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Abstract
It is a hallmark of the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory that it has consistently made philosophical reflection a central component of its overall project. Indeed, the core identity that this tradition has been able to maintain arguably stems from the fact that a number of key philosophical assumptions have been shared by the generations of thinkers involved in it. These assumptions form a basic ‘philosophical matrix’, whose main aim is to allow for a ‘critique of reason’, the heart of the critique of modern society, which emphasises the collective, historically situated and naturalistically grounded nature of rationality. In this matrix, Feuerbach's place has been only a minor one. This paper aims to show that there is more to be retrieved from Feuerbach for critical theory than at first meets the eye. The first section identifies key conceptual features that are shared by the central authors of the Frankfurt School. They signal a collectivist and materialist shift from Kant to Marx via Hegel. This shift is well adumbrated in Feuerbach's emphasis on the ‘intersubjective’ and social dependency of the subject. However, Feuerbach's decisive philosophical contribution lies in his insistence on the ‘sensuous’ modalities of intersubjectivity, that is, on the fact that the dependency of subjects on others for the formation of their capacities is mediated and expressed not only through language and other symbolic forms, but also and primarily through embodiment. This Feuerbachian ‘sensualism’ is a rich, original philosophical position, which is not soluble in Marx's own version of materialism. In sections II and III, I highlight the legacy of Feuerbach's sensualism in two areas of critical theory: first, in relation to the critical epistemology that grows out of the ‘philosophical matrix’ consistently used by critical theorists; and secondly, in relation to the arguments in philosophical anthropology that are mobilized to promote the critical project. In these two areas, Feuerbach's sensualism – his insistence on the embodied dimensions of cognition and action – represents a useful resource to resist the tendency of critical theory to translate its foundation in the critique of reason into a narrowly rationalistic enterprise.
Notes
1In order to keep this study within manageable proportions, I consider Feuerbach's philosophy only in relation to the central authors of the three ‘generations’ of Critical Theory: Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse for the first; Jürgen Habermas for the second; Axel Honneth for the third.
2As a good illustration, consider the rare references to Feuerbach in Adorno's Kierkegaard book (Kierkegaard: 39, 106, 130).
3This article is thoroughly indebted to the major study of Feuerbach published in 1977 by Marx Wartowsky. I will only emphasize the most substantial borrowings. Wartowsky shows in particular the extent to which Feuerbach's early Hegelian studies prepared the way for the arguments mounted in the Essence of Christianity and in the later writings, if only by applying to a sensualist, naturalist stance the early thoughts made in defence of idealism.
4To take a late example, Honneth's turn to the ‘social’ dimensions of justice and autonomy is explicitly presented as an anti-Kantian move (Struggle for Recognition, 171–3).
5See Marcuse's polemical reconstruction of the history of philosophy which pits the post-idealist, critical heritage against empiricism. According to Marcuse, empiricism is unable to support critical insight into the nature of social reality: ‘the empiricist restriction of human nature to knowledge of the given removed the desire both to transcend the given and to despair about it’ (Reason and Revolution, 20).
6See Adorno's pointed remark about Benjamin, the philosopher one would least associate with systematic thinking (Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 32).
7The force of the whole, which (Hegel's System) mobilizes, is not a mere fantasy on the part of spirit; it is the force of the real web of illusion in which all individual existence remains trapped. By specifying, in opposition to Hegel, the negativity of the whole, philosophy satisfies, for the last time, the postulate of determinate negation, which is a positing. The ray of light that reveals the whole to be untrue in all its moments is none other than utopia, the utopia of the whole truth, which is still to be realized.
8‘The ego attains consciousness of the world through consciousness of the thou … only where man communicates with man, only in speech, a social act, awakes reason. To ask a question and to answer are the first acts of thought’ (Essence, 83).
9‘Where is no pressure, no want, there is no feeling; and feeling is alone real knowledge’ (Essence, 228).
10Again, note the strong parallel with Adorno who is also well aware that this emphasis on the ‘somatic moment’ in epistemology could be mistaken for a return to, for instance, Hume's empiricism. Just like Feuerbach, his Hegelian reflexes immediately make him contrast his position with Hume's (Negative Dialektik, 202).
11This is what he means when he writes: ‘human feelings have no empirical or anthropological significance in the sense of the old transcendent philosophy; they have ontological and metaphysical significance’ (Principles, 53).
12Or in a similar formulation: ‘only out of the negation of thought, out of being determined by the object, out of passion, out of the source of all pleasure and need is born true, objective thought, and true, objective philosophy’ (‘Theses’ in Fiery Book, 164).
13‘The need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth. For suffering is the objectivity which weighs on the subject; what it experiences as most subjective, its expression, is objectively mediated’ (Negative Dialektik, 29). See also Negative Dialektik.
14See, for instance, Adorno's concluding words in the long sociological studies on the ‘authoritarian personality’: ‘If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy’.