James Gordon Finlayson

‘Immanent criticism' has been discussed by philosophers of quite different persuasions, working in separate areas and in different traditions of philosophy. Almost all of them agree on roughly the same story about its origins: It is that Hegel invented immanent criticism, that Marx later developed it, and that the various members of the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno, refined it in various ways, and that they are all paradigmatic practitioners of immanent criticism. I call this the Continuity Thesis. There are four different claims that interest me. Hegel is the originator of immanent criticism. Hegel's dialectical method is that of immanent criticism. Adorno practises immanent criticism and endorses the term as a description of his practice. Adorno's dialectical method is fundamentally Hegelian. In this article, I offer an account of immanent criticism, on the basis of which, I evaluate these four claims and argue that the Continuity Thesis should be rejected

The thesis is that Adorno has a normative ethics, albeit a minimal and negative ethics of resistance. However Adorno’s ethical theory faces two problems: the problem of the availability of the good and the problem of whether a normative ethics is consistent with philosophical negativism. The author argues that a correct of understanding the role of the ineffable in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics solves both problems: it provides an account of the availability of the good that is consistent with his philosophical negativism. The author counters the prevalent objection that Adorno’s aporetic philosophy, like some negative theology, leads to irrationalism and mysticism. The parallel with negative theology is developed by means of a comparison with Nicholas of Cusa. Drawing on Wittgentstein’s saying/showing distinction and Adrian Moore’s work the author argues that Nicholas and Adorno can be seen to share a philosophically defensible notion of ineffable knowledge

Many of Habermas's critical commentators agree that Discourse Ethics fails as a theory of the validity of moral norms and only succeeds as a theory of the democratic legitimacy of socio-political norms. The reason they give is that the moral principle is too restrictive to count as a necessary condition of the validity of norms. Other commentators more sympathetic to his project want to abandon principle and remodel Discourse Ethics without it. Still others want to downplay the role of universalizing moral discourse and to make more of Habermas's less demanding, though still somewhat vague, conception of ethical discourse. Against this chorus of critical voices Habermas maintains that his conception of moral discourse and the moral principle are central to Discourse Ethics in general, and to the normative heart of his political theory in particular. The conflict may have arisen in part because the concept of a ‘universalizable interest’ which is central to Habermas's understanding of moral discourse and of the moral principle remains opaque even after nearly two decades of critical debate. Actually Habermas's concept of interest is pretty obscure too. But the obscurity surrounding the concept of interest is not the source of the confusion. For our present purposes we can simply stipulate that an interest is a reason to want. The notion of reason rests loosely on the notion of a need, and the concepts of need and desire are take left deliberately vague. The source of the current confusion lies in the notion of universalizability that is in play. Once we pay due attention to the conditions of the universalizability of interests contained in Habermas's formulation of the moral principle, we can distinguish between a weaker and a stronger version of the principle. I argue that only the weaker version is defensible. But I also want to show that Habermas is tempted into defending the stronger version, and to explain why he does so.