Critical Theory

"Bernstein and the utopian socialists should be the historical theoretical figures of contemporary social democrats but the problem is that these figures were severely and rightfully discredited by Marx and Engels and Lenin, respectively."

"Fundamentally, the problem with post-Marxists and neo-Marxists is that they want it both ways. They want to be able to claim the historical legacy and tradition of Marxism (classical) while at the same time rejecting their most important elements."

"What is happening to Marx’s doctrine has, in the course of history, often happened to the doctrines of other revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation. ... After their death, attempts are made to turn them into harmless icons, canonise them, ... at the same time emasculating and vulgarising the real essence of their revolutionary theories and blunting their revolutionary edge. ... They omit, obliterate, and distort the revolutionary side of its teaching, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is, or seems, acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now 'Marxists' — joking aside!"

"The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die."

"It is during election season that narratives become cesspools of predictable inanity. It is no longer enough for candidates to simply win or lose or be right or wrong. They must also control the narrative."

"Such is the power of the narrative that the facts of suffering, humiliation or injustice lose their evocative potential; they cease to scandalise, they are unable to evoke a moral response. Democracy can thus afford the co-existence of multiple injustices and a quiet citizenry when such narratives are able to reconstruct facts and convince the masses of the validity of that reconstruction. The silence today is a result of the popular acceptance of reconstructed reality and adherence to an alternative morality."

"When the public narrative significantly diverges from lived experience, the only outcome is more frustration among the people, who realise that on top of being poorly served, they’re also being lied to and manipulated."

"When did a plain story become a perpetual narrative? It used to be that after something happened, our leaders, or would-be leaders, would simply debate whatever occurred...Now we must fashion ‘‘narratives.’’ It has all become so faux-momentous, especially in the dispiriting potboiler of our national politics. There might be ‘‘counternarratives’’ to a ‘‘false narrative’’ that feed a ‘‘meta-narrative.’’"

"You may remember what Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said of the lockdowns: “You don’t make the timeline. The virus makes the timeline.” Well, if history is any guide, the same thing holds true for campaigning in a year of national crisis. You don’t control the narrative. The crisis does."

"Generally, because most people see themselves as valuing social justice, most people also see themselves as acting justly in their lives. In response to questions about how they practice social justice, many would say that they treat everyone the same without regard to differences; because they do this, their actions are aligned with their values."

"In contemporary debates on social justice, Honneth has focused less on the mere violation of formal rights and more on the social conditions that make individual and collective autonomy possible. According to his theory, autonomy is not a natural attribute of the subject but the outcome of successful processes of socialization grounded in relations of recognition. Society can thus be understood as an order of recognition: a set of practices and institutions that promise individuals the confirmation of their moral and social worth."

"Honneth's overcommitment to a merely reformist project becomes clear when we consider his discussion of Marx. According to Honneth, any unfreedom and exploitation of workers should be addressed within the capitalist system because no practical alternative to it is currently identifiable. Here he abandons another key insight of (at least the first generation of) Critical Theory and, indeed of Marx (and even Hegel): anticipating what the alternative would be is neither necessary in order to engage in radical critique, nor possible. Such an alternative is only going to emerge from actual practical struggles; and only in retrospect can it be theoretically grasped. ... Status quo-reinforcing false consciousness ... might extend so far that even our faculties of theorizing and imagination are chained, ultimately, to reproducing the status quo. Instead of genuine alternatives, all we can conceive of is a tax reform or granting mothers an extra year towards the qualifying condition for the state pension. In sum, if we treat “the fact that there do not seem to be practical alternative to the economic system of the market” as decisive, then we are no longer doing context-transcending critique (whether it be guided by immanent standards or not). Then, we let how things socially appear determine our theorizing (and associated practices), rather than trying to look behind the social façade as Critical Theory aspired to do"

"Social philosophy is primarily concerned with determining and discussing processes of social decelopment that can be viewed as misdevelopments, disorders or "social pathologies.""

"A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest."

"Every presentation of philosophy, whether oral or written, is to be taken and can only be taken in the sense of a means. Every system is only an expression or image of reason, and hence only an object of reason, an object which reason—a living power that procreates itself in new thinking beings—distinguishes from itself and posits as an object of criticism. Every system that is not recognized and appropriated as just a means, limits and warps the mind for it sets up the indirect and formal thought in the place of the direct, original and material thought."

