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II

The Genesis of Critical Theory

Viewed from the heights of reason, all life looks like some malignant disease and the world like a madhouse.

— GOETHE

I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.

— NIETZSCHE

At the very heart of Critical Theory was an aversion to closed philosophical systems. To present it as such would therefore distort its essentially open-ended, probing, unfinished quality. It was no accident that Horkheimer chose to articulate his ideas in essays and aphorisms rather than in the cumbersome tomes so characteristic of German philosophy. Although Adorno and Marcuse were less reluctant to speak through completed books, they too resisted the temptation to make those books into positive, systematic philosophical statements. Instead, Critical Theory, as its name implies, was expressed through a series of critiques of other thinkers and philosophical traditions. Its development was thus through dialogue, its genesis as dialectical as the method it purported to apply to social phenomena. Only by confronting it in its own terms, as a gadfly of other systems, can it be fully understood. What this chapter will attempt to do, therefore, is to present Critical Theory as it was first generated in the 1930’s, through contrapuntal interaction both with other schools of thought and with a changing social reality.

To trace the origins of Critical Theory to their true source would require an extensive analysis of the intellectual ferment of the 1840’s, perhaps the most extraordinary decade in nineteenth-century German intellectual history.¹ It was then that Hegel’s successors first applied his philosophical insights to the social and political phenomena of Germany, which was setting out on a course of rapid modernization. The so-called Left Hegelians were of course soon eclipsed by the most talented of their number, Karl Marx. And in time, the philosophical cast of their thinking, shared by the young Marx himself, was superseded by a more “scientific,” at times positivistic approach to social reality, by Marxists and non-Marxists alike.² By the late nineteenth century, social theory in general had ceased being “critical” and “negative” in the sense to be explained below.

The recovery of the Hegelian roots of Marx’s thought by Marxists themselves was delayed until after World War I for reasons first spelled out by Karl Korsch in the pages of Grünbergs Archiv in 1923.³ Only then were serious epistemological and methodological questions asked about the Marxist theory of society, which, despite (or perhaps because of) its scientific pretensions, had degenerated into a kind of metaphysics not unlike that which Marx himself had set out to dismantle. Ironically, a new understanding of Marx’s debt to Hegel, that most metaphysical of thinkers, served to undermine the different kind of metaphysics that had entered “Vulgar Marxism” through the back door of scientism. Hegel’s stress on consciousness as constitutive of the world challenged the passive materialism of the Second International’s theorists. Here non-Marxist thinkers like Croce and Dilthey had laid the groundwork, by reviving philosophical interest in Hegel before the war. During the same period, Sorel’s stress on spontaneity and subjectivity also played a role in undermining the mechanistic materialism of the orthodox adherents of the Second International.⁴ Within the Marxist camp, Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy were the most influential stimulants in the early 1920’s to the recovery of the philosophical dimension in Marxism.⁵ Much of what they argued was confirmed a decade later, with the revelations produced by the circulation of Marx’s long-neglected Paris manuscripts. When, for one reason or another, their efforts faltered, the task of reinvigorating Marxist theory was taken up primarily by the young thinkers at the Institut für Sozialforschung.

On one level, then, it can be argued that the Frankfurt School was returning to the concerns of the Left Hegelians of the 1840’s. Like that first generation of critical theorists, its members were interested in the integration of philosophy and social analysis. They likewise were concerned with the dialectical method devised by Hegel and sought, like their predecessors, to turn it in a materialist direction. And finally, like many of the Left Hegelians, they were particularly interested in exploring the possibilities of transforming the social order through human praxis.

The intervening century, however, had brought enormous changes, which made the conditions of their theorizing vastly different. Whereas the Left Hegelians were the immediate successors of the classical German idealists, the Frankfurt School was separated from Kant and Hegel by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Bergson, Weber, Husserl, and many others, not to mention the systematization of Marxism itself. As a result, Critical Theory had to reassert itself against a score of competitors who had driven Hegel from the field. And, of course, it could not avoid being influenced by certain of their ideas. But still more important, vital changes in social, economic, and political conditions between the two periods had unmistakable repercussions on the revived Critical Theory. Indeed, according to its own premises this was inevitable. The Left Hegelians wrote in a Germany just beginning to feel the effects of capitalist modernization. By the time of the Frankfurt School, Western capitalism, with Germany as one of its leading representatives, had entered a qualitatively new stage, dominated by growing monopolies and increasing governmental intervention in the economy. The only real examples of socialism available to the Left Hegelians had been a few isolated Utopian communities. The Frankfurt School, on the other hand, had the ambiguous success of the Soviet Union to ponder. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, the first critical theorists had lived at a time when a new “negative” (that is, revolutionary) force in society—the proletariat—was stirring, a force that could be seen as the agent that would fulfill their philosophy. By the 1930’s, however, signs of the proletariat’s integration into society were becoming increasingly apparent; this was especially evident to the members of the Institut after their emigration to America. Thus, it might be said of the first generation of critical theorists in the 1840’s that theirs was an “immanent” critique of society based on the existence of a real historical “subject.” By the time of its renaissance in the twentieth century, Critical Theory was being increasingly forced into a position of “transcendence” by the withering away of the revolutionary working class.

In the 1920’s, however, the signs were still unclear. Lukács himself stressed the function of the working class as the “subject-object” of history before deciding that it was really the party that represented the true interests of the workers. As the passage cited from Dämmerung in Chapter 1 indicates, Horkheimer believed that the German proletariat, although badly split, was not entirely moribund. The younger members of the Institut could share the belief of its older, more orthodox leadership that socialism might still be a real possibility in the advanced countries of Western Europe. This was clearly reflected in the consistent hortatory tone of most of the Institut’s work in the pre-emigration period.

After the Institut’s resettlement at Columbia University, however, this tone underwent a subtle shift in a pessimistic direction. Articles in the Zeitschrift scrupulously avoided using words like “Marxism” or “communism,” substituting “dialectical materialism” or “the materialist theory of society” instead. Careful editing prevented emphasizing the revolutionary implications of their thought. In the Institut’s American bibliography⁶ the title of Grossmann’s book was shortened to The Law of Accumulation in Capitalist Society without any reference to the “law of collapse,” which had appeared in the original. These changes were doubtless due in part to the sensitive situation in which the Institut’s members found themselves at Columbia. They were also a reflection of their fundamental aversion to the type of Marxism that the Institut equated with the orthodoxy of the Soviet camp. But in addition they expressed a growing loss of that basic confidence, which Marxists had traditionally felt, in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat.

In their attempt to achieve a new perspective that might make the new situation intelligible, in a framework that was still fundamentally Marxist, the members of the Frankfurt School were fortunate in having had philosophical training outside the Marxist tradition. Like other twentieth-century contributors to the revitalization of Marxism—Lukács, Gramsci, Bloch, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty—they were influenced at an early stage in their careers by more subjectivist, even idealist philosophies. Horkheimer, who set the tone for all of the Institut’s work, had been interested in Schopenhauer and Kant before becoming fascinated with Hegel and Marx. His expression of interest in Schopenhauer in the 1960’s,⁷ contrary to what is often assumed, was thus a return to an early love, rather than an apostasy from a life-long Hegelianized Marxism. In fact the first book in philosophy Horkheimer actually read was Schopenhauer’s Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life,⁸ which Pollock gave him when they were studying French together in Brussels before the war. Both he and Lowenthal were members of the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft at Frankfurt in their student days. Horkheimer was also very much interested in Kant at that time; his first published work was an analysis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, written for his Habilitation under Hans Cornelius in 1925.⁹

If Horkheimer can be said to have had a true mentor, it was Hans Cornelius. As Pollock, who also studied under Cornelius, remembers it, his “influence on Horkheimer can hardly be overestimated.”¹⁰ This seems to have been true more from a personal than a theoretical point of view. Although difficult to classify, Cornelius’s philosophical perspective was antidogmatic, opposed to Kantian idealism, and insistent on the importance of experience. His initial writings showed the influence of Avenarius and Mach, but in his later work he moved away from their empiriocriticism and closer to a kind of phenomenology.¹¹ When Horkheimer became his student, Cornelius was at the height of his career, a “passionate teacher . . . in many ways the opposite of the current image of a German university professor,, and in strong opposition to most of his colleagues.”¹²

Although the young Horkheimer seems to have absorbed his teacher’s critical stance, little of the substance of Cornelius’s philosophy remained with him, especially after his interest was aroused by readings in Hegel and Marx. What does appear to have made an impact were Cornelius’s humanistic cultural concerns. Born in 1863 in Munich into a family of composers, painters, and actors, Cornelius continued to pursue aesthetic interests throughout his life. Talented both as a sculptor and a painter, he made frequent trips to Italy, where he became expert in both classical and Renaissance art. In 1908 he published a study of The Elementary Laws of Pictorial Art,¹³ and during the war he ran art schools in Munich.

