Horkheimer on Science & Crisis

[Ralph Dumain]

There is some fascinating stuff on science, metaphysics, idealism, 
positivism, philosophy in general and society in Horkheimer's old 
essays.  It will be interesting to compare this material, largely admirable 
with some quibbling caveats, with the work that seems to have been most 
influential and thus worthy of distrust, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

This is a most interesting passage:

"5. Science in the pre-War years had in fact a number of limitations. These 
were due, however, not to an exaggeration of its rational character but to 
restrictions on it which were themselves conditioned by the increasing 
rigidification of the social situation. The task of describing facts 
without respect for nonscientific considerations and of establishing the 
patterns of relations between them was originally formulated as a partial 
goal of bourgeois emancipation in its critical struggle against Scholastic 
restrictions upon research. But by the second half of the nineteenth 
century this definition had already lost its progressive character and 
showed itself to be, on the contrary, a limiting of scientific activity to 
the description, classification, and generalization of phenomena, with no 
care to distinguish the unimportant from the essential. In the measure that 
concern for a better society, which still dominated the Enlightenment, gave 
way to the attempt to prove that present-day society should be permanent, a 
deadening and disorganizing factor entered science. The result of science, 
at least in part, may have been usefully applied in industry, but science 
evaded its responsibility when faced with the problem of the social process 
as a whole. Yet this was the foremost problem of all even before the War, 
as ever more intense crises and resultant social conflicts succeeded one 
another. Scientific method was oriented to being and not to becoming, and 
the form of society at the time was regarded as a mechanism which ran in an 
unvarying fashion. The mechanism might be disturbed for a shorter or longer 
period, but in any event it did not require a different scientific approach 
than did the explanation of any complicated piece of machinery. Yet social 
reality, the development of men acting in history, has a structure. To 
grasp it requires a theoretical delineation of profoundly transformative 
processes which revolutionize all cultural relationships. The structure is 
not to be mastered by simply recording events as they occur, which was the 
method practiced in old-style natural science. The refusal of science to 
handle in an appropriate way the problems connected with the social process 
has led to superficiality in method and content, and this superficiality, 
in turn, has found expression in the neglect of dynamic relationships 
between the various areas with which science deals, while also affecting in 
quite varied ways the practice of the disciplines. Connected with this 
narrowing of scientific purview is the fact that a set of unexplicated, 
rigid, and fetishistic concepts can continue to play a role, when the real 
need is to throw light on them by relating them to the dynamic movement of 
events. Some examples: the concept of the self-contained consciousness as 
the supposed generator of science; the person and his world-positing 
reason; the eternal natural law, dominating all events; the unchanging 
relationship of subject and object; the rigid distinction between mind and 
nature, soul and body, and other categorical formulations. The root of this 
deficiency, however, is not in science itself but in the social conditions 
which hinder its development and are at loggerheads with the rational 
elements immanent in science."

SOURCE: Horkheimer, Max.  "Notes on Science and the Crisis", translated by 
Matthew J. O'Connell, in: Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: The 
Seabury Press, 1972), pp. 5-6.

Observations and questions:

(1) Science in the pre-war years: World War 1?  Restrictions on science due 
to social rigidification?

(2) 2nd half of 19th century: this seems to be a flashback to an earlier 
time before "pre-war years".  Horkheimer is vague about what happened to 
science itself, but he seems to be describing the rising dominance of 
positivism, which would indeed limit the conception of science to 
description and empirical generalization and was linked to a technocratic 
notion of social control (Comte).  This conception certainly would be 
conducive to making science utilizable for industry without addressing its 
deeper explanatory function.  However, the actual effect on science 
(physics alone would be a good example) is left extremely vague.  Of course 
science abandoned its proper role in analyzing society, as the sole 
function of social science outside of Marxism (and to some extent even 
within it) was social control and administration.

(3) Subsequent remarks are a little nebulous.  Also, "simply recording 
events as they occur" hardly describes "the method practiced in old-style 
natural science".  Neither Galileo nor Newton nor Maxwell limited 
themselves in such a way.

(4) The last sentence is very good.