Frankfurt School on Religion

This commentary is on an essay by Jurgen Habermas titled "La verbalisation du sacré" from Parcours 2. An English version is also available under the book title of Postmetaphysical Thinking.

The form of the argument

The essay is divided up into sections designated by Roman Numerals. The first two consist largely of stage setting. The real action begins with section III.

The most important part of the stage setting for our purposes is his claim, I would argue correct claim, that a ritual does not depend on an antecedent meaning. You do not need to have a pre-existing mythical narrative in order to explain a rite. (There might be such a mythical narrative; the point is that there doesn't have to be one.) Habermas rejects the dichotomy that myths are representation and rites are performative. Rather there is a sacred compound of meaning and action that exists in the performing of the rite.

Rites seem to do two things for Habermas. They reassure us as to things that we feel vulnerable in the face of such as, "Will the sunshine return after solstice?" "Will there be spring this year?" "Rain?" Secondly, they reassure as to our collective identity.

It is this second purpose, not surprisingly, that most interests Habermas. His hypothesis is that in the genesis of our collective modes of life and associated forms of communication out of an egocentric, or self-referential understanding, ritual fills a blank space. That is to say we are naturally “narcissistic” [see note marked with * below] as it were, we treat our world as something to be manipulated to achieve our ends. Consequently, our understanding of language is self-referential. What is this thing to me? What is needed is a move that gets us from that to a position where I can talk to someone else about something that is not defined as how it figures according to my purposes but rather that has a meaning apart from me that I must recognize. Not just recognize as a definition but recognize in terms that impose standards on me.

Ritual, he will argue, plays a unique role in achieving this transition. It is important, I think, to understand the kind of argument he is making. He does not go so far as to say that, for example, it was logically required to bridge this gap the way that a cosmologist would say that certain highly unstable Helium molecules must exist because that is the only way Carbon could be formed. Nor does he agree that there is or could be empirical evidence such as archeological findings that ritual did play this role as a matter of historical fact. Rather he rather tentatively suggests that it could fill the gap and that there are no alternatives.

I would argue that the argument he does make is comparable to the argument for evolution. Evolution predicts but not in a testable way because there is no non-trivial difference between the survival of the fittest and the survival of the survivors. Why do I believe that evolution is true then? Because there is no alternative explanation that is even remotely credible.

To return to the text

Beginning at section III, Habermas argues, following Durkheim, that a ritual such as a dance or an exchange of gifts does not require an antecedent mythology. We do not have to imagine these behaviours as, for example, appeasing spirits or gods. All the meaning necessary is inherent in the practice. And there exists in these rites the potential for normative standards. This is how you do the dance.

If I might digress, this points to a deep problem in Liberalism. Anyone who has bashed their way through Leviathan will remember the interminable section where Hobbes tries to come up with a rational reason to surrender their weapons and enter into a social contract. I think every child reproduces that step: Two children agree to put down their water ballons. Then one says to the other, “You first!.” On the one hand, it is in boh heir interest not to ge wet. On the other hand, if one child can fool he oher ino puting down their wtare ballon firts hey can soak he oher wih impunity.

Arguing on the base of self-interest, which is Hobbes’s goal, never gets off the ground. In 2011 Habermas presented this paper at Georgetown University and in an aside he made a similar comparison with Rousseau. In order to enter into the Social Contract, Rousseau’s free individuals must renounce themselves.

In line with this, Habermas cites the issue of adopting a new status. He draws on Arnold van Gennep for this as he drew on Durkheim for the previous bit. He gives the example of a child going through a rite of passage boyhood to manliness. Figuratively speaking, the boy must die to one status before adopting the other. There is an odd limbo where he exists in a kind of no-man’s land where he cannot draw on his old identity and where he cannot yet begin to assume the new one. The rite, whatever it, Bar Mitzvah for example, must be gone through. That, and only that, gets the person out of his status-less state and beginning the development of his new life as adult. Habermas gives this a sort of metaphor for the socialization process. There has to be a self-renunciation and, although he doesn’t put it in these terms, that will put the person making any such transition in a very vulnerable position. Then, there needs to be a rite that establishes the new identity, the new status.

That metaphor established, he moves to an extended discussion of primates versus humans. Primates he argues are trapped in a self-referential viewpoint, an egocentric position. To move beyond this human beings need to be able to achieve two types of intentional relations.

