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67-682: Sean Griffin is a critical queer film theory scholar and professor at the Meadows School of the Arts . His work includes Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out , which was adapted from his dissertation. Tinker Belles and Evil Queens (2000) suggests that The Walt Disney Company , despite having a focus on heterocentric " family values " in its films, has long attracted gay audiences , particularly through queercoding and gay subtext of its films. It

134-485: A social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only toward understanding or explaining it. Wanting to distinguish critical theory as a radical, emancipatory form of Marxist philosophy , Horkheimer critiqued both the model of science put forward by logical positivism , and what he and his colleagues saw as the covert positivism and authoritarianism of orthodox Marxism and Communism . He described

201-549: A challenge, to be met by a more complete theory of knowledge. Attempts at such a theory often centered on special forms of intuition which Kant either deemed impossible or denied as appropriate foundations for knowledge in the strict and systematic sense, for example in the case of "spiritual" insights that cannot be observed, shared, and tested reliably and repeatably, and thus cannot form the basis of abstract laws about regularities in nature. In developing these claims, philosophers like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel further argued that

268-457: A commitment to some version of the "transcendental method". In England, during the nineteenth century, philosopher Thomas Hill Green embraced German Idealism in order to support Christian monotheism as a basis for morality. His philosophy attempted to account for an eternal consciousness or mind that was similar to Berkeley 's concept of God . John Rodman, in the introduction to his book on Thomas Hill Green's political theory, wrote: "Green

335-493: A critical theorist to the extent that he was an unconventional and critical sociologist; this appropriation is similarly casual, holding little or no relation to the Frankfurt School . In contrast, Habermas is one of the key critics of postmodernism. When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Habermas redefined critical social theory as a study of communication , with communicative competence and communicative rationality on

402-457: A foothold open for skepticism within the framework of Kant’s own philosophy. For now the question arose how two such heterogeneous realms as the intellectual and the sensible could be known to correspond with one another. The problem was no longer how we know that our representations correspond with things in themselves but how we know that a priori concepts apply to a posteriori intuitions. Maimon attempted to resolve this problem by introducing

469-404: A function of our own subjective constitution projecting certain of its notions onto organized matter. Conversely, Kant makes the same critical claim about materialist reductionism, as it too is a function of certain "regulative" ideals (such as the drive to reduce our experience of external plurality and multiplicity to a minimum of fundamental laws, forces, and beings). For the critical idealist, it

536-610: A positive doctrine: " transcendental idealism ", which is distinct from classical idealism and subjective idealism . On this view, the world of appearances is "empirically real and transcendentally ideal." That is, the mind plays a central role in shaping our experience of the world: we perceive phenomena in time and space according to the categories of the understanding . The best-known German idealist thinkers, after Kant, are J. G. Fichte , F. W. J. Schelling , and G. W. F. Hegel . Critics of Kant's project such as F. H. Jacobi , Gottlob Ernst Schulze , and Salomon Maimon influenced

603-455: A result, critical theory was left, in Habermas's words, without "anything in reserve to which it might appeal, and when the forces of production enter into a baneful symbiosis with the relations of production that they were supposed to blow wide open, there is no longer any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope". For Adorno and Horkheimer, this posed the problem of how to account for

670-452: A result. Immanuel Kant 's work purports to bridge the two dominant philosophical schools in the 18th century: rationalism , which holds that knowledge could be attained by reason alone a priori (prior to experience), and empiricism , which holds that knowledge could be arrived at only through the senses a posteriori (after experience), as expressed by philosopher David Hume , whose skepticism Kant sought to rebut. Kant's solution

737-459: A similar function. Hegel claimed that "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all". Neo-Kantianism emphasizes the critical dimension of Kant's philosophy as against the perceived excesses of German Idealism. It was the dominant philosophy in Germany during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although there was considerable disagreement among the neo-Kantians themselves, they shared

