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Ladies and gentlemen,

This series of lectures was announced under the title of ‘Philosophy and Sociology’, and the title itself might give rise to misunderstandings for those of you who are just beginning your studies. I think it is my duty, therefore, to try and clear up such misunderstandings – such potential misunderstandings – here at the start. Since the person who is speaking to you right now occupies a position specifically designated as that of Professor of Philosophy and Sociology,¹ some of you might just expect that I should really try – like one of those clumsy and silly protagonists you hear about in fairy tales – to instruct you in philosophy and sociology with a single blow, so that you could somehow pick up both these fields in two hours of lectures a week throughout the semester. But such a thing, of course, is out of the question. It is not feasible in this series of lectures for me even to give you what would generally be called an introduction to philosophy or an introduction to sociology. What I would like to do, by contrast, and in accordance with my overall theoretical conception, is to offer you, with reference to a quite specific point, a kind of model for thinking. For what I should like to unfold for you here is something about the conflict, the problematic, that has historically prevailed in the relation between the two fields of philosophy and sociology, and which is becoming even stronger at the present time, and indeed from both of the sides involved. I should also like to try and explain, for those of you who happen to come from either one field or the other, something about the problem involved in the way these two disciplines have come to be so personally united, as it were, in the case of both Herr Horkheimer² and myself, here at this university, even though, according to a very widely shared preconception on both sides, they are actually incompatible and have nothing to do with each other. Thus I would like, from a quite specific, critical, and decisive point of view, to shed some light on these two fields; and this, so I believe, will bring us right to a problem, a central one, that is of considerable relevance both philosophically and sociologically speaking, a problem that neither of these disciplines is able to evade. I am talking about the problem of the idea of truth, on the one hand, and the idea that knowledge is essentially determined by social factors, on the other. And I believe that, by starting from this single and central problem, it then becomes possible to shed some further light on the particular fields of philosophy and sociology; thus from this quite specific and expressly chosen perspective you may also – if it is not too presumptuous to expect this – gain a certain point of entry to both fields at once, and, above all, from each of these sides – I must really emphasize this – you may then be able to disabuse yourselves of the prejudice or preconception that, with philosophy and sociology, we are essentially dealing with two at least disparate, if not downright irreconcilable, spheres of thought.

The pressing need for such reflections lies in the fact, on the one hand, that we constantly come across philosophers who react rather naively to the kind of philosophy that seems interested predominantly in social problems by saying: ‘Yes, but there must still be something like a philosophy which is right!’ The idea of being ‘right’ that is at work here is generally taken over without further ado from a very specific and, I have to say right away, limited notion or conception of philosophy; what is understood specifically by philosophy here is the realm of that which immutably persists, of the purely intellectual or spiritual, of the truth that is detached from all human factors or conditions, even though we do not even bother to ask whether the philosophical tradition itself actually corresponds to this concept of philosophy, let alone to raise the more urgent and more radical question of whether, from the substantive point of view, philosophy should submit to this concept of the supposedly correct or ‘right’ philosophy, a philosophy that we could perhaps best define as one in which absolutely nothing happens that essentially concerns us. On the other hand, we find in the field of sociology that many people, and specifically very many young people, who take up this discipline effectively do so because – as we know from America – this is a promising, evolving, and increasingly popular field of study that also offers all sorts of potential applications across a range of professional contexts. In other words, people believe that they can thereby acquire a number of specific skills and forms of expertise, if I may put it that way, which may bring them academic distinction, or fame, or money, or perhaps just a secure professional position – all fine things in their way which, heaven knows, I certainly do not disdain, and which I would certainly not wish to discourage you from pursuing.