Critical Theory and Practical Philosophy: On The Moral and Political Credentials of Frankfurt School Social Criticism
The Ideals of a Critical Theory (1937-40)
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- 4.3. Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Critique of Instrumental Reason 1940-7
- 4.4. Adorno’s dialectical negativism and minimal morality.
- Summary of Conclusions
- 5. Further Analyses of the problem.
The Ideals of a Critical Theory (1937-40) There are a several broadly speaking normative ideas in play in Horkheimer’s early essays on materialism. Alongside the emphasis on humanity and the moral feelings, and the dialectical realisation of morality, there is a more political line of thinking that becomes more prominent in Horkheimer’s programmatic 1937 essay, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’. In the earlier essays Horkheimer characterises materialism as “an aspect of the effort to improve human conditions” and as an “interest in changing the concrete conditions under which human beings suffer” (CT 26, 32/KTI 47, 53). The idea of a better society is encapsulated and expressed in the humanitarian principles of the enlightenment; justice, equality and freedom, principles which figure prominently throughout his work. The ideals of justice, equality and freedom, are not moral principles but the ‘isolated features of the rational society as they are anticipated in morality’. They are not metaphysical postulates, or eternal universal values: they emerge concretely out of the experience of the discrepancy between the actuality of human suffering and the real technological and economic potential for eliminating human misery. (CT 45/KTI 66, BPSS 37-8/KTI 97-8). In ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ Horkheimer still appeals to the notion of humanity, but puts markedly less emphasis on moral feelings. Instead he emphasises the human interest in emancipation. He speaks of the “interest in reasonable conditions”, the “interest in social transformation” and the “interest in the elimination [Aufhebung] of social injustice” (KTI 147, 189, 190).28 The human interest in emancipation is, he claims, “the materialist content of the idealist concept of reason” and guides the experience and perception of “the idea of a reasonable organisation of society that will meet the needs of the whole community [der Allgemeinen]” (CT213/KTII 162).29 Whose experience and perception this is, Horkheimer omits to say. It is not that of the proletariat, whose knowledge of the situation, he claims, in a scarcely veiled objection to Lukács, is not vouchsafed to him by the experience of misery and injustice. Nor is it the ‘constellation of social groups’ to which he averted in the earlier essay, ‘Materialism and Morality’.30 Actually, Horkheimer gives two different and discrepant answers to this question. The first adverts to his notion of humanity: ‘the aim of a rational society…is innate in every human being’. (KTII 199/CT 25 translation amended.) The second answer is more considered and cautious; it is the special position of the critical theorist understood not “as expressing the historical situation but as a ‘dynamic force’ for change within it” that makes his perception and experience of the guiding idea reliable. (CT 215/KTII 164) So, although this idea of a good society, is supposedly “immanent in human labour” it is not open to view, not available to the proletariat (the class of free wage labourers) as the beacon of a socially transformative practice. The reason why the critical theorist has reliable access to this idea, while the proletriat does not, has to do with the nature of critical, as opposed to traditional theory. In brief, critical theory is interdisciplinary, rather than specialised, dialectical rather than contemplative, and reflexively aware of its own social origin and function. The consequence is supposed to be that whereas ‘traditional theory’ – an umbrella term included almost everything from mathematics and formal logic through to the natural sciences – thought of itself mistakenly as a systematic body of general, universally valid, propositions, and was therefore afflicted by the ‘positivist’ illusion that it mirrored an order of facts, that are fixed, obtain independently of the theory and are hence unalterable, critical theory was free from such illusions. Because it reflected on the social and historical conditions that gave rise to it, on its own function within society, and on the purposes and interest of its practitioners and of human beings in general, and because such reflections were built into the theory, critical theory was largely immune to ideological illusion, and was itself part of the progressive historical tendency towards the good or rational society that it alone was able to reliably discern. Hence, under the right conditions, it would also issue in a socially transformative practice. However, similar difficulties beset Horkheimer’s appeal to the political ideals of justice and equality, as beset his confidence in the moral feelings and the concept of humanity. In what respects do they differ from the eternal values or, universal moral principles that he rejects as ideological fences for the interests of the petit bourgeoisie? Why should we put any weight in the empirical observation that current society falls short of these ideals, but none at all the fact that, for example, it offends our moral sensibilities, or fails to live up to our moral principles. Horkheimer’s repeated insistence on the historical nature of these ideals does not answer this question. If they emerge from the concrete historical situation, have not we all the more reason to suspect them. 4.3. Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Critique of Instrumental Reason 1940-7 The excursus, ‘Juliette or Enlightenment and Morals’ which forms the second part of Dialectic of Enlightenment, appears to have been written largely by Horkheimer and contains many of the characteristic concerns of his earlier work. The main point of the comparison between Kant and Sade in the Juliette essay is to advance and illustrate a certain critique of the formalism of Kant’s moral philosophy. According to Horkheimer, Sade, along with other ‘dark writers of the Bourgeoisie’ draws attention to the ‘consequences of enlightenment’ by refusing to assume ‘that formalistic reason stands in a closer relation to morality than to immorality’ (GS3 139/DE 117-8). The impossibility of deriving from reason any principled argument against murder: Not to have suppressed this, but to have proclaimed it far and wide, is what incited the hatred with which progressives now pursue Sade and Nietzsche. (DE 119/GS3 140) The critical point is that project of explaining the requirement of morality as requirements of reason is fundamentally misconceived, because morality does not have a rational kernel that is up to the task. (This is the origin of a long-running disagreement between Horkheimer and Adorno, and their most important and influential pupil, Habermas.31 ) Yet the implication of these remarks is that, morality, and indeed a principled argument against murder, is nonetheless needed. The Juliette essay, though continuous with some strands of Horkheimer’s early materialism, is entirely coloured by the thesis developed in cooperation with Adorno, and expounded in the introduction and opening essay, ‘Concept of Enlightenment’. The thesis of Adorno and Horkheimer is that by the time of the Enlightenment reason has become completely formal and instrumental. This is the eventual results of a process the anthropologically rooted in the concept of rationality. Rationality and the faculty of human reason is at bottom a tool with which human beings can master and control the unpredictable effects of external nature on the subject.32 From its origins in magic and primitive religion, a long and highly complex but ultimately fateful process ensues, in which human reason is gradually refined and developed into increasingly abstract and philosophical conceptual systems. Eventually these systems are evacuated of any philosophical substantial notions of truth and beauty and goodness and are replaced by science and mathematics. All reason and rationality has become instrumental has been reduced to a calculus for finding the most efficient means for realizing given ends. In his Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer describes essentially the same process as the decline and fall of objective reason at the hands of formalized, subjective reason.33 “Reason as an organ for perceiving the true nature of reality and determining the guiding principles of our lives” he is now “regarded as obsolete…Reason has liquidated itself as an agency of ethical, moral and religious insight.” (ER 18) This is more than just a theoretical development. For according to Adorno and Horkheimer the social world is partly constituted by the ways in which human subjects think about it, by their beliefs about the world and their attitudes toward it. In turn these concepts, beliefs and attitudes are all moulded and shaped by social conditions and by existing practices and institutions. The result is that the social world and human life been gradually denuded of all intrinsically valuable or worthwhile ends. Everything valuable in the social world has come to exist for the sake of something else. This is the state of affairs that Adorno calls ‘universal fungibility’ (PDM 228). What appear to be ends in themselves – say culture, art, intellectual perusuits, or even simple innocent pleasures – have been annexed by all-pervasive forms of economy and administration and turned into mere means for the attainment of self-preservation.34 In particular the effects of advertising and of the culture industry, their capacity to manipulate and to manufacture human needs, has eradicated any human desires or interests that might have been able to resist this process. This process has been accelerated by processes of commodification and exchange that have accompanied the spread of economic and administrative systems, and the technological exploitation of science under capitalism. However, the underlying dynamic is not socio-economically driven, it is not the exchange of labour-power for wages, nor the self-movement of capital; rather it is based in the concept of rationality and in the various processes of rationalisation that reach their apogee in modernity. The conceptual links forged both in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and in Eclipse of Reason, first between rational thought, conceptuality and instrumental reason, and second between instrumental reason and domination, marks a decisive development Horkheimer’s thought. First, he must drop the assumption that labour, as the vehicle of self-realization and the defining moment of the constitution of society, vouchsafes the idea of a good society and is the harbinger of emancipation. Labour, as an expression of man’s instrumental rational activity is equally the cause of the domination of nature and the origin of social oppression. Second, it can no longer be assumed that the increase on what Marx called the forces of production, brought about in part by increases in technological efficiency, will yield a radical, qualitative change in human lives. On the contrary he must now assume that such an increase would yield more of the same, more oppression, alienation and misery, even under altered relations of production, in a communist society with a planned economy.35 Third, it