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804-584: A stable other". Instead, many postmodern scholars have adopted "alternatives that encourage reflection about the 'politics and poetics' of their work. In these accounts, the embodied, collaborative, dialogic, and improvisational aspects of qualitative research are clarified." The term critical theory is often appropriated when an author works in sociological terms, yet attacks the social or human sciences, thus attempting to remain "outside" those frames of inquiry. Michel Foucault has been described as one such author. Jean Baudrillard has also been described as

871-629: A temporary moment of relatedness with some aspect of the world. Rosa describes himself as working within the critical theory tradition of the Frankfurt School, providing an extensive critique of late modernity through his concept of social acceleration . However his resonance theory has been questioned for moving too far beyond the Adornoian tradition of "looking coldly at society". Focusing on language , symbolism, communication, and social construction , critical theory has been applied in

938-516: A theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them". Critical theory involves a normative dimension, either by criticizing society in terms of some general theory of values or norms ( oughts ), or by criticizing society in terms of its own espoused values (i.e. immanent critique ). Significantly, critical theory not only conceptualizes and critiques societal power structures, but also establishes an empirically grounded model to link society to

1005-424: A theory as critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them". Although a product of modernism , and although many of the progenitors of Critical Theory were skeptical of postmodernism , Critical Theory is one of the major components of both modern and postmodern thought, and is widely applied in the humanities and social sciences today. In addition to its roots in

1072-448: A theory that many use to understand critical theory, the theory of recognition . In this theory, he asserts that in order for someone to be responsible for themselves and their own identity they must be also recognized by those around them: without recognition in this sense from peers and society, individuals can never become wholly responsible for themselves and others, nor experience true freedom and emancipation—i.e., without recognition,

1139-454: Is a real object in the external world that is related to its subjective representation. This belief is a result of revelation or immediately known, but logically unproved, truth. The real existence of a thing-in-itself is revealed or disclosed to the observing subject. In this way, the subject directly knows the ideal, subjective representations that appear in the mind, and strongly believes in the real, objective thing-in-itself that exists outside

1206-723: Is addressed in a much more assertive way in contemporary theory. Another criticism of critical theory "is that it fails to provide rational standards by which it can show that it is superior to other theories of knowledge, science, or practice." Rex Gibson argues that critical theory suffers from being cliquish, conformist, elitist, immodest, anti-individualist, naive, too critical, and contradictory. Hughes and Hughes argue that Habermas' theory of ideal public discourse "says much about rational talkers talking, but very little about actors acting: Felt, perceptive, imaginative, bodily experience does not fit these theories". Some feminists argue that critical theory "can be as narrow and oppressive as

1273-403: Is any approach to humanities and social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to attempt to reveal, critique, and challenge or dismantle power structures . With roots in sociology and literary criticism , it argues that social problems stem more from social structures and cultural assumptions than from individuals. Some hold it to be an ideology, others argue that ideology

1340-402: Is best seen as an exponent of German idealism as an answer to the dilemma posed by the discrediting of Christianity...." "German idealism was initially introduced to the broader community of American literati through a Vermont intellectual, James Marsh . Studying theology with Moses Stuart at Andover Seminary in the early 1820s, Marsh sought a Christian theology that would 'keep alive

1407-497: Is distinguished in consciousness by the subject from the subject and object, and is referred to both." He thereby started, not from definitions, but, from a principle that referred to representations in a conscious mind. In this way, he analyzed knowledge into (1) the knowing subject, or observer, (2) the known object, and (3) the image or representation in the subject's mind. Gottlob Ernst Schulze objected to Kant's critical philosophy as self-contradictory. According to Kant himself,

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1474-490: Is known for his works Pathology of Reason and The Legacy of Critical Theory , in which he attempts to explain critical theory's purpose in a modern context. Jaeggi focuses on both critical theory's original intent and a more modern understanding that some argue has created a new foundation for modern usage of critical theory. Butler contextualizes critical theory as a way to rhetorically challenge oppression and inequality, specifically concepts of gender. Honneth established

