Frankfurt School

 Historical Context:

But it also appropriates a great many other important philosophers, particularly from the continental tradition and particularly in the case of the Frankfurt School, in the case of 20th century Germany, it's necessary to locate in historical context developments and intellectual life because of the notorious and catastrophic events of the 20th century in Germany.

1918 and the WWI. Treaty of Versailles

1933 coming to power of Hitler and National Socialism.

1945 with Russian and allied English and American occupation of Germany.

What we have here is a series of catastrophes, and it is impossible to see 20th century German intellectuals except in the context of this catastrophic political history. What's most important, particularly when we consider social and political theory, which is what the Frankfurt School is primarily concerned with, is the fact that in German politics in the 20th century, we had a much greater degree of polarization between the left and right than we did in the United States, which sometimes makes it difficult to see what's going on, in other words. What happened during the Vienna Republic is that the center collapsed and we had a tremendous move to both the right of fascism and the left of communist resistance to it or Marxist resistance to it, and there was not much of A center there. It's polarized. The question who, which side are you on? So all German intellectuals that, like Heidegger, didn't support national National Socialism tend to be operating in reaction to these developments. They tend to be on the other side, they tend to be in opposition, and for good reasons. It's entirely understandable. But it is often quite difficult to move from their conception of society and politics to the actual details of society and politics in the United States because of the great differences in historical experience.

But it's important for us to keep in mind that this school, this left wing interpretation of politics and society, makes a great deal more sense. If you understand that this is the product of a polarized society and the other side was a terrible catastrophe, so it's understandable why they would shift in the same direction. And what's important about the frankfurt school is that it's a coalition of different disciplines or of different figures. Some very powerful intellects coming out of different academic disciplines, all working in the same direction towards what would be called a critique of society. And here critique is made in the content sense of a criticism which sets the boundaries, which is normative[1] as well as conception. So, for example, we find in the front of the school psychoanalysts like Eric From, we find musicologists like Adorna, We find a political theorist like Marcusa who are all working on a common project to account for the terrible catastrophe of 20th century politics, particularly 20th century German politics and other words. They're all looking around in the wreckage of Berlin and the wreckage of their culture. The way Thomas Mann did and his wonderful novel Doctor Faustus. And they say, and like Thomas Mann, they say at some point we deserve to be destroyed. We had this coming to us. We made some terrible errors somewhere along the way, and that's what generates Hitler and National Socialism. So what they want to do is go back and rethink political theory, rethink social theory. Trying to identify where western culture because they want to hang this on on as a responsibility of the West as a whole, not specifically German culture and essentials. Where did the West go wrong? How do we mess things up so greatly in this century? What's the source of this? So what the frankfurt school attempts to do is first of all, to account for the contemporary state of society, and second of all, to account for the genesis of this catastrophe, of this crisis. Where did it come from and how? And the 3rd and final thing which distinguishes them from all other or most other social critics is they want to explain in a normative and teleological way. What we are supposed to do next? Where do we go from here? So in other words, like Marx, they believe that philosophers have interpreted the world's point is to change it. They intend to breakdown the distinction between theory and practice part of their Marxist heritage, and create a theory which tells us not only why we have messed the world up so badly and what it is that has gone wrong. But how we go about fixing it and that we ought to fix it. In other words, this is a philosophy which creates not just declarative sentences, it creates imperative sentences. It tells you what to do. And if you think back to the tradition of reason, of cognition that comes out of particularly German speaking philosophy, we get the idea of reason as being normative. The reason is being teleological. Think of Kantian ethics, right? It is possible to drive universal laws of moral behavior from pure rationality. That is to be distinguished from the tradition that comes that we find in the in the Anglo American world where reason, as you put it, is the slave of the passions. And reason cannot tell you what ends to choose. Reason only tells you in the human sense what means to choose for ends that are decided upon arbitrarily. Well, the German tradition of philosophy the teleological tradition that goes far as kant says that rationality can tell us not just the means by which we achieve various ends but it tells you what ends you ought to achieve. So there is a heavy element of teleological reason, of expanding reason beyond the domain of science and mathematics, to the realm of ethics and in the case of Adorno, aesthetics as well.

