Horkeimer on Materialism and Metaphysics

[Ralph Dumain]

Horkheimer begins his essay by dissecting Dilthey.  Somewhere in the middle 
of this essay, I lose the thrust of Horkheimer's argument.

One detail: he refers to a German debate on materialism of 1854, followed 
by a reference to Du Bois-Reymond [p. 15].  I am not familiar with this 
apparently famous debate.

There are some interesting paragraphs on the tension between concept and 
object, and the conditioning of concepts by subjective as well as objective 
factors [p. 28]  There is also an interesting discussion of materialism's 
requirement to unify philosophy and science [pp. 34-35].  He suggests that 
this effort was given up in the mid-19th century, with the 
pseudo-materialist monism of a Haeckel the result.

The argument then picks up with a discussion of Mach and Mill, and the 
generation of materialism into a positivism that only seeks the appearances 
of things.  And then--bam!--a few pages of profound analysis:

Quote:

In maintaining this doctrine of the necessary limitation of knowledge to 
appearances or rather in degrading the known world to a mere outward show, 
positivism makes peace, in principle, with every kind of superstition. It 
takes the seriousness out of theory since the latter must prove itself in 
practice. If non-positivist metaphysics must exaggerate its own knowledge 
(since by its nature it must claim autonomy for itself), positivism, on the 
contrary, reduces all possible knowledge to a collection of external data. 
In addition, it usually overlooks the contradiction between its own 
metaphysical description of known reality as appearance and externality, on 
the one hand, and its ostensible power of prevision, on the other (the 
latter already containing the undialectical separation of subject and 
object). "Not to know the true but only the appearance of the temporal and 
accidental, only what is empty-this emptiness has become widespread in 
philosophy and is still being broadcast in our time, and even boasts of 
itself." [48]

This objection of Hegel to the Enlightenment can today be directed 
primarily against positivism, which of course originated in the 
Enlightenment. Hegel himself, despite the sound of his words here, did not 
separate truth and knowledge from the temporal; on the contrary-and this is 
the secret of his depth of thought-he made knowledge of the temporal as 
temporal the content of philosophy. His idealism consists in the belief 
"that to call a thing finite or limited proves by implication the very 
presence of the infinite and unlimited, and that our knowledge of a limit 
can only be when the unlimited is on this side in consciousness.'" [49]

Yet, despite his hostility to it, Hegel is closer to the genuine 
Enlightenment than positivism is, because he admits nothing to be in 
principle inaccessible to human knowledge and subject to surmise alone. 
Positivism, on the other hand, is very conscious of its tolerance in this 
respect; it even wanted its very name to be interpreted expressly as 
opposition to the "negative," that is to any denial of such surmise. Sound 
philosophy, says Comte, leaves aside necessarily insoluble problems but in 
so doing it remains more impartial and more tolerant than its opponents. It 
investigates the factors that conditioned the duration and decline of 
former systems of belief

"without ever engaging in any absolute rejection.... In this way it renders 
scrupulous justice not only to various monotheistic systems besides the one 
which is dying among us today, but also to polytheistic or even fetishistic 
beliefs, while always relating them to the corresponding phase of the basic 
evolutionary process." [50]

An historical understanding of these beliefs signifies here simultaneously 
the recognition of a correlative area of reality which is in principle 
inaccessible to knowledge and not assumed into the historical dialectic.

Materialism, too, seeks an historical comprehension of all spiritual 
phenomena. But its insight that there can be no infinite knowledge does not 
lead to impartiality in the face of a claim by any finite knowledge to be 
infinite. Thought is recognized to be limited, but no areas are set aside 
to which thought is not to be applied. This opinion of the positivists is 
itself in fact a contradiction. That we do not know everything does not 
mean at all that what we do know is the nonessential and what we do not 
know, the essential. These faulty judgments, by which positivism has 
knowingly made its peace with superstition and declared war on materialism, 
allow us to see that Bergson's depreciation of theoretical thinking and the 
rise of modem intuitionist metaphysics are a result of positivist philosophy.

Positivism is really much closer to a metaphysics of intuition than to 
materialism, although it wrongly tries to couple the two.

Since the turn of the century positivism has seemed, in comparison with the 
reigning metaphysics, not to be "concrete" enough, that is, really, not 
spiritualist enough. But in fact positivism and metaphysics are simply two 
different phases of one philosophy which downgrades natural knowledge and 
hypostatizes abstract conceptual structures. Bergson, like vitalism 
generally, bases his metaphysics of la duree on the doctrine of an 
immediate datum which is verified by intuition; the only distinction from 
positivism is that for Bergson this datum is not made up of discrete and 
detached elements but consists of the intuitively known vital flow of life 
itself. The metaphysics of the elements, the interpretation of reality as a 
sum-total of originally isolated data, the dogma of the unchangeableness of 
the natural laws, the belief in the possibility of a definitive system are 
an the special metaphysical theses of positivism. It has in common with 
intuitionism the subjectivist claim that immediate primary data, unaffected 
by any theory, are true reality, as well as the use of "only" by which both 
philosophies try to limit any theory of rational prevision (a theory which, 
we must admit, they wrongly interpret along mechanistic lines).

