Abstract
The role of philosophy in ‘critical thinking’ is found in its social function. That social function is to be critical of prevailing modes of thought and patterns of life. Horkheimer said it well in one of his early essays:
Today… the whole historic dynamic has placed philosophy in the center of social actuality, and social actuality in the center of philosophy…. By criticism, we mean that intellectual, and eventually practical, effort which is not satisfied to accept the prevailing ideas, actions, and social conditions unthinkingly and from mere habit; effort which aims to coordinate the individual sides of social life with each other and with the general ideas and aims of the epoch, to deduce them genetically, to distinguish the appearance from the essence, to examine the foundations of things, in short, really to know them.1.
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Notes
Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), pp. 168, 270.
Yuri Krasin, Sociology of Revolution: A Marxist View ( Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972 ), pp. 20–21.
Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory of Society ( New York: Herder and Herder, 1971 ), p. 14.
W. Tatarkiewitz, Twentieth Century Philosophy (Belmont: Wadsworth Press, 1973), p. 190. Commenting on the criticism of sociology by Marxists Tatarkiewitz states: ‘Marxists criticized the first group [the idealists] for not seeing the unity between nature and society and the second [the naturalists] for not seeing the difference between them. They themselves posited the unity of society with nature but stressed the qualitative difference between them. They explained the development of society as due not to universal laws of nature but to laws peculiar to society. A more fundamental objection of the Marxist concerned the generalization of results by the majority of non-Marxist sociologists. The Marxists denied that there are sociological laws valid for all time and in all societies; they showed that each law is tied to a certain form of society and this form is tied to a definite form of production.‘But a new element comes into the picture with Horkheimer and Wellmer, on the one hand, and Krasin, on the other: namely, not only epochal development but historical development as a whole. This throws the ‘absolute’ into the relative picture, as in the case of Lukacs’ move from Marxist sociology to a social ontology. One should recall Lukacs one-time attachments to the Frankfurt School and Theodor Adorno’s impact on his thinking. Sociological relativism was an arch foe of such theorizers. One has the feeling that ‘dialectical reason’ is supposed to cure this relativism and scepticism once and for all but, as we have seen, it does not. It merely puts the issue of relativism on a higher plane, the plane of totalizing reason, which is also subject to relativism, all over again.
Trent Schroyer, The Critique of Domination ( New York: George Braziller, 1973 ), p. 130.
M.G. Plattel, Utopian and Critical Thinking (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1972), p. 86. The author continues: ‘Several dialecticians speak only about progress without including any transcendence, while others strive too much for transcendence without progress. In either case the dialectical equilibrium is disturbed. The first group gets stuck in negation, and the second in transcending negation. According to the French dialectician, L. Goldmann, this situation is rather characteristic of the entire ‘School of Frankfurt’. Its representatives make too sharp a distinction between the positive and the negative aspects of dialectics: thus they face the choice of either directing themselves negatively to the existing situation of assuming a positive Utopian position outside this situation’.
Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), particularly the chapter on ‘Facts and Ideals.’ The concept of reified self- transcendence is brought out strongly in chapter 4 on ‘The Human World of Space and Time.’
T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1972 ), pp. 405–406.
William Horosz, ‘The Self-Transcending Totalizations of Sartre,’ Philosophy Today (December, 1975 ).
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1966 ), p. 142.
Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1972 ), pp. 122–123.
Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1969 ), p. 48.
J.J. Kockelmans, Phenomenology ( New York: Doubleday, 1967 ), p. 375.
Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984 ), p. 258.
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Horosz, W. (1987). The critique of domination in the Frankfurt School. In: Search Without Idols. Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3493-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3493-1_8
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