³ But, in thinking of sociology as a professionalized discipline in this way, many sociologists are tempted to regard philosophical reflection or investigation as some sort of disturbance or obstruction, like sand that has got into the machinery; so we start racking our brains about how it is possible to know social reality, or about the very concept of society, or about the relationship of static and dynamic factors in society,⁴ or however we may choose to describe these problems, instead of just learning how to construct a questionnaire or how best to set up relevant ‘interviews’, etc., or whatever it happens to be that is required by the sociology of today, which in this sense could justly be described as an appendage of the economic system. Now I believe that in the context of the following lectures I shall be able to show you that sociology must actually call upon philosophy if it wishes to retain any genuinely scientific character for itself, if it really wishes to be anything more than a mere technique; and indeed I believe that those of you who do decide to study a subject like sociology at university level actually expect something more from such studies than mere technical expertise. Yet the resistance to philosophy that we encounter in sociology is not generally equivalent to the belief that we can evade the issue of scientific status simply by appealing to useful techniques of one kind or another; on the contrary, the resistance in question is given a rational justification and buttressed by claiming a greater scientific character for itself. Thus what is distinctive about this sort of critique of philosophy, if I can put it this way, is that it regards philosophy itself as not scientific at all, but as a field which only introduces something alien, arbitrary, and ultimately insusceptible of proof into the proper questions of social science – in other words, as a kind of ancient relic from the chest that we supposedly like to drag around, especially in Germany, but which actually only obstructs the task of elevating sociology to the level of a genuine science modelled on the procedures of the natural sciences. Now today I would simply like to say, by way of anticipation, that I believe this kind of exaggerated claim to scientific status, when it is specifically contrasted with the philosophical approach to things, is essentially reactive in character. In other words, this claim to scientific status, inasmuch as it refuses to go beyond the identifiably given,⁵ and repudiates the idea of doing so as essentially ‘unscientific’, thereby reveals an inner tendency to regress to a pre-scientific level, and thus to retreat to what we could basically call the social practice of a reporter; and while there is of course nothing contemptible whatsoever about the task of gathering information and recording facts in the field of the social sciences, this process both presupposes certain theoretical elements and requires, if it is to enjoy any scientific dignity at all, further theoretical interpretation. And in this context, as you will see, the concept of philosophy actually signifies nothing other than precisely that. What I hope to do, in the second part of this series of lectures, later in the semester, is to address this complex, or indeed this conflict, between sociology and philosophy specifically as it presents itself from the side of sociology, and I intend to do so not in merely general or abstract terms but with reference to a current controversy of particular relevance to us here in Germany; it is a controversy that is partly connected with a contribution of my own entitled ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’,⁶ to which Helmut Schelsky, my colleague from Hamburg, has responded in some detail in his essay ‘The Current Position of German Sociology’,⁷ as indeed has René König in one of his recent essays.⁸ I shall try and present something of this controversy to you in due course, including my response to the arguments advanced by my two colleagues, so that you will also get a good idea of what is involved in what one might call my defence of philosophy within sociology itself, with specific reference to an extremely concrete and developed sociological analysis.

But for the moment I would like to begin by introducing, in its most general form, the problem with which we shall be concerned throughout this semester, and indeed from every possible angle. We could perhaps put it this way: in Germany there is a philosophical tradition which – understandably or not so understandably – starts from Kant and which, remarkably enough, has continued specifically within those philosophical schools that originally found themselves in a certain opposition to capitalism, in other words within phenomenology and the existential ontology that developed out of it. This whole intellectual tradition – if I may just present it to you here in summary fashion, in an admittedly highly abbreviated and thus rather undifferentiated way that could give rise to all sorts of misunderstandings – ends up in the following situation. For the sake of clarity I concentrate on Kant here, although the same thing also holds for a great deal of modern philosophy, even if it is expressed there in very different terminology and with different points of emphasis. So, if we just stay with Kant for a moment, we can put the matter this way: the principal task of philosophy, according to Kant, is not to tell us anything directly about the essence of things as such, but to exhibit the possibility of knowledge and to determine the limits of human knowledge. But if philosophy is to exhibit the possibility of knowledge, or, to put this in more precise and specifically Kantian terms, to exhibit the possibility of experience in general, then according to Kant’s argument it cannot presuppose any kind of material content which, for its part, derives from experience but must remain ‘pure’, as Kant puts it.⁹ ‘Pure’ in this sense effectively amounts to reflection on the cognitive function as such – in other words, on something purely intellectual that excludes any reference to real or material factors that might be reflected in this purely intellectual realm, or even form the presupposition of such a purely intellectual realm. In Kant’s philosophy, specifically in the Critique of Pure Reason, this issue takes shape as the problem of what is called ‘constitution’.