Archives for November 2016

Review of George Friedman: The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.

 

Founded in 1923 in Frankfurt Germany, the Institute for Social Research “developed a unique and powerful critique of modern life,” providing “the basis of much of the student movement of the 1960s” (13). Its luminaries included Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and (most famously) Herbert Marcuse; thinkers closely associated with the Frankfurt School included Walter Benjamin and Erich Fromm.
George Friedman wrote this book under the guidance of the late Werner Dannhauser, that witty and humane scholar whose mastery of Nietzsche must have proved helpful, inasmuch as the Frankfurt School pioneered the appropriation of Nietzsche’s thought by the ‘Left.’ This was a move by no means obvious to make, but the technologized horrors of the First World War convinced many socialists that Marxian social-class analyses could not adequately explain the modern world. By the time Adorno and Horkheimer wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944, revulsion against Nazi and Communist mass-murder had convinced anyone with eyes to see that the great diagnostician of nihilism spoke more immediately and more profoundly to the crisis of the West than anything Marx had to say.
On a visit to Auschwitz, I saw the remains of a small death factory. Nearby, at Birkenau, I saw a vast space where the Nazis undertook murder on a truly industrial scale. And all so meticulously organized. “In our time,” Friedman writes, “we have discovered the darker side of reason. We have found that along with great triumphs, reason has also brought great brutality. The Frankfurt School set itself the task of defining the relationship between reason and brutality” (13-14). From Machiavelli, who advises the prince to pull back from all beliefs and sentiments in order to master Fortuna, to Bacon, who would harness experimental science in order to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate, and culminating in Hegel, who claimed that the course of events itself unfolded rationally, ‘dialectically,’ and had reached its logical conclusion in his own system of thought—replacing philosophy or the love of wisdom with sagacity, wisdom itself—”modern philosophy… is marked by a radical self-confidence” (14). It “believes that all things could be as they ought to be,” that “the real and the rational had become one” (14).
But had it? Reason understood as modern rationalism has indeed given human beings power over nature. But given that power, how shall we use it? The world wars and the concentration camps show that scientific, world-transforming rationalism can serve the purposes of insane tyrants as well as humane democrats. Hegel pointed to the administrative state as the means of making societies rational, but Auschwitz deployed the science of administration in a slaughterhouse for humans. “Auschwitz was a rational place, but it was not a reasonable one” (15). “It was this unreasonable rationality, this modern paradox, that was the great concern of the Frankfurt School,” whose members saw in Auschwitz the abandonment of critical reason (16). To make social science ‘value-free,’ as social scientists had tried all too successfully to do, left social science intellectually and morally powerless against the use of social science by tyrants.
Accordingly, “the Frankfurt School denied modernity’s complacent certainty of its progressive excellence”—its claim that the course of events or ‘History’ unfolds logically to a good conclusion–while nonetheless “affirm[ing] modernity’s confidence that all things human could be known, or at least sensed, however dark their origins.” These scholars “condemned modernity’s sense of itself without denying its project”—which is probably why Friedman carefully avoids using the fashionable term ‘postmodernism’ to describe them (16).
The Frankfurt School followed a longstanding line of modern thought, beginning with Rousseau, which directs its ire at the characteristic modern social class, the bourgeoisie. In the Anglophone world alone, we have seen the Romantic poets, Victorian essayists like Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Arnold, and Ruskin, down through the ‘counterculture’ writers of the second half of the twentieth century, alit with loathing for the materialism and pedestrianism of bourgeois life. Frustratingly for these thinkers, the working class upon which anti-capitalists pinned their hopes have continually sided with the bourgeoisie, because the bourgeoisie delivers the material goods that the workers want every bit as much as the businessmen do. And so the central dialectical clash of post-Rousseauian modernity has turned out to be not the bourgeoisie against the proletarians (as Marx and his followers expected) but the bourgeoisie against the ‘intellectuals’—very often the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie, rebelling against the boring banality of life dedicated to comfortable self-preservation.
“The Frankfurt School took on as its political project an attack on bourgeois philistinism,” understanding that the real struggle was esthetic, not economic, a matter of sensibility not sense (18). Marxism in both its dictatorship-of-the-proletariat, Bolshevik form and its democratic-parliamentarian social-democracy form had failed by valorizing the same mindless ‘work ethic’ touted by the bourgeois. Bourgeois or modern-liberal thought had aimed its ire at religious fanaticism; in taming religious passion, it had gone a long way to conquering not just nature but the human sense of the sacred, making of religion into mere moralism.

Following Heidegger, the Frankfurt School approached philosophy through textual explication or “critical theory,” but “under the apparently dispassionate exegesis moved a radical purpose: to comprehend modernity in order to undermine it,” and to recover, through what seems at first an esthetic project, “a politics of principle rather that of mere effectiveness” (20)—”to formulate a theoretical exegesis of the sociocultural crisis of the contemporary world and to prepare the theoretical ground for practical activity” (22) freed from the morally neutral inability to exercise moral judgments which enabled the tyrannical enormity of Auschwitz to occur. Not in foolishly optimistic progressivist historicism but in a return—Friedman calls it “nostalgia”—to the ideational roots of modernity and even (in Benjamin’s case) to the pre-modernity of Judaism we can think and feel our way out of the “brutal catastrophe” of Marxist and other historicist rationalisms (25). The Frankfurt School urged modern man to move away from rationalist utopianism back, but also forward, to a renewed Messianism; “they craved the Messianic from the bitterest roots of historical despair” (26).

