|
commentary on mere criticism can now be applied to the position of the Frankfurt School itself:
The reflection of the critical subject, who believes to have preserved for himself a truly free life and the historical future in the form of an appeal, remains self-righteous over and against all instances; Marx, who had already recognized this privilege to be the case of the Bauer brothers, therefore spoke ironically of the 'holy family'. 73
Against this interpretation, which reduces the position of the Frankfurt School to that of the 'holy family', it can be argued that while the critique of political economy no longer serves as a paradigm for the Frankfurt School, there are still norms and values immanent to the culture of late-capitalist societies that have an emancipatory content. However, these norms and values are no longer provided by rationalist natural law theories, whose embodiment in the institutions of liberalcapitalist society Marx could take for granted. It is no longer the norms of a bourgeois public sphere, of the liberal marketplace and of the liberal state, practising the rule of law, to which critique can appeal. With the transformation of political domination into rational administration, the rational and emancipatory content of the natural law tradition has been emptied out. Emancipatory norms are no longer immanent in public and institutional structures. Instead, they have to be searched for in the unredeemed Utopian promise of culture, art, and philosophy ( Adorno), or in the deep structures of human subjectivity that revolt against the sacrifices demanded by an oppressive society ( Marcuse).
Adorno, who insists upon the unredeemed Utopian potential of absolute Spirit, could therefore begin Negative Dialectics with the following sentence: 'Philosophy, which once seemed to have been overcome, remains alive, for the moment of its actualization has been missed. 74 Since the promise of philosophy to be one with a rational actuality ( Hegel) or to be a material weapon of the masses who are about to actualize reason ( Marx) has failed, it must engage in ruthless self-criticism. This self-criticism of philosophy must reactivate the illusion to which philosophy owes its continued existence -- the illusion, namely, that philosophy could become actuality. This illusion must be demystified, for it betrays the arrogance of conceptual thinking that considers its other, that which is not thought, to be a mere vehicle for the actualization of thought. Actuality is not the vessel into which thought empties itself, although it is this striving towards the unity of thought and actuality that gives philosophy its raison d'être. This aporia must not be abandoned, but continually practised and revived through
-87- |