The first he classifies as horizontal: two people who reciprocally take the perspective of the other. He doesn’t use this example but we can play a role-playing game with children with dolls. An adult acts out a drama where one doll hides something in a trunk while another doll is out of the room. The second doll is brought back and the child is asked to role play the second doll looking for the hidden object. The doll that was out of the room cannot know that he object is in the trunk and must therefore look around. To have the doll go directly to the trunk and pull it out is to fail the test. The vast majority of five-year olds figure this out and do the role play correctly. They will also pass a battery of similar tests. Neither Washo the signing chimp nor Koko the signing gorilla could do anything like that.

The second intentional relation Habermas classifies as an intentional attitude towards something in the world. The ability to believe that the yogurt I left in the fridge when I left home this morning will still be there barring some unusual circumstance such as someone else eating it before I get home. Again animals cannot do this with any consistency.

The ability to do these two things requires us to make a cognitive leap that is not explainable in terms of simple evolutionary adaptiveness. Human beings have a monopoly on this.

Interestingly, a mastery of language is not necessary to do these things.

At the same time, other requirements are fairly stringent. It wouldn’t be enough, in Habermas’s terms, for us only to figure out how to operate in cooperation based on symbolic mediation. That wouldn’t explain the deontic normativity that grows out of ritual. I can break off a game at relatively little cost. To break off a normative ritual in which the entire community is united is another thing altogether. That sense of duty is what meets the horizontal requirement.

The vertical requirement is met by the nature of ritual as well. If we are all making abeyance to the sacred microphone in the middle of this room it requires our all accepting something about the microphone that cannot be seen, that is its sacredness. But nothing that you can see about the sacred microphone distinguishes it from other microphones. I once saw women at a bachelorette party make reverence towards the plastic phallus. I doubt any of them thought the phallus was sacred. It was a bit of acting out, binding blasphemy. They recognized the importance of something they were transgression against and they implicitly agreed it was a real something even they could not see it. All they could see was a plastic novelty item. No one needed to tell the others not to go home and tell their grandmothers or their boyfriends about this. (You can't be blasphemous unless you recognize sacredness.)

I don’t think, as I note above, that Habermas makes a strong claim of proof. Ritual practice offers itself as a plausible candidate for this normativity and there isn’t any readily available plausible alternative. [I might mention Gadamer in Truth and Method and the connection between word and meaning. The only possible explanation is convention but Gadamer has set the matter up such that he needs something stronger. The meanings cannot be endlessly malleable. ]

There is, of course, a tension in any society between the meaning my momentary self-interest attaches to something and societal cohesion. "Yes, that really is my friend's donut but he’s not here and I’m hungry." I don’t think Habermas is claiming that ritual establishes a fixed set of normative standards that can never change. This is not his terminology but there is a degree of stickiness obtained through shared ritual that mere self-interested cooperation such as game playing could not achieve.

He goes on to say, and this I will conclude on, that in modernity many people live such that they do not make recourse to ritual. As a consequence, religious people have access to a kind of experience that others do not. He doesn’t quite come down and say it is a necessary experience but it is something that secular society simply does not have.

* Habermas does not use the term "narcissistic". That is my choice. He might object to it.

Frankfurt School on Religion

Habermas says that Adorno had only a negative dialectic. That's true enough. As I've noted before any true adherent of Marx could only have a negative dialectic. (Full disclosure: I'm not entirely convinced dialectic is a "thing". If we used to think one way and now we think another way does it necessarily follow that there was some process that took place?)

I suggested in the first class that the critique if Weber, an almost obsessive critique, we find in Habermas and in Alasdair MacIntyre serves as a way to mask something. That is, it helps these thinkers hide from themselves that they have broken with Marx. Up until someone might reasonably have said, that’s all very interesting but what has it to do with the subject matter of this course?

Moving very quickly. For Marx, the reification of consciousness was a purely negative matter. A false consciousness, that’s Engel’s term, arose when ideology provided a hermeneutic that masked the real, and less admirable materialist motives that underlay power structures. A revolutionary ideology could have no direct access to truth, that is to a hermeneutic that would describe reality as it was. This would only available after a revolution lead by a class of people, the proletariat, who had been stripped of all potential for this false consciousness by capitalism.