Friedman divides the body of his book into three parts: a nine-chapter section on the philosophic roots of the Frankfurt School (in which Heidegger appears as the central figure); four chapters on the problem of modernity; and three chapters on the “solution” to that problem, which is most emphatically not a ‘final’ solution in either the straightforward, Hegelian and Marxist sense of an ‘end of history’ or in the sinister genocidal sense we associate with Nazism. Indeed, the Frankfurt School’s distinctive break from the ‘Left’ philosophies and ideologies which they had imbibed may be seen in this refusal of historical finality, which they had come to associate with the tyrannies now described (following Mussolini) as ‘totalitarian.’ Out of “the complex of antibourgeois thought that emerged from the nineteenth century” (29), they “appropriate[d] the criticism of the mass”—the esthetic and political culture of democracy or egalitarianism—”for the Left” (30) (italics added). At the same time, they opposed the old Left, the Marxist Left, because “they did not share Marx’s idea that the perpetual rationalization of the human condition is a good and inevitable thing” (31).

What would later become known in the United States and elsewhere as the New Left selected a few thoughts from Marx while eschewing Marx’s proudest claim, to have discovered laws of historical development modeled on those of Hegel—complete with the notion of an unfolding ‘dialectical’ clash of opposites leading inevitably to the end, the purpose of that conflict. Having learned from Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud, “they simply were no longer Marxists in any ordinary sense” (37). They regarded Marx’s deterministic laws of history as themselves products of late capitalism, “not an insight into the nature of human history but rather an attitude of a corrupted age,” “humanly false and evil” (38). While retaining some of Marx’s class-based analysis of social development, they rejected the actual self-understanding of proletarians, which they regarded as bourgeois-too-bourgeois. Instead of claiming that proletarians and the middle classes would lose their false consciousness by their decline into impoverishment, as class divisions under capitalism widened, the Frankfurt School expected these classes to confront an ever-increasing sense of the meaninglessness of lives devoted to comfortable self-preservation. Socialism will occur not because social change will lead to psychic transformation but rather psychic transformation will spur social change (41). This line of argument eventually appealed less to proletarians than to the disaffected sons and daughters of the middle classes, now at university en masse. It also dovetails with the growing ‘environmentalist’ movement of the 1960s; “the conquest of nature becomes the ratification of repression rather than the preface to heroism”; “a rationalized existence is antithetical to a free one,” they averred, in their “most profound break with Marx” (48). Marx had supposed that fully-instantiated human rationality would both construct and deconstruct, both affirm ‘History’s’ progress and cunningly advance it. But “to the Frankfurt School, reason had become affirmative”—justifying the worst crimes—”and seemed to have lost its cunning” (48), and indeed its common sense.

Nor did the critique of Marxism lead them back to Hegelianism, although they shared Hegel’s obsession with “the problems of history and reason”(51). They rejected Hegelianism on four grounds: Hegel’s dialectically unfolding Absolute Spirit leads to a final synthesis of opposites, an affirmation of “the prevailing social order” with no room for any further negation or critique of that order; his claim that the Absolute Spirit proceeds according to rational laws embodied in the sociopolitical institutions of each historical epoch; his “positive faith in the dialectical certainty of history”; and his “actual social and political prescriptions”—most notably, his esteem for modern, statist bureaucracy animated by the spirit of the science of administration (51). To put it in the language of modern philosophy, which distinguishes sharply between the thinking ‘subject’ and the ‘object’ the thinker thinks about, the attempt of Hegelian rationalism to make the thinker’s logical/dialectical thought objective, to fully instantiate that thought in the world around him via the science of administration, destroys human freedom; at the moment this project is realized, it “makes itself and what it rules unfree by forcing them into its necessarily formal confines” (55). A fully rationalized world leaves no place for human freedom, but ossifies into a ‘totalitarian’ structure that leaves no room for criticism. For the Frankfurt School, “the rationalized world [of the administrative state] constituted the gravest threat to authentic being” (60). Enlightenment, culminating in Hegelianism, “had not driven away darkness; it had caused the darkness to descend more thoroughly than ever” (61). Less metaphorically, “Reason, which had existed to discover authentically true horizons, had succeeded only in abolishing the old and false ones. Reason had become its own horizon, and the formal and objective requirements of the logic of reason had supplanted an authentically useful horizon” (62), leaving only two possibilities remaining: positivism or a retreat to some outmoded metaphysics.

