[marxistphilosophy] Horkheimer: Traditional & Critical Theory

[Ralph Dumain]

(12) How is critical thought then related to experience?  For thought to 
remain locked up in itself was the way of idealism.  Thinking in a 
detached, compartmentalized, "spiritualist" way reflects existing 
conditions of division of labor.  The difference between traditional and 
critical theory with regard to the role of experience is expressed in the 
character of social interest, the needs of the society and the goals of 
work.  Marx and Engels saw the proletariat as "necessarily generated in the 
proletariat."

"But it must be added that even the situation of the proletariat is, in 
this society, no guarantee of correct knowledge.  The proletariat may 
indeed have experience of meaninglessness in the form of continuing and 
increasing wretchedness and injustice in its own life. Yet this awareness 
is prevented from becoming a social force by the differentiation of social 
structure which is still imposed on the proletariat from above and by the 
opposition between personal class interests which is transcended only at 
very special moments. Even to the proletariat the world superficially seems 
quite different than it really is. Even an outlook which could grasp that 
no opposition really exists between the proletariat's own true interests 
and those of society as a whole, and would therefore derive its principles 
of action from the thoughts and feelings of the masses, would fall into 
slavish dependence on the status quo. The intellectual is satisfied to 
proclaim with reverent admiration the creative strength of the proletariat 
and finds satisfaction in adapting himself to it and in canonizing it. He 
fails to see that such an evasion of theoretical effort (which the 
passivity of his own thinking spares him) and of temporary opposition to 
the masses (which active theoretical effort on his part might force upon 
him) only makes the masses blinder and weaker than they need be. His own 
thinking should in fact be a critical, promotive factor in the development 
of the masses. When he wholly accepts the present psychological state of 
that class which, objectively considered, embodies the power to change 
society, he has the happy feeling of being linked with an immense force and 
enjoys a professional optimism. When the optimism is shattered in periods 
of crushing defeat, many intellectuals risk falling into a pessimism about 
society and a nihilism which are just as ungrounded as their exaggerated 
optimism had been. They cannot bear the thought that the kind of thinking 
which is most topical, which has the deepest grasp of the historical 
situation, and is most pregnant with the future, must at certain times 
isolate its subject and throw him back upon himself."

(Excellent!)

And:

"If critical theory consisted essentially in formulations of the feelings 
and ideas of one class at any given moment, it would not be structurally 
different from the special branches of science. It would be engaged in 
describing the psychological contents typical of certain social groups; it 
would be social psychology."

The same issues apply to the consciousness of the bourgeoisie, and for that 
matter the revolutionary vanguard.

"If, however, the theoretician and his specific object are seen as forming 
a dynamic unity with the oppressed class, so that his presentation of 
societal contradictions is not merely an expression of the concrete 
historical situation but also a force within it to stimulate change, then 
his real function emerges. The course of the conflict between the advanced 
sectors of the class and the individuals who speak out the truth concerning 
it, as well as of the conflict between the most advanced sectors with their 
theoreticians and the rest of the class, is to be understood as a process 
of interactions in which awareness comes to flower along with its 
liberating but also its aggressive forces which incite while also requiring 
discipline. The sharpness of the conflict shows in the ever present 
possibility of tension between the theoretician and the class which his 
thinking is to serve. The unity of the social forces which promise 
liberation is at the same time their distinction (in Hegel's sense); it 
exists only as a conflict which continually threatens the subjects caught 
up in it. This truth becomes clearly evident in the person of the 
theoretician; he exercises an aggressive critique not only against the 
conscious defenders of the status quo but also against distracting, 
conformist, or utopian tendencies within his own household.

"The traditional type of theory, one side of which finds expression in 
formal logic, is in its present form part of the production process with 
its division of labor. Since society must come to grips with nature in 
future ages as well, this intellectual technology will not become 
irrelevant but on the contrary is to be developed as fully as possible. But 
the kind of theory which is an element in action leading to new social 
forms is not a cog in an already existent mechanism. Even if victory or 
defeat provides a vague analogy to the confirmation or failure of 
scientific hypotheses, the theoretician who sets himself up in opposition 
to society as it is does not have the consolidation that such hypotheses 
are part of his professional work. He cannot sing for himself the hymn of 
praise which Poincare sang to the enrichment deriving even from hypotheses 
that must be rejected. His profession is the struggle of which his own 
thinking is a part and not something self-sufficient and separable from the 
struggle. Of course, many elements of theory in the usual sense enter into 
his work: the knowledge and prognosis of relatively isolated facts, 
scientific judgments, the elaboration of problems which differ from those 
of other theoreticians because of his specific interests but nonetheless 
manifest the same logical form.

"Traditional theory may take a number of things for granted: its positive 
role in a functioning society, an admittedly indirect and obscure relation 
to the satisfaction of general needs, and participation in the 
self-renewing life process. But all these exigencies about which science 
need not trouble itself because their fulfillment is rewarded and confirmed 
by the social position of the scientist, are called into question in 
critical thought."

(All excellent.)

(13) There is more on the functions and intellectual self-consciousness of 
the intelligentsia (the theoretician's social position).  In the specific 
abstract role in which competing theories and political ideas are 
considered, they and their proponents may all be formally equal, but 
critical theory rejects such a formalistic formulation.  An abstract 
enlightening (missionary) view of the intelligentsia's role is wrong 
especially in a time of crisis.  "Mind is liberal", true, but it is not 
self-sufficient, and must recognize this too in its quest for 
autonomy.  "To that extent, mind is not liberal."  "Critical theory is 
neither 'deeply rooted' like totalitarian propaganda nor 'detached' like 
the liberalist intelligentsia."  (Excellent!)