becomes self-defeating to harness rationality, reason and science, which by Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s lights have become mere tools and an implements of domination, as the means of achieving desired political and social aims. Even if, as Lenin thought, a revolutionary élite could, by means of the correct theory of dialectical materialism, somehow seize power, they could not by the same means effect the kind of qualitative social transformation that critical theory aims at. This assumption brings untold problems for the political component of critical theory, since it seems to imply either that politics must do without all strategic and instrumental reasoning at the price of succumbing to the There is a strong whiff of paradox about the arguments that Adorno and Horkheimer puts forward at this phase in in the development of critical theory. IN his Eclipse of Reason Horkheimer presente the paradox as a “disease afflicting reason” which is “inseparable from the nature of reason” in civilisation hitherto. “The disease of reason is that reason is that reason was born from man’s urge to dominate nature, and the ‘recovery’ depends on insight into the nature of the originaldisease, not on a cure of the latest symptoms.” (ER 176) In Dialectic of Enlightenment the authors acknowledge the aporia that faces them. On the one hand, as they remark in the preface to the Dialectic of Enlightenment they are convinced that ‘social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought’, and here they are certainly thinking, among other things, of the humanitarian ideals of liberty, equality and solidarity. On the other hand, the very same enlightenment rationality which was supposed to liberate human beings from enthralment to nature is responsible for the regression to barbarism; ‘this very way of thinking, no less than the concrete historical forms, the institutions of society, with which it is interwoven, already contains the seed of the reversal that today is ubiquitously occurring.’ (DE xiii/GS3 13) In their view, there is nothing left, but to ‘reflect’ upon this aporia, so as to avoid blindly succumbing to the ‘regressive moment.’ It is not clear what, if anything, reflection can accomplish.36 An aporia is a Greek word meaning difficulty or perplexity and derives from the adjective ‘a-poros’, literally ‘no path, or no passage’. Reflection is no way out. At very best it is the theoretical equivalent of shipwrecked sailors treading water in order to stave off the fate of drowning. 4.4. Adorno’s dialectical negativism and minimal morality. In Adorno’s late work he develops and refines a conception of dialectical negativism which he associates with the theological ban on graven images.37 Adorno’s negativism is encapsulated in three theses that are central to his mature work. ‘Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen’ (GS 4 p.43)]. The central thesis of Minima Moralia is very hard to interpret. The best translation of this crucial sentence into English is something like: “The false life cannot be truly lived.” 38 Jephcott’s translation of this sentence: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” makes it look as if Adorno is using the moral concepts ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, whereas, in fact, he deliberately eschews such vocabulary, and deploys the prima facie more neutral terms ‘richtig’ and ‘falsch’ (true/false, correct/incorrect). In similar vein Adorno’s dedication opens with a remark about an age-old philosophical topic that has fallen into neglect: ‘die Lehre vom richtigen Leben’ which Jephcott again, misleadingly, translates as ‘the good life’. Jephcott’s subtle moralization of the text, has encouraged some anglophone interpreters to see Minima Moralia foremost as a treatise about the good life, or rather about the impossibility of leading a moral life in the light of the depredations wrought by capitalism and consumerism on ethical life of the community.39 In my view such interpretations are misconceived. Talk of the good life is conspicuous in Minima Moralia only by its absence. The subtitle of the book refers to a ‘damaged life’. The phrase ‘the doctrine of the correct life’ in the dedication, may allude to Aristotle, but not specifically. It refers to moral theories in general, ancient or modern, to the right no less than the good.40 Given the minute care and attention which we know Adorno paid to the phrasing of his philosophical works, we have to assume that this use of language, the avoidance of normative vocabulary, is deliberate.41 Minima Moralia is thus best understood as a collection of aperçus, aphorisms and homilies intended to illustrate the myriad ways in which life itself (not ‘the good life’, or ‘the moral life’ or ‘ethical life’) has degenerated into an economically driven and politically administered sphere of private consumption. Insofar as it is a theory, it is a theory about the increasing regimentation of modern life the and systematic elimination of the qualities that make it worth living. It is not just that there is no way of living morally, but there is no real living at all, just various forms of ‘going on’ to use Beckett’ phrase. This is how the above thesis should be interpreted. No doubt it also suggests that there is no way under these circumstances in which human being can do (and know that they do) the right thing, from a moral or a political perspective. Rational subjects cannot be sure that even apparently harmless or valuable activities are not contributing covertly and in spite of their intentions to the general state of alienation and unfreedom with which modern society is afflicted.42 The second thesis that encapsulates Adorno’s negativism is that the social world is radically evil.43 