Social justice and language: The importance of Fichte´s thought for critical teory since the 1950s

Abstract

The discussion on social justice has the theme of language as an important topic for thinking about intersubjectivity. This is especially true of the reopening of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in the 1950s, when the pretension of uniting empirical research and philosophical reflection characteristic of previous decades disappeared and interest in the intersubjectivity of social action emerged. This new direction is led by Habermans and can also be understood as a kind of symptom of what is understood as the linguistic turn in philosophy. The linguistic turn began in the mid-1920s, through the philosophy of Wittgeinstein, and goes back a long way to German idealist thought. This text discusses how Fichte's thought, especially in On Linguistic Ability and the Origin of Language (1793), which was indispensable for the future development of the linguistic turn in philosophy, is also of great importance for critical theory.