¹⁰ The Critique of Pure Reason is a work that investigates how knowledge is constituted or, in other words, if I can express this once again in a rather abbreviated form, tries to identify the factors or functions through which something like an objective world becomes possible in the first place, and thereby allows insight into the essential connections governing this objective world, whatever it may involve or contain. In the context of this method, however, the objective world itself is regarded as secondary or, in Kant’s terms, as the constituted in relation to the constitutive,¹¹ as that which has been generated or produced over against the purely intellectual and productive principles which make something such as experience in general possible in the first place. And from here the argument then proceeds relatively simply and relatively plausibly: ‘Well, something such as sociology, namely the scientific study of society, or even the sociology of knowledge itself, which investigates the social conditions of consciousness, all this is a kind of knowledge which already moves within the realm of the constituted, the realm of that which has itself been constituted. In other words, the objective world, here society, already belongs to the realm of experience, and the realm of experience itself must be regarded, in accordance with Kantian philosophy, as secondary; the task of investigating it cannot properly belong to philosophy but can only fall to the individual sciences which concern themselves with the relevant field.’ On this line of argument, therefore, philosophy and sociology must appear incompatible with each other, unless we are to engage in a kind of hysteron proteron argument, where first principles are confused with last principles; in other words, knowledge itself would have to be derived from the object to be known, whereas for this whole tradition of thought all material or substantive determinations would already presuppose reflection upon the forms of our cognition or knowledge in general. Now it may perhaps surprise you when I claim that this theoretical outlook, which can generally be regarded as the core element of an idealist philosophical position, is still characteristic, to a very large degree, of so much contemporary philosophy which typically flatters itself for being anti-idealist in character, which constantly assures us, implicitly or explicitly, that it has moved beyond Kant, that it has overcome idealism. Yet I believe that it does not require that much acumen if we consider, for example, the most popular philosophy to have spread within the German universities, namely the so-called existential ontology of Heidegger, to rediscover such lines of thought still at work – albeit through recourse to a much older tradition – under the problematic name of the relationship between ‘being’ and particular ‘beings’, where the latter are supposed to be merely derivative in relation to the former. In the context of Heidegger’s philosophy, ‘being’ is not, heaven forbid, supposed itself to be anything, is not at any cost supposed to be remotely tangible, to be connected with experience or with anything material whatsoever. On the contrary, it is supposed to be that which makes experience in a higher sense possible; or, as Heidegger’s teacher Husserl put it, it is supposed to be available to categorial intuition¹² rather than to discursive or scientific concepts of any kind.¹³ And over against this so-called knowledge of being, any substantive social knowledge, and especially any attempt at social self-reflection, can appear only as a kind of Fall, as a recourse to something secondary, whereas the task is precisely to return to what is first, namely to the concept of being. I may note in passing that I have just drawn your attention, with reference to one small specific model only, to a relationship between idealism and modern existential ontology which I nonetheless believe is of far greater relevance and significance than might initially appear. I believe that it is possible, and indeed even obligatory, to offer a detailed critique of contemporary existential ontology that will show how it is actually an idealism malgré lui-même, or, in other words, an unwittingly covert and thus, if I may put it in this way, miscarried form of idealism.¹⁴ But I do not wish to elaborate on this today, as perhaps I shall have an opportunity in the next semester to look at these particular problems in more detail.¹⁵ This opposition between philosophy and sociology also crops up in the context of the seemingly concrete theorems of contemporary existential ontology, as we can clearly see from certain remarks of Herr Heidegger from the pre-fascist era, when he once compared the sociologist to someone who just clambers up the façade of a building – the proud edifice of philosophy – and forces his way into the sacred precincts, only to make off with all of its splendid furnishings,¹⁶ as Richard Wagner would put it.¹⁷ This is basically the same kind of argument to be found in Kant as far as the relation to the empirical realm is concerned, except that Kant, with typically unerring and admirable honesty, proceeded far more gently in relation to psychology, which is something from which he similarly tried to distance himself in his own time, just as existential philosophy tried to distance itself from sociology in ours. When you read Kant, of course, you will find nothing regarding sociology in the sense in which we use the word. Incidentally, I would just like to point out here, if you want to get a good general idea of what is commonly understood by sociology, at least in Germany, that the Mohr publishing house has just issued a reprint of the short introduction to Max Weber’s Economy and Society, which includes discussion of a range of basic sociological concepts.¹⁸ I would strongly recommend all of you, if you can, to take a look at this little text. Although I myself do not share the specific conception of sociology that is defended here, I think the introduction to Economy and Society will provide an excellent starting point for those who would like to know – those of you who do not yet know – exactly what we mean when we talk about sociology.