It's a very ambitious project, and like Hagel, if they fail in this project, it must be noted that this is a very worthy endeavor. And if it is impossible, well, then we have to give them a certain degree of leeway. We have to read them with a certain degree of charity. If we do that, then this is an amazing attempt, which is. Workable for itself, its aspirations, if not for its achievements. Now the Frankfurt school as a whole, and when I'm talking about the from school, I mean in general the most notable figures there, Marcusa, Horkheimer, Adorno, but there are probably another dozen or so that are quite influential, but stick restrict myself to them for now.

The frankfurt school treats fascism and Nazism as the necessary totalitarian development of capitalist society. In other words, super structure and the economic base are all meshed together in the Marxist view, and since the ideology of Nazism developed in late capitalist society in Germany and we get fascism in the West at the same time among societies that have the same sort of economic development. The argument they're going to make is that Nazi is meant totalitarianism, and the genocide that accompanies it is a necessary result of the destruction of reason through the ideological necessities of the capitalist system. In other words, Frankfurt scholars want to hang the responsibility for national Socialism and the rise of fascism on the high bourgeoisie and say this is the best reason to have the global proletarian revolution. This is the best reason to adopt A Marxist posture towards politics. If we don't, that means that we have to succumb to the right. You almost always think back to the context of German politics. There's no center to move towards. If you don't support the Marxist alternative, then almost by default you find yourself among the fascists.

So for this reason they're running scared, they're afraid of the consequences of the development of late capitalism and they are trying to create some ideological means by which we can bootstrap ourselves up out of these ideological illusions towards true rationality or Hegelian resonances here. So that we can come to know ourselves and the world around world around us. And when we do that, we will know not only what the world is, but what we're supposed to do with it and how we're supposed to act. It will be teleological. It will be normative as well as descriptive. So they have quite a bit on their plate. It's a very ambitious Project

Now the ideology of capitalism is a truncated form of reason. That's what we might call instrumental reason. Reason in the sense that David Hume used the word reason. For Hume and all the Anglo American tradition that leads up to the Vienna Circle of positivism, the world is all that is the case. And reason tells you about the way the world is. It tells you how it is, but it doesn't tell you how it ought to be, in other words. According to the Anglo American tradition, there's a skepticism about ought statements. We cannot derive them from any set of observations. We cannot derive from science or math. And thus most of the Vienna Circle, most of the logical positivists who are viewed by the Frankfurt School as being the epitome of capitalist ideology, have generated a kind of conceptual system. But we're no longer able to talk in a rational, meaningful way about right and wrong. And their argument is that this sets the stage for totalitarianism and nihilism because reason can no longer be normative. And that means that, well, you may happen to not like nihilism, but that's a question of taste. You may not like the Nazis, but that's your own subjective feeling. There's no rational reason not to. And they said this opens Pandora's box. And this is what causes the terrible catastrophe of 20th It's a very intriguing argument, and there may be something to it to examine this a little more closely. Another important thing we have to look at when we think about the ideology of capitalism is it takes many forms, not just positivism. Positivism is the epistemology of late capitalism which makes this is all distinction, but connected with it are a whole bunch of ancillary cognitive disciplines which also operate in this truncated non teleological view of reason. Examples of this would be like neoclassical economics. It tells you how the market works, but doesn't tell you how the market ought to be. Think about something like liberalism in politics. Liberalism in politics. Well, you think this. I think that doesn't tell you how you are, because I tell you what what opinions really are good. In other words, what liberalism and neoclassical economics and logical positivism have in common is that they are techne without telio. They tell you about the ways in which you can get things done, but it doesn't tell you the ends towards which your action should be directed. And it's actually quite an interesting thought of that. Who would have thought to connect up at some fundamental logical point? Neoclassical economics and logical positivism. I mean, I guess it appeals to the same sort of mathematical precise brain, but it's hard to see how they would have clinched these together. They managed to do so based upon the idea that they are united by a conception of reasoning which excludes teleology, which excludes ought from its domain. And when you exclude off from its domain, you leave the door open to the nihilists, to the fascist, to the bigots.

