The opposition between formalism and positivism is a false one. These two epistemological modes are not, as they might appear, opposites—but two sides of the same coin, each distorted by its artificial separation from the other. They are not opposing standpoints, but complementary errors.

The apparent antagonism collapses under dialectical scrutiny, which reveals their interdependence as constituent moments of understanding. To paraphrase Kant: form without content is empty; content without form is blind. Each is unintelligible without the other. This is no mere philosophical nicety, but a structural insight into the conditions of rational cognition.

The widespread failure to grasp this reciprocity—this mutual determination—is symptomatic of a deeper contradiction in modernity: the non-identity of what is and what could be. The Enlightenment promised practical freedom through theoretical reason. But when either pole of that promise is severed from the other—when one is treated as prior to, rather than as the condition of, the other—the whole project turns in on itself. The result is not progress, but paralysis disguised as clarity.

Rawls fancies that his "veil of ignorance"—and the "original position" in which it places a subject—echoes the Kantian basis of morality, since his veiled subject does not (and indeed cannot) make choices based on the self-interest of a particular identity. Kant's moral agent, when acting in accordance with the categorical imperative, likewise reasons from a standpoint that suspends particular self-interest. Both Rawls's veiled subject and Kant's moral agent, then, legislate morality on the basis of disinterestedness. But if the legislation undertaken by the Rawlsian subject bears a resemblance to that of the Kantian rational agent, the similarity ends there. More than that: the "disinterestedness" of Rawls's veiled subject is a perversion of the kind of disinterestedness that defines Kant's moral agent.

Rawls believes that he is echoing Kant's call to overcome the determination of the will by immediate self-interest. He even claims that his veil of ignorance fills out the Kantian account by providing its deontology with an empirical basis that he says it otherwise lacks. In fact, however, he liquidates the essential substance of Kantian morality—its basis in autonomy. For Kant, to be moral is to direct one's will—as a finite and therefore particularly interested being—to act in accordance with reason, rather than with inclination. To so reason and to so act is, for Kant, to express one's freedom by overcoming the heteronomy of natural drives and impulses. This autonomy is grounded in the agent's capacity to legislate moral law for itself, through the categorical imperative. In Rawls, by contrast, the subject's standpoint is not self-given but externally imposed: the veil of ignorance is not a product of reason but a contrivance that deprives the agent of knowledge in order to simulate impartiality.

Thus, rather than overcoming self-interest, Rawls merely constrains it in such a way that the outcome resembles Kantian universality. His agent does not transcend but capitulates to the heteronomy of inclination. He takes the dominance of self-interest as given and immutable, and on that basis devises a scenario in which the agent does not will the rational but is compelled to reach similar conclusions by being artificially stripped of the knowledge that would activate particular interests. The veiled subject does not freely reason; it approximates reason under externally imposed conditions.

In short, freedom has no real place in Rawlsian justice. The logic of the "original position" appears to offer a rational vision of society—but it is only that: appearance, form without substance.

Rawls does not even entertain the possibility of true freedom, i.e., rational self-determination. His "original position" operates on the implicit assumption that freedom—as conceived by Kant (and by Rousseau before him and Hegel after him)—is impossible. He can only conceive of human reason as an instrument of self-interest. His subject arrives at the universality of "fairness" only by being prevented from knowing what would serve its interests. This is not a transcendence of finitude; it is a surrender to it.

The only basis on which Rawls can imagine a "just" or "fair" society is ignorance. For Rawls, the foundation of justice is not the elevation of reason to self-consciousness, but the constriction of self-consciousness—and, ultimately, the abandonment of freedom as a goal or a guide for human thought and action.

Historical optimists like Steven Pinker have no real account of why their cheerfulness is so widely rejected. Appeals to cognitive bias and media distortion cannot bear the weight he places on them; prevailing discontent cannot be explained away as misperception or faulty thinking. What Pinker overlooks is the contradiction at the heart of modernity—between what is and what could be. One doesn't need to be a scholar to see that our scientific and industrial capabilities contain the promise of a far better world, one our political realities relentlessly foreclose. People intuitively grasp the gap between the Enlightenment's ideal of freedom and the hollowed-out reality we inhabit. To claim we are living out that promise is not to honor the Enlightenment, but to misconstrue its meaning entirely.

