Critical Models Interventions and Catchwords

Critique is essential to all democracy. Not only does democracy require the freedom to criticize and need critical impulses. Democracy is nothing less than defined by critique. This can be recalled simply in the historical fact that the conception of the separation of powers, upon which every democracy is based, from Locke and Montesquieu and the American constitution up to today, has its lifeblood in critique. The system of checks and balances*, the reciprocal overview of the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary, means as much as that each of these powers subjects the others to critique and thereby reduces the despotism that each power, without this critical element, gravitates to. Critique and the prerequisite of democracy, political maturity, belong together. Politically mature is the person who speaks for himself, because he has thought for himself and is not merely repeating someone else; he stands free of any guardian.¹ This is demonstrated in the power to resist established opinions and, one and the same, also to resist existing institutions, to resist everything that is merely posited, that justifies itself with its existence. Such resistance, as the ability to distinguish between what is known and what is accepted merely by convention or under the constraint of authority, is one with critique, whose concept indeed comes from the Greek krino, “to decide.” He who equates the modern concept of reason with critique is scarcely exaggerating. The Enlightenment thinker Kant, who wanted to see society emancipated from its self-incurred immaturity and who taught autonomy,² that is, judgment according to one’s own insight in contrast to heteronomy, obedience to what is urged by others, named his three major works critiques. This was true not only for the intellectual capacities, whose limits he intended to measure off and whose procedures to construe. The power of Kant, as for instance Kleist vividly sensed, was that of critique in a very concrete sense.³ He criticized the dogmatism of the rationalistic systems that were accepted prior to him: the Critique of Pure Reason was more than anything else a blistering critique of Leibniz and Wolf. The influence of Kant’s main work was due to its negative results, and one of its most important parts, which dealt with pure thought’s transgressions of its own limits, was thoroughly negative.

But critique, cornerstone of reason and bourgeois thinking tout court, by no means dominated spirit as much as one would assume from that spirit’s self-image. Even the all-destroyer, as Kant was called two hundred years ago, often showed the gestures of one who blamed critique for being improper. His vocabulary shows this in malicious expressions like “subtle reasoning” [Vernünfteln], which not only punish reason’s exceeding its bounds but also want to bridle its use that, in Kant’s own understanding, irresistibly surges past its own limits. Finally Hegel, in whom the movement commencing with Kant culminates, and who in many passages equates thinking altogether with negativity and hence with critique, likewise has the opposite tendency: to bring critique to a halt. Whoever relies on the limited activity of one’s own understanding Hegel calls, using a political epithet, Raisonneur [carper, argufier] and accuses of vanity because he does not reflect on his own finitude, is incapable of subordinating himself to something higher, the totality.⁴ However, for Hegel this higher thing is the present conditions. Hegel’s aversion to critique goes together with his thesis that the real is rational.⁵ According to Hegel’s authoritarian directive, that person is truly in control of his reason who does not insist on reason’s antithesis to what presently exists, but rather within given reality recognizes his own reason. The individual citizen is supposed to capitulate before reality. The renunciation of critique is twisted into a higher wisdom; the young Marx’s phrase about the ruthless critique of everything existing was the simple reply to this, and even the mature Marx subtitled his main work a “critique.”⁶

The substantive import of those passages in Hegel, especially in the book that concentrates his anti-critical tendency, the Philosophy of Right, is societal.⁷ One need not be a sociologist to hear in his ridicule of the Raisonneur and the starry-eyed reformer the unctuous sermon admonishing the underling to keep still, who out of stupidity—the modification of which obviously does not concern his guardian—objects to the decrees descending upon him from the authorities on high, because said underling is incapable of recognizing that ultimately everything is and happens for the best and that those who are above his station in life also should be his intellectual superiors. Something of the contradiction between the modern emancipation of critical spirit and its simultaneous dampening is characteristic of the entire bourgeois period: from an early period onward the bourgeoisie must have feared that the logic of its own principles could lead beyond its own sphere of interests. Habermas has demonstrated contradictions of this sort in the notion of the public sphere—the most important medium of all politically effective criticism—that on the one hand should concentrate the critical political maturity of society’s subjects and, on the other, has become a commodity and works against the critical principle in order to better market itself.⁸