The Frankfurt School is of course composed of professional philosophers, professional academics, and they naturally have appropriated the entire history of philosophy to their ends, they Those figures more than other, and it will make more sense to you if you look at what they are taking from the tradition and what they are using these parts that they are taking. For the first case, they borrow a great deal from Rousseau and what we see in here is the big Rousseaun borrowing is the idea that the front for school has a sort of nostalgia for a lost innocence. Do you know when the social contract where Rousseau says Man is everywhere in chains, but it's Born Free? Well, there's some idea that we are the chains of ideology. We are in change in the chains of illusion, and that we have somehow lost our innocence by being socialized in the particular kind of late capitalist society that we have been. Certain categories and modes of thought have been enforced upon us, and these categories make us misunderstand the world and generate these terrible political consequences.

there's also borrowing from Kant, from configured, the idea of moral universality, right, and the idea that reason is teleological, right? You can't think that reason can tell you what you ought to do, not just how the world is. They're gonna hold on to that idea. And certainly one of the most important things they appropriate. From Hagel, the Frankfurt school takes historicism and the idea that progress is the realization of freedom. In other words, rationality and freedom are always connected up in the German tradition Kant thinks, to be free is to be rational(That's what autonomy means, and that's also what morality mean). Well, they're borrowing that teleological view of reason, that view of reason, which says that reason can inform you about ends as well as means, and that's crucial to their project.

In addition, they borrow a great deal from Marks. They take a sort of left-wing Hegelian reading of a left wing reading of Hegel and that Marks picks up on that. And from Marx they get the idea praxis and the idea of political volunteerism. Commit yourself to political progress. Theory should not be separated from praxis.

Now, one of the important thing is that the Frankfurt school sees that there are gaps in Marxs. In particular, Marxism is missing a kind of social psychology. Marks very rarely talks about the individual psyche and the individual soul, and how and how the individual relates to society, except to say that he's pushed around by the means of production and by the ideology that accompanies that. What the Frankford School does is, they do a very careful reading of fraud and they play with Freudian themes in such a way. So they make a very interesting meshing of Freudian social psychology and Marxian philosophy of history. So it's a combination of Freud and Marx, which offers very many insights because it makes these things are quite complementary. Certainly Freud, the left out and didn't spend much time on social theory or philosophy of history. They complement each other quite nicely and in addition to fraud, I mean who offers us things like the social psychology and the connection between the individual and society. They also add in Heidegger very important. Herbert Marcusa, one of the leading lights of the Frankfort School, was one of high degree PhD students and there's got his degree under Heidegger. And while Marcus is still a young man, Heidegger becomes a Nazi. And Marcusa thinks to himself, my God, this is terrible. What terrible thing has happened to the minds of our philosophers that they are actually willing to buy into this?

other things borrowed from high

Heidegger has technophobia. Heidegger has a neurosis about technology. Any of you have read that essay on the question concerning technology? Now he's a real technology basher. He's part of the humanistic. That sort of humanistic intellectuals that does not like science and particularly does not like technology will be part of that crowd that says it alienates you and you don't get in touch with your real being or your real self because of all these machines. And this is, I think, one of the most lamentable tendencies in 20th century philosophy. And in addition to technophobia and other things borrowed from Heidegger, is a hatred of  the Mass Man. TFor all its postering about universality and about extending participatory democracy and about liberation, the Frankfurt school is one of the most elitist conceptual movements of the 20th century. It appears to be accessible only to German philosophers and a few people who are professional thinkers in the post capitalist world. It has not gotten a tremendous number of adherents it had when it became a mass movement as in the student revolts of the 60s. It was a watered-down version of the Frankfurt School. Most people will not have the mental or intellectual wherewithal to actually adopt this posture.

