ABSTRACT
In an important, but neglected, essay published in 1976, entitled “Aesthetic Experience and Self-Reflection as Emancipatory Processes: Two Complementary Aspects of Critical Theory,”1 Shierry Weber located a fundamental, albeit often subterranean, tension in the Frankfurt School’s work. Although emphasizing their potential complementarity, she singled out two impulses in Critical Theory that have been subtly at odds through much of its history: aesthetic experience as a prefigurative cipher of redemption and rational selfreflection as a critical tool in the struggle to achieve that utopian state. Recalling Critical Theory’s debt to German Idealists like Friedrich Schiller, she contended that it is the artistic representation of wholeness that explains the Frankfurt School’s fascination for aesthetics which embodies “a non-alienated relationship between man and nature, subject and object, and reason and the senses.”2 In contrast, Weber contended, “the process of self-reflection is focused more on man conceived in his universal aspect as a rational member of a sociohistorical species.”3 Rather than leading towards the reconciliation anticipated by aesthetic wholeness, rational self-reflection encourages man’s increasing liberation from what Karl Marx called his Naturwüchsigkeit or embeddedness in nature.4