It is easily forgotten in Germany that critique, as a central motif of spirit, is not very popular anywhere in the world. But there is reason to reflect on a specifically German phenomenon in the hostility to critique especially in the political arena. Full-fledged bourgeois emancipation was not successful in Germany, or only in a historical period in which its prerequisite, the liberalism of diffused free enterprise, was already undermined. Likewise the unification into a nation-state—which in many other countries was attained parallel to the strengthening of the bourgeoisie—limped behind history and became a short intermezzo. This may have caused the German trauma of unity and unanimity that scents weakness in that multiplicity whose resultant outcome is democratic will formation. Whoever criticizes violates the taboo of unity, which tends toward totalitarian organization. The critic becomes a divisive influence and, with a totalitarian phrase, a subversive. The denunciation of alleged quarrels in the party was an indispensable propaganda tool for the National Socialists. The unity-trauma has survived Hitler and has possibly even been intensified by the division of Germany following the war Hitler unleashed. It is a banality that democracy was a belated arrival in Germany. There is probably less general awareness, however, that the consequences of this belatedness extended even into the ramifications of mind. Besides the economic and straightforward societal problems democracy in Germany confronts in order to permeate the sovereign people [Volk], not inconsiderable is the additional difficulty that predemocratic and undemocratic forms of consciousness—in particular those that stem from statism and a thinking that conforms to authority—survive in the midst of a suddenly implanted democracy and prevent people from making it their own. One such vestigial pattern of behavior is the mistrust of critique and the inclination to throttle it under some pretense or other. The fact that Goebbels could degrade the concept of critic into that of criticaster, could maliciously associate it with the concept of the grumbler, and wanted to prohibit the criticism of all art was not only meant to take independent intellectual impulses in hand. The propagandist was calculating in terms of social psychology. He could tap into the general German prejudice against critique that dates back to absolutism. He was expressing the heartfelt convictions of those already being led by the hand.

If one wanted to sketch an anatomy of the German hostility to critique, one would find it unquestionably bound up with the rancor against the intellectual. In public or, in Franz Böhm’s expression, non-public opinion, the suspect intellectual is probably equated with the person who criticizes.⁹ It seems plausible that anti-intellectualism derives originally from a submissiveness to officialdom. Again and again the injunction is intoned that critique must be responsible. But that always amounts to meaning that only those are actually justified to criticize who happen to be in a responsible position, just as even anti-intellectualism until quite recently didn’t extend to state-employed intellectuals like professors.¹⁰ According to the subject matter of their work, professors would have to be counted among the intellectuals. However, in general, because of their prestige as government officials, they were highly respected in established public opinion as long as conflicts with students didn’t convince them of their actual powerlessness. Critique is being departmentalized, as it were. It is being transformed from the human right and human duty of every citizen into a privilege of those who are qualified by virtue of the recognized and protected positions they occupy. Whoever practices critique without having the power to carry through his opinion, and without integrating himself into the official hierarchy, should keep silent—that is the form in which the variation of the cliché about servants’ limited powers of understanding returns in the Germany that formally has equal rights. Obviously, people who are institutionally intertwined with present conditions will in general hesitate to criticize them. Even more than administrative-legal conflicts they fear conflicts with the opinions of their own group. By means of the division between responsible critique, namely, that practiced by those who bear public responsibility, and irresponsible critique, namely, that practiced by those who cannot be held accountable for the consequences, critique is already neutralized. The unspoken abrogation of the right to critique for those who have no position makes the privilege of education, especially the career insulated by official examinations, into the authority defining who may criticize, whereas the truth content of critique alone should be that authority. All this is unspoken and not institutionally anchored but so deeply present in the preconscious of innumerable people that it exercises a kind of social control. In recent years there has been no lack of cases where people outside of the hierarchy—which, incidentally, in the age of celebrities is certainly not limited to officials—practiced critique, for instance, criticizing the juridical practices in a certain city. They were immediately rebuffed as grumblers. It is not enough to answer this by indicating the mechanisms that in Germany create the suspicion that the independent individualist or dissenting person is a fool. The state of affairs is much more grave: through the anti-critical structure of public opinion the dissenter as a type is really brought into the situation of the grumbler and takes on the characteristics of a malcontent, to the extent that those characteristics have not already driven him to stubborn critique. Unwavering critical freedom easily slides by its own dynamic into the attitude of Michael Kohlhaas, who not coincidentally was a German.¹¹ One of the most important conditions for changing the structure of public opinion in Germany would be if the facts I’ve indicated here became generally conscious, for instance, were treated in civics education, and thereby would lose some of their disastrously blind power. Occasionally the relationship of German public opinion to critique virtually seems to be stood on its head. The right to free critique is unilaterally invoked for the se the critical spirit of a democratic society. However, the vigilance that rebels against such misuse requires the strength of public opinion that is still lacking in Germany and that can hardly be produced by mere appeal.

Indicative of the concealed relationship of public opinion to critique is the attitude of its organs that actually lay claim to a tradition of freedom. Many newspapers that by no means wish to be thought reactionary assiduously cultivate a tone that in America, where analogies are not lacking, one calls pontifical*. They speak as though they stood above the controversies, assume a posture of sage experience that would befit the epithet “old-maidish.” Their supercilious remove usually only benefits the defense of the official state of affairs. At most the powers are solemnly encouraged not to let themselves be swayed from their good intentions. The language of such newspapers sounds like that of governmental announcements, even where nothing is being announced about any government. Behind the pontifical posture stands the authoritarian one: both in those who assume it and in the consumers who are being cleverly targeted. Identification with power prevails in Germany now just as it did before; in this lurks the dangerous potential of identifying oneself with power politics inwardly and outwardly. The caution exercised in reforming institutions, where the reform is demanded by critical consciousness and to a considerable degree is acknowledged by the executive powers, is based on the fear of the voting masses; this fear easily renders critique without consequence. It also indicates how widespread the anti-critical spirit is in those whose interest should lie in critique.