Nietzsche and Heidegger to the rescue—remarkably, to the rescue of the Left. Nietzsche’s slashing attack on all of the “transcendental and antisensual moralities” had “made real the possibility of the sensually erotic life, which was the true intention of the Frankfurt School” (63). Reason or Enlightenment rationalism had merely established itself as a new myth, but one without content, “incapable of supplying anything but facticity and doubt” (63). Fully-developed Enlightenment rationalism (and indeed, Nietzsche argued, reason itself, beginning with Socrates and his enunciation of the principle of non-contradiction) “must deny the autonomy of any part [of the world] excluded from its reality,” most notably the “autonomous will” of the thinking subject” (64). But to give oneself over entirely to ‘objectivity’ one must deny self-consciousness; since the self-conscious or self-knowing subject is the ground of reason, “reason, in order to conclude its own conquest must regress, since it must deny the one thing that would allow will: consciousness” (65). Positivism or brute facticity then reigns supreme; what began in mindfulness drowns in a sea of mindlessness. “Reason, therefore, must deny what it had initially promised: freely realized humanity”; “modernity is catastrophic for man” (65).

Mass culture exemplifies this mindlessness. The high culture of the old aristocracies has become subordinate to “the demand of the social mechanism” (65), the philistine tastes of an egalitarian society. Nietzsche excoriates this as decadence. Adorno called upon the few persons of taste now remaining “to withdraw from the culture that makes one ill—which is illness” (67). However nostalgic this may seem, the Frankfurt School rejected the path of Romanticism, believing, with Nietzsche, that there is no road back to high culture. Nor, of course, did they return to the historical teleology of Hegel or Marx, these being manifestations of the rationalism which caused the problem in the first place. Rather, they followed Nietzsche in the willed rejection of all systems, valorizing negation or critical thinking. They most emphatically did not follow Nietzsche (and indeed seemed to ignore Nietzsche’s teaching) in claiming that deep inside every individual there is a small but ineluctable core of fatum, of fatality. Rather, more optimistically, they contended that the right response to the banality of mass culture is to negate, negate, and negate again, to exercise critical rather than positivist thinking.

Most tellingly, the Frankfurt School refused to follow Nietzsche in his radical individualism. Unlike Nietzsche, they could not bring themselves to reject compassion or to deny the social circumstances in which they lived. They endorsed revolution, not the Superman. Centrally, they turned to Heidegger (Marcuse had been his student), but turning him politically leftward, away from fascism. Heidegger takes from Marx the concept of the alienation of modern man in the face of unlivable social conditions, and the resultant search for authenticity. Marx and Heidegger adopt, but also adapt Hegelian historicism—the latter following Nietzsche in rejecting the rationalist dimension of all previous forms of historicism.  “The Frankfurt School occupies the nexus connecting the two giants” (72), Marx and Heidegger—rejecting Marxist rationalism while accepting Marx’s socialism, rejecting Heidegger’s national socialism or Nazism while accepting his emphasis on authenticity as non-rational. Whereas historicist rationalism succumbs to the error of positing a fully rationalized world that leaves no room for the human subject, its will and its consciousness, Heideggerian irrationalism refuses “to allow Being to become identical with a being in the world” that would at the same time reserve to itself the power to criticize or negate elements of the world (74).  What is invaluable in Heidegger is his acknowledgment that the human subject is a historical being, not a natural being; Heidegger in this sense not only remains a historicist but radicalizes historicism; and he does this without abstracting the human subject from its authentic, non-rational essence, without making the subject a rationalist, Cartesian ego cogito, a being which imagines its ability to think proves that it exists. In the eyes of the Frankfurt School, “Heidegger’s search for being was the search for an authentic whole” (74). He failed because he “grasps at an illusion,” namely, “a Being radically free of its social context” (75). “He fails to place Being into practice” (76), succumbing instead to the uncritical endorsement of the existing social condition of his time and place, Nazism.

To avoid the error of his teacher, Marcuse pointed to the individual as the ground of the future revolution: “The revolution begins with the individual and ends with his transformation” (77). “Narcissism” or “self-realization” retains Nietzschean/Heideggerian individualism while remaining cognizant of, and more ambitiously aiming at the radical transformation of society, too. This is Marcuse’s “aestheticization/eroticization of being” (77). Because Heidegger and Marcuse “both render the individual radically important” in their own ways, both must “face the radicalized problem of death,” given the mortality of each individual life (77). Owing to his estheticism and eroticism, Marcuse valorizes art, high culture against low or at least art-as-negation of mass culture; owing to his individualism, he valorizes “a life without metaphysical solace” or “existentialism (78).

These moves led the Frankfurt School to its fascination with the thought of that odd yet highly suggestive thinker, Oswald Spengler, whom they considered “a great, if limited, prophet” (79). In The Decline of the West, Spengler describes “the dual character of the Enlightenment”—its promise of human liberation via the conquest of nature and its actual “Caesarism,” which was Spengler’s term for a worldwide, scientistic-administrative rule and its “static culture,” all of which meant “that the West would necessarily revert to a barbarism” (80). As we have seen, “these three insights formed the crux of the Frankfurt School’s vision of the West in late modernity” (80). Spengler even saw the function of the communications media within this system, predicting “the coming of Caesars of world-journalism” (81)—William Randolph Hearst and the other ‘press barons’ whose rise complemented that of the ‘robber barons.’ Spengler’s book was “the origin of [the Frankfurt School’s] critique of technology and the culture begotten by technology” (84); in the fully rationalized but unreasonable machine-age, man becomes the object and the machine becomes the subject, destroying human creativity—as seen in a thousand science-fiction novels and as analyzed in Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. Finally, Spengler warned that the money-cultural, mass-cultural, machinist, prison would find opposition in the bloody horrors of barbaric, technology-driven war, as spirited men rebelled violently against the enclosing, soul-deadening embourgeoisement. “It was Spengler, more than Marx” (or Hegel) “who gave the School their sense of the future” (85). “The crisis is whether any way to breakout can be found” (85), and the Schoolmen entertained few hopes for that, beyond the kind of psyche-transforming revolution they held out in some desperation.

