"Philosophy and Critical Theory"
Erich Fromm :
Humanistic Psychoanalysis
Erich Fromm:
Politics and Psychoanalysis
Reason
- The fundamental category to have come out of philosophical thought is Reason
- Reason was "the idea of an authentic Being in which all significant antithesis (of subject and object, essence and appearance, thought and being) were reconciled" (Pg. 59)
- Reason became that by which the given world was judged
- Man must be able to influence the world for Reason to have any practical consequence
- People torn from primitive union with nature
- Yet have power of: reason, foresight, imagination
- Self-Awareness
- Feelings of: isolation, homelessness
- Two choices:
- Escape from freedom into dependency
- Self-realization: love & work
- Personality understood in terms of human history
- Can peace be achieved through mass psychoanalysis?
- Interpreting individual personality requires looking at their "life-fate"
- Determined by constitution & experience (Freud)
- Applying to society requires "common life-fate"
- Economy = fate of society
- Psychoanalysis & Historical Materialism:
- Consciousness has same role in both
- Driving forces of consciousness are different
Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School: An Interdisciplinary Historical Approach
Erich Fromm:
Politics & Psychoanalysis
Erich Fromm
- Psychoanalysis of society would require understanding its relationship with method of historical materialism
- This "gross misunderstanding" assumes:
- Historical materialism = conscious driven by economic/acquisitive interest
- Psychoanalysis = driven by sexuality
- Historical materialism actually concerned with economic conditions, (social, political, economic), ideology
- But HOW these ideologies come to be ignored
Progress
Why does Fromm believe there is a “gross misunderstanding” between historical materialism and psychoanalysis (215-216)? How does he attempt to bridge the gap between the two?
Angelous Novus
Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.
This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward
This storm is what we call progress.
Theodor Adorno:
Background
Frankfurt School
Theodor Adorno:
Causes/effects of authoritarian personality
However, "science as a means of production has not been properly applied" (57).
Notes on Science and the Crisis
Max Horkheimer
- Institute for Social Research
- Updating of Marxian critique of Capitalism and Revolution
- Thus: "critical theory" of society emerges
- Examine aspects downplayed by Marxists
- Late 40s, early 50s
- Europe recovering from WWII
- Anti-communist sentiments in US
- Members of Institute looking for roots of fascism through empirical research
- Authoritarian Personality: part of Institute's Studies of Prejudice
- Wanted to explain it to hopefully eliminate it
- Why do individuals accept irrational forms of authority?
- Look at conception of ideology and underlying needs in the person
1. ...science accepts as a principle that its every step has a critical basis, yet the most important step of all, the setting of tasks, lacks a theoretical grounding and seems to be taken arbitrarily (56).
- Contradiction:
- We have mastery over the scientific method, but not over its focus
- Similar to the economy
- "in large measure dominated by monopolies, and yet on the world scale it is disorganized and chaotic” (56).
Science is a means of production with social foundations
- As a store of information on nature and the human world,
- Possessed even by people in the lower social classes
- Part of the intellectual equipment of the researcher,
- Whose discoveries decisively affect the forms of social life (52).
- Creates social values
2. ...science has to do with a knowledge of comprehensive relationships; yet, it has no realistic grasp of that comprehensive relationship upon which its own existence and the direction of its work depend, namely, society (56).
The scope and direction of science is not predetermined by science itself
- It is subject to the tendencies, agendas, and limitations of scientists
- It is subject to the needs of social life
Theodor Adorno
Source: http://people.cs.uct.ac.za/~dnunez/new/teaching/psy203s_authoritarian.ppt
Critical Theory
Questionnaire scales:
- A-S: Anti-Semitism
- E: Ethnocentrism
- PEC: Political & Economic Conservatism
- F: Potential for Fascism
*Scales measure attitudes, F meant to measure organization of personality
- Tested using: scales, surveys, clinical-like interviews, projective exams
- F-Scale has 9 sub-scales
- Conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, projection, sex, power & toughness, destructiveness & cynicism, superstition & stereotyping, anti-introception
Theodor Adorno
"From Ontology to Technology"
What was the ultimate purpose of technology and how has it been manipulated so that, as Marcuse writes, "Technicity became the most efficient method, the most fruitful way, to subjugate man to his instrument labor"?
The root of this deficiency, however, is not in science itself but in the social conditions which hinder its development and are, at loggerheads with the rational elements immanent in science.
- As an ideology held by the bourgeois, science continues to seek science and becomes further estranged from societal application
- Strict mathematical or “scientific” methods lend themselves to "a form which hinders it in discovering the real causes of the crisis” (55).
- “...oriented to being and not becoming” (54).