So there's a suggestion here that the Frankfurt School hates mass man hates mass culture hates cultural life of most people in modern and developed democracies. The idea is that they have been forced into an illusory relation with the world, and the job of philosophers is to explain it so far. As possible. How to get out of the fly bottle? How to liberate themselves from this ideology? I would take the Frankfurt school for those of you who are familiar with the Marxist tradition and know the history of Marxist philosophy. If you know the work of Garrett Lukash, particularly History and Class Consciousness and the early works of Antonio Gramsci. The Frankfurt School plus Gramsci and Lukach are an attempt to reject the late marks, to reject the late positivistic marks of Capital and the Grundies. What they're trying to do is go back to the early marx, the Hegelian marx, where sizes the the questions of freedom and alienation, liberation from the socially imposed blinders that are that are put on our vision of the world. So there's a tendency in particularly following the First World War, following the Bolshivic revolution, to make Marxism less positivistic and less scientistic, to reject the late marks of favor of the early marks. And it's not just true of the Frankfurt School, it's also true of Grouchy and Lukash.

The main theme of the Frankfurt School is that freedom is reason. In other words, the truth shall make you free. You know, the passage from the Bible is one of the best lines in the Bible, and this is the Germanic rationalization of that. Everyone, Hagel said, right, that we move from pictorial representation to a logical, philosophically adequate representation. Well, moving from the truth shall make you free to rationality is freedom. Is something along those lines and the point is this rationality is sub. Not merely formal. You can see why they're going to have tremendous disputes with the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. They're trying to reduce all of thinking, all of reasoning, to some logical formalism. I mean they they reached the end of the line when they get to Googles incompleteness theorem, but. With the goal of the Vienna Circle is to reduce logic, mathematics to logic and logic to a certain set of formal relations. Well, what the Frankfurt School is saying is that the whole idea of treating reason as purely formal as mistake reason is substantive. That's connected with the idea of it being teleological. It tells you not just how things are, but how things ought to be. Their objection to the Vienna Circle is exactly the kind of objection that can't would have raised to humans. They would both say you Englishman or you Anglo Americans, don't understand the nature of reason. You're using a truncated conception of reason, which prevents the investigation of ends rather than means, and you buy into a particular kind of ontology and a particula We are trying to break the bounds of those illusions. So the idea that there's no skepticism about is in awe. The reason is normative. I would say that the font for schools, the 20th century adaptation of what the great historian Leonard Krieger called the German idea of freedom, which is a much bigger idea of freedom than mere contingent. The contingent ability to do what you want, the freedom that the Frankfurt School offers us, is freedom from the from the socially imposed bondage of the necessary illusions generated by the society that we were socialized into.

Look at some of the leading figures I've already mentioned. Herbert Marcusa. He's probably the most famous and most influential of the members of the Frankfurt School. He had a long and varied career. He left Germany, came to the United States, and was not happy with what he found. In other words, like any other league capital. Society, we live under this veil. Maya we park forced to have the necessarily false consciousness that accompanies the ideology of a society divided into classes. Because we haven't had the global proletarian revolution, we are necessarily under the realm of ideological illusion. So Marcusa comes here and tries to offer criticism both of Germany and the tendency of 20th century politics, but in addition criticism of the United States. And I think that they're probably less successful in offering criticism of the United States (in a less successful) in the Old world, despite the protestations about the universality of this. It isn't my submission exceedingly provincial? What's the statement that someone once said that a man has never so provincial as when he begins to legislate to the universe? And they spent a lot of time legislating for the universe and for the very few other people that really understand in quotes. The project they are engaged in now,

