The Early Frankfurt School and Religion Also by Margarete Kohlenbach

DAS ENDE DER VOLLKOMMENHEIT: Zum Verständnis von Thomas Bernhards Korrektur WALTER BENJAMIN: Self-Reference and Religiosity

Also by Raymond Geuss

THE IDEA OF A CRITICAL THEORY HISTORY AND ILLUSION IN POLITICS MORALITY, CULTURE, AND HISTORY PUBLIC GOODS, PRIVATE GOODS POLITIK UND GLÜCK OUTSIDE ETHICS The Early Frankfurt School and Religion

Edited by

Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss Editorial matter, selection, introduction © Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss 2005 Chapter 2 © Raymond Geuss 2005 Chapter 4 © Margarete Kohlenbach 2005 Remaining chapters © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2005 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-3557-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-51798-5 ISBN 978-0-230-52359-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230523593 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The early Frankfurt School and religion/edited by Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

1. Religion – Philosophy – History – 20th century. 2. Sociology – Philosophy – History – 20th century. 3. Critical theory. 4. Frankfurt school of sociology. 5. Institut fèr Sozialforschung (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) I. Kohlenbach, Margarete. II. Geuss, Raymond. BL51.E27 2004 200’.7’043––dc22 2004048940

10987654321 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Contents

Acknowledgements vii Abbreviations and Translations viii Notes on the Contributors ix

Introduction: The Frankfurt School and the Problem of Religion 1 Margarete Kohlenbach and Raymond Geuss

Part I Students, Theologians, Critical Theorists

1 Max Horkheimer’s Supposed ‘Religious Conversion’: A Semantic Analysis 15 Pascal Eitler

2 On the Usefulness and Uselessness of Religious Illusions 29 Raymond Geuss

Part II Constructions of Religious Experience

3 Emerging ‘Orders’: The Contemporary Relevance of Religion and Teaching in Walter Benjamin’s Early Thought 45 Pierfrancesco Fiorato

4 Religion, Experience, Politics: On Erich Unger and Walter Benjamin 64 Margarete Kohlenbach

5 Allegory, Metonymy and Creatureliness: Walter Benjamin and the Religious Roots of Modern Art 85 Barnaba Maj

Part III Legal Philosophy and Jewish Tradition

6 Law and Religion in Early Critical Theory 103 Chris Thornhill

v vi Contents

7 Jewish Law and Tradition in the Early Work of Erich Fromm 128 David Groiser

8 Critical Theory and the New Thinking: A Preliminary Approach 145 Howard Caygill

Part IV Dialectic of Enlightenment Reconsidered

9 Does Dialectic of Enlightenment Rest on Religious Foundations? 157 Rüdiger Bittner

10 Secularisation, Myth, Anti-Semitism: Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 171 Gérard Raulet

Notes 190

Bibliography 218

Index 234 Acknowledgements

This book is the result of a working conference held at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at the University of Bielefeld in September 2003. The editors thank the Centre for its generous financial support, and for the professional and friendly assistance they received both before and during the conference. Thanks are also due to the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (Marbach) and the Max Horkheimer Archiv (Frankfurt/M.) for opening their collections to several contributors to this volume, and to Esther J. Ehrman ( Jerusalem) for granting us permission to quote from unpublished sources in Erich Unger’s estate. The University of Sussex and the University of Sassari supported the completion of this book by shouldering most of the translation costs. We are particularly grateful to Ladislaus Löb (Brighton) for the great skill and care with which he undertook the translation into English of three of the ten chapters, and for his general advice and bibliographical support. Our discussions at Bielefeld benefited a great deal from contributions by participants other than the authors assembled here. We thank espe- cially Martin Bauer of the Hamburg Institute of Social Research and Michael Gormann-Thelen (Hanover) of the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Society. We are also grateful to Wolfgang Braungart, Jürgen Frese and Michael Wolff of Bielefeld University, and to Martin Bonacker (Ham- burg), Martina Herrmann (Dortmund), Joachim Koch (Bad Oeynhau- sen), Christoph Lienkamp (Bremen), Timo Ogrzal (Hamburg), Johannes Sabel (Wipperfurth), Ingo Stucke (Bielefeld) and Andreas Seiverth (Frankfurt/M.).

