness than recourse to the supreme essence. Schopenhauers unconventional solution also easily includes fatalism and means in a certain sense resignation. No less than the Kantian and Voltairian thought, his thinking on the Reformation, so presented, shows how he virtually negates the free will, and with it responsibility, without laying specific values with reference to the freedom of action: Je pense que vous croyez la destine; pour moi cest mon dogme favori. Toutes les affaires de ce monde me paraissent des boules pousses les unes par les autres.10 The Christian civilization is, as has been said, inseparable from the ChristianTheological picture of the world, even when this was opposed at every moment. When moral impulses have been transmitted to the youth, even when these, free from confessional commitments, go together with conscious atheism, they become, as soon as reference to a transcendent is eliminated, a matter of taste and mood, the same as its opposite. Moral engagement, no less than erotic engagement, appears today as something left behind. For this reason, philosophical help appears more necessary than ever, as it becomes simultaneously more superfluous, since morality loses all social significance. The more regulated are the details of individual life by administration, and ones personal decision becomes reduced to the precise reaction to determined signs,

the more personal work is rigidly dictated according to tasks and goals, not only by the overarching apparatus and by specialization that that same apparatus conditions, but also by the gigantic social and political constellations, the narrower the game field for the development of the individual becomes. Relations with others, already predetermined in the sense of utility by the gigantic apparatus, stays marginalized to the field of the useful, just like every other non-required activity, and thus remains relegated to the so called free time. Work and interest, once closely united in the bourgeoisie, have become separate parts. Religion appears today with a right to existence, for it keeps humans united through the church and the community, keeping them partially busy during the free time, thus working against solitude. To believe in its doctrines, even today, confers to many a comforting support without too great a risk. Not few of the services that the religious and their organizations offer society could be turned over to secular institutions, and the functions that still perform the strictly theological passes over frequently to a secondary plane. The fading of thinking on an Other that is distinct from empirical reality affects language itself. For science as well as with administration, more precise forms of communication are appropriate. Without nationalisms, the transition to more functional systems already appeared a long time ago as a fortunate transformation, and the more so inasmuch that the different situations of the individual, to which belong fully the thin walls of homes and the instruments of listening, is not in any way whatsoever appropriate for differentiated expression. The historical process, which includes the demise of cultural spheres, does not dissolve domination. The feudal, absolutistic, bourgeois forms of society, in which many could still make use of religion, and which in the face of a gross injustice points to a threatening and promising beyond, translate however into structures that are no longer a system of two classes, and that cannot be thought rightly anymore as a transition to a realm of freedom. If the diagnosis by the founder of historical materialism, that the crisis would exacerbate itself, as it has proven itself so far, this theory in its totality is outstripped by reality. In the Eastern countries, Marxism functions under rejection of its theological as well as idealist elements as the seeming actual religion. This serves as an instrument of inward, as well as outward, manipulation. In contrast, for the workers in the Western countries, the residues of The Communist Manifesto, and the critique of political economy are no more than fading traditions, analogous to the fate of the confessions under bourgeois society. The relativization of what is extant, whether it is as the finite, as in Christianity, or as prehistory, as in Marxism, appears in the administered world as a romantic symptom. It would seem assured that, aside from that which has not befallen catastrophe, a transition in highly industrialized societies to a totally organized and automated society is being realized, in opposition to messianic time and its secularized form, the Marxist utopia. A system of reactions, proper to the state of technique, will become part of human nature. If the individual does not function with security, if he is not normal, but is no longer immoral; he needs medical treatment: a repair. Perfect socialization is mediated through total administration, and if it is necessary through a dictatorship, for a long time already appropriate. The inexhaustible yearning, the lack of an internal support, which is concomitant with the need for community, momentarily offers a chance for a demagogue to alter history. An unconditional end is no longer such, and real aims, that once

accomplished immediately become means, are, despite so much rationality, in themselves so empty that a good part of the youth protests against every glorification of the quotidian through their identification with the Beatles, provocateurs and happenings. The service that philosophy may still offer to what is disappearing resides in expressing this loss and its consequences. The effort is a paradox since the traditional form of the pronouncement and the words themselves presuppose precisely that sense whose loss they themselves try to give expression to.

Notes
1. Citation in Hartman Grisar, Luther, III (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1911), 836. 2. Arthur Schopenhauer, Aus Arthur Schopenhauers Handschriftlicher Nachla: Abhandlungen, Anmerkungen, Aphorismen und Fragmente, edited by Julius von Frauenstdt (Leipzing: F. A. Brockhaus, 1864), 429. 3. Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paraliponema: Kleine philosophische Schriften vol. 2 (Zrich: Diogenes Verlag, 1977), 177, p. 401. [English translation, Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 182.] 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Paul Tillich, The Future of Religions (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 81. 7. A. Schopenhauer, Aus Arthur Schopenhauers Handschriftlicher, 430. 8. Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paraliponema, 163. 9. See Voltaire, Oeuvres compltes X, (Paris: Garnier Frres, 1877-82), 130, and many other places. 10. Voltaire, Oevres Compltes, Vol. 45, 98.