We forget but, for Marx, capitalism’s destructive force was ultimately a positive thing: 

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

And it’s worth nothing that Marx shares this position with both the liberal Pope Francis and anti-liberal Catholics such as Patrick Deneen. That is to say, they all agree that capitalism in a liberal democracy will result in the profaning of all that is holy. The difference is that Marx thinks this is a good result and Francis and Deneen think it a bad thing.

Marx remained firmly committed to praxis, the philosophy of the deed. Its as only when a class so freed by this destructive force that it was free of ideology came and then set up a new state based on nothing but its interests as a class, that a new ideology could come along. The

For Marx the goal was obliteration of religion. For Habermas, the goal seems to be the transforming of religion with something that resembles it in some key ways. Thus his belief in some sort of positive dialectic.

What is gained by calling the activity of discussing issues, changing our minds, coming up with new ideas a dialectic? 

Think of the starting point of Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic. There is conflict between two people. One submits and the other makes him their slave. But why does this happen? The weaker person could have chosen to fight to the death. The stronger could elect to always kill those he conquers. Why does a relationship get established? Is there a philosophical answer to this?

The same is true of any relationship. Two people are on a bus. They might or might not start a conversation. They might or might not agree to continue it once they get off the bus. They might or might not agree to meet at a future date. Why do they choose one and not another option? Is there any reason to believe that there is actually an answer to these issues.

Habermas says, “Mead offers only a vague description of the evolutionary point at which symbolically mediated interaction appears.” That doesn't surprise me. What surprises me is that Habermas seems to believe that anything more might be possible.

The sacred

 A few years ago there was a news story about a teenage girl who had a great love for big cats. Hoping to eventually have a career working with them she had started a job where she cared for them. She loved the cats and they seemed to trust her. One day, however, one of them (I think a tiger) killed her. 

The large cats showed the same behaviour pattern towards this girl that they do towards the young of other prey. If a young antelope wanders in amongst lions, the lions will ignore it until they are hungry. Then they kill it an eat it. The young are easy to kill so there is no need to act immediately.

The large cats don't reason this through. That said, what they do makes rational sense. Cats need protein. Teenage girls are a good source of protein and they are easy to kill if you're a large cat.

We humans, on the other hand, are appalled.  For us this is a horrific event. Something that shouldn't have happened.

That seems to me a good example of what the sacred does for someone like Durkheim/Habermas. It establishes a line where no logical reason for there to be a line. Friends aren't food even though, strictly speaking, they meet all the biological requirements to be food and a tiger, where she present, might well demonstrate this to us in terms we would never forget.

Thus the sacred provides a  binary distinction: you never eat other human beings because they are sacred. There is no rational ground for this. It would make more sense to say this is the rational ground for everything else.

I was puzzled, however, that Habermas quoted Durkheim to the effect that an absolute separation of sacred and profane as required. That seems dubious at best. The whole point of a sacred is to transform the profane. Profane comes from "fanum" meaning a sanctuary temple. To be pro-fanum literally means to be in front of the temple. 

There are people who act as if he sacred needs to be protected. Indeed, some people who regard themselves as traditionalist Catholics act as if Jesus needs constant protection. They are, to be blunt, wrong. 

In any case, Durkheim, assuming Habermas has read him correctly, seems to be operating on a rather impoverished understanding of sacredness.

Frankfurt School on religion

Habermas doesn't set forth his own view so much as he teases it out by criticizing the views of others. At first glance we might think he is dismissing Weber, Durkheim and Mead but, in truth, he is building his views on theirs. They are more than a foundation of his view, they constitute a significant portion of the superstructure as well. There are other philosophers whom he does use in a foundational role and these might escape our notice for they get relatively little notice. At the same time, they get little or no critical appraisal from Habermas. Does this mean that he largely accepts their views as authoritative? I don't think so.

We might roughly classify the way Habermas uses other philosophers into two streams. The largest of these streams is his analysis of what we might call analytic strategies. Last time we saw him read Weber as a source of analytic strategies and he evaluated these in terms of their coherence and effectiveness. There is, however, another use of other philosophers and that is more as the ground. Habermas is working in a post-Kantian mode. He doesn’t say much about this. The ground, after all, tends to be there and we are usually more interested in the structures built upon it.