In their opposition to materialism, therefore, positivism and intuitionism 
are at one. In fact, if the defenselessness of these philosophies before 
any and all supernaturalist tendencies may be said to find especially 
obvious expression in their helplessness in the face of spiritism and 
occultism, then Bergson even takes precedence over Comte. A philosophy with 
metaphysical content fills the transcendental regions with its own 
speculations. Therefore, as Comte says reproachfully, it "has never been 
able to be anything but critical" [51] towards prevailing doctrines of the 
afterlife. Bergson must begin, consequently, by expressly assuring us that 
the transcendence of consciousness is "so probable that the burden of proof 
falls on him who denies it, not on him who affirms it" and that philosophy 
leads us "little by little to a state of mind which is practically 
equivalent to certitude." [52]

Comte, on the other hand, having equated reality with subjective data and 
mere appearances, is antecedently and in principle rendered helpless before 
all claims to have experienced the suprasensible.

At the present time it is hardly possible to distinguish between the more 
positivist and the more intuitionist forms of a philosophy that is marked 
by such subjection to the occult. According to Hans Driesch it is clear 
that his teaching "not only is not opposed to the 'occult' but even paves 
the way for it." [53] Bergson does not hesitate to assure us in his most 
recent book

"that if, for example, the reality of "telepathic phenomena" is called in 
doubt after the mutual corroboration of thousands of statements which have 
been collected on the subject, it is human evidence in general that must, 
in the eyes of science, be declared to be null and void: what, then, is to 
become of history?"

and he does not think it impossible "that a gleam from this unknown world 
reaches us, visible to our bodily eyes." [54] In fact, Bergson seriously 
conjectures that such messages from the other world could bring about a 
total transformation of mankind. The neglect of the theoretical in favor of 
the bare immediate datum thus wholly robs philosophy of its illuminative 
effect. "Whenever sensation with its alleged independence is taken as the 
criterion of reality, the distinction between nature and ghosts can become 
blurred." [55]

The disciples of Comte, especially the empirico-criticists and the logical 
positivists, have so refined their terminology that the distinction between 
simple appearances, with which science deals, and the essential is no 
longer to be found. But the depreciation of theory makes itself felt 
nonetheless in very varying ways, as when Wittgenstein declares, in his 
otherwise first-rate Tractatus logico-philosophicus:

"We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been 
answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there 
are then no questions left, and this is itself the answer . . . There are, 
indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves 
manifest. They are what is mystical." [56]

Neither does materialism, as we explained above, believe that the problems 
of life are solvable in a purely theoretical way, but it also regards it as 
unthinkable that "after a long period of doubt ... the sense of life" [57] 
could become clear in any other way. If hypostatized in such a way, there 
is no "mystical" and no "sense of life."

Materialism has in common with positivism that it acknowledges as real only 
what is given in sense experience, and it has done so since its beginnings. 
"What we contemplate in mind has its whole origin in sense perception," 
says Epicurus. [58] "If you fight against all sensations, you will have no 
standard by which to judge even those of them which you say are false." 
[59] Throughout its history materialism has held to this theory of 
knowledge, which serves it as a critical weapon against dogmatic concepts. 
On the other hand, materialism does not absolutize sensation.

The requirement that every existent manifest itself through the senses does 
not mean that the senses do not change in the historical process or that 
they are to be regarded as fixed cornerstones of the world. If the evidence 
of sense experience is part of the grounds for existential judgments, such 
experiences are far from identical with the constant elements of the world. 
Theory is always more than sensibility alone and cannot be totally reduced 
to sensations. In fact, according to the most recent developments in 
psychology, far from being the elementary building blocks of the world or 
even of psychic life, sensations are derivatives arising only through a 
complicated process of abstraction involving the destruction of formations 
which the psyche had shaped. [60] Even apart from these two considerations, 
we must say that eternity cannot be predicated of our sensibility. Like the 
relation of "subject" to "data," it is conditioned and changeable. Even in 
the same period of time individual subjects have contradictory perceptions, 
and the differences are not to be resolved simply by appeal to a majority 
but only with the help of theory. Sense experiences are indeed the basis of 
knowledge, and we are at every point referred back to them, but the origin 
and conditions of knowledge are not identically the origin and conditions 
of the world.

SOURCE: Horkheimer, Max. "Materialism and Metaphysics", translated by 
Matthew J. O'Connell, in: Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: The 
Seabury Press, 1972), pp. 38-43.

This is an extraordinarily acute analysis.  Horkheimer has described the 
underlying unity of positivism and lebensphilosophie and their mutual need 
to gang up on materialism.  Engels saw the opening of pure empiricism to 
superstition.  And here we have an argument of how Comte leads to Bergson 
and Driesch, and young Wittgenstein's austere logicism leads right to his 
mysticism.  Then Horkheimer shows that materialism allies with positivism 
against traditional metaphysics based on the common priority of sense 
perception.  Finally, he provides an argument for the irreducibility of 
matter to sensation.  All in all, Horkheimer's argument is very much in 
line with Roy Wood Sellars' critical realism.