FRANKFURT SCHOOL

The Frankfurt School, most famous for its Critical Theory, was conceived in 1922 by Felix Weil. His family fortune provided for both the inauguration of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany and the financial independence necessary for its members to perform the envisaged social research and theoretical speculation both there and elsewhere, especially in the United States, during the period of exile caused by Nazism. Officially erected in 1923, the Institute only began to develop the approach which later characterized it in 1930 under the leadership of Max Horkheimer (1895–1973). He remained director of the Institute until his retirement. He and Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) are most closely identified with both the Institute and the development of its Critical Theory. Among others associated with the institute, the more well known are W. Benjamin, F. Pollock, and especially in the United States, P. Tillich, E. Fromm, H. Marcuse, and J. Habermas.

General Theory. In order to produce a new critical theory, the Frankfurt School attempted a fusion of Marx's socio-economic with Freud's psychoanalytic critique. Originally directed precisely against the capitalist economic system and its concomitant implicit ontology, the new Critical Theory soon widened its scope to include the "whole (of reality)," which it deemed to be a "totally administered world," and, hence, destructive of individual human persons, their freedom, their pleasure, their being. Thus, "the (empirical) whole is the untrue." Consequently, Critical Theory rejected both the more recent positivism, empiricism, and scientism as well as the older classical metaphysical systems, because both inherently tend to accept and equate any given particular state of reality with reality pure and simple. According to Critical Theory, the malaise of modern man is rooted specifically in the Enlightenment, but can be traced all the way back to the dawn of human consciousness and reflective thinking. The exploitation of nature and the alienation of humanity involved in this beginning have intensified steadfastly and culminated in the capitalist economic system, whose own proper fruit has been the mass culture and consumer civilization, so typical of the West, but inexorably infecting all mankind. The result is the total and seemingly incurable alienation of man—not only economic, social, cultural, but also ontological.

A Theological Dimension. Although some thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School have remained steadfastly atheistic, there is discernible in the writings of especially Benjamin and the later Horkheimer and Adorno what has been termed a theological dimension. Thus Adorno and Horkheimer have been led to the conclusion that, since "the whole is the untrue," the appeal to or "longing for the entirely other" is not absolutely reprobate, although it "is, to be sure, a nonscientific wish." However, on the basis of their fear of and opposition to the cheap reconciliation advocated in customary metaphysical systems (German Idealism) and the reduction of everything to the status of means in contemporary empiricist scientism, they remain decidedly dedicated to their Negative Dialectic. By it alone can the temptation to absolutize the present moment be overcome. Thus their admittedly impressive achievement remains but a negative critique. Hence their noble aim of overcoming the split in human consciousness, of reconciling subject and object, person and nature, of restoring paradise (the influence, however implicit and unreflective, of the Jewish background of many members of the Frankfurt School ought never be overlooked) was essentially beyond attainment. The thin line between Judeo-Christian negative theology and rationalist agnosticism is strikingly manifest in their thought.

Writings. Horkheimer and Adorno not only thought together, they also wrote together Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York 1944, 1972). The foundation of Critical Theory, as well as of all their later writings, was provided by that book along with Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason (New York 1947, 1974) and Adorno's Minima Moralia (Frankfurt, 1951, 1976). Their entire work can be viewed, as they themselves viewed it, as "a critique of philosophy, and therefore (it) refuses to abandon philosophy." Their journey, starting in the culture of assimilated German Jewry, took them through classical Greek and modern European philosophy as well as the Marxist and Freudian critiques to a head-on confrontation with contemporary mass-consumer culture, created by technological rationalism. They were philosophers characterized by a refusal to accept human suffering, by a demand for justice in a world where injustice at least seems to triumph. Hence they were led to define the human being as the "Longing for the Entirely Other," the title of what may be termed Horkheimer's last will and testament (Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen, Hamburg 1970). For theistic thinkers their writings are clearly an inspiration and a challenge, for the philosophy of religion an especially fertile source of new insights about the transcendent, both human and divine.

Bibliography: Suhrkamp Verlag of Frankfurt, Germany, has published the collected works of T. Adorno and is publishing those of M. Horkheimer. t. adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York 1972); Jargon of Authenticity (Evanston 1973). t. adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (New York 1976). m. horkheimer, Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen (Hamburg, 1979); Critical Theory (New York 1972); Critique of Instrumental Reason (New York 1974). m. jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston 1973). k. oppens et al., Über Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt 1970). h. schweppenhÄuser, ed., Theodor W. Adorno zum Gedachtnis (Frankfurt 1971).

[r. kress]