Now I have just said that you will not find the term ‘sociology’ in Kant, a term which did not yet exist in his time and was first used by Auguste Comte,¹⁹ about whom we shall have more to say shortly. However, the idea of sociology itself is actually earlier and derives from Comte’s extremely insightful and important teacher, Count Saint-Simon.²⁰ But the principal writings in which Saint-Simon actually lays the foundations of sociology were only composed and began to exercise an influence when Kant was very advanced in years, or indeed only after his death, and he practically knew nothing about them. And the extraordinarily rich body of material on sociological issues that had emerged in the context of the French Enlightenment, especially in the writings of D’Holbach and Helvétius,²¹ but also among the so-called Ideologists,²² can hardly have been known to Kant either. The creation of sociology as a specific discipline is a relatively late phenomenon. We can say that this discipline comes to reflect upon itself as a kind of science only very late in the day, and there are very particular reasons why this is so – something that I shall also have more to say about in one of the coming lectures. But of course, in substantive terms, we are talking about something here which is already incomparably older, and I think it is actually a very good idea for you to dispose, once and for all, of the notion that sociology is a young science, even though we constantly encounter this claim, and one which is repeatedly defended by sociologists of all people. The precise point of time at which a science becomes independent, expressly reflects upon itself, or sticks a label on itself and the point at which such a science arises are two things which we can distinguish, though not in such a way as to conclude that a science really exists only once it has given itself its own name. And we can indeed say that, in this broader sense, sociology as a discipline is as old as philosophy, and that especially among the greatest representatives of ancient philosophy that separation between sociology and philosophy which will perhaps seem self-evident to many of you is not yet present at all.

When you read Kant you will constantly encounter a vigorous repudiation of psychology, and there is a specific reason for this. For Kant’s philosophy is essentially an analysis of the faculty of knowledge – in other words, of the faculty of human consciousness itself. Now human consciousness, as it presents itself to Kant, is bound up with actual, living human beings, and in a certain sense is also itself a part of the empirical world. The empirical subjects or empirical human beings, as psychology deals with them, form just as much an object of our experience as, for example, are things in space or anything else. But Kant is seeking to identify the constitutive factors of experience in general, and in his analysis of consciousness he cannot properly therefore assume this consciousness insofar as it is itself an empirical fact to which I stand in relation. You have to remember that the British philosophy of his time, which represents one factor in the Kantian parallelogram of forces,²³ and particularly the philosophy of Locke and Hume, understood itself as a kind of psychology, as an investigation of the elements of consciousness.²⁴ And the fact that this British psychology, this British philosophy, was empiricist in character, and thus essentially denied the prevailing conceptions of valid knowledge as such, springs directly from the way this philosophy starts from our actually existing and transient empirical consciousness. But Kant wanted something very different; he specifically wanted to salvage eternal truth. But he wanted to salvage this precisely through an analysis of human consciousness. That, of course, is why he was particularly allergic to any conception of consciousness or the mind which would have turned this consciousness into something merely factual, simply into a piece of empirical reality; and that is why – in accordance with Freud’s famous thesis concerning the pathos of the smallest differences²⁵ – he always strove with a quite particular passion to distinguish his own analyses of the mind, of consciousness, or of whatever else it might be, from psychology in the most emphatic possible way. With highly questionable success, it has to be said, for, in spite of Kant’s express and constantly repeated claim (especially in the second account he provides of his theory of knowledge, namely the Prolegomena) that his analysis of consciousness has nothing to do with an analysis of the actually given empirical human mind or empirical human soul,²⁶ it is possible to show that he is nonetheless constantly forced to make use of particular expressions and particular considerations that are undeniably derived from the real actual life of particular individuals, from the psychological