Critical Theory and Practical Philosophy: On The Moral and Political Credentials of Frankfurt School Social Criticism

1 Often Frankfurt School theorists are divided into generations, with Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse, deemed as first-generation theorists, Habermas a ‘second-generation’ theorist, and Axel Honneth, the current director of the Institute (since 1997) the third generation.

2 ‘Traditionaelle und Kritische Theorie’ ZfS, 8, no 1/2 (1937) 245-94, and ‘The Social Function of Philosophy’ SPSS 8, no. 3, 91940) 322-37, both reprinted in Horkheimer Critical Theory:Selected Essays tr. M. J. O’Connell, New York, Seabury Press 1972.

3 ‘For me there was no Critical Theory, no coherent doctrine. Adorno wrote essays on culture and held seminars on Hegel. He made contemprorary a certain Marxist background. That was it.’ See ‘The Dialectics of Rationalisation’ in AS 95-131. This remark is not as such a criticism as a reflection on how he perceived things at the time. For habermas’s own illuminating account of his relation with Adorno and Horkheimer see also ‘Critical and Frankfurt University’ AS 2211-233; and for more background see Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994, 537-566.

4 See PDM and TCA1.

5 Geuss The Idea of a Critical Theory, Cambridge CUP, 1980???

6 Consider the preoccupation with transcendence and the refurbishiment of the notion of metaphysics in Negative Dialectics, which is prima facie hard to square with the themes and arguments of his critique of Husserl, published as Against Epistemology [Metakritik der Erkenntnislehre] which was eventually published 1956, but for which much of the preparatory work had been done in the mid-1930’s as a graduate student at Merton College, Oxford.

7 Habermas remarks that his “research programme has remained the same since about 1970” ( JA 149). In his own estimation his early work, where his approach is essentially akin to that of the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers, includes everything up to the publication of Knowledge and Human Interests. In the 1970’s, inspired by pragmatism and speech-act theory, he goes back to the drawing board. Habermas’s mature theory as expounded in Theory of Communication, his various writings on discourse ethics and Between Facts and Norms, form part of the same basic research programme. There have, of course been a lot of developments within that programme. See James Gordon Finlayson¸ Habermas: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, OUP 2005.

8 Fred Rush’s introduction to the (otherwise useful) Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, though it nods towards the complexity and diversity of critical theory, grossly oversimplifies: ‘Critical Theory was born in the trauma of the Weimar Republic, grew to maturity in expatriation, and achieved currency on its return to exile. Passed on from its founding first generation – among others Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno – to the leader of its second, Jürgen Habermas, Critical Theory remained central to European philosophical, social and political thought throughout the Cold War period. It is still a vital philosophical and political perspective, and a third generation of critical theorists, among whom Axel Honneth is most prominent, continue to press its concerns largely in terms of the tradition that began in the Weimar years.’ The assumption that ‘critical theory’ comprises a set of ‘shared core philosophical concerns’ that has been passed down three generations of thinkers, and that its current exponents press their concerns ‘largely in terms of the tradition that began in the Weimar years’ is an exaggeration that borders on complete untruth. It is also incorrect and anachronistic to claim that critical theory was central to European social and political thought during the Cold War. Recall that Habermas, when he was a member of the Institute, was not even aware that there was such a thing as Critical Theory. The truth is that in their lifetime the first generation Frankfurt School critical theorists worked on the margins of established German academic philosophy, and tended to be viewed with indifference or hostility. Adorno did not receive a full professorship at Frankfurt University until 1957, nor did he ever receive a formal offer of a post elsewhere. Even then, some academics resented his appointment, and believed he had been awarded it on the grounds of reparations rather than on merit. Not until the 1970’s in Germany, and later in the U.S. and Britain did critical theory begin to gain recognition as a central tradition of European philosophy, and even today it continues to be virtually ignored by mainstream analytic philosophers.