1541-637: Is one of the remaining Marxist philosophical concepts in much contemporary critical theory. The legacy of Critical Theory as a major offshoot of Marxism is controversial. The common thread linking Marxism and Critical theory is an interest in struggles to dismantle structures of oppression, exclusion, and domination. Philosophical approaches within this broader definition include feminism , critical race theory , post-structuralism , queer theory and forms of postcolonialism . Max Horkheimer first defined critical theory ( German : Kritische Theorie ) in his 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory", as

1608-489: Is simply not possible to know whether living things are ultimately teleological or mechanical, or something else entirely. Kant's successors agreed with Kant that the subject in its ordinary state lacks immediate knowledge of external reality (as in naive realism ), and that empirical knowledge based on sense data ultimately tells us only about the subject's own categorial organization of this data. But they often interpreted this Kantian limitation on ordinary knowledge as

1675-828: Is the application to social work of a critical theory perspective. Critical social work seeks to address social injustices, as opposed to focusing on individualized issues. Critical theories explain social problems as arising from various forms of oppression and injustice in globalized capitalist societies and forms of neoliberal governance. Critical environmental justice applies critical theory to environmental justice . While critical theorists have often been called Marxist intellectuals, their tendency to denounce some Marxist concepts and to combine Marxian analysis with other sociological and philosophical traditions has resulted in accusations of revisionism by Orthodox Marxist and by Marxist–Leninist philosophers. Martin Jay has said that

1742-489: Is the principal obstacle to human liberation. Critical theory finds applications in various fields of study, including psychoanalysis , film theory , literary theory , cultural studies , history , communication theory , philosophy , and feminist theory . Critical Theory (capitalized) is a school of thought practiced by the Frankfurt School theoreticians Herbert Marcuse , Theodor Adorno , Walter Benjamin , Erich Fromm , and Max Horkheimer . Horkheimer described

1809-436: Is therefore "transcendental" or "critical," in that it examines the categorial (transcendental) structure of possible knowledge in order to trace all knowledge claims back to their foundations in the subject's own categorial framework. For example, Kant argues that teleological interpretations of homeostasis and autopoiesis in living things, though seemingly observable and thus empirically provable (or at least probable), are

1876-473: The National Post , argued that any challenges to the "legitimacy [of critical theory] can be interpreted as a demonstration of their [critical theory's proponents'] thesis: the assertion of reason, logic and evidence is a manifestation of privilege and power. Thus, any challenger risks the stigma of a bigoted oppressor." Robert Danisch, writing for The Conversation , argued that critical theory, and

1943-664: The natural sciences or the humanities , through its orientation to self-reflection and emancipation. Although unsatisfied with Adorno and Horkheimer's thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment , Habermas shares the view that, in the form of instrumental rationality , the era of modernity marks a move away from the liberation of enlightenment and toward a new form of enslavement. In Habermas's work, critical theory transcended its theoretical roots in German idealism , and progressed closer to American pragmatism . Habermas's ideas about

2010-526: The Fichte's "I" needs the Not-I, because there is no subject without object, and vice versa. So subjective representations are identical to the extended objects which are external to the mind. According to Schelling's "absolute identity" or "indifferentism", there is no difference between the subjective and the objective, that is, the ideal and the real. Friedrich Schleiermacher was a theologian who asserted that

2077-503: The Oppressed , a seminal text in what is now known as the philosophy and social movement of critical pedagogy . Dedicated to the oppressed and based on his own experience helping Brazilian adults learn to read and write, Freire includes a detailed class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. In the book, he calls traditional pedagogy the " banking model of education ", because it treats

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2144-479: The absolute transcendental entity which is God. Salomon Maimon influenced German idealism by criticizing Kant's dichotomies, claiming that Kant did not explain how opposites such as sensibility and understanding could relate to each other. As he clearly saw, this presented a serious skeptical objection to the Kantian project: By thus pointing out these problematic dualisms, Maimon and the neo- Humean critics left

2211-432: The apparent persistence of domination in the absence of the very contradiction that, according to traditional critical theory, was the source of domination itself. In the 1960s, Habermas , a proponent of critical social theory , raised the epistemological discussion to a new level in his Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), by identifying critical knowledge as based on principles that differentiated it either from

