| The Institut fur Sozialforschung, better known as the "Frankfurt School," was born between the catastrophes of World War I and World War II. Rooted in Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and other philosophers, the Critical Theory of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, and others, is generally understood to be solely secular. The core thesis of this dissertation refutes that claim. I argue that not only did the Frankfurt School draw upon their secular sources for their critical analyses, but also the religions of Judaism and Christianity. Unlike their immediate predecessors, especially the 19th century materialists, who argued for the abstract negation of religion, the first generation of critical theorists argued for a determinate negation of religion, wherein the liberational, emancipatory, and prophetic semantic and semiotic materials of religion would be rescued by way of translation into critical political philosophy. In other words, if religion was to survive secular modernity, it would need to do so via its migration into an alternative form, i.e. critical philosophy. Additionally, I argue that a similar process of determinate negation can be found in Jurgen Habermas' call for members of the Islamic faith to translate the moral-practical elements of their religion in post-metaphysical reasoing, wherein it can escape from its closed semantic universe and enter into democratic deliberations. Yet, I argue against Habermas' temperate call for the Muslim community to translate only the moral-practical elements or their religion. Rather, I argue for a return akin to the first generation of the Frankfurt School's radicality; Muslims should translate the monotheistic concept of tawh&dotbelow;id (divine oneness) into post-metaphysical reasoning, just as the first generation of critical theorists translated the Jewish theological concept of bilderverbot, the "image ban" of the Second Commandment of the Decalogue, into critical philosophy. |