9 See Onora O’Neill, and Willi Goetschl.

10 See for example Heinrich Heine ‘Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland’ Heine: Werke in fünf Bänden Weimar, 1958 bd. 5, pp. 94-110 and alss Dieter Henrich Hegel im Kontext Frankfurt pp. 54 ff on the conservative theological backlash against the ‘Kantischen enragé’ Carl Immanuel Diez. This is why Hegel could write to Schelling in 1795 that “From the Kantian system and its highest completion, I expect a revolution in Germany…Heads will be reeling at this summit of all philosophy by which man is so greatly exalted.” Hegel: The Letters tr. C Butler and c. seiler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 35.

11 Cambridge edition ??? Prussian Academy Edition A481

12 See Hegel’s famous declaration in his Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History “Der einzige Gedanke den die Philosophie mitbringt, ist aber der einfache Gedanke der Vernunft, daß die Vernunft die Welt beherrsche, daß es also auch in der Weltgeschichte vernünftig zugegangen sei.” Werke 12, 20. The only though which philosophy brings with it. in regard to history, is the simple thought of reason – the thought that reason rules the world and that world history has therefore been ratioal in its course.” G W F Hegel: Introduction to the Philosophy of History, tr. Leo Rauch, Indiana: Hackett, 1988, p.12

13 Thomas McPherson, Social Philosophy, 1970, London Van Nostrand Reinhold, p.130. ‘Social philosophy can conveniently be regarded as a subject lying on the borderline between moral philosophy (ethics) and political philosophy.’ Joel Feinberg Social Philosophy, Prentice Hall, New Jersey, 1973.

14

15 John Rawls Theory of Justice, Oxford, OUP, 1973, p. 3.

16 ‘The contemplative stance adopted towards a process mechanically conforming to fixed laws and enacted independently of man’s consciousness and impervious to human intervention, i.e. a perfectly closed system, must likewise transform the basic categories of man’s immediate attitude towards the world…’ HCC p. 89/GK 179

17 For example

18 Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (eds.), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2000, 1.1.27. I call this reading of Hume the neo-Kantian interpretation since it assumes that as Francis Snare observes, on this reading Hume must simply assume that no purely factual propositions are themselves evaluative. For Horkheimer’s view of Hume see Eclipse of Reason where he is described as “the father of modern positivism”. He is so called because he spawned a notion of reaon that is no longer “an organ for perceiving the true nature of reality and determining the guiding principles of our lives” …and that “has liquidated itself as an agency of ethical moral and religious insight”. (ER18)

19 See Herbert Schnädelbach ‘Max Horkheimer and the Moral Philosophy of German idealism’ in On Max Horkhiemer, eds. S. Benhabib, W. Bonss, J. McCole, Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1993 p.281. Schädelbach provides a reconstruction of the early Horkheimer in which he challenges a view, that he takes to be the prevailing one, that Horkheimer has an ‘ethics deficit’.

20 Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics; Studies in the Development of Critical Theory. (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1985) The category of Adorno’s mature work has been superadded.

21 Kant Groundwork ref???

22 ‘The fear which moral prescriptions…still carry from their origins in religious authority is foreign to materialism.’ ‘Materialism and Morality’ (BPSS 32/KT 91 translation amended.) See also ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’ (CT 18/KT 39)

23 (BPSS 14-22/KT1 71-6. See also CT12/KT1 33 and passim.)

24 (CT44/KT1 64, BPSS 34-5/KT94) This way or arguing had an enduring effect on Adorno, who writes in Negative Dialectics that Hitler has imposed on mankind a “new categorical imperative” namely “to order their thought and actions such that Auschwitz never reoccur, nothing similar ever happen” and immediately remarks that it would be a ‘sin’ to try to justify the new categorical imperative conceptually (ND, 358/365). Compare also his earlier remark: “One ought not to torture: there ought to be no concentration camps . . . These sentences are only true as impulses, when it is reported that somewhere torture is taking place. They should not be rationalised. As abstract principles they lapse into the bad infinity of their derivation and validity” (ND, 281/285; CM, 202).