A key figure in this ground is Charles Sanders Peirce. Habermas doesn’t have a whole lot to say about Peirce but his name keeps cropping up at key moments. He comes up twice in Volume one and five times in Volume 2 three of those five times in Volume 2 occur in the section where Habermas identifies where the analytic strategy of Mead is inadequate before moving on to Durkheim. And it is precisely here where religion enters the discussion.

What is Post-Kantian about Peirce? In rough terms, I would explain it as follows. Peirce accepts the Kantian notion that there are percepts and precepts and uses them in similar fashion. However, for Kant, reason is one thing. He can write a book and call it, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. The key point being that “religion” is singular. If we set out to understand religion within the limits of reason alone, everyone should come up with the same answer. If we ask whether there is a religion possible within the limits of reason alone, there is, for Kant, only two possible answers: 1) That there is none or 2) that there is one.





(What of Peirce? The answer there is complicated. His colleague William James thought it was possible to have several, possibly even many, religions that satisfied the requirements of reason. Peirce should be willing to accept that but he argued that ultimately our views should converge. On what grounds he argued that I have never been able to figure out. It seems a statement of faith to me.)

To return to the question of Peirce as post-Kantian, Peirce looked at non-Euclidian geometry and realized that Kant's assumption that the dictates of reason were universal would no longer do. The precepts that we have are not given and universal. They have to be invented and applied. Which precepts get applied will, as a consequence, be determined by how well they work. Peirce’s contemporary, Ernst Mach, argued that Newton’s Euclidean notions of space could not be generalized to subsume the notions of space from Non Euclidean geometry. And then Einstein came along and proved them both right.

And yet, when we drive a car, we are much better off operating in a Euclidean world.

And that raises a problem for these precepts tend to be normative. We acquire them socially. For example, in Ontario where I live, doctors as a child of 18 months to identify body parts. A child is expected to be able to point at and name two. Mothers teach this to children by singing a song called head and shoulders. The song is sung to the tune of London Bridge is Falling Down and she touches her head, shoulders, knees, toes, eyes, ears, mouth and nose while singing. At first, the child imitates the pattern along with her. The child has not known all along that she has knees and is just now learning the name for them. She is just learning a pattern. The business of attaching names to things comes well don the line. The first step is learn the pattern and that pattern is normative. If I point at my elbow when the song says ears, then I am wrong. Likewise, if I distinguish green and blue in different ways from everybody else in this room, that proves that I am green-blue colour blind. It does not establish that I see green and blue in different ways. A mother teaches these names with absolute authority. There is no question that she might be wrong.

Habermas says there is a kind of “social control” that serves “to integrate the individual and his action with reference to the organized social process of experience and behaviour in which he is implicated.” And that is fine so far as it goes. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? But there is a chicken and egg problem: How does an “organized social process of experience and behaviour” arise?

As I have emphasized, Mead reconstructs this developmental step only from the ontogenetic perspective of the growing child …” and he adds, “This methodological restriction is legitimate so long as he is dealing with the genesis of the self.” That’s not going to be enough because society precedes the individual.”The genetic primacy of society in relation to socialized individuals follows from the basic assumptions of the theory of socialization developed by Mead.

Here is how Habermas spells out the circle: “Oddly, Mead uses the generalized other, the phylogensis of which is to be explained, only in the role of explanans … Mead is moving in a circle: in order to explain the phylogenetic transition from symbolically mediated to normatively guided interactions. he resorts to something that figured in ontogenesis, even though the “ontogensis” of this "generalized other" cannot be explained without recourse to phylogenesis.

Religion, before we bring in Durkheim, is a thing that exists. A child can be raised and taught right and wrong in terms of this thing. A convert can enter into it. But we have no explanation of how it can be evaluated against other forms of “social control” that serves “to integrate the individual and his action with reference to the organized social process of experience and behaviour.” Inside the form of life, there is room for a critical stance but it’s not clear how we would work between forms of life.


I don't mean that we cannot criticize forms of life. That we do so is empirical fact. We might make a distinction between types of criticism. If I play a melody from Chopin I might be criticized for getting the notes wrong. In that case, the person making the criticism might point at the score and showing that, for example, I played F natural where I should have played F sharp. A second type of criticism might acknowledge that I followed the score correctly but still argue that I played it "wrong". The difference between the two is that there is no external authority that everyone accepts that can be pointed at.