Horkheimer was also certainly attracted by Cornelius’s progressive political tendencies. Cornelius was an avowed internationalist and had been an opponent of the German war effort. Although no Marxist, he was considered an outspoken radical by the more conservative members of the Frankfurt faculty. What also doubtless made its impact on Horkheimer was his cultural pessimism, which he combined with his progressive politics. As Pollock recalls, “Cornelius never hesitated to confess openly his convictions and his despair about present-day civilization.”¹⁴ A sample of the almost apocalyptic tone he adopted, which was of course shared by many in Weimar’s early days, can be found in the autobiographical sketch he wrote in 1923:

Men have unlearned the ability to recognize the Godly in themselves and in things: nature and art, family and state have only interest for them as sensations. Therefore their lives flow meaninglessly by, and their shared culture is inwardly empty and will collapse because it is worthy of collapse. The new religion, however, which mankind needs, will first emerge from the ruins of this culture.¹⁵

The young Horkheimer was less eager to embrace so Spenglerian a prognosis, but in time Cornelius’s appraisal of the situation increasingly became his own. In the twenties, however, he was still caught up by the revolutionary potential of the working class. Accordingly, his analysis of The Critique of Judgment showed little evidence of resignation or despair; instead, it demonstrated his conviction that praxis could overcome the contradictions of the social order, while at the same time leading to a cultural renewal. From Kant, however, he took certain convictions that he would never abandon.

Horkheimer’s reading of Kant helped increase his sensitivity to the importance of individuality, as a value never to be submerged entirely under the demands of the totality. It also heightened his appreciation of the active elements in cognition, which prevented his acceptance of the copy theory of perception advocated by more orthodox Marxists. What it did not do, however, was to convince him of the inevitability of those dualisms—phenomena and noumena, pure and practical reason, for example—that Kant had posited as insurmountable. In concluding his study, Horkheimer made it clear that although these antagonisms had not yet been overcome, he saw no necessary reason why they could not be. Kant’s fundamental duality between will and knowledge, practical and pure reason, could and must be reconciled.¹⁶ In so arguing, Horkheimer demonstrated the influence of Hegel’s critique of Kant on his own. Like Hegel, he saw cognitive knowledge and normative imperatives, the “is” and the “ought,” as ultimately inseparable.

Because of this and other similarities with Hegel on such questions as the nature of reason, the importance of dialectics, and the existence of a substantive logic, it is tempting to characterize Critical Theory as no more than a Hegelianized Marxism.¹⁷ And yet, on several fundamental issues, Horkheimer always maintained a certain distance from Hegel. Most basic was his rejection of Hegel’s metaphysical intentions and his claim to absolute truth. “I do not know,” he wrote in Dämmerung, “how far metaphysicians are correct; perhaps somewhere there is a particularly compelling metaphysical system or fragment. But I do know that metaphysicians are usually impressed only to the smallest degree by what men suffer.”¹⁸ Moreover, a system that tolerated every opposing view as part of the “total truth” had inevitably quietistic implications.¹⁹ An all-embracing system like Hegel’s might well serve as a theodicy justifying the status quo. In fact, to the extent that Marxism had been ossified into a system claiming the key to truth, it too had fallen victim to the same malady. The true object of Marxism, Horkheimer argued,²⁰ was not the uncovering of immutable truths, but the fostering of social change.

Elsewhere, Horkheimer outlined his other objections to Hegel’s metaphysics.²¹ His strongest criticism was reserved for perhaps the fundamental tenet of Hegel’s thought: the assumption that all knowledge is self-knowledge of the infinite subject—in other words, that an identity exists between subject and object, mind and matter, based on the ultimate primacy of the absolute subject. “Spirit,” Horkheimer wrote, “may not recognize itself either in nature or in history, because even if the spirit is not a questionable abstraction, it would not be identical with reality.”²² In fact, there is no “thought” as such, only the specific thought of concrete men rooted in their socio-economic conditions. Nor is there “being” as such, but rather a “manifold of beings in the world.”²³

In repudiating identity theory, Horkheimer was also implicitly criticizing its reappearance in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness. To Lukács, the proletariat functioned both as the subject and the object of history, thus fulfilling the classical German idealist goal of uniting freedom as an objective reality and as something produced by man himself. In later years Lukács was himself to detect the metaphysical premise underlying his assumption of an identical subject-object in history: “The proletariat seen as the identical subject-object of the real history of mankind is no materialist consummation that overcomes the constructions of idealism. It is rather an attempt to out-Hegel Hegel, it is an edifice boldly erected above every possible reality and thus attempts objectively to surpass the Master himself.”²⁴ These words were written in 1967 for a new edition of a work whose arguments Lukács had long ago seen fit to repudiate. His reasons for that self-criticism have been the source of considerable speculation and no less an amount of criticism. Yet, in pointing to the metaphysical core at the center of his argument, he was doing no more than repeating what Horkheimer had said about identity theory almost four decades before.

To Horkheimer, all absolutes, all identity theories were suspect. Even the ideal of absolute justice contained in religion, he was later to argue,²⁵ has a chimerical quality. The image of complete justice “can never be realized in history because even when a better society replaces the present disorder and is developed, past misery would not be made good and the suffering of surrounding nature not transcended.”²⁶ As a result, philosophy as he understood it always expresses an unavoidable note of sadness, but without succumbing to resignation.

Yet although Horkheimer attacked Hegel’s identity theory, he felt that nineteenth-century criticism of a similar nature had been carried too far. In rejecting the ontological claims Hegel had made for his philosophy of Absolute Spirit, the positivists had robbed the intellect of any right to judge what was actual as true or false.* Their overly empirical bias led to the apotheosis of facts in a way that was equally one-sided. From the first, Horkheimer consistently rejected the Hobson’s choice of metaphysical systematizing or antinomian empiricism. Instead, he argued for the possibility of a dialectical social science that would avoid an identity theory and yet preserve the right of the observer to go beyond the givens of his experience. It was in large measure this refusal to succumb to the temptations of either alternative that gave Critical Theory its cutting edge.

Horkheimer’s hostility to metaphysics was partly a reaction to the sclerosis of Marxism produced by its transformation into a body of received truths. But beyond this, it reflected the influence of his readings in non-Hegelian and non-Marxist philosophy. Schopenhauer’s extreme skepticism about the possibility of reconciling reason with the world of will certainly had its effect. More important still was the impact of three late nineteenth-century thinkers, Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Bergson, all of whom had emphasized the relation of thought to human life.

To Horkheimer,²⁷ the Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) they helped create had expressed a legitimate protest against the growing rigidity of abstract rationalism, and the concomitant standardization of individual existence that characterized life under advanced capitalism. It had pointed an accusing finger at the gap between the promises of bourgeois ideology and the reality of everyday life in bourgeois society. The development of the philosophy of life, he argued, corresponded to a fundamental change in capitalism itself. The earlier optimistic belief of certain classical idealists in the unity of reason and reality had corresponded to the individual entrepreneur’s acceptance of harmony between his own activities and the functioning of the economy as a whole. The erosion of that conviction corresponded to the growth of monopoly capitalism in the late nineteenth century, in which the individual’s role was more overwhelmed by the totality than harmonized with it.²⁸ Lebensphilosophie was basically a cry of outrage against this change. Because of this critical element, Horkheimer was careful to distinguish the “irrationalism”²⁹ of the philosophers of life from that of their twentieth-century vulgarizers.