25 Immanuel, Kant, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 244.

26 In this, Horkheimer is influenced by the work of the economist at the institute, Friedrich Pollock: ‘Die Gegenwärtige Lage des Kapitalismus und die Aussichten einer planwirtschaftliche Neuordnung’ in ZfS 1. 1932

27 Note how this Hegelian-Marxist position is broadly similar to the approach of Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, especially to the analysis of the Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought in ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat. HCC110-148/GKB???. Lukács argues that the truth-content of what Kant designates as the antinomies of pure reason (A426/B454-A567/B595) is in fact these apparent paradoxes are in fact the most cogent theoretical expression of the contradictions of bourgeois consciousness and indeed ultimately of bourgeois society itself (HCC148/GKB). They crystallize them into a form which point the way to their dialectical Aufhebung. And of course the Aufhebung of actually existing bourgeois society is the revolutionary transformation of capitalism into communist society. The chief difference is that Horkheimer seeks to evince through the sociology of morality, what Lukacs demonstrates with the Hegelian metaphysical trope of the identical subject-object. For Lukacs it is the proletariat which in gaining consciousness of itself as the identical subject-object of history, the agent of this transformation. For Horkheimer, the agent of social change is not the proletariat à la Lukács, nor the individual moral subject à la Kant, but ‘a constellation of social groups’ dynamised by moral conscience. (BPSS 21/KTI 78. See also CT 213-4KT II 162) This broad similarity between Lukács and Horkheimer, who are after all both Hegelian Marxists, stands in stark and deliberate contrast to the position of neo-Kantians such as Karl Vorländer, who accepted Kant’s theory of morality, but argued that it was consistent with Marxism and could provide and ethical justification for socialism.

28 Throughout his loose, but readable translation of ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ Matthew J. O’Connell translates the German word ‘Interesse’ as ‘concern’. (CT 199, 241, 243)

29 As Herbert Schaedelbach points out, in the original 1937 article in the Zeitschrift, Horkheimer talks of the “interest of the overcoming of class domination.” ZfS 6, 1937, 292. This marks a noticeable transition from a Marxist understanding of the aim critical theory in terms of class struggle, the normative significance of which is left entirely out of the picture, to an explicitly normative one.

30 See note 14 above.

31 Habermas rejects Horkheimer’s ‘profound scepticism concerning reason’ and admits that this remark of Horkheimer’s has always irritated him. Habermas,1993, Justification and Application (Cambridge, Polity Press) p.134. ‘Zu Max Horkhiemer’s Satz: Einen unbedingten Sinn zu retten ohne Gott ist eitel,’ Texte und Kontexte, Frankfrut a/M, Suhrkamp 1991, pp. 110-26.

32 See DE 3-42/GS 319-50 passim. See also remarks in the Juliette excursus such as the follwing; “Science itself is not conscious of itself; it is only a tool.” DE 85/GS3104 “Reason is the organ of calculation, of planning: it is neutral in regard to ends.” DE 88/GS107. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason [1947] New York, continuum Press, 1974, p.176 and passim.

33 Horkheiemer ER p.11 ff.

34 This might seem to be an almost hysterical, even paranoid overstatement of the situation. One should not underestimate the shock that assimilated Jewish German intellectuals experienced at the sudden and almost total capitulation of German culture and civil society to Nazism, at the absence of almost any principled moral and political resistance from within religious, academic and legal institutions. Nor ought one to forget that Horkheimer and Adorno like many left wing intellectual émigré’s from Germany found it very difficult to adapt to their exile North America, with its culture industry, consumerism and virulent anti-communism, and remained highly allergic to it. Consequently they tended to emphasize the similarities and parallels and downplay the differences between the culture of Weimar and Nazi Germany and U.S. consumer capitalism. See P.U.Hohendahl ‘The Philosopher in Exile’ and ‘Reading Mass Culture’ in Prismatic Thought , Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1995 and Julian Roberts, ‘The Dialectic of Enlightenment’ The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory. ed F. Rush, Cambridge, CUP, 2004.

35 Influence of Pollock’s theory that Soviet style communism is a kind of state capitalism. See Dubiel and Postone.

36 Nor does what Horkheimer calls ‘insight into the nature of the original disease’ fare any better.

37 Paradigmatically see the section with the running title ‘Materialism Imageless’ in Negative Dialectics (GS6 204-9/ND 204-7).