For investigation of the psyche, the Schoolmen turned to Freud, whose psychoanalytic theory describes the profound tension between reason and desire and speaks of the malign effects of rational and social repression of desire. Freud thus offers a dimension of human life hitherto neglected by the Left, and by the Marxian Left above all. Starkly, “Marx’s failure to consider psychology in a way paved the way for the Russian terror” because “failing to consider subjectivity in a revolution opens the door to reification and tyranny” (88). The inhuman shallowness of Marxist revolution led it first to the violent brutality of state-sponsored terror and then to a philistinism more bourgeois than that of the bourgeoisie, as seen even a century later wherever the remains of Soviet-era architecture pimple the landscape of eastern and central Europe. Marxism leaves no real place for Eros; as such, it must remain fundamentally bourgeois and psychically repressive, as when Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev fulminated like a fundamentalist preacher at the dancers when he visited the Hollywood set where the movie Can-Can was being produced.

Freud saw something the economic determinist Marx could not see: even with material abundance, “the scarcity of nature constituted a permanent and transhistorical reality” (90) because our erotic desires will remain frustrated even as we eat pineapples on the moon. “The real intention of the School is to deepen the possibility of liberation” to include the erotic desires of the human psyche. This means that the rationalist conquest of nature cannot liberate us. Only the unleashing of “libidinous energy” against the tedious and painful labor commended by both the bourgeois and proletarian work-ethics will do this. Only such a transformed inner, psychic world can satisfactorily transform the social world. By “turn[ing] the revolution inward” (91) as the initial step, the Schoolmen would solve the Marxian problem of alienation in a non-Marxian way by appropriating elements of Freud for their own revolutionary purposes.

Heidegger and Spengler flirted dangerously with contempt for Jews and Judaism, associated as they were in the minds of their enemies with money and cosmopolitanism. Before and especially in the wake of the Holocaust, the Frankfurt School utterly rejected this aspect of these thinkers. Here Friedman turns particularly to the thought of Walter Benjamin, a somewhat marginal figure (he never actually joined the Institute) but an important voice on the non-Marxist Jewish Left. Benjamin and to some degree the core of the Schoolmen understood that supplementing Marx with Freudian psychology would not suffice; the “Jewish Question,” upon which Marx had written and which Hitler had answered with murderous fanaticism, could find no answer in either Marx or Freud. With regard to Freud, it might well be replied that the satisfaction of erotic desires comport quite well with the rule of the administrative state; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World comes to mind, as does Tocqueville’s description of soft, democratic despotism in Democracy in America. To Marx, “The practical side of Judaism, the god of commerce, had overwhelmed and obliterated he sacred possibilities of man” (93). The answer to the Jewish Question was the abolition of capitalism; the advent of communism—after the seizure of the state by the proletariat, its use to abolish all social classes, and the consequent withering-away of the state itself—amounted to an atheist Messianism: “Marx’s preoccupation with the abolition of Jews has about it a strange and not quite expressed Jewishness” (93). European Jews had embraced the Enlightenment, but Enlightenment liberalism had failed to provide them the protection it had promised. The Schoolmen saw that Marxism didn’t protect Jews, either; Friedman doesn’t mention it, but Stalin eventually came for the Jews, too. The road to liberation could not lead through statism, much less through statist terror, but that is where Marxism-Leninism had tried to lead it.

In view of concentration camps built by both the tyrannical Right and the tyrannical Left, the Left needed to rethink the Jewish Question. Benjamin understood that the Fifth Commandment, requiring the Israelites to honor their parents, serves as the fundamental bond of society under the Mosaic Law. “The redemption by the son of the promise of the father is what inextricably makes one a Jew” (94). The redemption of Israel and humanity as a whole (for which Israel will serve as the light unto the nations) will require divine intervention in the form of the Messiah. Crucially, the Messianism of a Creator-God, of a Holy Spirit, differs fundamentally from the Messianism of Marxism or of any historicist thinker. Hegelian historicism posits an Absolute Spirit, not a Holy one. The Absolute Spirit is immanent in all things; the cosmos itself is nothing other than the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit, over time. Marx takes the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit and gets rid of the spirituality, positing an entirely materialist theory of historical development. In radical contrast to these theories, the Creator-God of the Bible, holy (that is, separate from and utterly superior to His creation), creates the cosmos not out of Himself but out of nothing. Thus the Messiah-substitute of Marxian communism issues from rationally knowable laws of History, the predictable development of class conflict; Walter Benjamin knew Judaism teaches that “the Messiah may enter at any moment,” redeeming the sufferings of the parents and all the ancestors, but according to the will of God, not the supposed laws of History. The will of God is knowable to human beings only insofar as God chooses to reveal it to them, and He has not chosen to reveal the time of the coming of the Messiah.

