Horkheimer: Traditional & Critical Theory (2)

[Ralph Dumain]

(6) Horkheimer criticizes bourgeois philosophical systems such as 
Neo-Kantianism as a form of false consciousness, oblivious to the realities 
of their social being.  Specialist theoretical activity is elevated to the 
level of the universal Logos, a "camouflaged utopia".

"In fact, however, the self-knowledge of present-day man is not a 
mathematical knowledge of nature which claims to be the eternal Logos, but 
a critical theory of society as it is, a theory dominated at every turn by 
a concern for reasonable conditions of life.

"The isolated consideration of particular activities and branches of 
activity, along with their contents and objects, requires for its validity 
an accompanying concrete awareness of its own limitations. A conception is 
needed which overcomes the one-sidedness that necessarily arises when 
limited intellectual processes are detached from their matrix in the total 
activity of society. In the idea of theory which the scholar inevitably 
reaches when working purely within his own discipline, the relation between 
fact and conceptual ordering of fact offers a point of departure for such a 
corrective conception. The prevailing theory of knowledge has, of course, 
recognized the problem which this relation raises. The point is constantly 
stressed that identical objects provide for one discipline problems to be 
resolved only in some distant future, while in another discipline they are 
accepted as simple facts. Connections which provide physics with research 
problems are taken for granted in biology. Within biology, physiological 
processes raise problems while psychological processes do not. The social 
sciences take human and nonhuman nature in its entirety as given and are 
concerned only with how relationships are established between man and 
nature and between man and man. However, an awareness of this relativity, 
immanent in bourgeois science, in the relationship between theoretical 
thought and facts, is not enough to bring the concept of theory to a new 
stage of development. What is needed is a radical reconsideration, not of 
the scientist alone, but of the knowing individual as such."

So far so good ....

(7) The vantage point of the individual of bourgeois society is very 
different from the vantage point needed to understand society as a 
whole.  Activity and passivity are not divided for society as a 
whole.  The" natural history" of experiment, technology, production, 
tool-making, perception and judgement are considered.  The relationships 
connecting the components of Kant's philosophy are analyzed: passive 
sensation, active understanding, the transcendental subject  .... Kant's 
idealism and his obscurities reflect the limitations of his conception of 
social activity.  Hegel's cunning of reason and the absolute spirit as 
universal subject step in to advance the recognition of the social, but 
Hegelian reconciliation is dubious.  (Though I grasp the general train of 
thought, I am not convinced this part of Horkheimer's argument is a direct 
logical development development taking off from [6].)

(8) Horkheimer jumps to the current situation:

"The integration of facts into existing conceptual systems and the revision 
of facts through simplification or elimination of contradictions are, as we 
have indicated, part of general social activity. Since society is divided 
into groups and classes, it is understandable that theoretical structures 
should be related to the general activity of society in different ways 
according as the authors of such structures belong to one or other social 
class. Thus when the bourgeois class was first coming into being in a 
feudal society, the purely scientific theory which arose with it tended 
chiefly to the break-up of the status quo and attacked the old form of 
activity. Under liberalism this theory was accepted by the prevailing human 
type. Today, development is determined much less by average men who compete 
with each other in improving the material apparatus of production and its 
products, than by conflicting national and international cliques of leaders 
at the various levels of command in the economy and the State. In so far as 
theoretical thought is not related to highly specialized purposes connected 
with these conflicts, especially war and the industry that supports it, 
interest in theory has waned. Less energy is being expended on forming and 
developing the capacity of thought without regard to how it is to be applied.

"These distinctions, to which others might be added, do not at all change 
the fact that a positive social function is exercised by theory in its 
traditional form: that is, the critical examination of data with the aid of 
an inherited apparatus of concepts and judgments which is still operative 
in even the simplest minds, as well as the interaction between facts and 
theoretical forms that goes on in daily professional activity. In this 
intellectual work the needs and goals, the experiences and skills, the 
customs and tendencies of the contemporary form of human existence have all 
played their part. Like a material tool of production, it represents 
potentially an element not only of the contemporary cultural totality but 
of a more just, more differentiated, more harmoniously organized one as 
well. To the extent that this theoretical thinking does not deliberately 
lend itself to concerns which are external and alien to the object but 
truly concentrates on the problems which it meets in the wake of technical 
development and, in this connection, itself turns up new problems and 
transforms old concepts where necessary--to this extent it may rightly 
regard the technological and industrial accomplishments of the bourgeois 
era as its own justification and be confident of its own value."