2278-443: The awakening of self-consciousness. Thus Hegel introduced two important ideas to metaphysics and philosophy: the integral importance of history and intersubjectivity . Hegel also claims to sublate the traditional concept of God with his concept of absolute spirit . Baruch Spinoza , who changed the anthropomorphic concept of God into that of an underlying substance, was praised by Hegel whose concept of absolute knowing fulfilled

2345-441: The concept of "infinite mind". For this reason, Maimon can be said to have returned to pre-Kantian transcendent speculation. In the words of Frederick C. Beiser , "by reviving metaphysical ideas from within the problematic of the critical philosophy, he gave them a new legitimacy and opened up the possibility for a critical resurrection of metaphysics. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel responded to Kant's philosophy by suggesting that

2412-490: The direction the movement would take in the philosophies of his would-be successors. According to Immanuel Kant , the human mind is not capable of directly experiencing the external world as it is in itself. Instead, our experience of the world is mediated by the a priori categories and concepts that are inherent in the human mind. These categories and concepts, which Kant calls "transcendental" because they are necessary for any experience, structure and organize our experience of

2479-439: The discourse of modernity. Habermas engaged in regular correspondence with Richard Rorty , and a strong sense of philosophical pragmatism may be felt in his thought, which frequently traverses the boundaries between sociology and philosophy. Contemporary philosophers and researchers who have focused on understanding and critiquing critical theory include Nancy Fraser , Axel Honneth , Judith Butler , and Rahel Jaeggi . Honneth

2546-591: The economy had effectively abolished the traditional tension between Marxism's " relations of production " and "material productive forces " of society. The market (as an "unconscious" mechanism for the distribution of goods) had been replaced by centralized planning . Contrary to Marx's prediction in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy , this shift did not lead to "an era of social revolution " but to fascism and totalitarianism . As

2613-406: The first generation of critical theory is best understood not as promoting a specific philosophical agenda or ideology, but as "a gadfly of other systems". Critical theory has been criticized for not offering any clear road map to political action ( praxis ), often explicitly repudiating any solutions. Those objections mostly apply to first-generation Frankfurt School, while the issue of politics

2680-406: The first-generation Frankfurt School, critical theory has also been influenced by György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci . Some second-generation Frankfurt School scholars have been influential, notably Jürgen Habermas . In Habermas's work, critical theory transcended its theoretical roots in German idealism and progressed closer to American pragmatism . Concern for social " base and superstructure "

2747-586: The heart in the head.' " Some American theologians and churchmen found value in German Idealism's theological concept of the infinite Absolute Ideal or Geist [Spirit]. It provided a religious alternative to the traditional Christian concept of the Deity . The Absolute Ideal Weltgeist [World Spirit] was invoked by American ministers as they "turned to German idealism in the hope of finding comfort against English positivism and empiricism." German idealism

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2814-580: The human subject. It defends the universalist ambitions of the tradition, but does so within a specific context of social-scientific and historical research. The core concepts of critical theory are that it should: Postmodern critical theory is another major product of critical theory. It analyzes the fragmentation of cultural identities in order to challenge modernist-era constructs such as metanarratives , rationality , and universal truths, while politicizing social problems "by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, to implicate themselves in

2881-461: The ideal and the real are united in God. He understood the ideal as the subjective mental activities of thought, intellect, and reason. The real was, for him, the objective area of nature and physical being. Schleiermacher declared that the unity of the ideal and the real is manifested in God. The two divisions do not have a productive or causal effect on each other. Rather, they are both equally existent in

2948-403: The individual cannot achieve self-actualization . Like many others who put stock in critical theory, Jaeggi is vocal about capitalism's cost to society. Throughout her writings, she has remained doubtful about the necessity and use of capitalism in regard to critical theory. Most of Jaeggi's interpretations of critical theory seem to work against the foundations of Habermas and follow more along