life of particular individuals. Thus the famous unity of consciousness, the synthetic unity of apperception, which is ultimately the most important concept in Kant’s whole philosophy,²⁷ essentially derives simply from observing that what is called the ‘I’ is a unity only because it is aware of itself as something identical in the horizon of time – in other words, through the process of recollection, presentation and anticipation. Thus Kant’s principle of identity itself is, if you like, actually drawn from psychology, which is why it also already involves the dimension of time; and, precisely because it is temporal in character, consciousness is determined in the first place as an empirical consciousness. Here I am merely drawing your attention to one side of the issues involved. For we are talking about an extraordinarily complex and many-sided question. Nor with these observations do I simply wish to tie Kant down to a merely psychological thesis. I have already mentioned that the psychological and the anti-psychological themes in Kant’s thought work in some friction with each other, but here I just wanted to show you that the dividing line between pure Kantian philosophy and the realm of psychology is not nearly as clear, as sharp, or as unambiguous as Kant himself intended. And while the full force of the central element in Kant’s critique of reason, namely the deduction of the pure forms of the understanding,²⁸ specifically and originally derives from the way that this deduction clings so closely to the experience of concrete and individual human consciousness, i.e. precisely through a certain proximity to psychology, it is surely remarkable to note that Kant, with his inimitable perceptiveness and his inimitable honesty and intellectual integrity, actually points out that he himself thereby runs the danger of making transcendental philosophy appear to depend upon the empirical; and in a sense one can understand the development of Kant’s philosophy as an ever more emphatic turn against the perspective of psychology. Thus in the Critique of Practical Reason you will discover much more invective against any possible kind of psychological interpretation than you can in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant was not yet quite so strict about these things – and this from a deep sense that any such static and absolute separation of the transcendental sphere of purely intellectual processes from the psychological sphere that involves the temporal embodiment of mind cannot actually be carried out. Now if Kant so strongly repudiated the real individual human subject in contrast to the pure ‘I think’ that accompanies all my representations,²⁹ i.e. in contrast to consciousness as a pure formal unity of experience,³⁰ then he would also clearly have to reject any reflection on society, namely sociology, as having any grounding or constitutive force as far as philosophy is concerned. For society, after all, is in fact something like a functional connection, a functional connection that obtains between individual empirical human beings, which would then indeed also appear as factors within a constituted field of knowledge. When Kant speaks in the Prolegomena of ‘consciousness in general’,³¹ he does not actually mean – as the expression tends to suggest, and I believe for good reason – the consciousness which distinctively belongs to all human beings; that is to say, he does not mean something social, or a social consciousness, since for Kant the qualification ‘in general’ means consciousness as such, namely a consciousness without which something like an intrinsically coherent experience or an intrinsically valid case of knowledge could never be entertained at all. But in this famous formulation of ‘consciousness in general’ you may notice once again, and by way of anticipation, that it was not so easy for Kantian philosophy either to accomplish this separation from sociology, admittedly a discipline which did not specifically exist as sociology in his time. For what, in the final analysis, is this ‘consciousness in general’? If you try and grasp what this ‘in general’ means, you will probably be able to think only of a consciousness that is not your consciousness, or my consciousness, or anyone else’s consciousness but consciousness in general – in other words, a consciousness common to us all. The logical extension implied by the expression ‘in general’ already includes the ‘we’ in its very meaning, or, if you like, already implicitly includes society, although Kant would not be able to ascribe central philosophical significance to society precisely because it belongs to the realm of the constituted and enjoys a merely derived status. Now Kant certainly did recognize the significance of empirical psychology, and he would – I think it is safe to say – probably also have been able to recognize the significance of an empirical sociology. In