by Francis Lee for The Saker Blog

Nomenclature Below – Men and Ideas

1. INTERACTIONISM/PHENOMENOLOGY

Wilhem Dilthey (1833-1911)

Edmund Husserl (1859-1958)

Max Weber (1864-1920)

Alfred Schutz (1899-1959)

Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936)

Karl Mannheim (1893-1947)

2. EXISTENTIALISM

F.Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Martin Heidegger (1899-1976)

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1985)

3. HUMANISTIC MARXISM

Georgy Lukacs (1885-1971)

Karl Korsch (1886-1961)

4.  THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

Herbert Marcuse

Walter Benjamin

Theodor Adorno

Max Horkheimer

Erich Fromm

Neo-Frankfurt

Jurgen Harbermas

PART 1

HUMANISM INPHILSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

At the outset, it needs to be made clear that I am using the terms ‘humanism’ in a generic, but also very specific manner: generic insofar as in that it will be used to subsume several overlapping and inter-related perspectives in sociology (and psychology and philosophy for that matter). The latter will include hermeneutics, phenomenology, interactionism, existentialism, ethnomethodology, and behaviourism; specific in the sense that it refers to a perspective based upon the unique attributes of man, and an appreciation that although man is part of nature he is also distinct from nature. Humanism, particularly as it was developed in Germany and the German speaking world, was perhaps synonymous with romanticism; its patterns of thought and weltanschauung that it gave rise to was in large part a reaction against both the Gradgrind empiricism which developed in Britain and the rationalist tradition in France. The Anglo-French worldview was itself very much a product of the Enlightenment and was composed of two distinct currents of thought which gave rise to the formation of positivist doctrine. On the one hand there was the philosophy of Descartes, and on the other the empiricist tradition articulated by Bacon, Hume, Locke and the two Mills (father and son, James and John).

The Anglo-French approach made little headway in Germany. For the German philosophical tradition is best characterised by the idealist celebration of the self; by respect for the transcendental, and by the conviction of the power of the imagination and will. As opposed to positivism – namely, the doctrine that the social and historical world may be apprehended and understood by using a precise empirical-quantitative methodology as used by the natural sciences – humanism regards the social and historical world as being largely inaccessible to experimental-quantitative investigation. Fundamental to difference between positivism and hermeneutics (i.e. the interpretive understanding of man and society) is the dualistic of humanism and the monistic structure of positivist thought. This structure entails an assumption on the part of positivists that there is one world – a world of nature of which man and society are a part. This view is easily discernible in both behaviourism and functionalism. Thus, there is no distinction to be made between the world of inanimate matter and the world of man and society. Both nature and society are held to be governed by an unchanging and invariant system of cause-effect connexions or laws. It therefore follows that the methodology which has had such (it is claimed) spectacular success in discovering these laws in the natural world, should also be utilised in the study of history and the social world.

Humanism, except in its more extreme phenomenological forms, regards this as being largely question begging. The outer world of causal necessity must be sharply demarcated from the inner world of will, meanings, values, intuitions, emotions, normative and religious impulses. What constitutes an appropriate methodology for the study of nature should not necessarily be regarded as serving for the template methodology for the study of man and society. Humanistic epistemology, therefore, is dualistic in the sense that it postulates two worlds – nature and man – and implicit in this recognition is the necessity to fashion methods of enquiry and investigation which are appropriate for each.

It was the great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) who first laid the foundations of this approach. In his magnum opus, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) he was to put forward this notion of two worlds: there was the world as it is the noumenal or intelligible world, and the world as it appears to us – the phenomenal or sensible world. He argued that we could only directly apprehend the phenomenal world, i.e. the world of appearances. Being trapped in the world of appearances we could only infer the existence of a ‘higher’, ‘transcendental’ or ‘noumenal’ world. What we did not and indeed could not know was whether world as it appeared to us corresponded to the world as it was. We could not know the thing-in-itself. Did appearance coincide with essence? Since there was no way of finding out we were left with a rather unsatisfactory epistemological agnosticism.