All traditional philosophical oppositions are false insofar as they are treated as mutually exclusive, either-or alternatives. Each pairing can only be properly understood within a both-and framework. Moreover, each individual term can only be fully grasped in dialectical tension with its counterpart. The pairings include, but are not limited to:

Materialism vs. Idealism
Rationalism vs. Empiricism
Determinism vs. Free Will
Objectivism vs. Subjectivism
Absolutism vs. Relativism
Deontology vs. Consequentialism
Egoism vs. Altruism
Libertarianism vs. Egalitarianism
Individualism vs. Collectivism

Early Modernist painting set itself apart from traditional painting by directly engaging the political realities of its time. By the mid-20th century, however, abstract painting had stripped itself of that content—this was its very premise. Since then, attempts to reintroduce direct political meaning have largely failed. It no longer works.

Humpty Dumpty can't be put back together. But his fall wasn't simply an unfortunate event; it was the necessary precondition for the abstractions of high modern painting.

Thus, we should not mourn the loss of explicit political content in modern painting, but understand its exhaustion as a signal that something new needed to emerge. Abstract painting responded to the need for new visual forms capable of reflecting modernity's ever-deepening crisis, offering an acute and edifying symptom of it.

Postmodernism, by contrast, turned away from this task. Whether from uncertainty or weariness, it sought to disinherit the contradictions of high modern painting rather than confront them. In doing so, it only rendered those contradictions more opaque, thereby deepening their grip rather than escaping them. It constrained the scope of our aesthetic imagination and its ability to provoke recognition of the crisis of the late modernity.

In seeking a return to politically didactic work, Postmodernism fails to clearly express or grapple with modernity's evolving crisis. Instead, it offers only an obscure and confused symptom, after a half-century of which our aesthetic imagination has become severely limited in its capacity to metabolize or meaningfully engage the present, which we now tend to mistakenly assume requires a explicit and didactic element.

Historical scholarship may never be objective—but that doesn't mean it can't be true. Or false.

Below is my response to a second round of edit suggestions for a "business ethics" lesson that I wrote for Study.com. The commodification and degradation of intellectual labor, especially in the humanities, has become intolerable.

Hi ------

Thank you for the continued feedback. I agree with all of your recommended changes, especially your comments on source quality. As a professor, I would never accept Wikipedia or unexplained layperson sources from my university students, and I understand the importance of maintaining that standard here as well.

That said, from what I understand, I'm being paid $60 per lesson. I've already spent over four hours on this one, which works out to about $15/hour. Given the expectations for content quality, I feel this is a very low rate for the level of work and expertise involved. With that in mind, I'm not willing to put in additional time without further compensation.

I included those sources because, under the current pay structure, I didn't feel it was worth the additional time to locate better ones. I'm also not willing to make further edits to the lesson content without additional pay. If that means forgoing the $60 for this lesson, I understand.

Thanks again,

Soren

Freud was not a determinist who denied the possibility of freedom. On the contrary, his psychoanalytic project sought to identify both the possibility of freedom and the conditions for its potential realization through critical self-reflection. His phylogenetic and ontogenetic accounts of the psyche do not contradict the Enlightenment ideal of freedom but aim to clarify its basis and potential.

Both formalism and positivism are opposed to theory. The latter neglects the necessary formal dimension of knowledge, while the former cannot countenance that content exerts a determinate force upon form. Both neglect the dialectical reciprocity between form and content that theory, properly understood, must maintain. Theory emerges from the tension between the conceptual and the concrete, between essence and appearance.

History and freedom are not merely linked but dialectically co-constitutive; to sever their speculative unity is to render history unintelligible and freedom unreal. To read Hegel's claim that 'the history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom' as either deterministic or utopian is to miss the point—history does not ineluctably progress toward freedom, but without the struggle for freedom, history itself collapses into incoherence.