This a problem that springs up over and over again in contemporary philosophy. Consider Sartre’s famous question of the young man who wants to choose between joining the resistance or staying how to care for his widowed mother. Sartre says, just choose. And it is true that once you have chosen one or the other a whole raft of norms come along. But there is this weird, friction-less universe outside the two choices where it feels like you are just leaping across a void. Sartre seems to have thought that place was where true freedom lived and pretty much nobody was convinced by that suggestion.

Still, we have to give the devil his due. When it comes to choosing between forms of life, there don’t seem to be any authoritative norms. There are authoritative people, much as the mother is an authority to the child. Further, these people are following a norm. The mother's effectiveness teaching depends on her using the same terms for body parts every time, There is no final authority, however, as to what language she should choose.

Wittgenstein had an answer to this that I accept but many others don't. That answer is in two steps: the first is to say that “explanations must come to an end somewhere.” That is to say, there is no ground for anything where it is not possible to ask how that ground is to be grounded. The second step is to point at human activities and say, “look around, this is what human beings are like.”

I’ll finish up for now by returning to the distinction between Peirce and William James I discussed at the top. For Peirce there was a real convergence on truth. As the slogan from the X Files had it, the truth is out there. We choose between different precepts based on whether they work and ultimately this working will converge on the truth. James, famously or infamously, said that we choose based on what works and that is the end of it. The truth may be out there or it may not but we have no way of knowing. Ultimately, I think Wittgenstein and James agree on this. Beginning with Bertrand Russel, that answer has scandalized philosophers and, I would note, Catholic theologians. In Veritatis Splendor John Paul II wrote the following, “the dangers of relativism, pragmatism and positivism.” Them is cusswords!

All of these rest on a claim that there is not, to put it in religious terms, a non-trivial difference between acting as if something were true and acting on the belief that it is true. Ultimately, Habermas is going to attribute a Peircean, as opposed a Frege-James-Wittgenstein account of truth.

If we go to Volume one p. 276

The idea of truth can get from the concept of normative validity only the impersonality—supratemporal—of an idealized agreement, of an intersubjectivity related to an ideal communication community. This moment of a “harmony of minds” is added to that of a “harmony with the nature of things.” The authority standing behind knowledge does not coincide with moral authority. Rather, the concept of truth combines the objectivity of experience with a claim to the inter-subjective validity of a corresponding descriptive statement, the idea of a correspondence of sentences to facts with the concept of an idealized consensus. It is only from this combination that we get the concept of a criticizable validity claim.

Frankfurt School on Religion cont'd

More than a month has gone by since my preliminary post on the subject.

My principal concern then was "What is criticism good for?" Another way of asking the question is to ask how far did the Frankfurt School get from Enlightenment rationality? Drastically simplified, the Frankfurt School worried that Enlightenment rationality reduced rationality to functionality and tended, as a consequence, to be exploitative. If politics, for example, is about what works then how is that different from controlling people?

That's a fine and understandable point. However, the thing about Enlightenment rationality is that it tends to focus on what is measurable. That is to say, it connects criticism with consistent results. Criticism, on the other hand, focuses on the internal logic of what is criticized. From that perspective, it would seem to follow that because an existing practice has internal tensions it must be possible to create a new one that is better. I'm not sure that is true.

What I propose to do in this post is to look at an approach to irrationality, to systemic bias, in Marx and map it onto the concepts of ideal validity and empirical validity that Habermas identifies in Weber. Why I am doing this will, I hope become clear as I go along.

In Marx’s account of ideology we find a very profound analysis of the problems of systemic bias. Indeed, I would argue that Marx clearly identified a problem that many others have failed to recognize. The problem is that irrationality, and bias is a form of irrationality, cannot be overcome by rationality. I can overcome error by being careful in my reasoning or submitting it to others to criticize as I am doing now. But we can’t overcome systemic bias that way. Marx famously states the problem in the Theses on Feuerbach with the question, “Who will teach the teachers?” If we are all subject to a systemic bias, then the teacher is every  bit as much biased as the student. And what applies to the classroom will apply equally to individual psychology. There is no stance I can take that will allow me to criticize my own beliefs. There is no meta-language that won’t also be subject to the same system bias.