Briefly put, Adorno means by this that the social world consists entirely of sedimented and institutionalized patterns of instrumental reason. The appearance that there are any ends that are worth pursuing for their own sake, is illusory. In fact all socially available ends are, like the offerings of the culture industry, only instrumentally valuable as means to self-preservation through the manipulation and control of external nature. Furthermore, Adorno thinks that instrumental reasons guide actions heteronomously, they are forms of necessity or compulsion, rather than of autonomy or maturity.44 Hence all activities that the late-capitalist social world makes available to subjects are forms of institutionalized unfreedom. The third and final thesis is that we can have no positive conception of the good society. Adorno frequently claims that the good society (or what he prefers to call variously ‘reconciliation’, ‘redemption’ ‘happiness’ and ‘utopia’) cannot be thought. He means not just that we cannot represent or picture the good, utopia etc. We cannot even conceive it, without falsifying it, because to conceive is to identify it, to subsume it under a universal and to make it equivalent with something else. These three theses add up to a position we can call strong negativism about the good and the right. Strong negativism is the view that there is no good in the social world, that there are no intrinsically valuable or worthwhile final ends, and no possibility of living a meaningful and worthwhile life. However, we can at least know that there is no good in the world.45 Adorno’s strong negativism raises the problem of how some value or ideal absent from the social world can nonetheless be made accessible to social theory. For he needs to avail himself of some values and ideals in order simply to be able to appropriately and reliably condemn it as ‘unjust’, ‘bad’, heinous ‘Unheil’, disastrous, ‘evil’, ‘radically evil’ (ND 23,31,365), ‘corrupt’, ‘unfree’, ‘unequal’ and so forth. Without the notions of justice, goodness, freedom, equality he should not be able to do this. In Minima Moralia and in Negative Dialectics Adorno solves this problem by seeking out the truth about life everywhere in its ‘alienated form’ i.e. by reading the traces of the rational content of these concepts (the right and the good) the surface appearance (Schein) of the actually existing irrational - indeed radically evil - social totality.46 This is the approach Adorno first adopts in Minima Moralia, where and that he continues in Negative Dialectics. The trouble is that this way of securing the availability of liberal ideals is just a prestidigitation which, in spite of appearances, contravenes the assumption of strong negativism. In fact, as Michael Theunissen shows, Adorno’s attempt to trace ‘a real path of the positive in the negative’ amounts to an inverted version of Hegelian optimism, of reading the traces of rationality in the actual.47 The force of Theunissen’s criticism is the greater, given that Adorno’s major criticism of Hegel is of the doctrine of determinate negation, the view the negation of a negative yields a positive (ND 164: MCP 144). By Adorno’s own lights then, strong negativism is, as Theunissen claims, ‘prenegativistic’ and ‘not negative enough’. Practical upshot. Individual vigilance and resistance ot the myuriad of ways in which humand beings are pressured and cajoled into accepting current social dn institutional reaily, and conforming with prevailing norms, practices and self-interpretations. Muendigkeit. Education. Even this assumes society is something to which individual’s ought not to conform, which does not merit acceptance, but on the contrary resistance: alienation not reconciliation is the order of the day. 4.5. Summary of Conclusions In spite of the development of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critical theory from the 1930’s to 1967 there are a common threads. It is quite clear that at no stage do or can either Horkheimer or Adorno present critical theory as an exercise in applied moral philosophy. It is simply not open to them to judge presently existing society and find it wanting on the basis of moral principles and moral values. At the same time their social criticism, their diagnosis of the pathologies of the present, and their proposed remedies insofar as they have any, has an indelibly ethical/moral tinge, as evidenced by the moral colour of the concepts in which they portray it. Hence their continued disavowals of moral norms and moral values creates a problem. I have just presented four different, increasingly abstract, and theoretical attempts to fill the gap, none of them satisfactory. i. Moral feelings and the concept of humanity. ii. Political ideals of justice, freedom and equality and the interest in emancipation. iii. Reflection on the aporia of enlightenment reason. iv. Dialectical negativism and the scrutiny of life in its alienated forms.
Frankfurt School critical social theory is critical at least in the sense that it demonstrates of what is wrong with society, with its institutions, laws, customs, practices and culture, and with the character of its inhabitants, insofar as their character results form their socialisation into (and within) its institutions, laws, customs etc. We have seen that for various reasons Horkheimer and Adorno eschew normative moral theory and conceptions of the good. Can the diagnosis of social pathologies do without At various times in the course of its development critical theory has thought of itself as I think a stronger point can be made, namely that any critical theory of society worth its salt has to give a normative an evaluative assessment existing social conditions.
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