Thread by @ConceptualJames

The origin of the Critical Theory was an essay by Frankfurt School director Max Horkheimer, titled "Traditional and Critical Theory," written in 1937. It says the same crap we deal with today.

The essence of Horkheimer's essay is that traditional theory, which is concerned with facts and figures and math and stuff, cares about understanding the world as it is without wanting to see beyond it or change it.

Therefore, the traditional theorist reproduces the society in which he works, un-Critically.

In fact, he doesn't even realize he's part of a historically contingent moment and just repeating and reaffirming the assumptions and class conflict of his time. (For Marxists, all of history, wrote Marx, is the history of (the evolution of) class antagonisms, so any particular moment in history is a particular set of class antagonisms based on a stage of historical development.)

Horkheimer writes,
"In this view of theory, therefore, the real social function of science is not made manifest; it speaks not of what theory means in human life, but only of what it means in the isolated sphere in which for historical reasons it comes into existence. Yet as a matter of fact the life of society is the result of all the work done in the various sectors of production. Even if therefore the division of labor in the capitalist system functions but poorly, its branches, including science, do not become for that reason self-sufficient and independent. They are particular instances of the way in which society comes to grips with nature and maintains its own inherited form."

In short, knowing what you're talking about is just a means of reproducing the oppressive society, so it's not actually that good. In fact, Horkheimer says the Critical Theory is suspicious of the very idea that the society we have produces good things at all.

Horkheimer writes,
"On the contrary, [Critical Theory] is suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable, as these are understood in the present order, and refuses to take them as nonscientific presuppositions about which one can do nothing."

For Horkheimer, there is no making anything "better, useful, appropriate, productive, or valuable" in the existing (capitalist) system because the whole thing is rotten and any improvements only make the situation worse by making people believe it is good or that it works. Dismal!

The alternative is to adopt a Critical Theory as a second and dominant dimension of theoretical thinking. This style of thinking imagines a world outside of the current system that is more concerned with living the good life than it is with getting right answers about the world or making things better inside the system.

Horkheimer writes,
"In fact, however, the self-knowledge of present-day man is not a mathematical knowledge of nature which claims to be the eternal Logos [traditional theory, strawmanned badly], but a critical theory of society as it is, a theory dominated at every turn by a concern for reasonable conditions of life."

This is the classic socialist strawman and sad-funny-dangerous confusion: only socialism has any "concern for reasonable conditions of life." Therefore, anything that isn't socialism is a system that doesn't have "concern for reasonable conditions of life." All of socialism is this conclusion in search of arguments and damage it can do to the existing system.

My point isn't these details, though. I'm only showing you them so you can see that they're there from the start. My point is telling you what a Critical Theory is and always has been.

It's the annoying claim that people who work to make the society we have better are upholding it and therefore a problem because they have decided the system we have is rotten at its very foundations and has to be replaced with socialism to be any good.

It doesn't matter that not one society ever in the history of man has made a socialist society work, and they have produced little more than squalor, misery, struggle, and death. People just haven't conceived of it rightly yet.

How should they conceive of it, then?

The Critical Theorists don't tell us. In fact, Horkheimer said some 30 years later that they can't tell us. He said that it is not possible to describe a good or ideal society on the terms of the existing society. "We lack the means," he said in a 1969 interview. All they can do, he insisted, is bring up the negative aspects of the society we have that they wish to change.

So Critical Theory is a belief that making society better is a moral wrong because it reproduces a society they hate. They cannot offer anyone a viable alternative, though. All they can do is complain about things that don't go perfectly until people come to hate the society they have for not being something they can't even describe.

For the New Discourses homies, there's more!

What Horkheimer was doing was re-establishing in a slightly new way Hegel's original hierarchical categories of "The Science" (Wissenschaft, as conceived of by Hegel in the early 19th century).

If you recall, Hegel divided Wissenschaft (The Science) into two levels, Vernunft (Reason, superior) and Verstand (Understanding, inferior). Working to understand the world was important but only revealed to you the world within the current Theoretical Idea, which is limited. Reason, as he called it, was more important because it pointed outside of the current conception through the dialectic. Understanding had to be made to reflect and indicate Reason, and Reason would draw out the contradictions that are unveiled to update the Theoretical Idea (closer to the Absolute).

For those really in the know, Hegel didn't even invent this. He, like most German mystics (er, "idealists") at the time, was Neoplatonic in much of his thinking and just imported it from Plato and then pretended he didn't, first by naming it all in German instead of the original Greek and then by never mentioning the fact.

For Plato, it was Scientia that was The Science, and it was hierarchically composed of episteme and dianoia (maybe plus techne) in the same relationship. I don't have to tell you what these things mean from the Greek because I already told you in the German imports.

The astute student of science here will immediately recognize that this program ("The Science") gets science exactly backwards, now that it has matured. As Richard Feynman said, the meaning of science is that it doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is (Vernunft, Reason, episteme, whatever), if it disagrees with observation (Verstand, understanding, dianoia, whatever), it's wrong.

That is, in the sciences, theory has to accord itself to the observations, not the other way around. Hegel's Wissenschaft and Plato's Scientia get science exactly inverted. Theories are comprehensive explanatory systems of all of the available established facts and observations. They are the product of "understanding," not the guide for it.

Horkheimer's project was just to rename Hegel's inverted categories of Wissenschaft in terms of two approaches to "theory." Understanding, Verstand, he renamed "traditional theory." Reason, Vernunft, he renamed "Critical Theory" and based all of its assumptions on Western Marxism as it was developing in the Frankfurt School (and before with characters like Gramsci and Lukacs).

He then projected the consequence of the inversion, which is that science/traditional theory exists to reaffirm itself as it already exists, onto traditional theory and to make Critical Theory the escape hatch from that Hermetically sealed epistemic loop. That is, he said it is traditional theory that forces all observations to fit existing theory, and Critical Theory sees beyond that (and with a different goal, the "reasonable conditions of life" or whatever.

Horkheimer writes exactly that,
"In the social division of labor the savant's [talented traditional theorist's] role is to integrate facts into conceptual frameworks and to keep the latter up-to- date so that he himself and all who use them may be masters of the widest possible range of facts. Experiment has the scientific role of establishing facts in such a way that they fit into theory as currently accepted. The factual material or subject matter is provided from without; science sees to its formulation in clear and comprehensible terms, so that men may be able to use the knowledge as they wish."

As a good little Marxist, he insists (just before this passage) that the reason is because these results are useful to industry, particularly industries that produce things like explosives. They're such slimy little bastards, aren't they?

Anyway, the Critical Theorist is the one who understands the relevant "social division of labor" here and therefore how the "savant" is just reproducing the given theory with no possible paradigmatic update (that is, becoming a socialist, ultimately).

So the Critical Theorist is the one with a predetermined conclusion (Vernunft), escape from the existing Hermetically closed system for socialism (the guiding "Reason" to do theory at all), who is forcing all analysis into it, and Horkheimer projects that onto the traditional theorist. This is the same thing every Critical Theorist today does when he insists that whatever it is just maintains the "status quo."

But, as is always the case, there's nothing new or interesting in the formulation of the Critical Theory. It's just recycled Hegel in more Marxist-materialist terms. It's just the same crackpot mysticism that keeps coming back and coming back and coming back in slightly new formulations with new terminology such that it can apparently bamboozle another series of generations of people for another century.