Horkheimer charged Marcuse with conflating classicist aesthetic theory with actual artistic practice.

Evidence

This can also be seen, for example, in the fact that classicist aesthetics is assumed automatically, without the question even being raised of whether the way it was practiced by its greatest representativesI am thinking of Goethe, or Beethoven . . .corresponds to Herder’s Reflections [on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind], Kant’s Critique of Judgement or Schiller’s Aesthetic Education, and whether, precisely in art, the bourgeois rupture between theory and practice is not of enormous significance, i.e whether classicist aesthetics does not deny what actually happens in Elective Affinities or in the second part of Faust. The fact that Marcuse presumes that these are identical means that he succumbs to the idealist delusion; admittedly, it is then easy for him to demystify it. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 913

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘bourgeois rupture between theory and practice’ echoes the Grundrisse/Capital theme of bourgeois ideology’s systemic split, central to the Institute’s critical theory.