38 Literally translated it means: ‘There is no right living in the false [life].’ Jephcott’s translation of this sentence: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly is very misleading.” MM 39. This makes it look as if adorno is using the moral concepts ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ whereas, in fact, he is deliberately avoiding using those terms. This sends most English interpreters scurrying in quite the wrong direction. For example Jay Bernstein argues as follows: “Like Aristotle, Adorno presupposes that ethical though is a reflective articulation of ethical experiences, which is itself structured through ethical practices. This assumes that the ethical possibilities open to an individual are delimited by the state of the ethical world this individual inhabits: wrong life (the state of the ethical world) cannot be lived rightly.” J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics p.41. This interpretation of Adorno as a kind of post-holocaust communitarian assumes that Minima Moralia is first an foremost a treatise about the good life and its absence.

39 J. M. Bernstein, for example, argues as follows: “Like Aristotle, Adorno presupposes that ethical thought is a reflective articulation of ethical experiences, which is itself structured through ethical practices. This assumes that the ethical possibilities open to an individual are delimited by the state of the ethical world this individual inhabits: wrong life (the state of the ethical world) cannot be lived rightly.” J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics p.41.

40 It is doubtful that the title Minima Moralia, is an allusion to an immature work by Aristotle, the Magna Moralia, the authorship of which was disputed. More likely is that it is meant literally as a series of little moral tales, or homilies, about a damaged existence.

41 Minima Moralia is a series of apercus, homilies that illustrate the way in which life has degenerated into and economically driven and politically administered sphere of private consumption. Insofar as it is a theory, it is a theory about life, about its regimentation and the systematic elimination of the qualities that made it worth living. It is not, as Bernstein argues, a treatise about ethical life or the meaning of moral terms. “[…] Adorno’s evidence for the claim that our life is “wrong” devolves down to the way in whichwhat remains of ethical life is deformed and distorted.” The textual evidence Bernstein himself adduces points up the inappropriateness of this interpretation. ‘He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy, has to inquire into its alienated form, the objective powers which determine individual existence even in its hidden recesses.’ GS4 13/MM15.

42 Later, in his unpublished lectures The Problems of Moral Philosophy Adorno offers an interpretation of this remark: The only thing that can perhaps be said is, that the good life [das richtige Leben] today would consist in the shape of resistance against the forms of a false life [eines falschen Lebens], which has been seen through and critically dissected by the most progressive minds. (PDM 249/Eng???)

43 Throughout his later writings Adorno uses terms like ‘absolute evil’ DA 171, HTS 62, ‘radically evil’ ND 374 & 23 MCP 114-5 and ‘the bad’ [das Schlechte] ND 128, without blushing..

44 When Kant writes, in the Groundwork, that willing the means to an end is analytically contained in the act of willing the end, AA IV 417, one way of reading this statement is that the desire compels the rational will to take the mean to its satisfaction. Hence on this view an instrumentally rational action would be unfree. The other possible reading of this passage is that the authority of the instrumental reason (to take the necessary means to the specified end) the intstrumental ‘ought’ is analytically contained in the willing of the end. But Adorno, following Horkheimer, is apt to interpret the rational ought as a form of internalised social compulsion. So even on this reading of Kant, acting on a hypothetical imperative is an expression of unfreedom. C.f. Jean Hampton and Christine Korsgaard.

45 See the motto to part 2 of Minima Moralia, that adorno attributes to F. H. Bradley. “Where everything is bad, it must be good to know the worst.”

46 MM 15. Michael Theunissen first identified this trope of Adorno’s, which is captured in the following metaphor in Negative Dialectics: ‘Consciousness could not despair over the grey, if it did not harbor the concept of a different colour whose scattered traces are not absent from the negative whole.’ GS6 370/ND 377-8 translation amended. Michael Theunissen ‘Negativität bei Adorno’ in Adorno-Konferenz eds. L. von Friedeburg and J. Habermas, (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt, 1983) p. 57.

47 Ironically Adorno is guilty of exactly the same Hegelian mistake, for which Cook criticises Habermas. Not quite, because Cook thinks that Habermas is guilty of Hegel’s mistake of deeming that rational to be real. She is criticising the conservative or positivist view he supposedly holds. Theunissen is objecting to the implicit Hegelianism in Adorno’s method of reading the rational in an (albeit absent) real – a kind of negative theodicy. Cook 2000: 81.

48 VE 16