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and practice has become one of the most widespread slogans in the present-day world, where it is being vulagrized in various ways to absurdity, and transformed into an exact opposite of the original idea, and because reason is equally excluded from theory and practice, their thinking merits fuli attention. Some reference to this was madę in the previous chapter, the concept of critical theory being impossible to explan without demonstrating its relationship to practice, so we shall only complement it in our further discussion. Here again it will not be possible to show up all the shades in the standpoints of different thinkers. We can only try to outline the prevalent view in this theo-retical current. Their views shall be taken either as an expression of a common standpoint, or as its further elaboration, and in some cases as departure from them.

As a result of the earlier mentioned circumstance that the most in-fluential spokesmen of the critical theory are outside political move-ments (Marcuse in recent years being an exception), and that they op-pose concepts about the role of the theory current in various anti-capitalist movements, relationship between theory and practice is ge-nerally considered from the theory’s viewpoint seeking endorsement for it in philosophical tradition. Opposition to the theory being turned into an instrumental-technical tool of practice, and the criticism of positivist and pragmatist philosophical justifications of this subordi-nation of the theoretical thought are invariably based upon an inves-tigation and interpretation of classical philosophical concepts of reason as the only possible form of a comprehensive rational self-consciousness and ideative prereąuisite for a liberation-bringing-socio-historical practice. This has been equally true of Horkheimer and Marcuse sińce the nineteen thirties, and of Habermas in morę recent times. Adorno also continued the investigations of philosophical tradition, begun long before the Second World War and for a long time carried out in closest cooperation with Horkheimer.³⁷ On several oc-casions Marcuse presented clearly and concisely his interpretation of the concept of reason in the bourgeois philosophical tradition and in Marxian thought, which was later also done by Habermas.³⁸ Horkheimer did the same,³⁹ but he was mainly interested in how the concept of mind and its role in individual and social life changed in the

⁵⁷ Adorno is morę critical both toward the classical German philosophical idea-lism and towards the phenomenology and the German existentialism than most of the other representatives of the critical theory. Apart from unanimity in the assess-ment of the contcmporary positivism, an exhaustive study could everywhere estab-lish differences between Adorno’s and other interpretations of the philosophical tradition and contemporary philosophy, some of which are not insignificant. It is quite possible that some of Adorno’s interpretations also imply tacit criticism of the other members of the family.

³⁸    H. Marcuse, »Philosophy and Critical Theory«, originally published in German in Zeischrift fiir Sozialforschung, Vol. VI (1947) ąuoted according to its trans-lation, H. Marcuse, Negations, Essays in Critical Theory, Beacon Press, Boston, 1969, pp. 135-141. H. Marcuse, Reason and Revolułion, Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, (1941), Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1963, pp. 252-257. J. Habermas, Theorie und Praxis, Luchterhand, Neuwied, 1963, especially pp. 231-239.

³⁹    M. Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason, passim; »Zum Begriff der Vernunft«, in the book M. Horkheimer, T. W. Adomo, Sociologica II, pp. 193-204.

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