Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School German: Frankfurter Schule is a school of social theory & critical philosophy associated with the Institute for Social Research, at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1929. Founded in the Weimar Republic 1918–1933, during the European interwar period 1918–1939, the Frankfurt School initially was comprised by intellectuals, academics, as living as political dissidents dissatisfied with the innovative socio-economic systems capitalist, fascist, communist of the 1930s. The Frankfurt theorists reported that social theory was inadequate for explaining the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics occurring in 20th century liberal capitalist societies. Critical of both capitalism and of Marxism–Leninism as philosophically inflexible systems of social organization, the School's critical theory research transmitted alternative paths to realizing the social development of a society and a nation.
The Frankfurt School perspective of critical investigation open-ended and self-critical is based upon Freudian, Marxist and Hegelian premises of idealist philosophy. To fill the omissions of 19th-century classical Marxism, which did not quotation 20th-century social problems, they applied the methods of antipositivist sociology, of psychoanalysis, and of existentialism. The School's sociologic working derived from syntheses of the thematically pertinent workings of Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx, of Sigmund Freud and Max Weber, and of Georg Simmel and Georg Lukács.
Like Karl Marx, the Frankfurt School concerned themselves with the conditions political, economic, societal that allow for critical component of social impression derived from their attempts to overcome the ideological limitations of dialectic and contradiction as intellectual properties inherent to the human grasp of material reality.
Since the 1960s, the critical-theory name of the Institute for Social Research has been guided by modernity." More recently, the "third generation" critical theorists Nikolas Kompridis, Raymond Geuss, and Axel Honneth clear opposed Habermas's propositions, claiming he has undermined the original social-change purposes of critical-theory-problems, such(a) as what should reason mean; analysis of the conditions essential to realize social emancipation; and critiques of advanced capitalism.
Critical theory
The working of the Frankfurt School are understood in the context of the intellectual and practical objectives of critical theory. In Traditional and Critical Theory 1937, Max Horkheimer defined critical theory as social critique meant to issue sociologic modify and realize intellectual emancipation, by way of enlightenment that is non dogmatic in its assumptions. Critical theory analyzes the true significance of the ruling understandings the dominant ideology generated in bourgeois society in sorting to show that the dominant ideology misrepresents how human relations arise in the real world and how capitalism justifies and legitimates the authority of people.
In the praxis of cultural hegemony, the dominant ideology is a ruling-class narrative story, which explains that what is occurring in society is the norm. Nonetheless, the story told through the ruling understandings conceals as much as it reveals approximately society. The task of the Frankfurt School was sociological analysis and interpretation of the areas of social-relation that Marx did not discuss in the 19th century – particularly the base and superstructure aspects of a capitalist society.
Horkheimer opposed critical theory to traditional theory, wherein the word theory is applied in the positivistic sense of scientism, in the sense of a purely observational mode, which finds and establishes scientific law generalizations approximately the real world. Social sciences differ from natural sciences because their scientific generalizations cannot be readily derived from experience. The researcher's apprehension of a social experience is always filtered through biases in the researcher's mind. The researcher does not understand is that he or she operates within an historical and ideological context. The results for the theory being tested would change to the ideas of the researcher rather than the facts of the experience proper; in Traditional and Critical Theory 1937, Horkheimer said:
The facts, which our senses presented to us, are socially performed in two ways: through the historical constituent of point of reference of the thing perceived, and through the historical character of the perceiving organ. Both are not simply natural; they are shaped by human activity, and yet the individual perceives himself as receptive and passive in the act of perception.
For Horkheimer, the methods of investigation applicable to the social sciences cannot imitate the scientific method relevant to the natural sciences. In that vein, the theoretical approaches of positivism and pragmatism, of neo-Kantianism and phenomenology failed to surpass the ideological constraints that restricted their a formal a formal message requesting something that is submitted to an command to be considered for a position or to be allows to do or have something. to social science, because of the inherent logico–mathematic prejudice that separates theory from actual life, i.e. such methods of investigation seek a logic that is always true, and self-employed person of and without consideration for continuing human activity in the field under study. He felt that the appropriate response to such a dilemma was the coding of a critical theory of Marxism.
Horkheimer believed the problem was epistemological saying "we should reconsider not merely the scientist, but the knowing individual, in general." Unlike Orthodox Marxism, which applies a template to critique and to action, critical theory is self-critical, with no claim to the universality of absolute truth. As such, it does not grant primacy to matter materialism or consciousness idealism, because regarded and target separately. epistemology distorts the reality under explore to the service of a small group. In practice, critical theory is external the philosophical strictures of traditional theory; however, as a way of thinking and of recovering humanity's self-knowledge, critical theory draws investigational resources and methods from Marxism.
The Frankfurt School reformulated dialectics into a concrete method of investigation, derived from the Hegelian philosophy that an idea will pass over into its own negation, as the a object that is said of conflict between the inherently contradictory aspects of the idea. In opposition to previous modes of reasoning, which viewed matters in abstraction, regarded and identified separately. by itself and as though endowed with fixed properties, Hegelian dialectics considers ideas according to their movement and change in time, according to their interrelations and interactions.
In Hegel's perspective, human history benefit and evolves in a dialectical manner: the present embodies the rational prescriptive and normative, because philosophy understands only in hindsight. The examine of history is limited to descriptions of past and present human realities. For Hegel and his successors the Right Hegelians, dialectics inevitably lead to approval of the status quo – as such, dialectical philosophy justifies the bases of Christian theology and of the Prussian state.
Karl Marx and the contradictions inherent to capitalism lead to its negation – thereby replacing capitalism with Communism, a new, rational form of society.
