Critical Theory and Practical Philosophy: On The Moral and Political Credentials
of Frankfurt School Social Criticism
1.
The ‘Frankfurt School’ and ‘Critical Theory’
The term “critical theory” is now part of the lingua franca of academic discourse in
literary and cultural studies, art history, intellectual history, sociology, political theory and
not least in social and political philosophy. The term is sometimes used to designate
almost any currently fashionable theorist, but is most closely associated with the
approach to social theory taken by the members of the Frankfurt School. That is how the
term will be understood here, as shorthand for the critical theory of society of the
Frankfurt School.
The term “Frankfurt School” can itself mislead. It is the collective noun for the group of
philosophers, sociologists, social psychologists and cultural theorists who worked under
the aegis of the privately financed Frankfurt based Institut für Sozialforschung from about
the 1930’s onwards, and who, (until it ceased publication in 1941), published in its
journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Members of the School can be divided into an
inner and an outer circle: The inner circle comprised figures such as Friedrich Pollock,
Max Horkheimer, Leo Löwenthal and Herbert Marcuse, and later Theodor W. Adorno.
The outer circle included the social psychologist Erich Fromm, the legal and political
theorists Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, and the cultural theorist Walther
Benjamin. Jürgen Habermas was a researcher at the Institute in the latter half of the
1950’s, before being gently levered out by Horkheimer (who considered him to be a
Marxist radical and thus a political liability) and later became Professor of philosophy and
sociology at the University of Frankfurt, where the Institute is now based.1
Even if one uses the term ‘critical theory’ to cover only the social theory of the defining
intellectual figures associated with the Frankfurt School - Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse
and, later, Habermas, the term is apt to mislead in two respects. First, it can appear to
suggest that all these figures share a common approach, or a work within a common
paradigm. This is only partly true. Adorno and Horkheimer did indeed work closely
together, most obviously in their joint authored study Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944); and
before the Second World War, Horkheimer wrote some important essays which later
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came to be viewed as programmatic for the entire school.2 However, Marcuse’s
philosophy shows marked differences from Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s as does
Habermas’s. The differences are even more pronounced in the case of Habermas, who is
known for having located and addressed some deep theoretical problems in the critical
theory of Adorno and Horkheimer. Indeed, when Habermas was Adorno’s research
assistant, it did not seem to him that there was any such a thing as critical theory.3 Later,
in the 1960s, when the original idea of a critical theory had retrospectively been made
clear to him, Habermas began a systematic and far-reaching critique of critical theory,
which in turn shaped his own, much more systematic and very different idea of social
theory.4 Habermas’s mature conception of social theory as expounded in Theory of
Communicative Action is such a radical reinterpretation of Horkheimer’s original idea that
some commentators argue it marks a departure from, rather than a development of, the
idea of critical theory.5
It is clear, then, that the stock phrase ‘Frankfurt School critical theory’ is a collective
noun for the thought of various thinkers with distinctive, and in some cases, markedly
different approaches. Furthermore, not only do the different members of the Frankfurt
School have differing conceptions of ‘critical theory’, these conceptions themselves
develop and change over time. Even in the case of Adorno, whose thought, among that
of all figures mentioned, remained most stable and consistent over the course of his
intellectual career, there are marked differences between his late and his early work.6
These difference between the late and the early work are even more pronounced in
Marcuse, and Habermas.7 So it is difficult and dangerous to make general statements
about something so multifaceted and dynamic as ‘critical theory’. This is not to say that it
should not and cannot be done. It can and should, for the thinkers mentioned do share
some important background assumptions and their respective work does bear some
important resemblances. To generalise with sensitivity and without oversimplification,
one must always bear in mind whose conception of critical theory one is discussing, and
at what period of its development.8
With this caveat in mind we must turn to the question of what critical theory is. Critical
theory is a particular kind of social and cultural criticism, one that understands itself as an
immanent critique. To understand what makes a criticism immanent we have briefly to
recall the origins of the term ‘critique’. Prior to Kant the term ‘Kritik’ (which in German
just means criticism, and nothing very fancy) had been mainly used in the context of
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textual (e.g. biblical) criticism. Criticism referred to the practice of restoring, completing
and where possible authenticating (usually) ancient texts manuscripts. Kant in the Critique
of Pure Reason (1781) gave the term ‘critique’ its primary modern sense of theoretical selfreflection: a critique is a self-examination of reason by reason. Kant’s critique of pure
reason set itself both negative and positive tasks: negatively it was to limit (and thus to
suspend) the claims of transcendent dogmatic metaphysics, for example that of St.
