Critical Theory
It seems each week we populate an entry with a multiplicity of questions, many of which don’t get answered. Thus, this week I am going to keep it simple, straight forward and to the point: is critical theory a continuation of the enlightenment (utopian) project and if so in what ways? Is this problematic? Can reason escape power?
I will give you my take and you can either respond to the above question or dissect my humble words to your hearts content.
Critical theory is utopian and envisions, especially in Habermas, an unrealizable end state that would require potentially horrific degrees of overt social engineering. This implied end state is best seen on page 53: “To acquire knowledge requires not just a minimal economic surplus, but an ability to experiment, to try out alternatives, a kind of freedom to experience and discuss the results of experience.” I question the possibility of creating ideal speech situations (transcendental) and necessary to experiencing such freedom. In fact, I think it could be argued that the extraction of surplus repression is an inherent byproduct of Aristotle’s political animal. We experience power and recreate it constantly. This is possibly the only consciousness as opposed to a false consciousness. Kant’s ‘reason’ can’t save man from the Hobbesian state of nature. Institutions (social ordering mechanisms) are required to balance our interactions and they require, by their very nature, the extraction of surplus repression. In fact, I would say most of the problems in politics begin in the fourth ‘initial stage’ of critical theory, the domain Geusse refers to as the ‘nightmare which haunts the Frankfurt School’: “….agents are actually content, but only because they have been prevented from developing certain desires which in the ‘normal’ course of things they would have developed, and which cannot be satisfied within the framework of the present social order,” (83).
I will give you my take and you can either respond to the above question or dissect my humble words to your hearts content.
Critical theory is utopian and envisions, especially in Habermas, an unrealizable end state that would require potentially horrific degrees of overt social engineering. This implied end state is best seen on page 53: “To acquire knowledge requires not just a minimal economic surplus, but an ability to experiment, to try out alternatives, a kind of freedom to experience and discuss the results of experience.” I question the possibility of creating ideal speech situations (transcendental) and necessary to experiencing such freedom. In fact, I think it could be argued that the extraction of surplus repression is an inherent byproduct of Aristotle’s political animal. We experience power and recreate it constantly. This is possibly the only consciousness as opposed to a false consciousness. Kant’s ‘reason’ can’t save man from the Hobbesian state of nature. Institutions (social ordering mechanisms) are required to balance our interactions and they require, by their very nature, the extraction of surplus repression. In fact, I would say most of the problems in politics begin in the fourth ‘initial stage’ of critical theory, the domain Geusse refers to as the ‘nightmare which haunts the Frankfurt School’: “….agents are actually content, but only because they have been prevented from developing certain desires which in the ‘normal’ course of things they would have developed, and which cannot be satisfied within the framework of the present social order,” (83).
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