Moreover, this cosmological dualism is taken further and replicated in the self. Kant divides the self into:

1.  The knowing subject, or noumenal self, and

2.  The object which is known about, the phenomenal self.

Thus, the self becomes a unity of two worlds, the subject-object, inner and outer, noumenal and phenomenal, intelligible and sensible. On the one hand, the phenomenal is posited in the world of appearances and subject to causal laws; on the other hand, the noumenal self exists outside the realm of necessity and inside the world of choice and moral freedom. Contemplating these two dimensions of human existence Kant opined that ‘’ “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

It was in this way that Kant had solved (or at least thought he had solved) the timeless antimony of the freedom-versus-necessity polemic.

Subsequent German thought never escaped the giant shadow cast by the Konigsberg professor. After the substantial interruption of Hegel, the Kantian influence reasserted itself in Germany: Neo-Kantianism began in the 1870s and took on a number of different hues. Probably the most influential of these was the Marburg school, but no less important – for our purposes at least – was the Baden school, whose best-known representatives were Windelband and Rickert. This latter strain of neo-Kantianism was of crucial importance for the development of hermeneutics and interpretive social theory. (It should be noted at this point that social theory and sociology were now beginning to develop within the matrix of traditional philosophy.) As Kantians Windelband and Rickert’s epistemology was based upon a dualistic structure: they argued for two types of knowledge, and, as a consequence, they advocated two types of methodology. There were the sciences of the natural world (Naturewissenschaften) and the sciences of man and society (Kulturwissenschaften) or (Geisteswissenschaften). This was also the view of one Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) who for a time had been under the influence of the British and French positivists. Dilthey was to advocate an interpretive system of social science, Geisteswissenschaften, for the study of the social world. The methodology would be in part based upon the strictly scientific approach (since man was a material being in the world and therefore subject to invariant laws of causality), but also based upon an interpretive understanding (verstehen) of the inner dimension of human existence which remained inaccessible to empirical investigation. This latter approach Dilthey termed Hermeneutics. The combination of the two methodologies, that is, the hermeneutic-scientific paradigm was to become known as Lebensphilosphie.

‘’We do not show ourselves genuine disciples of the great scientific thinkers simply by transferring their methods to our sphere: we must adjust our knowledge to the nature of our subject matter and thus treat it as the scientists treated theirs. We conquer nature by submitting to it. The human studies (Geisteswissenschaften) differ from the natural sciences because the latter deal with facts which present themselves to consciousness as external and separate phenomena, whilst the former deal with the living connections of reality experienced in the mind … We explain nature but we understand mental life … This means that the methods of studying mental life, history and society differ greatly from those used to achieve knowledge of nature … and … Any empiricism which forgoes an explanation of what happens in the mind in terms of the understood connections of mental life is necessarily sterile.’’ (Ideas about a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology).

Thus, it would be incorrect to cast Dilthey as being an opponent of science; it would be more correct to say that he was aware of the limitation of scientific methods, and aware of its misapplications to the human studies. Not only would natural science methodology be inappropriate for the study of man and society, it would positively distort the very reality it sought to apprehend. He argued that:

‘’The starting point is the scientific approach. As long as it remains conscious of its limitations its results are incontestable’’ (An Introduction to the Human Studies)

Commitment to science yes, but the caveat is clear in that the wholesale importation of natural science methodology into the human studies (positivism) as advocated by inter alia, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill, would ‘’mutilate the very historical reality they sought to understand to assimilate it to the concepts and methods of natural science.’’ (op.cit)

As a thinker Dilthey was very much under-rated and was to strongly influence Max Weber (1864-1920). It might also be noted that little in the way of an admission of intellectual indebtedness came from the latter source. This notwithstanding, and taking his cue from Dilthey, Weber was also committed to the construction of a new unified scientific-hermeneutic paradigm for the social sciences. This commitment is summed up in his famous axiom, ‘’sociology must be causally adequate and adequate at the level of meaning.’’ Weber believed that history and society consisted of an interlocking concatenation of cause-effect variables which might be apprehended by dispassionate empirical investigation, such as was instanced in his famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (PESC) where he sought to explain the rise of capitalism in the west by reference to several antecedent causal variables (one of which was ascetic Protestantism). Per Contra, however, he was also of the view that the understanding (Verstehen) of ‘meanings’ is essential to the understanding of human action. Moreover, this understanding involved an interpretive penetration into the inner world of meaning structures (hermeneutics) and was bound, therefore, to be largely intuitive, involving as it did the synchronisation of two minds. This dualism in Weber’s thinking is again apparent in his work, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, where he argues for the necessity of a value-free social science, and then goes on – like Kant – why such value-freedom is not possible. My own view was that Weber was in fact arguing for a rigorous rather than a scientific sociology.