Anselm to be able to deduce the existence of God entirely a priori. Positively, it was to
establish (contra Hume’s scepticism against induction) the a priori credentials of the
synthetic propositions of natural science, to vindicate the principles of pure reason. The
details of the Kantian project are not important here. However, it is crucial to note that
this project had a political agenda that went far beyond the political and judicial
metaphors in which Kant’s philosophy was couched, particularly in the prefaces and in
the Transcendental Doctrine of Method.9 Kant’s first Critique declared brazenly that the
only true authority was human reason, and thus issued a direct challenge to the dogmatic
claims of religious and political authority.10 In this respect criticism is linked, albeit
indirectly, to the political project of enlightenment, which Kant famously described in
1783 as the emancipation of a people from its state of Unmündigkeit (minority or
tutelage).11
Critical theory as immanent social criticism continues to understand itself as a form of
rational self-reflection, a reflection on reason by reason. However, unlike Kant, the
Frankfurt School thinkers did not conceive reason as an individual faculty of mind and as
a realm of pure, a priori ideas and principles. For them reason was not formal, it was
substantial; not individual but social; and not theoretical, but practical. As for Hegel, for
the Frankfurt School reason and rationality designated something more like a dynamic
principle of development toward a good life or good society, that was historically
inscribed into a society and culture, although of course they were more acutely aware
than Hegel was that its development had been arrested.12 Still, in spite of the differences
with Kant, the Frankfurt School notion of social criticism is a descendent of Kant’s
notion of critique; it is still a form of self-reflection. Reason and society are at once critic
and criticised object. Social criticism is itself rational; it is a form of argument that is
sensitive to reasons and justifications, and it is equally a criticism directed toward the
irrrational organisation of a society or culture, and guided by a vision, if an as yet
unrealized one, of a good society. Similarly, to the extent that the critical theorists are a
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part of (and have been socialized within) the society they are criticising, their critical
practice is itself social, it reflects a progressive and transformative tendency within that
society towards a better or more rational one; and the object of the criticism is also
social, for it is directed towards those regressive and negative forces that thwart or hinder
the development of the rational society. One could say that, in the case of critical theory:
rational self-reflection is socially mediated, and that social self-reflection is rationally
articulated
Immanent social criticism [Gesellschaftskritik] as envisaged by the thinkers associated with
the Frankfurt School differs markedly from a kind of social criticism that became
prevalent in English speaking countries where the traditions of analytic philosophy
became dominant in the 20th Century. Social philosophy in the latter tradition is situated
within the much narrower domain of normative ethics and political philosophy.13 In this
tradition social criticism is understood as a kind of philosophical elaboration of moral
criticism. To be sure, philosophers in this tradition have always been aware that their aim
is not just to understand and explain, but also to offer ‘a diagnosis of, and a cure for,
social ills’, however the medical metaphor here is just a way of speaking about the
practical implications of the normative moral concepts such as justice, rights, obligation
and duty. 14 For example, John Rawls famously wrote that, ‘justice is the first virtue of
social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.’ He asks the question, is the ‘basic
structure of society’ just? If the answer is no, this has practical implications because ‘laws
and institutions, no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or
abolished if they are unjust.’15 The members of the Frankfurt School reject this kind of
social criticism for a variety of reasons that we will examine more closely below. One
reason is that as a matter of empirical and historical fact societies, political communities,
and indeed large corporate organisations, seem to be rather good at making themselves
immune from moral criticism, to judgments made on the basis of the moral standards
and values that hold sway within them, by which moral agents hold one other to account.
