Some of the subjects of Martin Shuster’s study, such as Theodor W. Adorno, likely would have bristled at the book’s brisk 200 pages and diminutive format, while others, masters of the philosophical miniature such as Walter Benjamin, likely would have exhaled languidly at the book’s expository limpidity. A professional hazard, I suppose, when one chooses to write about modernity’s most agile and adept critics.

Written for the novice, Shuster’s book eschews the usual historical introduction to Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the conceit of “generational” supersession in favor of a thematic approach, organized by chapters entitled “critique,” “self,” “society,” “art,” and “religion.” Nonetheless the emphasis is on certain first-generation thinkers, principally Adorno and Marcuse, with some discussion of points by Horkheimer and Fromm, and quick mention of Benjamin, Kirchheimer, Neumann, and Pollock. Of the later thinkers, Habermas receives some attention, Honneth a quick mention, and Forst, Menke, and Jaeggi are absent. Real virtues of the book include its attention to religion (often overlooked or downplayed in introductions), its intricate yet very accessible presentation of lesser-known essays by Marcuse and others, and suggested connections to later developments in critical theory, broadly conceived (feminism, gender theory, post-colonial theory, Foucault, etc.). To my knowledge this is the first introduction to Frankfurt School Critical Theory to cater expressly to aficionados of alternative rock music (cue Adorno’s apoplexy here).

According to the conventional intellectual narrative, the Frankfurters were taking up the Hegelian-Marxian legacy to explore how the expected revolutionary instauration of rational freedom in modern Western societies in the early 20^th century was supplanted by oppression: by fascism in Germany, Stalinism in Russia, and the welfare-state administration in the US. Investigating how the liberatory potential of reason inverted into irrational domination was how the initial theorists themselves understood their interdisciplinary research program. In its arguably founding text from which numerous later works radiated, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, authors Horkheimer and Adorno state in the preface:

We have no doubt – and herein lies our petitio principii – that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking [that is, reason]. We believe we have perceived with equal clarity, however, that the very concept of that thinking, no less than the concrete historical forms, the institutions of society with which it is intertwined, already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today.[1]

The grand historical narratives of the increasing realization of rational freedom towards “autonomy” and “maturity” (Kant), the “identity of subject and substance” (Hegel), and “free association” (Marx) instead halted and became suspended in the “iron cage” (Weber) of the twentieth century.[2]

Although countenancing its explanatory suggestiveness (e.g., p. 12), Shuster avoids directly highlighting this narrative in favor of elevating the alleviation of suffering into the cynosure anchoring the book’s organization. However, positing “needless suffering” as the Archimedean fixed point of Critical Theory (“the theme of this book: what drives things here is needless suffering,” p. 127; “the sort of needless suffering that this book has prioritized,” p. 138; and passim)[3] ultimately denies the eminently dialectical commitments of at least the early Frankfurters.

Suffering, even needless suffering, cannot serve as the normative ground for critique. First, what is needless and what is needful, necessary, is not fixed but rather historically and socially relative. Adorno rejects Marx’s axiomatic givenness of human needs; one might claim that thwarting human self-actualization is itself a form of inflicted suffering, or that an “ideal rational agent” would optimally discern needed and needless, but here nuance is required. As adherents of “dialectical anthropology,” and more generally of a dialectical interplay between nature and history such that neither conceptual pole may be isolated or hypostatized (as Shuster rightly notes), Horkheimer and Adorno believe that there are no given independent “bare” facts of human nature, capacities, or needs that can be axiomatically invoked to leverage critique.[4] Instead, what counts as “nature” is always socially conditioned, what counts as “culture” or “history” is always reified as an invariant “second nature.” Each pole can at best serve situationally to criticize its other: the physiological “naturalness” of needless suffering – somatic pain – becomes historically inflected (into phenomena like heartache, grief, psychic trauma, institutional practices of humiliation, non-recognition, etc.), the “historicity” of needless suffering becomes naturalistically inflected (into phenomena like human dignity, invariant human needs, universal human rights, under whose banner liberal Western societies have inflicted untold suffering.).

Second, suffering is also individualistically relative: any good Nietzschean knows that the question is whether one can endorse, welcome, will one’s suffering as one becomes who one is:

Man, the bravest animal and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not negate suffering in itself: he wants it, he even seeks it out, provided one shows him a meaning for it, a to-this-end of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not the suffering itself, was the curse that thus far lay stretched out over humanity—and the ascetic ideal offered it a meaning! Thus far it has been the only meaning; any meaning is better than no meaning at all … man would much rather will nothingness than not will…[5]

At issue is not suffering per se, but the value and meaning one ascribes one’s suffering, such as the vertiginous thoughts Nietzsche traced to his own profound ill health, or his apparent approbation of Goethe, Napoleon, and Cesare Borgia.