- Does not capture, or refuses to acknowledge, the dynamics of society
- "Critical Theory" term emerged in '37
- Most members had emigrated to US following Hitler's rise to power
- General theory of contemporary society
- Aimed to allow criticism/revision
- Sought freedom from all oppression
- Committed to: freedom, happiness, rational ordering of society
- Critique of mass culture
- Often incorporated empirical analyses (e.g. Adorno)
- Inspired by dialectic tradition (Hegel/Marx)
- Stark differences between some members
- Horkheimer, director 1930, wanted multidisciplinary approach
“Philosophy and Critical Theory” & “From Ontology to Technology”
- Seeking to understand "potential fascists"
- Those who'd likely "accept fascism" if it had a strong social movement
- Personality "evolves under the impact of the social environment"
- Hypothesis: "political, economic, and social convictions of an individual often form a broad and coherent pattern...this pattern is an expression of deep-lying trends in his personality"
- Looks at total personality: "Enduring organization of forces within"
Theodor Adorno
Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, Nevitt Sanford
1950
Science must be rooted in a broader societal context
Understanding of the crisis of science depends on a correct theory of the present social situation; for science as a social function reflects at present the contradictions with society (57).
Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
Thesis on the Philosophy of History
Max Benjamin
Example questions:
- The businessman and the manufacturer are more important to our country than artists and writers.
- Every person should have complete faith in a supernatural being whose decisions he obeys without question.
- An insult to our honor should always be punished.
Authoritarian parenting instills strict morals, that human nature is sinful and must be restricted, threats and punishment encourage respect.
- Can be heightened by "status anxiety"
- When moving to a lower levels of society can cause insecurity
- Fits theory that economic conditions affect psychological responses.
"From Ontology to Technology"
"Philosophy and Critical Theory"
"From Ontology to Technology"
Erich Fromm: Background
Historicism and Historical Materialism
Where nature and human reality fall within a technical world
- Reason is dependent upon the tensions that arise between different modes of being: between subject and object
- The movement towards technicity undermines this relationship
- the noumenal and phenomenal worlds lose their distinction because both are regulated by mathematics
The Turk
The role of economics within Critical Theory
- Critical Theory of society is an economic system, not a philosophical one
- Human happiness cannot be without an overhaul of the prevailing material conditions
- Freedom, happiness, and rights can be attained in the real world
- The ultimate goal of Critical Theory is to liberate "the totality of human relations" (Pg. 65)
A few of the reasons why
- It is possible for man to attain his liberty through the use of technology
- Yet, man's own aims have been lost to the technical process
- The result is that rather than allowing man to at last be comfortable with his immediate instincts (enjoyment, rest, satiation, etc.), technology subjects man to labor
- "In this process, the human organism ceases to exist as an instrument of satisfaction and instead becomes an instrument of work an renunciation: satisfaction is postponed, enjoyment sacrificed" (Pg. 125)
- Critical Social Psychology
- Freudian psychoanalyst
- Post WWII popularity
- Escape from Freedom, The Sane Society
- Influenced by:
- Humanistic rabbis
- Marx & Freud
- Zen Buddhism (rationality)
- Johann Jakob Bachofen's writings on matriarchal societies
The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.
- Historicism gives the "eternal" image of the past;
- Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time.
- History for history
One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called "historical materialism" is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.
Erich Fromm:
Politics and Psychoanalysis
"Philosophy and Critical Theory"
"From Ontology to Technology"
"Philosophy and Critical Theory"
Why Does Kant's philosophy not bring about a better future?
The impacts of the scientific method
- The scientific method opened the way for mankind to overcome human relations based on predetermination
- freedom, happiness, and rights could be realized in the world
- The scientific method's emphasis on truth as that which can be calculated had negative consequences
- The natural world becomes a technical world
Limits of fantasy (or imagination)
- Critical Theory only focuses on economics until the exploitative economic system is reconditioned
- In a rational reality, the laborers are ends and the labor process works for them, not them for the process
- Marcuse says that there is "not an endless horizon of possibilities," but that the only limit to the potentialities of freedom, happiness, and rights is the level of technological progress, and the nature of technology/how it is used (Pg. 71)
Historical Materialism
Because...
- It tells people to find reason and freedom through mental activity; separate from the physical world
- Marcuse's example of a person with a debilitating condition
- This leads to an inability to transcend the given social system, and this is why Kant's philosophy plays into the hands of the bourgeoisie
- Psychoanalytical can bridge this gap
- Shows how certain economic conditions can affect people
- Psychoanalysis as politico-social therapy?
- Individuals with disturbances caused by neurosis
- "The mass is not a neurotic"
- Emotional attitudes depend on living conditions/changes in conditions
- Mass "neuroticism" can't be cured by analysis
- Must transform triggering circumstances
Historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past.
It is based on a constructive principle
- The historian focuses on unique configurations planted in time - a monad
- a revolutionary chance
- Messianic cessation of happening
- Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.
Vulgar-Marxist view:
Progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society;
- First of all, the progress of mankind itself
- Secondly, it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind.
- Thirdly, progress was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course.
Historical materialism can be used as a tool
- History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by, the presence of the now.
- The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called "Once upon a time" in historicism's bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.