Instrumental reason enables humans to determine the means by which they secure individual survival and species reproduction. Yet, as this faculty advances, it develops interests distinct from those of the species' survival and even that of the individual organism, leading to an internal conflict. This divergence sets human life apart from all other species, initiating an ongoing dialectical process we call history.

The ego-subject emerges from the differentiation between humans as natural and rational beings, identifying with the latter through opposition to instinct. Subjectivity redirects individual priorities beyond generic biological directives, serving the specific needs and desires of the individual. Yet, as the subject consolidates itself, it develops its own survival instinct, distinct from and sometimes in conflict with the body in which it is embedded. It must adjudicate between these competing interests, but regardless of which it prioritizes, the subject remains bound to self-interest. Thus, though subjects gain a measure of self-determination through reason, they remain bound to the imperative of survival. It has learned to determine rational means, but not yet rational ends. The subject is constituted by reason yet governed by natural self-interest.

Initially, the ego-subject emerges as a means to pursue individual interests more effectively than instinct alone allows. Yet, to sustain itself, it must fortify its independence from its biological foundation. Paradoxically, this pursuit of autonomy compels the ego to subdue, discipline, and repress the very natural inclinations it was formed to serve. Consequently, the subject develops interests increasingly detached from—and even opposed to—its body's natural ends.

Thus, while originally formed to serve the body, at a certain stage the ego-subject begins to prioritize its own distinct and sometimes conflicting interests. At the same time, since the subject remains dependent on the body for survival, it must also work to satisfy and preserve it. The subject's very existence thus appears question-begging; it was brought into being to more effectively satisfy the body's needs and desires than instinct alone, and yet it comes to counter-identify and suppress those very inclinations.

This paradox reaches its highest expression in Kant's self-legislating will. Over time, the subject's self-interest is subdued—not by instinct, but through reason itself. As its ideal of rationality develops, it begins to recognize the irrationality of pure self-interest. In Kant's conception of the self-legislating will, the ego-subject comes to view its telos as the cultivation of a fully rational will, one necessarily decoupled from individual survival for its own sake. Reason and biological inclination have now fully separated.

Even Kant, however, recognizes that the ideal of pure autonomy is ultimately unrealizable—the will is always bound to a body, making true independence impossible. The subject cannot be both fully autonomous and embodied.

It appears that true autonomy is unattainable, and all that remains is its ideal, an illusion sustained by the very logic of instrumentalization. Yet, beyond the subject's capacity for reason, it possesses the faculty of apperception—the capacity for self-conscious awareness. Through this awareness, the subject recognizes that its supposed autonomy is not freedom at all, but a deeper submission to nature's dictates. Ironically, by prioritizing individual self-interest over species-being, the rational subject has only further entrenched itself in contingency and heteronomy.

Yet, this recognition is itself the first step toward overcoming the impasse. If the subject uses its apperceptive faculty to interrogate its continued dependence on ends beyond its determination, it may begin to glimpse a path beyond the cycle of self-instrumentalization. For Rousseau, this very recognition—the awareness of the gap between what we are and what we could be—is itself already an expression of true freedom.

Theoretical models that reject the modern conception of historical progress in self-determination often implicitly reproduce its core features. B.F. Skinner's radical behaviorist psychology is a prime example. Skinner dismisses what he derisively calls the Enlightenment's "literature of freedom" as fundamentally misguided. Human experience and behavior, he argues, can only be explained through natural mechanisms like pain avoidance and the survival instinct. From this perspective, "it is the environment which acts upon the perceiving person, not the perceiving person who acts upon the environment." The notion of "autonomous man," he writes, "is a device used to explain what we cannot explain in any other way."

Without the fiction of free will, the modern ideal of historical progress—where civilization moves toward ever-greater degrees of rational self-determination—collapses. Yet, when Skinner defends the social value of his behaviorist framework, he paradoxically appeals to that very ideal. He claims that radical behaviorism will enable the "vast changes in human behavior" necessary to rescue civilization from existential threats like "population explosion," "world famine," "pollution," and "nuclear holocaust." Only by abandoning the illusion of free will and accepting our mechanistic determination, he argues, can we acquire the knowledge needed for mitigating these and future threats to the survival and well-being of the human species.

