Logical positivism functioned regressively by abandoning reason’s constructive power over nature and society.

Evidence

Horkheimer’s critique was not a mild one. He described the logical positivists as the modern representatives of the nominalist tendency, whose function had now become regressive instead of progressive. The transformation of the specialist sciences, with their ideals of objectivity and exactitude, had betrayed the progressive elements within liberalism by abandoning both the relation to a perceiving subject and the constructive power of reason, which aimed at the complete domination of nature and society. It implied silence in the face of the horrors which the totalitarian inheritors of the reactionary elements of liberalism had brought upon the world. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 749

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Adorno/Horkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment argument that instrumental reason’s retreat from critique complicitly serves domination. — connects to: Positivist philosophy imposes an empirical a priori that cannot be transcended — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 671; Adorno attacked positivism for severing logic from the world and knowledge from subjects. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2272; Reason was originally conceived as a subversive power that transforms reality toward truth — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 487 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Adorno attacked positivism for severing logic from the world and knowledge from subjects. #expands (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2272
• Reason was originally conceived as a subversive power that transforms reality toward truth #complicates (0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 487
• Positivist philosophy imposes an empirical a priori that cannot be transcended #expands (0.78) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 671
• Horkheimer blamed society’s irrational structure for the retreat from systematic theory #corroborates (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2388