[FRA:] Horkheimer under review (3)

[Ralph Dumain]

Adorno vs. Horkheimer (2)

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

(4) Introduction, chapter 1, pp. 1-22.

[begin quote]

This new perspective on Horkheimer's work is significant because it 
demonstrates that what has come to be known as critical theory actually 
encompasses multiple paradigms that cannot be seamlessly translated into 
one another. At the beginning of the 1930s at least two contrasting 
alternatives can be distinguished. In counterpoint to the interdisciplinary 
materialism that Horkheimer advocated in his 1931 inaugural address, Adorno 
later that year set out his own vision in his own inaugural lecture as 
Privatdozent in philosophy at Frankfurt. The alternative program Adorno 
presented in "The Actuality of Philosophy" differed from Horkheimer's on 
two essential points. On the one hand, Adorno was skeptical about the 
claims of philosophy and much more critical than Horkheimer of the 
conceptual structure of Western rationality, which he characterized as 
"identity philosophy." Whereas Horkheimer insisted on the normative 
potential of the concept of reason developed in the Western philosophical 
tradition, in Adorno's view this potential had now broken down irrevocably. 
And that was why, in turn, the interdisciplinary collaboration of social 
philosophy and social research offered no viable alternative. For Adorno, 
there could be no general, positive solutions, and in particular all hopes 
for an internal reform of the social sciences were bound to prove futile.

Adorno's version of critical theory, with its turn to aesthetics and 
cultural criticism, increasingly prevailed from the end of the 1930s 
onward. But a demonstration that this development was by no means 
inevitable in fact preceded the intellectual historians' rediscovery of 
Horkheimer's early essays and addresses. A case in point can be seen in the 
development of Juergen Habermas's work. Beginning in the early 1970s, 
Habermas rejected Adorno's aesthetic orientation and began arguing for a 
reorientation of critical theory toward a renewed collaboration between 
philosophy and the social sciences.

[11]
[end quote]

(5) Hauke Brunkhorst, "Dialectical Positivism of Happiness: Max 
Horkheimer's Materialist Deconstruction of Philosophy," chapter 4, 67-98.

[begin quote]

That is Horkheimer's central argument against the idealistic metaphysics of 
philosophers from Plato to Hegel: they stand in "the service of 
transfiguration," because they believe they must ground "the misery of the 
present" and the "material privation" of the "earthly order"--in short, 
empirical reality--in an "overarching" "second reality." In view of the 
irredeemably affirmative alliance between "optimistic metaphysics" and 
"social pessimism,"  Horkheimer sometimes finds it difficult to hold fast 
to his own program of materialistically preserving the truth content of 
idealism and metaphysics, of taking up the inheritance of philosophical 
reason in the materialistic context of a theory of society, of 
reconstructing traditional theory as critical theory. Metaphysics stands 
convicted of the crime of transfiguration, which can no more be atoned and 
made amends for than the misery and suffering of the past.

That distinguishes Horkheimer from Adorno and Marcuse. If the thinking of 
the latter, the most affirmative among the philosophers of negativity, 
always moved within the spell cast by the idealistic concept of reason, so 
for Adorno, in even the most radical negation of an enlightenment that has 
been leveled out by identity philosophy, philosophy could only be a 
question of redeeming the moment of truth in precisely that enlightenment 
and its rationality. Marcuse's and Adorno's relationship to philosophy--the 
one more exoteric and conventional, the other esoteric--was, however 
indirectly, that of an internal transformation. Adorno and Marcuse remained 
philosophers throughout their lives. Compared with them, however, 
Horkheimer was an antiphilosopher in the most productive phase of his life.

[70]
[end quote]

The forerunners of materialism are the ancient pre-Socratic philosophers 
and the French Enlightenment.  The expression itself, like the term 
critical theory, refers directly to Marx's theory and to the Frankfurt 
School's own theoretical position within the context of Marxism. Until 
1937, this position was called "materialism"; after 1937, "critical 
theory." [ . . . . ]

The change in terminology signals a shift in meaning similar to that 
involved in the change from "idealism" to "traditional theory." Alongside 
the critique of positivism/scientism, which is articulated more firmly from 
1937 on, the expression critical theory announces a first, if halfhearted, 
approach to versions of the historical materialist philosophy of history 
such as that of the early Lukacs. Nevertheless, for Horkheimer the 
fleeting, never really consequential assimilation of critical theory and 
proletarian class consciousness (in Lukacs's sense) was only the point of 
entry into the negative philosophy of history of instrumental reason he 
developed together with Adorno in the 1940s--a path that, for him, was to 
end in a negative metaphysics. How firmly Horkheimer still kept his 
distance from the traditions of the philosophy of consciousness and history 
in the programmatic text on "Traditional and Critical Theory" is 
illuminated by the fact that only Marcuse's emphatically calling attention 
to the essay's deficient grounding induced Horkheimer to revise his 
position in a text first published together with Marcuse's essay under the 
title "Philosophy and Critical Theory" in the Zeitschrift, and later as a 
"Postscript" to "Traditional and Critical Theory."