In the 1930’s, he argued, attacks on reason were designed to reconcile men to the irrationality of the prevailing order.³⁰ The so-called tragic outlook on life was really a veiled justification for the acceptance of unnecessary misery. Leben and Dienst (service) had come to be synonymous. What was once critical had now become ideological. This was also true of the attack on science, which, in the hands of the first generation of Lebensphilosophen, had been a justified corrective to the pretensions of seientism, but which by the 1930’s had degenerated into an indiscriminate attack on the validity of scientific thought as such. “The philosophic dismissal of science,” he wrote in 1937, “is a comfort in private life, in society a lie.”³¹

In seeing the irrationalism of the thirties basically as an ideology of passivity,³² Horkheimer neglected its dynamic and destructive sides, which the Nazis were able to exploit. This was a blind spot in his analysis. But in another way he enriched the discussion of its historical development. In distinguishing between different types of irrationalism, Horkheimer broke with the tradition of hostility towards Lebensphilosophie maintained by almost all Marxist thinkers, including the later Lukács.³³ In addition to approving of its antisystematic impulse, Horkheimer gave qualified praise to the emphasis on the individual in the work of both Dilthey and Nietzsche. Like them, he believed in the importance of individual psychology for an understanding of history.³⁴ While their work in this area was less subtle than the psychoanalysis he hoped to integrate with Critical Theory, he considered it far more useful than the bankrupt utilitarianism that informed liberalism and orthodox Marxism.

What became clear, however, in Horkheimer’s discussion of Dilthey’s methodology³⁵ was his rejection of a purely psychological approach to historical explanation. Dilthey’s notion of a Verstehende Geisteswissenschaft (a social science based on its own methods of understanding and reexperiencing, rather than on those of the natural sciences) did, to be sure, contain a recognition of the meaningfulness of historical structures, which Horkheimer could share. What he rejected was the assumption that this meaning could be intuitively grasped by the historian reexperiencing his subject matter in his own mind. Underlying this notion, he argued, was a Hegelian-like belief in the identity of subject and object. The data of the inner life were not enough to mirror the significant structure of the past, because that past had not always been made consciously by men. Indeed, it was generally made “behind the backs and against the wills” of individuals, as Marx had pointed out. That this need not always be the case was another matter. In fact, Vico was one of Horkheimer’s early intellectual heroes;³⁶ and it was Vico who had first argued that men might understand history better than nature because men made history, whereas God made nature. This, however, was a goal, not a reality. If anything, Horkheimer noted pessimistically, the trend in modern life was away from the conscious determination of historical events rather than towards it. History, therefore, could not simply be “understood,” as he claimed Dilthey had hoped, but had to be “explained” instead. Horkheimer did, however, hold out some hope for the attainment of the social conditions that would make Dilthey’s methodological vision viable.

Horkheimer’s admiration for Nietzsche was equally mixed. In 1935 he argued that Nietzsche was a genuine bourgeois philosopher, as demonstrated by his overemphasis on individualism and his blindness to social questions.³⁷ Still, Horkheimer was quick to defend Nietzsche against those who sought to reconcile him with the irrationalists of the 1930’s. In a long review of Karl Jaspers’s study of Nietzsche³⁸ he castigated the author for trying to “domesticate” Nietzsche for völkisch (populist nationalist) and religious consumption. What he valued most in Nietzsche’s work was its uncompromisingly critical quality. On the question of certain knowledge, for example, he applauded Nietzsche’s statement that a “great truth wants to be criticized, not idolized.”³⁹

Horkheimer also was impressed by Nietzsche’s critique of the masochistic quality of traditional Western morality. He had been the first to note, Horkheimer approvingly commented,⁴⁰ how misery could be transformed into a social norm, as in the case of asceticism, and how that norm had permeated Western culture through the “slave morality” of Christian ethics.⁴¹ When it came to the more questionable aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, Horkheimer tended to mitigate their inadequacies. The naive glorification of the “superman” he explained away by calling it the price of isolation. Nietzsche’s hostility to the goal of a classless society he excused on the grounds that its only champions in Nietzsche’s day were the Social Democrats, whose mentality was as pedestrian and uninspired as Nietzsche had claimed. In fact, Horkheimer argued, Nietzsche had been perceptive in refusing to romanticize the working classes, who were even in his time beginning to be diverted from their revolutionary role by the developing mass culture. Where Nietzsche had failed, however, was in his ahistorical belief that democratization inevitably meant the dilution of true culture. He was also deficient in misunderstanding the historical nature of labor, which he absolutized as immutable in order to justify his elitist conclusions. In short, Horkheimer contended that Nietzsche, who had done so much to reveal the historical roots of bourgeois morality, had himself fallen prey to ahistorical thinking.

Towards the third great exponent of Lebensphilosophie and one of the Institut’s actual sponsors in Paris, Henri Bergson, Horkheimer was somewhat more critical.⁴² Although recognizing the trenchant arguments in Bergson’s critique of abstract rationalism, he questioned the metaphysical yearnings he detected at its root. Bergson’s faith in intuition as the means to discover the universal life force he dismissed as an ideology. “Intuition,” he wrote, “from which Bergson hopes to find salvation in history as in cognition, has a unified object: life, energy, duration, creative development. In reality, however, mankind is split, and an intuition that seeks to penetrate through contradictions loses what is historically decisive from its sight.”⁴³ Horkheimer’s hostility to the unmediated use of intuition as a means to break through to an underlying level of reality, it might be added, was also extended to the similar efforts of phenomenologists such as Scheler and Husserl.

In an article devoted primarily to Bergson’s metaphysics of time, which Bergson himself called “a serious deepening of my works” and “philosophically very penetrating,”⁴⁴ Horkheimer supported Bergson’s distinction between “experienced” time and the abstract time of the natural scientists. But, he quickly added in qualification, Bergson had been mistaken in trying to write a metaphysics of temporality. In so doing he had been led to an idea of time as durée (duration), which was almost as abstract and empty as that of the natural sciences. To see reality as an uninterruptible flow was to ignore the reality of suffering, aging, and death. It was to absolutize the present and thus unwittingly repeat the mistakes of the positivists. True experience, Horkheimer argued, resisted such homogenization. The task of the historian was to preserve the memory of suffering and to foster the demand for qualitative historical change.

In all of Horkheimer’s writings on the Lebensphilosophen, three major criticisms were repeatedly made. By examining these in some detail, we can better understand the foundations of Critical Theory. First, although the philosophers of life had been correct in trying to rescue the individual from the threats of modern society, they had gone too far in emphasizing subjectivity and inwardness. In doing so, they had minimized the importance of action in the historical world. Second, with an occasional exception such as Nietzsche’s critique of asceticism, they tended to neglect the material dimension of reality. Third and perhaps most important, in criticizing the degeneration of bourgeois rationalism into its abstract and formal aspects, they sometimes overstated their case and seemed to be rejecting reason itself. This ultimately led to the outright mindless irrationalism of their twentieth-century vulgarizers.

As might be expected, Horkheimer’s interest in the question of bourgeois individualism led him back to a consideration of Kant and the origins of Innerlichkeit (inwardness).⁴⁵ Among the dualistic elements in Kant’s philosophy, he noted,⁴⁶ was the gap between duty and interest. Individual morality, discovered by practical reason, was internalized and divorced from public ethics. Here Hegel’s Sittlichkeit (ethics), with its emphasis on bridging the public-private opposition, was superior to Kant’s Moralität (morality). Despite this, Kant’s view was closer to a correct reflection of conditions in the early nineteenth century; for to assume that a harmony could exist at that time between personal morality and public ethics, or between self-interest and a universal moral code, was to ignore the real irrationality of the external order. Where Kant had been wrong, however, was in considering these contradictions immutable. By absolutizing the distinction between the individual and society, he had made a natural condition out of what was merely historically valid, thereby unwittingly affirming the status quo. This was also a failing of the Lebensphilosophen. In later years, however, Horkheimer and the other members of the Frankfurt School came to believe that the real danger lay not with those who overemphasized subjectivity and individuality, but rather with those who sought to eliminate them entirely under the banner of a false totalism. This fear would go so far that Adorno could write, in a frequently quoted phrase from Minima Moralia, that “the whole is the untrue.”⁴⁷ But in the 1930’s Horkheimer and his colleagues were still concerned with the overemphasis on individuality, which they detected in bourgeois thinkers from Kant to the philosophers of life.