3015-423: The interests of one section of society masquerading as the interests of society as a whole. One of the distinguishing characteristics of critical theory, as Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer elaborated in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), is an ambivalence about the ultimate source or foundation of social domination, an ambivalence that gave rise to the " pessimism " of the new critical theory about

3082-400: The law of cause and effect only applies to the phenomena, not between phenomena and things-in-themselves. Yet, Kant directly claims that the thing-in-itself is the cause of phenomena. After Schulze had seriously criticized the notion of a thing-in-itself, Johann Gottlieb Fichte produced a philosophy similar to Kant's, but without a thing-in-itself. Fichte asserted that our representations are

3149-406: The learner from an oppressive construct of teacher versus student, a dichotomy analogous to colonizer and colonized. It is not enough for the student to analyze societal power structures and hierarchies, to merely recognize imbalance and inequity; critical theory pedagogy must also empower the learner to reflect and act on that reflection to challenge an oppressive status quo. Critical social work

3216-521: The lines of Honneth in terms of how to look at the economy through the theory's lens. She shares many of Honneth's beliefs, and many of her works try to defend them against criticism Honneth has received. To provide a dialectical opposite to Jaeggi's conception of alienation as 'a relation of relationlessness', Hartmut Rosa has proposed the concept of resonance . Rosa uses this term to refer to moments when late modern subjects experience momentary feelings of self-efficacy in society, bringing them into

3283-592: The mind-dependence of all possible experience entails a form of absolute idealism , the position that the ultimate nature of reality is ideal or mental, as in Platonism. They often viewed Kant's transcendental or critical idealism as a necessary and admirable critique of philosophical "dogmatism," but as leaving the critique of knowledge unfinished, in an intolerable state of dualism, agnosticism, and even nihilism. The post-Kantian German idealists have often been described as monists , emanationists , and nondualists as

3350-621: The mind. By presenting the external world as an object of belief, Jacobi aimed to legitimize belief – or faith – in general. Karl Leonhard Reinhold published two volumes of Letters Concerning the Kantian Philosophy in 1790 and 1792. He tried to prove Kant's assertion that humans and other animals can know only phenomena, never things-in-themselves. In order to establish his proof, Reinhold stated an axiom that could not possibly be doubted. From this axiom, all knowledge of consciousness could be deduced. His axiom was: "Representation

3417-471: The modern humanities more broadly, focus too much on criticizing the current world rather than trying to make a better world. German idealism As a philosophical position, idealism claims that the true objects of knowledge are "ideal," meaning mind-dependent, as opposed to material. The term stems from Plato's view that the " Ideas ," the categories or concepts which our mind abstracts from our empirical experience of particular things, are more real than

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3484-516: The one hand, and distorted communication on the other, the two versions of critical theory began to overlap to a much greater degree than before. Critical theory can be used to interpret the right of asylum and immigration law . Critical finance studies apply critical theory to financial markets and central banks . Critical theorists have widely credited Paulo Freire for the first applications of critical theory to education/ pedagogy , considering his best-known work to be Pedagogy of

3551-547: The particulars themselves, which depend on the Ideas rather than the Ideas depending on them. In the context of German idealism, the term is ambiguous because it was used in different ways by Kant and his successors, chief among them Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. For Kant, our knowledge of external reality must conform to how our experience of this reality is structured by our own minds in the very act of receiving information or stimuli from it (e.g., sense data). When we abstract from

3618-418: The particulars, for example to discover physical forces underlying them or logical laws without which speech and thought would be contradictory or impossible, we merely "discover" the categorial or conceptual scheme which our own mind necessarily supplies to all our experience. We do not peer into the structure of external reality itself, as Plato believed. It remains forever inaccessible to us. Kant's idealism

3685-422: The possibility of human emancipation and freedom . This ambivalence was rooted in the historical circumstances in which the work was originally produced, particularly the rise of Nazism , state capitalism , and culture industry as entirely new forms of social domination that could not be adequately explained in the terms of traditional Marxist sociology . For Adorno and Horkheimer, state intervention in

