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physics-this is what must be made clear." Clear they made it; but often only
formally clear, and hence open to error. Adorno's sometimes perceptive but
generally misunderstanding critique of jazz is but one example: perhaps more
portentious was the formal demonstration that fascism is the simple logical
continuation of liberal democracy-a demonstration which, in
Dialectic of the
Enlightenment,
becomes a formal cosmology of rational domination which is
as aphoristically interesting as it is theoretically empty. Formal truths, critical
or negative space: these remind one more of Weber than Marx; and they can
only lead to a moral call to action.
The inbuilt moralism of the School, which was to become an offended
liberalism by the time it left the United States, was rooted in the basic premise
of the theory: substantive reason. The
term-Vernunft
(as vs.
Verstand)
in its
theoretical usage,
Sittlichkeit
(as vs.
Moralitiit)
in practical affairs-comes
from German Idealism; it is rounded out and adapted by Marx. Yet a reading
of the discussions of Hegel that appear in Jay's summary shows only a series of
contradictions; and it is not Jay who is responsible for them. Opting now for
Kant, now for Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, Hegel is rejected from the stand–
point of the integrity of the individual. But then, when it is necessary to pre–
sent a critique of massified individual in their atomized bourgeois form, Hegel
returns as a kind of philo opher of the Polis, in glory. (Marx, interestingly,
hardly appears on stage, serving mainly as a foil!) Here, the position of Criti–
cal Theory falls apart: To criticize the forms of modern domination it needs
the autonomous individual; but since the autonomous individual is the bour–
geois who is, finally, responsible for the whole mess, it has to say that the
completion of its substantive reason will come in a Beyond which cannot be
named or defined without its losing the openness of creativity. This invitation
to moralism of course finally became a return to religion in Horkheimer's old
age. It is generally responsible for the "politics" of Horkheimer and Adorno
vIs-a.-vis the
praxis
of the German student movement.
Myth number three concerns the political behavior to be adopted by in–
tellectuals in a time of torment. The hopeful openness of an unrealized sub–
stal1live reason cannot be concretized. This is clear in the ultimate failure of an
interdisciplinary approach. Even the partial success of
The Authoritarian Per–
sonality
was programmatically vague; it replaced the old goal of revolutionary
praxis
and social change by that of "education", as Jay well notes. Further, Jay
poil1ls out that the psychological orientation of
The Authoritarian Personal–
ity
is at polar opposites to the cosmological, world-historically presel1lation of
the origins of anti-semitism in
Dialectic of the Enlightenment.
Presumably
the goal of Critical Theory was to bring together the two approaches in a
political theory; such , at least, is the claim of Marxism (as well as of Jurgen
Habermas' variety of Critical Theory). The School's inability in this regard
seems to me rooted in its fundamental theoretical stance. Jay writes: "Critical