If we live then in a world where our political, moral and, most importantly for this course, religious language is merely ideology that conceals the real material nature of human relationships, how can there be a genuine revolution? The question was raised last class, wouldn’t any revolution reflect only the biased views of the people leading the revolution? And that was Marx’s critique of the English, American and French revolutions. These were bourgeois revolutions and succeeded only in replacing a distorted ideology that favoured the aristocracy with a distorted ideology that favoured the bourgeoisie.

Why would a communist revolution be any different? The answer to that, for Marx, was that capitalism put the proletariat into a special situation. That their condition was so alienating that they were in a  position to see matters clearly. Not so clearly, and this is vital, not so clearly that they could conceive of a new system that could replace capitalism. Rather, they might come to be in a position where they could see that they shared interests as a class and then, as a class, they might foment revolution and following the revolution, create the conditions that would make it possible to construct a new social order. Not construct the order immediately, but merely create the conditions where it would finally be possible to see clearly, to see without systemic bias and, therefore, construct a just society. I’ll come back to this.

This is sometimes described as a conditional prediction. Marx would be guilty of determinism if he had said revolution were inevitable. But, the argument goes, he did not. Much as I might say that this paper will catch fire if if is raised to a certain temperature in the presence of oxygen, Marx outlined a series of conditions under which revolution might follow. Roughly there were three: 1) that capitalism would be subject to continued crises, 2) that the proletariat would become poorer in absolute terms and finally, 3) that the proletariat would develop class consciousness, that is begin to think of themselves as a class with shared interests rather than as an aggregate of individuals who just happened to earn their livings by selling their labour. For some left socialists in 1920s Germany, it looked like the first two conditions had been met but the third wasn’t. At their peak the left socialist parties didn’t quite get fifteen percent of the vote. And that was at their peak.

Marx writes about a "revolutionary ideology". How does that work given the limits to rationality he has recognized? What I’d like to suggest is that it fits under the category of ideal validity that Habermas finds in Weber but that it is limited in a  way that is not the case for Habermas/Weber. That limitation is that, for Marx, those who would seek to encourage revolution, or to encourage class consciousness in the proletariat, cannot point at any post-revolution social justice for system bias will only reproduce sublimated forms of the current moral ideology, that is to say another religion in the same sense that Feuerbach criticized the Christian Holy Family as a magnification and projection of actual families into the heavens thus setting up a standard that real families cannot meet and, because their own value is taken from them and projected into this sphere, impoverishing actual families. (I'm a Catholic Christian but I acknowledge that there is something profoundly correct about Feuerbach's critique.)

A revolutionary ideology, therefore, could only highlight contradictions within the existing bourgeois ideology.

What, then, would correspond to empirical validity? There is something in Marx but it’s an anticipatory validity. The proletariat cannot see what is beyond the veil. Their special clarity regards what is wrong with the current ideology. As I mentioned above, the new order cannot follow directly from the revolution. There has to be an intervening stage called the dictatorship of the proletariat where that class, pursuing its own interests zealously and without regard for anything but its own self-interest as a class will create the conditions where a new social order could be constructed that would be free from distortion by ideology.

Now, there are two big points to make here. The first, as I noted above, is that this empirical validity is only anticipated. And that is quite a jump, to say that because we can point out tensions, contradictions and injustices, even brutal injustices, in the current system that there must be an alternative that does not suffer from these shortcomings. That is a religious claim, not an empirical one. We hear it often enough, I think every progressive politician has said at some that, “there must be a better way!” But there is no reason that follows. Not empirically. If, like Simone Weil and Raymond Aron, we are going to suggest that Marxism the opiate of the intellectuals, this is where we will aim our artillery. There is something mystical, religious even about this promise. It is a view not unlike what we find in the First letter of John:

Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.

As I read him, Habermas sees more than this strictly negative role for ideal validation in the rationalization of society. He is working towards a notion of rationality that can create the conditions for a legitimate social order and not just a distorted ideology. As a consequence, his view of religion will also change for religion, even an illusory religion has a role to play on the side of ideal validation. This opens the possibilities for religion that simply do not exist in Marx.

A final remark 

As I understand them, both Adorno and Marcuse denied that the objective conditions for revolution existed in the 1920s and they certainly didn’t think they existed in 1968. Therefore, for them, what needed to explained was not why the proletariat had failed to do what it was supposed to do. What needed to be explained was why the socialists of the 1920s and the students of 1968 falsely came to believe that revolutions possible when to quote Marcuse, it was not only no a revolutionary situation, it was not even a pre-revolutionary situation.

Franfurt School: Approaches to Religion

What is criticism good for?

I'm doing a summer seminar on the Frankfurt School. We've had a first lecture and, before we get into the real meat of the course, I wanted to set down some of the basic questions I have going in.

Marx famously contrasted describing the world with changing it. Is criticism merely a form of description? That would be problematic for pretty much everything Marx actually did could be called criticism.
 What the Frankfurt School did from the beginning could be called a challenge to Marx's description of the world. In saying that philosophers had described the world, Marx was issuing a challenge and a praise. The challenge was "lets get on with it." But underlying that was praise: an implicit claim that the Hegelians of the Left had described the world adequately. And the specific philosopher that Marx was responding to when he wrote that famous line about changing the world was Feuerbach. Significantly, the piece that inspired Marx's Theses on Feuerbach was a critique of the Christian religion.

We have three terms: 1. Describing, 2. Criticizing, 3. Changing. Marx only speaks of describing and changing. But he himself criticizes and he labels some of his writings as "critiques." By implication, it seems that Marx takes criticism to be something valuable. And the Frankfurt School implicitly agree with him as everything they do is also criticism. Indeed, it is a commonplace charge on the left that the members of the school just dilly dally in criticism rather than engaging in revolutionary action.

Not surprisingly, defenders of the school point at the failure of 1968 to bring about revolution as proof that more criticism is necessary. But who is this criticism for? What is it supposed to do? Members of the school are presumably already convinced that the world needs to be changed. The answer is that criticism will produce widespread change in attitudes towards capitalism that will create the social conditions that will make revolution possible. We might say that criticism replaces class consciousness.

What do I mean by that? One way of looking at Marx is to say he made a conditional prediction. He said that if three things happen there will be revolution: 1. If the conditions of the working class continue to deteriorate, 2. If capitalism continues to suffer serious crises, 3. If the working class come to see themselves as members of a common class with shared interests. In 1923, when the Frankfurt School was founded, it was no longer possible to believe that economic state of the working class was deteriorating. Appearances might be saved, however, by shifting from the absolute conditions of the working class and talking about relative wealth of rich and poor. That's not a very good argument but it's an argument. The second was only all too easy to believe in Frankfurt given the post-war hyperinflation that Germany had suffered. That leaves us with the third and that was problematic to say the least. Nothing even vaguely resembling class consciousness had come to pass. Worse, the very notion of a working class was starting to disappear; today, many workers own vast amounts of capital through pension plans and virtually everyone we call middle class earns most of their income by selling their labor. The question then becomes, how is it that the vast majority of workers, many of whom are university-educated people who buy tickets for the local symphony orchestra and who attend art museums unable to see that it is in their interest to bring about a revolution?

(A question I am going to pursue is whether it really would be in their interest? I leave it aside for now for it is a question the members of the Frankfurt School never seriously entertained.)

To return to criticism, we might say that the members of the Frankfurt School began to doubt Marx's description of the world. They doubted that economics really was the bedrock that underlay politics and morality. What they didn't question, however, was the value of criticism. And that's the primary question that interests me going into this course. Criticism seems like a worthwhile thing to do but there doesn't seem to be any necessary connection between criticism and the viability of the forms of life that criticism is directed at. Marx's relentless criticism of capitalism convinced him and his many adherents that capitalism's internal tensions would eventually tear it apart. Alas, the rumours of its death were greatly exaggerated. Of socialism, on the other hand, it is the rumours of its birth that keep proving false.