Human subjects apparently tolerate a high degree of social ills, from starvation, misery,
oppression, to institutionalised injustice and discrimination, and the most unjust societies
are often not characterised by widespread feelings of moral indignation and a clamour
for reform. Frankfurt School critical theorists thought that this apparent ability of
societies and institutions to immunise themselves from moral criticism is itself in need of
explanation. The Hungarian Marxist philosopher Gyorgy Lukács explained this by way of
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his theory of reification, whereby under capitalism because of the domination of the
commodity form and the exchange principle, social phenomena take on the illusory
appearance of naturalness. At the same time atomised social subjects come to regard
their relation to society and economy as a purely contemplative one.16 This explanation
had enormous influence on Horkheimer and Adorno, who incorporate a sociological
explanation of the function of morality into their social and cultural criticism. There are
less audacious explanations.17 Brecht’s dictum: “first eating, then morals” contains the
thought that in situations of extreme social injustice people have more basic things to
worry about, than morality, such as food or survival. More pertinent still is that moral
criticism is a first-order judgment of one person (his character or actions) by another
person. This usually involves the attribution of blame, and it is a way in which moral
persons/agents hold each other to account. It is much more difficult, due to a host of
metaphysical and epistemological considerations concerning identity, agency and
causality, to level such judgments against society, community, government or indeed any
corporate organisation, and as a consequence more difficult and usually less satisfying to
hold them to account. In any case, it is a fact that Frankfurt School critical theorists do
not think of immanent social criticism as applied moral theory, and do not generally rely
on moral arguments. Moreover, they leaven their account of what is wrong with society,
(of why and in what respects it is not as it ought to be) with a large amount of
sociological explanation, not to mention a fairly explosive mix of other ingredients
including, Marxian social theory (filtered through Lukács) and psychoanalysis.
2.
The aims of Critical Theory
Practical and normative aims of Critical Theory 1. diagnostic 2. remedial
It is relatively simple to state what the diagnostic aim is, namely to identify and to
correctly describe what is wrong with a society or culture, or to state why that society or
culture is not as it ought to be.
In addition to this various remedial aims have been attributed to critical theory
These have been both therapeutic, and aimed at individuals, and social and political aimed at
the collective institutional life of the whole, and sometimes both at once
Therapeutic aims of social theory
Epistemic emancipation – disillusionment (especially of beliefs that unbeknownst
to agents contribute to their oppression/lack of fulfilment.)
Practical emancipation – abolition of subjective states of unhaapiness
unfulfillment and alienation
5
Social and political aims of social theory
Reform – improvement of social conditions, achievement of fair redistributions
of goods and opportunities etc.
Revolution – in the pragmatic sense of seizing power and overthrowing the
political establishment and eliminating the social, institutional and economic
causes of oppression, misery etc.
Revolution – in the utopian sense of the total qualitative social transformation of
individual and collective life
At various stages in its development critical theory has propose to remedy the current
situation, by
1.
disillusioning or undeceiving subjects about their condition and the social
conditions under which they live.
2.
offering an alternative picture of what that society of form of life could be like,
thereby
3.
unblocking the paths to social emancipation
In addition through
4.
piecemeal practical reform (the gradual abolition of oppression and misery) or
5.
revolution, in both sense described above
to abolish flawed institutions and practices
and to create new ones in their place
For various reasons all the critical theorists have rowed back from the remedial aims of
critical theory. However all of them without exception have continued to embrace the
diagnostic aim
To identify or correctly describe what is wrong (in a suitably specified sense) with a
society (ditto) or its members or to state why that society or culture is not as it ought to.
Honneth diagnosis of social pathology
3.
The problem of the moral ambivalence of critical theory
This attempt by the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists to distance critical
theory, as immanent social criticism, from moral theory, and to give an account of what
is wrong with society that does without moral and ethical concepts, gives rise to a
problem that is frequently discussed in the literature. The problem concerns the
normative and practical aspirations of critical theory and is peculiarly salient in the
thought of Adorno and Horkheimer. I shall call it the problem of the moral ambivalence
of critical theory. It can be described quite briefly as follows.
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One important characteristic of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical theory of society that
their criticisms are not morally or evaluatively innocuous. Their characterisation of
contemporary social conditions, their diagnosis of what is wrong with the social world
(both before and after the war) is in fact redolent with moral language. It states that the
social world is bad, unjust, false, and even a ‘radically evil’ and, to that extent, is guided
from the very beginning by a vision of a good society should be like. It is hard to see
how such a characterisation of their contemporary social world can do without any moral
and ethical concepts, and if it did it would surely be a lot more anodyne than it in fact is.