The contradiction is already evident. And yet he expresses it even more directly in his book's concluding note, where he links his behaviorist model to an Enlightenment-inspired vision of human progress: "We have not yet seen what man can make of man." Paradoxically, embracing causal determinism appears to promise self-determination at the highest level.

Ultimately, Skinner's attempt to explain human behavior in purely deterministic terms is driven by the very social and historical aspirations that motivate the "literature of freedom" he rejects. Perhaps he is more aware of this than he lets on—perhaps he is attempting to bridge the gap between phenomenal causality and noumenal freedom that Kant deemed unbridgeable. This may give him too much credit, but his insights could still prove valuable in that regard.

Kant's moral philosophy is typically understood as prescriptive, but this view is incorrect, or at the very least, incomplete. He does not advocate for one form of moral reasoning among competing moral doctrines. Rather, he argues that whenever we make moral claims or countenance morality at all, we necessarily appeal to an a priori form of reason, even if we do not fully understand or consciously recognize it. His moral philosophy is, therefore, primarily descriptive, though not of anything empirical. Instead, it describes the necessary a priori foundation of any moral claim.

Seen in this light, the idea that Kant demands absolute adherence to strict moral law—for example, that one must tell the truth even when doing so would bring disastrous consequences—is revealed as a caricature. When we say that someone was justified in lying in a particular circumstance, the very notion of justification presupposes that lying violates moral reason at its most fundamental, a priori level. That a priori law remains the necessary framework for moral reasoning, even when, at a practical level, we determine that violating it is unavoidable or the better option (for non-self-interested reasons).

In other words, Kant's moral philosophy is not primarily normative—at least not at the outset. It begins by describing an object—morality, or its a priori basis—whose essence is normative. Certainly, in demonstrating the rational necessity of this foundation, Kant's moral philosophy acquires a normative character, but this normativity arises from the object of itself (morality) as a result of its philosophical critique.

The singular goal of socialism is to transform the relationship between human beings and production. Under capitalism, people serve as instruments for sustaining and expanding production, leaving both unfree. In socialism, production would serve human needs, enabling human beings and their productive activity to mutually emancipate—fulfilling production's original purpose.

When, in 1933, Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany, German philosophers Ernst Cassirer, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, all of Jewish descent, were forced into exile. It is difficult to imagine a historical vantage point from which it would be harder to sustain the thesis that history points towards universal freedom. Yet, in years following their exile, each of these figures took up, examined, and ultimately upheld some version of this thesis.

My dissertation poses the question: Why would philosophers in such a position seek to clarify the modern, teleological concept of history precisely when the Enlightenment project, from which that concept descended, appeared to be collapsing entirely. Or, as Horkheimer and Adorno put it in 1944, when "humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a renewed barbarism."

In this historical context, all three figures maintained that the Enlightenment's historical imagination could not and should not be summarily condemned or dismissed. Each saw a need to register such apparently aberrant developments as fascism through the lens of Enlightenment reason, not in spite of but precisely because of the acute contradiction between its vision and the historical realities that followed its articulation.

As a neo-Kantian, Cassirer approaches these matters by way of a rather different philosophical methodology and framework than Horkheimer and Adorno, themselves both founding members of the Marxian Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. There are, nevertheless, substantive points of convergence between the two approaches. To begin with, they share a commitment to the foundations of modern critical philosophy. They also both place the form/content and subject/object relations at the core of their respective inquiries and understand these relations in similarly dialectical terms.

By identifying and elaborating on these shared commitments, my dissertation makes the case that a 21st century philosophy of history must directly contend with the modern, teleological concept of history. Epistemological merits aside (for the moment, at least), I argue that it must do so because such a conception has been and continues to constitute a decisive, material factor in the present. And if this is so, then we need to develop a better understanding of the relation between this mode of historical consciousness and the empirical historical which so clearly does not bear it out.

