If universalizing language cannot guide action, only raw experience remains unexpressed.

Evidence

Horkheimer himself at once considered the objection that the concept of generality used in the second case could at best only be described as being just as bourgeois as any other ideal. There was no concealing the fact that it was derived from Kant, and it could not offer any guidance. And then, at a loss, he added, `That may be so, but then all that will be left is experience, not its expression.’ In that case, logic would really be reason in its purest form. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2163

Categorization

• QUESTION: Horkheimer’s admission that he is ‘at a loss’ marks a genuine unresolved tension in early Critical Theory between Kantian universality and historical concreteness worth tracing forward.
• XREF: connects to: Language can never directly express our immediate sensory experience because words are inherently universal; Language itself cannot represent a state radically different from the present of utterance; Sensation and action cannot be cleanly separated in bodily experience

Broader Connections

• Language can never directly express our immediate sensory experience because words are inherently universal #qualifies (0.85)
• Language itself cannot represent a state radically different from the present of utterance #expands (0.72)
• Sensation and action cannot be cleanly separated in bodily experience #corroborates (0.72)