First it was important books was called Reason and Revolution, and what that is, is a revival of left wing Hegelianism. They're going to take that history of philosop) in the Old world, despite the protestations about the universality of this. It isn't my submission exceedingly provincial? What's the statement that someone once said that a man has never so provincial as when he begins to legislate to the universe? And they spent a lot of time legislating for the universe and for the very few other people that really understand in quotes. The project they are engaged in nowhy that Hagel had been doing in, or the history of kind of speculative psychology that Hagel had been doing in the Phenomenology and extended right up to the present a worthy, insensible project. How is we got into this mess? How is it that positivism scientism came to reign in the late 19th century? And look at the 20th century consequences of that very intriguing argument. A second book that Marcusa wrote, which is was became very popular among student radicals in the 60s, was called Up Arrows and Civilization. What it was is sort of mixture of Freud and Marx, which says that we which is like a fridge conception of the relationship between self and society without the pessimism characteristic of Freud and that's Freud says in civilization that's discontents. You can never resolve the conflict between the individual society necessary to being civilized. Society is the frustration of some of your desires. You can't have sex with everyone you want, have sex with your parents, your siblings, your children What Marcusa says is not that then we can completely abolish the restriction of our desires, but that if they can be diminished to a great deal to to a great extent further than they have. In other words, many of the restrictions on our. Emotional life, the restrictions in our libido, only serve the interests of the domination that society exerts on us. And when we are finally liberated from the veil of Maya, when we have these illusions. Remove from us all these archaic memories regarding our sex lives. Things like that will disappear, right? We will get rid of them, and that will have a kind of sexual utopia, as, freud says, we'll have polymorphous perversity. Now I think Freud is more realistic and I think that I mean Freud just makes a better argument here. The difficulties that emerge here, or at least two first of all, First off as. Points out very nicely and beyond the pleasure principle, you need some restrictions, even some few, not just because they're necessary to conduct conduct of society and civilization, which is because you need some contrast. If you can do everything that will lead you straight away to despair. Yeah, you need something, some restrictions in order to have the possibility of pleasure in life. And that's a deep observation. What are for it's best thoughts.

A second idea that I would drive from Kierkegaard is that a society which we could constantly express our in our libido all the time would be frightfully boring. It would be just unbelievably tedious. How long will it take before we succumb to despair? I mean, it's not what happens to somebody like the Marquee Disad that really does let his libido go. I mean, what more unhappy men could there be? I am not convinced that at the end of this yellow brick road that we get rid of these restrictions on libido that the result will be happiness. My guess would be that the result will be what durkeim calls anami (idea with no laws).

The most important book that Marcus wrote, most influential one, was called one-dimensional Man, and I believe that this was largely finished while Marcia was in California. And there's something terribly incongruous about stodgy German professors being in Southern California because they look at Lotus land. You know, I was in Southern California this summer, and it's nice all the time and everything is cheery there. You can't have this outlook on the world and feel comfortable in California. I mean, it's like edifice in Disneyland. It's just it doesn't really belong here. He is too too negative and also too self-conscious to find this satisfactory mode of life, which is fine as far as it goes. But what he does here is offers a critique of one-dimensional Man saying you think you people in America think you're happy just because you have liberal democracy. Nay, you're not really happy. You kids that are surfing and having sex and drinking beer and listening to Rock'n'roll, you're not happy. If you were happy, you wouldn't be alienated. You wouldn't be following th This. Isn't real happiness. You're not achieving your telos here. You're under the realm of illusion. So the idea is first of all, that in one-dimensional man, that the kind of ideology that we have, scientism, neoclassical economics, liberal politics, makes teleological criticism in the German conception impossible, is a paralysis of criticism. Why? Because all of our judgments of ends of right, wrong are turned into questions of opinion. You like this? I like that. Great dude. It was kind of relaxed and Marcusa just can't stand this.