In any such effort, the modern concept of history must be taken up critically, not affirmatively, that is, precisely in the spirit of the texts that I take up in my dissertation. In chapter 1, "Teleology in modern philosophies of history," I trace the modern concept of history's own historical development, at both the empirical and intellectual registers. I locate its gestation in the Renaissance, in the emergence of the bourgeois class as a politically consequential constituent in European life. The concept solidifies around the political aspirations of the bourgeois revolutions and is given explicit articulation in Enlightenment philosophies, such as in Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. I then trace the concept's fate through the historical and epistemological crises of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and arrive, finally, at its disavowal by Postmodernist philosophy.

Chapter 2, "Cassirer's neo-Kantian epistemology of the human sciences," discusses Cassirer's efforts to establish a firm epistemological foundation for the cultural sciences on the basis of Kantian categories and neo-Kantian elaborations of those categories. Cassirer supplements his neo-Kantianism with a fuller appreciation of Hegel than was afforded by his neo-Kantian predecessors. This allows him to round out his take on the form/content relation of historical epistemology with a fuller appreciation of its subject/object dynamic.

Chapter 3 discusses Horkheimer's distinction between traditional and critical theory. He characterizes the former as passive and affirmative. It reflects, he argues, the reality in which it is situated, and therefore becomes "a factor in the conservation and continuous renewal of the existing state of affairs." He claims that the latter, by contrast, seeks to identify a given state of affair's immanent tendency towards its own negation and overcoming.

This means that Critical Theory is really only possible when a state of affairs is so dialectically constituted, that is, when it contains contradictory tendencies within itself. For this reason, Horkheimer does not really allow for the possibility of Critical Theory until the crisis of bourgeois society through the industrialization of the capitalist production process in the mid-19th century. In other words, Horkheimer's definition of Critical Theory is more or less synonymous with Marxism.

Horkheimer argues that bourgeois theory, with Enlightenment philosophy as its heart, is a form of traditional theory in crisis. The bourgeois society which it reflects contains internal contradictions, and these are reflected in the corresponding theory, but they have not yet matured to the point where theory can recognize their historical genesis. Bourgeois theory, then, can only understand the theoretical contradictions which it encounters as insoluble aporias or antinomies.

Critical Theory, then, stands in a negative and thus tenuous relation to the world it inhabits. Its claims can be rather easily dismissed because they do not simply reflect, but rather directly challenge their objects. But this does not mean, according to Horkheimer, that Critical Theory's claims are unrooted in reality. On the contrary, by articulating reality's negative aspect, the theory offers a fuller picture of that reality than traditional theory is capable.

Chapter four examines Horkheimer and Adorno's collaborative essay, "Odysseus, Or Myth and Enlightenment," the third chapter of their book Dialectic of Enlightenment. In the book's preface the authors state that "... no work bears more eloquent witness to the intertwinement of enlightenment and myth than that of Homer, the basic text of European civilization." Elsewhere, Horkheimer wrote that "the Odyssey is the first document on the anthropology of man in the modern sense, that means, in the sense of a rational enlightened being."

In taking up the figure of Odysseus as "the prototype of the bourgeois individual," Horkheimer and Adorno take him to express, in embryonic form, modern subjectivity more generally. Through the Greek hero's efforts to overcome mythical fate, they claim, Odysseus discovers a refined form of instrumental reason that will ultimately become an essential factor in modernity's emancipatory as well as its self-destructive tendencies.

On the basis of these chapters, I ultimately find that Cassirer's insights, though highly valuable, are constrained by his neo-Kantian commitment to the idealist framework and his corresponding tendency to privilege the ideal over the material realm. I am sympathetic, then, to Horkheimer's remark that neo-Kantian philosophy, wherein theoretical activity is positioned outside of and above its objects, "everything about the object is reduced to conceptual determinations." From the Critical Theoretical perspective, Neo-Kantianism assumes a passive posture, which Horkheimer places squarely on the "traditional" side of his theoretical register. This posture makes it difficult for Cassirer to recognize the full extent of theory's active role in reproducing the world it inhabits, and the relation of theory and practice in general.

Nevertheless, I maintain that both Cassirer's neo-Kantian articulation of the cultural sciences and Horkheimer and Adorno's Critical Theoretical approach to the modern historical dialectic are immensely important for historical and social philosophy, and that both need to be rescued and rehabilitated, the former from decades of neglect, and the latter from decades of distortion.