The trouble is that, for a variety of different reasons, which I will examine more closely
below, reasons which stem in part from the philosophies of Hegel and Marx, and which
are pervasive throughout Hegelian-Marxism, Horkheimer and Adorno are prevented
from embracing a moral theory, from endorsing moral principles, and from propounding
a conception of the good. The difficulty that arises is that, absent these broadly moral
and or ethical considerations, they cannot reach the conclusions that they do: their
characterisation of what is wrong with the social world, ought to be, if not more anodyne
than it is, then much less richly couched in moral and ethical terms.
The problem I have just sketched is sometimes known as the problem of the ‘normative
foundations’ or ‘normative grounds’ of social criticism. However, these familiar labels are
an inappropriate way of putting the problem. It is jumping the gun to assume generally
that normative conclusions require normative grounds or premises, and that the problem
here is the absence of adequate foundations or grounds. This would be a description of
the problem that Adorno and Horkheiemer would reject, since they reject what is
sometimes called ‘Hume’s law’ namely that one cannot validly infer a moral ‘ought’ from
a non-moral ‘is’. At least if they don’t expressly repudiate Hume’s conjecture in the
Treatise on Human Nature, they certainly reject the neo-Kantian interpretation of it, that no
ethical or indeed evaluative conclusion may be validly inferred from any number of
purely factual premises.18
To describe the problem as a “moral deficit” as is sometimes called, is also potentially
misleading.19 The problem is much better understood as a surfeit of moral or evaluative
assumptions and conclusions, than as a deficit of moral or evaluative justifying grounds
or premises. These two familiar names for the problem, the problem the concerning the
normative foundations or the moral deficit of critical theory, point to a solution that that
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the critical theorists in question reject, namely that they should bolster their conclusions
with moral arguments or premises. Nonetheless there is a problem and it is due to the
gap between Adorno and Horkheimer’s normatively and evaluatively rich conclusions
and the empirical and dialectical arguments that are suppose to evince them.
4. The Rejection of moral theory in Horkheimer and Adorno
Having briefly described the problem of the moral ambivalence of critical theory. But to
demonstrate that this is a genuine problem for them, it needs to be demonstrated with
examples from Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s work. Building on Helmut Dubiel’s division,
I will provide examples from four phases of the development of Horkheimer and
Adorno’s work.20
i.
Horkheimer’s materialist period 1930-37
ii.
Horkheimer’s original programme of critical theory 1937-40.
iii.
Horkheimer and Adorno’s Critique of Instrumental Reason 1940-45.
iv.
Adorno’s mature work 1952-1971.
4.1
Horkheimer’s ‘materialist’ critique of morality (1933-37)
In 1933 Max Horkheimer published two articles in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung,
entitled ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’ and ‘Materialism and Morality’ respectively. In
that period ‘materialism’ was Horkheimer’s preferred term for what four years later he
came to call ‘critical theory’. One thing to mention is that in these works morality is
equated more or less exclusively with Kantianism. Frankfurt school theorists were not
faced with anything like the current menu of moral theories, competing as it were on
equal footing. Nor does there seem to have been any question but that Kant’s theory
adequately captured the phenomena of what they called ‘bourgeois’ morality. To all
intents and purposes Adorno and Horkheimer assumed that the really existing
(bourgeois) morality of Weimar Germany was Kantian morality. Thus in criticising
Kant’s moral theory, Horkheimer was criticising the moral self-understanding of the age:
criticism of morality was a criticism of existing society.
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Horkheimer’s criticisms in this period are directed towards the deontological, universalist
and rationalist features of Kantian morality. There are two aspects to his criticisms of
Kant’s deontology. First, he claims that Kant’s deontological insistence that the moral
worth of an action depends exclusively on the conviction [Gesinnung] of the agent, no
matter the consequences of the action, is a ‘regressive tendency’, and the idea that the
good will is the sole source of moral value, an ‘idealistic delusion’ (BPSS 24/KT1 82).
