Arvi Särkelä

This article is the introduction to a special issue on critical naturalism. “Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto” was published in 2022. It was envisaged as a common platform put forward as an invitation for open-minded discussions about the state of critical theory today and the challenges it is facing. It sought to make space for varying practices of philosophical, artistic and scientific social critique to take seriously the enormous challenges our societies face in their relation with inner and outer nature. It has since inspired much discussion. This special issue of Critical Horizons contains four highly original contributions to critical thought on the challenges presented in the Manifesto that situate themselves beyond the theoretical blockages diagnosed therein. This introduction briefly summarizes the discussion around the Manifesto and introduces the four contributions by Sabina Lovibond, Sakari Säynäjoki and Tere Vadén, Corrado Piroddi, and Agnès Grivaux.

How can social critique respond to a catastrophic world? From Emerson to Adorno, a tradition of radical social critique has flourished that utilizes methods which disclose rather than judge the form of life: instead of trying to say what is wrong and what would be better, these criticisms seek to show how the world is false and to reveal how we might escape the vicious circles of present society—pointing out its catastrophic state and directing readers to the real possibilities for another form of life. This book presents an incisive history of critical disclosure by looking at its common metaphors. As Särkelä illuminates, circular metaphors continually interact in the works of 19th- and 20th-century European and American authors including not just Emerson and Adorno, but also Nietzsche, Tarde, Freud, and Dewey. By reconstructing the driving examples of such disclosing critical gestures, Särkelä articulates their similarities and differences, and considers their potential for contemporary social critique. The result points the way toward the cultivation of critical skills relevant for our own age of catastrophe. "Vicious Circles advances an exciting, ambitious, and original vision of disclosive critique. Through the careful excavation of prominent historical exemplars, Särkelä develops a compelling alternative to the normative, juridical conceptions of critique that predominate in contemporary critical theory." —Amy Allen, Pennsylvania State University "What are the conditions and nature of effective social criticism? In this groundbreaking study of disclosive critique without conceptual guardrails, Särkelä moves the terms of this long-standing debate decisively forward." —Espen Hammer, Temple University "Särkelä succeeds brilliantly in his principal task of placing disclosing critique on the radar screen of social philosophers. I am confident that this book will quickly become a classic text in critical theory, both within and outside the boundaries of the Frankfurt School." —Frederick Neuhouser, Columbia University

This essay investigates the method of Dialectic of Enlightenment and asks what is critical about it. It seeks to contribute to a history of methods of philosophy, which clears away transhistorical misunderstandings in philosophy. Much has recently been written about Adorno’s style, but the question of method is different: whereas a style seems to include an individual imprint and may at most be imitated by others, a method may be adopted in and across historical contexts. A history of methods must therefore take into account both what the authors say about their method and how their work actually works in its historical context. This brief study suggests that the way Horkheimer and Adorno proceed in Dialectic of Enlightenment has something to do with literary montage and the catastrophic state of the world it was written in. The essay seeks to bring that connection into clearer view. To that end, it assembles a constellation of remarks drawing on cultural history, social history, conceptual analysis, and passages from Horkheimer and Adorno’s enigmatic book as well as from Adorno’s work before and after it.

In this paper, we comment and discuss the fifteen replies that interpret, solicit, problematize, and further develop our Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto (Krisis 42(1)), that have been published in Krisis 43(1). In the paper, we address four overarching topics that we see emerging from the replies: Histories and traditions of criticial naturalism; the relation between theory and praxis; the question of what is critical about critical naturalism; and finally the question of utopia. Additionally, we discuss three general types of attitudes that our critics take to the Manifesto.

Die Sozialphilosophie ist ein relativ junges Geschäft: Der Begriff tritt erst am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts auf, begleitet von den aufsteigenden Sozialwissenschaften, vornehmlich der Soziologie. Jedoch kommt bereits mit Rousseau und Hegel eine philosophische Betrachtungsweise des Sozialen in Sicht, deren wertender Zugriff auf die soziale Realität weder auf politischer Legitimität noch auf moralischer Richtigkeit fußt, sondern angibt, sich aus einer tieferen Quelle zu speisen: Diese neue Perspektive auf das menschliche Zusammenleben situiert sich somit jenseits von ›bloßer‹ Moral- und politischer Philosophie, indem sie beansprucht, das Ganze des Sozialen unter ihre evaluative Lupe zu nehmen (Honneth 2000; Fischbach 2016). Die nur knapp über hundert Jahre sozialphilosophischer Forschung, die uns von Georg Simmels »Parerga zur Socialphilosophie« trennen, erschienen 1894, sind von einer stetigen Auseinandersetzung nicht nur um den Gegenstand, sondern auch um die Herangehensweise und die Natur dieser Disziplin charakterisiert.