Benjamin “saw in the Messiah the metaphor for the historical problem” (96). Until now, history has been profane; escape from profaneness cannot come via the historical dialectic, whether Hegelian or Marxist, but only through the unpredictable irruption of a Messianic event. Accordingly, “Benjamin turns Marxism into a Jewish event” (95), an event that can be invoked not through the dictatorship of the proletariat in control of the state but (in a way paralleling a religion of the Holy Word, a religion of the Book) via language. “The intention of the revolutionary, like the Kabbalist, is to discover the formula that will invoke the sudden and miraculous intrusion into history of an exogenous force, thereby shattering the structure of time and opening the path to redemption” (97). The language needed to free humanity from the chains of profane history is not the manipulative language of political rhetoric or propaganda seen in late-modern politics. Again paralleling the Bible, the language needed is the language of naming, seen first in the divine command to Adam in the Garden of Eden. “The name incorporates the thing into the structure of language” (96); what the American scholar Harry V. Jaffa called “the miracle of the common noun” consists in the human capacity (in the Bible, given by the God who creates Man out of dust) to see the commonalities amongst many particulars, to see and express the commonality among the many red oaks as the identifiable species, ‘red oak.’ But the language of naming can only go so far, because it cannot incorporate a thing or a being that exceeds the human capacity to describe. And so God’s name is not to be spoken. Similarly, it will take the advent of the Messiah “to remake the very structure of time in such a way as to redeem the past by annihilating the suffering that constituted its moment” (97). The character of the future Zion, the future ‘Heaven on Earth,’ is as ineffable as the character of God. “Profane language cannot speak without having something to speak of. In the speaking of the triumph, the language of history is unfree. The conquest of nature is the preface to redemption, but only the preface, because the second problem is not solved Language must turn to itself through naming in order to be purged of the profane” and thus at least prepare the way for the unpredictable coming of the Messianic event that will issue in the ineffable Zion.

Such a language cannot be scientific or rationalist. It must be metaphorical, an indirect expression or suggestion of something that cannot yet be humanly defined. “Only the metaphor frees us from identity but roots us in reality” (98). For example, if I say “God is love” I have spoken of God, but I have not defined God, inasmuch as God is not only love. “Jews speak of God and redemption metaphorically. Identity and abstraction are catastrophic to them. So, too, Benjamin and Adorno speak metaphorically. But where the Jewish conception of redemption is a metaphor of a thing unimaginable—redemption—the Frankfurt School’s is a metaphor for a metaphor. They use the Jewish formulation of language to explain their own epistemological dilemma: language is the ground of freedom but simultaneously of imprisonment. Redemption requires the Messiah who would cut the dialectical knot.” (98) For them, the advent of communism is the Messiah-substitute for the Biblical Messiah. “The point of Communism is that it is a radical break with the past—a Messianic break” (99). Benjamin understood that this parallels the Biblical condemnation of idolatry. He “chooses a Jewish metaphor for Communism because his alternative is a Greek image“—one thinks of the picture of communism painted by William Morris in News from Nowhere. “An image is, however, on a continuum with the original and is thus dialectically bound up with it” (99). An image of the future Zion, the world of communism, would amount to an idol, and idolatry anticipates the error of rationalism, especially in its historicist form, the error of demanding lawful predictability from Being, the error of believing that reality is fully ‘enlightenable’ or knowable, humanly controllable.

As Friedman quietly understates the matter, “The problem is the leap from metaphor to reality” (99). Historical dialectic had been exhausted in bureaucratization; “neither damned nor redeemed, history exhausted itself, suspended between hope and horror” (100). One can only hope for “the Messianic intervention into seamless time,” an intervention “blast[ing] that moment and that time into nonexistence, thereby redeeming its suffering” (99). To prepare for this moment devoutly to be wished, the Schoolmen identified “the political task of Critical Theory [as] establish[ing] the prismatic formula through which the Messianic entity could be invoked and identified” (100). Almost pitiably (I remark), they searched for a “revolutionary subject” outside the course of modern history: these included the peoples of the ‘Third World” (that is, outside the ambit of either the bourgeois West or the communist East), peoples of color living inside the sphere of the liberal West, and even, by the 1960s, the students of the New Left, who had given themselves over to the Dionysian ‘counter-culture’ of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll—all in conjunction with a politics of communitarianism.

To their credit, the Schoolmen understood that these reeds were quite likely weak. The odds of finding a Moses in those bulrushes seemed very long to them. In the intellectual dimension of their project, Critical Theory resembled the Midrash: “the profane hermeneutic of the utterly sacred” (101). “Both are the attempt of the unredeemed to glean visions of redemptions from the words that mediate between the sacred and the profane” (101).