One way to approach the question is to ask, as the kids say, if criticism is a thing. It certainly sounds like a thing. There is a word for it! But is it just one thing. There is a school of biblical criticism that calls itself the Historical-Critical Method. So what exactly is this method? Well, that's easy. Right? We just research the historical situation that led to the creation of scripture and then we ... criticize, whatever that means. In practice, what it has tended to mean was that people brought a series of criteria derived from some purpose and applied it. The problem is that different people had different purposes and that led to there being a number of different sets of criteria being used by a number of different people. Historical criticism was full of promise but produced little consensus because it wasn't one thing but a whole lot of different things. If the criteria used in criticism are determined by the interests of the person doing the critique, then it will always be a matter of criticisms; there is so such thing as criticism in the singular.

Periodization

 "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language." Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Marxists are fond of the expression "late capitalism". That term derives from what is a popular form of bloodletting among historians: the naming and defining of periods. Again, just because we can give a name to something doesn't make it a thing. And "late capitalism" implies not only that it is a thing but that it is a thing that has been going on a while and that is far from self evident.

Consider that Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was meant to describe something new. Capitalism was not the reigning economic system when the book was published in 1776. Mercantilism was the prevailing system and capitalism was emerging. When capitalism can be said to start is a bit of a stretch but, no matter how we date it, to speak of "late capitalism" sounds more like wishful thinking than serious criticism to me.

Another way to look at it is to ask when does the Medieval period end? Many historians like to refer to the period from 1500-1800 as the Early Modern Period. Again, the term makes it seem like a thing. On the other hand, some Medieval historians argue that the middle ages don't really end until the 18th century. The basis of that argument is that the social, political and economic forms that defined the middle ages continue to dominate. There are many challenges and we can see the emerging forms of social, political and economic arrangements that will define the modern period beginning to emerge but it is not until the end of the 18th century that they begin to be firmly established. That seems plausible to me. An historical period might end with a bang but it seems more likely that it would be with a whimper. For a long time, it was argued that the Antique world ended with the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. Lately, however, this view has been largely replaced with a countering view that says there was an extended decline that can be called Late Antiquity and that the middle ages cannot be said to have ended until the form of life of Antiquity were effectively replaced by the new forms of government and agriculture that defined the middle ages and that took another 300 years after 410.

If we accept that argument, and I do, then we have to apply the same criteria to determining the end of Middle Ages. Although it is clearly the case that the forms of life associated with the middle ages were in decline from 1500 to 1800 I don't think it can be credible argued that they began to be effectively replaced before the 18th century. If we start thinking that way, then we might start to think of René Descartes as a late medieval thinker, as playing a role similar to what Augustine did. That is to say that while Augustine was immensely influential for the middle ages, he was still a figure from the antique world. Likewise, I would say that while Descartes has been immensely influential to the modern era, he was still a figure from the middle ages. (Descartes most famous argument has clear Augustinian roots.)

All this matters for the philosophical issues that concern me in this course for it seems that a society can survive even in the face of inner tensions. What Hobbes called the ghost of the Old Roman Empire had a very long life. Criticism in the post-Enlightenment sense has consisted at pointing at internal tensions in a form of life and asserting that we can do better. It seems, however, that internal tensions are not fatal to forms of life. For all we know, they may thrive under this tension the same way the human body tends to under training. Physical training, lifting weights, is the deliberate imposition of trauma to the muscles. Done the right way, it causes growth. There is a vast amount of evidence that says the same is true of psychological trauma. Why wouldn't it also be true of social trauma?

Depending on how we answer this question, we will define "modern" philosophy differently. We might say, and I would, that modern philosophy begins not with Descartes but with David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith. That last is a bit controversial. Even those who might accept the first two will bristle at Smith. They will do so because if Smith is a foundational philosopher of the modern period, then capitalism is a foundational form of life of the modern period.

Others might question whether Hume belongs with Kant. Kant, they will argue, is surely the giant figure and Hume deserves the still significant but lesser honour of being the catalyst who inspired Kant's more significant work. There is a lot that would have to be said but the outline of my argument would go as follows: Kant rightly saw that there are percepts and precepts but just as Galileo falsely assumed that orbits must be circular so too, Kant falsely assumed that precepts are universal. I agree with Charles Saunders Peirce in believing that the advent of Non-Euclidean geometry put paid to that notion. Thus, I would would argue that Hume's realization that notions like causality are not extracted from reality so much as applied to it should count as the beginning of modern thought. To put it in Peircean terms, organizing concepts mathematics and geometry were not abstracted from reality, they were not discovered but invented.