(This I think is very good.)

(9) Horkheimer briefly discusses the overall utility of theorizing, even 
the emptiest and most marginalized of metaphysical systems within the 
context of productive and unproductive labor.

(10) Critical theory challenges the social totality.  In traditional 
theoretical thinking, practical applications are taken as external to 
theoretical thinking itself, an alienated modus vivendi which eases the 
tensions within the specialist.  "The investigation into the social 
conditioning of facts and theories may indeed be a research problem", this 
sociology of knowledge can also be accommodated within traditional theory.

"In this reaction to critical theory, the self-awareness of thought as such 
is reduced to the discovery of the relationship that exists between 
intellectual positions and their social location. Yet the structure of the 
critical attitude, inasmuch as its intentions go beyond prevailing social 
ways of acting, is no more closely related to social disciplines thus 
conceived than it is to natural science. Its opposition to the traditional 
concept of theory springs in general from a difference not so much of 
objects as of subjects. For men of the critical mind, the facts, as they 
emerge from the work of society, are not extrinsic in the same degree as 
they are for the savant or for members of other professions who all think 
like little savants. The latter look towards a new kind of organization of 
work. But in so far as the objective realities given in perception are 
conceived as products which in principle should be under human control and, 
in the future at least, will in fact come under it, these realities lose 
the character of pure factuality."

(Very good!  Very important!)

(11) "Bourgeois thought is so constituted that in reflection on the subject 
which exercises such thought a logical necessity forces it to recognize an 
ego which imagines itself to be autonomous. Bourgeois thought is 
essentially abstract, and its principle is an individuality which 
inflatedly believes itself to be the ground of the world or even to be the 
world without qualification, an individuality separated off from events. 
The direct contrary of such an outlook is the attitude which holds the 
individual to be the unproblematic expression of an already constituted 
society; an example would be a nationalist ideology. Here the rhetorical 
"we" is taken seriously; speech is accepted as the organ of the community. 
In the internally rent society of our day, such thinking, except in social 
questions, sees nonexistent unanimities and is illusory.

Critical thought and its theory are opposed to both the types of thinking 
just described. Critical thinking is the function neither of the isolated 
individual nor of a sum-total of individuals. Its subject is rather a 
definite individual in his real relation to other individuals and groups, 
in his conflict with a particular class, and, finally, in the resultant web 
of relationships with the social totality and with nature. The subject is 
no mathematical point like the ego of bourgeois philosophy; his activity is 
the construction of the social present. Furthermore, the thinking subject 
is not the place where knowledge and object coincide, nor consequently the 
starting-point for attaining absolute knowledge. Such an illusion about the 
thinking subject, under which idealism has lived since Descartes, is 
ideology in the strict sense, for in it the limited freedom of the 
bourgeois individual puts on the illusory form of perfect freedom and 
autonomy. As a matter of fact, however, in a society which is untransparent 
and without self-awareness the ego, whether active simply as thinker or 
active in other ways as well, is unsure of itself too. In reflection on 
man, subject and object are sundered; their identity lies in the future, 
not in the present. The method leading to such an identification may be 
called explanation in Cartesian language, but in genuinely critical thought 
explanation signifies not only a logical process but a concrete historical 
one as well. In the course of it both the social structure as a whole and 
the relation of the theoretician to society are altered, that is both the 
subject and the role of thought are changed. The acceptance of an essential 
unchangeableness between subject, theory, and object thus distinguishes the 
Cartesian conception from every kind of dialectical logic."

(Not bad at all.  You will notice, I hope, that the more Horkheimer gets 
into this, the less specifically he feels the need to conflate the 
intrinsic characteristics of scientific theorizing with the alienated 
ideological complex that penetrates the consciousness of the bourgeois 
specialist.)