Friedman concludes the section on the ideational origins of the Frankfurt School by clearly distinguishing them from the Old Left of Marxism. “Marx was no solution. Indeed, in many ways, he was the heart of the problem. To industrialism, he could juxtapose only more industry; the reason, only more rationalization.” All of this resulted in “the towering emptiness [the Babylon?] that accompanied Communism” (104-105). The Right, which did oppose modernity without availing itself of modernity’s conceptual tools, also failed because it was ‘reactionary,’ attempting to return to an irrecoverable past. Would the Frankfurt School prove to be “the redeemer or the executioner of the teleological hopes of the Enlightenment” (106-107)? With this, Friedman turns to the second section of his book, in which he examines the Schoolmen’s statement of the problem of modernity in their own terms, not in the terms of the thinkers they drew upon.

“The centerpiece of modernity faith is its belief in Enlightenment,” in the “demystification” of all remaining mysteries, the dispelling of all shadows of ignorance. The Schoolmen trace the Enlightenment to Homeric Greece, to “the myth of Odysseus,” the man who assumes “that through reason or cunning, the natural can, somehow, be known to man” (111-112). Reason has its place, but only in the form of criticism or negation of the given, never as “positivity” or construction, which only leads to tyranny (113). By denying the rational subject’s power to know the essence of a thing, the ‘thing-in-itself,’ Enlightenment rationalists inclined to denying essence altogether, dismissing it as a pseudo-problem on the shaky assumption that if the rational subject cannot understand the essence of a thing, if Enlightened reason cannot shed its light upon it, essences may as well not exist at all. In the rational attempt to remove all contradictions the Enlighteners dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their ideas: “the idea becom[es] identical with the thing” (116). This leads either the identification of reason with whatever exists—Hegel’s error—or, as seen in the ‘totalitarian’ tyrants, the identification of reason with whatever must be forced to exist, according to the tyrant’s systematic plan. Either way, the result is the denial of critical reason, the denial of the human capacity to negate the fact in favor of the essence. “Reason, under the rule of Positivism, stands in awe of the fact” (118), losing “true subjectivity” (120) or the capacity to judge the fact. Reason comes to “recognize no standard beyond the fact” (121). This illusion perpetuates itself easily because positive, instrumental reason does succeed in delivering economic goods and because it is logically consistent with its own anti-essentialist premises. To “break out of its self-satisfaction,” this form of rationalism “requires an act of self-conscious will rather than dialectical movement” (123), which would only confirm the premises with which it begins. No logical system can overcome the problem of systematization itself. Only critical theory—purposely unsystematic or “prismatic”—can enable philosophy to escape its self-made cage.us

If Enlightenment yields materialism; materialism yields the criterion of quantifiability as the test of truth; quantifiability characterizes modern science and lends itself to technology; and technology aims at the conquest of nature, overriding the essence of things, then the conquest of nature implies the self-deification of man. Because man is not really a god, this means that the result of Enlightenment ‘demystification’ of the world is a myth, that the “Enlightenment is itself a myth” (130). Like the mythical Odysseus, that “human Prometheus” (130), “with real and imagined suffering and with authentic cunning,” the rational man “roams the world slaying whatever is enchanted, eluding and deluding those magical things that can only be dealt with so” (130-131). Enlightenment “never escapes mythology but recapitulates myth in rationalistic form” (132); like the magicians of antiquity, it fears what it cannot see, namely, the essences of things. Anything that “did not conform [was] ruled out of existence,” and those elements that did conform were integrated into a precreated structure of thought” (133). What began as a critique of mythology and barbarism ends in a new myth and a new barbarism.

The Enlightenment thus precipitates a crisis of culture. Against rationalism, the Frankfurt School upheld esthetic sensibility; “our tastes determine our experience of the world” (139). Culture “consistently subjects itself to analysis and criticism” precisely because it has this esthetic criterion of judgment. “The critic’s role is pivotal in relation to culture” (139)—never allowing culture to ossify into a supposed ‘end of history.’  “The root of the cultural crisis is the failure of the work of art in this age to take a critical stance. Rather than upholding the beautiful as a historical alternative to the ugly irrationality of the world, the work of art either lapses into historical irrelevance or into a positive affirmation of the world as it is” (141)—useless abstraction or pointless concretion” (143), art-for-art or artful propaganda. Art becomes either a commodity, as under capitalism, or an instrument of political control, as under ‘totalitarianism.’ Against this, the Schoolmen deployed critical textual exegesis in an attempt to “conjure the radical possibilities embedded in the tradition without falling into reaction” (154). Exegesis keeps truth rooted in language, not in the distorting objectivism of Positivism.

Can this work? Under contemporary conditions, human beings are entertaining themselves to death; “amusement replaces art as the principle of mass culture” (163), as we doze in a relaxing hot tub of uncritical bliss. “Television takes this [inauthentic or pseudo-art] to radical extremes” (161); by penetrating the home, it makes the rightly private, erotic quest of art into a public spectacle. The entertainment industry “must maintain itself and thereby maintain the system it is a part of” by eschewing the critical function of genuine art. “It does this by abolishing the distinction between the cultural product and life. Life becomes like a movie, and movies tend to recapitulate life” (164). The Schoolmen did not live long enough to view ‘reality television,’ and Friedman published his book decades before its invention, but they would see it as the culmination of the phenomenon they abhor.

The modern crisis extends, therefore, into the human psyche itself. The abolition of scarcity accomplished by the conquest of nature has not abolished the problem of alienation, as Marx had supposed. “Clearly, something had gone wrong with the consciousness of the masses” (169). As we have seen, the Frankfurt School turned to Freud as the great explorer of the unconscious and the repressive Superego, while rejecting Freud’s naturalism as too conservative, ahistorical. For the Schoolmen, “scarcity is historical and not natural” (172). They also rejected Freud’s theory of the death wish, which tends to deny the possibility of Messianic irruption. “Freud’s pessimism, moderated through Marx, becomes optimism” (179). Having conquered nature, we should now be able to liberate our repressed desires, which had to be repressed while we conquered nature but are no longer repressed for any good reason. “The greater the potential for liberation from material want, the less possible is freedom from psychic distortion” (185). It is easy to see why the comfortable, middle-class university students of the 1960s found all of this so appealing.

“The overarching crisis” of modernity is a crisis of history, “the failure of history to transcend itself—the freezing of history at an inhuman moment” (186). If “the essence of humanity is in its negativity,” in its capacity to say ‘no’ to the factual conditions in which it finds itself, in “its standing against the affirmations of everyday life, in the rejection of the demand to be a member of the group”—that Freudian Superego—then “the attack on [the] private sphere,” the attack on the human subject, whether by commercial capitalism or ‘totalizing’ modern tyranny, “is the essence of the historical crisis” (188). In the United States, capitalism uses technology to seduce; in Nazi Germany, the regime uses technology to terrorize. The Soviet regime, too, “sprang from the same ground of Enlightenment as the West” (198), so it could never fulfill its self-proclaimed Messianic mission. Like anti-imperialist Third-World guerrillas, the ideational warrior of Critical theory carried on “the warfare of irregular against regularity itself” (203).

Friedman devotes the third section of his book to elaborating the Frankfurt School’s “search for the solution” (205)—again, never to be an ominous, dehumanizing ‘final’ solution. The Schoolmen proposed three interdependent solutions: exegetical, political, and Messianic.

The exegetical solution, Critical Theory, arose out of their conviction that Marx was mistaken, or at least no longer correct in his demand that philosophy bend itself to the practical purpose of advancing the proletarian revolution or, to put it more grandly, that theory and practice could achieve unity at the end of History. Bolshevism, Social Democracy, and Fascism had each “given the lie to the promise of philosophy” (208). On the contrary, reality will not come to embody philosophy in any predictable way—that is, as the result of any supposed laws immanent in History itself. For now, philosophy must become contemplative and (especially) critical again. “The opposition between appearance and reality, which was an essential element of ancient philosophy, constitutes the core of Critical Theory” (209). More, Critical Theory returns “to what is both the most concrete and the most metaphysical element of the philosophic: the text,” to language, because “what was true in the universe came to man not directly but rather mediated through the word” (210)—an insight embodied in both the Bible and the Platonic dialogues. Even if the noetic perception of Being is wordless, “prior to all that [is] profane,” we live enmeshed in the profane; we can approach “philosophic and religious truth” “only through the words of those who had captured the truth in the web of language, whether Moses or Plato” (212).

Critical Theory addresses the condition of human beings as they exist now, offering a critique of that condition and “pointing to” (without attempting foolishly to delineate) “the next moment in time” (213); it does so by “negat[ing] the existent untruth, at least in theory” (214). Philosophy is not ideology, not merely the expression of the interests of a given ruling class; it has a transhistorical element, which enables just this ‘pointing beyond.’ And beyond that, Critical Theory “conjures up images of authentic being that are rooted not in time but in the unrealized possibilities inherent in men” (213). In this form of exegesis, “the text as a whole is not treated as sacred; rather, elements of the text, little chips of the sacred (or more precisely, the prophetic) embedded in a complex of the profane, are conjured from the circumstances that defile them” (216). The significance of Spengler (for example) “was in what he knew and not in who he was or what he accomplished” (215), but the Schoolmen also persisted in identifying his contradictions. That is where reason, and even a sort of Socratism, come in. This philosophic approach follows from the characteristic style of Nietzsche, as opposed to Hegel: the critical insight encapsulated in an aphorism, not as a building block in some grand system. The word “conjures” makes sense, as the critical selection made from any text amounts to a “Messianic mediation” which prepares the actual, unpredictable Messianic moment by making “the sacred sensually real” (219) through metaphoric rather than rational, imagistic, and discursive system-building or “positivity” (219). “The historical can no longer tolerate the burden of being systematized,” inasmuch as “the systematic stance would be to abandon the struggle against the system” (223). Auschwitz was simply too stark and crushing, too much an event of “awesome singularity” (even if, sickeningly, replicated many times in the twentieth century) to be explained away as just another dialectical incident in the march of historical progress. This is true, one surmises, even if, as Hegel had remarked, the dialectical clash of opposites can be described as a slaughter-bench. “History has become such that the particles of experience can no longer be understood if they are forced into the unnatural categories of eternally unchanging systems” (222). Transcendence via contemplation, not immanence via dialectics is the only approach that holds out the promise of breaking free from the stultifying system of the World State. “The ultimate hope is for the transfiguration of being itself into a realm of utter negativity and autonomy” (225).

