Herbert Marcuse’s essay "Philosophie und kritische Theorie" in the 3/1937 number of the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung is available in an English translation by Jeremy Shapiro as "Philosophy and Critical Theory" in Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (1968). The English text of Negations is available online in an authorized SCRIBD edition from MayFly Books and is available as a text or PDF download. The translations here are mine from the original published text.
Marcuse points out the Marxism, which he here treats as the original form of "critical theory", was based on a materialist outlook, though it was not understood as "a philosophical system against other philosophical systems. Social theory is an economic, not a philosophical system."
Marcuse emphasizes that critical theory in his sense is based on the effort to apply Reason to existing social conditions, both in understanding them and seeking to alter them. In classical "bourgeois" (capitalist) thought, Reason included the idea of freedom. This is especially pronounced in Hegel's philosophy, whose influence is very visible and explicit in Marcuse's thinking.
Aside from his usual academic style of writing in this longer essays in the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, he uses a notion here that makes this essay even less accessible to readers not familiar with it. He has a concept which he develops at length in Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941), that philosophy in the true sense ended with Hegel. As he puts it in the 1937 essay, "With the concept of Reason as Freedom, philosophy appeared to have reached its limits: what still remains, the realization of Reason, is no longer a task of philosophy."
But he was not entirely consistent in his career with how he used that particular notion. Because he was an academic philosopher himself. And he clearly considered that other "academic" philosophies like existentialism had continuing value in understanding the world and in illuminating practical tasks.
In this essay, he discusses how the understanding of the Subject in the philosophies of Descartes, Kant, Fichte and Hegel were based ultimately on a bourgeois (capitalist) understanding of property. As Marcuse puts it, the form of freedom conceived in their thought in reality comes down to "the freedom of a never ending, exhausting labor". But he also argues that German Idealism was not empty ideology; it always contained elements that challenged the existing order. Importantly for the conditions of 1937, Idealism opposed "the sacrifice of individuality in the service of false collectives". Its limitation is that its criticism of existing conditions remains in the sphere of ideas; it did not extend to the social relations of the material world.
His essay is largely devoted to elaborating these concepts. It's also clear that he is focusing in particular on the situation of people in the Western authoritarian states, Germany above all, in which the independent voices of the working class were being efficiently suppressed. Since critical theory relies on a Marxist concept of the working class as the indispensable agent of creating the post-capitalist society, the inability of the working class in countries like Germany to assert themselves effectively in politics presented a problem for critical theory that could not be surmounted in the immediately foreseeable future. Marcuse discusses some of the implications of that in this essay.
As he puts it, "Social relationships conceal the sense of truth: at the same time, they constitute the horizon of untruth that truth needs for its effectiveness." This the kind of Hegelian but materialist concept one finds frequently in Marcuse's work. Truth has to be realized in the material world. But that can only happen through the struggle of truth with untruth.
And he writes, "Critical theory is [also] critical of itself, of its own social agents," that is, the working class and the working-class parties, both Social Democrats and Communists.
And he explains that the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung is committed to dealing with various philosophical themes, such as rationalism vs. irrationalism, a major issue in analyzing fascist and Nazi philosophy and propaganda. And its goal is also to situate those philosophical themes in their material social contexts. "The bad materialism of philosophy will be overcome in the materialist theory", i.e., critical theory.
He stresses the importance of fantasy, of imaginative thinking, in understanding the current state of society and its future possibilities.
Marcuse closes his essay with reference to the shadow of Nazism and fascism that hung over the world in 1937. As he puts it, in the 19th century it was possible to see the development of capitalism into a form of barbarism. But what lay between the present and the realization of the more just and humane society envisioned by critical theory is "not just a piece of the 19th century, but rather authoritarian barbarism."
Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, herbert marcuse, max horkheimer
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