Faith in (Prophetic) Philosophy beyond the Boundaries of “Good” and “Bad” Religion

  • Joe Bartzel
Keywords: Al-Qaeda, Cornel West, Faisal Devji, global war on terror, Max Horkheimer, pragmatism, terrorism

Abstract

Max Horkheimer concludes Eclipse of Reason with a call for “faith in philosophy.” He contends that the purpose of philosophy is to translate the suffering of martyrs into a broadly understandable idiom through which to express a critique of instrumental reason and its destructive potential. Horkheimer concludes Eclipse of Reason having offered scant details of how this translation project should work. Moreover, if readers take seriously Horkheimer’s insistence upon philosophy as an object of faith, then his project risks being saddled with an untenable distinction between “good” and “bad” religion. I describe an avenue whereby the details of Horkheimer’s translation project might be fleshed out, including freeing it from the good/bad distinction that threatens to undermine its feasibility. I contend that the figure of the Hebrew prophet serves as a model of the individual who critiques oppressive social systems, and I argue that Cornel West’s description of cultural workers as critical organic catalysts offers a model for such critique in a modern Western context. Given some surprising parallels between Horkheimer’s thought and Al-Qaeda members’ self-descriptions— in particular, regarding the power and importance of suffering—I contend that the realization of Horkheimer’s philosophical project offers a promising avenue for nonviolent engagement with religious extremism in the era of the Global War on Terror.

Author Biography

Joe Bartzel

PhD Candidate
Indiana University, Department of Religious Studies
107 S Indiana Ave, Bloomington, IN , USA 47405
e-mail: bartlett.joseph@gmail.com 

References

Boer, Roland (2011). “The Superstitions of Max Horkheimer.” In Criticism of Theology: On Marxism and Theology III, 11–56. Leiden: Brill (Historical Materialism 27).

Brittain, Christopher C. (2005). “Social Theory and the Premise of All Criticism: Max Horkheimer on Religion.” Critical Sociology 31.2: 153–68.

Coogan, Michael D., Marc Z. Brettler, Carol Newsom and Pheme Perkins, eds (2010). The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha. Fourth edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Devji, Faisal (2008). The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gramsci, Antonio (1999). “The Formation of the Intellectuals.” In Selections from the Prison Notebooks [1929], ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, 134–47. London: The Electric Book Company.

Horkheimer, Max (1947). Eclipse of Reason. New York: Oxford University Press.

Horkheimer, Max (1974). Critique of Instrumental Reason: Lectures and Essays since the End of World War II. Trans. Matthew J. O’Connell et al. New York: Seabury Press.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno (1988). Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944]. New York: Continuum.

Johnson, Clarence Sholé (2003). Cornel West and Philosophy. New York: Routledge.

Kant, Immanuel (1996). “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” In Practical Philosophy [1784], ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor, 15–22. New York: Cambridge University Press.

King, Martin Luther (1963). “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Christian Century 80: 767– 73.

Lohmann, Georg (1993). “The Failure of Self-Realization: An Interpretation of Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason.” In On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives, eds. Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang Bonss, and John McCole, 387–412. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Marx, Karl (2000). “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction.” In Karl Marx: Selected Writings [1843], ed. David McLellan, 71–82. New York: Oxford University Press.

McCutcheon, Russell T. (2006). ““It’s a Lie. There’s No Truth in It! It’s a Sin!”: On the Limits of the Humanistic Study of Religion and the Costs of Saving Others from Themselves.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74.3: 720–51.

Orsi, Robert A. (1998). “Snakes Alive: Resituating the Moral in the Study of Religion.” In In the Face of Facts: Moral Inquiry in American Scholarship, eds. Richard Wightman Fox and Robert B. Westbrook, 201–226. New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.

Siebert, Rudolf J. (1977). “The New Religious Dimension in Western Marxism: II.” Hori- zons 4: 43–59.

Smith, Jonathan Z. (n.d.). “The Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines.” University of Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning. http://religion.ua.edu/secure/rel- 490smithnecessarylie.pdf.

Stanski, Keith (2009). “Book Review: The Terrorist in Search of Humanity.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 22.2: 319–20.

West, Cornel (1989). “Prophetic Pragmatism: Cultural Criticism and Political Engage- ment.” In The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, 211–39. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

West, Cornel (1990). “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” In “The Humanities as Social Technology,” eds. Joan Copjec, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, and Martha Buskirk, special issue, October 53: 93–109.
Published
2015-12-29
How to Cite
Bartzel, J. (2015). Faith in (Prophetic) Philosophy beyond the Boundaries of “Good” and “Bad” Religion. Stasis, 3(2). Retrieved from https://stasisjournal.net/index.php/journal/article/view/38