The article is a critical examination of Marcuse's speculations about the possibility of determining a biological foundation for ethical norms. It considers three key objections to this project: that Marcuse fails to adequately define needs, that he misinterprets Freud, and that, details aside, he fundamentally misunderstands what a `biological' foundation for ethics would entail. The objections are accepted, to varying degrees, as regards the content of Marcuse's argument. The article concludes, however, with a different account of biological foundations designed to (...) rescue the deeper aims of Marcuse's project. Key Words: biology • ethics • foundation • Herbert Marcuse • needs • socialism. (shrink)

We apply dialogism to ethical thought to form a theory of Dialogical Ethics (DE). Specifically, DE is defined as the interplay between four historic ethical traditions: Formal (Kantian) Ethics, Content-Sense (Utilitarian) Ethics, Answerability Ethics, and Value/Virtue (Story) Ethics. On a broader level, DE can be understood as the interplay between the ethical ideas of society. We then use DE to analyze a number of problems in business including sweatshop labor and environmental degradation. To counteract these injustices, we propose two recommendations: (...) (1) a rebalancing of Kantian and Utilitarian ethics in business with the ontological focus of Answerability and Value Ethics and (2) a revolution in business education. No longer can business education focus only on techne. Instead, educators must challenge students to develop phronesis, so that they become better able to understand how their actions and how our living stories interacts with the stories of others. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 2, Page 155-163, February 2022. This article comments on Asger Sørensen’s stimulating book “Capitalism, Alienation and Critique”. The article argues that Sørensen overlooks an important methodological contiunuity between Max Horkheimer’s and Axel Honneth’s work: namely, the model of immanent critique, to which both remain committed. Moreover, through a critical discussion of Honneth’s method of normative reconstruction, the article argues that globalized capitalism represents a serious methodological challenge not only to Honneth’s work, but to (...) the Frankfurt School model of immanent crituque as such. (shrink)

Habermas' claim to provide a critique of reification by means other than marxian ones requires him to transpose not only meaningful freedom, but also a dialectical view of social becoming, into terms com patible with linguistically mediated intersubjectivity. In order to remain critical of reification as colonization, he thus finds himself committed to the view that colonization is the outcome of the development of two perma nent and competing principles of sociation. Compelled to draw upon the resources both of the (...) dialectical tradition and of transcendental pragmat ics, the theory of communicative action is thereby constrained to remain both quasi-dialectical and quasi-transcendental. This founding gesture generates, in turn, at least two unavoidable aporias. The first can be under stood as a radical and structural deficit for critical judgement concerning the interplay among the decentered cognitive value spheres. The second is an inversion of the apparent claim of accessing a 'reason beyond reason' of which he accuses Horkheimer and Adorno. It shows up in the logical and epistemological problems surrounding the relation between performative contradiction and the status of his theory. Taken together, these theories signal that the theory of communicative action, rather than amounting to a transcendence of earlier approaches to reification, is simply a parallel, but one which becomes less than fully two-dimensional. Key Words: Adorno • .communicative action • .dialectic • .Habermas • . Horkheimer • . performative contradiction • . * reason • . reification. (shrink)

ExcerptWhat would happiness be that was not measured by the immeasurable grief at what is? For the world is deeply ailing. Theodor Adorno, “Regressions,” Minima Moralia1Unfortunately, for the last half century many critical theorists have disregarded the founder of Critical Theory: Max Horkheimer. In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse's popularity largely concealed the rest of the Frankfurt School. Today, Horkheimer is seen as a tardy pessimist in the wake of Walter Benjamin2 and, much too often, as a footnote to Theodor Adorno's (...) genius. Even the quintessential statement of the Frankfurt School, Dialectic of Enlightenment, has been…. (shrink)

I argue that Aristotelians who are sympathetic to the critique of liberal moral categories put forward by Alasdair MacIntyre ought to avail themselves of Marx's analysis of capitalism in Capital, Volume 1. Broadly speaking, there are two reasons for such a recommendation. First, Marx's account shows capitalism to be the sociological substrate for the evisceration of particularity that so concerns MacIntyre and other Aristotelians. I offer an explanation for why MacIntyre seems not to appreciate this. Second, Marx's own thinking is (...) markedly Aristotelian, in ways that I specify. (shrink)