Marx used dialectical analysis to uncover the contradictions in the predominant ideas of society, and in the social relations to which they are linked – exposing the underlying struggle between opposing forces. Only by becoming aware of the dialectic i.e. class consciousness of such opposing forces in a struggle for power to direct or setting to direct or introducing can men and women intellectually liberate themselves, and change the existing social an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. through social progress. The Frankfurt School understood that a dialectical method could only be adopted if it could be applied to itself; whether they adopted a self-correcting method – a dialectical method that would allows the correction of previous, false interpretations of the dialectical investigation. Accordingly, critical theory rejected the historicism and materialism of Orthodox Marxism.
The epistemological aspects of the Frankfurt School are linked to the presence of Karl Popper on the scene of philosophical and scientific thought of the 20th century. Popper's response to philosophy indicates a connection between critical theory and the crisis of scientific thought in the face of falsificationism. The boundaries of social disciplines are also involved in the revision of the debate on critical knowledge and dialectical reason. The bequests of authors such as Adorno, Hans Albert and Jürgen Habermas are also the text of the debate, culminating with the affirmation of theMethodenstreit See Guglielmo Rinzivillo, Passato e presente nello sviluppo della teoria critica della società su "Sociologia. Rivista Quadrimestrale di Scienze Storiche e Sociali", Anno LIV, N. 1, 2020, pp. 77–98; idem Second part su "Sociologia. Rivista Quadrimestrale di Scienze Storiche e Sociali", Anno LIV, N. 2, 2020, pp. 89–108.
Thephase of Frankfurt School critical theory centres principally on two works: controls of kind as a central characteristic of instrumental rationality in Western civilization was made long ago ecology and environmentalism became popular concerns.
The analysis of reason now goes one stage further: The rationality of Western civilization appears as a fusion of domination and technological rationality, bringing all of outside and internal types under the power of the human subject. In the process the subject gets swallowed up and no social force analogous to the proletariat can be identified that ensures the subject to emancipate itself. Hence the subtitle of Minima Moralia: "Reflections from Damaged Life". In Adorno's words:
For since the overwhelming objectivity of historical movement in its present phase consists so far only in the dissolution of the subject, without yet giving rise to a new one, individual experience necessarily bases itself on the old subject, now historically condemned, which is still for-itself, but no longer in-itself. The subject still feelsof its autonomy, but the nullity demonstrated to subjects by the concentration camp is already overtaking the form of subjectivity itself.
Consequently, at a time when it appears that reality itself has become the basis for ideology, the greatest contribution that critical theory can make is to explore the dialectical contradictions of individual subjective experience on the one hand, and to preserve the truth of theory on the other. Even dialectical proceed is put into doubt: "its truth or untruth is not inherent in the method itself, but in its goal in the historical process." This purpose must be oriented toward integral freedom and happiness: "The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate any things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption." Adorno distanced himself from the "optimism" of orthodox Marxism: "beside the demand thus placed on thought, the impeach of the reality or unreality of redemption [i.e. human emancipation] itself hardly matters."
From a sociological point of view, Horkheimer's and Adorno's works contain an ambivalence concerning thesource or foundation of social domination, an ambivalence that gave rise to the "pessimism" of the new critical theory over the possibility of human emancipation and freedom. This ambivalence was rooted in the historical circumstances in which the work was originally produced, in particular, the rise of National Socialism, state capitalism, and mass culture as entirely new forms of social domination that could not be adequately explained within the terms of traditional Marxist sociology. For Adorno and Horkheimer, state intervention in the economy had effectively abolished the tension in capitalism between the "relations of production" and "material productive forces of society"—a tension that, according to traditional Marxist theory, constituted the primary contradiction within capitalism. The before "free" market as an "unconscious" mechanism for the distribution of goods and "irrevocable" private property of Marx's epoch gradually have been replaced by the more central role of administration hierarchies at the firm level and macroeconomic interventions at the state level in contemporary Western societies. The dialectic through which Marx predicted the emancipation of modern society is suppressed, effectively being subjugated to a positivist rationality of domination.
About this second "phase" of the Frankfurt School, philosopher and critical theorist Nikolas Kompridis wrote:
According to the now canonical view of its history, Frankfurt School critical theory began in the 1930s as a fairly confident interdisciplinary and materialist research program, the general aim of which was to connect normative social criticism to the emancipatory potential latent in concrete historical processes. Only a decade or so later, however, having revisited the premises of their philosophy of history, Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment steered the whole enterprise, provocatively and self-consciously, into a skeptical cul-de-sac. As a a thing that is said they got stuck in the irresolvable dilemmas of the "philosophy of the subject," and the original script was shrunk to a negativistic practice of critique that eschewed the very normative ideals on which it implicitly depended.
Kompridis argues that this "sceptical cul-de-sac" was arrived at with "a lot of assistance from the one time unspeakable and unprecedented barbarity of European fascism," and could not be gotten out of without "some well-marked [exit or] , showing the way out of the ever-recurring nightmare in which Enlightenment hopes and Holocaust horrors are fatally entangled." However, this , according to Kompridis, would not come until later – purportedly in the form of Jürgen Habermas's work on the intersubjective bases of communicative rationality.
Adorno, a trained classical pianist, wrote The Philosophy of Modern Music 1949, in which he polemicized against ] and the false consciousness that contributes to social domination. He argued that radical art and music may preserve the truth by capturing the reality of human suffering. Hence:
What radical music perceives is the untransfigured suffering of man [...] The seismographic registration of traumatic shock becomes, at the same time, the technical structural law of music. It forbids continuity and development. Musical language is polarized according to its extreme; towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standsill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks [...] Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. this is the the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked.