[FRA:] Horkheimer under review (2)

[Ralph Dumain]

Adorno vs. Horkheimer (1)

I have yet to grasp the difference.  More quotes to come.

On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives
ed. Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang Bonss, John McCole

(1) Stefan Breuer, "The Long Friendship: On Theoretical Differences between 
Adorno and Horkheimer," chapter 10, pp. 257-279.

Conclusion:

[begin quote]

Yet despite the indisputable influence that Horkheimer exercised on Adorno, 
two things should be clear by now. First, Adorno's theoretical development 
proceeded more continuously than Horkheimer's, as if to confirm Benjamin's 
remark upon the publication of Kierkegaard book that the author's later 
work would grow out of it.  Both strands of argumentation we have pursued 
in Adorno--the value form critique of "pure sociation" and of the "second 
nature" produced by it, and the critique of the identity principle from the 
perspective of the philosophy of history--are already adumbrated there, 
before Horkheimer's version of critical theory took shape. It was only at 
the beginning of the 1940s that Horkheimer managed a breakthrough to the 
critique of idealism that Adorno had formulated in his early work. Even 
then, he did so with serious reservations and never adopted the critique of 
fetishism. The critique of bourgeois rationality represents a break in the 
development of Horkheimer's thinking, whereas for Adorno it meant only an 
extension of a position already established.

Second, if we weigh the elements these authors contributed to critical 
theory against each other, it is Adorno's contribution that appears to 
provide the more promising point of departure today. Although Horkheimer 
provided critical theory with important impulses, his thought, down into 
his late work, remained so close to idealism that fundamental insights into 
the formal determination of thought and of sociation remained closed to 
him. Because Horkheimer saw idealism not as the reflexive form of an 
abstract society but as the preliminary appearance of truth, which he was 
increasingly unable to mediate with reality, he was backed into a defensive 
position that can scarcely be distinguished from that of late bourgeois 
cultural criticism. The diagnostic capabilities of critical theory 
increasingly yield to a posture that assigns to philosophy the task of 
being "the remembrance and the conscience of humanity"--in other words, a 
substitute religion (KT, 3:278). Consequently, in Horkheimer's late work 
one hears more about original sin, the truth of theology, and the relevance 
of Schopenhauer than about the architectonics of modern society.

Adorno on the other hand, kept critical theory open to experience and 
diagnosis, perhaps because he had something in him of the attitude of the 
collector and "natural historian" that he praised in Benjamin.  However 
inhibiting and theoretically sterile his unhistorical philosophy of history 
may have been, it did not prevent him from opening himself to theories, 
works of art, or phenomena of the culture industry in a way that is 
unparalleled in critical theory. No work by Horkheimer or Marcuse displays 
an intensity in confronting its object comparable to Adorno's studies of 
Husserl or Heidegger in his Metacritique of Epistemology and Negative 
Dialectics; none of the institute's contributions on mass culture can match 
the penetrating analytical acuity of The Philosophy of Modern Music or the 
studies on occultism, television, and film, whose significance for an 
anthropology of the industrial age has barely been recognized. Whereas in 
Horkheimer's work critical theory's diagnostic capacity vanished along with 
its revolutionary hopes, Adorno shows that the future of critical theory 
lies not in climbing back over "abandoned stages of reflection" but in an 
opening to the present, even at the risk that its traditional categories 
and concepts will thereby be confronted with hopeless paradoxes.

[276-7]
[end quote]

(2) Georg Lohmann, "The Failure of Self-Realization: An Interpretation of 
Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason," chapter 15, pp. 387-412.

[begin quote]

Horkheimer sees this concept [truth] preserved, in however distorted a 
form, in the "great ideals of civilization--justice, equality, freedom"; 
"they are ... the only formulated testimonies we possess" (169/182). 
Philosophy is to secure for itself the rational potential of these ideas; 
though it denies their claim to "ultimate and eternal truth," it grants 
"that the basic cultural ideas have truth values" (170/182). This view is 
contradictory. If in critically examining the relation between ideal and 
reality philosophy can "transcend them" (ibid.), then it may do so only 
when, on the side of the ideals, its criterion of truth is justified. The 
"basic difference between the ideal and the real" (171/183) characteristic 
of this "true philosophy" is at the same time a relapse into metaphysics.

Adorno, consequentially, transferred the theoretical intention of truth to 
the mimetic capacity. And in Negative Dialectics, he showed why, in his 
view, truth defined as the correspondence between concept and reality 
reinstates the domination of identity thinking.  By contrast, Horkheimer 
persists with aporetic "on the one hand, on the other hand" constructions. 
He can only evoke a concept of reason able to wield a concept of truth that 
would heal the "disease of reason." It would have to be a form of reason 
that is not infected with the disease of "reason in civilization as we have 
known it thus far" (164/176), hence a form of reason that is genetically 
prior to all reason that, from the outset, has borne the subjugation of 
nature as its mark of Cain." He believes of such a form of reason, oriented 
to reconciliation with nature, that "by being the instrument of 
reconciliation, it will be more than an instrument" (165/177)--a 
paradoxical formulation, which once more only points out the failure of the 
attempt to recover a comprehensive concept of reason.

In his careful reconstruction of the critique of instrumental reason, 
Juergen Habermas has given a severe account of its aporetic outcome and 
convincingly demonstrated why Horkheimer and Adorno had to run aground in 
these aporias insofar as they wanted to reinstate a universal concept of 
reason.

[407]
[end quote]

(3) Wolfgang BonB, "The Program of Interdisciplinary Research and the 
Beginnings of Critical Theory," chapter 5, pp. 99-125.

[begin quote]
Despite his own postulates Horkheimer was in no position to think through 
the concept of philosophy in a post-Hegelian form, nor could he imagine an 
autonomous development of social research.

 From this perspective, Adorno was more consistent. His "The Actuality of 
Philosophy" (1931) at times suggests an alternative model for the program 
of interdisciplinary materialism." Adorno interpreted the crisis of science 
and philosophy as a transformation of the conditions of the possibility of 
knowledge. He assumed that after the breakdown of the Enlightenment's 
concept of reason, knowledge can only be produced negatively. To the extent 
that the universalization of the commodity form eliminates the potential of 
social life to oppose the existing structures, "only history now vouches 
for the images of our lives." They appear only in traces, splinters, and 
fragments, and deciphering them requires a concept of "preserving traces" 
that goes beyond the "most refined scientific methods" in Horkheimer's 
sense and points to a different form of scientific appropriation.

Of course, one may argue whether Adorno's version of the concept of 
"preserving traces" can be reconciled at all with the program of an 
interdisciplinary social science, but it can hardly be contested that his 
argument took Horkheimer's critique of science more seriously and even 
radicalized it. As Susan Buck-Morss has shown, on this point Adorno stood 
much closer to the "dialectic of enlightenment" than to the concept of 
"interdisciplinary materialism" and precisely this emphasis was probably 
what hindered his line of thought from achieving more influence on the 
development of early critical theory. For Horkheimer at the beginning of 
the 1930s, there could be no question of anticipating the "dialectic of 
enlightenment." Like Adorno, he saw an increasing trend toward 
irrationalism but did not interpret these symptoms of a crisis as an 
irreversible destruction of reason. Rather, they appeared as a temporary, 
socially conditioned regression that was to be illuminated by the positive, 
specialized sciences. And the integration of these sciences, in turn, was 
understood to be fundamentally rational, inasmuch as the "detour" of 
analyzing the regression would uncover the possibility of bringing about a 
realization of reason.

[120]
[end quote]