"In high industrial civilization, ... the “inner” dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking—the critical power of Reason—is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition. The impact of progress turns Reason into submission to the facts of life, and to the dynamic capability of producing more and bigger facts of the same sort of life. The efficiency of the system blunts the individuals' recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of the whole. If the individuals find themselves in the things which shape their life, they do so, not by giving, but by accepting the law of things—not the law of physics but the law of their society."

"The philosopher will ask himself … if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history."

"The greatest merit of the critical spirit is that it tends to cure fanaticism, and it is logical enough that in our own fanatical times the critical spirit should tend to disappear."

"If the progressing rationality of advanced industrial society tends to liquidate, as an “irrational rest,” the disturbing elements of Time and Memory, it also tends to liquidate the disturbing rationality contained in this irrational rest. Recognition and relation to the past as present counteracts the functionalization of thought by and in the established reality. It militates against the closing of the universe of discourse and behavior; it renders possible the development of concepts which destabilize and transcend the closed universe by comprehending it as historical universe. Confronted with the given society as object of its reflection, critical thought becomes historical consciousness as such, it is essentially judgment. Far from necessitating an indifferent relativism, it searches in the real history of man for the criteria of truth and falsehood, progress and regression."

"When an active individual of sound common sense perceives the sordid state of the world, desire to change it becomes the guiding principle by which he organizes given facts and shapes them into a theory. The methods and categories as well as the transformation of the theory can be understood only in connection with his taking of sides. This, in turn, discloses both his sound common sense and the character of the world. Right thinking depends as much on right willing as right willing on right thinking."

"The idea of critical theory, in the context of the history of marxism, is usually associated with the Frankfurt School for Social Research. In terms of its reception, critical theory is often reduced to the cultural pessimism associated with works such as Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) and Marcuse’s One-dimensional Man (1964). The Frankfurt School achieved much else beside (Wiggershaus 1994), but its main theses did indeed include this idea of modernity as entrapment, Marx plus Weber, as it were in the early period spirit of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Critical theory can indeed be viewed as Marx plus Weber, commodification plus rationalization. Two earlier intellectual links helped to make this bond, well before Dialectic of Enlightenment, and long before critical theory became a kind of household word for radicals."

"The error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority."

"For the Romantics and for speculative philosophy, ... to be critical meant to elevate thinking so far beyond all restrictive conditions that the knowledge of truth sprang forth magically, as it were, from insight into the falsehood of these restrictions."

"Instead of ideologically synchronizing contradictions, or assigning them to separate halls of the academy, critical theory seeks to articulate them."

"Diese Irrationalität der Ratio hat ihren Niederschlag in der List gefunden als der Angleichung der bürgerlichen Vernunft an jede Unvernunft, die ihr als noch größere Gewalt gegenübertritt."

"To grasp existing things as such, not merely to note their abstract spatial-temporal relationships, by which they can then be seized, but, on the contrary, to think of them as surface, as mediated conceptual moments which are only fulfilled by revealing their social, historical, and human meaning—this whole aspiration of knowledge is abandoned."

"Die metaphysische Apologie verriet die Ungerechtigkeit des Bestehenden wenigstens durch die Inkongruenz von Begriff und Wirklichkeit. In der Unparteilichkeit der wissenschaftlichen Sprache hat das Ohnmächtige vollends die Kraft verloren, sich Ausdruck zu verschaffen, und bloß das Bestehende findet ihr neutrales Zeichen. Solche Neutralität ist metaphysischer als die Metaphysik."

"… truth neutralized as cultural heritage."

"Dem Positivismus, der das Richteramt der aufgeklärten Vernunft antrat, gilt in intelligible Welten auszuschweifen nicht mehr bloß als verboten, sondern als sinnloses Geplapper. Er braucht—zu seinem Glück—nicht atheistisch zu sein, weil das versachlichte Denken nicht einmal die Frage stellen kann. Den offiziellen Kultus, als einen erkenntnisfreien Sonderbereich gesellschaftlicher Betriebsamkeit, läßt der positivistische Zensor ebenso gern wie die Kunst passieren; die Leugnung, die selbst mit dem Anspruch auftritt, Erkenntnis zu sein, niemals. Die Entfernung des Denkens von dem Geschäft, das Tatsächliche zuzurichten, das Heraustreten aus dem Bannkreis des Daseins, gilt der szientifischen Gesinnung ebenso als Wahnsinn und Selbstvernichtung, wie dem primitiven Zauberer das Heraustreten aus dem magischen Kreis, den er für die Beschwörung gezogen hat, und beidemale ist dafür gesorgt, daß die Tabuverletzung dem Frevler auch wirklich zum Unheil ausschlägt."

"Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine. Enlightenment pushed aside the classical demand to “think thinking.” … . Mathematical procedure became a kind of ritual of thought."

"In the world of exchange the one who gives more is in the wrong; but the one who loves is always the one who loves more."

"Machinery mutilates people today, even if it also feeds them."

"Die Herrschaft tritt dem Einzelnen als das Allgemeine gegenüber, als die Vernunft in der Wirklichkeit."

"This illusion, in which utterly enlightened humanity is losing itself, cannot be dispelled by a thinking which, as an instrument of power, has to choose between command and obedience."

"The more complex and sensitive the social, economic, and scientific mechanism, to the operation of which the system of production has long since attuned the body, the more impoverished are the experiences of which the body is capable."

"Not only is domination paid for with the estrangement of human beings from the dominated objects, but the relationships of human beings, including the relationship of individuals to themselves, have themselves been bewitched by the objectification of mind. Individuals shrink to the nodal points of conventional reactions and the modes of operation objectively expected of them."

"On the way from mythology to logistics, thought has lost the element of reflection on itself."

"Precisely by virtue of its irresistible logic, thought, in whose compulsive mechanism nature is reflected and perpetuated, also reflects itself as a nature oblivious of itself."

"As solid citizens, philosophers ally themselves in practice with the powers they condemn in theory."

"… subordinating life in its entirety to the requirements of its preservation"

"Den Menschen wurde ihr Selbst als ein je eigenes, von allen anderen verschiedenes geschenkt, damit es desto sicherer zum gleichen werde. Weil es aber nie ganz aufging, hat auch über die liberalistische Periode hin Aufklärung stets mit dem sozialen Zwang sympathisiert. Die Einheit des manipulierten Kollektivs besteht in der Negation jedes Einzelnen, es ist Hohn auf die Art Gesellschaft, die es vermöchte, ihn zu einem zu machen."

"Die Wohltat, daß der Markt nicht nach Geburt fragt, hat der Tauschende damit bezahlt, daß er seine von Geburt verliehenen Möglichkeiten von der Produktion der Waren, die man auf dem Markte kaufen kann, modellieren läßt."

"Reason serves as a universal tool for the fabrication of all other tools, rigidly purpose-directed and as calamitous as the precisely calculated operations of material production, the results of which for human beings escape all calculation. Reason’s old ambition to be purely an instrument of purposes has finally been fulfilled."

"Since, under the work-pressure of the millennium now ending, pleasure has learned to hate itself, in its totalitarian emancipation it remains mean and mutilated through self-contempt."

"The unity of the manipulated collective consists in the negation of each individual and in the scorn poured on the type of society which could make people into individuals."

"The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market."

"Wer die Symbole verletzt, verfällt im Namen der überirdischen den irdischen Mächten."

"As a means of reinforcing the social power of language, ideas became more superfluous the more that power increased, and the language of science put an end to them altogether. Conscious justification lacked the suggestive power which springs from dread of the fetish."

"The way of civilization has been that of obedience and work, over which fulfillment shines everlastingly as mere illusion, as beauty deprived of power. … [Odysseus] knows only two possibilities of escape. One he prescribes to his comrades. He plugs their ears with wax and orders them to row with all their might. Anyone who wishes to survive must not listen to the temptation of the irrecoverable, and is unable to listen only if he is unable to hear. Society has always made sure that this was the case. Workers must look ahead with alert concentration and ignore anything which lies to one side. The urge toward distraction must be grimly sublimated in redoubled exertions. Thus the workers are made practical. The other possibility Odysseus chooses for himself, the landowner, who has others to work for him. He listens, but does so while bound helplessly to the mast. … The bonds by which he has irrevocably fettered himself to praxis at the same time keep the Sirens at a distance from praxis: their lure is neutralized as a mere object of contemplation, as art. … Odysseus is represented in the sphere of work. Just as he cannot give way to the lure of self-abandonment, as owner he also forfeits participation in work and finally even control over it, while his companions, despite their closeness to things, cannot enjoy their work because it is performed under compulsion, in despair, with their senses forcibly stopped."

"Aufklärung … schneidet das Inkommensurable weg. Nicht bloß werden im Gedanken die Qualitäten aufgelöst, sondern die Menschen zur realen Konformität gezwungen."