Third, and relatedly, for the Frankfurters modern society dominates not by inflicting suffering preeminently and insidiously but through regression: thwarting autonomy and delivering distraction and dispensation from maturity, self-reflection, and the individual demands of free association. Autonomy is felt not as self-actualization towards self-fulfillment, but as a burden from which one yearns for what nowadays is blithely called “cognitive offloading.” For the Frankfurters, such regression enabled the barbarism of fascism and the Nazi genocide but also characterized the emergence of the politically tractable “authoritarian personality” in the US. The culture industry repeatedly stimulates momentary distractions according to an ethos of superficial “fun” and prurient titillation, while infinitely deferring the promise of genuine pleasure and happiness: “works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish”; “fun is a medicinal bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe. It makes laughter the instrument for cheating happiness.”[6] This suggests more Zarathustra’s complacently self-stultifying, squinting “last man” than the wretched protagonist of a late short by Beckett. Shuster acknowledges this only in passing: “society has a massive culture industry dedicated to producing a range of aesthetic [sic] products aimed exactly at obfuscating and hiding the suffering it causes” (141). This isn’t quite right. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the culture industry doesn’t produce even the semblance of happiness, rather it persistently palms off “fun” and the perpetually deferred pleasure, happiness, and love as labor’s reward. If we are “amusing ourselves to death” (Neil Postman) with pleasurable bagatelles, by what standard, ideal, or norm does Critical Theory bemoan such deplorables? In Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections there is a scene in which the English professor Chip, in the final hour of a semester-length seminar on varieties of postmodern cultural critique, is stymied by Melissa, one of his students:

“This whole class,” she said. “It’s just bullshit every week. It’s one critic after another wringing their hands about the state of criticism. Nobody can ever quite say what’s wrong exactly. But they all know it’s evil. They all know ‘corporate’ is a dirty word. And if somebody’s having fun or getting rich – disgusting! Evil! And it’s always the death of this or the death of that. And people who think they’re free aren’t ‘really’ free. And people who think they’re happy aren’t ‘really’ happy. …

Melissa’s accusations had cut him to the quick. … Criticizing a sick culture, even if the criticism accomplished nothing, had always felt like useful work. But if the supposed sickness wasn’t a sickness at all … then there was no longer even the most abstract utility to this criticism. It was all, in Melissa’s word, bullshit.[7]

What normative standpoint does one occupy from which to deny that the pleasant deliverances of modernity in general and the culture industry in particular do not constitute the right sort of happiness and pleasure? And I note from my own experience students’ reluctance to acknowledge the threats posed by “surveillance capitalism” and their willingness, even eagerness to trade their data privacy for the ease and comfort of digital consumer convenience.

In a trenchant essay from 2005, the philosopher Raymond Geuss notes that “contemporary liberalism rests on, and also fosters, an extremely highly developed sensitivity vis-à-vis the phenomenon of suffering” and concludes:

It is historically perfectly understandable that in the ‘50s and early’60s of the last century Adorno made the abolition of suffering in a rather unqualified sense one of the central motifs of his philosophy. However, ever then that was an undialectical thought, and, one way or another, a mistake. One would hope that if Adorno were still alive, he would have tried to develop a more sophisticated and differentiated analysis of suffering than he did. Wouldn’t it be most appropriate for contemporary dialectical thinking to try to overcome the one-sidedness of a philosophy of suffering, either of the liberal or the 1950 Frankfurt variety? Would Adorno’s epistemology itself remain unchanged by this revision in its substance?[8]

What would a dialectical critical theory of suffering look like? It would tease out, situationally, how whether suffering is “needless” is often ultimately determined retrospectively.[9] In a lecture course Shuster does not discuss, Adorno invokes a “moral addendum,” a somatic jolt that supplements moral reasoning in moving one to act, and illustrates it with the conversation of one of the July 1944 plotters to assassinate Hitler, who recounts that he simply could not tolerate the situation anymore, and had to act. The plot by army officers failed and hundreds were rounded up and executed in Plötzensee, where nearly 3000 political prisoners were murdered during the Third Reich. Was their suffering needless? Did the German people lose the war or succeed in liberating Germany from…. themselves? Adorno coined the term “context of guilt” or debt (Schuldzusammenhang) to refer to the fact that in modern societies even the most morally pristine action is inextricably interwoven with, interdependent on morally compromising, economically exploitative, and unjust actions. A dialectical analysis of suffering would painstakingly articulate the stakes of such pain. Moreover, it would uncover a structure similiar to what Adorno described as the paradox of culture: its very existence as ‘free’ intellectual activity towards emancipation inexorably depends on the respite wrought by necessary material labor. In order to be the reserve of mimesis, the capacity of expressive suffering[10], art relies for its existence upon the leisure afforded its creation by the miserable, manual labor – the suffering – of others. The utopian possibility vouchsafed by art lies in the necessity of “needless” suffering.

[1] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002): xvi.

[2] For an excellent study of the Hegelian-Marxian tradition of Critical Theory, see Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (Columbia University Press, 1986).

[3] Shuster insists that his concern is needless suffering, even when his authors are not so clear: “When Adorno [in Aesthetic Theory] is referring to ‘what is objective,’ he is referring to (needless) suffering, whose ‘expression is the suffering countenance of artworks.’” (140)

[4] Adorno, “Theses on Need” (1942). For an analogous misreading of Marx along these lines, see Allen Wood’s neo-Aristotelian interpretation in his Karl Marx, second edition (Routledge, 2020). On dialectical anthropology and its implications, see N. Coomann, “’Im Schema: ‘Caput mortuum’: Adornos Fragmente einer dialektischen Anthropologie,“ Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 65 (2017): 51-66.

[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. M. Clark (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998): 117-118.

[6] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002): 111, 112. Cf. also Theodor Adorno, “Aldous Huxley and Utopia,” Prisms, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988).

[7] Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001): 45-6.

[8] Raymond Geuss, “Suffering and Knowledge in Adorno,” in his Outside Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2005): 128, 130.

[9] Structurally similar here is the notion of “moral luck” by Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams, who suggests that whether the suffering of Paul Gauguin’s family, whom the painter forsook to travel to Tahiti for inspiration, can only be (relatively, if at all) justified by his resulting success in revolutionizing painting, otherwise the moral culpability is absolute.

[10] Cf. for example, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002): 103-4.

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Henry W. Pickford is Professor of German Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Duke University.

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