In the world of philosophy, the post-Kantian movement in Germany was moving away from epistemology (theory of knowledge) and towards ontology (theory of being). Thus, latter branch of philosophy being subsumed under the catch-all phrase ‘’existentialism’’. In the first instance the main proponents of this doctrine were Freidrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and a little later by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). There were also a number of other inputs into this doctrine but for some reason they all came from France. These included Sartre, Buber and Merleau-Ponty.

Like nearly all German thought, existentialism is generally opposed to rationalist and empiricist doctrine – which is to say the whole Anglo-French intellectual/philosophical tradition which assumes that the universe is a determined and ordered system, governed by objective laws intelligible to the contemplative observer who may discover these natural laws. Existentialists also question the assumption that reason is the guiding force in the regulation of human affairs. For existentialists, the universe is an unknowable chaos; no individual has a predetermined place or function within a rational system and no-one can discover his supposed duty through reasoning: everybody is compelled to assume the responsibility of making choices. Because of this the human condition is one of anxiety (angst) which arises from man’s realisation of this necessary freedom of choice, of the awareness of manifold possibilities, and of the finiteness of any existence that was preceded by and must terminate in nothingness.

Free-choice is at the heart of existentialism – in a threefold sense: epistemological, ontological, and normative. This last sense being probably the most important. ‘Become what you are’ enjoined Nietzsche, ‘live authentically’ declares Heidegger. Excessive conformity – that is extrinsically induced role-structured behaviour – was an example of what Sartre called ‘bad faith’ or ‘mala fides’. When we cease to choose and merely slump into a preconceived ‘role’ we are in a state of inauthenticity or ‘bad faith’ (mala fides) because we are surrendering our humanity by this denial. Refusal to choose transforms us into ‘objects-in-the-world’ rather than a conscious acting subject. To repeat: The man who unthinkingly accepts his condition, including moral code by which he lives, as if it were inevitable, is in bad faith.

These moral imperatives, and the relativism which they imply, is also replicated in existential theories of knowledge. The world is to be interpreted as Nietzsche once remarked. From Nietzsche’s view point, not only was the selection of ethical codes and a way of living purely arbitrary and subjective, so also was the experience and perception of the natural world. We had a choice about what view of the world to adopt. Thus, the relativism which is at the heart of existentialism extends from the normative into the epistemological sphere:

‘’It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics too is only an interpretation and arrangement of the world (according to our own requirements, if I may say so, and not an explanation of the world).’’ (Beyond Good and Evil – aphorism 26)

This type of epistemological relativism clearly presages and permeates the work of later theorists of the sociology of knowledge and the philosophy of science such as Karl Mannheim and Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn endorsed the view that there is no objective world of ‘facts’ and ‘laws’ which may be apprehended using natural science methodology. Or at least if there were it would be impossible to recognise it even if we saw it. According to Kuhn scientific theories are constructed around paradigms, but these paradigms have a given shelf-life. It follows from this that if the world is paradigm-structured (which it is), the science is nothing more than – in Kantian terms – ‘making objects conform to our concepts.’ (We may note in passing that the Copernican revolution is still alive and kicking.) What was true at one time and place was not necessarily the case in any other. It would seem to follow logically that the history of science will more than confirm this, and that all ‘truths’ (excluding the a priori variety) must be regarded as being provisional. ‘Truth’ the ‘Facts’ are seen to be very elusive quarries; will-o’-the-wisps forever eluding our grasp. Science does not necessarily furnish us with an explanation of the world, instead it provides us with a paradigm which seems plausible for a given time. As George Santayana once opined in this connexion:

‘’Science … which had seemed like a family of absolute monarchs – sovereign axioms, immutable laws – was very shortly transformed into a democracy of theories elected for a short term of office.’’

It was initially through the work of Edmund Husserl (1859-1958) that phenomenology first entered the mainstream of the German humanistic tradition. In an attempt to ground reason in a secure context Hursserl advocated a system of rigorous introspection: an examination of individual intellectual processes. As far as Husserl was concerned there was and could be no distinction made between what is perceived and the perception of it. Unlike the empiricists, however, phenomenologists believed that experience is not limited to apprehension through the senses, but also includes whatever can be an object of thought, e.g., mathematical entities, moods, dreams and so forth.

Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) is usually credited with the development of phenomenological sociology whose main contours are to be found in his rather obscure work, The Phenomenology of the Social World. The theory is based upon a number of key premises.

The influence of social structure on individual behaviour is disregarded. Or in Husserllian terms ‘bracketed off’. Individual action stemmed from volition and meaning.

Phenomenological sociology is concerned with an analysis and description of everyday life, the ‘life-world’ of the individual and associated states of consciousness. Social reality is nothing more than the creation of the social actors resulting from their multiple interactions. Precisely in this sense, and in contrast with Kantian dualism, phenomenology is monistic – this insofar as there is deemed to be no second reality, no second noumenal or transcendental world beyond or behind the world of our creation, there is simply our own subjectively created world.

This ‘life-world’ is the ‘paramount reality’ of social life. As was the case with the other variants of the humanistic school, phenomenology requires interpretive skills of the highest order from its practitioners; these interpretive skills involving an intuitive and empathetic understanding of the inner states of the social actors. As Max Scheler, the famous advocate of this approach once remarked, ‘phenomenology was the name for an attitude of intuitive contemplation in which one receives something to intuit or to experience which would otherwise remain hidden.’

Demarcation of interactionism from phenomenology is largely a matter of emphasis: it could be argued the interactionism represents a methodological riposte to naturalist and positivist methodology, whereas phenomenology represents a strongly anti-structuralist theoretical perspective. Although of course in the final analysis this distinction is rather scholastic since it is impossible to disentangle method from theory – the one being predicated upon the other.

PART 2

HUMANISTIC MARXISM

It should be clear from what has already been said that the development of social theory does not take place in a vacuum. The development and formation will be given a quite distinctive stamp and be largely shaped by the national, political, and cultural milieu of which it is a part. Thus, the formation of German social theory both reflected, and in turn was largely influenced by that cultural and academic tradition. This is not to exclude the existence of a romantic movement in England or a positivist movement in the German speaking world; but these movements were weak and marginal, being out of step and against the mainstream of the dominant traditions.

What was true of German social theory in general was also true of Marxism in that part of the world – particularly during the 20th century. The general history of Marxism will provide ample evidence of a gradual ossification of a system of critical thought and political practice (praxis) into a pseudo-science of the most sterile positivist type. Marxism, particularly in the hands of those such as H.M.Hyndman, G.Plekhanov, F.Engels, and N.Bukharin, was to be transformed form a theory of revolutionary praxis into a materialistic dogma which postulated ‘iron laws’ of social development. Per the theory of historical materialism, for example, all societies moved through similar stages of development from ‘primitive communism’ to the definitive stage of ‘higher communism’. Within this grand conceptual schema socialism became the inevitable stage of human development. The views and actions of individual social actors were deemed irrelevant as this great historical drama unfolded.

This view of history and social development shares very strong affinities with that of the French positivists: indeed, there is a striking similarity between this doctrine and Auguste Comte’s ‘law of three stages’. It is worth repeating at this juncture that both positivism (and positivist Marxism) are both predicated upon the belief that the historical process moves forward under its own impetus and according to the laws of historical development which are regarded as having an objective existence. This inexorable historical process will take place regardless of the wishes, views, and activities of individual social actors. The object of the social scientist should be to lay bare these ‘laws’ of social development. This positivist outlook is common to thinkers as diverse as Durkheim and Engels.

It is precisely this positivist Marxism that became one of the principal objects of attack for the humanistic Marxism of Georgy Lukacs (1885-1971) Karl Korsch, and later the Frankfurt School (see more below). In his very influential and at the time controversial book History and Class Consciousness Lukacs critiqued what he regarded as the pseudo-scientific, orthodox Marxist ‘science of society arguing that it leads to a contemplative position on the part of the observer. This necessarily followed if socialism was regarded as being in any sense inevitable. For if it were inevitable the implication would be that political praxis would be irrelevant. Lukacs always insisted that Marxism was first and foremost a theory of political praxis. Political activity was indispensable for any struggle to change the world. Additionally, he was concerned to restate the dialectical relationship which existed between thought and being. In the rather sterile world of orthodox Marxism man was a social product, being determined consciousness. Changes in human consciousness were considered by the orthodox school to be mere epiphenomena occasioned by changes in the economic base of society. This in fact was not the view of Marx.