Horkheimer also questioned the moral imperative that Kant had postulated. Although agreeing that a moral impulse apart from egoistic self-interest did in fact exist, he argued that its expression had changed since Kant’s time. Whereas in the early nineteenth century it had manifested itself as duty, it now appeared as either pity or political concern. Pity, Horkheimer argued, was produced by the recognition that man had ceased being a free subject and was reduced instead to an object of forces beyond his control⁴⁸ This Kant had not experienced himself, because his time provided greater individual freedom, at least for the entrepreneur. Political action as the expression of morality was also spurned by Kant, who overemphasized the importance of the individual conscience and tended to reify the status quo. In the twentieth century, however, politics had become the proper realm of moral action because, for the first time in history, “mankind’s means have grown great enough to present the realization [of justice] as an immediate historical task. The struggle for its fulfillment characterizes our epoch of transition.”⁴⁹ Both early bourgeois thinkers like Kant and later ones like the Lebensphilosophen had failed to appreciate the necessity for political praxis to realize their moral visions.

Horkheimer’s second major objection to Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Bergson was, as noted above, that they were really hidden idealists. In contrast, Horkheimer proposed a materialist theory of society, but one that was very clearly distinguished from the putative materialism of orthodox Marxism. In one of his most important essays in the Zeitschrift, “Materialism and Metaphysics,”⁵⁰ he set out to rescue materialism from those who saw it simply as an antonym of spiritualism and a denial of nonmaterial existence. True materialism, he argued, did not mean a new type of monistic metaphysics based on the ontological primacy of matter. Here nineteenth-century mechanical materialists like Vogt and Haeckel had been wrong, as were Marxists who made a fetish of the supposedly “objective” material world. Equally erroneous was the assumption of the eternal primacy of the economic substructure of society. Both substructure and superstructure interacted at all times, although it was true that under capitalism the economic base had a crucial role in this process. What had to be understood, however, was that this condition was only historical and would change with time. In fact, it was one of the characteristics of twentieth-century society that politics was beginning to assert an autonomy beyond anything Marx had predicted. Both Leninist and fascist practice demonstrated the change.

Horkheimer also disliked the tendency of vulgar Marxists to elevate materialism to a theory of knowledge, which claimed absolute certainty the way idealism had in the past. In fact, to argue that a materialist epistemology could exhaustively explain reality was to encourage the urge to dominate the world, which Fichtean idealism had most vividly displayed. This was borne out by the fact that monistic materialism as far back as Hobbes had led to a manipulative, dominating attitude towards nature.⁵¹ The theme of man’s domination of nature, it might be added parenthetically, was to become a central concern of the Frankfurt School in subsequent years.

Despite the impossibility of attaining absolute knowledge, Horkheimer held that materialism must not succumb to relativistic resignation. In fact, the monistic materialist epistemology of vulgar Marxism had been too passive. Echoing Marx’s critique of Feuerbach almost a century before,⁵² Horkheimer stressed the active element in cognition, which idealism had correctly affirmed. The objects of perception, he argued, are themselves the product of man’s actions, although the relationship tends to be masked by reification. Indeed, nature itself has a historical element, in the dual sense that man conceives of it differently at different times and that he actively works to change it. True materialism, Horkheimer contended, is thus dialectical, involving an ongoing process of interaction between subject and object. Here Horkheimer returned once again to the Hegelian roots of Marxism, which had been obscured in the intervening century. Like Marx, but unlike many self-proclaimed Marxists, he refused to make a fetish of dialectics as an objective process outside man’s control. Nor did he see it as a methodological construct imposed like a Weberian ideal type, or a social scientific model, on a chaotic, manifold reality. Dialectics probed the “force-field,” to use an expression of Adorno’s,⁵³ between consciousness and being, subject and object. It did not, indeed could not, pretend to have discovered ontological first principles. It rejected the extremes of nominalism and realism and remained willing to operate in a perpetual state of suspended judgment.

Hence the crucial importance of mediation (Vermittlung) for a correct theory of society. No facet of social reality could be understood by the observer as final or complete in itself. There were no social “facts,” as the positivists believed, which were the substratum of a social theory. Instead, there was a constant interplay of particular and universal, of “moment”* and totality. As Lukács had written in History and Class Consciousness:

To leave empirical reality behind can only mean that the objects of the empirical world are to be understood as objects of a totality, i.e., as the aspects of a total social situation caught up in the process of historical change. Thus the category of mediation is a lever with which to overcome the mere immediacy of the empirical world, and as such it is not something (subjective) foisted onto the objects from outside, it is no value-judgment or “ought” opposed to their “is.” It is rather the manifestation of their authentic objective structure.⁵⁴

Moreover, the relationship between the totality and its moments was reciprocal. Vulgar Marxists had been mistaken in seeking a reductionist derivation of superstructural, cultural phenomena from their substructural, socio-economic base. Culture, Horkheimer and his colleagues argued, was never epiphenomenal, although it was never fully autonomous. Its relationship to the material substructure of society was multidimensional. All cultural phenomena must be seen as mediated through the social totality, not merely as the reflection of class interests. This meant that they also expressed the contradictions of the whole, including those forces that negated the status quo. Nothing, or at least almost nothing, was solely ideological.⁵⁵

In so arguing, it might be added, Horkheimer was closer to Marx himself than the self-styled Marxists who claimed to be orthodox. When discussing the bourgeois state, for example, Marx had not interpreted it solely as the “executive committee of the ruling class,” but also as an adumbration, albeit distorted, of the reconciliation of social contradictions that the triumph of the proletariat was to bring about.⁵⁶ Engels, likewise, when discussing Realism in literature, had shown an appreciation for the progressive elements in ostensibly reactionary writers like Balzac, because of their ability to portray the concrete totality with all its contradictions. The Institut’s extensive work on aesthetic and cultural matters was rooted in the same assumption.

In stressing the totality, Horkheimer correspondingly criticized other social theorists for concentrating on one facet of reality to the exclusion of the others. This led to one of the methodological fallacies the Frankfurt School most frequently attacked: fetishization. More orthodox Marxists within the Institut, such as the economist Henryk Grossmann, were always criticized for their overemphasis on the material substructure of society. The composition of the Institut, with its deliberate diversification of fields, reflected the importance Critical Theory placed on the totality of dialectical mediations, which had to be grasped in the process of analyzing society.

Horkheimer’s stress on dialectics also extended to his understanding of logic. Although rejecting the extravagant ontological claims Hegel had made for his logical categories, he agreed with the need for a substantive, rather than merely formal, logic. In Dämmerung Horkheimer wrote: “Logic is not independent of content. In face of the reality that what is inexpensive for the favored part of humanity remains unattainable for the others, nonpartisan logic would be as nonpartisan as a book of laws that is the same for all.”⁵⁷ Formalism, characteristic of bourgeois law (the ideal of the Rechtsstaat, which meant judicial universality without relating the law to its political origins), bourgeois morality (the categorical imperative), and bourgeois logic, had once been progressive, but it now served only to perpetuate the status quo. True logic, as well as true rationalism, must go beyond form to include substantive elements as well.

Yet precisely what these elements were was difficult to say. Substantive logic was easier to demand than explain. The agnosticism in Horkheimer’s notion of materialism also extended to his views on the possibility of a philosophical anthropology. He dismissed the efforts of his former colleague at Frankfurt, Max Scheler, to discover a constant human nature as no more than a desperate search for absolute meaning in a relativist world.⁵⁸ The yearning of phenomenologists for the security of eternal essences was a source of self-delusion, a point Adorno and Marcuse were to echo in their respective critiques of Husserl and Scheler.⁵⁹

Accordingly, Critical Theory denied the necessity, or even the possibility, of formulating a definitive description of “socialist man.” This distaste for anthropological speculation has been attributed by some commentators to the residual influence of scientific socialism.⁶⁰ If “scientific” is understood solely as the antonym of “Utopian” socialism, this is true. But in view of the Frankfurt School’s hostility towards the reduction of philosophy to science, it seems only a partial explanation. Another possible factor, which Horkheimer himself was to stress in later years,⁶¹ was the subterranean influence of a religious theme on the materialism of the Frankfurt School. It would be an error, in fact, to treat its members as dogmatic atheists. In almost all of Horkheimer’s discussions of religion, he took a dialectical position.⁶² In Dämmerung, to take one example, he argued that religion ought not to be understood solely as false consciousness, because it helped preserve a hope for future justice, which bourgeois atheism denied.⁶³ Thus, his more recent claim, that the traditional Jewish prohibition on naming or describing God and paradise was reproduced in Critical Theory’s refusal to give substance to its Utopian vision, can be given some credence. As Jürgen Habermas has noted, German idealist philosophy’s reluctance to flesh out its notions of utopia was very similar to the cabalistic stress on words rather than images.⁶⁴ Adorno’s decision to choose music, the most nonrepresentational of aesthetic modes, as the primary medium through which he explored bourgeois culture and sought signs of its negation indicates the continued power of this prohibition. Of the major figures connected with the Institut, only Marcuse attempted to articulate a positive anthropology at any time in his career.⁶⁵ Whether or not the Jewish taboo was actually causal or merely a post facto rationalization is difficult to establish with certainty. Whatever the reason, Critical Theory consistently resisted the temptation to describe “the realm of freedom” from the vantage point of the “realm of necessity.”

