offered here attempt to sketch out the social and political conditions requisite for
achieving true freedom, justice, and happiness. They also raise questions regarding
the foundations and methods of ethical reflection and social critique treated explicitly
in Part V. The essays in Part VI, by Jürgen Habermas, reformulate these meth-
odological questions in an attempt to provide a more analytically rigorous grounding
of moral reason. His appeal to the communicative basis of moral reason in evaluating
the dialectic of enlightenment (here reflected in essays dealing with legitimation
crises and other forms of modern social disintegration) rounds out this anthology.
Part VII concludes with critical appraisals of Habermas's work by poststructuralists,
postmodernists, and feminists.

Unlike most contemporary theories of society, whose primary aim is to provide the
best description and explanation of social phenomena, critical theories are chiefly
concerned with evaluating the freedom, justice, and happiness of societies. In their
concern with values they show themselves more akin to moral philosophy than to
predictive science.

From its earliest inception in ancient Greece, philosophy designated rational
inquiry into basic principles of reality that had hitherto been the exclusive province of
myth, poetry, and religion. Writing about contemporary philosophy, Adorno points
out ("Why Philosophy?") that the dual nature of classical philosophy--at once
rational and ontological--has broken apart into two diametrically opposed tenden-
cies: the one subservient to scientific specialization and analysis, the other (largely
inspired by the existential phenomenology of such thinkers as Martin Heidegger)
oriented toward a global, prerational, and poetic disclosure of Being in general. At
the same time, he observes, these tendencies converge in their abandonment of
critical thought. Anglo-American logical positivists criticize the existential philoso-
phy of their Continental counterparts for being uncritical in its speculative reference
to empirically unverifiable "essences." But logical positivists, Adorno argues, are
just as uncritical in their assumption that true knowledge corresponds to conceptually
unmediated facts. Thus, existential phenomenologists rightly debunk the artificiality
of distinctions drawn by philosophical analysis. However, they too are uncritical in
their acceptance of a true being whose original meaning somehow precedes concep-
tual articulation.

According to Adorno, neither adherence to the "facts" as they present themselves
to scientific analysis nor poetic receptivity to a preordained and prediscursive horizon
of meaning transcending human thought and volition (Being) realizes the rational
(and critical) potential of philosophy. On the contrary, critical philosophy resists
immediate identification with what exists. Thought and reality are mutually inter-
dependent but irreducible terms. Hence, for Adorno, philosophy presupposes the
negative "unity" of subject and object, conceptual thought and sensuous being,
transcendent idea and mundane reality, universal essence and particular fact, "ought"

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