So this became popular as a kind of foundational text for the 1960s radicals, most of whom couldn't understand it, but they liked the idea of disputing the fact that this is a good society and they were very unhappy. And those guys were vehicle to talk about that. And it's kind of highbrow German stuff. So for that reason, this becomes one of the foundational texts of student radicalism both here and in France in 68. That, to put difficulty is of course, is that viewing this as the apogee of rationality. I think it's highly implausible and exceedingly self indulgent. I mean, I'm looking back at the tapes from Columbia at 68. Is this rational? Does it look rational to you? Well, maybe it's teleological reason. Let's be charitable about that. I think that for the most part, what? Well, I think that this is a a failure in its attempt to account for American Society. It does appear fairly good job with the rise of Nazis and fascism in Europe doesn't translate very well to America. A second figure after Marcusa is Theodore Adorno

and he's in some ways the inverse of Marcus because he's much more anti systematic, much more influenced by Nietzsche and he's for the most part esthetician.

A second book that he authored with Horkheimer was probably the most famous book that the French book produced was called The Authoritarian Personality. And here we have this fusion of Marx and Freud that I was talking about. They look at the mass Society of Germany during the 30s and they say what could cause people to behave in such a way? How is it that they're willing to follow a terrible, evil man like this and do terrible things? And they say, well, since we've been reading a lot of fraud. It must have to do somehow with the the model of their psyche. There must be some process by which advanced capitalist societies socialize people in such a way. So there's psyches are systematically distorted and all distorted in the same way. And you might want to say they put out the eye of righteousness, they put out the eye of morals for all their babies and of course the babies and morally blind as adults. So suppose we didn't do that to people. How could we first of all identify the authoritarian personality, the kind of people that support fascism, support Nazism? And also how can we produce a better kind of people, people like us, who can get beyond this well? What they do is they give out. I mean they actually get empirical data, which is. Mark before the front from school, they give up these tests of attitudes, these attitude long attitude surveys and they count them all up and they find that Germany is. With authoritarian personalities both in the 30s and at the time when doing this post war right. This is 47 or so and say look they give up a test for conformity. People that tend to support fascist political ideals. Are rigidly conformist. They do what's expected of them, and they have rigid disapproval of people who are outside the norm. In addition, the authoritarian personality is allegedly sadomasochistic, at least implicitly in its sexual orientation. There are there's a high rate of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in the authoritarian personnel and they actually get empirical data construct some model of the typical follower of fascism and say the socialization characteristic of late capitalism generates this all the time. Now they come to America and start giving out these tests, same tests and they find that America's. With authoritarian personalities. But alas, there's no obvious authoritarianism, so they fudge it and they say, aha, you don't think it's authoritarian, but in fact this is just the iron hand with a velvet glove over it. Your pole process of socialization, all your rock'n'roll and your movies and your surfboards, all these things are the veil of Maya. In fact, you are authoritarian. This is authoritarianism with a happy face drawn up. In fact, this is the least overt in that respect, the most dangerous kind of authoritarianism. In other words, liberal contemporary America. Gets assimilated with Nazi Germany. All other products of late capitalism all are etiological or are the product of a truncated reason which must be overcome.

So the authoritarian personality, we end up finding out that capitalism demands the systematic destruction of rationality, the systematic distortion of the psyche. Now a problem emergency here. My guess is that if you were to go to ohh, no post war Russia, you'd find that post war Russia was also. Good with authoritarian personalities. My guess is if you went to Sweden and Turkey and Angola and the South Pole, you find that all those places were loaded with authoritarian personalities too. My guess is that what they mean by the authoritarian personality is people who are not members of the Frankfurt School (I don’t buy this underlined opinion of the professor). You know this is what it amounts to where they we're liberated. Everybody else is in the bonds, the shackles of illusion, right Places that have authoritarian governments full of authoritarian personalities, places that don't are full of authoritarian personalities and if America's.

Disclaimer: This article is in the making.

References:

The Frankfurt School. Youtube, Michael Sugrue, 22 Jan 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX9EI8wEyuY.

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[1] Normative is an adjective that refers to establishing, relating to or deriving from a standard or norm especially of behaviour. It often involves prescribing rules or standards that dictate how things should be done or how people should behave.  For example, normative ethics involve creating or evaluating moral standards to determine what is right and wrong.