Метод против истины. Часть 2: Схизма с советским марксизмом и трансформация дискурса Франкфуртской школы

Abstract

The article is the second part of the study of the evolution of the Frankfurt School theoretical views in the context of the history of Marxism and the development of the «left idea» in the 20th century. The central point is the degeneration of «critical theory» into a conformist quasi-liberal-democratic conception that retains only a distant formal relationship with Marxism. It is shown how the critical attitude and radical negativism of the first generation of the Frankfurt School in the second generation gradually turn to a recognition that an alternative to liberal democracy and the capitalist economy is absent. Combined with the shaped in the 1950s rejection of Soviet Marxism and the USSR, which considered as a form of poorly disguised totalitarianism that fetishized labor and state power and abandoned freedom and reason in favor of domination and effective exploitation, the political conformism of the employees of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main led to their actual break with Marxism. There was a rejection of both the main plots and approaches to their interpretation — economic relations, class struggle, dialectical materialism, etc. — and the Marxist language itself: the second generation of the Frankfurt School does not use Marxist terminology and abandons the Marxist discourse. The critical attitude from the universal metaphysical, as it was in Adorno, is reborn into an morally-epistemological one: it acquires objective limitations and means not pure negativity, but something opposite — a reflexive readiness to be wrong, a willingness to discover a mistake. In J. Habermas and A. Honneth, the critical attitude approaches the critical rationalism of K. Popper and turns from revolutionary into conformational — now it is a tool for creating social harmony and improving, rather than destroying the social order. In this way, the method defeats the truth, declaring it impossible, but in the end turning into an endless, unsolvable promise of approaching an unattainable truth, which cannot be, but which can be imagined. The theoretical (“critical”) work that leads nowhere ultimately benefits the existing order — in full accordance with Marcuse’s ideas about a one-dimensional society, but in a diametrically opposite modality for the second generation of the Frankfurt School: now this is a reason not for horror, but for optimism.