Horkheimer on Logical Positivism

[Ralph Dumain]

Quote:

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.

From: Jay, Martin.  The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt 
School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston: Little, 
Brown and Company, 1973), pp. 62-63.

Naturally, I will have to check Horkheimer's own writings to evaluate this 
paraphrase properly, and I have my doubts about Jay anyway, but I find this 
characterization fascinating, both for its shrewdness and for the points at 
which I find it jarring.  Some observations:

(1)     This would confirm the supposition that the real philosophical 
players in the 1930s were indeed the positivists and the 
irrationalists.  Dialectical materialism is left out of account here, but 
the Soviets had by that time botched it so badly that nobody else could do 
anything with it, I presume.  Other alternatives to positivism in the 
scientific camp apparently did not register on the radar screen, for 
example Roy Wood Sellars' critical realism, which was rooted in the 
sciences and the tradition of American philosophy, but from an 
anti-positivist perspective.  (Whether Sellars had graduated to the point 
of saying anything of importance about values at that point, I do not know, 
and I doubt he was well-versed in the territory that the Frankfurters 
covered.)  In effect, Horkheimer was attempting in his own way to transcend 
the positivism-lebensphilosophie divide, but he was stuck as everyone else 
with the consequences of its legacy.

(2) The empiricist stress on perception was not just "passive", it was in 
effect anti-materialist, an alienated abstraction.  Sellars criticizes this 
in his autobiography.

(3) Formal logic: it seems the Frankfurters were as confused about this as 
the dialectical materialists.  The fetishization of formal logic has to be 
analyzed properly, not just from the point of view of its ideological 
function in a social way, but in view of the fundamentally flawed 
perspective of empiricism, which is anti-materialist and covertly 
idealist.  Both the Frankfurters and the dialectical materialists came out 
of the Hegelian heritage, separate from the developments in formal and 
mathematical logic, hence the latter two perspectives were never properly 
assimilated by the same people, let alone integrated.

(4) Again, this characterization of Logical Positivism was shrewd, from the 
perspective of its functioning in the total cultural system, which the 
Frankfurters understood far better and the positivists were unequipped to 
analyze at all, even those who were socialists.  However, when we examine 
closely the subtleties of these arguments now, we need to detect certain 
lapses which indicate that the real integration of the formal and natural 
sciences and the geistwissenschaften has not been accomplished.  Maybe 
someone has written something on this subject, but damned if I know who or 
what.

Again, the link to excerpts from REFLECTIONS ON AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY FROM 
WITHIN by Roy Wood Sellars; start at:

Foreword & Table of Contents:
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/sellarsrefl-0.html

and follow the links.