“Eliminating the worst is more human than seeking the good”: Problems of an “optimistic praxis” and layout of an anti-optimistic emancipation based on Horkheimer's late Critical Theory

problemas de uma “práxis otimista” e esboço de emancipação anti-otimista a partir da Teoria Crítica tardia de Horkheimer

Abstract

The article starts from Habermas’s accusation that Horkheimer had been unproductive in his late phase, making the tasks of Critical Theory depend on theology and becoming “too negativistic a philosopher of history, too radical a critic of reason”. With this, it seeks to outline, especially based on an analysis of Notizen (Notes) as Horkheimer’s final production that Habermas despises for not being systematic, contents of what I propose to call elements of anti-optimistic emancipation. The main objective of the study is, therefore, to show what these elements consist of, which would not only indicate practices of solidarity in a broad sense and as a negative concept – extended, even, to the sphere of a “negative policy” –, but would perform everything that can fit into a praxis that, as we read in one of the fragments of Notizen, does not intend to “seek the good”, but “eliminate the worst”. To this end, I propose that it is necessary to consider the controversial presence of the pair pessimism-optimism in Horkheimer, which is not always used in a strictly Schopenhauerian sense; and, in particular, how one can understand the recommendation of the founder of the Frankfurt School of a theoretical pessimism complemented by a practical optimism or by an “optimistic praxis”.