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chapter four

From Quantitative to Qualitative

According to the critical theorist of the second regeneration, Karl Heinz Haag, over the course of centuries the medieval universality struggle had pushed back more and more into the alliance with the natu- ral sciences, which emancipated themselves from and and concentrated on quantitative space and infinity rather than on the qualitative Infinity, the concrete Universality (Hegel 1801: 1-22; 1986h: 181-230; Healan 2007: 2-22; Haag 1983: chaps. 1-3; 2005; App. A, B, C, D, E, F). However, metaphysics was still making a noise right into the 20th and 21st centuries, and even into the post-metaphysical Frankfurt School.

Critique of Philosophy

In his newest book Metaphysic as Demand of a Rational World Concep- tion (2005), Haag traced this philosophical development as in the modern centuries it yielded to and positivism even where it wanted to oppose it through the construction of an absolute Spirit and as it finally came to its end in neo-positivism, which abolished philosophy altogether (Haag 1983; 2005). The problems of such philosophy were well known: chorismos and methexis. First of all, there existed a deep antagonism be- tween and particular singular things. The main questions concerning the dialectical were: how could the particular partici- pate in the universal? How could it do that? How did the universal par- ticularize or singularize itself? How could it do that? Why should it do that at all? Secondly, in the static philosophical world systems no change was thinkable. Progress could not be comprehended. Already in his ear- lier book, Progress in Philosophy (Haag 1983) emphasized two positive points of reference where philosophy poisoned itself against itself: Kant’s and Marx’s–what the second generation critical theorist Alfred Schmidt called–negative , and their synthesis in the dialectical philosophy of Adorno. According to this negative ontology, one could say, that there was something ontically given, but one could not say anything positively about it. According to Kant, this was so because all one could know of it 154 chapter four was its appearances. For Marx, one only knew of its socially mediated form. In his new book, Haag developed these two bases, beginnings, or starting points through extending his critique of philosophy to the natural sciences and to theology.

Critique of Theology

For decades Haag, who himself came from a family in Frankfurt (Höchst) and from the Jesuit Philosophical-Theological University of St. Georgen in Frankfurt (Niederrad) where Adorno had grown up, observed that in the of , Hans Küng, Johann B. Metz and Cardinal Ratzinger–now Benedict XVI–as well as in the Protes- tant theology of Rudolf Bultmann, and Karl Barth, nominal- ism and positivism and the natural sciences had been yielded to and how they were at the same time avoided (Rahner 1964; 1968a; 1968b; 1976; Lehmann/Raffelt 1979; Haag 1983; 2005). The theologians cleared and va- cated the field of the empirical world. They shifted a radically de-mythol- ogized and de-substantialized God into a safe and secure but exactly also inaccessible Beyond. Instead, the theologians insisted on the act of faith. In a thoroughly positivistically dominated world, the theologians admit- tedly recognized the results of the natural sciences, but they held against them a defiant nevertheless. The theologians could not say any longer why one should engage in such a nevertheless of faith because they had given up an objectively given God a long time ago. Already in October 1969, Haag told Horkheimer that the Roman had practically given up Transcendence (Horkheimer 1988n: 535-536; Haag 1983; 2005). The work of played no role any longer. The participation in the sacrament of reconciliation decreased rapidly. Since Duns Scotus and the beginning of the de-Hellenization process, the be- came limited to the four first commandments. Pope Paul VI saw the role of the natural law purely biologically (Paul VI 1968; Horkheimer 1988n: 535-536; Haag 1983; 2005). According to Haag, faith had become an irrational act in which no God stepped towards the believer any longer or got in contact with him or her as it had happened in the Torah, the and in the Koran: transcendence without counter-movement (Haag 1983; 2005; Siebert 2000). The theologians reduced the of and God to the decision and achievement of the believers. Thereby, this existence of religion and God became itself still a piece of unrecognized mythology. In the believer, human subjectivity was made into an idol. In the perspective of the new critical theory of religion, in-