Abstract

Admittedly, the dialectical philosophy of the Frankfurt School has its basis in Hegel; however, it is not commonplace knowledge that the continuity between the latter and the former lies in the following phenomena: the privileged role of the Critic or the philosopher; the dialectical logic of criticism that perceives the world in a state of crises. The Frankfurt School re-evaluates the privileged role of the Critic that was implicit in Hegel and explicit in Bruno Bauer in the light of a perpetual crisis giving import to an antithetical escalation between the Critic and the crisis . ;The research claims that Hegel introduced the privilege of the Critic which enabled him to criticize every other philosophy because it was rooted in the crisis of its time. Hegel, however, failed to recognize the antagonism between the Critic and the world, which his logic had made inevitable. Bruno Bauer overcame this shortcoming by exposing the dialectic as a science of an antithetical escalation. Bauer in turn utilized the thesis of an antithetical escalation without explicating the logic behind it. This logic was provided approximately a century later by the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School exposes the critical logic as a purely negative system that discards all ontological structures, including the seemingly self-evident notion of self-sameness of objects. ;The undertaking follows a developmental approach. It exposes Hegel's thesis of mediation and antithetics as a thesis espousing an antithetical escalation between the Critic and the world without knowing about this very antagonism. Bauer is seen as a Hegelian who brings this antagonism into a sharper focus by positing the Critic as an antithesis of the masses. The Frankfurt School gives the method of the antithetical escalation a logical shape by attacking all a priori structures in the logic of non-identity. ;There are two important consequences of the research. First, the logic of non-identity is a culmination of the Hegelian dialectic in its sharpest stage; second, it is opposed to the very foundation of Hegelianism in that it separates the instrumental knowledge from a critical knowledge, re-establishing a dualism in knowledge, reminiscent of Kant. ;Two important conclusions can be drawn from this research: first, that the logic of Criticism is Hegelian and yet leads to anti-Hegelian conclusions; second, and more important, the contradictory position of this logic leads to an unbridgeable gap between theory and practice, and a concept and its realization. As a result, this philosophy cannot be acceptable to dialectical materialists, who always find a link between theory and practice, and a concept and its realization