3752-498: The process of collecting and analyzing data, and to relativize their findings". Marx explicitly developed the notion of critique into the critique of ideology , linking it with the practice of social revolution , as stated in the 11th section of his Theses on Feuerbach : "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." In early works, including The German Ideology , Marx developed his concepts of false consciousness and of ideology as

3819-419: The process of collecting and analyzing data, and to relativize their findings". Meaning itself is seen as unstable due to social structures' rapid transformation. As a result, research focuses on local manifestations rather than broad generalizations. Postmodern critical research is also characterized by the crisis of representation , which rejects the idea that a researcher's work is an "objective depiction of

3886-418: The productions of the "transcendental ego", that is, the knowing subject. For him, there is no external thing-in-itself. On the contrary, the subject is the source of the external thing, object, or non-ego. Fichte claimed that this truth was apparent by means of intellectual intuition. That is, the truth can be immediately seen by the use of reason. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) claimed that

3953-457: The rationalization, bureaucratization, and cultures they seek to unmask and change. Critical theory's language has been criticized as being too dense to understand, although "Counter arguments to these issues of language include claims that a call for clearer and more accessible language is anti-intellectual, a new 'language of possibility' is needed, and oppressed peoples can understand and contribute to new languages." Bruce Pardy, writing for

4020-470: The relationship between modernity and rationalization are in this sense strongly influenced by Max Weber . He further dissolved the elements of critical theory derived from Hegelian German idealism , though his epistemology remains broadly Marxist. Perhaps his two most influential ideas are the concepts of the public sphere and communicative action , the latter arriving partly as a reaction to new post-structural or so-called " postmodern " challenges to

4087-442: The social sciences as a critique of social construction and postmodern society . While modernist critical theory (as described above) concerns itself with "forms of authority and injustice that accompanied the evolution of industrial and corporate capitalism as a political-economic system", postmodern critical theory politicizes social problems "by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, to implicate themselves in

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4154-406: The student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge. He argues that pedagogy should instead treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge. In contrast to the banking model, the teacher in the critical-theory model is not the dispenser of all knowledge, but a participant who learns with and from the students—in conversation with them, even as they learn from the teacher. The goal is to liberate

4221-416: The unsolvable contradictions given by Kant in his Antinomies of Pure Reason applied more broadly to reality as such. Given that abstract thought is thus limited, he went on to consider how historical formations give rise to different philosophies and ways of thinking. In The Phenomenology of Spirit , he went on to trace formations of self-consciousness through history and the importance of other people in

4288-515: The world is mediated by the structures of our own minds. Kant restricted the domain of knowledge to objects of possible experience. His three most notable successors, however, would react against such stringent limits. In 1787, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi addressed, in his book On Faith, or Idealism and Realism , Kant's concept of "thing-in-itself". Jacobi agreed that the objective thing-in-itself cannot be directly known. However, he stated, it must be taken on belief. A subject must believe that there

4355-435: The world, but they do not provide us with direct access to the thing-in-itself, which is the ultimate reality. Kant's transcendental idealism has two main components. The first is the idea that the human mind is not a passive recipient of sensory information, but is actively involved in shaping our experience of the world. The second is the idea that the nature of reality is ultimately unknowable to us, because our experience of

4422-691: Was described by journalist Nico Lang of Harper's Bazaar as "the book on the gay history of Disney". According to Jonathan Alexander , Griffin argues that Disney did this out of economic considerations of LGBT consumers paying for Disney products. In 2023, Hbomberguy accused James Somerton of plagiarising text from Griffin's Tinker Belles in one of his YouTube video essays . Critical theory 1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville  ·  Marx ·  Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto ·  Tönnies · Veblen ·  Simmel · Durkheim ·  Addams ·  Mead · Weber ·  Du Bois ·  Mannheim · Elias A critical theory

4489-407: Was to propose that, while we depend on objects of experience to know anything about the world, we can investigate a priori the form that our thoughts can take, determining the boundaries of possible experience. Kant calls this approach " critical philosophy ". It is less concerned with setting out positive doctrine than with critiquing the limits to the theories we can set out. There is, however,

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