The young Marx – whom Lukacs and his co-thinkers were at pains to rehabilitate – always insisted upon the dialectical reciprocity which existed between being and consciousness, infrastructure and superstructure, historical subject and historical object, social and social structure. KM always insisted that man was both product and producer of history and culture. Following Marx, Lukacs was concerned to restate this relationship of the active and volitional side as well as the institutional and cultural side of being and consciousness; a relationship which had been obscured by the one-sided, structuralist, determinism of orthodox Marxism. The question of whether capitalism was to be replaced by socialism was, for Lukacs, a yet unresolved question. Such transitions are largely a matter of political will and organization. There was no inevitable transition from one to the other.

Concurrent with Lukacs’ work the social theory developed by the ‘Frankfurt School’ shared many affinities of the Hungarian thinker. The FS was comprised of a group of social scientists who worked at the Institute of Social Research (1923-1950) which was connected to the University of Frankfurt/Main. It was closed by the Nazis in 1933 but reopened after the war. During the period 1933-1945 the work of the school was transferred to the United States where members of the group worked at various universities including Columbia and Berkeley. These thinkers and the work included the following: Herbert Marcuse One-Dimensional Man, Reason and Revolution, Eros and Civilization, Theodore Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralis, Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, The Sane Society and other lesser luminaries such as Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer, who wrote mainly on aesthetics. The German playwright, Bertolt Brecht, was also part of this ideological milieu, although he was not directly involved.

The defining characteristics of the Frankfurt School – who were to become the intellectual icons for the far left in the 1960s – were as follows

  • A rejection of the type of economic determinism that was so much part of orthodox Marxism;
  • Extreme eclecticism incorporating into its own version of (humanistic) Marxism both Weberian social theory and Freudian psychoanalysis.

This rather catholic paradigm prompted the French social theorist, Raymond Aron to remark that ‘inside every neo-Marxist there is a neo-Weberian trying to get out.’

It should be no surprise, therefore, that discussions which took place between the wars involved both Marxists and non-Marxists, and that a certain cross-fertilization of views and ideas were to ensue.

A series of discussions took place in the Weber household on Sunday afternoons involving inter alia Max Weber, Lukacs, Georg Simmel and the writer Thomas Mann. Marianne Weber was to recall that only Lukacs could hold his own with her husband acting as an opposite pole of attraction during these informal debates.

Post 1945 Frankfurt neo or humanistic Marxism revised traditional Marxist theory arguing that the working class had become to a degree integrated into the system and had become a conservative force. This was particularly a cogent view put forward by Marcuse in One Dimensional Man. If there was to be a social revolution – and Marcuse and his co-thinkers were not particularly sanguine about this possibility – then it would have to come, or at least must be spearheaded by the ‘out’ groups, that is by those new radical forces and movements not yet integrated into the system, to wit, feminists, students, the poor and unemployed, ethnic minorities and ecological groups. The FS also placed considerable emphasis on the importance of culture and its role in reproducing and legitimating the role and dominance of capital.

A later figure in this lineage of humanistic Marxism has been Jürgen Harbermas. Many of the familiar themes of the FS are reiterated and updated in Harbermas’ writings. His various themes and postulates are grouped under the heading of Critical Theory and include politics and problems of epistemology, the fact/value distinction (very Kantian) methods and problems of legitimation, as well as that principal leitmotif in German social theory – the critique of positivism.

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I think that it would be legitimate to claim that social and political theory including British empiricism, American instrumentalism, French rationalism, German metaphysics, seem to have come to a shuddering halt at the present time. The era of Grand Theory seems to have run its course. We apparently have eschewed the great ‘ism’s and imbibed a routine ultra-conservatism which reduces the world to a type of permanent Gradgrind ‘common-sense.’ More broadly, it seems beyond question that the West is in unstoppable decline. All the great literature, philosophy, history and science are no more. Additionally, looking at the West’s leadership we may observe a collective and destructive mediocrity which is incapable of reversing this trend; and on the contrary are accelerating it; and in the vanguard of this are what I will call the crackpots of Davos: Karl Schwab, Bill Gates, and the totally compromised political, business, and media elites. How long and in what form will these future developments take place is a matter of conjecture; but that they will take place is pretty much certain.