[80-81]
[end quote]

(6) Jurgen Habermas, "Remarks on the Development of Horkheimer's Work," 
chapter 3, 49-65.

[begin quote]

Although after the war Horkheimer and Adorno always assured one another 
that their thoughts were "one," this obscured the uniqueness of the 
constellation between November 1941, when an impatient Adorno moved to 
Santa Monica to join Horkheimer, and May 1944, when they completed work on 
the manuscript they presented to Pollock on his fiftieth birthday. Such 
assurances covered up differences that had always existed between their 
positions, differences that receded only during those years of intensive 
collaboration The deeper reasons for this temporary rapprochement resulted 
more from Horkheimer's development than from Adorno's. On the one hand, 
Dialectic of Enlightenment marks a break with the program pursued in the 
Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung; on the other, it fits seamlessly into the 
continuity of a way of thinking later characterized as negative dialectics. 
In making his publishing decisions in the 1950s and 1960s, Adorno could 
ignore the original contexts of his works, even those dating to the Weimar 
period, and raise them all to a moment of almost identical simultaneity, 
since his whole work branched out from its early roots without a break. In 
fact, his late philosophy draws its essential motifs from the early writings.

The preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment opens with the authors' 
confession of skepticism about science. Their previous work, they assert, 
had been oriented to the established pursuit of science and learning and 
thematically connected to specific disciplines; they had limited themselves 
to "the critique and pursuit of specialist knowledge." But "the fragments 
that we have collected here, however, show that we have had to abandon that 
trust" (DA, 1/DE, xi). In fact, it was only Horkheimer who, with these 
words, was recanting the program of his inaugural address as director of 
the Institute, as well as the program developed in the Zeitschrift fur 
Sozialforschung. Adorno had never had much confidence in sociology and the 
specialized disciplines. In his inaugural address as a lecturer in 
Frankfurt, delivered at approximately the same time as Horkheimer's 
inaugural address, he had already drawn a sharp distinction between 
philosophy and science: "The idea of science is research; that of 
philosophy, interpretation."  Even if sociology, like some clever cat 
burglar, should someday succeed in stealing half-forgotten and almost lost 
things from the dilapidated house of metaphysics, it would not be able to 
keep the booty for long, since only philosophy can recognize the true value 
of those treasures.

It was not even Horkheimer's original intention that Dialectic of 
Enlightenment remain a collection of fragments. He had planned a systematic 
work, and had previously made use of conventional forms of presentation. By 
contrast, Adorno was convinced from early on that fragmentary 
representation was the only suitable form for philosophical thought. 
Philosophy has no method, no hermeneutic at its disposal. It must decipher 
the fantasy-laden traces and mazes of a deformed reality and respond with 
presence of mind to "fleeting, vanishing hints within the enigmatic figure 
of what is."

Moreover, the young Adorno had already adopted two motifs from Benjamin: 
negative totality and natural history, on the one hand, and the affinity 
between myth and modernity, on the other. In Dialectic of Enlightenment 
these are joined with Horkheimer's idea of reason reduced to the function 
of self-preservation. The text, however, is by no means a seamless web: the 
authorship of the individual chapters is by no means undivided. Gretel 
Adorno once confirmed my suspicion, which is at any rate obvious to careful 
readers: the title essay and the chapter on de Sade are predominantly 
attributable to Horkheimer, while the chapters on Odysseus and the culture 
industry belong to Adorno. The differences are not only stylistic.

The greatest difference can be seen in how the two authors responded to the 
aporia broached in the Preface. If enlightenment is caught up in an 
irresistible process of self-destruction, then on what does the critique 
that determines this base its right to such a diagnosis? Since Nietzsche, 
the answer has always been the same: the radical critique of reason 
proceeds self-referentially; critique cannot simultaneously be radical and 
leave its own criteria untouched.

Horkheimer is troubled by this aporia. He shies away from the conclusion 
that the very act of enlightened knowledge is affected by the process of 
self-destruction, depriving it of its liberating effect. He would rather 
entangle himself in contradictions than give up his identity as an 
enlightener and fall into Nietzscheanism. The old trust was obstinately 
reaffirmed in the preface: "Enlightenment must reflect on itself if 
humanity is not to be totally betrayed" (DA, 5/DE, xv).

But interestingly, in the text itself, evidence of this position is found 
only in those chapters in which Horkheimer's hand is visible--for example, 
an insistence on the power of theory, intensified to an almost 
eschatological degree; the belief in the antiauthoritarian tendency of the 
Enlightenment; and the formulaic invocation of a self-transcending 
Enlightenment. Admittedly, these affirmative tendencies emerge clearly only 
in Eclipse of Reason, for which Horkheimer alone was responsible. Here 
Horkheimer does not hesitate to lower the sights of a totalizing critique 
of reason that seriously implicates itself, in order not to deprive the 
dialectic of enlightenment of its own enlightening function: "Reason can 
realize its reasonableness only through reflecting on the illness of the 
world as produced and reproduced by man; in such self-critique, reason will 
at the same time remain faithful to itself, by holding fast to the 
principle of truth, which we owe to reason alone, and by appealing to no 
other motive."

Adorno, faced with the aporia of the self-referential critique of reason, 
was better able to keep his composure because he could bring another motif 
into play. He did not need to depend solely upon the enlightening power of 
philosophical criticism but could let his thinking circulate within the 
paradoxes of an identity logic that denies itself and yet illuminates from 
within. That is, for him the genuine aesthetic experience of modern art had 
opened up an independent source of insight. A work immediately preceding 
the collaboration with Horkheimer already contained that construction of 
truth, appearance, and reconciliation that would later become decisive for 
Adorno's two-tracked late philosophy: the essay on Schoenberg, written in 
1940 and published in 1948 as the first part of his Philosophy of Modern 
Music.  Mimesis, that nonrational potential of an ancient reason distorted 
by the imperatives of self-preservation, is silently preserved by the 
utopian content of artistic beauty but stands mute and in need of 
interpretation. This establishes a relation of mutual reciprocity of 
aesthetics, art, and negative dialectics that contains what philosophical 
criticism can no longer guarantee: the anarchistic hope that one day the 
negative totality will still be burst asunder as if struck by lightning.

III

The differences between Horkheimer and Adorno, present in Dialectic of 
Enlightenment but never worked out, clarify part of the hesitant behavior 
that so characteristically distinguished Horkheimer from Adorno after his 
return to Germany, even in their publication policies. Whereas immediately 
after the war--with his Philosophy of Modern Music, Minima Moralia, Prisms, 
and  Dissonances--Adorno returned to works from the 1930s and 1940s and 
thus kept Dialectic of Enlightenment present as a background model, 
Horkheimer hesitated on the German edition of his Eclipse of Reason until 
1967. The essays and lectures published in the 1950s and 1960s display a 
remarkably indecisive productivity, which perhaps reveals new tones but no 
new approaches--and certainly no identification with what he had produced 
so far. Horkheimer's hesitation applied to both previous phases of his 
intellectual biography, the collaboration with Adorno in California no less 
than the work of the New York circle.

 From the beginning of the 1960s Horkheimer considered making his essays 
from the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung publicly available. At first he 
dismissed the plan; the reasons are found in a letter of refusal to the 
publishing house S. Fischer dated June 1965. Yet in April 1968 they 
appeared after all. A Preface to the new edition reiterates the distance 
that Horkheimer had already expressed in his letter: "If early theoretical 
efforts appear without the author having placed them in relation to 
contemporary insights, then he has surrendered the claim to substantive 
validity" (KT, II:ix). A peculiar shift in temporal perspective is 
contained in the remark that the goal of a just society has been barred 
"since the end of the war." In fact, by the beginning of the 1940s, 
Horkheimer had already broken with the position represented in his essays 
of the 1930s. Thus, much in the Preface to the new edition remains 
unintelligible unless one is clear that in the 1968 edition two distancings 
coincide: Dialectic of Enlightenment is intended as well. Resisting 
Adorno's pleas, Horkheimer delayed issuing a second edition of the book, 
long out of print, until after 1968.

I have already given the deeper reason for this hesitation: Horkheimer was 
stymied by the aporia of a self-referential critique of reason mentioned in 
the Preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment. Unlike Adorno, he could not take 
recourse to the mimetic content disguised in the esoteric works of modern 
art, nor did he want, like Nietzsche's followers, to slip into 
irrationalism. Of course, the "terror with which the rationalized, 
automated, and administered world takes its course" (KT I: xi) leaves no 
room for doubt about the totality of an inflated instrumental reason. But 
Horkheimer wished to remain true to his original impulse [. . . . ]

[56-59]
[end quote]

-------------------

It looks like I have some homework to do.  I have not yet attempted to 
compare Horkheimer's and Marcuse's programmatic essays.  I need to re-read 
Adorno's 1931 "The Actuality of Philosophy."  I like Horkheimer's 1930s 
conception of critical theory as I understand it, and I don't like the 
DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT.  Therefore, I have to figure out what I think 
of Adorno's perspective in the 1930s before he joined forces with Horkheimer.

I still need to review the critiques of Horkheimer's program of the 1930s 
(chapters 2-5, 8).  I still have not grasped the alleged fundamental flaws 
in Horkheimer's conception, let along compare them to the perspectives of 
Adorno and Marcuse.