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Abstract
This paper traces some lines of influence between post-Kantianism and Critical Theory. In the first part of the paper, we discuss Fichte and Hegel; in the second, we discuss Horkheimer, Adorno, and Honneth.
Notes
1‘The best way to show how Critical Theory offers a distinctive philosophical approach is to locate it historically in German Idealism and its aftermath' (Bohman, ‘Critical Theory’).
2Habermas is, of course, a figure of significant interest in this connection. However, he is something of an outlier in the context of the narrative we here develop. For further consideration of his work, see the contributions of Alison Stone and Jean-Philippe Deranty to this special issue.
3In letter to Reinhold written in 1800, Fichte claims that ‘My system is from beginning to end nothing but an analysis of the concept of freedom' (Fichte, Introductions, vii).
4Our discussion of Fichte's distinction between idealism and dogmatism is indebted to Breazeale, ‘Idealism vs. Dogmatism’.
5It supports domination, because the dogmatic world-view conceives of human beings as essentially passive things that are manipulable by external, causal control. It is worth pointing out, in this connection, that Fichte's critique of dogmatism has its roots in his 1793/4 defence of the French Revolution. For discussion, see Philonenko, Théorie et praxis, 93, 104.
6See Inwood, M. Hegel Dictionary, 245–7. Cf. the entry on Anerkennung in Krug's Allgemeines Handwörtebuch.
7For a corrective to the standard view of Hegel's relation to immanent critique, see Gordon Finlayson's contribution to this special issue.
8For a lucid summary of Habermas' argument, see Finlayson, Habermas, Chap. 1.
9This is perhaps due to the profound influence that Alexandre Kojève's reading of Hegel exerted on Hegel scholars. As far as we are aware, Kojève was the first to claim that recognition plays a fundamental role in Hegel's thought. See Kojève, Introduction.
10For an illuminating account of Fichte and Hegel on recognition, see Fischbach, Fichte et Hegel.
11In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau argues that the emergence of moral injury (and also the ‘first duties of civility’) is coeval with the emergence of the ‘idea of consideration’ and relations of mutual appraisal (Discourse on Inequality, 166). See Honneth, Struggle, 185, note 19.
12It is of course also due to the work of scholars such as Kojève, Siep, and Wildt.
13For, Adorno – and, indeed, Horkheimer – concepts are intrinsically ‘emphatic’ insofar as they are ‘ineliminably prescriptive and descriptive' (Jarvis, Adorno, 66). Concepts not only describe the empirical world, but prescriptively point towards unrealized, improved states of affairs in which those concepts – for example, ‘freedom’, ‘individuality’, ‘society’ – are fully realized. Concepts themselves, then, have an internal striving towards better states of affairs, and ‘disclose possibilities that are [not] fully actual' (Cook, ‘Actual to the Possible’, 174). Philosophy is itself emphatic insofar as it is responsive to and aids the realization of these jointly prescriptive and descriptive features.
14Lukács bases his concept of reification on Marx's analysis of the ‘fetishism of commodities’ in Capital, Volume I. According to Marx, one peculiarity of commodity exchange is that objects that are qualitatively distinct and incommensurable with regard to their ‘use-value’ (and to the material properties on which that use-value supervenes) are rendered universally commensurable. Marx explains this through his analysis of the ‘commodity form’. He argues that in the process of exchange, commodities acquire a new property – ‘exchange-value’ – in virtue of which they are universally commensurable and fungible (Marx, Capital, 95). This property appears to producers as an intrinsic property of the commodity – as an inner, animating power that determines the relations between the commodity and other commodities. The upshot of this is that the social relations that produce commodities and economic value appear to their participants in inverted form as properties of, and relationships between, things. Marx's account of commodity fetishism provides Lukács with a model for understanding both capitalism's ‘objective form’ (i.e. the mechanics of capitalist production and exchange) and also the ‘subjective stance corresponding to it' (Lukács, ‘Reification’, 84). The commodity form not only determines the process of production and the nature of the resultant products (commodities); it also determines the consciousness of the human beings that produce and exchange commodities. As Lukács puts it, the commodity form ‘stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man’ (Lukács, ‘Reification’, 100). The influence of the commodity form on human consciousness is far-reaching. It affects our conception of ourselves and of our relation to our social world: the reified human being conceives of herself as a mere thing in a world of things. It affects our conception of our relations to other human beings, whom we also conceive of as mere things. Lukács also claims – in a move that will prove crucial for Critical Theory – that the commodity form underwrites and is ultimately responsible for the fundamental problems of ‘bourgeois’ philosophy. (‘Modern critical philosophy springs from the reified structure of consciousness. The specific problems of this philosophy [ … ] are rooted in this structure’ (Lukács, ‘Reification’, 110–1)).
15Art represents another kind of normative resource, for Adorno. For an exploration of this aspect of Adorno's work, see Jay Bernstein's paper in this issue.
16Adorno most often explores this in relation to the idea of an ‘impulsive’ response to the experience or perception of bodily suffering (cf. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 202–3, 286). This element of Adorno's thought has recently received a great deal of attention, perhaps due to its promise to solve some fairly serious metaphilosophical problems in Adorno's account. See Finlayson, ‘Morality and Critical Theory’; Freyenhagen, Adorno's Practical Philosophy; Bernstein Disenchantment and Ethics; and Kohlmann, ‘Selbstreflexion der Ethik’.
17See, in particular, his work on the idea of a ‘metaphysical experience’ in Negative Dialectics (e.g. 373, 375, 392–3).
18This is a running theme in the work of both philosophers, and is at work in the majority of their collaboratively authored Dialectic of Enlightenment. For a particularly clear example, see Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 23.
19See, for example, Adorno's account of transcendental apperception as emerging out of, and continually dependent on, somatic impulses (Adorno, Minima Moralia, 122–3).
20
The controversy about the priority of mind and body is a predialectical proceeding. It carries on the question of a ‘first'. [ … ] Both body and mind are abstractions of their experience. [ … ] All mental things are modified physical impulses, and such modification is their qualitative recoil into what not merely ‘is'.
21For a more detailed consideration of the relationship between Adorno and Hegel's conception of dialectics, see Alison Stone's paper in this issue.
22Brian O'Connor explores an interconnection between the work of Friedrich Schiller and Marcuse – two important figures we have been unable to cover in this paper – in his paper in this issue.
23This leads Renault to propose replacing Honneth's ‘expressive’ conception of recognition with a ‘constitutive’ conception. See L'expérience, Chap. 3.
24We would like to thank the journal editor and the contributors to the special issue for their helpful comments and criticisms.