And yet, even in Horkheimer’s work there appeared a kind of negative anthropology, an implicit but still powerful presence. Although to some extent rooted in Freud, its primary origins could be found in the work of Marx. In discussing Feuerbach’s attempt to construct an explicit picture of human nature, Marx had attacked its atemporal, abstract, antihistorical premises. The only constant, he argued, was man’s ability to create himself anew. “Anthropogenesis,” to use a later commentator’s term,⁶⁶ was the only human nature Marx allowed. Here Horkheimer was in agreement; the good society was one in which man was free to act as a subject rather than be acted upon as a contingent predicate.

When Marx seemed to go further in defining the categories of human self-production in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Horkheimer drew back. The central position of labor in Marx’s work and his concomitant stress on the problem of alienated labor in capitalist society played a relatively minor role in Horkheimer’s writings. In Dämmerung he wrote: “To make labor into a transcendent category of human activity is an ascetic ideology. . . . Because socialists hold to this general concept, they make themselves into carriers of capitalist propaganda.”⁶⁷

The same was true of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. To Benjamin, the vulgar Marxist stress on labor “recognizes only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism. . . . The new conception of labor amounts to the exploitation of nature, which with naive complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat. Compared with this positivistic conception, Fourier’s fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove to be surprisingly sound.”⁶⁸ Adorno, when I spoke with him in Frankfurt in March, 1969, said that Marx wanted to turn the whole world into a giant workhouse.

Horkheimer’s antagonism to the fetishization of labor expressed another dimension of his materialism: the demand for human, sensual happiness. In one of his most trenchant essays, “Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation,”⁶⁹ he discussed the hostility to personal gratification inherent in bourgeois culture. Despite the utilitarianism of a Bentham or a Mandeville, the characteristic ideology of the early bourgeois era was Kantian.⁷⁰ Seeing no unity between individual interest and public morality, Kant had posited an inevitable distinction between happiness and duty. Although he gave a certain weight to both, by the time capitalism had become sufficiently advanced, the precedence of duty to the totality over personal gratification had grown to such an extent that the latter was almost completely neglected. To compensate for the repression of genuine individual happiness, mass diversions had been devised to defuse discontent.⁷¹ Much of the Institut’s later work on the “culture industry” was designed to show how effective these palliatives were.

But even allegedly revolutionary movements, Horkheimer contended, had perpetuated the characteristic bourgeois hostility to happiness.⁷² The fourteenth-century Romans under Cola di Rienzi, and the Florentines in the time of Savonarola, were two clear examples of revolutionary movements that ended by opposing individual happiness in the name of some higher good. Even more strikingly, the French Revolution and especially the Terror illustrated this theme. Robespierre, like Rienzi and Savonarola, confused love for the people with ruthless repression of them. The equality brought by the Revolution, Horkheimer noted, was the negative leveling produced by the guillotine, an equality of degradation rather than dignity. In the twentieth century a similar phenomenon had appeared in fascism. The Führer or Duce expressed in the extreme the typical bourgeois combination of romantic sentimentality and utter ruthlessness. The ideology of duty and service to the totality at the cost of individual happiness attained its ultimate expression in fascist rhetoric. The revolutionary pretensions of the fascists were no more than a fraud designed to perpetuate the domination of the ruling classes.

In contrast to the bourgeois ethic of self-abnegation, Horkheimer upheld the dignity of egoism. During the Enlightenment, Helvetius and de Sade had expressed a protest, however distorted, against asceticism in the name of a higher morality. Even more forcefully, Nietzsche had exposed the connection between self-denial and resentment that is implicit in most of Western culture. Where Horkheimer differed from them was in his stress on the social component in human happiness. His egoistic individual, unlike the utilitarians’ or even Nietzsche’s, always realized his greatest gratification through communal interaction. In fact, Horkheimer constantly challenged the reification of individual and society as polar opposites, just as he denied the mutual exclusivity of subject and object in philosophy.

The Institut’s stress on personal happiness as an integral element in its materialism was further developed by Marcuse in an article he wrote for the Zeitschrift in 1938, “On Hedonism.”⁷³ In contrast to Hegel, who “fought against eudaemonism in the interest of historical progress,”⁷⁴ Marcuse defended hedonistic philosophies for preserving a “moment” of truth in their stress on happiness. Where they traditionally went wrong, however, was in their unquestioning acceptance of the competitive individual as the model of highest personal development. “The apologetic aspect of hedonism,” Marcuse wrote, is to be found “in hedonism’s abstract conception of the subjective side of happiness, in its inability to distinguish between true and false wants and interests and true and false enjoyments.”⁷⁵ In upholding the notion of higher and lower pleasures, Marcuse was closer to the Epicurean type of hedonism than to the Cyrenaic, both of which he treated at length in the essay. (He was also in the company of an unlikely ally in the person of John Stuart Mill, who had made a similar distinction in his Utilitarianism.) As he explained, “Pleasure in the abasement of another as well as self-abasement under a stronger will, pleasure in the manifold surrogates for sexuality, in meaningless sacrifices, in the heroism of war are false pleasures, because the drives and needs that fulfill themselves in them make men less free, blinder, and more wretched than they have to be.”⁷⁶

But, as might be expected, Marcuse denounced the ahistorical belief that the higher forms of happiness could be achieved under present conditions. In fact, so he argued, hedonism’s restriction of happiness to consumption and leisure to the exclusion of productive labor expressed a valid judgment about a society in which labor remained alienated. What was invalid, however, was the assumption that this society was eternal. How historical change would come about was of course difficult to predict, because “it appears that individuals raised to be integrated into the antagonistic labor process cannot be judges of their own happiness.”⁷⁷ Consciousness was therefore incapable of changing itself; the impetus had to come from the outside:

Insofar as unfreedom is already present in wants and not just in their gratification, they must be the first to be liberated—not through an act of education or of the moral renewal of man but through an economic and political process encompassing the disposal over the means of production by the community, the reorientation of the productive process toward the needs and wants of the whole-society, the shortening of the working day, and the active participation of the individuals in the administration of the whole.⁷⁸

Here Marcuse seemed to come perilously close to the stress on objective social development, which more orthodox Marxists had maintained, but which the Institut had attacked by emphasizing the subjective element in praxis. In fact, to digress momentarily, the key problem of how change might occur in a society that controlled the consciousness of its members remained a troubling element in much of Marcuse’s later work, especially One-Dimensional Man.⁷⁹

Whatever the means to achieve true happiness might be, it could only be reached when freedom was also universally attained. “The reality of happiness,” Marcuse wrote, “is the reality of freedom as the self-determination of liberated humanity in its common struggle with nature.” And since freedom was synonymous with the realization of rationality, “in their completed form both, happiness and reason, coincide.”⁸⁰ What Marcuse was advocating here was that convergence of particular and general interests usually known as “positive freedom.”⁸¹ Individual happiness was one moment in the totality of positive freedom; reason was the other.