The worth of an action according to Horkheimer is determined consequentially by
whether or not it actually conduces to the transformation of bourgeois capitalist society
into a rationally organised society, to the elimination of human suffering and oppression,
and to what he calls the ‘happiness [Glück] of life as a whole’. (BPSS30/KT1 88). Second,
he rejects Kant’s central idea that one can explain the peculiar stringency of moral laws,
the obligatoriness and overidingness of the moral ‘ought’, by showing that they were the
manifestation of pure practical reason to a human nature that was both rational and
sensible, and so not merely rational. That is why, according to Kant they appear as
imperatives.21 However there are alternative explanations. Both Hegel and Schopenhauer
argue that the command like nature of morality is a relic of Mosaic law within the Judeo
Christian tradition. Nietzsche traces the severity of moral commands back to rather
gruesome origins of contract law, whilst Freud puts it down to the internalisation of fear
of the father figure. Horkheimer is with the dissenters. He attributes these features of
Kantian morality to their religious origins. 22 He also portrays them as an internalisation
of social compulsion and as a psychic consequence of the suppression of the instincts
(BPSS 33/KT1 92).
Horkheimer’s rejection of both the rationalism and the universalism of Kant’s moral
theory is related to the first criticism. As these articles make clear, Horkheimer has a
historical understanding of morality: in the bourgeois era, he claims, the human psyche
has been stamped with the features of possessive individualism. However, motives of
individual self-interest, are not sufficient to cement society together. Hence, once
religious traditions and hierarchies have ebbed away, other mechanisms are needed to
provide the requisite repository of altruistic or non-prudential motives. Morality comes
to fill the void, by trying to shore up an historically contingent set of behavioural norms
and values with the illusory metaphysical backing of a ‘transcendent order of reality’.23
Horkheimer argues that the general attempt to ground moral prescriptions as
9
requirements of pure practical reason, together with the widespread idea that moral
actions stand in need of rational justification, is an illusion.
The materialist tries to replace the justification of action with an explanation
routed through the historical understanding of the agent. He reveals this
justification to be an illusion. Most human beings today manifest a very strong
need for such justifications. Although, when they make important decisions they
are not content to call upon their feelings of indignation, compassion, love and
solidarity, but refer these instincts back to an absolute world order by calling
them ‘moral’, but this by no means shows that this need [for metaphysical
backing - GF] can reasonably be fulfilled. (CT 23 KT144)
Furthermore, Horkheimer brands this illusion “ideological” because it misrepresents
what are in fact the contingent needs, interest and aspirations of a particular class as
“universally binding postulates, anchored in transcendent authorities, as principles that
correspond to the eternal essence of the world and of humanity.” (CT22/KT1 42-3
translation amended).
The upshot is that Horkheimer rejects what he sees as a ‘metaphysically grounded
morality’ in favour of a rich conception of humanity, which foregrounds the moral
feelings of love, compassion and solidarity, and the anthropological fact that humans
desire happiness. These moral feelings, and the associated “claim to happiness” [Glück],
Horkheimer thinks, do not stand in need of any “justification or grounding”24.
It would be wrong to suggest that Horkheimer simply repudiates Kant’s deontic
conception of morality, and replaces it with a eudaemonist philosophy of moral feelings.
His argument points to a more complex dialectical relation between the two. The main
idea is that whilst Kant’s deontological, universalist and metaphysical theory of morality
captures bourgeois morality accurately, a sociological account of this conception of
morality can highlight its ideological function. Kant states that morality “is not properly
the doctrine of how we are to make ourselves happy, but of how we are to become
worthy of happiness.” i.e. by each person on his own, acting in accordance with and for
the sake of duty, or by universalizing his maxims according to the categorical
imperative.25 In Horkheimer’s view this procedure is necessary only because, in an
antagonistic capitalist society in which atomised individuals blindly and chaotically pursue
their self-interest, the possibility of happiness is foreclosed. Now for Horkheimer,
10
happiness, as we have already seen, is a property of social harmony that belongs to life as
a whole. It is the vision of a rationally organised social whole in which the individual
interest harmonises with the common interest. This harmony has a political and a
philosophical aspect. Politically it implies that the individual citizen is at one with (not
alienated from) society and its institutions; philosophically it means that the particular is
taken up into but not subsumed and absorbed within the universal. This vision of society
as a kind of organic unity, is the relic of a long tradition of perfectionism stretching back,
ultimately to Aristotle, different versions of which can be found in Rousseau, Kant,
Schiller and of course Hegel. But Horkheimer gives his concept of happiness an
distinctively Hegelian-Marxist twist insofar as labour is the vehicle of individual selfrealization through which the individual’s self-conscious activity become integrated
within the social whole (BPSS 20, 37/KT1 77, 98)
In the future society towards which the moral consciousness aspires, the life of
the whole and of individuals alike is produced a not merely as a natural effect but
as the consequence of rational designs that take account of the happiness of
individuals…In place of the blind mechanism of economic struggles, which
presently condition happiness and – for the greater part of humanity –
unhappiness, the purposive application of the immeasurable wealth of human
and material powers of production emerges. BPSS 29/KT1 88.
