Abstract
I am beginning to type but don’t know what’s coming, if anything is coming, or how it is going to go on, whether it will develop, how it is going to end. What an embarrassing confession! But I have to make it, for I am beginning (once more — not only to type). This time I wish to surrender to critical theory; the first thing that comes up is my memory of Max Horkheimer, how he got me to the Institute in Frankfurt, twice, 1952 and 1953, to do some work they wanted done — the first time was the first time I went to Germany, nineteen years after I’d left. I met and got acquainted with Adorno and Pollock and later in the States with Herbert Marcuse, who became my colleague and friend, and with Habermas. None of these critical theorists had or has space for my concern with surrender-and-catch. Horkheimer, even before I went to Frankfurt, when I met and talked with him about it in the States, said something like “old hat”: surrender is the initial stage of any investigation, the muddling-through stage — first I couldn’t believe he had heard me right but then feared he had, and we had different views; but when at his request in Frankfurt I gave a talk about the present state of sociology and mentioned surrender-and-catch as a corrective alternative (or something of the sort), he or another member of his group denounced me in the public discussion: they had finally managed to overcome Heidegger, and here somebody came from, of all places, America and tried to reimport metaphysics if not worse, perhaps mysticism: that’s just what they needed; and I don’t think what I said in response cut any ice.
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Notes
SC,Chap. 18, pp. 115–138.
See Sec. 6 below.
For hints at connections between characteristics of work and author, see “Phenomenology and Sociology” (see Chap. VIII, n. 16, above), pp. 518–520.
Janet Wolff, “Hermeneutics and Sociology” (see Chap. IX, n. 3), p. 193.
Zygmunt Bauman, “Critical Theory,” in Etzkowitz and Glassman, eds., The Renascence of Sociological Theory (see Looking Backward and Forward [5], n.), pp. 277–303.
Ibid.,p. 280. (From now on, page numbers refer to this chapter by Bauman.)
See Max Horkheimer’s foundation paper, “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), reprinted in several places, e.g., in Paul Connerton, ed., Critical Sociology (Penguin, 1976), pp. 206–225.
For critiques of phenomenology by critical theorists, esp. Herbert Marcuse and Theodor W. Adorno, see “Phenomenology and Sociology,” pp. 506–509 and ns. 25–37.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), transi. John Cumming ( New York: Herder and Herder, 1972 ).
Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), transi Jeremy Shapiro ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1971 ).
Ibid.,p. 308; quoted in Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory ofJürgen Habermas (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1978), p. 58. (Incidentally, I have long wondered why Habermas does not mention Max Scheler’s in some respects similar typology of kinds of knowledge and their psychic roots; see Scheler, Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge,esp. p. 78 [see Chap. V, n. 13] — and why didn’t Hannah Arendt? — see Survival and Sociology,p. 40, n. 1.)
McCarthy, op. cit.,pp. 92 ff.
Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (1973), transi. by Thomas McCarthy ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1975 ).
That is, (to repeat — cf. Chap. V, Sec. 2, above), the position according to which there is truth and morality only relative to time and place. In contrast, methodological relativism makes no validity claims but only enjoins us to try to understand as best we can, whatever it may be, relative to it; in its terms rather than ours.
I am indebted to Joy Gordon for this formulation: Minutes (see Chap. IX, n. 3, above), p. 364.
For an argument leading to this view, see Kurt H. Wolff, Surrender-and-Catch, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Critical Theory,seminar notes, Memorial University of Newfoundland, unpublished, 1982, pp. 33–57, also pp. 93–111; and the next section of this chapter.
Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory” (seen. 7 above), p. 224.
SC,p. 196 (italics omitted).
SC,pp. 32–35, and Surrender-and-Catch, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Critical Theory,pp. 2–6.
Its perhaps most important piece is Habermas’s review (1967) of Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode,transi., presumably by Fred R Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy, in Dallmayr and McCarthy, eds., Understanding Social Inquiry (Notre Dame and London: Notre Dame University Press, 1977), pp. 335–363. For a lucid and comprehensive presentation of the controversy between Habermas and Gadamer and a full bibliography of its expressions until the late 70s, see McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas,pp. 187–193 and p. 415, n. 50.
See “`Surrender-and-Catch’ and Sociology,” pp. 207–208, and SC,pp. 128–132; Surrender-and-Catch, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Critical Theory,pp. 108–111.
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), transl. Thomas A. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press), Vol. 1, 1984, Vol. 2, 1987. In addition to James Schmidt’s review (see n. 24 below, see Anthony Giddens’s “Reason without Revolution? Habermas’s Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns,” Praxis International,2, 3 (October, 1982): 318–338.
Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections, transi. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1978 ), p. 289.
Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929), ibid.,p. 191. The place where Habermas puts these two excerpts from Benjamin together is “Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism — The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin,” transl. P. Brewster and C.H. Buchner, New German Critique,no. 17 (Spring, 1979): 59. James Schmidt’s paper: “Jürgen Habermas and the Difficulties of Enlightenment,” Social Research,49, 1 (Spring, 1982): 181–208; the above quotations are on p. 208.
Gillian Rose,The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 147.
Ibid.,p. 148.
Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), p. 186. This study competes in instructiveness and conscientiousness with Martin Jay’s well-knownThe Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (Boston: Little Brown, 1973).
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), p. 357. Cf. Negative Dialectics,transi. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), pp. 364365.
29. Ibid.,p. 358; cf. English transl., p. 365.
Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (1964), transl. Knut Tarnowski and Frederick Will, foreword by Trent Schroyer ( Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973 ).
But see some of his essays, e.g., on Ernst Bloch (1960), Walter Benjamin (1972), Gershom Scholem (1978), in Philosophical-Political Profiles, Transl. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1983 ).
Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality ( New York: Harper, 1950 ).
Friedrich Pollock, ed. Gruppenexperiment (Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie Band 2) (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955).
Ibid.,pp. 349–350, quoted in “On Germany and Ourselves” (1956), in Trying Sociology,p. 142.
An illustrative scene from it is quoted ibid., pp. 140–141.
Cf. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 220, 235, 249.
0 Loma! Constituting a Self (1977–1984) (Northampton, MA: Hermes House Press, 1989).
Surrender and Rebellion: A Reading of Camus’ The Rebel,” in SC, Chap. 11, pp. 49–69.
SC,p. 50.
SC, p. 9 (and in several other places).
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Wolff, K.H. (1995). Surrender-and-Catch and Critical Theory. In: Transformation in the Writing. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 166. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8412-8_10
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