vii Abbreviations and Translations

Primary and secondary sources are first cited by their complete title, then frequently with a characteristic abbreviation. Except for transla- tions acknowledged in the bibliography or the notes, all quotations from non-English sources were translated either by the authors or, in the case of Chapters 1, 3 and 10, by the translator Ladislaus Löb. The following abbreviations are used throughout the volume:

AB Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, Frankfurt/M. 1994. Cor Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, eds Gershom Scholem, Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson, Evelyn M. Jacobson, Chicago 1994. DA Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente, Frankfurt/M. 1977. DE Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Stanford 2002. GB Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, eds Christoph Gödde, Henri Lonitz, 6 vols, Frankfurt/M. 1995–2000. MHGS Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, eds Alfred Schmidt, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, 19 vols, Frankfurt/M. 1985–96. SW Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, eds Michael W. Jennings et al., 4 vols, Cambridge (Mass.) 1996–2003. TWAGS Adorno, Theodor W., Gesammelte Schriften, eds Rolf Tiedemann et al., 20 vols, Frankfurt/M. 1970–86. WBGS Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, eds Rolf Tiedemann et al., 7 vols, Frankfurt/M. 1974–89.

viii Notes on the Contributors

Rüdiger Bittner is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bielefeld. He is the author of What Reason Demands (1989), Doing Things for Reasons (2001), and the editor of Nietzsche’s Writings from the Late Notebooks (2003). Howard Caygill is Professor of Cultural History at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of Art of Judgement (1989), A Kant Dictionary (1996), Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (1998), and Levinas and the Political (2002). Pascal Eitler works as a historian at the Research Centre ‘The Political as a Space of Communication’ at the University of Bielefeld. He is completing a doctoral thesis on the relationship between politics and religion in West German society during the 1960s and 1970s. Pierfrancesco Fiorato is Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Sassari. He is the author of Geschichtliche Ewigkeit: Ursprung und Zeitlichkeit in der Philosophie Hermann Cohens (1993) and has widely published on neo-Kantianism and German-Jewish thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is also the Italian editor and translator of several of Hermann Cohen’s works. Raymond Geuss is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. His main publications comprise The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (1981), Morality, Culture, and History (1999), History and Illusion in Politics (2001), and Public Goods, Private Goods (2001). In 2005 his Politik und Glück will be published, and a collection of his essays entitled Outside Ethics is soon to appear. David Groiser is Lecturer in German at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Brasenose College. He works on nineteenth- and twentieth- century German intellectual history and literature, with a particular focus on the German-Jewish tradition. His Tradition and Revelation in the Works of Franz Rosenzweig will soon be published. He is also the editor of the forthcoming volume II of the Martin Buber Werkausgabe, Mythos und Mystik: Frühe Schriften 1900–1928. Margarete Kohlenbach is Reader in German at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Das Ende der Vollkommenheit: Zum Verständnis von

ix x Notes on the Contributors

Thomas Bernhards ‘Korrektur’ (1986) and Walter Benjamin: Self-Reference and Religiosity (2002). She works on German Romanticism and twentieth- century German literature and culture. Barnaba Maj is Professor of Philosophy of History at the University of Bologna. He is the author of Walter Benjamin: sul concetto della storia (1994), L’unità di senso della storia nell’orizonte contemporaneo (2000), and Heimat: La cultura tedesca contemporanea (2001). He is also co-editor of Walter Benjamin tra critica romantica e critica del romanticismo (2000). Gérard Raulet is Professor of German Intellectual History at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. Between 1982 and 1999 he was Director of the Research Programme ‘Weimar Culture’ at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme; since 1999 he has been Director of the Research Programme ‘Contemporary Political Philosophy’ at the CNRS. His main publications include Natur und Ornament (1987), Herbert Marcuse (1992) and Le caractère destructeur: Esthétique, théologie et politique chez Walter Benjamin (1997). Chris Thornhill is Reader in German at King’s College, London. He is the author of Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus (1996), Political Theory in Modern Germany (2000), Karl Jaspers (2002), and co-author of Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Politics and Law (2003).