The leftist intellectuals petrificated

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UVUnUnWfHI&t=393s

 The leftist intellectuals petrificated

Review of an article by the prestigious intellectual Prof. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, published in German in August 2020 in Zurich, in the Neue Zuercher Zeitung

Wikipedia presentation: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Würzburg, 15 June 1948) is an American literary theorist of German origin whose work ranges from philology and philosophy, through literary and cultural history, to the epistemologies of the everyday. Professor at Stanford University since 1989, he holds the Albert Guérard Chair as a lecturer in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French and Italian, in the Section of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at Stanford; he also collaborates in the Departments of German Studies, Iberian and Latin American Cultures, and in the Program of Thought and Modern Literature at the same university.

Why the critical gesture of intellectuals is out of fashion

¿Por qué tiene la izquierda siete vidas?

Intellectuals, in particular, are very interested in questioning the balance of power. But those who are too critical tend to be mostly one thing: moralists. Critical judgment became necessary with Plato and Aristotle when general knowledge was no longer sufficient.

Too often a new use of words is emerging.  Thus, the replacement of the adjective “interesting” by the participle “exciting”, which has become a rule with its variants in the German language, is particularly annoying, simply for reasons of taste. Equally irritating is the conceptual inflation of the concept of “sustainability”, whose whiff of morality presents us with recommendations that are both too well-intentioned and confusing.

However, the most difficult cases are those in which the original meaning of a word has become its opposite, without its followers wanting to draw any consequences from this. Thus the term “criticism”, which two and a half centuries ago meant the highest claim to knowledge of the cognitive capacity of the human mind and which, after a history of forgotten terminological decline, has now become a parody of its origins.

First Kant, then Marx

This practical relevance of judgment, as a precursor to the modern concept of ‘critique’, was always within the reach of the philosophical discussions of antiquity, especially in Plato and Aristotle, and could serve as a guide, if a process of intellectual hygiene were to reopen the possibility of a new use of words. His modern history, on the other hand, began, especially in the German language, at the highest level, in the “critical” writings of Immanuel Kant and his intention to undertake “not a criticism of books and systems, but rather of reason in general. The English term “critique” has retained precisely this meaning of an examination of human capacity for knowledge, with which the Enlightenment reached its climax and conclusion.

Among the thinkers of idealism, especially among Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, the word “critique”, on the one hand, lost the dominant position it had occupied in Kant’s writings and, on the other hand, suffered a change in its conceptual content. It was the result of a growing proximity to the then new concept of science, which quickly acquired an aura of intellectual superiority after the 18th century – in contrast to the general cognitive faculty that Kant had studied.

But it was only under the so-called “left-wing Hegelians”, who used Hegel’s thought without reaching his conclusions in their philosophical discourses. Especially in Karl Marx “critique” assumed the central position and the preponderantly controversial meaning it still has today. This arose from the combination of the prestige of scientific language (on which Marx based himself, for example, in his “Critique of Hegelian Philosophy of Law” of 1844) with the rejection of the conditions of the contemporary state and its capitalist economy (for example, in the “Critique of Political Economy” of 1859). This assimilation turned the word “critique” into a political instrument that was supposed to help fulfill the promise of a “classless” society.

A fatal shortcut

Through the unique impact of the writings of Marx and Engels, the connection between the aura of science and political controversy became a dominant condition of experience in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Anyone who came across this amalgamation hardly needed to justify their reaction, because Marxism was considered wrongly superior.

At the same time, this blocked the possibility of a positive evaluation of the contributions, which had existed since the initial exercise of scientific judgment. Thus, anyone who ever expressed praise fell under the suspicion of being part of a conspiracy of exploiters against the working classes.

Unilateral judgment as a rejection also prevailed in “Critical Theory”, a demanding academic practice of analysis of art, literature and music on a Marxist basis, which has remained emblematic in the writings of Theodor W. Adorno to this day. The political opportunity of the aesthetic experience, Adorno stated, arises from the condensation and visualisation of class conflicts through the forms of the works.

The lack of self-criticism

Among his great achievements are also Jürgen Habermas’s reflections on structural situations of injustice in the societies of the late 20th century. But no matter how Habermas, as a widely disseminated intellectual, contributed to the late establishment of democratic life in Germany, the aura of superiority of science also clearly prevailed in his controversies. While he was largely in agreement with his comrade of the French generation of Michel Foucault, with regard to social grievances and their alternatives, the followers of “Critical Theory” imposed their reservations about the absence of a Marxist basis in Foucault’s works, even to the point of absurd accusations of neo-conservatism.

In a book published last year, Habermas himself once again differentiated his conception of science in the context of faith traditions. Unlike him, however, most of the intellectuals who achieved academic and public honors under his influence – with the pretense of remaining critical, of all things – were closed to any self-critical review.

Blind to the undeniable phenomena of the advance of the 21st century, against the background of supposed global warming, the transformation of human labour through electronic technology and changes in the demographic pyramid of the age, Marxism continues to cling to its outdated philosophical dogmas and to certainties of its own ethics (a new favourite word). This unwavering firmness of erroneous principles reminds its populist opponents in the public arena, who rely on the content-free acceptance of gestures of authenticity as a new mode of politics – labelling them as not adhering to the “politically correct”.

Ideologues and populists

Whoever looks for the reasons for this petrification of the critical spirit of yesteryear will once again find a strange affinity with the opposite political side.

A state of mind of “falling behind” and the consequent resentment it produces in the face of the technological-cultural present has been well identified, I believe, as the situation to which, for example, the current heads of state of the United States, Brazil, Italy or Hungary owe their stable voter base. But can’t a structurally similar resentment be observed among the “critical left” of the past – and of the present – whose traditional images of social progress (such as the drastic reduction of working hours) have lost their appeal for other contemporaries to the extent that they have become feasible?

The habit of being critical has become the final affirmation of a past social utopia – and the grotesque self-celebration of resentment as a science. Curious intellectuals should free themselves from the spell of this last stage by practicing controversial interventions in everyday language, even if it is a final “affirmation” of the “critique” syndrome.

Anyone who points out the frozen implications in the critical practice of the left should no longer allow himself to be accused of being “affirmative”, “right-wing” or “neoliberal” today. The forced insistence of intellectuals on a narrow spectrum of political positions has always been the legacy of an amputated concept of “critique”, and thus a great misunderstanding of itself. The impulse for a critique of the traditional concept of “critique”, on the other hand, could revive our desire for independent and never predictable judgments like the original critical practice.