Adorno held that humanity’s immaturity consists in its inability yet to speak

Evidence

I totally agree with the thesis about the antagonistic nature of every language that has yet existed … If humanity is still not yet mature [mündig], then it means that, in the most literal sense, it has not yet been able to speak; Kraus’s illusion was that it had lost the ability to speak. Your new variation on the philosophy of language is also very closely connected with our critique of psychology. In psychology, the utopia of a beneficent generality, however inadequately represented by logic, goes by the board, while the bad generality, i.e. simple commonness, emerges in it all the more decisively. I should like to give my passionate support to the new trend in the philosophy of language, together, of course, with its dialectical antithesis. In fact I am so convinced by it that I can hardly understand your hesitation. It should not be called critique of language, but something like language and truth' or reason and language’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2164

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the Frankfurt School’s ‘critique of language’ as a dialectical antithesis of psychology — bad generality (commonness) supplanting the utopia of beneficent generality.
• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s broader ‘mündigkeit’ theme (from Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’) and the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s language-instrumentalization critique. — connects to: Adorno experienced spoken language as inherently truthful. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2166

Broader Connections

• Adorno experienced spoken language as inherently truthful. #qualifies (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2166