Critique’s lack of consequence in Germany has a specific model, presumably of military origin: the tendency to protect at any cost subordinates who are charged with misbehavior or offense. In military hierarchies the oppressive element of such an esprit de corps may be found everywhere; however, if I am not mistaken, then it is specifically German that this military behavior pattern also thoroughly dominates the civil, especially the specifically political spheres. One cannot shake the feeling that in answer to every public critique the higher authorities, who stand above the person being criticized and who ultimately bear the responsibility, first and foremost, irrespective of the facts of the case, defend the criticized person and strike outward. This mechanism, which sociology really should study thoroughly, is so ingrained that it automatically threatens political criticism with a fate similar to that granted the soldier who dared to complain about his superior during the Wilhelminian era. The rancor toward the institution of defense commissioner is symbolic for this entire sphere.

Perhaps the damaged German relationship to critique is most comprehensible in its lack of consequence. If Germany deserves the title “land of unlimited presumabilities” that Ulrich Sonnemann formulated, then this too is related.¹² It may be simply a phrase that someone has been swept away by the pressure of public opinion; however, worse than the phrase is when no public opinion forms to exert that kind of pressure, or, when no consequences are drawn if it does happen. A topic for political science would be research studies comparing the consequences of public opinion, unofficial critique in the old democracies of England, France, America with the consequences in Germany. I do not dare to anticipate the result of such a study, but I can imagine it. If the Spiegel affair is held out as the one exception, then it should be kept in mind that in that case the protesting newspapers, bearers of public opinion, showed their rare verve not out of any solidarity with the freedom to criticize and its prerequisite, unimpeded information, but rather because they saw themselves threatened in their own concrete interests, news value*, the market value of information.¹³ I am not underestimating attempts at effective public critique in Germany. They include the fall of a radical right-wing minister of culture in one federal state. However, since that solidarity between students and professors does not exist anywhere now the way it did then in Göttingen, it is doubtful whether something similar could happen again today.¹⁴ It looks to me as though the spirit of public critique, after it was monopolized by political groups and thereby became publicly compromised, has suffered severe setbacks; I hope I am mistaken.

Essentially German, although once again not so completely as one who has not had the opportunity to observe similar phenomena in other countries might easily suppose, is an anti-critical schema from philosophy—precisely the philosophy that besmirched the Raisonneur—that has sunk into blather: the appeal to the positive. One continually finds the word critique, if it is tolerated at all, accompanied by the word constructive. The insinuation is that only someone can practice critique who can propose something better than what is being criticized; Lessing derided this two hundred years ago in aesthetics.¹⁵ By making the positive a condition for it, critique is tamed from the very beginning and loses its vehemence. In Gottfried Keller there is a passage where he calls the demand for something edifying a “gingerbread word.” He roughly argues that much would already be gained if the mustiness were cleared away where something that has gone bad blocks the light and fresh air.¹⁶ In fact, it is by no means always possible to add to critique the immediate practical recommendation of something better, although in many cases critique can proceed by way of confronting realities with the norms to which those realities appeal: following the norms would already be better. The word positive, which not only Karl Kraus decades ago but also a hardly radical writer like Erich Kästner polemicized against, has in the meantime in Germany been made into a magic charm.¹⁷ It automatically snaps into place. Its dubiousness can be seen in the fact that in the present situation the higher form, toward which society should move according to progressive thought, can no longer be read out of reality as a concrete tendency. If one wanted for that reason to renounce the critique of society, then one would only reinforce society in precisely the dubiousness that obstructs its transition to a higher form. The objective obstruction of what is better does not abstractly affect the larger whole. In every individual phenomenon one criticizes, one swiftly runs up against that limitation. Again and again the demand for positive proposals proves unfulfillable, and for that reason critique is all the more comfortably defamed. Perhaps the observation suffices here that from a social-psychological perspective the craving for the positive is a screen-image of the destructive instinct working under a thin veil.¹⁸ Those talking most about the positive are in agreement with destructive power. The collective compulsion for a positivity that allows its immediate translation into practice has in the meantime gripped precisely those people who believe they stand in the starkest opposition to society. This is not the least way in which their actionism fits so smoothly into society’s prevailing trend. This should be opposed by the idea, in a variation of a famous proposition of Spinoza, that the false, once determinately known and precisely expressed, is already an index of what is right and better.¹⁹