In the practice of social criticism, the concept of human dignity has played and still plays an important role. In philosophical debates, however, we find widely divergent accounts of that concept, ranging from views based on a conception of human needs to religious approaches trying to explain the ‘inviolability’ of the person. The view presented here reconstructs the basic claim of human dignity historically and normatively as resting on the moral status of the person as a reason-giving, reason-demanding and reason-deserving (...) being. The person as holding a basic moral right to justification is the true ground for the claim of having one’s dignity respected: as someone who must not be subjected to norms, rules, or institutions which cannot be properly justified to that person in appropriate practices of justification. To possess human dignity means being an equal member in the realm of subjects and authorities of justification and to be respected as such. This is the moral ground of social criticism, implied in particular social and political demands raised in given historical contexts. Thus, critical theory has to be reoriented towards a critique of the relations of justification in a given social order of justification. (shrink)

Adorno’s critical theory aims to open space for the expression of alternative futures, but its insistence on dialectical reflection encourages at the same time our sustained attentiveness to the psychic and material constraints that may prevent the very possibilities we imagine. In this article, I argue that dialectical reflection signals a location at which transcendental claims enter our thinking and that, for Adorno, such reflection provides a locus for a critically animating interplay between rhetorical figurations of darkness and redemption, or (...) material constraint and alternative possibility. Concerned less with the substance of Adorno’s criticisms than with how his dialectical mode of thinking can be said to shape critical reflection as such, I suggest that Adorno provides a model orientation for democratic engagement in our time and a sobering critical supplement to recent Derridean discourse on radical democracy. (shrink)

Max Horkheimer does not generally receive the scholarly attention given to other ‘Frankfurt School’ figures. This is in part because his early work seems contradictory, or unphilosophical. For example, Horkheimer seems, at various points (to use contemporary metaethical terms), like a constructivist, a moral realist, or a moral skeptic, and it is not clear how these views cohere. The goal of this article is to show that the contradictions regarding moral theory exist largely on the surface, and that one can (...) go below the surface to reconstruct a coherent position. Part I will examine Horkheimer’s skeptical critique of morality, and show that it leads to the realist position discussed in part II. Part III then shows that such realism can only be understood within a larger constructivist project, which elaborates on a minimal normativity present in human experience. This reconstruction should make sense of Horkheimer’s work, and show its contemporary relevance. (shrink)

Frankfurt School critical theory has long opposed metaphysical philosophy because it ignores suffering and injustice. In the face of such criticism, proponents of metaphysics (for example Dieter Henrich) have accused critical theory of not fully investigating the questions is raises for itself, and falling into partial metaphysical positions, despite itself. If one focuses on Max Horkheimer's early essays, such an accusation seems quite fitting. There he vociferously attacks metaphysics, but he also develops a theory that pushes toward metaphysical questions. His (...) work can thus seem laden with unpacked metaphysical baggage, and fraught with contradiction. The aim of this paper is to show that Horkheimer's critique of metaphysics makes sense and is not contradicted by a surreptitious metaphysics. To show this, Horkheimer's views will be compared with Bas van Fraassen's in The Empirical Stance . Ultimately, the paper should show that Horkheimer's early philosophy can be reconstructed in such a way that it employs a 'materialist stance'. (shrink)

The role of metaphysics in critique stands as a defining issue for the Frankfurt School theorists. Max Horkheimer himself claims that metaphysics serves as an instrument of domination, leading him to develop an interdisciplinary mate- rialism as a postmetaphysical alternative. Critics such as Georg Lohmann con- tend, however, that Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental reason is aporetic insofar as it undermines all metaphysical claims while implicitly making them. Since Horkheimer narrowly equates metaphysics with identity thinking, this article argues that his appeal (...) to nonidentity thinking as the foundation for critique is better understood as a form of antimetaphysics. This, however, leaves Horkheimer no better situated, since antimetaphysics remains a variant of metaphysics. While Horkheimer reproduces the techniques of domination he sought to avoid, this lapse into metaphysics warns of the difficult path that postmetaphysical thinking must navigate between the antipodes of metaphys- ical and antimetaphysical positions. (shrink)

Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.Hegel, Phenomenology of SpiritCritical Theory and Heideggerian thinking are the conflicted offspring of Husserlian phenomenology.1 Their lineage goes through Husserl to the phenomenology of Hegel. This mixed ancestry, whether acknowledged or suppressed, is especially evident in two pathbreaking essays from the 1930s on the topic of truth. One, by Martin Heidegger, carries the title “On the Essence of Truth” (1930). The other, by Max Horkheimer, is (...) titled “On the Problem of Truth” (1935). A single word sets the English titles apart: where Heidegger.. (shrink)