The Frankfurt School never loses sight of the political aim of its contemplative and critical approach. “Just as the goal of Critical Theory in dealing with texts had been to transcend the textual material, so the goal of the Critical Theory in dealing with the world was to transcend the practical” (226). This transcendence, again, is not immanent in any historical process but Messianic, to be revealed in a catastrophe of history and not in some mythical historical telos. Here is where the Schoolmen pin their hopes on ‘Third World’ peoples, American blacks, and students, which they take to be “strangely archaic” forces outside of the tentacles of Enlightenment historicist systematizing. “If the Enlightenment turned the world profane, the revolutionary act would make it divine again—more fully than before” (242), as “the revolutionary act puts man in contact once more with the roots of his being and sensibility,” with the sensuously erotic subject rather than the abstractly conceived object (246). But the political revolution is not the Messianic moment itself. That is rather “the transfiguration of Being” (248).

Like Jews, and even a bit like Marx in his saner moments, (in admitting he could not delineate the exact character of life after the withering-away of the state, life under communism), the Frankfurt School eschews any firm knowledge of the future. Still, some things can be guessed at, negatively. Just as a strict Jew will describe God’s attributes negatively (God is not lacking in loving-kindness, not lacking in justice, and so on), the condition brought about by the Messianic event will betoken the negation of the struggle against nature and the disappearance of the death wish from the psychic landscape. To say any more than that, the Schoolmen had recourse to mythic language. So, for example, Marcuse would replace the figure of Prometheus with those of Orpheus and Narcissus, personifications of “the joy of gratification” and of “self-gratification” (257). “Marcuse rediscovers the individual in the age of the mass in the privacy of the erotic” (261). Consistently enough, the Frankfurt School sympathized with the drug use popularized in the Sixties because “the faculty of fantasy shatters the power of the reality principle,” fantasy being “perpetually indifferent to reason” (264-265). Drugs, dreams, art, and play all can serve to “forge a space between the powers of Positivism and [Heideggerian] existentialism” (266). The man of the Messianic age will be the Last Man, not the aristocratic Superman: but he will spend his time fantasizing and playing, not working as a drone in the industrial beehive.  The whole body will become sexual/erotic, not just a few erogenous zones. Perpetual progress will give way to “perpetual gratification” (276). As Friedman wittily and accurately puts it, this is “the spirit of Nietzsche turned egalitarian” (261). This is a point that cannot be emphasized too much. It is Tocqueville’s soft despotism reconceived not as a place of industrious herds but as self-gratifying individuals. One may well consider it an implausible notion, but many daydreaming university students took it as a realizable vision of Paradise.

Friedman offers his own criticisms of Critical Theory in his concluding chapter. The Frankfurt School’s (and most especially Marcuse’s) vision of a world o erotic gratification runs into two problems: administration and death. However eroticized human life may become, we will all still die. In such an intensely pleasurable life, “death comes not as a relief but as a tragedy” (281). Death’s prospect “will sour such a life, every time the individual thinks of it. Nietzsche answered the problem of death by calling a good death “the consummation of life, the greatest and deepest act of will,” but Marcus cannot do that. “To see virtue in the negation of Eros is to see virtue in the negation of gratification,” to tear Orpheus to pieces (283). “Marcuse founders on the heart of his problem: joy cannot have eternity” (283). Adorno tries to solve the problem by waving it away, by claiming that fear of death is bourgeois, all-too-bourgeois. The problem, he declares, is “null and void” (286). Brave words from the brave new worldist, but how plausible? Not to Friedman: “The Frankfurt School’s love of life makes it impotent against life’s universal and inevitable negation” (286-287). To negate that negation, you need the God of the Bible, a genuinely divide intervention. “What Adorno never answers is how satiety in socialist society would be less boring and troublesome” than it is in bourgeois society (289). He recapitulates the very problem he sees in the administrative state organized by the social democrats. Yes, work will be abolished, but why will a life of perpetual play satisfy human beings? His “radically childlike” vision of life would freeze men and women in a condition of perpetual infantilism. “In a way, the Frankfurt School attempted to do metaphysically what Trotsky and Mao attempted politically: to institutionalize revolution by making it permanent” (296). In this, they partook of the modernity they opposed, inasmuch as “modernity has always tried to abolish the distance between being and becoming by somehow rooting being in the practice of becoming”—quite unlike the erotic quest seen in Plato’s Republic, or the God-fearing, prophetic quest of the Biblical prophets. Recall that it was Machiavelli who condemned “imaginary republics.” “The Frankfurt School is, in the end, most praiseworthy for he thing that they failed to accomplish, for by failing, they demonstrated the bankruptcy of modernity” (301).

The Frankfurt School thus offers us an astounding mixture of insight and bosh.