Die Rezeption des klassischen amerikanischen Pragmatismus durch die Frankfurter Schule hebt als eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit John Dewey an, wird jedoch paradigmenbildend für sie durch die affirmative Aufnahme von Charles Sanders Peirce und George Herbert Mead als Philosophen der ›kommunikativen Vernunft«, um in den letzten Jahren zurück zu Dewey als kritischem Sozialphilosophen zurückzukehren. Ein Grund für die stetige Auseinandersetzung Kritischer Theoretiker mit den Arbeiten der klassischen Pragmatisten ist in den gemeinsamen geistigen Wurzeln und in der geteilten Orientierung an sozialer Transformation zu finden. Eine ernsthafte Diskussion zwischen Pragmatismus und Kritischer Theorie stellt heute jedoch nach wie vor große Herausforderungen für die Beteiligten dar. Im Folgenden werden erstens die gemeinsamen geistigen Wurzeln der beiden philosophischen Bewegungen kartiert. Danach wird der Rezeptionsgeschichte des Pragmatismus durch die Frankfurter Schule nachgegangen. Es wird sich zeigen, dass die Aufnahme pragmatistischen Gedankenguts in der Kritischen Theorie grundlegende Probleme aufwirft.

This article attempts to present the unity as well as the difference between Hegel’s and Dewey’s social philosophical approaches to struggles for recognition. It argues that interpreting Dewey’s Lectures in China as a commentary on Hegel sheds new light on Dewey’s social philosophy as a recognition theoretical whole. Furthermore, the resulting “experimentalist” account of recognitive relations, norms and values might turn out to present a fruitful perspective in contemporary discussions on recognition.

A striking feature of John Dewey’s philosophical attitude in his later period is that for self-description, he did not prefer the term “pragmatism.” Instead, he employed such isms as “experimentalism” and “naturalism.” In the period in which he moved towards developing his own original philosophy, he even stated that “I reject root and branch to the term ‘pragmatism.’”1 As he was at the time drawn to naturalism, it might be revealing indeed that he rejects “root and branch” to “pragmatism.” Also in the newly released notes for his lectures on social philosophy in China 1919, the word “pragmatism” goes without a single mention.2 The reader does not encounter the creed for a “pragmatist social...

This paper is an introduction to the special issue on Pathologies of Recognition. The first subsection briefly introduces the notion of recognition and trace its development from Fichte and Hegel to Honneth and his critics, and the second subsection turns to the concept of a social pathology. The third section provides a brief look at the individual papers. The special issue focuses on two central concepts in contemporary critical social theory: namely ‘recognition’ and ‘social pathology’. For defenders of a theory of recognition, adequate recognition is itself a key normative criterion for analysing social wrongs and pathologies which fall short of the ideal. For critics, the focus on recognition – even at its best – rather conceals social wrongs. While the contributors in this collection represent slightly different approaches, the general consensus amongst them is that recognition as such is a good ideal but like all good ideals it can go wrong in various ways and take pathological forms itself. In this introduction we focus first briefly on the concepts of recognition and social pathology, and finally present the papers of this special issue.

Critical social theories are generally understood to be distinct from other normative theories by their explicit orientation toward emancipation: they not only present normative criteria for assessing the legitimacy or justification of social institutions or merely inquire into the actualized freedom of a given form of social life but claim to point toward a “freedom in view”—an end that might aid those participating in social struggles to overcome the pathological, alienated, or ideological social order of the present. John Dewey’s social theory clearly cherishes this ideal of social criticism. It contributes to a critical social inquiry in a variety of ways, some of which, so we believe, are still to be...

ABSTRACT There are two traditions of immanent social critique. One of them, prominent in contemporary Frankfurt school critical theory, regards the immanence of critique as a quality of the standard employed. Such a conception of immanent critique needs to show, prior to the concrete practice of critique, how the standard is immanent in the object of critique. Showing this is the task of a “model of immanent critique.” The other tradition, going back to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and practiced in particular by Dewey in his later works, regards the immanence of critique as the form of critical practice itself. Because such a conception of immanent critique does not, at the outset, ask how the standard is immanent to its object, it also does not need a model licensing critical practice. Indeed, it must be inherently hostile to any attempt at modeling immanent critique because the immanence lies in the power of critical practice to transform any models it applies.