Science & Critical Theory

[Ralph Dumain]

Luckily, Horkheimer's "Traditional and Critical Theory" is included in his 
CRITICAL THEORY: SELECTED ESSAYS.  On the way to finding that I came across 
an essay in THE ESSENTIAL FRANKFURT SCHOOL READER by Marcuse, "On Science 
and Phenomenology."  I found this essay rather unsatisfactory; it reads 
like a luftmensch take on the world.  The main fault lies with Husserl 
himself.  Marcuse's essay is basically a review of Husserl's THE CRISIS OF 
EUROPEAN SCIENCE AND TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY.  In the end Marcuse 
criticizes transcendentalism and Husserl's philosophy as replacing the 
hubris of science by that of philosophy, but I find Husserl's whole scheme 
suspect, just as I find it a shame that a more sociological approach that 
Husserl's is no more sophisticated.  There are a number of abstract 
statements made that are totally unconvincing: (1) scientific rationality 
conceals within itself the germs of irrationality, not to mention an 
implicit "technological reason" prior to all application; (2) modern 
science is a reduction of the Greek concept of reason to pure mathesis 
without even the total ontological concept the Greeks had in mind; (3) 
Galileo's universalized mathematization of nature not only furthers this 
process but leaves the lebenswelt intact as an assumed but uncriticized 
constituent of the scientific enterprise.  I think all this is a load of 
shit.  And it is curiously external to the subject matter; it is all on the 
outside, in the realm of pure ideology.  It is not only obtuse to anything 
intrinsically present in scientific method itself, but it ignores the real 
locus of the problem of scientific ideology, which is not within the nature 
of scientific theorizing itself but in its role within the total realm of 
social practice.  The emergence of the modern scientific world view upset 
the feudal apple cart, impinged on religion and authority, and necessitated 
strategies to accommodate it within a total system of social relations, and 
hence philosophically as well.  There is where certain conceptions of 
quantification, empiricism, utilitarianism, as well as the diremption 
between abstract theorizing and lived experience come in.