Richard Wolin

The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism

Despite their differences in origin, the three influential schools of twentieth-century continental cultural criticism--the Frankfurt School, existentialism, and poststructuralism--have long been treated as an ensemble and with critical hesitancy. Examining these schools as responses to the apparent collapse of Western civilization in the twentieth-century and as formidable intellectual challenges to the cultural legacies of the Enlightenment, this book provides a productive base for criticism and broadens our understanding of their histories and reception.

Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger: An Exchange of Letters

Lieber Herr Heidegger, I have thought for a long time about what you told me during my visit to Todtnauberg, and I would like to write to you about it quite openly. You told me that you fully dissociated yourself from the Nazi regime as of 1934, that in your lectures you made extremely critical remarks, and that you were observed by the Gestapo. I will not doubt your word. But the fact remains that in 1933 you identified yourself so strongly with the regime that today in the eyes of many you are considered as one of its strongest intellectual proponents. Your own speeches, writings, and treatises from this period are proof thereof. You have never publicly retracted them not even after 1945. You have never publicly explained that you have arrived at judgments other than those which you expressed in 1933-34 and articulated in your writings. You remained in Germany after 1934, although you could have found a position abroad practically anywhere. You never publicly denounced any of the actions or ideologies of the regime. Because of these circumstances you are still today identified with the Nazi regime. Many of us have long awaited a

Critical Theory and the Dialectic of Rationalism

ion, the tool of enlightenment, treats its objects as it did fate, the notion of which it rejects: it liquidates them .... The distance between subject and object, a presupposition of abstraction, is grounded in the distance from the thing itself which the master achieved through the mastered .... The universality of ideas as developed by discursive logic, domination 40. Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin ofNegative Dialectics (New York, 1977). 41. Cf. Benjamin, Illuminations 254 ff. I have explored the relationship between the philosophies of history ofBenjamin and the authors ofDialecticofEnlightenment in my study WalterBenjamin: An Aesthetic ofRedemption (New York, 1982) 266 ff. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 05:29:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 48 Dialectic ofRationality in the conceptual sphere, is raised up on the basis of actual domination. The dissolution of the magical heritage, of the old diffuse ideas, by conceptual unity, expresses the hierarchical constitution of life determined by those who are free. The individuality that learned order and subordination in the subjection of the world, soon wholly equated truth with the regulative thought without whose fixed distinctions universal truth cannot exist.42 The explanation for the emergence of rational thought offered here is a thoroughly disenchanted one. Its motives point in the direction of a radicalized ideology-critique that seems to draw more on pragmatist insights and a genealogical focus of Nietzschean inspiration than the Marxist tradition with which critical theory was earlier associated. The utopian potentials of the rational concept could emerge only with great difficulty from this perspective. Instead, the faculty of rational thought would appear to have more determinate links with the history of domination over human and non-human nature than with prospects for emancipation. Whereas Horkheimer seemed for the most part to retain this negative historico-philosophical orientation in his later work, he never attempted to work out fully the epistemological implications of the critique of reason in Dialectic ofEnlightenment. Instead, this task was left to Adorno, who, one might say, executed it with a vengeance in Negative Dialectics, where it seems that the most essential function that conceptual thought could assume at present would be to reflect on its own inadequacies. As Adorno remarks: Reflection upon its own meaning is the way out of the concepts seeming being-in-itself as a unit of meaning .... Disenchantment of the concept is the antidote of philosophy. It keeps it from growing rampant and becoming an absolute unto itself.4s If the preceding reconstruction of the development of critical theory is correct, then its own internal ambivalences concerning the history of Western rationalism would have to be taken into consideration to a much greater extent than it has been in the secondary literature heretofore. One possible way out of this dilemma would seem to be to 42. Horkheimerand Adorno, DialecticofEnlightenment 13-14. 43. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (NewYork, 1973) 12-13. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 05:29:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Richard Rorty in Retrospect

Richard Rorty, who died in 2007, was one of the leading American philosophers of the twentieth century. Rorty hailed from a family of leftists. His parents, James Rorty and Winifred Raushenbush, were disillusioned communists with avowed Trotskyist sympathies. His maternal grandfather was Walter Raushenbush, who, during the 1920s and 1930s, along with Reinhold Niebuhr, was one of the pioneers of the Social Gospel movement. In his sermons, Raushenbush would rail volubly against “the servants of Mammon...who drain their fellow men for gain. . .who have made us ashamed of our dear country by their defilements...[and] who have cloaked their extortion with the gospel of Christ.” Despite this background, Rorty’s own political interests crystallized relatively late in life, with the 1998 publication of Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in the Twentieth Century.

Introduction to Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger: An Exchange of Letters

Existentialism collapses in the moment when its political theory is realized. The total-authoritarian state which it yearned for gives the lie to all its truths. Existentialism accompanies its collapse with a self-abasement that is unique in intellectual history; it carries out its own history as a satyr-play to the end. It began philosophically as a great debate with Western rationalism and idealism, in order to redeem the historical concretion of individual existence for this

Defending the Enlightenment

Richard Wolin reviews Susan Neimans Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists and Rob Riemens Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal.

Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism.

Written by a former student of Heidegger, this book examines the relationship between the philosophy and the politics of a celebrated teacher and the allure that Nazism held out for scholars committed to revolutionary nihilism.

A Radical Philosophy

The author analyzes the nature of philosophical activity to show how questions of value still constitute the core of philosophy, and to make plain the choices and obligations these questions impose. The book begins by showing the worlds need for a changed philosophy; it ends by showing how philosophy needs a changed world, a world in which humanity can be at home. Thus it is a statement of a radical philosophy and a philosophy for radicals - based unashamedly on a commitment to both morality and pluralism.

Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption

Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolins book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamins writings, offering a philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism, and Western Marxism. Wolin provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamins widely studied writings on Baudelaire, historiography, and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially for this edition, Wolin discusses the unfinished Arcades Project, as well as recent tendencies in the reception of Benjamins work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates about modernity and postmodernity.