#ideality

The sense of the term 'critical' used by critical ethnographers derives from Hegelian and Marxian philosophical ideas and their development by twentieth-century Marxists. As Lobkowicz (1967) shows, Marx adopted a view of the relationship between theory and practice, based on the writings of Hegel and Kant, that is quite different from what is found in earlier thinking about this issue. Thus, for Aristotle, practice was distinct from theory, and neither had much relevance for the other. They were concerned with different domains, the universal and the contingent. He believed that there is practical knowledge, but that this is necessarily only probabilistic and of uncertain validity; and it is directed towards the achievement of the good, not towards truth per se. Theory, on the other hand, is concerned with the contemplation of eternal verities and is of value in itself. There is an implied contrast here between the human and the divine (Lobkowicz 1977). Kant, however, identified the practical with the ethical, and thereby with a higher metaphysical realm which is quite separate from the reality dealt with by theory (in the form of natural science), and is necessarily unknowable in scientific terms (Kroner 1914). What we have here is in many respects an inversion of the Aristotelian view: the practical partakes of the divine, while theory deals with human experience. Hegel's contribution was to 'overcome' these distinctions by reintroducing Kant's metaphysical reality back into the world, and knowledge of it back into theory. He argued that the point in history had been reached (its end-point in fact) at which theory (that is, the ideal) and reality were reconciled. He believed that his own philosophy represented the world become conscious of itself. While, like other left Hegelians, Marx did not accept that this reconciliation had already occurred, he did adopt the view that history had arrived at the point where all the contradictions that had previously characterised human society could be overcome (that is, humanity could be emancipated and realise its true being). And he believed that the potential for that reconciliation was embodied in his own theoretical work. All that remained was for reality to come into line with theory, and this would be achieved through the development of the proletariat and its adoption of his 'scientific socialism' (and the social transformation that would ensue from this). What we have here is a teleological view of history as at least potentially leading towards the self-realisation of humanity, the actualisation of all that human beings have striven for in the past but have previously been unable to achieve. This view is central to the ideas of influential twentieth-century Marxists such as Lukács, Korsch and the Frankfurt School (though some of the latter, notably Adorno and Horkheimer, later became pessimistic about the prospects for emancipation). A crucial feature of this perspective is what is sometimes called negative critique: the criticism of existing social relations in terms of the ideal immanent in history; in such a manner as to stimulate the process by which ideal will become reality. This plays a particularly important role in the thinking of the Frankfurt School, for whom a key feature of advanced capitalism was an ideology that denies (on technical grounds) that social arrangements could be different. From this point of view, negative critique is, at the very least, an essential preliminary to bringing about emancipation. Indeed, it has been argued in relation to Horkheimer and Adorno that: 'critical theory had no active theory of politics and was left only with the notion of "immanent critique"' (Dickens 1983: 134). More sympathetically, we can see the Frankfurt theorists as seeking to keep critical consciousness alive at a time when, they believed, even the very possibility of an alternative socio-cultural order had almost been expunged (Buck-Morss 1979).

One is in love with what resembles an ideal that is out of sight but present in the memory.

ιδεατότητα (αποσπάσματα)

ιδεατότητα (αποσπάσματα)