This somewhat fanciful proleptic vision of society as a harmonious social whole in which
happiness is fully actualised is bound up with the view held by Horkheimer and Pollock
at the time, that a rationally organised society would have a planned economy.26 In the
absence of this rational, self-conscious, economically planned social harmony, morality
functions as a socially integrative mechanism by suppressing the individual’s demand for
a happiness that is denied to them anyway. Kantian morality is an internal psychic
mechanism that compensates for the absence of a rationally organised society with a
planned economy. (BPSS 20/KT1 77) Thus in these early texts Horkheimer ends up
advancing a convoluted dialectical theory whereby the realisation of morality demands
the abolition of the very circumstances that require its existence: “Bourgeois morality
strives towards the sublation of the order which first made it possible and necessary.” 27
Among may questions that this view raises is the how the moral feelings of compassion
and solidarity and the notion of humanity differ sufficiently from the universal moral
principles and values Horkheimer exposes as ideological illusions, that they remain above
11
all such suspicions? Moreover, assuming the diagnosis of the present situation is correct,
it is equally unclear how an appeal to the moral feelings, and to the idea of humanity
support the conclusion what is required is the transformation of bourgeois society into
an organic, egalitarian society with a planned economy.
4.2. 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
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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
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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
14
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
15
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
16
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
17
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.
18
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’.
19
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.
5.
Further Analyses of the problem.
We have seen that the critical social theory of Adorno and Horkheimer throughout its
development is characterised by an ambivalence towards moral principles and values.
Ernst Tugenhat thinks that this shows a deep “conceptual confusion” in their thinking.48
He thinks that their social theory is only critical in the sense that it normatively puts
20
society into question. However, this requires judgement on the basis of moral principles
and values that Adorno and Horkheimer must themselves “hold to be correct”. Since
they repudiate morality as ideology, they cannot do this without contradicting
themselves.
Of course this objection assumes that the conception of social criticism that Adorno and
Horkeheimer reject, roughly social criticism as applied normative ethics, is the only one
available. The question is whether there is a way in which the minimum requirement of a
critical social theory, a diagnosis of social pathology.
But this may just show that they found no strategy which could reconcile their critique of
morality with their diagnosis of social pathology
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.
(Descriptive social theory is not critical at all.
Functional social theory is not critical in the right sense.
Formal criticism (in coherence or inconsistency) not critical in the right sense.
Normative evaluative criticism.)
Conclusion: Critical Theorists need to make (and anyway certainly do make) reasonably
strong evaluative or normative claims about society.
Cannot base their assessment on moral considerations, moral principles.
Cannot base this assessment on ‘thin’ universal values.
21
Cannot base these on ethical considerations conception of the good or the good life.
Cannot base their assessment on particular values ‘thick ethical concepts’.
5.1.
Habermas’s description of the Problem
5.2.
Tugendhat’s version of the problem
6.
Historical Origins of the Problem of the moral deficit of critical theory
6.1.
Hegel ‘s criticism of the ought and the problem of the Aufhebung of Morality in
Sittlichkeit.
6.2.
Marx and morality
6.3.
Hegelian Marxism: Lukacs
7. Immanent Criticism
6.1
Immanent Social criticism as an answer to the problem of the political deficit
Marx 1843
Marx: Poverty of Philosophy
Lukacs: Ethics and Tactics
7.
Habermas’s response.
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.
22
‘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
3
23
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.
13
14
15
John Rawls Theory of Justice, Oxford, OUP, 1973, p. 3.
‘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
16
24
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 postholocaust 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
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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 AdornoKonferenz 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.
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