The Frankfurt School’s stress on reason was one of the salient characteristics of its work.⁸² Here its debt to Hegel was most clearly demonstrated. Horkheimer’s third major objection to Lebensphilosophie, it will be recalled, was that its overreaction to the deterioration of rationality had led to the rejection of reason as such. As Horkheimer would repeat over and over again during his career, rationality was at the root of any progressive social theory. What he meant by reason, however, was never easy to grasp for an audience unschooled in the traditions of classical German philosophy. Implicitly, Horkheimer referred more often than not to the idealists’ distinction between Verstand (understanding) and Vernunft (reason). By Verstand, Kant and Hegel had meant a lower faculty of the mind, which structured the phenomenal world according to common sense. To the understanding, the world consisted of finite entities identical only with themselves and totally opposed to all other things. It thus failed to penetrate immediacy to grasp the dialectical relations beneath the surface. Vernunft, on the other hand, signified a faculty that went beyond mere appearances to this deeper reality. Although Kant differed from Hegel in rejecting the possibility of reconciling the world of phenomena with the transcendent, noumenal sphere of “things-in-themselves,” he shared Hegel’s belief in the superiority of Vernunft over Verstand. Of all the Institut’s members, Marcuse was perhaps most drawn to the classical notion of reason. In 1937, he attempted to define it and turn it in a materialist direction in the following way:

Reason is the fundamental category of philosophical thought, the only one by means of which it has bound itself to human destiny. Philosophy wanted to discover the ultimate and most general grounds of Being. Under the name of reason it conceived the idea of an authentic Being in which all significant antitheses (of subject and object, essence and appearance, thought and being) were reconciled. Connected with this idea was the conviction that what exists is not immediately and already rational but must rather be brought to reason. . . . As the given world was bound up with rational thought and, indeed, ontologically dependent on it, all that contradicted reason or was not rational was posited as something that had to be overcome. Reason was established as a critical tribunal.⁸³

Here Marcuse seemed to be arguing for an identity theory, which contrasted sharply with the Frankfurt School’s general stress on nonidentity. In fact, in Marcuse’s writings the aversion to identity was far fainter than in Horkheimer’s or Adorno’s.⁸⁴ Still, in their work as well, the sanctity of reason and the reconciliation it implied always appeared as a Utopian ideal. Jews, after all, may be prohibited from naming or describing God, but they do not deny his existence. In all of the Institut’s writings, the standard was a society made rational, in the sense that German philosophy had traditionally defined that term. Reason, as the passage above indicates, was the “critical tribunal” on which Critical Theory was primarily based. The irrationality of the current society was always challenged by the “negative” possibility of a truly rational alternative.

If Horkheimer was reluctant to affirm the complete identity of subject and object, he was more certain in rejecting their strict dualistic opposition, which Descartes had bequeathed to modern thought.⁸⁵ Implicit in the Cartesian legacy, he argued, was the reduction of reason to its subjective dimension. This was the first step in driving rationality away from the world and into contemplative inwardness. It led to an eternal separation of essence and appearance, which fostered the noncritical acceptance of the status quo.⁸⁶ As a result, rationality increasingly came to be identified with the common sense of Verstand instead of the more ambitiously synthetic Vernunft. In fact, the late nineteenth-century irrationalists’ attack on reason had been aimed primarily at its reduction to the analytical, formal, divisive Verstand. This was a criticism Horkheimer could share, although he did not reject analytical rationality out of hand. “Without definiteness and the order of concepts, without Verstand” he wrote, “there is no thought, and no dialectic.”⁸⁷ Even Hegel’s dialectical logic, which Critical Theory embraced, did not simply negate formal logic. The Hegelian aufheben meant preservation as well as transcendence and cancellation. What Horkheimer did reject was the complete identification of reason and logic with the limited power of Verstand.

Throughout its history, the Institut carried on a spirited defense of reason on two fronts. In addition to the attack by the irrationalists, which by the twentieth century had degenerated into outright obscurantist mindlessness, another and perhaps more serious threat was posed from a different quarter. With the breakdown of the Hegelian synthesis in the second half of the nineteenth century, a new stress on empirically derived social science had developed alongside the increasing domination of natural science over men’s lives. Positivism denied the validity of the traditional idea of reason as Vernunft, which it dismissed as empty metaphysics. At the time of the Frankfurt School the most significant proponents of this point of view were the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle, who were forced to emigrate to the United States at about the same time.⁸⁸ In America their impact was far greater than the Institut’s because of the congruence of their ideas with the basic traditions of American philosophy. In later years Horkheimer took pains to establish the similarities between such native schools as pragmatism and Logical Positivism.⁸⁹

His first major broadside against Logical Positivism came in 1937 in the Zeitschrift.⁹⁰ Once again his sensitivity to the changing functions of a school of thought in different historical contexts was evident. Originally, he argued, empiricism as practiced by Locke and Hume contained a dynamic, even critical, element, in its insistence on the individual’s perception as the source of knowledge. The Enlightenment empiricists had used their observations to undermine the prevailing social order. Contemporary Logical Positivism, on the other hand, had lost this subversive quality, because of its belief that knowledge, although initially derived from perception, was really concerned with judgments about that perception contained in so-called “protocol sentences.”⁹¹ By restricting reality to that which could be expressed in such sentences, the unspeakable was excluded from the philosopher’s domain. But even more fundamentally, the general empiricist stress on perception ignored the active element in all cognition. Positivism of all kinds was ultimately the abdication of reflection.⁹² The result was the absolutizing of “facts” and the reification of the existing order.⁹³

In addition to his distaste for their fetishism of facts, Horkheimer further objected to the Logical Positivists’ reliance on formal logic to the exclusion of a substantive alternative. To see logic as an analogue of mathematics, he held, was to reduce it to a series of tautologies with no real meaning in the historical world. To believe that all true knowledge aspired to the condition of scientific, mathematical conceptualization was a surrender to a metaphysics as bad as the one the positivists had set out to refute.⁹⁴

What was perhaps worst of all in Horkheimer’s eyes was the positivists’ pretension to have disentangled facts from values. Here he detected a falling away from the original Enlightenment use of empiricism as a partisan weapon against the mystifications of superstition and tradition. A society, he argued,⁹⁵ might itself be “possessed” and thus produce “facts” that were themselves “insane.” Because it had no way to evaluate this possibility, modern empiricism capitulated before the authority of the status quo, despite its intentions. The members of the Vienna Circle might be progressive in their politics, but this was in no way related to their philosophy. Their surrender to the mystique of the prevailing reality, however, was not arbitrary; rather it was an expression of the contingency of existence in a society that administered and manipulated men’s lives. As man must reestablish his ability to control his own destiny, so must reason be restored to its proper place as the arbiter of ends, not merely means. Vernunft must regain the field from which it had been driven by the triumph of Verstand.

What made Horkheimer’s stress on reason so problematical was his equally strong antimetaphysical bias. Reality had to be judged by the “tribunal of reason,” but reason was not to be taken as a transcendent ideal, existing outside history. Truth, Horkheimer and his colleagues always insisted, was not immutable. And yet, to deny the absoluteness of truth was not to succumb to relativism, epistemological, ethical, or otherwise. The dichotomy of absolutism and relativism was in fact a false one. Each period of time has its own truth, Horkheimer argued,⁹⁶ although there is none above time. What is true is whatever fosters social change in the direction of a rational society. This of course once again raised the question of what was meant by reason, which Critical Theory never attempted to define explicitly. Dialectics was superb at attacking other systems’ pretensions to truth, but when it came to articulating the ground of its own assumptions and values, it fared less well. Like its implicit reliance on a negative anthropology, Critical Theory had a basically insubstantial concept of reason and truth, rooted in social conditions and yet outside them, connected with praxis yet keeping its distance from it. If Critical Theory can be said to have had a theory of truth, it appeared in its immanent critique of bourgeois society, which compared the pretensions of bourgeois ideology with the reality of its social conditions. Truth was not outside the society, but contained in its own claims. Men had an emancipatory interest in actualizing the ideology.

