ABSTRACT
This chapter explores an "ideology for those wishing with a bad conscience to keep what they have" and such criticism remains focused on maintaining one's own position of relative superiority over others; it is a kind of "critical" coming to terms with the prevailing conditions. Effective critique of social reality presupposes, to quote Adorno, "sufficient involvement in it to feel it itching in one's fingertips, so to speak, but at the same time, the strength to dismiss it Instead, it is the tendency to dismiss thoughts and actions that do not match our own ideas of a right life as irrational, irresponsible, etc. that is the subject of analysis. By denying that other people have reasons for their actions, as Holzkamp points out, people deny them their subjectivity; that is, they see them primarily in terms of how people can use them for our own ends, which, in turn, they consider to be beyond any need for critical scrutiny.
