How to engage our world has always been an important topic of philosophical speculation and argument. Until the eighteenth century, Christianity had played a major part in people’s worldviews. Later, the Enlightenment replaced it with a rational system of philosophy based on scientific knowledge, and gave thinkers confidence in reason to master nature and build a rational-humanist engagement with the world. In the nineteenth century, the Enlightenment thinkers were attacked for their metaphysical interpretations of nature and society formed through abstraction. Masters of Suspicion started to question reason and seek the essence of human beings in irrationality. Nevertheless, giving way to suspicion did not work against one’s willingness to engage the world; on the contrary, it bound people together to find solutions for human beings and life’s meaning.
Despite the new insights into human nature, the progress of science and technology ushered in by reason had loosened the power people failed to control. The troublesome developments in politics and the catastrophic results of the World Wars turned what the Enlightenment movement had promised for people a mere illusion. Instead of improving the human condition, as the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School argued, Enlightenment rationalism and scientific progress served the purposes of domination and exploitation by power authorities. Therefore, for critical theorists reason had a very limited influence over human behaviors. In addition, they criticized the dialectical view of history taken by Hegel and Marx, who believed in totality containing tendencies leading to the final solution to human life. This totality, according to critical thinkers, was closely related to the Totalitarianism that increased the alienation of humanity from itself and the disengagement with the world. Thus critical theorists not only rejected reason’s power, but also complicated the struggle of engagement by dismissing total...