the period when Kantian thought developed, which was still the period of Enlightenment and bourgeois culture in its ascendant phase, if I may be allowed to use such expressions, thinkers had certainly already sought to protect the traditional concept of philosophy from being confused, contaminated or conflated with the merely empirical; however, they did not yet display that exaggerated fear of the empirical that has become widespread today and serves in a way to complement that blind enthusiasm for ‘the facts’ and everything empirical which is equally widespread these days. This yawning gulf between extreme fear of the factical, on the one hand, and an intoxication or orgiastic obsession with the facts, on the other, can sometimes make it look as though we of the older generation are the reckless ones, while the younger generation seems to display the sobriety that we sought in vain to acquire.³² But things were not yet like that in Kant’s time. On the contrary, in the context of his critique of reason there is still plenty of room for psychology – and, I might plausibly add, for sociology too – as long as we make the following qualification: ‘All this belongs to the realm of the constituted; none of this may provide your starting point of departure, if you are trying to justify the fundamental principles of philosophy itself.’

In the climate that prevails today around the problem of philosophy and sociology, there has been a quite decisive change precisely in this regard; when I said right at the beginning of this lecture that, in a sense, the Kantian problematic is still directly relevant for us in this connection, I must now correct that claim somewhat or present it in a more nuanced manner. In other words, what we find today is that philosophy is now hardly inclined to allow sociology any room at all, and that both fields have parted from each other in mutual acrimony. They now display a mortal fear of coming into contact with each other and thus I might even say of infecting each other – something it would almost need a Freud to explain. The idea that the sciences must be legitimated as purely and autonomously as possible without borrowing anything from elsewhere is an inheritance from the nineteenth century which has played a very important role in connection with the problematic notion of presuppositionless enquiry,³³ a notion that continues to draw on that inherited idea; while philosophy is increasingly thrown back upon its own resources as the sphere of its authority is progressively cut back by the advances of the so-called positive sciences (and it is of the essence of scientific progress that poor old philosophy, which once also embraced geography, medicine and who knows what else, increasingly finds itself robbed of any connection with such fields). The result is that philosophy guards even more jealously the position that it has now at least managed to establish for itself as just one branch among other branches of enquiry, which is why it not only refuses to tolerate any invasions of its own territory on the part of sociology or psychology but even attempts wherever possible to attack these disciplines even in areas where they perhaps seem to be most appropriate. Thus in the Kantian tradition today, insofar as this still survives in Germany, we no longer find that Kantian tolerance towards psychology as a kind of positive science in contrast to philosophy. There is no question of this, and what we find instead is that psychology and especially sociology appear from the start as a threat to the philosophical peace; and where modern existential ontology does pay any attention to psychology or sociology, it specifically tries to do so in a way that gets rid of the empirical salt, of the empirical thorn, and seeks to grasp the psychological realm by means of extremely formal categories that have been purged of any actual concrete meaning. In this connection you might think of the fashion for so-called Daseinsanalyse or ‘existential analysis’,³⁴ a trend which is very pronounced today, in contrast to the psychoanalysis that explores psychical life as a field of concrete experience. Thus we can say that modern philosophers in general, if they are philosophers in an emphatic sense and not simply methodologists like the logical positivists for example, are anti-sociological in outlook – with the exception, I would add, of a very few individuals, some of whom you will find here in Frankfurt. Thus the anti-empirical tendency of philosophy is now extended to fields that have been removed from the realm of philosophy. Where there is still something such as philosophy to be found, it tends to treat sociology negatively and refuses to let it be even in its native territory, so to speak. And in the next lecture you will hear how the reverse is also true as far as the kind of naive sociology which does not reflect upon itself is concerned.