(14) The difference in the logical structures of traditional and critical 
theory can now be ascertained in light of their functions.  There are 
another four pages showing how physics and Marxian political economy are 
similar in their logical scientific structure.

"The problem that arises as soon as particular propositions of the critical 
theory are applied to unique or recurring events in contemporary society 
has to do not with the truth of the theory but with how suitable the theory 
is for traditional kinds of intellectual operation with progressively 
extended goals. The special sciences, and especially contemporary political 
economics, are unable to derive practical profit from the fragmentary 
questions they discuss. But this incapacity is due neither to these 
sciences nor to critical theory alone, but to their specific role in 
relation to reality.

"Even the critical theory, which stands in opposition to other theories, 
derives its statements about real relationships from basic universal 
concepts, as we have indicated, and therefore presents the relationships as 
necessary. Thus both kinds of theoretical structure are alike when it comes 
to logical necessity. But there is a difference as soon as we turn from 
logical to real necessity, the necessity involved in factual sequences. The 
biologist's statement that internal processes cause a plant to wither or 
that certain processes in the human organism lead to its destruction leaves 
untouched the question whether any influences can alter the character of 
these processes or change them totally. Even when an illness is said to be 
curable, the fact that the necessary curative measures are actually taken 
is regarded as purely extrinsic to the curability, a matter of technology 
and therefore nonessential as far as the theory as such is concerned. The 
necessity which rules society can be regarded as biological in the sense 
described, and the unique character of critical theory can therefore be 
called in question on the grounds that in biology as in other natural 
sciences particular sequences of events can be theoretically constructed 
just as they are in the critical theory of society. The development of 
society, in this view, would simply be a particular series of events, for 
the presentation of which conclusions from various other areas of research 
are used, just as a doctor in the course of an illness or a geologist 
dealing with the earth's prehistory has to apply various other disciplines. 
Society here would be the individual reality which is evaluated on the 
basis of theories in the special sciences.

"However many valid analogies there may be between these different 
intellectual endeavors, there is nonetheless a decisive difference when it 
comes to the relation of subject and object and therefore to the necessity 
of the event being judged. The object with which the scientific specialist 
deals is not affected at all by his own theory. Subject and object are kept 
strictly apart. Even if it turns out that at a later point in time the 
objective event is influenced by human intervention, to science this is 
just another fact. The objective occurrence is independent of the theory, 
and this independence is part of its necessity: the observer as such can 
effect no change in the object. A consciously critical attitude, however, 
is part of the development of society: the construing of the course of 
history as the necessary product of an economic mechanism simultaneously 
contains both a protest against this order of things, a protest generated 
by the order itself, and the idea of self-determination for the human race, 
that is the idea of a state of affairs in which man's actions no longer 
flow from a mechanism but from his own decision. The judgment passed on the 
necessity inherent in the previous course of events implies here a struggle 
to change it from a blind to a meaningful necessity. If we think of the 
object of the theory in separation from the theory, we falsify it and fall 
into quietism or conformism. Every part of the theory presupposes the 
critique of the existing order and the struggle against it along lines 
determined by the theory itself.

"The theoreticians of knowledge who started with physics had reason, even 
if they were not wholly right, to condemn the confusion of cause and 
operation of forces and to substitute the idea of condition or function for 
the idea of cause. For the kind of thinking which simply registers facts 
there are always only series of phenomena, never forces and counterforces; 
but this, of course, says something about this kind of thinking, not about 
nature. If such a method is applied to society, the result is statistics 
and descriptive sociology, and these can be important for many purposes, 
even for critical theory.

"For traditional science either everything is necessary or nothing is 
necessary, according as necessity means the independence of event from 
observer or the possibility of absolutely certain prediction. But to the 
extent that the subject does not totally isolate himself, even as thinker, 
from the social struggles of which he is a part and to the extent that he 
does not think of knowledge and action as distinct concepts, necessity 
acquires another meaning for him. If he encounters necessity which is not 
mastered by man, it takes shape either as that realm of nature which 
despite the far-reaching conquests still to come will never wholly vanish, 
or as the weakness of the society of previous ages in carrying on the 
struggle with nature in a consciously and purposefully organized way. Here 
we do have forces and counterforces. Both elements in this concept of 
necessity-the power of nature and the weakness of societyare interconnected 
and are based on the experienced effort of man to emancipate himself from 
coercion by nature and from those forms of social life and of the 
juridical, political, and cultural orders which have become a straitjacket 
for him. The struggle on two fronts, against nature and against society's 
weakness, is part of the effective striving for a future condition of 
things in which whatever man wills is also necessary and in which the 
necessity of the object becomes the necessity of a rationally mastered event."

(This is all very good, but one caveat: the ontological distinction between 
the natural and social sciences (the objects of their study) should not be 
conflated with the social functions that differentiate traditional and 
critical theory.   Any perspicacious philosopher of science ought to be 
able to recognize these distinctions, though critical theory may well 
explain why many of them do not.  Also, dialectical materialism--not in its 
apologetic misuse but in its original intent--was founded on a recognition 
of stratified ontological distinctions as well as upon a fundamental unity 
of the material world.)


"Fascism has awakened a sleeping world to the realities
  of the irrational, mystical character structure
  of the people of the world."
    -- Wilhelm Reich