Abstract
Habermas has always shown a certain resistance, when his earliest philosophical work (up to about 1970) is considered within the tradition of the Frankfurt School, even though he is undeniably a prominent representative of its “second generation” (see Wiggershaus 1994). In a 1981 interview, he stressed that a personal path had brought him close to the philosophical and political positions of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Habermas 1981, 126–155). Speaking with Honneth, he observes:
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- 1.
In 1956, Habermas became Adorno’s Forschungsassistent of social philosophy and collaborator at the Institute. He remained there until 1961. The protagonists of the early history of the Institute were C. Grünberg, F. Weil, F. Borkenau, K.A. Wittfogel, H. Grossmann, F. Pollock, M. Horkheimer. L. Lowenthal, T. Adorno, E. Fromm, H. Marcuse and W. Benjamin, who came later during the 1920s and the 1930s.
- 2.
Later, he declares that his philosophical work was already focused on the search for a “ theory of modernity” and the problem “of the distorted realisation of reason in history”. Evidently, it was a matter that grew in the same soil that nourished Marxist thought.
- 3.
Habermas explains that it was the young intellectuals who rediscovered Critical Theory at the end of the 1960s. They clarified that the theory must once have been of a systematic nature. As for the term “Frankfurt School”, R. Wiggershaus remembers that it was a label that the Institute became stuck with in the 1960s, but at one point the Institute began to use it (see Wiggershaus 1994).
- 4.
Fromm’s replication was swift, unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, who strictly maintained their disagreement (see Wiggershaus 1994, 510–521). From the pages of Dissent, he particularly targeted Marcuse’s interpretation of Freud’s Eros/Thanatos dialectic. Fromm accused Marcuse of nihilism, judging his interpretation as unfair and emphasising his lack of therapeutic experience (see Fromm 1955–1956).
- 5.
This is a re-managed work, published in 1970 in two separate volumes: Kritik des psychoanalytischen Symbolbegriffs, and Sprachzerstörung und Rekonstruktion: Vorarbeiten zu einer Metatheorie der Psychoanalyse (Lorenzer 1970a, 1970b). Setting the preface to Sprachzerstörung und Rekonstruktion alongside Habermas’ preface to Erkenntnis und Interesse helps us to understand how this meeting has been productive for the development of hermeneutical research in Habermas along with the analytical research in Lorenzer.
- 6.
Horkheimer’s article was published among the others in Zeitschrift between 1932 and 1941, and is now collected in Horkheimer 1968.
- 7.
The attack against positivism is clear here. It began with Horkheimer’s article “Der neueste Angriff auf die Metaphysik” (1937; now in Horkheimer 1968), reaching its peak at the 1961 Tübingen conference “Tagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie” on the methodological problem of sociological research, in which Adorno and Habermas opposed the neo-positivists Karl Popper and Hans Albert (Adorno et al. 1961).
- 8.
Among the differences between Lukács and Korsch on the one side and the Frankfurt School on the other, there is the refusal of the School to act in accordance with Communistic International lines. Second, the School has always pursued a specific line of critical innovation interpreting the “political commitment”, first of all, as commitment “in the discourse” (consequently diluting every dialectical connection with militant action).
- 9.
For Honneth, in the Theory of Communicative Action Habermas not only for the first time attempts to determine his theoretical relationship with Adorno, but also realises a change of position in relation to him, going so far as to develop an aesthetic theory of society, something heretofore reserved for Adorno, with the expansion of the concept of rationality to the domain of expressive action.
- 10.
The entire critical/philosophical potential of Habermas’ interpretation of psychoanalysis will be revealed in his subsequent speculative developments, starting from the dispute on Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology. Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik is the title of a collection of essays published in 1971 to document this dispute (from the end of 1960s) between Karl-Otto Apel, Claus von Bormann, Rüdiger Bubner, Hans Joachim Giegel, and Gadamer contra Habermas (Apel et al. 1971). The dispute goes far beyond questions of a philosophical or methodological nature; and beyond the first lively discussions in the aftermath of the output of Wahrheit und Methode on the “ambiguity of the relationship with Hegel”; beyond even the foundation of the historical and social sciences. What is at stake is the issue of human emancipation taken in its disorientation and returning it to its historical reality and concrete possibility of change (Gadamer). What is at stake, on the other side, is freeing it through the process of a meta-psychoanalysis of ideology at the pre-linguistic and at communicative levels (Habermas). Coming to psychoanalysis, Gadamer summarises in his Replik the concept underlined in Habermas’ interpretation of Freud. In it, he precisely expresses the two pivotal nodes of Habermas’ reading: the interpretation of psychoanalysis as a reflective technique, and his interpretation as an example of emancipatory practice. It is precisely around this concept of emancipation that Gadamer and Habermas develop dissonant perspectives in Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik.
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Busacchi, V. (2016). From the Kritische Theorie to the Tiefenhermeneutik . In: Habermas and Ricoeur’s Depth Hermeneutics. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39010-9_2
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