In rejecting all claims to absolute truth, Critical Theory had to face many of the problems that the sociology of knowledge was trying to solve at the same time. Yet Horkheimer and the others were never willing to go as far as Karl Mannheim, who coincidentally shared office space at the Institut before 1933, in “unmasking” Marxism as just one more ideology among others. By claiming that all knowledge was rooted in its social context (Seinsgebunden), Mannheim seemed to be undermining the basic Marxist distinction between true and false consciousness, to which Critical Theory adhered. As Marcuse was to write, Critical Theory “is interested in the truth content of philosophical concepts and problems. The enterprise of the sociology of knowledge, to the contrary, is occupied only with the untruths, not the truths, of previous philosophies.”⁹⁷ Yet curiously, when Horkheimer wrote his critique of Mannheim in the pre-emigration years,⁹⁸ he chose to attack him primarily for the absolutist rather than relativist implications of his sociology of knowledge. Especially unfortunate in this respect, he argued, was Mannheim’s “relationism,” which attempted to salvage objective truth by arguing that all partial truths were perspectives on the whole. By assuming that such a total truth existed in the synthesis of different viewpoints, Mannheim was following a simplified Gestaltist concept of knowledge.⁹⁹ Underlying it all was a quasi-Hegelian, harmonistic belief that one could reconcile all perspectives, a belief whose implications for social change were quietistic. Unlike Marx, who had sought social transformation rather than truth, Mannheim had covertly returned to a metaphysical quest for pure knowledge.¹⁰⁰

Moreover, Horkheimer charged, Mannheim’s concept of the “Being” that determined consciousness was highly undialectical. To Horkheimer, there was always feedback and mediation between base and superstructure.¹⁰¹ Mannheim, in contrast, had reverted to a kind of dualism of subject and object, which hypostatized both. There was no “objective” reality that individual consciousnesses partially reflected. To argue that there was was to ignore the part played by praxis in creating the world.

Praxis and reason were in fact the two poles of Critical Theory, as they had been for the Left Hegelians a century before. The interplay and tension between them contributed greatly to the Theory’s dialectical suggestiveness, although the primacy of reason was never in doubt. As Marcuse wrote in Reason and Revolution, speaking for the entire Frankfurt School, “Theory will preserve the truth even if revolutionary practice deviates from its proper path. Practice follows the truth, not vice versa.”¹⁰² Still, the importance of self-determined activity, of “anthropogenesis,” was constantly emphasized in the Institut’s earlier writings. Here the influence of Lebensphilosophie on Horkheimer and his colleagues was crucial, although they always understood true praxis as a collective endeavor. The stress on praxis accorded well with the Frankfurt School’s rejection of Hegel’s identity theory. In the spaces created by the irreducible mediations between subject and object, particular and universa!, human freedom might be sustained. In fact, what alarmed the Frankfurt School so much in later years was the progressive liquidation of these very areas of human spontaneity in Western society.

The other antipode of Critical Theory, the Utopian reconciliation of subject and object, essence and appearance, particular and universal, had very different connotations. Vernunft implied an objective reason that was not constituted solely by the subjective acts of individual men. Although transformed from a philosophical ideal into a social one, it still bore traces of its metaphysical origins. Vulgar Marxism had allowed these tendencies to reemerge in the monistic materialism that the Institut never tired of attacking. And yet, as we have seen, even in Critical Theory there were an implicit negative metaphysics and negative anthropology—negative in the sense of refusing to define itself in any fixed way, thus adhering to Nietzsche’s dictum that a “great truth wants to be criticized, not idolized.”

As thinkers in the tradition of “positive freedom” that included Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx, they were caught in the basic dilemma that dogged the tradition from its inception. As Hannah Arendt has pointed out,¹⁰³ the notion of positive freedom contained an inherent conflict, symbolized by the tension between the Greek political experience and the subsequent attempts of Greek philosophers to make sense of it. From the former came the identification of freedom with human acts and human speech—in short, with praxis. From the latter came its equation with that authentic being which was reason. Attempts at an integration have been made ever since. The subtlety and richness of the Instituas effort mark it as one of the most fruitful, even though it too ultimately met with failure.

Before passing on to the methodological implications of Critical Theory, the contributions of other Institut members to its formulation should be made clear. Although Lowenthal and Pollock were concerned primarily with other matters, both intellectual and institutional, they still actively participated in the discussions of the articles submitted for publication in the Zeitschrift. More influential, however, were Adorno and Marcuse, both of whom wrote extensively on theoretical issues under their own names. By examining their work individually, we can perhaps further clarify the Instituas philosophical stance. We will do so, however, without commenting on the validity of their analyses of other thinkers; the object is to illuminate Critical Theory, rather than to outline an alternative interpretation.

Insofar as his Institut contributions were concerned, Adorno was occupied in the 1930’s almost entirely with the sociology of music. Outside of the Zeitschrift, however, he published one long philosophical study and worked at great length on another.¹⁰⁴ In both, his closeness to Horkheimer’s position was manifestly revealed. Although the two men did not write collaboratively until the i94o’s, there was a remarkable similarity in their views from the first. Evidence of this exists in a letter Adorno wrote to Lowenthal from London in 1934, discussing his response to the recently published Dämmerung:

I have read the book several times with the utmost precision and have an extraordinary impression of it. I already knew most of the pieces; nonetheless, in this form everything appears entirely different; above all, a certain broadness of presentation, which earlier had annoyed me in single aphorisms, now seems obvious as a means of expression—exactly appropriate to the agonizing development of the capitalist total situation whose horrors exist so essentially in the precision of the mechanism of mediation. . . . As far as my position is concerned, I believe I can almost completely identify with it—so completely that it is difficult for me to point to differences. As new and especially essential to me, I would like to mention the interpretation of the problem of personal contingency against the thesis of radical justice, and in general, the critique of static anthropology in all the pieces. Something to discuss would perhaps be the general relation to the Enlightenment.¹⁰⁵

Here perhaps for the first time Adorno hinted at that more sweeping critique of the Enlightenment which he and Horkheimer together would carry out many years later.

Adorno’s earliest major philosophical critique was Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, written in 1929–1930 and submitted as a Habilitationsschrift for Paul Tillich in 1931. Its date of publication ironically fell on the day Hitler took power in 1933. Siegfried Kracauer, with whom Adorno had studied Kant, was the recipient of its dedication; the impact of another close friend, Walter Benjamin, was also evident in Adorno’s arguments. Both Benjamin and Tillich were among the book’s favorable reviewers.¹⁰⁶ Kierkegaard was, however, not a critical or popular success. While partly due to its unapologetically abstruse style and demandingly complex analysis, its minimal effect was also produced by what Adorno was later to call its being “overshadowed from the beginning by political evil.”¹⁰⁷

Whatever its difficulties—all of Adorno’s work was uncompromisingly exacting for even the most sophisticated reader—the book did contain many of the themes that were to be characteristic of Critical Theory. The choice of a subject through which Adorno hoped to explore these issues was not surprising in the light of his own artistic inclinations. From the beginning of the book, however, he made it clear that by aesthetics he meant more than simply a theory of art; the word signified to him, as to Hegel, a certain type of relation between subject and object. Kierkegaard had also understood it in a specifically philosophical way. In Either/Or, he had defined the aesthetic sphere as “that through which man immediately is what he is; the ethical is that through which he becomes what he becomes.”¹⁰⁸ But as Adorno noted in his first of many criticisms of Kierkegaard, “the ethical subsequently withdrew behind his teaching of paradox-religion. In view of the leap’ of faith, the aesthetic was deprecatingly transformed from a stage in the dialectical process, namely that of the nondecisive, into simple creature-like (kreatürliche) immediacy.”¹⁰⁹ To Adorno, immediacy, that is, the search for primary truths, was anathema. Like Horkheimer’s, his thought was always rooted in a kind of cosmic irony, a refusal to rest somewhere and say finally, Here is where truth lies. Both men rejected Hegel’s basic premise of the identity of subject and object.

Ostensibly, Kierkegaard had rejected it as well. Yet to Adorno, Kierkegaard’s renowned celebration of subjectivity unwittingly contained an identity theory. “The intention of his philosophy,” Adorno wrote, “does not aim towards the determination of subjectivity but of ontology; and subjectivity appears not as its content but as its stage (Schauplatz)”¹¹⁰ Behind all his talk of the concrete, existential individual, there lurked a covert yearning for transcendent truth; “Hegel is turned inward: what for him is world history, for Kierkegaard is the individual man.”¹¹¹

Moreover, the ontology posited by Kierkegaard was that of hell, not heaven; despair rather than hope was at the center of his vision. The withdrawal into inwardness that Kierkegaard advocated was really a retreat into a mythical, demonic repetition that denied historical change. “Inwardness,” Adorno wrote, “is the historical prison of prehistorical humanity.”¹¹² By rejecting the historical world, Kierkegaard had become an accomplice of the reification he so often denounced; his dialectics were without a material object and were thus a return to the idealism he claimed to have left behind. By denying real history, he had withdrawn into a pure anthropology based on “historicity (Geschichtlichtkeit): the abstract possibility of existence in time.”¹¹³ Related to this was his concept of Gleichzeitigkeit,¹¹⁴ time without change, which was the correlate of the absolutized self. Here Adorno was making a criticism similar to that leveled by Horkheimer a few years later against Bergson’s idea of durée, as discussed above.

Along with his analysis of the philosophical implications of inwardness, Adorno included a sociological probe of what he referred to as the bourgeois intérieur in Kierkegaard’s time. Subjective inwardness, he argued, was not unrelated to the position of rentier who was outside the production process, a position held by Kierkegaard himself. In this role he shared the typical petit-bourgeois sense of impotence, which he carried to an extreme by ascetically rejecting the natural self in its entirety: “His moral rigor was derived from the absolute claim of the isolated person. He criticized all eudaemonism as contingent in contrast with the objectless self.”¹¹⁵ It was thus no accident that sacrifice was at the center of his theology; the absolutely spiritual man ended by annihilating his natural self: “Kierkegaard’s spiritualism is above all hostility to nature.”¹¹⁶ Here and elsewhere in his book Adorno expressed a desire to overcome man’s hostility to nature, a theme that would play an increasing role in the Institut’s later work.

Although he wrote an occasional article on Kierkegaard in later years,¹¹⁷ Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic was really Adorno’s Abschied (farewell)¹¹⁸ to the Danish philosopher. In 1934 he left the Continent for England, where he studied at Merton College, Oxford. Except for occasional trips back to Germany, he remained in England for the next three and a half years. While continuing his interest in music and producing articles for the Zeitschrift on related topics, he found the time to begin a long study of Edmund Husserl, in whose work he had been interested since his doctoral dissertation in 1924. By the time it appeared in 1956, its tone was scarcely less critical than that of his earlier treatment of Kierkegaard. In this work, too, many of the ideas that Horkheimer and Marcuse were simultaneously developing can be found. Although certain sections of the work—the third chapter and the introduction—were not written until the fifties, an examination of Towards a Metacritique of Epistemology does give some insight into Critical Theory’s attitude towards phenomenology in the thirties.

In his first book, Adorno had singled out Husserl as someone who shared Kierkegaard’s stress on the self.¹¹⁹ Accordingly, he now concentrated on the epistemological aspects of Husserl’s work, especially those contained in his early Logical Investigations, which was published in three volumes in 1900, 1901, and 1913. He applauded Husserl’s desire to go beyond psychologism as an explanation of cognition, but when Husserl spoke of a transcendent subject, Adorno sensed a desire to annihilate the contingent individual. In the same spirit as Kierkegaard, Husserl betrayed a fundamental yearning for ontological certainty. In attacking his “reductive” method, which sought eternal essences through a phenomenological exploration of consciousness, Adorno, like Horkheimer, argued for the importance of mediation (Vermittlung).

Husserl’s search for first principles revealed an inherent identity theory, despite his anti-idealistic pretensions. The need for absolute intellectual certainty, Adorno argued, was likely to be a reflex of personal insecurity: “freedom is never given, always threatened. . . . The absolutely certain as such is always unfreedom. . . . It is a mistaken conclusion that what endures is truer than what passes.”¹²⁰ A true epistemology must end the fetish of knowledge as such, which, as Nietzsche demonstrated, leads to abstract systematizing. The truth was not what was “left over”¹²¹ when a reduction of subject to object, or vice versa, took place. It resided instead in the “force field”¹²² between subject and object. Absolute realism and absolute nominalism, both of which could be found in Husserl’s work, led to equally fallacious reifications. As Adorno wrote in another article on Husserl, “whoever tries to reduce the world to either the factual or the essence comes in some way or other into the position of Münchhausen, who tried to drag himself out of the swamp by his own pigtails.”¹²³

By seeking the immutable, Husserl implicitly accepted the reality of the current “administered world.”¹²⁴ Husserl, Adorno wrote, was “the most static thinker of his period.”¹²⁵ It was not enough to look for the permanent within the transient, or the archaic within the present. A true dialectics, Adorno argued, was “the attempt to see the new in the old instead of simply the old in the new.”¹²⁶ Although Husserl had tried to puncture the reified world by means of his reductive method based on intuition (Wesensschau), he had failed. Adorno admitted that intuition was a legitimate part of experience, but ought not to be elevated into an absolute method of cognition. In doing just that, Husserl had expressed an unconscious rejection of the “real world,” which was “ego-alien” to him.¹²⁷ Being could no more be divorced entirely from the facts of perception than it could be equated with them.

From Husserl’s epistemology Adorno went on to criticize his mathematical realism and logical “absolutism.” The triumph of mathematical thinking in the West, Adorno argued, contained a mythical element. The fetish of numbers had led to a repudiation of nonidentity and a kind of hermetic idealism. Similarly, the reliance on formal logic as a mental absolute contained mythical traces. These modes of thought were also not without social significance. The reification of logic, Adorno asserted, “refers back to the commodity form whose identity exists in the ‘equivalence’ of exchange value.”¹²⁸ Instead of formal logic, which perpetuated the false dualism of form and content, Adorno suggested a more dynamic alternative that referred back to Hegel. “Logic,” he wrote, “is not Being, but a process that cannot be simply reduced to the pole of ‘subjectivity’ or ‘objectivity.’ The self-criticism of logic has as its result dialectics. . . . There is no logic without sentences, no sentences without the synthetic mental function.”¹²⁹ Formal logic with its laws of contradiction and identity was a kind of repressive taboo that ultimately led to the domination of nature.¹³⁰ Adorno also strongly objected to a mimetic theory of perception, and he found it even in Husserl’s phenomenology, despite its stress on intentionality. The locus of truth, when correctly understood, he contended, “becomes the mutual dependency, the production through one another (sich durcheinander Produzieren) of subject and object, and it should no longer be thought of as static agreement—as ‘intention.’ ”¹³¹ By whatever means, Husserl’s attempt to uncover the essential truth, he argued, was in vain: “Only in the repudiation of every such illusion, in the idea of imageless truth, is the lost mimesis preserved and transcended (aufgehoben), not in the preservation of its [the truth’s] rudiments.”¹³²

Husserl’s tendency to reify the given, Adorno argued, was related to advanced bourgeois society’s destruction of Erfahrung (experience) and its replacement by administered, lifeless concepts. The disappearance of true experience, which Benjamin had also stressed as a characteristic of modern life,¹³³ corresponded to the growing helplessness of modern man. To Adorno, phenomenology thus represented the last futile effort of bourgeois thought to rescue itself from impotence. “With phenomenology,” he wrote, “bourgeois thought reached its end in dissociated, fragmented statements set against one another, and resigned itself to the simple reproduction of that which is.”¹³⁴ In doing so, it turned against action in the world: “The denigration of praxis to a simple special case of intentionality is the grossest consequence of its reified premises.”¹³⁵ But worst of all, the assumption of absolute identity and immediacy could well lead to the political domination of an absolute ideology. There was, Adorno suggested, a subterranean connection between phenomenology and fascism—both were expressions of the terminal crisis of bourgeois society.¹³⁶

Among the members of the Frankfurt School Adorno perhaps most consistently expressed abhorrence of ontology and identity theory. At the same time, he also rejected naive positivism as a non-reflective metaphysics of its own, contrasting it with a dialectics that neither denied nor fully accepted the phenomenal world as the ground of truth. Against those who stressed an abstract individualism, he pointed to the social component through which subjectivity was inevitably mediated. He just as strongly resisted the temptation to acquiesce in the dissolution of the contingent individual into a totality, whether of Volk or class. Even Walter Benjamin, the friend from whom he learned so much, was not immune to criticism on this score. In an essay he wrote after Benjamin’s tragic suicide in 1940, Adorno complained:

His target is not an allegedly overinflated subjectivism but rather the notion of a subjective dimension itself. Between myth and reconciliation, the poles of his philosophy, the subject evaporates. Before his Medusan glance, man turns into the stage on which an objective process unfolds. For this reason Benjamin’s philosophy is no less a source of terror than a promise of happiness.¹³⁷

In his persistent stress on nonidentity and contingency, Adorno developed a philosophy that was as “atonal” as the music he had absorbed from Schönberg.¹³⁸